The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 9/15/06 Section: The Arts

Perhaps more than any event in US history, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 more closely resembled a Hollywood blockbuster than anything we could expect to occur in reality. The instant that first plane crashed into the WTC tower, it crashed its way into a disjunctive space in the American consciousness, one whose locus lay somewhere between the limits of the fantastic and the bounds of what we actually believed could happen.  For this reason, the attacks will always be more than themselves, carrying a surplus meaning that allows for a dangerous re-appropriation of their symbolic potency, a fact that has been made only too clear in the five years that have followed, one fraught with half-justified wars, assaults on domestic freedoms, legitimization of torture, and a devastating paradigmatic shift in mainstream thought. Like any major event whose implications are infinitely nebulous, the 9/11 attacks can only achieve a totality of meaning through their incorporation into narrative. That is to say, by linking the events to a series of other events, the attacks and the events that precede and follow them interrelate in such a way that they appear to make some sort of sense. This act is always ideological, of course, and one only needs to look to the way in which the Bush administration has attempted to join the attacks with the Iraqi war to see this. The attempt to use 9/11 as a causal agent for the invasion of Iraq works twofold; it recasts 9/11 as a symbol of global terrorism, regardless of specific attackers, and it justifies Iraq as a morally and politically necessary reaction to this symbolic injury. The most recent, and thus far, most sweeping, attempt to explicitly narrativize the events of September 11th comes in the form of ABC’s ‘docudrama’ The Path to 9/11, which aired this week on the eve and day of the five-year anniversary of the attacks, and drew an estimated thirteen million viewers. The series aired amidst attacks from both sides of the political spectrum, although most of the controversy centered on the series’ perceived anti-Clinton bias and what many viewed as neo-con chest thumping.  What’s far more important, however, than simple red versus blue political stumping, is the way in which the series recasts 9/11 formally, how it builds dramatic fiction out of factual circumstances, and ultimately, how its status as a dramatization makes it the only way to create a sensible truth out of real events.

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