The Return to Ground Zero

In his account of post-9/11 literature, Richard Gray criticises many 9/11 novels for their insular focus and the way in which they reduce ‘a turning point in national and international history to little more than a stage in a sentimental education’ (2009: 134). Against this, Gray celebrates, and calls for more, ‘immigrant fictions’, typified by Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), that explore difference and hybrid identity within US society. Responding to Gray’s work, Michael Rothberg argues that in addition to Gray’s model of literary multiculturalism, there is a need for novels in the mould of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) that attempt a

complementary centrifugal mapping that charts the outward movement of American power. The most difficult thing for citizens of the US empire to grasp is not the internal difference of their motley multiculture, but the prosthetic reach of that empire into other worlds. (2009: 153)

While 25th Hour (and the documentaries described in chapter one) and Fahrenheit 9/11 might be considered part of Gray’s celebrated ‘immigrant fiction’, Syriana seeks to chart Rothberg’s ‘outward movement of American power’. However, these inclusive and searching approaches to 9/11, indicative of resistance, uncertainty and a liberal counter-reaction that gathered momentum mid-decade, sit alongside cultural production that maintained the unity discourse by pulling away from an inclusive, historicised and global sense of things and insisted instead that 9/11 be shown only via the claustrophobic and terrifying experience of those who had direct experience of the attacks. This act of conservative reassurance is visible at work in two feature films, United 93 and World Trade Center.

United 93 was released in April 2006 and depicts the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93, one of the four planes taken on 9/11. As the terrorists prepare to fly the plane into a target (possibly the White House or Capitol Building), the passengers use their mobile phones to talk to family and friends and in doing so hear about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Forewarned, they attempt to overpower the terrorists and take control of the plane. As the struggle intensifies, the plane crashes in Pennsylvania. The film was preceded by a public relations campaign that pledged a donation of ten per cent of the first weekend’s box-office receipts to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund and the inclusion in press notes of the obituaries of the passengers who had died. These moves were relatively successful in heading off the inevitable accusations that the film was returning to the events too soon and seeking to commercially exploit death and suffering.

By the time of the film’s release, the events on board Flight 93 had become central to the nationalist response to 9/11. Susan Faludi points to ways in which stories of Flight 93 invariably foreground the physical size, sporting background and rugged character types of predominantly male passengers, at the expense of women (2007: 56–7). The passengers’ actions were also subject to specific constructions of national identity, with a Newsweek article celebrating the men of Flight 93 as a ‘group of citizen soldiers who rose up, like their forefathers, to defy tyranny. And when they came storming down the aisle, it wasn’t Americans who were afraid. It was the terrorists’ (quoted in Faludi 2007: 59). In a speech at the Pennsylvania crash site on 11 September 2002, Tom Ridge, the inaugural US Secretary of Homeland Security, repeated the phrase ‘citizen soldiers’, thereby ‘putting the patriotic rhetoric of World War II in service of the “war on terror”’ (Jaafar 2006: 80). The words ‘Let’s roll’, which were attributed to passenger Todd Beamer and widely understood to have been shouted as the passengers confronted the terrorists, quickly became shorthand for those advocating a belligerent response, and were even trademarked by Beamer’s widow, Lisa, who subsequently licensed them to Wal-Mart and the Florida State University football team, among others (see Winter 2006: 15). Positioned in culture thus, the events on board Flight 93 ran with the grain of the nationalist sense of 9/11 and formed the basis for a number of patriotic television films, including Let’s Roll: The Story of Flight 93 (2002), Last Hour of Flight 11 (2004), Flight 93: The Flight That Fought Back (2005) and Flight 93 (2006). Set against these more clearly ideologically aligned versions, United 93 is relatively considered and pared down. But that is not to say that it escapes the preferred reading of Flight 93 completely.

