When Deanna Sirlin and Philip Auslander, co-editors of The Art Section, asked for permission to include a scene from my film “The Unrecovered” in a special issue of their on-line journal devoted to art and 9/11, I was happy to comply. https://www.theartsection.com/unrecovered But when they asked me to write a short “Director’s Statement” about the film, I hesitated—at least initially.
Even though I’ve directed a number of projects for film and video over the years, I continue to think of myself primarily as a critic. And one of the pitfalls I try my best to avoid as a critic is what W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley called “The Intentional Fallacy”: the idea that critical analysis of a work of art should take into account the author’s verbally expressed “intentions.” But the fact is: I’ve always been made uncomfortable by artists who seem overly eager to tell us what they “intended” to accomplish in a particular work. I’m a firm believer in D.H. Lawrence’s adage: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.” The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, regardless of how promising the recipe may have sounded. So why should I treat my own “creative work” any differently in this regard?
Well, maybe it’s because “The Unrecovered” is the first work of fiction I’ve created that’s been widely written about by other critics. The experience of reading what other people have to say about one’s work can be highly instructive—to say the least. If nothing else, it’s given me a more palpable sense of what it feels like to be “on the receiving end” of professional criticism. And I’m not talking about the experience of being wounded– emotionally and psychologically– by unkind critical barbs. The reviews, I’m happy to say, have been quite positive thus far. But they’ve forced me to reconsider some of my deeply held prejudices about the value of knowing what the artist “intended” in his or her work. Then again, it’s equally true that many of the works I most admire (e.g. Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children) succeed precisely because they transcend or “escape” the artist’s more crudely didactic political intentions.
But –at least for me–there’s no denying the satisfaction that comes from reading a critic—especially if he or she is someone whose opinions you respect—who fully understands your…. intentions. (Of course, it can be even more satisfying to have that same critic discover additional dimensions of the work that you never—consciously at least, —intended.
For example, two of the artists who exerted the greatest degree of influence on my film were Jean Luc Godard and Spalding Gray. Hence the great pleasure I derived from reading the following words in an essay James Wolcott wrote about my film in Vanity Fair in 2006.
Articulate and quirkily analytical, ‘The Unrecovered’ suggests a cross between a Spalding Gray monologue and the digital scrapbooks of late period Jean Luc Godard…
Wolcott’s essay, titled “Through A Lens, Darkly” was actually devoted to two very different films: Eugene Jarecki’s documentary “Why We Fight” and my own, unabashedly fictional and poetic meditation on the psychological aftermath of 9/11. Toward the conclusion of his essay, Wolcott wrote,
It might seem that Why We Fight and The Unrecovered occupy separate compartments. One is factual, linear, emphatic; the other is ruminative, Cubistic, evocative. As different as Edward R. Murrow and Edgar Allan Poe. But they share a sadness, an unresolved ache. Closure eludes them both. The searchers in The Unrecovered end in various stages of resignation, their souls emptied out.
Nothing could have pleased me more than Wolcott’s suggestion that Jarecki’s documentary and my work of fiction could in fact cross-fertilize one another in valuable ways. What Wolcott had done (unknowingly of course) was to identify the original set of “intentions” that brought my film into being in the first place.
In the weeks and months following September 11, 2001, I did a great deal of writing and lecturing about the ways in which artists have traditionally responded to real life circumstances so compelling that works of fiction appear –at least initially—feeble and insignificant by comparison. Even the great novelist V.S. Naipal — hardly the sort of person to give up prematurely on the expressive power of the novel)–was quoted as saying, shortly after the attacks, “Given what is happening in the world today, how can one continue to go into a room and just make things up?”
Predictably enough, by the time of the first anniversary of 9/11 in Sept. 2002, a number of fine documentary films chronicling various aspects of 9/11 had already begun to appear. But very few works of fiction (in any medium) had attempted to chart the ways in which the key, recurring images of that horrific day had burrowed their way deep into this nation’s collective unconscious.
