May 19, 2006
united 93
The order in which the vics die in slasher movies (as a general rule, the women die per facts of coiffure: styled blonde, straight blonde, styled brown, with straight brown for the survivor) is formulaic, which is to say, formed: a way the film presents its madeness, no less than a sonnet's rhymes. Plot, harmony, a lead character's unifying experience, a moral...really any form of self-consistency and stability that offers a clear line from start to finish is, by its very unrelation to lived experience, a distancing effect (similar arguments resonate with plastic arts).
This is United 93's appeal. As everyone notes, the basic events, and ending, are already known and unchangeable; for most critics, this is an even though — the film is affecting despite this limit. This is an error. The film is affecting because of this limit (which is different from saying that it gets its force from the story already in place). Because the external form is fixed, the film's internal progress is freed to be relatively jumbled. The choice to have no hero or even heroes isn't simply a compulsorily ethical one regarding the need to honor all the dead and respect their familes equally; it allows for a telling that presents coherence-systems far less than most feature films. There's no rooting, no tracking a single character, not much strategically-paced revelation of events; in recompense, actions and phrases come from all directions, shaky and disorganized, far from familiarities of pacing.
It may indeed be a general rule of real-time, of which this film is a kind of terminal case: real-time without order and control always threatens panic. United 93 induces panic quite successfully, and in inverse proportion to expressions of madeness. Don DeLillo, in the most eloquently ambivalent formulation of White Noise, sez "all plots lead to death." But isn't the opposite true: isn't plot indicative of one's power to give shape to that real-time unfolding which has no shapeliness but that it ends in the tomb? Isn't plot the expression of control over death?
For all the inevitability of reviews' describing the last shots of United 93, the film — so effective up until this point — betrays itself a couple minutes before. As the passengers and hijackers equally ready themselves for the onrushing confrontation, the film opts to deploy parallel crosscuts between the two groups, the latter frantically praying to Allah, the former just as frantically to their god. It is not simply that this gesture has a didacticism unike the rest of the film, but that it's exactly what Coppola would have done. As a gesture, it's cinematic; it's shapely, made. And with that small decision, the film loses its effect, returns us to ourselves, viewers. Perhaps this is necessary, if not inevitable; though the film is after something like human immediacy within the iconic spectacle of "9/11," one does well to recall that those events were as much a part of an image-war as anything else, that their immediacy was not — could not — be conceived of as independent from the sphere of symbol management.
Posted by jane at May 19, 2006 10:50 AM | TrackBack