Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

9. Trauma and History in United 93 and World Trade Center

190 9 | Trauma and History in United 93 and World Trade Center Simultaneously disruptive and conservative, the narratives of United 93 and World Trade Center occupy an odd netherworld of historical representation—challenging in terms of subject matter, but narrowly circumscribed in their approach. Shaped by the cultural barriers erected around the memory of 9/11, both films are scrupulous in their pursuit of authenticity, and yet focus on such a narrow slice of history that they seem to deflect historical understanding as well as any larger sense of “coming to terms.” While not rising to the level of prohibition that surrounded Holocaust representation before Schindler’s List, the idea that it is still “too soon” to represent 9/11 has permeated much of U.S. culture, a perception that apparently influenced the filmmakers to rigorously delimit their works. As the critic and essayist Frank Rich has commented, however, perhaps it is already “too late”; the event has begun to fade from memory, the culturally therapeutic value of representing the event may no longer hold, and geopolitical realities in Iraq and Afghanistan may have superseded the event itself.1 Both United 93 and World Trade Center have been approvingly characterized as politically neutral acts of memorial representation and as straightforward narratives of self-sacrifice and collective determination . Both films perform a certain kind of cultural work, reframing historical trauma as a narrative of heroic agency. Radically different in their visual styles and in the particular elements of the events that they Trauma and History in United 93 and World Trade Center | 191 portray, these two subdued and tightly focused works each follow a narrative arc that emphasizes human agency and collective heroic action in the face of overwhelming catastrophe. Sensitive to the demand that representations of 9/11 have a special connection to “discourses of responsibility,” the films rehearse a pattern that has emerged as a culturally dominant formula, underscoring the theme of heroism in a much larger landscape of victimization. Nowhere in United 93 or World Trade Center are the compound contexts, the traumatic cultural and social effects, the devastating losses or the profound alterations of national life that characterize 9/11 registered; instead, linear narrative patterning and classical limitations of character, place, and time impose a rigorous and singular structure. Adherence to the “discourses of responsibility ” seems, in both works, to have led to a determined refusal to acknowledge the radical alteration of national life wrought by 9/11. The Hitchcockian Blot Rather than observing the “discourses of responsibility,” limitations of form and content of this sort might be read as a symptom of cultural repression, the “too soon” or “too late” suggesting the skewed temporality of trauma. Understood in terms of the ongoing historical narrative of the United States, 9/11 has begun to seem like a prohibited zone, an event that cannot be assimilated beyond a few singular strands, the isolated bits that confirm a national story of heroism and providential guidance. An unstated consensus seems to be emerging that 9/11 should be considered a hallowed event in that “graven images” should not be made of it, suggesting that just beneath this veneer lurks a sense of fear and dread. The refusal of several CBS affiliates to air a documentary on 9/11 at the five year anniversary mark, ostensibly because of the strong language used by the firefighters and other rescuers is a symptom of this tendency, which has become more pronounced over time: the same documentary had been aired twice before on CBS. In psychoanalysis, a distinction is made between “acting out” and “working through,” a distinction that the historian Dominick LaCapra has applied to historical narratives dealing with the Holocaust. Seen as initial dramatic responses to 9/11, the two films’ insistence on the literal, narrow representation of events can be understood as an example of “acting out,” the recreation of the traumatic event in a form 192 | Trauma and History in United 93 and World Trade Center that is largely depleted of context or temporal extension. LaCapra describes “acting out” as a melancholy possession of the subject by the past. “Working through,” by contrast, suggests a breaking out; without freeing oneself from trauma, the subject attains a “measure of critical purchase on problems.”2 Despite their emphasis on agency and positive action, World Trade Center and United 93 seem closer to the spirit of melancholy possession than they do...