TRASHFUTURE - American Psychosis Episode 1: Let's Roll

Episode Date: March 20, 2021

Boonta Vista's Andrew and Trashfuture's Riley are back with a brand new "show within a show" about the lasting cultural impact of September 11. In the first episode they introduce the show and discuss Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, the commoditisation of tragedy, memorial NASCAR races and a two word phrase from that fateful day that lives on in cultural infamy. Just like the Boney Island Whitefish before it, further episodes of American Psychosis will be dropping monthly on both the Trashfuture and Boonta Vista Patreons!

Our military is powerful. Financial institutions remain strong. Bin Laden is there, and you're going to kill him for me. My fellow Americans, let's roll. Welcome to episode one of American Psychosis. My name is Andrew, and I'm here with my good friend Riley. That's right. We are, in a sense, back. The Boney Island Whitefish are riding again, not as the Boney Island Whitefish as an entirely new program that will be way less concerned with the goings on of season five of the show bones and instead with the goings on of season 205 to 304 or so of America. Don't check my math. I don't care if my math is wrong at someone else about it.

In fact, you may know me as one of the hosts of the podcast Wonder Vista. You may know Riley as one of the hosts of the podcast Trash Future. We are joining forces again for a new series in which we plan to look at, I guess, the effect, the lasting cultural and psychic effect that 9-Eleven had on America and how it all came back out in, I guess, their most lasting and enduring form of culture. Cinema and TV. Three important parts. Yeah, the important parts that you can do the research by sitting on your couch and having a beer. That's right. I'm sure we will also be getting into music, pieces of writing, musicals.

Certainly musicals. We have a lot of good fun stuff lined up. You know what I think is really funny? I've been talking about this for a while. I've been thinking about this for a while. I feel like there is, I can tell you about culture after the financial crisis. I can also tell you about culture in the 1990s. I cannot really tell you what culture was like between 9-Eleven and the financial crisis. I don't really know. It's this strange dead zone where you often forget that the Lord of the Rings

sequel won Best Picture where you wonder what was being produced that's memorable. Then you remember that it's because everyone went completely mad. You remember Freedom Fries, but there's a lot of other stuff going on that you might have forgotten. American Beauty was winning Best Oscar kind of stuff, although that was a bit earlier. When I think about things that were charting at that point as well, I look and it's just like, number one on the charts, Ja Rule. I think, okay, nobody is pulling out and playing a full Ja Rule album. It's absolutely not happening. Ja Rule isn't playing full Ja Rule albums.

Nobody is doing that. There was this period of sustained economic prosperity that looked like it was going to go on forever, but that was slowly rotting out from the inside. Well, simultaneously, this strange innervation and fear of people who believe themselves invulnerable, then I'll give you an example. An old friend of mine, he now works in a different kind of insurance, but in the early 2010s, he worked in terrorism insurance. Basically, what he would do is he would write policies. He was at a Lloyds Syndicate.

In London, the insurance industry is such that Lloyds is actually, there's Lloyds, and then there's the Lloyds Insurance Syndicates, which are all different from the bank, which are all these little companies that are all constantly writing insurance policies, either for one another or for other entities, and they can ensure basically anything. There always used to be these stories that J-Lo would get her ass insured or whatever, and that's what will do it. The whole point is you can ensure any outcome that will affect your revenue stream. He used to write political risk insurance focused on terrorism, and it was to the point where there would be chicken farms in Idaho that would be like, well, we need terrorism insurance.

Just when you're talking about wide-ranging impact of an event, it's really on all levels. It's not just cultural, it's not just political, it was also financial, and just in the mindset of a whole nation, like you're saying, people in the middle of flyover countries saying, you never know. Al-Qaeda, they hit the most important financial building in America. What happens when they hit the most important chicken farm? Yeah, there could be an envelope full of anthrax coming to us. Or a lot of people loving to say, hey, I wish Al-Qaeda would just try it in my town.

Oh, God. And of course, these are some of the things that we want to talk about during the run of this show. We are really interested in exploring those kind of mixed responses, particularly as they have exhibited themselves through music and cinema and things like that, because I've been listening to some music in the lead-up to this, that is like songs inspired by 9-11, songs with lyrics that directly refer to 9-11. And I was pretty stunned by the breadth of genres that are getting into this, because like you said, everybody remembers Freedom Fries,

and everybody remembers Toby Keith saying, we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way. Those are the things that kind of stick in the mind is the very reactionary country music. Hey, I personally am going to kick the shit out of Osama bin Laden. But there's this whole other realm of stuff that I feel like kind of passed me by, or I didn't internalize in the same way, and that's part of the stuff that's just fascinating to me, is like it's much simpler to see how hard right-wing conservatives would react to this. It's much more predictable, really. I mean, obviously, it was horrible in a lot of ways, but it's absolutely fascinating to look at how people who are culturally liberal would be Democrat voters

and the states responded to this, because it seemed like a thing that they were really, really, really, really not prepared to deal with an attempt to interpret in any way. They were really repeatedly asking the question, should you have done that? Just because you can doesn't mean you should. That's going to be the theme of this podcast is Andrew saying, should you have done that? Yes. What if you had not written that song? Well, I mean, and this is another thing where there was a dissent article published sort of in the sort of aftermath, the immediate aftermath of this period, that sort of prominent for essentially laying out the cleavages on the left.

