United 93 (not a review)

[rm]

I am glad that United 93 is as well-made as it is. If it weren't the discourse about it would be even more complicated than it aleady is, and I'm similarly glad the Times review (http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/movies/28unit.html) seems as baffled as it is.

I haven't seen it yet, and I suppose I will because it is something I want to be able to write about in an informed manner, although I am torn about when and how. I don't, as you probably know, have a large amount of scruples about what is and isn't appropriate. I am, after all, the woman who had over a dozen people (almost entirely unconnected with NYC/DC/PA) unfriend her during 9/11 events because I blurted out in my journal that I was glad it wasn't the Chrysler Building. (It's a trivial thing I'm still irritable about because it annoys me when people are possessive in grief or refuse to understand strange solace.)

All of this said, I find the idea of United 93, not so much inappropriate, but irksome. Oliver Stone, who also has a movie coming out about 9/11 will at least regales us with conspiracy theories. Adam Sandler's 9/11 movie is reportedly a dramedy about dealing with the aftermath. Both projects share the notable trait of putting fiction onto fact. United 93, which granted is brought to us by the guy who gave us Bloody Sunday (which is quite effective), largely isn't. It's an exceptionally produced bit of reconstruction like you'd see on the History Channel or something, just better. Various government officials play themselves in it!

More galling, perhaps, than the thing's existence (again, I'm not on about propriety here, and this should become clear in a moment) is that it's opening the Tribeca Film Festival, which, of course, was started to revitalize the downtown economy after 9/11. Opening with this movie (as opposed to showing it in special session with a panel or something, which would have been appropriate), strikes me like that SNL skit soon after 9/11 -- it was mocking some awards show where people were tryig to dress soberly because of 9/11, and one fellow, dressed as some famous actor or other shows up in a suit covered in shit. When asked by "Joan Rivers" what's up with that, he says, "I didn't think we all felt bad enough, so I sat under a horse."

New York will never stop being heartbroken, but heartbreak is about life, not death. And if you're going to open our film festival with this, going to put this on our screens, going to make us watch those ridiculous testimonial ads about this film, we deserve better, not in craft or skill, that's evidently present in large amount. But in art. An event that moved us from one era into another, that negated the fearful imaginings of our nuclear childhoods as not imaginative enough, deserves to have art, not just artfulness. Courage here isn't cementing the apocrypha of the events of that day, but creating it, and recreating it, and calling it story. I don't feel outraged in all of this, merely poorly done by.

Comments

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Every time I see the commercials for this movie, I burst into tears. I can't even control that reaction. I think because it was the planes that horrified me the most on that day, and thinking about the people on them raging against the inevitable. It still scares me.

Some of the old World War II movies were made scant years after the conflict ended, and I wonder how people felt about seeing John Wayne up there fighting their battles. I'm vaguely dreading Stone's movie (even as a fan of his sometimes beautiful insanity) perhaps only because he cast Nicolas Cage in the lead.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Stone makes me habitually angry, as you know, for all sorts of reasons, but I'm deeply cogniscent of him being a very valid person to be taking this thing as clay and doing something with it.

[abnormal-apathy.livejournal.com]

I don't want to start an argument, but can you clarify your comment about people possessing grief annoying you? Frankly, I find the comment about the Chrysler Building to be a bit flippant, but perhaps I'm oversensitive considering I lost a family member in the WTC that day.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I mean that everyone expresses grief (and fear) differently, and certainly are prone to saying absudist, "inappropriate", odd, things. The idea that there is only one "right" way to react to a situation outside of immediate (or even long-term) comprehension, bothers me, espeically When I was getting crap directed at me for one sentence out of thousands and thousands of "appropriate" ones (this was on my own journal). I think grief is too fucked up for right and wrong, although I certain understand someone saying "okay, I need to do this reaaaaaly differently than you do, so let's not do this near each other".

I should note, my feelings about this also stem from two deaths in my life that happened vaguely around the same time, and elicited really abominable behaviors and recriminations within my social circle. So it's not purely a 9/11 sentiment.

(I should also note, I lived right by the Chrysler building at the time, the true crassness of the remark was that I was glad something didn't fall on m, and that the poeple objecting to my remark were folks who lived far away, and had less of a direct connection to the thing than I, and far less certainly than you).

And I'm sorry for your loss. My remark aside, what do you think about this beginning of the movie influx?

