United 93

Watching Paul Greengrass' 9/11 re-enactment United 93 is a lot like being punched in the gut. Actually, allow me to rephrase that. It's a lot like being punched in the gut repeatedly for about 2 hours while a guy films you, then having that guy show up at your house 5 years later to screen all the footage. What sickness so pervades the American character that we feel the need to lovingly recreate our national tragedies in this way?

Popular films have always chronicled the real events of our history. That's obvious. As the most immersive, immediate and compelling of all our popular arts, it's only natural that a lot of our shared history would find its way into our movies. But the idea was more about presenting historical information with a certain perspective, using a recreation of a iconic moment as part of building a larger case.

The propaganda films of WWII illustrate this concept perfectly. There weren't a lot of films that dryly re-enacted the attack on Pearl Harbor, or that gravely dissected the tactics and calculations behind the Doolittle Raid. These films were a recruitment tool, a declaration of war and a deliberate attempt to sway an uneasy public. Whether or not one agrees morally with the purpose and method of such propagandizing, there can be no debate about the ultimate goal of these sorts of pictures - getting young people to enlist and getting everyone else to conserve aluminum and buy war bonds.

So what, may I ask, is Paul Greengrass' and Universal Studios' purpose in bringing the world United 93, a minute-by-minute account of how, on September 11th as part of a coordinated attack on America, some very angry, very psychotic and very devout Muslims hijacked an airliner and then failed to hit their intended (and unknown) target?

It's not informative. Because none of the film's "characters," from air traffic controllers to military commanders to dazed passengers, have any idea what's going on, nothing concrete about the day's events can be gleaned. The sceanrio plays out just as you'd expect. Odd, unexpecting and violent things begin happening. Everyone gets upset and panicked. Then, fiery death.

It's not entertaining. No, I take that back. If you are Osama bin Laden or a member of Al-Qaida, I suppose there's a small chance you would find the film entertaining. The operation, after all, was a complete success, so it might be a pleasant, nostalgic memory to revisit, much in the way a filthy Jew devil might enjoy looking back over a Bar Mitzvah video. Everyone else will probably find it extremely unpleasant.

It's certainly not insightful. I don't feel like Greengrass really has a lot of say about 9/11. It appears for a brief time that the film will be critical of the government's response. No one can get through to Dick Cheney or George Bush. There's no planned course of action in this situation, so no one has any clue of what to actually do once they know the planes have been hijacked. The military reaction in particular seems lackadaisical. They can't get fighter jets into the air in time to intercept the planes, and no one is even around to answer urgent phone calls.

But these sorts of side observations are never developed. They hang around the margins. The focus remains squarely on retelling the story of United Flight 93 exactly as it might have happened, beat by painful beat. I'll ask again...What's the point of such a brutal exercize? To paraphrase the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword..."Paul Greengrass, why do you wish to make the first big studio 9/11 movie? Is it for Todd Beamer's glory...or for yours?"



There is something deeply neurotic about a society that needs to recreate tragic moments exactly as they occured in motion picture entertainments less than 5 years after the events themselves. I suppose it's an understandable impulse (more on this in a moment), but I would think it does us more psychic harm than good.

To be honest, we don't do a very good job of remembering September the 11th. We seem to keep making the same mistakes that led up to that horrible day. We continue to ignore the real threats against us while focusing our energies on boogeymen and infighting. We have yet to enact any realistic measures to keep our citizenry safe, spending this money instead of elaborate and failed foreign wars of conquest. The sense is that our government is less organized and less capable of responding to a crisis now than it was five years ago. (Certainly, the response to Hurricane Katrina did not bode well for anyone).

So, we pretty much ignore what's really important about September 11th, and spend our time memorializing, shedding crocodile tears and cynically exploiting the tragedy for personal gain.

To my mind, we shouldn't make a weepy movie about United Flight 93 and how it crashed because of mean old terrorists and how it's so sad because all the people on that plane were so nice and they just wanted to relax and enjoy their airline food without being explodeded. It is sad those people died. I'm sure most of them were good people. And they definitely did do a brave thing, bum-rushing the terrorists and possibly saving the lives of others by taking down that plane before it could be used as a projectile weapon.

But it doesn't serve their memories to make them into posthumous movie characters. (I'm sure their families and friends remembered them just fine without a Hollywood movie, and the rest of us didn't know them in the first place.) It doesn't somehow make their deaths more sensical or worthwhile to see them dramatized. Actually, it serves the purposes of...the terrorists.

For 2 hours, we go into a theater and we become terrorized, all over again. For some reason I'll never understand, we subject ourselves to al-Qaida's evil plot purposefully. We spend $12 on a ticket and then buy popcorn and a soda to compliment the experience. That's the experience of watching this movie...It is harrowing. It is sickeningly unpleasant. It is like being punched in the gut. It's a second victory for those who want to make Americans afraid and upset.

Of course, I have to be fair. United 93 has this effect because it's rather expertly put together. Greengrass' style is far more suited to this kind of realism than, say, the secret agent theatrics of The Bourne Supremacy. There, his jerky camera and his intrusive close-ups and his jumpy, stacatto editing just seemed like unneccessary window dressing, distractions from what might have been an otherwise highly watchable (if cookie cutter) spy thriller. Here, these same techniques, along with largely improvised performances, give the film a rare naturalism. Solid performances from a large ensemble of actors, playing nameless faces in a crowd rather than characters, on top of Greengrass' matter-of-fact documentarian pose, combine to make the hijacking sequence grueling, almost to the point of being unwatchable.

