National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood by Matthew Alford & Tom Secker

Author:Matthew Alford & Tom Secker [Alford, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf, epub
Published: 2017-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

United 93

Paul Greengrass’s United 93 was generally received as a neutral piece of work with emphasis placed on its avoidance of a sensationalist style, through the use of unknown actors, its decentralisation of the famous ‘Let’s roll’ line, and its use of hand-held cameras.[cclxxxviii] It is a literal depiction of what happened to Flight 93 on 11 September 2001, namely the terrorist take-over, the passengers rebelling and then crash-landing the plane in rural Pennsylvania. In other words, it was not a jingoistic piece of Hollywood trash, but rather a sensitively made piece of work that dealt respectfully with the human beings who all lost their lives on that day.

Still, a closer look at the film suggests it is not as neutral as it appeared. 9/11 had occurred whilst Greengrass was making Bloody Sunday (2002), which recreated the 1972 massacre in Northern Ireland. Greengrass commented, ‘[9/11] made what I was doing seem a bit irrelevant. But then, as we carried on working, it became for me oddly relevant, because Bloody Sunday was really about how we overreacted, how we militarised the early stages of the conflict and made it much worse.’[cclxxxix]

United 93 raised no such issues, so it is hard to see how Greengrass saw it as ‘oddly relevant.’ The film’s ‘Bible,’ as Greengrass put it in his DVD commentary, was the Bush administration’s official 9/11 Commission Report, which simply presented the events as described on the day. Perhaps this is what Bush had in mind when he said ‘See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.’[ccxc]

In our analysis, we are not making any solid claims about 9/11 itself but we are saying that, in stark contrast to the way it was marketed, this film is a political construction over a highly contentious set of events that is, yet again, favourable to the propaganda needs of the national security state.

This 2006 docudrama is an unusual movie for two key reasons: It was the first big budget Hollywood film based on the 9/11 attacks, and it had no formal script—the dialogue was largely improvised. As a result, when the producers, Michael Bronner and Lloyd Levin, approached the DOD to ask for production support, there was no script to review. Instead they provided Phil Strub with detailed treatments, and Levin, along with the director Paul Greengrass, had a conference call with the DOD in November 2005 where Greengrass ‘expressed his intentions to accurately and realistically portray the US military.’[ccxci] This persuaded the Pentagon to agree to providing assistance, including on-set advisors for the scenes depicting the military.

Passengers aboard the hijacked United Airlines flight 93, as depicted by United 93.

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