And the article was essentially saying that the left obviously should be pro-war because of the emotional resonance because basically they said, yes, you may look at every other time we've done this and see the disaster, draw the comparisons to Vietnam and so on, but you have to understand the depth of feeling that the American working class has about all of this stuff, about being attacked and feeling unsafe and the left should actually go with this. I'll find the article again. I was reading it last night and just really was sort of quite struck by how much the language, and again there's relatively mainstream left publication, would now sort of just, it seems almost like a puppet theater version of politics where when you watch something like the first Star Wars movie or whatever, you sort of, you look at the special effects and it's like, well, I guess people in the 70s would have been incredibly impressed by that.

And then you look at the sort of, at the same sort of political rhetoric around 2000, 2001, 2002, especially like as the left is working out how to respond to this. And a lot of the kind of pro-war, pro-intervention, we got to get revenge for 9-11, which is basically an NYC Guido voice tweet. It looks like this, it is as sort of, like people were impressed by this back in the time, it feels sort of so hokey. It fits and so sort of unsophisticated, like it really, really feels old and 20 years ago and so on. And it clearly worked. I mean, it's, you know, a thing popped into my head when I was thinking about Alyssa the other day, which was,

do you remember Michael Moore accepting an Oscar and saying, hey everybody, I actually think that invading other countries and doing wars is bad and the audience at the Academy Awards booed him. Yeah, absolutely. And again, if you think of it, you know, like you said, if you're talking about sort of 20 years ago, like think now about the way that Republicans talk about Hollywood and the liberal elites and the leftists and the communists and the socialists and everything. Just imagine, you know, the idea of a left-wing filmmaker getting up and saying war, bad actually, and everyone going, get this guy off the stage, get him out of here. And I suppose now that sort of it served its purpose, the war has happened, you know, effectively.

We're now in the forever war period, but it's also like, you know, politically, it's basically just politically static. You know, it almost doesn't matter if there's a left-wing filmmaker who gets up and booze it because, well, it's a fate of complete at this point. Pretty much. So on this kind of topic, we thought that we would start off with a film. They kind of land squarely in the middle of a lot of this stuff that we're talking about because obviously, you know, there would eventually be films that were anti-war about these specific conflicts. But also, there was a lot of very pro-war stuff, a lot of very jingoistic stuff, you know, Middle Eastern terrorists immediately became a generation's bad guys in cinema, immediately overtaking the Euro terrorists of the late 80s and the 90s. And we never got them back.

Never got them back. I feel like it's kind of Eastern Europeans now, maybe. Yeah, there's a little bit of it. Well, there was a little bit of Eastern European or like Balkan sort of criminal gangs. Yeah. And that was sort of in the sort of when I think I guess Americans got bored of, they got bored of always having Muslim terrorists threatening the nation where now and it was Eastern European terrorists threatening your family. I think I genuinely think that it finally got to a point where although it's still not okay to say what if we didn't have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's no longer cool to be racist about it in movies, basically. So those are the kind of the two ends of the spectrum of filmmaking.

And we thought we would start off with a film which kind of falls squarely in the center of this in a lot of different ways and produces as a result a very, very strange cultural artifact. And that movie is 2006's World Trade Center by Oliver Stone. And Oliver Stone as well. Of all people. The guy who made JFK, one of the most sort of confused, a searing but confused indictment of the military industrial complex. A platoon and anti-war polemic based on his own experiences of what he saw in Vietnam. Yeah, and then here he and then he goes and makes World Trade Center, which is attempting to recapture some of the, I guess you could say indomitable spirit of the common man against sort of all odds as like platoon. But at the same time, he's basically said over and over again that I, Oliver Stone, he's sort of one of the most like, you know, old Hollywood liberal strongman basically, right?

He's sort of titan of liberal Hollywood. I am going to make an apolitical 9-11 movie because that's what the country needs in 2006. It definitely, like watching it, obviously you have to consider these things both with the distance that we now have and also how they would have been received, you know, in context at the time. Because I was thinking to myself, you know, this is five years after 9-11 and it's clearly still such a searing wound in the nation's psyche that it's incredibly sensitive. And as soon as they announced that Oliver Stone was making this movie, a lot of people freaking out, major newspapers running editorials saying that, whoa, you're having the JFK guy do this movie? He's going to be up there talking about how Bush did it and how jet fuel can't melt steel beams and all this kind of thing. He's going to be up there talking about how they buried the 9-11 Commission's report, you know? Yeah.

