Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
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The ‘Apolitical’ Cinema of 9/11 / Arin Keeble
Abstract: The first mainstream cinematic engagements with 9/11, Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), are stridently apolitical. These films are conspicuously micro in scope, circumscribed with the task of dramatizing emergency and trauma. Nevertheless, a certain kind of politicised rhetoric emerges in both films. This article argues that by surreptitiously or perhaps unintentionally adopting two integral tropes of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, these two films adopt a fundamentally unilateral or singular politics that eschews any kind of exchange or international scope. Both films, therefore, ultimately remain ‘apolitical’, though clearly not in the sense that they are reverently documenting the emergency or trauma of the day, but rather, in their alignment with the rhetoric of a ‘state of exception’ that operates outside of conventional political dialogues.
Keywords: 9/11, Cinema, Politics, Terrorism, Trauma, Bush Doctrine
<1> The first mainstream cinematic representations of 9/11, Paul Greengrass’ United 93 (2006) and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), are stridently apolitical. These films focus directly on the emergency, chaos, and disaster of the day entirely eschewing any kind of wider interrogation of how or why the attacks occurred.
<2> United 93 is a real-time “docu-drama” that focuses simultaneously on the passengers and hijackers of United Airlines flight 93 (which was forced by a passenger uprising to crash land near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) and responses from the military and various air-traffic control and aviation authorities during the first hours of the attacks. Ostensibly, Greengrass’ thoughts on United 93 suggest greater insight: “If you look clearly and unflinchingly at a single event, you can find in its shape something much larger than […] the event itself – the DNA of our times” (Jaafar: 53). This is a provocative statement but what is important here is his stated concern to look at a “single event” which conspicuously avoids the burdens or perceived insensitivity of explanation or larger narrative. The film dramatizes the two critical hours on the morning of 9/11 and what is prioritized is the documenting of the minutiae of this single flight and the chaos surrounding its hijacking, in real-time realism. As Douglas Kellner states, “[…] it is highly specific and does not engage with broader contextual issues” (Kellner: 117).
<3> Oliver Stone’s vision is equally singular in World Trade Center, which dramatizes the true story of two Port Authority Police Officers, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, responding to the emergency on the morning of 9/11, and getting stuck beneath the rubble of the towers. B. Ruby Rich states in a Sight and Sound review: “World Trade Center is a movie so determinedly circumscribed, so micro-focused, as to constitute not a historical epic but rather a classic disaster movie. Men are trapped. Families await word. Help is on the way” (Rich: 14). Stone has explicitly expressed his intentions of being reverent and depicting the attacks and the chaos of the day as realistically as possible at the expense of any political conjecture or attempt at insight, describing the film as a “memorial”; “[…] your grandkid in 30 years time can see this movie and, no matter what, can say that he has a feeling of what that day was like. That’s important. It is a form of memorial” (Stone: unpaginated).
<4> This article argues that World Trade Center and United 93, as circumscribed as they are, each have concealed political strands. These strands, however, essentially uphold the G.W.Bush rhetoric of a “changed world” characterized by an imperative of militarization, revanchism and a “clash of civilizations”; a state of exception where political norms no longer apply. Therefore, while they inadvertently transcend their self-imposed, apolitical frameworks, in accommodating this unilateral, conservative ideological position, or the “Bush doctrine”, they maintain a singularity in depicting 9/11 as an irreducible event (Holloway: 4). Ultimately the rhetoric of these films is so singular and unilateral that they retain an essentially apolitical state; albeit not the one that was intended.
<5> Paul Greengrass and Oliver Stone are both filmmakers with strong political pedigrees and this evacuation of politics and accommodation to the conservative mainstream is uncharacteristic. Stone has engaged contentiously with the Kennedy assassination and the Viet Nam War amongst other highly politicized subjects and Paul Greengrass came to prominence with his lauded dramatization of the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, Bloody Sunday (2002) and continues to make subversive political thrillers like Green Zone (2010). World Trade Center and United 93 seem incongruous when set against the backdrop of each director’s traditions. Instead, unconsciously perhaps, they adapt to and incorporate conceits of blind aggression and Manichaeism.
