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On an occasion like 9/11 everyone remembers where they were. It’s something of a cliché to say that of course. Growing up the line was that people could always remember where they were when Kennedy got shot, but that was way before my time, so I’d always considered the statement as overused and meaningless. On September 11th 2001, unlike Daniel Mendelsohn, I wasn’t in New York looking up at the Twin Towers as one of the planes struck. I was in an all-you-could-eat Pizza restaurant in a small Finnish town. In the latest New York Review of Books Mendelsohn describes going to pick up a friend at her apartment on the morning of September 11th. Having made good time he phoned her to say he had arrived a little earlier than expected. Then, says Mendelsohn “I flipped the phone shut, looked up, and a dark flash of something darted into the building that loomed directly before me, which was the north tower of the World Trade Center. A gigantic ball of bright orange fire ballooned out of the tower, followed by vast plumes of dense, black smoke.”

His first reaction is to think that it is the filming of a disaster movie and is puzzled momentarily that they should choose to use real planes in the age of CGI technology. His second reaction is to call his friend to ask her to turn on the news to find out what had happened (as if they would have helicopters already in the air recording as historic event unfolded). Needless to say, there was nothing on the news: ‘It was just the raw event. What had just happened had not yet become the story of what happened.’

For me, like billions of others, the event was experienced entirely through the TV news. We stepped into a ‘Rock’ bar and the screen usually reserved for the viewing of Ice Hockey matches was showing the two towers on fire. The first thought was that of a movie, the Towering Inferno. The possibility of a terrorist attack hadn’t occurred to us. We continued to watch with stunned fascination and were appalled when one of the towers collapsed. During all this a young Finnish lad with large specs and a deer hunter jacket walked in and went immediately for the gambling machine directly below the screen. He continued to play through all the excited talk at the bar and completely ignored the stalled comments from the flabbergasted journalists trying to make sense of what was happening from the little information that was available. Only when the tower collapse did the frightened gasps force him to look up momentarily to see what was happening.

Our main reaction and what many people said at the time was that it was like a disaster movie. The scale of the reality was too great and as it was experienced through a TV it felt like it had the unreality of a movie. Also, the landscape of New York has so often been used by Hollywood as a backdrop for simulated disasters on a similar scale, allowing cinematic fantasists to show iconic buildings being destroyed and distraught New Yorker screeching in their vain attempts to escape the giant perpetrator of the wreckage - be it an ape, a spaceship or a tidal wave.

In his New York Review of Books article, Mendelsohn, is reviewing the two Hollywood movies that deal with the events on that Autumn day in 2001: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. The reality of the events, he argues, indeed its scale, drowns out an examination of the wider significance of the events.

Reality in both movies is an obsessive concern of the film makers he says, and both ‘have a severe sobriety of tone, as if to acknowledge that these are no mere entertainments; we are told that the families of victims (and, in the case of World Trade Center, the survivors themselves) were constantly consulted during the making of both films.’ Real pilots and stewardess are used in the United 93, as if to heighten the sense of reality. But he argues, reality in a movie, even one that strives for authenticity through accuracy, is always going to be ‘artfully constructed’.

The events that occurred on board United 93 are considered so sensitive and close at hand that the purpose of the movie is not to entertain in the normal sense, but to edify:

“There can, therefore, be no useful aesthetic value in the decision to use real people, only a symbolic and perhaps sentimental one: by emphasizing such authenticity and realism, the film reassures its audience—which may well be anxious about its motives for paying to see a film about real-life violence and horror—that what they're seeing is not, in fact, "drama" (and therefore presumably mere "entertainment"), but "real life," and hence in some way edifying.”

The reality in the film, like reality in life, produces an unstructured work that contains no larger meanings outside the reality of the events depicted.

Mendelsohn, who is a scholar of Classic Greek Tragedy, argues that rather than being likened to a Greek Tragedy, as one film critic opined that the 9/11 films are more like TV movies: “All that United 93 can tell us […] is that many people are brave and some people are dastardly. […] This isn't to say that the emotions evoked by United 93 aren't strong. But your feelings of horror while watching the hand-to-hand violence in United 93 don't derive from the way in which the action has been treated by the writer and the director, but rather from the prior historical knowledge you already bring to the occasion—it's only awful to watch because you know something like it happened to real people. If United 93 were a fictional TV movie of the week, you might watch it with friends, and then go out for pizza without thinking about it ever again, except perhaps to wonder why there was no real ending, or why you never really knew anything about the characters (and hence wondered why they act the way they do).”

It’s a point that Slavoj Zizek agrees with. In yesterday’s Guardian Zizek while talking about the same two films says: ‘The realism [of United 93 and World Trade Center] means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. […]All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake.”

The political reality is that unlike previous enemies of the free world, Terrorists don’t have a standing army to oppose or national boundaries that can be threatened with nuclear attack. The enemy of this war is more spectral than that of the cold war. Bush posits it as an ideological battle in his TV address to the nation on the anniversary of 9/11 yesterday, "The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation," he said. "If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons." Even if the nature of this conflict is very different the language of the cold war continues, the angels against the devils. But the nebulous aspect of this enemy adds to the sense of the unreality of the conflict – that it is happening yet it is not.

Zizek argues that despite the threats, the majority of people continue to go about their business and fighting terrorism is left to the federal agencies, blurring the distinction between a state of war and peace.