Five Years Later: Pop Culture of Denial

Patrick Goldstein published a column five days after 9-11-01 in which he said

The terrorist attacks may have brought to a close a decade of enormous frivolity and escapism.

Maybe Hollywood will recognize that Americans suddenly view the world as a more serious place. There's a new moral gravity out there.

Today he admits that he was then

blissfully unaware that it would take more than a horrific catastrophe to quench our thirst for the madcap antics of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Star Jones Reynolds, Jessica Simpson and all the other bobble heads bouncing around our celebrity universe. When it comes to frivolity, escapism and a lack of moral gravity, we haven't lost a step, have we?

. . . . But the truth is that the trauma of Sept. 11 did not change us, not so much because we live in a culture of superficiality as because we are imprisoned in a culture of hyperactivity. We're so inundated by juicy bites of information — both serious and tawdry — that we don't have the psychic attention span to emotionally involve ourselves in much of anything. What we're really good at is denial.

In this atmosphere it's hardly surprising that Sept. 11 has the sound of distant thunder, treated with great solemnity but rarely given a thought in our daily lives . . . .

The events of Sept. 11 have been anointed in heroic balm, its victims sanctified either for their ordinariness (as in "United 93") or for their stouthearted stoicism, as in "World Trade Center." The subject is still too sensitive for artists to have any dramatic free rein — we've had authenticity, but precious little poetry. The rest of our culture is awash in irony, sarcasm and the self-flagellation of reality TV, but the respect for the Sept. 11 dead prevents artists from exploring the blindness, delusion and foolish human behavior that make for great drama . . . .

Trying to see shades of Sept. 11 in our fragmented pop culture is something of a fool's errand . . . .

You could also argue that historic events today don't pack the wallop they once did, since they are so quickly chewed over and transformed into cheesy cliché by our voracious media machine.

The world of new technology, which in many ways is the most strikingly different part of our post-Sept. 11 universe, has made us so over-connected that we have trouble processing real, traumatic tragedy. It quickly becomes so over-analyzed that it loses its potency by losing its singularity . . . .

This fragmentation is just a fact of life in our world, which has so many hundreds of niche channels and radio formats that we rarely get to share a common reaction to a cultural event.

Goldstein concludes by citing writer-director Paul Weitz, whose "American Dreamz" was a cheeky satire about the convergence of politics, terrorism and show business:

There are so many different venues for entertainment that you don't have to be exposed to any serious thoughts if you don't want to — there's no one guy like Walter Cronkite to watch.

The sheer proliferation of media makes it hard to make judgments or really be engaged in the world. You wonder — if Watergate happened today, would people really all be irate or would they just be watching some other channel?

Five Years Later: Pop Culture of Denial