And Stone, you know, and the financial backers of the movie went to great efforts to reassure everybody that it was essentially going to be apolitical. And it worked. It united Red and Blue America. United Red and Blue America and saying, what's with this movie? One thumb up raves purple states. And that's what was so interesting to me is that, like, I have to say, like, I understand that Oliver Stone is a well-regarded filmmaker or is at least a regarded filmmaker. Having gone back and watched several of his movies in the not too distant past, I am forced to say I don't actually think Oliver Stone was ever that good. Like, The Doors is a terrible, terrible movie. Born on the 4th of July is a terrible, terrible movie. What about Natural Born Killers?

Natural Born Killers at least has the decency to be, like, just gonzo. Yeah, Natural Born Killers. I think natural born killers is fun and JFK also very fun. Making a movie that is sort of that compelling for that long, basically as just a series of conversations between extremely drunk men and smoke filled rooms, that takes me doing. Both highly controversial and very stylized films, right? This movie is doing its absolute damnedest. It is working as hard as it possibly can to ensure that it is neither controversial nor stylized in any way that anybody could take any form of offense from. It's sort of fitting that most of the action sort of takes place under the weight of, like, I don't know, a building's worth of rubble. Yeah, no one can do anything. And they're just, it's just two men trying to stay awake, much like the experience of the two men watching this movie. Hey-oh.

Well, you are not wrong because, I mean, like, what, you know, one of the issues with this movie for me is that, so they, the movie starts off with Port Authority police officers, Nicholas Cage and Michael Pina. Playing John McLaughlin and Will Jimeno, who were real, real people who got buried in the rubble. And basically, you know, it starts with them heading out at dawn to go and be first responders going about their day. They very helpfully humanize the cops by, you know, making Jimeno's character look nice with the conversation that he has where he's shooing a homeless man away from sitting on a park bench. Yeah, because they're friends, you know. It's like, hey. We're buddies. We, you know, we, we, we, we, we shuck and jive. We get into it like, ah, don't let me catch you here again. And then he basically starts racially profiling two young men, but then he's distracted by the low flying of a plane over a shadow.

Yes, the shadow of the very literal. And again, it's one thing this film loves to do is this film loves to save symbolism. What if what if the audience doesn't get symbolism? Everyone's still too shaken from 911. What if the symbolism offends conservatives? We're going to put the shadow of the plane over the action. We don't want to risk any misinterpretation. The other thing I sort of want to talk about as well is Oliver Stone's decision to make a to show, to show normalcy, the normal, a normal life in New York. And it's, it is people riding the train and, you know, people going to, going to work and getting up and kissing their families.

Did you notice that when, uh, when people were riding the train to work in the morning, nobody was looking at a smartphone and they were talking to each other, not a phone inside. It was that, but also there's this real sense that as the audience, you're supposed to be like, ooh, they don't know it's 911 today. Yeah, yeah, especially like I found myself thinking, you know, because they, they, they both get up and start going about their days and heading in towards work. And Jimeno is, is driving over one of the bridges in towards the island. Uh, you know, it's the sun's coming up and he's listening to a country song about the sun coming up over New York City and sitting in a traffic jam. That's right. That's what you want to listen to is you want to, you want to listen to, uh, well, if you're, if you're waking up in New York City, you go to work and the sun's coming up while you're going to work, you want to listen to a song about what's going on. You don't want to confuse yourself.

You are a port authority police officer in your pickup truck. Um, he, so, so yeah, he's driving along. And then as he, as he heads off down the highway, a subtitle comes up on the screen says September 11, 2001. And I found myself thinking like, I wonder what it was like to watch this closer to the event. You know, before like, clearly we have passed the point now where 9-11 is allowed to be a punchline for things again. Um, you know, people make jokes about it, all that sort of stuff. But like, was that, you know, like only five years out from it were American audiences watching this was like, was that a gut punch when that came up in cinema? Back when people could go to the cinema.

Back before the world fell apart in a much more real way. Yeah. Um, God, I guess. I mean, that's the, uh, when I got, when I sort of think about this, right? I think about like how making a joke where 9-11 was the punchline was like edgy shock humor. And I think about the fact that the most recent SNL after 9-11, um, I don't know if anyone remembers this had Reese Witherspoon do as the host who like uncomfortably told like a two minute long street joke. Like just like so not one she'd ever, um, that she'd written or that was written for her.

Just a very uncomfortable like joke about a polar bear with balls or whatever. Um, and just didn't, and didn't mention what happened or whatever. I suppose like you're fucking SNL. What are you going to do? Be like, uh, that was crazy. 3,000 people just died a bunch of bitches. Like, you know what they do? If it was now they'd have, um, Kate McKinnon play a song on the piano and everybody cry together.

Well, yeah, it's because I think it was from the after 9-11 sort of as American society kind of, you know, realigned as one that was on kind of like a permanent defensive war with Klendathu. Basically, um, is that, uh, so the entertainment people, the entertainers began taking very seriously the idea that they were actually speaking truth through their, you know, um, through their reboot of the cone heads or whatever. Oh, like, but, but you could, you can chart like a really direct path, I think from, you know, these events to John Stuart hosting the Daily Show and people saying, uh, I actually get my real news from the Daily Show and him occasionally breaking out to do like, you know, uh, impassioned monologues. You can chart a path straight from that to now every time that there's, you know, like a mass shooting that's big enough to get discussed on American TV or, or, you know, some sort of horrible thing that happens and you get to have like a tearful Jimmy Kimmel monologue.