<6> Despite some negative publicity regarding audience reaction to the first trailers for United 93, the film has been a commercial and critical success (Kendrick: 515). Even in liberal-leaning critical accounts that would be wary of the rhetoric of heroism or patriotism that characterized much of the early television representation of 9/11, United 93 has been highly regarded; for example, Sight and Sound described the way it “terrifyingly conveys the nature of the threat facing the world today and poignantly conveys on screen the decision by a few brave individuals to fight back” (Jafaar: 53). United 93 has three main sub-textual strands, two of which, the representations of heroism, and government intelligence and communication, have been identified as aspects of the film that are treated with great restraint and fidelity. The third, which this essay will refer to as the “clash of civilizations” strand, involves the representation of the terrorists, an area that has not been extensively analysed. It will be useful here to work through the first two, to show how they create the film’s “subversive” aspects whilst clearly upholding its apolitical aspect. These aspects of the film may also explain why the third sub-textual strand has escaped criticism.
<7> The portrayal of heroism in representations of 9/11 has frequently been identified as hyperbolic. Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America (2007), which focuses particularly on the way male heroism was actively advocated and disproportionately preoccupying for the US government, national media, and culture industries, begins by citing The Spirit of America (2001), the three minute montage to “classic Hollywood heroes” directed by Chuck Workman, which according to the New York Times, appeared in a quarter of all American Cinemas by December 2001. Faludi identifies the preoccupation with heroism as fundamentally retrograde, citing the way American cultural representation, particularly cinematic representation, began its response to 9/11 by evoking American heroic archetypes:
Our cultural response to it had distinct developmental phases that seemed to have little bearing on the actual circumstances we faced; they seemed instead to retrace some hidden road map. We sped through our memory bank the way The Spirit of America whipped through a hundred years of Hollywood heroism in three minutes. (Faludi, 13)
<8> Heroism in United 93, however, is toned down, despite the fact that one of the most memorable coinages that emerged from 9/11, purportedly originated with a passenger on flight 93, Todd Beamer. The phrase “let’s roll” was appropriated by George W. Bush in a presidential address on November 8th in support of US military action, as well as the State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, an appropriation which epitomises the importance the Bush administration and national media placed on a certain image of individual heroism (Bush 2001, 2002). United 93, therefore, was well placed to continue to endorse this kind of heroism in dramatizing what had become a powerful and resonant national myth. In reality, the “let’s roll” moment is, as described by Jaafar, “underplayed” and conforms to the way United 93 conspicuously avoids “mawkish sentimentality” or “jingoism” in general (Jaafar: 53). Indeed, this moment, before the group of passengers rush forward toward the cockpit, is barely audible, and is “downplayed to the point that it could easily be missed” (Kendrick: 525). The focus in this scene, created by characteristically jerky camera movements and rapid-cut editing, is on extreme anxiety. There is a deliberateness in this depiction of one of the most popular truisms of the event; almost a statement of the intent to avoid the popular images of 9/11 heroics and remain faithful to a singular vision of emergency and chaos.
<9> However, while it is clear that United 93 is non-triumphal in its portrayal of frightened and anxious citizens, the passenger rebellion was a genuinely heroic act, and it is also the only documented act of American retaliation on the day of 9/11. Accordingly, the final scenes of the passengers charging the cockpit, as faithful as they remain to Greengrass’ vision of anxiousness and chaos, do carry a charged aura of vengeance, and the depiction of the passengers bludgeoning one of the terrorists with a fire extinguisher is as violent as the film gets; as J. Hoberman states: “[...] the movie cannot escape the dramatic need for vengeance. Underscored by martial drumbeats, the thrillingly cathartic finale has the passengers not only enter the cockpit but actually appear to kill the hijackers” (Hoberman 2006: 22). Nevertheless, these scenes in general are characterized by chaos, urgency and futility and this kind of vengeance is nothing like the allusions to military aggression and vengeance in World Trade Center. Furthermore, the fact that Greengrass removed the planned end title, “America’s War on Terror had Begun”, is evidence of the film’s wilful avoidance of this rhetoric.
