Just got back from seeing "United 93"

[pegkerr]

I expect I will have trouble sleeping tonight. The reviews are right. It is gripping and absolutely excruciating. I think it was absolutely respectful, and it did not strike me as exploitive. In fact, it was all the more powerful because it wasn't exploitive but, on the contrary, underplayed, which made the events depicted carry an even greater wallop. But that is my deeply personal reaction.

I cannot tell you whether or not to see it. I think that everyone must decide that for themselves. I believe that there are those who will never be able to see this movie.

I can only tell you that for myself, as painful as it is to sit through, especially the furious and desperate final twenty minutes, I am very very glad that I did.

Edited to add: here is my response to a comment made below by minnehaha B, who asked me, extremely reasonably, why on earth I would want to take my knowledge and memories of the event and replace them with a fictional dramatization designed to push all my buttons? I replied:

Another specific reason that I went to see the film is that I just finished reading Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. The book included a discussion of a study of some children at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California "playing the Purdy game." This was a case where a perpetrator named Patrick Purdy stood at a playground's edge and sprayed hundreds of bullets at the children playing there. Five died and twenty-nine were wounded.

In the ensuing months, the "Purdy game" appeared spontaneously in the play of boys and girls at the school, where the children reenacted the tragedy. Sometimes they played it so that the children killed Purdy.

The psychologists figured out that story is part of the way that children heal from PTSD, by emotional re-learning:

One way this emotional healing seems to occur spontaneously--at least in children--is through games such as Purdy. These games, played over and over again, let children relive a trauma safely, as play. This allows two avenues for healing: on the one hand, a memory repeats in a context of low anxiety, desensitizing it and allowing a nontraumatized set of responses to become associated with it. Another route to healing is that, in their minds, children can magically give the tragedy another, better outcome: sometimes in playing Purdy, the children kill him, boosting their sense of mastery over that traumatic moment of helplessness."

You can argue that I am not a child, and that I didn't actually 'live' through the events of United 93 personally. Very true. But this rang really true to me, and reading this chapter was part of the reason that I went to see the movie. I have always had enormous respect for the healing effects of story and have personally used it for emotional purposes previously myself--witness how I continually return to the same books when I am distressed about something.

I think this movie is partly our nation "playing Purdy" from the trauma of 9/11.

Anyway, the chapter is titled "Trauma and Emotional Relearning," if you'd like to look at it.

Understand: processing by re-telling (and even re-shaping) story is a way I process things. For me, seeing it was the right decision. But I also understand and freely accept that Your Mileage May Vary.

Edited to add again: And do me the courtesy of at least believing that I understand that the movie includes fiction mixed with fact, dammit.

Edited to add again: All right, people. No more comments on this post, if you please. Because, you know, I've just about had enough. Yes, I am being dictatorial, but hey, it's my journal and I get to do that. The ushers are sweeping up the popcorn and the projectionist has left the building. If you would like to discuss this further, please take it to your own journals. Thank you.
Sincerely,
The Management

Comments

[fmsv.livejournal.com]

I've got to admit that I've got doubts about seeing it in a theater. Not so much for the movie itself, but more for the reactions of the other audience members. (My major worry is that I'd encounter people that confuse patriotism with adulation of the current administration, and get pumped up in that mindset from seeing the film, and I don't think I'm ready to deal with that.)
(I don't think the filmmakers are going that route (none of the ads for the film that I've seen suggest that), but the subject itself carries a pretty strong emotional charge.)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Well, from my experience, the movie grips you so tightly that you are not aware of the rest of the audience; you even lose sight of it being a movie. You are there. People were very quiet; I never heard a "yeah, go get him!" cheer or anything like that. When the lights came up, I heard people crying mostly very quietly. Some left immediately, some (like me) sat, stunned, through the credits.

Nobody seemed to be speaking as they left. I think they were all affected too deeply.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I do not want to be there.

K.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

For one of the few times I can remember, I'm so very with you.

one of the few times you're very with me

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Can you just clarify why this is one of the few times you can remember being so very with me?

I'm quite certain I don't know you, and I do not understand what you mean.

K. [wondering if you are confusing me with minnehaha B.?]

Re: one of the few times you're very with me

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

But I don't know this person, either.

B

Re: one of the few times you're very with me

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Well.

You're in a bunch of journals I read (though mostly Peg's). And basically, when you react to things, it seems as if we have different worldviews. (I mean, B moreso than you, but it's still true of you, too.) I don't really /know/ if we do or not, not having interacted with you much in any venue, but from a surface scan, it does seem so.

