Alasdair
Spark and Elizabeth Stuart
University
of Winchester
Abstract
This article analyses the
depiction of religious belief in Paul Greengrass’ controversial film United
93 which tells
the story of the doomed flight which was hijacked and eventually crashed
into a field in Shanksville, PA on September 11, 2001. It argues that
Greengrass paints religious belief as sincerely held by devotees but ultimately
either dangerous or futile and no contemporary construction of God survives
that day of terror. The film is also shown to question human trust in the
mundane miracles of modern western life. Greengrass does valorise the belief of
men and women in each other, their relationships and the human spirit. The film
suggests that this is the only faith worth having in the post 9/11 world.
(1) United 93 is a film about 9/11. It tells the story of the day through a
meticulous re-enactment of United 93, the last of the four hijacked aircraft,
in the belief that by examining this single event, something larger can be
found–the shape of our world today. By a quirk of fate Flight 93 was
delayed on the runway at Newark for 45 minutes. By the time it was airborne,
the other three planes had reached their intended targets. As a result the
forty passengers and crew upon Flight 93 were the first to inhabit our new and
terrifying post 9/11 world. The terrible dilemma those passengers faced is the
same we have been struggling with ever since. Do we sit passively and hope all this turns out OK? Or do we
fight back and strike at them before they strike at us? And what will be the
consequences if we do?[1] (United
93 director and screenwriter Paul Greengrass)
(2) United 93 (2006) is a remarkable attempt to pull
an intensity of meaning out of a very circumscribed set of events. Key among these
are questions of religious belief and this article aims to analyse the
constructions and deconstructions of faith offered in United 93. This article will argue
that while the film criticises fundamentalist Islam as a threat to the complex and
liberal order of western society, it also suggests that any faith in God can offer
little more, whether set in the context
of that order, or in the context of these threats to it. All religious faith is
depicted as desperate and ultimately futile, no matter what God one may believe
in. The film also exposes and questions our largely unconscious faith in the systems
which underpin contemporary western living, systems that, for example,
transport us from one location to another. However, United 93 is not a
nihilistic or cynical film. One faith is powerfully valorised, the belief of
men and women in each other, especially when it is intensified by moments which
make us recognise the fleeting nature of all life and the lonely death which we
all fear and will all face. Ultimately what United 93 appears to propose is that only love and faith in the human spirit
have the potential to eradicate the terrible threats posed by the collision of
forces in the twenty-first century. While it offers no answer as to how human
beings might accomplish this, save for the literal evidence of itself and the
events it depicts, United 93 poses powerful and
thought-provoking questions for those it welcomes aboard.
(3) United 93 begins and ends in darkness, opening with
the softly muttered prayers of Muslim men preparing for death in their motel
room and ending with invocations to Allah from those men as the airliner they
have hijacked dives towards the ground and the screen fades to black. In
between, the meticulous re-enactment provided by United 93 manages to pose troubling questions about the place of life, death
and faith amid the complexities of western civilisation. Perhaps in expectation
of this, trailers for the film were booed in some cinemas in the United States
and withdrawn from others, and many declared their intention not to see the
film.[2] Rarely can a director have had to justify an unseen film as often as Paul Greengrass,
particularly in reply to the criticism that it was just too soon to depict the
events of 9/11 in the commercial cinema. Generally, his statements defended his
film as offering a way to reveal the tenor of our times. Greengrass said in an
interview upon the film’s release in the United States in April 2006: “There are lots of ways to find meaning
in the events of 9/11. Television can convey events as they happen. A reporter
can write history’s rough first draft. Historians can widen the time frame and
give us context . . . Filmmakers have a part to play too, and I believe that
sometimes, if you look clearly and unflinchingly at a single event, you can
find in its shape something much larger than the event itself - the DNA of our
times.”[3]
(4)
Flight 93 was widely reported in the aftermath of 9/11 and had already been
represented in documentaries, a TV film, and books.[4] In pursuit of his goal, Greengrass went to extraordinary lengths to make the
film authentic on the screen and for the actors. He sought and gained the
approval of all the families of the seven members of the flight crew and almost
all of the families of the thirty three passengers (excluding the four
hijackers), and researchers conducted more than 100 interviews with relatives
of the dead and participants in the event. Recordings of the air traffic
control chatter provided the factual baseline for the action and some of the
air traffic controllers and military personnel involved actually re-enacted
their experiences. Most notable was Ben Sliney, who on September 11th served as his first day as the director of the National Air Traffic Control
Centre in Herndon, Virginia. Both of the pilots in United 93 were played by real airline pilots, as were several of the flight
