[by Amy Bass]

On April 28th, Universal Pictures will release United 93, a film that professes to be a real time account of what may have happened onboard United Flight 93 before it crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001. The pull of the story, of course, is that amidst the well-known calamities of the day, passengers on this plane -- most famously Todd Bemer and his “Let's Roll” charge -- halted the terrorists in their tracks by bringing the plane down themselves, before it could do harm to others.

This film marks the first Hollywood interpretation (television has already left the gate) of September 11th, although Oliver Stone's World Trade Center -- “A true story of courage and survival” -- is set to open later this year. Universal seems to be having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to market the damn thing because of a furor by those who claim no one wants to watch one of the great tragedies in U.S. history unfold before them on the big screen.  Why, they ask, does Hollywood feel the need to submit us to a ninety minute recreation of something we experienced a mere five years ago?

Why indeed? Why do we make historical recreations at all, in fact? History is written in many ways. While the most obvious form remains the scholarly, well-researched tome, done by professional historians after years of archival research, history lives in many other forms and fashions. It lives in the songs, films, poems, and novels of the day. It lives in the stories people tell -- stories that often, likely, differ greatly from what actually happened.

History is a frustrating beast, one that fails to organize time and space the way we often wish that it would.  Decades pay no attention, for example, to the ethos that we attribute to them. The sixties -- the era of rebellion -- really begin in the 1950s, with actions like the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. And rather than end on December 31, 1969, they went past their expiration date, continuing into the 1970s with Radical Feminists and Black Panthers deciding they had more to say. And while it would've been lovely for the idea that “greed is good” to have remained in the 1980s, thankfully times other than the 1920s “roared.”

Because of this, dates in general tend not be a central focus for many of us who study history, particularly those of us who focus on cultural history.  We rely on chronology far less than many think we should, making for a thorny undertaking of defining historical trends while avoiding vulgar generalizations. Does it remain a worthy endeavor? Of course, for how else would we understand how, for example, an electorate chose Richard Millhouse Nixon in the visibly revolutionary year of 1968?

History, then, is not a fixed entity, but rather is a process. It changes according to whose history it is, who is doing the telling, who is doing the remembering, and for what purpose.  It changes through time, with events visited and re-visited. One of the oft-cited examples used by historians is Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War, which entailed the federal rebuilding of the physically, economically, and culturally devastated South. The history of Reconstruction evolved over time, with the same course of events examined.  The early stages of its historiography began with an agreed-upon story from what has been called the Birth of a Nation school, a version in which the Ku Klux Klan is posed as the saving grace that finally threw northern carpetbaggers out of Dixie and restored order with Black Codes and Jim Crow. After the turn of the 20 th century, W.E.B. Du Bois made his own intervention, bringing a black intellectual voice into the story to offer a far different perspective from those who felt D.W. Griffith's masterful, but screamingly racist, film offered any kind of ray of truth. More recently, the esteemed Eric Foner leveled the field, at least until the next account, with his tome Reconstruction, a comprehensive three-braid narrative that examines the perspective of white southerners, northern legislators, and former slaves.

The story of 9/11, like anything else, is certainly not a done deal, perhaps particularly with the increased visibility of conspiracy theories of late, and within the bigger picture, the story of what took place on United 93 is far from settled.  While the “Let's Roll” version persists, for example, the official 9/11 Commission report concluded that the hijackers actually crashed the plane -- not the passengers. But which version is more important -- the official story, based on tapes and conversations? Or the popular version, the one that people perhaps need to believe? The story of United -- like any other re-telling -- relies on speculation and manipulation, something few historians admit they do, but all hopefully recognize as a mode of operation. History isn't about fact: it's about the representation of fact, meaning that once something has happened, it has no chance at ever recovering a moment of authenticity.  It is a feature of what Walter Benjamin called the “age of mechanical reproduction,” a culture in which the reproduction of representations of reality permeate our postmodern sensibilities.

In terms of representing the movie itself, Universal has taken some heat. Just the hanging of the poster on the walls of multiplexes raised eyebrows, what with its image of the shadow of the spiked head of the Statue of Liberty facing the outline of a plane headed towards an already-smoking New York City skyline that still includes the barely standing twin towers. To appease those who raised the eyebrows, the studio has promised 10 percent of the gross from the first three days of the film's release to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund, and has screened a “making-of” short that includes footage of family members saying they supported the film.

But it is perhaps the trailer for the movie, shown on some 3,000 screens, that has caused the most talk, with many stories about moviegoers who were uncomfortable with the images in the trailer. Some theaters reported that audience members yelled “Too soon!” at the screen, and in New York City, AMC Lincoln Square pulled the trailer after people complained.

