> 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.
I think this is what it really boils down to. Not that 9/11 trauma is somehow less-than, but that Japan, as a nation, was given a double-tap to the national psyche ON TOP OF losing a major conflict, ON TOP OF losing their centuries-old social order in the process.
9/11 was bad, but it wasn't like we dissolved Congress afterwards, or never made a movie in the hallowed ground of NYC again. It's not like we looked at the smoking wreckage of the Twin Towers and as a global society decided that skyscrapers and 727s should never be used again. Other than security theater, turning air travel into a national nightmare and deciding that war crimes are OK if we do it - I don't think the America pre/post 9/11 can honestly be compared to Japan pre/post Hiroshima. The scale is different, the timing is different, and the national temperments are almost polar opposites.
The thing about the past two decades is they've been the era of the TV show rather than the movie. So the "Godzilla of 9/11" isn't "Zero Dark Thirty" or "War of the Worlds". It's "24": a popular, conversation-setting TV show, debuting just a few months after the attacks and continuing through the height of the War on Terror, reflecting and shaping the national debate over terrorism, counter-terrorism, Islam, torture, and more.
Honorable mentions to "Battlestar Galactica" (maybe the next-best candidate), "Arrested Development" and "The Wire."
24 is a great answer - it hasn't (i don't think?) spawned a Greater 24-iverse, but it feels like a *huge* number of middle-brow law & order dramas (including Law & Order itself) are still drawing from that well
Re: No. 5, if you include that then you should also make the case for the Hunger Games, which was conceived when Suzanne Collins was flipping back and forth between Iraq news coverage and Survivor. Soldiers' deaths were being turned into infotainment in real time. And then what if you just didn't give Survivor contestants unlimited rice or keep a doctor on set? Is it really such a stretch to think a show like that wouldn't have gotten top ratings in 2004?
I think this is right though it's always funny to me that a series about traditionalist rural families rising up against the decadent sexual deviants of the city is generally understood as "liberal."
I’ve long maintained that the opening sequence of War of the Worlds—in which gleaming towers rise from the ground and destroy a pleasant, tightly-knit working-class neighborhood—represented a 9/11 in reverse, and was really more of an allegory for private equity. The rest of the movie is just Spielberg asking “What if World War II happened in the United States?”
Cloverfield, while deeply entrenched in J.J Abrams-isms, is actually a Matt Reeves joint! Which explains why it’s so much better than most of Abrams filmography
Someone else already mentioned "24", and I really do think that's as close as you can get. It really gets at the combo of elite operators, disregard for morality, and domestic threat that others don't have in equal measure (most other elite operator shows or films are international). If I'm remembering season 1 correctly, the bad guys were even something from some operation in Jacks past, so there even a bit of an acknowledgement of blowback... even if they still deserve to be tortured in the 24verse.
But what really blew my mind was that 24 premiered in November of 2001. This got me to look at things released in 2001 and early 2002 and I would like to propose a subcategory of the final category: "things made before 9/11 that just so happened to be released after 9/11 and really encapsulated the moment". And two things jump to mind: "Band of Brothers" and "Black Hawk Down".
I think enough ink has been spilled analyzing "Saving Private Ryan" and I'd say both of these fall into similar categories. " Black Hawk Down" has the advantage of a MENA location and more contemporary setting, but still, I can't think of anything that better captured that immediate mood before Iraq... complicated things.
Or, with about 50% sincerity, "The Godzilla of 9/11" is that JibJab (I think?) flash animation where missles chase Bin Laden while a parody of Day-O is sung by Colin Powell.
"Minority Report" is another candidate for your excellent new proposed category IMO--one of the best movies made about post-9/11 surveillance and policing (both domestic and foreign), and it was in the can before 9/11 and released in early 2002.
Hey Max, long time reader first time commenter. Amazing analysis; I'm especially intrigued by the idea of the depth of Spielberg's post-9/11 run--gonna need to revisit Catch Me If You Can through this lens for sure--and the cargo cult-like notion of "movies about planes" falling under this umbrella.
Inspired by your first annotation though, I'm curious how Starship Troopers didn't make the list of '90's movies that are about 9/11, somehow.' That to me is the first film to come to mind for this entire project.
