Reenactment and Cinematic Spectatorship

It is necessary at this point to reemphasize that, like most cinematic reen­actments, United 93 produces its ultimate payoff in the hearts and minds of spectators. If the spectator of the cinematic reenactment bears witness in some sense to a world of revivified motion, in a way that the reader of a liter­ary narrative does not, it is also true that the spectator is not “going through” those motions as participants in reenactment exercises do.

At a moment like this, Greengrass’s comments seem to make him a spec­tator to the film he is in fact directing, thus adding yet another layer of interpolation between the film’s audience and the spectacle of destruction to which the film bears witness. A similar moment is registered in one of Greengrass’s most telling comments on his film: “as I watched these people reenacting this you could feel that it must have felt like this on the day” (Greengrass, 2006, my emphasis). There are few more articulate directors than the Cambridge-educated Greengrass, but here his very syntax seems to break down, with third-person, first-person, and second-person pronouns becoming unmoored in the process, as if one didn’t quite know who was looking at whom or doing what to whom. And throughout the film, the recurring emphasis on affect—what it all “must have felt like”—seems to connect with the question of spectatorship in its affective dimension. In the context of the other issues I have already enumerated about Greengrass’sReenacting 9/11 on Screen 21 construction of the story and his approach to directing it, what then do we make of all this emphasis on spectatorship, especially given his own acute sense of his production as a reenactment exercise?

A key to this question, and to the special character of Greengrass’s approach to reenactment, lies in a feature of the film I have not yet dis­cussed, one which also marks the film’s one major departure from the account of things in The 9/11 Commission Report—the “bible” on which it was based, as Greengrass (2006) puts it. Reading through the narrative of events in the Report, one finds repeated moments, not at all surprising in such a document, in which the commissioners reflect on decisions that were made (or that failed to be made) by responsible parties on the morning of September 11.

By contrast, Greengrass’s emphasis in United 93 is not—decidedly not—on the decision-making process in those control centers. Although these were indeed the places where such decisions were largely to be made, that is not the film’s point of emphasis. Furthermore, Greengrass’s own decision to cast these scenes so prominently with persons who were actual participants in the scenes being reenacted is consistent with his tendency to divert atten­tion away from personal responsibility for choices made or missed. This decision may itself have followed from a prior idea about where the empha­sis should fall in the film, or it may have set conditions for what could be emphasized in the film. Either way, it is unlikely that Director Sliney at the FAA Command Center, for example, or Fox and Powell at NEADS, would have agreed to participate in a reenactment that put mistaken decisions into strong relief. And either way, this feature of the film is conspicuous and has to be accounted for in any understanding of Greengrass’s complicated engagement with reenactment techniques.

Greengrass’s handling of this question in United 93 comes into striking relief when compared to what he does in an earlier film, Bloody Sunday (2002), which recounts the dreadful events of the so-called Bogside Massacre in Derry on 30 January 1972, when police and military forces were deployed to attack a civil rights protest. Both in its modest local look (shot in black and white) and in its subject matter, it might seem a stretch to compare it with United 93, but what the two films share is a preoccupation with the workings of a control center in a crisis.

What makes this bafflement all the more arresting in the film is that these are the operational personnel whose job it was to decode just such evidence, and to do it quickly, with immense security issues hanging in the balance. These were in effect all “situation rooms,” and these were the professionals who staffed them in order to make sense of situations and produce the appropriate responses.

System failure in the face of novel situations, it must be said, is also a major point of emphasis in The 9111 Commission Report.⁹ In Greengrass’s film, though, the question of historical unintelligibility, the notion of what might be called a historicity of the recognizable situation, is elaborated in interesting ways. Such was the level of unpreparedness that, when the first report of the hijacking occurred, there was even skepticism about its valid­ity, a point subtly made in the film. Hijackings, it was said, were a thing of the past. “Haven’t seen that in years,” says one agent, playing himself, in the morning briefing. Put another way, the label “hijack,” as it appears early in the film, carries with it a sense of obsolescence. After being told about the possible hijacking of AA 11, Ben Sliney seems almost bemused. He isReenacting 9/11 on Screen 29 certainly not about to go into emergency mode. When he enters his routine morning round-up meeting, he reports the possible hijacking offhandedly and skeptically. Minutes later, he is shown joking with his staff about rou­tine delays and their costs. Again, the tone of Sliney’s exchanges about the supposed hijacking carries the sense that this is just not the sort of thing that is done anymore: hijackings belong, it is implied, to the age of the Cold War and the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, the unfolding of events shows that the situation in question belongs not to the historical moment before 1989, but rather to the historical moment just coming into being, and to the new epoch that the men and women involved in the events of that September 11 are about to enter.¹⁰ The airliner hijacking—at least this kind of airliner hijacking—proves to be (in Raymond Williams’s terms) not a residual form but an emergent one, not a bygone situation but a situ­ation to come, a new structure of feeling and thinking (see Williams, 1977, pp.