<10> Ultimately, the aspect of the film which steers it away from this image of individual heroism is its very deliberate focus on the collective rather than individual. In some ways this tactic is oddly reminiscent of Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic anti-colonial film Battle of Algiers (1966). Like Pontecorvo’s film, United 93 uses a combination of people who were actually participant in the events as actors with a large group of unknown actors and even more than Battle of Algiers, spreads screen time equally among the large group of individuals emphasizing the group rather than any individual heroes. As Kendrick States: “The centrality of the group character is contrary to classical Hollywood narrative, which almost uniformly places importance on the individual hero(ine) and how he or she stands out from everyone else” (Kendrick: 525). Unlike Battle of Algiers, however, and perhaps because of the temporal constraints of the film’s “real-time” element, the emphasis on collective also contributes to the film’s apolitical quality as much as it subverts popularised notions of heroism. The lack of any fully characterized individual and the foregrounding of chaos and emergency rather than narrative consolidates this.
<11> Given that the film downplays the popularized “let’s roll” notion of heroism it is also important to consider the depiction of the Americans as victims. Though the film culminates in the only known episode of American retaliation on 9/11, much of the narrative focuses on the communication between air-traffic control at Newark, Boston and Cleveland, the aviation authorities at Hendren and the military response and attempts at military liaison with the FAA. This narrative duality between the people on the plane and the people on “the ground” adds another dimension to the sense of chaos and emergency on 9/11. As Jafaar states: “The chaotic bewilderment reaches its nadir as the chains of communication and command between the military and the civilian authorities fall apart when the World Trade Center is hit for a second time”(Jaafar: 23). A more cutting reading of this duality is also possible. In the midst of the anxiety aboard the plane, the passengers do manage to “unite” and retaliate, gathering and sharing fragments of information, and taking action. The passengers share mobile phones, scrupulously relay messages, build information and establish consensus. When it is agreed that they are hostages on a “suicide mission”, they are decisive. The response of the officials on the ground contrasts starkly as the various authorities continually fail to share information or successfully communicate and strategise. As Kellner states:
The most critical aspect of the film is the incompetence with which the government agencies and military respond to the hijackings. While air traffic controllers overhear conversations that suggest a hijacking, they seem not to communicate effectively with the FAA or the military [....] Equally disturbing, the FAA starts off slowly, not reacting seriously to threats of an airplane hijacking, and then keeps losing track of planes, or tracking ones as hijacked which are not. (Kellner: 103)
To some degree, United 93 is sympathetic to the authorities in its characterization of 9/11 as a completely unprecedented event, particularly in the scenes at the air traffic control rooms at Newark, Boston and Cleveland. Furthermore, the casting of dozens of actual participants, including Ben Sliny, the head of the FAA, strongly suggests that Greengrass wasn’t intent on condemning the authorities. However, the lack of communication and loss of control over the situation is comprehensive, and the inability of anyone to contact the US president is particularly conspicuous. Sliny is noticeably terse with the “Military Liaison” officer repeatedly stating “I want action”, while various military personal continue to request “rules of engagement” and ask, “Do we have any communication with the president? How about the vice president?” The answer is no, and this absence is alluded to repeatedly and concludes with the statement from military personal that “Air Force One has taken off – they don’t know where it’s going”. Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review cited this as being a pointed criticism of the Bush administration: “The film is at any rate fiercely critical of Bush and Cheney, who are shown to be being quite unreachable by the authorities” (Bradshaw: unpaginated). This view was evidently not shared by Bush himself, who subsequently screened the film for families of the victims in the White House. What is certain, however, is that there is a binary aspect between the people on the plane and the people in charge, and this is not simply predicated on circumstance but between citizen and authority. Kellner states: “The subtext of United 93 appears to be that US citizens cannot trust their government for national security or to protect them from terrorists [...] The film suggests that groups of people must decide to protect themselves and organize to fight for their own survival’ (Kellner 2010: 104). This is a tenuous extrapolation, but the division of the “united” on the plane, and the disarray on the ground is clear. Furthermore, whatever degree of “criticism” of the authorities is interpreted, the film remains fundamentally apolitical in the sense that it doesn’t ask the questions of how and why, and is not interested in this; rather, it simply enacts a duality.
