9/11 Anniversary

This article originally appeared in The Age on September 7, 2002

A friend of mine who was close to the world Trade Centre when it was hit on the morning of September 11 tells me that one thing the images of this day can never capture is the smell. The images themselves – of skyscrapers and jets and flames are the stuff of Hollywood movies. They are abstract. There are the facts too, which are hard to comprehend. One and a half million tonnes of debris was removed from Ground Zero. 20,000 body parts were found and are being checked for DNA. More than 2800 people died (343 of whom were fire-fighters) but only 1330 people have been identified.

Joe Casaliggi, one of the firemen who pieced through the wreckage (9/11, Channel 7, Wednesday, 8.30pm), makes facts more meaningful: a 110-storey office building and ‘you don’t find a telephone, a computer, a desk, a chair.’ The sounds of September 11 are not abstract either and no matter how hokey some of the documentaries that will abound this week, they all have the power to shock. 9/11 is by the brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet, who just happened to be making a doco about one of New York’s oldest fire stations that day. This meant they ended up inside the Foyer of Tower 1 and their cameras recorded the sound of the constant thud of bodies as they hit the foyer roof. In Channel 10’s The Firefighters’ Story (last Thursday, 8.30pm) there are the mayday calls of people that are trapped.

This week your television screens will encourage you to relive September 11 from every angle. Some of these shows capture the intimacy of what happened. That these were real people. That everyone lost friends and New York has been deeply wounded. But there is the two-dimensional life story of the suicide hijackers (SBS, next Saturday, 7.30pm), and there will be endless news and Current Affairs specials on every channel. Channel Nine’s Ray Martin will host, live, the memorial in New York. They will also show, In Memoriam (Tuesday, 7.30pm) a graphic record of the events of September 11. More interestingly, this Wednesday (7.30pm) they will screen Flight 93, Countdown to Terror about the flight that was heading across the skies of Pennsylvania, famous, in part, for the fact that the passengers succeeded in crashing the plane before it reached its target and for the call passenger Tom Burnett made to his wife. "I'm on flight 93. The plane has been hijacked. They have already knifed a guy. There is a bomb on board. Call the FBI."

So, where does that leave viewers? The attack was carried out in the most media driven, camera-holding, mobile-phone-using city in the world. There is hardly a moment that has been unrecorded but so many other world tragedies, and mass murders, do not document themselves in this way. That does not make them less meaningful. September 11 gives television the visuals.

There is another thing, too. The tragedy that struck New York that day has been taken up in rhetoric of violence and war that I have no truck with. Perhaps that was why I so moved by 9/11. It captures the terror, and the innocence, of those first hours. The Naudet brothers don’t know what is happening, or why and neither do the fire fighters. They are just being brave.

A fire-fighter (who survived) talked in Channel 10’s doco of the damage done to his children who were made to watch the events as they unfolded, and therefore watched the towers collapsing knowing their dad was in there. Jules Naudet sums up many people’s feelings. Certainly mine. ‘There are the images and the replays that never stop. Okay, enough TV.’

Posted by Sophie at 03:37 PM