Reflecting on Twin Towers’ Cameo in a 2000 Romcom

My Netflix DVD queue contains 47 movie titles. At a rate of about one viewing per week, it would take almost a year to get through my whole list, if I weren’t always growing it. Often, I’ll add a movie and shoot it directly to the top. The list remains roughly the same length, and it contains many movies that linger until they eventually bubble up, often with me having no recollection of why they were added in the first place.

This happened last week with the arrival of Keeping the Faith, a 2000 movie starring Ben Stiller, Edward Norton, and Jenna Elfman. It’s about a priest and a rabbi, lifelong friends, who both fall in love with a woman they knew as young boys.

The movie is set in Manhattan, and as one of the scenes showed the New York skyline, I said, “Wow, the twin towers were still standing then.” It seemed strange to see the World Trade Center buildings towering over the city once again.

At that point, my attention shifted from the movie to reflection about those towers. It occurred to me that many of the people who were inside them, during the movie’s 1999 filming, perished two years later. Furthermore, some of the victims might have sat in a darkened movie theater in 2000, watching this very same movie. When they spotted the towers, they might have looked upon the scene and thought, “I work there.”

In 2000, even though the World Trade Center had already been the target of a smaller attack, we were more innocent than we are today. We hadn’t yet watched the unthinkable. We hadn’t seen gruesome images of humans being murdered, one on one. We hadn’t become terrified of one certain religion.

In Keeping the Faith, the rabbi and priest plan an interfaith community center. The end of the movie depicts the celebration of the center’s debut, complete with karaoke, a lively comingling of Catholic and Jewish culture. This seemed like a quite an accomplishment in 2000. . .

–Ann Silverthorn