I wish you, you get to have, you get to have Stephen Colbert like weeping as he talks about how democracy is dead on his late night comedy program. Um, personally, I think Jimmy Kimmel should have done that while he was still hosting the man show with Adam Corolla's more tearful model, which he would have been at this time. I believe that's true. Um, my how our lives have changed. Yeah, Jimmy Jimmy. I just go bursting through a time portal in 2004 and telling my 14 year old self, Jimmy Kimmel went woke. What? Um, so, so like, yeah, it's, it's an interesting choice to me that essentially like within, I'm going to say the first five to 10 minutes of this movie, they've had the planes hit the tower.

And then the sort of major sort of sees like, see like act one rather. Um, question is, is a second plane going to hit the tower? Yeah, and like, and, and again, I kind of, I get the point in the way, you know, ah, remember what it was like when everybody was trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Um, I was, I was talking to my wife about this because she was watching with me and I was talking to her about remembering where I was because I think for, for people, for people my age, this is the, this is the JFK getting shot of my generation. This was the, where were you when you heard about this thing happening? And I was always going to say where, if without, without wanting to age you, uh, what, what were you doing when this happened? So, so I was having my memory, right? Of seeing this on the news at nighttime.

And my wife was like, I remember watching it on the news in the morning. And I said, both of these things can't be right because we live in the same country. Um, so, so we did a bit of, a bit of thinking, a bit of looking at time zone differences between, between here and New York in September. And it turned out my memory was more correct than hers as correct as a memory can be, which is that my memory was that I had come home from like being out somewhere with my family, like out at dinner or something like that. Um, I would have been, uh, I would have been about 18 or 19 at the time. And so, you know, we'd, we'd been out and come home and it was like after 11 o'clock and somebody put on the TV and there was this news on and, uh, the World Trade Center was there with a big smoking hole in it. And so, so I remember that I was watching it live at the point where the newscasters were like, we think a plane has accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center and then seeing the second one hit live and hearing the newscasters freak out. And having that realization of something, something very big and fucked up is happening right now.

And, um, so, so, you know, I understand the compulsion to kind of portray people seeing this stuff happening and trying to figure out what's going on. But basically in the first, you know, 10 minutes of the movie, the planes have hit the towers. Uh, these cops have suited up and decided to go in and try and evacuate people. And then, uh, the towers have collapsed. One of the towers has collapsed on them and almost all of them are killed except for three of them, um, who are trapped in the rubble. And that is where they will remain for the rest of the film. Yep. Just under the issues that there's court trying to fall asleep under a lot of stuff. Yeah.

Now, now the issues that this causes like for a film is that you have given us virtually no time to establish the actual characters, you know, what these guys are like, what they're about and why we're supposed to care about them. But the answer is you're supposed to care about them because they're cops. And they're not, and how Oliver Stone establishes that is long, almost, almost loving shots of civilians walking away from the catastrophe and then the cops walking into the catastrophe. That's right. And there's constant and, and shot and just shot after shot and sort of minute 15 or so of, um, of all of these, of the sort of civilian street of just constant juxtaposition of the civilians walking from right to left. Um, so you sort of are immediately off put by them because that's not how movements supposed to go. Um, and then the cops walking left to right correctly into, um, into the, uh, into the sort of into the building sort of do their duty and meeting up and again, almost like you can also see like, like, like the writing of, of this sort of, um, sort of, I guess in Britain, you'd call it blokey, uh, sort of gent, gentle ribbing of one another as they're like, Oh, I didn't want to save all the fun for you.

And so we're just putting on accents that are so New York that they become Boston. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of the issue, right? Is that effectively every, every character in this movie, well, there, there are two characters in this movie. There's a lot of different actors, but there's two characters and the two characters are, uh, New York cop and cops wife. And those are the two characters basically. Oh, I think I lost you. Nobody has any individual motivations or internal life or anything like that. They are either a cop who is currently pinned under the rubble of the World Trade Center and would like to get out. Uh, or they are a cop's wife who would like to know where her husband is and is stressed out about it.

There is, there is a scene early in the going, which I thought was an interesting tight rope walk from, uh, from Oliver Stone where Nicholas Cage has gathered his, his, um, squad of cops and is looking for volunteers to go into the building. And this is the faithful, the fateful moment that Jimeno, um, Amoroso, Pazulo, uh, that a bunch of these cops put their hand up and step forward and say, I'll go in. And it's, it's really interesting to me because he is, he's trying to say, here are the brave ones. These are the most selfless people who put their hand up and said, I'm going to go into the danger here while the other ones kind of look a bit, a bit, you know, cautious about it. They're not, they're not leaping to put their hand up. But at the same time, he's not doing it in a way that says the cops who didn't do it are cowards. So all the cops are heroes because that's the deal. And if you're a cop who was in New York on 9 11, you're a national hero.

