Twenty-four Years of '25th Hour'

Image Credit: Touchstone Pictures

By Arlen Fox-Helbig

There are satellite photos of September 12th, 2001 in New York City. A pale ominous cloud floats from Ground Zero, casting deep shadows on Jersey City and Hoboken. This year, we’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. As the stock phrase goes: 9/11 was a marker of the true start of the current century. 

I was upstate, staying at my parents’ house, helping my brother move. It was on my mind, so I brought it up to them. They were a pair of North Jersey Green Party members and education majors. In the fall of 2001, they were living upstate, working as teachers. “Was it anything like this?” I asked, referring to the current war in the Middle East.

“Very different,” said my mother, born in Georgia and raised in East Brunswick — the one-time mayor’s daughter. “We started from a happier, safer place before the tower attacks. It was a cultural loss of innocence — smashed in that moment of impact.”

“Bush Jr. was getting hepped up to attack somebody,” my father said, a carpenter/pianist/American history teacher of German stock from Dumont, NJ. “Propaganda about Saddam was everywhere. We had troops in Afghanistan already, I think.”

“American flags started being flown everywhere. The local paper published a paper flag in the centerfold, and everyone taped it up in their front window.” He said the paper was likely the Times Herald-Record, one published since 1956 in the areas north of Westchester, where they were then living.

Infamously numerous films were delayed and modified in the wake of 9/11. A poster for the then-upcoming Spider-Man depicted the hero from Queens suspended between the now-gone towers — it had to be hastily deleted.

One film in development at this time (and partly filmed at CCNY’s own Shepard Hall) was Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, based on the book of the same name by David Benioff. In the film, Edward Norton plays Monty, a drug dealer (the drug in particular is never specified, but it’s addictive and expensive) who was just busted by the DEA. He has 24 hours before he has to go to Otisville Correctional Facility for seven years. Him and his last few friends spend that last day together to say goodbye. He is forced to process his grief, overwhelming regret, and fears of what will happen inside the correctional.

It is a long film with an episodic structure and a tendency to linger in discomfort, a major contrast to Spike Lee’s style in films like 1989’s Do the Right Thing. Do the Right Thing was stylized, energetic, colorful, and fast. 25th Hour is washed instead in cloudy silver and grainy contrast, a little like Michael Radford’s bleach-bypassed Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The brightest colors are yellow streetlamps and the oppressive blue neon of the club scenes. It’s grungier, more heartbroken.

The shots are often static, flat, detached. This could easily become boring, but Spike Lee has clearly studied animation, a medium which uses static and flat angles expressively, and particularly the Japanese anime which was gaining popularity in America at the time. Shots are often huge ones where the actors’ faces are hard to see, leaving their expressions unseen. Their emotions are private, and the audience is almost a stranger. This is characteristic of contemporaneous anime like Shiro Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop. Bebop uses wide, flat, static shots because it is animation for TV, where perspective shots are difficult and expensive. Both in Bebop and 25th Hour, though, this technique takes focus away from the characters’ human emotions and onto the scale of the place in which these emotions play out. Human beings change. We grow old. The city just grows. It outlasts grief, regret.

The film is often criticized among Lee’s oeuvre for its focus on white, successful characters instead of the underclasses of color usually focused on in his art. In an industry where black filmmakers and stories are often passed over for yet more movies by and about white people, it seems like a mistake, a missed opportunity. Says Slant magazine: “Monty’s... just another successful white guy approaching middle age, the kind of ordinary chump that Lee usually mocks.”

This is further complicated by an iteration on the classic Do the Right Thing “y’all take a chill!” scene. Do the Right Thing’s original version was a semi-didactic demonstration of a variety of racist stereotypes of New Yorkers. Spike Lee remixes his own work, as it were, through a version of the rant delivered solo by Edward Norton into a mirror. Similarly, the meaning is mirrored. Do the Right Thing’s montage of racism served to condemn it. In 25th Hour, the rant is a montage as well. It is an expression of anger, self-loathing, a rage which comes from the pain of the collective trauma of 9/11, and both the character’s and Director Lee’s love for the city. His complaints with the ordinary people of the city are so detailed, so specific. A comparison point is David Bowie’s “Five Years”: “My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare / I had to cram so many things to store everything in there [...] I never thought I'd need so many people.” 

The soundtrack turns anthemic, up-tempo, and as Monty turns his rage towards his friends and finally himself, these feelings unmask themselves. The second stage of grief is anger, and Monty doesn’t have time to move forward. You can feel his grief. This scene is the heart of the film. It is even mirrored at the very end as Monty leaves the city like the Magic Rat in his sleek machine and watches as all the people of New York meet his eyes and seem to smile goodbye.

Monty’s last day provides structure. He is not the main character of the story, nor is his girlfriend or either one of his best friends. Monty’s eyes, and his last day, are the lens through which we view New York City, in a specific moment of its history. The film is a love story. As much as America has changed, and New York with it, the aspects of it worth loving haven’t gone anywhere. “From the row-houses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in Soho. From the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park Slope to the split-levels in Staten Island.”

My parents remember the Towers falling. I am of the first generation not to have any memory of this century-defining event. Films like 25th Hour are important for preserving the history - what that time felt like, what it meant to the people embroiled in it. This is why 25th Hour still matters today - 25 years after 9/11.

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Arlen Fox-Helbig is currently in her senior year of Anthropology at City College. She believes strongly in the importance of disseminating knowledge and critique for the benefit of society. When not studying she draws, writes, produces music, and performs in several bands in the New York City area as a songwriter, vocalist, and bassist.