There are certain pivot points in history after which nothing is ever the same again. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 fifteen years ago is one. Four coordinated hijackings by terrorists affiliated with the Islamic fundamentalist group Al-Qaeda that took the life of 2,996 people, the event remains the worst terrorist attack in history and has left a scar on the American psyche that may never heal.
To many watching on TV, the imagery of the attacks themselves were immediately reminiscent of blockbuster cinema. But Hollywood, the big lumbering beast that it is, has had an uneasy relationship with 9/11 in the fifteen years since the attacks —ignoring it, erasing it, kicking against it, exploiting it, and to some degree accepting it. As the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks approaches, we wanted to examine the varying reactions Hollywood cinema has committed since.
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“These were the kind of events that Hollywood has been imagining these past decades in the worst of movies,” novelist Ian McEwan wrote in The Guardian on September 12th 2001. “We had seen this before, with giant budgets and special effects, but so badly rehearsed. The colossal explosions, the fierce black and red clouds, the crowds running through the streets [and] the contradictory, confusing information had only the feeblest resemblance to the tinny dramas of ‘Skyscraper,’ ‘Backdraft’ and ‘Independence Day.’”
The imagery of the day —an iconic American landmark and symbol of late capitalism felled in front of an audience of billions, the attacks staggered seemingly for maximum live TV impact— indeed seemed to be drawn straight from Hollywood cinema. “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie,” read one Onion headline in the weeks that followed. Even Saddam Hussein agreed. “When we watched what was happening in America for the first time, we thought it might be another American movie,” he was reported to have said.
For awhile, it led to what writer Kevin Maher called a sort of “collective guilt” among filmmakers and audiences, “an overwhelming feeling that the incessant soulless depiction of spectacular widescreen devastation in the likes of ‘Armageddon,’ ‘Deep Impact’ and ‘Independence Day’ had somehow spawned the crashed planes, fuel explosions and grand demolitions of that fateful day.”
Some filmmakers seemed to try to put their imaginations to patriotic use —the likes of David Fincher and Spike Jonze were recruited to brainstorm with Pentagon officials about how to prevent future terrorist attacks. But most seemed to agree that the age of devastation as spectacle was over. “What people are feeling is this: we don’t want to be reminded in our entertainment of the disaster we went through,” Harvey Weinstein told The Guardian a few weeks after the attacks.
Weinstein’s point of view was the dominant one in the weeks and months immediately following 9/11, as studios scrambled to avoid reminding people of real life tragedy. Movies like “Zoolander” and “Serendipity,” released just weeks after the attacks, were digitally altered to remove the World Trade Center from their NYC skylines. Films with terrorist or bomb-themed plots, like Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Collateral Damage” or ensemble comedy “Big Trouble,” were pushed back indefinitely.
A specially-shot trailer for Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” that featured the hero catching a helicopter in a web spun between the Twin Towers was virtually scrubbed from existence (“Probably right after the death of someone we love, it’s sometimes hard to look at their pictures,” Raimi said at the time). The big-budget remake of “The Time Machine” was heavily retooled to remove a sequence where chunks of the moon rain down on New York City. And some films on the eve of production —the Jennifer Lopez and Samuel L. Jackson-starring terrorism thriller “Tick Tock,” for one— were scrapped altogether. As far as Hollywood was concerned, the message was of escapism, rather than grappling with a devastating, world-altering tragedy.
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It didn’t last long. Less than a year after the attacks came “The Sum Of All Fears,” the most recent of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan thrillers and a film that featured a successful nuclear attack on Baltimore by neo-Nazi terrorists. Many speculated that it was too soon for a film like this, but it proved to be a legitimate hit, earning nearly $120 million in the U.S. alone. Other military or spy themed movies proved successful in the year after 9/11: “Behind Enemy Lines,” “Black Hawk Down,” “The Bourne Identity” and “xXx.” “Spider-Man,” which features what Peter Bradshaw called an “obviously tacked-on” scene where New Yorkers come to the hero’s aid, telling the villain “Ya take on of us on, ya take us all on!,” was the top-grossing movie of the year.
If the first stage of grief is denial, the second is anger. And the years immediately following the attacks were notable for a prevalence of not just these patriotic action movies, but also a string of revenge films like “Kill Bill,’ “The Punisher” and “Man On Fire,” mirroring the way that the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal had sparked the original spate of revenge movies like “Death Wish” in the 1970s. “I think people want to get into the minds of people who do this kind of thing,” said Schwarzenegger while promoting his delayed revenge-on-terrorists actioner “Collateral Damage.” “And they want to see Americans kick their butts.” Schwarzenegger’s own movie proved to be a failure —likely because his star was fading rather than any sense of “too soon”— but his sentiment was by no means incorrect.
Anger could be found in spades, albeit in very different form, in the first studio movie to directly reference 9/11 and its aftermath, Spike Lee’s “25th Hour.” The movie, based on a novel by David Benioff (who’d go on to be the co-mastermind of “Game Of Thrones”) telling the story of the last day of freedom of a New York drug dealer before he begins a seven year prison sentence, was written, published and in preproduction before the attacks. But as Lee says in the making-of documentary on the DVD for the film, “I feel we would be irresponsible artists if we set this film in New York, and people were wandering around like 9/11 never happened.”
From a credit sequence featuring the ‘Tower Light’ memorial to sequences memorably shot overlooking Ground Zero, the film has a haunting, mournful mood that provides an indelible portrait of a city of mourning that stands along films like “Rome, Open City” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” Yet it also has a very New York sense of rage and defiance to it as well. Amidst a self-loathing rant in one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Edward Norton’s Monty, having laid into multiple ethnicities and even, breaking a taboo at the time, the NYPD, declaims “fuck Osama bin Lade, al-Qaeda and cave-dwelling fundamentalist assholes everywhere. In the name of thousands of innocents murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your 74 virgins roasting in a jet-fuelled hell, you towel-headed camel jockies,” before ending on an apocalyptic note: “Fuck this city and everyone in it… let the fires rage, let it burn to ash.”
Meanwhile, Barry Pepper’s Frank, a Wall Street asshole and Monty’s oldest friend, is asked why he doesn’t move out of his apartment overlooking Ground Zero. “Fuck that! The good money I pay for this place? Bin Laden could drop another one right next door —I ain’t moving.” It’s a very New York response, and was almost disarming at the time as the first movie to really engage with how many people in the city were feeling at the time. Indeed, arguably no other film (perhaps except Kenneth Lonergan‘s “Margaret,” a film that’s never directly about 9/11 but is nevertheless entirely about 9/11) has grappled with the aftermath as effectively.