[Marxism] David Walsh reviews Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews
Oliver Stone?s World Trade Center: a crude and dishonest work
By David Walsh
12 August 2006

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World Trade Center, directed by Oliver Stone, screenplay by Andrea Berloff

Five years after the fact, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New 
York City and Washington, DC, remain largely uninvestigated. The most 
critical questions surrounding events that supposedly ?changed everything? 
continue to go unanswered and even unaddressed.

Oliver Stone?s World Trade Center, following in the wake of United 93 
(directed by Paul Greenglass), does not deign to approach any of the 
troubling issues surrounding September 11. On the contrary, Stone?s work is 
artistically crude and politically dishonest.

The film follows two Port Authority policemen, John McLoughlin (played by 
Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña), who are ordered on the 
morning of September 11 to help with the evacuation of the first World 
Trade Center tower to be struck and end up buried in rubble themselves. For 
the greater portion of the film we see McLoughlin and Jimeno, in pain and 
speaking to one another, stuck in the tons of wreckage of the massive 
skyscrapers.

At one point in Stone?s film, President George W. Bush shows up on a 
television screen. ?The resolve of our great nation is being tested, but 
make no mistake,? he asserts, ?we will show the world we will pass the 
test.? New York City?s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani makes a brief appearance. 
Horrified television viewers around the world watch the event.

Much of the film cuts between the two trapped men and their distraught 
wives and families in suburban New York and New Jersey. Donna McLoughlin 
(Maria Bello), the wife of the 21-year veteran of the police force, has 
four children, one of whom accuses her of indifference because the family 
sits at home and waits for news. Eventually, Donna heads into Manhattan to 
find out her husband?s fate.

Jimeno?s wife, the younger Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), is five months 
pregnant. With her family and in-laws, she waits anxiously across the river 
in New Jersey. Given false information that her husband has been rescued, 
Allison and other family members rush to lower Manhattan, only to be told 
that Jimeno remains trapped in the ruins.

An ex-marine from Connecticut, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), changes into 
his old uniform and unofficially reports for duty at Ground Zero. 
Patrolling the site at night, he makes contact with Jimeno and McLoughlin, 
who are eventually brought to the surface by emergency workers risking 
their own lives in the process.

The real McLoughlin and Jimeno survived the ordeal, and the screenplay, by 
Andrea Berloff, is based on their accounts of the experience.

Stone has never been a serious artist. His ?good? films (Salvador, Platoon, 
Born on the Fourth of July, JFK) were not very good, unsubtle and 
bombastic, and his bad films (The Doors, Natural Born Killers, Any Given 
Sunday, Alexander) have simply been awful.

About Any Given Sunday, six years ago, I wrote: ?In any event, the final 
result is at once clichéd, impersonal and hysterical. Nearly everyone acts 
detestably throughout.? About Alexander, in 2005: ?Alexander tells us 
little about its central figure or the sort of society he emerged from or 
envisioned. Its goings-on are rather silly. It?s not at all clear what 
Stone is getting at, other than suggesting that conquering the world is 
exhausting and psychologically damaging work. He wants us to admire youth 
and heroism, but a sensibility that finds it difficult to distinguish 
between the exploits of Jim Morrison of The Doors and Alexander of Macedon 
may be lacking some fundamental ingredient.?

Berloff?s screenplay for World Trade Center, although based on facts, is 
cliché-ridden and contrived, and the direction follows suit. Even the 
opening banter among the Port Authority cops feels false. Certain moments 
are objectively moving, and the performers do their best, but the film is 
emotionally manipulative and maudlin. ?Is Daddy coming home?? asks 
Allison?s daughter at one point. ?They did what they had to do,? we are 
sternly told at another. Although no expense or theatrics have been spared, 
the condition of McLoughlin and Jimeno is never genuinely 
communicated?because the film, at its core, is deeply evasive and 
untruthful and this finds expression at every dramatic turning point.

Stone and his colleagues assert that World Trade Center is ?not a political 
film.? In a variety of interviews, the director has sounded this theme. 
?The beauty of my original premise was to take you inside the lives of 
these two men,? Stone told the Chicago Sun-Times. ?I wanted to narrow it 
down to two men and feel their fear, their strength and their courage. I 
thought this was a fresh way to purge our systems of this tragedy.?

