If someone approached me and asked me to create an interpretation of the events of September 11th I don’t think I would be able to nearly as creative or insightful as the presentations that we saw at the film tonight: 11'09''01 (watch trailer by clicking on the movie poster). I know that I am not in the movie industry so this statement makes some sense; however, I am so shocked and impressed at how one event is portrayed so differently without overlapping or interweaving.
I have a strong personal connection with 9/11 since I live in Westchester. I remember when we were slowly given pieces of information throughout the day by our teachers and how this information was very secret and frantic at first but then became increasingly alarming. It was first a small plane in the river, then we were told about the large planes and the attacks, and eventually we were released to go home where my family gathered in front of the television and frantically called friends and other family members.
We watched as helicopters and planes flew overhead from West Point towards the city. Life felt like it went on as per usual in our town just 10 miles north of the city, but at sunset I vividly remember a majority of the town sitting on the Hudson watching as smoke and debris billowed up the river with an anxiety that the aftermath of the attack were getting closer and closer (both figuratively and literally as loved ones were no longer accounted for). This proximity to New York City has given me a sense that I know what happened on September 11th better than someone living further away; however, the film showed me that to tell the story of that day you could live anywhere in the world and come from any walk of life.
No part of the film conflicted with my personal experience with the events; they only complicated it and made me reflect more about my personal reactions and my personal connection to September 11th. Each portion offered something different. The directors used allegory, language/non-language, image, sound, and the seen/unseen to engage all of the viewer’s senses. Since I had a sensation of being there and being desensitized to the events since then, I was shocked at how real and how human these experiences were even though few showed the entirety of the events.
That last sequence from Japan was so strange; there is literally no way for me to make sense of how weird that person/snake was or how it fit in with the events of 9/11. Even Haley and the girl in the other ICS 200S section we were sitting with couldn’t make sense of it. Like what the hell does a creepy Japanese man who acts like a snake have to do with September 11th?
My favorite sequence was definitely the one from India because it made me think very differently about the United States and the way that Americans turned on American citizens who looked Arab after September 11th. It touches on the racism and paranoia that were present, but keeps a distant as not to fully criticize the United States (we don’t know fully about the son’s whereabouts when the film ends). It was so obvious that the family was judged not on the fact that they had lived in Brooklyn for so long but just that they were foreign. I think that, like Spitty said, my personal take of the events would have been different after seeing this movie.
