There are moments in the series, like that one, that I am eager for other people to watch. For a New Yorker like me who can still recall the putrid, unnatural smell of the city at that time, this footage again brought back an array of long-buried emotions. “You also had people that were very fine people,” says “Agent Orange” (as Lee and Busta Rhymes call him), over images of David Duke and other neo-Nazis parading in the streets.Įpisode three rewinds 20 years, for a step-by-step analysis of September 11, 2001. It includes a clip of Donald Trump condemning hatred and violence on, as he later put it, “ many sides” after the 2017 white nationalist protests in Charlottesville. The second episode segues into the summer of 2020’s national referendum on racial injustice after George Floyd’s death. When Waka Flocka Flame, early in the pandemic, is shown in a radio studio saying, “minorities can’t catch” the virus, Van Jones is there to contrast him, saying that such conspiracy falsehoods “killed more minorities than the KKK.” The documentary’s first episode focuses on how New York City responded to COVID. What’s most striking about this debacle is how aware the rest of Lee’s movie seems to be of the times we live in now, and how promoting fringe ideas isn’t as harmless as it may have once been. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. The director laughs, responding, “no, not really.” Indeed, when Sunder ends one of his statements, he asks Lee if it answers his questions. But if Sunder’s contrasting message didn’t land with me, that means it probably wouldn’t have landed with a lot of other people either. Maybe that’s just because I’m an idiot I’ll take that hit. I did not even realize, until very far into this 30-minute sequence, that his whole purpose is to provide a counterpoint to what Gage and his group are saying, as his monotone was going in one ear and out the other. The problem-and one can hardly fault Lee here-is this: Comparatively, Sunder is an absolute bore. There’s no mention, meanwhile, that journalists have been debunking 9/11 conspiracies since at least 2005.įor “both sides” bona fides, Lee instead turns to Shyam Sunder, who led a study for National Institute of Standards and Technology that tore down the conspiracy claims that Gage and his pals bandy about-even the so-called smoking gun of WTC 7. Johnny Fever look you’d expect from a conspiracy theory guy.) When Gage shares that his devotion to his cause cost him his marriage, and Lee compares Gage to Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (then cuts to that film’s most emotionally charged scene), you’re primed to feel bad for him. (Only demolitions expert Tom Sullivan has the Dr. Other members of Gage’s group appear, and are similarly eloquent. It all zooms by rather quickly, but the images are striking. In the original version of the film, we see footage of buildings on fire that don’t come down, then controlled implosions that, on the surface, certainly look similar to what happened at the World Trade Center. As first noted in an interview in the The New York Times, then in a pointed column in Slate, the initial cut of Epicenters didn’t merely touch upon conspiracy mongers and so-called 9/11 truthers-it exalted them. The fourth episode is now being reedited in advance of its airing on September 11 it has been pulled from HBO’s press screeners app, and Lee sent a note via publicists to journalists that read, in part, “I Respectfully Ask You To Hold Your Judgement Until You See The FINAL CUT.” While I personally hold Lee and his work in extremely high esteem (I gave Chi-Raq five stars!), this incident feels notable enough to me to disregard his request.Īt around the 75-minute mark of the episode’s original cut, the film’s panopticon approach to the city’s twin crises of COVID and terrorism went down an unusual rabbit hole. I don’t know how long the finished version will be. Seven-and-a-half of those hours were, I felt, an exuberant, maximalist, mad rush of a love letter to New York from one of the city’s greatest artists. Spike Lee’s documentary NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½ was, when I watched it via preview links sent to me by HBO, eight hours long in total.
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