Mandel Mavens Nest on The World Trade Center:
In Memoriam In Sight and In Sound: From New Yorkers' POV
WE'RE ALL THANKFUL THAT WE (and we were all in the city that day), OUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES WHO WORK IN DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN --including a cousin on the 51st fl, another in 7 WTC, and our nephew evacuated from the World Financial Center -- AND FLY FREQUENTLY ARE ALL OK -- even our car, parked just north of the WTC, is fine. Our hearts go out to all who suffered, there, in, D.C. and PA, and the plane crash near here in Queens, and we're relieved that our cousins in Israel are unhurt in terrorist attacks. While Harold witnessed the horror from his office window (and our now daughter-in-law from her Stuyvesant High School window), he was immediately busy managing a relief center for rescue workers and getting his agency reconfigured for the re-opening of Lower Manhattan. He advised the Lower Manhattan Development Commission on residential issues, and even got a new parking spot. We posted a flag in solidarity for the postal workers felled by anthrax in memory of Grandpa Louis Lifschutz who worked for the Post Office Dept. for over 50 years.
When out-of-town friends-of-friends asked me right afterwards how they could help NYC, I suggested supporting Chinatown, which had lost all its tourists and restaurant patrons and was getting none of the philanthropic outpouring.
As the years have passed, and our family has blessedly expanded and our family tree research has extended to more branches, we’ve found that our mishpuchah did have relatives more directly affected: an out-of-town cousin’s brother-in-law, a cousin’s cousin, and a seven-year missing doctor who had to be declared a 9/11 victim by court decision.
9/11 in Photos
9/11 in Poetry
9/11 in the Movies
9/11 in TV Fiction
9/11 in Song
9/11 in Literature
It's sad that so many of the Web sites created in tribute to the events of 9/11 are no longer posted so I can't link directly to them anymore, when I have a chance to check and update. But the 10th anniversary is bringing on new and compilation resources.
For the transcripts from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's emergency calls.
For a timeline of all the 9/11 attacks.
The Tribute in Light, pictured in the background, beautifully shines dusk to dawn at the anniversary, presumably as long as the Municipal Art Society can get funding to keep producing it.
For the rhetoric of 9/11.
The Foundation Center documented where the 9/11 charitable dollars went.
For cheerleading on the rebuilding plans or just the facts, though it doesn't seem updated.
The issues around the rebuilding quagmire have given me flashbacks to my city planning career, including trying to deal with the Port Authority's design stubbornness. The two finalist proposals represented what Har and I each picked -- he the THINK plan, me the Libeskind. While the Daniel Libeskind proposal, the winning selection, is the most dramatically innovative and creative, it makes the memorial aspect dominant, and that concept has won sway due to the moral domination of The Families-- let's all remember in planning the memorials that the now deserted Grant's Tomb was the most popular tourist site of the late 19th century as every Union soldier felt it was an obligatory pilgrimage. The new Lower Manhattan Grand Central Station with the PATH Station, even reduced, needs to be central to any enlivened, practical plan, despite family objections and financial considerations.
Ada Louise Huxtable on how the designs are being weakened. We too are pretty much fed up with what's happened to the plans.
We support the building of the Muslim-led Cordoba House (or Park 51, or whatever it will be called) on Park Place, north of the WTC site. When a Congressional campaign flyer came in the mail proclaiming that a candidate supported the project, I thought that was a positive position, until I turned it over and saw it was from his opponent.
Background reading on a somewhat comparable controversy could be helpful in defusing the debate: Memory Offended The Auschwitz Convent Controversy, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (Praeger,1991) and The Continuing Agony: From the Carmelite Convent to the Crosses at Auschwitz, edited by Alan L. Berger, Harry James Cargas, and Susan E. Nowak (University Press of America, 2004).
9/11 In Photos
You can virtually be here before, during and after the attacks at a "democracy" exhibition of photographs of New York and New Yorkers and the CameraPlanet video archive. These focus on the rescuers and their health consequences.
For an archive of contemporaneous online reactions and newspaper front pages from 9/12/01
For a photo-essay by photojournalist James Nachtwey. For Uniformed Fire Fighters Association own photographic tribute, and you can contribute to their funds.
From Artists on the Run, Their Art Left Behind by Carol Vogel, in The New York Times, September 13, 2005:
"The whole landscape of American art is in the process of upheaval," [Willie Birch, a 66-year-old painter, said in a telephone interview from an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which he kept when he moved back home to New Orleans in 1993 after winning a Guggenheim Fellowship.] "Between 9/11 and Katrina, I am seeing artists dealing with history. When I was at school we were concerned primarily with form. Now that's all changed."
The New Normal - a traveling art exhibition on the impact of heightened security on our lives.
PBS’s 9/11 Video Quilt of people’s thoughts on what’s changed.
9/11 In Poetry
For a poetic tribute to the iconic symbolism of a Skyscraper, by Carl Sandburg from 1910 but even more true now.
Pete Seeger relayed that he found this apropos poem on the late Lee Hays' piano:
To Know Good Will
If I should die one day by violence
Please take this as my written will
And in the name of simple common sense
Treat my destroyer only as one ill
As one who needed more than I could give
As one who never really learned to live
In peace and joy and love of life
But was diseased and plagued by hate and strife
My vanished life might have some meaning still
When my destroyer learns to know good will.
My mother Charlotte Mandel read and discussed her two poems at a first anniversary poetry tribute.
For how every New Yorker's reaction that morning was to reach out to their loved ones, like Lou Reed's first thought was of his significant other, Laurie Anderson.
We went to see the eight finalists for the memorial competition -- and were really disappointed at the blandness and unoriginality! As quoted in The New York Times on the memorial plans:
8 Mute Minimal Designs by "the Wall Street poet" Eugene Schlanger
Where is the twisted human torso?
Where are the flames? Where is the smoke?
What crossed fingers still dangle below
These calm subterranean spaces?
Should we not, here and now, make known the
Inexplicable agony? Who among these
Names leaped to their deaths? Who did not
Have a chance to leap, scorched, crushed?
Placid well-lit puddles of piddling light
Confine the defiant. Monuments.
Intended to mourn, feign empathy and
Experience. Serene Ground Zero.
Is this the scene searched in vain for remains?
Each age has the art it deserves.
Will this be called the architecture of amnesia?
9/11 through American Popular Culture
9/11 in the Movies
You can see the Twin Towers still standing in NYC movies, and in videos like Ryan Adams's "New York, New York". Like the chorus says, "Hell, I will always love you, New York."
Philippe Petit’s obsession with the buildings is fascinating, as recalled through Man on Wire, based on his book To Reach The Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers. His stop-the-city aerial act that so floored all of us on August 7, 1974 (and also got New Yorkers to start liking them too) inspired the Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein.
Colum McCann used what he called this “act of bravura,” in The New York Times 11/28/2009, "Significant (Little) Moments Pulled From Obscurity" by Motoko Rich, to anchor the multiple story lines in the 2009 National Book Award winner for fiction Let the Great World Spin to contrast with the “human bravura” down below for "an allegory about resilience and recovery after" 9/11. "Several years ago he read an essay about Mr. Petit by Paul Auster. Then, the Sept. 11 attacks were viscerally brought home when his father-in-law, working in the south tower of the World Trade Center, escaped and walked uptown, arriving covered in ashes at the apartment of Mr. McCann and his wife, Allison. Mr. McCann always knew he wanted to write obliquely about Sept. 11 using Mr. Petit’s walk as a leitmotif. But as he spun out his story of interconnected lives, [he]. . .researched the history of 1970s New York in the New York Public Library, and the writer Richard Price introduced Mr. McCann to a police detective who took him on tours of the city. He also talked to computer hackers, older graffiti taggers and a judge to help make several of the novel’s characters accurate.. . .[H]e would always defend the notion of hope. 'I would stand up and go bare knuckle for that'." (Reviewed by our Fiction Book Club).
I think the image of Ground Zero as "my heartache" in the Martin Scorsese-directed Robert DeNiro American Express commercial is lovely, not exploitative.
The Cats of Mirikitani shows the surprising ramifications on people downtown, revealing lives.
Nora Lee's 9/11-Related Movie Reviews, Commentary and Recommendations
Does not include made-for-TV documentaries or films I don’t recommend
The documentary Dust (Staub) includes the environmental and health consequences of the toxic powder from the collapse of the towers in its international survey of particles. (12/3/2008)
The impact of 9/11 is shown as part of the back drop of kids' lives in the documentary Mad Hot Ballroom.
It is hard to separate Fahrenheit 9/11 as an Op Ed piece to just evaluate it as a film.
Michael Moore is effective overall in the film's coherent organization, even though it is too long and has some repetition, some played up for comic relief, and news reports have usurped and surpassed some of his revelations, including findings by the 9/11 commission as prodded by The Families.
Most of the film is a compilation; unlike a book where one can check the footnotes for the source of a quote, one can only see all the film credits at the end and wonder where a clip comes from and why it hasn't been widely seen before. It is roughly divided into thirds and the last third is the most powerful and what stays with the viewer.
The first third is How to Steal an Election 2000 with really pointed attacks on the Bush family and their connections. In between dredging up old news, he does focus on how minorities were particularly affected by the vote, with what I presume is a C-SPAN excerpt of Black Caucus members protesting the election certification, which did not get much attention at the time. It is cheap shots to show various administration officials as they prep for TV interviews.
Ironically, it is this background part that might have gotten the film its unnecessary R rating as in showing the Bush's cozy relationship with Our Traditional Allies the Saudi oil potentates, Moore finds grainy footage demonstrating the Saudi Arabian justice system with a beheading that I'm sure is not too different from what has been seen in PG-13 fictional fare.
Part 2 is 9/11, continuing looking at the Saudi influences, and the calculated lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Moore very powerfully does not show any WTC images directly, but instead blackens the screen then focuses on the horrified faces of witnesses, particularly of minorities. Surely it was pool coverage that produced the tape of Bush staying in the classroom reading a children's book for eight minutes after he's informed about the attacks -- so why is Moore the first to show it?
While he does make much of tearing off the fig leaf of the Weapons of Mass Destruction and the hypocrisy of the Bush administration about falsely linking Iraq to 9/11, these have been skewered better by Jon Stewart and the crew at Comedy Central's The Daily Show.
Part 3 is the war and is quite intense, involving and moving. He shows how the press was not just embedded but in bed as jingoists, though this aspect was shown from a more interesting perspective in Control Room, which makes an essential sidebar for this film.
Moore is very careful to not repeat a mistake of the Viet Nam War protesters - he is passionate about supporting the troops vs. criticizing their leaders. He refers to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in bare passing as good soldiers driven to immoral acts by functioning in an immoral situation. Will the G.I.'s who were filmed frankly criticizing the war get demoted like the well-meaning PR rep in Control Room reportedly was?
Then the film takes a turn more reflective of Moore's distinctive flare as he looks directly at the impact of the war on his hometown of Flint, MI, from the recruiters who zero in on unemployed minority kids to loyal and patriotic everyday Americans who now see that they have sacrificed their sons and daughters based on lies. He also subtly chastises anti-war activists who don't respect their overwhelming grief and betrayal.
The universality of the carnage is implicitly considered by showing footage of first a distraught Iraqi mother screaming for revenge and then an equally grief-stricken Michigan mother in D.C. -- is an updated Lysistrata tactic the answer?
The music selection is excellent, particularly the closing choice of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." (7/3/2004)
The Great New Wonderful marks the lead-up to a nervous anniversary I vividly remember - September 2002 -- so it is difficult to separate out my own recall of feelings of unease and dread in comparison to the film's portrayal of how a somewhat disparate group of New Yorkers experienced the same month or to evaluate it as a film on its own.
