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

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Fascinating discussion. I haven't seen it, but my immediate reaction to the IDEA of the movie is similar to minnehaha. Why would you want to replace your actual memories of an important event with fictionalized ones? Especially on a topic that is such a political hot button already? What, do you people just LIKE being emotionally manipulated for political ends?

On the other hand, your point about using story to process traumatic events and perhaps make them easier to live with is well taken. There was another crashing airplane movie maybe 15 or 20 years ago (?) that ended up demonstrating this phenomenon, albeit accidentally. Maybe somebody here remembers it.

The airplane disaster was trivial by comparison to Flight 93. Actually, it was only a NEAR-disaster. A commercial jet flight suddenly dropped several hundred feet so abruptly that it not only scared the passengers half to death, it permanently injured some of them due to the multi-G forces on neck and spine. The pilots managed to pull the plane out of free fall, but there was a class-action lawsuit by the traumatized passengers. Ultimately it got made into a tv-movie (probably a pretty boring one, since it was mostly about the lawsuit).

Here's the interesting part. The guys that made the movie were so obsessed with portraying the passengers' experience realistically that they brought a bunch of them onto the set as consultants. They built a big vibrating-about-to-shake-apart airplane simulator and had their consultants test it out. Over and over again, while they tuned the effects. They weren't doing this as therapy for the passengers, they were just trying to get the special effects right. The passenger/consultants reported that it was really scary the first time they sat in that crashing-airplane simulator, but each time they went back it got less scary (although more realistic, presumably). By the time they were done with the gig, they noticed that their lingering PSTD symptoms were much relieved.

SO... I think you and minnehaha both have perfectly valid viewpoints. Like B, I don't respond to distant disaster with a powerful first-person emotional reaction. But clearly, many people do. I think you've done a good job speaking for the folks that process the news that way (although, frankly, I only dimly understand it). B has done a good job of articulating the reaction of those of us at the other extreme. I'm glad to hear that the movie was made with artistic restraint and integrity. Maybe I'll watch it someday, maybe not. If I do, it will just be as a movie, not as therapy or as history.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Why would you want to replace your actual memories of an important event with fictionalized ones?

There may be some kind of dividing line implicit in that question, with you, me, and minnehaha B. (or maybe both of them) on one side, and some folks on the other.

I don't want my memories changed, or ameliorated, or in any way made easier to live with. Nor do I want to substitute other people's memories for mine--or in this case to substitute some filmmaker's idea of what those people's memories would be if they had lived to have memories. As I have mentioned before, the best summary of my viewpoint is what Kirk said: "They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!"

What I don't need is other people's pain. My imagination--or empathy, or something--provides me with plenty of it; just caring about those around me provides plenty of it. I'm not going to seek it out. And I'm certainly not going to trade in my own memories of seeing, hearing, feeling what I did on that day for someone else's pseudo-memories of an event that neither of us actually participated in.