Um, but somehow it's just kind of, oh, the cops who said, yes, I'll do the thing. I'm being asked to put their hand up and stepped out. I like you're especially heroes, but the ones that just went, uh, they, they just, they just disappeared from the movie at that point. So, um, it's, it must have, must be very difficult to try and portray some cops as more heroic than others without painting them to be cowards. But that's a tight rip that he's really trying to walk here. You know. Yeah. Well, it's at every, uh, they, oh, they would have gone in, but they didn't have the right training.

I mean, again, for me, the thing to remember as well as the political context of when this film was getting made, um, because, you know, it's 2005, 2006. Like this was the beginning of the story about how the American government has failed the first responders. And I think there was this idea that this was something that transcended politics. You know, this was, this was something that like you could, you could make bigger than, you know, just your opposition to, I don't know who was it, John Boehner, I think at the time. How you could essentially, you know, everyone in America could agree that the, from the furthest left to the, to the, to a communist, to a fascist, right? You could, um, you could agree that the 9-11 first responders, uh, should be, you know, fairly compensated. And I think, you know, the, the point that Stone is making here as well sort of fits into this by, by pointing out number one, every cop and, and, and, um, uh, every, every police officer is a hero. Um, every, uh, every firefighter is a hero.

Um, and because they went the other, they walked, they went left to right when all the sort of, you know, pussy civilians are going right to left there to be saved by the heroic police officers, essentially. Um, and he really focuses on like long lingering shots of, uh, heroes coughing with, um, Yeah, there is, there is a lot of, of first responders coughing in this. Yeah. First responders love to cough. The majority of the movie winds up taking place with, uh, the, the two surviving cops played by Nicholas Cage and Michael Pina pinned under rubble, um, for almost all of the movie, almost the entirety of the movie with the occasional, uh, cutaways to their wives and families, um, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal is the pregnant wife of Michael Pina's character. And Maria Bello is playing Nicholas Cage's wife in the most distracting blue contact lenses. I think that I've seen in many a year in films like she looked like Jason Momoa as Aquaman.

It was absolutely wild. You know, when like, when contacts aren't just bright, that they look like, it looked like her eyeballs had been directly painted onto with a brush. I could not stop looking at it and thinking about it. Absolutely wild. But they were upset, uh, and, and the first responders spent a lot of the time hoping that they're going to get out of there and everything. And I just couldn't stop asking myself over and over again, why make this movie? Why, why make this movie? It makes me think of W. Did you ever see W? Uh, I didn't see W actually. I think I'm sure we're watching for this, uh, this series. Well, I, I saw W at the movies when it was out and, um, and it was, I just remember being struck by how bizarre it was for Oliver Stone. Again, Oliver Stone to make this like bizarrely uncritical paint by numbers biopic of George W. Bush.

It was so weird. Like Josh Brolin was very good in it. Everybody else in the film was just doing an impression of Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. You know, Brolin's very good, but I was also just like, why did you make this movie? It's like, it's, it's like he got onto some form of contrarianism that is like, ah, everybody thinks that I'm a controversial filmmaker. I'll show them. Yeah, well, I really weird. I couldn't understand what the point of making it was, and I couldn't understand what the point of making this was other than like you, you can say, you can be very trite and say, well, the point of this is to honor the ordinary heroism of the first responders who went into this building and were immediately squashed by it.

I don't know that I needed it to our long film to convince me that it would be like there would be shitty to be pinned under the World Trade Center's rubble. But remember, remember what, remember what the political environment was in the States in the late 2000s. You had this idea of, you had this idea of either of being pro or anti-bush. You had this, you had what appeared to be the beginning of like the fault lines being laid for what would become the intractable divisions in American politics going forward. I mean, the idea that these divisions sort of started with Obama or started with Trump, I think is something that a lot of people think because they don't remember that period between 2001 and 2008. And there is essentially, yeah, there's essentially this forgetting that a lot, like if most of these people are just basically, these divisions are more or less politically static and that the approach of the old time Hollywood liberal, whether that is someone like Oliver Stone or whether that's someone like, like John Stuart, is to attack the division because they wanted to be above the fray, right? Yeah.

And so that's why, that's why sort of Oliver Stone ends up basically turning himself into a small sea conservative filmmaker because he doesn't know how to handle what appears to be, where he doesn't know how to handle a situation where he doesn't have like a clear bad guy because like, okay, for most of Oliver Stone's films before this one, the clear bad guy is the American intelligence community in the American imperial war machine in the Cold War, right? That is sort of overthrowing governments and undermining its own values at home and mistreating its domestic pop and against a correct, that's a correct position. But then when America is attacked and there are stakes for American civilians, essentially, beyond just getting drafted and being sent to go do platoon, more or less, when there was those stakes for American civilians and the bad guy isn't the American military industrial complex, the bad guy is someone else, and he has to reckon with his view of America as a villain, basically. It's not America as a villain, but elements of America as a villain because those elements of America are now striking back at the most recent villain in America who happens to not be in America.