attendants–to portray Captain Jason Dahl, Captain J.J. Johnson took five
weeks leave from his flying duties at United Airlines.[5] The actors playing the passengers were relative unknowns and many met with relatives
of the people they portrayed and improvised their dialogue based on the
knowledge they gained (down to whether the person would have ordered tea or
coffee with breakfast). The actors playing the hijackers were kept separate
from those playing the passengers in order to heighten the tension between
them. The movie was filmed in sequence and takes place in real-time, covering
the approximately 90 minutes of the flight. Instead of a set, a retired Boeing
757 was used and the movie contains no exterior shots of Flight 93 after it has
taken off, with the action totally confined to the metal tube of the fuselage.[6]
(5)
Judging by the reviews, Greengrass’ attempt to find a meaning that could unlock
the post 9/11 world failed, or at best produced a set of contradictory
decodings. Ron Rosenbaum, writing in the on-line journal Slate, argued that in the context of the War on Terror and the catastrophe
of Iraq the real message might now be the opposite:
Does what happened
on Flight 93 represent a triumph of the human spirit, a microcosmic model and
portent of the ultimate victory of enlightenment civilization over theocratic
savagery, as the pre-release publicity about the new film insists? Or is the
story of United Flight 93 a different kind of portent, not “the DNA of our
times,” but rather the RIP?
The story of 9/11 as a whole
increasingly seems a portent that Flight 93 was an aberration, and that those
intent on suicidal martyrdom may well prevail over those who value human life
over holy books.[7]
Conversely, David Beamer, the
father of Todd Beamer (the passenger immortalised in accounts of Flight 93 by
his overheard words “Let’s roll’) claimed:
Often we
attend movies to escape reality and fantasize a bit. In this case and at this
time, it is appropriate to get a dose of reality about this war and the real
enemy we face. It is not too soon for this story to be told, seen and heard.
But it is too soon for us to become complacent. It is too soon for us to think
of this war in only national terms. We need to be mindful that this enemy, who
made those holes in our landscape and caused the deaths of some 3,000 of our
fellow free people, has a vision to personally kill or convert each and every
one of us. This film reminds us that this war is personal. This enemy is on a
fanatical mission to take away our lives and liberty–the liberty that has
been secured for us by those
whose names are on those walls in Battery Park and so many other walls and
stones throughout this nation. This enemy seeks to take away the free will that
our Creator has endowed in us.[8]
Certainly if seen
as a representation of religious fanaticism and its ability to fracture the complexity
of western civilisation, United 93 represents a
call to arms for the West. However, as other critics have noted, the film
appears to give moral equivalence to the Muslim hijackers, not least in the
citation at the close of the film which declares it to be in memory of all who died on September 11th. In his review in the Guardian newspaper Oliver Burkeman makes the point thus:
United 93 is so stripped-down, in narrative terms, as to communicate no clear
moral, still less a political position. It is what you make of it. Greengrass
seems uncomfortable with this idea–no director, presumably, likes to be
accused of making a film without a message, and the film might reasonably be
accused of too much caution–but Tim Bevan, the film’s co-producer,
embraces it vigorously. “The absolute brilliance of this film is, if you’re
extreme leftwing or extreme rightwing, you’ll read into it what you wish,” he
says. Which you can interpret as commercially minded cynicism, or as something
more worthy: an attempt to show what 9/11 was without taking sides on all the
things that 9/11 has come to mean.[9]
John Beifuss wrote
similarly of the film in his review:
It’s hard to imagine
how a commercial studio movie on this still painful subject matter could be more
conscientious and less exploitative; even Todd Beamer’s legendary comment is
presented without emphasis, as part of an impatient, tossed-away run-on
sentence: “Let’s roll, let’s go already...” Greengrass definitely doesn’t want
to divide audiences, so he’s produced a film that may be embraced by both sides
of the argument over the “war on terror.” … Greengrass is so determined not to
provide grist for anyone’s political agenda or to exploit the deaths of the
passengers by “entertaining” moviegoers (has any other commercial film been so
devoid of humor?) that his movie becomes almost an academic exercise in style–an
experiment to determine at what point deadpan dramatization plus audience
anticipation equals emotional devastation.[10]
However, what
Beifuss misses is that United 93 works exactly because
of the reasons for which it has been criticised–as an experiential ordeal
for individual viewers. It unlocks not the genome, but the personal code, most
obviously in terms of providing viewers with a dramatisation of a type of journey
familiar to most which ends in death. Thus it precisely offers some stark and basic
questions of life, death and faith to the viewer: “What if it happened to me?” “What
would I do?” “What if I knew I was going to die very soon? Who would I talk to,
and what message would I leave?” “What if I were faced with a choice between my
suicide and my murder?” “Do I believe and would I pray?” “How can belief in God
lead people to such hatred, that they can act like this against innocent others?”
