America's 'Turn' - How things changed back.(World Trade Center and Pentagon Attacks, 2001)(Brief Article)

Until 9/11, the trick to making a blockbuster action movie was pretty straightforward: invent a flawed but heroic main character, create a bloodthirsty villain, and come up with a terrorist plot so awful, so apocalyptic, that the only acceptable ending is a happy one. It is axiomatic in Hollywood action movies that nerve gas will not, at the last minute, be sprayed over the city; that a nuclear device will not, at the last minute, explode at the Super Bowl; that the World Trade Center will not, at the last minute, come crashing down on thousands of good and decent people.

Until the other day, Hollywood, like the rest of America, believed in the near miss and the last-minute save. Things change.

In script writing, there is something we call the "turn," a moment when the main character changes in some essential way. In High Noon, a movie I've been watching every few days since September 11, Gary Cooper's high-minded, determined marshal realizes, about two-thirds in, that he can't count on the feckless, cowardly townspeople to stand by him as he faces down a killer bent on revenge. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character turns when he realizes that he loves Andie MacDowell-really loves her-and that the only way to win her is to become a better man.

Something turned on September 11, and it happened somewhere between the two flights that hit the World Trade Center and the one that hit the ground outside Pittsburgh.

Think, for a minute, the unthinkable (or the previously unthinkable). You are on one of the first two planes. It is hijacked. There are a few stabbings and a few people are dead. You try to remain calm. Because you are an American, and Americans are essentially rational people who prefer to think that the rest of the world is rational, too, you know in your bones that there is some way out of this. The pilot will land the plane. It will be surrounded by police and the FBI. Negotiations will begin, and the story will, after days of wrangling and CNN and tarmac sitting, eventually have a modified happy ending. Because you don't know that the hijackers have no intention of landing the plane, because you can't imagine such evil, you remain calm. You sit tight. You go along. In this movie, the hijackers' real weapon isn't a box cutter or a pair of tweezers, it's that they know that the plane is doomed and you do not. They know what they're about to do and you don't.

The people on the Pittsburgh flight were in a different movie. They knew. And so they struggled with their hijackers and ditched the plane in the middle of a meadow, killing themselves but saving who knows how many, who knows what.

It isn't that the Pittsburgh plane was filled with brave people and the first two were not. It's that the first two planes were filled with Americans who simply did not know, and that the later one was filled with Americans who did. Somewhere in the skies above ...