And so he's sort of unable to take a side because he's unable to reconcile that. And so what ends up happening is the role of Oliver Stone is basically taken over by, I don't know, Adam McKay, I guess? Well, yeah, it has like a very strange kind of committee decision feel to it. It kind of makes me think in a weird way of a parallel with Dunkirk. Have you seen Dunkirk? I have. Another film I did not care for. I guess the conceit of that film that was supposed to be interesting was a war movie where you never see the enemy because, you know, that's what it was like. It was scary to not know if someone was about to bomb you or strafe you in a plane or whatever. And so you never actually see the other troops or anything.

You have kind of a similar effect here where it's like, this thing has happened, this terrible, terrible act has happened, and we don't talk about it at any point in the movie. Because within the context of the movie, none of the characters know what's happened or anything like that. So, you know, we're confining it to a very specific context. We're confining it to like a 48 hour period. And it is just really weird. The whole thing is very weird. The feeling is that the movie is so, so carefully calibrated to avoid offending anybody. Like you can't offend any cops. You can't offend survivors. You can't offend families who had loved ones die in the event. But at the same time, it also seems like it's very deliberately been stripped of any sort of Maudland sentimentality so that he can't be accused of like milking a tragedy. I think they were already so conscious of being accused of the film being a cash grab before making it.

Like I said, it's just been so, so carefully designed to, you know, be devoid of ways to be criticized that it is just, it's completely soulless. It's completely by the numbers. And all has this sense of like completely foregone conclusions all the way through. The most interesting character in the movie to me is Michael Shannon's character. Absolutely. Absolutely. Dave Carnes is the most interesting because it is the character that clearly Oliver Stone respects the most. Because the story is all as full of civilians sort of fecklessly saying they want to help and sort of, you know, again, looks like sort of empty lead gesturing and oh, we should go down there. You know, it's too dangerous. Then Michael Shannon, Dave Carnes, going a former Marine who now works as an accountant, walking out of his job, getting a buzz cut so he like looks like a serving Marine and putting on his uniform so he can like sneak in and be the good civilian more or less with a good civilian as a former troop to go in and essentially set in motion the chain of events that caused these two guys to be rescued from the rubble under which they are being compressed. The thing about Carnes is that I'd say he has, if anything, the most sympathetic portrayal in this film of anyone not sort of under being compressed under rubble.

And the real Dave Carnes refused to cooperate with the film because of Oliver Stone's criticisms of George Bush in the preceding five years. Now, can I read to you from a profile in Slate magazine that came out on the one year anniversary of the September 11 attacks? Because the character as he's presented in the movie to me is the most interesting to me because he seems psychotic. Oh, yeah. I mean, to be fair, that's just Michael Shannon as well. He's very good at playing guys who seem crazy. So he's, you know, when when the attacks are on TV, he is in a suit in his accountant's office, you know, everybody else is standing around. They're all watching it on TV and he is like a full head and shoulders taller than everybody else in the office. And he announces to his assembled colleagues, you may not know it yet, but this country is at war and just walks out of the building and immediately gets himself a buzz cut and goes to New York. So this is from this profile came out a year afterwards.

Only 12 survivors were pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center after the towers fell despite intense rescue efforts. Two of the last three to be located and saved were Port Authority police officers. They were not discovered by a heroic firefighter or a rescue worker or a cop. They were discovered by Dave Carnes. Carnes hadn't been near the World Trade Center. He wasn't even in New York when the planes hit the towers. He was in Wilton, Connecticut, working in his job as a senior accountant with Deloitte. When the second plane hit, Carnes told his colleagues, we're at war. He had spent 23 years in the Marine Corps infantry and felt it was his duty to help. Carnes told his boss he might not see him for a while. Then he went to get a haircut.

The small barber shop in Stamford, Connecticut near his home was deserted. Give me a good Marine Corps squared off haircut, he told the barber. When it was done, he drove home to put on his uniform. Carnes always kept two sets of marine fatigues hanging in his closet pressed and starched. It's kind of weird to do, he said. I agree, Dave. But it comes in handy. What the fuck does it come in handy for? This.

What if there's a terrorist attack and I have to go pose as a Marine so I can get past the barriers keeping the general public out and be the inciting force of the rescue of the 18th and 19th people pulled out of the rubble? I always have to keep my Marine Corps uniform around because what if that happens? I feel like much of history has just been to vindicate the crazy assumptions of Carnes. Next, Carnes stopped by the storage facility where he kept his equipment. He'd need repelling gear, ropes, canteens of water, his Marine Corps K-bar knife and a flashlight, at least. Then he drove to church.

He asked the pastor and parishioners to say a prayer that God would lead him to survivors. A devout Christian, Carnes often turned to God when faced with decisions. Finally, he lowered the convertible top on his Porsche. This would make it easier for the authorities to look in and see a Marine, he reasoned. If they could see who he was, they'd be able to zip past checkpoints and more easily gain access to the site. For Carnes, it was a quote, God thing that he was in the Porsche, a Porsche 911, that day. He'd only purchased it a month earlier. It had been a stretch financially, but he decided to buy it after his pastor suggested that he pray on it.