<12> There is, however, one aspect of the film which accommodates the Bush doctrine: the allusion to the “clash of civilizations” narrative which was quickly appropriated and utilized for answers and explanations in the wake of 9/11. It will be useful here to establish some context before a close analysis of this aspect of the film. David Holloway describes the post-9/11 appeal of this clash of civilizations “abstraction”: “With so many overlapping and unstable factors in play, an abstraction like “clash of civilisations” was attractive because, like all sound bites, it reduced complex and opaque historical forces to a more manageable form” (Holloway: 11). Holloway attributes the rise of this abstraction to a variety of sources, mostly beginning with the post-9/11 appropriation of the writings of Samuel P. Huntington who published an article entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs (1993) and then an expanded book-length version called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1997). Huntington defines civilization by drawing on opaque ideas of culture rather than ideology or government, ultimately reducing his definition to, “culture writ large” (Huntington: 41). Huntington is careful to differentiate between government and ideology and posits that religion is the primary cultural element of a civilization: “Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion” (Huntington: 42). The crux of Huntington’s thesis is that the contemporary global political landscape is characterized by the volatile relationships between seven different civilisations and that the West needs to be aggressive and strategic, creating alliances between some of them, in order to maintain its stability and global pre-eminence against particularly the “Islamic” and “Confucian” civilizations – essentially the Middle East and China. Furthermore, Huntington’s rhetoric is frequently homogenizing, designed, it would seem, to characterize certain “civilizations” such as “Islam” as monolithic and all encompassing. Huntington’s section on “Islam and the West” is particularly inflammatory and in his analysis there is no possibility of reconciliation between these two “civilizations”: “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam itself, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power” (Huntington: 209). This thesis is both prone to abstractions (as Holloway has illustrated) and is also validated by the credence it has been given and influence it has exerted. Edward Said was quick to identify the increasing cachet the “clash of civilizations” would gain after 9/11, publishing “Islam and the West are Inadequate Banners” in The Observer on September 16, 2001, continuing his longstanding debate with and criticism of Huntington and Bernard Lewis. Nevertheless, the “clash of civilizations” abstraction garnered unprecedented popular currency, appearing everywhere from newspaper articles to President Bush’s repeated citation of an attack on “our way of life.” As Holloway notes:
Sometimes it was appropriated to serve agendas other than those explicitly addressed in Huntington’s essay. Sometimes it was caricatured. More often it was plagiarised, usually unwittingly, by voices that had assimilated some of the argument from other sources. (Holloway: 8)
<13> The reason these views are important is to establish their influence as a key aspect of the political and cultural backdrop into which writers and filmmakers in the West began attempting to represent the terrorist other. As we have seen, United 93 is a real-time film that doesn’t employ a conventional narrative arc, doesn’t develop what we might call three-dimensional characters, and doesn’t refer to any context beyond the chaos and emergency of the morning it dramatizes. How, then, does United 93 accommodate the Bush doctrine?
<14> The opening sequence is crucial to the narrative of United 93. The film opens to a dimly lit close up of the Qur’an, fades to black, and then shows an establishing shot of the Qur’an open in the hands of an Arab man praying on a bed in a hotel. He is shown to be praying in Arabic but it is not subtitled for the understanding of non-Arabic speakers; the camera studies him intently. Another Arab man enters the room and says “It’s time”, which is subtitled. The un-subtitled praying continues as voiceover as the camera moves to an overhead shot of the New York skyline. It then alternates between aerial shots that glide in between skyscrapers in the pre-dawn light, to shots of the men, clearly establishing them as terrorists, preparing: shaving their chests and genitalia and praying on prayer mats inside the hotel room. The dominant images and sounds in this opening sequence are a conflation of Islam and terrorism, and particularly, as the prayer chants are not subtitled, they are, to the non-Arabic speaker, religious abstractions. After this dark and ominous sequence the scene changes to Newark airport and the narrative of 9/11 begins, emerging out of these abstractions.
The subtitling (or lack of subtitling) remains largely the same throughout the entire film, only appearing during tactical statements: “we have to do it now” or “wait for the sign”, for example. During the action sequences on the flight, it could be argued that it reinforces the realism of the film. The passengers (who we presume cannot speak Arabic) do not understand what the terrorists are shouting and this adds to the chaos of the clash, and as these scenes are not subtitled, the audience (who we also assume, for the most part, cannot speak Arabic) is immersed in the drama. But the arbitrary nature in which subtitling is employed is particularly important in the opening sequence which contributes to the abstraction of Islam. It is also important to consider that the prominence of religious imagery highlights the conspicuous absence of any mention of political motives. While the terrorists are only given minimal characterization, it is entirely split between tactical dialogue and religious abstraction.
