On Sunday, part one of Spike Lee’s New York Epicenters: 9/11-2021½ aired on HBO. It’s an eight-hour documentary about the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, combined with stories of how New Yorkers loved, lost and survived during the pandemic. Spike joined those two threads, of terrorism and pandemic, and the documentary series features stories from first-responders, family members who lost people in the towers and the pandemic, healthcare workers, activists and more. To promote the series, Spike chatted with the NY Times – you can read the full piece here. It turns out, Spike is still – 20 years later – kind of a 9/11 Truther. Really. Some highlights from the piece.
The connection between 9/11 and the pandemic: “Well, I think that we’re honoring the people who lost their lives, people who lost lives with 9/11 related illnesses. And also the more than 600,000 Americans who are no longer here because of Covid. More Americans have died of Covid-19 than Americans have died in World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq and ironically, Afghanistan. Combined.
The NYPD didn’t want to be part of the series: “We just wanted to be as well-rounded as possible, a kaleidoscope of witnesses. That’s what I call them: They’re witnesses. The only people who said no was NYPD. They don’t look good in this. And that footage [of police officers assaulting Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020] does not lie. They were cracking heads.
He learned something new about 9/11 during this series: “I didn’t know about the maritime exodus [after the World Trade Center attacks]. Over half a million New Yorkers got off the island [by boat] — more than Dunkirk.
He included 9/11 Truthers in the series: He interviews people from the conspiracy group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Why: “Because I still don’t … I mean, I got questions. And I hope that maybe the legacy of this documentary is that Congress holds a hearing, a congressional hearing about 9/11….The amount of heat that it takes to make steel melt, that temperature’s not reached. And then the juxtaposition of the way Building 7 fell to the ground — when you put it next to other building collapses that were demolitions, it’s like you’re looking at the same thing. But people going to make up their own mind. My approach is put the information in the movie and let people decide for themselves. I respect the intelligence of the audience.
Why he’s not saying “make up your own mind” about the election or vaccines: “People are going to think what they think, regardless. I’m not dancing around your question. People are going to think what they think. People have called me a racist for “Do the Right Thing.” People said in “Mo’ Better Blues” I was antisemitic. “She’s Gotta Have It,” that was misogynist. People are going to just think what they think. And you know what? I’m still here, going on four decades of filmmaking.
I think there are still questions outstanding from the 9/11 attacks too, but those questions are not about the science of why the towers fell. The science has been explained thoroughly, right? It’s not that steel melted, it’s that the heat from the jet fuel fire compromised the steel, and thus, compromised the structural integrity of the towers. Building 7 fell because the weight of two towers’ worth of debris, steel and two commercial planes fell on it. People act like the towers were built to be invincible when that was never the case. Is Spike being massively irresponsible by showcasing these conspiracists in what sounds like an extremely moving docu-series?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
I don’t see why it’s necessary to talk to the 9/11 truthers and I also think it’s irresponsible. It immediately makes me think of the Atlantic article about Bobby McIlvaine and his dad becoming a truther. That article was amazing and heartbreaking.
I loved that article, so well written and moving. But more than 9/11, it really tackles the notion of grief and how we all deal with it differently.
I remember when the author asked Bobby’s dad if his conspiracy theories were a way to keep a “bond” with Bobby and he admitted that it probably was.
Much like everyone becomes an infectious disease expect, authorities in virology and immunology, political science majors and constitutional scholars, everyone also all of a sudden becomes a structural engineer and architect. Gotta love those YouTube degrees!
but these are ACTUAL ARCHITECTS AND ENGINEERS with actual degrees. and they are from all over the world. So no not idiots
I’ve worked with architects and engineers fore the last 20 years and they can be just as dumb as anyone else.
Anyone that calls themselves or associates themselves with any kind of “truther” is an idiot. These big ass conspiracies do not exist. Two can keep a secret… only if one of them is dead. It is literally impossible to silence all the people who would have to be involved with a conspiracy like the 9-11 or Sandy Hook, or Covid vaccine “conspiracies” out there.
The believers in this sh– are insecure ignoramuses trying to make themselves seem and feel smarter and more “awake” than the real experts that they wish they were smart as.
