“It’s Too Soon”—that cowardly phrase planted in the public’s mind by the mainstream media—keeps Oliver Stone’s movie World Trade Center from the people who might especially appreciate its value. The phrase seems designed to control popular sentiment while Stone endeavors to particularize and analyze the huge mix of personal and political feelings that have mounted in the American psyche ever since the sad events of 9/11. World Trade Center is never so untrustworthy as an attempt at an “official” remembrance of that day. Stone (and screenwriter Andrea Berloff) make the admirable, intelligent decision to concentrate on the experiences of two Port Authority policeman and their families. John McLoughlin is played by Nicolas Cage and Will Jimeno is played by Michael Pena. The particular speaks for and to the universal.
Anyone who remembers 9/11 deals with it on a daily basis. (More 9/11 movie stories should be made.) To suggest that popular culture cannot link up with and express those memories is, actually, an insult to our sensibilities. Sufferers and survivors must assess and grow from experience. It is an ennobling process but today’s cultural gatekeepers either don’t believe in the people’s capacity for nobility or simply insist that only empowered speakers and media wonks know best.
Consider that the vapid action-cartoon Snakes on a Plane was generally greeted in the media as a phenomena of smart marketing. Never too soon for that. GO SEE IT! hailed publications from AM New York to The Nation magazine’s blog. In the latter, Snakes on the Plane was praised for being a 9/11 allegory by Richard Kim who invited readers to follow the hype and embrace the spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson—wild-eyed, vituperative and profane as usual—as he tazers reptiles on board a commercial passenger plane. It’s a silly disaster movie premise, yet Kim takes it as an allusion to United Flight 93, the plane that went down in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back a group of terrorists. Snakes on a Plane isn’t a movie that inspires thought (neither did Paul Greengrass’s dour, uninspired docudrama United 93). Instead, it provides an occasion for The Nation to propagandize for you (Kim launches into ridicule of President Bush and the Homeland Security alert system). In other words: It’s Too Soon to think for yourself.
The bizarre difference in media attitudes toward World Trade Center and Snakes on a Plane reflect the change in public discourse that has taken place since 9/11. Movies that attempt to deal with the spiritual and ethical crisis of that tragedy—The Manchurian Candidate, Cellular, Phone Booth, Red Eye, War of the Worlds, Munich, Chicken Little, Final Destination 3, Monster House–are routinely misunderstood. Either their serious meaning is denied, or their serious effort is scoffed at. This isn’t just the usual mindlessness of journalists who promote anti-intellectualism and Hollywood marketing, but an insidious form of cultural hegemony. Let the punditocracy and irresponsible Hollywood hacks trivialize 9/11 their way—always the ignoble way and one that furthers commercialism.
In World Trade Center, Stone creates one of the finest American narratives in modern pop. Storylines that alternate between McLoughlin and Jimeno trapped in a pit under the rubble of Tower One and the anxieties of their suburban, multi-ethnic families are terse and poignant. The interplay of these scenes prove that sentiment can be accessed without undue sympathy. What Stone elicits, in fact, is credible empathy. You’d have to go back to the unifying sense of public distress during World War II (and to movies like Till the End of Time, The Best Years of Our Lives, From Here to Eternity) to find examples of filmmaking that aroused a similar shared pathos connected with common hope. In World Trade Center, hope is not namby-pamby; it’s informed by a desperation for the fundamental patterns of life that have been ruthlessly shaken. Stone restores decency to a culture that was mired in cynicism long before 9/11. Thus the inability of some critics to appreciate the archetypal quality of Stone’s characters. His respect for the range of American personalities, exhibited in the behavior of various working-class folk (along with the respect from actors who live fully into their roles, seizing the rare occasion of representing the working-class) is so radical that it tends to unnerve those mediacrats who (since Vietnam? Watergate? Clinton?) have claimed authority over democratic virtues.
Now, even the best American filmmakers find it difficult to treat honor as a subject. Any modern attempt to do the right thing runs into opposition from some preening establishment. That’s what happened to Steven Spielberg’s great, complex Munich. Not even the impressive collaboration with Tony Kushner (Angels in America) escaped the censure of those whose political biases clashed with the film’s thoroughly inquisitive spiritual drama. Upset their own positions were not simply upheld, they couldn’t stand to imagine how others felt politically. So Munich was refused proper philosophical and political engagement and denied its place in the discourse of popular culture.
Refusing Munich (as rudely as Spielberg’s pungent 9/11 allegory in War of the Worlds was refused), the left-liberal media soon found a comfy alternative. In the first American theatrical release of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 film Army of Shadows, pundits could relax all that 9/11 anxiety and bask in an anachronistic spectacle of the already-won World War II. This film from the late-60s also brought back nostalgia for the good ol’ counterculture. Liberal moviegoers weren’t stepping into New York’s Film Forum with forward-thinking courage and commitment; they were retreating into Melville’s grave via his tired, late-career blandness. Army of Shadows was exasperatingly colorless, featuring a cast of art-house icons such as Simone Signoret and Lino Ventura who were way past their prime, yet fondly representative of uncomplicated political issues. This wasn’t snakes on a plane but totems in a reliquary. A film as uncompelling as Army of Shadows could only become a hit in an era where elite audiences are afraid of their most urgent feelings—afraid of the shadow cast by 9/11.
After all, as critic John Demetry noted, no pundits whined “It’s Too Soon” about Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. The exploitation of 9/11 footage and the conning of soldiers and soldier’s families in Moore’s anti-Bush propaganda was ok’d by most journalists. But when they didn’t get the expected Moore-rebuttal from Stone, some even complained that World Trade Center wasn’t political. “It’s Too Soon” must really mean that only the approved perspective will be accepted. But keeping people away from this extraordinary film is a form of cultural treason; it keeps audiences from finding their own responses, keeps them from catharsis.