For some, movies can, certainly, be a form of escape.  But they serve many other purposes as well, one of which is to make us visually understand a course of events, regardless of when those events took place.  In doing this, United 93 is hardly unprecedented, as many movies have reflected on the history in its most recent form.  On July 4, 1968, for example, The Green Berets, starring John Wayne, came out smack in the middle of the Vietnam war, mere months after the brutal Tet Offensive turned the tide of public opinion regarding the battles that television showed in non-fiction form in American living rooms each evening. The film that many consider to have put a human face on AIDS, Longtime Companion , came out less than a decade after the disease became visible in the U.S. And what of Hotel Rwanda or The Killing Fields or Salvador, films that likely shed light on brutal events that many people hadn't paid any attention to?  Or even more recently: Jarhead, Three Kings, Osama, Live from Baghdad. The list is long. And some of the list is distinguished.

But not all. What of The Producers , a musical about the man who brought us the Holocaust? A small film that became the most successful Broadway musical in history, spawned yet another film version, but at its core, is of a troubling nature.  Can you imagine a Columbine-the-Musical? Would you be able to see it happening in fifty years or so? How about Hurricane Katrina? What would its “Springtime for Hitler” be called? And conversely, has time and space allowed us to not be disturbed over the sights in a film such as Life is Beautiful? Were people just fine with the details of the concentration camps because they belonged to an older history? Or is it that only those people who have access to making their voices known -- those who are able to be the loudest -- have opinions that matter?  And that those who are upset but silent don't?

So when does history come too soon? It can't, and when United 93 bows at the Tribeca Film Festival, an affair founded by Robert De Niro and friends as part of the effort to rejuvenate lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11, people will likely discover this to be true.  History happens the second time moves on, not in terms of societal progress, but rather in terms of historical space. It isn't always pleasant, nor should we expect it to be. History can be disturbing, and gruesome, and brutal, and uncomfortable, and distressing, and alarming, and unsettling. Because that is what life is like for many people in this world.

So perhaps we should get used to it. And if we don't like what we see, perhaps we should have the courage to turn it off, make it better, or perhaps put effort into ensuring that what is so disconcerting never happens again.

April 12, 2006

V For Vague
Unlike Alan Moore's canonical comic, the film V For Vendetta is heavy on the popcorn and light on the philosophy: MORE

Batty Dread
The Boston Red Sox's Manny Ramirez may be an overgrown kid, but he still took his team into the history books: MORE

Garrison State
Muslims rioting. Americans killing. Too bad no one's made a film called Why We Fight. Wait, Eugene Jarecki has! MORE

Songs About Fucking
The Motor City's Demolition Doll Rods like it hard and raw. Their rock and roll, that is. And they're putting out nightly: MORE

Sixteen Scandals
From Katrina videotapes to Dubai port deals, the Bush clan can't stop fucking up. Where's Long Duc Dong when you need him? MORE

We're Shocked! Shocked!
The White House just found over 250 pages of emails relating to the Plame case. Someone call Claude Rains: MORE

Toon Town
The cartoons that pissed off Muslim Nation came out months ago. But can't a suffering people call bullshit anyway? MORE

Hyper-Famous Amos
Now that her video set Fade to Red is on the shelves, Tori Amos is looking more and more like a movie star: MORE

The Plame Game
Alberto Gonzales is now withholding Plame emails from the Fitzgerald investigation. Is anyone surprised? MORE

Keeping It Sane
Before he passed, Bill Hicks was committed to speaking truth to insanity. A new DVD shows we need him more than ever: MORE

Something in My Toe
"But one can never be sure about anything. And that is the one thing I've always been sure about:" MORE

Moving Backward
The gaze-hop of Dalek has broken borders. Why the world is still conservative is another story: MORE

1926-2005
The year that was created many casualties. But none as tragic as the underrated blues giant RL Burnside: MORE

Only One
"All of which serves as a humorous reminder of the Order of Things. Some appetites carry a heavy price:" MORE

Democracy's Dark Side
California is a place where actors turn virtual wars into real ones. It's also a place where they die failures: MORE

Twisting Things Up
The Heavenly States have proven that just because the personal is political doesn't mean it sucks. Our interview explains: MORE

Way of the Samourai
Although he revered American film noir, Jean-Pierre Melville's French take on the brutish narrative helped shaped Hong Kong action cinema: MORE

Dead Eye Genealogy
Rumor has it that Abraham Lincoln was the first photographic president. The cult of the face began here, in these Illinois barebones: MORE

The Violent Truth
David Cronenberg spent a career tearing bodies apart and putting them back together. Now History of Violence is doing the same with the mind: MORE

Guilin
"The smell of damp earth that hangs over Guilin will surrender, and join the cosmopolis cropping up along the Li:" MORE