THE BEST OF 2006
THE DUKE ON UNITED 93
THE DUKE ON UNITED 93
I
9/11 In The Goon-Shack
September 11th 2001 I’m sat in the smoking room of a psychiatric
hospital listenin’ to a fella telling me all about the time Judas
Iscariot sucked him off out back some ale-house couple hours west
of Jerusalem. “He earned his 30 pieces that night” says he, “I’ll
tell you that for the price o’ a builder’s rawhide. And I’d have
happily given him thrice as much again, had I been in any position
to give him anything. As it happens, I was well skint.”
I nod. “I dare say he’d have been a wild man for the willy, right
enough.”
“Oh, save us, he was shockin’” says he, “Swear to God, the nuts o’
fifty men couldn’t o’ held the lust he had boilin’ ‘tween the
thighs.”
Round about, sulphur-mawed men and women sit muttering to
themselves or growling at fag-ends or grinding great clods of
theosophical cud atween teeth ragged and cragged and blackened and
bent. In the centre of the room, the Spice Girls sing about 2
becoming 1 from out a set of knackered speakers.
“Did he swallow, at all?” asks Garth, an old fella sat leafing
through a month old broadsheet, pulling on a counterfeit Regal King
Size.
“He done none o’ that” says my companion, “And well he didn’t. I
dare say he’d have had no bother wi’ thon noose, if’n he had’ve,
for he’d o’ been choked t’death there and then.”
For a time I sit watching the smoke rising up and out the throats
of those assembled, great clouds o’ grey / black fugg jiggering and
jaggering out past trembling lips, wreathing about dope-dulled
skulls, drifting past eyes look like candles flick’rin dimly other
side of upheld bed-sheets.
I watch that, and I watch also the woman in the corner, woman sat
patting at her eyes with the end of a lipstick-stained sleeve,
woman now and then mouthing the name of a husband she never met, of
a son she never bore.
I watch her, and I watch also the skyway other side of the glass
door, I watch that skyway as the fly bound in the yarn of the
arachnid’s arsehole watches said spindly-legged bastard fidgeting
on the other end o’ yon web. I watch that skyway as the fella lain
in muck and shit and the blood o’ his friends watches some faceless
phantom through the lens of the rifle held afore him.
I watch that skyway with the stomach careering around my ribs and
with the taste of a savage terror draped o’er my tongue as a shawl.
“Turn thon up, there” says Garth, wagging a yellowed finger at the
radio. “Turn it up, what’s that he’s sayin’?”
From out the cracklin’ fuzz of the airwaves, a woman announces that
one of the World Trade Centre towers has been struck by some manner
of missile. A breathless fella talking via a mobile phone half-
connection stutters and stammers and says about it just streaked
across the sky, whatever it was, just careered o’er the heavens
like thon plague o’ liquid night Yahweh sent skiting o’er the
stones of Egypt.
From out the sky, it came.
I turn away from the glass-door, and from that terrifying, infinite
spread.
In the TV room, a half-dozen patients are sat on their knees front
the screen, with the flames and the fumes and the screaming and the
roaring and the rubble and the ruin lashing at the gloom.
“They interrupted Trisha” says a young lass with a black eye. “And
wasn’t it goin’ to be shown who the father o’ the wain was, and me
waiting three days to find out.”
The newscaster squirming in a tiny box bottom right of the screen,
he’s saying about it was an airplane, it turns out, an airplane
flung like a dart from out the blue into the side of that building.
They’re playing with the possibility that it could’ve been
intentional, but by who and for what reason they’re not at all keen
on hypothesising at this stage.
Couple nurses arrive at the door with the arms folded and the heads
shaking. “Isn’t it wild altogether?” says one, and the other, he
sucks the air through his teeth and says “Break your heart,
wouldn't it? And me and the wife with the flight booked for a
month's time, sure it’d put you off ever rising so much as a foot
off of the kerbstones, wouldn’t it not?”
The second plane hits the second tower in a ‘ruption of red and
orange and black, the screen wobbling, the gasps and the cries and
the “Holy shit”, the lot of us sat there with the yaps agape and
the eyebrows twitching and back of the brains gnawed rotten by one
thought thunk in unison; “Dear Christ, I hope they don’t attack
this hospital.”