What can be said satisfactorily about losses that are unfair and criminal, or sacrifices made without choice? The 9/11 terrorists stole the liberty that comes with an engaged battle, forever leaving us in a state of mortified offense. There hasn’t yet been a fully declared war to relieve this unique frustration, yet other events have moved in to distract our mourning and cast Americans into bitter ideological contradictions.
One benefit of pop culture is to take-in and weigh these circumstance which Stone’s film does beautifully by choosing to interpret the McLoughlin and Jimeno experiences as spiritual trials. “Where are we?” McLoughlin asks when close to succumbing, with massive rock weighing on his chest. “We’re in Hell,” Jimeno answers with the sarcastic, gallows humor instinctively developed by men in combat. Stone uses this to characterize and validate civilian-life shock-and-awe. The hell of stolen liberty forces the men to reconsider how they lived their lives, to painfully revisit their daily regrets.
World Trade Center’s approach is not apolitical. Stone’s post-Vietnam alarm is threaded gently throughout, yet it is respectfully held in check—which is a different kind of politics than pundits customarily understand; a different rhetoric, if you will. His rectitude is judicious; he realizes that that blue-sky, blue-collar day triggered a working-class sense of unity, including the agape that makes privileged secular commentators uneasy. As shown, the events of 9/11 illustrate a richer sense of possibility than that fearfully half-satirized in Stone’s Wall Street. Here the will strains toward a world of love not toward worldly power or material gain. As the buried men struggle to survive, their wives (portrayed by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal) fight for faith. Their endurance is never Norman Rockwell banal; the Catholic families all pray in ethnically distinct manners and the men accept their grievous, unequal portion: “I don’t smile a lot,” McLoughlin tells Jimeno. “That’s why I’m not Lieutenant. People don’t like me because I don’t smile a lot.” Stone carefully leavens his stories with an earned solemnity, not rah-rah demagoguery; it is the equivalent to not smiling a lot.
In the consumerist mania that has taken over film culture, that song from The Wiz, “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News,” holds sway. It is, ironically, a cynic’s anthem. Feel-good pop narratives disrespect post-9/11 audiences, denying them the catharsis that comes with hard-earned deliverance. The Village Voice’s critics deviously ridicule this as “uplift”. Their attitude reveals privileged-class decadence. They dismiss commiseration and fellow-feeling, ensuring factionalism and polarization.
At the end of the widely disapproved Munich, a discreet vision of the World Trade Center towers appears in the distance. It is breathtaking—a visual memory that accentuates the story Spielberg was telling. History reverberates from that vista. Memory collapses into sorrow, for the terrorist slaughter of the 1972 Munich Olympics and the 2001 attack that took down the towers. What we might have wished never happened reappears almost magically, as if in fable, but now and forever an image of terrifying realism. It is a wound we all share and must not be forgotten.
Admittedly, nothing in Stone’s movie is quite that powerful or cautionary but he literalizes another trope from Spielberg’s 9/11 trilogy: That avant-garde fade to black featured in War of the Worlds—a cessation of stimulus—also occurs in World Trade Center after the towers fall. But Stone follows it brilliantly, though maybe too obviously, with a close-up of McLoughlin’s eyes. It is a symbol of shocked witnessing–from inside the chaos–appropriate for the ending of Munich, appropriate to world-wide experience that September day. Those stunned, pain-filled, apprehensive eyes describe how we currently look at movies.
When additional rescuers arrive at the towers site, they’re soon waylaid by clouds of debris and billowing smoke. A marine says “It’s like God made a curtain of smoke, shielding us from what we’re not yet ready to see.” Film geeks might liken this moment to John Boorman’s Excalibur when the fog rises, helpfully obscuring the small number of King Arthur’s army of shadows; it’s part of Boorman’s intelligent use of national mythology. Stone has dared not to distance himself from the immediacy of 9/11; he’s willing to countenance contemporary historical mythologizing, insisting that we are ready to see and assess the felt consequences of what’s happened to us. World Trade Center reminds us, though in a less philological way than Excalibur, that movie culture has a commemorative and restorative purpose.
Audiences who come out of Stone’s movie sniffling, teary-eyed and shaken experience a rare sense of community largely because they have not assembled for something trivial. (They are not contemptuously regarded as snakes on plane.) The step-by-step process of catharsis can only be accomplished by the ritualistic variations Stone makes on the action film, the war film, the domestic drama, the love story, the social documentary as alluded to by each scene in World Trade Center. (Consider how meaningfully Stone immobilizes Cage, the fatuous 90s action hero, how he puts Bello into a more humane context than the rabid A History of Violence—each choice a correction of recent pop mythology.)
Stone’s most artful risk comes with an aftermath montage showing an empty, debris-strewn downtown, a vacant Staten Island Ferry, an un-peopled subway car, then a wall of hand-made posters that advertise the lost as missing. This existential vacancy is a very beautiful capstone, recalling the metaphysical ending of Antonioni’s The Eclipse. But this isn’t just an artistic flourish; it respectfully accretes familiar images of despair, converting them into towering forms that we, hopefully, are ready to see. Stone’s ultimate ending is sorrowful yet vital. Because Stone’s touch is perfectly deft, never cloying, the audience’s tears come from understanding for themselves the tragedy that they deal with everyday. As they walk out, they walk forward. They cry righteous tears. Never too soon for that.
From September, 2006