(By the way, I will take the opportunity to note that, from an outsider's perspective, I really don't understand why you guys /don't/ have separate journals. (Particularly if you think LJ people you don't personally know /are/ prone to confusing you two.) I assume there's a story behind it, or at least a logic?)

Re: one of the few times you're very with me

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

We share our journal because we like doing it that way. I am not concerned with people confusing us and I doubt if B. is either. We nearly always sign our posts and comments so that readers know who wrote what.

K.

Re: one of the few times you're very with me

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I don't actually particularly think people will confuse you, either -- you have very different writing styles and perspectives on things.

I only asked because journal sharing is somewhat out of the ordinary.

(Thanks.)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Don't worry. You won't be there. You'll be in a fictional place that's focus-group designed to make you think you're there, only with more beautiful actors, a tidier plot, and better pacing. This isn't a documentary, no matter how many people will forget that.

B

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

And if that's not the very definition of "exploitative", I don't know what is. Would this film be anywhere near as "powerful" if it were understood to be entirely fictional?

[redbird]

"Exploitative", to me, means that they're using you or your emotions for a purpose, notably a purpose that you don't approve of ahead of time, or that they are using people without their consent in ways they wouldn't want. (That's a tricky question, when so many of the people being depicted are dead--but we don't assume that anything about Abraham Lincoln, or the First World War, is necessarily exploitative.) Tightening the plot, or making the actors more attractive, is something that movies do, in the same way as written narrative tightens dialogue (removing the "ums" and such that are a large part of actual conversation).

Also, I gather that it isn't entirely fictional--I don't know how close it comes to the true story (and doubt I will go see it), but it is connected to events that actually happened.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

The very fact that Peg suggests in this post that seeing the film is akin to children playing out their own trauma over and over again in order to cope with it displays exactly why this film is exploitative. The nation is being encouraged to take 9/11 extremely personally, to the point that Peg is talking about PTSD. From Minnesota. The American people, most of whom watched these events on television, cannot be those children with post traumatic stress. The people of the United States are not all victims by nature of the brand of their passport. Don't accept that lie. It's exists to manipulate you.

The pain of the people directly affected by 9/11 is being adopted by the entire country. Since that day there has been a propaganda machine at work, and this film is capitalizing on that. There have been lots of really horrible tragedies over the years, but none of them have stirred up so much victimhood across such a large population.

If you're watching this film because you feel it will purge you of your demons, please ask yourself where those demons are coming from, and who created them. Is this film purging them, or building its revenue off the fact that so many people believe that all the events of 9/11 were really about them?

Sorry Peg, obviously these issues stir up strong feelings for everyone.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Um.

There's documented evidence that incidences of ASD (Acute Stress Disorder) and PTSD increased after 9/11, nationwide.

You can (and I would) argue that this is becuase people were glued to their TV sets, but to say that they should not /have/ PTSD, because they should not be so attached to America as a notion, is dismissive and unkind to quite a large number of people.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

America as a notion?

I'm not trying to be unkind; I'm trying to say that it's apparent from the outside there there is a lot of high level posturing to encourage that level of victim-creation. This film seems to me to be capitalizing on that fact.

America as a notion! Is that in jeopardy? Why are so many people encouraged to think that it is?

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree that there is a lot of high-level posturing to encourage people to perceive themselves and America as a whole as The Victim, and not The Aggressor. We didn't cause any of this! They just up and bombed us! It was an unprovoked attack! Froth!

On the other hand, I repeat that what happened did cause very real trauma. I think you can be angry about the manipulation of the media and the popular consciousness without dismissing the trauma that's all too apparent in many circles. That's all.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't dismiss the trauma that decended on Muslims after this event, but I will challenge Americans, particularly those more than a day's drive from NYC, to be critical and question how their emotions are being manipulated. For people not directly linked to the events of 911, that trauma is rhetorical, constructed. Why this event and not all the other traumatic events of recent American history?

[redbird]

Whether the entire country should have been traumatized by those events, I don't know--I don't find it very useful to tell people they shouldn't be feeling what they do feel, whether that's delight in a child or friend's accomplishment, or sadness over the death of someone they never met.

I should note that I'm posting this from New York City. I know someone who is alive today only because we had a primary election and she voted before work, and thus hadn't arrived at the World Trade Center when the planes hit. And someone else who seriously considered getting a tattoo with the names of the 14 coworkers he lost that day. I'm lucky--nobody I know died there, and I was uptown that day, not stuck in the subway with vague announcements about "police activity at Chambers Street" and eventually coming up to the street level to see the smoke.

