Is there a 'Godzilla' of 9/11?

A taxonomy of 9/11 movies, Part One

Last week the very funny writer and podcaster Rachel Millman posted, to the video-first platform “X,” a screenshot of a review of Akira that she’d originally written on the film-diary social network Letterboxd:

Millman would later describe the response to this post as “very annoying,” which is another way of saying it was a hit tweet. Many, many people had strong opinions about whether or not her assertion was correct, or about what movies might be considered “decent” or even “9/11,” or whether this was even a comparison worth making. By great skill or bad luck, or both, she’d tweeted herself into a particular kind of engagement nexus--a volatile but fertile content territory in which geopolitics met movies met millennials’ endless capacity for re-examining the events and pop culture of their adolescence.

I don’t want to cause Rachel any more psychic pain by litigating in too literal-minded a fashion what is to my mind an excellent Letterboxd provocation (and I would remind would-be commenters that it’s a shitpost, not a graduate thesis), but I too want to get in on this engagement nexus, especially since this newsletter is about, if nothing else, pedantic aging millennial pop-cultural narcissism. (E.g.)

And besides, the questions raised by Rachel’s post are good ones: Has the U.S. made a “decent 9/11 movie”? If not, why not? What would make for a “decent” 9/11 movie? And, genuinely, what does it tell us about 9/11 that the answers to this question are not immediately obvious?

The answers to these questions are complicated and difficult, and I am lazy and want to stretch out the content-creation opportunities for as many weeks as possible, so this is the first of a multi-part, extremely unnecessary and certainly not rigorous taxonomy and exploration of 9/11 movies and whether or not there is a Godzilla of them.

The first step to overthinking this is to set our definitions.

What is a “9/11 movie”?

What is a “9/11 movie”? I propose that there are at least six categories of movies that could feasibly be described such:

1. Movies that are specifically about 9/11 or its immediate aftermath

2. Movies that are “about 9/11” to the extent that they are about “the Global War on Terror,” literally or metaphorically, including the following subcategories:

   1. Movies that are about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

   2. Movies that are about the C.I.A.

      1. …where the C.I.A. is good

      2. …where the C.I.A. is bad

   3. Movies that are about vague American misadventures in the Middle East

   4. Movies that are about new regimes of policing, surveillance, and security

3. Movies that use alien invasion or possibly supernatural destructive force as a 9/11 stand-in

4. Movies that are about 9/11 but process it as mainly being about planes and/or airports

5. Superhero movies

6. ‘90s movies that are about 9/11, somehow

The first part of this series (which you are reading now) will focus on categories one and two, arguing that movie that are specifically about 9/11 are poor candidates for 9/11 Godzilla, and movies about the Global War on Terror are more properly though of as “post-9/11” movies than as “9/11 movies” per se.

Category One: Movies that are specifically about 9/11 or its immediate aftermath

Includes: United 93, 9/11, World Trade Center, Reign Over Me, Remember Me

The most obvious type of “9/11 movie” is any movie that is specifically about the events of September 11, 2001, or that use those events as an important plot point. And yet, for the purposes of our more narrow exercise--which is, fundamentally, asking the question: “What is the Godzilla of 9/11?”--they are probably the least likely candidates.

On the one hand: they are quite literally about 9/11. On the other hand, realist 9/11 fiction (or semi-fictionalization) may be too straightforwardly about what happened on September 11, 2001 to be about 9/11, the psychic/discursive hyperobject. A movie like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center tells us very little about what 9/11 “means”--only that it happened and was memorialized in relatively conventional ways.¹ Even United 93, probably the only movie in this category that reaches the “decent” threshold, is more interested in factitious recreation of events than investigating meaning.² The rest are not really even worth commenting on, except that some subscribers may be interested to note that Reign Over Me features a number of scenes involving Adam Sandler teaching Don Cheadle how to play Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2.

