United 93: Cinematic Reenactment in Real Time
United 93 can best be described as a cinematic reenactment of the events of the morning of September 11 as chronicled in the long first chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report (2004).
Indeed, the film closely follows the chronology that is clearly and precisely charted in that report, and for most of its 100-odd minutes, the action of the film takes place in real time, quite rigorously so for the 81-minute period of the flight from “wheels up” at 8:42 a.m. to the fatal crash in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03. There is a very brief prelude spanning several hours of real time, in which the four United 93 hijackers are shown--first, readying themselves in a New Jersey motel (saying morning prayers, shaving, and dressing), and then making their way to Newark Airport, where they pass through security, join the other passengers at the gate, and board the plane. From this point on, however, the film proceeds mostly in real time, from the moment the plane departs the gate (only to sit in a queue on the runway for 25 minutes) through the uneventful first 45 minutes of the flight, the takeover of theplane by the hijackers, and the eventual 6-minute struggle for control of the plane after passengers mounted a charge to the cockpit.Of the four planes hijacked that morning, United 93 was, of course, the last one to leave the ground. It was also, by a good margin, the last to be seized, its planned takeover having been delayed by ground traffic at Newark Airport and by the mysterious hesitation on the part of the hijackers once the plane reached cruising altitude. The flight’s belatedness meant that the fates of the other three planes, and the official responses to those events, could be woven into the narrative of United 93’s doomed progress. Boston Control Center becomes aware of the hijacking of American Flight 11 at 8:25. AA 11 crashes into the first tower at 8:46, though it is not known to be AA 11 for some time.
Fighter jets from Otis Air Force Base take off in pursuit of AA 11 at 8:53. At 8:52, a flight attendant aboard United 175, another Boston-Los Angeles flight, notifies United Airlines that the plane has been hijacked. At 9:03, that plane crashes into the second tower. At 9:05, American Airlines headquarters becomes aware that a second of their planes, AA 77, has been hijacked. At 9:28, the four hijackers aboard United 93 take over the cockpit. At 9:37, AA 77 crashes into the Pentagon.The interlocking of these narratives is part of the design of the nineteen hijackers, of course, but the film (like The 9/11 Commission Report itself) is interested in how the facts that led to the eventual revelation of this plan were or were not duly communicated and registered by those responsible for the security of US airspace. Thus, intercut with the linear narrative of the fate of United 93 is the parallel set of sequences representing the action on the ground at the sites that constituted the relevant operational centers of two vast monitoring systems: the civil air traffic system (Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)) and the military air security systems (The North American Aerospace Defense Command [NORAD] and The Northeast Air Defense Sector [NEADS]). The civil system is itself composed of several levels of authority: from local airport control towers, to regional Air Traffic Control Centers (of which there are twenty-two nationally, four of them relevant to this story: Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Indianapolis), to the FAA Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, to the FAA headquarters in Washington.
The larger storyline of United93—again closely following the account and emphasis of The 9/11 Commission Report—is about the failure of communications within the FAA system, and the crucially failed interface between the civil and military systems. Most of the first 80 minutes of the film are concerned with action in the various control centers on the ground, especially the FAA Command Center in Herndon, from which Ben Sliney, serving his first day on the job as director, eventually issued the order to ground all planes in American airspace.
United93, then, is the story—as Greengrass tells it with his script, his direction, and his later DVD commentary—of the failure of those massive systems on which our modern security rests, and about how it fell to forty passengers and crew on a commercial airliner bound for a major target in the US capital to do something about it.Reenacting 9/11 on Screen 23I want to emphasize that in calling the film a “reenactment” of these events, I am echoing Greengrass’s description of it at several moments in his commentary for the DVD release of the film. At the same time, it is important to understand that the film’s relation to reenactment procedures is complicated, for example, by the fact that it faced two very different kinds of reenactment scenarios and dealt with them in interestingly different ways. First, there is the “inside narrative” of the events aboard United 93. Greengrass had, to be sure, a small body of evidence on the basis of which to extrapolate much of what happened—transmissions from the cockpit, telephone calls from crew and passengers (many more than on the other flights), flight records, and, indeed, the recovered cockpit recorder that carried the confused sounds of the fatal struggle. Seat assignments, for example, were known and precisely followed in the film. Considerably more evidence is available about what happened on United 93 than for the other three flights. Yet, since no one survived the crash in Shanksville, much of the story nonetheless remains forever “black boxed.” There is little clarity even about the question of whether the passengers managed to breach the door to the cockpit, or whether the plane (therefore) went down in a struggle over the controls (as suggested, somewhat allegorically, in the film), or whether it was simply crashed by a hijacker who wanted to prevent the plane from being saved (a speculation the film does not completely rule out) (Figure 2.1). The claim to tell the true story about those events comes under serious challenge in light of such crucial uncertainties. This makes another contrast with Stone’s World Trade Center, in addition to those I discuss below, since the counterpart “inside narrative” of that film—the story of the two men trapped under the rubble of the collapsed buildings—has an authority underwritten by the fact that they survived to bear witness to it.