(6)
Certainly God is everywhere and nowhere in the film. God is both “Allah” in
whose name the terrorists act, constructing themselves as martyrs for his cause
and “Our Father,” the Christian God, to whom some of the passengers pray in
their final moments. God both demands blood, as a God of terror, and God is
pathetically weak, incapable of
responding to the frantic prayers, mocked earlier by the hopeless plea of a billboard
glimpsed at the airport, “God Bless America” and perhaps ultimately slain by
his own ineffectiveness. In fact, the
viewers are put in the position of God, as in the opening sequence of the film we
soar silently, like angels, over the illuminated streets and skyscrapers of
night-time New York. As we do so, we hear the voices of the men in their motel
room, reciting the Qur’an as a plea for success in their plan to smash the
glittering sights below. As viewers, we know what is going to happen, we know
how this story will end, and from our transcendent perspective many things that
are important to the passengers do not seem to matter at all, most poignantly for
the one who just catches the flight (Mark Bingham). This is accentuated as we
eavesdrop on snatches of conversations in which people plan their future, looking
forward to moments such as anniversary trips to London and hiking trips to
Yosemite which we know they will never make. We simulate the perspective of the
divine, feel the pain of watching people go about their ordinary lives unaware
of their imminent death, feel revulsion at the acts committed in the name of
God, but apparently like God, we are powerless to do anything about it.
(7)
Of course, a powerless God has proved particularly to the liking of the modern
western world. With the technological systemisation of human inventiveness and ingenuity,
God has been crowded out, and if not quite dead, then he lives on in hiding, in
the space between electrons, particles and waves that invisibly govern our
lives. Even with the doubts of a post-modern age, faith survives (not least
when flying), but it rests in the rationalities of the world, in airflow, jet
thrust to weight ratios, and radar, inscrutable things for most of us, that is until
they go wrong, or are smashed. This is why for over half its length the film
documents the intricate and widespread systems that deliver us safely from one
place to another, layers of reality which we are hardly conscious of, but upon
which we depend to maintain the larger reality in which we feel secure. The
film likewise documents just how much the litany of technology has replaced
other litanies which once provided reassurance and ritual in our lives: “push
back” as plane leaves the terminal, “Seat backs in the upright position” as the
flight takes off, “You have the aircraft” the reassuring phrase the pilots
address to each other, ironically inverted as the terrorists take control, and the
curious “squawk 7500” (the code for a hijack). The film shows the tremendous
intricacy of contemporary commercial flight and air traffic control, but presents
these as thoroughly everyday practices, accompanied by chit-chat, ritual greetings,
cups of coffee and dull conferences on traffic delays. In its early scenes United
93 effectively documents the mundane miracle of
this complexity and the high order of human accomplishment involved, something
entirely underscored by the routine avoidance of the risk of accident or collision
which defines contemporary air travel. Flight has become mere commuting, and while
the flight attendants carry out the familiar ritual of pointing out the
emergency exits, few of the passengers pay much attention to the safety
demonstration.
