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First off, as fast as the twilight of my college days recedes, I cannot outrun my demographic - believe me, my legs are about to give out. The popped-collar Izod trixies depicted in this film are fully-posable stand-ins for anyone else who has yet to unplug from the Grand Uncanny of our time. 9/11 has happened, as Rudy Giuliani would be more than happy to explain, and frankly, few of us are willing to be disabused of stories of heroism and good old throatfloodingly green Americana.
Hey, not to delve too deeply into the murky post-9/11 emotional reservoirs we all tap into now and again - when some of us saw Those images beamed into our faces, whether there, or 2,323 miles away, we realized how ingloriously fragged we might be.
I say we continue making movies that quote, reframe, detourn, juxtapose, subvert, and denature 9/11. Give it the full on Warhol Portraiture treatment. The Germans have ostologie - some of them want their wall back, and two feet higher - so why should anyone pull punches?
Make more movies about 9/11. Romantic comedies in which love interest A books a flight to California from Boston on that fateful morning. Throw that in for a twist ending --- Early Oscar Talk, that's what that says to me.
Better yet, I see a preview (all audiences) here --- man sipping coffee, reading the Times. Location? Windows On the World, time? 8:45 am. Zoom out for an establishing shot of the World Trade Center, and follow the plane in, in, in...Finally you see the face of Osama Bin Laden, froth of cafe du lait over the lip as he tucks the Times under his arm, and lo, white dazzle and three serifless numerals appear on the screen - 9 1 1 .
Should we set disaster flics elsewhere? LA and the west coast always gets it in earthquake films. Maybe Detroit? Is it too early to throw up an establishing shot of New Orleans under twenty feet of wastewater?
Who cares if people walk into the theater, secretly harboring a vindictive thrill at watching Gotham go up in flames.
Cinema has grown up, has adapted to the stark, criminal features of the "real world". I Am Legend's scenes of desolation were half grounded in Billy Joel's "Miami 2017", and the rest of the film was a muddled religious mess.
I for one am very pleased to have seen a movie as effective and well-sequenced as Cloverfield. Fact is, cinema is a tool for reification. If you disagree with the economy of this film, its abstractions of terror and Otherness, that's okay.
If we're bound to relive 9/11, I know I'd rather not relive it through demagoguery and political mythification. Now that we've found the shape and form of our nightmares, let's take crayons to it. Because honestly, try finding more ingratiating spatio-temporal graffiti than this film.