The sole exception in this category, I think, is the Robert Pattinson movie Remember Me, which uses 9/11 in such a strange and counterintuitive manner that it demands our attention. Here’s Richard Lawson’s contemporary summary, though you can also watch the YouTube video embedded above:

Everything is hunkydory for most of the film. Two young sexys — Bobby Patentleather, crazy Claire from Lost — meet cute during college in the gray whirlwind of New York. They battle past sadnesses, mean daddies, and cigarette addictions on their course to true love. They get married and the Vampyr heads off to his first day of grownup man work. He goes up and up in an elevator and everyone in the audience is saying "My, that's an awfully tall building, where does he work exactly?" And then, can you guess it?

9/11.

Edward Pattinson dies of 9/11 at the very end of Remember Me and all the film's happiness goes with him. This is their shocker! It's like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had featured just a few more vampire sexpots. And if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had used a national tragedy as an opportunistic, zam-bang! instant-meaning hook at the end, rather than throughout the whole book.

Writing a script in which you unexpectedly kill off your teen romance-movie lead in 9/11 in the last seconds is the kind of narrative sociopathy that I have no choice but to respect, and convincing an entire cast, crew, and studio to go along with it is a feat of conviction and coordination that demands unbridled admiration. The insanity of the ending is so pronounced that probably the main way that 9/11 is remembered online is via people discovering and posting about the movie on Twitter and TikTok. But does that make a candidate for a 9/11 Godzilla? To be honest, I don’t know, because I find the choice of ending to be so strange and terrible I can’t even locate meaning in it--it defies any attempt at interpretation. All I can do is move on.

Category Two: Movies that are “about 9/11” to the extent that they are about “the Global War on Terror” literally or metaphorically

Includes: Hurt Locker (subcategory 2a), Fair Game (subcategory 2b.i), Zero Dark Thirty (subcategory 2b.i), Body of Lies (subcategory 2b.ii), The Report (subcategory 2b.ii), The Kingdom (subcategory 2c), Kingdom of Heaven (subcategory 2c), Syriana (subcategory 2c), Eagle Eye (subcategory 2d)

One of the most important (and revealing) questions raised by Rachel’s shitpost is whether or not “9/11 movies” have to specifically be about (in whatever sense) the immediate experience of 9/11 or whether any movie (literally or metaphorically) about the Global War on Terror that was kicked off by the attacks counts as “a 9/11 movie.” This by far the largest category on the list, and by volume of decent movies the “best” category. But are these “9/11 movies”?

Subcategory 2a: Movies that are about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Take as an example the Chris Hemsworth movie 12 Strong, which describes itself, a bit presumptively, as “the declassified true story of the horse soldiers.” The movie opens with its characters watching the 9/11 attacks on their televisions before getting sent to Afghanistan, and even has Michael Shannon saying, improbably, about Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth-largest city in Afghanistan, “if we don’t take that city, the World Trade Center’s just the beginning.” But 12 Strong isn’t interested in the feeling of terror or the guilt of survivorship except insofar as those are convenient triggers for the violent vengeance (and weepy camaraderie) that are the movie’s real subjects.³ In that sense it’s not a 9/11 movie in the way Godzilla is a bomb movie--rather, it’s a prototypical GWOT movie, and that distinction seems important to make.

In truth, among the main reasons that we don’t really have a “9/11 Godzilla” is that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq--incompetent and misguided failures that they were--very quickly became much bigger national tragedies than the attack that was their proximate cause, and therefore much more prominent occupants of American psychic space. (And, further, we already have well-worn tropes and genres for processing and propagandizing wars that don’t require metaphorization.) You could argue, if you were feeling a little cheeky, that the real Godzilla of 9/11 was, say, cable-news coverage of the invasion of Iraq. But I don’t think you can call Green Zone or Lone Survivor or Three Kings⁴ or Jarhead “9/11 movies,” even if they are movies that could only emerge from the very specific war-humping post-9/11 context.

Subcategory 2b: Movies that are about the C.I.A.