It certainly will have more resonance to New Yorkers than to others, even as TV's Rescue Me has already sneered at such feelings of those like most of the characters in the film who didn't directly lose a loved one or colleague on 9/11. But the documentaries and TV shows have focused on survivors and first-responders so that this attempt to capture every day New Yorkers, albeit mostly neurotic middle-class white ones, provides fresh insight.
The film well captures the malaise that seemed to infect us all, powerfully enough that I cried just before the climax, though to me it's like commemorating a yahrzheit, an anniversary of a death. When three-quarters through the film a plane traverses the screen, I gasped, just as I did at noisy planes throughout that month. While it took me over a year until I could even walk by Ground Zero, and then only by looking away from that hole in the ground, the repeating panning to the new skyline has already gotten too familiar to us and no longer has the shock of the gaping hole in the sky, or maybe the golden-tinged panorama is more of midtown with the Empire State Building restored as our icon than of lower Manhattan.
Directed in an European-feeling style by Danny Leiner, like an inter-edited take on the 2002 collection of 11 minute thematically-linked films by 11 international directors 11'09''01 - September 11, the mordant script by debut screenwriter Sam Catlin emphasizes festering explosions of repressed violence in various forms, mocking New Yorkers' contentions that 9/11 would somehow change us forever to be more serious and to appreciate life and despite what we read in the wedding stories in The New York Times for a year or two afterwards. Sharply edited through leisurely short stories that gradually ratchet up in pacing, the characters do not have coincidental mutual impact as in Amores Perros and even fewer interrelations than the characters in Nine Lives except for occasional propinquity that has a frisson of 9/11 jitters.
The five boroughs are represented, with an age range from senior citizens (a terrific Olympia Dukakis' restless Jewish wife in Brooklyn) to a frazzled couple (Thomas McCarthy and Judy Greer) coping with their creepy child who is manifesting more symptoms of an incipient serial killer than the teens in the Columbine-inspired Elephant, to service workers to the rich-- an ambitious pastry chef (Maggie Gyllenhaal as the skinniest baker in the world) and her circle very amusingly prepare for a My Super Sweet 16 on MTV-like party in a satire of "let them eat cake" as she unironically offers a fancy dessert called "The Ophelia"; a meek cubicle denizen (Jim Gaffigan) who apparently was in the Twin Towers that day so is in mandated counseling with therapist Tony Shalhoub that is surely inspired by similar scenes from Miracle on 34th Street; and a pair of Indian security guards (Naseeruddin Shah and Sharat Saxena). I kept expecting the last set to have perceived some increased tensions for being South Asian, but instead the two are coping in divergent ways.
What all the characters share is no control over their lives and dependence on other people's decisions. Each does takes an unpredictable step-- climaxes and catharses (whether violent, sexual or artistic) that vary in their credibility within the film. For most of the characters we see the build-up of their frustration and its aftermath but not their existential act-- like looking at that skyline before and after.
Some secondary characters work better than others. The only character at peace has Alzheimers and wonders how World War II will end. Edie Falco's business lunch with Gyllenhaal is a masterpiece of understated bitchy competition in its timing and politesse, but Will Arnett as the slacker husband does not add anything. Stephen Colbert, as always, is the master of the unctuous, here as the odd student's private school principal. Seth Gilliam is the opposite of his macho cop in The Wire.
The film is full of very New York touches -- we see playwright Tony Kushner backstage at a Kevin Kline performance at
The Public Theater, the residences reflect different neighborhoods, and there's lovely scenes of bedraggled Coney Island with a yet still beautiful Atlantic Ocean. Visual juxtapositions abound, such as a very effective scene as the camera backs up to gradually revealed to be taking place on Liberty Island.
The cinematography by Harlan Bosmajian is very washed out. One scene brightened up and I at first thought there was some symbolic importance about characters' growing emotional clarity towards the end, but then it seemed more of a brief accident.
While the score by Brett Boyett and John Swihart is effectively understated and helps to connect the segments, the pop song choices were just plain odd, with zero connection to New York, from Bob Seger singing about L.A., to a karaoke of Canadian Sarah McLaughlin's ode to ice cream, to New Zealand's Neil Finn over the credits.(7/10/2006)
Other fiction films on New Yorkers' responses: Reviews forthcoming:
The Guys
Clear Blue Tuesday
The Road to Guantánamo is not a documentary. It is a series of interviews interspersed with dramatic recreations and news video. It comes across viscerally as a powerful docu-drama with the feel of "based on a true story" prison films like Midnight Express or war, extending beyond the style of Reds, or Holocaust memoirs that edit together the real and the reel.
Co-director Michael Winterbottom's recreations in situ are so blazingly hyper realistic that they are hard to distinguish from the non-identified actual news video. Though the in-your-face feeling is interrupted near the end with jarring omniscient narration, the film has the direct immediacy of his In This World exploration of young Afghan refugees going in the opposite direction.
But this feckless, eyewitness journey from slacker British young men of a variety of Muslim South Asian backgrounds to modern Pakistan for an arranged marriage to an ancient Afghanistan with motor transport that explodes into the chaos of a war in coalitions from tribes to bombs, and then into the no man's land of Gitmo are undercut by co-director Mat Whitecross's unchallenged interviews with "the Tipton 3". (It is a bit difficult for American ears to always understand their accents and it did take me awhile to keep them straight, as each interviewee is also portrayed in action by an actor, until the conclusion when we see real documentation of them completing the original purpose of their trip.)
While we understand that any first-person account will be self-serving, self-aggrandizing and deflective, their ingenuousness is so remarkable that it is simply hard to believe that any guys presented as this foolish and reckless can live outside a Clerks or Bill and Ted movie. You were going where in October 2001? Because you heard the nan bread there was really good? Because you wanted to "help"? And they were originally four, with one missing and presumed dead from the initial attacks. The illiterate kids on the Iraqi border portrayed in Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand) without even understanding the English on CNN seemed better informed than these guys. We don't learn until near the end of the film they are ex-juvenile delinquents (though their brushes with the law ironically provide their alibis).
Though it is a bit confusing as to why it took so long for them to admit their British citizenship, their very idiocy and naiveté effectively undercuts the rationale for Guantánamo and its counter-productive interrogations of alleged evil-doers and their sympathizers. The years it took the U.S. and Britain to realize their incidental involvement in history also emphasizes, especially through flashbacks and daydreams to the guys' Western-style adolescence, how late the authorities were to realize that their on-the-ground observations could have been useful intel about the pull of Muslim solidarity, recruitment and attitudes.
The titular progression is key as once they are caught up in the war, each move they experience you think can't get any worse to endure, and then it does get worse and ratchets up further. Their experiences at Gitmo itself seem out of the Inquisition, if not medieval witch trials and look much more like revenge out of
Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy than really providing any useful information that the fictional "Jack Bauer" would get for immediacy's sake in 24. While this doesn't quite get into the territory of the kind of extreme accusations of what happened at Abu Ghraib, and the prisoners are grateful for tiny kindnesses of Americans such as stomping on a threatening scorpion, there is clear disrespect for the Koran and Muslim beliefs, reinforcing the other side's rallying point. We don't see enactments of the hunger strikes or suicides we have heard about recently, so perhaps those happened after these three were released.
As has so often happened to political prisoners through history, these young men end up impressed that their fellow inmates who best withstand the nightmare with discipline are the most observant and ideological such that they are radicalized and by the end they of course refused to cooperate.
I was thinking that the British actors portraying American interrogators had terrible accents, until a closing line that a Brit later claimed he was one of the alleged Americans.
While a viewer has to take the facts with some grains of salt, the film is as gripping as it is cautionary on many levels. (7/14/2006)
Documentaries about how New Yorkers' have responded as the 10th anniversary approaches:
New York Thanks You (briefly reviewed in Final Roundup of the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival)
Love Hate Love (briefly reviewed in Final Roundup of the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival)
More and more documentaries and docu-dramas look into how leaders’ and soldiers’ perceptions of 9/11 affect the subsequent war being fought in our name, and the impact on people living in the target areas:
Ones I have reviewed:
Camp Victory, Afghanistan (briefly reviewed at 2010 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival)
Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (briefly reviewed at Part 1 Recommendations of 2009 Tribeca Film Festival)
The Prisoner Or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair (4/1/2007) (emendations coming after 10/1/07)
Restrepo
The documentary's poster, excerpted on the left, crops out 9/11 from Tim Hetherington's [R.I.P.] original photograph, on the right, of a soldier's marked-up grenades symbolizing his reasons to fight, though it can be seen in this promotional web Gallery section. Maybe Nat Geo thought the NY baseball symbol was enough. And then they cut the whole image off completely in the movie ads.
The Western Front (briefly reviewed in Recommended Documentaries at 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: my commentary on the Jewish woman.)
You Don’t Like The Truth—4 Days Inside Guantánamo (briefly reviewed at 2011 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, dedicated in memory to my activist dad)
And now the war can even be satirized as in the biting In The Loop. (Briefly reviewed in Part 1 Recommendations at 2009 Tribeca Film Festival) and even jihadis in Four Lions.
More fiction films that reference 9/11 and its global aftermath, but not from New Yorkers' POV (incomplete):
Amreeka (briefly reviewed at 2009 New Directors/New Films of Film Society of Lincoln Center/MoMA)
Brothers (Brødre) (Better than the American remake)
Paradise Now
Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha hâm parvaz mikonand)
Excellent films on the fall-out from 9/11 that I haven’t formally reviewed:
A Mighty Heart
Armadillo (previewed at 2010 Doc NYC Festival)
Bad Voodoo’s War
Battle For Haditha (fictionalized - needs to be seen with Rules of Engagement)
Carrier - In the 10-part docu-series, about life on the air craft carrier Nimitz, originally broadcast on PBS in 2008, two of the young Navy crew in the 1st episode “All Hands”, cite the 9/11 atack as a reason and justification for their enlistment and ongoing commitment.
Cult of the Suicide Bomber (by Baer, not Rehov)
Full Battle Rattle
Generation Kill (David Simon's fiction HBO mini-series based on nonfiction book)
< Grace Is Gone (fiction)
The Hurt Locker (fiction feature based on nonfiction book)
Iraq in Fragments
The Messenger (fiction)
No End In Sight
Over There (a one-season fiction TV series)
Severe Clear (seen at DocuWeeks 2009)
Standard Operating Procedure (but needs to be seen with these other related docs)
Stop-Loss (fiction)
Taxi to the Dark Side (needs to be seen with Ghosts of Abu Ghraib)
Brothers at War (noteworthy that 9/11 is never mentioned for their motivation to fight in Iraq)
Green Zone (fiction feature inspired by but only loosely based nonfiction book)
The Wounded Platoon
The Battle for Marjah (on HBO in 2011) a.k.a. Bravo's Deadly Mission (on U.K.'s Channel 4 in 2010) (no mention of 9/11 for why troops are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan)
The Boy Mir—Ten Years in Afghanistan (previewed at 2011 DocuWeeks) (By finally being more about poverty in Afghanistan than politics, it may be closer at looking at the roots than most other films.)
Hell and Back Again (previewed at 2011 DocuWeeks) (Not a mention of 9/11.)
Flat Daddy (previewed at 2011 Doc NYC Festival) (one NYC family is included)
Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan: A Docu-Series on the G4 video game channel, it is like a real-like counterpart to The Hurt Locker, but shows that the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) patrollers are struggling not only with “enemy” bombs, but to understand the locals (in their “man-dresses”) and why, with no references to 9/11, the heck they are there -- except that the young guys have fun sending out robots and blowing things up. (12/30/2011)
Films that focus on the impact of 9/11 in the U.S. on those perceived as Muslim:
AmericanEast (2008) (in L.A.)
