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Katherine Hennessey
Andrew Beutel
ENG280—008
25 February 2016
Taking Responsibility Through the Use of Cinema: 9/11 Attacks
September 11th, 2001—very few, if any, American’s hear this date without immedi–
ately being filled with a sense of sadness, loss, uncertainty and confusion. In many ways,
9/11 is a mystery. The only people with the knowledge of what exactly occurred on the hi-
jacked planes are no longer here to tell their story, but that does not mean we should not con–
tinue to investigate it, in fact, as educated and intellectual American’s, it is our duty to con-
tinue to investigate these events. The first step in deepening our understanding of the devas–
tating events of 9/11 is to simply expose ourselves to different depictions of what might have
happened. We can do this through movies, books, articles, stories and other different forms of
media. Simply accepting that we cannot be sure of the events that happened and stopping
ourselves from furthering our knowledge will result in an eventual dilution of the severity of
the attacks and possibly 9/11 being forgotten all together. Unfortunately, forgotten history has
a tendency to repeat itself. To make sure that the United States of America, or any other
country for that matter, never has to re-experience the events of 9/11, we must keep the con–
versation going. Because of this, movies that depict 9/11, such as United 93, are critical in
deepening our understanding for the events that happened because they are able to continue
to show us the severity of the trauma of the events, they are able to show us
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different perspectives of the events and they allow us to experience 9/11 in a much more real–
istic fashion than what we get when we simply hear stories.
Many critics critique movies such as United 93, claiming that it in no way helps us as
a society come to terms with the events that happened on 9/11—this is an absolutely bogus
claim. For starters, if our goal, as a society, is to come to terms with these events—these ter-
rorist attacks—then we need to seriously reevaluate our long-term goals. To come to terms
with something means to “come to accept” something, or “become reconciled with” and that
is not what America needs to be doing (Cambridge Dictionary). Yes, of course it is important
for each individual to personally come to terms with their own grief regarding 9/11, as it was
a traumatic experience on the national scale, but I do not think everyone, as a society, should
