Sunday, September 04, 2011
Looking back at the cultural impact of 9/11
Salon.com: The second entry in our slide show series about pop culture after 9/11 covers three years, 2002-2004. It was a dense and lively period that saw movies, TV, music, literature and comics shifting out of a numb, somewhat disconnected state and becoming more reactive, then provocative, and by 2004 -- an election year -- combative.
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Of all of the creative reactions to the 9/11 attacks, The 25th Hour is the one that hits me the most. Spike Lee really hit the nail on the head with his depiction of the eeriness and anger that was felt in New York after the attacks. Even as a fifth grader in NYC, I felt that anger and eeriness, therea was no way to get away from it. One of the most memorable, important parts of that film is Edward Norton's angry monologue before he heads to prison. That monologue is not just about the anger he has because of what he did, and the price he had to pay, but it is truly about the confusion that we all felt after the attacks. I think that the reason that The 25th Hour was so successful as a 9/11 film was because it was shoved in the audience's faces as a 9/11 film; but I believe that if you were in NYC on 9/11/01, this film helps you realize that you were not alone in your anger and sadness.
The responses to 9/11 that bother me the most are the ones with a message of retaliation and hate. I agree that it is important to "get the bad guys", but I don't think that we should breed hate. Post 9/11, the hatred toward Arabs was completely unsettling, and I'm talking about the Arabs who live in our neighborhoods, whose children we grew up with. This hate just caused more pain for everyone.
Although I agree with Allegra that there were unfortunately many responses of hatred and bigotry that accompanied this influx of media in response to the 9/11 attacks, there was a good amount that was misconstrued as such. Yes, people were angry, and rightfully so. But a lot of the anger was out of the hurt felt and that anger was an incentive to come together as a country and band with one another over this horrible event. Unfortunately a lot of times it takes a horrific event such as this to bring out the community pride and compassion in people.
It's interesting to talk about the immediate cultural impact of the events of 9/11 because they have greatly morphed and evolved over the 10 years since. Those movies and music from shortly after the original attack were aimed more about trying to help people grieve and get through the initial shock of all that happened. Now that we are farther away from the attacks, tv and such is trying to show and help audiences understand the greater overall impact and consequences of 9/11 and what happened after. The differing interpreations of that will be interesting to see as we try to understand and evaluate the greater impact of the events of 9/11 on the nation as a whole 10 years later.
9/11 is always something that will be a difficult topic for me. I think because it is so hard for many people to talk about, having pop culture show the impact of it, makes it easier to talk about or at least know it's okay to talk about. I agree with Allegra that we shouldn't continue the hate, though, because that will achieve nothing. Gandhi said, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." I completely agree with this quote because it's so true. Promoting hate is not going to solve the problems.
In a different vein though, I think it's important to show current events in the media and pop culture because it allows people to show how they feel and for others to see that they may not be alone in their views.
September 11th was brief, but its impact has affected our culture and attitude towards culturally rich nationalities. Musically, I have seen a dramatic rise in the strength of the American identity, along with a refusal of contradicting identities. Film has shown to delve into the cruel nature of our cultural distrust, anger, and mysterious response of the American culture. We see a representation of this through The 25th Hour, as well as Unthinkable.
I agree with Tiffany's response to Allegra's comment about the reactions to 9/11. Many responses were developed out of fear, anger, and mistrust. The American people didn't know what to believe or who to trust, thus we saw such powerful reactions to those in our communities that rekindled the hurt felt by the nation on September 11th. The nation needed something to come together through, and used the separation from Middle Eastern races to do so.
Growing up in NY and being in middle school 20 minutes away from the towers on 9/11 is something that has always struck me as a little bit surreal. I could see the smoke and could watch on tv as everything unfolded, but it took a few years for me to really come to terms with what the attacks meant for the United States. I knew that the intense patriotism of the first year or so after the attack couldn't last, but I didn't know what the reaction would be after that. Some of these cultural reactions are honest attempts to deal with the anger, sadness, and horror of what happened. Others I have problems with. For example, in Dawn of the Dead (full disclosure, I have never seen it), they apparently make a point of showing Muslim men praying in a mosque. I think that at this point, 10 years after 9/11, it should be clear to everyone that it was not Islam that attacked the US. Even equating The Passion of the Christ with reactions to 9/11 seems to me to be a blow to Islam as the "violent religion" of our time. I think it is these slightly off reactions to 9/11 that sparked the intense, and in my opinion, rightly criticized, reaction to Bin Laden's death a few months ago. The criticism of Islam as a religion in some cultural reactions to 9/11 could glamorize and legitimize other intense reactions to future events.
It is sort of fascinating to track the arc of emotion in the kinds of cinematic and theatrical responses to the 9/11 attacks since such responses started being produced. It is hard to believe that the tragic series of incidents that created these reactions occurred an entire decade ago - I appreciate this article for providing a synopsis of these reactions, but what I am more interested in seeing, perhaps in a graphic format, is how old those who were involved in producing or directing these productions were when 9/11 occurred. I myself was only a child when it happened, but as a northern NJ resident, I have seen how people from different age groups have developed in different ways relative to the attacks' impact on their lives- especially in tandem to the age they were when the attacks happened. Might there be a correlation between age and the kinds of dramatic response, i.e. vengeful or cathartic?
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