Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center has a similarly hobbled feel. As with United 93, you sense, as you’re watching it, that the film is wearing blinders; that it isn’t looking, or can’t look, at what we all know now to have been a very big picture.
This isn’t the kind of movie you expect from Stone, who has a penchant for the epic, even the operatic, and who, in films like Born on the Fourth of July and JFK and Nixon, has enjoyed riling audiences with interpretations of recent political history that smack of a certain paranoia of the kind often associated with liberal cranks. ( JFK strongly hints that Lyndon Johnson was in on the plot to kill Kennedy, along with a band of rich, cross-dressing gay men in New Orleans.) Accordingly, before the movie’s release, there was a general expectation that World Trade Center would be a grand treatment of that epic day. These expectations were not in any way disappointed by the preview that ran in theaters across the country in the weeks leading up to the film’s release (a respectful one month’s distance from the fifth anniversary of September 11). In that preview, images floated across the screen with ominous, almost mythic grace—montages of ordinary people beginning their workdays, the shadow of a plane flying bizarrely low overhead, millions of sheets of paper fluttering to the ground—suggesting the great and terrible arc of events that morning. The first time I saw the preview, I burst into tears, because it brought it all back. I was afraid to see the movie when it came out.
But what you saw, finally, was something very small—something that was, once again, more like television than like cinema. World Trade Center is, indeed, a misleading title: after an opening sequence that does, very beautifully, bring back the sense of ordinary life, spread across classes and boroughs, that was soon to be brutalized (and for that reason seduces you into thinking it’s going to be about many people on that day of many deaths) the movie shrinks into the kind of narrative you associate with prime-time TV. Once again, it’s as if the aura of sanctification around the event—“you cannot cheapen this material with drama”—seems to have cowed people. The only story that World Trade Center dares to tell is the tale of two Port Authority policemen who were trapped in the rubble of a collapsing building and who, after keeping themselves and each other alive by trading stories through a hellish day and night, are rescued by courageous Marines and firefighters.
This true story is without question a moving one, and the representation of the anxiety of the officers’ families, driven to distraction by conflicting reports about the two men’s probable fates, makes for effective drama. But after that big opening sequence, the sudden and disorienting shift in focus feels odd; the movie very quickly acquires the predictable feel of an episode of ER. Only during a brief and extraneous-feeling sequence toward the end (about David Karnes, a square-jawed Marine vet living in Connecticut who, on watching the news that day, dons his uniform and heads to ground zero, where he will be the one to find the two trapped policemen) does the focus open out at all to suggest the larger world. “We’re gonna need some good men out there to avenge this,” he says, ramrod-straight in his carefully pressed Marine fatigues, as he surveys the wreckage. It’s the only time you’re reminded that what happened that day was part of a series of globally significant events, and would lead to many more.
To my mind, that scene—with its gung-ho rhetoric straight out of a Marine Corps advertisement—gives the lie to Stone’s repeated protestations that, as he put it in a interview for a piece in The New York Times, “This is not a political film. The mantra is ‘This is not a political film.’” It—and, in its way, United 93—is a political film; it’s merely that the politics of these works lurk under a sentimentality so overpowering that it seems perverse, even hardhearted, to take issue with them. It’s surely not accidental that the first two major pieces of popular entertainment to appear that have taken the events of September 11 as their subject have chosen to concentrate exclusively on events that are, strictly speaking, highly unrepresentative of what happened that day: the heroic and nearly successful passenger revolt (because only those passengers understood the real nature of the crime that was under way), the successful rescue of two cops. A title card at the end of Stone’s film declares that a total of twenty people were pulled from the rubble; but as we know, thousands more perished.
There’s no question that that day was also a story of heroism and bravery; but the fact that people were forced to be so heroic was the result of a vast and complicated network of political, social, and historical forces which, five years later, it is irresponsible not to want to acknowledge. The pretty much exclusive emphasis thus far on the “good”—the heroism and the bravery of ordinary Americans—in these entertainments is noteworthy, because it reminds you of the unwillingness to grapple with and acknowledge the larger issues, the larger causes and effects that culminated in what happened on September 11, which has characterized much of the national response to this pivotal trauma. That both films, like so much we have seen on various screens over the past five years, clothe their fictions and their editorializing in the pious garment of reverence for authentic reality—a pose that will elicit tears, if not serious thinking—should be cause for alarm rather than applause.
You could write a real tragedy, a Greek tragedy, about September 11 and what it has led to—a story with a true Aristotelian arc, a drama with a beginning that leads organically to a middle that leads organically, reasonably, to its inexorable end. This tragedy could, for instance, be about the seemingly inevitable way in which even the greatest empires can be thrown into confusion by a small number of enemies whose ideological fervor makes them unafraid of death. Or it could be about a specific empire, one whose contemptuous refusal to take its enemies seriously has made it deeply vulnerable. Or it could say something about a foolish and unseasoned ruler whose desire to outshine his more accomplished father has an unfortunate effect on his policymaking, with the result that he ends up seeming even more foolish and unseasoned in comparison to his father. Or it could be about the seemingly irreducible strangeness of the West to the East, and vice versa. Or it could even be a kind of black farce (a genre not strange to Greek tragedy) about the injustices of power—about a ruler so inept that he brings his country to ruin and yet never suffers, personally, for his errors. You could write such a tragedy today and to some people, at least, it might have a larger meaning. But then, someone has already written such a play; it’s called Persians.
