Looking back, superhero movies and a boom in Middle Eastern terrorists on television and film were probably the inevitable pop culture responses the September 11 attacks, the former a fantasy of stopping the worst before it happens without loss of life and treasure, the latter an attempt to personify an enemy most Americans hadn’t even considered. But while most of these cultural references have been more allusion than direct reference, the Joker’s demented drag as a substitute for Osama bin Laden, Oded Fehr in Sleeper Cell instead of Mohammad Atta, The Avengers and The Dictator both seem to me to be addressing September 11 and its aftermath with unusual directness, if to very different effect.

The Avengers is hardly the first post-9/11 movie to have superheroes rampage through New York, causing property damage and loss of life along the way. But I was struck, in the moment when Thor, doing battle with his brother Loki atop Stark Tower, forces him to look out at the city Loki’s forces were laying waste to, trying to force him to recognize the stupid, destructive futility of his attack. The crash of alien invaders into skyscrapers was one of the most striking visual allusions to the September 11 attacks I’ve seen in an action movie, flowers of fire blooming from pillars of steel in an eruption of violence hugely more widespread than the terror accomplished by 19 angry men in three hijacked planes.

The buildings didn’t fall. We didn’t have to go to war, because we could shut the border between our world and the one from which our enemies came. We didn’t even have to conduct a mop-up operation or interrogate detainees because when that portal closed, the invaders collapsed like toys (interestingly, while in Avengers captivity, Loki assumes he’ll be tortured and Nick Fury certainly seems prepared to do so, but it’s Black Widow who talks information out of the mad god without touching him). This isn’t just a fantasy of an easy dynamic, of revenge on the bad guys as Adam Serwer has written at Mother Jones. It’s a dream of resilience and clean war, where we can suffer greater losses and survive; where we can solve our problem without putting as many men and women at risk of death, deformity, or traumatic brain injury; where we can end the war in a day; where we can avoid doing grievous harm to ourselves and our values in the process.

The Dictator doesn’t perform alchemy on our post-9/11 fears, it mocks them. Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming comedy about a Middle Eastern dictator adrift in New York City takes on issues ranging from anti-Arab sentiment. But it also features an extended joke, which appears at the end of this red band trailer, that derives its humor from the idea that a pair of tourists in a helicopter are stupid to think that they might be the victims of a 9/11 style attack again:

It’s a poor choice of target. Publications like The Onion and Modern Humorist dived in immediately after 9/11 to start making fun of the hijackers themselves, and the Taliban and al Qaeda more broadly, turning them into small, delusional, murderous, isolated men rather than giving them the deference of treating them like an existential threat to the United States. It’s that kind of thinking that leads to raids to take out Osama bin Laden directly, rather than grinding wars that have accomplished little more than giving the sense that the country responding with force equal to the trauma we felt on September 11 itself. If you want to make fun of that trauma, it makes more sense to mock the things that it’s made us do to ourselves, be it the threat level system, invasive TSA searches, or watch lists. For all the movie’s other fantasies, Bruce Banner’s indignant request to know why “Captain America’s on a threat list?” in The Avengers says a lot more about the idiocies of post-9/11 vigilance than mocking the terror of two middle-aged tourists who think they’re about to die.

So, um, this is the origin story for the Beast in one of the two, count ‘em, two, Beauty and the Beast shows in development:

Vincent worked as a doctor at the New York University hospital – and was working On September 11, 2001 when the towers came down. Long story short, a wounded Vincent ends up in a medical clinic where he’s injected with a DNA-changing drug. The drug turns him into an unstoppable soldier type that is used in Afghanistan. Think ‘Captain America’ or a ‘Universal Soldier’. Unfortunately, the strength and stamina comes with a price…it also changes Vincent’s look — in particular, hair sprouts hair everywhere. When he returned from Afghanistan, looking like he is, he hid himself away.

That’s a way of integrating fairy tales into our self-mythology of our actions after September 11, I guess? There are certainly real side effects of the way we treat our veterans, including a dramatic overprescription of really powerful painkillers that are more serious than a lot of body hair. But I have to say that I think Sherlock has done a better job of linking an old story to a new Afghan war.

And I’m actually more interested in the way in which Beauty and the Beast narratives intersect with our schlub-gets-the-girl trope popularized by Judd Apatow’s movies. There have already been some feints in mashing up those movies with superhero or secret identity narratives, most notably Kick Ass. But it’s one thing to take a guy who’s always been a schlub and putting him in the path of a gorgeous, talented woman, and another to take a guy who’s been popular and attractive, strip him of his physical assets, and then put him in the path of the kind of woman he’d be able to conquer easily were he his old handsome self. That whole breaking a main character down before he can be built back up thing sounds suspiciously like what we so often do to female characters.

