Abstract
I engage in a discourse analysis of National Geographic’s docuseries “9/11: One Day in America” to argue that the series’ multi-layered effort at commemoration, geared as a long-awaited “full” telling of the 9/11 story, but committed to honoring a specific group of victims and survivors, is enabled by a disorienting temporality that raises questions about the role of national memorials and archives at this moment. Temporality is essential to the development of narrative, and with narrative a central element in the making of memory worlds, temporality cannot be underestimated as a key factor in how memories take shape. “One Day” depends on structural instantiations of time to develop its narrative as authentic memory, reflecting a paradoxical linear yet circular pattern that simultaneously authenticates and undermines the veracity of the story it tells. “One Day” transports viewers into lower Manhattan and through the events of 9/11 via a vividly illustrated timeline. But while a linear version of time in “One Day” supports the telling of survivor stories and the memorialization of the dead, the overarching effect of the timeline for viewers is circular, transporting viewers back in time to 2001 and a state of fear and confusion, forcing collective memory to exist in a repetitive temporality that excuses a turn away from history and consequences. The resulting circular mechanism for commemoration allows cultural institutions, like the ones represented in “One Day,” to emphasize the past at the expense of more critical understandings of both history and the future.
Keywords
Introduction: “One Day’s” promise
On the eve of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in the summer of 2021, it was nearly impossible to watch TV—live or streaming—without confronting an advertisement for one of the dozens of documentaries, retrospectives, or specials promising to “remember” 9/11 in moving, descriptive, and informative ways. One such documentary series, National Geographic’s “9/11: One Day in America,” claimed to commemorate the 20th anniversary by telling the story of 9/11 from start to finish “in full.” As such, “One Day” pegged its contribution to the vast array of anniversary content on the hook that there was more to the story—an authoritative version of the story—waiting to be told. In making this promise, “One Day” echoes an effort to “get to the bottom of” that is a fixture of collective memory (Erll, 2020: 867). Astrid Erll (2020) argues that it is natural for publics to grapple with why and how major events happen, but while Erll writes of the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic, an event that is still very much in progress with little public consensus as to its origins and consequences, these efforts seem misplaced in the case of 9/11, an event that has been the subject of constant investigation and response for two decades. Twenty years later, the dust has settled, memorials have been built, and survivor stories are well-documented. With the time that has past, questions that have been answered, and the world undoubtedly changed, why are we still trying to “get to the bottom of” 9/11?
“One Day’s” chief contribution to the veritable canon of 9/11 memorial and survivor narratives amassed in the past two decades is in the way it weaves survivor accounts together with corresponding archival footage from its collaborator, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, to craft a precise timeline of the events of 9/11. “One Day” takes viewers into lower Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001, and after six episodes and 7 hours of survivor interviews, it leaves viewers in the rubble at about midnight on September 12th. The blurb on its streaming platform, Hulu, describes the series as providing “unprecedented detail” (Hulu, 2021), suggesting that the filmmakers have gained access to 9/11 footage that has never been seen—marketing the series as a miracle of resurrected material just in time for the 20th anniversary. Sourced from over 950 hours of archival footage and 54 survivor interviews (Asilo, 2021), there is no doubt that “One Day” is a feat of archival filmmaking, telling a story that feels “full” in the most literal sense of the term, providing an immersive, detail-packed experience for the modern-day viewer.
But in practice, viewers are met with a “full story” that comes only from one perspective, as “One Day” structures its “definitive” narrative of 9/11 around mostly white, mostly male, American survivor interviewees, whose stories have long been the subject of 9/11 remembrance. At the start of episode one, “First Response,” white text on a black screen emerges against the backdrop of eerie, otherworldly music: “For many years, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum has been documenting the experiences of one day. It is now possible to tell the story of that day in full. From the first plane hitting to the last survivors rescued from the rubble. Through the eyes of those who witnessed, suffered and survived.” “One Day’s” suspenseful opening suggests viewers are in for a big reveal—that finally, after 20 years, they will learn the “full” story of 9/11. But in reality, “One Day” reflects the well-worn mission and temporal modes of the archive from which it is sourced, narrowing its focus to 9/11 “the event,” as opposed to “the era,” as some scholars have come to think of it (Sturken, 2022), and those it immediately impacted. Billed as both a long-awaited “full” telling of a set of events, and a testament to “those who survived,” “One Day” privileges a particular version of the story of 9/11—the survivor story—as the “real” one.
