After September 11, fear of the next attack gave way to another worry - fear of inadequate solemnity. Christian Lorentzen on Hollywood's awkward attempts to 'get serious' about terrorism on screen. Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism Stephen Prince Columbia University Press Dh120 Of the American clichés born in the past decade, none has been so pernicious as the notion that "September 11 changed everything". In the political realm, that line leant cover to a reckless government in its pursuit of an aggressive foreign policy and enabled its infringement of civil liberties on the domestic front. As the Bush administration invaded Iraq without casus belli, tapped phones without warrants and suspended habeas corpus, a pliant media told stories of aluminum pipes, advertised the protective virtues of duct tape, and promoted consumption as a means of national security. Meanwhile, the homeland, as it came to be called, was placid. In Hollywood terms, September 11 has been that rare thing - a blockbuster without a sequel.
While the citizens of Baghdad or Kabul live under a siege of terrorism that varies only in its intensity, Americans who want to see buildings explode have to go to the movies. Disaster flicks have been a staple of American cinema since the onset of the Cold War, and the rise of special effects made the instant destruction of a city a legitimate concern of realism. Moviegoers come to have their fears of the worst first tickled, then assuaged. The asteroid is diverted, the missile steered out to sea, the bomb detonated harmlessly in the mine shaft.
The science of villainy in Hollywood has always been crude. Nazis, Soviets, and rogue tycoons have for decades made for reliably uncomplicated foes. The mastermind faced down by Sean Connery, Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone might be markedly bloated, slightly effeminate, or a little too Aryan, but the face-off remains comfortably a match between white males. Even the rogue band of mall- and church-bombing Latino, African, Arab, and Asian terrorists vanquished by Chuck Norris in Invasion USA (1985), a politically incorrect fantasy Norris cowrote, had to be led by a Russian. With a few exceptions, Hollywood has relied on a cartoonish dichotomy of good vs. evil, and the motivating force of the latter has always been similarly fuzzy: Imperial conquest? Revenge? Greed?
Did September 11 change any of this? Should it have? In the chatter that ensued after the attacks, many wondered - nervously, even - whether American popular culture would be altered by the events. Irony, it was reported, might have died in the flames, and a new seriousness would emerge out of the rubble to clarify the tasks ahead and prepare Americans to engage an all-too-specific enemy. If the attacks, for a time, instilled among Americans a genuine fear of terrorism, they also generated another anxiety: that if American society was not fundamentally altered, if September 11 hadn't "changed everything", then perhaps we weren't scared or serious enough.
The subtitle of Stephen Prince's new book Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism is a symptom of this thirst for solemnity. "Terrorism," he writes, "has furnished a defining experience for our time, encompassing policy, politics, emotion, perception, insurgent strategy, aesthetics, and violence in ways that seem insurmountable." So one terrorist event, now eight years in the past, both inaugurated an "age of terrorism" and now defines not only politics but emotion itself. "For Americans," Prince continues, "the fallout from 9/11 has included the emergence of a new culture of anxiety. The airplane passenger sitting next to you on the flight might try to light a fuse in his shoe - one cannot know for sure if this will not happen." In the movies, of course, one also cannot know for sure if one will not be murdered at any instant in a school, in a massage parlor, or in the shower.
By positing his conclusion as his premise - that the films of the "age of terrorism" will be defined by anxiety about terrorism - Prince has made himself a Procrustean bed. "This anxiety," he writes, "is masked by a curious sense of apathy induced by the passage of many years in which a second, massive attack inside the United States did not occur." Actually, the anxiety did not put on a mask; it dissipated. And by the old formula whereby comedy equals tragedy plus time, before long September 11 became something acceptable to joke about: When presidential candidate Joe Biden mocked former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for being incapable of forming a sentence that didn't consist of "a noun and a verb and 9/11," no one said: "Too soon."
But if the political relevance of September 11 has expired in America, its potential at the box office never amounted to much. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Hollywood shied away from material that might suggest a connection to the event, and shots of the World Trade Center were removed from films like Spider-Man and the Al Pacino vehicle People I Know, which were still in production. Bolstered by his reputation as a New York auteur, Spike Lee, in his 2002 film The 25th Hour, was the first major director to make explicit reference the attacks, incorporating shots of a wrecked World Trade Center, an Osama bin Laden wanted poster, discussion of the air quality in Lower Manhattan and a message from the film's protagonist to bin Laden himself: "On the names of innocent thousands murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your 72 whores roasting in a jet-fuelled fire in hell." It was an attitude that seemed fresh at the time.
So far only two Hollywood films, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and Paul Greengrass's United 93, both released in 2006, have approached the events head-on. Prince judges both films to be successful, both as box-office draws and as "entertainment" - a word that, along with "genre," he employs with an unconscious pejorative sense - but each movie leaves him cold. Prince is put off by the fact that Stone took on WTC after his $155 million pet project Alexander bombed and that, in pursuit of a box office comeback, Stone eschewed his famously contrarian tendencies and produced a story of heroism and Christian redemption about the rescue of two firefighters in the rubble of the Twin Towers. "By confining the film's focus to what the principal characters experienced," Prince writes, "Stone is unable to capture the enormity of the event." He also worries that the film's "emphasis on the moral force of Christianity" might cast September 11 as the start of a "religious war" and serve as ballast for Samuel Huntington's idea of a clash of civilizations.
