World Trade Center

Oliver Stone’s new film World Trade Center is not really about the September 11 attacks on the twin towers in New York City. It focuses narrowly on two men trapped in the rubble of one of the towers. It moves back and forth from the plight of the buried men and the anguish of the families uncertain of their fates. These two men survived the collapse, along with a few others. They were the exceptions in the World Trade Center collapse, not the rule. Their experience was not typical or representative. Virtually all of those in the towers who were trapped or unable to escape in time died. These qualifications need to be made. World Trade Center does not attend to the many who died, only the few who lived.

This is a well made film but it lacks the energy, passion, and recklessness of Oliver Stone’s best films. It’s cautious and conservative, and it feels like what it is: a film directed by Stone based on someone else’s script, a film made for hire -- but a film with many merits nonetheless.

World Trade Center closely follows journalistic accounts of the rescue of the two men. Both of them, with their families, advised Stone as he made the film. Out of respect for the subject and the victims of that day, he probably felt compelled to adhere to the facts. He did make minor changes, but not sweeping ones. His commitment to fact may have fettered his filmmaking talents. A documentary account of the rescue, with the same actors and settings, could possibly have worked better, but who knows? I do not agree with those who say that the WTC disaster is not appropriate subject matter for film or literature. We’ll never come to terms with it if we don’t think and talk about it -- art and literature offer legitimate and useful means of understanding the event.

World Trade Center effectively uses audience knowledge about the events of September 11. The contradiction between what the trapped men don’t know and what we in the audience do know is always at work, and there is a constantly developing dramatic irony that gives the film some of its energy. Neither trapped man realizes, for instance, that the buildings have collapsed until he has been rescued. Early in the film, the impact of falling bodies on the roof of the building where the port authority officers have gathered is horribly disturbing. The film never explains these noises, but the audience knows what they are. Although we know the trapped men will survive, that the families will be reunited, the film maintains our interest by chronicling the rescue and the individuals who brought it about.

Audience knowledge and memory of the events of that day do not always work to the film’s advantage, however. We all remember the images of the day -- the impact of the planes, the burning buildings, the falling bodies, the smoking, burning ruins. Probably no visual images in our national history have so indelibly marked our consciousness. They are difficult to put out of mind, and their effect still lingers. No recreated image could match their power. For the film, Stone’s crew built a set to replicate the World Trade Center ruins. They don’t look authentic. And when the port authority officers first drive up to the trade center buildings and see sheets of paper wafting down from the sky, as they did after the plane impacts, the scene looks staged, not real. The scenes beneath the rubble seem realistic because we don’t have those images in our minds.

The film does a good job portraying what it might have been like for the two families who don’t know whether their husbands and sons and fathers are dead.

The most overtly political moment in the film -- a brief and not at all obvious moment -- comes when one of the characters speaks of taking revenge for the World Trade Center attacks. The moment is entirely understated and disappears almost immediately. But it is a tantalizing link to subsequent events outside the film’s purview -- the war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq, our crisis in national leadership, the latest terrorist threats. Does this comment suggest that vengeance is justified? Or does it suggest that revenge is not the best grounds for designing a national foreign policy?

Much has been made of the absence of a political slant in the film. It’s fairly patriotic in tone, especially in its portrayal of Marine Staff Sergeant Dave Karnes who voluntarily comes to the collapsed twin towers to search for victims and discovers the trapped men. Unlike some others who examined the tragedy, such as William Langewiesche in American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, Stone does not critically examine or subvert the popular notion of the heroism of the various law enforcement groups involved in the WTC events. Nor does the film reflect the considerable chaos and discord and poor coordination among the various law enforcement agencies at work that day -- conflicting radio systems, miscommunications, some bad decisions -- documented in 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, by Kevin Flynn and Jim Dwyer. (This is the best account I’ve read of the events transpiring in the minutes between the impact of the planes and the collapse of the towers). Langewiesche does not disagree that many acts of heroism occurred that day and afterwards, but he does argue that a range of behaviors were involved, some of them self-serving. Stone’s goal is to portray the heroic story of the two men’s survival and of the heroic efforts of their rescuers. In this sense, he contributes in the film to a national mythology through which the audience can relate to the events of the day. Evil persons -- terrorists -- committed horrible deeds on that day -- but American courage and bravery rise to the moment and redeem the crime. Such a perspective is not incorrect, but myths can blind us to ways of understanding the WTC events that ground us in reality. Sentimental 9/11 commemorations, teary romanticisms, and mythic distortions do not tell the tale. We need reality to understand the WTC events and their causes.

Stone has done an admirable job with this film. It is a tightly focused and compassionate look at the experience of two fortunate men caught in the events of that day, and of their rescuers. By not dwelling on those who perished, by focusing on survival instead, it suggests that a new perspective, a new national solidarity, may rise from those ashes. For a time, in the weeks immediately following the attacks, such a perspective seemed possible. But five years have passed, and much has happened. World Trade Center does not acknowledge the events that intervened between then and now that shattered the national consensus, manipulated and abused the horrors and heroisms of September 11, and brought us to a worse dilemma than crazed Al Qaeda terrorists alone could have managed. Others close to home must also share blame for our current state of affairs.