(8)
It is this amazing, yet ordinary universe which the film accurately shows as
disrupted by the hijackers. The fragility of the densely interwoven,
overlapping complexities of technological civilisation is terribly exposed by
the simplicity of religious fundamentalism, such that a handful of men can wreak
devastation if they dare to believe in simple “truths” and act upon them. Confusion
reigns as anxious controllers in Boston, New York and Cleveland attempt to
track the hijacked flights and determine what is happening onboard the
aircraft. At the National Air Traffic Control Center’s control room in
Virginia, the nerve centre of U.S. air traffic control, the white collar supervisors
at first cannot believe the information coming from below. Revealingly, the
hijackers do not communicate any demands to the authorities (because they do
not have any that can be made, at least not in this world) and only garbled snatches
of transmissions from the cockpits are picked up–”We have some planes.” Puzzlingly at first, and then understood
as threatening, the I.F.F. (Identification: Friend or Foe) transponders are
turned off and the aircraft drop below the radar, recklessly weaving their way
through the intricate web of aircraft which criss-crosses the nation. Technological
certainty is demolished, with the frantic controllers unsure how many aircraft
have been hijacked and which have crashed. This is the opposite of the calm,
collected, rational, problem-solving demeanour which usually marks such scenes
of technological teamwork in the movies, for instance the representation of Mission
Control (modernised versions of which the various control rooms resemble) in
the movie Apollo 13. Things become worse as the
military are alerted to events which they describe as “real world,” but none of
their simulations and exercises contain scenarios in which civilian aircraft
are used as suicide bombs. United 93 accurately
shows NORAD’s air defense centre unable to find any fighter aircraft to respond
with, and then unable to locate the higher authority who can give permission to
shoot down the airliners. It is not until the attacks on New York and
Washington were seen live on CNN that the reality of the terrible events becomes
clear to those in the supposedly information privileged command centres and air
traffic control rooms. Finally, only an absolute worked–to ground every
civilian aircraft in the United States and close the country to international
travel, in effect turning back the clock seventy years or more for four days.
(9) United 93 fruitfully reveals our distance from
an earlier event which was also said to define an era, the sinking of the R.M.S.
Titanic. Just as Greengrass claims that Flight 93 embodies the contemporary
world, so the disaster of April 14-15, 1912 has been seen as declaring the
moment at which an Edwardian faith in both God and human progress was punctured,
two years in advance of the industrialised slaughter of Flanders’ fields. Titanic survivor Jack Thayer Jr. later wrote in a memoir to his family that
the demise of the White Star vessel was “the event which not only made the
world rub its eyes and awake, but awake with a start keeping it moving at a
rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction and
happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.”[11] This was a world in which it seemed that God was either totally absent and random
chance ruled, or a world in which God only proved his presence in response to extreme
challenges such as those set by the makers of the “unsinkable ship”–”God
Himself could not sink this ship” as the legend has it.[12] The events of that “night to remember”
have a fascination and resonance beyond the facts of the sinking, something evident
in the many representations of the disaster in the near century since. Of
course, to properly match 9/11,
this would have to have the great ship first pirated and then rammed into an
iceberg deliberately, a fiction (so far) beyond even Hollywood. Thus Peter
Bradshaw claimed in his review of United 93 that
the film provided:
an Anti-Titanic for
the multiplexes–a real-life disaster movie with no Leo and Kate and no
survivors: only terrorists whose emotional lives are relentlessly blank, and
heroes with no backstory. These passengers are quite unlike the cross-section
of America much mocked in Airplane!–with the singing nun and the cute
kid–neither are they vividly drawn individuals with ingeniously imagined
present or future interconnections, like the cast of TV’s Lost. They are just
affluent professionals from pretty much the same caste, with no great interest
in each other, and nothing in common except their fate. And all these people
are ghosts, all of them, dead men and dead women walking.[13]
While Bradshaw is
right, and we do not learn the backstory of these passengers (for instance that
Todd Beamer was a committed Christian or that Mark Bingham was gay[14])
and they often do seem indistinguishable from each other; the power of this is that
they are also indistinguishable from us, and from our behaviour, both in normality
and potentially in extremis. Thayer’s prediction has come true for a
world in which death did not come in the two and a half hours the Titanic took to
sink, but in the less than an hour it took the suicidal hijackers to change the
course of Flight 93, and fly onwards towards a crash. There is no rusting wreck
to nostalgically visit, no survivors to interview and to compare the accounts
of, and there can be no “women and children first” on Flight 93 because there
were no survivors by design. However, while the death toll was complete (albeit
reduced by the plane not reaching its target), there is a difference which
Greengrass greatly exploits. Flight 93 did not take place in the cold isolation
of the North Atlantic at night, but over America (or the “Homeland” as it was
re-christened post 9/11), with the passengers able to make final telephone calls
to their loved ones.
