Even for those of us who were there, the attack on the World Trade Centre had an unmistakably cinematic quality. From below, the billowing Roman candles of the twin towers 1,000 feet overhead seemed too spectacular to be real. After watching so many Hollywood stunts, it seemed almost impossible to believe that all those office workers were actually leaping to their deaths.
Then al-Qaeda’s dastardly fantasy came crashing to the ground amid a killing mushroom cloud of debris. I still remember my pulse throbbing in my neck as I ran to escape the asphyxiating fog. Recovered from the rubble was one 10-ton chunk of collapsed skyscraper that had four floors compressed into just two feet, like a piece of ancient sedimentary rock.
I always thought that was a good metaphor for 9/11. Despite the high drama of that day, it has taken — and will take — years to unpack the experience. Meticulous work, level by level like an archaeologist, is required. Some of my most vivid images come not from being an eyewitness, but from what survivors and rescuers told me later. A fireman, for instance, explained that those leaping office workers “exploded like water-melons” on impact. A salvage worker said that a lift full of dead people had been found in the atrium of the nearby World Financial Centre after being shot up the lift-shaft and across the street like a bullet.
As we near the fifth anniversary, television is playing a greater part than ever before in this great unpacking of the attack’s political and psychological debris. In the coming days, the airwaves — both in America and the UK — will be full of documentaries, docudramas and discussions. Some, like The History Channel’s dramatisation Countdown to Ground Zero, descend into silly special effects. Others in the US, such as Lionsgate’s On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report, seem determined to feed the public need to blame the US Government. Many of the individual stories, such as Brian Clark’s “Good Samaritan” rescue of Stanley Praimnath, are repeated so often that one fears a hardening of the narrative of 9/11 into a few choice tales of heroism. Yet any of these programmes can offer new insights.
Who knew, as reported on CNN’s special In the Footsteps of Bin Laden, that the al-Qaeda chief, who received religious sanction for the attack, now has a fatwa from a Saudi cleric permitting the annihilation of 10 million Americans in a nuclear attack? How terrifyingly unique is the description of the concertina collapse of the north tower given on The Miracle of Stairway B by Fire Chief Jay Jonas, who was trapped inside: “Every time a floor hit another floor it would not only make a noise but it would cause tremendous vibration, so we’re being bounced up and down on the floor, hearing the collapse coming closer.”
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For me, the greatest insight from the programming was how my wife must have felt as she watched the disaster unfold on television from our loft in SoHo just blocks away. Listening to account after account of husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters whose relatives did not survive, I for the first time appreciated the scale of the panic that gripped my wife until — the mobile phones jammed and pay-phones mobbed by desperate crowds — I was able to reach a land-line in a friend’s shop to tell her I was alive.
Terror re-lived on TV
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THE MIRACLE OF STAIRWAY B
Monday, Channel 4, 9pm
An astonishing survivors’ story.
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9/11 MILLIONAIRE WIDOWS
Wednesday, Channel 4, 9pm
The curse of 9/11 compensation.
THE TWIN TOWERS
Thursday, BBC One, 9pm
Unbearably moving testimonies.
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THE PATH TO 9/11
Sept 10/11, BBC Two
US drama about events leading up to 9/11. Harvey Keitel stars.