The September 11 Syndrome

In this chapter, I examine another discourse that gave shape to post-9/11 cinema, namely, the treatment of 9/11 as an event experienced as a psychological trauma. Reflecting on television news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Pat Aufderheide observed that alongside the jingoistic rallying cries to war ran a ‘therapeutic patriotism’, with news networks assuming ‘a therapeutic role as grief counsellor…nurturing insecure viewers who had been stripped of their adult self-assurance by the shock of the attacks’ and providing ‘emotional reassurance’ (2001). This therapeutic patriotism gave shape to news coverage of the cycles of funerals, eulogies for the dead and ritualised mourning practices surrounding the burial of those killed on 9/11, invariably with a focus on the recovery (or the struggle to recover) of survivors and family and friends (see Kitch 2003). In Karen M. Seeley’s account of the work of mental health professionals in New York following 9/11, she notes that

based on a rapid assessment of mental health needs conducted by Columbia University’s School of Public Health, the New York State Office of Mental Health warned that residents of New York City and its environs would suffer an epidemic of psychiatric problems, including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and, especially, PTSD. (2008: 147–8)

Tom Pollard calls on a number of studies to indicate how post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – a severe condition first diagnosed in the 1980s that may develop after a person has experienced (directly or indirectly) a traumatic event, and which results in symptoms that include flashbacks and high levels of debilitating anxiety – was the primary problem reported. According to Pollard,

7.5 percent of New Yorkers and 20 percent of those who were near the World Trade Center when the attacks occurred suffered from PTSD [and] in the weeks and months following September 11 a significant number of children and adults exposed to media coverage of the attacks developed full-fledged cases of PTSD (over 5 percent). In addition, an astonishing percentage of children (18.7 percent) and adults (10.7 percent) developed some symptoms of PTSD but did not develop full-blown cases. (2011: 7)

In response, through schemes such as the Project Liberty programme, the federal government made available $155 million for mental health support, with up to 1.5 million New York state residents seeking treatment (see Seeley 2008: 165).³⁵ The fact that a mental health problem was often an important precursor to a successful compensation claim further consolidated the high incidence of this way of responding to the attacks. As these accounts of the wider response show, 9/11 was ‘effectively medicalized’ (Seeley 2008: 4), with Seeley describing how ‘one therapist maintained that, instead of encouraging people to rationally analyse the events of 9/11, the government [through the distribution of leaflets by FEMA, NIMH and other federal organisations and through the wider public health response] consistently advised them to pay attention to their feelings’ (2008: 157). Frustrated by this use of the therapy paradigm, Susan Sontag warned that ‘the politics of a democracy – which entails disagreement, and which promotes candour – has been replaced by psychotherapy’ (2001).

Psychologised thus, 9/11 is made available to the redemptive moves of a therapeutic patriotism. Susan Faludi argues that the political campaign ad ‘Ashley’s Story’, in which a female who has been traumatised by 9/11 is ‘cured’ on receiving a heartfelt embrace from George W. Bush, is an example of the preferred right-wing response (see 2007: 147–8). Here, the wounded, traumatised (usually female) subject has little agency and retreats from the public sphere to await the state’s paternal/therapeutic cure. What is more, the traumatic experience of 9/11 acts as a catalyst that precipitates a strong, action-driven response: in this discourse, those wounded by the attack are made safe in the family home while father/protectors make the US safe. Between $14 million and $17 million was spent to screen the ad more than 30,000 times in the final week of Bush’s successful re-election campaign (see Faludi 2007: 163).

