Weâre nearing the end, and we can all feel it. We are closer together than ever before, but further apart. No one talks to anyone anymore; they just send texts. The top 1 % control most of the nationâs wealth; for the rest of us, itâs a fight every day simply to survive. Apocalyptic concerns are no longer the sole province of the lunatic fringe; the reality of global warmingâ2015 was the warmest year on record for the planet, hands down (see Miller)âmass starvation on a global scale, huge waves of immigrants from the war-torn Middle East teeming into Europe on a scale unseen since World War II, rampant gun violence in the USA becoming an everyday affairâall of these things point to a society in crisis, and with it, a crisis for the cinematic machine that creates the dreams that this society so desperately needs in order to continually reify itself, in a futile attempt to shore up the failing pillars of rampant late-stage capitalism. Whether one chooses to live off the grid, or continue to battle it out in the arena with hypercapitalists intent only on predation and self-aggrandizement, the signs are very clear; this is the end. Once it was fantasy; now, itâs real.
Both weâve been talking about this for a long time, even if only as some distant abstraction. And once, it was something we could just play withâas in âwhat if?â In 1967, Jim Morrison and The Doors released their first eponymously album, containing the determinedly fatalistic song âThe End,â but the idea of such terminal nihilism is nothing new. At the time of the songâs first appearance, it seemed out of place with the explosion of culture and optimism on both the East and West coasts of America, as part of the artistically vibrant 1960s era. But now, it seems that âThe Endâ is an outlier, a harbinger of things to come, a prescient text, that despite its distinct limitations, nevertheless, accurately sketches a world when individual ambition has vanished, corporate culture dominates discourse, and hope seems but a distant memory; indeed, as Marx would have it, âan illusion.â
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the films and television programs that followed in the wake of 9/11, especially in America in the televisual constructs that preceded this horrific event, as if anticipating the inevitability of eventual disaster in a nuclear world. Leslie Libman and Larry Williamsâs HBO television movie Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing (1997) documented the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and demonstrates exactly how easy it was for the bombers to gain access to the building. Near the filmâs end, when the bombing has proved less than catastrophic, a frustrated terrorist utters as he looks at the World Trade Center towers: âNext time, weâll bring them both down.â The film makes clear that the terroristsâ battle for the worldâs attention is far from over, and that repeat assaults on the twin towers can be counted on as a natural consequence of world events; indeed, this is just what happened, and here, it seems that commercial art prefigured the events of 9/11.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a number of forthcoming terrorist dramas had to be scrapped, shelved, or reedited, including Andrew Davisâs Collateral Damage (2002), an Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle; Deadline, a hijack film written for director James Cameron that never made it past the script stage; World War III, a proposed Jerry Bruckheimer film in which terrorist invaders drop nuclear bombs on Seattle and San Diego; Barry Sonnenfeldâs Big Trouble (2002), a Tim Allen âcomedyâ centered on a bomb on a passenger jet; and Nose Bleed, a never-made Jackie Chan comedy in which the veteran action star would have stopped âa terrorist plot to blow up the WTCâ (Hoberman 2001).
at least one Hollywood veteran saw all of this as nothing more or less than a prophecy fulfilled. The late Robert Altman told the Associated Press in an interview shortly after the World Trade Center attack that movies such as the ones discussed in the preceding lines âset the pattern, and these people have copied the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless theyâd seen it in a movie. [âŠ] I just believe we created this atmosphere and taught them how to do itâ (qtd. in Hoberman 2001). Not surprisingly, once the images of the 9/11 disaster were an accomplished fact, duly videotaped from a variety of angles by both professional and amateur video recorders, they became fair game for a new series of pornographic disaster videos, not unlike the notorious Faces of Death series (see Foster, 2014 for more on this).
CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and other US outlets broadcast and rebroadcast the images of the twin towers being hit over and over again like a porno loop, but in China, enterprising entrepreneurs went one step further, creating such instant DVD âdisaster moviesâ as The Centuryâs Great Catastrophe, Surprise Attack on America, and Americaâs Disaster: The Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century (all 2001). These hybrid productions, freely mixing pirated news footage with equally illegal clips from conventional Hollywood disaster movies, appeared fewer than 72 hours after the World Trade Center attack, and were sold throughout the world, but perhaps most ironically as bootlegs on the streets of Manhattan, as nearly instantaneous souvenirs of the disaster. Many of these DVDs, to boot, were critical of Americaâs policies throughout the world, and viewed the events of 9/11 as the result of dreams of global domination. What these ersatz, fugitive productions presented was nothing less than the spectacle of death as entertainment. After the end of the Second World War, but before the turn of the twenty-first century, the arts before 9/11 dealt with many issues: birth, life, death, capitalism, love, nature, and celebrated the act of creation with an almost hedonistic abandon. Above all, the arts celebrated life.