Only highlighting the trauma and perspectives of certain survivors and victims’ families, “One Day’s” backing by and sourcing from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum certifies as truth a narrative that centers heroism, hope, and tragedy; fraternity, teamwork, and dedication, ignoring the messy and unflattering geopolitical and historical context in which both 9/11 and its 20th anniversary occurred. The choice to shirk context was intentional, as producer Caroline Marsden describes the creators’ mission of highlighting the survivors, saying, We didn’t want anything to distract, and I think the people who survived that day, their narratives have been hijacked by the politics of it in many ways. And so, we wanted to strip all that down and just get back to the testimony (as quoted in Turchiano, 2021).
Centering individuals in 9/11 remembrance is not new, echoing the role of memorials writ large (Engle, 2009) and the organization of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City (Sodaro, 2018a), but the refusal to grapple with the politics and history of it all is especially troubling after so many years. “One Day’s” focus on 9/11 the day suggests 9/11 exists outside of history and without precedent, the “out of the blueness” of it allowing the United States to avoid any responsibility for how it came to be or what happened after (Sturken, 2007). This reductive narrative, combined with the documentary’s claim to truth—reflected in director Daniel Bogado’s (2021) comment that, “As a documentary maker your first commitment has to be to the truth” (as quoted in Turchiano, 2021)—raises the stakes for the role of “One Day” in collective memory.
As a mode of commemoration, the focus on the individual represented in “One Day” maps onto a pattern of 9/11 sentiment in which the state of the country is reflected in its treatment of 9/11 at any given time (Bond, 2015). The 20th anniversary of 9/11 coincided poetically, if tragically, with America’s retreat from, and the Taliban’s rise in, Afghanistan; collided against the second year of the health, economic, and social crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic; and punctuated the United States’ continued reckoning with domestic terrorism and authoritarianism in the wake of the 6 January 2021 attacks on the US Capitol. Amid such a complex and dystopian backdrop, the choice to highlight the American survivor story—one that centers (largely) male heroism and strength, unwavering patriotism, and miraculous interventions—reflects a country that understands itself and its history only through “codes of sacrifice and heroism” and which pines for the glory days of American “unity” that 9/11 ostensibly wrought (Sturken, 2022: 36, 26). Ironically, one could argue, it is this very set of mythologies that has landed the United States at the difficult historical juncture in which the 20th anniversary of 9/11 took place.
In the pages that follow, I engage in a discourse analysis of “One Day” to argue that the series’ multi-layered effort at commemoration, geared as a long-awaited “full” telling of the 9/11 story, but committed to honoring a specific group of victims and survivors, is enabled by a disorienting temporality that raises questions about the role of national memorials and archives at this moment. Temporality is essential to the development of narrative, and with narrative a central element in the making of memory worlds (Erll, 2020), temporality cannot be underestimated as a key factor in how memories take shape (Ricoeur, 2004). “One Day” depends on structural instantiations of time to develop its narrative as authentic memory, reflecting a paradoxical linear yet circular pattern that simultaneously authenticates and undermines the veracity of the story it tells. “One Day” transports viewers into lower Manhattan and through the events of 9/11 via a vividly illustrated timeline. But while a linear version of time in “One Day” supports the telling of survivor stories and the memorialization of the dead, the overarching effect of the timeline for viewers is circular, transporting viewers back in time to 2001 and a state of fear and confusion, forcing collective memory to exist in a repetitive temporality that excuses a turn away from history and consequences. The resulting circular mechanism for commemoration allows cultural institutions, like the ones represented in “One Day,” to emphasize the past at the expense of more critical understandings of both history and the future.
The topography of time in “One Day”
Time is the central organizing force that allows the 9/11 Memorial & Museum archive to come alive in “One Day,” deployed on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour basis that reconstructs not just the individual events of 9/11, but also how they exist in relation to one another. Indeed, it is also time that allows this kind of reconstruction to hold meaning for survivors and viewers alike, as the force allowing history to take shape in memory (Zerubavel, 2003). Eviatar Zerubavel (2003) argues that time’s “topography,” or its structural instantiations, maps history in distinct, meaningful ways in the minds of both individuals and collectives. Understanding the ways in which time inhabits formal, structural patterns in “One Day” makes legible the role of the archive, deployed in the documentary, in informing historical narratives.
Time in “One Day” appears in a chronology that privileges linearity, setting to-the-minute timestamps (8:46 a.m., for example) and corresponding images and sounds to the survivor accounts that weave together to tell the story of 9/11 “From start to finish.” As a commemorative documentary meant to acknowledge a major anniversary event, “One Day” is first and foremost a “bridge” linking the present to the past, “coagulating essentially noncontiguous patches of history into a single, seemingly continuous experiential stream” (Zerubavel, 2003: 7). Linear time is equated with Enlightenment ideals of progress, events building on one another in a logical way to reach a point of greater development (Zerubavel, 2003). At first glance, then, the linear demarcations of time in “One Day” each act as a different piece of iron, steel, and concrete building the bridge that tells the story of 9/11 both as it happened then and how it should make sense to viewers and publics now.