At the same time, this neoconservative response – in which being traumatised by 9/11 is bracketed as a gendered reaction in need of strong male guidance and leadership – works in parallel with a more liberal, less obviously gendered, version that extends the wounded state to all. Harriet B. Braiker’s self-help book The September 11 Syndrome: Anxious Days and Sleepless Nights (2002) is indicative. Braiker writes that

following the events of September 11, and continuing to this day, an intense sense of vulnerability and loss of control has taken hold. These troubling feelings may linger beneath the surface producing heightened anxiety at any time, stimulated by replaying news footage of the September 11 attacks or by current news events from the war on terrorism. These jolts cause the embers to reignite into a flame of heightened anxiety and from there into more serious feelings of stress, depression, anxiety and loss – the September 11 syndrome. (2002: 5)

Braiker’s self-help approach deals with these difficult emotions and feelings via Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): a ‘worry-timer’ to restrict time spent worrying, an elastic band to twang when feeling anxious, choosing to not watch the news or read a newspaper, and so on. The latter suggestion, to turn away from media coverage of 9/11, to effectively avoid thinking about the event, to retreat into the realm of the personal and the domestic, signals clearly the political stakes. This chapter argues that a cycle of post-9/11 films, including The Guys (2003) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, places the experience of 9/11 in this liberal therapeutic framework and that this serves to sequester the experience of 9/11 squarely in the realm of the personal and in doing so turn away from more expansive senses of the event that had become central to critical views of the attacks. Spanning nearly a decade, this cycle signals the longevity of this way of framing the experience of the terrorist attacks and is especially important in indicating the continued centrality of therapeutic nationalism to the brokering of consensus in relation to 9/11 and its aftermath.

In Anne Nelson’s stage play The Guys, a fire captain and ex-soldier asks a female journalist to help him prepare eulogies for eight of his men who were killed on 9/11. Opening less than twelve weeks after the attacks, the play was first staged at the Flea Theatre in Tribeca, New York, very close to the ruins of the World Trade Center, with Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray in the central roles. The play was a success and transferred to Los Angeles in July 2002 and to the Edinburgh Festival in the same year. A modestly budgeted film version, starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, premiered at the Toronto film festival in September 2002, followed by a limited release in the US in April 2003.

As a stage play written within days of the attacks, The Guys is readable as part of the very first wave of responses to 9/11 described in chapter one, and also an addition to the variety of voices, many based in New York, who resisted the call to arms. In interview, Nelson has described the play as a selfconscious attempt to produce a counter-hegemonic response to 9/11, stating:

In the weeks after September 11, I felt as though New York’s grief was being appropriated for all kinds of other political and commercial interests. I thought that if I wrote this small play, it would be claiming a little patch of ground for the way I and the people around me were actually experiencing the event. (Quoted in Finn 2006)

In some respects the film version embodies a left-liberal sensibility. Joan (Weaver) is a cultured, middle-aged photojournalist who has reported on ‘dirty wars’ in Latin America. Perhaps her background is here intended to point to clandestine US involvement in that region in much the same way Ken Loach intended with his contribution to 11′09″01 September 11, which describes the CIA-supported coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile on 11 September 1973. However, the loose, associative way this fact sits within the narrative of The Guys suggests that it functions more as a mark of a certain middle-class, left-liberal cosmopolitanism than as a political comment. Joan reflects on the vernacular used by New Yorkers in the days following 9/11. She notes how people ask, ‘Are you okay? Are your family okay? Are your people okay? Are your acquaintances okay?’, the careful and varied choice of words negotiating racial, national and ethnic difference, and implicitly pointing to the city’s diversity and complexity. In a coffee shop, Joan’s server tells her that he has lost two people and says ‘God Bless America’, leading Joan to ruminate on how difficult it is to use the term ‘God Bless!’ in New York because of the multiplicity of religions at large. Reinforcing this, cutaways show grief-stricken multi-ethnic New Yorkers going about their daily lives. By these means the film seeks to show how loss affects a widely varied New York community and not only the rescue services that were given privileged status in much mass media coverage. Considered thus, it might be argued that in its humanism and commitment to community the film stands apart from the mainstream media response and offers potential for left-liberal critique. However, to the extent that it also offers an early working through of the PTSD/therapy paradigm, it may be regarded as forming part of the outpouring of therapeutic patriotism.