In the years following 9/11, the arts have been transformed into a mirror of the fear, death, paranoia, and uncertainty that now pervades American existence. The disaster of the Twin Towers has transformed the cultural landscape profoundly, inescapably, and forever; itâs one of those defining moments in which a culture is shaped anew by the social events that impact it. Fear, death, and paranoia are the new social currency. What is celebrated now is not art; itâs artifice. Our culture surrounds itself with totemic images of destruction, from everything to such television series as Life After People (2008â2010), which predicted what might happen in a post-apocalyptic future; to films like Andrew Niccolâs In Time (2011), in which life expectancy is a commodity to be bought and sold, and the rich have all the cards, including potential immortality.
New York, once the artistic hub of the USA, has become a museum of itself, seeking to recreate the past by selling off the totemic paintings, sculptures, and other art works of the pre 9/11 era for outrageous prices to the stratospherically rich. The emptiness of every aspect of post 9/11 art, except where it deals with themes of pain, destruction, and violence, is everywhere apparent; pop music has been transformed from an agent for change into mindless escapism, even as the digitization of culture wipes out record stores, bookstores, and video stores, as text, music, and images become streamed liked utilities âavailable for a price, stored in a cloud, and accessed only by a continual outlay of cash by the consumer.
At the same time, the more original and authentic arts are being attacked vigorously everywhere by the ruling classes throughout the world, because they are dangerous; they offer a voice to the individual, in a society that now seeks to rule by forced consensus. This is part of the conglomerization of art; itâs become a corporate commodity, a trophy, rather than something that an individual creates. More than ever, it seems true that the best artist is a dead artist, because thereâs a limited supply of his or her work, which can be sold as a commodity, and the best celebrity spokesperson is also a corpse, because the iconic images of Kerouac, Bogart, Hepburn, and Taylor can be used to sell anything, without the slightest risk of possible future scandal, or an unflattering headline.
All their future is in the past, and thus it can be recycled, packaged, and used to sell new goods to those too young to remember the world the way it was. Spectacle, as in films such as Zack Snyderâs call-to war movie, 300 (2007), has replaced content, and action has replaced thought. Music cues tell you how to feel; when to feel sad, when to rejoice. Everything is laid out in a clear, schematic design. The films of the twenty-first century are designed, because of their ever-increasing cost, for mass audiences, leaving no one behind. Nothing is really at risk; as Stan Lee, the impresario of Marvel comics long ago observed, what comic book movie fans want more than anything else is not change, but rather the illusion of change. As Tom Bacon put it, âthat whatever plot-twists the story goes through, the status quo will always prevail. Why? Because the writers want the next comic [or film] to sell just as well as this one did.â
Itâs entertainment for a populace that wants to forget the inequities of the real world. The Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, which I am in deep sympathy with, continually pounds home a simple theme, and yet those in power pretend to be mystified by the movementâs guiding principle: the rich are getting much, much richer, while the poor and middle class are being left behind, as seen in J.C. Chandorâs superb film Margin Call (2011), which effectively depicts the 2008 market meltdown with unsparing accuracy. The semi-fictitious financial firm in Margin Call suddenly discovers that itâs deeply over-extended in mortgage derivatives, and sells off 93 % of their position in a single day to avoid the companyâs collapse, but at the expense of all who buy the worthless âequitiesâ the company offers.
Meanwhile, the top executives of the company, one of whom is played with brilliant sardonicism by Jeremy Irons, walk off with multiple millions in bonuses, while those directly beneath him sit in their offices doing nothing, collecting massive paychecks for simply staying off the street with the bad news. The traders, meanwhile, on the lowest level of the company, sell off the bad debts, and are then summarily fired. The whole scenario is all too true; in the twenty-first century, money rules, and everything elseâall human communication, art, or interpersonal bondsâis entirely expendable. Much the same theme was explored in Adam McKayâs The Big Short (2015), though the overall impact of the film was diluted by a skew toward a comedic approach to the material.
Criticism has all but vanished in the wake of the web, and with everyone now qualifying her or himself as a cultural authority, any real value to the critical act has all but vanished. Damien Hurst makes art out of consumption, with a series of diamond-studded skulls and other totemic icons of consumerism; films such as Kathryn Bigelowâs The Hurt Locker (2009), Lars Von Trierâs Melancholia (2011), and Margin Call, which deal honestly and forthrightly with the vicissitudes of our current existence languish on the commercial sidelines, while escapist fare such as James Cameronâs Avatar (2009), which encourages audiences to believe they can abandon their damaged bodies and escape into a new, virtual world, rack up mind-boggling grosses; it offers the masses mindless escape.
Joe Johnstonâs Captain America: First Avenger (2011) is in many ways the perfect prototype of new millennial film; set in World War II, but concluding in the present, it offers Nazis as conveniently circumscribed villains, and deals resolutely in the past, but at the same time depicts a society relentlessly at war, much as we were, until recently, in Iraq. Thus, it asks audiences to participate in a wartime social environment, with this added bonus; itâs a war that the West decisively won. This time around, the lines are much more blurred. I call the Iraq the âsilent war,â although it was anything but silent. It was absolutely tangible, yet through length and repetition it became almost a phantom conflict. There were no bodies, just coffins, and images were carefully screened by the Pentagon and other authorities, especially under the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld regime.
