The Unrecovered (2007)
Directed by Roger Copeland
130 minutes
Never Forget, Always Remember: 9/11, 25 Years Later – Spectacle Theater What was 9/11? It depends who you ask. A news anchor would tell you it was a national tragedy; a conspiracist, an inside job; a leftist, an empire's comeuppance; a film critic, the year's biggest blockbuster; and your cousin, a meme. In his typically blasé fashion, Baudrillard called it "the absolute event," while the renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen controversially called the attacks "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." A pattern emerges: from the moment American Airlines Flight 11 was piloted into the North Tower, it has been remarkably difficult to comprehensively define 9/11. The attacks were encoded in the national memory over seemingly endless minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of media coverage. A quarter of a century later, it is tempting to think of 9/11 as a media event announcing material reality's final, total subordination to the image—as Baudrillard said, "They did it. We wished it." Yet to conceive of 9/11 in only these terms would be to overlook the lived horrors of the day and the insidious reverberations of a nationwide psychic trauma. From our historical vantage, the events of September 11 seem as fundamental to our current reality as the air we breathe. In recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001, Spectacle presents a selection of films that confront the phenomenal and psychic impact of the attacks, and the indelible scar they left on the world. There was before, and this is after. THE UNRECOVERED (2007) — Roger Copeland