September 11, 2024
By Titus Techera
Sometime recently we came to the end of the era of 9/11 movies. Our politics have changed, as have the generations and the preferred technologies for entertainment. We are also ready, perhaps, even to forget that there was an attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, along with other iconic locations. So this is the right time for a review of the one moment in the 21st century so far when art and politics could come together for Americans.
The major productions that first confirmed this possibility were Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and Paul Greengrass’s United 93, which came out in 2006. They were both attempts to prove America undeserving of terrible suffering and to vindicate the American character while forcing audiences to relive the events of the day. We all saw 9/11 on TV, so cinema seems unusually fitting a medium for national memory. Since both films are based on real stories, they add the perception of truth to the emotional power of the storytelling.
Despite these promising origins, neither proved an American classic, nor even popular. Possibly because of their commercial failure, no one else even tried to reach such an artistic height. Instead, the moral power of that moment was squandered on therapy and fantasy. It’s worth looking at the way subsequent films distorted, so to speak, the American mind, because we are living with the consequences.
Therapy
Several movies made for adults only touch on 9/11 in a sentimental and therapeutic mood. A number of them nevertheless involved stars, as though stars had the power to bring people around to liking weak productions rather than being responsible for representing the typical and interesting parts of American character.
Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle starred in Reign Over Me (2007), a movie about grief and men losing their autonomy. Sandler plays a man who lost his family on 9/11 and has gone made, indulging boyish pursuits like music and computer games. Cheadle plays a successful dentist whose wife wants him to take up photography with her. They were once college roommates and meet again by accident, helping each other face these troubles. The beautiful interracial friendship is drowned in sentimentality. The man facing death learns nothing about what it means to be human; the man facing middle age and middle-class success in an increasingly feminine society blinks and forgets. 9/11 barely enters into this story, except as a pretext. That might not be so bad, except that the storytelling fails to take its characters seriously, too.
Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, in their turn, starred in the drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), as the parents of an autistic boy. If Reign Over Me was about a father losing his family, this is the correlative story of a boy losing his father on 9/11. Perhaps an autistic boy is the supreme object of sentimentality—certainly the Oscar nomination for Best Picture suggests the voters of the Academy felt that way. Still, the film was roundly booed in the press and the audience ignored it, despite the star power of its leads.
The story is all about the boy learning to process grief, reconciling himself to his mother’s love when previously his father had tried to turn life into a series of puzzles to draw the boy out of himself. He discovers in the process a magical New York[1] where people he interviews to solve a puzzle are very kind to him and his wish to receive something more from his dead father can come true. To call this mawkish would be to miss the point. The audience is supposed to undergo catharsis by being infantilized, reducing 9/11 to a topic to bring up in therapy. It’s really about getting over a traumatic experience, which the boy eventually does.
Reign Over Me and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close are both family dramas. Let us also consider a romance: Robert Pattinson, who now the titular The Batman but was then the heartthrob of Twilight, starred in Remember Me(2010). It is a story about a bunch of kids dealing with difficult adolescent years. Their parents are callous, cruel, distant, demanding. The romance of a girl whose mother was mugged and murdered in front of her and a boy whose brother committed suicide is already sordid. The bad taste reaches a new low when the young man dies in the North Tower.
It is obvious that none of these stories had anything essential to do with 9/11. They are attempts to reduce the most shocking event to something mundane. But what else could they be? We had no genres or artists available to deal with the matter more seriously. The most remarkable thing to learn from such movies, which might as well be pieces in our leading periodicals, is that no one in our “creative class” learned anything from the event.
They assumed that politics has to be reduced to something else, like psychological maladjustment or trauma. Nothing they saw or experienced changed their minds. Hence, their storytelling remained merely the adjunct of a tired ideology of self-improvement. It's worth comparing 9/11 movies to those dealing with previous wars, which had much greater political and artistic ambitions, a surer grasp of the American audience, and an interest in what brings people together in a common good, whether the story is of success or failure.
Fantasy
If therapeutic movies turned 9/11 into an occasion to “process” grief, fantasy movies instead turned out to be the arena for reliving the event.
