In the Shadow of No Towers

Art Spiegelman's mediation in 'In the Shadow of No Towers'is highly personal. On 11 September, he, you can say, was living in the shadow of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The film opens with a cloud of dust...toxic dust, the residue of the collapse towers as a result of two airplanes deliberating crashed into them by Islamic terrorists. In the wake of this earth-shattering tragedy, it seemed as though the world had gone mad. And the results of this lunacy, Spiegelman attempts to come to terms, for the sake of sanity...his and ours. What was the smell of the dust? he muses. And he hears in his inner ear the answer of his father,a holocaust survivor, when asked what was the smell of the human ash from the concentration camp ovens: 'indiscribable'. And he, too, concurs. Furthermore, he connects the camps and the fallout of the Twin Towers to the destruction visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US Army Air Force. More, to find the ground of sanity, he looks to the world he knows best: cartoons, not any old cartoons, but ones from the comic pages of newspapers of way back when newspapers had a wide circulation and were read. And he uses 'The Katzenajammer Kids' of World War One vintage, as a metaphor for the Twin Towers, as an antidote to the lethal poison that terrorism has visited on us. With an untranquil stomach, in a world turned upside down, he discovers that the temper of the moment unleashes the demons of anti-Semitism, for example. 'In the Shadow of No Towers' tells of the panicked stamped of Americans who were willing to give up the Constitution and our democracy to the cynical White House of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their band of scoundrels. It is through symbols, caricature, exaggerated representations, analogies and above all irony, Spigelman succeeds in capturing his mood of those frightful hours and days after 11 September. Words are not enough to do full justice to 'In the Shadow of No Towers', the film has to be seen. For the dastardly daring of that day is forever seared in the world's imagination that slowly loses its hold on the popular imagination, and as Freud noted the horror of the dead and the acrid smell of burnt flesh mixed with molten metals of the Towers structure remained as a vivid reminder and health hazard for years thereafter. And especially for Spiegelman, his wife and daughter who had as neighbors the Twin Towers of the WTC. John Tuturro narrates in English, and Enzo Salmone his the voice in the Italian version.

Art Spiegelman's comic of the same title is animated and presented with narration and music.

I want to give this a good rating because I love Art Spiegelman, and it is hard to give a low rating to anything about 9/11. But, frankly, this just happens to be boring. Even with John Turturro narrating, there is absolutely nothing here that is an improvement on the comic itself. If anything, this is a step in the wrong direction. Maybe even the 4/10 is a little bit high.

Others have said the soundtrack is pretty decent, and I guess I would not disagree. But it is not enough that it makes the film worth watching... it is barely enough to keep someone from turning the film off. Even with less than an hour of running time, it tests viewers' patience.