OKAY?! People at the same time think our government is full of incompetent lackeys and idiots who can’t be trusted…but also who are also capable of orchestrating 9/11 and Sandy Hook and COVID etc etc with no leaks?
Please.
I agree with you on the psychology of a conspiracy theorist. It’s people who need to feel smarter and more important so they convince themselves they know the “truth”
It is 100% irresponsible to feature these people.
As one of my history profs always used to say, “Where’s Murphy?” As in Murphy’s law. You’re telling me that elaborately conceived conspiracies go off without a hitch when we can’t even get potholes fixed?
I just started to watch the show last night. Now I won’t bother. I have no patience for truthers, birthers, QAnon, any of that nonsense.
I agree with the author that there are still questions remaining about 9/11, but none of those questions have to do with the nature of the demolition. Whenever I ask a truther why did the buildings need to be full of explosives (isn’t crashing a plane into a building sufficiently horrifying?) they never have an normal answer.
But the families of 9/11 victims do believe there is information withheld, and have petitioned the government for it to be released and have been denied many times. I don’t think those families are crazy for thinking there’s something unusual going on with the official story.
I read something the other day that was talking about how people have ingested knowledge over the years has changed so much, especially recently. It used to be that knowledge gained through experience weighed so much more in our minds, but now, most of what we know is from online/books etc., not first hand experience. With the recent diminution in value of true experts, as a global society we are more than ever taking things in as “knowledge” from untrustworthy sources. It might be the downfall of humanity.
Twenty years later and i’m still shook by 9/11. And for those of us who were there it was so much more than the day it happened. I had to go through check points with armed military to get to work, walk past hundreds of posters of the missing, smell burnt chemicals for weeks. I developed PTSD and ended up quitting my job and moving in with my parents because I never felt safe. I felt guilty and weird for having panic attacks because fellow New Yorkers said being 10 blocks away was far enough away that It shouldn’t have effected me. Anyway this time of year just makes sad and there is no way I could watch this movie.
I watched the Pentagon burning from my office window. It was terrifying. For weeks, fighter jets patrolled the sky, armed military members were everywhere and the streets were completely silent.
Anyone who says you shouldn’t be affected because you were 10 blocks away needs to be smacked. That’s ridiculous. I was affected and I’m all the way on the other coast, so yeah. I was supposed to go to a meeting in my city downtown that day and canceled it because I didn’t particularly want to be around tall buildings for a while.
My husband is still triggered by the sound of a train roaring by because it takes him right back to the moment that the buildings came down on and around him. He can watch a documentary and see the buildings come down and be okay, however if the sound is on and he hears them come rushing down, we totally loses it
My trigger is that very specific clear sky with that precise shade of blue. It’s not just any clear sunny sky. It’s that blue and those clouds. My friends and coworkers know what I’m talking about but people who weren’t there don’t understand.
And yes, maritime Exodus. I got home by jumping on a ferry after walking through military personnel with rifles and armor and s***.
Ugh, seriously, that’s so irresponsible of him to include 9/11 conspiracy theorists (they are not “truthers.”) I had a teacher who showed us the Loose Change documentary in high school a few years after 9/11, not sure why he did. It was really upsetting to watch such a twisted documentary posit that 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government and was responsible for the death of thousands of American civilians. I remember there being a slowdown of the collapse of one of the towers and the footage highlighting “explosives” that were the “real reason” the towers collapsed, and not due to the impact of two jet planes crashing into them at high speed. Like the government actually installed a bunch of explosives in the towers to purposefully collapse them after somehow hiring terrorists to crash the planes into the towers as well???
I was 13 when 9/11 happened and I had panic attacks for months whenever I heard planes flying overhead. I am from Westchester County and we heard planes ALL the times since my house was located under the flight path of JFK, Laguardia, Newark, and Westchester County airport. It took MONTHS for me to not freak out every time I heard a plane in the sky. I was convinced one would crash on top of my house, that nowhere was safe. Not to mention my school used 9/11 as teacher assignments so we were forced to write about it in class and for homework. And I wasn’t even there that day in NYC, I didn’t witness the planes crash in person or see the live footage of plane 2 hitting the towers like lots of people (my mom did). So my trauma isn’t even near what so many people experienced that day since I was shielded mostly geographically. But to know something so horrific had happened so close to home was traumatizing enough. Also my dad worked by the WTC for YEARS downtown in the 80s and 90s. He could see the Statue of Liberty from his office in the harbor. In the mid-90s, he asked to be transferred to an office in Stamford, CT to be able to work closer to home. His colleagues who were not transferred ended up in the Towers if I’m not mistaken. Had my dad not been transferred, he would have been there in person downtown and who knows what could have happened. My mom used to have weekly meetings in the Towers too for some kind of committee she was part of (she worked by Grand Central in mid-town so it wasn’t her regular office space). Luckily she was not in NYC at all that day, she was on some business trip in Philly and got stuck there a few days. I know I can’t be the only one disturbed by this, especially in time for the 20th anniversary.
