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• Wednesday, August 9, 2006 01:04 AM

  can we look yet?

  i didn't see united 93, and i won't see this film, but i read this piece out of curiosity about what a salon writer would have to say about wtc (should be called wtc: the movie!). anyway, while reading it, i thought about whether we'll ever get to a point where someone can make a meaningful (non-doc) film that deals with 9/11/01, which immediately put me in mind of hiroshima mon amour, one of my favorite films, which was made (or released, anyway) 14 years after the bomb was dropped on hiroshima. regardless of the extent to which the film "deals with" the dropping of the bomb, i can say that it doesn't strike me as exploitative or cheap, even though it equates (or compares/contrasts) the fallout of an adulterous affair (to be reductive about it) with an unspeakable act of mass murder. anyway, i don't know when we'll get to the point where 9/11/01 can be used as context in a film (and of course, it is significant that in the case of hiroshima mon amour, the director was french, rather than american or japanese; perhaps a filmmaker with some cultural remove from nyc circa 9/11/01 will be better equipped to capture and frame this historical event), but i'm sure we'll eventually get to a point where the opinion that cinematic art cannot be made with respect to 9/11/01 will not seem self-evident. of course, the fact that many of us experienced the events of that day via television makes us resistant to filmic treatment of the attack, but there's a lot more to "9/11" than planes crashing into highrise buildings.

  i remember, in the late months of 2001, wondering when our best writers and artists would speak up about (and, more importantly, make art dealing with) what happened that day, and what happened after that day--remember the silence that followed 9/11/01? eventually, of course, the tacky 9-11 emergency tagline became common terminology, and the tragedy was transformed into a rallying cry for consumerism (if you don't shop, the terrorists have won), and the temporary moratorium on marketing the disaster was lifted. on the other hand, we're not so nervous about talking it over anymore, and that's a good thing (even if we're jaded about discussing the matter). if all we could say about it was "never forget," revenge fantasies really would take the place of remembrance and understanding (remember when "why do they hate us" was supposed to be an unanswerable question?).

  anyway, i'm sure there already have been some interesting cinematic responses to 9/11/01 that i'm not aware of; i'll getr on that, but i thought i'd drop a few cents here in the meanwhile.

  your

  ray gonne

  r--------*

  —specialrecipe Read specialrecipe's other letters
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