Films of Infamy

By David Thomson, the author of The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 30/04/06):

In the week or so before the film "United 93" opened, there were fretful questions being asked, like "Is America ready?" and "Is such a movie a form of exploitation?"

Now that it has opened — and Paul Greengrass's film is a good one — a small wave of self-congratulation has begun to break across the country. "We watched our first 9/11 movie," we seem to be saying. "It was hard but we made it all the way through. Good for us."

Well. Sort of.

Let's go back to 2001, to Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor," which appeared only months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Film purists and ordinary spectators all agreed: the movie was dreadful as drama, appalling as history and addicted to explosions. Of course, "Pearl Harbor" was released regardless, for we do not like to impose our "taste" in the form of censorship. As such, it was part of a climate of disaster/horror/spectacle movies so embedded on the morning of 9/11 that it's understandable if some children taking in the destruction of the Twin Towers with their Cream of Wheat asked their parents, "Which movie is this from?"

America the bold had been selling such imagery for decades before it came back in what you'd have to call "documentary" form. And just as we as a society have often confused history and story, so we are sometimes bewildered about the authenticity of things seen in film and photograph; many Americans may find themselves confused as to which is the more accurate depiction of torture: what they see on "24" or in the snapshots from Abu Ghraib.

America has a deserved reputation as the gleeful purveyor of shock imagery, disaster footage or anything that Hollywood could guess you had never seen before. Indeed, if you wish to understand how America is now perceived in the rest of the world, then you have to see the paradox (there are other words) in selling mass destruction and then wondering whether the American public is "ready" for "United 93."

After all, our cultural history is one in which we have ordained, licensed for residuals and traded on varieties of movie mayhem that were often blithely detached from consequences.

What consequences? Pain, loss, historical context. And here's the rub: while it is in the nature of a film industry to support war efforts, to be patriotic, to distinguish heroes from villains, it is in the nature of art to see that everyone has his reasons. In 1937, fearing the worst, and suffering an injury incurred in World War I, Jean Renoir made "Grand Illusion," a picture that hardly has a shot fired and that confronts the startling idea that Frenchmen and Germans are alike enough to be friends. The film moved people. It was even nominated for an Academy Award. Two years later, Renoir sighed, the apocalypse.

As it happens, Paul Greengrass's film gets the dread of passing moments, it knows the clumsiness of real struggle, and it has ordinary people. The stress on false heroics has been reduced. Why? In part, because Mr. Greengrass has lived much of his life with the hideous local hatreds of Ireland, and he is weary of "good clean action" films.

In truth we have never cared too much whether Hollywood films are good: we only want them to sell, and we are not famous for our sense of taste. But we do have a commitment to our right to see the things we do.

It is part of striving for an open society: if we have sex, can't it be shown? If we execute killers, can't their last moments be seen? If a despairing person jumps off a building, is his descent "private"? If a person can muster enough resolve to smother fear on a crowded plane, isn't that a part of us? So I honor the passengers of Flight 93, and I hope people will see the movie Mr. Greengrass has made about them.

At the same time, this is not actually as "dangerous" a film as you might think. This is a picture about American courage and enterprise. It need not be a training film, but it is about the way we all might hope to behave. It is a rousing affirmation of a war effort, not very different from, say, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944), which reveled in the Doolittle "gotcha" after Pearl Harbor. Similarly, the big American movie on the Holocaust waited on our discovery of Oskar Schindler — our way of making films requires heroes, even if sometimes a hero is like poison in the muddied water.

More recently, Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is a brave, if troubled, attempt to look at both sides of a fraught conflict. But I can imagine a film other than "Munich" or "United 93," a greater film, a film about different kinds of courage. In this film, the courage of the passengers would be shown and honored, but there would be an equal effort to show the courage of the terrorists (without calling them simply "evil" or "insane"). You can feel already, I know, that that film is less likely. It has a kind of moral ambivalence not settled by giving 5 percent of the proceeds to families of the lost.

But I remember a great scene in "The Godfather: Part II." Michael Corleone is in Havana to make a mobster deal to extend the milking of that island. He is in a car that has to stop. Rebels or terrorists have caused a problem up ahead and one of them blows himself up rather than be captured. Later, Michael tells Hyman Roth: Be careful, that bravery is hard to beat. Before the film ends, Cuba has fallen (or risen).

The really difficult film to make or offer in America will be the one that says no, the world did not alter its nature on 9/11, even if the worst politicians used that event to switch their reality. But on 9/11, we faced the first need to ask ourselves how other people — evil, alien, insane — could be so brave. The history of terrorism — and it includes the independence of this country — is that in the end you have to understand the grievance of the aggrieved, whether you agree with it or not. That film has still to come.