Almost a cliche – even during its immediate aftermath – the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was, according to eyewitnesses and witnesses of the television, like a film. In their struggle to articulate the unimaginable that they saw, individuals would repeatedly compare that horror of burning and collapsing buildings to the disaster films that have become Hollywood currency in recent decades. Meanwhile, producers of films shot in New York just prior to that time scurried and struggled over decisions to edit out background images of the Twin Towers – to erase those visual reminders of a real, and, for many, unbearable, absence.

Five years later, we now begin to see what promises to be a steady stream of films about the 9/11 attack, a typically delayed effort to recuperate on some level that massively traumatic event which – as the common complaint that it is too soon indicates – only after enough time may be seen again. Movies like United 93 (2006), Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) and Paul Haggis’s forthcoming adaptation of Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies join a growing number of films now attempting to return to, resurrect and reframe those images that have defined and haunted the popular imagination and public memory for five years. Recognized immediately as cinematic, the events of 9/11 now return again and again to the cinema and television screen as either some kind of testimony – or, perhaps, exorcism.

Because of their love of the spectacular and their mass appeal, movies have always turned natural and historical disasters and political upheavals into public entertainments that often function also as public forums. Since 1895, earthquakes, assassinations and mass crashes have attracted filmmakers and viewers as ways to define and consider the personal and social terms of what it means to be human. Indeed, war films especially have acted out these efforts to grapple with personal and social trauma, and the events of 9/11 and the films that depict it are of course also and inseparably about a war that continues today.

Disaster films and war films have been a staple of film history, from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to Saving Private Ryan (1998). In all these cases, narrative feature films don’t offer especially real or accurate depictions of the facts of loss and suffering (newsreels and some documentaries usually claim more realistic images). Yet, it may be precisely the narrative and fictional reworking of those tragedies that becomes their most important and even therapeutic advantage.

In the cycle of repetitious films surfacing as years give us distance on the event, we often find cinematic displacements of images that have become too disturbing to see and watch in reality but which beg to be seen and understood in the framework of film fantasies and fictions that can better address the psychological and emotional fabric of that reality. For me, these movies are ultimately better or worse not because they more or less accurately portray that lingering trauma of a public nightmare but when they adequately and imaginatively struggle with the complexity of portraying that trauma as a profound difficulty to see and to understand.

Understanding what we dread to look at is, needless to say, an enormous challenge for a filmmaker and a film viewer alike. With films about historical traumas and wars, we are constantly tempted to drift into a passivity of voyeuristic fascination, a kind of unacknowledged admissions that all we can do is watch. The movies have an oblique and fragile access to historical events across the complexities of the personal and the political.

Yet, especially with public traumas like 9/11, the multiple, contravening public images that sometimes immediately and sometimes very slowly follow those crises become, at best, critical forums not for recognition of a truth but for an active reflection and debate, a reflection and debate not about the performance of an actor or the success of a special effect but about the unseen or unacknowledged history that waivers on the edges of every film frame.

In her 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster, Susan Sontag writes about science-fiction films, made in the 1940s and 1950s, in terms that I believe we should keep in mind as we watch the growing number of films that have started to appear about 9/11 and the Iraq war. In their relentless redundancy and often questionable quality, these films tell us, Sontag argues, that we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. Now, as then, the imagery of disaster – is above all the emblem of an inadequate response – of the inadequacy of most people’s response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness.

And it’s this inevitable inadequacy found in the 9/11 movies today that we’d do well to turn into serious thought and action.