First and foremost, for all its evocation of a multi-ethnic, polyvocal New York, the film focuses primarily on the experience of white Anglo-American Nick (LaPaglia), a war veteran and fire captain. The film’s opening scene, seemingly from a surveillance camera, shows a lone firefighter standing outside a fire station at 08.39am on the morning of 11 September; pieces of paper fill the air and a fire engine leaves amidst a cloud of smoke and debris. Later, we learn that these images are haunting Nick (who was not on duty on 9/11) as disruptive flashbacks. He sees his men begin the journey that will lead to their deaths, but their bodies have not been recovered and he doesn’t even know which of the Twin Towers they attended. In the stage play these and further images of the terrorist attacks were projected behind the actors, functioning, like the intrusive flashbacks Nick suffers, as a constant reminder of the way in which the trauma of 9/11 infiltrated and disrupted the everyday lives of those who experienced it.

The film then shows how Joan’s therapeutic support allows Nick to come to terms with these images (and the trauma they connote), indicating how the wider discourse around the firefighters’ heroism and their heroic victimisation dovetails with a narrative of recuperation and redemption. The specific plot moves are as follows: the primary problem faced by Nick is how to write eulogies for his men. Joan encourages him to search for the telling detail or anecdote that might unlock something of each man’s character. They discuss writing the eulogy for Bill Doherty, an Irish churchgoer, whom Nick describes as ordinary and unremarkable. Joan teases out the fact that Bill was also a mentor to the younger firefighters, that he had a fascination with the history of New York and that he was the self-appointed fire station food critic. This process is repeated with each of the men, with the eulogies emphasising the quiet, modest surface appearance of each man and their characterful and colourful inner lives. This is then extended to the city as a whole, with Joan observing, ‘I knew then that whenever I saw a person on the street I only saw their public shadow’. While their dialogue contains some critical comment on the ways in which firefighters were cast as heroes, it also affirms the men as extraordinarily strong and good-natured.

Here the film aligns with the 1,910 300-word obituaries published in the New York Times in the weeks following 9/11 under the heading ‘Among the Missing’ and later ‘Portraits of Grief’. These vignettes – which represent a therapeutic response in microcosm – were widely celebrated as embodying

the utopian moment of solidarity right after the attacks, when the unity of the population, transcending usual dividers of gender, race, and class, was also concretized in candlelight vigils, small-scale classical concerts, and the more mournful than defiant flying of the American flag. (Versluys 2009: 9)

However, as Nancy Miller, in an extended analysis of the portraits, observes, the telling anecdotes that allowed the lives to be condensed and celebrated were assembled according to a specific formula. She writes:

If you have attended a funeral lately, or watched one on television, these anecdotes will sound familiar. Like the subject of the eulogy, the subject of the portrait always appears in a good, often humorous light – and the story told, like the desirable details the reporters typically sought for, is meant to illuminate that something ‘true and essential’ [and] always reveals something good, like virtue – often civic, or at least domestic, virtue. (2003: 117)

Miller’s critique of the ‘Portraits of Grief’ may also apply to The Guys, with Nick and Joan’s eulogies focusing on civic virtue and celebrating the values of family, community and friendship. As Richard Gray observes, ‘through talking about the dead and making them come alive again in memory and eulogy, the two characters achieve a kind of catharsis’ (2011: 153). Miller argues that the consequence of subjecting all deaths to this positive form is that ‘they are crafted to serve as the microcosm of family life, of community values, of a valiant and, though wounded, above all, happy America’ (2003: 122). On a wider scale, this process aims for catharsis by sidestepping any political or historical framework in which to place 9/11 and the focusing on the spirit of individuals who make up the nation. While the efficacy of therapy for those suffering mental health problems and the important palliative role of funerals and eulogies are undeniable, it is significant and consequential that these personal responses become a cultural trope (financially underwritten by the state, amplified in the mass media and rehearsed again and again in the cinema). At the film’s close, Joan describes the attacks in reverse, undertaking a fantasy that what has happened can be undone. This is edited with footage of actual funeral services, and the combination of words and image sets a redemptive tone; the final scene has Nick addressing a large remembrance service, overcoming his fear of public speaking and celebrating the lives of his men. Grief and anger are recognised but are pressed to the service of therapeutic nationalism seeking closure and redemption. Gray notes that the film ends with advice to avoid thinking about 9/11, recalling Braiker’s advice to avoid watching the news or reading a newspaper: ‘Nick confides in Jean that “I lie awake at nights thinking, ‘What was the reason?’”…And Jean speaks for the play when she replies simply, “No reason”’ (2011: 153).