Fig. 9: ‘Let’s roll’: United 93 (2006)

The film undertakes a complex interweaving of narrative strands showing the hijackers boarding the plane, the events in the plane, and reactions to the hijackings at the Boston and New York Air Traffic Control Centers, the national Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, and the office of NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, New York. Robert Burgoyne notes that ‘the technique of parallel editing here renders in a detailed way activities in six different locations, each of which is distinctively colored and clearly defined’ (2010: 156). Although the construction of the narrative is complex, this complexity does not address the wider context: the nature and locales of the film’s different points of action are circumscribed. Unlike Syriana, which is characterised by a formally similar narrative complexity, the film is closed off from the wider event and its consequences.

United 93’s director, British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, has emulated a vérité style of filmmaking. This aesthetic makes the film readily readable as authentic given the widespread assumption that news events, especially those depicting violence, do not permit camera crews to maintain steady framing and careful composition. As a result, the film looks more like a documentary than a fictional feature film. While this technique is often described as displaying realism or verisimilitude, it is, in fact, equally congruent with the intensified continuity techniques associated with big-budget, commercial action films. Burgoyne notes, for instance, that ‘as the film progresses, the camerawork becomes increasingly jagged, with the speed and intensity of movement, the fragmentary split-second images, and the whip pans of the camera creating a tachycardic rhythm that pummels the audience’ (2010: 155). This editing technique, combined with our knowledge of what is going to happen, amplifies a bodily sensation of tension, terror and fear. In contrast to Syriana, with its stylistic attempts to place specific events in context, United 93 provides what one reviewer calls a ‘sense of claustrophobic doom’ that does not bring wider understanding to the events; vérité is placed here in the service of pure affect rather than a desire for deeper understanding (see Jaafar 2006: 81). Stephen Prince notes that

scenes in the control centers and on the airplane were shot using multiple cameras, with staggered start and reload times. This permitted Greengrass to obtain takes of up to one hour and offered the performers the extraordinary advantage of performing in real time for extended intervals. (2009: 108)

This extended coverage enabled the actors to improvise freely, enabling the construction of a contingent and believable range of responses to the attacks. Shooting in this way also allowed improvisation around the known facts, thereby elaborating or ‘filling out’ the details of what might have happened on board the flight, and rather than being edited out these are included for their ‘reality effect’. In this way the film’s production strategy and performance style allow for pauses, stuttering and incoherence, thereby giving events an authentic feel; this contingency is subsumed, however, by the linear blow-by-blow account that makes the (contested) events that take place on the plane concrete and certain. A number of further elements sustain the film’s powerful ‘reality effect’. For example, the cast includes a number of air-traffic control officials who were at work on 9/11, most notably Ben Sliney, then the US Federal Aviation Authority’s (FAA) national operations manager, and Major James Fox at NORAD, both of whom play themselves. This information was made public before the film so that viewers would be on the lookout for these ‘real’ people who had experienced events first hand. Similarly, pre-publicity drew attention to the care taken to consult with and gain the consent of victim’s families. This approach – a coherent and worked-through aesthetic that brings immediacy and drama to political events – is consonant with Greengrass’s previous work, including The Murder of Steven Lawrence (1999) and Bloody Sunday (2001). But whereas these earlier films depict versions of events that have been suppressed, and are shown in order to counter preconceptions, in United 93 this aesthetic reiterates the dominant version. The consequence is that many viewers and reviewers are likely to be convinced of the film’s authenticity, with the result that United 93 gains a privileged position in relation to claims about the meaning of 9/11.

