Is there a 'Godzilla' of 9/11? Part Two

Surveying alien movies, plane movies, superhero movies, and '90s movies

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and welcome to part two of this newsletter’s widely acclaimed and somewhat questionable attempt to answer the most important question in culture (as of three weeks ago): Is there a Godzilla of 9/11? (That is: a great, enduring work of popular cinema that grapples seriously with, or reflects the psychic experience of, 9/11 as a national tragedy.)

If you have not read part one, you can read it here:

Is there a 'Godzilla' of 9/11?

Previously in this series

Last week, we began by asking the question: What is a ‘9/11 movie,’ exactly? We lovingly sketched out six possible categories of “9/11 movie”: Movies literally about 9/11; movies about the Global War on Terror; movies about alien invasion or similar destructive force; movies that are about planes; superhero movies; and ‘90s movies that are about 9/11, somehow.

We examined the highlights, low lights, and surprising appearance of God of War for PS2 in the first two categories¹--movies that are actually about 9/11 and movies that are about the Global War on Terror--but ultimately determined that neither category produced particularly good candidates for a Godzilla of 9/11, in one case because of a lack of proper metaphorical distance and in the other because of a focus on non-9/11 national tragedies like “the Bush administration.”

This week, we’ll run down the remaining categories, starting with:

Category Three: Movies that use alien invasion or possibly supernatural destructive force as a 9/11 stand-in

Includes: War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, Signs, The Happening, The Mist

This is, for better and for worse, the “obvious candidate” category, and to the extent we’re looking for an extremely literal answer to the title question we’ll find it here. The two where New York City gets flattened in particular stand out: War of the Worlds, the most explicitly “about 9/11” movie of Spielberg’s “9/11 run” (Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich), and Cloverfield, the J.J. Abrams “found footage” disaster movie.

Both of these movies are, for whatever it’s worth, pretty great. War of the Worlds in particular is incredible, and you just cut off the silly final third you’d have one of the most viscerally terrifying depictions of mass catastrophe imaginable,² even if it is truly funny watching Tom Cruise do his best to act like a “a normal guy” who “has anxiety” and “human feelings” instead of a Cleared Theta Clear who has complete control over matter, energy, space, and time. Cloverfield is similarly J.J. Abrams’ best movie, and gets extra “9/11 points” for the diegetic handheld-camera conceit, which suggests a whole 21st-century aesthetic to accompany the 21st-century trauma it’s excavating.

And yet! Excellent and appropriate though they are, neither of these movies occupies anywhere near the psychic-cultural brain-space that Godzilla does, in the U.S. or anywhere else. Should this matter? One obvious response is that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much more world-historically and geopolitically important than 9/11--not to mention vastly more violent and traumatizing--that the Godzilla of 9/11 will be proportionally less iconic, for lack of a better word. Indeed, one possibly conclusion we might draw from comparing “9/11 movies” unfavorably to Godzilla is that 9/11 was simply, in the end, not particularly nationally or globally traumatic.

Category Four: Movies that are about 9/11 but process it as mainly being about planes

Includes: Red Eye, The Terminal, Catch Me if You Can, Flightplan

If 9/11, as we are suggesting, did not quite produce national trauma to the level the merchandising effort around it might have implied, how did Americans process 9/11? One possibility suggested by the movies of the post-9/11 period is that they mainly processed it as being about planes and airports.

And why not, really, when the main way 9/11 changed most Americans’ lives was by making air travel even worse? Red Eye and Flightplan both stage plane hijackings as acts of psychological (rather than violent) terrorism, in which the heroines are made to look and feel crazy for their suspicions. Catch Me if You Can, another masterpiece from Spielberg’s crazy 9/11 run, is both a bit of gossamer post-9/11 feel-good entertainment, and also a kind of bright mirror of 9/11 itself: what if there was a guy wasn’t supposed to be on your plane--but in a funny way?

But, look, even when I’m trying to be cute I can be honest: This is a thin premise for a category and none of these are the Godzilla of 9/11.

