September 11 as Heist

Abstract

This article examines two films, James Marsh's Man on Wire and Spike Lee's Inside Man in relation to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It looks at both films as examples of the heist genre and explores the ways in which genre conventions enable the production of meaning about the terrorist attacks. The conventions of the heist film, it argues, help make sense of September 11 by producing a different set of relations to time and space that draw on the uncanny, rather than the traumatic, nature of the events. Narrating stories of transgression, both films place the horrors of September 11 in another context. Through the genre conventions of the heist, each film offers a view of New York in which the events of September 11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center stand as the center. Not yet complete in one, already destroyed in the other, the Twin Towers haunt these films. As Man on Wire and Inside Man each attempt to make sense of the world in which the city of New York is marked most powerfully by a profound absence, it is in their uses of the heist genre that they find a representational space in which to mourn the World Trade Center and the victims of the attacks.