I Am Singh (2011) (Well-meaning but wooden Bollywood outcry against how turbaned Sikhs were attacked and discriminated against in a U.S. full of racist skinhead gangs and bimbo blondes.)
The use of the images of 9/11 for heart-stringing, plot manipulation purposes in the dreadful soap Dear John (2010) was shameless. Even Lifetime's Army Wives refrains from using 9/11 as soap opera fodder, but as time goes on other shows have also stooped: the web series Anyone But Me (2008) used the premise of a firefighter husband/dad’s lingering reactions to 9/11 to explain why they’ve fled NYC for the Westchester suburbs where the teenage daughter has to come out as a lesbian in less liberal environs, and Person of Interest (CBS, 2011) premises the attack as the start of the ex-CIA operative’s personal downslide.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden by Navy Seals made me think of issues of justice vs. vengeance that were explored in the documentary broadcast on PBS earlier in the same year as the 10th anniversary: Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate
Though I'm way behind in adding films here, New Yorkers started to incorporate post-9/11 into their film fiction to assimilate what happened, from David Benioff updating his early 2001 novel for Spike Lee's adaptation of 25th Hour in 2002 to The Missing Person in 2009 (which used a snarky noir plot as in several TV shows). A March 12, 2005 New York Times article by Stephen Farber claimed to document 9/11 Is Sneaking Onto a Screen Near You, "But that terrible moment's real impact on cinema has quietly arrived, writ small in a series of new pictures that have no political content but that are suffused with a deep, enduring sense of grief born in the tragedy's wake." -- and the movies he cites in fact have nothing to do with 9/11, let alone how New Yorkers dealt with it then or are dealing with the aftermath or scars. Just several movies about grieving families in general. Farber claims that what's different is that "Sudden loss has ever been the stuff of movies; but the American take on the subject has tended toward tales of healing and inspiration. . . In the much darker season at hand, however, death has recovered its sting." which I don't think is a supportable generalization about how American movies have dealt with death.
Virginia Tech Professor Stephen Prince looks more broadly at 9/11 movie images in Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. But is it non-New Yorkers who use visual reminders of 9/11 gratuitously? as in Spielberg's re-make War of the Worlds, as the aliens destroy Bayonne, NJ. but which inspired Post-9/11 anxieties influence spate of films in The L.A. Times by Rachel Abramowitz and John Horn on June 29, 2005: (this excerpt may constitute more than fair use):
". . .Spielberg said in an interview earlier this year with The Times. Noting that he shot the film in a manner similar to the gritty Saving Private Ryan Spielberg added, "9/11 set the tone and made it worth my time and the audience's time to see this story treated in this way."
As in Spielberg's movie, the terror references in some of these upcoming films are indirect. Yet several others, mostly still in development stage, confront 9/11 head on, including planned adaptations of the book 102 Minutes and movies about rescue workers and firehouse chaplain Mychal Judge [Saint of 9/11].
The nearly completed projects range from Syriana, a film chronicling the netherworld of the international oil trade, to Stealth, a drama about unmanned fighter planes and terrorist cells. A number of new independent films — Yes, The Great New Wonderful, and the documentary Protocols of Zion — were all begun in the weeks and hours immediately following the attacks as personal, creative responses to the tragedy.
"You don't want to turn away from the greatest conflict of our generation," said Sally Potter, who began writing Yes the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. "You want to deal with it and make a contribution."
For Potter and several other filmmakers, that contribution rests on using the attacks more as an emotional framing device than as a direct visual or narrative reference. In Yes, an Irish American woman falls in and out of love with a Lebanese man. The intersecting stories in The Great New Wonderful conclude on Sept. 11, 2002.
"One of our concerns was to not make a story that exploits those events, and the emotional resonance around those events," said Michael Nozik, executive producer of The Great New Wonderful (the title refers to one character's bakery). "It's not about 9/11 in a direct way. It's about emotional recovery and grief."
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Hollywood was squeamish about making any movies that touched on the themes of 9/11, even tangentially. Any number of movies about terrorists were either scrapped or rewritten. Both The Interpreter and Flightplan . . . were put on hold. The debut of the comedy Big Trouble (whose plot included a bomb on an airplane) was delayed, as was the comedy Sidewalks of New York.
A few art house movies addressed the attacks, but failed to attract audiences; both The Guys, a drama about fallen firefighters and 11'09'01 — September 11, a compendium of short films, flopped.
As time went by, though, a group of filmmakers realized that 9/11 played such a dramatic role in the nation's psyche that ignoring it would be foolish.
Last year, Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was a breakout hit. The studios started to change course, embracing the very movies they had avoided just a few months earlier.
. . .In the wake of 9/11, I thought something so interesting was happening," said Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of Traffic and the writer-director of Syriana. Rather than fearing a single outlaw as easily identifiable as Saddam Hussein, the country was now dreading a shadowy, shifting villain who moved from country to country, Gaghan said.
"It's an incredible shift. And it's incredibly scary. The discussion [about global politics and oil] has moved front and center. In the 1990s, foreign policy was an abstract. It was all about the Internet, and the stock market. Now your personal security is involved. I was determined to make a movie about what was going on," Gaghan said of his film. . .
Rob Cohen, the director of July 29's Stealth, says his film wouldn't even exist had it not been for the Sept. 11 attacks. "There is a fear now that there is an invisible enemy that is all over the place," the director said. "And we have to come up with a technological answer to this new reality."
In this popcorn action film, that answer turns out to be an unmanned fighter with a mind of its own. "The film tries to explore ideas about war, and how it will not make the world better, rather than, 'Isn't America great?'" Cohen said. The movies posters even feature the ominous tag line "Fear the Sky."
Some filmmaker responses to the attacks are highly individual. Director Marc Levin said his movie Protocols of Zion opening later this year, was inspired when an Egyptian cabby in Manhattan told Levin the attacks were coordinated by Jews as part of their plot for global domination, a scheme laid out in the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion. So Levin went out with a camera to interview people on the street about their prejudices and conspiracy theories.
"I felt there had to be another way to discuss religious fanaticism, bigotry and hate," Levin said. Many of his friends discouraged his cinematic inquiry, fearing it would help publicize a loathsome book and reopen fresh wounds. But now that four years have passed, Levin feels the time might be right.
"For a lot of people, [the attacks] were a long time ago," Levin said. "It's moved more forward than I would have thought — it's the hyper-speed of our lives."
Yet for many, the attacks remain in the subconscious, if not discussed, then always remembered. Suspicion and mistrust have become a part of modern American life, and now, it seems, part of Hollywood's. "Paranoia is what happens when you're afraid that something is coming at you right around the corner, but it never materializes," Spielberg said. "Our story starts with paranoia, which is very quickly realized."
How to Make a Movie About 9/11? Carefully by David M. Halbfinger, in The New York Times April 20, 2005: (this may be more than fair use excerpt):
Appropriately enough, the first in an expected wave of movies and television projects explicitly about the trauma of 9/11 will make its debut in New York on Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival, which itself was started to bring a measure of financial and psychic relief to Lower Manhattan months after the attacks.
But the new picture, The Great New Wonderful, is anything but explicit. Crashing jets, falling towers, Islamic terrorists and fleeing workers are nowhere to be seen. Instead the inexpensively made movie, which stars Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tony Shalhoub and Olympia Dukakis, zeroes in on a handful of New Yorkers a year after the attacks as they struggle to cope with emotions - grief, rage, helplessness - that seem inexplicable, and that have no obvious outlet.
The director, Danny Leiner - known for the stoner movies Dude, Where's My Car? and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle [a different director would in 2008 make Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay] - says he set out not to make a film about 9/11, but to show he had more up his sleeve than broad comedy.
A Brooklyn native, he says he also wanted to make a film in his hometown. And when Mr. Leiner began putting together a script about angst-ridden New Yorkers with the playwright and actor Sam Catlin in the spring of 2002, "9/11 was just there," he said. "It was around us. And it was hard to think of New York without bringing that into the mix."
. . .Hollywood producers are pursuing several sweeping projects that seek to harness directly the full dramatic potential of the cataclysmic 9/11 story: its antecedents and causes, its horrors and its aftermath.
NBC and ABC are locked in a footrace to produce the first mini-series based on the the 9/11 commission report. Columbia Pictures has optioned 102 Minutes, the account of the struggle for survival inside the World Trade Center by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, reporters for The New York Times. Universal Pictures is developing a screenplay about the last two Port Authority police officers pulled from ground zero alive. [which became Oliver Stone's World Trade Center]. And the producer Scott Rudin has hired a screenwriter to adapt Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, told from the point of view of a precocious 9-year-old whose father was killed in the attacks.
In nearly every case, the producers and others involved say that though they are tripping over one another to be first into production, they are taking plenty of time to grapple with unusually difficult questions about timing, taste and tone:
Are Americans ready yet to watch, let alone pay to watch, a re-enactment of some of the most searing events in their lives? When will enough time have passed? How do you make use of the stories of the victims and survivors without being seen as exploiting them? Then there is perhaps the most basic creative dilemma: Do you show the airplanes crashing into the twin towers? On this, there is unanimous reluctance.
"It's too much," said Stacy Sher, a producer of the Universal project. "We're not ready for that yet."
"Ultimately, that's probably a decision that doesn't get made till the last second," said David Nevins, president of Imagine Television and executive producer of NBC's 9/11 mini-series.
"The plan is to never show the planes hitting the building," said Michael De Luca, a producer of 102 Minutes. Mr. De Luca, who said his project was probably years away from being made, said it would be confined, as was the book, to the stories of people inside the World Trade Center in the minutes before and the hours after the attacks. (The New York Times, as a partner in Times Books, retains a quarter-interest in the screen rights to the book.)
"My courage has never been tested like that," Mr. De Luca said. "It may never be, but I read that book and thought, God, I hope that if I'm ever faced with anything like that, I'd have the courage of those people. Those are ordinary people, not people trained to exhibit grace in the face of extraordinary disaster."
At Universal, Ms. Sher and her partner, Michael Shamberg, the team behind Erin Brockovich and many other films, are making a more narrowly focused 9/11 story that they describe as a fairly conventional rescue film. "Think Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, " Mr. Shamberg said. The story is about five police officers, two of whom were killed instantly when the south tower collapsed while a third died because he would not abandon his colleagues; the survivors endured fireballs and worse until a volunteer rescue worker heard one of them banging his handcuffs on a pipe.
Like Mr. De Luca, Mr. Shamberg said his film would be scrupulously accurate. "We learned on Erin Brockovich that what you make up is never as good as what happened in real life," he said. "We're aiming very high: that we can tell a true story that moves people, and that entertains people."
Ms. Sher said that when she and Mr. Shamberg acquired the rights to the stories of the survivors, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, "we weren't sure that anybody was ever going to be ready" for a movie about the 9/11 attacks.
Among the television networks, meanwhile, both ABC and NBC are pursuing mini-series based on the the 9/11 commission's exhaustive report, in hopes of getting on the air in the next 18 months. Both insist they will steer clear of a political point of view - "We're trying to be as objective as one can in a medium that is by definition subjective," said Marc Platt, executive producer of the ABC project - while still aspiring to have an impact on everything from attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims to domestic security and emergency preparedness.
Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Television, which is producing the NBC mini-series - and which has hired The Times as a consultant - said he hoped it would do for Muslims what Wolfgang Petersen's film Das Boot did for World War II-era Germans. "Every approach prior to that was, the Germans were horrible," he said. "He humanized them, because they are human. That's what I'm hoping we do, that we don't demonize, that we humanize all the different sides, and so we see the seeds, and we get an understanding from each culture's point of view as to how they got to such a horrible place."
Asked if even four or five years later was too soon for a cinematic treatment of 9/11, Quinn Taylor, ABC's senior vice president in charge of television movies, said: "The way the government had to react, the way we all had to quickly come to terms with what Al Qaeda meant, how to say it much less how to spell it - that was a tremendous education we all had to go through together. There is distance now to look back at that, and maybe we can channel those emotions into effecting change."
Indeed, Sally Regenhard, an outspoken advocate for skyscraper safety whose son was killed on 9/11 - and who has met with Graham Yost, the writer of NBC's mini-series - said she hoped the end product would be harrowingly graphic. "I think the public should see the people jumping out the windows, the brutal death these people suffered," Ms. Regenhard said. "Because maybe they'll get the truth and put pressure on the system to do something about it. There's a difference between what the families of the victims are ready to see and what the public is ready for. But no one should ever be ready for a fictionalization."
The Hard Look Back Hollywood confronts 9/11 by Missy Schwartz, September 2, 2005 in Entertainment Weekly "analyze[s] whether audiences are ready for two new films and a TV miniseries on the tragic events of that day". She also cites United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, and the ABC miniseries based on the 9/11 Commission Report and reports that NBC shelved its own 9/11 miniseries. (may be more than a fair use excerpt):
"Why is Hollywood suddenly willing to address 9/11 directly? Timing, for one thing. Both Universal and Paramount are considering 2006 releases to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the attacks. ''As the world approaches [that] anniversary,'' says a Universal spokesperson, ''we think it is legitimate, and even necessary, for today's leading filmmakers to...investigate the events of that epochal day.'' As ABC sees it, the public is owed an explanation. ''We have to tell people what happened,'' says the network's senior VP of movies and miniseries, Quinn Taylor. ''We have to talk about how we got to that moment. I think people are ready to grapple with [9/11] in a way that should at least ask why.''
But how ready is the public? Most respondents to an EW.com poll consider the projects exploitative. When Paramount announced Stone as director of its movie in July, furious debates erupted on the Internet, with many bloggers accusing the studio of capitalizing on tragedy, and others expressing fear that the famously political filmmaker would turn McLoughlin and Jimeno's story into JFK-style conspiracy theory.
Denis Leary, cocreator and star of the FX series Rescue Me, which deals with the ongoing impact of 9/11 on New York City firefighters, is not entirely comfortable with the conjectural approach these films will take. ''I had a friend who was in the plane that went into the second tower, so my head has imagined many times what he was doing, what he was thinking, what he was saying,'' Leary explains. ''And you have to remember, it's about the kids: They don't want to see an actor playing their father dying in what may have been the circumstances. That's fiction versus reality.''
The studios defend their choices. Sources close to the Stone movie insist that unlike his rabble-rousing political films, this one is an uplifting story told from the point of view of the two officers. Universal acknowledges the challenging nature of United 93, but reminds skeptics of Greengrass' deft touch with 2002's haunting Bloody Sunday, about the 1972 Irish massacre by British troops. ''We trust his insight and sensitivity,'' the studio says.
The underlying message of heroism in Stone's and Greengrass' features does seem a relatively safe entry point into such a raw subject. Of course, that's no guarantee of quality. . . But as ICM agent Robert Newman points out, it also produced Spielberg's Schindler's List. ''We've seen the death and destruction of 9/11, so to have an artist's interpretation that shows what humanity could accomplish, and the good within it, I don't think there's anything inappropriate about that.''
FILMING 9/11: Respondents to an EW.com poll had misgivings about Hollywood's retellings
Is it exploitative for Hollywood to make 9/11-related movies?
55% Yes
45% No
Is it disrespectful to make a film based on the events of Flight 93 — which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania — when no one knows for sure what happened during the flight?
59% Yes
41% No
Are 9/11-themed movies different from other films depicting historical tragedies (the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, Rwandan genocide)?
68% Yes
32% No
9/11 In TV Fiction
Third Watch during the 2001/02 season was very emotional as it was the first fictional series to deal effectively and realistically with post-9/11 NYC. The writers and whole staff were clearly deeply affected (see interviews) because many of the technical advisors and uniformed participants in the NYC-shot series about cops, firefighters and medics were killed at Ground Zero. Seguing from an "In Their Own Words" season opener with the actors' real counterparts (which won a Peabody Award), the characters and story lines then really reflected what was happening in New York City immediately and the ongoing impact of 9/11. Originally broadcast April 2002, "Falling" by producer Janine Sherman Barrois, has cocky, macho Officer Maurice "Bosco" Boscarelli (played so appealingly by Jason Wiles) finally stop denying that he could be having panic attacks that are negatively affecting him during the job's usual violence and tensions due to post traumatic stress and guilt from 9/11. After avoiding formal and informal departmental counselors, he breaks down to his partner "Faith" (played by Molly Price - who a month after 9/11 married a firefighter who appeared on the show) with whom he has a long term maternal/big sister relationship:
"Bosco": I got down there right when the second tower was being hit. And they were already jumpin' from the North Tower. People fallin', y'know. Watchin' em. All the way down. There was nothin' I could do.
"Faith": There was nothin' that any of us could do.
They were just fallin'. So hard and so fast and it seemed like it took forever. Ten seconds, 15, I don't really know. I saw a couple people holding hands. Faith, I saw women holdin' their dresses down. That sound - thump. Y'know, I'm just standin' there. I'm just standin' there, doin' nothin'. I mean, what, I pulled on a couple of people. This way and that way. I was frozen. It was like I was frozen. I was numb. I couldn't believe it. And there was this rumble, like nothin' I ever heard before, this huge wave of sound. So I ran. I ran away, Faith.
Bosco, the tower was comin' down.
I just ran. I kept runnin'. I remember I just kept runnin'. And then that cloud came. I couldn't see nothin'. It was just pitch black. I couldn't breathe. I thought that was it. I must have run right into a building because that's when I finally stopped runnin'.
Everybody ran.
I didn't go back.
Yes you did.
No, I sat on the street and I just, I couldn't, I couldn't. I could not go back.
Bosco, I saw you there.
I sat there. I was afraid.
Bosco, I saw you there. You were helping people.
You saw me later. Because I sat there. It must have been like an hour. I was sittin' there for an hour. I don't know how long. I could have been there for two hours.
"Bosco, you were probably in shock.
I ran. God help me. I ran. I ran. I ran. [He collapses in tears.]
In "Two Hundred Thirty Three Days" a few weeks later, executive producer John Wells paid specific tribute to the lost firefighters, via a story line of the remains of a woman firefighter's firefighting dad being found at Ground Zero. His colleagues (played appropriately by actors from Hill Street Blues, the previous generation inspiration for this show) memorialize while looking at the Lower Manhattan skyline after his funeral in Staten Island:
Y'know, I'll never get used to it. I always hated them. Butt-ugly. It's hard to imagine.
It still doesn't feel real to me.
Me neither.
They went there to out a fire and to save people. (sigh)
233 days.
Wha?
It's been 233 days since September 11th. I've been to 28 funerals and memorial services and I should have gone to more, but some days I just couldn't face it. 233 days and in a few weeks it's going to be over. Every one and every thing that was going to be found will have been found. There won't be any place left to dig. And then we're going to have to just walk away. And there will be a park with a marble monument with names that slowly stop seeming like real people. They'll name a junior high school after somebody. But soon enough it'll just be us. We will be the only ones who remember. That's what we can do to honor the people we loved and lost. We can be the ones that remember.
We see them go back to work -- after finishing off a wood plaque in the fire house that says "Never Forget 9/11/01."
On the same day that in real life the first firefighter was killed in action since 9/11, a fictional one died on the 2003 season premiere, "The Truth and Other Lies" by executive producer Edward Allen Bernero. is distraught wife screams: Can you tell me why? You want to do something for me? Then tell me why this happened to my husband. It sure isn't the money. He worked three jobs so we could keep our kids in a decent school. The people honked their stupid horns for one week two years ago then went back to ignoring all of you. The city's heroes. You're not heroes. None of you. You are husbands and wives, sons and daughters. God help me I don't understand why you would want to do a job that leaves a wife to explain to her children why that [burnt] monster is all that's left of their father.
The 2003 - 2004 season continued to follow the emergency workers' post-traumatic stress. The oldest medic, who the show's creator called "its moral center", "Monte 'Doc' Parker" (played by Michael Beach) started to unravel when one of his EMTs was graphically killed in an accident at last season's finale and he fixated this season on the possibility that the bureaucracy was going to shut their fire station. During the February Sweeps, in "No More, Forever" by consulting producer John Ridley, he explains to police officer "Sully" why he just shot his new stickler supervisor: You remember The Day? The equipment was set by the river. We checked and double-checked our bags because we had the triage set. We were ready for the people. We were ready to help. Nobody came. Nobody. (I remember echoes "Sully.") I remember thinking that they can't all be dead. I mean, not everybody. Then all we could do was pick body parts from the rubble. That's not why I'm here, Sully. You know I'm here to save lives. And if this house is gone then people are going to die and I can't let that happen. I mean, I can't let that happen. You understand that, right? You understand what I'm saying? I can't let more people die.
The 2005 season was suddenly sticking in the usual Arab terrorists fooling around with bombs that have become so common on action shows lately, when the episode "The Other L Word" by returning writer Charles Holland had a very unusual reflective moment from one of the toughest broads on TV "Sgt. Maritza Cruz" (played by Tia Texada) as she anxiously watches her temporary partner on a Joint Terrorism Task Force being patched up in the hospital: He woke up after 9/11 and wanted to make sure it never happened again. All I ever thought about was why is everyone so surprised. Of course bad things happen. I deal with it every single day. I wasn't surprised that those guys could kill thousands of people. That's what we do to each other. Do you know that I didn't receive a single message that day? I didn't call anyone either. Her eyes tear up as her new partner tries to reassure her and suggests matchmaking her up with the injured cop. But in walks his previously unbeknownst to her wife, crying out what will she tell their four year old? Tell him his father is a hero and he is definitely a Lucky man. He's gonna pull through.
The Wire vividly shows how the changes in FBI priorities are changing police work - thereby demonstrating why the 9/11 commission is right that they can't really fight both conventional crime and political terrorists. The opening episodes showed that the FBI can't fight two wars "since those towers fell" and the higher-ups "don't care about who is in handcuffs unless their name is Osama," and "too bad Americans don't have the heart to fight two wars," despite the cops vainly trying to argue that drug-dealers are urban terrorists, laying waste to whole neighborhoods. One wire tap in the 2004 season is obtained with alacrity with the little white lie that a kingpin's name is "Achmed."
In Rescue Me (complete series available on DVD) Peter Tolan and Denis Leary can be more FX Channel-scabrous about firemen. The opening episode "Guts" featured a hunk only quasi tongue-in-cheek protesting about his current sex life: Hey, it's getting slow out there pal! All that pussy I was getting after 9/11. Now nothing. People forget. In Episode #2, "Gay", the central fireman's wife explains why she's proceeding with divorce and a move to California with another man: I need to get away from this. This. Every other house on the block has a dead hero dad. Every other kid in school has lost a father or an uncle. And you know what's worse than all the guys that died that day? The rest of you left behind. Walking around like everything's fine when you're dead inside. The retort of her husband "Tommy" (who converses regularly with the ghost of his cousin): Okay, you know what? I can't fix what happened to me, okay? I can't go talk to somebody, some shrink or something or go to some spa and sweat it out. You knew when you married me, my job was. . . She interrupts: Jesus Christ, Tommy, I'm sick of it. I want my kids to grow up normal.