Category Five: Superhero movies that are really about 9/11

Includes: All of them

If War of the Worlds and Cloverfield are formally Godzilla-esque but don’t exactly have a Godzilla-type place in culture, what does? That’s right: the superhero movie.

Superman Returns--a Superman movie with a strangely mournful tone, in which Superman stops a terrorist attack that uses a plane as a weapon and catches a man falling from skyscraper--and The Dark Knight--in which Batman all but turns to the camera and says “[Christian Bale batman growl] and that’s why extrajudicial rendition and torture is often justified”--are often mentioned as 9/11 movies. But you don’t need to be annoying and counterintuitive to see how much 9/11 suffuses the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. The very first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Iron Man, opens in Afghanistan. The first Avengers movie destroys New York City; the third and fourth bridge an unfathomable, tragic, and sudden loss of life with which all the characters are forced to grapple.

This isn’t to say that the M.C.U. movies are “good.” But, look, to point out that Iron Man and The Avengers eventually developed into a sprawling, bloated, sentimental, juvenile, and often bafflingly bad universe of sequels increasingly divorced from the context in which they arose serves only to make the comparison more apt. It’s not like Godzilla Raids Again is a great piece of 20th century pop art, exactly.

Category Six: ‘90s movies that are about 9/11, somehow

Includes: Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Enemy of the State, The Siege

I mean, obviously Independence Day is not the 9/11 Godzilla, but, at the same time, it kind of is, right? I always liked the English film critic David Thomson’s essay on the attacks, published a few days after 9/11:

Entertainment culture pre-empted the real thing, and made us all the more vulnerable. In this culture, "disaster" has been box office. […] We have been trained to love these big bangs, to cheer at them, to feel the amazing, liberating beauty of all that pink and amber and orange. We have come to feel, in that absolute safety that is a theatre's dark, the fun, the abandon, the passion in the destruction of things we have to take such neurotic care of all the time in real life.

This is a society carried away by the fun and the spectacular dispersal of unreality. It is a culture that has been encouraged to separate such things from the damage that goes with them. And it has seemed like a flourish of American supremacy that it can so flirt with disaster, and turn it into an entertainment.

A list of potential 9/11 Godzillas proposed to varying degrees of seriousness in this series of posts

So where are we at? What is the Godzilla of 9/11? I would say we have mooted, not always entirely seriously, one punt and six candidates. Take your pick:

1. There is no Godzilla of 9/11, because 9/11 was a tragedy of a different category and scale and coming in a vastly different historical (not to mention cultural and commercial) context than Hiroshima and Nagasaki

2. The Godzilla of 9/11 is War of the Worlds, because War of the Worlds is a great popular disaster movie that metaphorizes the experience of violent tragedy in genre

3. The Godzilla of 9/11 is Cloverfield, for basically the same reasons as above

4. The Godzilla of 9/11 is Zero Dark Thirty, because it’s a well-made and essentially fictional popular movie that best articulated the national mood in the years after 9/11 (i.e. “evil and cruel”)

5. The Godzilla of 9/11 is the cable-news coverage of the invasion of Iraq, because they were the entertainment medium through which Americans most deeply responded to and re-enacted the 9/11 attacks

6. The Godzilla of 9/11 is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because superhero movies were a beloved global pop-cultural force that were intrinsically shaped by 9/11 and its aftermath.

7. [Zizek and/or Baudrillard voice] The Godzilla of 9/11 is Independence Day

1. Many, many people commented and emailed to ask why I hadn’t mentioned 25th Hour. The omission was an error, though face-savingly I would suggest that 25th Hour is a “post-9/11 movie” more than a 9/11 movie, and in any event is not the Godzilla of 9/11 even if it is a good movie.

2. H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, it seems worth noting, was meant in part to put its readers in the place of native Tasmanians facing imperial-colonial slaughter. Spielberg’s version, in which humans are terrorized by unknowable aliens whose presence on earth predates their existence, seems to almost seems to reverse the metaphor. “You're safe in your space,” Robbie tells his little sister. “Nothing is going to happen to you in your space.”