It seems inevitable that with every passing year, we give less thought to 9/11. It’s not clear that there is anything new to say and the silent artillery of time must gradually do its work. Although the event was on TV and the live coverage is still easily available, we do not wish to relive it. It’s not exactly that we lack either civic rituals or public spirit, but more that there is no national leadership, and we lack works of art. We are a mass media society, so our Netflix queues are full and the virtual public space is somehow empty.

　　It was not always so, or it didn’t have to be—there have been attempts to remedy the problem. The first major movie about 9/11 was United 93 (2006). Director Paul Greengrass, famous for Bourne thrillers, got an Oscar nomination as Best Director, won a BAFTA as director, and got another nomination for the script, along with a nomination from the Writer’s Guild Award. Critic Associations around the country added their accolades and the American and British Film Institutes named it among the films of the year, as did many major newspapers. The movie opened at the Tribeca Film Festival and grossed $76 million worldwide.

　　United 93 is still today the only prestigious artistic statement on the defining event of the twenty-first century so far, the biggest success in a small genre. What can explain it? The movie tried to document the events on that flight and at air control in real-time, over 100 minutes. Its quite moving, because we know the terrible outcome and we get to see how confused everyone was, civil and military authorities both. It’s also competent technically, but its not a great movie, certainly not deserving of such accolades, and unequal to the national crisis.

　　Civilian and Military Control

　　Greengrass is unique among directors for documenting the crises of modern society, especially deadly failures of authority. Half his movies dramatize such incidents, from his debut, Resurrected (1989), about a soldier accused of deserting in the Falklands War, and Bloody Sunday (2002), about terrorism in Ireland, to Captain Philips (2012), about Somali pirates hijacking a cargo ship, and 22 July (2018), about the massacre of teenagers in Norway. His upcoming The Lost Bus is about the deadliest wildfire in California, from back in 2018.

　　Greengrass wrote the script for United 93 from the 9/11 Commission Report and he seems to take the official side of the story very earnestly. Everyone involved is shown to act from the best motives, seemingly competently, but they are all overwhelmed by unprecedented, unimaginable events for which no plans had been made. The characterization for the most part insists on professionalism, the reconstruction of the drama of air control is impressive, and there is every attempt to avoid pinning blame on any official or institution.

　　Yet 9/11 happened. I believe the success of United 93 with elites, much greater than with ordinary Americans, who largely avoided it, has to do with the way it exonerates everyone in authority by conflating ordinary citizens and officials on the ground. Both experienced the same day, and had many of the same feelings, but treating them together implies a total abandonment of responsibility. It is regrettable to even mention such things, but we should never forget that not even the highest officials in the FBI or CIA felt the need to resign for that terrible failure; no important politician asked for such resignations. Perhaps at that moment, elites became officially independent of their appointed tasks, including defending the peace of the American people.

　　United 93 does offer us one vision of an official in leadership: Ben Sliney, who plays himself in the movie, as do some other officials. His first day on the job was 9/11. The job was FAA National Operations Manager. His defining act was ordering a National Ground Stop. More than 4,000 domestic and international flights had to land at the nearest airport. The skies were suddenly empty. He gave the order after the third hijacked plane hit its target, the Pentagon. The fourth plane had already been hijacked. It seems useless in retrospect, but it may have been the right thing to do at that time, when, it seems, no one knew anything about what was happening. Sliney’s justification is striking: We’re at war with someone.

　　On the other hand, political leadership in United 93 is only conspicuous by its absence. There are scenes where military figures are asking for authorization to shoot down hijacked airliners, but cannot reach the president; instead, they must try to get authorization from the vice president. In turn, military authority is not different from civilian authority; it’s all about administration among people who like each other but cannot do anything. Perhaps this is the impotence of bureaucracy; no one makes any decisions; everyone is trapped in a command room instead. If we waive sympathy for a moment, it’s an existentialist play about the absurdity of a freedom that deprives us of action.

　　For most of the movie, we see our fellow citizens prepared to act the part of lambs in a slaughter. Only at the end are they free to behave like human beings who deliberate and act together.