Yet under the surface of this powerful aesthetic, a number of ideologically significant operations already noted in relation to the wider discourse can be clearly identified. For example, a key tension in the film and its relation to the wider discourse is its depiction of the response of the authorities. Here the film navigates the positions (and ideological skews) articulated in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (the authorities acted with propriety and calm) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (the authorities were bewildered and incompetent). A number of commentators have read United 93 as gesturing towards the latter in its recognition of some of the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report, which criticised the response of the FAA in particular. Prince notes that

in contrast to Hollywood’s action thrillers, which tend to show the nation’s security forces responding to terrorism efficiently and effectively, United 93 shows the confusion, paralysis, and incomprehension that gripped the air control and defense systems. (2009: 109)

But any potential anxiety is mitigated by the fact that federal bureaucracies are shown peopled by ordinary people who do their best in difficult circumstances. Ultimately, the film shows key managerial figures in the FAA behaving heroically at a time of great stress and uncertainty. Marc Redfield notes in relation to the performance of Sliney, for example, that ‘the camera returns again and again to his urbane, middle-aged face as he struggles bravely and competently, though of course ineffectively, with the unfolding crisis’ (2009: 40). J. Hoberman, in his review of the film, claims it offers a vision of the ‘collectivisation of heroism’ (2006: 22): a ‘we’re all in it together’ response that disallows the valid and necessary suspicion and criticism of those in positions of power, regardless of their personal endeavour and selfsacrifice. The depiction of this quiet heroism is reserved only for some. For example, there is no evidence that, as the film shows, a German passenger panicked and attempted to warn the hijackers of what the other passengers intended to do. A German businessman, Christian Adam, was on board United Airlines 93, but, as Thomas Reigler notes, ‘it was the actor assigned his part who suggested his supposedly defeatist attitude [which] reinforced stereotypes about European willingness to compromise in the face of suicide terrorism’ (2011: 158).

Fig. 10: The heroic calm of FAA National Operations Manager Ben Sliney: United 93

As noted, Faludi describes how most accounts of Flight 93 prioritise the role of the men on board. It seems just as plausible that the flight crew, who were primarily women, would have been in a better position to coordinate any action, something United 93 does at least gesture towards. But this aside, the film largely conforms to and reinforces a belligerent response to 9/11. The film’s use of the Lord’s Prayer as the passengers steel themselves to tackle the terrorists gives it a religious anchor, and an early cut of the film reportedly ended with the words, ‘America’s war on terror had begun’ (see Jaafar 2006: 80).²⁷ Although the film is understated in the way it shows the decisive ‘Let’s roll’ moment – even implying that it might be a prosaic reference to the use of a hostess trolley as a battering ram – the film still culminates in the successful fight back, with the passengers breaking in to the cockpit and seemingly killing the hijackers. This is a significant piece of improvisation, given that the transcript of conversations taking place in the cockpit during the final thirty minutes of the flight suggested that the passengers did not get inside (see Prince 2009: 113). The film reaches an emotional climax as it shows the phone calls made from the plane to family and friends, mainly involving declarations of love (though the Beamer family are shown calmly discussing what might be done). Here the film develops a narrative trope found in a large number of contemporary Hollywood films (including many described in this book), whereby a traumatic event galvanises and crystallises feelings and emotions that without the state of emergency would remain qualified and conditional. Crucially, the feelings and emotions found of value in such a moment of crisis are traditional, conservative and, seemingly, universal, thereby underwriting specific nationalist and political discourses with the deep structures of common sense and shared human feeling. For all its seemingly liberal credentials, then, this is a narrative of collective endeavour, family values, Christian faith, justified aggression and overcoming. This reaffirms the mood in the days immediately after 9/11 that was so easily co-opted and cultivated into belligerent support of the war in Iraq.

The theatrical run of United 93 ended in July 2006, with World Trade Center released just four weeks later. The film is based on the story of John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña), Port Authority police officers who volunteered to help with the evacuation of the World Trade Center and who became buried when the South Tower collapsed. Publicity photos for the film showed McLoughlin on set with director Oliver Stone and Cage, and both McLoughlin and Jimeno worked as consultants to ensure accuracy, as well as appearing in the film’s epilogue attending a memorial service. Careful hiring of extras and bit-part players ensured the participation of more than fifty of McLoughlin’s and Jimeno’s colleagues and co-workers (see Riegler 2011: 158). As with United 93, this respectful consultation and inclusion of those directly involved served to indicate the filmmakers’ commitment to remaining faithful to the survivors’ stories, thereby legitimating the production and heading off potential criticism.²⁸

