— More coverage of the 9/11 coverage —
Reporters aren’t known for spiking stories before they’re written. Given the assignment to write about the cultural and artistic changes exacted by 9/11, a reporter could hardly come back with the conclusion that there’s no story to be told — that, in the words of Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. Ten years after the attacks, however, the idea that 9/11 changed everything is increasingly been seen as the dog that didn’t bark. It’s not that American culture didn’t respond to the tragedy; it did, in a million different ways, from the obvious (John Updike’s Terrorist) to the slightly more subtle (Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight). But declaring that 9/11 changed everything is not the same as examining everything that changed on 9/11. The former is predicated on a world in which all variety of cultural developments, including the rise in tabloid sensationalism and the proliferation of sexy vampire stories, are rooted in 9/11. The latter acknowledges that, as Michiko Kakutani of the Times puts it, “We now know that the New Normal was very much like the Old Normal, at least in terms of the country’s arts and entertainment.”
Yet even as Kakutani and other arts critics caution against attributing all things great and small to 9/11, they indulge in the very fantasies they dismiss. Articles, of course, still have to be written, and that hole in the Culture section is not going to fill itself. Kakutani observes that “fantasy epics — pitting good versus evil in stark Manichean terms — dominated the box office in the last decade,” then reminds us in the next breath that “Voldemort sprang from J.K. Rowling’s imagination well before 9/11.” True, but once Kakutani admits that the theme of light vs. dark predates the age of terror by decades (Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”) as well as millennia (the Bible), you begin to wonder why she even brings up these non-examples at all. The temptation to fill the page with connections between 9/11 and every cultural phenomenon of the last decade overwhelms even those people who claim to know better.
More convincing, perhaps, is the suggestion by John Powers that “it has always been the genius of pop culture that, by wrapping things up as ‘entertainment,’ it can get across feelings and ideas that more officially serious culture cannot.” He cites the Batman film The Dark Knight as a case of pop culture reflecting a deeper anxiety about the prosecution of the war on terror and “the dangers of fighting evil.” Far from implying that 9/11 tipped a domino line of cultural factors that produced a clearly defined chain of responses, Powers makes the case that artists and writers reacted to the disaster in the way that the creative class has always done: by processing the monumental into the mundane, and allowing the uneasy zeitgeist to filter into their work. This is more believable than the sudden attribution of long-established trends — say, the craving for the trivial fluff of Us Weekly — to the fallout from 9/11. It gives artists agency, acknowledging that understated meditation on current events is no less a conscious response to the world than the direct address represented by Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man or straightforward documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side. Powers sees in The Dark Knight a transformation of America from a lovable superhero to “a monster who winds up slinking into the shadows, reviled by those who once loved him.”
There is a line, however, between identifying cultural parallels in a sophisticated screenplay and chalking up every passing fad to the effects of 9/11. It is a bridge too far to suggest, as Powers later does, that zombies (“mindless, brain-eating killers who attack in hordes”) are “a simple metaphor for those shadowy aliens who threaten us — in this case Islamic terrorists,” or that the popularity of the dangerous-yet-seductive vampires in Twilight and Buffy is attributable to the war on terror’s blurring of good and evil. No amount of persuasion is going to convince me that Stephenie Meyer’s writing explores anything deeper than teenage lust and the dispiritingly persistent value our society puts on female purity. As for Buffy — well, I remember watching a lot of Buffy episodes. In ninth grade. In 2000.
One of the more tenacious cultural tropes holds that Americans respond to hard times by retreating into mindless fluff and artistic comfort food. As proof, we are offered the example of 1940s families flocking to movie theaters to escape from the anxieties of World War II. The idea that hemlines rise and fall with the stock market, suggesting that an uncertain economy spurs a conservative retrenchment, has been floating around for years. “[P]op culture has slid so far into the slough of celebrity worship and escapist fluff that the antics of the Kardashian sisters now pass as entertainment,” Kakutani writes. She can’t quite bring herself to blame 9/11 for the elevation of Sharon Osbourne and Paris Hilton to national celebrities — “a lot of post-9/11 culture seems like a cut-and-paste version of pre-9/11 culture” — but she also can’t resist mentioning the surge of mindless entertainment, rationalizing that today’s obsession with TMZ is “a more extreme version” of what existed before the attacks.
Powers vacillates even more dramatically between exaggeration and reality. He’s found his fence and is determined to sit on it, proclaiming that the popularity of SpongeBob Squarepants and YouTube videos of barking cats demonstrates our need for escapism, then brushing off such simplistic connections: “While it would be foolish to suggest that September 11 caused all this . . . .” Who exactly is the fool here? Ultimately, Powers adopts Kakutani’s halfway argument. “The search for mental comfort food was everywhere,” he writes, citing “the cupcake boom, the cars shaped like Tonka Toys,” and “Hollywood comedies about 30-year-olds who behave like teens.” As if realizing his logic is shaky, he too insists that it’s all about intensity of the shift: “I know American have been loving cute things forever . . . but over the past decade, things have reached a new level.” Even without 9/11, the past decade would likely have brought older cultural phenomena to a new level. Every decade is an overdone version of the last; adults have been bemoaning the callousness and stupidity of the next generation since the Roman empire. America did not need a terrorist attack to choose Good Morning America and its comparison testing of anti-wrinkle creams over the urbane sobriety of Walter Cronkite’s successors. And Hollywood has never served up terrific role models; screenwriters invented immaturity long before 9/11.
Despite diligently turning out their dispatches on the post-9/11 cultural scene, both Kakutani and Powers seem skeptical of the notion that one day changed everything. Powers is convinced that 9/11 at least exacerbated what he apparently considers a cultural decline. “[I]t’s hard not to think the fear and confusion following the terror attacks made the retreat to such sideshows more frantic,” he writes. But he ends on an optimistic note, citing resilience as one of America’s greatest assets. “One can even imagine someone comparing the United States to The Hangover franchise, whose heroes, having once been knocked out only to wake up in trouble, let the same thing happen again in the sequel.”
. . . So Well Read. . . 