So, much to my own surprise (given my initial belief that 9/11 was another of those events which would automatically defy—and thus defeat –the “fictional imagination”) I began to envision a film that might provide its audience with access to the inner-life of three different characters, harboring three utterly different dreamscapes that would ultimately converge into one collective nightmare.
But at the same time, it seemed to me essential that the film never lose sight of the public and political context which had triggered those private nightmares in the first place.
I would thus describe the “The Unrecovered” as a feature-length, fictional narrative film that incorporates and re-textualizes many aspects of a more conventional documentary. To be more specific: actual news coverage from television, radio or the internet provides a constant “background” against which are “foregrounded” three different characters (who often appear to be absorbing these streams of media imagery indirectly– as if by osmosis.)
The film’s title refers not only to the “unrecovered” bodies at ground zero, but also to the state of the nation-at-large. Set in that virtually hallucinatory period of time between September 11 and Halloween of 2001, “The Unrecovered” examines the effect of terror on the human mind, the way a state of heightened fear, anxiety and/or alertness can cause the average person to make the sort of imaginative “connections” that are normally made only by two distinct (and rather marginal) categories of human being: artists and conspiracy theorists –both of whom figure prominently in “The Unrecovered.” In fact, by the end of the film, the audience is left to ponder some rather striking similarities between creativity and paranoia. More specifically, “The Unrecovered” sets out to explore the ways in which irony, empathy, and terror interacted with one another in the wake of 9/11.
I think of “The Unrecovered” as a horror film with a lot on its mind. Indeed, I’ve long dreamed of seeing a movie that would combine the clear-eyed, analytical intelligence of Godard’s “Two Or Three Things I Know About Her” with the shape-shifting, personality-morphing, dream logic of Bergman’s “Persona” (arguably the most sophisticated vampire film ever made.) An improbable marriage of “Two or Three Things…” and “Persona”– that’s a pretty good description of what—in the best of all worlds—I wanted to accomplish with this work.
“The Unrecovered” employs a collage-structure which repeatedly cuts back and forth between three separate narratives titled “Sound and Silence,” “Wings and Roots,” and “Fog and Friction.” The first focuses on an artist, a composer struggling to create a musical work and a video diary about 9/11. The second story concerns a mother and daughter who were abandoned some years earlier by their husband/father. The third centers on a survivalist/millennialist/conspiracy theorist.
These three characters and their stories embody three fundamentally different interpretations of the film’s title: (e.g. The conspiracy theorist is convinced that 2001, not 2000 was the true “millennial” year and that the events of September 11, 2001 mark the beginning of “end times” as foretold in the Book of Revelations.) For him, the unrecovered bodies at ground zero have merely been wafted into heaven, as the initial stage of “The Rapture” —the climactic event he believes will trigger the appearance of the antichrist and the ensuing “Tribulation.” (How and why a devout evangelical Christian like himself was “left behind” is the question that propels his course of action in the film).
The composer (who refers to himself on several occasions as a “recovering formalist”) is very much an aesthete, but one who realizes that September 11th was one of those rare occasions when real life manages to put art on the defensive. He’s brave enough to acknowledge what a lot of artists felt (but were afraid to admit) in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: “envy for the death artists, envy of the sensory impact, global reach, and symbolic resonance of what the terrorists accomplished on September 11.” He’s especially obsessed with the (real life) comments of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who declared — a mere five days after the attacks– that the events in New York and Washington amounted to “the greatest work of art in Western History.”
By contrast, the twelve year old girl in the “Wings and Roots” story becomes fixated on the possibility that her missing father may have been living in Manhattan under an assumed name and working in the World Trade Center. As a result, she begins to fear that his remains may be among the “unrecovered” at ground zero. With the zeal of a modern-day Nancy Drew, she sets out to determine whether or not these suspicions are true. Early in the film, she watches a documentary at school about the ritual origins of Halloween. She learns that “trick or treating” may have evolved from the ancient Celtic rite of Samhain when the spirits of those who died during the past year wander restlessly in search of bodies to inhabit. And she fears that if her father was indeed killed on September 11th, then the most likely time for her to encounter his unrecovered spirit is on Halloween night.
