Remembering 9/11 at the Movies

It`s ten years ago today. And yes, it still deserves - will always deserve - the attention it gets.  Especially a few years from now, when we talk to our kids (and grandkids) about 9/11 the way our grandparents talked to us about Pearl Harbor, hoping that a profound historical moment our children never actually experienced will nonetheless resonate and influence the way they design and shape the world's future after we're gone.  


Like most of us, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.  Highway 2 between Calgary and Edmonton en route to a western religions class on modern Islam, enjoying the sunrise to my right and listening to the radio. A plane had flown into the World Trade Center and I wondered how drunk a pilot had to be to miss seeing that in the way.  Then word of a second plane and, immediately, I knew this was no accident.  Then came that sick, pull-the-car-over, "what the hell just happened" feeling.  Even as the news reports poured into the college cafeteria, we didn't comprehend the full impact of what had just taken place, either in personal or historical terms.  We were too shocked, too numb, too much in-the-moment.   


As the days and months unfolded, we went from sad to worried to a little crazy.  Every Walmart and Home Depot in the midwest States figured it was next.  Unceasing CNN danger alerts kept Americans entrenched in fear and George Bush in office.  In eventually going after bin Laden, the President couldn't resist pointing his guns at Saddam Hussein, lambasting the French, and insisting that we were either with him or with the evildoers (i.e. Al-Qaeda - oh and by the way, Iran and North Korea, too).  The Dixie Chicks couldn't criticize the President without engendering the closest thing to a Nazi-style CD burning on U.S. soil.  For years, the news became a surreal, nightmarish rehearsing of America's most embarrassing traits and ugliest historical moments - McCarthyism, the Red Scare, bomb shelters, racial segregation - in short, conservative fear-mongering on the right and liberal pandering to Islamic groups on the left, none of which seemed close to addressing the real problem.  But as nuts as it all seemed, it made perfect sense at the time.  We were sad and shocked.  More than anything we were, well, terrified.  


Ten years later, it's interesting to think about how Hollywood reflected (or fed) our public and private emotional responses to 9/11, as well as our eventual determination to move on.     


In 1998, The Seige (starring Denzel Washington, Annette Bening and Bruce Willis) eerily forecasted how a domestic terrorist attack might play out.  So wonderfully naive were we in those pre-9/11 days, many of us found the film's depiction of indiscriminate mass-murder and threatened constitutional rights distasteful or far-fetched.  Who knew how small Edward Zwick's imagination would end up feeling compared to the real thing?  By the time The Sum of All Fears debuted in 2002, audiences were in a decidedly more receptive frame of mind.


Images of the WTC were quickly pulled from films and television ads. Early promos for 2002's Spiderman were immediately re-shot. In Serendipity and Zoolander, the twin towers were digitally edited out.  Other films were re-written, postponed or axed altogether.  The ending of 2002's Men in Black II, originally located at the WTC, was moved to the Statue of Liberty grounds.  The release of Arnold's Shwarzenegger's Collateral Damage (whose tagline, "the war hits home", was ultimately removed) was delayed a full year.  Jackie Chan's Nosebleed, about a window washer who discovers a plot to bomb the towers, was shelved permanently.


Interestingly, while movie attendance dropped significantly for a couple of weeks, it quickly rebounded and overtook 2000 box office sales by nearly 20% ($1.2 billion).  Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Shrek, Monsters Inc, The Mummy Returns, and The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring scored huge between the fall of 2001 and summer of 2002.  Apparently, we needed to escape for a while, and fantasy was bumped forward on studio schedules while more realistic movies with even the slightest psychological connection to 9/11 were pushed back.


"I think one of the major problems that the movie industry now faces," said Collateral Damage screenwriter Terry George at the time, "particularly the big studios that produce the mega-blockbusters -- is that the reality of events on Sept. 11 so overshadowed and engaged and shocked this nation and the world, that any attempt to come close to, or duplicate, or re-enact a similar scenario is going to look pretty foolish and pathetic."  


And yet our appetite for cinematic destruction didn't go anywhere.  In fact, we got hungrier.  North American video rentals of high-action films like Die Hard and Independence Day skyrocketed right after 9/11.  And if ticket sales for half-milers like 2012 in the years since say anything, it's that we never really lost our fear (or desire) to see shit blow up and tragedy rain down upon us.


And of course we still needed heroes, perhaps more than ever.  For a while, Hollywood served up (apparently to our delight) national champions who defended the "homefront", even if it was thousands of miles and hundreds of years away.  Troy's Achilles (Brad Pitt) and 300's Leonidas (Gerard Butler) appealed not only to the ladies but to anyone wanting to believe someone could step up and protect us.  


Even our existing heroes changed. With Daniel Craig, James Bond dropped the smarmy charm for scowling, straight-to-the-balls realism, suggesting that beating the bad guy wasn't quite as neat and easy as Hollywood had suggested prior to 9/11.  This 007 didn't linger at the martini bar with a wry smile; he stared you down like the mad man he'd become before kicking the piss out of you and leaving you in the desert to die.  Batman ended the decade as the people's choice for most compelling crime-fighter primarily because he reflected the new, morally-challenging manner in which evil and evildoers might have to be addressed.  The Dark Knight's Joker might have strained an audience's credulity had it been released a decade or two earlier.  (Jack Nicholson's rendering actually scared us in 1989.)  The clown prince's insatiable thirst for disorder and the inability of government officials to stop him in Nolan's film would have arguably played too grimly back then.  But by 2008, Heath Ledger's Joker made perfect sense because, by that point, we'd already been forced to recognize that evil on that scale was not only possible, but its remedy was truly that elusive in a world where the bad guys could hide quietly among us. 


Wonderfully, something else happened in the years between then and now.  Slowly but surely, we allowed Hollywood to accompany us through the various stages of our collective grief. We experienced the tragedy of 9/11 vicariously and put a figurative arm around its victims in films like Reign Over Me and Remember Me.  We celebrated the courage and enduring human spirit of those who risked their lives to save others in Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center.  We got downright angry and questioned the manner in which our leaders handled the national response in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.  Gradually, we began to debate the growing culture of fear, lamenting what we were becoming in Spike Lee's Inside Man and Gavin Hood`s Rendition.  And through it all, we entertained subversive speculation about how it all went down on the internet in conspiracy flicks like Zeitgeist and Dylan Avery's Loose Change.  

And now we get Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon.  Sigh.  


I guess it was inevitable.  And you know what, probably a good thing.  Because it means we didn't let the bastards completely destroy our way of life, even if our way of life includes moral conundrums like Michael Bay.  By and large, I think Hollywood and filmmakers in general have done a pretty good job of mirroring, exploring and helping us get through the last decade.  Sure, we've been manipulated, duped or pandered to in some of those films.  But that's Hollywood for you. That's life.  If even a handful of them consoled us and helped us effectively process the unbelievable shock and grief that hit us on September 11, 2001, then we have one more reason to love going to the movies.