9/11’s impact on pop culture has been wide, but not deep

One moment, they were standing there together, side by side. And then, suddenly, one of them began to fall.

“After 9/11, everybody was going through their own kind of hell,” recalls Michael Smuin, director of San Francisco’s Smuin Ballet. “I was watching CNN, and there was one of those firemen’s funerals that followed in an endless procession. The widow and her kids were at the head of the casket, and there were firemen standing at each of the four corners.”

Next to the men stood their wives, and suddenly one of the women fainted and began to fall. “She fell straight backwards,” says Smuin, who gasped as he watched her topple over, the symbolism instantly apparent and the collapse almost unbearable to watch. “And then, at the very last moment, her husband caught her.”

Smuin had been looking for a way to memorialize the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, but had reached a point of such despair the night before rehearsals for his tribute were to begin that he decided to cancel the ballet. Then he saw the woman falling. In the fireman’s catch, Smuin saw a way to begin processing his grief, and to transform the horrifying images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center as they came crashing down into art.

“That was my opening image for the ballet,” he says.

“Stabat Mater” premiered in October 2001 and was performed by the Dance Theater of Harlem before 6,000 people in New York’s Battery Park on the first anniversary of Sept. 11. (The title is based on a 13th-century hymn that begins Stabat Mater Dolorosa, “The sorrowful mother was standing ...”) “I felt as if a stake had been pulled out of my heart the minute that ballet was performed,” Smuin says.

Five years later, Sept. 11 remains a stake not so easily removed from the heart of American popular culture. Its impact has been predictably wide, but it has not always been deep. Hollywood - the mammoth engine that drives American popular culture - was a timid first responder, digitally removing the World Trade Center from more than a dozen movies that came out in the first year after the attacks. Wary of allowing their customary box-office imperative to profane an event that took the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans, the motion picture studios have spent most of the past five years engaged in hand-wringing about whether it was “too soon” to make movies about Sept. 11.

Hollywood’s uncommon display of restraint struck many people as sensitivity taken to the level of self-censorship. “It’s never too soon,” says Kirby Dick, director of the upcoming documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” which deals with censorship. “That’s what art does. Art isn’t effective or successful unless it happens too soon.”

Nobody could fault the nation’s book publishers for holding back. A year after the assault, the New York Times bestseller list featured nine attack-related titles among its top 15 books, and there were an additional 60 or so that never made the list. The Sept. 11 commission’s official report was the first to go multi-platform, released initially as a bestselling book, and more recently as a TV special and DVD (“On Native Soil”) and even a comic book (“The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation”).

Literary carpetbaggers swarmed over the emotional wreckage, but far from the bestseller lists, the real work of art often was going on in what some people referred to - unironically, inasmuch as irony had been declared dead - as the shadow of ground zero. In “The Smoke Week,” Ellis Avery writes about watching the rain dissolve thousands of photos of the missing that papered Lower Manhattan after the towers imploded. “It’s like they’re dying all over again,” she writes. “Isn’t it enough, to be killed and ashed and scattered? Do we have to breathe and drink their pictures, too? Today I cannot bear the ruthless thrift of living, the sickening alchemy of rot and seed. Even grief becomes manure.”

Television had served its role as communal campfire, but as the images of the planes slamming into the buildings were replayed again and again, no one was quite sure how to react, or even how to feel. “Evil possesses an instinct for theater,” Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, “which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify its damage by the power of horrific images.”

But those images - at first paralyzing and powerful - soon became part of the continuous loop of the news cycle as it accelerated and elongated. (More than 17 television specials recalling the attack and its agonizing aftermath were scheduled for the past month alone.) As images dominated words, the aesthetics of the attacks - or what Morrow referred to as Sept. 11’s “production values” - had a dulling effect on emotions. Even the term “9/11” - which emerged through an unspoken national consensus to become the American Dialect Society’s word of the year for 2001, after coinages such as “Terrible Tuesday” were tried and discarded - used numbers to depersonalize the event, according to one linguist.

It seemed possible that the tragedy itself was so inherently dramatic, and had been experienced by so many people simultaneously, that it effectively prevented the creation of drama. Who needed a Broadway play about Sept. 11 when you had witnessed the actual horror unfolding in four acts?

Images of rubble and dust by photographers Joel Meyerowitz and Gilles Peress - often with no humans in sight, only wreckage - created a glossy aesthetic for what was still a mass grave site. “To acknowledge the beauty of photographs of the World Trade Center ruins in the months following the attack seemed frivolous, sacrilegious,” essayist Susan Sontag noted in her book “Regarding the Pain of Others.” Sontag had once written that the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl - “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will” - were so stylistically brilliant that, despite their glorification of Adolf Hitler’s death machine, they were beyond censure. Here she seemed to be making the same point about the terrorists’ handiwork: “The most people dared say was that the photographs were `surreal,’ a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced notion of beauty cowered.”

