AT THE END of "Gangs of New York," Martin Scorsese inserts a montage of the city across time--from a decrepit nineteenth-century slum to the modern megalopolis of Manhattan. In the last shot, right before the credits roll, two buildings stand out: the twin towers of the World Trade Center. They stand out not just because they are taller than other buildings, but because their presence in the film was a somewhat audacious move, a year and a half after the towers had been erased from the New York skyline.
Scorsese had a cinematographic reason for leaving the towers in "Gangs of New York": He wanted them as symbols of the pain, fear, and terror that--the bulk of his film argued--has always typified New York. But what's more interesting than this somewhat tendentious proposition is the change that the presence of the World Trade Center in the film signaled. "Gangs of New York" was released just before Christmas, the same day that Spike Lee's "25th Hour" hit the cinemas. These films, together with Jim Simpson's "The Guys," which opened this week, mark a move away from the bowdlerization of film that came after the attacks of September 11--when filmmakers, unsure of how to represent a tragedy from which the country was still reeling, obliterated mention of it altogether.
Such films as "Spiderman" and "Serendipity," in production before the terrorist attacks, went back and carefully eliminated scenes of the World Trade Center. Movies about terrorism made before September 11--such as "Collateral Damage," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a firefighter who hunts down the terrorist who killed his wife and child, or "Big Trouble," a mad caper that features, among other things, a bomb being smuggled onto a plane--were put temporarily on the shelf.
For similar motives, movies that cast a cynical eye on America's foreign or military interests (such as "The Quiet American," which suggested that nefarious actions may be swathed in altruism, or "Buffalo Soldiers," about drug-running soldiers) were held back, for fear of appearing unpatriotic. At the same time, movies like "Black Hawk Down" (which was the number one movie for four weeks in January 2002) and "We Were Soldiers" (a number one movie in March), both of which featured brave American soldiers who were willing to fight for their country and their brothers in the military, seemed appropriate expressions from Hollywood--although, it's worth noticing, both of these were in planning before September 11, suggesting the film industry's turn to a more patriotic stance has been building for some time.
Still, feature filmmakers remained curiously reluctant to address the central events of September 11. Crudely put, the attacks on the World Trade Center are a filmmaker's dream: apocalyptic and fraught with tragedy, bravery, and melodrama. The movie industry has never been exactly shy about exploiting human suffering, and yet September 11 has remained the province of news cameramen and documentary makers, such as Jules and Gédéon Naudet, whose film "9/11" was an accident born out of another documentary they were filming about firefighters. (Even that film, which is generally regarded as the documentary about the attacks, shied away from footage of bodies on fire and people falling from the upper floors of the building.)
"THE GUYS" is the first feature film whose subject is solely September 11, but it is such a controlled and confined film that the enormity of the actual event is diminished from a tragedy of mass horror to a minor drama. Originally a two-character play performed at the fledgling Flea Theatre in New York, "The Guys" is the story of a writer named Joan (played by Sigourney Weaver) who is approached by a fire captain named Nick (Anthony LaPaglia) for help writing eulogies. He needs to give eight eulogies immediately for men lost in the towers, and possibly 350 more in the next few months. "You've got to understand," he tells Joan. "Over a bad year we lost maybe . . . six. This was in one day. One hour."
The horror of what occurred transcends Nick's capacity for language. Initially, he describes the first of his eulogy subjects as "A schmo. If Bill walked into a room, nobody would even notice," but with Joan's careful prodding, Nick is able to find his voice and name the qualities that define the humanity he seeks to recreate. As his inarticulateness dissolves, Joan helps Nick uncover the language that transforms these ordinary guys into heroes with enough human detail to make them real.
"The Guys" is nearly empty of action and visual stimulation. The film takes place in Joan's apartment, but we are never given a real sense of what the apartment looks like. There are exterior shots of New York, but no sweeping vistas of the newly decapitated skyline or gloomy shots of the desolation of Ground Zero. The film is made up almost entirely of conversation, and even in conversation there is no mention of terrorism and no call for revenge. Only erasure.
By confining his film to a melancholic stillness, Simpson removes it from a larger context, as though September 11 were not about the thousands who died and the terrorists who killed them, but about two people made sad and contemplative by those deaths. In "The Guys," September 11 becomes a kind of natural disaster that served to bond the disparate people of New York.
In "25th Hour," September 11 is used in a similarly limited fashion. "25th Hour" is, in many ways, a quintessential New York film, featuring such stock characters as a drug dealer, an obnoxious preppie stocktrader, and dangerous Russian mobsters. Based on a book by David Benioff, the screenplay was tweaked to address post-September 11 New York. The film is about Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) and his last day in the city before he starts a seven-year prison term for drug dealing.
The movie opens with shots of the twin shafts of light used to memorialize the twin towers, and most of the crucial action takes place against the backdrop of Ground Zero or some other memorial of the tragedy. Throughout the day and against this background, Monty and his friends contemplate his future and mull over the remnants of his crumbled past, wondering who betrayed him to the cops and where it all went wrong. As they do this, Lee creates a sense of confusion by constantly changing the axis of action. Characters shift from left to right on the screen and back again, and in these moves, all stability is lost.
FOR A FEW MOMENTS, this changes at the end of the film, when Lee creates a dream sequence in which Monty imagines his life without prison. In almost every frame of this sequence, the American flag is shown, an allusion to the profusion of flags after September 11. Whatever Lee's personal beliefs, the film seems to suggest that the flag and its ideals are what have the possibility to create stability.
As with all cataclysmic events, the full meaning of September 11 remains unclear to the generation that experienced it, but both Simpson and Lee have taken steps toward trying to understand it. For Simpson, it is the private individuals affected that are most telling, while for Lee it is the renaissance of American patriotism. Incomplete as these early examples are, the paths of explanation they lay out will find many more followers in the years to come.
Gaby Wenig is a reporter for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and the editor of www.Olam4Israel.com.