United 93: Art, film, and national trauma

Though I'm a great admirer of the TV show Law & Order, I've always found NBC's favorite teaser for that show's episodes, "Ripped from today's headlines," to have a crassness of tone considerably at odds with the quality of its writing. The show's appeal lies not in the fact that many of the show's plots are indeed based on cases that have recently occurred, but in the fact that, even years after our memory of the news accounts of those cases has faded, the show's treatment of that material still retains a weight, an oomph that, sorry, you AP wireservice writers out there, those news stories lost long ago. It's not the events but their telling that we remember and admire.

But Law & Order's narratives are about local matters, no matter how nationally- or culturally-pertinent their themes. National narratives, especially traumatic ones, are another matter entirely. Over at Cup o' Joel, a well-written blog worthy of your visits, fellow Kansan Joel Mathis recently posted a commentary on the soon-to-be released film United 93. Well, not so much the film as the context in which it's being released. I happen to agree with his sentiments; indeed, just before I read his post this morning, I had posted the following over on the House of Leaves boards, where a small discussion about the film has begun:

My wife and I saw a trailer for the film night before last--as we've been seeing them for the past couple of weeks now--and she asked me what I thought about "all that."

In principle I'm not opposed to the idea of making films about events such as this--I'm not sure about Marsjams' tone above, but I'll just say here that I do think some things are worth dying for and it's valuable to be reminded of that--but my own feeling is that in the case of this film, it's just too soon. Not that one can or should ever be truly objective and clinical in one's thinking about national traumas, but my personal sense of things is that we're still trying to clarify for ourselves just how that day has affected us as a nation and, even more important, what our proper response(s) should be to it. I have doubts that this or any film about that day, right now, will help in that process, and the making of money off this only makes "all this" more, not less, problematic.

And with regard to the appealing of the "R" rating and all that that implies: Here's a suggestion: if the makers and studio truly want to honor the event depicted, I propose they put their money where their collective mouth is and not charge admission. Show their film in stadiums and throw the doors open. What SHOULD matter for them is an audience, not a paying audience. What's the never-to-be-recovered expense of a few tens of millions of dollars compared to paying tribute to the never-to-be-recovered lives of the thousands of people who died that day?

Lurking about in all this, hard to see because of our constant associations between commercial film-making and money, is the question of what is, or should be, the place of Art in depicting moments of national trauma.

One of Joel's commenters notes that Art has the potential to clarify our thinking about such events and that this film might accomplish that--something that I sort of acknowledge without directly stating it above. But as I say above: the question is not the choice of subject matter; the question is its timing and whether it is too soon for this film to engage us emotionally without blinding us rationally. In other words: is it too soon to make effective Art out of the complex materials of this event?

Back in January, my good online friend Raminagrobis asks this same question regarding recent novels that use the events of 9/11 in his post "Too Loud and Too Close", and he intriguingly (given the literal meaning of "novel") reaches the following conclusion:

Though we no longer have to think of novels as totalities, fully realised worlds in which no element is otiose and all contributes to the perfection of the form, we retain the (perhaps outmoded) conviction that a novel should represent a unity, an aesthetic whole. I think that the intrusion of the present, in all its stupid, brute meaninglessness, fractures that unity irreparably. It is not only a problem of perspective – of our blindness towards outcomes distorting our view of things – it is a question of form. If vision is style (and it is: ‘Le style,’ wrote Flaubert (I think), ‘est une vision du monde.’), I might call this an astigmatism of form.

Grobie of course is more concerned with the novel-as-form here, but personally I'd give more weight in this matter to the audience's response to the intrusion of the present. Speaking for myself as a reader, there's something about the novel's written-ness that makes that intrusion seem more controlled, more mediated--more akin, in other words, to Wordsworth's definition for poetry: emotion recollected in tranquility. It's startling, that intrusion of the present, yes: but I'd argue that the novel can handle it; the question is whether the reader can.

Film, though, is another matter entirely, it seems to me: its text is image. It's a scripted and thus written image; but the audience's act of processing that image is a very different, much more direct one compared to the act of processing a written text. There have been no outcries against the novels Grobie mentions that I'm aware of. But much of the reluctance that many feel about United 93 has to do precisely with the nature of the medium itself, no matter how honorably its makers have depicted those events.

In a very real way, we won't be able to watch United 93 for a very long time. But I do think we're ready to read about it, if novelists are ready to write about it.


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Art, Novels, Film, United 93