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With the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks fast approaching, and to mark the release of 9/11 drama Reign Over Me, Blockbuster.co.uk's Marshall Julius explores how Hollywood has dealt with the tragedy.
The world's changed since 9/11, and not for the better. We live on a planet fractured by terrorism and strained by racial tension, our civil liberties revoked by governments who claim it's for our own protection. With no end in sight to The War on Terror, I worry that the events of September 11, 2001 will define not just the Noughties, but the whole of the 21st Century. Now there's a depressing thought.
Traditionally, in times of woe, Hollywood has opted to avoid the issues of the day, preferring to dish out escapism to reality-weary audiences hungry for a break. Eventually the movies do catch up with the times, but only when it's deemed culturally sensitive to do so. Certainly Vietnam was taboo until long after the conflict ended in 1975, the first film to directly address the consequences of that regrettable war being Michael Cimino's Oscar®-winning The Deer Hunter (1978), paving the way for Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).
Similarly, Hollywood stayed silent on 9/11 for quite some time. Back when it happened, the first thing the studios did was delay the release of terrorist-themed Schwarzenegger actioner Collateral Damage, and withdraw the Twin Towers-set trailer for Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man movie. Other than that, all seemed normal in Movieland. Though a number of actors spoke out against Bush and his holy war, a bold move from the likes of Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, collectively speaking, Hollywood stayed silent on the whole affair, and within a month got right back to business. In early October, audiences flocked to see Denzel Washington in Training Day, a disturbing vision of police corruption at a time when the cops were being hailed as heroes for their bravery and sacrifice in the aftermath of the attack. Yet no one seemed to mind the film or label it insensitive. On the contrary, it did very well, earning Washington a Best Actor Oscar®.
Still, people remained sensitive about the notion of film and TV projects depicting the events of 9/11, and it was three years before anyone went anywhere near there. A poorly received 2003 TV movie, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis failed to convince anyone that the time was right for docutainment, and the love-it-or-hate-it response to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a damning indictment of the Bush administration, perfectly reflected how deeply divided America was.
Almost five years after the attacks, Hollywood finally decided it was time to tackle the subject head on. Released in 2006, hot on the heels of identically themed TV movie Flight 93, United 93 told the story of the fourth hijacked plane. The one that crashed, but missed its target when the passengers fought back. Written and directed by Brit Paul Greengrass, its vivid, explicit content shocked an awful lot of Americans.
Even the trailers upset people. When one played at Hollywood's famed Chinese Theatre, audience members called out, "Too soon!" In New York, the response was even more dramatic. Containing news footage of one of the planes about to hit the World Trade Center, the trailer was ultimately pulled from screens after numerous complaints. "One lady was crying," the manager told a local paper. "I don't think people are ready for this." Hollywood felt otherwise. "We expect that some moviegoers will have a strong response to its images and narrative," commented Universal Pictures, adding they had the approval of every victim's family, and that while they wouldn't delay the opening of the movie, they planned to donate 10% of its opening weekend takings to the Flight 93 National Memorial Fund.
So the movie came out, and it was good, and respectful, and devastating. It wasn't easy to watch but it was essential, and like The Deer Hunter before it, it marked the end of Hollywood's silence and cleared the path for an increasing number of film and TV projects. Also released in 2006, Adam Sandler played a 9/11 widow in Reign Over Me, out now on DVD and available to add to your list, and Nic Cage was a port authority cop trapped under the rubble in Oliver Stone's rousing World Trade Center.
"You have to make films like this sometimes because they're important," stressed Stone. "It's a healthy movie, a clean movie. It doesn't offend. It can hurt, it can be hard to go through, you can cry but I think you'll come out cleaned and healed. There's something to be said about facing the fears, confronting them, demythologising them."
Today there's no shortage of 9/11-inspired material from Hollywood, from factual to fictional and everything in between. Though Tinseltown's treatment of the attacks may still seem insensitive to some, Paul Levinson, a brainiac from New York's Fordham University, call them a "healthy" sign that popular culture is finally coming to terms with the calamity. "Since this is one of the transcending, defining events of our age, inevitably Hollywood has to deal with it," he said plainly. "It's part of the process by which we come to understand our own feelings about this."
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