This post contains spoilers for A Vist from the Goon Squad.

There may be something sentimental about the idea that we are all connected, affected by each others’ actions and worldviews in ways we can’t see until later. But for a novel that’s ultimately about how art helps us collectively and individually overcome the traumas of September 11, it’s a fitting ideological framework. The events of that day came about in part because of reactions to our actions that we didn’t see, or take seriously enough, in part because a small group of poisonously angry men wanted to make themselves seen, and felt. In the years since the attacks, we’ve mostly responded by trying to regulate the world in a way that’s more advantageous to us, to see everything, even at the expense of privacy and liberty. The power of Egan’s novel comes from asserting a positive vision of interconnection, one governed not by power and victory but by compassion and openness.

Because it turns out, of course, that Alex’s bad night with Sasha in the early years after the attacks ends up becoming the key to his ability to appreciate the event that changes — and maybe heals — a nation. As the New Yorker of longer vintage, she is part of his initiation into city. And years later, her experience of loss will refract back to him:

Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty…The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse.

He’s right to be anxious, maybe even more than we can understand. Egan’s very, very good at evoking the future. She places us in time with the reference to a 15-year war and the baby boom that followed, though whether it’s our involvement in the Middle East or another conflict remains unclear. Her description of social networking gives us a sense of vaster, though still personal, webs of connection, of earlier adoption of technology by children. Both the war and the spread of technology have enabled the expansion of the state security apparatus, though whether the fear is legitimate or justified also remains open to question. And the reaction to Scotty’s performance, the moment when “ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched,” are so strong that they suggest that things got truly bad. It might still be possible to make rock music, and to market it, but there’s something shimmering off the page.
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I’m not usually one to police the behavior of celebrities, but Mark Wahlberg’s recent statements about September 11 are really egregious and deserve a thorough fisking. He told Men’s Journal: “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.”

First, who knew Mark Wahlberg knew how to fly commercial aircraft?

Second, for the love of all that is holy, do you know nothing about what went down on September 11? When people get out of their seats and start murdering members of the crew, it wouldn’t have been particularly surprising if people were shocked enough not to react until it was too late. And as it turns out, they weren’t. The passengers on United 93, including a judo expert and a rugby player (who may not be as fit as Mr. Wahlberg, but are not incapable people), fought back against the men who hijacked their flight. As it turns out, people with weapons who are determined to die are decent at thwarting the people fighting back against them who want to live. The hijacker at the controls of the plane dipped and rolled to thwart the passengers’ efforts. And he crashed it before they could get to the cockpit.

This is just profoundly disrespectful to everyone who died on planes on September 11, whether they fought back or not. It shows no understanding of their ordeal, or their courage. And it mistakes action movie theatrics, where the fights are scripted and all the participants share an interest in making a great scene rather than finding themselves at deadly odds, for the struggle to live.

This post contains spoilers through section 7 of A Visit From the Goon Squad. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

Perhaps it’s because I’m writing this at the Television Critics Association press tour, but A Visit From the Goon Squad feels more like a television show than almost any novel I’ve ever read. Normally, that comparison goes in the opposite direction to compliment and elevate a television show, but in this case, it shouldn’t feel like a demotion. Do you remember that opening tracking shot that begins the Battlestar Galactica miniseries that kicked the whole shebang off? Where you skip from one character to the next, and in a couple of minutes, you learn an enormous amount about who’s going to matter and get an initial sense of who they are? A Visit From the Goon Squad feels like that. And much like Battlestar Galactica, this is a novel about climactic moments, both when everything changes for everyone, and little things when people get set slightly off kilter in ways they can only recognize with hindsight.

First, the big thing. This is a New York novel without being heavy-handed about it, and because of that, it’s a September 11 novel in a way that I suspect that terrible day will figure in many events in the future. The references to it will be glancing, not all events will be organized around it, and yet, September 11 will be recognized as a moment that sent almost all of us off in different directions, however slight the course correction. Sasha “hated the neighborhood at night without the World Trade Center, whose blazing freeways of light had always filled her with hope.” For Jules, September 11 is a way of expressing his profound dislocation from the world after his release from prison. He tells Stephanie “I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people.…And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!” And Stephanie finds a conversation about al Qaeda in New York a symptom of the awfulness of her new life in the suburbs with Bennie, proof of the blinkered nature of the people around her.

That same deftness shows up in the revelations the characters have that aren’t connected to major world-historical events, that might, in fact, be inexplicable to anyone else. There’s Sasha’s realization about why she steals:

It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing.

