I started this column two years ago by vowing not to see a movie, and I find myself tempted to take the pledge again.
In the spring of 2004, I decided that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was a faith-shoring visual aid, akin to Thomas fingering Christ's wounds. Believing by seeing. So far I have kept my promise, and do not anticipate wavering.
I don't know about United 93, however. My colleague Josh Bell, in his Weekly review of the Paul Greengrass docudrama, noted approvingly the movie's levelheaded, almost clinical approach to the story, and even evoked Gibson's movie: "In its straightforward recounting of events, United 93 is less like a movie than a memorial. And like another controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, it is something that, for many, will be more about having the experience and paying tribute to the fallen than about going to the movies."
Maybe the "it's not only a movie" aspect gets me. I approach with arched eyebrow any aesthetic project that proclaims itself influential, crucial or redemptive. That third quality irked Slate's Ron Rosenbaum recently. Rosenbaum notes that United 93 follows two small-screen productions which in other ways attempted to narrate the doomed flight: "Could it be that the three films are a symptom of our addiction to fables of redemptive uplift that shield us from the true dimensions of the tragedy? Redemptive uplift: It's the official religion of the media, anyway. There must be a silver lining; it's always darkest before the dawn; the human spirit will triumph over evil; there must be a pony."
But the redeemed is as niched-out as a market can get. A&E's Flight 93, as Rosenbaum points out, was directed by an old pal of George Bush. In The New York Times, Frank Rich, who disses United 93 for its clinical approach, recalls "Showtime's DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, in 2003. That dog, produced with White House cooperation and larded with twin-tower money shots, starred Timothy Bottoms as a derring-do President Bush given to pronouncements like ‘If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me!'" Clearly these efforts aim for a broad redemptory demographic, those who want to see what they believe, over and over. But another niche takes its recapitulations neat, no ideological chaser. These folks might range from the otherwise pious to the cynically urbane, but whether they feel betrayed by the Bush Administration or confirmed in their distrust of it, they need some cinematic healing.
Problem is, those niches seem to be getting smaller. My admittedly unscientific survey of Adults I Know finds unwavering animadversion to United 93. Not from any fear the horrors of that day are being played for profit ("This is America, for heaven's sake," says Rich) but simple revulsion at the prospect of reliving The Events Of. Maybe it was the overplay at the time, when omnimedia fed endlessly our perverse need to see, leaving a staccato, jangling montage of money shots that plague our dreams, and which we have no care to re-endure. Or redeem. Or maybe we have tired of what selective redemption has bought us in the name of The Events, partly through our eagerness to do something and our willingness to trust our leaders to do it. This is why Rich is not surprised that many do not want to see United 93: "When Americans ... think about Iraq, they don't say, ‘Let's roll!,' they say, ‘Let's leave!'"
The first opt-out, event-weariness, is troubling enough. It implies at its extreme a life of intense present experience and no memory. Been there, done that, but also don't go there. Memory at least might remind us that our overwrought performance of the Events' Aftermath helped bring about that second opt-out, post-event-wariness.
But why would anyone want to see The Events re-created, to seek that redemption? Even the precise, uninflected vision Josh Bell cited in United 93 presumes a desire, not necessarily to relive but to re-have. Lending The Events the familiarity of filmed fiction gives the day order, redemptive or not. Rosenbaum worries that this distracts us from our mission, our fight against an enemy whose vision of redemption involves our indiscriminate slaughter. Rich says United 93 comes not too soon, but too late, we've already picked the wrong enemy to fight and bred more of the real ones. You could argue that opting out of the replay signals a refusal to confront the enemy at all.
Have we, or must we, put an end at last to the idea that art can transfigure life? The Aristotelian model of tragedy purging fear and pity required heroes with flaws that prescribed their downfalls. This in turn required an audience capable of discerning flaws in heroes, and of translating that purged fear and pity into understanding. Whether we believe in heroes or not, whether we seek redemption or recusal, omnimedia has flattened our responses to events into categories of simplified emotion. Almost inevitably, any retelling of recent history invokes nothing more than feelings.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.