Each episode of “One Day” represents a rung on a “ladder,” constructing the literal, forward motion of time that makes past turn to present and future (Zerubavel, 2003). From “First Response” to “The South Tower,” onto “Collapse” and “The Cloud,” ending with “I’m Coming for You, Brother” and “It’s all Gone, Kid,” even at the level of episode names, “One Day” tells a story that moves history forward from problem to rising action, climax, and resolution. The episodic structure of the series alone encapsulates this paradoxical temporality. Each episode—or rung on the “ladder”—ends with a cliffhanger, even though most viewers are likely well-versed in the order of events that occurred that day. Episode One, for example, ends with the words of FDNY Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer, who recalls standing in the lobby of the North Tower with the fire department chaplain, Father Mychal Judge: “I could see his lips moving because he was praying. . .there is something bad about to happen.” Suspenseful temporality links one event to the other, one episode to the next. (Figure 1(a) and (b))
Screenshots from “One Day.” (a and b) FDNY Chaplain Father Mychal Judge prays inside the North Tower. Closed captioning quotes FDNY Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer.
Timestamps within each episode do the precise work of constructing each of these metaphorical rungs, lending granularity—and therefore authenticity—to the overall narrative the ladder builds. Take Episode Three, “Collapse,” which represents the climactic event of the ladder’s narrative—the highest point of the temporal bridge—in which both towers fall, a third plane strikes the Pentagon and a fourth crashes in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. “Collapse” covers the period of 9:40–10:50 am. A brief summary illustrates the time and space it traverses:
10:05 am—the rubble of the South Tower’s collapse, smoke rises as a survivor interview begins
10:10 am—the chaos of the Pentagon where a plane has just hit, personnel are running, people on stretchers are frantically being rushed to safety
10:15 am—the camera pans upward to the sky where American fighter pilots are patrolling the airspace
Seconds later—California, where it’s 6:37 am and the mother of someone on the plane headed toward Shanksville, PA, is just waking up
10:22 am—back to the rubble in NYC, where the survivor from earlier is seen walking away from the scene, bloodied but alive
10:45 am—the newsroom at CNN in Atlanta, Georgia, where reporters have just gotten word that the last plane has crashed in Shanksville
Timestamps work on overdrive to assign a linear narrative to a series of complex, near simultaneous events, their pace signaling the climax of the story and seeding this moment as the one to be remembered—the one that “matters”—of 9/11.
The quick succession of timestamps here is dizzying, reflecting the kind of “chronomania” that pervades 9/11 discourse, a key factor in the “disappearance of history” from 9/11 narratives in favor of an obsession with the “material conditions” out of which 9/11 arose (Neuman, 2016; Sodaro, 2018a). In Episode Three, outlined above, the pace of time seemingly picks up as shot after shot viewers are transported to a different physical space and between time zones. The timeline here appears complete, as viewers “witness” the events of New York City, Shanksville, PA, and Washington, DC occurring seemingly simultaneously. 1 But just as quickly as viewers are introduced to the attacks in PA and DC, the series moves on, back to New York City where the damage was the most dramatic. The events in PA and DC are not to be mentioned again in any meaningful way, the series’ timeline instead focusing on the towers’ eventual collapse and search and rescue efforts in Lower Manhattan. Linear time ends up undermining the veracity of its own narrative, unable to accommodate, ultimately, the breadth of 9/11’s immediate impact.
Pairing contemporary interviews with the precise moments they detail, “One Day’s” timeline signals that the archive from which the story is told is complete, comprehensive, and authoritative, capturing, down to the minute, the ways in which the events unfolded that day, and how they led to the present moment. The “laddering” (Zerubavel, 2003) of the archive assigns causality to the historical events the archive illustrates, building a cohesive relationship between past, present, and future (Bond, 2015). Survivor Tom Canavan is particularly relevant here. Archival footage shows Tom emerging from the rubble at 10:22 am (timestamp included) on the morning of 11 September 2001, his contemporary voice narrating the footage on screen. Tom brings viewers with him from the rubble and into the present moment, illustrating how the events in “One Day” logically build on one another to construct the present. The “bridging” and “laddering” effect of time in “One Day” frames the version of the events it narrates as logical and progressive, naturally leading to the present moment from which viewers are watching. (Figure 2(a) to (c))
Screenshots from “One Day.” (a) The introduction to Episode Three, “Collapse.” (b) Tom Canavan remarks on his unlikely survival on 9/11 in a modern-day interview. (c) Canavan leaves the rubble on 9/11 and gives an interview to a reporter on the ground. Closed captioning in final image is from archival footage.