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So, Tim Kring started out the panel for Touch, his new autistic-people-are-magic show starring Keifer Sutherland as a 9/11 widower by informing us that Sutherland’s character’s son, a white American child, is “the most disenfranchised person on the planet. He’s small, he’s unable to communicate, to make his point known.” Given that, it wasn’t exactly shocking that Kring ended up presenting himself essentially as the Evan Bayh of Hollywood. Rather than lamenting partisanship in Washington, Kring’s come up with something he calls “social benefit storytelling,” which turns out to be a plan to change the world with warm, fuzzy television that avoids actually discussing what it means to have an autistic child.

To be fair, Kring told me that “he show…is really just about putting this message out into the world and trying to create stories that uplift people through this theme of interconnectivity. In terms of actually calling attention to various things, it is a show that aspires to do that, and I would love to have some of the stories we tackle call attention to various issues around the world and use the power of storytelling to create some positive change out there.” And he did cite the idea “that people tens of thousands of mile away would fly planes into this building is a result of our globally connected world.” So I really do hope that if this is going to be a butterfly effect show, it will be one that actually suggests that there are consequences for American policy at home and abroad.

But I’m really turned off by the idea that positive energy is the basis for our failures to connect. There’s nothing wrong with wanted to set a civil tone or approach other people with a spirit of openness, and after 24, I do think it’s good that Keifer Sutherland wants to be involved in a project that preaches those values. But there are structural factors that influence why people are unable to connect with each other and to be civil to each other. You see this in movies like A Better Life—poverty means you can’t be generous, that you don’t have time to build the family life that you want. It’s the reason the broadband gap matters: if you can’t get online, you don’t have access to what Kring called “the emerging story of our time is that we’re more connected to each other than we ever thought or knew, and I think it’s being born out by the whole social networking world that we’re living in.” There’s something odd about wanting to tell stories about the things that keep us from talking each other but starting that show out by inventing a magical alternative to autism.

As someone who likes politically engaged art, I very much wanted to like Amy Waldman’s The Submission, a novel about the jury for a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks who find themselves embroiled in controversy after choosing a design that turns out to have been submitted by a Muslim architect. There’s no question that Waldman manages to make a debate over the fate of public art and public spaces gripping — I read the novel in one sitting. But the characters frequently read less as actual people and more as vehicles for a carefully selected range of perspectives. And while I appreciate Waldman’s respect for and engagement with immigrants, there’s a self-castigating streak in the novel, a suggestion that Americans by birth make less good use of their freedoms than Americans by choice.

Waldman’s characters have strong streaks of unlikability, and a tendency to marinate in indecision. Claire Burwell, a wealthy 9/11 widow whose husband used his ancestral wealth to support good liberal causes and to act as an art patron, supports the garden designed by a secular Muslim architect, Mohammad Khan, until a vicious gossip columnist poisons her mind against him. She then makes common cause with Muslim activists who have gotten everything they want out of the memorial controversy and sense the point of diminishing returns approaching to kill the design, turning liberal alliances to illiberal and un-aesthetic ends. She’s contrasted with Sean Gallagher a handyman who has defined his life since the attacks by becoming a full-time mourner for his firefighter brother, who he was estranged from when his brother died in the September 11 attacks. It’s a stance that could be entirely repulsive — and Sean certainly doesn’t help, pulling a Muslim woman’s headscarf and inspiring a wave of similar attacks, crashing with a Pamela Geller-like anti-Muslim opportunist in what may be the novel’s deftest satire. Waldman treats that incoherent attempt to build a life out of tragedy with an effective amount of respect. But ultimately, he too, sputters out into incoherence, and Waldman lets his storyline trail off.

Mohammad Khan, the architect who designed the memorial in the first place, acts as a kind of inverse to Claire and Sean. He’s simultaneously resistant to any call to explain himself or his design, and frustrated that he’s not understood, even though he doesn’t entirely understand himself. Waldman’s fair about the expectations that are placed and projected on to him — when Laila, a lovely Muslim attorney Mo starts dating during the uproar tells him that he doesn’t seem like he’s stumbled into this, despite his protestations, she does him a disservice by not believing him. Paul Rubin, the extremely wealthy former hedge-funder (we know he left his firm because of the rise of new financial instruments, but it’s not clear if we’re supposed to admire him for it) who is chairing the memorial commission is similarly invested in the idea that the marketplace of ideas is a meritocracy, a conviction he uses to avoid taking a stand. Rubin cares so much for approval, whether he’s trying to broker a solution to the unbrokerable problem of the memorial or giving money to the gay rights organization that his son runs without actually trying to understand or get comfortable with the issues he’s backing financially, that he ends up standing for absolutely nothing.
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