Harry, an old auctioneer from a town few miles removed from Antrim,
he stands up with a great snarl and, with arms flailing about him,
he says “Didn’t I tell you, and did youse listen? You listened
none, and what now? Cities attacked on the TV screens there, and me
preachin’ war day and night. You’ll listen now, heth you will,
you'll want t’be hearing everything Harry has to say about the
trenches and the mushroom clouds o’er Dublin.”
Harry, he’s riddled with paranoia and schizophrenia, but he’s
saying nothing the rest of us aren’t thinking. It’s war. We’re
buggered.
“Will we be drafted, d’you think?” I’m asking Janet in the smoke
room later that evening. “Look at me, how can I shoot a gun? By god
I can barely blow a load ‘gainst the porcelain without needing to
be lain in a darkened room for a fortnight with the shame and the
guilt risen like boils on my back, how can I fire an AK?”
“If’n they’re draftin’ it’ll not be out the nut-house” she says,
but Harry, sat across the way there, fiddling with a rolling
machine, he’s not so sure.
“Suppose, now” says he, “You’ve got a load of healthy young men and
women well trained and educated and fit as Samson’s nut-sack.
Suppose you’ve also got a bunch o’ cuckoos in the wards there
jigglin’ like tuning forks off of wheel trims. Who’s the first you
send, who’s the ones you fling in blind to test the place? It’s not
the elite, I tell you that. It’s the goons, is who, for by Jesus
it's better to loose a man already lost as loose one o’ the able.”
“That’s a load o’ arse” says Janet, putting a hand on my arm,
“Don't listen to him.”
“And anyway” she adds, quoting Morrissey afore he got time to think
of it, “They attacked America. America is not the world. America’s
not County Londonderry.”
She says this and I’m thinking of the yellow M risen far side of
the river, glaring o’er the town, casting shadows across the waters
and the roads and the council estates.
(“It’s not actually an M” says a woman high on Winsor McKay, “It’s
arches.”)
I’m thinking of the Starbucks set for splurging incandescent out
the ashes of the old record store used to be perched on the corner
by the newsagents.
I’m thinking how many times I’ve heard someone say “Totally” or
“Random” this evening.
Sometimes around 10 in the PM I’m sat on the edge of the mattress
yackin’ to the nurse, I’m saying about what are the chances, pray
tell, of them maybe flying thon planes into the hospital here?
“I wouldn’t worry about that” says she, “For even if they did
attack Northern Ireland, the chances of which are altogether very
slim, even if they did, it wouldn’t be the hospitals they’d go for.”
“Well what, then?”
“Oh, I dunno, maybe the banks or Stormont Castle or something. But
they won’t, anyway.”
“Can you promise that?” I’m saying, leaning forward, “Can you
promise they won’t, for I’d be a man would put a lot of stock in a
promise, particularly one from out the mouth of a nurse.”
“I can promise you it’s very, very unlikely.”
A friend of mine, lad suffers something savage from manic
depression, he’s been talking all evening about the folks who
overpowered the hijackers on one of the planes, crashed into a
field in Pennsylvania. Curiously, it’s served to rouse him
momentarily from out the insufferable blue’s kept him pinned to the
mattress like Christ to the cross for the past eight days. “Can you
imagine?” he says. “Can you imagine the courage that must’ve taken?
To bring that plane down? Can you imagine how beautiful those souls
must be shining tonight?”
“No” I said. “No, I can’t for a moment imagine it.” And it’s true.
And I still can’t.
I fall asleep listening to a fella scribbling plans for a shelter
into an A4 file-block. “Underground” he’s muttering, “Underground
is where t’be, and them boys’ll all be waddling about the streets
for they’re stupid, is what they are, but no, underground, that’s
where I’m headed.”
II
“Does the sky still scare you?” asks my ladyfriend, Beautiful Ms
Gillian, the pair of us headed towards the doors of the multiplex
one evening in sunny July of 2006.
“Not so much” says I, “The pills and the doctors and the
occupational therapy and what have you, afore long they siphon out
any such deranged notions ‘till all’s left’s a sort of mucus
dangling from atween the thighs. I still step in it of occasion,
but it’s nothin’ a wire-brush and a prosaic lather can’t shift.”
In order that there might be some canoodling and laughing and
smooching of an hour or two, y’unnerstann, myself and herself, we
figured we’d take ourselves down the street for to sit in the glow
of a cinema screen for a couple hours. “You can pick the flick”
said she, passing a newspaper my direction. “Whatever you want.
