On April 28, 2006, when the movie United 93 made its theatrical debut, the significance of the occasion went completely unnoticed. But given that two other movies dramatizing the same incident—2002's Let's Roll and 2006's Flight 93—had already aired on TV, the addition of United 93 to the canon meant that the real-life story of the courageous passengers who fought back against their Islamist hijackers had inspired as many movies as Joey Buttafuoco's sordid seduction of underage wild child Amy Fisher.
So perhaps things really are different in the wake of 9/11.
After the attack, late-night TV shows went off the air temporarily. Professional sports games were called off. Even this city blinked. Siegfried & Roy cancelled their show that night. At Paris Las Vegas, security shut down the Eiffel Tower. The Mirage's volcano went dormant.
For the next few days, introspection was in, spectacle out. Our most accomplished purveyors of celebrity fluff and tabloid sleaze issued somber vows of repentence. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter declared an end to "the age of irony." Tom Pollock, the head of Universal Studios, exclaimed that he "wouldn't even pitch a comedy, because everything and everybody had changed." A concerned program director at radio conglomerate Clear Channel worried that traumatized listeners might find "Dust in the Wind" and approximately 150 other "lyrically questionable" songs too painful to bear. Even the news media, our best source of frivolity and hype, threatened to get serious. With just a few devastating blows, it seemed, the 9/11 terrorists had destroyed the world's most unruly pop culture, and henceforth, we would all be as monomaniacal as Taliban scholars.
In Las Vegas, the rhetoric never quite got so ponderous, because, really, what choice did a city built on spectacle have? On the Friday after the attack, casinos observed a minute of silence to honor those lost. The Stratosphere draped a huge American flag across its tower. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority began crafting a new marketing strategy that positioned the city as an oasis of escapism in our new Code Orange world, and it was back to business as usual. In November, dozens of the town's performers came together to present "Las Vegas Salutes the Spirit of America," a four-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet of fireworks, belly dancers, gospel choirs and duelling impressionists that raised more than $200,000 for the USO.
Then: Goodbye, chastened introspection, hello Anna Nicole Smith! By mid-2002, our new collective appetite for deeper meaning and greater purpose had somehow propelled that triple scoop of inanity into basic cable stardom. By 2004, the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror were such familiar ground that even President Bush felt it was safe enough for tasteless shtick. At the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, a slide projector showed images of him storming the underside of his Oval Office desk in yet another futile search for those elusive weapons of mass destruction. Sorry, Baghdad, his bad!
Now, every year around this time, pundits ponder our swift reconciliation with frivolity and indifference. Sometimes they scold the media and the entertainment industry for backsliding so easily. Sometimes they reprimand the public for failing to sufficiently honor those who've been lost, those who continue to serve, the threat that has not yet diminished.
Ultimately, however, those who predicted a monolithic shift to the age of seriousness and those who lament that shift's failure to achieve permanence ignore an obvious but critical fact about America's pop culture. It's massively parallel. It contains multitudes. If you think we're burying our heads in the trivial sands of reality TV, video games and Gawker.com, have you somehow overlooked that comedy channel that broadcasts a full hour of political commentary four nights a week? Did you fail to note that our desire to understand 9/11 was so great that in 2004, it turned Michael Moore into a matinee idol capable of outgrossing Leonardo DiCaprio? America's pop culture has gotten more serious since 9/11—so serious that thousands of attorneys, college professors and even U.S. military personnel now spend their workdays parsing The New York Times for partisan bias instead of surfing for Japanese foot-porn.
At the same time, how to explain the popularity of Dane Cook, pretty much the first comedian since Andrew Dice Clay to achieve rock-star status based solely on his stand-up? As The Daily Show and The Colbert Report regularly prove, the Bush administration is a bottomless bowl of comedy, and yet one senses Cook would sooner take a job telemarketing than tell a Dick joke. Or a George joke. Or, for that matter, a Mahmoud joke.
Is his success due in part to 9/11, a desire for completely apolitical entertainment in these highly politicized times? Or is it just a coincidence? Either way, choosing Cook over Jon Stewart, or Talledega Nights over World Trade Center, as moviegoers did during the latter's opening week, is a political act of sorts, and a fairly vital one. When the scope of the various distractions we're free to spend our time on starts narrowing, we won't need Sean Hannity to point out the trouble we're in. Our TIVOs will tell us.
In the dark days of 2003, when radio stations waged a War on Dixie Chicks CDs, hawkish patriots often referenced a key fact of liberty: Without a strong military to protect us, our right to free speech, our freedom to watch Scary Movie 4 and Big Brother 7 and, most pointedly, our freedom to protest U.S. military actions, would disappear in a furious hail of Taep'o-dong missiles. Or, as star-spangled coot Charlie Daniels put it in an open letter to Hollywood, "[Our troops] go to battle and risk their lives so ingrates like you can live in luxury."
How ungrateful Hollywood is is a matter of debate—Al Franken, Robin Williams, Drew Carey, Jessica Simpson, Tom Green, Henry Rollins, Kid Rock and 50 Cent are just some of the stars who've entertained troops overseas. In addition, there's a flip side to the maxim that it's only because our soldiers make such great sacrifices that we have such great freedom, and it goes like this: It's only because our freedom is so expansive, and because we exercise it in so many ways—ways that are often trivial, irreverent, injudicious—that the efforts of our armed forces are so noble. Because it's not just our military that makes us a superpower—it's our pop culture, too, in all its permutations. That 9/11 inspires us to greater seriousness and engagement with the world is good. That it did so little to restrain our passion for YouTube.com, Simon Cowell and 4,000-room megaresorts is essential.