Geoff King and Mike Chopra-Gant both describe how within hours of the attacks continuity editing techniques associated with fictional film and television were used by the news channels to bring together the myriad fragments of film and photography to create a coherent cause-and-effect description of the event (see King 2005: 54–5; Chopra-Gant 2008: 89–91). This orderly presentation was then echoed and consolidated in high-profile 9/11 documentaries such as 9/11 and In Memoriam (see King 2005: 51–2). These documentaries impose order, edit out dissenting views and seek a redemptive through-line. Of course, as we have seen, elements of many films – Nina Davenport’s decision not to film the World Trade Center site in Parallel Lines, the use of a desolate and empty Ground Zero as backdrop to existential soul-searching in 25th Hour, the forensic re-examination of news footage in Loose Change – sought to subject 9/11 to critical scrutiny. But rather than acknowledge these more qualified views, World Trade Center returns to the period immediately after the attacks, when the dominant response was one of bewilderment and confusion. A character viewing an image of the Twin Towers cloaked in smoke on a television screen states: ‘It’s as though God put up a screen of smoke to prevent us from seeing something we are not yet ready to see.’ This indicates the film’s re-distancing of 9/11, separating the event from the critical discourses that had adhered to it. Karen Randall notes that ‘the spectacle of the twin towers collapse is already understood to be imprinted on the audience’s memory’ (2010: 146), indicating that a certain understanding of the event determined in the hours immediately following the attack remained available even some five years later. World Trade Center seeks to return its audience to this already ideologically-framed version of the event. United 93 works in the same way, with the events mainly depicted via television, and with only one shot of the Twin Towers (after the plane strikes but before their collapse) seen in the far distance through the binoculars of an air-traffic controller. The two films appear to be simply retelling what happened and nothing more, and yet they disinter the initial response. Robert Burgoyne notes that ‘an unstated consensus seems to be emerging that 9/11 should be considered a hallowed event, that “graven images” should not be made of it’ (2010: 149). This prohibition on the direct representation of 9/11 places the conspiracy filmmakers who insisted that images of 9/11 must be revisited and questioned in the role of iconoclasts and privileges those filmmakers who kept the event at a distance, thereby maintaining its integrity.

World Trade Center begins with McLoughlin waking up at 3.29am, leaving his sleeping family, and travelling into New York to begin his shift. Burgoyne compares the opening sequence to the city symphony films of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttman, and comments that ‘like Vertov and Ruttman, Oliver Stone draws a familiar portrait of the city, picturing it as a place that is both prosaic and beautiful – the epitome of a particular historical moment’ (2010: 161). This celebration of New York, casting its high-rise buildings in the light of a rising sun on a beautiful clear day, is similar to the opening sequence of In Memoriam. New York is presented as a shining beacon, and McLoughlin as a cipher for US rectitude and family values. Against this backdrop, the attacks are shown as a catastrophic upheaval of the everyday lives of hard-working, ordinary people, the cityscape and, by extension, the fabric of the nation. McLoughlin’s stoic resolve in the face of this upheaval reinforces the sense of 9/11 as a schism, an event that comes literally out of the blue, alongside the privileged response that 9/11 must be met with hard work and dutiful conformity. McLoughlin rallies his men and seeks to help those evacuating the World Trade Center but becomes trapped underground, along with Jimeno, as the towers collapse. His ordinary heroism becomes overlaid with pain, suffering and self-sacrifice.

