Ground Zero

****

Decade succeeds in humanizing moral failings: fear, shame, doubt. In the simplest and most intimate scene, we hear a blokish, British New Yorker talk through the guilt of swapping his day off for 9/11, his creeping frustrations with the official investigation, his confusion at finding his public criticisms picked up by conspiracy theorists.

It’s a devastating performance by Tobias Menzies, pared down, humble. And Menzies isn’t the only talented performer here: Kevin Harvey is fierce and firm as the Marine ordered to shoot Bin Laden, as well as pulling off a neat Barack Obama impression.

The ever-reliable Emma Fielding is solid as a professional 9/11 widow, monumentalized in grief, even if her accent wanders. Snaking through all these stories, Scott Ambler’s choreography is revelatory – dances hint at the ritual of everyday life, our interdependence, combat, humility, at infinite possible relationships formed in the rubble.

The problem with all these stories is that they can’t compete with the 2749 real tales out there, lost among the rubble but occasionally sifting to the surface. Decade is timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of these attacks, but the schedule does it a disservice: beside the long, narrative ceremony of the official memorial, few of us have emotional energy to waste on fiction.

It’s only a few weeks since the name of every victim was read aloud at the crash site. It was as theatrical as experience as Decade, as heavily staged-managed. When a posthumous child read out the name of a father he’d never met, promising to ‘love you for loving the idea of having me’, we knew we were being manipulated, we knew that we were being urged to identify with America, to feel its wounds as our own, to condemn its enemies.

But indeed we did weep, because no cynicism could have made us forget that this story was, in all its heartbreak, true. We were looking at a tiny nine-year-old without a father.

Successful literature has drawn on fictional suffering in 9/11. But in most cases, the strength of the work has been that it has used the tragedy as a collective reference point from which to delve into more unusual questions. Neil Labute’s The Mercy Seat follows the decision of a survivor to return to his mistress, rather than his family, but is a play not about terror but about responsibility, betrayal and adultery.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is obsessed with loss, but Safran Foer is more interested what happens when you lose control of words – words deleted unheard on answer phones, sealed in unread letters, scribbled and lost on shop scrap paper – than when you lose people. In one of the novel’s central images, a character recalls how ‘The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river. I was the tree, the world was the river.”

It is the image of a man no longer able to find words to express his grief. And the scenes in which nine-year-old Oskar mourns a father killed in the World Trade Centre are at their most affecting when he imagines himself similarly letting all the words his father might have uttered drift away from him. These are the type of scenes that make you want to force a hand inside your chest to see
if your heart is still beating – not because of the problems of geopolitics, but because of the fragile nature of language.

But the novel becomes disappointingly diffuse when it compares Oskar’s loss to his grandfather’s suffering in the Dresden fire-bombings, with wars and orphan experiences around the world becoming condensed into Oskar’s soap-opera rage at his mother’s new boyfriend: ‘you’re not my Dad!’ We pick up the book because the cover promises to make artistic sense of 9/11, but we only really read the bits that aren’t about 9/11 at all.

Talented fiction writers have tried to tackle the specifics of 9/11 directly. As Frédéric Beigbeder notes in his novel, Windows on the World, we are drawn to imagine the darkest places inside the Twin Towers precisely because no one survives to report: ‘The only way to know what took place in the restaurant in the 107th Floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center on September 11th 2001 is to invent it”.

Beigbeder’s novel is the tale of a divorced father who chooses to spend his court-scheduled time with his sons on a trip to the Trade Centre. It’s a powerful work of compulsive voyeurism. In a heart-stopping passage, the heat builds in the burning floor without respite. The young children are dying. ‘At some point, Jerry looked round at the water cooler which was making a strange glug-glug noise. Bubbles were starting to form in the clear plastic water bottle. Inside, the water was about to boil.’

But even Beigbeder shies away from fully piecing the story together: the final passages of the story are scarred with ellipses, even page breaks, where empty space on the book’s leaves marks the large gaps the author couldn’t bear to fill with text.

If Decade is braver than Windows on the World, it is also more foolhardy. Beigbeder wrote one chapter to describe every minute between the impact of the first airplane and the collapse of the second tour. Decade tries to memorialize the same events in just 150 minutes of live action. Where Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel about missing messages, Decade shoehorns in racism, terrorism, abortion, therapy culture, media, parenthood, betrayal, sex, war and religion (in at least four different varieties!)

And in pressing so many emotive buttons, it makes the same mistake that George Bush did ten years ago, for all that its creators revile and reject him. The West should not have made decisions about who to vilify and invade while the bodies of the New York dead still smoldered like a pile of mascots. And no theatre audience should be directed to ‘set all this in the context of history’ while watching a widow enact her husband’s last moments.

It’s not art. It’s not history. It’s just a mess.

Pages: 1 2