Something fun.”
“Something fun” said I, nodding. “That’ll be the very thing for us.”
“So this is about 9/11” she’s saying as we dander towards the
ticket booth.
“It’s that if it’s anything, and it’ll be amazing, I can assure
you. Paul Greengrass, he’s by all accounts gone out his way to
fashion the starkest, tightest, most harrowing hour and a half of
plane-based drama a fella could e’er envision. And by God, if his
Bloody Sunday wasn’t the best ‘Troubles’ flick since In The Name Of
The Father then I don’t know what at all might be.”
Beside the doors of Screen 3, a one-sheet’s hung on the wall
advertising Over The Hedge. “I laughed ‘till I pished my mother’s
knickers” says the quote on the poster. Another assures us that
“If'n it’s a date film you’re after, well by Luther’s belly, this
is the very article for you. Laughin’ and canoodlin’, that’s what
you’ll be up to, if this is the picture you and the lady friend are
viewing.”
On the United 93 poster, the quotes are all stunned silences.
Closest they get to a sentence is this one from, I believe, The
Sun; “Death… loss… my eyes crawl o’er my face like dying flies…”
“It’ll be fun” I reassure Ms Gillian as we’re taking the seats.
An hour and a half later I’m staggering out the cinema like a hobo
just pulled a bungalow out his urethra. “That was… I can’t breathe.
That was devastating... I’m devastated. My tongue’s gone black,
look, black as a miner’s arse-crack. The best film of the year, and
I know I said that about The Hills Have Eyes and also Brokeback
Mountain and The Proposition but… no, film of the year, United 93
is.”
Ms Gillian, she’s not so sure, and less sure again about how much
“fun” it might’ve been, the whole affair. “I was kind of in the
mood for… y’know. A good time?”
“Hmm” says I, scratching the chin. “You were, and so was I, and yet
there we sat choked and silent afore thirty minutes of men
muttering confused commands to one another followed by an hour of
people hurtling to their deaths.”
The pair of us wander ashen-jawed to the car-park, contemplating
the horrors scarred thon screen.
Still, we look like giddy dope-drunk cherubs bathed in God’s
lambent dribble in comparison to the poor bastards stumbled out The
Da Vinci Code round about the same time. They claw at others ear-
lobes and scratch confounded laments o’er others legs. “I thought I’
d died half-way through” says one, “But then, didn’t I come to my
senses and see no, I hadn’t died, and worse, there was near an hour
and a half of the fuckin’ thing left.”
Similar sentiments mouthed by angry punters stompin’ out The Wind
That Shakes The Barley. “Has Ireland not suffered enough?” says
one. “First the potatoes wither and rot ‘side the turnip, then the
civil war, then the troubles, and now, maybe worst of all, Ken
Loach.”
“Aye” nods the lass beside him. “It’s more than any nation should
be asked to tolerate.”
“It’d be a braver man than me” says the young lad crawling on hands
and knees behind them, “Could put up with a quarter of it.”
Bravery. It’s something United 93 has a man considering long into
the following Thursday.
III
Early January 2007 and I’m watching United 93 for the fifth time,
sat in the living room with an old blanket strewn about me and a
bent cigarette dangling out the maw.
Every viewing, a whole new set of questions rises out the murk of
the mind.
What would I have done in that situation? Would I have fought,
would I have stormed up the aisle with the fire-extinguisher thrust
this way and that, or would I have sat weeping into an in-flight
magazine chewing on rosary beads and whispering Hare Krishna?
How many of the folks who died on that unholy morning did so whilst
rejecting with all their hearts the counter-measures taken against
the hijackers? How do we feel about those individuals? Are they
heroes also?
Are there any heroes here?
Why is a film about the most horrendous, terrifying, tragic
situation a man might imagine so exhilarating, so stirring, so life-
affirming?
Part of the answer to the last, of course, is that no answers
whatsoever are provided for any of the others.
United 93 is the best film of 2006 and the best of Greengrass
career thus far. It’s probably the bravest, also.
“Oh aye?” says an ol’ queen stood jabbing at the buttons of a poker
machine in the far-end of the tavern later that evening. “And
what's so brave about it, at all?”
“What’s not brave about it?” says I, closing the notebook a moment.
“That it goes out of its way to present the hijackers as human
beings is in itself a fairly brave move.”
