9/11

Saw 9/11, a documentary about the first responders to the world trade centers on 9/11.  It uses footage shot by these two French brothers who were filming a documentary about a fireman becoming A Man during fireman training.  The irony is of course that they sought to capture some event in the life of a single person but they instead caught a pivotal event in the lives of many Americans that had broad, rippling effects throughout the world.  Its fairly moving.

The film was made in 2002 while the fallout of the event was still unfolding.  The Patriot act had just been passed and if I'm remembering right, Bush and Colin Powell were talking about WMDs.  So, the film wisely focuses in on the specific firefighters and men who were first on the scene, recounting their harrowing adventure trying to save who they could, fleeing from the collapsing buildings, and then returning to search for body parts.  To them, the subsequent crowds of cheering New Yorkers calling them heroes seem incongruous and mistaken.  How can they be heroes?  They did only what they could and not enough.

It's interesting to listen to these firefighters talk about their feelings of guilt at surviving, of gratitude that they made it out okay, but already the nationalism that would be used to justify the Iraq war was showing up: there's much zooming in on flags at half mast and the American flag is draped over everything.  I feel nowadays that the event has been fully co-opted into a nationalistic symbol which makes it hard to just feel bad for these firemen and for the folks trapped in the towers.  Glenn Beck would start a "9-12 project" in 2009 to re-capture the feeling of shared grief and collective healing that folks felt in the immediate aftermath, but of course the second "principal" of this project is "I believe in God and He is the center of my life."  The first one is "America is good."

Anyway, the footage is interesting to see - there's a sense of immediacy to it.  You get the sense of the chaos of the event, with everyone running around and rumors spreading, stragglers emerging from dust clouds, confusion everywhere.  The film is very focused on the humans involved.  The political machinery is present but on the TVs playing in the background (and a brief glimpse of Giuliani being hustled through the streets by a gang of suited men) but the struggles of the firemen are foremost.  It would be a good film to show high-school students, to give them a sense of the reality of the event.  It made me feel mixed emotions however: the tragedy of the event, the toll it took on the firemen, the poignant knowledge of what all of this would be used to justify.