All these years later and you can still see the ramifications of 9/11 at airport security checkpoints, soldiers strolling around with machine guns at Grand Central and other places around NYC, not to mention the path to becoming an American citizen became a whole lot harder.
“And you know what? I’m still here, going on four decades of filmmaking.”
I don’t know if Spike Lee is a bigot, but the fact that he’s still working in movies really doesn’t prove that he’s not.
I don’t have HBO but if I had an opportunity to watch this I would. It’s an interesting parallel to make, specifically with NYC. The footage last year of Times Square being completely empty and quiet are exactly what it was like after 9/11. I watched from AZ for both and I remember last year seeing pictures from NYC and having that same dreadful feeling I felt on 9/11. The streets of New York being empty and quiet give me a unique pit in my stomach.
There is absolutely no need to give conspiracy theorists more airtime. We absolutely need investigative journalism and for people who will keep digging when they keep being told ‘nothing to see here’ but this is not that. We know who the terrorists were and where they came from.
I remember very clearly watching an engineer on TV in Portugal (where I lived at the time) after 9/11 explaining why the buildings collapsed although they were engineered to resist collisions, quakes etc. It’s simply because they were made to resist small collisions, small jets etc., never two huge commercial planes and, if my memory is correct, not from those angles. But conspiracies are all the rage since then, and now more than ever.
I guess it’s easier to believe that the government is this savvy horrendous plotting machine rather than the climate emergency, the horrible legacy of EU colonialism and US interventionism etc.
The buildings were definitely not structurally sound. They could take the impact of a plane but the cheap steel could not take the jet fuel and fire than easily melted it. Lots of buildings in the 70s while the mob had a hold of New York were built very cheaply.
Spike has done this before — I don’t know if he is sincere or just trying to stir up controversy for the film.
It was his “Trouble the Water” documentary about Hurricane Katrina. He posed that the levee failure at the Intercoastal canal wall/levee which bordered the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was 99 percent black, was due to the US government blowing it up so the “rich” and white part of town — which the immediate neighborhoods would have been the Upper Nine and Bywater, which at that time werent’t wealthy neighborhoods and actually pretty diverse — wouldn’t get flooded. (The waters would have to still go through another neighborhood, the Marigny, to reach the French Quarter, which was built on high ground.)
Here’s the reality: A large barge did break through (I saw it there after) and the Lower Nine would have flooded anyway, though not as much with the levee breach. What he fails to say (and he may have, I don’t remember seeing it) is that the Lower Nine was already getting water from the MR-Go (a canal for deep-draft ships), which acted as a funnel, as well as the rest of Gulf of Mexico. To get to the Lower Nine, that water would have had to go through the predominantly white St. Bernard Parish (which is mostly blue-collar), of which if you look at a realistic map of New Orleans, is that there isn’t a lot of land.
That all said, the theory does have a basis in history: the levee in St. Benard was blown up — a decision made by NO businessmen, one who included writer Michael Lewis’ great grandfather or grandfather — during the Hurricane of 1927, flooding St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes to save the rest of New Orleans which didn’t have the levee system it does now. Back then, it was a mix of blacks, Islenos (immigrants from the Canary Islands) and whites.
But back to Katrina — one thing living through it is that the federal government was so inept in its response, there is no way it could have put together a crack group of military men to blow up the levee. Seriously, Bush & Co. and “Brownie” were awful.
a well known tactic of conspiracy theorists is to pretend they are not conspiracy theorists, that they are just innocently asking questions. it is all manipulated and a sad attempt to draw people in.