9/11 in Cinema

Historically, America is not great at confronting sources of national trauma. A pertinent example is the Vietnam War, the first major conflict that the US ever lost. After more than a decade of fighting and nearly 60,000 American deaths, the nation slipped into a long period of self-induced historical amnesia, an unwillingness to confront the ghosts of the past. Indeed, it was only in 1986, nearly fifteen years after the American withdrawal from Saigon, that the true realities of the War were first addressed in cinema, with Oliver Stone's Platoon. Even in 1986, Stone had immense difficulty getting funding for a script which had been universally shunned for a decade.

Recovery from, and indeed confrontation of, the tragic events of 9/11, seems to have been more accelerated. After various TV projects telling the same story, Paul Greengrass' outstanding United 93 was released in cinemas earlier this year, to both massive plaudits and massive controversy. Telling the story of the fourth hijacked plane with a notable absence of recognised actors and several air-traffic controllers playing themselves, the film comes across as almost documentary in style, especially as we watch the controllers on the ground reacting to the horrifying events in New York and Washington.

Of course, many believe that United 93 was made 'too soon', coming less than five years after the attacks. Although I of course understand the argument, my own belief is that 9/11 is an unavoidable area of study, in order to attempt to understand and explore the foundation of the Bush Administration's current foreign policy. The roots of the current chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq are to be found in the chaos that was created in New York and Washington back in 2001.

Only months after Paul Greengrass explored the story of United 93 in a gritty, stomach-churning and apparently authentic style, Oliver Stone has won apparently universal praise (in the US, at least) for the first major studio response to the attacks, World Trade Center. With a big budget and a big-name actor, Nicolas Cage, Stone's approach to the subject seems to have been far easier for American audiences to digest. With television schedules around the fifth anniversary of 9/11 crowded with documentaries and docu-dramas exploring the numerous governmental failings that lead to the attacks, it is actually refreshing to hear a story of courage and strength that emerged from the death and destruction. Telling the story of two Port Authority cops who were among the last survivors to be pulled from the rubble of the fallen towers, Stone's film tells the story of 9/11 from two relatively unseen angles; first from inside the towers up to the moment of collapse, and then from beneath twenty feet of rubble as the two men attempt to stay alive, their distraught families living on scraps of information that reach the outside world from the search-teams.

It is by no means a terrific film, displaying many of the negative hallmarks of mainstream Hollywood in regards to tinges of emotional manipulation, and a sequence exploring global reactions to the attacks carries a cringe-inducing crassness. For me, the film was in fact near its most poignant during the opening scenes, as we see a city waking up and going about its business, oblivious to the physical and emotional devastation about to be wreaked upon it. For all its faults, however, the sentiment is right, and is certainly the direction in which we should be headed. With governmental failings identified and (hopefully) addressed, and with chaos subsequently wrought across Afghanistan and Iraq with the resulting wrath of US foreign policy, it has never been more important to remember the humanity that saved lives back on the day that the world changed.