At 6am on the morning of September 12 2001, my alarm went off to the RNZ Morning Report theme and the voice of newsreader Hewitt Humphrey saying something about “the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbour”.
Instantly wide awake, I went straight to the lounge and switched on CNN1.
For me — and I imagine many others — 9/11 is the defining geopolitical moment of my lifetime. We watched the Berlin Wall come down, Mandela walk to freedom, but this was the moment when I realised that the unthinkable could happen. That anything was possible.
For years since then, the first thing I do when I wake up is reach for my phone to check the world is in the same state I left it when I went to sleep the night before.
We live in the world that 9/11 made. Many decent and rational people were driven mad by what happened that day, propelled towards hatred and authoritarianism and ever-deeper rabbit holes of conspiracy. Bin Laden got exactly what he wanted. Here in the West, we are still eating each other — and our neighbours — alive because of what happened that day.
For years I avoided footage of the event, still haunted by what I saw live on the news. Films about it — Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Robert Pattinson in Remember Me — were mostly considerate enough to avoid recreating the horrific specifics while superhero films like Man of Steel blithely destroyed whole digital cities with no regard for the audience’s trauma.
9/11: The Falling Man is a documentary made for Channel 4 in the UK, expanding on Tom Junod’s famous Esquire article from 2003 about one of the hundreds of victims who chose their own way out. In the article, Junod uses Richard Drew’s photograph — the publication of which was criticised at the time — as a starting point to try and understand what it must have been like up there as the heat and flames got closer, but also to identify that particular man and, by extension, humanise everyone who died that day.
Because of my unwillingness to risk being retraumatised, the film sat unwatched in my collection for years but I finally steeled myself a few months ago and I’m glad I did. It’s an extremely sensitive investigation — that takes some interesting turns — and it works hard to honour all of the ordinary victims of the tragedy by telling the story of just one.
Extra: Searching for 9/11 references2 on the old F&S site, I discovered this post from 2010 which I copy and paste for you here:
Sigourney Weaver in Esquire’s What I’ve Learned:
I volunteered to serve food to the workers at Ground Zero after 9/11. There were dogs trained to find living people. The people who worked with the dogs became worried because the day after day of not finding anyone was beginning to depress the animals. So the people took turns hiding in the rubble so that every now and then a dog could find one of them to be able to carry on.
Where to watch 9/11: The Falling Man
Worldwide: YouTube3
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