‘World Trade Center’ is insulting

Toby Harnden says that ‘World Trade Center’ ditches Oliver Stone’s left-wing conspiracy theories, but dishonours one of the heroes of 11 September by caricaturing his faith

New York

Staff Sergeant David Karnes was working as an accountant at DeLoitte & Touche in Wilton, Connecticut, on 11 September 2001 when the first plane flew into the World Trade Center. He and his colleagues watched it on television. Karnes announced that America was ‘at war’ and drove home in his Porsche 911 (he saw this as an omen from above) to don his old marine uniform. He got a buzz cut at the barbers, picked up equipment at a storage facility that he rented and went to a church to pray before driving to Manhattan, stopping for a McDonald’s on the way.

Once there, his uniform got him through checkpoints outside Ground Zero, which had been declared unsafe for rescue workers. ‘God made a curtain with the smoke, shielding us from what we’re not yet ready to see,’ he said as he set out alone to find survivors. He located two Port Authority cops, Sergeant John McLoughlin and Officer William Jimeno, trapped in the rubble and, after helping save them, reflected on New York’s losses with the observation, ‘We’re going to need some good men out there to avenge this.’ And this is just what Karnes did. After 9/11 he re-enlisted for active duty and, now 48, has served two combat tours in Iraq.

Staff Sergeant Karnes is a supporting character in Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie World Trade Center, which opens in London next month. He is hardly your typical Stone hero — being a God-fearing patriot rather than an agonising left-liberal — but he is not at all happy about the way he has been portrayed: as a religious zealot.

The news that Oliver Stone was to direct Hollywood’s first take on 9/11 sent the blood pressure of red-state Americans into orbit. He was, after all, the man who brought us JFK, based on a baroque conspiracy theory, and has also been a bitter opponent of the wars in Vietnam — where he was a US grunt — and Iraq. In October 2001, furthermore, at a film symposium in New York, Stone compared Osama bin Laden’s jihadists to the French revolutionaries of 1789. ‘This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy,’ he theorised enthusiastically. ‘All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood.’ He mused that the ‘revolt of September 11’ might never have happened if it hadn’t been for Florida’s hanging chads and the Republican Supreme Court justices who robbed Al Gore of his rightful place in the White House.

The flag wavers need not have worried, however. In Stone’s World Trade Center the badly-injured cops pray together, talk of their love for their families and are dug out by a group of all-American heroes while their wives weep helplessly at home. In his utter conventionality, Stone manages, bizarrely, to make something close to a feelgood movie as the gruff Sergeant McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and chipper Officer Jimeno (Michael Pena) bond over reminiscenses of the theme tune of Starsky and Hutch.

The only mention of those who might have been responsible for what happened is in a diner in Wisconsin, where someone denounces ‘those bastards’ (the same words my father used when in 1979 I told him the IRA had blown up Lord Mountbatten — the first time I heard him swear). The movie’s mundane, ground-level images make it much less dramatic than what actually happened that day — or even the version that appeared on our television screens.

The Left has lambasted Stone for slavishly following a script that could have been penned by President George W. Bush. Yet the portrayal of Karnes is double-edged. As played by a steely-eyed, lantern-jawed Michael Shannon, he is a scary fanatic. Karnes himself is distinctly unimpressed by this. Extremely wary of the spotlight, he has declined to make any public comment since seeing a private screening of the movie.

James Barker, the pastor who prayed with Karnes on 9/11, was one of four people who accompanied him to the screening. ‘He feels he comes across as an oddball, a zombie,’ he told me. While the mainstream politics of Stone’s film are a break with his left-liberal past, he stuck to his practice of taking liberties with the facts. Whereas United 93, directed by the British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, was an austere, documentary-style movie, in which every detail was minutely researched, World Trade Center has some embarrassing lapses.

The other former marine who bumped into Karnes at Ground Zero and joined him on his search is identified only as Sergeant Thomas and is played by a short white man. After the show’s premiere, a 6ft 3in,  17-stone black man called Justin Thomas popped up to declare that he was marine number two. Neither was Karnes consulted. ‘He was in Iraq but they [Paramount] could have made more of an effort to get him,’ said Barker. Perhaps they didn’t want to find him. McLoughlin and Jimeno were mega-heroes even before the film. But looking coolly at what happened, their actions, while commendable, were limited to rushing to the scene as their duties demanded. Before they could do anything, the south tower had come down on them.

Karnes, who responded to a national emergency with almost preternatural determination and ingenuity, is relegated to being a marginal, kooky presence — a ‘nutbag’, as one fireman calls him in the film. Depressingly, Karnes believes that the men he saved, and who were courted by Stone, want to hog all the glory. ‘It seems Jimeno and McLoughlin wanted to make a movie without Dave’s input,’ said Barker. The two policemen have not spoken to the marine since 2002.

The schmaltz and star-spangled religiosity of World Trade Center will prompt snorts of derision in post-Christian, anti-Bush Britain when it opens there on 29 September. But America is still raw over 9/11. A sanctity still surrounds almost everything connected to that day and this has insulated the film from criticism — even down to its linking, through Karnes, of 9/11 to Iraq. Driving past the Grace Bible Church in Accident, Maryland, recently, I saw a Karnesian sign that read, ‘Freedom is Always Purchased With Blood.’ The growing disenchantment with Mesopotamian events notwithstanding, it is a sentiment that is not uncommon. Perhaps Stone was using the character of Karnes — a person he seems not really to want to understand — to undermine, even subconsciously, the overt rah-rah message of his own film. Or maybe he just wanted the money.