Fig. 14: therapeutic nationalism: The Guys (2002)

We might reasonably expect a clash between the value systems of the two protagonists: it seems unlikely that a liberal journalist and a fire chief would share the same worldview. Yet it turns out that their meetings are relatively conventional in tone. Gender difference does rise to the surface (Nick’s inarticulacy; Joan’s empathy), but this is resolved through a moment of transcendence. Nick mournfully comments on how post-9/11 nobody has fun any more, and Joan replies by describing a ‘tango wedding’ she attended which was carefree and full of laughter. This prompts Nick to reveal that, like his men, he too has an unexpected side: he’s been taking dancing lessons for years. The scene proceeds with the two dancing, and Nick telling Joan, ‘you have to let go’ and ‘learn to follow’. Here Joan’s gender is emphasised and her power (to narrate, to articulate) de-emphasised. This keys her character into a gendered construction that stresses her role as an enabler, a healer – in her voice-over narration she expresses the ‘primal’ need to hug a baby in the week after 9/11. This episode is described as ‘a dream intermission in the middle of all this’, and we later learn that the dancing scene never happened. But its work – masculine capability providing direction to a wounded female – is done.

Writing in the New York Times in 2005, Stephen Farber noted that a cycle of films including Fear X (2003), Winter Solstice (2003), Bereft (2004), Imaginary Heroes (2004) and The Upside of Anger (2005) features protagonists who are faced with the sudden, traumatic death of a loved one. Farber argues that this cycle of films is ‘suffused with a deep, enduring sense of grief’ that can be read as an early attempt to address the experience of 9/11; he notes how

healing figures in some of these new movies but it is a minor part of the story; most of the films survey characters who remain stuck in a syndrome of grief and anger that overpowers them for months or even years after the traumatic event. They convey a profound sadness that in some cases has more than subliminal connection to the post-9/11 mood in which the pictures, with their typically long lead times, took shape. (2005)

These films may well describe something of the kind of pain experienced by those grief-stricken by 9/11. However, as already noted, this raw experience, not easily reconciled or overcome, was, in cultural terms, arguably subject to a therapeutic nationalism shaped by the wider discourse and (albeit in a qualified way) by films such as The Guys. Reign Over Me (2007), directed by Mike Binder, also responsible for The Upside of Anger, is indicative of the two tendencies being brought together, with the raw anger of loss subjected to a therapeutic steer towards resolution. The film tells the story of Charlie (Adam Sandler), who lost his family on 9/11 and who has subsequently spiralled into a depressed existence and displays symptoms that fit with a diagnosis of PTSD. He behaves childishly, wears headphones at all times to drown out intrusive thoughts, obsessively plays a violent computer game (the ‘boss’ characters can be read as an allegory for the Twin Towers) and has sleep problems due to vivid nightmares. Five years on from 9/11, Charlie meets former college roommate Alan (Don Cheadle), who is suffering marital problems. As they reconnect, a therapeutic relationship allows Charlie to begin the process of recovery and Alan to mend his broken marriage. Here we see how the general melancholy registered in the cycle of films described by Farber is given structure by the therapeutic discourse, and how this structure inevitably moves towards closure, even against a background of considerable consternation and critique related to 9/11 and prevalent in the wider culture.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was given a limited release on 25 December 2011, and a full theatrical release on 20 January 2012. However, the film, based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestselling novel, has its origins mid-decade, alongside Reign Over Me, when the book was published and when director Stephen Daldry and producer Scott Rudin began work on the adaptation. The film tells the story of a hyper-intelligent, hyperactive and by some accounts autistic 11-year-old boy, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), who is seeking to find the meaning of a key (marked with the label ‘Black’) that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The film renders the symptoms of PTSD in two ways. The first is the intrusive thoughts that Oskar has resulting from hearing the desperate phone messages left by his father, Thomas (Tom Hanks), as he was stuck in the North Tower, and especially Oskar’s failure to answer the sixth message, which was being recorded as the building collapsed. And the second is Oskar’s fixation with the image of a man falling from the World Trade Center, an image that appears at a number of crucial points in the film’s narrative, including the beginning of the film layered with images of Oskar watching his father’s funeral, in a scene where Oskar downloads from the internet photographs of people falling from the Twin Towers, in a sequence on the subway where Oskar has a vision of a falling man, clearly identifiable as his father, and at the film’s close.³⁶ Both elements have an intensely personal meaning for Oskar (he feels guilt that he didn’t pick up the telephone and imagines that the falling man may be his father), but both are also central aspects of the wider cultural response to 9/11.