(10)
We are first shown phone calls at the departure gate as the passengers chat on
their cell phones to their relatives or their colleagues. In contrast, the
four hijackers communicate with no-one, except at the last moment before
boarding when the lead hijacker Ziad Jarrah (later shown as prevaricating about
when to seize the plane) rings someone (we are not told who, but it was his
German girlfriend[15]) and speaks
his own final message of “I love you” three times, the number of fullness and
completeness in Islam. This prefigures the later moments in the film when,
equally certain of death, the passengers try to phone their husbands, wives or children
to tell them they love them and say goodbye. So much stress is given to the phone
calls in United 93 that the impression is given of
more frequent and numerous contact than actually took place. Testimony at the
Moussaoui trial in 2006 revealed that calls were made by eleven passengers and two
flight attendants, mostly via credit card air phones, with only two cell phone
calls made.[16] In a
curious echo of the Titanic (in which the first class passengers gained spaces
in the lifeboats first), all but one of the six first class passengers called,
while most of the twenty seven coach passengers did not.[17] A significant number of the callers provided information about the hijack to
family members and asked them to call the authorities; they were told in turn that
other planes had been hijacked and deliberately crashed into the World Trade
Center. It was after learning this that Jeremy Glick told his wife that the men
had “voted” to storm the terrorists. However, as William Dutton and Frank
Nainoa note, “A striking feature of the reported calls is the degree to which
so many carried relatively little or no instrumental information. Instead,
people wanted to say goodbye, reassure, say their last words or convey their
love to their family.”[18] Such evidence of the essential human desire to exchange the final message that “I
love you” is achingly repeated in United 93 (and
of course, it was also true of many of the victims trapped in the burning Twin
Towers.) Not all the calls connect, and some passengers must leave messages
with operators, giving their final words to a stranger, but at least this is someone
who will live through the next hour–most notably, Todd Beamer who spoke
to phone supervisor Lisa Jefferson for almost 15 minutes. Others left messages
on answering machines, to be heard only after death. The film takes time to depict
an act of great compassion as a passenger lends her cell phone to another
woman, so that she may call home, one final time.
Digest
of calls from United Airlines Flight 93
09:28 Passenger Thomas Burnett makes a call to his
wife, Deena, and tells her the flight has been hijacked. She calls 911.
09:34 Thomas Burnett calls his wife a second time
and tells her that hijackers are in the cockpit. She tells him about the
attacks on the World Trade Center.
09:35 United Airlines’ maintenance centre in San
Francisco receives a call from an unknown flight attendant aboard Flight 93 (probably
Sandra Bradshaw) saying they have been hijacked.
09:37 Passenger Jeremy Glick calls his wife, Lyz,
and tells her of the hijacking. He says “I can’t believe this is happening to
me.” Passenger Lauren Grandcolas leaves a message for her husband, Jack,
telling him she loves him.
09:41 Passenger Marion Britton calls her friend, Fred
Fiumano, and tells him that two people on board have been killed.
09:44 Passenger Mark Bingham calls his mother,
Alice Hoglan. He tells her that three guys on board said they had a bomb, and
that he loves her.
09:45 Passenger Todd Beamer reaches Lisa
Jefferson, a GTE/Verizon supervisor. He asks her, “If I don’t make it out of
this, would you please call my family and let them know how much I love them?” He
asks her to pray with him. Thomas Burnett makes a third call to his wife. He
says that he and others are making a plan.
09:50 Passenger Honor Elizabeth Wainio calls her
stepmother, Esther Heymann. Elizabeth worries how her brother and sister will
take the news. Flight Attendant Sandra Bradshaw calls her husband, Phil.
09:53 Passenger Linda Gronlund makes a call to
her sister, Elsa Strong, and leaves a message. She says that the passengers know
of the attacks against the World Trade Center. Her partner, passenger Joseph
Deluca attempts to call his father.
09:54 Thomas Burnett makes a fourth call to his
wife. He says that he and others have come up with a plan. He says “It’s up to
us, I think we can do it... Don’t worry, we’re going to do something.”
