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In the season three opener of HBO’s crime series, The Wire, audiences see something that strangely resembles the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Not only that, but they see in this scene and the broader narrative arc that encompasses it the politics of mourning and nostalgia which had, by then, imbued the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with a particular “metaphysical or national-political” meaning.[1]

As the episode begins, we see Bodie, Poot and Puddin walk into scene. They can be heard talking about the Franklin Terrace Towers. Having featured so prominently in the Barksdale’s drug empire in season one, the Franklin Towers are finally set for demolition. Baltimore Mayor, Clarence Royce, announces to local residents that the Towers, “which sadly came to represent some of this city’s most entrenched problems”, will give way to a “new Baltimore.”

As Royce details what the development will mean for the city as a whole, Bodie and Poot reminisce about the past, something which for Poot, more than Bodie, the Towers seem evocative of:

Poot: I dunno man, I mean I’m kinda sad. Them Towers be home to me.

Bodie: You gonna cry about a housing project now? Man, they shoulda blow them motherfuckers up a long time ago if you ask me.

Poot: Man, it ain’t always been bad. I mean I seen some shit up in them Towers that still make me smile, yo.

Bodie: You talkin’ steel and concrete man, steel and fuckin’ concrete.

Poot: No, I’m talkin’ about people, memories and shit.

Bodie: Ain’t the same.

Shortly after the boys arrive, Royce keys the destruction. They, along with those who have gathered, fall silent.

Before them, the Towers explode and then collapse, one after the other. Almost immediately, thick plumes of smoke and ash descend to street level, engulfing the spectators who have come to see the spectacle.

In her insightful analysis of this scene, Elizabeth Bonjean argues that “[a]s at-home viewers, we are voyeurs of this fictional event, yet instantly are transported back in time to 11 September 2001 when Americans – and the world – witnessed the collapsing World Trade Center Towers”.[2] Though the terrorist aspect is absent from this scene, the crumbling infrastructure of the Barksdale drug empire is very much as its centre – the war on drugs in this sense becoming an analogy for the war on terror. Indeed, both the war on drugs in The Wire and the war on terror in reality were brought to bear through the falling towers. The same smoke that descends from the Franklin Towers and engulfs the inhabitants of West Baltimore in The Wire had only just, a few years back, engulfed the residents of Manhattan, after the collapse of the World Trade Center. Though subtle, the allusions are nonetheless powerful.

In fact, just days before this episode went to air on 19 September, 2004, the governors of New York and New Jersey along with the Mayor of New York City had erected the cornerstone for the new Freedom Tower set to replace the World Trade Center at Ground Zero. A crucial feature of the design, it was agreed, was a memorial that would be erected to “honor and remember those who lost their lives” – a place of mourning and remembrance for the physical devastation, the loss of life and, perhaps most significantly, for the destruction of a world that had supposedly come to an end on 10 September, 2001. These things are important, as Poot conveys in The Wire. People, memories, the past: these are worthy of commemoration. And Poot, if not Bodie, is stricken to see them destroyed.

But nostalgia for the past can, through acts of public commemoration, transform that past into something which it was not.[3] Today, when we recall the collapse of the World Trade Center and the chain of events that followed in its aftermath, what is foremost in the minds of many is the world that was somehow altered, or even destroyed, on the morning of 11 September, 2001. In the years that followed, commemorating 9/11 became not just about remembering the senseless destruction of life. Nor was it solely about........

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