How Hollywood responded to 9/11
The movies have a long tradition of absorbing our traumas and feeding them back to us as entertainment.
Sometimes the process is obvious: During World War II, Hollywood produced dozens of morale-boosting war films. Sometimes it's more subtle: The disillusionment of the 1970s generated downbeat dramas and discomfiting Vietnam War movies ("The Deer Hunter," "Coming Home"). Whatever is happening in our lives, we've relied on filmmakers to help us escape reality but also make sense of it.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001.
The horror of 9/11, its complex causes and its politically polarizing effects, have proved nearly impossible to package into a crowd-pleasing movie. Movies about war in the Middle East, no matter how attractive their stars, routinely flopped at the box office. Instead, over the past decade of violence, fear and uncertainty, movies and moviegoers alike retreated to the safety of superhero and fantasy films, two genres defined by their distance from reality.
"The American response to 9/11 is full of all these mixed emotions," says Robert McKee, author of "Story," the bestselling screenwriting guide. "The good and evil isn't clear anymore. Stories are about values: freedom and slavery, justice and injustice, good and evil. And when those values get blurry . . . it's extremely difficult to tell a story."
Initially, 9/11 seemed destined for the Hollywood treatment. Eyewitnesses and news anchors repeatedly compared the destruction of the Twin Towers -- the blue sky, the roaring planes, the chaos -- to something out of a big-budget action flick.
Hollywood's first reaction was denial. Columbia Pictures erased the Twin Towers from the trailers for "Spider-Man." The Tim Allen comedy "Big Trouble," which involved a bomb in an airport, was postponed for months. Just the title and setting of "Sidewalks of New York," a romantic comedy, was enough to delay its release.
"There was definitely the sense of, did this event just change our world, and change everything we're doing as filmmakers?" says New York-based director Doug Liman, who was filming the espionage thriller "The Bourne Identity" at the time of the attacks. Concerned that his movie's unflattering portrayal of the CIA might prove unpopular, Liman shot an alternative, more upbeat ending that ultimately was not used.
"I'm normally a pretty decisive filmmaker," Liman says, "but living in lower Manhattan and feeling the world turn upside down, and doing a film that is in the political arena -- it was an environment where you were seeing movies getting shelved."
Dramatizations of 9/11 wouldn't appear until 2006: "United 93," a real-time drama set largely inside the plane that never reached its target (the U.S. Capitol) because of the intervention of passengers, and "World Trade Center," which found director Oliver Stone in an atypically reverent mood. But that was it. Filmmakers were by then turning their attention to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They tried varying approaches, from the somber drama "In the Valley of Elah" to the action thriller "Green Zone." But audiences largely stayed away. "The Hurt Locker," about a U.S. bomb squad in Iraq, became the lowest-grossing film of the modern era to win an Oscar for best picture.
"I was told many times that it was too early to approach the subject matter," says Paul Haggis, writer-director of "In the Valley of Elah." But he doubts audiences will ever embrace movies about Iraq and Afghanistan as they did films about Vietnam.
"These wars have gone on for much longer than many others," he says. "They seem to be endless."
Even in popcorn action films, where America's real-life enemies often appear on-screen, terrorism and war seemed largely absent. Though audiences routinely hissed at Soviets in late-Cold War-era movies like "Red Dawn" and "Rocky IV" (still the highest-grossing entry in that franchise), few recent movies have made villains of Arab terrorists.
That may be because of a new awareness of diversity -- it's no longer acceptable to demonize an entire ethnicity -- and a reluctance to fuel extremism. But the main reason may be the sensitive issue of religion, says Michael Barson, author of the book "Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture."
"You can have a nationalist issue," Barson says. "That part of it, nation-to-nation, pushes one kind of button. But when you get into religion, that's different."
Instead, screen villains have been more likely to wield magic wands, and screen heroes have been wearing tights and capes. The biggest hits of the past decade include "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (2001), "Spider-Man" (2002), "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003) and the all-time box-office record-holder, "Avatar" (2009), which has earned more than $2.7 billion worldwide. It's difficult to spot any parallels to 9/11 or the Middle East in these movies.
The "Harry Potter" films took an "absolutely earnest approach to concepts such as courage, loyalty, friendship, redemption -- things that I think had seemed for years sort of musty relics," says Steve Kloves, the franchise's main screenwriter. "Harry is quietly courageous, and things are very simple for him about what's right and what's wrong. I think we long for that in a complicated world."
"They say the movies are an escape from reality" McKee says. "My philosophy is just the opposite: People are running to reality. There are deep conflicts between themselves and their sense of the world, and they need equipment for living. Something has to resolve these terrible moral conflicts and confusions. So, they go to the movies."
Mixed emotions to 9/11 movies
BY RAFER GUZMAN, rafer.guzman@newsday.com
When 9/11 did show up in the movies, striking the right tone was a challenge. As many filmmakers found out, audience reactions could be unpredictable.
Spike Lee's "25th Hour," the first major film specifically set in New York City post-9/11, drew mixed reviews in late 2003. Its drug-dealer hero (Edward Norton) lived across from Ground Zero, but the plot had nothing to do with the attacks, leading some to wonder if Lee was being only superficially topical. Still, it's a vivid (and arguably still the only) film to evoke a freshly wounded and traumatized Manhattan.
Other movies seemed allegorical, particularly Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" (2005), in which an alien invasion causes various reactions among Earthlings: Some hide, some enlist, some go insane. Images of helpless, falling bodies -- even if only from spaceships -- proved too realistic for some viewers.
The British romantic comedy "Love Actually" took a gamble in 2003 by invoking the final phone calls of 9/11 victims in its opening voice-over (Hugh Grant did the honors). Surprisingly, it paid off: The movie became a sizable hit.
Not so for last year's "Remember Me." A somber drama about a young man estranged from his father, the film invoked 9/11 in a way that many found mawkish and exploitative. Despite its wildly popular star, Robert Pattinson, the movie was a resounding failure, earning only $19 million.