<15> Some critical accounts and reviews have identified humanizing gestures in the representation of the terrorists and there does seem to be a shade of hesitance in the leader/pilot. They are all characterized as frightened but committed and though there are signs of inner struggle, at least in the leader, he is galvanized when he becomes aware that the World Trade Center has been hit, announcing to his accomplices that “the brothers have hit their targets.” The leader character, Ziad Jarrah, played by Khalid Abdalla, also affects an air of sophistication, at least in the first half of the film; contemplative, bespectacled and smartly dressed. The most humanizing moment for any of the terrorists comes at the airport, when just after the other three board the plane he scans the departure lounge noting the cheerful telephone conversations of the passengers around him, Jarrah phones someone and says simply, “I love you”. Martin Amis points to Abdalla’s portrayal of Jarrah as exceptional and suggests that it nearly breaks the emphasis on the collective: “There are no weak points, and no obtrusively strong points, in the United 93 ensemble. But among the little-knowns and the unknowns and the people playing themselves, Abdalla, perhaps destabilisingly for the movie, is something like its star”(Amis: 135). This moment, however, is only the smallest of gestures towards characterization.
<16> The emphasis is on the group dynamics and it is precisely this, combined with the heavy emphasis on Islam which opens the film that conforms to the clash of civilizations discourse. As the film hurtles towards its finale, the passengers huddle together in the rear of the plane while the terrorists hold down the front; two locked in the cockpit and two guarding it outside, one strapped with explosives. As the antagonism between the passengers and terrorists palpably escalates, in an extraordinary sequence of rapid cut editing, there is a polarizing montage alternating between shots of the terrorists praying feverishly in un-subtitled Arabic and the passengers saying the Lord’s Prayer. The images are powerfully antithetical. Shortly after these scenes play out, the film culminates with a violent clash, as the passengers charge the cockpit and a literal clash between oblique Huntingtonian conceptions of Islam and the West ensues. Because of the lack of distinction between Islam and Islamism, the lack of characterization and the Manichaeism of the finale, United 93 conforms to the “clash of civilization” trope, and in the end directly evokes it. Martin Amis’s commentary on the film, ‘What Will Become of Us?’, brings this out in an alarming speculation. Amis imagines what the film may have looked like if there had been a child on board and his reductive interpretation of the terrorists (imagining explaining the situation to a child) is revealing: “What’s happening? Well, you see, my child, the men with the bloodstained knives think that if they kill themselves, and all of us, we will stop trying to destroy Islam and they will go at once to a paradise of women and wine”(Amis, 135). Amis’s interpretation clearly chimes with the “clash of civilizations” narrative and is an example of how it is perpetuated by cultural representation.
<17> World Trade Center is a much more traditional Hollywood film. It features established stars like Nicholas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhall and conforms to recognizable genre categories; most notably and repeatedly it has been cited as featuring the conventions of the “disaster movie”. It also defies expectations the audience might have for an Oliver Stone film; Kellner calls it “the ultimate un-Oliver Stone film: restrained, understated, often slow and sombre, and conservative” (Kellner: 117). It is important to consider, though, that Stone is aware of this perspective and the conservative aspect of World Trade Center is something that he has described as deliberate. Stone is revealing in his response to criticism from what he calls “the intellectuals of Europe”, emphasizing his wariness of “political” filmmaking:
I don’t believe the intellectuals of Europe are really in touch with people. They are so politicised by 9/11. It’s not their fault. It’s anti-Bush, pro-Bush, anti-Iraq. They’ve lost sight of something [...] They politicize everything. Every movie has to be seen through political glasses. They’re insane. I’m not a political film-maker goddamnit! I’m a dramatist and I always have been. (Stone: unpaginated)
However – as in United 93 – the intensely micro- approach which conspicuously avoids any political or international element also contains strands that reinforce a particular ideological position. In the case of World Trade Center, despite determined rhetoric from the director regarding the film’s apolitical intent, this position is even more explicitly aligned to the projects of the G.W. Bush administration. Conservative pundit Cal Thomas describes it as “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see” (Thomas: unpaginated). The film is not without its complexities however, and its dichotomous representation of heroism, outlined below, is an important context for discussion of its accommodation of another particular strand of the Bush doctrine.