Hm. I think I see what you're saying. So if Starship Troopers underlying thesis by Verhoeven's own admission is "War makes fascists of us all," and he skewed that through satire, that self-awareness kind of undercuts the 9/11 of it all, because a lot of the other examples listed took a more genuine or sincere position on translating the psychic trauma of the event. Whereas Starship Troopers ends up looking more cleareyed in it's comment of the insanity that the event wrought, and how it warped everything and everyone around it. I'm kind of thinking now that for a film to get to the Godzilla of 9/11 status, capturing that feeling and anxiety of it all, it's got to be a story told from an inside perspective, rather than an outside commentary. Anyway, I saw War of the Worlds for the first time last year--had no idea about Wells inspirations for the story, that is fascinating--and I wonder if the more shmaltzy aspects of the third act were always present from the get go. It's been fully discussed to death how unlikely the whole family reunion at the end was; I have to imagine that was a conscious choice to kind of rewrite the implicit tragedy of 9/11, and how not everyone escaped or made it back or anything like that. Showing that on screen might've been too much too soon.
Yeah, I suppose I mean more that it's a great candidate for "90s movie about 9/11" and not necessarily for Godzilla of 9/11--it was too big a box office flop to really get the status anyway. Re: War of the Worlds it's hard to say because Spielberg has been a sentimentalist his whole career, though I suppose he really turned it up in the years after 9/11, and I think you're right that he (and/or the studio) felt like they needed to bring everything together cleanly and happily to justify or pay back the genuinely horrifying first 80 minutes or so.
*adam curtis voice* Suddenly, a commenter on Read Max left a comment....A comment grappling with the much older forces of montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlxGtKw2KAA
Up in the Air, while ostensibly a GFC movie, is largely about planes and our longing for air travel to be emancipatory instead of penal... a sneaky category 4 9/11 movie?
I know it's technically outside the 90s parameters but when we rewatched Die Hard recently I got major 9/11 vibes during the building explosion scene, particularly all the paperwork raining down. Just throwing that into the mix, fwiw.
To add onto the 90s movies that are somehow about 9/11, I think a good candidate would be Titanic. Especially the scene where Kathy Bates watches people jump off the ship into the ocean.
Also did not know that Adam Curtis got his 90s-9/11 bit from David Thompson
I think the Modern Warfare games could be contenders here. Representing both the gung-ho post 9/11 militarism of American society and perhaps some of the cynicism that came with it.
> 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.
I think this is what it really boils down to. Not that 9/11 trauma is somehow less-than, but that Japan, as a nation, was given a double-tap to the national psyche ON TOP OF losing a major conflict, ON TOP OF losing their centuries-old social order in the process.
9/11 was bad, but it wasn't like we dissolved Congress afterwards, or never made a movie in the hallowed ground of NYC again. It's not like we looked at the smoking wreckage of the Twin Towers and as a global society decided that skyscrapers and 727s should never be used again. Other than security theater, turning air travel into a national nightmare and deciding that war crimes are OK if we do it - I don't think the America pre/post 9/11 can honestly be compared to Japan pre/post Hiroshima. The scale is different, the timing is different, and the national temperments are almost polar opposites.
The thing about the past two decades is they've been the era of the TV show rather than the movie. So the "Godzilla of 9/11" isn't "Zero Dark Thirty" or "War of the Worlds". It's "24": a popular, conversation-setting TV show, debuting just a few months after the attacks and continuing through the height of the War on Terror, reflecting and shaping the national debate over terrorism, counter-terrorism, Islam, torture, and more.
Honorable mentions to "Battlestar Galactica" (maybe the next-best candidate), "Arrested Development" and "The Wire."
Yeah, I strongly agree with this!
+1 to Battlestar Galactica, that was the first thing that came to mind
24 is a great answer - it hasn't (i don't think?) spawned a Greater 24-iverse, but it feels like a *huge* number of middle-brow law & order dramas (including Law & Order itself) are still drawing from that well
Re: No. 5, if you include that then you should also make the case for the Hunger Games, which was conceived when Suzanne Collins was flipping back and forth between Iraq news coverage and Survivor. Soldiers' deaths were being turned into infotainment in real time. And then what if you just didn't give Survivor contestants unlimited rice or keep a doctor on set? Is it really such a stretch to think a show like that wouldn't have gotten top ratings in 2004?
I think this is right though it's always funny to me that a series about traditionalist rural families rising up against the decadent sexual deviants of the city is generally understood as "liberal."
I wonder how much it would change the perceived politics of The Hunger Games if the protagonist were male?
I’ve long maintained that the opening sequence of War of the Worlds—in which gleaming towers rise from the ground and destroy a pleasant, tightly-knit working-class neighborhood—represented a 9/11 in reverse, and was really more of an allegory for private equity. The rest of the movie is just Spielberg asking “What if World War II happened in the United States?”
Cloverfield, while deeply entrenched in J.J Abrams-isms, is actually a Matt Reeves joint! Which explains why it’s so much better than most of Abrams filmography
Oh man I fully Mandela effected this!! No wonder it's good!
