Three DVDs That Commemorate 9/11

by Walter Chaw Distilling raw viscera into heartbreaking stories at once the most dangerous thing that we as an American culture do and the thing at which we are the best, the first anniversary of the September 11^th attacks on the United States finds three documentaries on DVD to go with the around-the-clock soft-milking of the events on what seems like every channel on the dial. While the endless cascade of now-familiar images continues to enrage and shock, too often the intention of the coverage is to find the "human" stories in the midst of the suggested carnage; to tug the heartstrings (and, truly, what human cannot be moved by orphaned children, widowed wives, widowed husbands, progeny-less parents, and martyred heroes) is fine so long as there is an accompanying resolve.

It's easy to forget that many wanted to keep the particulars of the Pearl Harbor attack from the mainland–and that it's only through the careful spinning of the tale that a humiliating lack of preparation was turned into a call to arms. We are in mortal danger of being so inundated by carefully sanitized images of this atrocity whittled, as they are, down to the basest Oprah/Dr. Phil homily that our bloodlust becomes dimmed and our vigilance dulled. Making this event a national holiday is perhaps not a bad idea, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn if Hallmark didn't already have a post-traumatic-stress sympathy card for September 11^th–but even the suggestion of branding 9/11 a holiday is at least twenty years (and one war decisively won) premature.

The Discovery Channel's New York Firefighters: The Brotherhood of 9/11 (*½/****) is a shrine to the heroic ladder crews (specifically "Rescue 3") that gave their lives to aid in the evacuation of over twenty-five thousand people from the WTC prior to their collapse. Alas, it makes no attempt to address the larger issues at play in the atrocity, choosing instead to give a clearer face to these civil servants who are now the closest thing we have to warrior saints. Not an ignoble thing, certainly, the presentation is predictably free of any real artistic or philosophical importance while providing archival footage interspersed with scenes of burly men wiping away tears. Narrated by Stockard Channing, the documentary continually observes that firefighters are courageous and selfless in the execution of their jobs. Free of supplements save the Discovery Channel preview that we can neither speed along nor kill outright, the video and audio quality are exactly what you'd expect from a cheaply made (if deeply felt) documentary made for television.

From nary a mention of either fury or vengeance we go to Operation Enduring Freedom: America Fights Back (ZERO STARS/****), an unintentionally fascinating propagandist war film in the proud tradition of Know Your Enemy and Leni Reifenstahl that plays with a sort of queasy newsreel inevitability, from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's stilted introduction through to the frighteningly efficient overthrow of a hostile government. Every hand-clap for every one of Bush's now-infamous "with us or against us" speech broadcast with the weight of cathedral bells, the picture provides peculiar recruitment music videos showcasing clip footage of a few of the United States military's vehicles of war. A quick (and, as a consequence, obfuscating) overview of Middle East tensions paints the American position as at once victim and crusader, the righteous paladin avenging the crash of Pan Am 103 which, the narrator informs us incredulously, fell just days before Christmas! Atrocity is atrocity, I agree, but the absolute lack of an opposing perspective makes Operation Enduring Freedom less educational than a laundry list of rationalizations for going to war (as if 9/11 weren't enough). Hair-raisingly hawkish, the film serves its purpose in the same way that the attacks themselves did: to incite this nation into violent action against Bin Laden. Ironic? Yes, but does it serve any clear purpose? Not so far as I can see. A photo gallery (of all things) functions as the disc's only bonus feature.

Far more useful though still failing to provide very much in the way of a useful visceral response is The Learning Channel's World Trade Center: Anatomy of the Collapse (**½/****). Like the others, the picture features shots of the WTC smoking in the middle of their illusion of an island sanctuary (footage featured here in a digitally obscured rotoscope fashion most familiar to those first experimenting with Macintosh editing software), but it takes the tactic of CGI re-enactments to pinpoint the structural weaknesses that led to the Towers' collapse. The whole thing is sort of like that part in Titanic where a bunch of experts sit around telling one another how the whole thing went down with untold hundreds (thousands, in this case) still on board. Anatomy of the Collapse is entirely focused on its topic, providing a nice history of the buildings and the climate that spawned them. In so doing, the doc provides the clearest insight into why the destruction of these buildings (carnage and Freud aside) touched a deep nerve in the collective American psyche. Again, no supplements decorate the disc.

The legacy of 9/11 may be more than just longer waits at the airports and the abundance of firemen costumes at Halloween–it may become a vital sociological landmark that identifies popular media's ability to take any abomination and craft from it little nuggets of uplift, history, scholarship, catharsis, propaganda, but by no means graphic and frank consideration of the grim consequences of calamity on this scale. The only thing off-limits for exploitation, in other words, is the very thing that is required to teach the herd a valuable lesson about the entropic ephemeral nature of existence and the violent way in which our lives can be taken from us by people who mean to do us, collectively, a great deal of harm. Without a genuine understanding of what we have lost, there is the very real danger that we will forget to be outraged. We'll be too busy congratulating ourselves, you see, for suffering unimaginable violations with stiff resolve, a quick purchase of some form of Old Glory, and encouraging our children to butcher the national anthem.