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This chapter examines the cultural narratives of four films that have been made about United Airlines Flight 93: Flight 93, United 93, The Flight That Fought Back, and Portrait of Courage: The Untold Story of Flight 93. All four films were produced by different groups of people with varying authorial and commercial interests and goals, but they have one thing in common: each attempts to tell viewers the truth about the events that took place on Flight 93's final voyage. Peter Markles, the director of Flight 93, characterized his artistic goal as the production of “something that spoke the truth.” Paul Greengrass, who directed United 93, exudes a similar confidence about the veracity of his film's perspective. The Flight That Fought Back, directed by Bruce Goodison and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, features interview footage with family members of Flight 93 passengers and crew and various other sources. Portrait of Courage is based in part on Deena Burnett's Fighting Back, which presents a decidedly culturally conservative vision of the meaning of 9/11.

This book examines the mythology of the United Airlines Flight 93 disaster in America's collective consciousness. Flight 93 was the fourth plane hijacked in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and it eventually crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Drawing on the basic intellectual framework created by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss nearly 100 years ago, the book explores the myth of Flight 93 and its relationship to the myth of America. It shows how the myth of Flight 93 is articulated in news coverage of the crash, in books and films about the flight and its passengers, and in the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel and the Flight 93 National Memorial erected at the crash site in Shanksville. The book analyzes the various sites in which the narratives, collective memory, and meaning of Flight 93 have been produced and are constantly being reproduced.

This chapter focuses on the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel in Shanksville as a commemoration of United Airlines Flight 93. It first provides the narrative on the origin of the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel before discussing some of the meanings being associated with the chapel, in the form of possible or likely readings of its symbolism in the context of the broader American culture. It then considers how people interact with the symbolic material at the chapel and how these interactions change the meanings that emerge from the symbols. It also explores the cultural narrative at work in the chapel, with particular emphasis on how dead bodies and their representations, even if they are not the bodies of heroes, acquire special symbolic importance. The chapter suggests that the basic meaning of the American flags present in the chapel is tied into the sacrificial death and transfiguration of the hero.

This chapter explores the cultural narratives of the biographical books written about some of the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93. The books, largely written by family members, about passengers on Flight 93 both can be classified as coherent and only slightly differing versions of an American hero myth. Only four of the passengers have been the subject of such “lives of the hero” books: Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett Jr., and Jeremy Glick, whose deaths are described as having been signaled in advance in some form of supernatural premonition or other mystically significant occurrences that demonstrate the hand of God in the events of 9/11. This chapter considers the emergence of 9/11 heroism and hero myth, with particular reference to the Flight 93 heroes and their depiction as adhering to highly traditional and conservative visions of values and moral purity. It also examines the emergence of the Christian hero-martyr in the popular literature on Flight 93 passengers.

This chapter explores the spontaneous, individualized memorialization of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville. It first examines the symbolic material that makes “The End of Serenity”—a photograph taken by a woman of the immediate aftermath of the Flight 93 crash—work by focusing on what the mythologist Gilbert Durand called anthropological archetypology. It then considers alternative narratives concerning Flight 93 that rely on elements of the American social imaginary rooted in populist distrust of official and state power. It also provides an overview of public participation in the local memorialization work that began in Shanksville immediately after the Flight 93 crash, along with the role of flags in the symbolic and mythological work around the Flight 93 temporary memorial. Finally, the chapter reflects on the speeches made during the annual marking of 9/11 in 2008 and 2011.

This chapter considers two feature films—United 93 and World Trade Center—that present 9/11 through the eyes of individuals who had direct experience of the attacks. United 93 (2006) depicts the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93, one of the four planes taken on 9/11. The passengers' actions to overpower the terrorists and take control of the plane were subject to specific constructions of national identity, with a Newsweek article celebrating the men of Flight 93 as a ‘group of citizen soldiers who rose up, like their forefathers, to defy tyranny’. World Trade Center was released four weeks after United 93's theatrical run ended. It is based on the story of Portland Authority police officers, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, who volunteered to help with the evacuation of the World Trade Center, and were buried alive when the South Tower collapsed.

This chapter reflects on what the memorialization of United Airlines Flight 93 symbolizes about American culture and society in the objective moment of crisis it is currently experiencing. More specifically, it explores the American cultural effort to propagate a mythology of national identity and heroism of the sort evident in the Flight 93 memorialization work. Citing evidence in the Flight 93 myth, the chapter suggests that the American civil religion is alive and well and continues to operate in morally complex ways. It considers how this set of mythical narratives and symbols about American identity continues to drive much cultural work and meaning-making, and especially that which is evoked by events of mass catastrophe and death such as those of 9/11. It argues that the intent of Flight 93 mythologization is to help us forget our vulnerability and our weakness and to thereby return as quickly as possible to our normal lives after the disaster.

In this chapter, the author offers impressions of visitors to the temporary memorial site in Shanksville for United Airlines Flight 93 based on the interviews he conducted during the summer and fall of 2009. In particular, he examines how the various elements of the Flight 93 narrative and memorialization process were understood by people who visited the site. His goal was to determine how the signs at the temporary memorial were actually interpreted by those who came there. He describes the physical layout of the memorial site and its general manner of access by visitors, along with the visitors' opinions about the permanent memorial design. He also considers the memorial visitors' sense of the role played by religion in the events of 9/11, and specifically of the crash of Flight 93, and their aftermath. Finally, he discusses the role of the Ambassadors from the National Park Service in shaping visitors' response and interpretation of what they saw at the site.

This chapter explores the cultural question of death and the American response to it in order to understand the meaning of the United Airlines Flight 93 disaster, with particular emphasis on the memorialization of catastrophic death. It begins with an overview of how death as a social reality is perceived by different cultures and civilizations, noting the difficulty of understanding death as a cultural fact. It then looks at examples that demonstrate the nearly unbearable solitude of the dying in some cultural settings and goes on to discuss death's place in American culture. It also considers the risks associated with catastrophic death, along with American public memorials to catastrophic death. Finally, it reflects on Flight 93 memorial sites within the context of the so-called dark tourism.