First, a warning: Do not see United 93 unless you want to be reduced to a crying, slobbering, emotional mess.
Otherwise, go because it’s fucking amazing.
Only two other movies have reduced me to honest-to-god free-flowing tears, the kind where you have no control over yourself: Schindler’s List and Dancer In The Dark, and those films did so only at their end, after the filmmaker had his way with me for 2+ hours and the entirety of the emotions involved had finally set in.
Instead, I cried through almost the entire second half of United 93. I cried for the people on that plane and their families on the ground, connected for the last time only by a crude cell phone call. I cried because — sitting there in the theater — I also felt trapped in that flight’s tiny cabin, helpless to do anything but choose how and when I was going to die.
But I really cried because this movie was the first time I actually understood 9-11 first-hand. I wasn’t in New York or even in the country on that day almost five years ago. Accordingly, I experienced the horror and tragedy of the attacks and the months following in the third-person, trying to somehow comprehend them through the black-and-white newsprint of the International Herald-Tribune or the tiny blurred video clips on CNN.com. I knew nothing of the fear. Or the anthrax. Or the smell. I could only sit and stare vacantly at the many candle-lit memorials that had sprung up in each European city I visited. I could only blankly accept the countless condolences of the people I would meet, who would all repeat: “We’re all Americans now.” Except I didn’t feel very much like one.
Because when I came home, I still felt like a tourist in my own country. Because “everything had changed”. Because “nothing will ever be the same”. And — most of all — because I wasn’t there, and I’ve always felt guilty about it. Like I was somehow less of an American. Like I was no longer part of the club. Like I was in the bathroom for the most important and harrowing cultural experience of my generation, and completely missed it.
Seeing United 93 was my way of regaining that missing piece of my cultural identity, and it wasn’t easy or comforting. But I’m relieved that I did it.
So, I implore you all: Go see it. In the theater. And — no — it’s not too soon.
2 Comments
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I’ve heard that a lot of New Yorkers who were not in New York for 9-11 experience the same sense of emptiness; like you missed out on something.
As for the movie, I’m curious as to how they wrote it since I was under the impression that the audio files of what really happened on United 93 were not publicly released until the Moussaoui trial. Anyone know how accurate this movie really is?
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I wouldn’t call it ‘missing out on something’ (being that I was with Beaker when we watched the terrible international coverage of 9/11)
I think it more of a personal disappoinment that I could not be there for the people that I care about, I could not be in the deli when the firefighter just wanted a bottle of water and everyone was there to thank him, or at the restaurant when the exhausted policeman just wanted a bite to eat and could find nothing to say.
It’s more about having lived in NY for a while now, but not being able to truly understand how much things have really changed.