9/11: The geist in the movie machine
Genre filmmaking has warped and twisted its aesthetic to reflect the zeitgeist in the eight years since 9/11 but has harmless fun become terror porn as a result? Ed Whitfield puts on his serious face and investigates.
World events have often conditioned filmmakers toward certain thematic and psychological preoccupations. Film Noir, a loosely defined movement of brooding, chiaroscuro imbibed thrillers from the forties and fifties, was a stylised form of filmmaking forged as civilisation fractured with the onset of World War II. This was both geographically the case as many of many Noir directors were European émigrés fleeing persecution in the old world and thematically so, as they brought a preoccupation with moral ambiguity with them – structuring the aesthetic toward something far bleaker than American audiences were accustomed too. This was a style modelled on the darker, expressionist cinema that pre-war Germany, a fragile society characterised by mass employment and social upheaval, had thrown up as its mind turned.
I prefigure my assault on what I’ll lazily refer to as ‘Noughties terror porn’ with this to illustrate just how unique and contemporary this phenomenon is. Although style has historically been born out of events, no forties filmmakers felt driven to mimic the style of the pantone newsreel in order to underscore their allusions to the fight occurring outside the cinema. Even in Nazi Germany, where Joseph Goebbels had commandeered the machinery of Germany’s film industry in order to mediate the regime’s ideology to the masses, it was Hollywood’s genres that were appropriated as the tools for the job – escapism retained its hyperrealist quality.
Indulge me for a moment as I take you on a magical mystery tour through this completely hypothetical scenario. Imagine for a moment that you’ve been murdered. Yes, this is still a film article so stick with it. You’ve been murdered and worse, you’ve been murdered very publically indeed. You were there on the turn of an age as the building you were working in, we’ll call it The World Trade Centre, was destroyed by a commercial airliner which had been hijacked by a group of hate fortified Islamic fascists. Outrageous I know, but stay with me.
So there you are, blown to smithereens and all around you is media – cameras in helicopters, TV crews on the ground, camcorders awkwardly shoved through nearby office windows, even the passing birds seem to be filming it. Your last moments on this earth produce what collectively must be thousands of hours of footage which represent the entire range of documentary dallies from diabolical amateur to experienced cameraman. These images are transmitted across the world, repeated endlessly and the nature of the footage – unimaginable horror recorded with a benign matter-of-factness, becomes shorthand for fear, surprise and stark reality in the popular imagination.
But it isn’t simply a form of visual shorthand that’s born that day; it’s also your final moments as a visual document – a cultural memory for the ages. Since you’ve been discontinued you’re not going to have an opinion on how this footage is cannibalised by popular culture, but were you able to state a view, you’d be inclined to accept its inevitable use as historical reference and archive. Then imagine a film director approached your spectral aura, or whatever it is you are and said “Ah, now don’t be angry about this, but I’ve got this fantasy thriller coming up and I may consciously riff on the footage of your death to tap into my audience’s memory of your murder and the fear they felt on that day as a means of making the experience of my picture more visceral – you know, give it some punch. A serious movie? No no, it’s about a cat army mutated by an Iranian nuclear test which marches on Washington DC.”
Are you angry? WELL, ARE YOU?
Since 9/11 something has undoubtedly changed on the big screen. In the Eighties and Nineties, high concept blockbusters, infantile beasts to be sure but sporadically entertaining, utilised a filmic vocabulary that was distinctly drawn from the traditions of the form – the traditions that is, pertaining to entertainment rather than reportage. Raiders of the Lost Ark was notable for many things, amongst them Spielberg’s decision not to utilise devices like hand held cameras, black and white film and realistic depictions of violence to augment the thrills. He understood that such a style was unsuited to a homage to 40’s adventure serials and saved the concision and brutality of documentary style photography for his treatise on the holocaust. An audience which had no real interest in feeling as though they were actually living through the early Nazi years, forgave him. Spielberg, back again for Saving Private Ryan four years later, deployed the full repertoire of the war cameraman to add vicissitude to his D-day landings. Here was a decision not to underwrite the suffering of those involved with the Technicolor flourish of The Longest Day and similar bloodless jaunts through the world war back catalogue.
