Five years after September 11, 2006
FIRST, THERE WAS PAUL GREENGRASS’ “UNIT-ed 93,” which told of the passengers of the ill-fated plane who fought off a group of hijackers-suicide bombers during 9/11. Now comes Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” which tells of two firemen who, trying to rescue the people trapped in the rubble of the razed buildings, got themselves pinned underneath it.
I haven’t seen either, even though both have gotten warm reviews—an increasingly rare feat these days with bad Hollywood movies piling up faster than corpses in Iraq and the Philippines. Stone’s piece has, in particular, critics agreeing it is so un-Stone. That is to say, it shows a lot of restraint, something the director is not particularly known for. Indeed, it strives for the human rather than the political, even eschewing moral judgment. If you want a movie that openly reviles terrorism, the critics say, watch something else.
I’ll probably see both movies eventually. But my reticence at doing so at this point is the tremendous ambivalence I feel not at the event itself but at the American attitude toward it. Some reviewers have already noted that at last America is coming to terms with it, finally willing to confront the pain of it, the way it did in the 1970s and 1980s about the Vietnam War, a self-examination or rumination pioneered by directors that included Stone himself. Which should result in something positive, a national catharsis that should help the nation to move on.
That isn’t the problem at all.
One critic, Ty Burr, catches a glimpse of the real problem when he says about “World Trade Center: “One reason ‘World Trade Center’ is such a good, healing cry is that it absolves us of the discomfort of thinking about everything that has happened since.”
That may be good for Americans, but it is not good for the world. The problem has never been when America will come to terms with the pain of 9/11, the problem has always been when America will come to terms with the pain of the 9/11s it has inflicted upon the world. The problem has never been when America will come to confront its pain, the problem has always been when America will come to confront the pain of others.
Doubtless 9/11 was a horrific day, a day that will rank up there in the annals of infamy. The images are burnt in our minds, the planes sailing almost serendipitously into the buildings one fine sunny day, the sudden ball of fire flaring at midsection, the structures collapsing like a set from a Godzilla movie—the Japanese kind where the props look like there were, well, “made in (1950s) Japan.” That is from afar. From the streets, where some people managed to take videos, you saw sights and sounds unimaginable in any American city, not to speak of America’s proudest one, where stands the Statue of Liberty. You saw people leaping to their deaths, you heard the screams of terror.
I have no problems with the dead being laid to rest with wreaths of public homage, their courage extolled in movies and articles, and their lives recalled each time 9/11 rolls in. I have a problem, however, with that being done without the same thing being done for the thousands of Afghans who died as the United States tried to bomb their country back to the Stone Age, the thousands of Iraqis who, like many of the dead in 9/11, choked on the dying air while trapped in the rubble produced by George W’s smart bombs—a monumental contradiction in terms— and the thousands of Lebanese, and not quite incidentally foreign nationals, like Filipino maids, who disappeared from the face of the earth as Israeli bombs howled like the wind in Hezbollah. No, more than this, without their existence even being acknowledged or impaled into reality with name or face.
We see only images from afar, bombs sending off colorful fireworks in the night sky, fuzzy outlines of buildings not unlike the fuzzy images from consoles in arcades that say after a few minutes, “Game Over.” The dead do not carry with them a name or a face, they carry with them, as the line up the wayside, a tag that says “Collateral.”
This unbelievable blindness or deafness does not make the repeated homage to the dead in 9/11 moving, it makes it at best narcissistic. It sends a message as horrific as 9/11 itself, a message expressly articulated by the American leaders who waged the Vietnam War, which is that the death of one American weighs more heavily upon the human conscience than the death of a thousand peasants in Vietnam or a thousand children in Iraq.
Shortly after 9/11, I heard Sting sing “Fragile” to mourn the 3,000 dead in New York, and I felt my hair stand on end. Never had his lines taken on such depth of meaning: “If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one/Drying in the color of the evening sun …/Perhaps this final act was meant/To clinch a lifetime’s argument/That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could/For all those born beneath an angry star/Lest we forget how fragile we are.”
Shortly after 9/11 as well, I heard Billy Joel sing tearfully “New York State of Mind,” his paean to the city he loves, and it took on the aspect of the loss of innocence or the stilling of laughter forever. And I was awed too by the unspeakable pathos of it.
But aren’t we all the same? Aren’t we all—black, white, brown, yellow, red and green—fragile? Aren’t all of us—American and Iraqi, Israeli and Lebanese—devastated by the razing of our New York, Baghdad, Tel Aviv and Beirut states of mind?
* * *
From Lea Salonga: “Hi. Just read Conrado de Quiros’ article today. I got a mention saying I trained at St. Joseph’s College. That is not true. I was a scholar at UP when I was a kid (piano and music).”