The phone calls made during the attacks – especially those made to family and friends from the passengers on board United 93 – functioned discursively to galvanise traditional and seemingly universal senses of family, love and community, and thus underwrite specific nationalist and political discourses with the deep structures of common sense and shared human feeling. Oskar’s failure to answer his father’s call has thereby (momentarily) disrupted the way in which these acts of communication helped to consolidate a redemptive account of 9/11. The figure of the falling man is more complex: footage of people falling/jumping from the Twin Towers had been shown in television news reports during the attacks, but within a few hours an editorial decision was taken not to show it. As already noted, documentaries depicting 9/11 were extremely careful in the ways they negotiated this, with 9/11, for example, using only an abbreviated audio-only version of camera footage of bodies hitting the ground. Despite this self-censorship, the images were revisited, appearing on websites such as Ogrish.com, in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s contribution to the portmanteau film 11′09″01 September 11 and in visual artist Sharon Paz’s Falling (2002), an installation of falling figures silhouetted on the windows of the Jamaica Center in Queens, New York. These early attempts to explore the significance of the figure of the falling people were widely condemned as exploitative, and Paz’s installation was withdrawn after public protests (see Swartz 2006). However, from mid-decade, following an extended article in Esquire which sought to identify a man featured in one of the most widely reproduced photographs, the singular image of a falling man became central to the wider responses to 9/11 (see Junod 2006). Here the general issue of people falling from the building (seeking air, falling by accident, deciding to die, being pushed by others) is replaced by a singular image of a particular individual. The central thrust of Junod’s article (and the wider media response, including a documentary film called 9/11: The Falling Man (2006)) is that this person must be identified in order to allow his family to grieve, thereby activating the therapeutic mechanisms called upon to alleviate wider anxieties regarding 9/11. We might relate this to an observation made by Jeffrey Melnick that mid-decade there is a wholesale shift from metaphors of rising (such as Bruce Springsteen’s important post-9/11 album The Rising and myriad images of ascension) to those of falling (Tom Junod’s article, for example, and Don DeLillo’s novel The Falling Man (2007)) (2009: 91); this discursive shift points to a move from a jingoistic to a therapeutic nationalism, with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as book and then film, a measure of the increasing centrality of the latter.

Oskar’s quest to track down everyone in New York with the surname Black, thereby finding the owner of the key, brings him into contact with a diverse range of people: a black woman who is grief-stricken and estranged from her husband, an evangelical Christian who states that if he finds the owner of the key it will be a miracle, an OCD Asian woman, a drag queen, and so on. Oskar tells his mother: ‘So many of them had lost somebody or something.’ Kristiaan Versluys offers a positive reading of these encounters, describing how Oscar’s expedition aggregates a range of different cultural and ethnic experiences, which ‘produces epic momentum and psychic uplift [and points to a] rich and complicated collective destiny’ (2009: 115). Taken together, Oskar’s journey and encounters provide, for Versluys, ‘a counterbalance to personal devastation’ (ibid,). But read in relation to the wider discourse of therapeutic nationalism, this aggregation, or archive, of suffering places the whole city (and by inference the whole country) in a parlous psychological state. As Holloway notes in relation to Foer’s novel,

The New Yorkers Oskar encountered were invariably as damaged, scarred, unstable or fixated as he…each of them gripped, like Oskar, by private tragedy so all-consuming that they became private universes in which their victims endured blighted and asocial lives. (2008: 116)

Described thus, Oskar’s visits (and one might argue the experience of 9/11 in general) point to suffering as a central facet of contemporary experience (the traumatised state of the ‘Blacks’ is not just a consequence of 9/11). Here, the film has correspondences with 25th Hour and Parallel Lines, shedding light on inequality, economic difficulty, and so on. However, in contrast to these films, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close seeks some redemptive note to tie this collective grief to the possibility of uplift and therapeutic overcoming resulting from the successful completion of Oskar’s quest.

