Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 11 September

9/11: The Falling Man (Singer, 2006)

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

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Not cur­rently available

Australia: Not cur­rently available

Canada: Streaming on Prime Video

Ireland: Not cur­rently available

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Not cur­rently available

UK: Streaming on Prime Video