"World Trade Center"

I've been doing a lot of thinking. Trying to figure out exactly what it is that deeply disturbs me with regard to the movie "World Trade Center," besides the obvious. I don't like when I can't pinpoint, and then articulate, how I feel, what I believe, and why. And when it comes to September 11th, I kind of...just can't . I can't wrap my brain around it; I can't compartmentalize it. I cry whenever it comes up, but my heart and my brain are like, suspended, desperately trying to make ANY kind of sense and/or peace with it. I think about the day, which I can still picture exactly in my mind, and I can't believe that it was a day that I lived, the worst day of my entire life bar none, but so, so much worse for so many others. I can't believe that day wasn't a movie. So for it to BE a movie...I just don't understand it. I can't understand it. I really would like to. But I can't. I see commercials, and it's like, "NO, this isn't right, it wasn't a soft-lens montage set to a Coldplay song -- which, does anyone else find it REALLY inapropriate that it's the same song that was in the "King Kong" commercials, and no, I'm not trying to be funny -- it was REAL. There were people jumping out of those buildings. My cousin got blood on his shirt that fell from the sky. My friend had a memorial service for a man whose body was never found.

I know this is true of every historical event that has been made into a movie, but this is just too soon. I'm sure there are good intentions from the people who made the movie, but I just don't get it. You want to donate money to the families? Make another movie and donate to them from that! The movie needs to be made because the heroes' stories need to be told? Why? Why now? Why like this?

It's just too soon to be trying to package that monstrous day away like that. It's too big, it's just too much.And why are movies about September 11th getting made before we can even get a memorial? What is THAT?

Someone was saying the other day -- I forget who, I'm sorry -- that s/he hated how every time something happened on the news now, it has a "title," like the thwarted airline attacks last week. Not a day had gone by, and it was "Terror in the Skies!" It's not "Terror in the Skies!" It's a day of horror that thankGodfully wasn't. How long passed after the towers fell before September 11th became "9/11" and worst of all, "911!" You know? I understand that as human beings we need to deal, but sometimes life just throws something really freakishly large and unwieldy at us, and much as we'd like to, we just can't slap a bow and a catchphrase on it and tuck it into storage. Life doesn't work that way, and for us to presume otherwise is horrifyingly dangerous. Just seeing "World Trade Center" in quotes like that -- it just looks wrong.

So those are my thoughts. But what I really wanted to do was link to this essay, because it's amazing. I read Tomato Nation before the attacks, and I credit Sars (the writer) with, not quite singlehandedly but almost, getting me back into the city after September 11th. I spent the day trapped there, thinking I was literally never going home again, because I was trapped on an island that was under attack, and the second I stepped into Queens after getting off the 59th Street Bridge, I wanted to literally kiss the ground. The idea of going BACK to the city seemed just, like, I couldn't begin to fathom it. I was paralyzed with fear. But Sars's essay, knowing she was still living in the city despite the attacks, and she'd been up close to the Towers (I was in midtown) was -- not comforting, exactly, but encouraging. Between that and her advice column...she has an advice section, and there were SO many people writing in just like, "What do I do? How do I deal with this?" and she got outside herself, her own trauma, to help other people, and to basically say, "We survived, and we're in this together, and I don't know HOW we're going to get through it, but we are." And one day, she quoted "The Shawshank Redemption": "Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'." Something about that...it was like a needle pricking through the paralysis. I went back to work the next day.

Maybe this movie will be healing for some. Maybe it will be healing for many. But my initial reaction, and still my reaction after thinking, and reading, and digesting, is that it is just too soon for such a polish to be put on that day. There hasn't even been another Tuesday, September 11th since 2001. I just think that maybe we're too anxious to literally and figuratively put that day on the shelf, and I don't think we can, or should. Not yet.