Both Ryan and Schindler’s List were grounded in historical detail and were filmed with an eye on giving the war it’s gruesome, inhuman due. Contrast this with Cloverfield, the 2008 monster movie in which a rampaging Al-Qaeda metaphor destroys New York while distraught natives run for their lives and capture what they can of the attack on the camcorder they brought to the Act 1 leaving party.
Events unfold in fits and shaky hand held starts with the beast periodically glimpsed whenever the terrified documentarian gets the chance. The characters aren’t up to much and are irrelevant in any event but their panic feels genuine enough and its in these scenes of fleeing, glancing upward to see a building topple and the like that déjà vu hits you in a very unpleasant way. One scene in particular – the collapse of an apartment block and the unfolding dust cloud deliberately play on the audience’s 9/11 memories. This of course is a very effective device to make something absurd genuinely mortifying but when popular entertainment starts to play on its audience’s real fears by appealing to direct experience rather than the base instincts that traditionally were its bread and butter (you didn’t need to have seen real footage of a shark eating a man to buy into Jaws – the premise was primal in its efficacy) then arguably a line has been crossed. There’s no doubting the filmmakers exploitative glee in Cloverfield but there’s an air of cynicism about the execution. It’s highly effective but no fun, so what you may ask, was the point?
In defending the allusion to 9/11, producer JJ Abrams’ assertion was “we live in a time of great fear and having a movie that’s about something as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe.” In other words, it’s only a movie but the question of whether or not a film is entertaining is separate from whether the way the audience gets its jollies is morally sound.
When Sylvester Stallone revived the Rambo franchise he consciously chose to corrupt Spielberg’s war reportage aesthetic to make the Reganite murder machine’s slaughter of the Burmese militia as photorealistic as possible. There’s no question that this is a reaction to the post 9/11 climate. When you contrast the Rambo of 2008 with its 80’s predecessors, the difference is a substitution of the cartoon like, fantastical bloodletting that defined action movies of that decade for faux snuff – plausible homicide for an audience that needs greater horrors to sate its blood lust in the wake of such a high profile and visual mass slaughter. Abrams pre-emption of the criticism made here fails to understand that the genre filmmaking of old was safe precisely because it was fantastical and therein lay the pleasure in its consumption.
But it isn’t just traditionally safe and escapist territory that’s been warped by the 9/11 aesthetic, it’s also succeeded in blunting material that might have succeeded had some cinematic quality been applied. The case in point is Brian De Palma’s 2007 Iraq War drama Redacted. The soldiers’ plight unfolds using a variety of new media, to create a narrative which might have been ripped from the headlines. However, the device of using cross media dressing to ‘authenticate’ the drama backfires because we as an audience have been saturated by grainy video, webcasts and new footage from the front line for years prior to the film’s release. Consequently De Palma evokes a strong sense of place and the cadences of the conflict but fails to hit the emotional markers. The performances oscillate from measured to melodramatic and as it goes on there’s a sense that what the director needs to do is give us an authentically cinematic Iraq experience to puncture our overfamilarity with the war, rather than something that looks like a media bleed but feels staged and consequently irrelevant. All in all this is new media in search of old story telling values and consequently it’s redundant.
The 9/11 decade is, thankfully, almost behind us and consequently film culture would do well to throw off its shackles. This is a healthy and forward looking manifesto that requires urgent examination; else we may wake up one day soon to find the event’s visual pollutants everywhere – the latest Disney/Pixar offering charting a cockroach’s journey as he scuttles away from a collapsing tower with a virtual shakey camera half acquiring his every move.
As filmmakers consider their ongoing response to the terror attacks and their attempts to innovate within the medium, inventing new genres and fresh stylisation for a 21st century audience, they’d do well to set the cinematic agenda, reflecting the world back to us using their own artistic sensibility, rather than poaching the iconography of real world news and current affairs and passing it off as style. I for one have had enough.
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