World Trade Center

It's appropriate that a collapsing pair of giant phallic symbols are the centerpiece of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center because this film is about as limp-dicked as political filmmaking gets. Contrarians will claim that Stone intentionally avoided making his take on 9/11 political, choosing to focus instead on the personal story of John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two Port Authority officers who struggled to survive while trapped in the remains of the South Tower. Don't buy it for a second. In movies, as in life, vacuous emotional appeal breeds thoughtlessness in politically-motivated situations and, in the end, more people get hurt than if rationality was carefully considered in the first place.

Whether Stone likes it or not, his film is politically conservative. Thoroughly one-sided, World Trade Center plays right into the United States' current, post-9/11 foreign policy mandate. Ironically, Stone cheapens the memories and actions of New York City police officers by focusing on 9/11 solely from the intimate perspective of the officers and their families. In doing so, a crude analogy to the current Middle East situation is created.

We are told to feel for the officers who sacrificed their lives on 9/11, but not to think about the larger political, economic, and military actions that led to 9/11. This is the same muddied "love the soldiers/hate the war" that is repeatedly used to soften critics' view of the Iraq War, even though it makes no sense. Sympathy for the micro does not equal righteousness for the macro, so why even discuss dying soldiers or dying police officers in the context of larger political schemas?

That said, I would have no problem with this film if Stone had made it during the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The anger, confusion, and grieving reflected in monologues delivered by David Letterman and Jon Stewart on their respective Manhattan-taped programs remain moving to this day because they made sense at the time. They captured the fear and disorientation Americans felt after experiencing first-hand the trauma and embarrassing vulnerability typically reserved for places far, far away from the United States.

By releasing World Trade Center in 2006, however, Stone attempts to retroactively reignite the uncontextualized, confused feelings that millions of people experienced when very few understood why 9/11 was happening, as it was happening. Stone wants us to feel borderline nostalgic for September 11th, 2001 and the days that followed. That way, the context that motivated the terrorists and everything that has happened since can be wistfully forgotten.

Paul Greengrass's United 93 -- the other 9/11 theatrical feature released in 2006 -- successfully emphasizes the more stereotypically masculine aspects of 9/11, building a narrative around ordinary passengers (practically all male), fighting back and downing a plane by courageously taking on and overpowering armed hijackers. Meanwhile, on the ground in United 93, America refuses to lose its composure, even as chaos unfolds, by engaging traditionally masculine institutions like the military to step it up and keep a stiff upper lip through the darkest of hours. United 93 offers genuine insight into how believing in one's own, deeply entrenched national mythos can both help and hurt a country when that mythos is most challenged by harsh reality.

Meanwhile, Stone's film is the corollary to United 93 and could have been called, The Emasculation of the American Empire. Granted, the iconic images of the second commercial airliner cutting through the South Tower set the emasculation stage for 9/11 well before Stone's film ever went into production. Videos of the South Tower attack played ad nauseam on television for days and weeks after the attacks, capturing the highly unusual image of a phallis being penetrated rather than penetrating and not just any phallis, but one of twin phallices, which America symbolically used to economically screw the rest of the world.

This image alone throws the entire notion of dominance-versus-passivity and masculinity-versus-femininity, as they relate to world politics, into question, but Stone takes themes of emasculation on 9/11 to the next level. Stone's plot revolves around hundreds of firemen and police officers -- both traditionally masculine occupations -- trapped underneath the collapsed towers with the only two surviving policemen pinned from the waist down, unable to feel their own extremities.

As the officers lie dying in the rubble, not one, but two nostalgic sub plots involving the officers' pregnant wives is introduced, as if virility -- perhaps even America's national virility -- has become a thing of the past. In short, World Trade Center is a film made by a politically impotent filmmaker, chronicling impotent policeman, trapped under collapsed phallices, during a time in which America felt emasculated.

Stone taps into the media's post-9/11 obsession with policemen, firemen, and the military in moments of emotional vulnerability, but he doesn't come up with any interesting new developments or a method of framing this intriguing phenomenon. Rent World Trade Center only if you want to see the movie equivalent of a Care Bear with 9/11 sewn across its crest: it's warm, it's fuzzy, and it has nothing but stuffing in its head. -- Jason Woloski