Leading up to the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks today, I heard more than a few people ask why the event has produced so few pop culture artifacts compared to grand tragedies and epochal shifts of similar magnitude. Vietnam, AIDS, World War II, the Kennedy assassinations, Iraq, Afghanistan—not only do plenty of dramatizations exist, they proliferate into subcategories: for Vietnam, there are combat films (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now), veteran films (Coming Home, Cutter’s Way, Rolling Thunder), metaphoric films (Southern Comfort), and masterpieces like The Deer Hunter that combine all three. With World War II, where do you even start? IMDb lists approximately 6000 films related to WWII, and it’s a genre that’s gone strong since the war itself. WWII remains a narrative gem, a period with a natural dramatic, an obvious morality, and a clear resolution.
The September 11 attacks offer no resolution and no second or third act; although the United States waged war on Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, the aftermath of September was never really addressed at home, and for the rest of the 2000s, it remained a present tense event. Not until Hurricane Katrina would the country endure another disaster, followed three years later by the financial crisis of 2008; although American contractors and journalists—not to mention soldiers—were semi-regularly kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist terrorists in the Middle East, the United States was thankfully spared more attacks, an impossible thought on September 12. Pick your year: George W. Bush’s administration cynically deployed a color-coded “Terror Warning” that remained active through his presidency, which nourished the ambient dread that smothered the nation in the years immediately after the attacks.
Afghanistan, Iraq, and even the killing of Osama Bin Laden offered no justice or catharsis; in the 2010s, Barack Obama presaged today’s Islamist politicians by defending the construction of the Ground Zero Mosque, infuriating survivors and causing enough of a blowback that he was forced to clarify that he wasn’t endorsing the “wisdom” of such a project, merely its constitutional legality. Fair enough—I’d say the same for Zohran Mamdani, who, as mayor, has an obligation to attend today’s memorial service regardless of his politics. Nevertheless, he remains on notice, a sympathizer at best and a subversive at worst: why else would he hire Al Qaeda lawyer Ramzi Kassem and pointedly hand him a ceremonial pen honoring the September 11 attacks?
9/11 has no second act because we’re still living through it. The other reason there was never a deluge of movies or television shows about the attacks is that the news footage of that day is more cinematic than any movie could ever be. The attacks even took place within the length of a feature film: just under two hours from the impact of the North Tower (8:46 a.m.) to its collapse (10:28 a.m.), a span that included the impact and collapse of the South Tower, the impact of the Pentagon, and the crash of Flight 93. 9/11 hasn’t been made into a movie because it already is one—it would be more accurate italicize the event as 9/11, a film with multiple “cuts” (CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, etc.) and mountains of “lore,” ranging from survivors’ stories to near misses to conspiracy theories, from the materialist to the truly woo-woo (I remember reading a GeoCities manifesto around 2004 that claimed the planes that hit the towers were holograms).
If younger generations don’t understand September 11 or treat it with flippant disrespect and callousness, it’s because they’ve only ever seen 9/11 as a movie. To those who didn’t live through it, 9/11 is merely a movie that people of a certain age feel strongly about, and that ardor is questionable when it’s attached to something that’s just a movie (a fucking wild one at that, with unparalleled special effects, impossibly high stakes, modern heroes and villains, and civilizational struggle played out on a scale so grand that Hollywood could never top it, instead sinking into what J. Hoberman calls a “blithe denial” of the event and the presidency of George W. Bush).
The ignorance of young Americans, along with the repulsive provocations by Mamdani, Hasan Piker, Ilhan Omar, and Abdul El-Sayed, have made this year’s anniversary particularly difficult. But Millennial Americans, in grade school during the attacks, are afflicted with a subtler alienation from the events themselves, because they lived through the day September 11 and experienced it as a movie in real time, on televisions rolled into classrooms. If you grew up in Ohio or even suburban Maryland, you likely only ever experienced September 11 as 9/11 the movie; if you didn’t fly, and if you didn’t watch the news, you could grow up untouched by the event, beyond encountering the occasional metal detector or considering the scrolling “lower third” on cable news channels, a feature introduced on September 11 that’s been there ever since.
On Wednesday, author Shannon McDermott wrote, “9/11 was so shattering, so singular. It is strange that it has so little presence in popular culture. Where are the great 9/11 movies - or the bad ones? How many stories have even alluded to it? Just references, the idea that 9/11 happened and people heard of it.” While it’s true there aren’t many September 11 movies (World Trade Center, United 93, Reign Over Me, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close the most prominent exceptions that prove the rule), it’s not true that 9/11 “has so little presence in popular culture.” Quite the contrary—when my family relocated from Lower Manhattan to Baltimore in the summer of 2003, we were treated well by all of the adults, while I endured the inexplicable jealousy (!) of certain classmates, friends, and even girlfriends who resented not only my proximity to the event but the pain and trauma it wrought on my family.
Unfortunately, it never stopped. When I visited Tribeca a few years ago, a young friend of mine found a commemorative September 11 sticker on the ground and rushed up to show me, as if 9/11 was where I came from, a set I worked on, an experience that, like the making of a major motion picture, most people never get “access” to even though they’ve all seen the movie.
This is merely a continuation of what my father wrote about at the end of September 2001 in New York Press’ “Best of Manhattan” issue: “Just last week I was speaking to a cop (the process of presenting photo ID and proof of residence is now an ingrained routine) and he told me how dozens of tourists have begged him to retrieve a piece of rubble from ‘Ground Zero’ for a souvenir. No novelist could make up this sick state of mind.”
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM