9/11 Analysis

1. The strong point of the movie is that it shows the parallel worlds of Lana and her uncle Paul. They both are people who try to help the world be a better place and they both end up in horrible situations in two very important cities in the United States. Lana is in Los Angeles volunteering at a Christian homeless shelter and Paul who is a Vietnam veteran tries to prevent Los Angeles from attacks just like 9/11. He suspects everyone who is of Arabic origin. They meet each other when a Pakistani gets brutally murdered. The best part of the movie is the well-assembled scenes, they are very dynamic, and that makes it that the two storylines come together so nicely. The Paul’s character is very tragic, he has suffered so much trauma in his life,
His effort to do this by the forced conversations and dialogs do not really work for me. I think the critique in here lies that Wim Wenders copies the behavior of Americans themselves. 9/11 was horrible, it happened because the United States is involved in many conflicts and I think the perfect portrayal of Paul is the actual way Americans view the world, with paranoia and suspicion. So after the attacks the War in Iraq began and the Americans made it sound that out of this horrible situation (lots of people died in the 9/11 attacks) something good came out of it, because they freed other people from Saddam Hussein, not knowing that many years later this turned out to be disastrous. Moreover, I believe the Europeans’ critique is that you cannot justify 9/11 or make it right afterwards and that is something the Americans tend to do in lots of
Benedict Anderson defines the term “imagined community” as follows: an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. […] imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Kooijman 42). He uses this concept to describe in detail something, which is very American, namely the conceptualization of Americanness. He explains this with the examples of the Oprah Winfrey Show and the TV shows The West Wing and Ally McBeal. He does this in such a fashion that sometimes his points get overshadowed by all the examples of the different aspects that mark the specific point he tries to convey. Especially with the TV shows, he goes to far in detail that it is too much information for the reader, and if the reader does not know these shows it is sometimes harder to understand what he tries to explain. However, he is very clear in the way how American shows can transmit a feeling of togetherness, a feeling of one community although this is the imagined community he explains at the beginning of chapter two. So he uses the basic theoretical concept of Benedict Anderson very well and the reader can definitely relate to this concept even if they are