If you want to register how much the world seems to have changed in the past three weeks — on the entertainment pages as well as in the news section — cast your mind back to the entertainment headlines. They included the death of R&B singer Aaliyah and non-stories such as “Whitney Houston ‘Not Dead'”.
Now they seem like bizarre artefacts out of a time capsule disinterred from the other side of the universe.
Entertainment news has reflected the World Trade Centre tragedy in the same way as straight news reporting. Just as the hard-news media have forgotten all about Gary Condit, China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation, the conflict in Macedonia and escaped murderers in Texas, no one’s said a word about Aaliyah or Houston since September 11.
What entertainment news there is inevitably focuses on the responses of Hollywood, the TV and radio networks and various entertainment figures to the hijacks and their aftermath. The business and sports pages are the same, given the suspension of baseball and the stock market.
The entertainment industry has had a complex response to the tragedy. After all, the universal reaction to the World Trade Centre footage was: “This is worse than any movie I’ve ever seen.” Those images trumped anything from Air Force One or The Peacemaker.
Presumably this was intentional. The outrages were obviously based on years of planning, involving flight training and a more than rudimentary knowledge of structural engineering. Like it or not, what those responsible were primarily interested in creating was an image that would sear the collective retina forever, and in that they succeeded beyond anybody’s wildest expectations.
It was almost inevitable that Hollywood, which has spent years filling our screens with apocalyptic imagery, should now pause for an interval of confused self-examination. Not because such images shouldn’t be manufactured or displayed, but because in the immediate aftermath of the hijacks, audiences’ nerves are so jangled and emotions so raw as to make them seem very upsetting indeed.
The short-term reaction has therefore been one of extreme sensitivity. Everything, from scripts in development to movies on the verge of release — and even their ad campaigns — has been subjected to reappraisal by nervous network executives. Talk shows have been furloughed or, if broadcast, in subdued form. Radio networks have pulled dozens of songs from their playlists.
In many ways the concern is justified. The United States is in shock, humming with talk of war and vengeance, grief and mourning. It will be a while before normal service is resumed. But there’s no shortage of oversensitivity as well.
There may be reasons Peter, Paul and Mary’s Leaving on a Jet Plane or Black Sabbath’s Suicide Solution are currently deemed in bad taste — but Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water? Sinatra’s New York, New York? The Bangles’ Walk Like an Egyptian?
The World Trade Centre was such an architectural icon that it has long been a favourite site for moviemakers of all sizes. Now that it’s gone, I’m amazed at how many unreleased movies feature it and even more surprised at their fates.
A trailer for Spider-Man has been pulled because it features the Marvel Comics web-slinger scaling the twin towers. Men in Black II was to have climaxed at the centre, but will now have to find another ending.
The new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage, in which “Ahnuldt’s” wife is killed in a skyscraper bombing, has been delayed indefinitely. Jackie Chan’s movie Nosebleed was to have featured the martial arts star as a window cleaner on the towers who uncovers a terrorist plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty. That’s been overtaken by events in that the plot can’t compete with grim reality and because the location no longer exists.
Even Ed Burns’s romantic comedy Sidewalks of New York is to be reexamined because it features shots of New York landmarks, including the twin towers. Likewise, shots will be excised from People I Know, including one in which a pill-popping Al Pacino wakes up on a sidewalk in lower Manhattan after a night on the razzle and, from his horizontal perspective, we see the centre apparently lying on its side.
Some movies still in the script-development stage are also likely to be reassessed. Lockerbie, in which Sean Connery is due to play a Scottish chief constable investigating the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103, may soon find itself in turnaround.
There may also be problems for The Alchemist, about a former CIA man who investigates terrorist atrocities by Pentagon figures, and The Lion’s Game, about an NYPD detective hunting Arab terrorists.
Studio executives are notoriously timorous in such matters and we can expect them to avoid even tangential contact with terrorism for a while to come.
On TV, meanwhile, this same nervousness registered in decisions to reschedule network showings of movies such as Independence Day and The Peacemaker. I was, however, astonished to find that in the two days following the attacks I was able to see, on various cable channels, the movies Fearless, Alive, and Drop Zone, all of which contain horrifically realistic plane-crash sequences. Not exactly my idea of escapism.
The usually glib and ironic late-night talk shows have been noticeably subdued and short on laughs. Jay Leno’s Tonight Show didn’t air for a week, and Comedy Central’s award-winning Daily Show, which uses a mock current affairs format to satirise not only the news but the self-important way in which it is presented, has extended its end-of-summer hiatus into a third week, with producers acknowledging the difficulties that recent events pose for its scornful world view.
And when David Letterman resumed his show on Monday, he dispensed with his usual monologue and top 10 and gave a nervous appraisal of how New York was coping.
His guest was veteran CBS newsman Dan Rather, once famous for his grilling of president Richard Nixon during Watergate, who broke down in tears twice on camera. Many have suspected Rather of being a drama queen — he once signed off by clenching his fist and solemnly saying to viewers, “Courage!” — and there were uncharitable suggestions that his performance deserved an Oscar.Still, seeing the US’s most hardened anchor crying was deeply unsettling.
One of the more fatuous remarks from a media figure came from Steven Spielberg, who suggested that the anniversary of September 11 be marked by a second of silence for each victim of the attacks. Given the likely death toll, that would mean about 83 minutes of silence, a long time when you consider that the millions who fell in World War I get only 120 seconds.
Spielberg’s influence was detectable in another, indirect way.
Two nights before the attacks, the miniseries Band of Brothers, which Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced, aired its third episode. For six months HBO has run a wall-to-wall ad campaign for this hugely expensive World War II series, and prompted networks such as Turner Classic Movies and the History Channel to jump on the bandwagon by scheduling marathons of war movies and documentaries.
For a couple of weeks before the attacks, US television was marinated in Private Ryan-style talk of “valour”, “courage”, “sacrifice” and “resolve”. The Private Ryan cash-in bestseller, The Greatest Generation, a collection of interviews with World War II vets, was written (well, compiled) by Tom Brokaw, a news anchor, so it wasn’t so surprising that the news channels and network coverage of the post-World Trade Centre national mood was suffused with this currently ubiquitous rhetoric from half a century ago.
At the first mention of the word “war” you could almost see the newsreaders straightening their spines and thinking, “Tall in the saddle …”
The news profoundly affected our movies and TV, just as in small, weird ways, TV and movies influenced the coverage of the events themselves.
One question: if a war ever comes, will Spielberg and Hanks be charged with producing its “Why We Fight” documentaries?