Hollywood had long since perfected its brand of glamorous violence as a kind of apocalyptic pornography, and within two months of the attacks, senior presidential adviser Karl Rove was dispatched to sit down with the studio heads to find out how movies could help win the war on terror. (Meanwhile, the rest of us were told to go shopping to keep the economy humming.)

“I think what’s happened is that culture itself has been temporarily put aside,” director Baz Luhrmann told the New York Times. Almost everyone said they expected movies to become less “gratuitously” violent in the wake of Sept. 11, but if that was ever true at all, it seemed to apply only to movies about Sept. 11. “United 93” and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” - both released this year - were carefully crafted restatements of the known facts about that day. Neither film attracted a large audience, but that didn’t stop Stacey Sher, one of the producers of “World Trade Center,” from asserting Hollywood’s right to lead the country through its grief. “This is how we process what happens to us as human beings,” she said, “through art.’

“World Trade Center” uses all the special effects and levers of uplift in the Hollywood arsenal while racing toward its happy ending, stopping abruptly before the 30 surgeries and lengthy rehabilitation of the past five years that have made a far less happy dissolve for the movie’s real-life protagonist, John McLoughlin. In any case, we may find out if it’s too soon for a fictional treatment of Sept. 11 when Sony releases “Reign Over Me” this fall. In that picture, Adam Sandler plays a man attempting to recover from the loss of his family on Sept. 11.

The unsubtle provocations of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” purported to be a muckraking documentary, but its real value may have been in loosening the tongues of Americans who had grown fearful of speaking up. Moore’s assertion of artistic license on a subject that previously had been regarded as sacred spurred talk of treason on conservative radio and TV shows after the movie was released in 2004, but that was overshadowed when “Fahrenheit 9/11” became the first documentary to make more than $100 million at the domestic box office.

At a moment when the world was being divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” - terms once used as shorthand in Hollywood Westerns, but now applied to anybody the president described as either “with us” or “against us” - few wanted to be caught on the wrong side of the moral divide. “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau withdrew strips mocking George Bush as an intellectual lightweight, and Barbra Streisand removed anti-Bush postings from her Web site.

When Bill Maher, then the host of ABC’s late-night show “Politically Incorrect,” said that, by lobbing cruise missiles at terrorist camps, “We have been the cowards,” several of his advertisers abruptly abandoned him. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer denounced Maher from the press room pulpit, warning that “Americans ... need to watch what they say, watch what they do,” soon after which, the network canceled Maher’s show.

“It was interesting how long it took following 9/11 for there to be jokes about it,” says Kirby Dick. “That’s always a reflection of how traumatic an event is.” For the first few days after the tragedy, comedy shows simply vanished from the airwaves, and David Letterman even suggested he might abandon his CBS talk show. He returned Sept. 17 with an emotional speech in which he wondered aloud to his audience how religion could have motivated the terrorists. “If you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you?” Letterman asked, his voice quivering. “Will that make any goddamned sense?”

Like the rest of us, he seemed to exhale his grief in a great spasm, then took a deep breath and got on with it. Soon the late-night comics were casually making terrorist jokes, and last month Letterman was so over his post-Sept. 11 despair that he enumerated the “Top 10 Signs That Osama Is In Love With You.” (No. 7: “You say you enjoy Barry Manilow - next day he sends you Barry Manilow’s ear.”)

No one seemed to feel it was too soon to laugh.

The removal of the rubble at the World Trade Center took nine months, a reversal of the gestation process that so far has produced only a footprint where the buildings once stood. Above it is an open wound that someday soon will be filled up with architecture, paintings, theater, dance, music, the messy stuff of life itself. “The only thing that lasts anyway is art,” says Michael Smuin. “Everything else goes away.”

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FILMOGRAPHY:
“9/11” (2002)
“September 11” (2002)
“Twin Towers” (2003)
“Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004)
“Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire” (2004)
“United 93” (2006)
“World Trade Center” (2006)

TELEVISION:
“The Path to 9/11” (ABC)
“On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report” (Court TV)
“Inside 9/11” (National Geographic Channel)
“Rescue Me” (FX Channel)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
“The Smoke Week: Sept. 11-21 2001” by Ellis Avery
“The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright
“The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation” by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon
“Watching the World Change” by David Friend
“American Ground” by William Langewiesche
“In the Shadow of No Towers” by Art Spiegelman
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer

DISCOGRAPHY:
“Let’s Roll,” Neil Young (2001)
“Vigil,” Suzanne Vega and members of the Greenwich Village Songwriter’s Exchange (2002)
“The Rising,” Bruce Springsteen (2002)
“Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” Toby Keith (2002)
“Sonic Jihad,” by Paris (2003)

THEATER:
“The Guys,” by Anne Nelson

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© 2006, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.