<18> Much of the apolitical drive of the narrative is down to its attempt to work through the trauma of 9/11 and it places emphasis not on “why” the attacks occurred but, simply “what happened”, in the immediate sense. From the very beginning of the film, Stone establishes the two protagonists as connected to the towers and to New York. The opening sequence depicts them waking up as the city wakes up. They are identified as family men and as shots alternate between the men driving to work and the sun rising over the city, their ethnic difference is reflected in the depiction of a culturally diverse city. As Rich suggests they are cannily representative:
They couldn’t have been scripted any better than they lived it: a veteran and a rookie, one with four kids and the other with a pregnant wife, one Irish and one Colombian [...] They’re not only suitable stand-ins for all the New Yorkers who survived or perished on 9/11, but they’re perfect movie characters – ordinary guys raised to greatness by extraordinary trials. (Rich: 16)
As the opening sequence develops, the shots continue to alternate between the two men, and the iconography of New York, particularly the World Trade Center, which has the effect of unifying them. When the final cityscape shot appears featuring a title stating “September 11, 2001” over the newly sunlit city, the two men and the city are firmly established as connected. Ceylan Özcan identifies this as a strategy the film employs to help its audience work through the collective trauma of the attacks:
[...] by dealing with the collective trauma microcosmically, through the individual stories, Stone is able to capture a sincere and effective account, as opposed to concentrating on it on a massive scale [...] the strength and survival of these two individuals becomes synonymous with the strength and survival of America as a nation. (Özcan: 209)
This sounds like national allegory, but even if this is the case, the personalizing of the 9/11 narrative in World Trade Center remains one of the defining aspects of its apolitical quality. John and Will are indeed “synonymous with strength and survival”, but what they are most associated with throughout their entrapment and the flashbacks that occur during their entrapment, is not so aggressive; generic qualities of good will, family, love and gratitude. This is epitomized by the final “McLoughlin and Jimeno Annual Barbeque” scene, where the voiceover narrative states: “9/11 showed us what human beings are capable of – the evil, yeah sure, but it also brought out the goodness we forgot can exist; people taking care of each other for no other reason than that it was the right thing to do. It is important for us to talk about that good, to remember, because I saw a lot of it that day.”
<19> The relationship between Will and John is not the only way the film attempts to work through the collective trauma of 9/11. The importance of its conforming to familiar genre tropes, particularly those of the disaster movie, is also very significant. Allessandra Stanley writes that “it could almost as easily have been about trapped West Virginia miners or mountain climbers buried under an avalanche” (Stanley: 2006). The men are trapped under the rubble and keep each other alive through love, comradeship and inner strength, while the families outside the disaster area wait anxiously for news. The anxiousness on screen, however, translates to a kind of reassuring quality in its compliance to genre conventions. The familiarity of genre is clearly related to Jenny Edkins’ notion of working through trauma by building it into a tried narrative: “incorporat[ing] what happened into the narrative forms we already have available[...] telling the story, fitting the event into a linear narrative framework” (Edkins: 248). Rich cites this as an explicit strategy Of Stone’s in World Trade Center: “He and his team comfort their audience – traumatized by the mere act of entering a movie theatre to see this day revivified – with the familiar cues of genre entertainment, smoothly shifting gears between action, melodrama and thriller formulas” (Rich: 14). There is another aspect of the film however, which may or may not have been included to help work through the trauma, but which clearly aligns World Trade Center to the Bush doctrine: the representation of Dave Karnes, played Michael Shannon.
