Remembering the World Trade Center

It doesn’t take long to get chills watching Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.” The film begins with the red numerals of an alarm clock coming into focus. Port Authority cop John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) wakes up, takes a shower, checks the kids and leaves for work as dawn breaks over the Manhattan skyline. On his car radio we hear, “It’s Tuesday...”

For me, that’s all it took. I thought: “Yes, it was a Tuesday.”

Tuesday
That Tuesday I was spending what I thought was the last day of a week-long trip visiting my sister and friends in Detroit. My sister’s marriage was just two years old; her first son was just two months old. We were going to a Tigers game that night at Comerica Park and the next morning I would fly back to Seattle. I was already thinking ahead to Seattle.

I was sitting in their breakfast nook reading Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free-Press when my brother-in-law, Eric, who had just left for work, returned to stick his head in the front door. “You might want to turn on CNN,” he said. “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.”

I assumed a single-engine. Hadn’t that happened to the Empire State Building?

When I turned on CNN and saw the damage and listened to the commentators, it became apparent that this was more than a single-engine. But how could a commercial plane be so off-course? How could you miss the World Trade towers? The eventual answer was: you couldn’t.

NBC VIDEO WTC movie 'superb,' says columnist Aug. 9: In Touch Weekly’s Tom O’Neil talks to MSNBC-TV’s Norah O’Donnell about “World Trade Center,” the new Oliver Stone 9/11 movie that opened Wednesday. MSNBC

At one point I went upstairs to wake my sister — I had the baby monitor and the baby was waking— and when we all returned to the living room my sister, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, said, “I thought you said it flew into one tower.” I nodded. “So why are both on fire?”

I couldn’t figure it out. Then came news of the Pentagon and rumors of the Capitol. We’re under attack, I thought. When the towers collapsed, I thought: This is irreversible.

“I don’t think we’re going to the Tigers game tonight,” my sister said.

“I don’t think I’m flying out of here tomorrow,” I said.

All the while I kept thinking the same thought a lot of people were thinking: It feels like a movie.

The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of landmarks
While it was standing, the movies had never been particularly kind to the World Trade Center. It’s not so much that Hollywood tried to destroy the towers in movies like “Meteor,” “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact”; it’s the kind of movies the World Trade Center generally appeared in.

Other landmarks got good films. The Empire State Building played pivotal roles in classics like the original “King Kong,” “An Affair to Remember” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” Mt. Rushmore got its close-up in Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest.” The Statue of Liberty? From the histrionic ending of “Planet of the Apes” to the battle royale in “X-Men,” the Statue’s done it all. It’s the first thing immigrants see upon arriving in this country (“Godfather Part II”) and the last thing Americans see when leaving to fight abroad (HBO’s “Band of Brothers”).

The World Trade Center, in comparison, has appeared in crap. Not the original Kong but the much-panned 1976 re-make in which Kong leers, and Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges) cheers wildly from one tower while Kong kills soldiers atop the other. Looking at its list of credits, it’s obvious the World Trade Center needed a better agent: “The Wiz,” “The Squeeze,” “The Dream Team,” “Big Business,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Godzilla,” “End of Days,” and a host of forgettable sequels: “Home Alone 2,” “Die Hard: With a Vengeance,” “American Pie 2,” and “Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.” The towers, interchangeable and rarely pivotal, stayed in the background. They were the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of landmarks.

Let’s face it: before 9/11, the World Trade Center was never particularly beloved. “A standing monument to architectural boredom,” said one critic in the early 1970s. “Two huge buck teeth” blighting the Manhattan skyline, said Norman Mailer. Earlier skyscrapers tended to end like church spires, pointing towards the heavens — the Empire State Building is even called “The Cathedral of the Skies” — but tapering in means losing valuable real estate. Thus modern skyscrapers’ blocky shape. The World Trade Center pointed at nothing. It just stood there. It just was.

The towers came to represent not architectural beauty like the Empire State Building, nor the liberty of the Statue, but blunt financial power. “Greed is good,” Gordon Gekko famously says in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” and so the film begins with morning shots of the Manhattan skyline, with the World Trade Center front and center. “I have a head for business and a bod for sin,” Tess McGill says in Mike Nichols’ “Working Girl,” but this is a feel-good movie, and so in the single-shot opening, the focus is on another working girl, the Statue of Liberty, who gets her 360-degree close-up. The twin towers are once again relegated to the background.

Deeper meaning
Now those very background shots take our breath away. God, the World Trade Center towered, didn’t it? It towered over even the New York City skyline, which towers over the world. Many cities have had one such tall building, but only New York, New York — the town so nice they named it twice — had the audacity to throw up two. Now that they’re gone, the skyline doesn’t look the same. Now that the buck teeth have been knocked out, we keep probing their absence with our tongue.

Certain scenes in pre-9/11 movies seem like bad foreshadowing. “Pushing Tin” from 1999 begins with a jet airliner banking toward the World Trade Center on a sky-blue day. Bennet Miller’s 1998 documentary, “The Cruise,” about existential New York City tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, includes this Levitch monologue: “Sometimes I like to spin between the two towers. You know, like spin around and make yourself dizzy? And then you look up, and it looks like the buildings are falling on top of you.”

9/11 gave the World Trade Center the deeper meaning it never had in life, and Hollywood’s initial reaction was to remove it from any unreleased movie. “Zoolander”? Gone. “Spider-Man”? Gone. The towers now had too much meaning. We couldn’t bear looking at them.

Slowly, though, the World Trade Center began to reappear in our movies, and as it did, with its newer, deeper meaning, it showed up in only the best films. Halfway through Jacques Perrin’s beautiful documentary, “Winged Migration,” there it is, gloriously, one of many man-made landmarks birds pass by in their journeys. It’s the focus of the entire eighth episode of Ric Burns’ comprehensive “New York” documentary, and the two exclamation points punctuating the end of last year’s best film: Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.”

It’s also the centerpiece of the Naudet brothers’ stunning documentary “9/11,” which aired on CBS in the spring of 2002. The two French brothers were filming a year in the life of a probationary New York City firefighter stationed near the towers. On the morning of September 11 a crew was investigating a potential neighborhood gas leak when a plane soared overhead — something you never hear in Manhattan — and the firefighters looked up. Cameraman Jules Naudet followed their gaze and caught the only known footage of the first plane flying into the north tower. Most footage of the second plane flying into the south tower was taken from a distance by news organizations already at the scene of a disaster. Naudet’s footage is taken from the ground, by people in the middle of an ordinary day, doing an ordinary job, and the plane attacks a peaceful setting. It’s the worst violation imaginable. As you watch, rage courses through you all over again.

MORE FROM MOVIE OPINIONS

‘Princess’ avoids the elephant in the room

‘Princess’ avoids the elephant in the room Oscar season nears, but where’s the buzz? Hollywood’s vampire obsession may bleed out Does ‘Precious’ stereotype big black women? Newsweek: The problem with ‘Precious’ When it comes to stardom, Clooney has smarts ‘Saw’ franchise creates buzz, but is it any good? Remembering concert documentaries that rock theGrio: ‘This Is It’ a final act fit for a king Best actress category looks slim for Oscars   Add Movie opinions headlines to your news reader: