Firstly, as to whether movies can or should be made about the events of 9/11, that seems to me to be a self defeating and somewhat dangerous question. Films will and must be made, it is the job of art (even in the trashy Hollywood sense of the word) to act as a lens through which the inexplicable can pass. Are there going to be false steps, of course, will there be good films about 9/11 of course, maybe not yet, but eventually there must be.

If 9/11 is a particularly unique event and I’m sure many will argue it is, I think it because of the ubiquitous and universal nature of the images. I, like I suppose the vast majority of Americans actually saw the events of that day unfold in horrifying detail and in real time through the prism of my TV. Because the events are still so clear in our minds, because certain images, the smoke pouring out over the harbor, the people walking across that bridge like refugees while the fires burned behind them are so strongly a part of our shared experience, I think it will be hard for film makers to render the events without falling into obvious traps. As I understand it, Stone doesn’t show much of the iconic images I mentioned and that we all can easily recall, instead he focuses on the stories of a few individuals, which from a story telling point of view probably makes good sense. This necessity to control an unwieldy narrative is interesting to me. On the one hand 9/11 is a discrete event with a tight timetable that lends itself to narrative, yet it is surrounded by a vast cloud of meaning that transcends while at the same time amplifying the actual facts. Sometime in the future a gifted director will probably make the 9/11 movie, a film that fixes in the public imagination what really happened on that day much as say “Schidler’s List” or “Birth of a Nation” provided, for better or worse a specific way of understanding deeply controversial subjects largely outside the audience’s experience. Still, at least for the generation that sat in shock in front of our TVs that sunny morning, it will be hard in deed for film makers to construct stories out of those core events that don’t seem hollow by comparison.

Secondly, in making films about 9/11 as the two released so far make clear, if only by its absence, there is another issue at play here and that is clearly political. As I understand it, both WTC and United 93 are scrupulously a-political and probably with good reason. In each case there was a firestorm waiting to erupt that would have engulfed the films had they been anything other than neutral. The Bush administration and the GOP in general politicized the events of September 2001 almost from their inception. 9/11 has been used as a pretext for a ruinous war, for unlawful attacks on our civil liberties and as a general bludgeon against anyone who dissents from their party line. I honestly can’t think of a national tragedy that so quickly morphed into a political weapon other than the Lincoln assassination and that fallowed an actual civil war. The fact that the reverberations and aftershocks of 9/11 are still with us in a way that say Pearl Harbor, or the Kennedy assassination five years later were not, says something about the way one side in the “culture wars” has sought to take sole ownership of this slice of common history. Some time in the next year, more Americans will have died fighting in Iraq, in a war that was sold implicitly and explicitly as revenge for those who perished on that day in New York, and as the chaos over there spirals on, I think it’s safe to say none of those ghosts, here or there will rest very quietly any time soon. Despite the attempts of Karl Rove and FOX news, 9/11 is not as yet set as a narrative, it exists in a fluid state, unfixed, a part of our collective memory and yet still open ended. In a sense this should make it prime fodder for artist, but clearly it also makes it very dangerous as well. The fact is I probably won’t see WTC or United 93, whatever their merits. My heart aches still from the memory of those events and worse from the terrible, and oh so predictable catastrophes that came in their wake. But that doesn’t mean that those movies shouldn’t have been made.

It is interesting that Ms. Miller chooses to comment on the author’s neutrality concerning whether or not paranormal events actually occurred. In her landmark work on the British spiritualist movement The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 the late historian Janet Oppenheim also chose to remain silent on this question, a stance which drew criticism in the American Historical Review. I think that Professor Oppenheim felt that it was not the place of an historian to make such a judgment. I think it is important to see these people through their own experiences and circumstances and to let them speak for themselves. I think that if one simply assumes that every instance of table rapping or precognition is by nature fake, then one comes away with a different, slightly skewed image of the men and woman who sought honestly to investigate these phenomena. While I may not be a believer myself, as an historian I think it is crucial, especially in regards to a subject like this, to give the ideas and theories of the individuals involved fair play. The Other World is an academic work and it may not be as accessible a read as Ghost Hunters, but I highly recommend it to anyone interested in late 19th century attempts to bring scientific methods to bear on alleged supernatural events and the tensions this provoked.