There has never been a great film about September 11, 2001. There should be. For 25 years, artists and audiences have been processing the attacks onscreen. But something is still missing.
You’re a moral person, I’m sure. So you may think no one should ever make a movie about 9/11. The sorrow of that day is unfathomable. Its consequences still reverberate across our brutal world. It would be respectful to leave it alone. But I love movies too much to think about this logically. Before 9/11, the deadliest attack on American soil was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thanks to Hollywood, we also know that Pearl Harbor was where Burt Lancaster necked Deborah Kerr in the waves, and where Kate Beckinsale banged Josh Hartnett in a parachute. From Here to Eternity is a better doomed romance than Pearl Harbor, of course, though neither of them would make a good history lesson. But there is something healing about converting real-life tragedy into emotional spectacle.
Brilliant cinema emerges from historical nightmares: the bloodbath of D-Day, epidemics of racial violence, outbursts of political assassinations. For a long time, the most successful movie ever was about an iceberg that killed over a thousand people. And if you’re about to protest how Titanic came out 85 years after the ship sank, remember some of us think Ari Aster already made the first COVID masterwork with Eddington. A 9/11 film has never achieved lasting cultural impact. This is only strange because — and I swear this is true, no matter how wrong it sounds — for a long time, American audiences wanted entertainment that reminded us of September 11.
Two fact-based docudramas, United 93 and World Trade Center, earned reasonable box office in 2006. The former was a legendarily tough sit, but traumatic endurance rituals were legit big business in the era of The Passion of the Christ and Hostel. Kathryn Bigelow won an Oscar for the bomberman war fiction of The Hurt Locker but then made $80 million more tracking the real-ish hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. Critics always admired Spike Lee’s 25th Hour for filming at Ground Zero. Academy voters loved the maudlin Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close enough to throw it a best picture nomination.
Not to mention all the megahits everyone agreed were secretly about 9/11: The Dark Knight (Batman is Dick Cheney), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Dolores Umbridge is Dick Cheney), Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (the Emperor is Dick Cheney) and War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise is America). These were the same days when, on the small screen, 24 and Lost both had plane crashes in their series premieres. Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams had a real 9/11 thing going in his days as a whiz-kid impresario — his other show Fringe wrapped a season 1 cliffhanger inside an alternate-reality South Tower — but you don’t need to just bring up the vague allegories and the topical fantasies. In 2004, Michael Moore’s political fever dream Fahrenheit 9/11 broke $100 million domestic. It was the highest-grossing documentary ever. The thing people always underrate about the 2000s is how many of us were not going to the movies to feel good. But there were so few other legitimate attempts to capture the day or its aftermath. At a low point, the twist ending of Remember Me was that 9/11 killed Robert Pattinson.
What happened? One line of thinking insists the attacks were already a multimedia spectacle: post-cinematic because of the sheer preponderance of news footage, maybe even the first global meme. If you were alive back then, you watched the towers fall over and over. From Here to Eternity comes down to us from a gone world where most people barely knew what Pearl Harbor looked like before they saw the Hollywood version. It was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1953, twelve years after the attack. Twelve years after 9/11, the second-highest-grossing movie of 2013 was Iron Man 3.
This sounds like I’m making a typical grumpy-critic comparison: Hollywood used to make real movies before it made superhero slop. But the third Iron Man is the one with the Mandarin, a terrorist styled like Bin Laden overseeing a spate of suicide-bomb attacks. He’s a scam, of course, an actor masking a hidden alliance between a corporate tycoon and a corrupt Vice President. We’re back in the realm of fantasy, even if that’s the precise kind of military-industrial conspiracy Michael Moore hinted around in Fahrenheit 9/11 before Loose Change birthed the truther fringe. You spot the paradox, though. 9/11 was literally nowhere in movies even when it was figuratively everywhere.
What’s missing, I think, is filmmaker who can combine the literal and the figurative: the authenticity of fact with the vitality of fantasy, inconceivable anguish portrayed with furious razzle-dazzle. This sounds like an impossible combination, especially since Adam McKay failed so bad at that with Vice. But it’s the sort of mytho-tragic entertainment that Oliver Stone produced for whole decade from Salvador and Platoon through JFK and Nixon. The director actually approached 9/11 a few times, filming the somber World Trade Center and his disappointingly normal Bush biopic W. None of that work measured up to the feverish controversies of his heyday. Was it all just too raw, even for the great provocateur?
Stone was the consummate anti-Boomer Boomer, his best work existing in opposition to the official stories propagated by a top-down media infoscape. 9/11 has proven elusive, in part, because it arrived at the precise moment everything was becoming elusive, when the possibility of an agreed-upon basis for reality faded into “truthiness.” Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant novel Bleeding Edge tried to capture this feeling, suggesting that the terrorist attacks were somehow also the birth of the internet. I suspect Edge is too weird even for Pynchon superfan Paul Thomas Anderson to consider adapting, though, and there’s a respectful distance in the book’s surreal approach.
Are we still too close to the material? I think time will offer clarity, or maybe just produce a younger generation willing to pull a few Band-Aids off. There are successful filmmakers today who don’t remember 9/11, and the kids flocking to bad-vibe A24 movies and Spider-Man: Brand New Day don’t recall how the first-ever Spider-Man movie trailer climaxed with webbing between the Twin Towers. Today’s most successful Republicans hate the Republicans of 2001; today’s hippest Democrats hate the Democrats of 2001. There is a new vogue for harsh truths onscreen, and we’re about to find out if audiences want every loathsome tech tyrant to get their own bummer epic. 9/11 is one of the most important horrible moments in human history. Respectful avoidance comes dangerously close to ignorance. Movies, good and bad, form a collective memory. There are things we should never forget.
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