United 93

I find myself hesitant to see this movie for fear it will disturb my nascent and hard-won agnosticism* about whether the events it depicts actually happened. I'm actually experiencing a disconnect in reading reviewers' assertions about just how powerful and difficult to watch this movie is. The reviewers of course are assuming I accept I'll be watching and experiencing something more real than the average Hollywood thriller. The movie relies on the same kick that James Frey relied on before his book got outed as fiction--and before various reality TV shows got outed as variously unreal. Oddly, by stating what a great movie the Flight 93 story makes, these reviewers are almost pushing me toward the conclusion that history was written with Hollywood in mind, rather than the conventional reverse. That is, if you were crafting a national myth for propaganda purposes, why not go "high concept" and envision the inevitable movie down the line? Only a foolish conspirator does otherwise. Notice I didn't entitle this post United 93: The Movie. I suppose I might see it, but if I do I'll be wearing my tin foil hat.

*Seeing the administration as having engaged in sweeping, high-stakes deceptions, as practicing unprecedented secrecy and as thwarting Congress from exercising the oversight that the Constitution demands, I feel that taking an agnostic posture toward 9-11 is practically a patriotic duty; that is, given that the administration's behavior and the physical evidence that is public appear largely consistent with a hoax, that the administration seems to have had an obvious motive for such a hoax, that the official story is the linchpin of current domestic and foreign policy and that if truly 9-11 is a hoax, then our democracy and the world are in the deepest doodoo ever.