“Human beings, is that right? Funny now, for all I saw were a bunch
o’ screeching yahoo’s racin’ about the place with red headbands on.
They were caricatures.”
“No they weren’t, and here’s why. For all of the hard-man posturing
they might’ve employed once they’d gained control of the plane,
United 93 never once suggests that these people aren’t fucking
terrified, at least as terrified as the people they’re bent on
killing. They’re terrified but they go ahead anyway, and why? Well,
for any number of reasons. That it was too late to do anything else
may be one. That death by that stage was a lot more welcoming than
the consequences they’d face should they decide to abandon the
whole wretched plot, no doubt that played on their minds. But at
the bottom of it all, see, is the belief that what they were doin’
was right. Greengrass refuses to present these people as monsters,
I’d wager, for at least two reasons. One of them is that they
weren't, at least as far as they were concerned. What they did may
be evil, and surely you and I both agree on that. But were they
evil? To be evil, does a man not need to be consciously acting
against the notion of goodness? They didn’t think that for a
second.”
The queen tuts and shakes his head. “Moral relativist horse-shite.”
He takes a jag of whiskey out the pint glass on the table-top next
to him. “And what’s the other reason? Why else does he so
‘humanise’ them, then?”
“Because to buy into the notion of an ultimate evil, to assume
certain individuals are inherently, unalterably so, takes a hell of
a lot of responsibility out of the hands of folks like us. And we
have a hell of a lot of responsibility. At the very least, we have
a responsibility to reduce the chances of folks like those onboard
that flight ever having to make those kinds of decisions again.”
The queen spits onto the wooden floor. Me and him, we disagree on
most everything, but oh how I cherish our debates. “So the best of
the year, according to you?”
“It is that. If for no reason other than it manages to be the
tensest, most exhilarating thriller of the decade without ever once
resorting to thriller tactics. Half an hour or more we’re watching
men watching tiny monitors, and yet look at these knuckles, still
white however many months later.”
“Well” says he, “I'd take half a Passenger 57 over a dozen o' them.
Wesley Snipes. Now there’s a man knows how to keep an arse in
shape.”
“That he does” says I, opening the notebook again for to finish off
an article all about how United 93 is the best film of 2006.
Thanks folks.
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9/11 In The Goon-Shack
September 11th 2001 I’m sat in the smoking room of a psychiatric
hospital listenin’ to a fella telling me all about the time Judas
Iscariot sucked him off out back some ale-house couple hours west
of Jerusalem. “He earned his 30 pieces that night” says he, “I’ll
tell you that for the price o’ a builder’s rawhide. And I’d have
happily given him thrice as much again, had I been in any position
to give him anything. As it happens, I was well skint.”
I nod. “I dare say he’d have been a wild man for the willy, right
enough.”
“Oh, save us, he was shockin’” says he, “Swear to God, the nuts o’
fifty men couldn’t o’ held the lust he had boilin’ ‘tween the
thighs.”
Round about, sulphur-mawed men and women sit muttering to
themselves or growling at fag-ends or grinding great clods of
theosophical cud atween teeth ragged and cragged and blackened and
bent. In the centre of the room, the Spice Girls sing about 2
becoming 1 from out a set of knackered speakers.
“Did he swallow, at all?” asks Garth, an old fella sat leafing
through a month old broadsheet, pulling on a counterfeit Regal King
Size.
“He done none o’ that” says my companion, “And well he didn’t. I
dare say he’d have had no bother wi’ thon noose, if’n he had’ve,
for he’d o’ been choked t’death there and then.”
For a time I sit watching the smoke rising up and out the throats
of those assembled, great clouds o’ grey / black fugg jiggering and
jaggering out past trembling lips, wreathing about dope-dulled
skulls, drifting past eyes look like candles flick’rin dimly other
side of upheld bed-sheets.
I watch that, and I watch also the woman in the corner, woman sat
patting at her eyes with the end of a lipstick-stained sleeve,
woman now and then mouthing the name of a husband she never met, of
a son she never bore.
I watch her, and I watch also the skyway other side of the glass
door, I watch that skyway as the fly bound in the yarn of the
arachnid’s arsehole watches said spindly-legged bastard fidgeting
on the other end o’ yon web. I watch that skyway as the fella lain
in muck and shit and the blood o’ his friends watches some faceless
phantom through the lens of the rifle held afore him.