"Revenge" by Michael Caleo demonstrated the series' mordant humor in dealing with 9/11: "Lt. Kenneth 'Lou' Shea" (played by John Scurti) has been dealing with his post-9/11 agony by secretly writing wrenching poetry; discovered doing so by his shocked and dismayed wife, he is pressed by a shrink to attend his post-traumatic stress syndrome therapy group. Reluctantly, he reads his dramatic poem "When Hell Came" that reveals his suicidal thoughts. Responding to the group member's tears he asks: You were there? In one of the towers? No, they each respond, one was on the Upper East Side buying a bagel, another in Jersey- I saw the smoke. Another in Paris. France? --Yes, that Paris.-- What do you got to be stressed about? I wish I was going to Paris. Get a load of this guy! So no one was actually there? Is that what I'm hearing? Did any one lose a family member? A close friend? Well, let me ask you this then. Was anybody here directly affected by the events of that day? One tearfully responds: I have a neighbor who has a cousin who has a friend who lost someone. The lieutenant explodes: I can't believe this. The surprised shrink asks: What's wrong? -- Everything is wrong. You're all a bunch of goddamn pussies. No. No. No. They come in here crying and pretending that your lives were affected because of this, right? OK, but there are people out there whose lives are never gonna be the same. Fathers and mothers, and kids everywhere who waited and prayed on that day for someone to just come home from work. To just walk through the goddamn door once more. Not to mention us poor bastards who had to march into that nightmare and if we were lucky to come out again, shells of what we used to be. That's it. I'm done. Thanks. This was a very cathartic experience. Thanks to you I won't be writing any shitty poetry again. Bunch of friggin' cry babies!
The show has even dared to take on The Widows - in "Inches", written by Stephen Belber and directed by John Fortenberry, the widows of 9/11 firefighters are shown provocatively dressed, seductive and horny, requiring chaperoning by brethren who won't break The Rule of sleeping with their buddies' ex's; a more recent widow eulogizes her husband that he was really married to his crew anyway.
In "Immortal", writers Tolan and Leary hit divisive post-9/11 issues that few have discussed, let alone comically: "Tommy" is racing to work late after a fight with his ex-wife and claims his mother's dying when pulled over by a cop who yells: The honeymoon's over. Tell all your friends -- all that hero-worshipping you got after 9/11 ain't gettin' paid any due from us any more. We lost guys downtown too, but nobody ever talks about us. 343 firemen. There was almost a hundred cops. ("Tommy" responds: That's true. Nobody's forgettin' about the cops.) Guess what - you so as much look at a cop the wrong way and you're payin' the price. All right, asshole? The house's chief lets a female firefighter know she's not welcome: After 9/11. There was a paralegal chick I worked with years ago. She never passed the physical. She took it three times, a special physical. Now they grandfathered her in because she sued the City for sexual harassment.[sic - he means discrimination] She was talkin' to The Post and she said that when she read the list of the 343 heroes that gave their life that day she was disgusted. Disgusted. Because none of the names on that list was female. Believe that shit? (Female firefighter responds: I actually heard that.) She didn't think about the parents who lost their child, the children who lost their fathers, the women who lost their husbands. All she was concerned about was herself and the girls.
In "Leaving", Tolan and Leary take on the out-of-towners who come to salute the dead firefighters. A cousin of one of the crew brings his fellow firefighters from Fitchburg to build a memorial. They never get down to Ground Zero as they spend their whole time drinking in a neighborhood bar. When they finally do build a shrine in the firehouse, it's labeled "For our brothers who perished on 9/11" and its eternal flame sets off a fire.
The moving season one finale, "Sanctuary" by Tolan and Leary, opens with "Tommy" baiting a cop merely with his presence as prep for the inter-departmental hockey game:
This is a cop bar.
Not in this precinct. You know, you guys can't just wander in wherever you want. You guys are heroes for like ten minutes, but that bullshit is over now.
After a good day on the job, the firefighters leave their own bar and gaze at the NYC skyline:Wow.
It's a nice view, huh.
It'll never be the same for me.
Yeah, me neither.
Even when they put up whatever it is they're putting up.
It's like they're trying to erase what happened, y'know.
It's insulting.
Remember they had those spotlights right after 9/11? I couldn't take that. I like it like this. Just the way those scumbags left it. No spotlights, no new buildings. Just empty.
Yeah, that's the thing about the spotlight, y'know. You walk out into it and at first everybody thinks they see a good-lookin' All American hero. You stay out there long enough, you start to notice certain things. Maybe your nose is a little crooked, maybe your teeth are too. Ya got a little scar on your upper lip. Your hair's not right. One eye's bigger than the other. They think they're looking at some kind of goddamned monster, like they're looking at King Kong. And they start throwin' shit at you.
I'll tell you one thing. That morning, they threw a couple of jets into a couple of buildings, and they threw at us the biggest job in the history of our profession. We gave up 343 of our guys and saved at least 10,000
And look at us now. Still waitin' for a goddamn raise. Tell you what guys. We were on our own that morning and we're on our own today.
This camaraderie is destroyed as they fight over "Tommy's" relationship with one of The Widows-- his cousin's. "Tommy" connects 9/11 with his relationships, ruefully noting that he didn't have sex for three months with his ex when he told her he was appalled that she complained about his cousin's parents' attitudes towards her on the morning of the funeral of their eldest son. The lieutenant, who is also secretly sleeping with one of The Widows, rhapsodizes:
What I think? Goddamn. After 9/11, after our four guys and the other 52 guys I knew, 52. 52 guys I came out of the Academy with, spent two or ten years with, best man at their marriages and godfather to their kids with. With. With With. What do I think? Everybody should do whatever the hell they want and they should do a goddamn lot of it, right now, because tomorrow, my friend, there ain't no guarantee. Birth, school, work, death. It goes that quick.
By the Season 2 opener in June 2005, "Voicemail" by Leary and Tolan, "Tommy" seems to be the only one bothered by the souvenir vendors hawking tshatshkes around Ground Zero. He's particularly annoyed by the "Twin Towers cookies" of firemen, as there's no equivalent 9/11 cookies of cops, and in an alcohol-fueled rage knocks over the tables and pees on the merchandise, then for the last time gets bailed out by his cop brother. In the next "Harmony" episode, also by Leary and Tolan, when "Tommy" protests a traffic ticket, saying Look I've been on the job 20 years. I lost like 60 guys on 9/11. . . the Jewish cop ties together the external and internal: 9/11 was four years ago, champ, deal with it. You had your day. They wrote books about you guys. They put you on a pedestal and what happened? Turns out you ain't just heroes. Turns out some of yous do blow and have gang bangs. Turns out some of yous are just broken down drunks on the verge of a complete total mental collapse. Americans don't like it when things get complicated, pal. In "Shame" by Evan Reilly, "Tommy" terminates his affair with his cousin's widow, who threatens to expose their relationship to his house but gets only an apathetic response: It's like 9/11. Everyone's moved on.
In the second to last episode of the second season, "Bitch" by John Scurti, "Tommy" is asked by the same cousin's wife to talk her teen age son "Connor" out of also wanting to be a firefighter, but is haunted by his cousin's ghost during the heart-to-heart, who he tends to hallucinate when he's in drug or alcohol withdrawal:
"Connor": I'm thinkin' about it. Maybe a way to, y'know, connect with my dad. . .like my dad's dead, died on the job, then my uncle, my dad's best friend, the guy who showed me how to carry his helmet the proper way when I marched behind his casket [then some of "Tommy"s misdeeds]. You listen, I loved my dad. What you do, it has an honor to it. Like no matter how screwed up your life might be. When you come home at night, part of you, you're satisfied, right? Like you know at some point during the day, even for a few hours, you did the right thing. Right? [Tommy concurs] That's what my dad used to say any way. Not in so many words. [The ghost chokes up: "That's my son."]
"Tommy": Yeah, well, that was before 9/11. We get paid shit. We'll always get paid shit cause the politicians got us by the balls because we never go out on strike. [Cousin's ghost: "Jesus Christ, Tommy, come on."] Yeah, this country respected us after 9/11, they put the spotlight on us, y'know, but now because this country has ADD we're back to being glorified garbage men with booze and drug problems, but garbage men nonetheless. . . Y'know what I should do, I should take you down to the burn unit, to show you what we're always thisclose from so you can see the shit. . .[he graphically catalogs the horrors of fire victims until the Ghost yells at him and he yells back, to "Connor"s confusion].
That's one side of the coin. On the other side, there's no other job on the goddamn planet I'd rather do than this one. Because every day, you do feel like you've made a difference. Like you gave something back, y'know. I cam down here, truthfully, to talk you out of it, but I can't do it. This fire thing is in our blood. It's in our family's bones, y'know. My dad was a firefighter. His dad was a firefighter.
Got something for you. That's your dad's badge. Had it with me every day since he died. Even when I'm at work I keep it in my bunker gear. They gave it to me to keep for you in case. When a guy dies in the line of duty they retire his badge number and the only person who can take it after that is his son, if and when he decides to come on.
"Connor":You like it, right, the job?
"Tommy": I love it.
"Connor":Even with all the dead babies and all that other stuff?
"Tommy": Yeah.
"Connor":Can I keep this?
"Tommy": Yeah, that's why I brought it. If you really make the move, I think you're gonna enjoy being a firefighter. There's nothing like it. [And the ghost gives "Tommy" a big hug.] When it turns out "Tommy"s own young son overheard this conversation, his wife wonders why he suddenly is so serious about being a firefighter - Where are the kids coming up with this stuff?, "Tommy" shrugs, Y'know what, it must be those stupid Third Watch reruns.
In "Retards" by Evan Reilly, the series reflected on the fifth anniversary. "Tommy" is in a bar, breaking his sobriety by cashing in on his FDNY cred, even as he demands 8 fingers of your best Irish whiskey. He details his scars and how he got them, and the lives he tried but couldn't save in Harlem and the Bronx, before revealing the survivor's guilt that has been a recurring theme this season, set off by having seen a memorial plaque in another fire house earlier that day. I know 60 guys died on 9/11. And you know the funny part is, I bet you all the people in the bar, you could name five finalists on American Idol before they could name one, one, name of the 343 from the FDNY who gave their lives on 9/11. Huh? Anybody got a name? One name? Anybody got a name? Of a dead fireman, huh? Yeah, nobody, I didn't think so. The bartender pours him another glass. His sponsor/cousin/ex-priest tries later to get him to deal with it: This isn't going away, shithead.