The same small demarcations of time that construct a linear narrative in “One Day” also contribute to an overwhelming sense of “liveness” that situates viewers directly in the versions of time and space its narrative constructs. Linear time simulates a sense of “liveness” that “relates to the power of real time” (Peters, 2001: 719), casting viewers as “eyewitnesses” to the version of 9/11 “One Day” offers, journalistic soundbites simulating the experience of being “on the site” at the version of 9/11 unfolding onscreen. The first episode begins this situating work immediately, opening with the sound of a newscast as footage of a calm Manhattan appears on the screen. Associated Press broadcaster Ross Simpson reports on the latest news in sports and provides an update on President Bush’s education policies. The innocuous newscast paired with the serene image of the sun-drenched Twin Towers situates viewers in time right away. This is pre-9/11 America, when morning newscasts were about the doings of Michael Jordan and the workings of Washington. The situating work of this newscast places viewers physically in Manhattan and temporally on the morning of 11 September 2001, setting them up as eyewitnesses to the events that are about to unfold. (Figure 3(a) to (c))
Screenshots from “One Day.” (a and b) AP reporter Ross Simpson delivers a newscast against the backdrop of archival images from downtown Manhattan on the morning of 9/11. (c) Survivor Ron Clifford remarks on the now-infamous cloudless, sunny sky the morning of 9/11.
“One Day’s” positioning of contemporary viewers alongside 2001-era reporters and residents alike as they try to make sense of the day allows journalistic soundbites to act as citations proving the accuracy of the version of events “One Day” details. Barbie Zelizer (2007) explains the veracity associated with eyewitnessing in journalism, writing, Eyewitnessing is thought to offer a kind of proof that is different from that provided by other types of reportorial chronicles. Drawing from the authority gained by being on the site of an event being reported, eyewitnessing refers to an ability to account subjectively for the events, actions, or practices seen with one’s own eyes (p. 411).
“One Day” is rife with these moments—viewers hear a newscast from inside someone’s apartment as home video footage pans to the window to document the smoke emerging from the burning towers; viewers listen with a crowd trying to make sense of the early moments of the attacks, gathered around a radio playing a report from someone’s car; and viewers watch as a radio belonging to a lower Manhattan security guard, positioned alongside of him when the second plane hits, crashes to the earth. “One Day” lends an added layer of authenticity to the effect of eyewitnessing by strategically deploying archival audio and visuals from newscasts on 9/11 to punctuate its temporal building blocks. (Figures 4 and 5)
Screenshots from “One Day.” (a) Home video footage shows survivors streaming out of the Twin Towers on 9/11 as a TV newscast plays in the background. (b) Home video footage pans to apartment window to document smoke covering Lower Manhattan on 9/11.
Screenshots from “One Day.” (a, b, and c) Security guard in Lower Manhattan listens to radio coverage of the first attack as the second plane hits.
The trick of real and linear time in “One Day” excuses viewers from understanding 9/11 as a product of and moment within history, allowing viewers’ only focus to be on the events unfolding—as if for the first time—before their eyes. James Carey (2011) describes the early moments of journalism during and in the immediate wake of 9/11, writing, “Before the events in New York and Washington could be grasped as history, they appeared only as chronology and narrative” (p. 85). The same can be said of “One Day’s” reproduction of 9/11 from the archive, simulating for viewers an experience of immediate crisis, in which grappling with an event’s historical context—its true “full story”—is impossible, efforts at survival becoming the most important and all-encompassing task. Twenty years later, real time and linear time work together to send viewers backward—not forward—in their perspective on the event, “One Day” delivering a “full circle” more than a “full story.”
Traumatized time in “One Day”
If, as I argue, “One Day’s” circular temporality precludes the promised telling of the “full” story of 9/11—enabling time travel back to the moment of 9/11 but forgetting anything that came after it in the process, thus leaving efforts at a “full” understanding of the event incomplete—then what and whose story does it tell? In her examination of 9/11’s impact on the visual imagination, Karen Engle (2009) invokes Freud’s Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (1958 (1914)) to understand what repetition means in the context of America’s relationship to 9/11, writing: For Freud, the compulsion to repeat indicates a latent trauma that must first be experienced directly in order to be exorcised. Talk it out. This is all well and good (if impossible) for individual patients suffering from individual traumas, but what of a nation or collectivity whose experience of a traumatic event can only ever be indirect? (p. 4).
