We believed, briefly, that movies were going to be less frivolous. We believed, briefly, that movies were going to be less violent. And if it didn’t happen right away, we reminded ourselves to be patient: making movies takes a long time, and it could be as much as 18 months before we noticed anything had changed.
Now here we are, two years later, squarely in the post-9/11 era. If you see a movie now, there’s no longer any question that it originated after the Twin Towers came down. And this past summer, it seemed like there were whole movies that stood as direct arguments against all those things we believed back in the fall of 2001. Movies will become less frivolous? “Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle.” Movies will become less violent? “Bad Boys 2.” It’s not important that those movies weren’t smash hits. They did well enough, and what’s more important is that Hollywood believed, post-9/11, that such movies were what American audiences wanted. If Hollywood’s beliefs about us haven’t changed, then regardless of whether they’re right or wrong, the movies won’t change either.
And let me be the first to say, amen. As someone who sees an unhealthy amount of movies every year, I want them to be wonderful and terrible, innovative and derivative, thoughtful and brainless in the same proportion as they’ve always been. I don’t want Hollywood wantonly deciding that I no longer enjoy watching violence or frivolity. I want Hollywood off balance, stabbing in the dark. I want Hollywood puzzled by me and perplexed by you. Art often happens by accident, anyway, not by design–especially when money and movie studios are involved.
That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m not disappointed in the movie industry’s response to 9/11. This is, after all, the formative event of this era, and what have filmmakers and Hollywood studios done with it so far? Nothing. Zilch. Sure, Spike Lee did pretend that his last movie, “The 25th Hour,” was, in some vague way that I’ll need Spike himself to explain, about 9/11. He even shot scenes overlooking Ground Zero–as far as I know, it’s the only studio movie to do so. And several talented international filmmakers (including Ken Loach, Mira Nair and Danis Tanovic) contributed segments to the high-concept “11'09"01,” a fugue of short films about the terrorist attacks. But hardly anyone saw it and Hollywood had nothing to do with the project. For the most part, Hollywood’s chief response to 9/11 has been to embarrass itself by cleansing its products of images of the Twin Towers. All of a sudden, studio executives (of all people!) had appointed themselves in loco parentis for Americans and decided that we just couldn’t bear the sight. Where were they when Michael Bay started blowing apart cadavers in “Bad Boys 2”? Why couldn’t someone cleanse that?
Even more embarrassing to the film industry, though, and, in the long run, perhaps more damaging, is the way television stepped in and took up the mantle of artistic bravery. If it was sacrilegious before 9/11 to suggest that television was surpassing film as popular culture’s freshest medium, it’s practically a no-brainer by now. If you’re looking for challenging thinking and of-the-moment entertainment, TV has become the destination. It’s given us nearly all of our best 9/11 storytelling so far–let’s be honest, is anyone still listening to that Springsteen CD?–and our only two artifacts for the time capsule.
The first is Fox’s Emmy-nominated drama “24,” starring Kiefer Sutherland as a counterterrorism specialist–the first post-9/11 TV franchise. Debuting just a few months after the attacks, the series vividly tackled Islamist terrorism and nuclear holocaust in its second season. Hollywood, by contrast, released a film featuring a nuclear attack, “The Sum of All Fears,” during the summer of 2002–and, ridiculously, made the culprits a troupe of neo-Nazis. (This is Hollywood at its very worst: by refusing to be honest about terrorism and choosing the most inoffensive villain possible, the filmmakers basically admitted that their enterprise was entirely commercial, and not at all serious. In other words, they were milking all of our fears for the greatest sum possible.)
The second is a single episode of the HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which Larry David, who plays himself on the show, ruins a charity benefit and alienates his wife and friends when he helps spread a false rumor about a terrorist attack on Los Angeles. The episode, which premiered late last year, was daring and brilliant: it asked, hilariously, what are the rules of etiquette governing fears of terrorism? What if you want to leave town but your wife doesn’t? Can you go without her? At what point does a rumored attack become sufficient grounds to skip a social engagement? If you hear a rumor about a terrorist attack in advance–and you’re told to keep silent to avoid a panic–what happens when your friends learn that you didn’t warn them? Instead of pretending this new anxiety in our daily lives didn’t exist, David did what real artists do: he made it a part of his art.
So where are all the artists in the movie business? It wouldn’t be fair to blame this dropped ball solely on Hollywood. We’ve come to expect the real statements from independent film–and that world hasn’t made much of a peep about 9/11, either. Only documentaries have tackled 9/11 in great detail, which is admirable but unsurprising: it was the most documented cataclysmic event in human history. The preponderance of documentaries is just more fodder for the notion that filmmakers are still uncomfortable telling stories (the made-up kind) about what happened. That’s a shame. But then again, there’s no rush–every major subject gets the big-screen treatment eventually. And besides, there’s a new season of “24” just around the corner.