[abnormal-apathy.livejournal.com]

Well, I wouldn't tell someone what they could and couldn't say on their own journal. I mean, I can only dictate what I say in my own space, not others and even if I didn't agree with you, I still wouldn't have gone to the extent of telling you what you could or couldn't say. And yes, I understand about needing your own space to work through things. I had that with several of my friends who just didn't understand what I was going through at the time but in all fairness, didn't make much of an effort to try to understand either.

Aaaah, see, I didn't know you lived near the Chrysler Building at the time. I would've said the same thing, irregardless of my personal loss.

I have mixed feelings about these movies. On the one hand, I know that I personally can't sit through them. It's not a boycott or anything. I just know that I am still too raw and emotional to sit through it so I won't waste my money on it. I may never be at a point emotionally where I can get through them and that's okay with me.

On the other hand, there is no such thing as absolute truth when it comes to these films and I'm not sure there ever will be in real life either. The truth went down in flames with the planes and the buildings. I'm concerned that these dramatizations will become pop culture and ultimately pop culture helps define history. This scares me. I don't want kids 25 years from now watching these films and thinking they are seeing history. I mean, I watched JFK, but I don't use that movie as my basis of an opinion on the man. I'm afraid that years from now, the stories that are remembered will be the blockbuster dramatizations and not the reality of the situation.

[poodah.livejournal.com]

I am so sorry for your loss.

Many of your thoughts on the subject of this movie resonate with mine. I'm not angry or offended that it was made, or done somewhat narrowly, but I can't bear the thought of watching it. The commercials make me viscerally upset, in my gut. It's been several years and I'm surprised to admit the event still pains me greatly. My sister and I gew up in NYC (Queens) and we both felt the loss so keenly even though everyone we know (including friends who worked in the WTC, lived around the corner, and were expected to exit that subway station) somehow managed to be at the right place and right time. Both of us lives many miles away from our old place in Queens, so we often found ourselves oddly isolated in our grief.

[abnormal-apathy.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I started trying to write more than that, but it was just a jumbled mess. But really, thank you for your thoughts.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

The salon.com review was bewildered too, along the order of, "This was horrible to watch, and while it was really well done, I came out of it wondering why I watched it, because there was no real catharsis or larger perspective on the whole thing which we know this director is capable of." It was a note-faithful reenactment and not more.

I am really curious about this Adam Sandler movie.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm shocked that it seems like a non-horrid film, but the idea still very much bothers me. I loved War of the Worlds and loved of the use of imagery similar to the WTC attack used in a film that had nothing to do with it, both because the imagery is exceptionally vivid and powerful for everyone who watched it on TV and also because using it in that film is (for me at least) a way of dealing with it and ultimately de-fanging it. In vivid contrast, despite the best intentions any film about September 11 will (in the US at least) ultimately be a political statement, and ultimately a right-wing political statement in that it will encourage jingoism and fear.

My own thoughts are that the quickest way to get this nation back to being something less horrid and insane than it currently is, is for everyone (and especially all of the many people who were not in NYC on that day) to forget about and stop caring about that attack as rapidly as possible. Perhaps for me, the personal has become too political...

As for the other films, I have little respect for most of Oliver Stone's work, but I am somewhat less bothered by an account that will almost certainly mix fact, fiction, and conspiracy theory than about a realistic portrayal of events. I cannot comment about the Adam Sandler film since I stringently avoid him and anything associated with him, since his style of comedy (like most comedy and especially most modern comedy) is something that I find absolutely unendurable.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I rented the 9/11 documentary - the one by the two French filmmakers who had been filming a rookie-to-fireman story about a fireman in the firehouse closest to the Twin Towers; it was painful and terrible and beautiful and real, and nobody in NYC should ever feel obliged to inflict that kind of pain on themselves.

I recently got an email from Netflix, saying that because I rented that, I might want to watch this Flight 93 re-creation.

No. I watched the 9/11 documentary because it was real footage shot on site and even in the towers on the dreadful day, because I wanted to see it as real and unfiltered by the damn news media as possible, and because I have a huge personal thing for firefighters.

I do not want to see actors playing heroes. Nor do I see any reason to re-open those wounds. THis film doesn't seem to be offering anything new to the story; no real footage, no new information, no catharsis or hope that a dramatized version should offer.

No thanks. Oliver Stone, maybe; I'll wait for the reviews. My view on these incidents is so lopsided from most of America's anyway (having grown up a walking terrorist target) that I don't know if Stone will reach me, but I can at least see where he's reaching out to Americans in general.