History in Real Time: National Trauma and Narrative Synchrony in United 93 and Out of the Blue

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Notes

1. For in-depth analysis of the implications of the 9/11 attacks for film and television, see in particular Dixon 2004 and Prince 2009.

2. Another intriguing parallel is offered by Matt Reeves’ science-fiction/ horror film Cloverfield (2008), in which a group of young aspirational twentysomethings must flee for safety when a gigantic Godzilla-like monster threatens Manhattan. Recording everything on a video camera, the characters generate the narrative by documenting their own experience. The film draws overtly on its audience's memory of the 9/11 attacks, and offers the iconic image of the Statue of Liberty's head, ripped off and thrown into a New York street. In many ways, this is a more critically focused film than United 93. Like many apocalyptic science fiction films, it tests the society represented on screen both practically and morally. It invites us to question whether civilization has lived up to its own standards, and does not assume that individuals or nations are innocent. It is also, to some extent like United 93 and Out of the Blue, a radically incomplete work. The inconclusive ending of the film, in which the main characters appear to have died, effectively invites the audience to seek out the story in other formats, including YouTube, Facebook and the film's own website. These venues were host to a panoply of additional material that complicated and extended the world of the film. As in United 93 and Out of the Blue, time and history are split across media, suggesting that real time is only one of the temporal modes that structure an audience's relationship to the world depicted.

3. Interestingly, Out of the Blue has been reviewed on a number of horror fan sites, including Horrorphile.net (http://www.horrorphile.net/movie-review-of-out-of-the-blue/) and Moria (http://www.moria.co.nz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2822Itemid=1), while Ron Rosenbaum, writing in Slate, has compared United 93 with George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), particularly in terms of the latter film's “brief but even more profoundly disturbing scenes in the control rooms of the television stations, on the screens of the TV sets as the familiar breaks down into panic, information disintegrates in the attempt to report on the growing breakdown of civilization overwhelmed by the undead” (2006). At the same time, Steve Lipkin (1999) points out the tendency for docudramas to employ melodramatic narratives, using JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) and Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) as examples.