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A World in the Afterword

By Jan Curry (Reviewer)

World Trade Center
Directed by Oliver Stone
(Paramount Pictures, 2006)

New Yorker critic David Denby applauds Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, not only as a powerful celebration of courage and strength, but also as a personal "coming home" for "warrior" Stone after the odyssey from Salvador through Platoon to Born on the Fourth of July. Stone, in an interview with Edward Douglas for ComingSoon.net, says that it is neither a documentary nor cinema verité, but instead a building up, from a "chain of evidence"—consultation with the characters' real counterparts, their families, and the transcripts of Chuck Serieka and Dave Karns—to present "the tightly connected emotions of four characters." These include Port Authority police sergeant John McLoughlin and Officer Will Jimeno, who are trapped beneath layers of the first tower's rubble; and their wives, Donna and Allison, who are home, trying to make sense of the news and their husbands' conditions.

The screenplay was written by Andrea Berloff and the producer was Debra Hill, and the portrayals of the wives were far more multidimensional and complex than the usual Stone female archetypes, as Denby rightly points out. The two women have to struggle against significant males in their families to carve out how it is that they can respond to the horror, the fear, and the inability to communicate with their husbands. This in turn deepens the emotional connections, both between the spouses separated by the disaster, and between the two men, for a key to their own developing bond is the ways in which they talk to each other about their wives. At one point, Sergeant McLoughlin (though a man of few words) says to Officer Jimeno, "I have the right wife"; coming as it does amid the full spectrum of his images of the marriage—from banality to the touchingly nagging to rock-solid solidarity to admissions of losing touch—definitely resonated with me (a veteran of a twenty-one-year-old relationship to a Vietnam veteran). McLoughlin is the last of the two to be rescued, and he fights with all the remaining strength he can call up to bring out each word to Donna as he is being wheeled into surgery: "You ... kept ... me ... alive". The younger couple, Will and Allison, upon their reunion, go back and forth innumerable times, each insisting that their soon-to-be-born daughter receive the name the other had preferred. In short, the classic Stone technique of unfolding a giant event as experienced through a Jungian family-sized group is revisited in this 9/11 portrayal.

Moving beyond this micro-dimension, there are precious few references to those outside the foursome and their families, and those that are presented take on enormous weight through their scarcity—at least to those of us who are committed to tracing accurately the global impact and implications of 9/11. Among these, three stand out. Just after the towers are hit, we are shown splices of half a dozen places around the world in which people are being drawn to their televisions to see the unbelievable. At the remove of five years after the event, this segment can almost remind one of how much the global community shared the shock and sadness, later overshadowed by the regret for subsequent US foreign policy. Later in the film, there is a simple on-screen statement that the Trade Center victims included representatives from eighty-seven countries—a possible caution against the hunkered-down, xenophobic, "with us or against us" jingoism, which, as the current intelligence committee reports state, did more to encourage than discourage similar attacks in our future.

The lightning strike, however, is the disclosure in the film's afterword, however true to the real character's story, that one of the key rescuers went on to enlist for two tours in Iraq. This is the character Dave Karns, an ex-Marine who, upon hearing of the 9/11 attack, immediately travels from Connecticut to "Ground Zero," heads out into the rubble after the official search had been called off for the night, and is the one who actually locates Jimeno and McLoughlin. He is a paragon of determination, so driven as to have put on his uniform for the search, so dedicated to military service that when asked by a fellow rescuer for a shorter name for quicker communication, he answers, "Sergeant Karns." Extreme or not, he is validated in that he is the key human link for the trapped officers, the very difference between their lives and their deaths. In the Douglas piece, when asked about this Marine character's statement that the attacks were "an act of war," Stone answers that the film "is accurate to every single person that was in it, and their emotions are naked, sometimes with things we don't like, but we gotta live with," and that if we consider where we were on 9/12 and where we are now, "you have to wonder that something went wrong." Nicholas Cage, who played McLoughlin, answered that to "attach" politics to the film would "take away" from the true meaning of the film. We might ask of Stone: Why not include a real character's view that any connections between 9/11 and al-Qaeda to Iraq were entirely fabricated to further the murderous oil agenda? But what we ask of Stone is not as important as what we ask of ourselves and the people we elect.