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How did Hollywood after 9/11 redefine its love of disaster? – The Hollywood journalist

 


Last summer and for the first time in a few years, I took my two young children, both born and living in France, to visit our family in New York. We spent much of the vacation walking the bridges and tunnels of Queens and New Jersey, but one day we made our way to downtown Manhattan – and, without really planning it, we strolled the 9/11 Memorial at the original World Trade site. Center.

After circling the man-made giant waterfalls marking the places where the Twin Towers once stood, looking at the names of all the victims carved along the barriers, my kids inevitably started asking me questions. Being too young and having grown up in a foreign country, neither of them had really heard of the 9/11 attacks, so they wanted to know what happened and, more specifically, how.

“Did they fly the planes in the towers?” My son asked. “Yes, an airplane in each tower,” I said. “How did they get the planes? He continued. “They were passengers and they hijacked them.” “How did they do that?” “They used knives.” “What kind of knives? “I think they were small utility knives or cutters.” “So they used knives to take control of the planes, then took them to New York and smashed them against the towers?” ” “Yes.” “It looks like a movie,” he said. “I know. But it really happened.

It has been 20 years since September 11, 2001, and it is still not easy for many of us to explain – either to ourselves or to our children – the realities that took place that day. . To those lucky enough to be far from Ground Zero witnessing the events on television, it felt like a Hollywood disaster scenario coming to life in the most terrifying way possible. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said in his collection of post-September 11, 2002 essays, Welcome to the desert of reality (the title comes from the scene in The matrix where Morpheus introduces Neo to the real world behind the computer simulation he lived in):

“For the vast majority of the public, the WTC explosions were events on the television screen, and when we watched the oft-repeated shot of frightened people running towards the camera in front of the tower’s giant dust cloud that grew taller. collapsing, was not the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of the spectacular shots of disaster films, a special effect that surpasses all others, since… reality is the best appearance of itself?

How did Hollywood cope with such a reality in the aftermath of September 11? Over the next few weeks, his first task was to delay the release of blockbusters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. Collateral damage – whose opening sequence featured a terrorist attack in downtown Los Angeles – so audiences could better digest the disasters fabricated by the movie industry at a later date. (The delay did not Collateral damage more digestible, and the film would become one of Schwarzenegger’s last big-budget efforts before he successfully ran for California governor in 2003.)

In the year since the 9/11 attacks, two feature films released, one on television and one in theaters, described the events in radically different ways.

The two-hour television documentary September 11th, which aired on CBS in March 2002, provided a heart-wrenching chronicle of Ground Zero, as evidenced by two French brothers, filmmakers who were in Tribeca filming a movie about a newbie NYFD firefighter, then found themselves swept away. in a major American disaster.

Twenty years later, the images captured by Jules and Gédéon Naudet, including one of the only shots of the first plane hitting the North Tower, remain a gripping time capsule of the destruction that took place on what must have been an average Tuesday morning. in the city. In terms of pure documentary evidence, there’s no better, and although some scenes are difficult to watch, there is a light at the end of the tunnel when we learn that the two brothers, as well as several firefighters who appear in the film, Survived.

The other characteristic was that of Spike Lee 25th hour, which has been adapted by future Game Of Thrones showrunner David Benioff from his own novel and follows the last day of freedom for a convicted drug dealer, played by a particularly downcast Edward Norton. Initially, the film had nothing to do with 9/11, but the attacks took place during preproduction and Lee decided to incorporate them into his film, which opens with shots of the massive projectors replacing the twin towers after their fall.

While the plot itself doesn’t deal specifically with terrorism, instead focusing on how Norton’s character ended up in jail after stepping too deep into the Russian crowd, no other movie has captured the story better. deep discouragement that lingered in New York City following the attacks – the sense of loss, of the city and the cityscape forever changed, New Yorkers trying to find meaning in their changed lives. (Lee’s new documentary NYC Epicentres 9/11 -> 2021½, which aired on HBO in late August, revisits the events of September 11 in a much more direct way.)

It will take a few years for Hollywood to pump money into what could be considered the first, and possibly the last, 9/11 blockbuster: the epic and bombast of Oliver Stone. World Trade Center, which, despite a story based in part on actual characters, comes across as a rather schmaltzy attempt to portray the disaster from the perspective of firefighters, police, and workers at the New York Port Authority.

