Seriously what are your points???

And of course there’s the argument that it hit too close to home. I would actually be interested in knowing how we handled Pearl Harbor or how other countries handled invasions and tragedies when it comes to cinema. The thing that really makes these two 9/11 movies stand out is that they’re based on actual people and their stories, and so there’s been a lot of controversy about which families approve of this. Unfortunately, I think that people still tend to see a movie made about an event and automatically are concerned about the exploitation as an action and money making vehicle. The notion of it as a tribute tends to get lost.

But I understand that things are very murky when you get into these “tragedy” films about human on human violence in an every day context. These are things that we struggle to understand. The closest approximation I can think of is something like Munich, but that was more about the fall out and was made decades later. I can’t think of any others…frankly, it will be more interesting to see what people have to say about the implications of 9/11 as the years go on. With Vietnam, we needed films about the war in order to make sense of it. Some of the greatest films of all time have come out of the ashes of Vietnam. This can only come with some perspective. United 93 and WTC stuck pretty close to the book. We probably will eventually see films that have more of an interpretation as we try to understand the meaning of what happened.

cib3k: You’re doing the exact same thing that you’re complaining about: marginalizing one tragedy for another. Some atrocities are worse than others. But it’s obvious why 9/11 is publicized so much (terrorists striking at the heart of the symbol of one of the world’s largest and most prosperous nation using our own planes), and that is no reason for apathy. Not only do you marginalize the events, but you marginalize most tragedies by saying that it’s all just another day and that they aren’t worth remembering. If 9/11 isn’t worth thinking about, then most tragedies aren’t worth thinking about, and that is kind of scary.

As for the government, most Americans aren’t going to excuse what our government has done (though the argument is far more nuanced than that, but your post isn’t exactly given over to nuances), but the line of thinking that you have presented is also scary. Governments commit atrocities every day. They make war with each other and amongst themselves. They aren’t just marginalizing their own tragedies. They’re the cause of it. The actions of the government shouldn’t doom the people and make them the subject of apathy, even if it is the people who are destroying themselves. Nobody “has it coming”, at least not as a group, because people really aren’t that different on an emotional level, and if we start dooming certain populations because we think that they brought it down upon themselves, then no one is worth saving. We wouldn’t be worth saving as a species because we are probably so apathetic that we would destroy ourselves without even realizing it.