Let's roll

Flight 93
Peter Markle
United 93
Paul Greengrass

Dolan Cummings
posted 26 June 2006

These two films appear in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, but rather than being merely commemorative, both are exercises in myth-making. United Airlines' Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco was the plane whose passengers fought back, preventing the hijackers from reaching their target in Washington, presumably the Capitol or the White House. These films testify to the ordinary heroism of these people who found themselves in an extraordinary situation and did their best to do the right thing.

United 93 opens with a beautiful moving shot of Manhattan from just above the severe, charcoal-shaded buildings in the dawn's early light. The Flight 93 hijackers are in the city, preparing to leave for Newark, but of course we know that their co-conspirators are leaving Boston and will be here shortly. A glimpse of the twin towers as the hijackers make their way to New Jersey is almost shocking. These men presumably knew what nobody else in New York knew, though even the terrorists probably did not know the towers would actually collapse.

Greengrass' film depicts the terrorists in more detail than Markle's, necessarily involving more speculation. Their leader and soon-to-be pilot is attributed with apparent doubts, to account for the crucial lateness of their takeover of the plane (though the flight was also delayed). He is spurred on by the youngest of the group, a baby-faced thug. Greengrass also shows us more of the air traffic control and military staff who found themselves trying to make sense of what was happening and to contain the situation. Several of these characters are played by the actual people depicted rather than actors, in keeping with Greengrass' filmmaking philosophy. His previous docudramas include The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and Omagh, and he always tries to involve those affected by his subjects, as a means of healing as much as for authenticity.

Markle's Flight 93 is perhaps more schamltzy, as one would expect from a TV movie (it was made for A&E, the US network that specialises in biography and true crime etc), but it would be unfair to dismiss it for this reason. The focus is much more on the victims and their families: the film opens with one of the pilots leaving his sleeping wife and baby to go to work. And whereas Greengrass shows us only the Flight 93 end of those desperate calls home, Markle also shows us home. Most heart-rending is the mother at home trying to comfort her daughter in the final moments, till she is left alone in her idyllic American living room, devastated. (Greengrass' technique of using non-actors, much less the actual people, would have course have been inconceivable for this purpose.)

What both films have in common is that they put flesh on the bones of a story we all know, deepening its resonance, much as a war film can take a particular aspect of an historic event and, by portraying it in evocative, human terms, become a point of reference in itself. This is not to say that either film serves a straightforward, patriotic purpose, for example. It is clear from interviews that Greengrass for one opposes the 'war on terror', but United 93 is not an anti-war film any more than it is a pro-war film. Its 'message' is more basic: it invites us to put ourselves in what sounds like an absurdly hypothetical situation but happens to have happened, and suggests a course of action that sounds implausibly heroic but happens to have been taken. Both films are utterly believable: there are no action heroes, just struggling human beings. But these films present us with myth, in that they foreground a universal, human story, understandably disdaining the messy and inscrutable details.

Of course, there are dangers in myth-making, especially when myth becomes a substitute for history. War films have a lot to answer for. Greengrass' own Bloody Sunday (which was also produced almost simultaneously with another docudrama, Jimmy McGovern's Sunday) appeared on the 30th anniversary of the event, by which time the political struggle that had originally given meaning to the killing by British soldiers of 14 civilians in Northern Ireland was over. This cleared the way for more creative accounts that resonate on an emotional level, but at the expense of historical authority; what mattered to these filmmakers was the story, not the truth.

Myth-making is arguably the most appropriate response to 9/11, however. The terrorist attacks were not historic in any profound sense. They did not reveal anything about how human actions actually shape the world; except in a sickenly literal sense. A few lost souls flew planes into buildings, showing only contempt for any properly human conception of political agency, and changing nothing beyond the destruction they wrought. The political and military response to this calamity was of course a different matter, but it was dictated less by the attacks themselves than by the context within which they occurred. If, by focusing instead on the immediate heroism of the passengers and crew who brought down Flight 93 away from its target, these films allow us to see beyond that context to a more universal humanity, this is no bad thing.