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"Can you remember where you were when John F. Kennedy was shot? What you were doing when you heard the news?"
For my parents' generation, the assassination of JFK was such a major event that nearly everyone of their age can answer these questions with "Yes". A moment in history that is anchored to collective feelings of shock, loss and mourning. Being born after the fact, growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, whenever the Kennedy topic was raised I was a bit miffed at not being able to truly participate. Surely the remembered emotions were exaggerated? At the time it was just a news item, right? Sure, a major one, but still... And foreign news too (for us here in The Netherlands)!
Little did I know that my generation got it's very own defining moment of collective shock, loss and mourning. Only it wasn't just MY generation: I do not know a single person who is unable to remember where he was and what he was doing when he heard about the planes hitting the New York World Trade Center on the 11th of September, 2001.
Seven years ago, to the day.
At the time I worked for a multinational oil company, with lots of American colleagues. I remember the colleague who told me: "Have you heard...?", and I remember the shock, and later panic. The people trying to phone friends in New York, but unable to get through. The uncertainty if more planes would crash, especially after the Pentagon got hit as well. Running for the cellar, not to hide, but because we had a big auditorium there with a beamer which started to project the live CNN footage on the screen. Hungry for news (desperate even), we saw the towers fall. Live. Monstrously enlarged on, believe it or not, a cinema screen.
No, the stories about collective mourning being linked to such an event were NOT exaggerated, as I learned.
And I fully understood the people who, in 2006, clamored about the film "United 93" as being "TOO SOON!".
Because many of them considered the wound to be too raw to commercially release a movie about it.
After the break there is a list of 5 movies which are in some way connected to the events of seven years ago.
And here they are.
Note: I'm not counting documentaries, only directed narratives, reenactments at the most.
5: The 25th Hour
Spike Lee's excellent adaptation of David Benioff's novel was one of the first movies that showed a post-9-11 New York without trying to hide that something had happened there.
In fact, Lee did quite the opposite: he splendidly used the temporary ground zero memorial (the pillars of light) and the less-temporary betrayed atmosphere in New York to strengthen the central storyline. Shot in 2002, this was bold to say the least but it worked.
4: The Omen (2006)
John Moore's remake of the classic 1976 horror film "The Omen" showed a rather more misguided use of the event. Footage of the planes crashing into the two towers was used in a collage of disasters, to show how our world was surely deteriorating and moving towards Armageddon.
Now if you include this footage to make a point, that's one thing. But to use it as a mood-changing device in a horror film (of which the primary gimmick is its release date of 6-6-2006), struck a lot of people as very disrespectful to the victims and their families.
3: Postal
Meet Uwe Boll. His 2007 movie "Postal" started with a shockingly alternate version of what might have happened on board of the first plane that crashed.
But while this truly is in bad taste, it's deliberately so and underscores a point Herr Doctor Boll wants to make. The jokes here are primarily at the expense of the media and the terrorists. It may not be to my tastes, but I'd rather see this than a sloppily researched documentary which edifies anyone who accidentally happened to be there, or an even more sloppily cobbled together conspiracy theory.
2: World Trade Center
Speaking of conspiracy theories, when Oliver Stone announced he was going to make a film about the events on 9-11, there was a loud wailing and a gnashing of teeth. Or rather, there was dread.
But the end result was a rather sedate drama about trying to dig up two firemen who lie injured underneath tons of rubble. Stone chose to focus on hope and the good in humanity, which kind of took the sting out of this movie. Still, the first half conjures up some powerfully bad memories...
1: United 93
I count this as the current king of the 9-11 movies.
It's a partly fictional account of what might have happened on board of the plane which was supposed to hit the White House but was forced into the ground by its passengers. Director Paul Greengrass tried to get as much right as he could and made a tragic document which treats the subject with integrity and dignity.
Yet I'll see snippets whenever it's on television, but I cannot get myself to watch the whole thing in one go.
For me it apparently still is "too soon"...
Some of you have noticed that the comments section for this Twitch-O-Meter was unavailable.
That was not done on purpose: when I made the article "stick" to the top of the page I had accidentally switched the comments off.
I'm really sorry about that for I was quite interested in your comments, movie-related or otherwise. It was not done to prevent a flamewar or some such reason. We actually think quite highly of our reader community here at Twitch.
Reader dequinix from New York (!) did not let himself be deterred by my technical blundering and opened a topic in our forum.
You can find it here:
http://twitchfilm.net/site/forums/viewthread/556/
I've opened up the comments for this article so feel free to comment here, or in our forum. Both should work.
I'll quote dequinix's comments, for they surely belong here underneath the article:
" I’m not sure why the comments are off on this article, especially if it’s going to be at the top of the page for most of the day, but I had to mention that as a New Yorker, no film captured the city post-9/11 better than Reign Over Me. The feeling of loss lingers far longer than anger or hatred, and often it confuses your foundation as a person. Director Mike Binder portrayed this so, so well that I was frankly surprised. I very much expected to have a high level of distaste for every film that dealt with 9/11. Even United 93, which technically is superb, felt just too crass at the end. I believe when it was released, many of us were still at the point where we didn’t want to hear about it. In fact, sometimes I wonder if we’re still ready to hear about it. "