In comments to the New York Times, the filmmaker went farther: ?It?s not 
about the World Trade Center, really. It?s about any man or woman faced 
with the end of their lives, and how they survive.?

The notion that this is merely a tribute to the courage and strength of 
individuals on a tragic day is absurd, and it?s doubtful that Stone 
believes it. If the work is simply about individual heroics, or how men and 
women face the end of their lives, why spend $63 million in recreating the 
rubble of the World Trade Center?

The filmmaker?s own view, which comes out from time to time, seems to be 
that September 11 was an extraordinary opportunity for national unity, 
which was hijacked by a crowd of neo-conservatives in the Bush 
administration: ?All I can say is that we had the sympathy of the world on 
that day. The rest of the world was with us. We had a right to pursue those 
murderers. We should have closed the circle. We didn?t need more and more 
terror, Constitutional breakdowns and more pain.? Iraq, he argues, like 
numerous leading Democrats, is the ?wrong war.?

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Stone had a more 
?left? take on the events. On October 6, 2001, at a New York Film Festival 
forum, he denounced the ?new world order? and asserted that ?the revolt of 
September 11th was about ?Fuck you! Fuck your order??? He suggested that 
those in the Arab world who celebrated the downing of the World Trade 
Center were reacting like those who had responded joyfully to the French 
and Russian revolutions. Stone also apparently drew a link between the 
attacks and the hijacking of the 2000 elections by the Bush camp, which he 
described as a confirmation of the demise of democracy.

To ascribe any degree of political legitimacy to the heinous attacks of 
September 11, in which 2,700 innocent human beings horribly lost their 
lives, was wrong and disoriented. Stone?s transformation into a 
manufacturer of patriotic myths is not an improvement. He asserts, ?Don?t 
pigeon-hole me; I change.? We feel that a lack of principles and any sense 
of political responsibility, however, are constants.

In any event, Stone, with whatever degree of consciousness, has made a 
highly political film. Granted, this takes a peculiar form. In World Trade 
Center, no effort has been made to provide the slightest historical or 
political context for the 9/11 attacks; on the contrary, Stone?s film is 
devoted to the principle of explaining nothing. The viewer, it is made 
clear, will know only what McLoughlin and Jimeno knew that day. Why is that 
an advantage? What is the point of art in that case? This was the premise 
of United 93, and it failed in that instance, too.

If sticking to the bare empirical facts, or claiming to do so, is a poor 
guideline for a historian or a journalist, it is nearly always fatal for an 
artist. Art exists to illuminate, to expand, to magnify. It lives or dies 
by the degree to which its imaginative and recreative powers are exercised, 
even in non-fiction or documentary?in those cases, the conscious 
intervention of the artist to arrange his or her material is perhaps all 
the more essential.

It is impossible to understand the smallest incidents of September 11 apart 
from their broader context. The film, of course, does not take this up, but 
the very unpreparedness of the city for such an attack led to the high 
death toll among firefighters in particular. The latter were unable to 
communicate with each other or the police. Firefighters in the World Trade 
Center?s north tower, for example, 121 of whom died, were never able to 
hear the order to evacuate because of faulty equipment?at a time when all 
the civilians who could possible have been reached were already out of the 
building.

Meanwhile, Rudolph Giuliani treated September 11 as one extended photo 
opportunity. As the WSWS has noted, the mayor ?did little other than appear 
repeatedly before the television cameras.? At the national commission 
hearings in May 2004, Giuliani was heckled by a number of relatives of 
those killed in the attack. (In a new book, as noted by the New York Times 
August 6, commission heads Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton admit that they 
failed to ?ask tough questions? of Giuliani out of fear of ?public 
anger??i.e., the right-wing media.)

