Conspiracy failure

Loose Change: Final Cut is a documentary – in the weakest sense of the word – that paints the events of 9/11 against the background of a massive government cover-up. At its core what the film alleges is that the US government orchestrated the events behind the catastrophes on that day – the collapse of the twin towers, the Pentagon crash and the United 93 crash in Shanksville – so that the government could then justify whatever it wanted to do from there on in (the Iraq war, the Patriot Acts etc…)

The filmmakers give their own take on the four incidents, as well as a sketchy background to the hijackers, all tied up together with soundbites from a bunch of ‘experts’. Given the nature of the material in question, and the rapidity at which Loose Change presents it, it is hard not to be drawn in. Whether knowingly or not, LC:FC is all about suckering an emotional response out of you. It concentrates shocking material on your eyes, but it disassociates the message behind it, thus misinterpreting the material to a different end. It’s almost hypnotizing, and because of this it’s no surprise that it has gained a cult following numbering in the thousands.

LC:FC capitalizes on reports, footage and comments made on the day or the day after the events of September 11th, ideally when everybody at the time was in a height of confusion, grief or worse. From this, the creators Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas (the researcher/producer, and one who believes the Apollo moon landings were faked) weave a tale of spiralling fantasy. Avery himself even admits that Loose Change started out as a work of fiction, but as the “research” progressed they became ever more convinced of their theories. Prior to Loose Change: Final Cut there were two prequels: Loose Change and Loose Change 2nd Edition, and with each version the content has varied dramatically, which could probably be seen as an attempt to distance itself from its farcical beginnings. Yet in spite of revelations in the subsequent months and years after the attacks, LC:FC, much like its prequels, still falls back on night-before, morning-after footage, cherry-picking what fits the fiction.

Exacerbating the issue of the narrow timeframe are the sources for the comments and “investigations” themselves. People who had nothing to do with the structural engineering of any of the buildings hit, or anything to do with aviation at all, make the majority of third-party comments. Some of them are even fellow conspiracy theorists trying to further their own agenda. The creators handily ignore investigation reports that took three years and millions of dollars, and instead experienced hacks are called in to give flawed, cack-handed attempts at explaining the discrepancies. Witness accounts used turn out to be from people standing at a considerable distance; squinting at planes that were travelling at over 500 mph. Dozens of other witness accounts confirming the opposite are overlooked.

That’s the problem with conspiracy theories. All any budding theorist needs is just one little inconsistency and it explodes. Like a badly written essay, they pounce on one thing and totally miss the bigger picture. Take for instance the film’s biggest claim: the Twin Towers were brought down by a controlled demolition, as “fire and gravity alone could not account for the collapse”. In one sense, they are absolutely right. Joe Bloggs setting off a fire on the south tower's 78th floor probably wouldn’t have done more than scorch the ceilings and ruin a lot of furniture. Instead, the film grossly ignores the fact that a Boeing 767, weighing over 150 tonnes and travelling at roughly 530 mph, slammed straight into the building.

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Can’t visualize it? Okay, think of a regular football and a double glazed window on your house. Now, this ball could easily bounce absentmindedly off the window without fear of breaking it, but were you to punt the ball as hard as possible, you would likely smash it and upset your mother. Look at the difference in damage to a car when it gets rear-ended at 10mph at the traffic lights, and what a brick wall looks like after a head-on collision at 70mph. Now, if you can, multiply that several million times in your head: that’s what happened to the Twin Towers. The planes ripped the building’s emergency sprinkler systems apart and blasted the fireproofing off the walls. Gallons of jet fuel flamed their way down elevator shafts, causing electrical generators to explode further in the building. Eventually the heat from the fires reached temperatures hot enough to cause the steel to lose its strength and fail to support the millions of tonnes above it.

Despite being a load of bunkum, a ridiculously large following has appeared: the so-called “Truth” movement. Look at Loose Change’s official site (loosechange911.com) and you’ll see millions of hits on the counter. Check out the site’s forums and chatrooms and, slowly but surely, you'll begin to see the darker side of Loose Change. Take enough time and you can find plenty of disgusting anti-Semitic remarks made by the “Truthers”. Unless you’re new to conspiracy theories, this is how most of them tend to end up – a David Icke-esque diatribe at anyone remotely Jewish, because, clearly, it’s all some big Zionist scheme, and the rest of us who don’t realise it are affectionately labelled as ‘sheeple’.

The only upside to this is that you don’t have to pay anything to watch LC:FC. Both Google and YouTube happily host it, so if you’ve got nothing better to do, or want to dodge something you should be doing, Loose Change can fill that two-hour gap. But you really shouldn’t, because if you disregard the content and take it from a critic’s point of view, LC:FC is a very poorly produced documentary. There’s no coherent structure to the jumble of archive footage, the sound quality in most places is horrible, the fact that it uses Microsoft Flight Simulator is laughable, and the sneering narration by Dylan Avery ends up giving the impression that instead of remembering the victims of 9/11, he is selfishly trying to keep the movement’s position in the public eye. Indeed his tone throughout is frighteningly similar to the narration used in attack broadcasts between rival political parties, and were he not so fervently against the US administration, he could easily make a living producing campaign advertising for the upcoming elections.

By Ben Glover

Photo: Ben Glover