9/11: The Movie
The power of images: A conscious attempt was made to answer the indelible destructive images of 9/11/2001 with a healing one in this Ground Zero memorial that was seen all over the world via the media (and could actually be seen by satellites from space).
Following up on my posts about "Wag the Dog"/JonBenet/Iraq & 9/11 and modern propaganda films:
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the atrocities of 9/11, I still think one of the most important yet least explored aspects of the day's attacks is how they were carefully designed and staged for the cameras. Deadly spectacles that everyone kept saying was "like a movie" actually were directed that way, as a horror/disaster movie with unforgettable psychological impact -- because it wasn't just a movie, it was real. The "terror" in "terrorism" is about spreading fear and panic, and the World Trade Center towers weren't just chosen because they were symbols of American riches and hubris, but because they were visual symbols that would make for spectacular and terrifying footage. The first plane guaranteed that the second would come as an even greater shock -- and would be caught by thousands of cameras. That was the way the perpetrators spread their murderous message: they intended to terrify not just the government but the population. And, initially, they succeeded. (Nobody looked more terrified on that day than Brave President Sir Robin, who bravely ran away, away, for most of the day: "When danger reared its ugly head / He bravely turned his tail and fled...")
So, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who called the WTC attacks "the greatest work of art ever" -- later changing it to "Lucifer's greatest work of art") was pilloried for being insensitive (and he was), while his larger point was ignored.
British artist/provocateur Danien Hirst elaborated a bit more in 2002, but it was still "too soon" for many, who thought his words sounded flip:
"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually."No matter what you think of his tone or his timing, I don't see how one can contest that.
Lawrence Wright's new book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," explores this in greater detail than any reporting or analysis that has come along so far. A piece in Salon.com cites Osama bin Laden's role as "director":
At the heart of Wright's wide-ranging narrative is America's arch nemesis. "One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it," he says. "The answer is certainly not."That's why I'm skeptical that a plot to blow up airliners somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is really the biggest plan out there. It's missing the visual aspect that is so effective at creating the fear and panic that lead to hysterical, reckless, wasteful, counter-productive and even self-destructive decision-making of the sort we've seen since 9/11. Politicians, no matter what their party affiliation (or lack of one), still haven't come to their senses.
And bin Laden himself used propaganda and mythmaking techniques to create a larger-than-life role for himself in the popular imagination. Salon continues:By exposing al-Qaida's clash with America, Wright also helps us see the road beyond it. His work reminds us that the consequences of the Iraq war, massive deficit spending on security and the military, and the degradation of America's moral standing fit bin Laden's goals. Indeed, when his terrorist organization officially trained its mass-murderous sights on the United States in the early 1990s, Wright explains, "al-Qaeda's duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West. In order to do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam -- 'a large-scale front which it cannot control.'" [...]
... [Bin Laden was a man who] had long shaped aspects of his life after the prophet Mohammed's -- a man who, in Wright's view, would come to use political and religious mythmaking "brilliantly" in the service of his ominous cause. [...]
Bin Laden's move, Wright says, was emblematic of his "public-relations genius." Only by retreating from modernity and the corruption of society could bin Laden presume to speak for "the true Islam" and those who longed to restore its purity and dominion. "Inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself," Wright says, "he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims."That image was mostly hogwash, but it worked.
Equally scary is Wright's account of the ways in which the FBI, CIA and other law enforcement agencies let the 9/11 hijackers simply slip through their fingers:
The highly secretive National Security Agency, which was monitoring a pivotal al-Qaida phone number in Yemen that could have helped track Hamzi and Mihdhar, was as possessive of its information as the CIA, and equally unhelpful. Ironically, FBI agents investigating the 1998 embassy bombings had found the pivotal phone number in the first place. "This Yemeni telephone number would prove to be one of the most important pieces of information the FBI would ever discover," Wright says, "allowing investigators to map the links of the al-Qaeda network all across the globe." [...]When are we going to see that movie?Still more astonishing, the CIA chose not to inform FBI investigators once they knew, by summer 2001, that Hamzi and Mihdhar had entered the United States. The FBI had an intelligence liaison with the CIA's "Alec Station" devoted to hunting bin Laden, but "the wall" still stood in the way. Even though another FBI analyst, Dina Corsi, was made aware of the information, she wasn't allowed to share it with the criminal investigators in her own agency.