While Oskar searches for the owner of the key as a means for coming to terms with his father’s death, a secondary narrative strand shows him establishing a relationship with his paternal grandfather. Oskar’s grandfather (Max von Sydow) accompanies him on his quest, and together they listen to the answering machine messages left by Oskar’s father, including the one Oskar ignored. A key aspect of Oskar’s grandfather’s mental state is that he experienced first-hand the Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II, during which his parents were killed, along with over 20,000 people. His experience was so devastating that Oskar’s grandfather chose to never speak again, resulting in the failure of his marriage, estrangement from his son and grandson and a near feral existence on the margins of family life. Where, as noted earlier, War of the Worlds calls on the experience of Iraq, the genocide in Rwanda and the bombing of Hiroshima, this conflation of the Dresden bombing and 9/11 has the effect of both amplifying the significance of 9/11 (as with Ground Zero, Pearl Harbor, etc.) and reducing history to a level playing field of traumatised victims. While the grandfather’s psychological derangement appears, at first glance, to indicate that this kind of trauma cannot be overcome, as the film’s narrative proceeds, 9/11 is folded into this wider trauma; and as the 9/11 syndrome is alleviated so too is his traumatic experience of World War II. As Oskar’s grandfather’s aids Oskar’s recovery (accompanying him in the quest for the owner of the missing key) his own traumatic experience undergoes rehabilitation. As a result he is able to return to the family fold, thereby healing the film’s multiple historical ruptures.³⁷

The search for the key culminates in a similarly resolute way: we learn that the key, found by Oskar in a vase, belongs to the father of a ‘Mr Black’ and that it was acquired by Oskar’s father accidentally when he bought the vase at an estate sale. Oskar’s search eventually allows him to identify William Black (Jeffrey Wright) as the owner, and the key allows Black to access a letter his father wrote to him just before his death which will allow him to resolve issues of his own. Oskar confesses to Black about the answering machine message and receives a form of absolution.

With the film’s preoccupation with fathers and sons comes a marginalisation of the experience of Oskar’s mother and grandmother. In the novel Oskar’s mother (Sandra Bullock) has a boyfriend who makes Oskar feel resentful; however, it has been reported that a scene from the film where Oskar’s mother meets a man (James Gandolfini) at a grief counselling session was cut due to negative test audience reactions (see Appelo 2012). The film is also clearer than the novel in the way it signals that Oskar’s mother knows about his quest and arranges for people to meet him, thereby ensuring that she cannot be accused of placing her son in danger. These changes from novel to film have the effect of depicting Oskar’s mother in a less complex way: she remains loyal to her dead husband and her mothering is at all times strong and capable despite her great suffering: the messy reality acknowledged in the novel is thus simplified into a schematic gendering.

In the penultimate scene of the film Oskar compiles a scrapbook recounting his journey and creates a final page in such a way as to allow him to have the falling man move upwards, or return, to safety: a redemptive image that echoes earlier instances of apotheosis already described in other post-9/11 films. Having found some comfort in his travails, the final scene has Oskar discovering a note left by his father on a swing in Central Park that he has previously been too frightened to play on (throughout his life his father had devised puzzles that required him to confront his autism). The note quietly reminds Oskar that the authority and comfort of his father will remain in memory, and thus reassured he overcomes his fear and rides the swing, a freeze frame catching this positive image of transcendence and offering it as a salve to the traumatic images of the falling man interspersed throughout the film. As such, the film takes two tropes by which the experience of 9/11 was mediated – the highly symbolic figures of the telephone calls and the falling man – and brings them into the service of a story of grief, anger and an existential search for meaning. Oskar’s quest reveals itself to be a therapeutic journey that enables him to alleviate the symptoms of PTSD caused by the death of his father on 9/11 and thereby subject the wider event to the logic of therapeutic nationalism.

