The new Netflix production Generation 9/11 is one of those documentaries that tries to do too many things at once, but it finds some of its most affecting moments in interviews with the grown children of the dead. One young woman, Laurel Homer, pays moving homage to her father, fallen United 93 copilot LeRoy Homer. As a Zoomer, she feels singularly lonely in her grief. To the rest of her generation, the images of 9/11 are little more than irony-pilled meme fodder. These are not like the memes that were circulated in old email lists and printed out for preservation in the Library of Congress, the ones photoshopping George W. Bush and his staff into action movie posters or reshaping the Manhattan skyline as a middle finger. They’re the kind that depict Bush as Thanos making the towers disintegrate, or a pair of denim jeans with a burning tower on each leg. Or, among the milder ones, Andrew Card whispering in Bush’s ear with a spoonful of baby food: “Another plane incoming, sir.”
Laurel stands apart from her peers, unable to participate in this ritual. Even though she was too little to remember the day, her life has been indelibly marked by it, marked by the Real. But her peers inhabit an age of unreality.
The September 11 attacks marked the last time America experienced a world-historic news moment as a monoculture. The drama unfolded in real time on television screens across homes and schools, bars and offices, holding the country in spellbound horror. For children old enough to grasp what was occurring, the images were forever carved into their memory. More than any other cultural touchstone, it is the defining generational dividing line between millennials and Gen Z, between the generation that can still remember a world before YouTube and the iPhone and the generation that can’t.