Engle suggests that repetition as a means of understanding trauma can only ever accommodate an individual experience, failing to address the complexity of a collectivity made up of individuals each experiencing trauma in their own way. For the individual, linear and circular time are not antithetical, but rather mutually constitutive of the experience of “working through,” enabling the return to and passing through of the traumatic event necessary to reach a point of individual resolution. For the collective, however, the confluence of linear and circular time means remaining stuck in a reproduction of events that reduces understanding to immediate logistics, rather than consequences, context, or meaning. This paradoxical temporality could be understood as what I am calling “traumatized time,” in which the role of time in shaping memory allows individuals to “work through” history to a point of resolution, while trapping collectives inside of it.
Traumatized time appears most viscerally in “One Day’s” choice to lean into the gore and human toll of 9/11 that earlier coverage did not. Scholars have documented the ways in which most early 9/11 coverage was devoid of the most gruesome evidence of human injury or death, a bizarre paradox for a mass casualty event. Karen Engle (2009) explains, for example, how “the morality of looking” in the aftermath of 9/11 led to “extraordinary state-sponsored attempts to control the media,” noting that Mayor Giuliani prohibited photography at the scene (p. 31). She cites the account of Don Emmert, the New York photo editor for Agence France-Presse who contended that, “the organization of Ground Zero was akin to the conduct of a police state,” the authorities refusing to allow any photos that “showed bodies” (p. 31). Zelizer (2011) has also noted this pattern, remarking: One type of depiction was missing altogether after September 11—that of bodies and human devastation. Images of corpses, body parts, and human gore were absent from the coverage following the events. . .What remained instead was the reigning image of the burning towers, where we are left to imagine—rather than see—the bodies dying inside (pp. 70–71).
At a moment in which people on the ground at the scene of 9/11 were experiencing death and bodily trauma, the images made public emphasized the collective experience of the event, symbolized by the towers, the rubble, and the dust, rather than the individual toll.
“One Day,” on the contrary, leans into the reality of gore that prevailing 9/11 narratives have not, emphasizing the horror of individual survivors’ and victims’ experiences that was absent in the immediate aftermath of the event. Kevin Leary, a former chef at the Marriott-owned Greenhouse Restaurant at the base of the Twin Towers, recounts, for example, how he was in the refrigerator deep in the kitchen of his restaurant when the first plane hit, missing the commotion of the initial crash. When he emerged, confused as to where everyone was, and went outside, he was confronted with a human arm. He remembers, “broken up bodies. . .maybe 100 bodies broken up into little pieces, arms and legs and heads. . .I’m freaking out. . .and then a body comes falling out of the sky and lands right in front of me,” emphasizing not only the enormity, but also the gruesomeness, of the human loss before him. Ernest Armstead, an emergency medical specialist with the FDNY, also recalls a harrowing experience with human death that day. Triaging victims, he accidentally labeled a woman as “deceased,” whose body was crushed below the torso, not realizing she was still alive. When she asked what he was doing labeling her “deceased,” he recalled: she didn’t know what I knew because she didn’t see what I see . . . her head did not hit the ground . . . she looked like maybe a woman that was on the plane . . . but what I saw below the torso was completely crushed, disfigurement . . . this lady must have came down feet first . . . she would not survive another couple minutes. (Figures 6 and 7)
Screenshots from “One Day.” (a and b) Survivor Kevin Leary describes the experience of seeing human remains outside the hotel where he worked on 9/11.
Screenshots from “One Day.” (a and b) Survivor Ernest Armstead recalls triaging victims on 9/11.
Visceral imagery in stories like Kevin’s and Ernest’s may help viewers understand individual survivor experiences in more detail than ever before. But while imagery generally can be key in moving publics toward a “post-traumatic” state (Zelizer, 2011), the addition of gore imagery in the 9/11 repertoire seems to have the opposite effect on overall, collective understandings of 9/11, crystallizing the meaning of 9/11 to individual tales of personal trauma. Chaotic scenes of crisis prevail throughout the documentary, accompanying stories of horror like those Kevin and Ernest describe (burn victims, people on stretchers, and firefighters listening as bodies of office personnel crash to the earth to escape the fires above them), but the extreme visuals—the confrontations with a human arm or a woman, still alive, missing the bottom half of her body—are illustrated only verbally. No image of a severed limb confronts us as Kevin tells his story, nor do we see a mangled and bloodied torso as Ernest tells his. Instead, viewers are immersed in the strained voices and pained faces of survivors as they give their interviews—a tactic also employed at the 9/11 Museum to bring visitors closer to victims and survivors (Sodaro, 2018b). This one-to-one viewing experience, as if the survivors are speaking their visceral testimony directly to the viewers, turns “One Day” watchers into trauma voyeurs, left to picture in their own minds the gruesome images of the victims the survivors so intently recall. The trick of simulated eyewitnessing is key here, allowing modern-day viewers to “bear witness” to a “full story” of 9/11 that appears more detailed than ever before with its visceral up-closeness, but is in fact individual in scope.