Fig. 15: The falling man as motif: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

There may be significant costs to the reliance on therapeutic nationalism in coming to terms with 9/11. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue that, as a cultural phenomenon, focus on the traumatised individual tends to offer an ahistorical and apolitical reading of any event that ‘obliterates experience’ and ‘operates as a screen between the event and its context’ (2009: 281). Karen M. Seeley argues that the medicalisation of 9/11 and the emphasis on the psychological harm done by the attacks promoted ‘clinical solutions to an act of international political violence’ (2008: 4) and conferred a status of victimised innocence on the sufferer: this becomes central to the commemoration of 9/11, in which ‘victims of the attack were considered heroes who had made sacrifices for their country’ (2008: 155). This broader criticism of therapy culture is certainly applicable to films such as The Guys, Reign Over Me and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The logic condenses in a dramatic scene in the latter where, frustrated with Oskar’s persistent questioning, his mother shouts, ‘Not everything makes sense! I don’t know why a man flew a plane into a building!’ The line of dialogue works to sum all the films described in this chapter: 9/11 cannot be explained; it can only be carried as a burden of pain and worked through via therapeutic frameworks. And this way of bracketing 9/11 extends to other films already discussed in this book: in the revenge film Man on Fire a traumatised special forces assassin, John Creasy, finds redemption (and therapeutic closure) through the sacrifice of his life for a child in his care; in World Trade Center a paramedic troubled by alcoholism finds redemption in his heroic actions helping the trapped policemen. We will have cause to return to this theme in chapter eight in discussion of how PTSD is also a central feature of films depicting the Iraq War.

Fig. 16: Fathers and sons and overcoming: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

That said, a number of films discussed in previous chapters engage the therapeutic discourse as a key structuring element but resist easy solutions.³⁸ Parallel Lines is couched in therapeutic terms: Davenport cannot face returning to her home in New York and is haunted by what the view of the Manhattan skyline from her apartment will look like. However, her journey engages difficult questions and pulls into play a number of wider political, social and historical discourses to give structure to her personal struggle and make her return a positive experience. 25th Hour activates a therapeutic mode, but the journey to well-being is shown to require atonement for past sins. In Margaret (2011), another film set in post-9/11 New York and described by Ben Kenisberg as ‘a definitive post-9/11 film’ (2011), a young woman experiences a traumatic and life-changing event for which she is partially responsible. The film follows her struggle to reconcile the different views and responses of family (her mother counsels an ethically unclear approach), victims (who resolutely refuse to behave like victims) and peers. The film links this personal quandary with explicit references to 9/11 made through high-school debating groups and numerous shots of planes leaving vapour trails high above the Manhattan skyline. Though the final scenes do offer a moment of resolution (as mother and daughter set aside their differences), the film celebrates resilience as opposed to victimhood and upholds a dialectical sense of the difficulty of coming to terms with traumatic experience. Roger Luckhurst claims that after the 7/7 bombings in London clinicians shifted to a resilience-based approach, which rather than imposing a framework related to PTSD instead responded to the attitude of the victims, many of whom did not present PTSD-related symptoms (2008: 210). Margaret is a film that might be said to explore how individuals and communities who experience traumatic events should be permitted to respond to their experience in ways other than a predetermined ‘post-traumatic afterwardsness’ (see Luckhurst 2008: 211–12). Cynthia Weber claims that

September 11 is a liminal moment in US history, not so much as a trauma that requires a national therapeutic response but rather as a ‘confrontation’ or an ‘encounter’ with questions that haunt the US relationship both between self and other and with(in) the self. (2005: 2)

The complex view offered by films such as Margaret indicates that the encounter/confrontation valued by Weber was being explored in US popular culture. And as we shall see in the next chapter, there is also evidence of its further staging in a cycle of post-9/11 ‘torture’ films.