Tracey Barnett: Irony takes a seat on the flight to death

It had never happened to me before. When the screen went black at the end of United 93, I felt two things - a rush of relief that the film was over and the realisation that the only sound I was aware of in the whole theatre was the pounding of my heart.

My reaction was visceral, and that shut me up. No one coughed or reached for their jackets. It was completely quiet.

My partner, usually reticent in public displays of affection, leaned over and kissed me. That unsettled me more, I had thought it was just me. I am American, I was supposed to feel this way.

After the end of the film about the fourth aircraft in the September 11 terrorist attack five years ago, the screen stayed black for a few more seconds. I hoped it didn't go into what we all knew came next.

Mayor Giuliani with microphones shoved under his chin, ennobled black and yellow fire-fighter jackets crawling around the site like a thousand ineffectual bees, or cloying internet slide-shows of shocked onlookers, set to Enya or Pavarotti, that would fill my email in-box for weeks to come.

It didn't. It left you alone.

It left you alone five years ago with the confused, middle-finger patriotism of the guy who pumped my gas that day. Days later, a friend told me how that same attendant wouldn't serve an Arab-looking man, and the two men stood screaming at each other.

The customer was Indian. It didn't matter. No one was to know that his perspective would win, and translate into an entire United States foreign policy still causing disaster five years on?

At first, I wasn't going to go to this movie. Its very existence annoyed me.

I imagined Tommy Lee Jones as the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, snarling into a headset: "Get me the President - now," as we cut to Sandra Bullock in a cleavage-enhanced United Airlines uniform charging up the aisle behind Bruce Willis, inwardly clenching teeth and testicles, ready to meet his maker.

The entire concept seemed an exploitation of tragedy. Was it supposed to teach me something about the human condition that day that was less immediate than remembering?

Only an hour after we had woken up to the footage of melting towers on that fine September morning, I joined small clusters of parents standing around the playground in groups of two or three, talking quietly long after the school bell had rung and their children had gone inside.

Nobody wanted to notice they were late for the office, or cared.

I stood looking down, kicking bark chips with my foot, listening to the angry tirade of a big athletic doctor friend. His words began to putter out into choked emotion that made him finally stop speaking and simply shake his head, restrained.

I had never experienced what a palpable, shared communal sadness looked like in the face of the person who handed you your mail or gave you change for a purchase.

Days later, I remember berating my friend Judy during a walk, expounding on how we should handle the attack with deafening silence.

Silence would hold the world on our side more powerfully than any retaliatory bombing ever would, with less death, less cost, and more effect.

Karl Rove sneered at the likes of me, a liberal who wanted to respond to September 11 with therapy and understanding. Hell, that's nothing, in my zeitgeist I would have had them spend some time journal-writing with Joni Mitchell and a candle.

Today, the mere mention of American troops arriving at any country's doorstep is no cavalry to the rescue, but an announcement of calamity in the making.

Afghanistan's death toll still ticks over, far more quietly now that flashier wars in Iraq and Lebanon capture the primacy of fresh news.

After September 11, Time's Roger Rosenblatt declared that the age of irony was over. America's chattering classes of columnists and pop culture-makers could no longer declare detachment and personal whimsy as they had always done.

It was our veneer of ironic distance that made it difficult for anyone to really see anything.

No longer, after September 11, Rosenblatt declared. We would genuinely know how to feel pain.

I thought he was wrong. Five years on, my ironic distance has returned full throttle. The BBC just pulled a comedy radio show with a sketch about a cow hitting the Twin Towers. Sounded funny to me. Isn't comedy nothing but tragedy plus time?

I sat down in that theatre ready to calculate what the gross earnings for a dead passenger would be from worldwide distribution if anyone actually thought to pay these people.

In true Hollywood style, lengthy lawsuits would mean they could finally - with any luck - get their dosh by the 10th anniversary of September 11.

These people deserved some. My detachment was decidedly restored.

But I was wrong, dead wrong. When the lights came up and we rose from our seats like passengers that were the lucky ones, I knew one thing for sure - the restrained artistry of this film explained more to me about the human condition than I could understand that day then or even until now.

It was not what I remembered that mattered. It was what I forgot that surprised me, collapsing my rebuilt ironic safeguard.

I'd forgotten that we are simply people trying to do our best in any given situation. We are not just dysfunctional military systems, or perverted political intelligence gone wrong, or disjointed communication networks, or one uniformly bad government.

We are people sitting on a plane thinking about whether they remembered to pay the phone bill or feed the fish.

We are individuals just trying to cope with circumstances that no one in their wildest nightmare could have ever dreamed would be put across their desk to solve that day.

For me, Paul Greengrass' faux documentary film deserves more than decent box-office returns or even Academy Award nominations. It took 111 minutes of art to remind me that in reality I had forgotten how to genuinely feel the pain of our disastrous trespasses.

The good intentions of so many are sometimes never enough. Maybe it's called forgiveness. I wonder if many of my countrymen had my pounding-heart reaction when the screen went black. It reminded me it was still there, like a rusted American Tin Man waiting for oil to allow him to move.

Ironic, isn't it? I had forgotten just how far my country has gone down this road with death - and that scared me into feeling alive.

* Tracey Barnett is an American journalist working in Auckland.