The events of September 11, 2001 caused a rupture not only in the normal order of things, but also, and perhaps especially, in the signifying systems underwriting that order. The Naudet brothers’ remarkable 9/11 documentary, which aired on CBS on March 10, 2002 and on TV stations around the world on the first anniversary of the attacks, seeks to re-institute the authority of the conventions and constructions of a culture whose limits the events of September 11 had painfully exposed. The film – entitled 9/11 – is marked by a fundamental tension between the revelation of an abysmal crisis of meaning on the one hand and the desire to bring this crisis under control on the other. The film-makers attempt to mitigate the traumatic potential of their unique atrocity footage by sanitizing it and integrating it into a Hollywood-style coming-of-age drama tracing a probationary firefighter’s perilous journey from innocence to experience. Thus, the focus shifts from a disorienting and overwhelming sense of loss to comforting, ideologically charged notions of heroism and community which perpetuate an idealized national self-image and come to function as a moral justification for retaliation. In its drive to obtain mastery over trauma by rendering it legible in terms of existing cultural codes, 9/11 appears to disregard what Cathy Caruth calls “the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” (154). Yet, for all its investment in a classical realist aesthetic, the film remains haunted by a traumatic history that exceeds and breaks down accustomed habits of thought, narration and visualization.