Figure 2.1 Ben Sliney, air traffic controller at Newark Airport, playing himself in the thoroughly documented film reenactment of events on the ground on September 11 in Paul Greengrass’s United 93.
Figure 2.2 A passenger aboard United 93 flight makes telephone contact with someone on the ground, minutes before the charge of the cockpit in the speculative reenactment of events in the air on September 11 in Paul Greengrass’s film.
The ground scenes, by contrast, were witness to events about which we could scarcely have a more exhaustive evidentiary record.
There was a massive battery of recording equipment at all of the sites in question, and, effectively, a 100 percent survival rate among the participants. The FAA and NORAD personnel who were interviewed by the 9/11 Commission produced testimony that was subject to thorough cross-checking. Some of the ground events, including the horrifying spectacle of the second plane hitting Tower 2, were actually visible to the naked eye of the very Newark Air Traffic Controllers who reenact their shocked reactions in the film. Many such events were also recorded on international television, where they were witnessed by growing audiences into the tens of millions, and then endlessly replayed over the next days (Figure 2.2).A part of Greengrass’s challenging task, then, was to fit together these two disparate kinds of reenactment scenarios to make a single work of cinematic narrative. In doing so, he made some critical choices. The first had to do with casting, where he opted for a mix of actors and nonactors, a hybrid ensemble that plays out very differently on the ground and in the air. For the ground scenes, Greengrass populated the control centers at Herndon and at NEADS, as well as the various regional Air Traffic Control Centers (Boston, Newark, Cleveland, Indianapolis), with “professionals” in the relevant areas of expertise: air traffic controllers play air traffic controllers, military personnel play military personnel, and so on. But beyond this, he recruited many of the key figures in the ground stories of 9/11 to play themselves in his film reenactment. In addition to the air traffic controllers in the Newark Tower, several of the officers at the NEADS command site play themselves, as do professionals in the Boston and New York Regional Control Centers. The most conspicuous example is Ben Sliney, the chief of the FAA Command Center in Herndon, Virginia, who plays as central a role in the film as he did on the day. For the scenes aboard Flight 93, however, Greengrass pursuedReenacting 9/11 on Screen 25 a different course.
All of the passengers aboard the plane (including the four hijackers) are played by professional actors, though the flight attendants and pilots are played by flight attendants and pilots, with the most central attendant being played by a woman who is both an actress and a former flight attendant.A second set of choices made by Greengrass has to do with how he shot the action in each setting. In both cases, ground and air, he opted for a kind of “real time” technique, with two cameras shooting very long takes in staggered roles over periods as long as 50 minutes to an hour. But the specific approach differed from the ground stories to the inside narrative aboard the plane. For the sequences aboard the plane, one camera was aimed forward from the rear galley and the other aimed rearward from its position on a pulley that ran along the central aisle. In these sequences, Greengrass relied on the ability of the actors to produce a collective improvisation, which he rehearsed with them for two weeks before shooting. For the sequences at the various control centers, however, the real-time effects were achieved in a different manner. The cameras in these scenes were both hand held by a pair of cinematographers who shot in two different styles—one attacking actors with close-ups, the other roaming, as Greengrass puts it, with “liquid motion” through the set. A second key difference with the ground stories has to do with the preparation for the long takes. Here, depending chiefly on non-professional actors who were either playing themselves or someone with the same job, Greengrass fed live information into the actors via various methods of communication.
Another innovation was developed for representing telephone conversations, so crucial to the action of this film. Here Greengrass reversed conventional cinematic procedure. Conventionally (as in Stone’s World Trade Center), there is no voice on the other end of the line while filming, but we do cut to the face of the interlocutor.
In United 93, by contrast, though we never see anyone at the other end of the line, Greengrass did have people off camera sending in messages in real time, “driving these environments with news from outside,” as he explains it (2006). Those on-screen “never knew about what we were going to say,” he adds. “The phones were live; the communications were live.” To create a sense of lifelikeness in the reenactment, according to Greengrass, “it was important that we controlled what went into those environments and they had voices to respond to” (2006).I hope it is clear from my account of the film so far that Greengrass’s repeated use of the term “reenactment” to describe his practice in United 93 is not an empty gesture. Far from being casual about the reenactment issues in his film (as I believe Stone is in World Trade Center), Greengrass is deeply engaged in the sorts of questions and issues that interest students of the field. What, then, can we learn from him, and from his film? What can we bring to it in the way of analysis, and what can we extrapolate from it by way of conceptual architecture?