By late August 2001, it did reach one of them, an FBI agent working with Soufan named Steve Bongardt -- when an urgent e-mail from Corsi was accidentally copied to him. Bongardt, one of several FBI sources Wright interviewed, called Corsi on the phone, incredulous. "Dina, you got to be kidding me! Mihdhar is in the country?" Following orders from on high, Corsi told him he had to delete the e-mail.
The next day, in a phone call with Corsi and a CIA supervisor from Alec Station, Bongardt was again told to "stand down" from any effort to track Mihdhar. Bongardt insisted that the intelligence should be shared, and that the wall was a misguided bureaucratic construction that was hurting the agents' mission. "If this guy's in the country, it's not because he's going to fucking Disneyland!" he said. In a follow-up e-mail to Corsi, he said, "someday somebody will die -- and wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective."
Wright reports that several of his FBI sources strongly believed that the CIA shut them out because the CIA was interested in recruiting Mihdhar and Hamzi, having never been able to penetrate al-Qaida with an agent. If the FBI collared the two as terrorist suspects, the opportunity to recruit them as agents would have been lost to the more transparent criminal investigative process. The nearly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11, Wright suggests, was the net result of the CIA's strategy.
Comments
The nearly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11, Wright suggests, was the net result of the CIA's strategy.
I think that is the most sickening and heart-wrenching piece of truth I've read in a long time.
Posted by: Joseph Gomez | August 30, 2006 08:16 PM
This isn't really in comment to the written part of the blog, but that picture reminds me of one of my favorite opening shots - the 25th hour. I like how the beams of light begin nearly abstract, but eventually reveal themselves to be the lights of Ground Zero. I think it's a wonderful way for Lee to set up the social politics of his movie without saying a single line of dialogue.
Posted by: Jordan Gray | August 30, 2006 11:13 PM
9/11 is about heroes, that's while you'll never see a movie about it.
Posted by: Phillip Kelly | August 31, 2006 12:15 AM
I do agree that, as insensitive as it sounds, there was a deliberate attempt to craft a (for lack of a better term) visual masterpiece on the part of the terrorists. Because you're absolutely right - what is more striking than something visually dramatic, repeated over and over and over the way the 9/11 attacks were on television? (That "over and over" is not intended as criticism of the media.) It may not just be "Executive Decision"-style tactics these terrorists sought to emulate, but the concept of the stunning visual so often present in action (and other) films that feature terrorist characters.
Interesting theory, very interesting.
Posted by: Eric | August 31, 2006 01:26 AM
"If this guy's in the country, it's not because he's going to fucking Disneyland!"
That line feels like is taken from some Harrison Ford thriller.
It's alomost as if we're in some giant movie with multiple directors; each of them giving their interpretation of reality--The Bush administration, the MSM, and other propagandists.
I swear I'm not high.
Posted by: Jay | August 31, 2006 07:05 AM
Damn! Joseph and Jordan both beat me to it. Well, no matter.
I was generally aware that the whole setup of the CIA and our government amounted to a series of fumbled attempts as described; 9/11 was when we finally dropped the ball outright. I've been sickened and wrenched from it to the depths of my being so many times since watching the live feed of the towers falling that day that I wonder how I can possibly get upset by it again; collectively, I wonder how a people can sustain so much greif? But nonetheless, it's good to hear an official come right out and say what needs to be said, even if it's only one piece out of a million that need to be heard.
Lee uses the lights at the towers so effectively in his film 25th Hour that they have been forever ingrained in my mind as part of the film, no matter how non-film the context is when I see them again. The (debatable) first shot is a slightly skewed look at the giant bulbs aligned together at the base of the former towers, the background cityscape tinged in a somber blue. Then - just as a plane much like the first to hit the towers passes through the skyline above - the lights turn from their inward position to shine upward to the heavens, as if looking for some truth from above.
I would argue that this seventeen second shot isn't so important as the entirety of the opening credits montage, nor the entire film, but Jordan described it perfectly as a wonderful setup. The movie is in many ways typical Lee fare, but here he's sorting through the rubble himself, trying to find the answers - 25th Hour is as much about conflicting social politics as it is about the healing of the soul.
