New Delhi: In 2001, Chandler Bing made a joke about bombs at an airport on Friends. The joke was never broadcast. 25 years ago, a canonical event made it a footnote. 9/11 changed how America saw airport humour.
The language of national security changed, but so did the subtext of airport rituals, humour and pop culture references. Something as simple as a bottle of shampoo was a suspect. A goodbye hug at the gate became a sin. Goodbyes were now restricted before security checks.
An entirely new national aviation security system came into being. Sharp objects like knives that the hijackers used to seize the four planes were permanently banned.
The hard rules had a lingering impact on soft culture. One of the many things that disappeared was the casual jokes, especially at an airport. Even Chandler Bing’s quintessential humour had to take a hit. Terrorism, or even the word bomb, was no longer a casual thing to joke about.
Post 9/11 scripts
Pop culture quickly adapted to these changes. Movies and TV shows removed references and even digitally altered pictures of the World Trade Centre. The Twin Towers were no longer part of New York’s visual grammar.
The 1997 Simpsons episode “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,” much of which takes place around the World Trade Center, disappeared from syndication for years. Films such as Serendipity (2001) and Zoolander (2001) were altered to remove the tower references.
The trailer for Spider-Man, which featured Peter Parker trapping a helicopter in a web stretched between the Twin Towers, was withdrawn, and a sequence planned around the World Trade Center was also removed from the film.
Analysing television culture after 9/11, a 2004 journal article by Lynn Spigel noted how the appetite for too much violence disappeared from American television overnight.
“While Hollywood usually defends its mass-destruction ethos with claims to “free speech,” constitutional rights, and industry-wide discretion (à la ratings systems), in the weeks following September 11 the industry exhibited (whether for sincere or cynical reasons) a new will toward “tastefulness” as potentially trauma-inducing films like Warner’s Collateral Damage were pulled from release”, it said.
The prime-time television broadcast of The Siege (1998), starring Denzel Washington, which dealt with Arab terrorists plotting to bomb New York, was removed. American broadcasting channels like TBS replaced violent films like Lethal Weapon (1987) with family fare like Look Who’s Talking.
“TNT replaced its 1970s retro lineup of Superman, King Kong, and Carrie with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Grease, and Jaws (although exactly why the blood-sucking shark in Jaws seemed less disturbing than the menstruating teen in Carrie already begs questions about exactly what constitutes “terror” in the minds of Hollywood executives)”, the article added.
The 2002 film Collateral Damage, a film about a man pursuing terrorists, delayed its release. Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) used images of ash, panic, and displaced civilians, carrying echoes of September 11.
In the 2002 re-release of his E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the dialogue “You’re not going as a terrorist” (spoken by the mother) was replaced with “You’re not going as a hippie.”
The ones who preserved the past
Other filmmakers went in the opposite direction: they refused to make September 11 part of stories that had nothing to do with it.
Man on Wire (2008), the documentary about Philippe Petit’s extraordinary 1974 walk between the Twin Towers, deliberately avoided mentioning the towers’ destruction.
Martin Scorsese dealt with a similar theme in his 2002 Gangs of New York. The film had been shot before the attacks and ended with a time-lapse of New York’s skyline stretching from the 19th century into the modern city. The original ending included the World Trade Center. Scorsese kept it.
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Comedy struggles to find its limits
Even live TV knew that the rules had changed. On September 29, 2001– 18 days after 9/11– during the Season 27 premiere of Saturday Night Live, executive producer Lorne Michaels asked New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani a question that became a historic: “Can we be funny?” He responded, “Why start now?”
He then opened the show flanked by the then Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, Fire Commissioner Thomas von Essen and two dozen stone-faced police and firefighters. “We choose to live our lives in freedom,” he said.
But permission to laugh was not permission to joke about everything.
Bill Maher discovered the boundary almost immediately when remarks on his late-night show, Politically Incorrect, about the hijacker’s courage provoked a backlash, advertiser withdrawals, and political condemnation. The program was eventually cancelled. The contours of comedy changed.
Music responds to a changed America
Music underwent its own adjustment. Some songs vanished from radio playlists because their titles or lyrics suddenly sounded inappropriate. Songs mentioning airplanes, bombs, falling, or New York could become unexpectedly uncomfortable. But musicians also found themselves being asked to respond.
The band My Chemical Romance was created after lead singer Gerard Way witnessed the 9/11 attacks firsthand, leading him to form the band as a means to process his emotions and create music that expressed feelings about the tragedy.
Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, released in 2002, became one of the defining musical responses to September 11. Its title song imagined a firefighter’s experience amid the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll,” released only weeks after the attacks, drew on the final moments of Flight 93 and the phrase associated with passenger Todd Beamer. Beamer’s last words were, “Are you ready? Let’s roll.”
Even superheroes changed sides. In the 2008 Iron Man film, Tony Stark’s story is rooted in Afghanistan. He discovers that weapons produced by his company have reached terrorist organisations, and his captivity forces him to confront the consequences of the machinery he has created.
Like Spiegel noted, “The de rigueur violence of mass media-both news and fiction-no longer seemed business as usual.”
Edited by Maryam Hassan