He had no choice but to take it that day because his mercury was in the shop. Driving the Porsche at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour, he reached Manhattan after stopping at McDonald's for a hamburger in the late afternoon. I mean, just it's sort of a normal. I guess it's what's weird is how normal sort of elements of his day seemed as well. Just thought of stopping for a hamburger and stuff. But I suppose you do go to get myself a buzz cut, fetch my big knife. So they went and dug these guys out.

And like you said, you know, he declined to be involved in the movie. However, Emeno and McLaughlin, who were the actual survivors, were both involved in the movie, both received payment and both have cameos in the film. The ultimate honor. See, even the first responders, they're smart enough to like Oliver Stone and get involved in this film. So not everybody was happy about it, particularly the widows of some of the cops who did die. Who said things like, quote, I don't need a movie to tell me that my husband was a hero. And my husband saved your lives. How are you going to do this to him? So there's a lot of accusations sort of flying around pre and post this movie about it being a cash grab.

And again, I have to ask myself like in some ways, is this like the American cultural equivalent of the way they have to like make another Spider-Man movie that nobody wants? Because otherwise the rights lapse and then there's just some money sitting on the table that somebody could have had. The rights to 9-11? Not the rights to 9-11, but just the basically like, hey, if we don't make a movie out of it, someone else will and maybe they'll get paid money. Yeah, I mean, I think asking sort of, the thing is, I think asking whether it's a cash grab is an interesting question, but also sort of the wrong one, if only because the only way to produce culture that's sort of consumed by more than five guys, is to sort of enter it into the sort of the culture industry and to have it be a piece of cultural production, an artifact with a balance sheet basically.

Otherwise, no one sees it because in order for sort of the distribution mechanisms of our system to then sort of make it out there, as a byproduct of that, there must be the flow of money, right? So if Oliver Stone wants to make a point about this, there's no way really to do it without being a cash grab, because if it's not a cash grab, then it won't be made and no one will see it. So it's one of these things where it's like, it's impossible to sort of try to say something sort of significant at a mass cultural level without also being deeply cynical, which is why I think sort of so much of the cultural response to this event was so weird, because it had to be led by marketing in some way. Yeah, which is, again, just a bizarre thing to think about.

So the other marine that are paired up with Dave, Dave Kahn's also, I believe, wasn't actually a marine at the time. Two guys independently decided to pretend to be marines, to sneak onto the side and bumped into each other. And started a great American tradition of pretending to be a marine. So the other guy was Jason Thomas, right? And this guy did not come out until significantly after, right? They found Dave Kahn's like a year later, but Jason Thomas did not reveal himself until like five or six years later. He was dropping his daughter off at the home of his mother on Long Island when she told him about the attacks. Despite having left active duty in August 2001, he drove to Manhattan to assist in the efforts telling the Associated Press, someone needed a help, it didn't matter who, I didn't even have a plan.

All I have all this training as a marine and all I could think was, my city is in need. As of 2013, Thomas is serving in the United States Air Force as a medical technician. Also, they portrayed him with a white actor when he is black. Yes, that's the other thing. Whoopsie-daisy. Pobedy's nerfed. Yeah, that's right. Especially not Oliver Stone. He also featured on a 2007 episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

Were they doing an extremely patriotic version of Extreme Makeover Home Edition? Well, apparently he moved his family, moved his wife and four kids from New York to Columbus and the house they bought started falling apart. And so the show intervened to help a patriot. This is kind of the point that I was coming around to when I was thinking about all this stuff is that, apparently there is only one final destination for everybody involved in a national tragedy and that is to be in a movie or on television. That is the highest honor, like you said, that can be bestowed upon an American. It's to be permanently memorialized in an Oliver Stone film or an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Yeah, if Oliver Stone gets your race wrong, then Extreme Makeover Home Edition is going to be there to make sure you're represented properly.

In the sort of grand book of deeds of America, which is reality television, that was there to break the writer's strike. Now, this takes me to the story of Todd Beamer. Now, Todd Beamer was one of the passengers who was on United Flight 93, which was also made into a film by Paul Greengrass. And Todd Beamer was portrayed by an actor in that film. He was one of the passengers who kind of grouped together and decided that they were going to storm the cockpit and take over the plane. He used to like, you know, the credit card phone things that he used to have in planes. Swipe a credit card and start calling from an air phone, much like John McLean's wife in Die Hard 2, Die Harder. And so he called down trying to get a hold of his wife, obviously could not get through, but instead they put him through to GTE air phone supervisor Lisa Jefferson

and told her that the group was planning to jump on the hijackers and fly the plane into the ground before they could follow through with the plan. At this point, I will say this is the thing that gained Todd Beamer and these passengers, their legendary status as people who gave everything to avoid a terrible disaster. I will note that George Bush had already given the order to shoot this plane down at this point. So he then recited the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm with Jefferson on the phone. He then told her, if I don't make it, please call my family and let them know how much I love them. Then she heard some muffled voices and Beamer clearly saying, are you ready? Okay, let's roll. And those were the last words that she heard over the air phone. Now, because America is the country that it is, let's roll as a phrase then became wildly ingrained into the American psyche.

