A commentary on World Trade Center - By N.L. Belardes

I was trying to think of names for the movie World Trade Center since the movie isn’t really about the World Trade Center. No history, no build-up, no idea who is in the World Trade Center except at one point in the movie when a statistic is mentioned: 50,000-60,000 people—and all treated like ghosts and practically demonic shadows—nameless ships that pass by in the night.

I thought maybe, The Lobby. But then it’s not really about a lobby. Or The Missing Bad Guys… and although the bad guys are missing from the movie, it’s not really about any bad guys or good guys for that matter. At least Apocalypse Now was a brave movie less than five years after Vietnam. It wasn’t afraid to say, “This was an ugly war and Americans killed and were killed and were traumatized and raped a country and each other,” and so on… hey it was a viewpoint whether you agreed or not and showed the brutality of war on a new level for cinema-goers to ponder.

World Trade Center shows the brutality of large concrete blocks, which is about as grey and lifeless as you can get. That’s about it. I thought maybe the movie could be titled, Brokeback Port Authority—two guys, in love, in a desperate situation… No, that wouldn’t go well with the Oliver Stone fanclub of compromising art, or those who read this blog and can’t take a joke. And besides, it wasn’t even really about the Port Authority, it was about a group of stooges who we don’t even know if they were friends, because we aren’t given any background information. Maybe I should step back and give the movie a daring title. Something risqué, like The Collapse of The American Mind. Yeah, or Below Ground: The Story of Shadows. Shadows because I’m supposed to believe that these two guys were that clueless, and in their conversations while trapped didn’t once speculate as to what happened to them.

You know what gets me? How I could leave a theatre about 9/11 without crying? How? I’ll admit right here and now I’m the most emotional person I know. I’m a big baby who will cry at movies for just the music being sappy. Hell I got emotional at The Devil Wears Prada. Flight 93 brought chills and tears—and how much more devastating were the attacks on the World Trade Center?

Not one tear.

Not even close.

Am I that desensitized? Or is the movie that bad?

It’s that bad, unless you just want to see a patriotic piece of goo about firemen digging rubble. But don’t call it World Trade Center. Title it, The Mole Men of 9/11. And don’t get me wrong. Authority figures and people of uniform in an array of job titles came together and kicked ass. And they died too. But I’m tired of the statistics all about cops and firemen.

The common men and women who were the targets of 9/11 were not the cops and firemen who daringly performed rescues and failed. The common target represented the economic structure of America. What is the average image of a person attacked on 9/11 at the World Trade Center? A woman in a red power suit? A man in a grey suit with a briefcase? What’s wrong with seeing images of the corporate frontlines, white collar workers lined up in the trenches of an exploded building, lives sacrificed simply for working in the greatest towers America ever built? And put any color of man or woman in those suits.

Give me the Apocalypse Now version of 9/11, one that explores the corporate warrior in the buildings through the entire devastation to the bitter end—a story of survival that ends tragically in disaster. The West Coast needs such a movie—one that isn’t afraid to talk economics, terrorists and the gloom of dying in a tie and long-sleeved button-up while trying to escape. Hey, how do you take the reality out of reality? Make a movie about ghosts...

I sat in the back of a bus just a few days after 9/11 and listened to gangbangers talk about 9/11. “Oh yeah, those white fuckers are all dead… they can keep dyin’.”

What?

No compassion.

I see it everyday. I see a lack of compassion in my own family. I see a lack of compassion in the people who walk past me on the way to work. I see a lack of compassion in artists, in musicians, in theatre folk, in fellow writers, in newspapers, in Bakersfield TV, in road rage mongerers, and in myself at times.

I see a peculiar West Coast phenomenon of “It happened to them and it won’t happen to me” mentality. And this crowd of unbelievers needs to see to believe.

Maybe World Trade Center is a just a simple movie about Democrats and Republicans—two opposing views falling into the rubble of the American consciousness. They must come to terms that they don’t understand a damn thing when it all caves in on them—that not even their uniform will rescue them. And just maybe they realize that when they weren’t trapped, they were just as much in the dark as when on the outside looking in.

And that’s just where those kids in the back of the bus are left if watching this movie.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Tuesday, August 15, 2006. You can leave your response.