"The absence of your presence is everywhere."—Unknown

They were never the beautiful part of the Manhattan skyline. In fact, filmmakers sometimes went out of their way not to feature the World Trade Center's twin skyscrapers, always favoring the more aesthetically pleasing deco façades of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings over the drab majesty of their downtown counterparts.

You usually saw them in passing, under the opening titles of innumerable thrillers, courtroom dramas, caper comedies, and "love letters to New York"; the helicopter-mounted camera swooping in off the Hudson on its way, via a series of dissolves, past the ubiquitous monuments that defined the face of the world's most instantly recognizable city. But once the picture got going, the towers typically faded into the background, their severe functionality rising up from terraces against night skies or glimpsed in soft focus through high office windows, no more or less significant than any other thread in the fabric of celluloid New York. They meant what they meant.

Now, of course, they mean everything. And as the world scrambles to navigate the maze of sorrow, anger, and mystery that attends our new reality, entertainment companies are scrambling to erase all images of the World Trade Center from their forthcoming products. Films with even glancing reference to the buildings are being postponed (Sidewalks of New York) and re-edited (Collateral Damage), promotional campaigns are being airbrushed (Spider Man), skyline shots are being digitally doctored (Friends). And while the sensitivity is understandable (one wonders how bad they'd be freaking out if The Two Towers were on the way), the impulse to blur our collective visual memory is counterintuitive and cheap, a characteristically insulting and ineffectual attempt by the media industrial complex to filter tragedy.

But despite the best efforts of terrorists and corporate Hollywood, the World Trade Center cannot be expunged from the cinematic record. Quite the contrary: Much as actors who die too young retroactively overwhelm the pictures they acted in, those buildings will now become the star of every film in which they appear. Furthermore, their appearance will transform the film, no matter how inane or innocuous, into an unshakable reminder of the day that the first great cataclysm of the 21st century finally pulled America into the harsh reality of the 20th. The films will be haunted forever by ghosts of steel and glass.

It should be noted that those ghosts—being ghosts—aren't necessarily easy to find. It was difficult to recall many films that feature the towers as anything more than skyline. But even as backdrop, in something as forgettable as The Butcher's Wife (a 1991 Demi Moore vehicle in which the grating ex-star plays a blond-tressed Carolina clairvoyant recently transplanted to Greenwich Village), the buildings' presence behind the cloying rooftop courtship between Moore and Jeff Daniels causes the mediocrity of the film around them to melt into poignant reverie. A single shot of the towers is all you get in the midnight perennial Liquid Sky (1982), but that shot now transcends the punker junkie sci-fi freakshow that contains it. Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) never luxuriates on the WTC, but the towers are a recurring motif, looming like totems over the wretched greed of virulent capitalism.

Sometimes they're far more prominent, as in the recently withdrawn teaser trailer for the upcoming Sam Raimi film of Spider Man, which culminated in a criminal getting stuck in a mammoth web of digital goo that stretched between the buildings. But in most cases, that prominence is limited to a single, defining scene in which the power of the architecture is hammered home by painful, unforeseeably prophetic irony.

In the ungodly Godspell (1973), a gaggle of ragamuffin hippie Jesus freaks dance on the roof while singing a song called "All for the Best," a duet between Jesus and Judas that contains the following lines: "Some men are born to live at ease, doing what they please/Richer than the bees are in honey.../ best at making mountains of money.../ Don't forget that when you get to Heaven you'll be blessed!/Yes, it's all for the (you must never be distressed)/Yes, it's all for the (someone's got to be oppressed!)/Yes, it's all for the best!" The camera pulls back to reveal all the sunlit glory of an unpopulated Manhattan behind them, before coming to an abrupt stop on a full shot of the two towers from across the water.

Aftershock, a schlocky 1999 TV movie about an earthquake that levels Manhattan, finds a woman surveying the wreckage from a helicopter. Over the radio, she reassures her boss that "the twin towers are still standing." They're pretty much the only buildings intact.

John Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981) offers an NYC that's been turned into an unguarded penal colony where the criminals are left to fend for themselves. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) infiltrates the city by landing a small plane atop the north tower. Even though the building is mainly represented by models and primitive computer graphics, it's undeniably harrowing to see an aircraft--no matter how small--zeroing in.

Dino De Laurentiis' 1976 remake of King Kong shifts the setting of the big ape's climactic climb from the Empire State Building to the then-novel Trade Center. Again, the effects are shoddy and fake-looking, but when the helicopters start exploding against the side of the building, the association is jarring.

Perhaps the most poetic use of the towers occurs at the end of the excellent 1998 documentary The Cruise, which profiles a mentally unstable yet intellectually agile tour guide named Timothy "Speed" Levitch. After expounding upon the arcane history of New York City for most of the film, Levitch stands between the towers, spins himself around and around, then stops and looks straight up. The gargantuan, immovable monoliths revolve around him, bending to his dizzy perception; nowhere can be found a more perfect representation of the merger of man and city.

No one's running out to rent these films simply because they contain footage of martyred skyscrapers, especially now. The recentness of the tragedy is a more likely cause for the morbid impact of these essentially transitory moments in essentially trashy films. But film lingers. You may be in a hotel room 10, 20, 30 years from now, long after the rubble of the coming holy war has been cleared away, and stumble by chance across one of these movies on late-night TV. And when you do, you will remember.

The most famous montage of New York architecture in the history of film occurs in the opening minutes of Woody Allen's Manhattan. Set to the glory of Gershwin, it seems almost every building, park, and storefront in the city is lovingly rendered in timeless black and white. Scanning the sequence now, the World Trade Center-- glimpsed momentarily, uncertainly, in a foggy silhouette--seems conspicuously absent. This is fitting, of course, not only because the other structures are more beautiful, but because "conspicuously absent" is precisely what the towers are destined to remain for a long time to come.