United 93’s Unfinished Flight

Despite media-fanned trepidation about United 93, the film is getting a smooth ride from critics. They generally like that the film has stayed as true as possible to the events of that day and the overall documentary feel of the piece. And with documentaries being so popular among critics in a weak couple of years for Hollywood, United 93 is the right film in the right style for right now. And I’m not even talking about the obvious political parallels of a group of ordinary Americans trying to take back control of a plane that’s been hijacked by a small band of religious fanatics that have been holding the passengers at bay with a fake threat and relying on fear to govern long enough to drive the whole country plane into the side of a building.

One thing people often talk about when they analyze books and TV shows and movies is identifying with the characters. So United 93 has us right from the start because we know the story and for everyone who watched the news for three straight days in September of 2001 like I did, we already identify with the people involved. So the film doesn’t have to do anything and we’re already on board.

The good thing for non-American viewers is that the film never becomes a patriotic screed. Neither the terrorists nor the passengers ever make a big deal about America. The story is about life and death and loss – period. That sort of jingoism that you might find in something like Air Force One is what can sometimes take non-Americans out of a film. I can still hear the pilot of one of the scrambled jets as he veers in front of the President’s plane to intercept an incoming missile and he says something like, “I’ve got this one, Mr. President,” and then his fighter is hit and explodes. I’m gagging at that even after all these years. But there's nothing like that in United 93.

At the same time, if we weren’t already emotionally primed for this story, we would have very little to identify with in the characters. The truly amazing thing about this film is what it does with almost no character back story. We hear the phone conversations to loved ones, but all we really know about the characters is that they have someone they care about. We don’t get full glimpses into their lives. We see slightly nuanced reactions to the events – no two characters appear to have exactly the same reaction at any time – but we don’t really ever know these people. And yet we identify with them.

In fact, the direction and the performances and the story are so even-handed, that there are moments when you have to actually sympathize with the terrorists. Before everything begins unfolding, we catch a glimpse of one of the terrorists repeating “I love you” three times to someone on the phone. We watch one terrorist trying to stand up to the crowd of charging passengers and being overwhelmed and just for a flicker of an instant we might feel his bravery and his terror, mixed with the satisfaction of seeing him taken down. And even while the passengers pray, so do the terrorists.

Now, there are practical and political reasons for this strategy of identification. By making the real people as thinly sketched as possible, you don’t risk alienating surviving family members by mischaracterizing someone. And the sprinkling of humanizing characteristics among the terrorists shows Arab Americans that at least you’re not resorting to easy stereotypes.

But that still leaves the question of just why this lack of detailed character backgrounds and stories works for the audience and for critics who so often demand character-driven plots.

There are three possibilities. The first is that when we are given nearly blank characters (especially those who don’t in some way offend us) we simply tend to identify or empathize. It’s a reflex. When all we have are a character’s fears we can relate to those. The second reason we can relate so easily is that the back story extends outside the film. It’s still relatively recent history to us and so we supply much of the emotion we felt on the day all of this happened. We’re both feeling what’s happening on the screen and recalling what we felt back then. The final reason this film works despite giving us so little background is that we don’t always need background and detailed character development. Sometimes we just want to know what happens – or, in this case, get a better understanding of how something happened.

We won’t know for some time if this film will still works long after the initial impact of 9/11 has faded. Maybe by then someone will have done a film more in line with Titanic, with a more conventionally themed story superimposed on a real-life disaster. There would be nothing wrong with that either. That’s how real events are eventually translated to cultural memory. First we try to understand and then we mythologize on the long unfinished flight into history.