HollywoodÂ’s 9/11 response: delayed but intensifying
When the attack upon Pearl Harbor landed America squarely in the midst of World War II in 1941, the U.S. entertainment industry responded with massed outpourings of motion pictures and songs to match, by turns encouraging the troops and ridiculing the enemy. Even Donald Duck and The Three Stooges mounted assaults on the Axis Powers.
And so the pattern has persisted through practically all of America’s crises over the long haul, before and since. Outcroppings of war, high-level assassinations, treacheries and intrigues from within and without — all have generally served as a caustic muse to those artists who respond to real-world developments in creative, albeit sometimes opportunistic, fashion.
All except Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks of that date seem to have traumatized the artistic and show-business sectors into an odd silence that has persisted — dwindling only gradually — into quite nearly the present day.
The turning point toward acceptance and chin-up confrontation may hang on two motion pictures of the present year: British filmmaker Paul GreengrassÂ’ United 93, dealing with the thwarted hijacking of that day, and American filmmaker Oliver StoneÂ’s World Trade Center, concerning the heroism that manifested itself at Ground Zero. Similarly motivated productions had come earlier and more timidly as a rule, via television, but these first big-screen theatrical manifestos address the ordeal with a blunt nobility that leaves no room for doubt.
So shaken, apparently, was the American confidence by the events of that date we have codified as 9/11, that a set of nagging questions took the place of spontaneous artistic and literary response: Are Americans capable of watching such interpretive re-enactments? Is now too soon? So when will sufficient time have passed? How does one tell the individual stories without exploiting the survivors and the victims? And can any movie do justice to a struggle of such epic scope?
Both Greengrass and Stone appear to have mustered an emphatic yes with their respective films, which are entirely un-alike barring shared subject matter. A less widely seen television production, Henry Singer’s The Falling Man (2006), proves as distinctive a statement about the horrors of 9/11 — dealing with the complex and confounding array of deaths in the immediate swath of the attacks upon New York.
The initial — and persistent — skittishness of Hollywood to have any perceived connections with 9/11 seems to have fallen into place immediately following the siege. On Sept. 12, 2001, the intended Oct. 5 release date of an Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller called Collateral Damage was postponed, and the film’s promotional campaign was altered to remove this slogan: “The War Hits Home!” At around this same time, a coming-attractions trailer for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was withdrawn in light of its depiction of the World Trade Center as a landmark.
In such television shows as Friends and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, existing footage was digitally altered with the removal of the towers from the Manhattan skyline. But a Twin Towers setting remained intact in a music video depicting Ryan Adams singing “New York, New York” — which received heavy airplay.
Broadway scrapped a Nov. 1 opening of Stephen SondheimÂ’s Assassins, partly on grounds of the title but also in light of its storyline about political treacheries; the musical would wait to open until 2004. By fall of 2002, the premium-cable network HBO had removed images of the Twin Towers from the prelude to a hit series, The Sopranos.
That same fall of 2002 found Eric Fischl, an artist of confrontational gumption, unveiling a sculpture called Tumbling Woman at Rockefeller Center — a memorial to the victims of 9/11. A massed objection forced the removal of the bronze, scarcely a week later.
The first major-studio movie to deal semi-directly with 9/11 is New Yorker Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2003), a crime melodrama that opens with a view of the Ground Zero setting. Later that year, the events of 9/11 figured in a line of half-baked philosophical dialogue in a romantic comedy called Love Actually. In 2004, Roland Emmerich’s weather-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow traded all but explicitly upon 9/11 imagery in its advertising campaign: “What you see is happening now! Lower Manhattan is virtually inaccessible!”
The arrival in 2005 of Danny LeinerÂ’s The Great New Wonderful can only have helped to render a mass audience receptive to the harsh honesty of Paul GreengrassÂ’ United 93, and in turn to the more overtly sentimentalized tribute that Oliver Stone pays with World Trade Center.
The Great New Wonderful is more of a meditation upon how 9/11 affected the lives of those who were not necessarily connected to the immediate attacks. The film explores in candid terms the emotional impact that 9/11 has continued to have upon tens of millions of Americans.
Any abiding concerns over “too soon” and “too sensitive” are beside the point as America marks the fifth anniversary of an event that qualifies as a Sea Change in the larger scheme of human affairs.
Even if such films as The Great New Wonderful, United 93 and World Trade Center might have jumped the gun in terms of readiness, they have assimilated well with the popular consciousness. Likelier than not, this handful of films has helped a good many people to come to belated terms with the events of 9/11.
If anything, such creative and interpretive responses come too late. It is never too early to apply the healing balm of art in attempting to deal with an outburst of inhuman violence.
Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net
