The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks will fall on Saturday, 9.11.21 — roughly 8 and 1/2 weeks from now. It’ll be treated as a fairly big deal by everyone, I suspect, and by the mainstream media in particular. Documentary tributes, historical assessments, first-hand recollections, etc.
But after repeatedly looking back at the particulars and reflecting on the social changes that have occured since and particularly the huge mess that the George Bush administration made of Iraq and Afghanistan…where the hell do you start and what’s really left to say?
I was at the Toronto Film Festival when the 9/11 attacks happened, and two distinct and primal thoughts were coursing through my head that day. One was that what had happened was Pearl Harbor all over again, and that no one would ever forget it…that was obvious. The other was that I wanted to hop a bus down to Manhattan immediately because I regarded it (and still do) as more of a home than Los Angeles, where I’ve lived since ’83. I don’t know anyone who feels emotionally close to Los Angeles. It’s just not that much of a rootsy place.
I lived in Manhattan for nearly six years, ’78 to ’83, as a struggling journalist, and in a pair of commuter towns in my childhood and teens (Westfield, N.J. and Wilton, Connecticut), and when that ghastly day arrived I guess I wanted to experience the horror among “friends”, so to speak. It felt somehow wrong or derelict to be in Toronto, of all places. I just wanted to be there. I suddenly wanted to reconnect with my lifelong Manhattan roots…a town I’d visited off and on from the time I was five or six years old…a city I’d begun visiting without my parent’s knowledge starting when I was 14 or thereabouts…I just felt terrible about not being there. It sounds perverse, but I wanted to share the aroma of crushed rocks and asbestos clouds and gasoline fumes.
Movie-wise a terrible tragedy arose from the 9/11 attacks, and that was the explosion of superhero movies. This happened, I believe, out of some kind of deep-seated need to dramatize and savor the vanquishing of villains by omnipotent good guys…figures who would rid our hearts of uncertainty and ambiguity.
D.C. superhero flicks have been a multiplex fixture since Batman Begins (’05) and the MCU onslaught began with 2008’s Iron Man. We’ve been living with them for 15 or 16 years now with no end in sight. Not only were many of the movies themselves oppressively formulaic and numbing to the soul, but the concurrent rise of cable and streaming led to the gradual collapse of middle-class theatrical stand-alones.
In a 3.25.17 N.Y. Times piece called “The Perverse Thrill of Chaotic Times,” Teddy Wayne wrote that “the common denominator in all these films is that we safely watch cataclysms from afar. Nearly all of us saw the Kennedy assassination and other national tragedies on a screen, not in person. A common observation after Sept. 11 was that the destruction of the World Trade Center seemed out of a movie.”
There’s another thing I can say for sure about 9/11, and that’s that four excellent films arose directly from it — Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire (’04), Paul Greengrass‘s Flight 93 (’06), and Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s The Hurt Locker (2009 stateside) and Zero Dark Thirty (’12).
Starting in ’02 or ’03 I began writing off and on about the 9/11 story of Port Authority employee Pasquale Buzzelli — i.e., “the 9/11 surfer”. I gradually got to know Pasquale and particularly his wife, Louise, during the aughts, particularly when I was living in Brooklyn in ’05 and again during my return to NYC between late ’08 and early ’11. I tried helping them find a co-writer for Pasquale’s book, “We All Fall Down.”
That’s all I have in my head right now. More to come, I’m sure.