Hollywood’s Forever War on Terrorism, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

All of it was inconceivable — the scale, the carnage, the optics. To watch the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in real time, especially on television, was to thrash desperately for order as everything fell away. For many of us, that tenuous toehold was Hollywood. “This is like something out of a movie” was a natural first reaction. With more than a century’s worth of images and exponential growth in special effects technology, we’re used to massive scenes of destruction that defy disbelief. But on that Technicolor blue morning 20 years ago, the script flipped.

Two decades after 9/11, the entreaty “Never Forget” feels redundant. The attacks imprinted themselves on a generation the way the Kennedy assassination did 38 years earlier. We couldn’t shake those memories even if we wanted to. What’s easy to forget, though, is it was more than a one-day event. We live in the world September 11 made, from our fractured politics and surveillance economy to our Forever War foreign policy and militarized local police forces. And, yes, our movies.

Before 9/11, Hollywood was no stranger to terrorism. Terrorists were reliable plot devices, both during the Cold War and in the following years. They were typically European, like Hans Gruber (Die Hard) or Ivan Korshunov (Air Force One). They could be freedom fighters striking at the heart of the West or soldiers of fortune striking at the heart of capitalism. Sometimes they were disaffected U.S. servicemen (Die Harder, The Rock) trying to make America great again. In the end, they were all cannon fodder in stories glorifying the rugged true-red-white-and-blue bravery and optimistic ingenuity of the gun-toting, freedom-loving authority figures protecting us all from invading forces of fear, chaos, and doubt.

By 2001, we’d become so inured to danger that it’s no wonder when a made-for-Hollywood crisis happened for real, no one — least of all Hollywood — knew how to process it.

Moviegoing is a national pastime often challenged, occasionally left for dead, but essentially durable. The COVID-19 pandemic has tested its resilience unlike any event since 9/11. But the threat was greater 20 years ago. In the pre-smartphone/social web era, the public square was the multiplex. After the attacks, we weren’t just worried about safety, we asked existential questions about what we wanted out of movies — and what movies even were in a world gone mad.

Viewer concerns were real, but Hollywood found itself enmeshed in the picayune crisis of scrubbing shots of the World Trade Center from every project yet to be released and generally altering movies made months before 9/11 lest anyone be offended or, worse, be reminded of the tragedy outside. For instance, a scene of a plane hijacking was deleted from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage (2002) before its release. The plot — a firefighter seeking vengeance on the terrorists who killed his family — didn’t seem to bother anyone.

Sony’s Spider-Man (2002) was a microcosm of the early-days absurdity. Its first trailer, where Spider-Man spins a web between the Trade Center towers to catch some crooks, was pulled. The studio tried revising a shot in the film where the buildings reflected in the eyes of Spidey’s mask but couldn’t pull it off. And during a climactic fight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, New Yorkers — who up to this point weren’t so cool with the superhero — come to his defense, with one exclaiming, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!” A well intentioned, I’m sure, nod to national solidarity with New York (remember that?), but it has always felt empty and asinine.

The industry eventually got its act together and over the last 20 years churned out material that spoke to and capitalized on the nation’s terror fears and the nebulous War on Terror. There are biopics, like W. (2008), Snowden (2016), and Vice (2018); potboilers, like The Kingdom (2007); Very Important Dramas, like Lions for Lambs (2007) and Rendition (2007); even a franchise, which began with Olympus Has Fallen (2013). But Hollywood’s favorite, by far, was the ripped-from-the-headlines dramatization: World Trade Center (2006), United 93 (2006), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), American Sniper (2014), 13 Hours (2016), and 12 Strong (2018), to name a few.

There are a lot of stinkers in the bunch — Hollywood has rarely been accused of prioritizing authentic emotional experience over the empty-calorie cynicism of maudlin spectacle. But Tinseltown also gave us a few classics.

One is Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour (2002), arguably the best American film of the aughts, a last-night-of-freedom drama set in post-9/11 New York, infused to the marrow with the uncertainty, anger, and fraternity that coursed through the city after the attacks, and a capsule of a traumatized country in the early throes of grieving. Team America: World Police (2004), by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is another. Made three years into the Afghanistan War and a year into the Iraq War, the marionette puppet satire relentlessly skewers self-righteous Hollywood liberals, toothless international bodies, North Korea, and, most pointedly, the hubris of an America bent on perpetual, endless revenge. It was and remains the most cogent mainstream argument against allowing fear, retribution, and empty piety to reshape the nation. And then there’s Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker (2008), an incisive dissection of the psychology (and pathology) of our conflict-addicted politics and culture. Bigelow uses an adrenaline junkie bomb disposal soldier (Jeremy Renner) in Iraq to reflect who we are as a country: exceptionally skilled, nihilistically brave, and selfishly reckless. It’s a beautiful, anxious film that speaks directly to where America was five years into the Iraq War, and where it would remain for the foreseeable future.

