As a scholar who’s sensitive both to historiography and contemporary media criticism, I’m well aware that for the vast majority of the world, those who don’t get to go into archives or interview historical actors firsthand, history only exists in the telling. We labor to make our work transparent, extensively documenting our work in part so that others can follow in our tracks, check the same sources and confirm (or rebut) our conclusions. In the end, though, this kind of fact-checking is simply too much, so the audience for history places its trust in the storyteller, assuming that what is seen or read is true unless offered evidence to the contrary.
That’s why this is so damned disturbing. In essence, you’re seeing a reframing of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, through an extremely partisan lens, rewriting actual spoken dialogue and re-editing the sequence of events for dramatic effect.
Let me be blunt: This. Is. Not. History. That. Should. Be. Toyed. With.
Two quotes from the story, which you should really read in its entirety:
“This is the story of DC 9/11. Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Donald Rumsfeld‚Äîall of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney, Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke.”
“There are, of course, precedents. ‘One of the original aspects of Soviet cinema is its daring in depicting contemporary historical personages, even living figures,’ Andr√© Bazin dryly observed in his 1950 essay, The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema. It was one of the unique characteristics of Stalin-era Soviet movies that their infallible leader was regularly portrayed, by professional impersonators, as an all-wise demiurge in suitably grandiose historical dramas. So it is with DC 9/11, where documentary footage of the collapsing WTC is punctuated by the pronouncements of Bottoms’s Bush…That Bottoms is reconfiguring his role in the Comedy Central series That’s My Bush! (a gross-out sitcom canceled a month before 9-11) provides a uniquely American twist.”
The mix of documentary and fictionally re-enacted footage is a dangerous, dangerous combination, and I don’t believe that the viewing audience will on the whole be sophisticated enough to draw a distinction between the two (especially given the verite, news-footage look which the creators of this program appear to be going for).
