On the anniversary of Islamo-fascism’s most savage unprovoked attack on western civilization, though all the news is about ABC’s 9/11 miniseries, I find my own mind going back to a moment in another film, United 93. It’s the scene in which the heroic American rebel Todd Beamer, played by David Alan Basche, utters the words that were to become the battlecry of our society’s ongoing fight for survival: “Let’s roll.”

The film, you’ll remember, is a self-consciously “realistic” documentary-style telling of the 9/11 attacks. The uprising on the doomed plane is shown as frantic and chaotic. The now-famous words are buried, almost inaudible under plane noise and a steady stream of frightened weeping and chatter. As the other brave American rebels try to gather their nerve for the assault against the Islamist hijackers, Beamer can just barely be heard muttering a nervous, “C’mon, let’s go, let’s go, let’s roll.”

Several people have mentioned this moment to me, always with praise for its “realism.” I always knew exactly what they meant. In fact, at first, I shared their feelings. By de-emphasizing the inspiring phrase, the filmmakers underplayed the drama and heroics of the moment. Rather than give us something that seemed to be part of the overblown, melodramatic world of the movies, they gave us instead something that seemed more like the confusion, smallness and helter-skelter of real life.

There’s only one problem with this: the moment in the movie isn’t real at all. In real life, the moment was as big, as overblown and melodramatic as any movie you’ll ever see. Beamer had managed to reach a phone company manager on his cell phone. A Christian family man, Beamer said the Lord’s Prayer with her. Then, setting the phone aside but leaving the line open, he said, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” Heartbreakingly, it was a phrase his wife recognized from family outings.

In other words, the makers of United 93 achieved a sense of realism by reworking reality itself.

There was no other way – because what we’ve come to think of as realism in movies and literature is nothing more than a style, a particular way of showing and describing things. When we are confronted with this style, we understand that what we’re being shown is “realistic” whether it has anything to do with reality or not. Like all styles, the style called “realism” has certain recognizable components. For instance, in realistic dramas, people don’t speak eloquently. They hem and haw, talk over each other and leave sentences unfinished. In realism, low motives are always in the foreground and higher ideals are always undercut with irony. Mean streets are realistic, so are unhappy endings. Comfortable homes, loving families, heroism and uplifting faith are not.

This is bizarre when you come to think of it. It means that realism is mute when it comes to describing the best of what we can be, of what life can be. And this partially crippled form of communication is the prevailing style of serious cinema. You could almost say that we know a film is serious by how “realistic” it is. Conversely, when we see true faith and true heroism in movies, we feel we’re in the presence of rank sentimentalism, of powderpuff family entertainment. We feel that it’s somehow “unreal.”

A perfect example of this is the other major 9/11 movie: World Trade Center. This weirdly old-fashioned creation from director Oliver Stone jerks the occasional tear or two but it’s never really convincing and it leaves the viewer – it left this viewer anyway – strangely empty. On reflection, I thought the reason was obvious: Stone simply no longer has the cinematic language with which to describe the movie’s most fascinating and resonant character. The leads are two men trapped and helpless underground. They are heroic men because of what they were trying to do when they were trapped, but they are not the heroes of the film because, in the course of the story, they do nothing but wait and survive.

The real hero of the film is Marine Staff Sergeant David Karnes. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the movie senses this. Karnes feels called by God to leave his comfortable civilian life, to go in search of the two lost men and then, having found them, to re-enlist to help avenge the attack on the country he loves. Of course he’s the hero! In any film made before 1968, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that he was not the hero. Stone, however, came of age when the language necessary to describe this man’s feelings and inner self was becoming as dead as Greek and Latin. Instead, he films the marine wreathed in eerie light, with actor Michael Shannon delivering his lines in the other-worldly tones of a mad prophet. As a human figure, he’s “unreal.” Perhaps he’s the spirit of America, half-remembered and now half-insane. Just as likely, he’s Stone’s tortured memory of the man he was when he enlisted to serve in Viet Nam. But having lost that man, having lost those ideals, having become a “realist,” he can no longer bring him to life.

Listen, no one denies the corruption of the world – not me anyway. No one denies that higher ideals are often mingled with mean motives or that even the most selfless moment can be tinged with selfishness. And yet, there is nothing unreal about a man turning to God and finding courage and guidance; about a man deciding to fight, and even to die, for a greater good; about a man assuming a natural mantle of leadership and speaking words of encouragement to lead his fellows on. These things happen all the time. They happened on United Flight 93. They happened at the World Trade Center.

Why have modern films - why have we - lost the power to speak of them?

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