Similar moments of exasperation accompany all Prince's dutiful summaries of September 11 and Iraq War movies: no film seems to be epic enough, tragic enough, sufficiently historically accurate, and completely politically correct to do justice to Super Tuesday. Strangely, this applies even to films made before September 11. Prince takes to task the makers of The Siege - a 1998 film written by the journalist Lawrence Wright, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his invaluable account of al Qa'eda's origins, The Looming Tower - for their "heavy-handed and clumsy" anticipation of how authorities might respond an assault by Islamist terrorists on American soil.
"The Bush administration," Prince sternly observes, "did not declare martial law" - as Bruce Willis's General Deveraux does in The Siege - "but it did move aggressively to expand Presidential power and to order warrantless surveillance of American citizens, which, however objectionable, is a more benign response than what The Siege shows. And the administration was cleverer than the scenario that the film offers. Instead of rounding up citizens and immigrants and holding them in a public stadium, those detained were declared 'enemy combatants' and held offshore and in secret, beyond the reach of courts of law." That the makers of The Siege chose to exaggerate the extent of a government's reaction to make a point about the rule of law and the indispensability of civil liberties in a democratic society doesn't excuse their lack of clairvoyance.
Prince notes that more Muslim terrorists are to be found in films made before 2001 - including Black Sunday (1977), True Lies (1994) and Executive Decision (1996) - than in the years that followed the attacks. He quotes the conservative commentator Ross Douthat, who perceives "an air of omission, even denial" in that Hollywood's "terrorist baddies turn out to be?anyone and anybody? except the sort of people who actually attacked the United States on 9/11." The author shares with Douthat a yearning for a didactic cinema that will explain the meaning of violence without reveling in it as spectacle.
This longing for explanation may explain Prince's odd esteem for the post-September 11 work of Steven Spielberg - though among academic critics there has long been an unfathomable tendency to accord gravitas to Spielberg, who was swiftly anointed as the rightful heir to Stanley Kubrick despite his juvenile preoccupations. Surely it has something to do with the director's sanctimoniously uplifting forays into such indisputably serious historical episodes as the Holocaust (Schindler's List) and slavery (Amistad).
Prince devotes considerable space to three films he takes as Spielberg's response to September 11: The Terminal (2003), War of the Worlds (2004), and Munich (2005). The first Prince dismisses as "whimsical and gentle comedy" about the absurdities of airport security, the second as a disaster entertainment that "evokes" the attacks while tastefully maintaining some "conceptual distance" by setting most of the action on highways and in the countryside. Munich Prince calls "the most sophisticated moral examination of terrorism and the response of a democratic society to it that Hollywood has yet produced".
After a dramatic re-enactment of the events of the 1972 Olympics, where Palestinian terrorists took 12 Israeli athletes hostage and then killed them, the film portrays the recruitment of a Mossad agent played by Eric Bana, then follows him on a mission to assassinate high-value Palestinian targets scattered throughout Europe. What results is a drama of revenge mitigated by the sort of tough-liberal hand-wringing generally left out of James Bond movies. By the end of his state-sponsored killing spree, Bana, who emigrates to Brooklyn, is, in the film's most mawkish scene, unable to have sex with his wife without images of the Munich attack and his own retributive murders running through his head. The film ends with a strained conversation on Roosevelt Island between Bana, who suspects he may have been duped into offing Palestinian leaders not directly connected to the Munich murders, and one of his hard-line handlers. Finally, the camera pans south for an extended shot of the recently erected Twin Towers.
Notice that for Bana's character - in line with Prince's own theories - terrorism has redefined the emotional along with the political. According to Prince, this was the cinematic response that all the other September 11 films failed to deliver; but for a viewer who comes to Munich looking for aesthetics rather than answers, the movie is turgid, alternating its formulaic revenge killings with arguments familiar from the op-ed pages. By literally fetishizing moral ambiguity, Spielberg courts seriousness at the expense of art.
It takes time for a culture to respond to history, and the works of art that best embody this response do so by absorption and not analysis and explication. In this, Hollywood's formulas, though they may yield week after week of celluloid dreck, can sometimes function as useful constraints. Three of the best movies of the past summer conveyed original visions by straining history through the distorting filters of tried-and-true cinematic equations. Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds re-imagined the Second World War film, typically a pious and ponderous affair, as a pure revenge flick, eschewing moral ambiguity to produce an arch and fiery festival of righteous counterfactual blood-letting. Kathryn Bigelow, in The Hurt Locker, took an opposite tack and made perhaps the first compelling Iraq War picture; Bigelow suspended the question "Why are we in Iraq?", adopted the conventions of the police procedural, and let the camera linger on an American Achilles seeking glory in defusing IEDs. Neil Blomkamp's District 9 reaffirmed the allegorical potential of science fiction, relegating a host of refugee aliens to a familiar-looking South African shantytown patrolled by a malevolent government contractor. Which is just to say, if there is ever to be a great September 11 blockbuster, it will probably be a genre film. Hollywood has never consistently done anything else well, and not even September 11 could change that.
Christian Lorentzen is a senior editor at Harper's Magazine.