The Movie That Best Captured That Post-9/11 Feeling

Twenty-five years is obviously a long time. In a quarter-century, social media services flourished, smartphones multiplied, and entire generations were born and came of age. That distance is probably why today’s sobering 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks has been met with a curious new trend on TikTok, X, and various other apps: younger users apprehensive or baffled by how solemnly folks become around this date. Others still incredulously opine that this seismic event had no serious impact on the culture, cinematic or otherwise.

The latter point seems odd in a world where superhero movies still define pop culture in ways great and small. Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man famously released only eight months after that terrible Tuesday morning. And in a hastily filmed reshoot set on the Queensboro bridge, the movie added a band of New Yorkers exclaiming, “When you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!” That film would kickstart decades of wish fulfillment where, as Chad Kroeger once crooned, “they say that a hero could save us!” Some of these genre pictures did it with greater sophistication, such as Raimi’s more authentically optimistic Spider-Man 2, or via creeping despair, a la Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, but the cultural memory still undergirds our escapism to this day, just as it did all those dour 2000s and early 2010s thrillers, be it Kathryn Bigelow war movies or the three JBs of spy entertainment: Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, and (Daniel Craig’s) James Bond.

So yes, 9/11 is in the bones of our pop culture, if ever increasingly in the form of a self-interrogation about the legacy of that era and the wars that followed. But whether it’s Claire Danes’ Homeland or Nolan’s Batman three films deep into moral relativism, all of that media is made with the assumption that audiences remember the psychic scars that came after the towers fell. But what about those who were too young to watch the sight live on television? What of those not yet born?

If you really need to learn what the mood of the country was in the direct aftermath, or want a reminder, the cinematic time capsule of the era remains Spike Lee’s haunting masterpiece, 25th Hour.

Not unlike Raimi’s original Spidey flick, 25th Hour was originally divorced from anything to do with terrorist attacks. It was a screen-transfer of David Benioff’s career-making novel, which Benioff adapted himself in the screenplay. A decade before co-creating Game of Thrones, Benioff was a hotshot scribe fresh out of Trinity College, which he attended following a stint at Dartmouth and a childhood in Manhattan. He understood the privileged side of New York, and its deep cracks like the one he created for Monty Brogan (Edward Norton in the film), an Outer-Borough kid whose intelligence got him into the private schools and on the Ivy League path, but whose greed and failings veered him toward dealing drugs in those ivory halls… and finally facing a shattering seven-year prison sentence. The film picks up on his final 24 hours with childhood friends, family, and his girlfriend Naturelle Riviera (Rosario Dawson) before he must report to prison.

The movie is on the surface a drama, as well as a bit of a crime thriller, as Monty comes to terms with why his life turned out this way, and who among his inner circle really loves him. It also was in its heart a New York story, so much so that the venerated Spike Lee first circled the project specifically because of a four-letter soliloquy of bigotry, self-loathing, and pain that Monty gives to himself while staring in a mirror. It’s a devastating speech that Benioff considered cutting in his script, but which becomes one of the centerpieces of Lee’s film.

The other is the long deep shadow of a city in catastrophic mourning.

While the film was still in pre-production in September 2001, the marrow of the project seems transformed by the agony felt by Lee, arguably the defining chronicler of life in late 20th and early 21st century New York. Every one of Lee’s pictures is informed by NYC, even the ones set in 1940s Italy or the South Side of Chicago. As a character in 25th Hour says, “You’re a New Yorker, that will never change. You got New York in your bones. Spend the rest of your life out West, but you’re still a New Yorker.”

And when Lee rolled film on the first day of production for 25th Hour in early 2002, New York was hurting in a profound, unutterable way. As was America. That grief is still set in amber so thick on the film that you can see the tear stains in its celluloid.

During the movie’s opening credits, composer Terence Blanchard’s magisterial and sweeping score weeps, as do the snow flakes captured like ghostly teardrops on the floodlights above Ground Zero. As a New Yorker myself these days, the spectral sight of the 9/11 floodlights in Lower Manhattan are still an annual occurrence, but now as a tribute and even a kind of reassuring memory of the past. In 2002, when 25th Hour was filmed and released, they were a nightly wake, an anguished scream of loss; a sense of shared identity and community shattered, and dead still not buried or identified. 

Their inclusion in the film’s opening credits sets a doleful, even apocalyptic tone that the rest of the film follows to its bitter end. It is indeed the End Times for a privileged and ostensibly “nice” guy like Monty—at least as far as exploitative drug dealers profiting on the misery of others can be. He is about to go to Otisville with a pretty face and a lifetime of never being in a real fight. But the film becomes about more than just Monty’s doom; it is of a city that will never be able to go back to the world and illusions it once took for granted.

This is captured in ways both subtle and monumental. The latter is most unforgettably crystallized when two characters, one a hotshot Wall Streeter, look out from his Tribeca apartment onto the gaping wound of Ground Zero, still in ruins and covered in debris. The actors in the scene, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper, speak of their own personal miseries and regrets, but it is dwarfed by the cosmic one out the window and swallowing Lee’s frame.

In the quieter sequences, though, the film more demurely documents that time when every NYC stoop and office was decorated with the American flag, from the homes of the Upper West Side to the financial bullpens on Wall Street, and most especially in the bar owned by Monty’s working class father James (Brian Cox). James was a firefighter once and he built a watering hole for firefighters. This was always in the script, but the wall decorations of folded American flags and photos of first responders who died in the towers, and the memorials left in their memory, feels too raw to be scripted.

It’s also in that bar Monty gives his now famous “fuck you” soliloquy, which was obviously modeled as a successor to the most famous scene of communal grievances and bigotries in Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). In that earlier film, every supporting character and passerby in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood is filled with simmering rage and anger at New York’s eternal racial tensions and rigged hierarchies. But in a post-9/11 25th Hour, it becomes something different. Monty’s epic pity party is filled with racist loathing and apparent disdain for neighbors of every complexion, religion, or creed. But as he seethes, the imagery in Lee’s montage shifts.

“Fuck this whole city and everyone in it,” he hisses. “From the rowhouses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in SoHo, from the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park Slope, to the split levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it, let the fires rage, let it burn to fucking ash, and let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place.”

As Monty raves, we see many and all the neighborhoods he curses, but we also see the people. And unlike Do the Right Thing, we are not witnessing the Americans who make victims of one another through their prejudices and systems, but the joy Monty has lost; the innocence of smiling children among the populations Monty dismisses, and the kindness of strangers who dot Harlem and Times Square alike. What appeared in the book as a scene of nihilism becomes a cathartic screed of lamentation. This is confirmed when many of the same extras we see during this montage are all there smiling to say goodbye to Monty at the end of the film as his father drives him to prison upstate.

The city he loved and now claims to hate is still there, and the New Yorkers will persevere, but Monty like so many Americans in those frightful days can only see its beauty after it seems stolen, forcefully ripped away from your desperate grasp. No film, piece of media, or time capsule might better capture that cataclysmic despair, or the dawning appreciation for one’s community, even while staring down the hell of the next seven years. That and longer, too, if you look to the future for America that followed.