The 2001 essay was always going to be about 9/11 and Tolkien.
I was living in my first apartment in 2001, having spent the previous year in the honors dorm and the previous 18 years in my parents’ house. The apartment was a complete piece of shit like every place where I lived in Morgantown, and it was owned by immoral slumlord pieces of shit, also a near-universal accompaniment. Morgantown, if you’re lucky enough to have never spent time there, would be just another river town if it were not for West Virginia University. With WVU factored in, Morgantown has a ton of restaurants and activities for such a small city, and basically every business is built to cater to or grift from the never-ending stream of new college students.
The house that I rented with three other guys was in a row of large, old-style single-family houses that were gutted and rotted and stretched to fit multiple apartments. The entire row was eventually demolished and replaced with a car wash, which was then replaced with an apartment building.
But in 2001, it was, in the eyes of code enforcement, somehow safe enough for student housing. I started the fall with a full class schedule and dropped classes one by one (see the previous entry), but we’re not talking school today. We’re talking about the day that fundamentally reshaped the US government’s relationship with its citizens and with the world, and which left an indelible mark on everyone who lived through it.
I took my first shift at a steakhouse buffet on September 10th, 2001. I don’t recall the name, but it was in Westover and had some variation on sizzle in its name. It was a bad job, but within the bounds of my experience in food service. I did my shift, including a 15-minute lunch break in which I ate a giant steak (on which the ownership graciously gave me a nearly 30% employee discount… I recall that I maybe cleared fifteen bucks in tips after kicking back ten bucks for that fucking steak). At the end of the shift, we were packing up the buffet. What with having essentially zero money, I asked if I could box up some wings and other buffet items to take home, since most of it was bound for the dumpster anyway. The shift manager looked at me like I had asked for a cup of infant blood, but I was persistent and they gave in with some admonition about “not letting it become a habit.”
I put the fifteen bucks into my SUV’s gas tank (probably bringing it up from bone dry to a quarter tank). I got home and put the wings in the fridge. With the negative money thing like I’d mentioned, those wings represented the only food I would have had in the house, and the only food that I’d have access to until my next shift. YAY AMERICA.
Anyway, went to bed and woke up the next morning. Everyone was in my roommate’s room, watching the news. I didn’t have much interest, but was hungry and got my wings and sat down. I sat there eating cold buffalo wings while we watched the first tower fall on the television.
I am not going to talk about the global ramifications of that day. We’re still experiencing ripples of it as I write this. I want to stay focused on my own experience, as the rest is beyond my ability to parse.
I watched the news coverage of the person jumping out of the window to their death, and I wondered if that was the first person I’d seen die in real-time. The room got more tense and more confused as more people tuned into the news. Phone lines were soon overloaded everywhere, with relatives calling each other to check in. I don’t remember how many of us were in the room while we watched this. At least the four of us who lived there, but probably a girlfriend was there too, and maybe a friend came over at some point? It’s been twenty years, so I don’t know.
I don’t know how long we watched, but at some point, after the initial shock wore off and we stopped waiting for a plane to fall on our heads, everyone realized that they still had life stuff going on. The internet wasn’t like it is now, especially for the purposes of announcements and news. We all had AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and Napster and other utility applications, but I don’t recall using the internet to check university or local news at that time. So everyone assumed that they’d still have class and other responsibilities, or at least, that they’d have to report to those responsibilities in-person to find out if they had been canceled.
I remember that I had creative writing class in the early afternoon. I remember walking to the class, sitting down, telling the teacher that I didn’t want to be there that day, and then leaving. Then I called my sizzling steakhouse job and quit over the phone, also citing the panic at the tragedy of the day (I wouldn’t have lasted a week at that job even under normal circumstances).
I don’t recall what happened the rest of that day, but I assume it was a lot of news watching and panic. There was far more panic in the subsequent weeks (and years). I remember countless notices to watch for untended bags in public spaces, and every loose backpack or cardboard box sent me into a panic that entire semester. I also remember being of that specifically annoying, myopic age range wherein I was apoplectic that radio stations would temporarily halt playing songs referencing crashes or airplanes. But despite the panic and the fear, life moved on. I went to a concert in Cleveland not even two months later, for fuck’s sake: bands were not even canceling tour dates in the wake of 9/11, and fans were also fine with attending large public events.