We, the spectators of Greengrass’s film, now inhabit that future, of course, and these situations are completely intelligible to us. Hence the lengths to which Greengrass goes to make the point that this future was so alien as recently as a few short years ago that the best and brightest assigned to the task of protecting us, and supported by the most advanced technologies in the world, could not discern its now obvious lineaments. This play of the knowledge that we have of the past against the immersive practice of putting ourselves in the position of not yet having it is unquestionably one of the most important sources of dramatic irony in the film.¹¹

Beyond or beneath the film’s lack of emphasis on decision making, Greengrass’s reenactment of 9/11 most establishes the film’s distinctive feel in ways that are not explicitly signaled in the narrative of The 9/11 Commission Report. Consider, for example, how the film patiently follows the actions and attitudes of passengers and crew of United 93 in the scenes that lead up to the moment of takeover. At the gate before boarding, in the boarding process, and once on board the plane, there is throughout a casu­alness about security matters that is striking to behold in the post-9/11 order of things. An alien habitus, in other words, reveals itself in the very comfort level of the passengers. There are some anxious fliers among them but, in general, the carefree demeanor of the group is something that is meant to leave its impression precisely to the degree that we recognize it as a relic of a bygone age, even though our separation from it can be measured in mere months. Once aboard the plane, the passengers go about their business in business class oblivious to their danger. We post-9/11 spectators of the film are meant to register in our guts, where fear strikes hardest, the insouciance of these passengers to the threat that is posed by the four hijackers among them. The hijackers glance furtively around. They perspire, twitch, confer, scurry in and out of the lavatory, and so on, and the first-class passengers casually read the newspaper, chat, eat their eggs (with steel cutlery!), and sip their coffee and orange juice. They, too, are at this point still inhabitants ofthe pre-9/11 world. It is in that role that we have to pass over to their point of view to feel what they are feeling, even as we also feel for them in their very blindness to danger. In some such terms, I think, do we begin to capture the complex play between spectatorial issues inside and outside the film’s diegesis in these crucial scenes.

Though I have stressed that the film does not follow The 9/11 Commission Report in judging the decisions of the personnel in the control centers on the ground, there is one decision that the film makes correspondingly pivotal to its denouement in the air: the decision by the passengers and crew of United 93 to charge the cockpit. At the point when this decision is made, we have left behind for good the work of the personnel in the control centers on the ground. In the last twenty or so minutes of the film, Greengrass ceases the intercutting with ground scenes, and we stay with the inside narrative of the events aboard the last hijacked airplane still flying. From the docu­mentary record, as pieced together by the 9/11 Commission, we know some­thing of what happened in those 20 minutes. The timing of events in this sequence is exquisitely tight. United 175 crashed into the second tower at 9:03, about 25 minutes before the hijackers took over United 93. At 9:37, AA 77 crashed into the Pentagon. At 9:57, the passenger revolt aboard United 93 began. Because so many passengers were in telephone contact with fam­ily and friends on the ground, they were able to recognize the contours of the hitherto-unintelligible situation, including the attack on the Pentagon, within mere minutes of when officials tracking things in the control centers on the ground finally did.

At the moment of this recognition, as Greengrass suggests in his commen­tary, these passengers became the first historic actors of the post-9/11 world. In Marshall Sahlins’s terms, they crossed to a new moment in “the structure of the conjuncture” (Sahlins, 1985, p. xiv).¹² They were the agents positioned to respond to final stage of a plot that, minutes earlier, had been literally unimaginable for the very professionals whose job it was to see it and deal with it. And just as Greengrass emphasizes the collective bafflement of the professionals on the ground, so he emphasizes the collective will of the pas­sengers in the plane. True, we find the names of Todd Beamer (the 32-year- old New Jersey accountant who was heard to exclaim “let’s roll”) and all the other passengers in the closing credits, next to the names of the actors who played them. True, too, the DVD of the film includes brief biographies of all the passengers and crew. Nonetheless, we do not at any point in the drama aboard United 93 learn the names of any passengers. At their heroic moment in the film, they act anonymously. In a pointed departure from the failures of communication on the ground, Greengrass shows them passing information among themselves, information gleaned from what they have seen aboard the plane or learned in the air-to-ground phone calls they man­aged to make. Though they are in circumstances of extreme duress, we see them come together as a group, assess the meaning of the three previous crashes, and make a hasty, desperate plan.