In the series' fifth season, beginning with "Frank" by Leary and Tolan, first aired April 2009, a sexy French journalist is preparing a 10th anniversary follow-up and interviews each fireman for their mordant memories, that are both funny and poignant about how shaken up and haunted they still are, even as they've had to move on (to be transcribed). She continues to dredge up memories and reactions in "Wine", also by Leary and Tolan, as "Mike" the rookie who signed up as a fireman because of 9/11 clashes with "Franco" who now subscribes to conspiracy theories as to who was to blame (which reflects actor Daniel Sujata's personal views, as expressed in his narration of Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup). Memories of 9/11 are still aggravating "Tommy"s alcoholism this season as he continues his affair with his ghostly cousin's widow and mentors his nephew as a probationary fireman. (more to be transcribed) (updated 8/21/2009)
In The New York Times interview Denis Leary on the Return of Rescue Me, with Jeremy Egner, posted 6/29/2010, he explained the sixth and final season in terms of 9/11: "The final episodes will lead up to the anniversary. During the last three episodes the characters are going to these meetings to plan the parades and memorial services. . .It was interesting because we were doing it a year in advance and we have a lot of firefighters on the set, so we got to watch their response. There’s a thing in the final scene, where down on the waterfront there’s a new boat called the 343, which was just commissioned. The name on the hull of the boat is done in steel from the World Trade Center. It’s a $27 million boat and the only reason they have them is because they realized on 9/11 that they need that service from the water, right down by where the buildings went down. Watching the boat, which the department was kind enough to give us that day, roll in was pretty emotional for a lot of the real firefighters. So for better or worse I think we did the right thing. . . The show has been the story of the male ego, the heroic male ego. The idea of dealing with life and death every day, and that struggle to fit into real life when you work a job that has no real connection to real life, except in the sense that you may die five minutes from now. Or you may save a life. This event was so catastrophic for these guys. It’s still below the surface but they can’t think about it every day because they have to jump on a rig and go back to work and jump into the building. But it’s like Vietnam or World War II for them — it’s something that will never go away. . .It’s survivor’s guilt in its truest form."
In the season opener, "The Legacy" by Leary and Peter Tolan and directed by Tolan, "Tommy" is having survivor’s guilt nightmares after being shot by his uncle angry that his drunk driving killed his wife. Images of the World Trade Center are surrounded in smoke, then lines of body bags emerge and open. The dead rise in bloodied FDNY uniforms, who then get intertwined with all the other victims he couldn't save over his career. Back at the firehouse, "Chief Nelson" is griping about the Mayor: This is what we're reduced to? This is what we gained from 9/11 – a pay scale that barely keeps a married probie with two children above the poverty level and they want to close more firehouses. Biggest rescue effort in the history of the service and 10 years later we're getting it right up the ass. . . In my heaven, these houses from 9/11 get the best seats in the house.
"Breakout" dealt more with the illnesses of 9/11 first responders (while debates about government funding for their treatment were in the news), as exemplified by their former colleague "Pat Mahoney" (played by Will Chase in a three-episode arc), who they visit in the hospital. Bald and cancer-ridden, "Mahoney" vents: This sucks. I'm going to die in this room and no one gives a shit. No plaques, no parades, no scholarships in my name. So what did I do it for? What'd I put my ass on the line after the fact? His colleague, ironically the crew-mate who is not the brightest bulb in the box, uneasily answers: It's what we do. It's what we've always done. It's our job. "Mahoney" turns out to be too ill to leave for an escapade with the guys.
"Blackout", by Tolan and Leary, dealt with "Tommy"s continuing survivor's guilt. The ghost of his cousin "Jimmy Keefe" (James McCaffrey) who died at WTC returns as a hallucination to haunt and taunt him as he's stumbling drunk in a bar: This is your choice?. . .God decided you get a chance. It wasn't your time. And this is what you do with it? It's pathetic! If it had been me walking out of those towers alive, you can bet you wouldn't find my drunken, pathetic Irish ass in some back room. I'd be singing and dancing in the street. But to you, this is piss, nothing but piss. "Tommy" yells back: You're dead! You're not even here! The cousin rejoins: That may be, but I'm a goddamn hero! "Tommy" beats him up, kicking him savagely.
Many episodes of the 2011 season made reference to 9/11 and the tenth anniversary. (Commentary coming.) (updated 8/11/2011)
Law and Orders and Rod Lurie's Line of Fire (as well as in the theater Neil LaBute's The Mercy Seat and Francine Volpe's Late Fragment) keep showing smarmy people who have used the WTC tragedy to cover-up nefarious activities. David Kelley's The Practice did an episode in 2004 on how the police are using their new powers to violate people's rights. Years later, in the 19th season opener of Law and Order, first broadcast 11/5/2008, “Rumble” by Richard Sweren and Christopher Ambrose, intriguingly combined feelings from That Day with the aftermath of the legal morass of the Patriot Act. A group of firefighters, many related to victims or were inspired to join up due to 9/11, get into a revenge fist fight with the friends of a construction worker who had accidentally killed a brother in a fight. The D.A. not only uses the Patriot Act to declare them terrorists, but drags a witness onto the stand to testify that she was working on Vesey Street on 9/11 and saw people jumping etc., and insists she compare her fear of the brawl to her feelings That Day. Objection!(updated 11/14/2008)
The Without A Trace first season finale at least captured the feelings of loss, including the closing before and after photographic view from Brooklyn. "Safe", on 10/6/2005, had an odd plot: a teen, who had witnessed the attacks downtown, is increasingly agitated about feeling safe, compounded by his former best friend siding with his new school's bullies to gang up on him. So he consequently stages a hoax abduction bomb threat to prove the weakness of his school's security effort but turns it real, though it only accidentally misfires, when he attempts to be a suicide bomber - huh?
The premise of the 2004 series opener of CSI:NYC (on CBS) having the head investigator, played by Gary Sinise, mourning his wife killed at the WTC was cynically used as the series is not filmed in NYC -- so was he grieving in front of a matte of Ground Zero? (The 8th season opener “Indelible”, written by co-star Carmine Giovinazzo and broadcast 9/23/2011, was a 10th anniversary tribute to DNA identification research, despite none yet available from the wife, and memories of that day for New Yorkers—again with a matte and Hollywood set background-- concluded with Sinise’s fundraising appeal for a memorial in Brooklyn to first-responders.)
That trope was still being referenced in TV shows ten years afterwards. At least 2010's Rubicon (on AMC) had the dignity to be filmed in Lower Manhattan for its hero ("Will Travers" played by James Badge Dale) to be still mourning a wife and child killed when he came late to meet them at Windows on the World. In the L.A. filmed, New York-set Castle (on ABC), the two-part "Setup" and "Countdown" written by Andrew W. Marlowe, broadcast in February Sweeps Weeks, revealed that federal "Agent Mark Fallon" (played by Adrian Pasdar), is prepared to use extreme measures on terrorist suspects because his wife died in the towers. The series' regulars stop him and he apologizes: Listen, um... what I do is not who I am. It's just how I have to be. I hope you both understand that.
This premise was repeated in the “Pilot” episode of Touch (first broadcast 1/25/2012 on Fox), written by series creator Tim Kring, the father (played by Kiefer Sutherland of the 9/11 themed 24), explains to the social worker how he can afford a large loft in Manhattan’s trendy Meatpacking District – that his wife died in the North Tower, though he hastens to add her family was wealthy so that it shouldn’t look like he was living off the settlement payment. But her death figures into the series’ weekly plot of connections between people, as revealed by their 11-year-old autistic son’s obsession with numbers, when he intersects with the firefighter who tried to save her, who is haunted by only being able to carry her from the 82nd floor down 31 floors, and he’s been fanatically playing those numbers in the lottery ever since. (updated 1/26/2012)
American Family concluded its first season by showing the impact of 9/11 on a Chicano family in East Los Angeles and continued the second season with following the eldest son to the War on Iraq, though Over There, ironically, hasn't mentioned 9/11 yet. Shows like the cancelled The Agency, Threat Matrix and JAG were more jingoistic about the consequent war.
There are volumes, and doubtless many PhD dissertations, analyzing and/or blaming the TV series 24 for influencing Americans' interpretations of 9/11, the initiation and course of the war, and the treatment of captives, so I'll just cite one article: Normalizing Torture, One Rollicking Hour At a Time by Adam Green in The New York Times, May 22, 2005.
In Louis C.K. (on FX), 9/11 was referenced to establish the titular/creator/writer/star’s NYC cred. In “Eddie” (first shown 8/11/2011), an old, out-of-town friend is subjecting him to a drunken accusation that he has lost touch with real people. Louis protests that he was living in a walk-up with his six-month pregnant wife with a direct view for watching The Towers smoke and fall. When “Eddie” (played by Doug Stanhope) mocks him for not having run to help save the victims, he crosses a line of tolerance for his obnoxious behavior, and Louis tells him to leave and find a reason for living. (8/24/2011
Science fiction TV, too has been influenced by this specter. John Hodgman in The New York Times July 17, 2005 quotes executive producer Ronald D. Moore: "'I knew that if you did Battlestar Galactica again, the audience is going to feel a resonance with what happened on 9/11. That's going to touch a chord whether we want it to or not. And it felt like there was an obligation to that. To tell it truthfully as best we can through this prism.' In the miniseries Moore wrote to introduce the new Battlestar Galactica, the echoes of the war on terror were unapologetic and frequently harrowing: what happens when an advanced, comfortable, secular democracy endures a devastating attack by an old enemy that it literally created (which enemy, in Moore's version, also happens to be religious fanaticism)?" (The original series always reminded me of James Blish's Cities in Flight.)
Fringe, a sci fi TV show on Fox that began in 2008, visually indicates when the story switches to the parallel alternate reality universe by panning over the WTC Towers that rise above lower Manhattan there. (3/3/2011)
We've gotten glimpses of the British view in the spy thriller MI-5 (Spooks) (first seen here much-edited on BBC America and A & E, before years later showing up, presumably uncut, in PBS syndication). In the third season episode "Who Guards the Guards?" by Rupert Walters, the liaison to MI-6 defends his lethal compromises to the head of MI-5: If you're asking me is there at present any thing we shouldn't do to achieve our ends then frankly I don't know. Post 9/11 we made a decision that nothing, nobody was to be off-limits any more. Look around at what's been happening since Iraq. We're up against it. We can't say any more 'This we do not do.' In the long term it will be proved right. The MI-5 head disputes that siding with the Americans justifies it: Part of the reason for all this trouble is that most Americans think that anything East of the Hudson is like those blank spaces on medieval maps where they drew in a monster and wrote 'Here be dragons.' If you people continue like this there won't be any long term for any of us. Not that I can see. (updated 8/21/2009)
Homeland is based on an Israeli TV series, Prisoner of War, but the CIA in this American version was haunted by 9/11 from the opening episode written by Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, & Gideon Raff. The obsessive CIA analyst, played rivetingly by Claire Danes, starts in an age of anxiety: I missed something once before and I won’t let that happen again. Her mentor, played by Mandy Patinkin, stays cool: Everyone missed something that day. She insists: I’m just making sure we don’t get hit again. He’s sarcastic: Well, I’m glad someone’s looking out for the country. (1/22/2012)
9/11 In Song
Since 1989, I went to summer concerts in the plazas of the WTC and World Financial Center, but by the summer of 2001 they had finally gotten the stage placement and sound balance right; that summer I was there three nights a week. So I very much associate the Twin Towers with music. I still avoid looking at Ground Zero as I have to walk around it to get to the replacement concerts downtown and am reminded as I have to walk three blocks out of my way to cross West St. to and from the same subway station as the pedestrian bridge from the WTC to the WFC no longer exists. For sounds surrounding the WTC, including the concerts I went to, is public radio's sonic memorial. Music excerpts are included under stories/cultural programs in public radio's collaboration on "Understanding America After 9/11."
Here's notable musical tributes that I feel accurately reflect New Yorker's reactions (unlike Alan Jackson's Middle American fiction):
The lyrics of "Gates of Hell" by ex-cop Chris Byrne with his band Seanchai (recorded on their CD I [shamrock] New York).
The lyrics of Dan Bern's Woody Guthrie-esque description of "New York 911." and the accompanying song America, Hometown of the World." (both of which he performed on 9/25/01 at WFUV in the Bronx" and has not evidently been recorded).
For what it was like for New Yorkers in the days after, listen to Loudon Wainwright near the beginning of his October 19, 2001 interview on NPR's Fresh Air (the interview seems to be accessible by Quick Time in the archives but I can't get it to work).
