By Jessica Reed
This is not a political movie. -Oliver Stone, director of World Trade Center.
A sunday night at the cinema and my friend and I are going to see Little Miss Sunshine, which won the Deauville American Film Festival's Grand Prix yesterday. We sat down in a room full of movie-goers chatting, just as trailers for upcoming movies appeared on the giant screen: the first one is advertising the Oliver Stone's movie 9/11 movie titled "World Trade Center". The sound of candy-wrappers suddenly stopped as the entire room fell into an uneasy silence; my friend murmured 'I think it is way too soon to want to fictionalise such an event'. With the words disaster porn in mind, we both agreed that the short clip made us feel like voyeurs.
Indeed, World Trade Center was released a month ago in the United States with moderate critical success and little box office popularity. Lot of Americans felt they were not ready to confront their still-vivid memories so soon after the attacks, as critics largely complained about the lack of contextualisation - as Daniel Mendelsohm points out in the New York Review of Books:
"The pretty much exclusive emphasis thus far on the "good"—the heroism and the bravery of ordinary Americans—in these entertainments is noteworthy, because it reminds you of the unwillingness to grapple with and acknowledge the larger issues (...)".
Some, like blogger Solana Larsen of openDemocracy, were harsh, adopting a less sympathetic tone:
Don’t believe the hyped reviews that tell you people in New York are watching this film in the serenest of moods. At the movie theatre on Union Square they were still laughing about how crap it was when they walked out on the sidewalk.
Either way, the release of these movies marks the beginning of a new aera in the post-9/11 cinematographic industry : one where Hollywood decides to go ahead and deal with 9/11, just like it had decided to release Apocalypse Now only four years after the Vietnam War ended.
Whether or not good movies (read: films unafraid to embrace the complexity of the issue in its entirety) will soon be made is now up them. Such a task seems herculean - how can a film director mix the personal with the political, the grief with the anger and the final aftermath prompting the birth of Bush's manichean rethoric - which itself announced disastrous future choices in foreign policy? Well... indeed. The topic's vastness might make more than one feel dizzy.
It may be that presently artists can only focus on one single angle of this global disaster - or even none at all. Shortly before his death, Arthur Miller was heard to say that he didn't feel like he could ever write about the tragedy. Paul Auster's last novel, the Brooklyn Follies, chronicles the life of an old man living in NYC in the pre-9/11 days, but the story ends on that very morning, leaving the reader to imagine the chaotic mess that followed. Bruce Springteen's The Rising was a shy yet masterful commentary of those two hours and beyond ("I want a kiss from your lips/ I want an eye for an eye/ I woke up this morning to an empty sky"). Neil Young's 'Let's roll' was a tribute to the victims.
However none of them can detache their art from the day itself so as to rise upon it and to englobe it all. It may that we should give artists (and ourselves) more time.
Elsewhere: "At least two local bloggers have earned their fame by reporting on the first part of the weirdly fictionalised "docudrama" The Path to 9/11"... More facts about the ABC film here.
