Conjuring Trauma: The Naudet Brothers' 9/11 Documentary

Abstract

Abstract: The events of 11 September 2001 caused a rupture not only in the normal order of things but also, and perhaps especially, in the signifying systems underwriting that order. The Naudet brothers’ remarkable 9/11 documentary, which aired on CBS on 10 March 2002 and on TV stations around the world on the first anniversary of the attacks, seeks to reinstitute the authority of the conventions and constructions of a culture whose limits the events of 11 September had painfully exposed. The film—entitled 9/11—is marked by a fundamental tension between the revelation of an abysmal crisis of meaning, on the one hand, and the desire to bring this crisis under control, on the other. The filmmakers attempt to mitigate the traumatic potential of their unique atrocity footage by sanitizing it and integrating it into a Hollywood-style coming-of-age drama tracing a probationary fire-fighter's perilous journey from innocence to experience. Thus, the focus shifts from a disorienting and overwhelming sense of loss to comforting, ideologically charged notions of heroism and community that perpetuate an idealized national self-image and come to function as a moral justification for retaliation. In its drive to obtain mastery over trauma by rendering it legible in terms of existing cultural codes, 9/11 appears to disregard what Cathy Caruth calls “the event's essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” (154). Yet, for all its investment in a classical realist aesthetic, the film remains haunted by a traumatic history that exceeds and breaks down accustomed habits of thought, narration, and visualization.