Netflix’s latest ‘Turning Point’ shows how much America was changed by 9/11
The changes were chaotic at first. They were even terrifying for many. Then, they became more and more gradual. As time went on, many Americans went about their lives, barely registering the idea that the fabric of our society had taken a very deep, often dark turn. Netflix’s newest “Turning Point” reflects just how deep and gradual those changes were, in a new documentary, “Turning Point: Generation 9/11”
In his “Turning Point” series, Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger has produced some of the most insightful, interesting, and sometimes shocking cultural histories of the United States. He’s done deep dives into some of the most definitive moments in American History, including his multi-part series on the Vietnam War and another on the Cold War and atomic weapons.
What’s most interesting for military audiences, however, is that this is not the first time Knappenberger documented the 9/11 Attacks for the series. In a 2021 five-part limited series, he revisited the attacks as part of “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.”
“We did a five-part series for the 20th anniversary,” Knappenberger told We Are The Mighty. “It did well, and it was very interesting to watch the conversations about it online. I realized pretty quickly that there were people that didn’t really know what happened on 9/11. It was eye-opening because, like many so people, 9/11 changed my life and my career. It was hard to talk to anyone who didn’t live through it, who didn’t remember virtually every minute of that day.”
“It struck me that there were people who didn’t, and who didn’t learn about it in school,” he added. “Here we are, 25 years after 9/11, we’re gonna pretty soon reach a point where almost half of all Americans were either born after 9/11 or were too young to remember it. So this film really started as kind of respect for that experience.”
“The genesis of this film really came out of that, because I do think it was a profound turning point in world history,” he said. “It changed us as a country in so many ways. not just the day itself, but the decisions that were made in the days and weeks and years after.”
But who is Generation 9/11?
Knappenberger interviewed immigrants who were young adults, living and working in New York on that day, as well as family members and children of the victims of the attacks, barely old enough to remember their parents.
Laurel Homer was 10 months old when her father, an Air Force Academy graduate and co-pilot of United flight 93, was killed when passengers stopped the plane from hitting the U.S. Capitol Building, crashing in a field in Shanksville, Penn. She shares her lifelong grief and frustrating encounters with online conspiracy theorists.
An Nguyen was 4 years old when his father, Khang Ngoc Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant and government electrical engineer, gave him a final goodbye kiss before being killed in the Pentagon attack.
Then there’s Michael Smoak. He was just 5 years old on 9/11 and later joined the U.S. Marine Corps, eventually finding himself stationed at the Kabul airport during the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, when an ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. troops and numerous civilians at Abbey Gate.
“I feel like I am [Generation 9/11], because 9/11 certainly changed and altered who we are,” Knappenberger said. “I was in Afghanistan on the one year anniversary. That was one of my first films and I continued to make films about it, to kind of grapple with some of the issues that it brought to our society.”
But that’s just one sense. What Knappenberger and “Turning Point” are really getting at in this latest film is that the people who were either not born yet or too young to remember the events of that day are growing up in a world that was shaped by the decisions that were made in the days and weeks and years that followed.
Specifically, he means the decision to go to a 20-year war in Afghanistan, a subsequent war in Iraq, and the decisions that transformed law enforcement in American society. The September 11th Attacks led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the agencies that would later become ICE.
“You know, it vastly expanded government surveillance, starting this period of a mass, suspicionless dragnet surveillance that we live in now,” he said. “All of this was borne from that day. If you were an adult on 9/11, you remember a world where this stuff wasn’t happening. America after 9/11 was just a different country than the America that came before it. And for an entire generation, this is the only America that they’ve ever known.”
“I want people to understand what we went through that day, what that fear was like, how that fear fed some of the decisions that came after; not just justifying them by any means, but, to understand the context for what came after and how that changed us as a country. I think the effort here is to help them understand that so that maybe they don’t continue to lead us down such a dark path.”
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