Dead Tree Alert: Ten Years After; Plus, Showtime’s Rebirth

I don’t have a piece in this week’s TIME magazine, but this issue, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, is a sweeping enough undertaking that I wanted to point it out. Rather than fill out the issue with stories and essays by bloviators like me, the issue focuses on the first-person stories of people who were in the attacks or who were affected by, or influential in, their aftermath. It’s an issue that works as well or better in digital form, so I also recommend the version on Time.com, including extensive video from the collection of interviews.

Closer to the subject of this blog, there’s a TV component: HBO will air a documentary based on the stories in the issue, Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience, at 8:46 a.m., this Sunday morning, Sept. 11, 2011. (I haven’t seen the documentary myself yet, so consider this an announcement, not a plug. It also airs on CNN tonight at 11 p.m., with a replay tomorrow night.)

And as you’ve probably noticed, there are other 9/11 TV specials airing this weekend, or already aired. A lot of 9/11 specials.

I wrestled myself with whether I should write more on this blog about the 9/11 commemorations, or the coverage of the anniversary, or the effects of 9/11 on TV and media. I decided against it—with some exceptions, like the Rescue Me finale—for a few reasons. For starters, I didn’t want to seem to be critiquing from a conflict of interest, since TIME was producing its own special.

For another thing, I feel that in a way, I’ve been writing the story of how 9/11 has (and hasn’t) affected media and pop culture since 9/11 happened—whether I was writing about 24 or CSI. The aftereffect of the attacks is a rich subject that many people have written brilliantly about but—and I am probably speaking subjectively as a New Yorker who was here that day—I’m just not sure the world needs me to add to that pile. (Ten years after, I would pretty much stand by what I wrote about 9/11 five years after; and for that matter, three weeks after: “All of us are likely to crave escape in the months ahead. But we should be afraid to live in a country where entertainment that deals with people’s fears is untouchable, where satire is impossible. A country where it is forbidden to mock the President by popular consensus is no freer than a country where it is forbidden to mock the President by law.”)

I will tip you to one of the many, many 9/11 specials, however: Showtime’s Rebirth, which also airs Sunday. The documentary does not involve any big celebrities, political, entertainment or otherwise. It doesn’t involve any melodramatic flourishes or disturbing re-enactments from inside the Towers. It just takes the stories of five people who survived the attacks or lost loved ones in them and interviews them each following year through the present. It’s like watching emotional time-lapse photography: you see the evolution of anger and grief into sadness and renewal, you see scars (literal and physical) heal or fail to heal.

Each of the five stories is compelling in its own way—a burn victim from the Twin Towers, a woman mourning her fiance. But one that especially stuck with me was that of Nick, who was a teenagers when his mother died at the World Trade Center. When we first meet him, he’s still in pain, remembering the early days of loss, sleeping with his siblings in his dad’s bed and crying for his mother: “It just sucked. Worst day of my life.” Then he gets angry: at his father, at the terrorists, at kids in his school protesting for the rights of Muslims.

He graduates; his face grows stubble and fleshes out. He leaves home, trying to use as little as possible of his mother’s death settlement. (“That money exists because my mom was murdered in a terrorist attack… It feels like dirty money, bloody money.”) He grows up. He gets a job. (Ironically, at Lehman Brothers, which would play its own role in the story of New York and the U.S. in the 2000s.) He starts to smile, and, eventually, to let go of the rage. In 2007, recalling his early anger at Osama Bin Laden, he reflects: “That just seems absurd. He’s living in some cave in Afghanistan. I don’t really hate the guy.”

No one can accuse Nick of “forgetting.” But for his sake and his mother’s, you feel glad for his healing.

I’ll admit: Nick’s story probably struck me personally, as stories of kids who lost their parents on 9/11 always have, because my first son was born a few weeks before that day. If I ever want to know how long it’s been, all I need to do is look at him and see how the top of his head now nearly comes up to my chin.

So for myself, I’ll think I’ll spend Sept. 11 with him and his brother, not a TV special. But if you want to watch one, you could do worse than Rebirth. And I’ll see you here, gladly, on Sept. 12.