‘Led us down such a dark path’: documentary explores how 9/11 changed America

“When I do that math, I get to the bomb at Hiroshima – that’s how distant it is,” says Brian Knappenberger, 56, director of a new Netflix documentary, Turning Point: Generation 9/11. “When we talk about the second world war, for our generation it seemed like a long time ago but, for the current generation of 20-year-olds, that’s how long ago it was.”

Having previously made series about the “war on terror”, cold war and Vietnam war, Knappenberger felt compelled to address a generation for whom 9/11 is an abstraction they might find in a school history textbook, a solemn annual ceremony or, most disorientingly, a meme circulating on TikTok and Instagram.

Speaking via Google Meet from Los Angeles, he adds: “This film is coming from a place of respecting that experience, not assuming that people understand what it felt like to live through 9/11, which is so ingrained to those of us that did. It’s to illustrate not just what terrorism meant and how frightening that was but also how the decisions made in the days and weeks and years that followed – maybe more than the events themselves – changed us as a country.”

Indeed, Knappenberger’s film captures a paradox: even as 9/11 fades from living memory, we are still living in a vividly 9/11 world. “We are at a place where it is moving into distant history. But I would like people to understand what we went through and record in a documentary what those decisions did to us – and ask what kind of country we want to be.”

Turning Point: Generation 9/11 follows in a long line of documentaries recounting the horror of a day that killed nearly 3,000 people: the morning TV shows jarringly interrupted, the trapped office workers, the final phone calls, the heroic firefighters, the falling towers, the dust-coated commuters, the sombre presidential address.

For older generations, it is a day when everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing. “9/11 changed my life,” Knappenberger reflects. “It changed how I saw the world. It changed how I saw the political system in the United States. It changed the course of my career. It’s hard to even describe with hindsight how profound of a change this was.”

But for anyone born in the late 1990s or later, 9/11 feels like an inheritance. The documentary focuses on young people whose entire lives were directly shaped by the catastrophe. Among them is Laurel Homer, whose father, LeRoy Homer, was the co-pilot of United Flight 93. Laurel was just 10 months old when her father and passengers fought back against hijackers over Shanksville. In the film, she describes feeling like “collateral” in a narrative that consumed her family.

She confides: “I know he was a hero but I wish he didn’t have to be … My entire life was kind of built around this. I’m just still struggling so much and it has taken over, like, my whole life.” Grieving a father she never knew, Laurel finds herself confronting strangers online who send callous direct messages or peddle conspiracy theories claiming the tragedy was an elaborate inside job.

There is also An Nguyen, whose father, Khang Nguyen – an immigrant who grew up amid the Vietnam war before emigrating to the US – was killed while working as an electrical engineer at the Pentagon. An was four years old when his father ran out to kiss him goodbye at the preschool bus on that Tuesday morning, never to return.

Knappenberger observes: “It’s incredibly profound to understand what the children of people who lost their parents, lost their loved ones on 9/11, went through on those days. But it’s more profound when you think about how it changed their lives and those events have stayed with them through the evolution that our country also went through.”

To view the modern US information ecosystem through the eyes of these families exposes the depth of contemporary political cynicism, he continues. There has been “memeification” of the event, where conspiracy theories and jokes about Osama bin Laden or George W Bush circulate on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

More perniciously, the “truther” movement rejects the official account of 9/11 in favour of conspiracy theories, including that it was orchestrated by the US government itself.

The director says: “9/11 gave birth to the truther movement – this incredibly dark movement that rises in a disinformation environment, claiming 9/11 wasn’t real or that jet fuel can’t burn steel, that it was an inside job. When you look at these disinformation campaigns through the eyes of children who actually lost loved ones, that makes it even more profound and telling.”

Knappenberger traces a thread from early conspiracy theories to today’s fractured political reality. “There is a direct line from the early 9/11 truther movement through all of the rise of conspiracy theories online, and a direct connection from that to figures like Alex Jones, who became a leading figure in the movement, all the way through the disinformation and misinformation that we see now that divides and tears our country apart.”

The timing proved fateful. Facebook launched in 2004, Reddit in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. “These platforms were coming of age right in the shadow of 9/11 and so you had this massive rise of conspiracy theories and this new technology and ways we’re communicating on social media happening at the same time. I don’t think you can separate these things. The truther movement is an early predecessor to some of the chaotic world of misinformation that we see now.”

The domestic fallout of September 11 was not confined to the internet. The film tracks how the institutional apparatus constructed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks permanently al