For New York songwriters tribute downloadable CD. Participating musician Suzanne Vega also includes images of 9/11 in her 2007 CD Beauty and Crime, but the main character of the record as a whole is New York City.
Bruce Springsteen's The Rising CD as a musical evocation of the Portraits in Grief bios of the victims in the New York Times, reviewed in my Best of 2002 selections. It was very emotional when he performed those songs at the Meadowlands and at Shea Stadium at the two concerts I attended.
For lyrics to related songs by John McCutcheon "Follow the Light" and "Not In My Name".
Elliott Murphy's "Ground Zero" (live version from 9/11/2002 on downloadable MP3) effectively captures the feelings behind the images of those posters up around Lower Manhattan immediately after.
Lucy Kaplansky's "Land of the Living" (from her album The Red Thread) may not be factually correct about that day, but speaks to the feelings in our diverse and scared city that day.
Holly Near was prescient on her 2000 CD Edge with "I Ain't Afraid" though she now sings an edited version with its chorus of:
I ain't afraid of your Yahweh
I ain't afraid of your Allah
I ain't afraid of your Jesus
I'm afraid of what you do in the name of your God.
Dayna Kurtz in "Day of Atonement, 2001" (scroll down on Another Black Feather) sorrowfully links that sentiment with sadness at the revenge that has been wrought. Ian Hunter has a similar feeling in tribute to a cousin who died in the WTC in "Soul of America" (scroll down for the lyrics) from his 2007 Shrunken Heads CD:
The Alamo shuddered, Pearl Harbor as well/The Statue of Liberty wept as they fell/And echoes were heard in the Liberty Bell/When they came for the soul of America/And the Manhattan skyline blew my mind the first time/We went down to the scene of the crime/Lookin' for the soul of America. . . /There's souls in the city, there's souls in the sand.
Eric Nicholas's "Election Day" (click on political and scroll down) expresses NY'ers resentment of political abuse of 9/11. After all the only states actually attacked by terrorists voted blue.
Rodney Crowell's "The Obscenity Prayer (Give It To Me)" on The Outsider" uses WTC as an example in a greed rant that's very like Phil Ochs's "Love Me I'm A Liberal": "Give to me my Aspen winter/Sorry bout the world trade center."
Willie Nile's "Cell Phones Ringing (In the Pockets of the Dead)", from his Streets of New York CD/DVD, was inspired by the terrorist attack on the Madrid train station, with 9/11 resonance.
I usually wouldn't count songs that claim to be about the aftermath of 9/11 that could apply to anytime, anywhere, like Jack Johnson's "Times Like These" (from On and On in 2003) -- but I guess this is as pointed as a laid-back surfer dude can get.
Now there's songs about attending memorials, like Kingdom Come, by Judy Collins, which she performs on Wildflower Festival. But here's a rant on music tributes.
The aftermath of the attacks includes the war in Iraq and anti-war songs:
Luka Bloom's "I Am Not At War with Anyone" as performed by school children, and the voice of God through Hamell on Trial's "Don't Kill" from his Tough Love CD.
I hadn't picked up that Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was about 9/11 when I their rock opera American Idiot on my Best of 2004 selections, but the poignant, seven minute video shows the connection with soldiers today, and may do even more so in the theatrical version.
And so many related songs from the troops’ POV:
Richard Thompson’s "Dad’s Gonna Kill Me", from his Sweet Warrior CD
Black 47’s "Downtown Baghdad Blues", from their Bittersweet compilation CD, a theme they expanded on into a full album Iraq.
Neil Young’s Living With War compilation of protest song videos and Songs of the Times, some of which are seen in CSNY: Déjá Vu.
9/11 In Literature
Newsweek in an unattributed 10th anniversary summation of “What We Read” about 9/11: “But not one novel can yet claim to have captured that moment and the ensuing years. . .Instead, it is nonfiction, including such now classics as The Looming Tower [by Lawrence Wright], Ghost Wars [: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll], and The Forever War [by Joe Haldeman], that speaks to our unceasing attempt to understand the messy realities of the word that engulfed us. Our Zolas and Dickenses are our war correspondents and journalists.”
Published August 2011: Amy Waldman on her novel The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):
In The Wall Street Journal, 8/13/2011, “Truth in Imagined Things”: “My new novel tells the story of an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial. A Muslim-American, Mohammad ‘Mo’ Khan, wins. Mo himself, obviously, had no historical precedent (I had completed my first draft well before the controversy over a proposed mosque near Ground Zero). Yet I came to believe that he had historical analogues. I studied those individuals to see how their temperaments shaped—and were re-shaped—by their predicaments. Mo is an architect—prideful, stubborn, even arrogant about his work.” She cites Jorn Utzon, as a foreign architect of the Sydney Opera House, Maya Lin, as the Asian-American designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., and Alfred Dreyfus in France. . . being certain you are right—as Dreyfus was, as Mo Khan is—can make it harder to convince people that you actually are.” In an interview with Pieter M. van Hattem in WSJ, 8/16/2011, “Reimagining Post-9/11 Through Fiction”, the former reporter who covered 9/11 for The New York Times, put her book in somewhat more of that context: “On the process and technical work, I found it much more challenging than journalism. But emotionally, it was easier for me in that I wasn’t writing about real people. I found it very hard after 9/11 to call someone and ask, ‘what’s it like now that your son has died?’ Compared to that, sitting in my room inventing was nothing.”
Published Spring 2010: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan has a final chapter that envisions Ground Zero in 2021 and how the generation born after 9/11 will perceive and use the space. (A recommended selection of our Fiction Book Club)
Published Fall 2009:
Home Boy by H.M. Naqvi - about being Muslim in U.S. post-9/11, inspired by his brother's experiences.
Motoko Rich in The New York Times 9/2/2009 describes A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore as taking "place in the aftermath of 9/11, with the threat of terrorism and war hovering over a liberal university town described as 'the Athens of the Midwest.'" Jonathem Lethem in his 8/27/2009 review in The Times cites: "In a 2005 interview, Moore made an allusion to this 'post-9/11' aspect of the work that grew into this novel: 'I’m . . . interested in the way that the workings of governments and elected officials intrude upon the lives and minds of people who feel generally safe from the immediate effects of such workings.'”
Published May 2008:
On Amazon “Question: How is the world of Netherland particular to the United States after 9/11? Joseph O'Neill: The story takes place in the aftermath of 9/11. One of the things it does is try to evoke the disorientation and darkness of that time, which we only emerged from with the election of President Obama.”
Published May 2007: Don DeLillo, Falling Man, (Scribner, 246 pages) The 5/2/2007 review by Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun cites additional 9/11 novels by: John Updike (The Terrorist), Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. And I’m way behind in noting more and more.
Published Fall 2006: First Tragedy, Then Chicanery - reviewed in The Wall Street Journal by Kyle Smith, September 8, 2006 - The Zero By Jess Walter (2006, Regan Books, 326 pages) (fair use excerpt) - "Are you ready for '9/11: The Comedy'? . . .The Zero lacks any ritual sense of piety or sentimental tribute to the usual 9/11 truisms. Indeed, it recasts many of those involved in the cleanup effort -- from the street cops and FDNY "smokers" to the brass -- as cynical opportunists who brag that they've never bedded so many women and fight about which celebrities they get to escort around Ground Zero. The story also metaphorically paints U.S. attempts to crack terror networks as blundering at best, morally dubious at worst. But the book's brilliant ironies, its deadpan truths, its insider smarts and its everyguy hero may lead even skeptical readers to forgive the irreverent point of view. The Zero could end up as the Catch-22 of 9/11. . .
"Many writers published obituaries for irony in 2001; in reality, it merely took a 20-minute coffee break. Mr. Walter is among the first to diagram the tragedy-into-kitsch machine that many of us have stumbled across ourselves. It was only weeks after the attacks that Manhattan sidewalk vendors began selling watercolor paintings of Ground Zero decorated with crosses and American flags -- this century's Elvis on black velvet. My own experience was typical: A friend from Los Angeles stopped by my New York office on a whirlwind weekend with her boyfriend. 'First we're going to Ground Zero," she told me, "then we're going to see Chicago!' . . .Though the idea that it was patriotic to keep New York tourism dollars flowing wasn't absurd, Mr. Walter takes it apart hilariously. The Boss, referring to a cheesy off-Broadway show, says: 'We will fight back even if it means every American sits through Tony and Tina's goddamn Wedding!' [OK, we went to see Urinetown the Friday after 9/11 out of a feeling of patriotic support for the coming back of Broadway.] . . .In a 'beautiful ghost bar,' rescue workers loot bottles of top-shelf booze, each time leaving behind a joke tip of a buck. News trucks go 'grief fishing,' cops strut in new federally supplied satin jackets 'like a slow-pitch softball team' and volunteers deliver heart-warming loads of the superfluous. . .It's not the emergency response but the frenzy to leverage the attacks into something -- cocktail-party prestige, an appearance on a box of 'First Responder' cereal, an excuse to beat people up -- that draws Mr. Walter's barbs."
Published Summer 2006: Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children (Knopf, 448 pages) - She explains “How Sept. 11 Invaded Her Novel” about New Yorkers in this 9/8/2006 NPR interview with Roseanne Pereira.
Published Spring 2006: Martin Amis, The Last Days of Mohammed Atta, a short story, first in The New Yorker 4/24/2006, then reprinted among his collection of essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (Knopf, 2008), along with "In the Palace of the End", imagining the life of the double of Saddam Hussein’s son, who was later portrayed in the 2011 film The Devil’s Double.
After a Long Wait, Literary Novelists Address 9/11 by Edward Wyatt, from The New York Times, March 7, 2005 (may be more than a fair use excerpt)
. . .After three years of near silence about the attacks of Sept. 11, the literary world has begun to grapple with the meanings and consequences of the worst terrorist attack ever to happen on American soil. . .
In Windows on the World (Miramax), Frederic Beigbeder imagines a divorced father's breakfast with his sons at the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. In The Good Priest's Son (Scribner), Reynolds Price tells of an art conservator whose flight back to the United States is diverted to Nova Scotia on the morning of Sept. 11, while his apartment in Lower Manhattan is blasted with debris.
In Ian McEwan's Saturday (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), saturated with a sense of dread that makes any calamity into a possible act of terrorism, a father and daughter debate whether Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. The Writing on the Wall, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Counterpoint), portrays a librarian whose cloistered world is ripped apart as she walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and sees a plane hit the trade center. And in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin), by Jonathan Safran Foer, an indefatigable 9-year-old searches the city for a lock that fits a key he found in the closet of his father, who died in the attack. . .[Reviewed by our Fiction Book Club].
And while the attacks have already found a place in a handful of mysteries, spy novels and other works of mass-market fiction, only now are books being published that some literary critics are saying take the substantial risks needed to give them staying power.
The delay of more than three years reflects both the logistics of producing a bound volume of a lengthy manuscript and the more subtle, complex process of creating a novel.
"Some art forms, like poems or the drawings of Art Spiegelman, lend themselves to a more immediate treatment of an event like 9/11," said James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University who has taught the "great books" curriculum there. "But a novel really has to do more. A novelist has to sustain a story that feels right to people who actually lived through the event, who have a sense of what really happened. It has to be more than just a recounting of the event."
By no means is that an easy task, of course. Joyce Carol Oates, the author and critic whose recent short story The Mutants dealt with a woman trapped in her Lower Manhattan apartment on 9/11, said novels might not be the art form best able to address the events of that day.
"This does seem to be about the right time for these novels to be coming out," Ms. Oates said. "But the greatest art form to deal with this might be film, because it can capture the hallucinatory nature of the long hours of that siege." . . .