Greengrass follows The 9/11 Commission Report in taking the view that the passengers and crew of United 93, by their resistance, probably saved either the Capitol or the White House from destruction. There seems to be little reason to believe the claim of some officials that United 93 would have been intercepted before reaching Washington. As the nation’s first post-9/11 historical agents, the passengers in this film rise to the occasion, acting decisively and effectively. It is at first easy to read this sequence as an endorsement of hawkish responses to the events of 9/11. The fact that Greengrass includes among the passengers an advocate for appeasement (a character with a vaguely European accent) lends some support to this reading. The film is decidedly not pacifist in outlook. In the end, though, it is not clear that the film’s response is as hawkish as it might initially seem. Certainly, the passengers and crew aboard United 93, having been placed in such desparate circumstances, are shown to have had only one honorable way forward, the one they in fact chose. Yet, for all the honor that the film rightly does these characters, it has another point to make as well. The vio­lent and chaotic struggles of the closing sequence, with the hijacking pilot rolling and pitching the plane to put down the rebellion, are not meant to amount to a satisfactory conclusion.

The film allegorizes the final moments as a struggle between opposing forces, each with a hand on the controls. But the point seems to be that the larger systems under our control ought not to be mismanaged in a way that produces so doomed a scenario as the one we witness in this gory denoue­ment. The allegory of the violent struggle of the hands on the controls at the close of the film, in other words, returns us to the opening 100 minutes of the film, away from the instinctive collectivity of primitively violent resistance and back to the mediated collectivity of the monitoring systems and their inadequately networked operators, managers, and directors. In speaking of the overall purpose of the project, Greengrass says that all of the cast and crew shared the same mission: “if we could create a film that would allow an audience to walk through 9/11, at eye level, that would give us some basis for evaluating this enormously important event” (2006). And the point of that evaluation, as he makes clear commenting on the film’s violent and abrupt conclusion, is to find a way forward: “I watch these images and I think this is where we are today.... Images of that day, but also of our own future, unless we find solutions.. We still have time to find another way” (2006).

Returning us to those sequences in the various control rooms, Greengrass seems to want us to register them with their dual affective impact. This kind of response, what might be called “affective knowing” on the part of its spectator, has a peculiar and contradictory structure. That is, we are meant, in our viewing of them, to have the feel of the real in these scenes, as Greengrass repeatedly emphasizes, but also to have the feel of how, real as it was, it all seemed so unreal, so mysterious, so baffling. The condition of such a response, I suggest, lies in the premise that the events being reen­acted themselves mark an epochal shift at once in affective sensibility and in cognitive frames of reference. Moreover, the fact that so many spectators of the film on its release were also spectators on the day only reinforces the recursivity of the process by which the film leads us through this experience with a sense of both discovery and recognition.

It may be helpful, by way of conclusion, briefly to set what Greengrass has done here next to Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Stone’s film is a reenact­ment of the rescue of the two Port Authority policemen, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who were buried deep in the rubble when Tower 2 (the first to fall) collapsed above them just as they were entering the concourse to evacuate victims. Like United 93, World Trade Center uses a mix of on- location shooting and studio replications of historical sites and spaces. It takes more license with the facts than does Greengrass’s ultra-faithful rep­resentation, but it does follow the documentary record quite closely, and, like Greengrass, Stone consulted extensively with the families involved. There are narrative similarities: like United 93, this film opens in the pre­dawn hours of September 11 and follows central characters from their morning preparation to the initial scene of the action—in this case, the Port Authority Police Headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Like United 93, the film unfolds in three acts (so marked by the director).¹³

Such similarities, however, only reveal profound differences between the films. Though both films (and both filmmakers) deploy a powerfully affec­tive rhetoric to represent 9/11 as an epochal event, Stone’s film is far less interested in the historicization of sensibility and far more interested in pro­ducing a moralized tale of human resiliency, a sentimental fable of how peo­ple can overcome differences to help one another. Stone stresses that on the morning of 12 September, when John McLoughlin emerges from the rubble on a stretcher borne hand to hand by dozens of rescuers (a moment captured by the broadcast media at the time), a new post-9/11 world has dawned. But rather than exploring the affective/cognitive differences between the worlds on either side of this epochal change, Stone exploits the moment for an alle­gory of rebirth through mutual caring and sacrifice.

