Sat, Jun 03, 2006 page9

• What passes through your mind when you face certain death?

  Only the people who died in the Sept. 11 tragedy will ever know what it was like at the end, but several recent works of fiction have sought to recreate those moments

  • By Peter Conrad / THE OBSERVER
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  In a newspaper article a few days after Sept. 11, Martin Amis asked an itchy, irrepressible question: "What was it like to be a passenger on those planes?" At a time of numbed shock and raw grief, his curiosity seemed both tactless and heartless. Even so, you had to admire him for blabbing it out: all of us were wondering the same. Who has not mentally booked passage on one of those aborted journeys and braced for the flaming concussion of arrival?

  Tragedy exists to answer Amis' query: it shows us people on a death trip, who talk us through the stages of their voyage to the undiscovered country. Birth and death are the primal and ultimate scenes of our lives, but they remain outside our experience. Only imagination, devising scenarios, can hope to understand the mystery.

  But most tragedies tell decorous lies about the end. With their gravely famous last words, the heroes pretend that death is under their control and take care to expire stylishly. Where can we learn about an obliteration that comes with indecorous suddenness, that is not a righteous judgment or an apt consummation? And what about the humbling commonality of death, which is not, as tragic heroes believe, a revelation reserved for the exalted individual?

  Paul Greengrass' film, United 93, soberly imagines what it was like to be one of the 40 passengers and crew on United Airlines Flight 93, which never reached its target in Washington and crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

  The story Greengrass tells is based on the available facts -- recordings from air traffic controllers, phone calls made from on board -- though these were amplified by a cast of unstarry actors, who researched the lives of the people they were resurrecting and then, sequestered in a studio outside London, played improvisation games to discover how they might have behaved.

  This group of victims at least had a certain freedom, on which drama depends. They understood that their flight was a suicide mission, because news had already come through about the crashes at the World Trade Center; they were able, as Greengrass has said, to decide on a course of action. They broke down the cockpit door and charged the hijackers. Even so, the plane turned upside down and instantly plummeted to earth, killing them all.

  Impromptu muddle

  Was this ending a defeat or a moral victory? The official version of the story credits the rebels with saving the White House or the US Capitol, which turns their doomed rampage into a triumph. In the reminiscences collected by Greengrass, the relatives of the passengers naturally present those they have lost as gung-ho zealots.

  One man's creed is said to have been "fear -- who cares?" Another, like a secular saviour, allegedly "left his mark on the world by making it a better place for all." A widow remembers that her husband "looked like Clint Eastwood" and to the very end was true to "the Eastwood image."

  But Greengrass' film has no cinematic superheroes. Swaggering and swashbuckling are left to the baffled air traffic controllers or inept air force commanders, who were all safe on the ground. When American Airlines Flight 11, piloted by Muhammad Atta, abruptly veers south towards the World Trade Center, a geek monitoring the radar in Boston almost rejoices at the prospect of an adventure and shouts that he hasn't had a hijacking for 20 years.

  As dramatized by Greengrass, the events on board UA93 have a ragged, disconsolate truth, far from the consolations of fiction. The revolt is an impromptu muddle. True, one of the leaders, like a Hollywood casting agent, yells: "We need some big guys."

  But as they hurtle down the aisle together, they have little idea of what they are likely to accomplish. They are unsure whether the bomb being brandished by one of the terrorists is a fake; with a food cart as their battering ram, they reach the cockpit, but since they cannot fly the plane, they merely accelerate its plunge to earth. G-forces tug at them, blurring their vision and clouding their brains, so their last moments of existence are an existential mess. The film's title promises unity, a concerted and collective demonstration of defiance. But as Greengrass shows, not everyone joins the rebellion.

  One passenger -- a German, ironically -- counsels appeasement. Others cower, whimper or sob. One woman, making her last phone call, ensures that she has left her affairs in order by passing on the combination of the safe in her bedroom.

  I don't want to die

  Despite the mayhem and violence, in retrospect, it is only too easy to give these events a sublimated serenity, which is the mood that tragedy aims to create. In On the Transmigration of Souls, an orchestral meditation on Sept. 11 commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, composer John Adams quotes a phrase from a phone call made by a disoriented flight attendant as AA11 banked above Manhattan: "I see buildings and water," she reported in bewilderment.

  Repeated on tape, her faint, aerated utterance sounds, in Adams' use of it, as if transmigration had already occurred. But before their souls were set free, these people were trapped in tormented, ravaged bodies.