Other 9/11-related books, like Windows on the World and The Third Brother, by Nick McDonell, also attempt literal representations of scenes from Sept. 11. Some authors take a more figurative approach: Mr. McEwan's novel, which takes place long after 9/11, opens with a cataclysmic event that is assumed to be the work of terrorists.
Windows on the World, coming this month, has already been a best seller in Mr. Beigbeder's home country, France, despite the tensions between France and the United States over the aftermath of 9/11.
Of the attacks, Mr. Beigbeder (pronounced big-bid-AY) recalled: "Many people here said, 'It's their turn. They deserve it.' No one deserves something like 9/11. But if a catastrophe happens, we have to make it useful, so that we can try to make it never happen again. We have to understand it, and that is why I wrote this novel."
Using fiction and imaginary characters can sometimes make an overwhelming event feel human. But with so many people personally connected to those who were killed on Sept. 11, taking a reader inside a World Trade Center tower, as Mr. Beigbeder has, can evoke hostile reactions.
"I've had people say it is really obscene and disgusting to do that," he said. "But that is the idea of writing fiction about history. It is always shocking. We should not be afraid of writing about what is important." Mr. McDonell, the 21-year-old author whose acclaimed first novel, Twelve, was published when he was a teenager, said he knew almost immediately after 9/11 that he would make it the subject of a book.
"I started taking notes the day after," Mr. McDonell said. "I spent a bunch of time downtown. I walked around the site, and I talked to everybody I know who'd been down there."
He also read the 9/11 commission report, as did Mr. Beigbeder. And when he retreated to Hawaii for three months last year to write the novel, he found himself spending a lot of time talking to soldiers who were preparing to ship out to Iraq.
Both authors say they were warned away from the topic, by friends, editors and others. Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, said that in Mr. McDonell's case, "I was a little worried about him trying to take on that subject."
"I feared it would overwhelm him a little bit," Mr. Entrekin said. "He's so young - 2001 is ages ago to him." But the resulting book,- written in three parts, with the middle section set on Sept. 11, as the lead character speeds downtown in search of his brother - is "incredibly powerful," said Mr. Entrekin, who admits he is a bit biased. . .
With 9/11, Mr. Shapiro said, "somebody has to come along and see something that happened at that moment in a way that is new to the people who breathed it, who felt it and who saw it again and again on television."
The Intertwining Legacy of Terror Attacks and Fiction by Caryn James, The New York Times, August 3, 2005 (this may be more than a fair use excerpt)
Written after 9/11 but before 7/7 meant a thing, Ian McEwan's novel Saturday creates a hero who looks out his window, sees London "waiting for its bomb," and worriedly thinks "rush hour will be a convenient time."
Today this fiction may seem as prophetic as Chris Cleave's Incendiary published in Britain on 7/7 itself, in which suicide bombers kill hundreds of Londoners in a soccer stadium. But both authors agree that their plots are based on sheer common sense and the awful fulfillment of our fears.
"How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?" Mr. McEwan wrote in an Op-Ed piece the day after the London subway and bus bombings. (His article appeared simultaneously in The New York Times and The Guardian of London.) That same day Mr. Cleave wrote on his Web site, "I don't think my book is unusually prescient - we all knew this was coming."
Faced with such inevitability and the persistent specter of terrorism, some of the most ambitious novelists in London and New York are not addressing the 9/11 attacks themselves but their intangible legacy, what Mr. McEwan in Saturday calls "the general unease" and Michael Cunningham in Specimen Days sees as a change that shook New York's "dreams of itself." Along with Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (coming in September), these writers are depicting how the air has changed in cities living with terror: the jittery feeling that comes and goes; characters who think they are adjusting, only to lose their grip on reason. . .
The impact of terrorism is more direct in Incendiary (Alfred A. Knopf, $22.95), narrated by a woman whose husband and small son have been killed by the stadium bomb. The novel is shaped as her letter to Osama bin Laden, a form that is both an attention-getting trick (it's hard to ignore a book that begins "Dear Osama") and an effective literary device. This unnamed woman has been driven mad by grief; it becomes increasingly clear that the letter is a symptom of her derangement.
Mr. Cleave's satirical touches don't always blend smoothly with his narrator's anguish, but Incendiary is stunning in its portrayal of a city living with terror. Like 9/11, the stadium bombing in May instantly gets its nickname, "May Day." Bodies are not identified for weeks. And the way residents are told to carry on with ordinary life is the most familiar detail of all. A Scotland Yard official says, "We win by persuading the Brits" to stand up on the Underground "and ask Does this bag belong to anyone?"
The New York writers, looking back on the attack on their city, take a longer historical view. Different though they are stylistically, Mr. Cunningham's poetic Specimen Days and Mr. McGrath's psychologically resonant Ghost Town share a remarkably similar structure: each is composed of three stories set in three different historical periods, suggesting that terror and its shock waves are nothing new.
The first section of Specimen Days (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25) takes place in the 19th century and the final section is set in the 22nd. The frighteningly plausible middle story, "The Children's Crusade," deals with contemporary terrorized New York. (Where Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was Mr. Cunningham's blueprint for The Hours here Walt Whitman's poetry is a touchstone for three traumatized characters.)
The heroine of "The Children's Crusade," a New York City police psychologist named Cat, takes a call from a boy who later straps a bomb to himself and blows up a stranger on a downtown street, "right by Ground Zero." Afterward Cat sees three girls pause to look in a store window but quickly move on. "Were they thinking of being showered with broken glass?" she wonders. "The danger that has infected the air for the last few years was stirred up now; people could smell it." Her own grief, predating 9/11, is stirred up too; after a second and possibly a third child suicide bomber appears, Cat becomes as unhinged as the narrator of Incendiary.
Similarly, the contemporary section of Ghost Town (Bloomsbury, $16.95) concerns a psychiatrist who becomes as unsettled as her patient. Mr. McGrath, the author of exceptional, darkly psychological novels like Asylum sets his first story in the 18th century, when the narrator looks back to the American Revolution, and the second story in the 19th century. The final section, "Ground Zero," takes place in the weeks after 9/11, when the psychiatrist treats a longtime patient who suddenly falls in love with a prostitute. . . .
The political always comes down to the personal, yet the long historical view isn't necessarily comforting. Many of these novels envision a fortress-like future in which civil liberties are severely curtailed. The extraterrestrials and androids in the final section of Specimen Days are tracked by electronic surveillance not many steps ahead of today's. In Incendiary, after the stadium bombing, Muslims working on planes or in hospitals are fired as security risks, and London is put under nighttime curfew.
The characters in all these affecting, post-terror novels are not only grieving some personal loss; they are also mourning their vanished, secure way of life.
Dark Day, Big City: On McInerney's New Book, a Blanket of Dust from The New York Times, by Edward Wyatt, August 22, 2005 (make be more than a fair use excerpt)
. . . Alfred A. Knopf will publish The Good Life Jay McInerney's first novel in more than six years. Its cover, designed by Chip Kidd, shows a photograph by Quyen Tran of dishes covered with concrete dust. Subtly peeking through the lettering of the title and the author's name is a faint image of one of the World Trade Center towers on fire.
On the spine is an ash-coated drinking glass, half full, or half empty. And on the back cover, a platoon of shirts, neatly arranged on hangers in a store, draped in the soot that enveloped Lower Manhattan when the twin towers collapsed.
Mr. Kidd, who has designed book jackets for Knopf and other publishers for 20 years, said he immediately thought of such an image when he first heard about the subject of Mr. McInerney's book.
Set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, The Good Life traces the story of Luke, who is late for a breakfast meeting at the World Trade Center that Tuesday morning, as well as those of several characters first seen in Mr. McInerney's 1992 novel, "Brightness Falls."
"I originally thought of that shot of the tea set covered in the ash from 9/11," Mr. Kidd said, referring to a photograph by Edward Keating published in The New York Times on Sept. 20, 2001. The photograph, taken inside a Cedar Street apartment that faced the World Trade Center, was part of a package of photographs that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for The Times in 2002.
Mr. Kidd asked researchers at Knopf to accumulate images from ground zero for consideration, and they found Quyen Tran's photograph and the others in the collection Here Is New York. The collection, published by Scalo Publishers, was culled from a storefront photo gallery that sprouted on Spring Street in SoHo soon after 9/11. . .
One of the few recent novels that made an explicit visual reference to 9/11 was Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, published earlier this year by Houghton Mifflin. Included in the book is a sequence of photographs of a body falling from one of the trade center's towers. The photographs are printed in reverse order, however, so when the pictures are flipped through, they create an effect, as imagined by the child narrator, of the body moving upward, away from death.
One other book that came close to using a recognizable 9/11 image on the cover was The Writing on the Wall, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, published in May by Counterpoint Press. When early copies of the novel were distributed to reviewers, the cover included a photograph of bouquets of flowers stuck in a chain-link fence, evoking the impromptu memorials that sprang up after 9/11.
David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Book Group, which owns Counterpoint, said that the cover provoked intense discussions among the company's marketing and sales staff.
"There was a concern that this was an image that was recognizable to New Yorkers but not necessarily around the country," he said, plus a fear that "the audience that would be interested in this book would not respond to" such a "harsh image" and the memories it might dredge up.
So before the book was sent to stores, a new cover was designed, with a more subtle image: a hazy, ghostlike photograph of the Lower Manhattan skyline, taken from the Staten Island ferry shortly after 9/11.
From When National Catastrophe Stokes Personal Anguish from The New York Times, August 22, 2005, Janet Maslin’s review of Nick McDonell's The Third Brother (fair use excerpt): “gropes awkwardly to find its subject matter. . . At that point its main character, Mike, wanders catatonically toward the wreckage of the World Trade Center, immersed in his own residue of family pain and destruction. The book comes outrageously close to turning the events of Sept. 11, 2001 into a narcissistic reflection of Mike's state of mind. . . .
Mr. McDonell uses language with elegant, minimalist precision. And that careful tone becomes increasingly inadequate as terrible things continue to happen. The anomie grows so intense that the last words on page 158 are: 'There is nothing to say.' The last words on page 159 are: 'He thought of nothing.' And the book, like the more gripping Twelve, is designed with a good deal of white space, furthering the impression of numb suffering and emptiness on the page.
. . . By the time The Third Brother reaches its 9/11 epiphany (followed by a limp back-to-Harvard finale) its imaginative elements have been beggared by reality. . . . But when this book reduces an epic disaster to myopia, it takes an irreversibly wrong turn. The facts that Tweety wanted to see snowflakes and that the World Trade Center's ashes are floating through Lower Manhattan are not easily equated.
’Mike thinks he sees body parts, like strange, horrible animals sleeping in the street,’ Mr. McDonell writes, sustaining a degree of stylish detachment even in the face of the unspeakable. . . ."
From Too Soon to Tell by Chris Cleave, author of Incendiary, a novel about an imagined terrorist attack on London, in The New York Times, September 11, 2005:
"Witness the critical reaction to some post-Sept. 11 books. A beautiful novel is "sentimental" (Mr. Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Colossal and erudite is "gratuitous and pretentious" (Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days). Idiosyncratic and questioning becomes "bitty and incomplete" (Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers). . .This oft-repeated charge of exploitation finds a softer echo in the whimsical British tendency to file away such novels as Ian McEwan's Saturday or Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown as "post-Sept. 11 fiction" - as if terrorism will turn out to be a blip and a genre that addresses it short-lived."
(updated 1/26/2012)
To the Mandel/Shultz Maven's Nest
Comments, corrections, additions, questions welcome! Contact Nora Lee at mandelshultz@yahoo.com
Copyright (c) 2012