08/13/06 - Posted from the Daily Record newsroom
Emotional images

Red Cross volunteer has advice for watching 'World Trade Center' film

BY LORRAINE ASH
DAILY RECORD

The attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, came out of a clear blue sky. The movie by the same name comes off the bare screen of a movie theater.

When it comes to seeing the film, the question of the day is indelible in conversations all around Morris County: To see the Oliver Stone production, or not to see it? What will the images of that fateful day trigger for us? Panic? Anxiety? Nausea? Fear? Helplessness? Confusion?

To help Daily Record readers know how to approach this most controversial of films, Mary-Michael Levitt, director of the Riverview Marriage & Family Counseling Center in Mount Olive, traveled with this reporter to a Paramount screening of the film in Manhattan. That the newspaper chose Levitt in particular was no accident.

After 9/11, Levitt volunteered as a trained Red Cross disaster mental health action team member at the Family Assistance Center in Liberty State Park, helping streams of 9/11 family members, volunteer workers and even state troopers through the tragedy. She escorted them on ferries to and from Ground Zero. On either side of the river, she held hands, heard stories, helped people bring themselves through.

"We were located across the river from the towers," she recalled. "This site was lit up every night. During the day the plume of smoke was endless. We saw it when we arrived. We saw it when we left and every time we walked outside."

This is a woman to talk about visual impact and how to think about a movie that could stir it all up again.

Who should see "World Trade Center," a movie billed as "a true story of courage and survival"? The film tells a microcosm of the tale, centering on the rescue of two Port Authority police officers whose bodies were crushed in the dark under the steel and cement that was once Tower Two.

As Sgt. John McLoughlin (played by Nicolas Cage) and Officer Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) lie trapped, they are threatened by shifting cement, avalanches of metal and rock, and spontaneous fires. They lie talking to each other, giving each other heart and encouragement, helping each other face the end, until they are found through the sheer gumption of one errant Marine.

Then teams of rescue workers and firefighters arrive to extricate the two men -- the 18th and 19th of 20 to be rescued from the rubble.

Stone has said he set out to make a film about heroes. Deliberately, he wanted to magnify the spirit of helpfulness and valor to which the devastation gave rise. The movie is meant to be positive, not political. But does that matter if the backdrop is all there, the grotesque tangled ruins of towers that changed the face of a country?

Who should see this movie? Levitt's answer is multi-layered: That depends on the ability of the viewer to absorb and process the intensity of the film.

'We're all witnesses'

"World Trade Center" is not entertainment, said Levitt, 55. "It is an emotional journey, one story in a day of endless stories."

As such, it should not be approached casually, she advised, but seriously because of its potential to create personal stress.

"People have to really examine whether seeing it is the right experience for them to have," she said. "People need to be honest with themselves about their tolerance for feeling deep emotions and their willingness to process what they see and feel. It will take self-reflection and a desire to know a deeper level of yourself."

Everyone should expect to possibly experience some degree of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms, which is normal under these conditions, Levitt said. The level of severity will depend on a person's relationship to the event.

"Some of us knew someone who died that day firsthand, secondhand or thirdhand, or not at all,"she said. "But remember that we're all connected to this trauma because we're all witnesses to the attack."

The clinical definition of PTSD, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), offers a way to evaluate reactions such as crying, flashbacks or intrusive thoughts. Levitt urges people to consider how often they would cry, how long it would last and how intense it would be.

"Once a day for a week?" she asked. "How intensely? A tear coming down your face, or open sobbing? If someone anticipates they'd be high on the scale for all three -- frequency, duration and intensity -- they might want to reconsider whether this is a movie for them to see."

But for those who do see "World Trade Center,"it can have an important impact, she added, because the script does no less than search for the meaning in the disaster. Levitt quoted Viktor Frankl, a World War II concentration camp survivor, in his classic work, "Man's Search for Meaning":

"We can discover meaning in three different ways -- by doing a deed, by experiencing a value and by suffering and facing our attitude toward it."

"That is what made this movie important for me," she said. "Each viewer must find his own meaning in this movie."

What to expect

The movie never diminishes the enormity of loss on 9/11, Levitt said, even though it is a story about two police officers.

"It's one story in a day of endless stories. It's a pinpoint," she said. "It's the head of a needle."

Stone shows just that with camera angles that show the ruins after the fall of the towers from the perspective of Sgt. McLoughlin's head, held between two pieces of concrete, to a wider shot of all the rubble around him, then a view of the "pile" where the two men lay from the outside.

The camera then moves upward to encompass all of Ground Zero and then farther up, into the heavens, so the audience looks upon it as if from a satellite. With camera angles, Stone implies the scope and enormity of the loss.

Such is also true in the final rescue scene when the bodies of the two Port Authority officers are carried down an enormous line from one set of hands to another and yet another and eventually down to the street and waiting ambulances below.

"Thank you," a weary and prone McLoughlin mutters over and over again to the many workers who worked for 22 hours to pull him out.

That the enormity of loss was depicted pleased Levitt, as did the way Stone presented the heroism.

"I saw real humanity in the faces of the characters, and the men and women they represented,"Levitt said. "I did not see our typical cultural superheroes in this film. It did not go Hollywood. These people were frightened, terrified, horrified, confused. This was real.

"The story is believable. I could believe the confusion and the lack of communication among the different sets of responders."

The script, by Andrea Berloff, kept to the facts. Stone also consulted with McLoughlin and Jimeno to ensure the accuracy of what happened, including Jimeno's vision of Jesus Christ holding a bottle of water and McLoughlin's spectral images of his wife and family as his consciousness waned in the later hours of his entrapment.

No planes

"In the movie we never saw the planes hit the building, and that is all we did see on television,"Levitt said. "The movie didn't feel like exploitation."

Instead, viewers see and hear the scene as the officers did -- all rumbles and smoke and mind-boggling images of bloodied businesspeople.

In fact, she found Stone's treatment emotionally resonant in several ways. She appreciated the depiction of the power of companionship in times of crisis, of which the movie was a patchwork as it followed the drama not only of the two trapped men but of their desperately worried families. The quiet camaraderie of the two Marines who found the men also illustrated the point, as did that among the rescue workers.

Levitt liked that the film drew the children of the officers into the story and especially appreciated the relationship between Donna McLaughlin and one of her sons.

"Stone captured how to talk about this with the children, how to understand the effects of the trauma on the children," she said. "I liked the part of the story where the McLoughlin boy goes out and sits in the truck outside the family's home in Goshen. That's how he tries to influence his mother to take action and go help his father at the World Trade Center.

"Part of her was going through the day as if nothing was wrong. This was disturbing to her son. He wanted her to show a more honest reaction to the event, and he pursued her several times until she heard him. I've seen that happen -- where the child is more willing to hear the honest truth, but adults think they should protect the child from the truth."

Of course, she said, every child is different, and every circumstance, so the truth has to be unfolded to just the right degree, in just the right way, in each instance.

It can never be said that any movie about the fall of the twin towers has a happy ending, Levitt said. Never. But the ending in the movie was positive in that two men did survive because of the work and selfless acts of the first responders. That is inspirational.

In the movie, as in the event, lies the possibility for understanding our own humanity, for knowing, as the movie cites, that wherever there is evil there is also heroism and courage and hope.

Levitt saw all three at Ground Zero, in the movie and in the eyes of everyone who can never forget what happened on a day that will live in infamy -- Sept. 11, 2001.

Lorraine Ash can be reached at (973) 428-6660

Ellie