An obvious question: In what way(s) are the three stories “connected”? The audience –of course– assumes that the narratives will eventually intersect; and many clues appear along the way suggesting that the answers to questions raised by one narrative strand may be found in another of the three (seemingly separate) stories. Whether or not the characters really do cross paths with one another remains deeply (and intentionally) ambiguous, because the film is ultimately about the question: “What is and what isn’t, meaningfully connected post-9/11 in a fully globalized world.?”
For the deeply paranoid conspiracy theorist, everything connects, there’s no such thing as a coincidence or a chance meeting. For the composer, whose sensibility is dominated by detachment and irony, no two things are inherently connected, except by virtue of the metaphors he devises in his art. This character is very much an inhabitant of the digital age, an artist for whom the “cut and paste” icons on the computer constitute not just editing tools, but a philosophy of life (i.e. an ever-shifting “collage” of unrelated experiences) At one point he declares “Cut and paste. Cut and paste. I link, therefore I am.” Indeed, on one level, “The Unrecovered” is unabashedly a film about the nature of metaphor, which (as we learn from one of the composer’s entries in his video diary) derives from the Greek root “metapherein,” a transference of meaning which forges connections between otherwise disparate things or events). Ultimately “The Unrecovered” is about the way in which metaphor, post-9/11, is fed by the sort of “pattern recognition” that is triggered by meta-fear.*
This helps explain why the composer seizes upon Edward Lorenz’s so-called Butterfly Effect (“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?) as the central metaphor for the way in which seemingly insignificant events in one isolated corner of a globalized world can generate major repercussions thousands of miles away. (Parenthetically, I might add that one of my chief ambitions in making this film has been to rescue the concept of “the butterfly effect” from the many banal and reductive uses popular culture has made of it in recent years.) And in an attempt to flesh out this metaphor, the composer performs a musical work by LaMonte Young in which a butterfly is turned loose in the performance area. When listeners complain that the butterfly makes no audible sounds, the composer objects strenuously, suggesting that it’s the audience’s responsibility to learn to hear the sounds the butterfly must surely -–at some decibel level–be making. “The tornado, that’s easy enough to recognize,” he argues, “but how do we learn to hear the sounds the butterfly makes when it flaps its wings?”
The question of what is and isn’t legitimately “connected” informs all aspects of the film– its structure as well as its content. For example, quite deliberately, none of the action in “The Unrecovered” is set in Manhattan or Washington D.C. This film is about characters whose connections to the events of 9/11 are entirely mediated by mass media. Thus, there’s barely a scene in the film in which there isn’t a television or a computer screen “on” in the background. “The Unrecovered” evokes a world in which an actual visit to ground zero is likely to feel anti-climactic, a world in which the endlessly repeated, record-able, replay-able image of a thing on high-definition TV is often destined to feel more “authentic” than the thing itself.
But… it also turns out that one of the characters may well be directly connected to (indeed responsible for) some of the events that kept the nation in a state of high anxiety in the weeks following September 11th. The conspiracy theorist (who dubs himself “The BioEvangelist”) becomes a self-professed avenging angel eager to accelerate the countdown toward “End Times.” There’s ample reason to suspect that this character may in fact be responsible for the anthrax deaths in October of 2001 (media coverage of which led the average American to fear the simple act of opening the daily mail.) Similarly, there are a number of (not-necessarily-reliable) clues suggesting that “The Bioevangelist” may be the twelve year old’s long-lost, missing father.
