Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Trailer: Right At Your Door
I went to see Lady in the Water last night (shit) and by far the most interesting part of the evening was seeing a trailer for Right at Your Door (directed by first timer, Chris Gorak), a movie about a dirty bomb attack on Los Angeles. Apart from the minor thrill of never having heard of the film before seeing the trailer in the theatre, what was interesting thing about it is its use of a terrorist attack on an American city as a dramatic backdrop. Trailer here, homepage here.
9/11, as a part of our cultural lives, has become something of a sacred cow. Images of the Twin Towers were removed from films (Spiderman being the most high profile) disaster movies stopped getting made (Rememebr the opening sequence of Armageddon where the Chrysler building collapses in a beautiful fx shot complete with plummeting, screaming people?), planes tended not to get hijacked anymore. Terrorism became the elephant in the living room of pop culture.
And not talking about it is bad. It doesn't help to deal with the very real shock of that attack. The silence allows politicians and other opportunists to fill it with their agendas. In a country so defined by its mass media, not having those events seep into the fabric of its programming can only lead to a cultural schizophrenia.
Last year's War of the Worlds gently introduced post 9/11 imagery into blockbuster cinema, but still hid it behind sci-fi concepts and the famous 'common cold' ending that broke down any current-affairs mirroring subtext.
This year, five years after the event, saw the first attempts to tackle 9/11 head on, with the films United 93 and World Trade Center, both very respectful and diligently unsensationalist accounts and both met with cries of 'too soon'. Both however, are very much 'testament' films. They are records of the events, as much memorials as entertainments.
What has been missing in mainstream cinema is the direct use of terrorism on US soil as nothing more than a juicy plot point, something that Right at Your Door, finally, seems to be doing.
This is not to say that the film will be any good, or even that it will be in good taste - its title seems fear-mongering and sensationalist in the very best exploitation movie tradition, and it seems too much of a coincidence that it is being released on 8th September - but it is important in its marking of a change of attitude towards fictionalising tragedy in a post 9/11 America.
Once the floodgates open and films, both good and, even better, bad, are made about the attacks, the event itself will lose its reason-destroying power. This can be seen as devaluing it, so going against all those 'never forget' posters, but what it actually represents is an important part of healing the wound. Until a tragedy becomes simply 'something that happened' and a part of a country's living history, the greiving process has not been completed and the wound is still open. This is dangerous, harmful and only useful to those who would seek to take advantage of that wound.
So let the crappy movies be made. Let the exploitation, horror and action movies be made. Let the teen comedy be made. Take 9/11 out of the hands of the few and into the hands of the culture at large, where it will be thrown about, used, abused, memorialised, respected, mocked, analysed and manipulated, and people will be free to approach it on their own terms, rather than with the pain of loss or the fear of being called a traitor.
Japan made Godzilla only eight years after atomic bombs destroyed two entire cities. Hollywood, for its part, needs to do the same before 'too soon' becomes entirely 'too late'.
Source: Rightatyourdoormovie.co.uk, TheMovieBox.net
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