Updated below
At least a couple of people asked me what I thought about the controversy around the infamous ABC telefilm The Path to 9/11. Politics and film in one neat package! What could be a better topic for me, right? Not really.
My hierarchy of interests goes something like this: movies > politics > everything else. So my integrity as a consumer of film outweighs my partisan allegiances. And so when I look around at the bloggers foaming at the mouth over the alleged lies of the docudrama, my response, heretofore unspoken, has always been to sagely intone, “wait and see.”
And while I agree in principle that it is a lie to represent Sandy Berger as an Osama-lover, and that it is despicable to depict that as a sober fact, I do not see fit to bully ABC into changing their film because of my politics. In the ever-tedious Culture Wars, liberals are not customarily the group that bleats about how disgusting Teh Hollywood is, and it’s not a very flattering look for us. Reviewing movies you haven’t seen is not our schtick: it’s theirs, and we rightfully mock them for it. And I’m disappointed to see that sort of behavior among my liberal bretheren.
The only response worth considering is that most Americans are not immersed in the facts of politics, and that they’ll take as Immutable Truth what they see on television. My response to that, in perfect 20/20 hindsight, is that it doesn’t matter one damn – having actually watched The Path to 9/11, or more accurately, failed to watch it, I am fairly confident that Jane and John America are not likely to take much away from this movie other than a sore ass and a keen interest in whatever was playing on Fox at the same hour.
Much was made of ABC’s decision to air the film uninterrupted. “Just a Republican informercial,” people sniffed. More likely, a conscious desire to ape NBC’s treatment of Schindler’s List as A Television Event, something so profoundly Important and Sincere that to run ads in the middle of it would be Gauche. The lost ad revenue of today is made up for by the prestige of tomorrow. But The Path to 9/11 is shockingly boring. So boring that I – I! who never stops in the middle of a film ever! – could only pay attention for about 40 minutes, and then found myself too busy making toast and sorting my bills to really watch, and so turned it off just shy of the one-hour mark. I tend to doubt that Jane and John have more patience than this humble Antonini-loving blogger.
I would call it a procedural, except that implies a forward momentum that the film utterly lacked. In one hour, I saw something like 80 characters, one of whom was played by top-billed Harvey Keitel for two minutes, chase after the bombers from the 1993 attacks. I believe they caught him while I was eating Jelly Bellies.
The script was just a floppy mess. I will give this much to the filmmakers: they didn’t want to demonize Islam. But this was expressed not by subtle, intricate means, but by thudding dialogues such as:
-FBI the first: “WHY DO SOME MUSLIMS KILL OTHER MUSLIMS!!!!”
-FBI the second: “THEY ARE TWO DIFFERENT MUSLIM KINDS!!!! SUNNIS AND SHI’ITES DO NOT LIKE EACH OTHER!!!!”
or:
-Muslim: “THEY ARE NOT MY MUSLIMS!!!! WE ARE PEACEFUL!!!! THEY ARE FUNDIEMUSLIMS!!!!”
It is odious political correctness, through and through: people trying to prove how much they don’t believe things that they probably don’t believe, but they really want to make sure you don’t accuse them of believing it, oh my god why are you looking at me like that I LOVE BROWN PEOPLE!
This is not the only problematic notes: the tiny credit “Based on The Cell by John Miller, Michael Stone, Chris Mitchell” attempts to assuage the fear that it’s not really based on The 9/11 Commission Report, but the four title cards at the beginning trumpeting that book tend to undermine that attempt.
More uncomfortably, and probably due to the screenwriter’s political leanings, it is much less a film about who they are and who we are, and much more about “grr! get the enemy! they are scaryviolent!” One bomber gets a line about “Now the Americans will understand that their foreign policies are selfish and create hatred of their country,” or something roughly that expository, and it’s pretty clear that we’re not meant to nod in agreement with that sentiment.
But mostly, it’s just too long-winded and blustery and dull. In which respect it is a very faithful adaptation of the Report. I think we can safely assume that nobody will form their opinions about What Happened That Day based on this film; network presentations like this are the very reason we have things like the Food Network.
This, by the way, was the only 9/11 post I will make. I’m sure that many people still retain a great deal of trauma over that event, and it is not mine to tell them how to feel about that trauma. For the rest of the country, let the survivors mourn without tarting up a very miserable event in pagentry and patriotism. 9/11 long ago ceased to mean “the day that nearly 3000 people died,” and has become a shorthand for “kill the darkies!” and I am not interested in memorializing an event that has been whored out as a bloody shirt for the darkest and most depraved impulses in the American psyche.
Update 10:24 AM: somebody says the same thing, only better.
Update 11:00 AM: Wow:
I would ask Bin Laden whether he had something special up his sleeve for the fifth anniversary. Why waste money, he would reply. The western media were obligingly re-enacting the destruction and the screaming, turning the base metal of violence into the gold of terror. They would replay the tapes and rerun the footage ad nauseam, and thus remind the world of his awesome power. Americans are more afraid of jihadists this year than last. In a Transatlantic Trends survey, the number of them describing international terrorism as an “extremely important threat” went up from 72% to 79%. As for European support for America’s world leadership, that has plummeted from 64% in 2002 to 37% this year.
Via James Wolcott.