BY THE time one is old enough to remember clearly something that happened 10 years ago, such events will, more often than not, strike one as having taken place absurdly recently. The attacks of September 11th, 2001, are surely an exception. The images from that day are burned so deeply into the collective psyche that it’s hard to recall a time when we were not familiar with them.
What's that on television? It's a shot of the Twin Towers in a repeat of Friends. Can that series really have begun a full six years before the aircraft struck?
That noted, the contemporaneous predictions about how 9/11 would affect popular culture seem rooted in the Pleistocene era. Consider one thesis that was absurdly popular with columnists. The United States was, many suggested, entering its darkest period since the Great Depression. During that era, to dispel the gloom, film-makers and musicians served up a stream of frivolous entertainment that revelled in easy escapism. It was the time of Busby Berkeley’s mad musicals, the galloping rhythms of swing music and the light-hearted stories of Damon Runyon.
Holding desperately on to their fragile, fraying narrative thread, the prognosticators predicted that, throughout the coming decade, extreme violence would be absent from multiplexes and the world's jukeboxes would throb to the happy sounds of some contemporary Benny Goodman. I remember at least one pundit suggesting that Roland Emmerich's Independence Day– in which America's cities are blown to then eerily familiar rubble – would never again be shown on mainstream television.
Space prohibits a comprehensive rebuttal of the historical argument. Let's just point out that the 1930s also saw the rise of the Universal horror film, the amoral gangster movie and the most mournful school of blues-based popular music. Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit– as grim as any song ever released – was, for example, recorded in 1939. Get the point?
Still, the predictions seemed, at first, to be playing themselves out quite persuasively. The first cultural casualty of the attacks was an Arnold Schwarzenegger film entitled Collateral Damage. Concerning (uh-oh!) a fireman seeking to avenge the death of his family in a terrorist attack, Andrew Davis's film was hurriedly pulled from the release schedules.
On September 14th, 2001, Hardball,a feel-good film in which Keanu Reeves coached underprivileged baseball players, was released to surprisingly healthy box-office returns. A decade of sunny distraction beckoned.
Well, it hardly needs to be said that the Hollywood studios rapidly slid back into their familiar ways. Among the biggest hits of 2002 we find the apocalyptic The Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, the sombre Signsand the far-from-cheery Minority Report. One could, perhaps, date the end of this false dawn to the release of Emmerich's T he Day After Tomorrowin 2004. A mere three years after 9/11, the bombastic German already felt able to annihilate New York (albeit via bad weather) for the entertainment of filmgoers.
The deliciously violent 24became one of the biggest hits on television. Kids got hooked on the vampires in Stephenie Meyer's Twilightbooks. And so forth.
Here’s the thing. Even if we pretend that the Busby Berkeley principle makes sense, we still have to admit that Americans did not – despite those overseas wars – have a particularly awful time of it during the first decade of the century. When Alan Greenspan responded to the momentary economic downturn by handing out free money to anybody standing within 50 feet of a realtor’s office he ushered in a period of (literally) fantastic prosperity.
It is nonsense to suggest that, in the years following the attacks, those Americans not directly affected felt constantly weighed down by the memory of the atrocities. Ordinary, day-to-day concerns rapidly take over. When there are franks in the fridge and a roof over the infants’ heads, culture consumers feel no need of escapist musicals or stories about wisecracking Broadway bookies.
Of course, 9/11 was referred to directly in popular culture. A paranoid nutter from rural New York, convinced that Bush and his cronies had arranged the attacks, poisoned the internet with a conspiracy screed entitled Loose Change. Oliver Stone made the dreary World Trade Center. Paul Greengrass made the excellent United 93. None made much impact on the mainstream.
A slew of films and TV series about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – The Hurt Locker, Generation Kill, In the Valley of Elahreceived strong reviews but attracted relatively few viewers.
Meanwhile, pop music continued to dig up inconsequential entertainers such as Lady Gaga and Susan Boyle. YouTube continued to feature videos of cats in buckets.
The unavoidable conclusion is that 9/11 had little direct impact on mainstream entertainment. It's hard to think of a single genuinely fashionable cultural phenomenon – maybe 24– that owed its existence to the events of September 11th.
Oh, hang on. What is the clunky Avatarbut a thinly failed metaphor for US adventures in Mesopotamia? If you'll excuse my facetiousness, al-Qaeda has a lot to answer for.