I watch that skyway with the stomach careering around my ribs and
with the taste of a savage terror draped o’er my tongue as a shawl.
“Turn thon up, there” says Garth, wagging a yellowed finger at the
radio. “Turn it up, what’s that he’s sayin’?”
From out the cracklin’ fuzz of the airwaves, a woman announces that
one of the World Trade Centre towers has been struck by some manner
of missile. A breathless fella talking via a mobile phone half-
connection stutters and stammers and says about it just streaked
across the sky, whatever it was, just careered o’er the heavens
like thon plague o’ liquid night Yahweh sent skiting o’er the
stones of Egypt.
From out the sky, it came.
I turn away from the glass-door, and from that terrifying, infinite
spread.
In the TV room, a half-dozen patients are sat on their knees front
the screen, with the flames and the fumes and the screaming and the
roaring and the rubble and the ruin lashing at the gloom.
“They interrupted Trisha” says a young lass with a black eye. “And
wasn’t it goin’ to be shown who the father o’ the wain was, and me
waiting three days to find out.”
The newscaster squirming in a tiny box bottom right of the screen,
he’s saying about it was an airplane, it turns out, an airplane
flung like a dart from out the blue into the side of that building.
They’re playing with the possibility that it could’ve been
intentional, but by who and for what reason they’re not at all keen
on hypothesising at this stage.
Couple nurses arrive at the door with the arms folded and the heads
shaking. “Isn’t it wild altogether?” says one, and the other, he
sucks the air through his teeth and says “Break your heart,
wouldn't it? And me and the wife with the flight booked for a
month's time, sure it’d put you off ever rising so much as a foot
off of the kerbstones, wouldn’t it not?”
The second plane hits the second tower in a ‘ruption of red and
orange and black, the screen wobbling, the gasps and the cries and
the “Holy shit”, the lot of us sat there with the yaps agape and
the eyebrows twitching and back of the brains gnawed rotten by one
thought thunk in unison; “Dear Christ, I hope they don’t attack
this hospital.”
Harry, an old auctioneer from a town few miles removed from Antrim,
he stands up with a great snarl and, with arms flailing about him,
he says “Didn’t I tell you, and did youse listen? You listened
none, and what now? Cities attacked on the TV screens there, and me
preachin’ war day and night. You’ll listen now, heth you will,
you'll want t’be hearing everything Harry has to say about the
trenches and the mushroom clouds o’er Dublin.”
Harry, he’s riddled with paranoia and schizophrenia, but he’s
saying nothing the rest of us aren’t thinking. It’s war. We’re
buggered.
“Will we be drafted, d’you think?” I’m asking Janet in the smoke
room later that evening. “Look at me, how can I shoot a gun? By god
I can barely blow a load ‘gainst the porcelain without needing to
be lain in a darkened room for a fortnight with the shame and the
guilt risen like boils on my back, how can I fire an AK?”
“If’n they’re draftin’ it’ll not be out the nut-house” she says,
but Harry, sat across the way there, fiddling with a rolling
machine, he’s not so sure.
“Suppose, now” says he, “You’ve got a load of healthy young men and
women well trained and educated and fit as Samson’s nut-sack.
Suppose you’ve also got a bunch o’ cuckoos in the wards there
jigglin’ like tuning forks off of wheel trims. Who’s the first you
send, who’s the ones you fling in blind to test the place? It’s not
the elite, I tell you that. It’s the goons, is who, for by Jesus
it's better to loose a man already lost as loose one o’ the able.”
“That’s a load o’ arse” says Janet, putting a hand on my arm,
“Don't listen to him.”
“And anyway” she adds, quoting Morrissey afore he got time to think
of it, “They attacked America. America is not the world. America’s
not County Londonderry.”
She says this and I’m thinking of the yellow M risen far side of
the river, glaring o’er the town, casting shadows across the waters
and the roads and the council estates.
(“It’s not actually an M” says a woman high on Winsor McKay, “It’s
arches.”)
I’m thinking of the Starbucks set for splurging incandescent out
the ashes of the old record store used to be perched on the corner
by the newsagents.
I’m thinking how many times I’ve heard someone say “Totally” or
“Random” this evening.
Sometimes around 10 in the PM I’m sat on the edge of the mattress
yackin’ to the nurse, I’m saying about what are the chances, pray
tell, of them maybe flying thon planes into the hospital here?
