Mass Media, September 11th, and the War on Terror

Five years on, mainstream films are being made about 9/11, and Flight 93 and World Trade Center were touted by mainstream news media as films that were just so Important that everybody had to see them to keep America strong. I didn't see either one because I watched the towers burn on live TV before going to class, and all critical reviews of both films emphasized the fact that both films had nothing to add, and nothing to say. The point was just to relive the experience as vividly as possible, and immerse oneself in the emotional reaction we all had that day. Some call that post-traumatic stress disorder, Fox News calls it patriotism.

What really makes the idea of safe, saccharine, didactic reenactments irritating to me is that since 2003 There has been an entire television show about what happened to America in the five years since September 11th, and now it's turned more consciously to the occupation of Iraq. It deals with religious fanaticism, a war for the survival of an entire culture, civil liberties in the time of war, suicide bombers, torture, and generally the question of what it means to remain human in a confrontation with evil. Fortunately, most people haven't figured it out, otherwise they'd be freaking out. It's Battlestar Galactica, and it's about the smartest thing on television.

The other thing I've seen recently that was also thought-provoking and therefore anathema to propaganda-hungry audiences was Paradise Now. That was a Palestinian film about two childhood friends who are sent out together on a mission as suicide bombers, but become separated. Watching the two of them decide what to do in the face of this, and what is revealed about their motivations and the environment that produces this is incredible. It doesn't make nearly enough of a moral judgment in its treatment of its protagonists to qualify as appropriate viewing material in America, but man was that a good movie. I was surprised that it got beat out by Tsotsi for the Oscar, and I wonder how much of that was politics, although Tsotsi was pretty fucking fascinating as well. In case anybody's wondering, that's the story of a South African thug who shoots a woman during a carjacking and then finds her baby still in the backseat. Both fascinating, both better than Crash.