<20> Karnes was an ex-marine who, on the day of September 11th, left his office in Connecticut where he worked as an insurance salesman, drove to New York, and immediately joined the rescue teams at Ground Zero, eventually uncovering McLoughlin and Jimeno, who were two out of only 19 recorded recoveries. Famously, after 9/11 he re-enlisted in the marines and completed two tours of duty during the Iraq War. Arguably, the inclusion of Karnes is essential to the project of being faithful to the actual events, and certainly this is the position of Stone. Even when discussing the conspicuously militarized and suggestive aspects of his characterization, the patriotic, nationalistic and religious zeal, Stone insists that this is in line with the pursuit of “the truth”: “People say I exaggerated him, but he’s a United States marine. He’s a fundamentalist. That’s the way marines are. They’re tough men. Once they go they don’t think about it, they go. They’ll walk through a wall.” However, not only does the characterization stand out, but his repeated references to vengeance are at odds with the representation of John and Will as described above. Rich identifies this as a fundamental polarization:
On the one hand, it wants to show that Americans were at their very best that day, helping each other and extending sympathy, performing with courage and conviction [...]On the other hand, WTC crashes back to earth as it seems explicitly to endorse the bloodthirsty revenge that has soiled America’s hands ever since. (Rich: 17-18)
Karnes has only a small amount of time on screen, which makes his characterization all the more prominent, as every time he appears he is defined by patriotism, Christianity or as a Marine. His characterization is built through a succession of interludes in the second half of the film which are spliced in between the narratives of McLoughlin and Jimeno and their families. He is first shown in his office standing with a group of colleagues around a television set watching George W. Bush deliver some memorable lines from the speech he made in Louisiana on September 11th. As they watch, Bush states; “The resolve of our great nation is being tested but make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass this test. God Bless.” Karnes, clearly moved by this, announces to his colleagues as he begins walking away; “I don’t know if you guys know it yet but this country is at war.” It is this precipitous and unconsidered movement, from the shock of the attacks to the suggestion of “war” that, again, is so unilateral that it appears apolitical: there is no known “enemy” at the point war is evoked.
<21> The very next shot locates Karnes at an evangelical church, in prayer. The pastor approaches him and they talk briefly. Karnes tells him that he feels compelled to go “down there”, and despite the pastor urging him to leave it to the emergency response teams he states: “I spent my best years with the marines. God gave me a gift, to be able to help people, to defend our country. I hear him call on me for this mission.” The striking thing here is the echoing of President Bush’s own, highly publicized submissions to God and willingness to be guided by God. The next sequence featuring Karnes shows him getting a regulation Marines haircut, the first emblem in the film of military response. We next see him at the site dutifully working through the rubble and eventually, of course, he does find McLoughlin and Jimeno. He delivers the most often quoted line of the film at the end though, which defies the circumscribed rhetoric of trauma and commemoration. Speaking on the phone at Ground Zero, presumably to his employers, he states: “No, I’m not coming in today... I don’t know...they’re going to need some good men out there to avenge this.” Karnes did rescue the men, an incredible story in itself, and he did in fact re-enlist in the marines. However, taking directorial decisions that clearly go beyond the pursuit of realism, World Trade Center highlights specific aspects of his character. Karnes is defined exclusively through evangelical Christianity, patriotism and militarism. Most significantly, there is an overt connection between Karnes and President Bush. Karnes is introduced through and motivated by the President’s speech and he echoes his well known Christian rhetoric and embodies his aggressive impulse and drive toward military action after 9/11.
<22> There are other notable aspects of the film that synchronize with the Bush doctrine. While the opening sequence emphasizes the diversity of New York and embraces the ethnic difference of McLoughlin and Jimeno, the representation of gender in World Trade Center is problematically homogenous. The heroes are all men while the women look after the children and worry about their husbands. In this respect the film upholds what Susan Faludi describes as the Bush White House and complicit national media’s “campaign that inflated male strength by artificially consigning women to a fearful and vulnerable position”(Faludi 2007: 216). In this aspect, World Trade Center echoes many of the memorial television accounts of 9/11, particularly the famous Naudet brothers documentary 9/11 (2002). While 9/11 is valuable in its unique “accidental” documentary form, it conforms to the gender division Faludi identifies in its depiction of the fire department who clearly stand in for the USA. As Stef Craps writes, “The fire-fighter’s community in general [...] metonymically and metaphorically represent the United States, a nation that sees itself as a force for good: the world’s fireman” (Craps 2007: 193). There are of course no women in 9/11 and in its Hollywood formulation of masculine heroism, it completely upholds Faludi’s claim that:
In the end, the character actors who won the 9/11 hero sweepstakes, hands down, were the New York City firemen [...] and conveniently for the mythmakers, the Fire Department of New York, more than any other urban fire agency in the nation, was male. Less than 0.3 percent of its fire-fighters were women. It seemed there would be no need to rewrite the gender roles in this drama.