Everyone I know here spent time, those days, checking in and assuring people all over the world that we were still alive. I have never been so glad I don't own a television as in September 2001--I saw the horrible images, but not over and over.

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

Of course not. Most fictionalized recountings of actual events would not be nearly as powerful if they were pure fiction. Do a global search-and-replace for appropriate words in, say, Judgement at Nuremberg, and it'll be much less powerful; Band of Brothers will become not only less powerful, but absurd (I mean, come on -- a single company being at, and playing a significant or even key role in every major event in Europe in WWII from D-Day on? That's jumping the shark -- except, of course, for the fact that it's true).

Or consider Joshua Chamberlain -- not just at Little Round Top, but later rising from what his doctors said was his death bed . . .

And so forth.

A reason that this movie quite clearly scares some people is the fear that it might be imperative -- that it's not merely a bunch of folks doing a bunch of things, not simply matter in motion, but it's an object lesson that might inform future behavior; an infectious historical meme, like, say, Thermopylae or Masada or Roarke's Drift, or Lexington and Concord, or American history balanced on the shoulders of a middle-aged rhetoric teacher ordering an exhausted, horribly depleted regiment to fix bayonets . . .

I dunno. Maybe they've got something to worry about.

I'd like to think so, but what happens very irregularly corresponds to what I'd like to have happen.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Of course not. But remember, the point isn't to be emotionally powerful. The point is to be profitable. Emotionally powerful is just the conduit for the money.

B

[laurel]

I really can't see that happening and it makes me sad that you think some people would have that sort of reaction (okay, maybe some would, but I think it'd be very rare).

Peg's account of reactions matches what I'd expect and I think it'd be the same all across the political spectrum.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Clearly you don't spend a lot of time reading Republican rhetoric.

Rush Limbaugh: "'The overwhelming emotion I had was sheer anger at the terrorists, bordering on hatred,' Limbaugh said."

The National Review: "Periodically, I want to remember, to be reminded of everything of that day, to know what this war we're fighting is all about, and what the world can be during its worst hours and what individuals can be at their finest hours. I wonder how many other folks feel like that."

Blogs for Bush: "How many of you are going? Does anyone really think it is too soon? Personally, I think it's nearly too late...too long we have forgotten That Day, and what it meant...to the point now where we are a hopelessly divided nation...though, perhaps this film will start a re-unifiction on the issue of fighting terrorism."

I'll stop at three. But honestly, just search any conservative blog and you'll find the same sorts of stuff. Not only will "some people have that sort of reaction," but very influential Republicans have already had that sort of reaction in public.

B

First it's for the money...

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

... and not emotions, and now it's to stir up emotions for political reasons?

Except for the "not" part, you're almost certainly right. People often do things for many reasons, and I'm confident that at least some people involved in this movie had both of the reasons that you're suggesting, and many more. (I doubt that Todd Beamer's father is in it for the money, but his WSJ piece makes it clear that he's supporting the movie because of its implicit political agenda.)

Political agenda's aren't exactly unknown in didactic fiction, or didactic nonfiction. (This movie, from early reports, is pretty clearly a fair historical, taking very few liberties with known facts, and with fair if unknowable implications from the facts.)

My guess is that the political implications and potential popular political influence of it are the source of much of the objections to it, roughly for the same reasons that many people found that awful Mrs. Stowe's rabble-rousing novel so disturbing. (My own guess is that they've far less to worry about than they think that they do, but I'm a cynic, after all.)

[laurel]

Okay, I thought what fmsv meant was that people would somehow indicate this while in the theater (by cheering or raising a fist or applauding or I dunno what).

Honestly, I haven't the slightest bit of problem with people being angered by the movie (and/or the events portrayed in it)-- that seems a logical thing to me. I didn't expect the terrorists to be portrayed in such a way that one would root for them (unless, you know, you're a terrorist or someone very much for their cause).

I also don't have a problem with any of those quotes. (Do you? Why? Perhaps that's a conversation better had in person. I'm really trying to understand this stuff, but few people will ever discuss these things with me). Note I haven't gone and read the entire pieces.

If fmsv was more concerned about what people might say later, I don't see how that effects one's enjoyment (or non enjoyment) of the movie. But then I often don't understand the furor around certain movies (like The Passion or The Last Temptation of Christ, to name two I can think of right now). They're just movies.

Hrm. Not sure I'm being clear, sorry.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I'm not making any representation about whether ther is anything wrong or right with those quotes. I presented them as examples of things I thought you said would not happen. If I was wrong about what you thought, apologies.

B