The film cuts between the men trapped underground and their wives watching the events on television, oscillating between an intense reconstruction of stark unknowing terror and a repetition of the experience of watching the events unfold on news networks (an experience which, as already noted, was subject to considerable editorial control). Even here, above ground, point of view remains limited, bound to the helpless suffering of the men’s wives. The gender dynamics on display support Faludi’s critique that terrified women are central to understanding the response to 9/11, with male weakness in the moment of the attacks quickly translated into a familiar idiom of female helplessness and male bravery (2007: 128). Jimeno’s wife, Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is pregnant, intensifying the pathos of the situation (a trope also found in Last Hour of Flight 11). The poignancy of Allison’s potential loss and her fecundity can be read as reinforcing the sense that gender is being reconstructed in conventional ways, and as a means of putting in place a certain national identity.

The conservative version of events is structured further through allusion to Christianity. Jimeno has a vision of Jesus, and in McLoughlin’s recollections of everyday situations with his wife she appears as ‘a latter-day domestic non-Virgin Mary, who calls her husband back from death’ (Redfield 2009: 39). As Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a former US Marine who will locate the men thereby allowing their rescue, contemplates whether to travel to the site of 9/11, he sits in a church under a large crucifix and reads the first page of Revelation. A coda to the film notes that after finding and rescuing the two men, Karnes re-enlisted in the military and served two tours of duty in Iraq. Karnes’s story gives the film a providential and redemptive direction (as well as keying the film into the wider rescue narrative identified by Faludi (2007: 216)). The contrast between the infernal, fiery dark pit in which the men are trapped and the brilliant white light of rescue might also be read in terms of religious discourse, with the film ending as McLoughlin emerges into the light ‘with a powerful sense of renewal and reunion’ (Burgoyne 2010: 163). This sense of renewal extends to the film’s closing scenes, in which the men attend a gathering of Port Authority police officers and their families. Marc Redfield goes as far as to suggest that the shots that rise out of the rubble of Ground Zero to a satellite orbiting the Earth constitute an omniscient, God’s-eye perspective and that from this ‘we cut to representative images of a global village, united by technology and sorrow: all over the world different peoples are hearing of 9/11’ (2009: 38). Here 9/11 is treated as a universal catastrophe, akin to a natural disaster and the film claims universality for the conservative Christian (though multicultural) worldview depicted. Unlike United 93, which presents two religious groups in conflict with one another, World Trade Center does not give any screen time to the terrorists or their creed or cause. This constrained view of 9/11 – the conservative depiction of hard-working federal employees and their suffering wives, the foregrounding of Christian faith and its rewards and consolations, the men’s survival and devotion to their families, and the straight line leading from 9/11 to war in Iraq – makes World Trade Center fully complicit with rightwing responses to 9/11.

For the majority of World Trade Center’s 130-minute running time the viewer is witness to the bodily suffering the men endure as they are slowly crushed to death and threatened by fire. The film’s tagline reads simply, ‘A true story of courage and survival’. This focus on bodily suffering and survival undertakes something of an elision of the fact that very few intact bodies or survivors were ever recovered from Ground Zero. Mikita Brottman describes how early news coverage showing images of people jumping from the towers and falling through space was quickly pulled by news editors (2004: 176). The New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins describes how when he visited Ground Zero he saw pieces of intestine standing out starkly against the rubble and that he overheard rescue workers state that they were finding a lot of spinal cords (2008: 44–7). Yet, in the days following the attacks, Susan Sontag could find published only one explicit photograph: a severed hand in the rubble at Ground Zero which appeared on 12 September in the New York tabloid The Daily News (2003: 61). This constraint also applied to the first wave of documentary films, with the executive producer of 9/11, for example, explaining at the press screening that the sounds of bodies hitting the ground that had been recorded by camera microphones were edited out on the grounds that ‘to have that incredible crush of sound every twenty or thirty seconds would have been very tough for the audience’ (quoted in Craps 2007: 199–200). As Prince notes, ‘the carnage on the streets below the towers, with hundreds of burst and shattered bodies strewn about the pavement, has never been written about or substantively photographed’ (2012: 502).²⁹ This propriety extends to World Trade Center, which sequesters the bodily horror of the event behind a decorous surface of heroic self-sacrifice, suffering and survival. The film seems to promise to show what has been hidden from view but in effect tells a story of survival and bodily intactness rather than disintegration. The failure to represent or note McLoughlin’s and Jimeno’s long-term disabilities, which have required them to retire from the police force, is telling.

