Celluloid Confetti

Conspiracy theories make for great movies, but lousy documentaries.

I realised this while I was watching a short video produced by Purdue university which simulates the physical impact of the flight that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11.

You can see the video itself on YouTube here and you can read more about the simulation here.

The video itself is short and to the point, and I thought it was very informative, but what caught my eye were the large numbers of comments users had posted on the YouTube website, roughly two out of three of which branded Perdue’s (somewhat innocuous) footage as being part of some great government conspiracy.

The idea, it seems, is that whilst plane-shaped objects may or may not have hit the two towers of the World Trade Centre, their collapse was actually caused by a controlled demolition, part of a government conspiracy to spark a war in the Middle East and cause really long queues in airports.

(As far as I can see, this theory is the equivalent of saying that, whilst Lee Harvey Oswald did indeed shoot Kennedy in the head, the only reason the President died was because the CIA had surreptitiously planted a bomb in his brain)

If you are interested, you can experience most of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 in a made-for-the-web documentary, Loose Change. First released in 2005, it has been subsequently re-edited, and a wider release is threatened for later this year.

(You can see the current version of Loose Change here, or view an annotated version here which does a much better job than I ever could at debunking the filmmakers’ claims)

Without wanting to criticise what is a slick and entertaining effort from some talented and passionate youngsters, Loose Change is a great big simmering load of horlicks.

Apparently, it started out as a student film project about a fictional 9/11 conspiracy, but along the way transmogrified into a documentary about the real event.

It’s a crying shame, because Loose Change would have made a fantastic feature film, like one of those great 70s paranoia flicks such as Three Days of the Condor (1975), The China Syndrome (1979) and The Parallax View (1974), but instead of Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Jane Fonda running round wearing pastel trouser suits and panicked expressions, it would be all about potato-shaped internet nerds writing really angry messages in chat rooms.

Thanks to sites such YouTube, the internet is a great opportunity for documentary makers and filmmakers alike to get started. The problems start when they get their genres crossed.