State of Angst? Pop culture after 9/11

By Andy Goldberg Aug 29, 2011, 5:01 GMT

Los Angeles - It was a defining moment of the modern age, an event that 'changed everything,' according to the popular analysis at the time.

In the cloud of national grief that followed the September 11 attacks, pundits and prognosticators saw a future in which Hollywood movies would be scrubbed of explosions and hijackings, where comedy and the very act of laughing would be regarded as an insult to the victims, and where the country would remain unified and eternally respectful.

But with the benefit of ten years hindsight, cultural historians are seeing things differently. The September 11 attacks may have changed pop culture for a few weeks, but even six months later, argues Syracuse University professor Robert Thompson, the inanities of American culture were back with full force.

'On the day that CBS marked the 6 month anniversary with a 9-11 documentary, Fox counter-programmed with the debut of a celebrity boxing show, Rosie O'Donell came out as gay in a two-hour TV special and the Osbournes aired on MTV,' the pop culture expert noted.

Indeed, it was only a few weeks after September 11 that Fox premiered the counter-terror series 24, in which operative Jack Bauer does whatever's needed to thwart the nastiest terrorists Hollywood could imagine.

A few weeks after that, a more archetypal super-hero came to America's aid. Spider-Man was one of the year's biggest movie hits - though it had to be digitally altered to remove the images of the World Trade Center from the New York skyline.

That's not to say that everything reverted to its September 10 status.

'It was a monumental blow to our souls and our identity,' said Thompson of the terrorist attacks. 'We have lost confidence in our country, and have a greater sense of how precarious our situation is.'

While that state of existential angst was nothing new for a generation that grew up facing the threat of Cold War nuclear annihilation, he points out, it was supremely unsettling for those who bought into the idea of American hegemony that followed the fall of communism.

Since the attacks, that sense of vulnerability has been exacerbated by the lurching of America from one crisis to another.

Some were a direct result of September 11, from the initial economic meltdown to the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others reflected the declining faith in government leadership - from the reaction to Hurricane Katrina to the more recent political deadlock that led the world's most powerful nation to the brink of default.

Cultural historian Jeff Melnick of University of Massachusetts calls this a sense of 'perpetual disaster' that has eroded faith in America's institutions.

Even the heroes of 9-11 are not immune. The drama series Rescue Me, which debuted in 2004, stars Dennis Leary as a violent, alcoholic, ill-tempered and manipulative firefighter, haunted by the death of his colleagues on September 11 but nevertheless happy to exploit his heroic status to attract money and women.

America's new-found vulnerability was also reflected in movies like Panic Room, in which a family is targeted in their home by mysterious attackers, and in a flood of zombie movies in which the faceless attackers seem unstoppable, Melnick says.

And far from banishing disaster from movie screens, the September 11 attacks seemed to have the opposite effect.

'Once we had seen all that coverage, the bar had been raised and you had to show bigger and more expensive explosions,' says Thompson. 'What is takes to shock us is much greater.'

On a wider cultural level, one of the most lasting effects has been the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment and the blanket targeting of 'brown people' as a threat to the American way of life, according to Melnick.

The attacks also served to slingshot society into the digital age.

The horror of the experience was magnified tremendously because so many millions of people watched it live on television. It was also one of the first mass events that prompted people to blog, upload photos and comment, turning the terrifying event into a the first socially networked disaster.

Wired magazine contended that it was 9-11 that gave birth to the blog as a mass medium.

The chaos was 'a galvanizing point for the blogging world,' Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, told the tech magazine. 'We had this explosion of personal, public testimony and some of it was quite powerful.'

'I remembered that old cliche that journalists write the first rough draft of history. Well now bloggers were writing the first draft,' he said.

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