In any event, the actual incidents of anthrax exposure began to mount in late October of’ 01 ; and as a result, October 31, 2001 was probably the most anxiety-ridden night of trick -or -treating in recent memory. “The Unrecovered” reaches its emotional climax on Halloween night, when the twelve year girl –in- search- of -her –missing-father does indeed experience an “encounter with the dead” –but not the encounter she had anticipated.
Then, after vanishing mysteriously on Halloween night, she re-surfaces (just as mysteriously) in a hospital ward where her identity appears to have metamorphosed into that of a young Palestinian girl who became a suicide bomber—(as depicted in a news story the young American girl listened to a few weeks earlier.)
As the title of her story (“Wings and Roots”) would suggest, the twelve year old is obsessed with her “family tree.” In fact, we frequently see her working on a science fair project that focuses on the role played by DNA analysis as a tool for tracing her own genealogy. The transmigration of souls she appears to undergo on Halloween night is designed to re-frame the film’s recurring question (“What is and what isn’t legitimately connected”) in terms of the roots and branches of her family tree. The underlying question is thereby re-formulated so as to read “Who is and isn’t related” in a post-911 world where the traditional concept of “roots” has given way to a more globalized image of crisscrossing, globe-trotting “routes.”
I realize that these notes make the film sound intimidatingly brainy and difficult. And to be sure, “The Unrecovered” never disguises its desire to engage its audience intellectually. But I’ve been equally determined to make something that’s extremely appealing to the eye. Images… of uprooted trees, Monarch butterflies, floating light bulbs, recurring sets of “twins” (Twin Towers and the Tower of Babel, “black boxes” and black helicopters, the crisscrossing strands of the Double Helix… to cite just a few) weave their way through all three stories, resonating off of one another in ways that suggest a convergence of thought-patterns. (i.e. Recurring “image-motifs” play at least as important a role in this film as do any of the characters.) And I’d like to think that one of the most adventurous aspects of “The Unrecovered” is the way it straddles the divide between narrative film and a more purely abstract –or at least, imagistic– variety of non-narrative film.) In this regard, the film opens with an allusion to Stan Brakhage’s “Anticipation of the Night.” Similarly, the film often blurs the distinction between “waking” and dream (or psychotically-hallucinated) experience.
If “The Unrecovered” succeeds, its accumulating momentum will be less a matter of narrative pacing per se than of key images which resonate with ever increasing frequency within all three stories. (Ideally, the film will function as a sort of paranoia-inducing machine, leading the audience to perceive “connections” everywhere.) Figuring out which ones are “valid” is the difficult task “The Unrecovered” assigns the harder-working members of its audience.
But it’s time to take off my filmmaker hat and replace it with the headgear I feel more comfortable in: that of the critic. And in this regard– speaking as a critic — I could go on forever about the film’s many shortcomings. Just for starters: it’s overly conceptualized and under-dramatized. I’m convinced that if I’d been able to collaborate on the screenplay with an accomplished writer of fiction, the three central characters would be much more fully fleshed out and would speak more often with their own idiosyncratic voices (rather than serving as the writer/director’s ventriloqual mouthpiece, or even worse, as a conveyor-belt for ideas and images that don’t necessarily originate within any specific character.)
But then again, when functioning as a critic, I’ve always been partial toward works that I regard as “ambitious failures.’ And all things considered, that’s probably the way I’d characterize “The Unrecovered.” If only because –at the end of the day– I’d prefer to sit through an ambitious failure than a slick success. As Melville once wrote, “Better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on vulgar shoals.”
* “The Unrecovered” was completed in 2006 and these notes were written in 2008. But looking back on the film from the vantage point of the present (2022), I think it’s fair to say that one of its –wholly unintended-accomplishments was to demonstrate the way(s) in which the paranoia induced by 9/11 –and actively cultivated (for political purposes) by the Bush administration — helped to produce a climate in this country increasingly conducive to conspiratorial thinking and ultimately, to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Big Lie about the election of 2020, and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.