Notes
1 Quoted from the call for papers for “Re-Enactment History and Affective Knowing,” Organized by Peter de Bolla and Simon Schaffer, March 19-21, 2007. I would like to thank my research assistant, Eric Powell, for his help with preparing this essay for publication.
2 One measure of Scott’s own investment in the sentimental tradition can be found in the fact that he dedicated Waverley (1814) to Henry McKenzie, author of The Man of Feeling (1771).
3 Scott’s historical novels were often immediately adapted for the stage and dominated the London theatrical scene (Bell, 1993, pp.
459-477).4 See Vanessa Agnew, “Introduction: What Is Reenactment,” special issue on “Extreme and Sentimental History,” in Criticism (Summer 2004) 46:327-339.
5 “I described constructive history as interpolating, between the statements borrowed from our authorities, other statements implied by them” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 240). Collingwood goes on to explain that this “act of interpolation” is both “necessary” and “essentially something imagined” (pp. 240-241).
6 “The controller understood, but chose to respond:... ‘you’re unreadable. Say again, slowly’” (The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004, p. 28).
7 “Despite the discussions about military assistance, no one from the FAA headquarters requested military assistance regarding United 93. Nor did any manager at FAA headquarters pass any of the information it had about United 93 to the military” (The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004, p. 30).
8 “Within minutes of the second impact, Boston Center instructed its controllers to inform all aircraft in its airspace of the events in New York and to advise aircraft to heighten cockpit security.... We have found no evidence that the Command Center acted on this request or issued any type of cockpit security alert” (The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004, p. 23).
9 In spite of all the comments on questionable decisions throughout the report, the commissioners also state that they “do not believe the true picture of that morning reflects discredit on the operational personnel at NEADS or FAA facilities” and, anticipating some of Greengrass’s emphasis, they summarize as follows: “The details of what happened on the morning of September 11 are complex, but they play out a simple theme.
NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they have never before encountered and had never trained to meet” (The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004, pp. 31, 45). This sort of comment earned the ire of Benjamin DeMott (2004), who called the Commission Report a “whitewash,” though his review makes clear he is more concerned with the Commission’s treatment of security failures in the White House and Pentagon over the years leading to September 11 than with the events of the morning of 9/11 itself.10 Greengrass (2006) comments on the related irony that NEADS had begun the day intending to carry out a conflict simulation based on pre-1989 Cold War assumptions.
11 These effects are to be distinguished from the more routine sorts of dramatic irony in the film, such as when the pilot of United 93 reports the “good news” that the plane is now “number one” in the queue and can take off shortly.
12 See Sahlins (2004) for elaboration of this point, in ways most apposite for United93: an analysis, with diverse examples, of how ordinary people come to exercise world-historical agency.
13 Act I: McLoughlin leads a Port Authority Police crew into Tribeca, where they assemble equipment for the rescue, enter the Trade Center, and take shelter in an elevator shaft when the first building collapses. Act II: With McLoughlin and Jimeno in almost total obscurity, many feet under the rubble, viewable mainly in fairly tight facial close-ups, this act consists of what Stone calls nine “holes” or segments of the hellish conditions intercut with segments that show the world outside, especially the responses of their families to the news of the destroyed towers. Act III: This covers the discovery of the two buried men by an ex-Marine whose journey from Connecticut to Tribeca that day we chart in the second act, and it shows the rescue of Jimeno and (several hours later) McLoughlin and their safe return to their families. There are also technical similarities to United 93, especially in the use of blackout. There are thematic similarities as well, in that each film marks 9/11 as a moment of epochal significance, though in different ways. Finally, as to casting, Stone’s film also includes along with its professional actors, a number of the participants in the events of September 11, including some who play themselves, two of whom were among the team that dug out McLoughlin and Jimeno.