09:57 Todd Beamer ends his conversation with Lisa
Jefferson, but the call stays connected, and she hears him say “Let’s roll.”
09:58 An unknown passenger, probably Edward Felt,
places a 911 call to an operator in Westmoreland, PA. Flight Attendant CeeCee
Lyles calls home; at first she gets an answering machine, then her husband and
they say a prayer together. She tells him that everyone is running to first
class and says goodbye.
10:01 Andrew Garcia makes a call to his wife. He
only has time to say her name, “Dorothy” before he is cut off.[19]
(13) United 93 dwells very heavily on the phone calls
in its representation for a reason, to indicate that making peace with a
significant God is less important than making it with significant others. The
last rites for contemporary Americans involve phone calls and words of love,
not holy oil, absolution, nor words from scripture. In a situation of total
despair these calls constitute what Douglas Davies calls “words against death”[20],
words or actions which at one and the same time acknowledge and defy death.
Davies notes that death “challenges human self-awareness, threatening to
terminate the identity it confers” and in response human beings employ language
to defy death.[21] For this reason many death rituals
employ “performative utterances,” words with force, words which are understood
to change things. If sudden death
rips apart relationships (represented in the film by clasped hands being torn
apart as the plane dives in the final few moments), the assurance of love in a
farewell exchange is such an utterance, a reinforcement of a relationship in
the face of dissolution. To offer a comparison, writing of her battle with
serious illness the theologian Melanie A. May remembered the night she thought
she was about to die. May sensed her life fading away until suddenly she was
overcome by a “roaring inside,” a desire to live: “My response then and there
was kinetic. My body moved without reserve to reach for the telephone.
Eloquence enacted. My body knew to be alive is to be connected”.[22] In the face of death those aboard the
doomed flight reached for life and re-affirmed their connections. In doing so
they refused to be overcome by the terror being enacted upon them and
transcend, if only for a moment, the horror, despair and entropy. Rowan
Williams notes,
Someone who is about
to die in terrible anguish makes room in their mind for someone else; for the
grief and terror of someone they love. They do what they can to take some atom
of that pain away from the other by the inarticulate message on the mobile.
That moment of “making room” is what I as a religious person have to notice. It
isn’t “pious”, it isn’t language about God; it’s simply language that brings
into the world something other than self-defensiveness.[23]
The expressions of
love by the passengers were a rejection of the power of death to triumph over
people’s lives, even as their lives were taken from them. Death always has the
last act, but it can be denied the last word. If the two great forces of
existence as defined by the Song of Songs (8:6) are pitted against each other,
death has its way, but love tries not to be defeated by its terror.
(3)
Death was expected and desired by the terrorists, and just as much unexpected
and feared by passengers unfortunate enough to catch that day’s early morning
flight to San Francisco. From the viewer’s transcendent perspective we know
that the moment the door closes on Flight 93 (with a thud like the sealing of a
tomb) all aboard enter the realm of death, their physical suspension above the
earth signifying a deeper suspension, suspension between life and death. This
is a suspension which we are all constantly located within but rarely
acknowledge, a suspension which when one becomes conscious of it makes the
mundane and the routine seem poignant and frustrating: you are checking the
plane but it is the passengers you should be checking, why sleep when you have
so little time to live, why take your pills when you are about to die, why
worry about the future and plan for it when you will have none, why work so
hard at the expense of giving your loved ones your attention? All these feelings and questions challenge
viewers as they watch in real time the final moments of Flight 93. Death meant
martyrdom to the four terrorists, but it has also led to a kind of martyrdom
for the passengers and crew of United 93, one commemorated (or better,
imaginatively recreated) by the film. Why else have the deaths of those on
American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the World
Trade Center, and American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, not
gained the same attention? It is partly because the attack failed, but that
leads to a larger meaning–Flight 93 represented the first experience of
9/11, before the date became fixed forever in that eerie denotation. The flight
took off late from Newark and the attacks on New York and Pentagon were over
before the hijackers even took over the cockpit and turned the aircraft back
towards the East. As Greengrass noted that meant that a “group of ordinary men
and women, who got up that morning for a routine commuter flight, were the
first people to live in our world, the post 9/11 world.”[24] In such peril the Christian religion is shown as temporarily recrudescent–the
controllers cry out “Jesus Christ” as the attacks are seen on the TV screens
and passengers offer prayers and cross themselves as they realise their
fate–but United 93 places its faith much more
in a revival of the human spirit and community.
