Britical

NYC

 
We are all familiar with the argument that this country’s piggy appetite for oil, enshrined in the ludicrous Tonka Toy proportions of our vehicles, contributed to the events of September the 11th, 2001.

A reminder is perhaps in order to refresh the memories of both the curious and the strangely forgetful. The salient points of the day’s events were chillingly summarized by the New York Times a few days afterwards. It is what some of us saw that morning - and I saw, standing in the middle of the street near the Flatiron Building, where the scurrying crowds and the normal, unthinking flow of the city simply stopped. Even the cabs and the cars had pulled haphazardly into the kerb, while scattered all down the middle of Fifth Avenue little knots of strangers huddled together, shocked faces upturned to the bluest of skies:

“Two quarter-mile-tall towers exploding, then imploding, one-acre floors falling through the next one 200 times over.”

So that’s what happened. You didn’t need a huge amount of imagination to realise what must have happened to all the people inside. The image and all its horrifying implications remains quite fresh. But just in case, Mr. Oliver Stone has made a great big movie about it. Cannily making sure to gather the support of a few firefighters and their families, and promoting the tired old “triumph of the human spirit” angle, he has the requisite immunity of a Get Out of Jail Free card firmly in hand. He has named the movie ‘World Trade Center’. World Trade Center. Just like that. I suppose it gets right to the point, although what the point of the film itself is eludes me and most others in this city.

Almost no one I know here has been to see it. On principle. Also because they cannot bring themselves to, and because the trailers, shocking things that, like raucous gatecrashers, suddenly barged unannounced one day onto movie screens, appear so predictably mawkish in the American way. An acquaintance from out of town saw it here one Friday night and said the cinema was almost empty. Someone else, also from out of town, complained it was boring (a dodgy word choice, I feel). Good, I thought, New Yorkers at least are voting with their feet and ignoring, even boycotting this vulgar spectacle. But not everyone shares this view - or more precisely, the same sorts of feelings.

Opening the paper quoted above a couple of weeks ago I come across, in the amusingly titled “Style” section (a whole ‘nother subject, this, as they say) a series of jolly little photos - socialites and actresses in pretty summer frocks. Caught twixt smile and twirl for the camera the gentle reader is relieved to learn they are “coping gracefully with the heatwave” as the paper would have it. The caption revealed that they were all (quite cheerfully, apparently) on their way to the premier of ‘World Trade Center’.

I wondered at the appropriateness of all this glamour, fawning and bias cut silk given the film in question. Did any of these people, getting dressed in front of the mirror, pause in some hand wringing moment about what the hell to wear, given the gravity and funereal quality of the subject matter? Sadly not, since the next sentence, continuing the queasy coyness of tone, assures us that most attendees arrived in air conditioned SUVs. SUVs!

Someone once remarked that the only possible reason for trundling about in one of these trucks is if you need to transport circus animals and maybe this is indeed what was happening here. After all, the delicious, Godawful grim irony of blood for oil was clearly lost on the delicately perspiring celebs and performers, turning and turning and grinning obliviously in the New York sunshine.

God Bless America.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2006