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This month, the Pickwick looks back on films from the year 2005, movies for which the Pickwick remains thankful.
I was nine years old on September 11th, 2001, so my memory of that day is somewhat problematic. I both remember it and yet don’t remember it — at least, not enough in order to write here what was precisely happening.
That day — my day — was cloudy at best, in precise contrast to the blue skies that allegedly hung over NYC. What I know with certainty & simple math is that both towers had been hit before 1st period class even began.
The worst day in my American history had already started before I even had a chance to barely pass a simple division quiz in math class.
In fact, the tardy bell likely rang just minutes before the second plane hit, and – on the drive to school – my mother & and I were likely listening to the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells, the Strokes’ Is This It, or the Shins’ Oh, Inverted World. Any of those burned CDs could have been the soundtrack for that morning – not the terrestrial radio that may have alerted us that the nation was under attack, had we been listening to it. In 2001 — perhaps even moreso today — my tiny family wanted the world filtered through an echo chamber that coincided with our likes & dislikes. My mom, for political reasons. Mine, because I was a selfish kid. Therefore, our worlds were filtered through the noise of alternative & rock, through Radiohead & Weezer, through Bob Dylan & Joan Baez, through the political folk of post-Beatles John Lennon & some Folsom Prison Blues-era Johnny Cash.
It remains a good filter to this day, I think.
What I can’t filter out here is that at one point during 1st period, the school principal walked into the room, quietly approached the substitute teacher, spoke in whispered tones into her ear, and then left the room. We were then told that we would momentarily turn on our classroom’s television set and watch breaking news of a dramatic tragedy in NYC: the crashing of two planes into the towers of the World Trade Center.
We would watch in quiet awe for the next hour, and since the crashes themselves had already occurred, we watched both the coal black smoke slowly burp from the WTC or up-to-the-minute footage of first responders rushing to the scene. But neither video impressed upon me what I was seeing, how real it was, how grave it was.
I felt like I was watching a movie.
And — for the rest of the day — no conversation that I had with my mother or my uncle or my teacher could truly contextualize for me what was happening that day.
Five years after I could have comprehended the anxiety of that day, I saw a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which particularly captured the hysteria that must have been felt across the nation on September 11th. Up to that moment — I already understood the identity of Steven Spielberg. I knew him as the director of my favorite movie — E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which made me sob in equal measures of sorrow & joy every time I watched it. And I’d seen his name appear in the credits of other movies that I loved: the adventures of Indiana Jones, the gateway horror of Gremlins (1984), and the time-traveling odyssey of Back to the Future (1985).
In Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, I would reach a momentary yet enduring understanding of the terror of 9/11, of what that day meant to America, though I wouldn’t know it until later. When I first saw the motion picture, it looked like little more than an emotional, action-packed thriller about an alien invasion. Entertaining, yes. A detour in the second act, yes.
But I wouldn’t understand the impact that these aliens would have on America immediately.
I felt like I was watching a movie.
Written by David Koepp (Stir of Echoes, 1999), this remake of H.G. Wells’ science fiction classic tells the story of working man Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise), who is charged to care for his two kids (Dakota Fanning & Justin Chatwin) whom he had with his ex-wife (Miranda Otto). But the lives of Ray and his kids change dramatically when their urban neighborhood is besieged by what can only be an alien attack, decimating the community and sending Ray on a mission to reunite his kids with their mother.
Like those 9/11 survivors, Ray dusts himself off of the attack’s debris, the dust of bodies & buildings. He contends with other survivors armed & prepared to shoot him for his motor vehicle in order to gain passage to some other safe haven. He meets people perfectly prepared to take his life in defense of their own. Understand once more that what I know of 9/11 is limited. My mother had intended to stuff envelopes as a temp agency employee that day, but she was told not to come in, because her shift would have started at 11 a.m., and hysteria had already shaken the nation to its core. So, she spent the morning instead sitting in front of the TV, watching, just watching.
My uncle, meanwhile, spent the day making deliveries for a home appliance store. Throughout the entire afternoon, he said, he was fully aware of what was happening in NYC. And he assumed — rightfully so — that Mom did, too, as he did the rest of the world. “It was so strange,” he told me. “It was business as usual, and it shouldn’t have been.”
Having finished his route for the day, my uncle was told by his boss to go home early, so he did. And arriving at his rented house, my uncle discovered a maintenance man affixing new gutters to his rooftop. The two spoke briefly about the events in NYC, never really talking about how they were feeling: scared, angry, confused, lost.
The most emotion that would be shared, my uncle said, was when the maintenance man confessed that his daughter lived in Midtown, in north Manhattan. My uncle asked him if he’d heard from her, and he hadn’t — he didn’t own a cellphone. As that maintenance man-family man stood on that ladder in my uncle’s front yard, his heart and mind were racing each other on foot somewhere in Midtown Manhattan.
“Go home,” my uncle told him. “You should be sitting by the phone. The gutters can wait.” The maintenance man replied that he had a job to do, and he would do it.
“Go home,” my uncle repeated. “You’re a father. And your daughter is in New York City today. You can be a maintenance man tomorrow. You’re a father today. You have a job more important than this one to do, today.”
That was all that needed to be said, I would have to imagine. When I asked, my uncle said that he never saw that maintenance man again — but his gutters were fully installed the following afternoon.
At its core, War of the Worlds explores something similar: how normal people confront a worldwide affront such as 9/11 — whether through panic, anger, fear, submission, or otherwise. The film embraces the moment from the viewpoint of a single person who is on the pavement as it happened — fearful for his own life, more fearful for the lives of his family, and possessed with little knowledge about what is unfolding around him.
In response, the only understanding Ray has is that of survival, even if for only one more day. He awkwardly embraces that strength when he’s forced to sing a lullaby to his frightened daughter (Dakota Fanning) in the basement of his wife’s home. He tearfully confronts the challenge of the moment when his son (Justin Chatwin) ultimately decides that he must join the military forces against the alien invaders — despite the fact that he likely won’t survive the war.
Upon these two levels — and, likely, so many more — Ray Ferrier’s existential life was changed on the day that aliens waged war on the world. Once upon a time, his greatest concern was heartily consuming the health market food that his daughter ordered for delivery to his home. Now, his greatest concern is returning his only daughter to the arms of his divorced wife, wondering if he will ever see the face of his argumentative son again.
I would like to think that the lives of my mother & my uncle were as similarly transformed on 9/11 as Ray Ferrier’s when H.G. Wells’ aliens laid claim to the planet Earth.
Perhaps I’ll never know to what extent that transformation happened. Perhaps my mother watched the world change forever on the television set that day as she waited impatiently for the school bus to safely deliver me home, and perhaps she was for a long time in fear of what waited for me out there in the world outside our house, whenever I went to school. Perhaps it was the fear that parents feel today, when they fearfully dream that their children may become targets in a school shooting. And perhaps my uncle — especially in light of the radio news barking updates at him — must have somehow felt that the American Dream seemed at least momentarily changed for him, when one’s dream might be a little more temporary after that day …
… Like returning home to find an answering machine message saying in a familiar voice that everything was going to be all right after all.
The gutters, after all, would wait.
***
Late-Night at the Pickwick Drive-In 
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