The Where We Were

The Where We Were

By Mitchell Miller ‘This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail.’

George W. Bush

The World Trade Center is a once and future place; the sign on the subway car showing that New York still waits for the return of its towers to the South island. It is still a destination – or to be more neocapitalist about it, an end – for the man or woman about town – even though if its physical reality is gone. Like the Gaels awaiting the return of their king, there is a refusal to let go – the memory must remain indelible.

This is understandable – the psychic shock of the great blocks crumbling in a matter of seconds to debris is not something New Yorkers should be expected to ‘get over’ quickly. They are entitled, to some degree, to confusion.

Their denial, or their vengeance, is also easy to understand, but may not be something the world itself can easily weather.

Everyone from the city can recall their whereabouts on the day – since Kennedy took his bullets, it has been a standard device of memorial, remarkably suited to the American idiom – personal but public, selfish yet sympathetic. And, as with all Manhattan real estate, the value placed on 9/11 is one of location, location, location – where the planes hit, where your loved ones were when the towers fell – where you were.

deafening. The 24-hour news feed responded to the event not just with endless replays and non-stop footage, but endless talk. Mikes were pinned to the lapels of a legion of pundits. Talk show stations accumulated gigantic ratings. The British press and public often in a roundabout, insinuating way, showed distaste over this verbosity – the unspoken comment was that the stress counsellors on hand at the scene, the soul-searching, the inescapability of the topic was unseemly. The unspoken rebuke was that, despite years of bombing campaigns in Northern Ireland and England, no such ‘bleating’ would be found in the UK – the resolve merely strengthened. ‘We’ endured, mourned and carried on in an almost caricatured silence. This was only partly true of course – while not loquacious, the years of mainland bombs provoked endless, if low key debate, kept even lower key by the farcical ban on the voice of Gerry Adams and other IRA apologists. Indeed, one of the nastier reactions I came across was a satisfaction that, finally, after years of funding IRA terrorists, Americans knew the price of a crusade waged at arm’s length. This feeling was almost exactly mirrored in the responses of much of the British left, who saw it as due payment for America’s other unofficial crusades.

Until now, this is remembered and commemorated in conversations and reminiscence, over drinks on Hogmanay, in a sign no-one could bear to remove, or now, as a crucial facet of formal introductions between a New Yorker and a visitor. It is a subject – notably so – everyone waits to be raised, because everyone knows. The big objects that stood in the south are dust – the subject though, lives on through the equally fragile phenomenon of reminiscence – of discussion, of outrage, of talking about it. The collapse of the towers is now a seemingly immortal moving image – yet its true power seems to lie in the verbal and linguistic activity that follows. Every New Yorker can give you a verbal souvenir of their September 11th.

All of these attitudes are captured in the anthology film, 11’9”01 September 11. This was a commemorative film that attempted to capture the personal and emotive responses to the event, rather than achieve any sort of abstract, collective sense of what happened. The overarching theme is one suited to film – of movement. The linking title sequences make clear the premise – on a wireframe map, a red glow signifies the impact of the plane – elsewhere, in turn, each of the different countries that contributed a director lights up and emits a shockwave, showing the impact of the event. In some places, such as the Afghan refugee camps in Iran, the event can hardly be conceived, though American retaliation easily can. Personal conception is all here, for all the collaborative and collective intent. As the film’s manifesto stated at the beginning promises:

From the start of course, the babble – or Babel – was near

11 Directors from different countries and cultures

14

the drouth

11 Visions of the tragic events that occurred in New York City on September 11th, 2001 11 points of view committing their subjective conscience Complete freedom of expression This came almost a year into what Bush called a ‘monumental struggle’ – a struggle conducted in stark words and starker actions. The subjective conscience then, is weighed into the balance against the Bush administration’s selective one.

The quality of the films vary – Ken Loach’s comparison of Chile’s September 11th has the truth on its side, but is preachy and clumsy and does not manage to avoid the British superciliousness mentioned above. Israeli Amos Gitai’s film is an insulting farce, whatever side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you happen to come down on. The Japanese film is beautiful, allegorical and brings into the debate the psychic effects of war in an exaggerated way.

It is the Mexican director, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, who is the most accomplished. Perhaps realising that any images he could produce are incomparable to the actual footage, or indeed, the hours of audio recordings. Realising, like Thatcher, that the voice is essential and its dislocation from the image can be fatal for the actual message, he restores those of the victims to something like the public sphere. We are only allowed to see properly once the voices have truly risen. On a black screen, the looped and distorted audio tape grows from white noise, to something reminiscent of Muslim prayer. Interspersing clips of people falling from the windows of the towers are the last messages – on mobiles and answering machines – from the dead. Many are too frightened even to speak of what they are experiencing. A furious caller to a talk station is cut in ‘I want every country that harbours terrorists to be hit. And I don’t just want the terrorists to be hit – I want their fathers to be hit, I want their mothers to be hit, I want their children to be hit.’ By this time of course, we know that this caller’s wishes largely came true.

schoolchildren – not because they are callous, or brutal or wicked, but because they do not comprehend – are as close to a state of innocence as one can say. And if the anger of the New Yorkers tells us anything, it is that while opinion elsewhere may dispute the extent of actual innocence in America, many Americans certainly felt innocent. Indeed, the insistence on it is almost heroic. The loss is deeply personal, and in an individualist’s paradise, keenly felt. What this film, in its better movements confirms, is that none find it easy to react with anything but wrath when innocence is stolen away.

There is a deeper anger too, over the true victor of 9/11, a ghost which triumphalists such as Fukuyama tried and failed to bust – history.

New York will raise its towers again – and like the brick kiln in Makhmalbaf’s section, its mass and size will impress – it might coerce the silence which Makhmalbaf’s teacher finally gets from her class. But monuments, and anti-monuments, such as the fall of the towers are the opposite of memorials.

They do not represent a present (as this film – all films do) but are simply present – and in that, they cannot guarantee their own effects on the aggrieved human mass surrounding them. The effect intended may be one of objective conscience – but the meaning taken depends on where you were when you saw …

This anger is far from the cold, but presumably crushing silence that a ‘monumental’ struggle must lead it to. It is a silence as impossible as that the teacher in Samira Makhmalbaf’s section tries to achieve from her Afghan

the drouth

15