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United 93
Universal Images

Stone’s film was released in 2006, a few months before the much more memorable United 93, who found Paul Greengrass applying his visceral docudrama style – something he would perfect the following year in Bourne’s ultimatum – the true story of the only plane hijacked on September 11 that failed to reach its target, the United States Capitol, thanks to a revolt of passengers who knew they were doomed.

There are a handful of other movies and shows illustrating the attacks, their planning, or their aftermath, some of them pretty decent (The report, the Hulu series The impending tower, the TV documentary September 11: The Falling Man), and others, for the most part, indecent (extremely strong and incredibly close, the star of Charlie Sheen September 11th). But the events of September 11 were so big and defining for the generation, their effect on Hollywood extended beyond mere content, impacting the way blockbusters would be made and experienced in the decades that followed.

On the one hand, and to return to Žižek’s quote on “a special effect that surpasses all others”, there have been attempts to recreate the dreadfully real spectacle of the original TV news, mostly in films of found images. like that of Matt Reeves. Cloverfield and Josh Trank the Chronicle – a 2008 monster film and a 2012 teenage superhero film, respectively – which captured footage of mass urban destruction through a shaking amateur-style lens. Other disaster films, like Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version of War of the Worlds, were more traditional in design, but featured realistic settings that channeled the sense of uncontrollable chaos and helplessness seen at Ground Zero.

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War of the Worlds
Paramount / Everett Collection

Much more important, however, has been Hollywood’s shift from realism to pure CG spectacle. The first post 9/11 comic book character movie to really hit the jackpot was Sam Raimi’s Spider Man, which was released in the spring of 2002. The film includes a scene where Times Square is terrorized, explosions knocking pieces of buildings down onto innocent pedestrians. But the fact that the attack was carried out by the Green Goblin and his pumpkin bombs obviously made it more palatable to viewers – to the point that Spider Man would gross $ 825 million worldwide and set the stage for the Marvel Universe that Hollywood and all of us live in now, for better or for worse.

We have seen entire cities decimated in The Avengers and in Batman vs. Superman, to name just two examples, and according to the stupendous box office of these films, we never tire of it. Does looking at digitally rendered urban disasters, the bigger the better, provide catharsis for the real destruction we witnessed on September 11?

Maybe for some. For others, however, who are still trying to make sense of it all – especially as we approach the 20th anniversary of the event and see that the great U.S. foreign policy initiative on September 11 in Afghanistan s ‘is tragically broken down – it might be worth revisiting a film that tackles the aftermath of 9/11 in both historical and existential ways: Kathryn Bigelow’s Dark zero thirty, a thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

By the time of its release in late 2012, the film received generally rave reviews and performed well in theaters, but was also mired in controversy over its factual accuracy and, some argue, its pro-torture stance. One reporter compared Bigelow to Leni Riefenstahl, and Žižek was among those appalled by the film’s policy. Looking at him now, however, Dark zero thirty unfolds like a gripping and complex quest to solve an intractable problem: America’s place in a post-9/11 world.

Dark zero thirty

In the film, Maya, the CIA analyst played by Jessica Chastain who stalked Bin Laden for nearly a decade, and the rest of the U.S. Secret Service spend billions of dollars and move mountains to hit their targets by all means. necessary means, resorting to torture – during the painfully crude opening section of the film – in order to obtain leads on the whereabouts of the al-Qaida leader.

When they finally locate him in a compound in northeast Pakistan, Bigelow presents the assassination of Bin Laden at the hands of the US Navy SEALs as a surgically operated home invasion where parents are murdered in front of their screaming children and terrorists shot dead. like crabs in a barrel. . There’s nothing glorious about it: it’s a dirty job done efficiently and without any pomp and circumstance – about as far away from Riefenstahl as possible – and it leaves us wondering if it was worth it, whether this murder will really solve America’s baffling problems abroad.

Dark zero thirty begins with chilling audio clips of 9/11 calls made by people trapped in the Twin Towers or hijacked planes, setting the stage for Maya’s journey to avenge their deaths and catch the man responsible. It ends with her boarding a military transport plane completely on her own, until she bursts into tears, as if the scale and futility of her accomplished mission have suddenly struck her. “Where do you want to go?” the pilot asks him, and he seems to be asking the question of all of us. She never answers him.

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2/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/critics-notebook-how-has-post-9-11-hollywood-mirrored-our-anxieties-and-redefined-its-love-of-disaster-1235001469/

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