I was not really aware of the extent of this for you. I mean, I was aware that this one phrase became significant, but I don't think I was sort of ready for the scale. It became significant, particularly after George Bush used it in a speech to America volunteers and he also used it again during his 2002 State of the Union address. The axis of evil address, in fact. So even though this was a phrase that was already in very common use, a bunch of people immediately started to try and claim it as a trademark. However, the Todd M. Beamer Foundation was granted a trademark for use of the phrase relating to quote pre-recorded compact discs, audio tapes, digital audio tapes and phonograph records featuring music. And let me tell you this, boy was their music. Are you ready to hear a little sampling of American releases prominently featuring or centered around the phrase, let's roll.

Let's go. Let's roll, in fact. Wake up America, until you're home to die. Let's roll, America, as the good Lord's on our side. Wake up America, it's Tuesday morning. Come on, let's roll. Tune in to America. Let's roll. Let's roll. Let's rock. Let's rock. Let's show the world's play. Sacrifice comes last September. We still hate our fellow class.

Are you ready? Okay, let's roll. These are all issues we've discussed broadly and fully within my administration. Tonight, I want to share those discussions with you. Let's roll. And in skies over Pennsylvania, Todd Beamer stood the test. And another quote was added to that hallowed list. Let's roll. Let's roll.

Honey, you know that I love you. Let's roll. Let's roll. Time for playing games. They did a drum and bass one, huh? They sure did. Imagine making like an upbeat song about telling your wife goodbye before you crash a jetliner into the ground. Yeah, because then at that point, it's a love song to America

who's about to be killed by a mysterious force who needs to be protected. That's the wife in all those songs of using let's roll. The wife is America, who is to be loved. I think what really struck me when I was putting that together was, you know, like we were saying before about like, you know, we all remember like Freedom Fries and Toby Keith and shit. But like, you know, in that list, you had like Melissa Etheridge and Neil Young, like the breadth of artists who felt the need not only to try and tackle

either thematically or directly 9-11 through lyrics. And boy, are we going to get into that in a future episode. But in this specific case, we're talking about like that phrase, the need to roll that particular phrase into it. There's so many examples of it and from right across the spectrum, ideologically of different artists. Well, because you can't use just symbolism. It has to be the literal thing.

And of course, it was not confined to music because, hey, there's all kinds of people out there that you can trademark this phrase to. It was on one of the patches of the helmet of the main character in the game, Ghost Recon Future Soldier. It was in Counter Strike Global Offensive that comes up on the screen right before you start. In the 2002 college football season, the Florida State Seminoles used Let's Roll as their official team slogan.

Everybody got mad at them, but then don't worry, they got an officially licensed trademark from the Todd M. Beamer Foundation. NASCAR driver Bobby LeBont drove a 911 tribute car with the words Let's Roll on the hood of his stock car in the 2002 MNBA All American Heroes 400. So you can see that basically, no matter what happens, at the end of the day, you will be put into a professional sport, onto a TV show, into a movie or the clumsy lyrics of an adult contemporary pop song. Or a drum and bass song.

There's one thing I wanted to read also before we roll out, which is Oliver Stone saying why he made this movie. This film is a memorial. Its function is to remember, because believe it or not, in America, many people are forgetting about 911. Never forget. In 2006, people were like, hey, what happened? What happened with this overwhelming sort of cultural, we are being blanketed in the cultural rubble of 911,

and everyone's just forgetting that they're under all of these fragments of the ideological world trade center, if only because it became so pervasive and so all-consuming that all you could see was the ideological rubble of the trade center. You couldn't see anything else. So Oliver Stone begins to worry that because you can't see the world trade center anymore, that everyone's forgotten about it. But what he's failed to realize is that America has been inside the whole time,

and that's why you can't see it. By thinking about the world trade center too much, have we been thinking about it not enough? Oliver Stone says yes. Well, I think that is it for our first episode. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much. So for breakfast, I had two pieces of sourdough toast with peanut butter

and coffee out of the orange mug. I'm not going to take breakfast update from you. I had eggs and bacon, a piece of toast, some grilled tomatoes from the garden. Oliver Stone says delicious. No good decos upon us. And I don't mind being a now whipping boy. I've had that pleasure for years and years. I know I never was a sinner.

But I don't know what else can I do. And the best is what you get. Tell them to bend the rules. Time to stretch the thirst. And when you lift up the spot. No way now. I declare my call for influence. For my victory is a favor.

And the news around my face. And I thought people don't want to dream in the dead. When the walls come tumbling down. When the walls come tumbling, come living in the walls. Come tumbling, come living down.