The first production to attempt this was Spielberg in War of the Worlds (2005).Tom Cruise plays a working class man trying to save his family from an attack on America which his children liken to terrorism. Urban panic, a people reduced to lawlessness, and the daring American military are the revelations of the story, visions of the ways America was bound to change. The vehicle of that change is emphatically political activity to restore public order, the correlative to which is the protagonist’s reasserted authority as a father. One might disagree with this political vision, but an adaptation of H.G. Wells turned out to be a lot more thoughtful and sensitive than most of the attempts to tell realistic stories. Among other things, it emphasized the technological character of modern horror.
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises was also about terrorism. In Gotham, the problem is not that people become savage because of panic. Instead, they are not really supportive of political order because justice isn’t much a concern for them. The corruption of public institutions is a greater worry than an alien threat. Nor could the family be the level at which the problem of authority is raised. Perhaps because of its strong political interest, the movie was accused of fascism, a hysterical way of noticing that it's about restoring some kind of responsibility for public decisions and citizens of the legitimacy of authority, primarily the police.
Next came a pair of movies Nolan was involved with, but did not direct: Zack Snyder's Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. In this sequence, aliens again destroy Manhattan. But this time the alien is Superman and the reaction, what we called the War on Terror, is Batman’s attempt to kill Superman. The portrayal of manly leadership is unique, since fantasy is a heroic genre, but it mixes an element of sentimentality with an unusually bold insight.
Snyder also uses Superman to make people think about Jesus and therefore to bring the problem of religion to attention in a way no other movie dared. Snyder makes you wonder why religion has not played more of a role in our recent popular culture, given the remarkable passions stirred by 9/11 dealing with life and death, grief and justice. Superman embodies the idealized American character. Yet only such a ideal, in his separation from the ordinary people who become his audience, can confront all the problems that make them feel powerless. The movie then offers more self-knowledge than a solution.
Despite their old reputation as trashy entertainment, fantasy stories had more prestige than the therapeutic attempts to deal with 9/11 and were vastly more popular. Unlike Robert Pattinson’s character, they will be remembered for another generation. Yet it’s remarkable and not a little disturbing that only superhero movies attempted what stories for adults should have done.
One reason why artistic talent went into that genre may be the greater freedom to tell stories by, for, and about men. The only truly popular genre of the 21st century has proved to be the superhero, a vision of nerd and jock, tech and courage, united. This is the taste of adolescent boys and more artists have tried to cater to it than to any other.
One can also look to a certain innocence of the fantasy genre—no one takes it seriously, it’s somehow childish—which again enhances freedom. Comparatively serious art, whether intended for a broad or a selective audience, faces restraints of various kinds. Some are political, some are to do with what kind of psychological analyses are preferred, some are more matters of taste or rhetoric, the necessities of flattering the audience or the “creative class.” This is a complicated situation, but one thing of importance is clear: the attempt to properly articulate American politics was taken more seriously by fantasy movies than by "serious" genres.
But the difference between therapeutic and fantasy films was ultimately a matter of degree. Both offered what the therapeutic ethic demands: closure. The Marvel Universe movies specialized in this task, blowing up a major metropolis on 4,000 screens across the nation regularly, sometimes more than once a year. By watching caped crusades duke it out, America became comfortable with the fantasy of destruction. That’s therapy! Ultimately, that’s why we’re forgetting about 9/11.
From Larger than Life to Small Screen
Instead of cinema, terrorism and counter-terrorism became a much more popular spectacle on TV. It provided the perfect story for the Prestige TV era, from 24 (2001-2010) to Homeland (2011-2020). The difference between the shows tracks a changing political sensibility, gradually replacing the Bush-era violent manliness (torture in primetime to stop bombs from exploding) with a neurotic feminine correlative in the Obama years (the mentally disturbed CIA agent caught in webs of lies). The drift of such shows into fantasy again suggests a fundamental unseriousness. Despite its immediate impact, 9/11 did not change entertainment that much.
We are confronted all the time by the collapse of the common culture. To properly deal with it, we'd have to understand why we missed the opportunity presented by 9/11 to make worthy art, or perhaps it were better to say, why our creatives failed in or neglected their duty to the public. The only obvious way out of the problem would be to recover the common history of America as a theme. We can learn some important lessons from that failure and perhaps reorient talent to popular passions.
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.
Comments