Of course, in the case of Pig, I imagined it to be an exploitation film, the kind of thing Nicolas Cage has been making lately (Mandy, Willy's Wonderland). It's not that at all.
With United 93, I knew what I was getting in to.
But this was no ordinary Saturday night. It was the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
I hadn't been planning to do anything to observe the anniversary, cinematically or otherwise. But when I posted yesterday's post about Pig -- or more precisely, about the long odds of Nicolas Cage's busy career allowing him to grow a beard -- I noticed the date stamp on the post: September 11th, 2021. It seemed like a pretty frivolous way to mark the anniversary or something that had an impact on me that was less than it was for some, but more than it was for many.
Quickly, a plan formed in my mind to watch the best film ever made about 9/11 -- Paul Greengrass' astonishing 2006 docudrama -- even though it was a Saturday night, the traditional night to let your mind relax on something funny or gory.
(Side note: Something that fit both descriptions, in a weird way, was the warm-up, as my wife suggested we watch the 1990 Australian Sam Neill-starring film Death in Brunswick to start the evening.)
I don't put forward with any conviction my claim for the personal impact 9/11 had on me, but it's not nothing. There was actually a very real chance I could have been near the World Trade Center that day, if my life had gone just a little differently.
See, I worked on Wall Street in late 1999 and early 2000. Don't get excited; it was nothing glamorous. In fact, it was the opposite of glamorous, except for the part where you could get a company car to drive you home from work if you stayed late, not to mention a free dinner.
For about eight months I was an assistant to investment bankers at Goldman Sachs, a temp job after I finished up at Columbia Journalism School with no idea of what my first foray into that career field would be. I did all the things you would expect an assistant to do -- gathered receipts for expense reports, maintained calendars, did photocopying, answered phones. It was never going to be my long-term career, but it did make me familiar with that area, and I would frequently shop in the underground mall that was at the base of the World Trade Center. I remember it well, remember specific Christmas presents I bought there in 1999.
The path that led me away there started in the summer of 2000, when I got a job as an editor on a technical theater magazine. Logically, this should have at least kept me in New York through 9/11/2001, but the job was not a perfect fit for me -- it wasn't me, it was them. They were happy with my work, but I was not happy doing it, and a variety of factors prompted a relocation to Los Angeles, where I would live until 2013, in the spring of 2001.
So when the planes hit the buildings on that fateful Tuesday in September, I was not yet six months gone from Manhattan, and only 18 months gone from actually working on Wall Street. That wasn't the main factor in my staring at the television for the rest of that day and most of the next day -- we all did that -- but it definitely added an underlying poignancy.
During my third viewing of this astonishing movie, which actually reminded me of my recent viewing of WarGames in some respects (planes mysteriously disappearing from old school monitors, control room conversations about whether this was a drill or not), I thought about how the actions of the passengers on board the titular flight is something scarcely possible in today's trying times.
I don't mean it's not possible because they wouldn't summon that courage today. The impossible part is the way we jointly perceived them as heroes.
I happened to be talking to someone yesterday, irrespective of 9/11 entirely, how there is no such thing as a non-politicized event in our modern era. There is no modern issue that both political liberals and political conservatives can agree on. They'll argue whether the sky is blue or not, if only because to agree to a point the other side has made first is to lose an infinitesimal amount of political power and influence.
If 9/11 happened today, we wouldn't have been able to agree in an uncomplicated way with what Dick Cheney is said to have uttered when he heard about United flight 93, which was "I think an act of heroism just took place on that plane." For the purposes of my current argument, I'm not saying those words would be uttered by a Republican (like Cheney) and that the Democrats would be in the absurd position of trying to contradict them. I'm just saying that for any event that can seemingly only be perceived one way, the other side would be trying to find a way to poke holes in it.
I'll share another personal story about the events following 9/11.
The first time I went back to the movie theater was that Saturday. I'm sure that wasn't a particularly long layoff at that time -- from Tuesday, I probably would not have gone to the movies until Saturday anyway. But it seemed a significant enough occurrence -- a purposeful way of distracting myself from the events of the world -- that I clearly remember what movie I went to see, even though this was about six months before I started keeping my chronological list of viewings.
The movie was Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about as much of a subject matter divergence from 9/11 as a person could hope to find. My friend accompanied me, since he obviously needed the distraction too.
We both liked the movie, but the notable experience came when we exited the theater in Hollywood, near the base of the Hollywood Hills.
On the corner outside the theater, a group of people had gathered with American flags and candles for a vigil. My friend and I were drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet.
This was not something that would have normally attracted either of us. We were the ultimate skeptics of anything too earnest. I mean, I'm an earnest guy in that I love movies with emotion, and I like to provide genuine warmth to friends and loved ones. But earnest displays of patriotism would have drawn eye rolls from me.
Not this day. Not anymore.
We might have stayed at that vigil for two hours. And it quickly became something a lot more rowdy than your average candlelight vigil. We were waving American flags in the streets as cars passed and honked. We chanted pro-America slogans, though I should be careful to clarify that they were not anti-Islamic slogans.
If you saw something like that today, you'd immediately be wary of its potential for violence. The people who had gathered would be trying to start a fight with someone. They'd have the sort of potential energy that led to lynchings and mobs with torches and pitchforks.
Twenty years ago, though, this was just an honest outpouring of the emotions we all felt -- we ALL felt.
Not one side. Not the other. Both sides. Everyone.
I don't know what would be the equivalent of that today. You would have thought COVID would be it, possibly. But COVID was decidedly not it. It immediately became politicized and has become the sort of crisis that might define the different sides of the political spectrum for years, if not decades, to come.
There was the hope that 9/11 might define a different sort of unity between the parties, the sort of united front that the heroic passengers on that plane formed as they revolted against the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their target.
It didn't last. And I don't know if we'll ever get it back again.
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