Just as traumatized time allows for the telling of more complete survivor experiences than ever before, while reducing public understandings of the event to immediate crisis, it accommodates individual paths to resolution, while leaving historical consequences untouched. At the individual level, 9/11 survivors have landed, 20 years later, on a version of what 9/11 was to them that feels resolved—emblematic of the process of “repeating” and “working through” that illustrates an evolution from disorientation, through emotions of anger, sadness, and fear, to resolution. Joseph Pfeifer, the FDNY Battalion Chief who lost his brother, a fellow firefighter, after directing his ladder into the burning towers, ends his story by discussing the ways in which his brother’s death led him to joyful memories of their times together growing up. Frank Razzano, a lawyer who remained in the burning towers to rescue the files for an important case he was working on, concludes that after his near-death experience, he understands what is important to him in life and tries to put his family first now. Chuck Sereika describes finding purpose amid alcohol and drug addiction through helping the first responders at the scene of the towers’ collapse. Or Tom Canavan, who survived the events of that day only to later go back to work at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, finds fulfillment in keeping the site pristine for families of victims. “One Day” survivors do not remain stuck in the trauma, shock, or confusion of that day. On the contrary, “One Day’s” timeline accommodates survivors’ paths to recovery, explaining how 9/11 meaningfully influenced the trajectory of their lives. It is the viewers, representatives of the collective, experiencing the timeline as the “full story,” who instead become stuck in that day—in a fundamentally dehistoricized understanding of 9/11.
If linear time in “One Day” makes working through possible for the survivors, literally moving their stories through the progression of tragedy to resolution, then simultaneous time brings their experiences to life onscreen in powerful and near unbelievable moments of storytelling. Businessman Ron Clifford, for example, shares his heartbreaking and harrowing 9/11 story, in which he both rescued a stranger and lost his beloved sister and niece. Ron recounts how he was in Lower Manhattan for a business meeting that day, and how upon the first plane hitting the tower, he stumbled upon a woman, Jenny-Anne, who had been badly burned in the first blast. At the same time, Ron reveals, his sister and niece were flying from Boston Logan International Airport back to California. Both were killed when their plane was hijacked—all while Ron was down below, saving a stranger from her own demise. Ron’s story is rife with simultaneity, the seemingly unbelievable irony of he and his sister’s twin roles in that tragic day moving enough to bring any viewer to tears. “One Day” amplifies the simultaneity at play in Ron’s story (and those of the other survivors) with its stunning and unlikely footage, which reveals, as Ron speaks, archival images of Ron and Jenny-Anne running to safety on that fateful day.
Stories like Ron’s are gripping and moving, and on a human level, they are important and worthy of being told. But as part of an “official” commemorative effort that promises to be “definitive,” the overall effect of simultaneity is reductive. Stories like Ron’s engage in 9/11 nostalgia that reduces the meaning of 9/11 solely to how it brought people together in moving and unprecedented ways. Strung together, moments of simultaneity in “One Day’s” definitive narrative amount to the kind of memorialization Sturken (2022) claims “become(s) a force through which contemporary concepts of national unity are negotiated and through which a position of national innocence is affirmed” (p. 26). The sheer unlikeliness of the simultaneity in “One Day”—of both the stories and the way the documentary brings them to life—trumps context, making the near-miracle unfolding onscreen take center stage as the core meaning of 9/11. Both narratively and cinematically, “One Day” highlights the “togetherness” of 9/11 at the expense of the “otherness” that occurred in the years following, using simultaneity to tell stories that may feel complete on an individual level, but that fail to reflect the reality of the event’s impact.
What is most important here is not the “success” or “failure” of individual attempts to work through trauma, and it is not the place of this project to use the often-problematic methods of psychoanalysis to place judgment on what are deeply personal experiences. Nor is the intent of this project to diminish the value and meaning of survivors’ experiences or suggest they should not be told. What this project aims to illuminate, rather, is that what might work as individual modes of memory, mourning and memorialization, do not automatically translate to productive meaning making in collective contexts. Traumatized time in “One Day” allows for personal narratives of “working through,” while making historicized, contextualized understandings of 9/11 effectively impossible 20 years later.
Who is left out of time in “One Day”?
Traumatized time in “One Day” means that only the experiences of individuals who were there when the attacks happened are highlighted, while the experiences of others—the global constituents who have been left to manage the fallout—remain invisible. In the 20 years since 9/11 occurred, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and other countries involved in the US-led “War on Terror” have been killed. According to conservative estimates as of March 2023, over 280,000 Iraqi civilians alone have died from direct war related violence (Brown Watson Institute, 2023). This phenomenon is not new in the post-9/11 era, in which the hypervisibility of the 9/11 attacks juxtaposes the invisibility of the violence that has occurred since. Zelizer (2011) writes of this double-blinded way of seeing: “. . .the extensive visualization of 9/11 stands in here too for an undepicted continuation of those events. . .This in turn raises questions about the ultimate value of the parallel that has been constructed, for whom, and to what end” (p. 72). Who gets forgotten in the attempts, like that of “One Day,” to remember 9/11?