The War on Terror gave a rudderless Hollywood an instant font of material. But when 9/11 sucked all the air out of America’s movie theaters, it was replaced with the fumes and exhaust of endless, incomprehensible violence. The War on Terror was never a genre; it was a genetic modification. There were movies explicitly tackling the subject, but it manifested in every film. Outside threats were omnipresent; surveillance a given. The Dream Factory became the Nightmare Mill.

For nearly a decade that seemed to be 9/11’s lasting cinema legacy. And then came the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Before the turn of the century, superhero movies felt like expensive versions of, well, comic books. From Superman (1978) to Batman (1989), the good guys wore homemade costumes, the bad guys were bent on property and wealth, stories were city-bound, and threats were local (even for a strange visitor from another world).

Spider-Man sent up flares that change was coming, but the turning point was Batman Begins (2005). Christopher Nolan’s prestigious reimagining of the Batman mythos is explicitly a terrorism story — a clandestine group of foreigners committed to cleansing the world of decadence and depravity poison Gotham City with an aerosol-based fear toxin — centered on a vigilante equipped with experimental, bleeding-edge military gear. Nolan’s Gotham is a city choking in a miasma of smoke and dread, a deliberate evocation of 9/11 that Nolan returned to in the subsequent sequels The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). His Batman trilogy is dark, brooding, and an explicit commentary on the War on Terror, from the urban attacks in Begins to rendition and surveillance in The Dark Knight to the nowhere-is-safe pathos and economic anxiety created by a decade of war in Rises.

Batman Begins was a smash, changing the calculus of cinematic superhero storytelling and creating an opportunity for Marvel Studios to begin an experiment. Iron Man (2008), a comparatively bright, quippy, action-heavy, character-driven adaptation of a B-level superhero, hit theaters with minimal expectations. It too was a hit — fun and rousing with characters we wanted to hang with and the tease of a connected universe of characters. It also showed an American beset by terrorism — and repelling it.

Over the course of 22 films in the Infinity Saga, Marvel turned the superhero film into Hollywood’s most lucrative enterprise. And it’s not just thanks to fanboys. Loud as they are, they can’t sustain an entire genre. What turned even the most comic book-hating jock into, well, Marvel nerds is the dedication to a complicated world where victory is possible against all manners of threats: jihadists, corrupt businessmen, alien swarms, intergalactic ecoterrorists. Heroes get beaten up and challenged and tragedy befalls them, but in the end, they come out on top. They save the world — and, by the conclusion of the Infinity Saga, the universe — from terrorist megalomania. And while these films are international hits, there’s no doubt that America — or, rather, the promise of America — is the paragon. After all, the leader of the Avengers, the first Avenger, is Captain America.

While there’s a lot of hoo-hah about Infinity Stones and superpowers and time travel and multiverses, these films are, at base, wish fulfillment, collective therapy, and pure escapism. That aggravates a certain viewer. A lot of these movies can be dumb and superfluous, especially as they get darker, and the stink of authoritarianism is omnipresent. The criticisms are well taken. But in this moment of perpetual crisis, it’s hard to fault viewers flocking to a bright, optimistic fantasy of witty good guys kicking ass the way Depression-era audiences desperate for a reprieve demanded snappy screwball comedies and high-kicking musicals.

For all their faults, superhero films brought something like life back to the movies. Dreams, imagination, and enthusiasm replaced nightmares, hopelessness, and dread. But after 20 years of endless war, hapless politics, dire economics, fractured civic life, and now a pandemic, is it time for something more? And at what cost?

Marvel has no fewer than 25 projects, movies and TV shows, on its slate. And folks are surely hard at work on big-screen versions of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the humanitarian disaster occurring at the Kabul airport. We need a break — from crass cash-ins on tragedy and franchise sequels. There is more to cinema than that binary. But this-or-that, with-us-or-against-us, is another legacy of 9/11, nationally and in Hollywood. Unless we’re willing to give up the movie theater, we must choose: superhero escapism or cynical despair?

I’m not ready to let cinemas become another casualty of the Forever War. So make mine Marvel.