　　Authority among us is delegated from the people to the politicians, and in the case of executive authority, everything flows from the president. But in practice, this means there are enormous bureaucracies; everything is institutionalized. The military officials we see accordingly ask each other and their civilian leaders about the rules of engagement. But they are also unprepared themselves. When they do manage to scramble jets outside DC, they’re flying in the wrong direction. The jets are disarmed, moreover, and the officials contemplate having pilots ram commercial airliners and eject. The military part of the movie is mercifully brief and deals with such mad details, but they are muted by the overpowering fear of that moment.

　　The Demands of Art

　　Since all earthly power is lost, let’s talk about religion. Out of 100 minutes, the last 20 deal with the plane crash of flight United 93. It’s almost an entirely different movie and it starts with the passengers realizing their situation and deciding to fight back. At that moment, we see a woman on the Airfone promising her husband to quit her job to raise her children if she survives. She is hopeful, even as she cries. The explanation is that action is imminent. She says: “A bunch of the guys have got together and they said they’re gonna try and take over the plane.” Another woman prays the Lord’s prayer. Then the men move.

　　The immediate prompt is a terrifying drop from cruising altitude. Men on the Airfone learn and spread the news that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. The movie’s hero, Todd Beamer, famous for saying “Let’s roll,” tells the passengers that the terrorists are on a suicide job. He instructs the stewardesses to get anything that could possibly be used as weapons from the back of the plane, and he gets everyone ready to follow him—in the deliberation, they also find a potential pilot onboard—and he leads the charge. Beamer’s leadership is recognized, though even here, it is somewhat understated, as though he is simply giving the others a nudge to do what they naturally wanted to do anyway.

　　Unlike the previous bureaucratic paralysis, here we see the American fighting spirit and the eagerness to associate to act. Indeed, at this point, everything turns into an action movie, but this time there’s no Hollywood star and our characters fail to overcome all odds. They lose something precious, their lives, but achieve something noble in preventing another terror attack. Reality asserts its rights against our wishes. For a moment, considering the outcome of such impressive daring, we might understand the terrible moral failure of our elites.

　　The character of the conflict between the terrorists and the passengers on that flight is unique in America, because all the adult citizens were disarmed by the government. This goes beyond the government guaranteeing that only terrorists are armed. Whats at stake is morality and intelligence, not just technical matters and instruments like guns. For most of the movie, we see our fellow citizens prepared to act the part of lambs in a slaughter. Only at the end are they free to behave like human beings who deliberate and act together. United 93 only conveys this context by portraying the paralysis of authority, and the loneliness of the passengers, who, abandoned, have to face death. The administrative effort to rationalize behavior since the airplane terrorism of the 70s led to this new situation in which individual action is an exception to the rules, comparable in that sense with terrorism and perhaps compatible only with it. The passengers were fighting for their lives and, in a sense, for America, but their activity has the character of breaking the law, no doubt involving multiple federal felonies.

　　All told, weve not had much impressive art about 9/11, and ultimately the reason is that artists didn’t want to side with the people, designate villains, and dramatize the political events that most urgently invited artistic treatment, a righteous populism, and a reevaluation of the claims to authority of an entire elite class. United 93 comes remarkably close to greatness in its juxtaposition of helpless professionals and daring citizens but ultimately fails. One reason for the failure is a softheaded humanitarianism that fails to describe the human phenomena in order to avoid polarization or judgment, even when it comes to life and death. The absurdity of compassion and empathy as moral ideals becomes obvious when we see the results among the passengers of United 93.

　　Still, Greengrass, an Englishman, is to be commended for a daring that Hollywood, in general, lacked. Generations of supposedly daring, transgressive liberal artists suddenly became conformists as elites feared getting on the wrong side of the dark passions the terror attack aroused in American hearts. The best of America has therefore not been shown to the country when it was most needed. Perhaps the next generation will tell these stories and recover both patriotism and the requirements of political knowledge, which Americans were once rightly proud of.