As the official commemoration of 9/11, 20 years later, the choice to focus on individual American survivor stories marks an intentional act of “forgetting” that amounts to an act of violence. Aleida Assmann (2008) writes of the archive, “Acts of forgetting are a necessary and constructive part of internal social transformations; they are, however, violently destructive when directed at an alien culture of a persecuted minority” (p. 98). “One Day,” which presents what is ostensibly the most “complete” footage from that day, not only ignores the global constituents who “would suffer most in the aftermath of 9/11” (Sturken, 2022: 7), but also disparages them as a universal ominous “other.” “One Day’s” only reference to other constituents involved in 9/11 comes in the form of opaque nods to the perpetrators of the attack, conflating the innocent civilians, especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been caught in the crossfire since, with those who hijacked the planes on 9/11. The silence with which collectives are addressed in “One Day” prevents understanding 9/11 from any kind of context outside of that of the American survivor, the universal “otherizing” inherent in this version of events amounting to the kind of harmful forgetting of which Assmann warns.
If, as Zerubavel (2003) contends, linear time is meant to build narratives that evolve in understanding to a point of greater wisdom, “One Day’s” choice to acknowledge non-Americans in its timeline only via the attackers, and only with anger and fear, suggests (backwardly) that American victimhood is the best possible understanding of 9/11. In doing so, “One Day” furthers the kind of “nationalistic exceptionalism” (Sturken, 2022: 4) that has long characterized 9/11 memory, perpetuating a narrative of American innocence that rings even more hollow with 20 years’ hindsight. “One Day’s” invocation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing contributes to this effect, as opaque references to the earlier attack—the only historicizing comments made throughout the documentary—suggest that the United States is always already under attack. Survivor Kathy Comerford tells the story of her office security guard, Rick Riscola, who made it his mission to prepare his colleagues for emergencies. While Kathy believed that “lightning never strikes the same place twice” and that therefore the building would not be hit again “after 1993,” she recalled that Rick was ready. In Rick’s mind, “it had been attacked before, and he was certain it would happen again.” Their story perpetuates a collective othering in the same breath, Kathy stating that Rick knew, “if they came again. . .they would come from the air” (emphasis added). As the only contextualizing event for 9/11, 26 February 1993, is, in effect, where “One Day’s” linear narrative begins, not with the morning of 9/11. Kathy and Rick’s story historicizes 9/11 only insofar as it fits into a seemingly natural, teleological order of events in which the United States is, as it was always going to be, the victim of global aggression.
“One Day’s” official retelling of the events of 9/11 ends at about 11:45 pm on 11 September 2001, with scenes of first responders traversing the massive pile of debris, paired with footage of concerned doctors and nurses standing outside of Manhattan hospitals with empty wheelchairs and stretchers, as the realization sets in that few would be rescued from the rubble. As the episode concludes, white text appears against a black screen that reads: “2,977 people were killed on 9/11. In 2014 the national September 11th memorial and museum was opened in honor of their memory.” The final words of the episode echo the 9/11 Memorial’s website, which characterizes its mission as a tribute of remembrance, honoring the 2,977 people killed in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center site, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon, as well as the six people killed in the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993 (“The Memorial”).
Both “One Day” and the archive from which it is drawn highlight the loss of life incurred that day. But what of the hundreds of thousands more who have been lost in the long-standing power struggle between the United States and its adversaries since? Noha Mellor (2011) writes, “covering a tragedy without any mention of the consequences for those directly caught up in it is nothing more than an aloof description of an event deliberately overlooking the human cost” (p. 164). Mellor refers here to her read of the detached stance of Arab news toward 9/11, but her argument stands in reverse as well. Using Mellor’s logic, commemorating a tragedy without any mention of the consequences for those lost in the aftermath might be thought of as nothing more than a myopic description of an event overlooking the human cost. In Mellor’s (2011) words, the consequences of this kind of narrative “relegate[s] life and mournability to the margins” (p. 164). Twenty years later, “One Day’s” 9/11 20th anniversary commemorative effort dismisses lives in the process of honoring others.
