DOCUMENTING A DISASTER
Grappling with how to remember 9/11 attacks
On Sept. 11, 2001, my high school government teacher, trying to make sense of the attacks for himself as much as he was for us, made a pronouncement I couldn't understand at the time: We'd be talking about and living with the ramifications of the day's events for the next 20 years.
The dozens of late August and early September TV specials memorializing the 20th anniversary of 9/11 have proved him more than right. The difficult question to grapple with now is how to remember and reflect upon an event that transformed the world, arguably far more than it should have. Each of the makers of 9/11 programming have had to answer that for themselves, and their disparate tacks reveal the competing impulses with which to observe the nearly 3,000 people killed on that day, the wars launched in their name and the fears and resilience that have defined the U.S. ever since.
The fall of the twin towers was a uniquely televised tragedy. Their site in Manhattan, the U.S. media capital, helped create seemingly endless amounts of footage of destruction. Along with, of course, the staggering death count there, the mass circulation of those unreal, movie-like images of the World Trade Center — planes plowing into buildings, skyscrapers collapsing and victims jumping to their deaths — cemented 9/11 in the national imagination as an exclusively New York event, an overshadowing of the Pentagon crash and Shanksville, Penn., deaths rarely challenged by TV memorials. The most honest and exhaustive retrospective is Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (Netflix). If you have the time or energy for only one TV commemoration, make it this one. Directed by Brian Knappenberger, the five-part docuseries foregrounds an unfortunate facet of 9/11 remembrance: For the country at large, that date can't be extricated from the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the justifications of torture by the George W. Bush administration and the subsequent increase in surveillance and Islamophobia within the United States.
Without partisan or ideological bias, Turning Point provides an opportunity to look back at the blunders in the “war on terror” (especially the lead-up to the
Iraq War), the atrocities at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and the delusions of the Donald Rumsfeld and Bush doctrines to make strange and outrageous once again what we've come to accept as normal — all while paying respect to the dead and the first responders who sacrificed their lives and their health. Though occasionally dry, its sober tone also makes for a welcome refuge from the sea of maudlin or faux-suspenseful 9/11 content elsewhere.
Just as critical but more domestically focused is the Frontline instalment America After 9/11 (PBS). Whereas Turning Point ends with the U.S. departure from Afghanistan, America After 9/11 provocatively draws a straight line from Sept. 11 to Jan. 6, calling this year's insurrection “the logical end point of the 9/11 era.” Director Michael Kirk's argument focuses on the leadership failures of the past two decades that have resulted in civic division and distrust. It's particularly compelling in laying out the lies that got us into Iraq — a theatre under-discussed in 9/11 analyses but key to Kirk's assertions of Americans' increasing cynicism toward the government and mainstream media since the early 2000s.
He sees that cynicism as a justified reaction to the war on terror, which saw the U.S. lose credibility (where it had it) as a legal and moral force around the world. Emma Sky, an adviser to the military, sums up much of the episode when she says of 9/11, “The U.S. response to that event included invading Iraq and Afghanistan, holding people without due process, torturing detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, kidnapping suspects in one country and transporting them to another and assassinating people in countries where the U.S. wasn't even at war. In this obsessive hunt to eradicate terrorists, (the U.S.) undermined the very rulesbased international order that it had set up and led for 70 years.”
Kirk's argument feels necessarily incomplete. The disaffection of the past 20 years has many more roots than the war on terror, as corrosive as that was and is to Americans' loss of faith in their institutions. But it's a worthwhile revisit of the sundry moments that eroded not just Americans' belief in government, but the very idea of unity itself.
For more despairing examples of government overreach, there's also Frontline's In the Shadow of 9/11 (PBS), which profiles a group of Black men in Miami whose lives were destroyed by an FBI anti-terrorism investigation, despite the men's utter lack of connection to al- Qaida.
Spike Lee's NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½ on Crave (the final episode of which airs Sept. 11) isn't so interested in unity, either — he repeatedly refers to Donald Trump as “President Agent Orange” — but the legendary auteur is certainly interested in people. As The New Yorker's Doreen
St. Félix has noted, New York is the Brooklyn native's muse, and with his four-part, nearly eighthour documentary, for which he interviewed more than 200 people, Lee achieves a lively and bumpy human texture missing in so many other 9/11 memorials. There's a lot to like about this stylish and personal portrait of New York's heart and vigour.
That intimacy is strangely lacking in 9/11: The Legacy (History Channel), a too-superficial overview of children affected by the attacks. And it's also missing in 9/11: One Day in America (National Geographic), a seven-hour docuseries that relays, in occasionally gruesome detail, the post-apocalyptic sights witnessed by survivors and heroic first responders.
But the most prominent forum for whitewashing one's post-9/11 image is 9/11: Inside the President's War Room (Apple TV+), which includes new interviews with Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Ari Fleischer, Karl Rove and other staples of the administration, as well as never-before-seen photos. Focusing tightly on the first 12 hours after the attacks, the 90-minute documentary, from British filmmaker Adam Wishart, offers Bush a chance to push back on the perceptions of his incompetence on Sept. 11, with little to no pushback from the director.
It allows Bush to wax on about what leadership amid crisis means to him, without having to answer for Afghanistan, Iraq, torture or the countless disastrous policies and avoidable deaths under his watch. Twenty years later, those topics, like the continuing war on terror, are the open sores we need to continue to address, lest we forget.