Inside the Inferno
The 9/11 documentary.

March 7, 2002 8:35 a.m.

ou 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.