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think you have seen and heard it all about the events of September
11. These images — planes hitting the Twin Towers, people standing
shocked in the streets, firemen rushing into the buildings, the
two collapses, the dust, the chaos — have all been shown so
often on television that they no longer retain the power to shock.
Here's something you have not heard, but you will if you watch 9/11,
the astounding CBS documentary airing Sunday night: the sound of
human beings striking the sidewalk outside Tower One, as captured
by a cameraman at the FDNY command post in the lobby. Do you know
what a human body sounds like when it reaches the end of a fall
from the top of a 110-story building? Like what you imagine a Dumpster
sounds like dropped from that height.
You do not see the corpses. You do not have to. The sickening crashes
make the indescribable violence of that day, and all its pain, fresh.
9/11, which was fashioned from documentary footage shot by
Jules and Gedeon Naudet, one of whom was filming inside Tower One
with firemen, is not a pleasant film to watch. But like the first
25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, a necessary one, if only
to bear witness again to the incredible courage of New York firemen,
and to remind yourself why we fight.
"I think it's really important that we don't forget,"
CBS producer Susan Zirinsky told the press after a media-only screening
Monday night. "There's a war going on, and not everybody remembers
that every day."
The Naudet brothers set out to document the rookie year of Tony
Benetatos, a first-year New York fireman who had been assigned to
Engine 7, Ladder 1 a downtown fire company. "The idea was to
show a kid become a man in nine months," Jules says in 9/11.
They followed Benetatos all last summer, and we see the rookie wishing,
with a naiveté that breaks our post-September hearts, for
a really big fire. Narrator James Hanlon, a fireman from that company,
says in the film, "I look back to last summer, and it doesn't
seem to be a different time, it seems to be a different world."
Knowing what is to come ratchets up the pathos we feel watching
the firemen's easygoing summertime horseplay.
On the morning of September 11, Jules was filming the firemen working
on a gas leak downtown when he heard a plane fly low overhead. Quickly
he raised his camera, and captured the only known film of the first
plane hitting Tower One. He rushed to the scene, tagging along with
Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeiffer, who set up a command post in the
lobby of the burning skyscraper.
The footage from inside the lobby is new; no one has seen this before.
The glass has been blown out because, we are told, burning jet fuel
cascading down an elevator shaft caused a fireball. When Jules enters,
we hear a woman's scream. He explains in the film's narration that
that was a charred woman dying. He did not film her.
"Two people were on fire. The image was so terrible, I made
a decision not to film it," Jules said after Monday's screening.
"It's not something anybody should see, or want to see."
He said no gory footage was left out of 9/11 for reasons
of taste. Jules censored himself as he was shooting, he explained,
out of respect to the dead and dying.
Viewers will see what looks like chaos, as fire chiefs swirl around
the command post deciding how to fight the fire above them. This
is misleading, the Naudet brothers said. In fact, the chiefs were
doing exactly what they always do. On screen is Father Mychal Judge,
his face a mask of downward tension, spending the last minutes of
his life in the lobby, praying. Yet it is striking, even today,
to see the looks on the faces of the firemen as they prepare to
go up, or pace the lobby strategizing. They do not look scared.
Serious, yes. Grimly determined, certainly. Anxious, for sure.
But fearless. Absolutely fearless.
When Tower Two collapses, the lobby of the first tower goes pitch-black
with dust and grit. Amazingly, the firemen in Tower One do not understand
what has happened (but one back at the firehouse does; Gedeon's
camera captures him suiting up to rush down to the remaining tower
after he sees the first one go down). Chief Pfeiffer orders
all firemen out of Tower One on a hunch. He and Jules leave the
building only six to eight minutes before it collapses. They do
not learn that the second tower has already come down until the
smoke clears.
The rest you know from previous news footage, showing the purgatorial
ruin downtown became. The men of Engine 7, Ladder 1 regroup at their
firehouse to tend their wounds and weep for the dead. And to curse:
9/11 is probably the first time the f-word will have been
broadcast on prime-time network television. It peppers certain portions
of the film. Zirinsky defended leaving the profanity in the final
cut, saying it was necessary for the sake of historical accuracy.
"The language was rough, but the circumstances were rough,"
the producer said. "This is a living historical document. To
have wiped everything clean would have been to not let it live in
real time."
Miraculously, all of the firemen survived, providing a semblance
of a happy ending. The Naudets got more exclusive footage when the
firemen slipped them onto Ground Zero on September 12, to document
the initial search-and-rescue operation in the smoking rubble.
9/11 uses reflective comments by the firemen sparsely —
a wise decision, I think, because we've had six months to ponder
what it all means, and there is probably nothing new to be said
at this point. Yet the quotes the film does use are well chosen
(CBS warns viewers at the outset that the language is rough at times).
One fireman says of the event, "I just realized something I
always wanted to deny: just how evil evil can be." Another
one describes the unspeakable force of the collapses by saying the
only recognizable piece he recovered from the collapse of a 110-story
office building was half the plastic cover of a phone.
"The building collapsed to dust," he says.
The film not only testifies to the heroism of the firemen (Robert
De Niro, who introduces the film, calls them "good men who
did great things"), but more viscerally, it conveys the tornadic
physical violence of the attack. 9/11 is like watching an
explosion from the inside. It is not meant to explain the events
of September 11 in a comprehensive way, only to document what that
day was like for one New York firehouse. Jules Naudet told me that
the film is meant to be seen solely as a tribute to the firemen,
not as an argument for war.
Fair enough. But there is no better justification than the images
captured by the Naudet brothers for why the United States has unleashed,
and must continue to rain down, unshirted hell on radical Islam
and its supporters. And more Americans will likely watch this two-hour
presentation Sunday than any single program in recent memory. Good.
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