Unlike the Vietnam War, which wound up in everyoneâs home on nightly television whether they liked it or not, and which polarized the nation precisely because of its visibility, the war in Iraq has largely been fought undercover, and the more recent iterations of it as a cinematic construct, such as The Hurt Locker, bear the burden of years of misdirection and misrepresentation in the media. Now, of course, with the rise in 2016 of a new wave of xenophobic fascism on the Right, we are gearing up for yet another, and perhaps even more catastrophic social and political warâwhat Gore Vidal so accurately described as âperpetual war for perpetual peace.â
Television has become an avalanche of shopping channels and ârealityâ programs, coupled with an embrace of nostalgia for a time that is now almost beyond authentic recall. In short, the arts after 9/11 embrace loss, death, the corporate ethos, and the reification of violence and torture as an everyday part of social intercourse. Jerzy Skolimowskiâs 2010 film Essential Killing, which depicts the escape of a ârenderedâ captive in Eastern Europe, offers further proof of our current economy of images; shot for a pittance, with only one leading character, portrayed by Vincent Gallo, who never speaks during the entire film, we see what the war machine does to all sides, to all combatants; itâs the great dehumanizer, the leveler of all values, past and present.
That we even consider, as a society, the use of waterboarding as a legitimate interrogation technique, doesnât go down all that well even at Fox News, where one of the channelâs most visible hosts, Shepard Smith, confronted with undeniable fact of the practice, was unable to contain his outrageâalthough, of course, Donald Trump has more recently advocated a return to the barbaric practice. âWe are America!â Smith shouted on live television. âI donât give a ratâs ass if it helps! We are America! We do not fucking torture! We just donât do it!â Surprisingly, Smith wasnât fired by Fox News, and the clip immediately went viral on YouTube. But torture remains popular. In many post 9/11 fictional entertainments, torture of one kind or another is part of the narrative construct.
The videotaped execution of Muammar Gaddafi is another example of twenty-first-century visual âentertainmentâ; graphic video clips of his execution, and that of Saddam Hussein, have gotten millions of hits on the web. Also, there are the infamous âcrushâ videos, in which innocent small animals are crushed beneath the high heels of fashionable dominatrixes in graphic detail, which, too, have become sadly popular of late. Clearly, as a society, we do tortureâand we love to do it. It offers, for those too inarticulate to express it otherwise, some fleeting relief from our own pain.
If one looks at our shared cinematic past, we can see that we have always been playing with disaster, fascinated by destruction. The nearly 3000 victims of the 9/11 disaster, and the 16 acres of damage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are merely the fulfillment of a dream of annihilation that has fascinated us for centuriesâit seems we are eager for the end. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster noted this in her article âConsuming the Apocalypse, Marketing Bunker Mentality,â when she wrote that
âthere are two parallel social movements that may, at first glance, seem unrelated, but are in fact closely intertwined; the rapid increase in economic inequity in contemporary society (as evidenced in the enormously wide gap between the wealthy and the poor) on the one hand, and the current apocalyptic cultural mindset (associated with paranoia, prepping, the rise of the gated community, the return of the underground bunker, and a massive uptick in gun sales) as celebrated in myriad apocalyptically-themed films and television programs, programs I define as apocotainmentââwhich now dominate the airwaves.
It is only in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and now the twenty-first century that we can give these phantasmal visions faces and sounds a sense of concrete actuality. The regime of computer-generated imagery (CGI) effects has made the illusion even more seamless. Where once matte lines and other technical imperfections in film created âlimit zonesâ of visual reality that distanced us from the spectacle we witnessed, now CGI makes a tidal wave, an atomic blast, a hurricane, or a meteor impact seem as real as late afternoon sunlight spilling through a back porch window. There is no separation anymore, no zone of the real and the not real. The cinema of the twenty-first century makes our most violent dreams of self-destruction simultaneously mundane and yet instantly attainable.
In the post 9/11 world, the romance of Armageddon is being replaced by the specter of inevitable destruction, albeit on a smaller scale. Piece by piece, city by city, landmark by landmark, the delicate balance of post-World War II nuclear politics has given way to a new war, in which atomic bombs, capable of decimating an entire metropolis in just one blast, fit in suitcases. The global apocalypse depicted by Stanley Kubrick in 1964âs Dr. Strangelove seems simultaneously remote and nostalgic; if only the lines of conflict were so simply drawn. But now, the threat is everywhere. The twenty-first century will be defined not by wars, but by terrorist incursions. Throughout its reign, the administration of George W. Bush seemed intent on upping the ante with each new pronouncement.
In a speech at the US Military Academy at West Point on June 1, 2002, for example, Bush declared that âpreemptiveâ military strikes may be necessary to âconfront the worst threats before they emerge,â thereby creating a scenario in which attack becomes defense (Dixon 2003, 128). This policy of perpetual alarmism, it seems, to me, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as violent action thrillers and video games inspire those who become addicted to them to take the âgamesâ to the next step: real weapons, real victims. Even a casu...