It seemed just like a movie

14 September 2001

We have seen it all before. When the jet plunges into the Pentagon, Chang Noi is a couple of kilometres away, trying to open a bank account. The bank staff snaps on a TV. The fire balls billowing up from the twin towers seem familiar from a thousand action films. The jet slicing into a building is so outrageous, so frightening that some around us ask: "Was that some kind of computer animation?" Watched live, the collapse of the twin towers only makes sense as footage of a rocket launch played in reverse.

The first horrified eye-witnesses interviewed live keep returning to the visuals learnt from cinema. When the buildings collapse, the typhoons blown through lower Manhattan are "just like Independence Day". The construction worker who clambers out of the collapsed side of the Pentagon gasps "it looks like a movie, y’know, the Airplane type." The panting, dust-smothered figures running north through Manhattan exclaim the scene downtown is "like the nuclear winter you see in the movie, after a big bomb."

Within minutes, the TV anchor-men are comparing the event to Pearl Harbour—not just the last armed attack on America, but the big action movie of a few months back. By mid-morning, CNN gives the event an action movie title, America Under Attack. NBC follows suit, headlining its coverage as Attack On America, complete with a movie-like animated logo based on a radar sweep.

The friend who drives us away from central Washington asks: "Do you remember the movie, On The Beach? Made in the fifties or sixties. About the last days of a few survivors of a nuclear war."

By mid-day, the TV stations begin to air amateur footage shot at street level. Again the movies have prepared us well. People sprint and stumble along streets, then turn and stare up into the sky, shading their eyes. Streams of people dash towards the camera as billows of grey smoke chase them up the street. Women cower behind parked cars as rubble rains down. Children look on in innocent disbelief. The New York skyline disappears under thick grey smoke. King Kong. Godzilla. Superman. Die Hard. Fatal Impact. Whatever.

Then people take cameras into the smoke and the scenes becomes more extraordinary than the movies dare. Action reality takes over from action film. No longer the colour-soaked hyper-realism of fire-balls, air disaster, or wide-action panic, but the bleak, colour-drained views of modern violence. Reams of paper blowing down deserted streets. Lone press photographers picking their way across heaps of rubble. Fatigue-clad rescue workers emerging from the smoke gasping for breath. The massive concrete chunks of wrecked buildings. Cars smashed and smothered in dust. Streets littered with rocks and debris. Wobbly hand-held cameras. Any colour as long as it’s grey. These are images from Chechnaya, Kabul, Serajevo, the West Bank and the modern visual catalogue of real urban destruction. And worse. The cameramen open the apertures wide to cope with the smoke darkness, giving the background the glare of a nuclear blast. A reporter stoops to pick up a handful of the 3-inch dust covering New York streets. It’s like the surface of the moon.

The TV anchors are now talking the language of war. Lower Manhattan is Ground Zero. A reporter at the Pentagon announces: "War has been declared on the nation today". An office-worker who escaped from the World Trade Centre mouths: "It’s like a horror show. It’s like World War Three." A commentator says the country has been "immobilised". General Norman Schwarzkopf, America’s commander during the Gulf War, phones in to declare the events "unbelievable". As an F-16 flashes over our heads, a Washington friend exclaims: "My God, they’re flying air cover over the nation’s capital."

But the film references are not quite erased by the realization that truth is much worse than anything a film director dares to imagine or display. By evening, the TV channels are intercutting newsreel clips from Pearl Harbour. The jet slicing into the tower, shown repeatedly from different angles, has the feeling of a sports action replay. A New Yorker exclaims: "It was just like a movie. There were people crying. There were people walking around in shock. I’m still shaking. I just don’t feel right." The witnesses’ adjectives try to close the gap between the everyday mayhem of popular entertainment and their own recent lived reality: surreal, unimaginable, insane. "Can you believe that something like this can happen in America?" CBS closes its coverage by repeating the day’s commonest quote: "It seemed just like a movie."

The reality is, of course, very awful but very simple. A handful of people armed with knives attacked the world’s most powerful nation and inflicted casualties and destruction on the scale of a major war within the space of two hours without even having to pay for the bombs. But while it is happening, that is too much, too outrageous, too horrifying to comprehend.