But 9/11, followed by the Patriot Act, then the Iraq War, then the war in Afghanistan… we lost our collective minds even if we didn’t acknowledge it at the time. I was fully against the war in Iraq but the “but you still support the troops?” thing was super weird. I guess that’s a topic for a later essay.
I don’t really have much to say about movies of that moment. The steakhouse job was replaced by a midnight shift at a gas station (for minimum wage, I got to be the literal only employee in the entire building from midnight to 6am, which meant no breaks for food or bathroom), and something like 90% of my monthly income went to my rent, so I was always broke and behind on every bill. And that meant that I really didn’t see many movies in 2001 until they were on DVD and someone else bought or rented them. This includes our movie of the week, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. I actually had a bootleg VHS of the movie, but it was entirely unwatchable. Making that tape was a convoluted process, somehow connecting my computer to a TV so that the movie file would play on the TV, and then it was recorded off of the TV screen via a VCR. So I didn’t properly see the movie until 2002. I did watch all of the subsequent Middle-Earth films in the theater, being equally as broke but by then a movie critic, which meant either free entry or reimbursement.
I’m a pretty big Tolkien fan, so I was following the production of these films back in high school (theonering.net was one of the earliest fan sites that I knew about). But even with a predisposition to like the movie, I was still floored by how good it was. Jackson, Boyens, and Walsh nailed it. The screenplay was deft and funny, the emotional moments all hit, the cast was perfect, the locations stunning, the practical effects and costumes were amazing. And the score… think about the Hobbits leitmotif (that mournful flute), the One Ring leitmotif (those menacing strings), the Eagles leitmotif (that high wordless soprano).
Escapism, I have long thought, is one of the many coping mechanisms which humans employ in our terrifying, nebulous, far-too-brief lives. And the Shire is about as far as one can get from a terrifying world wherein expansionist American neoliberal geopolitics is blowing up in our faces. And the idyllic hobbits being called forth onto the global stage is the exact opposite of where we were with a century of the US strong-arming the peoples of the Middle East, South America, Central America, and Southeast Asia. So, oddly, I think that Fellowship was released at a fortuitous time, when some well-made escapism sounded far better than another hollow speech being delivered out of Dubya’s mouth with Cheney and Rumsfeld mouthing the words from back in the shadows.
I’ve rewatched the Lord of the Rings movies and the Hobbit movies many times, and I’ve seen at least one entry in most of the tedious, bloated fantasy adaptations that also sprang forth in the early 2000s. And I truly feel that, with few exceptions, the LotR movies are just better made and don’t require metatextual information to be enjoyed. I sat numb throughout the Harry Potters (save the third one, which was decent), squirmed in my seat through a Narnia, was repulsed by a Hunger Games, and on down the line. But what always bothered me was that I’d make a good-faith effort to watch this stuff, but it felt like nothing on the screen worked unless one was predisposed to like it. Conversely, I tear up at Boromir’s death every time I watch Fellowship and still find myself thinking “Sam’s gonna drown this time. Frodo won’t get there in time!” like I am a dingdang child. The movie feels special to me in ways that I haven’t felt about the other intellectual property mining of this century.
And I wonder about the causes. Is it because I’ve read the Tolkien books multiple times (in English and Spanish), and played the Middle-Earth CCG in the 90s and the Fantasy Flight one currently? (Probably. ––Ed.) Am I more forgiving of the flaws (e.g., those dreadful pirate ghosts) because of this, and thus more likely to find flaws in Harry Potter or whatever because I have no attachment to it? Is it because LotR had a consistent creative team and one long production window, whereas the other literary adaptations often had new directors, writers, and production teams for each crummy sequel? Or was it because these movies came out during an extremely stressful time, and like other people rediscovering the joys of their youth during the pandemic, there is an Isengard-sized feeling of comfort associated with The Lord of the Rings?
I don’t know.
Other 2001 candidates: No other candidates were seriously considered with the week’s topic, but these titles could have generated something interesting in a vacuum: Shrek; Jurassic Park III; Planet of the Apes; Hannibal; The Royal Tenenbaums; Training Day; Gosford Park; Memento; Sexy Beast; The Tailor of Panama; Joe Dirt; Wet Hot American Summer
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.