Welcome to the 9/11 Show
The plane is going down. The engines are buckling and whining. Passengers are screaming. The ground is rushing up.
I'm describing the events of United Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, the one driven into the ground in Shanksville, Pa., after its passengers fought back against their terrorist captors. I'm also describing United 93, the blockbuster docudrama based on that incident which enters wide release this Friday.
If you read that opening depiction again, it sounds like an account of another thrilling experience altogether-a theme park ride. Unfortunately, it's this last experience that United 93 most resembles-but not because of any one misstep made by director Paul Greengrass or his cast.
The unofficial graffiti tag of 9/11 was "We Will Never Forget," yet this film, which is dedicated to the memory of all who died, is ironically designed to make you erase everything but the 100 most emotionally intense minutes of 9/11. Given all this, it seems no surprise that Greengrass' last film, The Bourne Supremacy, was a blockbuster action sequel about a government-trained killer with amnesia. This new movie is a different kind of amnesiac agent: It's propaganda produced by, and for, the malleable center of the American psyche, a place where political leanings are built from Tinker Toys.
The film's tone, which ranges from somber to harrowing, never strays outside the emotional bandwidth of a memorial service. There's not any single egregious creative misstep, but all these factors combine together to form some wild rollercoaster experience of the psyche.
The film's triumphs are wholly visceral, and so is its PR campaign. At a press screening last week, it reduced a roomful of hardened critics to tears. Some of them went straight to their offices afterward and filed rave reviews, and I can't say I blame them.
Writing about the movie so soon after watching it must have been the critics' equivalent of having to fill out an accident report after being pulled from a wreck. You can't really say anything except, "That was intense," and, "I'm glad it's over"-the same things you would say as you're stumbling into the crowd after the most hellish amusement park attraction of all-time.
Of course it's intense: It squeezes your heart in its fist, awakens your sense-memories of 9/11 and your dark imaginings of United Flight 93's last moments while sending you home without a scratch.
Anyone who denies its power is lying. But anyone who justifies that power on aesthetic grounds is perpetrating a greater lie.
United 93 is dismaying precisely because it is so outwardly safe and neutral in its politics and so discreetly circumscribed in its timeline (about two hours of real time). It is the Oscar-baiting blockbuster as blunt instrument, as cleanly designed as a claw hammer. Its emotional force is a blow to the skull that temporarily makes you forget any present-tense opinion you might harbor about the political and moral state of America and the post-9/11 world.
Greengrass is a former BBC documentary filmmaker whose dramatic features are not so much directed, but staged as live events and then covered from as many angles as possible. But while Greengrass' other fiction features-Bloody Sunday and The Bourne Supremacy-were steeped in documentary techniques, this new one has been marinated. With its nervous handheld camerawork, dirty soundscapes, whirlybird editing, off-the-cuff functional dialogue, and utterly natural performances (with some real-life participants reenacting the worst moments of their lives), United 93 is a documentary with actors-a reenactment as snuff film. Imagine if the rape in The Accused or the farmhouse massacre in Capote had been stretched out to feature length, then capped with a cut-to-black-roll credits.
In the run-up to the movie's national release, two questions continually pop up in reviews, features and op-ed pieces: "Is it too soon for a movie like this?" and "Do we need to see this?" The answers are, respectively, no and hell no.
Its power to induce forgetting-to neutralize critical thought and amplify emotion-makes it a shotgun marriage of prestige picture and exploitation cheapie, a marriage whose offspring is inadvertent propaganda. In its own roundabout way, United 93 induces that emotional state Daryll Worley invoked in his 2003 hit, "Have You Forgotten?" when he begged listeners to revisit the national trauma as a roundabout argument for the War on Terror and the Iraq invasion.
But, like that song, United 93 is an act of remembering that ultimately achieves quite the opposite effect: "Forget all the domestic rancor of the last five years," the movie tells audiences. "Sit back and experience the terror, the confusion, the desperate heroism of Flight 93. What? Have you already forgotten about Bin Laden?"
In contrast to other heroic 9/11 narratives-which revolve almost exclusively around rescue, not combat, and are suffused in sadness no matter what the outcome-the Flight 93 story has two core qualities you expect not just from any ole movie, but from a commercially viable Hollywood blockbuster: a clearly defined through-line of action climaxing in the defeat of evil. Seen through a Hollywood producer's jaundiced eyes, they did what would have been done in a fictional blockbuster about an attack on America-they rallied and took the fight to the enemy.
No wonder the entertainment industry is so eager to reenact-alright, I'll say it, to exploit-this story. (It's already been told on TV news programs and docudramas, including Discovery Channel's Inside 9/11 and A&E's Flight 93.) When you strip away the film's patina of humanistic empathy, you're left with a two-hour modern descendant of the early cash-in movies that lured people into nickelodeons a century ago. It's not a drama, but a drama-flavored spectacle. There are no characters in the usual sense, just anxious chess-pieces whose onscreen movements erase five years of national argument and return us to fight-or-flight mental space.
Greengrass delivers what he promised months ago-a movie shorn of almost any signifying sentiment from any recognizable school of thought on what 9/11 meant and where it led us. As it happens, that's the only sort of 9/11 movie that can be made within the Hollywood system without resorting to metaphor (as Spielberg has done with War of the Worlds and Munich). Oliver Stone, who was effectively blacklisted from making explicitly political blockbusters after the box-office failure of 1996's Nixon, will weigh in later this year with World Trade Center, a film that, like United 93, is being described as 100 percent politics-free. (A Stone film without muckraking agitprop is like a Fred Astaire movie with no dancing; what's the point?)
We've already seen alternatives to this approach, the majority of which have taken the form of genre films and TV dramas (David Mamet's Spartan, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake and the TV series 24, Sleeper Cell and Battlestar Galactica) and were greeted far more contentiously than United 93. All of them grappled, often unsubtly, with issues we've had to debate ever since the attacks: the efficacy of torture, the PR logistics of selling a potentially unpopular war and the necessity of amending one's moral code to fight an implacable foe.
United 93 represents the future of so-called "relevant" filmmaking at the Hollywood studio level. But for all its solemnity, all its careful Tom Clancy-like accounting of what happened when and to whom and at what altitude, it's a safe movie-not so much a drama as a ride, not too different in its methods from This is Cinerama and Rollercoaster in Sensurround.
This conflation of mass-murder memorial and virtual reality experience marks United 93 as a queasy milestone in post-9/11 American cinema. After the attacks, commentators observed that 9/11 was, in some horrendous but palpable way, "like a movie," with good reason. Like so many modern terrorist attacks, 9/11 was an example of mass murder as televised homicidal performance art, designed not merely to kill large numbers of people, but to create spectacular images which could then be replayed ad infinitum-the mass media equivalent of a dirty bomb, with lingering psychic residue.
There may be some short-term therapeutic value in United 93, but it's still more reenactment than art, and any praise heaped upon it should be qualified with this realization: almost five years after the attacks, Hollywood finally rose to the challenge of representing a grim day that was "like a movie" by making a movie out of it. The 9/11 Show!