My profoundest apologies! I stand corrected.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=20213
I haven’t seen either, even though both have gotten warm reviews—an increasingly rare feat these days with bad Hollywood movies piling up faster than corpses in Iraq and the Philippines. Stone’s piece has, in particular, critics agreeing it is so un-Stone. That is to say, it shows a lot of restraint, something the director is not particularly known for. Indeed, it strives for the human rather than the political, even eschewing moral judgment. If you want a movie that openly reviles terrorism, the critics say, watch something else.
I’ll probably see both movies eventually. But my reticence at doing so at this point is the tremendous ambivalence I feel not at the event itself but at the American attitude toward it. Some reviewers have already noted that at last America is coming to terms with it, finally willing to confront the pain of it, the way it did in the 1970s and 1980s about the Vietnam War, a self-examination or rumination pioneered by directors that included Stone himself. Which should result in something positive, a national catharsis that should help the nation to move on.
That isn’t the problem at all.
One critic, Ty Burr, catches a glimpse of the real problem when he says about “World Trade Center: “One reason ‘World Trade Center’ is such a good, healing cry is that it absolves us of the discomfort of thinking about everything that has happened since.”
That may be good for Americans, but it is not good for the world. The problem has never been when America will come to terms with the pain of 9/11, the problem has always been when America will come to terms with the pain of the 9/11s it has inflicted upon the world. The problem has never been when America will come to confront its pain, the problem has always been when America will come to confront the pain of others.
Doubtless 9/11 was a horrific day, a day that will rank up there in the annals of infamy. The images are burnt in our minds, the planes sailing almost serendipitously into the buildings one fine sunny day, the sudden ball of fire flaring at midsection, the structures collapsing like a set from a Godzilla movie—the Japanese kind where the props look like there were, well, “made in (1950s) Japan.” That is from afar. From the streets, where some people managed to take videos, you saw sights and sounds unimaginable in any American city, not to speak of America’s proudest one, where stands the Statue of Liberty. You saw people leaping to their deaths, you heard the screams of terror.
I have no problems with the dead being laid to rest with wreaths of public homage, their courage extolled in movies and articles, and their lives recalled each time 9/11 rolls in. I have a problem, however, with that being done without the same thing being done for the thousands of Afghans who died as the United States tried to bomb their country back to the Stone Age, the thousands of Iraqis who, like many of the dead in 9/11, choked on the dying air while trapped in the rubble produced by George W’s smart bombs—a monumental contradiction in terms— and the thousands of Lebanese, and not quite incidentally foreign nationals, like Filipino maids, who disappeared from the face of the earth as Israeli bombs howled like the wind in Hezbollah. No, more than this, without their existence even being acknowledged or impaled into reality with name or face.
We see only images from afar, bombs sending off colorful fireworks in the night sky, fuzzy outlines of buildings not unlike the fuzzy images from consoles in arcades that say after a few minutes, “Game Over.” The dead do not carry with them a name or a face, they carry with them, as the line up the wayside, a tag that says “Collateral.”
This unbelievable blindness or deafness does not make the repeated homage to the dead in 9/11 moving, it makes it at best narcissistic. It sends a message as horrific as 9/11 itself, a message expressly articulated by the American leaders who waged the Vietnam War, which is that the death of one American weighs more heavily upon the human conscience than the death of a thousand peasants in Vietnam or a thousand children in Iraq.
Shortly after 9/11, I heard Sting sing “Fragile” to mourn the 3,000 dead in New York, and I felt my hair stand on end. Never had his lines taken on such depth of meaning: “If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one/Drying in the color of the evening sun …/Perhaps this final act was meant/To clinch a lifetime’s argument/That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could/For all those born beneath an angry star/Lest we forget how fragile we are.”
Shortly after 9/11 as well, I heard Billy Joel sing tearfully “New York State of Mind,” his paean to the city he loves, and it took on the aspect of the loss of innocence or the stilling of laughter forever. And I was awed too by the unspeakable pathos of it.
But aren’t we all the same? Aren’t we all—black, white, brown, yellow, red and green—fragile? Aren’t all of us—American and Iraqi, Israeli and Lebanese—devastated by the razing of our New York, Baghdad, Tel Aviv and Beirut states of mind?
* * *
From Lea Salonga: “Hi. Just read Conrado de Quiros’ article today. I got a mention saying I trained at St. Joseph’s College. That is not true. I was a scholar at UP when I was a kid (piano and music).”
My profoundest apologies! I stand corrected.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=20213
posted by dqfan06 @ 9:21 AM
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