It was on the Thursday after September 11 that Persians first started making sense to me. All those years I’d been teaching it, I’d failed to notice the most obviously remarkable thing about it—the device that transmutes the raw and chaotic stuff of lived history into something bigger, something with a universal resonance. As I have said, the play was produced a mere eight years after the Greeks’ fabulous and unexpected victory over their immense foe. How much more striking, then, that Aeschylus—who, it’s perhaps necessary to point out, fought in the Persian Wars himself and lost a brother, called Cynegirus, in the aftermath of the great triumph at Marathon, a death that would become a popular talking point in the later Greek rhetoric about heroism—should have chosen to focus his imaginative sympathy not on the exulting Greeks, but on the sorrowing Persians. Which is to say that, in the very moment of their greatest victory, he asked his fellow Athenians to think radically, to imagine something outside of their own experience, to situate the feelings they were having just then—about themselves, about those others—in a vaster frame: one in which they might see that present triumph could induce a complacency that just might bring about future disaster. The sense of these larger, moral themes hovering over the play’s spectacle is, in the end, what gives the drama a resonance that transcends the particulars of the history it purports to represent. No wonder the Athenians, for whom tragedy was a form of political dialogue as well as popular entertainment, gave it the prize that year.
Lucky Athenians. There’s a point in World Trade Center when the square-jawed Marine, who apart from being an all-Ameri
can patriot is clearly deeply religious, too—one of our first glimpses of this hitherto unexplained character is of him sitting in a church pew, staring fervently at an enormous crucifix—arrives at the disaster zone and, peering through the ghostly smoke and soot, says to another would-be rescuer, “It’s like God made a curtain with the smoke, shielding us from what we’re not yet ready to see.” There’s shielding going on in this film, but I’m not so sure God’s behind it. A title at the end of World Trade Center informs you that, after rescuing the lucky Port Authority cops, the Marine went on to serve two tours of duty in Iraq; the clear implication is that he has nobly risen to his own earlier challenge—that he is, in fact, one of the “good men” who went on to “avenge this.” But of course, as we all know now, Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center, and so that bit of “vengeance” was misguided, to say the least—a fact the title card omits to mention. And so, five years later, the film asks you to make the same fuzzy, unthinking link between the two events that certain people were asking you to make at the time it all happened. However much they seek to illumine what happened on September 11, the films of Greengrass and Stone are, in the end, more like curtains than windows. For the present, at least, we still can’t bring ourselves to look.
—The New York Review of Books, September 21, 2006
Acknowledgments
The acknowledgments on the last page of this collection most appropriately take the form of an explanation of the dedication to be found on the first; in keeping with the strictures of my dedicatees, I’ll keep this short. Every working writer knows exactly how much he owes to his editors, and I think it is fair to say that few working writers have been as privileged (lucky, I can hear one of them saying) in their editors as I have been in mine—both official and unofficial. To the former category belong Chip McGrath, who as the editor of The New York Times Book Review gave me my first serious berth as a critic, and from whom I learned more about reviewing, and writing, and indeed literature in general than I could begin to say here (and with whom it was always a good time, too); and of course Bob Silvers, whose trust in and generosity to me from the beginning of my relationship with The New York Review of Books have been more than I ever hoped for and mean more to me than I can say. As the provenance of most of the pieces in this collection clearly indicates, I owe him my career. This book is, in many ways, his.
As for “unofficial”: I never wrote for Bob Gottlieb while he was running a publication, but it is safe (and true) to say that I have, nonetheless, been writing for him my entire professional life from almost the moment I finished graduate school and arrived in New York, in 1994, to start my freelancing career, which also happened to be the moment I met him. From the start (as he likes me to write), he was a treasured mentor: generously reading and rereading, correcting, prodding, line-editing, everything-else-editing, shaping, and always improving pretty much everything I wrote, from the Ra-Men noodle days of QW and OUT on through everything else. Along the way, he’s become the greatest of (as he likes to say) my “great friends.” There’s no a question in my mind that whatever’s strong in my writing is largely due to his teaching (and, as he and I both know, that what’s not so great is due to the times I didn’t listen to him). I couldn’t be more grateful to him.
I am, as I so often have been, happy to acknowledge my gratitude to Tim Duggan, for shepherding this project with his usual professionalism, enthusiasm, and grace; to Allison Lorentzen, for dealing with countless bundles and phone calls with her usual expert aplomb; and of course to my agent and friend, Lydia Wills, who since 1994 has made it her job to know everything I write as well as I do, and who for that reason was a particularly precious help during the ongoing process of krisis necessary to assembling this volume. Without her judgment, I’d be lost.
About the Author
DANIEL MENDELSOHN is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and many other publications. His books include the international bestseller The Lost, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Prix Médicis in France. His other awards include a National Book Critics Circle Award for book reviewing and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. He teaches at Bard College.
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Jacket photograph by Tanya Marcuse
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HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS AND HOW EASILY IT CAN BE BROKEN. Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Mendelsohn. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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