Subcategory 2b is, similarly, distinctly post-9/11, and it is certainly very interesting⁵ how prominently the C.I.A. featured in Hollywood product following the attacks. But generally, these are either contemporary espionage thrillers with updated post-9/11 political context (like Body of Lies, which wins the “biggest disappointment given the people involved” award) or Issue Movies made in a time where a suspiciously large number of Issues involved the C.I.A. in one capacity or other (Fair Game and The Report, to name two). These movies reflect the time and place when they were made, but are in general not “about” 9/11, even if the attacks loom large as historical background.

The only movie that might count for our purposes--and essentially the only “decent” movie out of the bunch on a formal level--is Zero Dark Thirty, which is a well-made and extremely evil movie. I leave it up to the reader to decide if “evil” is a disqualifying or symptomatic quality for a hypothetical “9/11 Godzilla.”

Subcategory 2c: Movies that are about vague American misadventures in the Middle East

The other two subcategories have somewhat better claim to “9/11 movie” status, if only because they tend to be more about post-9/11 moods and ideas than about specific events. Subcategory 2c contains most of the movies in which Hollywood tries to articulate “our” (that is, “the West’s”) relationship to “the Middle East” (or “Islam”) and place 9/11 in some kind of political-historical context, though admittedly the context is usually at the level of “addled forum poster” (Peter Berg’s tremendously insane The Kingdom⁶) or “history-book grandpa” (Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven). Even when the provided context rises to the level of, say, “NYRB subscriber” (Stephen Gaghan’s great Syriana), though, it’s still a stretch to describe it as “a 9/11 movie.” In fact, part of the point of these movies is to (however clumsily) de-emphasize 9/11 as the kind of singular event that requires a popular genre film to collectively process.

Subcategory 2d: Movies that are about new regimes of policing, surveillance, and security

The movies of subcategory 2d probably have the best case of all GWOT movies as being “9/11 movies” of the kind we’d want to consider “potential 9/11 Godzillas.” In general, they’re not docudramas focused on accuracy or didactic issue movies or examinations of the choices and actions of elite politicians, bureaucrats, or Tier One Operators--they’re about the state of ordinary life under the constant surveillance and aggressive policing that was cemented as policy by 9/11.

The problem is twofold: One, the movies are not very good, and two, these themes had already been explored adroitly in movies like The Conversation, which was made in 197 freakin’ 4. (Even the best movie about these subjects to be released after 9/11, Minority Report, had finished filming well before 9/11.) It’s not that the Patriot Act wasn’t a terrible new infringement on privacy or freedom, but it represented a change in degree, not in kind, and therefore not ultimately a great source of thematic material for a 9/11 Godzilla.

Join us in the next edition of this newsletter as we: Examine 9/11 movies that feature airplanes and airports; investigate Steven Spielberg’s post-9/11 run; situate the superhero movie; and, everyone’s favorite, Remember Some 90s Movies, this time in the context of 9/11.

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1. It’s true that the absence of inquiry in a movie like World Trade Center tells us a lot, but you don’t really need to watch a two hour movie about Michael Peña and Nicolas Cage being trapped in rubble to understand that American discourse completely departed from reality for several years after the attacks.

2. Though, again, repetition compulsion on an industrial scale could be revealing about “meaning” in its own way.

3. 12 Strong may not be a “9/11 movie” but its emphasis on 9/11 and the immediate aftermath, in a movie made 17 years into the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, is telling--in some sense the movie is an exercise in nostalgia for the immediate post-9/11 surge in nationalism and the brief window where invasion and occupation could be argued with a straight face as just and purposeful.

4. A friendly reader pointed out after publication that Three Kings came out in 1999. Sorry for its inclusion… but also a telling mistake that we can cover when we get to Category Six!

5. 👁️

6. The Kingdom, in which Jamie Foxx, Jason Bateman, and Jennifer Garner investigate a terrorist attack on an American compound in Saudi Arabia, is a truly wild document of its time--watching it is a bit like striking up a conversation about politics with a stranger at a bar, where some promising points of righteous overlap eventually give way to you just nodding noncommittally with your eyebrows raised in the hopes it will be over soon. Berg (who also did subcategory 2a movie Lone Survivor) is a pretty good director of action scenes, though.