I didn’t look forward to seeing Paul Greengrass’s United
93. Those who called out “Too soon!” when the trailer was
first shown a few weeks ago have my sympathy. Even five years
later, I’m inclined to think that we’re still too close to the
dreadful events of September 11th, 2001, to put them into a movie.
But this is not quite for the reason some may think. In particular,
I think so not because it’s insensitive to the families of the dead
or because we don’t need to be reminded of the horror we felt then.
On the contrary, Mr. Greengrass’s film is if anything, too
sensitive, to the families, as they have apparently put a veto on
any emphasis on the heroism of some of the passengers that day. And
the film itself is the best evidence that we need to be reminded of
the full ghastliness of these atrocities for, powerful as it is in
many ways, it shows some signs of being influenced by the liberal
and revisionist view of the events of 9/11, namely that the attacks
were at least partly our own fault.
No, the reason that it’s too soon is that there has been
insufficient time to create the space between illusion and reality
that all art requires. The problem is a complex one. Movies, like
other art forms, have to remind us from time to time of their
artificiality in order to create the illusion of reality. That
sounds paradoxical, I know, but United 93 is a good
illustration of why it is. In it, the material creates an
effortless sense of reality of its own — since everyone already
knows more or less what happened on flight 93 that day — and so
the film-maker’s art is compromised. Instead of trying to make his
images look more real, he has to stop them from looking too real;
instead of pressing on the accelerator, he has to slam on the
brakes. As a result, his compromises with reality stand out all the
more plainly, and his own point of view comes between us and his
material.
Thus his cross-cutting between the scenes on the airplane that
crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, that day and
the clueless military and civilian authorities on the ground hints
more than usually of a political purpose — and, sure enough, John
Farmer has taken the opportunity to advance what must be the most
preposterous argument of the decade in the Washington Post, namely that Hollywood’s
version of reality is more to be relied on than the federal
government’s. Thus, too, Mr. Greengrass’s efforts to downplay the
heroism of Todd Beamer (David Alan Basche), Jeremy Glick (Peter
Hermann), Thomas Burnett (Christian Clemenson), and Mark Bingham
(Cheyenne Jackson) in deference to the other families presented
David Thomson with the opportunity to argue in the New York Times that to regard these men as
heroes would be to perpetuate misunderstanding and thus lead to
further acts of terror. Incredibly (to me), Mr. Thomson criticizes
Mr. Greengrass for showing too much heroism on the part of
the passengers, thus suggesting that the hijackers are “evil” or
“insane.” But those who watch the film will find the hijackers
treated with as much sympathy as we could possibly imagine in any
film that was not simply propaganda for their point of view. Just
before they board the plane, we hear the lead hijacker, Ziad Jarrah
(Khalid Abdalla), whisper, Ich liebe dich into his
cell-phone, a detail obviously meant to create a degree of moral
equivalence between his death and that of all the desperate
passengers we are shortly to hear saying their final “I love yous”
to family and friends as the plane goes down.
The film is undeniably powerful, but it also hits us like a
suitcase falling out of an overhead bin with its unreality. When we
see the ordinariness of the preparations for departure, and of the
people as they get on the plane at Newark on the fateful September
morning, the emphasis on what would in other circumstances be
reality only stresses the unreal. When the flight is delayed, the
pointed irony of the pilot’s announcement that “Everything’s fine,
it’s just a normal delay out of Newark” fairly shrieks its reminder
to us of what we know that these people don’t. Don’t listen to him,
folks! It’s not just a normal delay out of Newark! The
trouble is that, because we know what’s about to happen, our minds
rebel. If it looks real, then it must still be possible to stop it,
yet we also know it’s not possible to stop it. In order
for the film to work properly as a film, the movie should persuade
us of that extra bit of reality that comes from not knowing how it
comes out. That’s why “predictable” is the most damning word in the
critical vocabulary.
In that sense, there never was a more predictable movie than
United 93, since literally everybody knows how it comes
out. Or everybody except the poor passengers. We, like them, feel
ourselves trapped in a nightmarish situation from which there seems
no exit, but they have that slender hope which is all the crueler
in its deceptiveness because we know it to be vain. How can they
not know? Everybody else knows. The wedge of this knowledge opens
up a gap between ourselves and them that soon yawns wide and allows
us to pity them without identifying ourselves with them. They are
like us in every way except in not knowing that they are doomed,
but being doomed and not yet knowing it — as of course we do know
it — ultimately makes them completely unlike us.
This excessive distance between us and them is exacerbated by
Mr. Greengrass’s style and authorial outlook, which is to increase
at every opportunity that pity-stream while at the same time
playing down the opportunities for the one thing that would cut
through the excessive pathos, namely admiration for the heroes who
fought back. To me, that would have been the only thing that could
have justified him in making this film. But, as articles like David
Thomson’s remind us, he also had to wrestle with an in-built
cultural bias in favor of the victim-hero, and unlike Messrs.
Beamer, Glick, Burnett and Bingham, he didn’t put up much of a
fight. He hardly even identifies the heroes, or allows them to
stand out from the rest. Equality in victimhood, insofar as it
remains possible when we know that some did fight back,
seems to have been his guiding principle. The attack on the
hijackers, when it comes, is as confusing and chaotic as doubtless
it would have seemed in real life. The ability of the camera to
pick out and isolate from the confusion deeds that ought to be
celebrated is modestly unasserted.
The only clear-cut res gesta is the moment at which
Jeremy Glick strikes the first counterblow and levels one of the
hijackers with a knee to the throat. We know it is he because he
has identified himself on the phone as “Jeremy”; but we swiftly
lose track of him in the melee which follows. There was nothing but
his name to distinguish him anyway. Only Thomas Burnett is allowed
to emerge as an individual, a real take-charge guy, the first to
realize: “This is a suicide mission. We have to do something.
Nobody’s going to help us. We have got to do it [ourselves].” But
he is not named, and the rest are just the big guys he gathers
together to help him. This viewer, anyway, could not tell one from
another. Even Todd Beamer’s “Let’s roll,” which has been a rallying
cry for millions in the last five years, is only muttered under his
breath as a gesture of impatience, and it doesn’t serve as the
signal for the counterattack as we know it did in real life.
If Paul Greengrass neglects to individualize heroism, he has no
such reservations when it comes to pathos. What most people are
sure to take away from the film are the almost unbearable scenes in
which one passenger after another says good-bye and “I love you” to
loved ones on passed-around cell phones. Each has something to
distinguish him or her from the others. One woman urgently wants to
tell her unseen interlocutor where to find a safe, and what is the
combination. One flight attendant says to another in one of those
unbearable ironies before the hijacking, “I like to be home with my
babies.” One touch that I liked was the Scandinavian-sounding guy
who said: “I think we shouldn’t provoke them; we should do what
they want.” That, too, is a satisfying irony for those of us who
long to see heroism distinguished from weakness, or even villainy,
but the rest of the film gives too much aid and comfort to the
Scandinavian’s spiritual and political heirs who would deny the
heroes of flight 93 their posthumous due.
