[A] newly released documentary, The Outsider, expands upon Kennicott’s criticism by chronicling the debates among the museum staff about the very purpose of the project and ultimately takes the side of the titular outsider, a struggling novelist and classic New York eccentric named Michael Shulan, who served as the museum’s vaguely defined “creative director” prior to its opening.1
Meanwhile, what Shulan did for 9/11 photos, a married couple was simultaneously doing for 9/11 video footage. 2 In the weeks that followed, Rosenbaum and Yoder solicited more than 500 hours of 9/11 footage from ordinary New Yorkers, which became the basis for 7 Days in September, a critically acclaimed 2002 documentary. A few years later, they donated their archive to the 9/11 Museum in exchange for access to its planning process. Thus, between 2008 and the 2014 grand opening, they were able to film key staffers, including Shulan, deliberating and debating over every aspect of the eventual museum.
....
I am not unsympathetic to the challenge Greenwald and her team faced in trying to balance competing pressures from left and right, from different factions among victims’ families, from the interests of real-estate developers and the city’s financial elite (including former mayor Mike Bloomberg, a major funder), and from the perceived needs of both locals and tourists. As much as the memory of 9/11 has been exploited and abused, it was an actual, horrible thing that happened to the two cities I know best, New York and Washington; I was 17 at the time, and remember it all too well. With that in mind, last week I paid my $26 entry fee, and for the first time descended an escalator into the underground abyss where all the exhibits are contained, amid what were once the foundations of the World Trade Center complex.3
....
- 1. In the immediate wake of the attacks, Shulan decided to turn his Soho storefront into a crowdsourced gallery for photographs capturing the day’s horrors, and quickly amassed what might be the largest single collection of 9/11 imagery, dubbed “Here Is New York.” It was on the basis of this collection that Shulan was invited to join a staff of more seasoned museum professionals that also included Alice Greenwald, the museum’s current chief executive, who previously worked at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
- 2. In 2001, Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder were running Broadcast News Networks, a company they co-founded that made documentary features for TV news. On the day of the attacks, Rosenbaum directed their employees to journey downtown from their office on 28th Street and to “point their cameras in the opposite direction” from what most camera crews were filming — that is, away from the burning Twin Towers and toward the faces of bystanders reacting to an apocalyptic scene. “If you’re a filmmaker, and you think the world’s ending, which we did, you make a film,” Rosenbaum told me.
- 3. One of the first things I registered was the introductory text succinctly laying out what happened on 9/11: After establishing that nearly 3,000 people were killed when members of Al Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes, the text notes, “Approximately two billion people, almost one third of the world’s population, are estimated to have witnessed these horrific events directly or via television, radio and Internet broadcasts that day.” This last bit stands out, because it acknowledges something uncomfortable: that a central aspect of 9/11 was spectacle. The terrorists didn’t simply kill a lot of innocent people, they did so in a way that was mesmerizing on camera. The Onion captured this two weeks after the attacks with the memorable headline “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” — a recognition that the destruction of the Twin Towers was undeniably cinematic, and perhaps the single most inescapable mediated event the world has yet witnessed. Shulan describes it as having “a terrible beauty,” in a scene from The Outsider that the filmmakers say the museum wanted cut.
