I strongly disagree. I watched it beginning to end and it blew me away (no pun intended).
>what little of it i watched seemed to me was
>a fairly matter of fact account...though i must admit i watched
very little of
>it...never saw DeNiro. my preconception about the idea of
>it was that it would read as a worlds most shocking
>home video type thing mixed in with some patriotism/hero
>perspective with some engineered "emotional" impact....
>with commercials........in general i am pretty disgusted
>with "tragedy" documentaries. in art school once i was eating
>lunch and some guy was sitting behind me and he was
>going on about this "doc" he had filmed about this families
>tragedy......of some sort...with the emotional reactions and
all.
>and this guy was talking about it in a way (that i think
>is probably pretty common) like a voyeuristic necrophiliac
>or something.....i got pretty creeped out...i don't think his
>reaction about what he filmed was an extreme or an exception
>at all. i doubt the 911 doc was any different than that.
It was a lot different, but you make a good point about the voyeuristic aspect. Maybe it's a generational thing, too. I was born in '70 and have become inured with (by?) TV and perhaps desensitized somewhat. But even so, the 911 doc was completely insane. They only had two or three commericals, (one with Steve Buscemi! who once was a NY firefighter) so it seemed more like a movie. (one was a bad ad for the Office of Homeland Security with a horendous Tom Ridge standing there in front of the Presidential seal. It induced the a-effect in this viewer whereby I briefly felt like I was in some Philip K. Dickian future-fascist state -
[whazzup Charles?!])
>that and the whole "hero" thing is way too exaggerated.
>obviously firemen become firemen because they like
>doing stuff like that... it's more like a bungee jumper
>dying in a bungee jump or a skydiver etc.
>
>~M.E.
I know you sort of qualified this already, but I didn't get this sense it all. They way it was edited helped humanize the firefighters (you should have watched the whole thing) to the extent I could recognize working class guys I know in a variety of them. It was done really well, I mean you could even sense some of them were complete assholes. (It was also interesting that they noted that the Probe - young, intern firefigher - was only making a little over $600 every two weeks. The other guys were laughing at him over it. Later, he couldn't believe the Pentagon was hit. "They must have balls.")
I heard the fact that two, young French (stereotypically French, in a good way) brothers were the filmmakers responsible for it was mocked by that alien Fox News Channel anchor. They really internationalized the sense of the film as did their footage of the diverse crowds on the streets around the WTC. I would really be interested to read someone like Yoshie or some film expert do a reading of it. In my view it was unprecedented and if another, similar film of a similar tragedy is shown in the future, which of course I hope there isn't the opportunity, I would not watch it because this one was too horrifying and too sad. I can imagine some kid watching the entire 911 doc and having it fuck her or him up.
One of the French filmakers made it into Tower 1 with the first batch of firefighters and, in the narration, he said to his right there were two people on fire and he didn't film them because he said no one should see that. And while the firefighters were standing around setting up a command post in the lobby and busy sending firefighters up the stairs, you could hear large crashes coming from outside (all the windows were blown out by the jet fuel that came down the elevator shafts) which turned out to be people hitting the ground. You could see it was totally bumming-out these tough, working class firefighters; it was traumatic like war. At the end of the day, the French brothers and some of the firemen were crying and completely traumatized.
Anyway, maybe they should show documentary films of US bombs blowing the hell out of people or films of client-state intelligence agencies torturing detainees at our behest. The citizenry is probably mature enough to handle it. Still, I dare anyone, even stoic Pope Cox, to watch those 2 1/2 or so hours and then immediately make the point that, well, the US has done a lot of bad things, too.
Peter