On 9/11
I first became interested in movies when I was thirteen years old. It was the year that brought Obama to the White House, Michael Phelps to Beijing and Heath Ledger to The Dark Knight. On the eve of those events I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, a movie in which Doris Day and James Stewart foil an international assassination plot while attempting to rescue their kidnapped son. It left me hungry for more — to watch, to learn, to dive into the medium. I didn’t realize it then, but this was to be the beginning of an indefinite personal study of the strange relationship between images and story.
The first movies I watched after The Man Who Knew Too Much were classics; as a kid, I’d always preferred history to life, so it wasn’t until the following year that I started following contemporary cinema. Initially it was a moviegoing year like any other for me — sporadic, pedestrian. I remember floating after (500) Days of Summer, and glaring into the rain that met me after Knowing. I wept at Up, like everyone else, and I was among that one-third-or-so of the world’s population that sat through Avatar. And then in the span of one month, I saw Bright Star, An Education, Up in the Air, and The Company Men. Suddenly, going to the movies was an adult activity. It became my vocation.
By the time I was fifteen I had come to notice a trend towards darkness in American movies. Estrangement, loss and outright apocalypse were as stock-in-trade topics for mature audiences as talking animals were for children. Movies like 2012, Transformers, X-Men, Taken, New Moon, and The Hurt Locker all seemed to have been produced during the fallout of some unacknowledged doomsday. It made me wonder if there was a potential source for all this gloominess; it didn’t take me long to speculate that perhaps the events of September 11, 2001 had left behind a conceptual residue so thick that it was clogging up the plot machines of popular American movies.
Since then, I have routinely revisited this idea of a post-9/11 cinema. It would be fatuous to suggest that all American movies over a nine-year period were explicitly defined by a single event. However, that one event did leave a significant impact on how Americans thought of themselves and their country. Considering its magnitude, it is not outrageous to approach 9/11 as a historical landmark by which to evaluate all else that immediately proceeded it.
More than that, it is important to remember that people are as responsible for their disasters as they are for their entertainment. Humans live in the world together, and we all function within a finite field of thought and ability. In the digital age, we are increasingly aware of one another and attuned to circumstances all over the world; our narratives overlap, our thoughts coalesce across borders and ideologies. The same collective consciousness that produced 9/11 also produced the Harry Potter franchise — and The Truman Show and Babel and Little Miss Sunshine and so on. These are all products of the human imagination. History and story are one and the same.
Much of this blog will be devoted to post-9/11 cinema. Studying the thematic trends in our movies can help us better articulate what we have gone through in the wake of seriously disarming international events. It can help us better understand our world — because how we tell stories is the same as how we like to think about ourselves. Movies offer us a window onto our ideals as much as our faults. We can learn from them, and reconsider how we engage with future challenges, how we tell our stories in years to come.
On the brink between ignorance and knowledge there is a point of no return. For some, it came while watching a TV screen one pleasant morning in mid-September. For me, it came while watching a movie about family conflict and international intrigue during the summer I first discovered I was gay. This blog is a series of reflections on the aspects of ourselves that we encounter onscreen; it is a celebration of our futile, blissful efforts to define life in our own terms.