Stone’s film, in other words, has little to do with Greengrass’s efforts to reanimate the emotional world before 9/11 so as to explore its alien texture and strange contours. Instead, it is about the reanimation of McLoughlin and Jimeno themselves, and especially McLoughlin, whose disaffection from his wife we glimpse in his failure to take leave of her in the morning, and whose appreciation for his marriage and his life is renewed in the course of the action. His dramatic exit from the rubble is shot from below, where he passes upward through a grave-like rectangular aperture, into the light. As Stone (2006) unnecessarily stresses in his commentary, the light is meant to carry symbolic significance. Though there are no recognizable actors in United 93, World Trade Center has several, including the hyper-recognizable Nicolas Cage, our modern-day James Stewart, who plays McLoughlin. Stone even compares the film at one point to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and its dramatization of a man’s recovery of his joie de vivre. Even ifReenacting 9/11 on Screen 33 Capra’s film were not so obviously based on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and its reanimating reenactments in the life of Scrooge, it would be fair enough, I think, to suggest that Stone’s 9/11 film is to Greengrass’s as Dickens’s historical fiction is to Scott’s.

Turning back, finally, to United93, the more substantial film and the more apposite for our purposes, we might say that Greengrass seems to be invok­ing something like Collingwood’s idea about how ages can be unintelligible to each other even as he reverses perspective on the problem. Whereas in Collingwood, the problem is about the unintelligibility of the past to the present, in United 93, it is about the unintelligibility of the future to the present, about the obscurity, as Percy Shelley once put it, of the shadows that futurity casts upon our time (Shelley, 1977, p. 508). Resorting to a kind of reenactment that depends more on a physical going through the motions than Collingwood would have been comfortable with, Greengrass also makes the issue a matter of affect, as if the failure was not one of technol­ogy but of imagination. United 93 thereby offers an affective engagement with the magnitude of what we don’t know, in any given moment, about the epoch to come, about the ground assumptions of the epoch we inhabit.

Yet there is in Greengrass’s film a certain mystification that speaks directly to the problem of reenactment cinema in post-Griffith narrative cinema. For in spite of all the reenactment techniques that I have enumer­ated, including the real-time shooting both on the plane and in the control centers, United 93^,s cuts from shot to shot and scene to scene emphasize that this is not a record of a reenactment experience. It is, finally, the result of careful editing work in the course of the post-production process. We may seem to have been given the experience of 9/11 at “eye level,” but in fact, we move among so many possible eyes in so many disparate locations, both in the air and in far-flung sites on the ground, that what the spectator sees can scarcely be understood within the framework of “lived experi­ence.” Greengrass (2006) concedes at one point in his commentary, in the midst of explaining how he drove and shot the central action of the film in real time, that the footage has to be assembled and cut. But he doesn’t fully acknowledge that this editing process, where the film is given its shape, builds into its narrative the teleology that the reenactment ideal leads the film to seem to play down.

Perhaps a cinematic reenactment project such as Greengrass’s leaves us closer to our starting point in Collingwood than we might initially have supposed. On the heels of the first two important claims of his argument in The Idea of History—“All history is the history of thought” and “The history of thought... is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind”—Collingwood adds a third: “All thinking is critical thinking; the thought which re-enacts past thoughts, therefore, criticizes them in re­enacting them” (1946, pp. 215-216). Shooting reenactments in real time to produce long takes of coherent action, Greengrass seems to ally himself with the bodily way of conceiving of affective knowing, the one Collingwoodrejects. And yet, in the editing process, in the cutting and assembling of the pieces to make his film, he in fact follows quite another way, one with a criti­cal dimension after all, and for which the “thought” inside the event, though not reducible to a bodily motion, is not exclusive of feeling. Greengrass’s striking metaphor of physical reenactment—walking through the event at eye level—captures something of what is important in the film. To take it as the whole story, however, would be to miss a crucial aspect not only of his film but also of reenactment cinema more generally, and of what it might contribute to our sense of the past: even the most physical reincarnation of a past action depends on the critical distance implicit in its being shaped in particular ways and represented in a specific medium.