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LOS ANGELES | Boy, did I open a can of worms this week at the TV critics’ press tour.
We were in a news conference with the producers and stars of “Rescue Me,†the great Denis Leary dramady about New York City firefighters that’s returning in April for a fifth season on FX.
In watching screeners of the upcoming episodes, I noticed the show drifting back to the 9/11 memories theme it explored at length in the first season. So I grabbed a microphone and asked a couple of actors about that.
One of them, Daniel Sunjata, has this fascinating scene where a French journalist is interviewing Franco, the firefighter he plays on “Rescue Me,†for a 10th-anniversary coffee table book about the 9/11 attacks.
“9/11? Inside job,†says Franco in the episode. “A massive neoconservative government effort, been in the works 20 years. Ever heard of PNAC? Project for a New American Century? According to them, the end goal of their effort is American global domination. Full spectrum dominance, they call it. Now, first question that pops into my mind is: How do you pull that off in this day and age?â€
Answer: You blow up the towers — though in the scene Sunjata states it much more elegantly and forcefully.
“I’m really gratified that they allowed that to be focused through my character,†Sunjata said at the news conference, “because I happen to subscribe to a lot of those theories and beliefs that 9/11 was an inside job.â€
Uh … what?
“You’re serious?†I said.
“Oh, absolutely, 100 percent, yeah,†he replied.
The show’s co-creator Peter Tolan piped up.
“That’s part of the reason why we wrote it, is because Danny is actually well-read and done a lot of research on this and has told us about it. And, you know, look, obviously not all of us buy in. But we went, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, and he’s passionate about it. Let’s use that.’ â€
Sunjata believes the 9/11 conspiracy theorists have “well-thought-out ideas and theories that seem to me to make a lot more sense than the ones that are popularly espoused.†He thinks just allowing the conversation to be held on the show “is admirable and should be applauded.â€
I’m not a fan of “9/11 was an inside job†theories, but I tend to agree that more discussion is needed, if only to discredit them. My problem with inside-job theories is that they unwittingly reflect the navel-gazing, insular, America-first viewpoint that I thought 9/11 was supposed to move us beyond. It’s all about us. Al-Qaida? They were in the tank for the neocons, somehow.
It’s a view that can be defended only by turning a deaf ear to the origins of modern terror, which — as Lawrence Wright masterfully details in his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 — stretch back 50 years to the persecution of radical Muslims by secular governments friendly to Western nations.