Marita Sturken argues that re-enactments of traumatic historical events must be judged according to whether or not they ‘involve an erasure and smoothing over of difficult material or alternatively, a constant rescripting that, like memory, enables an active engagement with the past’ (1997: 43). Neither United 93 nor World Trade Center enables such an engagement. Five years after the attack the interpretation of the event offered up by these films repeats the initial patriotic reactions and relegates any call for historical contextualisation. For Faludi, the films are indicative of a mass cultural response dominated by ‘slavishly literal reenactments of the physical attack […] or unrepresentative tales of triumphal rescue at Ground Zero [that were only able to] replicate not delve’ (2007: 2, 3). Burgoyne notes that the simplified view of 9/11 offered by the two films ensures that nowhere are

the compound contexts, the traumatic cultural and social effects, the devastating losses, or the profound alterations of national life that characterize 9/11 registered; instead, linear narrative patterning and classical limitations of character, place and time impose a rigorous and singular structure. (2010: 149)³⁰

Yet, five years after 9/11, these films, perhaps inevitably, bear the burden of representation. B. Ruby Rich asks, ‘is it possible to return the imagination, even in a movie theatre, to a time before the US government destroyed world sympathy with its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, before one disaster became many disasters?’ (2006: 18). The answer may well be no, it is not fully possible. A number of critics have suggested too that United 93 and World Trade Center display an ambiguity and relative perspective. Nick James points out that United 93 shows a ‘mirroring between the behaviour of the terrorists and the passengers’ (2006: 3) and Hoberman argues that Greengrass’s film ‘promotes official incompetence over conspiracy, eschews nationalist appeal, and shows the hijackers – as well as the passengers – addressing their God’ (2006: 22). Burgoyne notes that the films are ‘simultaneously disruptive and conservative’ and that a ‘sense of adrenalized stasis dominates…a mood compounded by their focus on the profound disconnection, claustrophobia, and sense of helplessness suffered by the characters’ (2010: 148, 150). Jeffrey Melnick observes that, ‘with its tense insistence on the power of these two fathers, [World Trade Center] barely hides its central anxiety – the one shared by so many 9/11 films – that the father has been rendered powerless by the attacks, or, worse yet, is revealed to have been powerless all along’ (2009: 128). The strain of reproducing the dominant discourse manifests here in a range of subtexts and contradictions that also appear in an even more marked way in the cycle of end-of-the-world films explored in the next chapter. However, although the films bear marks of the strain of upholding a straightforward, nationalist view of 9/11, they uphold the view nonetheless.

Some forms of cultural production did try to extend the more questioning and critical attitude. For example, the book 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Dwyer and Flynn 2005) pieces together numerous stories and vignettes of those caught up in the day’s events. These are prosaic rather than heroic – ‘how, for instance, to open a jammed door, or navigate a flaming hallway, or climb dozens of flights of stairs’ (2005: xxi) – and the dominant tone is antiheroic, detailing confusion, chaos and the grim work of survival. The book does record redemptive moments, what the authors call ‘acts of grace at a brutal hour’ (ibid.), including the rescue story recounted in World Trade Center (2005: 259–61), but this is balanced with some less acceptable revelations – for instance, that not all the people who leapt from the upper floors of the towers did so of their own volition, some being pushed by those desperate to escape the noxious smoke; that firefighters were looting from shops during the rescue; and that a ‘sclerotic emergency response culture’ marred by poor communications, inter-agency rivalry and failure to make changes after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing exacerbated the loss of life (2005: xxiii). 102 Minutes seeks to adhere to the facts and hold different viewpoints related to the terrorist attacks in tension; in contrast, United 93 and World Trade Center prefer instead to iron out contradiction and present a clear, heroic and redemptive view of 9/11.