  A transcript of conversations in the cockpit of Flight 93 was made public during the recent trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.

  "I don't want to die," protests a flight attendant, a good deal less lyrically resigned than the speaker in Adams' symphonic poem.

  There is then a brief silence, during which she does die. The hijacker, who has sliced open her throat with a boxcutter, then briskly reports on a job well done.

  "Everything is fine," he says. "I'm finished."

  This casual efficiency is a reminder that the self-willed, cathartic deaths were those of the terrorists. Catharsis means purgation and Greengrass' film begins with the hijackers bathing and shaving their pubic hair in a motel bathroom, ritually preparing for paradise. The transcript from the cockpit of Flight 93 ends with the pilot babbling prayers as the plane crashes: "In the name of Allah. In the name of Allah. I bear witness that there is no other God but Allah."

  Many of the passengers in Greengrass' film scream: "Oh God!" as they are jolted out of life, but their cries are expletives. In an emergency, they exhort a God in whom few of them probably believed.

  In God's absence, we have only other human beings to love us. Hence the phone calls made from the plane, heart-rendingly documented by Greengrass. The message or mantra is always the same and is uttered usually with calm deliberation: "I love you" is for these people a last will and testament.

  One woman, after completing her terminal call, hands the airphone to her younger neighbor in the next seat, who presumably lacks a credit card, and says: "Here, call your people." It is a small and beautiful act of generosity, devalued a little when you realize that the dying have nothing to lose and can gratuitously accumulate bills they will not have to pay. It is typical of Greengrass' unblinking, unmisted eye; the anecdote exemplifies what you might easily call the banality of goodness.

  The question Martin Amis asked was legitimate, indeed essential. But he went on to ask another one, perhaps less excusable: "What was it like to see those planes coming towards you?"

  I'm not persuaded that he was commiserating with the victims whose terror he wanted to share as they looked out of the World Trade Center at the approaching jets. It was excitement he craved, not enlightenment; he was replaying Sept. 11 as if it were a disaster movie in which the viewer can enjoy a spurious, simulated danger.

  Now Amis has volunteered to answer a third question, which he didn't dare ask in 2001. His real desire, it turns out, was to know what it was like to pilot one of the planes and he has imagined doing so in his story, "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" published in The New Yorker in April.

  The contrast with Greengrass' compassionate film could not be starker or more shaming. The passengers are absent from Amis' account. He glances at only one stray civilian, "a fat blonde with a scalp disease and, moreover, a baby," who sits beside Atta on a commuter flight from Portland to Boston early that morning.

  No sympathy

  The baby squalls and the fat blonde plugs him or her to her boob. Amis shares Atta's wincing disgust as he sees in the woman a prototype of the "doomed stewardess" he will kill on AA11.

  You have to wonder why Amis has elected to inhabit the mind and the body of Atta -- just as he chose to turn himself into Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben, who conducts vivisection while pretending to do research, in Time's Arrow.

  The reason, I think, is that Amis is conducting his own jihad, a campaign against the brawling squalor of obese humanity, especially fat blondes, although he has an equal contempt for a "swinishly luxurious dark female," a stewardess on a United Arab Emirates flight remembered by Atta, whose flesh is "damp and glowing as if from fever or even lust."

  Satire is Amis' version of a holy war. Atta, shaving, studies his underbite in the mirror and sees that "the detestation, the detestation of everything" is etched on his face. Can this be the writer's self-portrait? If so, the final dispersal of Atta's misanthropic consciousness comes as a mercy. Amis tries to make amends for this warped cruelty by having Atta look down with love on the "tutelary godlings" of Manhattan as he flies over the city.

  He feels no sympathy for the people he is killing; he warms only to skyscrapers, perhaps because they symbolize the erect, self-immortalizing ego. Atta here is the tragic hero who has "achieved sublimation," as Amis says, through a purifying hatred.

  Amis ends with Atta's blood boiling, his flesh frying, his beleaguered bowels shedding their costive load. I prefer Greengrass' end: the grappling chaos in the cockpit suddenly gives way, with no explosion and no blotting out of light, to a close-up of the grass in that field outside Pittsburgh.

  In imagining ourselves on the Sept. 11 flights, we are all, whether we huddle in the back of the plane, gallop down the aisle or, like Amis, proudly man the controls, speculating about what it will be like to die. The last few, still, quiet seconds of United 93 make me hope that it will be like this.
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