Ten years on, pop culture is still asking itself the most basic questions about how to approach the attacks of Sept. 11. Is the proper tone direct (Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” Paul Greengrass’ “United 93”), or oblique (Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland”)? Do we face up to it with alcoholism and rage (the FX series “Rescue Me,” the Adam Sandler film “Reign Over Me”), soft focus and tears (the Robert Pattinson movie “Remember Me”), bristling defiance (Spike Lee’s “25th Hour”) or Christian resignation (Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising”)?
“There was something about Sept. 11 that defies art,” says Syracuse University’s Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture. “What is so far the most enduring cultural expression of Sept. 11 was the news coverage on Sept. 11.”
Knowing that has posed a challenge for filmmakers, authors and other artists. In the first few weeks after the attack, Hollywood rushed to erase images of the Twin Towers from films such as “Zoolander” and “Serendipity.” A decade later, the culture is still reluctant to take on the events of that day.
To date, only two major movies have centered on the terrorism that killed more than 3,000 people in three locations.
In literature, “the field has been more notable for conspicuous disappointments than successes,” says Time magazine book critic and best-selling author Lev Grossman. “Novelists specialize in making the familiar fresh and new, but even 10 years later, the attacks still feel all too painfully fresh.”
“We haven’t seen a really great, lasting work of art that captures how we felt,” says Jeremy Gerard, theater critic for Bloomberg News. “What we’ve seen is more journalistic in tenor.”
ARTNews executive editor Robin Cembalest echoes that view: “In general, it’s hard to make art on any kind of dramatic historic event. The great artworks on the great tragedies are the exception rather than the rule.”
As Thompson points out, Pearl Harbor was 70 years ago. How many lasting works of art did it inspire? You’ll run out of nominees pretty quickly after “From Here to Eternity.” The Post’s chief theater critic, Elisabeth Vincentelli, notes that the first great AIDS play, “Angels in America,” didn’t appear until a dozen years after the crisis began, “so maybe it’ll take that long for the great 9/11 play to appear.”
Cembalest feels there’s a self-censorship at work, as well as a public attitude that effectively restricts artists. “What you see is a different kind of authority when it comes to Sept. 11,” she says. “It’s, ‘We have a moral right not to look at these images.’ ”
Or even, perhaps, think about them. And yet there have been some notable successes.
Here’s what succeeded in the aftermath of 9/11, and why
Film:
* “United 93” (2006). Winner of the New York Film Critics Circle award for best picture and an Oscar nominee for Best Director (Paul Greengrass), this quasi-documentary’s impact came from rigorously sticking to known facts and using actual technical dialogue and casting some airline and FAA employees. Both Metacritic and Movie City News determined it was the most acclaimed film of the year. Later in 2006, Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” which starred Nicolas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhaal, drew mixed reviews on its way to earning nearly $163 million worldwide.
Novels:
* “Saturday” (2005) by Ian McEwan. A thriller set in London in February 2003 on the day of a massive protest over the imminent Iraq invasion, “Saturday” takes an elliptical angle on 9/11. A bourgeois neurosurgeon trying to get home to his family is menaced by a random thug on the street who follows him home to terrorize his family.
“The best novel by far to deal with 9/11 and its effects,” says National Magazine Award-winning culture critic Lee Siegel. “Perhaps because he is British and was writing from trans-atlantic distance, McEwan could be blunt.”
* “Falling Man” (2007) by Don DeLillo. A lawyer who worked in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 roams a shaken city haunted by the impromptu appearances of a performance artist called “The Falling Man.” He appears suspended awkwardly in a harness, echoing the famous photo of a WTC worker jumping to his death. The photo inspired Henry Singer’s 2006 documentary “9/11: The Falling Man,” about the story behind the picture. “DeLillo is the only writer who has managed to capture the horror of that day, but also its spectacular chaos,” says John Freeman, editor of the literary magazine Granta.
* “Netherland” (2008) by Joseph O’Neill. O’Neill’s elegiac yet witty prose poetry infuses this story of a Dutch financial analyst whose family falls apart in the post-9/11 gloom. His wife takes their child and flees to London as he becomes obsessed with the cricket culture of some of his fellow immigrants from the West Indies. O’Neill won the PEN/Faulkner prize and popped up on President Obama’s reading list.
U2 at 2002 Super Bowl
* Coming from Ireland — land of the boisterous wake — a band with a well-established affinity for the New York that attracted so many of their countrymen turned mourning into a magnificent celebration of the departed. As U2 began “Where the Streets Have No Name” during the halftime show, they presented a colossal 200-foot-high video screen that scrolled the names of all of the Sept. 11 dead.
TV:
* “Rescue Me” (2004-2011), created by Denis Leary and Peter Tolan. A firefighter who spent 9/11 at Ground Zero has regular conversations with the ghost of his cousin, who died trying to rescue office workers at the site. “It’s a thoughtful, literate, sophisticated treatment of a guy who already had a lot of major issues,” says Thompson, the Syracuse professor, “and Sept. 11 just lit the fuse on those problems.”
Music:
* “The Rising” (2002) by Bruce Springsteen. Among the first major works of popular culture to grapple with the devastation, Springsteen’s triple-Grammy-winning, No. 1 album from the summer after 9/11 remains a landmark of memory and loss.
“ ‘My City in Ruins,’ ‘The Rising’ — just really good songs by somebody who had the street cred to perform them,” says Thompson. “Bruce Springsteen is an artist whose biography made him a good person to deal with the subject matter, and on top of that, it’s really an extraordinary album. I’m not a rabid Springsteen fan, but I would put that album right up there with the greatest albums of the rock era.”
Art:
* “Tribute in Light” (2002-2011) by the Municipal Art Society.
An ethereal outdoor art installation that involved shining high-intensity beams of light up to the heavens from Ground Zero to mimic the fallen towers, the project first appeared in March 2002 and was re-installed on Sept. 11 for subsequent anniversary displays. “It spoke to the hole that was left,” says Cembalest. “It was just a kind of very gentle, beautiful — almost like a shadow of the void, and people responded to it.”
Among those works of art that inspired distaste or rejection:
* Music: “WTC/9/11” (2011) by Steve Reich and Kronos Quartet. The album cover for minimalist composer Reich’s work, showing one Twin Tower smoking and the other about to be struck by the second plane, met with an immediate and hostile response from the public. “As a composer, I want people to listen to my music without something distracting them,” said Reich in announcing his change of heart. The cover is now being altered.
* TV: Tom Cruise’s Oscar-opening monologue (2002). In a shallow, self-indulgent speech, Cruise talked about growing up with movies and wondered if they really mattered. “Should we celebrate the magic the movies bring? Now?” he said. “Dare I say it? More than EVER!” He “so overused the dramatic pause he sounded like Moviefone,” ruled Newsweek.
* Sculpture: “Tumbling Woman” (2009) by Eric Fischl. A bronze in Rockefeller Center of a flailing naked woman falling through space was abruptly covered up and removed from public view after passersby complained that it was too graphic. “What’s clear,” says Cembalest of ARTNews, “is that work that’s specifically violent or has graphic images has been rejected.”