Posted by: rob | August 31, 2006 07:06 AM
I had a thought related to both this current "thread" of posts and the plane crash in Kentucky the other day: Isn't it possible that, in these types of scenarios, where so many individual things had to go wrong for the larger atrocity to occur, that we view them not as horrible breakdowns of procedure and/or bueraucracy, but rather as simply the random confluence of many small errors? If the pilots had to be unfamiliar with the runway AND the runway markings were unclear due to construction AND there was only one controller on duty AND they were only on 2 hours sleep AND they happened to look away at just the wrong moment....shouldn't we be encouraged that it takes that many mistakes for something like this to happen, rather than horrified that something that simple statistical analysis would show as being basically unavoidable in the long run actually happened?
There are thousands of commerical flights every day in this country, and every once in a while, everything is going to go wrong and people are going to die. Can't we just accept this as inevitable (just like the hundred or so people who die EVERY DAY from auto accidents) and not as some great national tragedy, where we all have to stamp our feet and demand "answers"? Guess what, the answer is that the system doesn't ALWAYS work, but if my odds of dying in a plane crash are less than the odds of getting hit by lightning twice...well, I can live with that.
Posted by: Ali Nagib | August 31, 2006 08:58 AM
Yes, Ali -- I think you're right that accidents will happen and the odds of a fatal airline accident happening to YOU (or me) are mighty slim. But, of course, in the case of 9/11, this was no accident. The "system" (that is, the bureaucracy) definitely failed -- but so did the people within it, as Wright's book details. It wasn't just one overtired worker in Kentucky who thought everything was A-OK and didn't know the pilot had gotten confused and chosen the wrong runway. 9/11 was the result of many redundancies failing, many people being explicitly told they should be paying attention to something and deliberately chosing not to do so.
Think of it as a movie, from the hijackers' POV. The number of times the various 19 were almost caught, should have been apprehended or at least watched, was so great that in a fictional narrative, you'd never believe it. Too many plot contrivances...
Posted by: Jim Emerson | August 31, 2006 07:22 PM
I don't know, it sounds like Film Critic's Bias to argue that the attacks were "devised visually" or directed to the level you're representing. Bear in mind that the attack on the Pentagon was so non-telegenic that it couldn't be recorded; it feels like it was conceived symbolically, and I don't see any reason to believe that the attack on the Towers wasn't conceived in the same abstract vein. The terrorists didn't choose that blue for the sky. They didn't know that the Towers would fall and probably only had a dim idea of what the results of the crash would even look like (although surely they understood it would be visually arresting). I think it's even too much to assume that they knew that, after the first crash, everyone would be filming the second, and always guessed myself that they'd desired simultaneous impacts.
In the movies and on TV terrorist attacks (along with prison-breaks, casino robberies and various long cons) are "masterminded." But I think that particular word applies to very, very little of what happens in real life. I see the intellectual purpose in comparing the attacks to an "artwork." But most art sucks. Stockhausen and Hirst seem to be implying that the artist on September 11th was some sort of maestro. That's an idea I have a hard time crediting, and it's something I'm grateful not to believe.
JE: I'm putting the emphasis on the Twin Towers as a media event -- particularly because of reports that al Qaeda was frustrated that the attack on the USS Cole and the embassy bombings didn't make enough of an impact in the US. (We don't know what the other original targets were supposed to be -- some say the White House and Congress, and that the Pentagon was a last-minute substitute.) Terrorism is very limited in scope without media coverate -- that's what they rely upon to deliver the message: fear.
Posted by: Dave Hunter | September 1, 2006 12:36 PM
Did you see this NYT review by Garrison Keillor of a book about the stories behind some of the 9/11 images?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/books/review/Keillor.t.html?ref=books
Posted by: DVC | September 2, 2006 08:26 AM
I agree that the primary goal of a terrorist attack is to get heavy rotation on the news. By the way, I think that the movie that you want to see is in the pipe on ABC?
http://abc.go.com/specials/pathto911.html
Posted by: Dave Hunter | September 2, 2006 01:07 PM
The very lack of a visual component to the destruction of a large number of airliners over the open ocean has its own pact with fear and panic. Think of the families of downed passengers who report that they never have any closure because they don't know for certainty was exactly happened. It's the reverse of the twin towers--the horror of not knowing. As you say we've become a visual culture. To not have a visual record of the disaster is to leave us forever wondering.
Posted by: peter simpson | September 2, 2006 04:26 PM
Whow, I just saw the movie "World Trade Center" and I am absolutely amazed. This is probably the best piece of art in terms of product placement that I have ever seen. I wonder how much the US Marines recritment advertising team had to pay for getting the Marines presented in this manner.
Posted by: Staff Sgt | September 4, 2006 08:50 PM