Aliens blowing up the White House. Calling game-show contestants "Survivors." Background shots of the New York City skyline. Caring about Gary Condit's and Anne Heche's love lives. Videogame warriors blasting through ruins. Insult comedy. Smug, detached comedy. Political comedy. These are just a few more of the casualties of Sept. 11's...
Wait. Start again. "Casualties"? An officeworker, encased in a steel-and-concrete tomb, who did not live to see the birth of his baby: that is a casualty. But an entertainment genre? That's the vanity of vanities. That's confetti. That's nothing.
This, in a way, is the problem facing American pop culture in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: so much that we could say casually a month ago rings empty, even cruel, today. Our metaphors have expired. Pleasure seems mocking and futile. The language that artists, comedians, storytellers and actors use to explain us to ourselves now seems frivolous, inappropriate or simply outdated. Entertainers in every field are in a crisis of relevance, caught up in a nationwide feeling of survivor's guilt, unsure whether their work has a place in the new reality. "I don't know if my writing right now is adequate to the time," says playwright Jon Robin Baitz. "I'm not going to write until I feel that's no longer an issue."
It is fair to say that this tragedy--and probably more important, the ensuing conflict--will change the culture. Great events do that. The absurdity of the First World War gave us Dadaism. The Great Depression created an appetite for frothy screwball comedies. World War II replaced them with sentimental, patriotic dramas and eventually film noir and social-issues movies and plays. The atomic age fed science fiction and rock 'n' roll; the Vietnam War gave us Norman Lear sitcoms and Robert Altman films.
But, at least in the short term, the terror attacks have not yet changed pop culture so much as suspended it. "No humor column today," wrote syndicated funnyman Dave Barry. "I don't want to write it, and you don't want to read it." Sports went on hiatus, and after they returned, a preseason hockey game between longtime rivals New York Rangers and Philadelphia Flyers ended with the players watching President Bush's address to Congress, shaking hands and skating off the ice in midgame. Satirical websites theonion.com and modernhumorist.com interrupted publication. A five-hour Law & Order mini-series on NBC was scuttled because it involved an anthrax-attack plot in New York City. Microsoft indefinitely put off the next version of its popular Flight Simulator because it includes the Twin Towers in its simulacrum of New York City. Terror-themed movies were shelved by studios and pulled from cable. A Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's musical Assassins was spiked for this season. Even advertisers yanked spots--including a Geico insurance ad with a piggy bank falling from the sky--and began questioning whether the irreverent tone of recent ads can survive darker times.