(14)
As such United 93 is a response to the crisis of
faith which led Bishop John Shelby Spong to declare that after 9/11 no one
could seriously believe that God was in charge, external to the human
experience and able to intervene if he so desired:
The image of
hijacked planes crashing into buildings killing thousands of people gives us no
hiding place for theological pretending. The skies are empty of a protective
deity ready to come to our aid. God defined theistically has died . . . The terrorist tragedy becomes an opportunity
to step self-consciously beyond the God of yesterday, that promised us a
protection theism has never been able to deliver. It calls us away from pious
delusions. That is a frightening conclusion, but that is where we live.[25]
Theologically,
it is not God’s irrelevance but his powerlessness against evil which is
revealed here. Spong echoed the earlier words of the theologian and martyr
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who argued that only the suffering God could any longer
hold meaning:
The God who is
with us, is the God who forsakes us [Mark 15:34]. ... In the presence of God we
live without God. God allows himself to be pushed out of the world on to the
cross. God is powerless and weak in the world and only as such and in such a
way is he with us and helps us. According to Matthew 8:17 it is clear that
Christ does not help us because of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his
weakness, his suffering! Here is the decisive difference to other religions. ...
only the suffering God can help us.[26]
As Ronald Goetz has argued, this idea of a “suffering God” became a new
orthodoxy of the twentieth-century, representing a fundamental shift in
Christian theology away from the tradition of divine impassability and theism
and metaphysics in general.[27] Goetz explains this as a reaction to
the fact that in modernity belief in God suffered a terrible (some would say
mortal) blow from atheism, democracy, acute examples of evil and from scholarly
reappraisals of tradition. If God exists, the argument goes, he simply cannot
be the sovereign Lord he was once understood to be. For many people of faith,
this was the truth of 9/11.
(15)
Spong’s answer was to suggest that to be rescued God needs to do more than just
to suffer, he must be “life, love and being” and it is through the human search
for this that God can exist. Intriguingly, this is a God also constructed out
of other life and death struggles by a number of feminist, lesbian and gay
theologians–a God who lives in our relational power. In this theology,
God is the love we are made from and whom we re-make in our loving
relationships.[28] Carter
Heyward put it so: “To be loved by
you is to be pushed by a power/God both terrifying and comforting, to touch and
to be touched by you . . . To love you is to sing with you, cry with you, pray
with you, and act with you to recreate the world. To say ‘I love you’
means–let the revolution begin”.[29] From the perspective of this theology, United
93 can be seen to testify to the power of human
beings to create love, meaning and spirit from hate, chaos, entropy and
despair.
(16) United 93 thus depicts a post-religious order in
which ordinary Americans are not bonded together by God, but by relationships
with each other. In this construction, outright religiosity is depicted as
dangerous, violent, and associated with death. Greengrass has made clear that
the film should be understood to contain two hijackings, one of the plane and
the other:
the hijack by
those young men of a religion, Islam, hijacked by a group of ideologically
driven, extraordinarily devout, woefully misplaced individuals… Devoutness, the
closed nature of the beliefs, it’s part of the particularity of fundamentalists–thinking
you create a closed belief system, so you can become blind, so that you can,
literally, as they do in the middle of the flight, get up and kill an innocent
stewardess and believe in your mind that you’re doing it on behalf of God.[30]
The film does not
suggest that a reply should lie in an alternative religious fundamentalism, indeed
it elides the most overt moment which could be shown here, Todd Beamer’s request
to Lisa Jefferson that she say the Lord’s Prayer (or the 23rd Psalm–accounts
differ) with him.[31] Indeed, implicitly,
the mentality of all those fundamentally minded is criticised, including not
just Muslim fanatics but Christians such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who
themselves hijacked 9/11 by declaring it a judgement on a decadent America and
the too liberal Christianity which they perceived as underpinning it.[32] As Rowan Williams noted in his
reflections on 9/11,
We’d better
acknowledge the sheer danger of religiousness. Yes, it can be a tool to reinforced diseased perceptions of reality. Muslim or
not, it can be a way of teaching ourselves not to see the particular human
agony in front of us; or worse, of teaching ourselves not to see ourselves, our violence, our actual guilt
. . . [33]
For its resistance
to fundamentalism and death United 93 places its
faith in community, with that resistance most evident in the refusal of the
passengers to passively accept their fate. The early scenes of the film depict
the passengers as disconnected, sealed in their own private worlds, barely relating
to those around them. Their ability to work together, take risks and transcend a
paralysing fear in the face of death restores human agency in the face of despair.
