A movie for the times

 

 

It’s the weekend, and I’m used to talking with Barbara Nicolosi (on the air) about weekend movies. Her blog is linked over on the right under the Arts section.

Film as art has always been an important part of our culture, and we like to look at the quality of what’s out there either posing as art, or hiding beneath the veneer of entertainment but actually providing the ennobling experience of art.

So what’s out there? I think this would be a good weekend to see World Trade Center, if you haven’t already. There’s an earlier post below about this weekend being declared “Three Days of Prayer and Remembrance” by President Bush, heading into the fifth anniversary of the attack on September 11, 2001.

Peggy Noonan has a poignant column today in the Wall Street Journal about a different set of memories of that infamous day, the sounds of 9/11. It’s titled “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Yes, she says, there was that horrible roaring sound of crashing metal and steel, and the sound of the explosion, and all that.

But the most important sounds of 9/11 were all the stripped down, urgent messages of love. Before I got even halfway through the article, I thought a lot about that movie, World Trade Center, and its pervasive message of the power of pure love. That stands out in that film more than any other single thing, more than the evil that struck that day. Love is, after all, stronger than evil, stronger than death.

In scene after scene of the film, the people hurled into the chaos of Ground Zero went back to their families, in thought or word, and held onto their love. It’s what kept the two main characters alive, two members of the Port Authority Police. Peggy Noonan recounts some of those personal moments.

Flight 93 flight attendant Ceecee Lyles, 33 years old, in an answering-machine message to her husband: “Please tell my children that I love them very much. I’m sorry, baby. I wish I could see your face again.”

Thirty-one-year-old Melissa Harrington, a California-based trade consultant at a meeting in the towers, called her father to say she loved him. Minutes later she left a message on the answering machine as her new husband slept in their San Francisco home. “Sean, it’s me, she said. “I just wanted to let you know I love you.”

Capt. Walter Hynes of the New York Fire Department’s Ladder 13 dialed home that morning as his rig left the firehouse at 85th Street and Lexington Avenue. He was on his way downtown, he said in his message, and things were bad. “I don’t know if we’ll make it out. I want to tell you that I love you and I love the kids.”

Firemen don’t become firemen because they’re pessimists. Imagine being a guy who feels in his gut he’s going to his death, and he calls on the way to say goodbye and make things clear. His widow later told the Associated Press she’d played his message hundreds of times and made copies for their kids. “He was thinking about us in those final moments.”

This is so powerful.

These were people saying, essentially, In spite of my imminent death, my thoughts are on you, and on love. I asked a psychiatrist the other day for his thoughts, and he said the people on the planes and in the towers were “accepting the inevitable” and taking care of “unfinished business.” “At death’s door people pass on a responsibility–‘Tell Billy I never stopped loving him and forgave him long ago.’ ‘Take care of Mom.’ ‘Pray for me, Father. Pray for me, I haven’t been very good.’ ” They address what needs doing.

Seeing the film was a good reminder to me of how important those messages are right now, and how relatively unimportant everything else really is. Peggy Noonan put it so well.

This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they’d guess. And this: We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

I get that also, and offer this. Tell people you love that you love them. Forgive and forget. And ask for prayers, and offer them to others, while you still have time.