My favorite movie about 9/11 is Finding Nemo

I guess we’ll remember this
all of our lives
on the last good day of the year

– Cousteau

Written 9/10/06: This year there has been much hullabaloo over the two 9/11 movies, United 93 and World Trade Center. I’ve no interest in WTC the movie. To quote the great comedian Tim McIntire, “You don’t need to study for a test you’ve already passed.” United 93 is of more interest, mostly because it explores something I don’t already know. The odd thing is all the conversation around about whether it’s too soon for a 9/11 movie when we already got one masterpiece on the topic three years ago: Finding Nemo, and no I’m not being sarcastic.

Nemo is a movie about the experience most of us had as a result of the event: learning how to live in a world filled with dangers that you can no longer deny by pretending they are irrational. It opens with a huge loss that happens in a single horrible moment — Marlin loses his wife and 499 of his children. Understandably Marlin loses all his trust in the rest of the world but still manages to raise a relatively well-adjusted son who then gets snapped up by a yet another unstoppable force. In his quest to fulfill the movie’s title he meets up with Dory who is so odd that I would argue she, too, is a trauma survivor. (And yes, I do think Ellen DeGeneres deserved the best supporting Oscar for that performance.) In the end, of course, Marlin does learn to not be so afraid of the world and to enjoy his life and he and Dory and Nemo create an odd family of survivors that wouldn’t have existed before the tragedy. Now that’s 9/11. (My other nominee for great 9/11 movie came out the following year: Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, which is about people realizing how much they lose when they lose the memory of the event that causes them so much pain.)