It wasn’t some NYU kids renting out equipment to film a mediocre comedy skit or a public access news crew that caught the only really significant known footage of American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001. It was Jules Naudet, a French documentary filmmaker who, with his brother Gedeon, had been embedded with the Engine 7/Ladder 1/Battalion 1 crews based at the New York City Fire Department’s firehouse on nearby Duane Street. The Naudet Brothers, who had been staying at the house as they filmed probationary firefighter Tony Benetatos learning the ropes had split up that morning, with the older Gedeon continuing to follow Benetatos and the less-experienced Jules getting in some practice with Battalion 1, riding along on a boring, routine call as they were sent to check out a possible gas leak a few blocks away from the towers.
That was just the start of Jules Naudet’s terrifying, badly miraculous day as immediately Battalion 1 rushed to the scene to begin responding, with then-Battalion Chief and now Deputy FDNY Commissioner Joseph Pfeifer making the first official report of the crash on the way. Jules stayed in and around the North Tower through the crash and collapse of the South Tower, eventually just barely making his way out before the former’s collapse along with Pfeifer and the others from Battalion 1. Gedeon, not knowing if his brother was still alive, got as close as he could, capturing the dust clouds from the collapses from blocks away. The brothers were later reunited at the firehouse where, miraculously, all crew members had survived despite the grievous death toll inflicted upon the FDNY crews based across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, 343 total dead that day.
Whatever the Naudet brothers had intended on naming the film that became “9/11” is unknown. Its reach and impact are certainly far bigger than it would’ve been if it’d just been about Benetatos’s probation. But what they wanted to film and what they ended up filming are still in many respects the same: Hard working, foul-mouthed firefighters answering the call, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect their city, whether it be checking out a gas leak or rushing into a towering inferno.
It’s difficult to articulate how uncomfortable and even kind of nauseating the phrase “Never Forget” is in its most recognizable context. Feels like most people who said it and bought fucking commemorative collector’s plates and other assorted bullshit wish themselves to have been the scrappy heroes of a Michael Bay movie about the attack. Meanwhile the actual heroes and the real movie’s directors washed the ashes of the dead souls from their heads in between crying almost uncontrollably from the shock and horror of what they’d just been through.
Those firemen didn’t want everyone to be back at the house safely after the worst terrorist attack in US history, they wanted to be back safely after rescuing an old lady who accidentally left a towel on her stove while heating up oatmeal. That’s what you should “never forget.”
They didn’t ask for this bad miracle. Nobody who was there or was personally affected did. You can see it in the faces of the people in that film. For all the bullshit in politics and media and fucking merchandising sold on daytime television to capitalize on that during the long, long aftermath, and how many people were “affected” by watching it unfold on CNN from their couch in Ohio or wherever, that’s the one most important thing to “always remember on September 11th.”
This is a solemn day, not one for showing everyone else how solemn you are by “commemorating” it. Pay your respects to the dead, show your respects to the living, as humbly and sincerely as you can.
If you don’t have that in you, if instead you have even a molecule of whatever demented impulse Rudy Giuliani still has to make it about him, then shut the fuck up and talk about something else.