April 10, 2006 issue – If movie trailers are supposed to cause a reaction, the preview for “United 93″ more than succeeds. Featuring no voice-over and no famous actors, it begins with images of a beautiful morning and passengers boarding an airplane. It takes you a minute to realize what the movie’s even about. That’s when a plane hits the World Trade Center. The effect is visceral. When the trailer played before “Inside Man” last week at the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, audience members began calling out, “Too soon!” In New York City, where 9/11 remains an open wound, the response was even more dramatic. The AMC Loews theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side took the rare step of pulling the trailer from its screens after several complaints. “One lady was crying,” says one of the theater’s managers, Kevin Adjodha. “She was saying we shouldn’t have [played the trailer]. That this was wrong … I don’t think people are ready for this.”
What depresses me is that Mr. Adjodha is right. People aren’t ready for this. Why they aren’t ready for this ought to be clear as daylight to anyone not actually writing for Newsweek: 9/11 happened, then virtually disappeared from public view.
Think about it a moment. We have seen plenty of news stories that mention 9/11 and events around it: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, the 9/11 Commission hearings, the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, and on and on. But how many times have we seen what actually happened that day. Beyond the scattered documentary in the past 4 1/2 years, how often has our media revisited the events of that day using the photos and footage taken that day? How often have we seen the stark images of people leaping from the towers, or of crushed and mangled emergency equipment? How often have we gone back and watched the towers fall?
Not very often, I’d wager. Certainly not nearly enough to make those images and memories useful to us in any meaningful way.
What we’ve done, thanks in part to a MSM that chose on its own and without consulting us to embago all but the most tame images of that day, is shove the memories of 9/11 into the backs of our minds and then lock them behind a stout iron vault door. We don’t want to think about them because they cause us pain. They confuse us. They make us angry. They make us think and ask questions – sometimes very uncomfortable questions; sometimes very uncomfortable questions about the way we lived in the two decades before 9/11.
No, I don’t believe we are ready for a movie about 9/11 mainly because we’ve spent no real time in the last 4 1/2 years reviewing those images slowly, over a matter of time. We’ve had no chance to internalize the horrifying images and sounds so that we can give them their proper places in our lives. We need to. It’s well past time that we did. Unfortunately, I don’t believe this movie is the way to do that – not right now.
I believe what’s needed is for our MSM to release their self-imposed nanny-like embargo on most of the images from 9/11. We need to see them again, over the coming weeks and months and, most importantly, we need the ability to talk about them with each other. We need to have the debate we never had in the weeks after 9/11. We need to rekindle our anger, then temper that anger with reason and debate. We need to measure the “we must understand our enemies” against the understanding of the implacable bloodthirsty nature of our enemies those images would give us. We need to review the evidence the 9/11 Commission saw and heard and consider it all against the footage of our friends, neighbors, and countrymen plummeting hundreds of feet to their deaths.
We also have to understand that the MSM will not volunteer those images until we demand them. Our media betters have decided that showing those images will cause us to rise up and start lynching Muslims in the streets. That idea is ridiculous on its face and hypocritical considering what else the MSM has chosen to put on its front pages, but that is their position and they will not move on their own. It’s up to use to move them toward doing the job they so jealously protect: the job of authoritative information gatekeepers.
Only then are we going to be able to come to an informed national opinion about the war that was brought to our shores on September 11, 2001. Then, and only then, will we be ready for Hollywood to fictionalize that day. Before that fiction, though, we need to see the facts – no matter how disturbing they may be.
UPDATE: Blackfive shows us a photo the MSM apparently has no problem at all showing us. It’s not from 9/11, but it does advance their own narrative about the war we’re fighting. A paragraph that undergirds my post:
In case anyone wondered where the LA Times stands on the war, they made it brutally obvious with their front page this weekend. They make all the usual excuses and justify their sad action with “the public has a right to know”, sure they do. And I assume the public has a need to see pictures of rape victims, and obviously every Sept. 11th they publish photos of the people jumping from the Twin Towers. The LA Times wouldn’t have one policy for their blatant attacks on the Iraq war and another for everything else would they?
Would it surprise anyone if they did?