“I wouldn’t worry about that” says she, “For even if they did
attack Northern Ireland, the chances of which are altogether very
slim, even if they did, it wouldn’t be the hospitals they’d go for.”
“Well what, then?”
“Oh, I dunno, maybe the banks or Stormont Castle or something. But
they won’t, anyway.”
“Can you promise that?” I’m saying, leaning forward, “Can you
promise they won’t, for I’d be a man would put a lot of stock in a
promise, particularly one from out the mouth of a nurse.”
“I can promise you it’s very, very unlikely.”
A friend of mine, lad suffers something savage from manic
depression, he’s been talking all evening about the folks who
overpowered the hijackers on one of the planes, crashed into a
field in Pennsylvania. Curiously, it’s served to rouse him
momentarily from out the insufferable blue’s kept him pinned to the
mattress like Christ to the cross for the past eight days. “Can you
imagine?” he says. “Can you imagine the courage that must’ve taken?
To bring that plane down? Can you imagine how beautiful those souls
must be shining tonight?”
“No” I said. “No, I can’t for a moment imagine it.” And it’s true.
And I still can’t.
I fall asleep listening to a fella scribbling plans for a shelter
into an A4 file-block. “Underground” he’s muttering, “Underground
is where t’be, and them boys’ll all be waddling about the streets
for they’re stupid, is what they are, but no, underground, that’s
where I’m headed.”
II
“Does the sky still scare you?” asks my ladyfriend, Beautiful Ms
Gillian, the pair of us headed towards the doors of the multiplex
one evening in sunny July of 2006.
“Not so much” says I, “The pills and the doctors and the
occupational therapy and what have you, afore long they siphon out
any such deranged notions ‘till all’s left’s a sort of mucus
dangling from atween the thighs. I still step in it of occasion,
but it’s nothin’ a wire-brush and a prosaic lather can’t shift.”
In order that there might be some canoodling and laughing and
smooching of an hour or two, y’unnerstann, myself and herself, we
figured we’d take ourselves down the street for to sit in the glow
of a cinema screen for a couple hours. “You can pick the flick”
said she, passing a newspaper my direction. “Whatever you want.
Something fun.”
“Something fun” said I, nodding. “That’ll be the very thing for us.”
“So this is about 9/11” she’s saying as we dander towards the
ticket booth.
“It’s that if it’s anything, and it’ll be amazing, I can assure
you. Paul Greengrass, he’s by all accounts gone out his way to
fashion the starkest, tightest, most harrowing hour and a half of
plane-based drama a fella could e’er envision. And by God, if his
Bloody Sunday wasn’t the best ‘Troubles’ flick since In The Name Of
The Father then I don’t know what at all might be.”
Beside the doors of Screen 3, a one-sheet’s hung on the wall
advertising Over The Hedge. “I laughed ‘till I pished my mother’s
knickers” says the quote on the poster. Another assures us that
“If'n it’s a date film you’re after, well by Luther’s belly, this
is the very article for you. Laughin’ and canoodlin’, that’s what
you’ll be up to, if this is the picture you and the lady friend are
viewing.”
On the United 93 poster, the quotes are all stunned silences.
Closest they get to a sentence is this one from, I believe, The
Sun; “Death… loss… my eyes crawl o’er my face like dying flies…”
“It’ll be fun” I reassure Ms Gillian as we’re taking the seats.
An hour and a half later I’m staggering out the cinema like a hobo
just pulled a bungalow out his urethra. “That was… I can’t breathe.
That was devastating... I’m devastated. My tongue’s gone black,
look, black as a miner’s arse-crack. The best film of the year, and
I know I said that about The Hills Have Eyes and also Brokeback
Mountain and The Proposition but… no, film of the year, United 93
is.”
Ms Gillian, she’s not so sure, and less sure again about how much
“fun” it might’ve been, the whole affair. “I was kind of in the
mood for… y’know. A good time?”
“Hmm” says I, scratching the chin. “You were, and so was I, and yet
there we sat choked and silent afore thirty minutes of men
muttering confused commands to one another followed by an hour of
people hurtling to their deaths.”
The pair of us wander ashen-jawed to the car-park, contemplating
the horrors scarred thon screen.
