9/11 in pop culture: Failure of the American imagination

The verdict is in. As an inspiration for great art, 9/11 has proved to be a dud. There were some good but not great movies, no epic novels despite the best efforts of the great master novelists. Popular culture – be it television series or pop music – produced little of note. “Ten years later, it is even clearer that 9/11 has not provoked a seismic change in the arts,” writes Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. As a cultural force, Twitter and Facebook were more powerful than the attacks that shook the world. The War on Terror has thus far proved to be a dull muse compared to its predecessors, including the two World Wars, Vietnam, or even the Cold War. The best-known post-9/11 creations can be categorized by certain adjectives: macho, sentimental, over-rated or, at its best, funny. The last perhaps holding out hope for the future. Sentimental: First came the grief, raw, at times mawkish, yearning for expression which it found most powerfully in Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. The 2002 release isn’t one of his best but it offered succour when most needed. “Very few recent albums have been anticipated with as much hunger or greeted with as much rapture as The Rising,” wrote AO Scott at the time. The title song became a national anthem of mourning much like Lata Mangeshkar’s Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon in the months after the Indo-China war. Watch video of the Rising: The most popular 9/11 novels chart the territory of loss, most notably Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close whose hero is a nine year old boy whose father dies in the World Trade Center. It was dismissed by a number of literary mavens like John Updike as “overextended and sentimentally watery,” but sentiment has been 9/11 fiction’s sole, undeniable strength. The great novels of ideas have mostly been clunkers (more on this later). [caption id=“attachment_81433” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Cover for Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close. Images screengrabs. “] ![Cover for Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close. Images screengrabs.](https://images.firstpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/BooksforLakshmipost.jpg "BooksforLakshmipost") [/caption] Hollywood too has preferred to err on the side of sentiment, taking nearly five years to produce 9/11 themed movies (with the exception of Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour which came out in 2002). The more thorny issues of 9/11 – terrorism, civil liberties etc – have been relegated to the safe confines of sci-fi or fantasy. Of the two best-known 9/12 movies, Oliver Stone’s maudlin World Trade Center was eminently forgettable but did better at the box office than the grittily realistic United 93. Most Americans were not interested in recreating a far-too-familiar tragedy, but in pop cultural creations that allowed them to mourn. Slideshow of 9/11 tenth anniversary magazine covers [fpgallery id=210] But grief has taken a sharper, more complicated edge in movies like Hurt Locker in the wake of the Iraq war which offered fresh reasons for sorrow. Macho: Country singer Toby Keith summed up the rage: “Oh Justice will be served../And you’ll be sorry that you messed with/ The U.S. of A./ ‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass/ It’s the American way.” Fury felt good in those early years, a counterpuntal note to grief. Keith’s song came out in 2002, after US missiles had indeed “lit up” Afghanistan “like the Fourth of July,” and after Springsteen’s The Rising. But as Rob Walker noted back then, “You’ll note that his most incendiary lyrics aren’t written from the point of view of someone yowling for revenge, but rather from someone beating his chest over retribution delivered.” Watch video of Toby Keith’s The Red, White and Blue The first on the scene to claim the mantle of machismo was Kiefer Sutherland in the TV series24 which was conceived before the attacks but went on air in November. Jack Bauer was a man willing to do anything to catch the bad guy, crossing legal and ethical lines that made wimpy liberals squeamish. It was a bit of serendipitous timing given the media clamour celebrating the return of “real men” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Bauer became more brutal and less popular with each passing season. The revelations of Abu Ghraib, secret rendition, and waterboarding soon made the series – and its Hollywood equivalents like TK – controversial and eventually unseemly. Kicking ass was great as fantasy, but not quite as satisfying in real life. Continues on the next page Over-rated: The great failure of the post-9/11 cultural imagination was also that of the biggest names in the Western literary canon. Ian McKewan, John Updike, Martin Amis, Don DeLillo, and the often omitted Salman Rushdie, each delivered one dud after another. Poorly conceived, self-indulgent, self-styled “big” novels of ideas that read primarily as an exercise in middle-aged literary angst. Their inability to grapple with the Age of Terror was made all the more conspicuous by their eagerness to insert themselves into the political debate over terrorism. The loud certainty that made for great sound-bytes served them poorly as writers. A reason perhaps why the best 9/11 fiction thus far has been penned by authors who are not male, middle aged, or celebrated. Compare, for example, Mohsin Hamid’s intimate, nuanced exploration of the making of a terrorist_, The Reluctant Fundamentalist_, with Amis’ earnest attempt to reimagine 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta: [caption id=“attachment_81504” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Memorial light for 9/11. NYT”] ![Memorial light for 9/11. NYT](https://images.firstpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/911Lakshmi.jpg "911Lakshmi") [/caption] Now, emitting a sigh of unqualified grimness, he crouched on the bowl. He didn’t even bother with his usual scowling and straining and shuddering, partly because his head felt dangerously engorged. More saliently, he had not moved his bowels since May… He had a feverish and unvarying ache, not in his gut but in his lower back, his pelvic saddle, and his scrotum. Every few minutes he was required to wait out an interlude of nausea, while disused gastric juices bubbled up in the sump of his throat. His breath smelled like a blighted river. Another recent success is The Submission by Amy Waldman in which a jury in charge of choosing a ground zero-like memorial selects a design created by a Muslim-American architect. The best 9/11 fiction recognises that we no longer live in an Us vs Them world, but that this new kind of terrorism had been birthed by globalisation and modernity, a multicultural hybrid that defies easy description or solution. Funny: On Saturday Night Live’s first post-9/11 telecast, creator Lorne Michaels famously asked New York City’s then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, “Can we be funny?” Giuliani shot back, “Why start now?” On September 26th, America’s most beloved humour mag, The Onion, released its 9/11 edition whose headlines included: US Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We’re At War With; American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie; Arab-American Third-Grader Returns From Recess Crying, Saying He Didn’t Kill Anyone. By the first year anniversary, late-night talk show hosts were making fun of bin Laden, Bush, Homeland Security, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart was making satirical hay of the War on Terror. The attacks themselves were still exempt until 2004, when 9/11 deaths became fodder for black humour in the TV series Rescue Me which centred on dysfunctional, alcoholic New York firefighters – the once-sacred symbols of 9/11 heroism. A few years later, Louis CK was gleefully recounting his signature 9/11 joke: “You can figure out how bad a person based on how long after 9/11 you masturbated, as in how long you waited. For me it was between the two buildings going down. I had to do it. I had to…otherwise they win!” Slideshow on books about 9/11 [fpgallery id=211] In the grandiosely titled, “ The Death of Counterculture,” Shougat Dasgupta claims, “Even now 9/11 is shrouded in pietism propagated by the shrill, cynical cable news stations that see commercial gain in endless soft-focus tributes. The effect is that you have to be careful what you say, which inevitably shackles the imagination.” A reason why there is “no American art of real distinction made about 9/11 or that reflected the world post-9/11.” The claim about “pietism” is absurd and its evidence selective. 9/11 has long become just another punchline in stand-up routines, sitcoms, even B-grade flicks (see: Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay). More importantly, all this hand-wringing – or posturing – over artistic mediocrity misses two important achievements of the post-9/11 era. One it has produced brilliant, matchless, unflinching non-fiction by the likes of George Packer, Thomas Ricks, Terry McDermott and Rajiv Chandrasekaran or documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side and 9/11. The remarkable willingness to document reality without flinching or the easy comfort of fiction, to grapple with tragedy in all its immense, awesome complexity was invaluable at a time of confusion and fear. This desire for truth is one part of America’s self-correcting mechanism, rescuing it from the mythic thrall of the tragedy that led it astray. The other is its sense of humour, which it maintained, however tenuously, in a moment of cataclysmic crisis. These are perhaps more invaluable to a nation’s soul than any great book or piece of art.

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9/11 in pop culture: Failure of the American imagination

The best-known post-9/11 books, movies, and TV series can be described as macho, sentimental, over-rated or, at its best, funny. But where the imagination failed, humour and truth-telling came to the rescue.

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