In an argument I was having some years ago, I said that if, on 9/11, you weren’t in New York City, Washington DC, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, or waiting for someone who was, I didn’t really care about your response to that event. Arrogant? You bet. But as Paul Fussell said when writing about Hiroshima, proximity to disaster absolutely determines your attitude towards it. And it can make the opinions of those who weren’t near seem dismissible because they weren’t formed by experience. I’ve talked to plenty of people who weren’t anywhere near the murders on 9/11 who have loved Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. But I can’t pretend to care about the reactions of those who don’t. Twenty-three years later, it remains the greatest piece of art anyone in any medium has produced about 9/11 or, to be precise, about how it invaded the soul of anyone who lived near it.
This piece originally appeared in the publication formerly known as Salon.
“But who can take a dream for truth?”
-- Robert Browning
Spike Lee can. Lee's latest film, 25th Hour, which got lost in the glut of prestige Christmas releases, climaxes with a dream that has so much emotional conviction, so much faith in the possibility of still being able to live a good life in America, that you’d have to be a complete cynic to think he’s putting one over on us. The movie is both a lament for the chances at a good life that we--individually and as a nation--have let slide and a profession of thanks for the chances that still exist. And yet that thanks is couched in a profound awareness of fragility. That fragility is apparent in the shot that closes the credit sequence--a view of the Manhattan skyline with the ghostly twin beams of light that emanated from ground zero six months after the attack. Never before has the city looked so stark, so impermanent against the nighttime sky, as if it were some magnificent set that had been erected for the camera and would be collapsed and put into storage when the director had the shot.
9/11 is referred to directly only a few times in 25th Hour, and yet the entire movie is overshadowed by it. Nothing I’ve seen or read—nothing--understands what it felt like to live in New York City after Sept. 11 the way 25th Hour does. By the time the movie gets to its closing line—"This life came so close to not happening”--those of us who lived in the city that fall are likely experiencing what we felt in our bones during those days, amazed that anyone got it on-screen with such uncanny accuracy. And maybe even more amazed that Lee was the one to do it.
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