Still, we look like giddy dope-drunk cherubs bathed in God’s
lambent dribble in comparison to the poor bastards stumbled out The
Da Vinci Code round about the same time. They claw at others ear-
lobes and scratch confounded laments o’er others legs. “I thought I’
d died half-way through” says one, “But then, didn’t I come to my
senses and see no, I hadn’t died, and worse, there was near an hour
and a half of the fuckin’ thing left.”
Similar sentiments mouthed by angry punters stompin’ out The Wind
That Shakes The Barley. “Has Ireland not suffered enough?” says
one. “First the potatoes wither and rot ‘side the turnip, then the
civil war, then the troubles, and now, maybe worst of all, Ken
Loach.”
“Aye” nods the lass beside him. “It’s more than any nation should
be asked to tolerate.”
“It’d be a braver man than me” says the young lad crawling on hands
and knees behind them, “Could put up with a quarter of it.”
Bravery. It’s something United 93 has a man considering long into
the following Thursday.
III
Early January 2007 and I’m watching United 93 for the fifth time,
sat in the living room with an old blanket strewn about me and a
bent cigarette dangling out the maw.
Every viewing, a whole new set of questions rises out the murk of
the mind.
What would I have done in that situation? Would I have fought,
would I have stormed up the aisle with the fire-extinguisher thrust
this way and that, or would I have sat weeping into an in-flight
magazine chewing on rosary beads and whispering Hare Krishna?
How many of the folks who died on that unholy morning did so whilst
rejecting with all their hearts the counter-measures taken against
the hijackers? How do we feel about those individuals? Are they
heroes also?
Are there any heroes here?
Why is a film about the most horrendous, terrifying, tragic
situation a man might imagine so exhilarating, so stirring, so life-
affirming?
Part of the answer to the last, of course, is that no answers
whatsoever are provided for any of the others.
United 93 is the best film of 2006 and the best of Greengrass
career thus far. It’s probably the bravest, also.
“Oh aye?” says an ol’ queen stood jabbing at the buttons of a poker
machine in the far-end of the tavern later that evening. “And
what's so brave about it, at all?”
“What’s not brave about it?” says I, closing the notebook a moment.
“That it goes out of its way to present the hijackers as human
beings is in itself a fairly brave move.”
“Human beings, is that right? Funny now, for all I saw were a bunch
o’ screeching yahoo’s racin’ about the place with red headbands on.
They were caricatures.”
“No they weren’t, and here’s why. For all of the hard-man posturing
they might’ve employed once they’d gained control of the plane,
United 93 never once suggests that these people aren’t fucking
terrified, at least as terrified as the people they’re bent on
killing. They’re terrified but they go ahead anyway, and why? Well,
for any number of reasons. That it was too late to do anything else
may be one. That death by that stage was a lot more welcoming than
the consequences they’d face should they decide to abandon the
whole wretched plot, no doubt that played on their minds. But at
the bottom of it all, see, is the belief that what they were doin’
was right. Greengrass refuses to present these people as monsters,
I’d wager, for at least two reasons. One of them is that they
weren't, at least as far as they were concerned. What they did may
be evil, and surely you and I both agree on that. But were they
evil? To be evil, does a man not need to be consciously acting
against the notion of goodness? They didn’t think that for a
second.”
The queen tuts and shakes his head. “Moral relativist horse-shite.”
He takes a jag of whiskey out the pint glass on the table-top next
to him. “And what’s the other reason? Why else does he so
‘humanise’ them, then?”
“Because to buy into the notion of an ultimate evil, to assume
certain individuals are inherently, unalterably so, takes a hell of
a lot of responsibility out of the hands of folks like us. And we
have a hell of a lot of responsibility. At the very least, we have
a responsibility to reduce the chances of folks like those onboard
that flight ever having to make those kinds of decisions again.”
The queen spits onto the wooden floor. Me and him, we disagree on
most everything, but oh how I cherish our debates. “So the best of
the year, according to you?”
“It is that. If for no reason other than it manages to be the
tensest, most exhilarating thriller of the decade without ever once
resorting to thriller tactics. Half an hour or more we’re watching
men watching tiny monitors, and yet look at these knuckles, still
white however many months later.”
“Well” says he, “I'd take half a Passenger 57 over a dozen o' them.
Wesley Snipes. Now there’s a man knows how to keep an arse in
shape.”
“That he does” says I, opening the notebook again for to finish off
an article all about how United 93 is the best film of 2006.
Thanks folks.
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