As Sandra Dahl, widow of Jason Dahl, the pilot of Flight 93, put it one year
later, at the memorial service at Shanksville:
In
the air, a wave of courage made its way from the cockpit to the rear of the
aircraft and back again, with all persevering to the end. Unknown to one
another, they supported each other in the fight of their lives and no one was
alone. [34]
In trying to find
a place for God in modern America William James wrote in 1897
that “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live
at all” and in resistance the passengers did exactly that. To make his point
James described someone trapped on a mountain facing an uncertain leap to
safety, and he concluded “And often enough our faith beforehand in an
uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”[35] The passengers’ leap to safety failed, but in opposing the hijackers, their
faith in human community was re-conjured and embraced all. Not quite … in a conspicuous
invention which has generated some controversy, the film depicts a German
passenger (presumably Christian Adams, although like the other passengers he is
not named) suggesting negotiation and later standing in the way of the attack.
He screams that he does not want to die, but is wrestled to the floor by the
others.[36] In doing so, United 93 powerfully exposes the limits of relational theology. The majority
reveals itself as being more than ready to literally stifle the feelings and
actions of the minority on the basis of might alone. The German passenger
reveals, as foreigners and outsiders in dramatic plots often do, other ways of
interpreting events and alternative ways of dealing with them, just as motivated
by the desire to live–but nobody listens. United 93 suggests that the majority behaved correctly but this brief scene
reminds us that to idealise community (in theology or elsewhere) can blind us
to the fact that it is almost always comes at a price.
[17]
Until the fight-back, the film’s depiction of Flight 93 has been meticulous, but
this scene leads to a key departure in how United 93 depicts the final moments.[37] The film strongly suggests that
the passengers organised themselves in order to wrest control of the plane from
the hijackers and land it safely. It is true
that a private pilot (Donald Greene)[38] was on board, but we can only speculate that this was the aim of the rebellion.
The dominant discourse prior to United 93 provided
a different version of events, one which President Bush used repeatedly in
speeches in 2002. Usually his form of words was identical: “history will show
that they said a prayer, they told their loved ones ‘Good bye,’ one guy said ‘Let’s
roll,’ they drove the plane in the ground to serve something greater than
themselves.”[39] The climax of United 93 presents the attempt to regain
control of the plane not so much as a noble act of self-sacrifice to save unknown
others, miles ahead in Washington, but as a brutal struggle to get their pilot
into the cockpit. This interpretation presumably comes because Greengrass wants
the struggle to gain a universal human meaning that goes beyond statements such
as Bush’s and the authority it has given to preemptive interventions such as in
Iraq. His own view of the
world post 9/11 is that “We are not going to solve it
in our lifetimes. I fear it’s going to be grim. But I believe the values of
tolerance and diversity will win out. It’s going to be our defining struggle. I
think you can see that in that airplane, and I think those passengers could see
it, too.”[40] However, the cockpit voice recorder
tapes of the plane’s final moments suggested to the 9/11 Commission, that the
passengers did not breach the cockpit door and that the plane dived to the
ground not as the result of a desperate struggle over the aircraft controls,
but as an act neither Bush nor Greengrass admit to, a collective suicide by the
hijackers.[41]
(17)
To conclude, United 93 suggests nothing but
absolute sincerity in its depiction of religious faith, yet the implication of
its representation of events is that religion as dangerous on one hand and weak
and ineffectual on the other. Faith in anything beyond human relationships is
portrayed as understandable, but misguided, and salvation can only come through
human action. The courage of
the crew and passengers of Flight 93 is shown as coming from their refusal to
lose faith in each other in the face of terror and their refusal to lose faith
in the love of those they left behind. In the post 9/11 world according to United 93, everyone’s prayers will go unanswered at the end.
Notes