World Trade Center clearly perpetuates the image of heroic masculinity that is embodied by 9/11. Despite the duality or dichotomy between Jimeno and McLoughlin there is an undoubted division in the roles of the men and women.
<23> Despite the personalizing of the 9/11 narrative, the focus on the two officers and their families, and the clear intent to work through the trauma of the events, a politicized rhetoric emerges in the call to arms of Karnes and his clear endorsement of the Bush program. Like United 93, though, this endorsement is charged with the notion that “everything’s changed”; the belief that on “September 11th, night fell on a different world”, which Holloway describes as the “ideological lynchpin for the War on Terror” (Holloway: 4). As with United 93, the political strand at the end of the film is paradoxical and the film remains depoliticized in that the political allusions it makes do not have adequate rationale or logic. While United 93 seems to concede to the ideas of the “unknowable other” that underpin this “clash of civilizations” discourse, as well as depict it in violent microcosm, it remains necessarily devoid of any meaningful contextualizing references to history or to the attacks themselves. Therefore this discourse is synchronized with the abstract use of the Huntington rhetoric which has been appropriated as a characteristic of this “changed world” as posited by President Bush. Similarly, World Trade Center evokes military aggression and revenge though the nameless and unknowable aspect of the “enemy”, and the complete avoidance of any aspect of context or history, stifles this gesture. Ultimately, the apolitical quality of these films is ironic in that they are rendered as such by adopting or conforming to the rhetoric of a particular kind of politics; unilateral, reductive and reflective only of a state of exception.
Works Cited
Amis, Martin (2008) The Second Plane, London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.
Bush, George (2002) ‘State of the Union Address’, available at http://www.c-span.org/ Accessed 05/09/10.
Bradshaw, Peter ‘United 93’ review in The Guardian June 2, 2006 available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Accessed 05/09/10.
Craps, Stef (2007) ‘Conjuring Trauma: The Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 Documentary’ in Canadian Review of American Studies 37.2 pp. 183-199.
Edkins, Jenny (2003) ‘Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11’ in International Relations Vol. 16.2 pp. 243-256.
Faludi, Susan (2007) The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed About America, London: Atlantic Books, 2007.
Greengrass, Paul (2006) quoted in Ali Jaafar ‘United 93’ Sight and Sound July, 2006.
Hoberman, J. (2006) ‘Unquiet Americans’ in Sight and Sound, October 2006 pp.14-23.
Holloway, David (2008) 9/11 and the War on Terror Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order London: Free, 2002.
Jaafar, Ali (2006) review of United 93 in Sight and Sound, July 2006.
Kellner, Douglas (2010) Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush–Cheney Era Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Kendrick, James (2009)‘Representing 9/11 on Film and Television’ in Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History ed. by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, Kentucky: Kentucky University Press, 2009 pp.511-527.
Ceylan Özcan (2008) ‘Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center as a Representation of the Collective Trauma of 9/11’ in Journal of Faculty of Letters Vol. 25.2, pp.205-221.
Rick Lyman (2001) ‘Three Minutes of Patriotism on Film’ in The New York Times available at: http://www.nytimes.com Accessed 05/09/10.
Rich, B. Ruby (2006) ‘Out of the Rubble’ in Sight and Sound, October 2006 pp.14-23.
Stanley, Alessandra (2006) ‘Once Again, the Tragedy You Can’t Avoid: Forthcoming 9/11 Programming’ in The New York Times, August 11, 2006 available at http://www.nytimes.com/ Accessed 09/05/10.
Oliver Stone (2006) interview with Ali Jaafar: ‘I’m Not a Political Filmmaker Goddamit’ in Sight and Sound available online only at http://www.bfi.org.uk/ Accessed 05/09/10.
Thomas, Cal (2005) review of World Trade Center at Townhall.com available at: http://townhall.com/ Accessed 05/09/10.
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