The general social and socio-psychological situation is a fundamental fact 
for cinema; it has to saturate a given work. Stone?s film, however, 
portrays an American society without sharp contradictions. The better 
Hollywood films about World War II never painted such a false picture. Even 
the titles of some of the works, They Were Expendable, the ironic The Best 
Years of Our Lives, acknowledged difficulties and social discontent. In 
World Trade Center the myth of a nationally unified, harmonious America 
filters into the images and falsifies critical moments, including intimate 
ones.

Explicitly political elements are not missing either in this 
?non-political? film. A Sheboygan, Wisconsin, policeman, focused upon for 
some reason, calls the terrorists ?bastards.? The images of the ex-marine, 
Karnes, in his uniform, determinedly searching the smoking ruins are 
particularly loaded. Having come upon the trapped men, in the company of 
another marine, he shouts down to them, ?We are marines. We?re not leaving 
you. You are our mission.? Later in the film, Karnes looks straight ahead 
and menacingly avers, ?They?re gonna need some good men out there to avenge 
this.?

Stone?s work is thoroughly conformist and encourages various forms of 
backwardness. One shot stands out in particular: one of Allison?s in-laws 
on her knees, tearfully praying. The camera lingers on the woman, in 
Stone?s inimitable style, which consists of hitting the spectator over the 
head until he or she cries ?Uncle!? We are also treated twice to a vision 
of Jesus Christ, which apparently came to Jimeno in his obviously desperate 
circumstances.

Patriotism, militarism, religion, Bush and Giuliani: this is nothing for 
Stone to be proud of. The extreme right, however, thinks highly of World 
Trade Center. Reactionary columnist Cal Thomas termed the work ?one of the 
greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God 
Bless America films you will ever see.? L. Brent Bozell III, president of 
the right-wing Media Research Center and founder of the Parents Television 
Council, described World Trade Center as ?a masterpiece.? These comments 
strike one as a clutching at straws. It?s dubious, in fact, whether such an 
insincere film will have a significant impact on those who see it.

Parenthetically, the effort by Paramount on behalf of World Trade Center is 
a further repugnant instance of the Hollywood studios? knuckling under to 
the ultra-right. The Los Angeles Times reports that Paramount ?was so 
worried about Stone?s bomb-thrower reputation that the studio hired a media 
firm [Creative Response Concepts] that played a prominent role in various 
conservative causes, notably the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group that 
attacked Sen. John F. Kerry?s Vietnam record during the 2004 presidential 
campaign, to do outreach in the conservative community. Paramount also 
tried to avert a backlash in Washington by having screenings of the film 
and its trailer for members of Congress.?

Why has Stone made this film? As he says, he ?changes,? and it may very 
well be that his own confused, disoriented views are drifting generally to 
the right. The atmosphere of intimidation that followed the September 11 
attacks and which has never dissipated has clearly had an impact on an 
entire social layer, in Hollywood in particular. How many leading film 
figures have denounced the Bush administration for its criminal activities?

There is another issue, however, perhaps an even more troubling one, and 
not only associated with Stone?s evolution (although he may be particularly 
susceptible): the obsession with celebrity in the US, the desire to be in 
the limelight, the fear of isolation and disapproval. As we noted seven 
years ago, at the time of informer Elia Kazan?s honoring by the Academy 
Awards??In America, after all, if you are not an immense success, a star, 
you are nothing, a human zero.?

Stone has been wandering in the wilderness for a dozen years or more. 
Recent films, Alexander in particular, have not been successful in the US. 
Directing World Trade Center did not fall into his lap. As he admits, he 
campaigned for the job. Clearly, he felt, here was a chance to get back in 
the industry?s good graces, to return to the fold. And, by all appearances, 
the strategy has worked.

The filmmaker made a revealing comment in an interview with the New York 
Times, whose reporter noted that Paul Haggis (Crash) is directing an 
adaptation of former intelligence analyst Richard Clarke?s book, Against 
All Enemies, which took the Bush administration to task for its failings. 
?Asked if that weren?t the kind of film he might once have tried to tackle, 
Stone first scoffs: ?I couldn?t do it. I?d be burned alive.? Then he adds: 
?This [World Trade Center] is not a political film. That?s the mantra they 
handed me.? ?

How can anything worthwhile emerge from this type of cowardice and cynicism?

 


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