{"id":540,"date":"2006-05-01T22:10:26","date_gmt":"2006-05-01T22:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=540"},"modified":"2006-05-01T22:10:26","modified_gmt":"2006-05-01T22:10:26","slug":"too_soon_apparently_not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/05\/01\/too_soon_apparently_not\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Soon? Apparently Not…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hm. Well, it appears my concerns about that deluge of new visitors from The Whatever<\/a> were overblown, since nothing much seems to be happening around here. So much for my delusions of grandeur.<\/p>\n

Moving right along, I see that my skills at predicting box-office success are no better than my estimation of my own celebrity drawing-power. By which I mean that I was surprised by the generally good business<\/a> done this weekend by United 93<\/i>, the movie about one of the doomed 9\/11 flights. I honestly didn’t think there would be a market for this film.<\/p>\n


\nIn the week leading up to United 93<\/i>‘s release, there seemed to be a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about whether it was “too soon” for this sort of film, i.e., a 9\/11 movie. But I myself wondered less about the timing of the picture’s release than I did about its purpose. Why was this film made? What was the goal of its makers, and what were viewers supposed to get from seeing it? Given that all the reviews<\/a> I’ve seen stress how sober, even-handed, and free of political messages the final product is, the only conclusion I can draw is that somebody simply thought we needed to relive that sparkling, awful late-summer day now five years in the past. But why? Why would we need to relive that?<\/p>\n

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I honestly don’t see the value of retelling the story of flight 93 unless there is new information to be revealed or a point to be made. From what I’ve read, there is neither to be found in United 93<\/i>. It is simply a dramatization of what we think happened on board that plane. And I don’t see the purpose of that.<\/p>\n

Some have suggested that seeing this film is similar to Schindler’s List<\/i> in that it’s a grim but useful viewing experience that will somehow make the viewer a better person for having seen it. I don’t buy that, though, for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the story of Oskar Schindler was 50 years old and not widely known at the time of List<\/i>‘s release. There was a genuine informational element to that film, because few modern movie-goers had ever heard of Schindler. That isn’t the case with United 93<\/i>. Everyone older than toddler-age knows this story; it’s still fresh on our minds and in our hearts. And it’s an extremely hurtful story for many.<\/p>\n

I know several people who were so affected by the events of 9\/11 that they find it difficult to watch purely entertaining films that have elements reminiscent of what happened on that dark day. One of my friends was turned off on Spider-Man<\/i> of all things, because it includes several scenes of New Yorkers falling from great heights. (I myself maintain that Spider-Man<\/i>, released not long after 9\/11, functioned as a sort of cathartic wish-fulfillment experience because it did include those scenes. In the movie, our hero manages to save the falling people and thus grants the viewers an emotional relief that was, of course, impossible in real life. But that’s another topic for another time.)<\/p>\n

I myself am not one of those who was so badly traumatized by 9\/11 that I can’t watch certain films or television programs. I have no problem with Spider-Man<\/i> or Die Hard<\/i> (a film in which a tall building explodes and which has been somewhat maligned in the post-9\/11 period), and I’m religious viewer of 24<\/i>, with its frequently horrific stories of terrorism and innocents dying. But those stories are fiction<\/i>. Watching Tobey Maguire pretend to be a comic-book hero is not the same thing as watching actors pretending to be real people who really found themselves in a bad situation and really did die.
\nIn addition, I think dramatizing events of this nature inevitably leads to a troubling deification of everyday people, which makes it easier for the powerful and would-be powerful to exploit their deaths. Even though the filmmakers apparently went out of their way to avoid placing any particular message within the film, the fact is that a lot of political baggage has already been assigned to the story. The passengers and crew of 93 did act heroically and they deserve our respect and remembrance. But I believe it would be a disservice to their memories to turn them into martyrs or simplistic symbols for a cause, a road they’ve already gone a ways down because of the Bush Administration’s flogging of the catch-phrase “let’s roll<\/a>,” among other things. Fiction, no matter how factually correct or sensitively done, invariably tends to make real people seem larger-than-life; it’s just part of having someone’s face magnified to twenty feet tall on a giant screen in a darkened room. And that’s the last thing we ought to be doing to these people. The people of the aircraft that was called United 93 should be remembered as people<\/i>, no different than you or me, not as characters in a film called United 93<\/i>. At least, not yet.<\/p>\n

I guess in the end, for me at least, it really is a matter of “too soon.” I have no intention of seeing United 93<\/i> and can’t understand why anyone else would want to, either. But I do look forward to seeing how the film is remembered in coming years when historians have begun to make sense of this tumultuous age in which we live…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hm. Well, it appears my concerns about that deluge of new visitors from The Whatever were overblown, since nothing much seems to be happening around here. So much for my delusions of grandeur. Moving right along, I see that my skills at predicting box-office success are no better than my estimation of my own celebrity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}