So, yes, it's well made. I find myself making the same argument about United 93 that I made about another extremely well-realized and unneccessary historical recreation, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. Interestingly, these are both films by British filmmakers in which recent, tragic events in American history, both involving failures on the part of the U.S. Military, are recreated in the most exact physical detail possible.

Okay, so here's the case as simply as I can make it, hopefully without getting too overtly Freudian, because I know that's out of fashion these days. These films allow us to recontextualize their respective events. The 9/11 attacks were intensely traumatic. It has justly been called one of the darkest days in all of American history. Of course, among the worst elements of 9/11 was the surprise and the mystery behind it. Anyone who was awake and watching TV that morning (as I was) remembers the baffling nature of these events.

Who is attacking us? Why? Will there be more of these hijackings? Why is the President still reading that book about the goat?

Bin Laden's plan worked because it played on our worst fears, it used our own technology and complacency against us and it kept us guessing. But now, in this film, we get to recreate the events on our own terms. Sure, the Towers still blow up. But this time, we know it's coming, we in the audience. Hell, we even know it's coming before the air traffic controllers do this time. We watch them fumble around confusedly, struggling to come to grips with the knowledge we've already had for years. It's no longer surprising, and thus we feel comforted.

Because 9/11 can't happen twice. It already happened and now we control it and we can do whatever we want with it. It's ours and our definitive film version can now comfortably stand in for unknowable, frightening reality.

That's why, to my mind, Greengrass inserting some real footage of the World Trade Center blowing up is so odious. He confers on to his film that level of reality. He conflates a fictional (if precise) retelling with the real events of that day. He makes United 93 the new "official version," our nationally agreed-upon sense memory of that fateful plane ride.

It's all here in this press photo:



United 93 has now been hijacked for a second time. At first, it was Saudi nationals storming into the aisles with box cutters, slamming down stewardesses and sealing off the cockpit. Now, it's Paul Greengrass, rebuilding an exact replica of the plane in a soundstage and then stomping around, making himself its master. Notice how, in that photo, all the other passengers are obscured by seats. They are the faceless throng, those without identities. The Murdered. But the centerpiece of that image, the subject if you will, is director Paul Greengrass, towering over the heads of those he eulogizes, offering a stylish exercize is self-aggrandizement designed ot highlight his talents as a filmmaker. See how elegantly and cleanly I have reimagined this tragedy? Aren't these swooping, nauseating angles impressive? Don't you admire my subtlety and restraint? I Am The World Trade Center!

I mean, thank goodness we have the director of that Matt Damon sequel to tell us all how to feel about the most discussed and important moment of our young century. We certainly couldn't figure out how to mourn the dead of Flight 93 on our own.

The few actual observations he even bothers to make amidst all the flourishes, the insights about what's actually happening on 9/11 and on Flight 93, are contradictory and confused, particularly when he attempts to extend the scope beyond a straight-forward, interpersonal level. He cuts back and forth between the terrorists praying to Allah in the cockpit and the passengers praying to Jesus in coach. Is he really trying to make a connection between these two groups? "Well, you know, even though those guys are killers and these guys innocent passengers, everyone loves God."

It's not just the egotism of a man who wants to tell this story over again that disgusts me. It's his attitude towards the material. There's a lot of talk in our popular discourse right now about being a "defeatist," of cutting and running from terror or what have you. As you can probably guess, because it's coming out of the mouths of our President, Vice-President and Secretary of Defense, it's all horseshit. Wanting to leave Iraq is being a realist, not a defeatist.

But Greengrass' film does actually strike me as defeatist. It gives in to terrorism. It accepts that we all must live in fear and dismay, that this could happen to us and we should be extremely agitated and disturbed about it. I mean, why else depict it in fetishized and exacting detail, if not to freak everyone out all over again? It happened once to people just like you. Look, they have portable music players and laptops! There are families waiting for them at home! They like a good omelette!

That's not really the message a healthy society would take away from 9/11. Yes, there are evil terrorist bastards who want to kill us. I can fit that neatly into my handy mental spreadsheet entitled "Reasons I Might Die At Any Moment" and go on living my day like normal. I don't panic every time someone mentions colon cancer even though it's extraordinarily frightening and unfortunate. I would definitely lose in a fight against a ninja, but it probably won't ever come to that, so I can watch ninja movies with impunity. Granted, a terrorist attack on Los Angeles is more likely than a ninja attack on yours truly, but still, what happened on 9/11 doesn't need to dominate our daily lives in the way that it has for the past five years.

In a movie that genuinely explored the American experience of being attacked by al-Qaida, all this horrible shit would go down, and then after a while it would be 9/12. People would wake up, get dressed, watch TV, eat breakfast, have sex, drive around, go bowling, shoot up heroin and begin to go about their lives again. It was a weird week, but we got through it, right? And that's the real story. United 93 crashes into a field in Pennsylvania, then some guy takes out the trash and plays Grand Theft Auto for a few hours, then someone in Cleveland robs a convenience store, then an old guy in a nursing home has a heart attack and dies of natural causes. Life goes on.

In Greengrass' film, 9/11 took place in a vacuum. Before, everyone was happy and content. Afterwards...well, there is no afterwards. This awful thing happened. The End. It was a complete anomaly with no context. Some crazy men gathered together one morning and laid out a plan of attack on the United States. Many died, some with bravery and others in silence. These are their stories.