Someone else already mentioned "24", and I really do think that's as close as you can get. It really gets at the combo of elite operators, disregard for morality, and domestic threat that others don't have in equal measure (most other elite operator shows or films are international). If I'm remembering season 1 correctly, the bad guys were even something from some operation in Jacks past, so there even a bit of an acknowledgement of blowback... even if they still deserve to be tortured in the 24verse.
But what really blew my mind was that 24 premiered in November of 2001. This got me to look at things released in 2001 and early 2002 and I would like to propose a subcategory of the final category: "things made before 9/11 that just so happened to be released after 9/11 and really encapsulated the moment". And two things jump to mind: "Band of Brothers" and "Black Hawk Down".
I think enough ink has been spilled analyzing "Saving Private Ryan" and I'd say both of these fall into similar categories. " Black Hawk Down" has the advantage of a MENA location and more contemporary setting, but still, I can't think of anything that better captured that immediate mood before Iraq... complicated things.
Or, with about 50% sincerity, "The Godzilla of 9/11" is that JibJab (I think?) flash animation where missles chase Bin Laden while a parody of Day-O is sung by Colin Powell.
LOL at JibJab. Our Toho Studios.
"Minority Report" is another candidate for your excellent new proposed category IMO--one of the best movies made about post-9/11 surveillance and policing (both domestic and foreign), and it was in the can before 9/11 and released in early 2002.
Hey Max, long time reader first time commenter. Amazing analysis; I'm especially intrigued by the idea of the depth of Spielberg's post-9/11 run--gonna need to revisit Catch Me If You Can through this lens for sure--and the cargo cult-like notion of "movies about planes" falling under this umbrella.
Inspired by your first annotation though, I'm curious how Starship Troopers didn't make the list of '90's movies that are about 9/11, somehow.' That to me is the first film to come to mind for this entire project.
I totally agree--Starship Troopers is one of the best candidates because of its self-awareness!
Hm. I think I see what you're saying. So if Starship Troopers underlying thesis by Verhoeven's own admission is "War makes fascists of us all," and he skewed that through satire, that self-awareness kind of undercuts the 9/11 of it all, because a lot of the other examples listed took a more genuine or sincere position on translating the psychic trauma of the event. Whereas Starship Troopers ends up looking more cleareyed in it's comment of the insanity that the event wrought, and how it warped everything and everyone around it. I'm kind of thinking now that for a film to get to the Godzilla of 9/11 status, capturing that feeling and anxiety of it all, it's got to be a story told from an inside perspective, rather than an outside commentary. Anyway, I saw War of the Worlds for the first time last year--had no idea about Wells inspirations for the story, that is fascinating--and I wonder if the more shmaltzy aspects of the third act were always present from the get go. It's been fully discussed to death how unlikely the whole family reunion at the end was; I have to imagine that was a conscious choice to kind of rewrite the implicit tragedy of 9/11, and how not everyone escaped or made it back or anything like that. Showing that on screen might've been too much too soon.
Yeah, I suppose I mean more that it's a great candidate for "90s movie about 9/11" and not necessarily for Godzilla of 9/11--it was too big a box office flop to really get the status anyway. Re: War of the Worlds it's hard to say because Spielberg has been a sentimentalist his whole career, though I suppose he really turned it up in the years after 9/11, and I think you're right that he (and/or the studio) felt like they needed to bring everything together cleanly and happily to justify or pay back the genuinely horrifying first 80 minutes or so.
> ‘90s movies that are about 9/11, somehow
*adam curtis voice* Suddenly, a commenter on Read Max left a comment....A comment grappling with the much older forces of montage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlxGtKw2KAA
I must note that in Reign Over Me, Adam Sandler is compulsively playing Shadow of the Colossus, not God of War, on PS2.
BORAT
Up in the Air, while ostensibly a GFC movie, is largely about planes and our longing for air travel to be emancipatory instead of penal... a sneaky category 4 9/11 movie?
Wow... the missing-link GFC plane movie
I know it's technically outside the 90s parameters but when we rewatched Die Hard recently I got major 9/11 vibes during the building explosion scene, particularly all the paperwork raining down. Just throwing that into the mix, fwiw.
To add onto the 90s movies that are somehow about 9/11, I think a good candidate would be Titanic. Especially the scene where Kathy Bates watches people jump off the ship into the ocean.
Also did not know that Adam Curtis got his 90s-9/11 bit from David Thompson
I think the Modern Warfare games could be contenders here. Representing both the gung-ho post 9/11 militarism of American society and perhaps some of the cynicism that came with it.
really thought it was gonna be "The Joker" 🤡
the Joker is the Akira of 9/11