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John Podoretz reviews United 93
Weekly Standard EFL'd just a bitON SEPTEMBER 18, 2001, ABC News president David Westin decided that his network would no longer air footage of the attacks on the World Trade Center only a week before. The constant repetition of the images of the planes crashing into the buildings had become "gratuitous," a spokesman said. Almost immediately, all other networks and news channels adopted the same policy, and ever since, it is only on rare occasions that Americans have been exposed to those indelible images. . . . One gets the impression that the video footage is kept largely under wraps because of the emotions it might provoke. Someone is trying to protect us from the neurochemical cocktail of grief and rage, sorrow and anger, trauma and vengefulness that even a few minutes' conversation about 9/11 can cause. Or, perhaps, some in the media might feel as though the imagery is almost too politicized. Perhaps because George W. Bush invokes the attacks and their meaning so frequently, leading figures in the media believe the imagery will tend to buttress Bush's arguments, and serve as unpaid advertising for the president's policies. Thus, while the events of 9/11 remain the most important and devastating in recent American history, they have achieved a peculiar invisibility. In New York, where I live, there are ferocious arguments about the way the rebuilding at Ground Zero has been mishandled--about the designs of the buildings and the street grid and the look, placement, and size of the memorials. Somehow, these discussions have become weirdly divorced from the reason that Ground Zero even exists. . . . The masterful new film United 93, the first major Hollywood release about September 11, is reticent as well when it comes to the depictions of the attacks in New York. American Airlines Flight 11 is shown only as a computerized glyph on an air-traffic controller's screen. The controller knows the plane has been hijacked and is tracking it as it enters the airspace over New York. Suddenly, the glyph just vanishes from his screen. "It's gone," the controller says. "It was there and then it's just gone." Flight 11 has just crashed into the North Tower. Sixteen minutes elapse on screen between that moment and the one in which writer-director Paul Greengrass shows us the fate of United Airlines Flight 175, following precisely the span of time on the real September 11. Greengrass brings us into the control tower at Newark Airport, which has a direct view of South Manhattan ten miles to the East. The people working there are asked if they can see Flight 175 just as, in the distance, the jet sails without hesitation into the South Tower. The men in the control room react without reacting, expressionless, unable to process what they've just witnessed. Greengrass's handling of these historic horrors is pitch-perfect, in part because we are so unused to seeing them close-up. By starting first with the little glyph and then moving on to the plane in the distance, he brings us back to that morning as most of us experienced it: a shocked phone call, a report on a car radio, worried whispers of a terrorist strike, a hurried move to a television, then the unimaginable news of a second plane hitting the second building, followed a few minutes later by a clear-as-day image of that seminal event. Greengrass is presenting the events of that morning in documentary fashion, a cinematic version of what journalists call a "tick-tock"--a minute-by-minute re-creation in narrative form. Everything we see is staged, written by Greengrass and performed by actors. But among the actors are Ben Sliney, who was running the Federal Aviation Administration's operations room in Herndon, Va., on the morning of September 11, and Major James Fox, who was in charge of the Northeast Air Defense Sector at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. As the movie jumps from Boston Air Traffic Control to the FAA to Newark Airport to Herndon to Otis, Greengrass achieves a staggering level of verisimilitude. The atmosphere is thick with confusion. Nobody has the same information at the same time, planes are routinely confused and misidentified, and key personnel are on vacation. For the central story Greengrass is trying to tell, the reticence and confusion are both essential. For United 93 is about the plane that was brought down in a Pennsylvania field because the 33 passengers on board figured out that they were being taken on a suicide mission and chose to take matters into their own hands. The scenes on board United 93 are, of course, mostly speculative. All we know about the flight comes from the phone calls made by passengers and some bits of discussion in the cockpit that were either transmitted to an air-traffic control center in Cleveland or were recorded by the plane's black box. We see the passengers, pilots, and flight crew board the plane, eat breakfast, make chit-chat. The plane is delayed on the ground for 47 minutes before takeoff, and we watch as lead hijacker Ziad Jarrah sits alone in seat 1A in first class while his compatriots sit behind him, waiting for him to act. It is Greengrass's speculation that a panicky Jarrah froze, which delayed the hijacking long enough for the passengers to discover from cellphone and AirFone calls that the Twin Towers had been hit and that there were other hijacked planes in the sky. Because the flight was delayed, and the hijacking itself did not take place for another half-hour, Greengrass manages the near-impossible. He makes us hope. He makes us think that, perhaps, the hijacking we know happened will not, that the panicky Jarrah and his evil crew will fail, that the attempt to take over the plane and land it safely might succeed. And because Greengrass chose circumspection in his portrayal of the Twin Tower attacks, the sudden and shocking violence of the hijacking of United 93 hits us hard. Four people were killed in the takeover of the plane, which would have seemed like small potatoes next to the devastation in New York. But because of Greengrass's brilliance, the horror of those murders is given its full weight. In the film's final 32 minutes, the passengers and crew become, as Greengrass has said, "the first people to live in the post-9/11 world." They gather information quickly, including word that a third plane has struck the Pentagon. The men who choose to storm the cockpit don't give speeches about their intentions. They simply decide they must do something, and they know there is a pilot among the passengers who might be able to land the plane. They don't intend to die. They intend to win. And in world-historical terms, they do win. . . . Because the movie reminds us of this, and because it does not seek to wring tears but wants us to have some sense of what might have happened on that plane as it was happening in real time, Greengrass has succeeded in making a movie about September 11 that is both appropriately heartbreaking and quietly triumphant. United 93 is a masterpiece of a kind; but it's hard to say what kind of masterpiece it is, because there's never been a movie like it before, and there may never be one to compare to it again. There's a lot of talk about whether Americans are "ready" to see a movie about 9/11. Some of that talk is doubtless due to the same attitude that says Americans can't possibly stomach seeing footage of the crashes, or the buildings falling. Such infantilization is an insult both to Americans, who are perfectly capable of handling such things, and to the memories of those who perished in the attacks, whose public murders are being treated as though they had been quiet and private deaths. There's no reason to fear United 93. It is a riveting examination of an unbearable moment. Not only can we take it, we can also rise to the challenge it presents--both to us, and to those who would treat Americans as though they were hothouse flowers incapable of feeling the "right way" about September 11. . . . Posted by: Mike 2006-04-27 |
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