In the weeks and months following 9/11, footage from the event helped mobilize the subsequent invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, acting as a guide for public understanding of the events that occurred, their consequences, and how to think about a response (Zelizer, 2011). Just as what was pictured then had strategic aims for mobilizing the “War on Terror,” what is pictured now versus what is not has strategic aims and consequences for what Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2013) terms “mediated prospective memory,” the ways in which media practices shape collective memory and set the “agenda” for what the public perceives as important. Following 9/11, the US image of strength and power was momentarily shaken, explaining why following the attacks “the treatment and recovery of the national image was one of the priorities of the public-political sphere” (Sturken, 2007: 65), an act of “agenda-setting” for the US response. What kind of agenda-setting is “One Day” signaling now, when 20 years after the event, at the exact moment that the United States is withdrawing from Afghanistan no less, the “full story” of 9/11 ignores the complex and global contexts—and the United States’ role therein—from which it occurred and the costs that came after?
Conclusion: time to forget?
The tension between the seen, heard, and mourned, and the invisible, silent, and un-mourned raises important questions about the mode of commemoration “One Day” offers. “One Day” presents a version of the events of 9/11 that commemorates individual American survivor stories told within specific parameters that creates a paradoxically linear yet circular temporality, a traumatized time, in which so much, yet so little, is seen and heard of the “full story” of 9/11. The consequences of this uneven parallel, in which by seeing “what seems like more we in fact still see less,” extend beyond simply an incomplete retelling of a series of events to impact “our capacity to produce critical readings of events in the public sphere” (Zelizer, 2011: 72).
To borrow the framework of Jay Winter’s (2014) guiding questions in his study of World War I memorials: Whom or what is “One Day” trying to commemorate? Precisely what about 9/11 is “One Day” asking us to remember, now and in the future? (p. 78). In the final episode, 9/11 survivor and 9/11 Memorial & Museum employee Tom Canavan shares his thoughts about the site of Ground Zero saying, to me it’s still a cemetery. . .I know it’s a memorial. . .some people think it’s a park. . .but to me it’s a cemetery. . .I want to keep that place pristine so when the family members come there, they’re proud of how we remember their loved ones.
Tom’s mission and that of the memorial is to tend, painstakingly, to the memory of lives lost that day. But while this mission may serve victims and loved ones, “One Day’s” use of the Memorial archive to reconstruct and reproduce the events of 9/11 on its 20-year anniversary tells a story now that remains stuck in the past and sets an uncritical agenda for the future. In other words, while “never forgetting” is supposed to keep the past from repeating itself, it remains to be seen how an obsession with remembrance staves off the specter of history (Goldblatt, 2020).
While “One Day” reveals the shortcomings of using official archives as commemorative tools for collective memory—effectively memorializing the memorial in ways that prevent new knowledge or perspectives—it also points to new possibilities for collective forgetting. As Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Chana Teeger (2010) note in their analysis of silence in collective memory, “collective forgetting” may be thought of as the antithesis of collective memory, the “silencing and muting of the past” (p. 1103). “Collective forgetting” emerges as a space of possibility, in which silence, far from an oversight, can be used strategically to find possibilities beyond “collective remembering” that are meaningful for the ways in which groups understand their relationships to the past.
What would it mean, then, for commemorations of traumatic events to change shape over time? What if instead of “never forgetting,” commemoration encouraged a kind of “collective forgetting,” thinking about how what has happened in the past can lead us into a better future? Critical takes on physical memorials might help us to imagine what this could look like. Sturken (2007) notes, for example, that “In cities where violence is a factor of everyday life, such as Jerusalem,” this is already the attitude toward memorialization, saying, “there is often an insistence on life going forward rather than inscribing a multiplicity of spaces of loss” (p. 200). Far from encouraging people to “forget” violence, Sturken points to a collective memory that chooses to move forward as a means of “working through.” Winter (2014) also alludes to this version of non-memorialization as memorialization when he acknowledges that the role of war memorials changes over time, writing, “. . .the meaning of war memorials was bound to change. They could have had no fixed meaning, immutable over time. . .Other meanings derived from other needs or events may be attached to them, or no meaning at all” (p. 98). Just as the physical memorial will undoubtedly decay over time, so might its purpose change, to serve in the “necessary art of forgetting” rather than remembering—if we let it (Winter, 2014: 115).
This is the true race against time represented in “One Day”—not the efforts of first responders to rescue civilians from the burning towers before it’s too late, as several episode summaries describe—but the overarching attempt to work against the passage of time to make the 9/11 archive relevant today in a way that was more urgently needed 20 years ago. The cost of “never forgetting” is remaining both in a rat race against time and frozen in traumatized time; in this purgatory history does not repeat itself, rather we repeat history by preventing time’s work on memory. Rather than “never forgetting,” “collective forgetting” might be the practice that allows us to accommodate the complexity of the past and plan for a more just future.
