Documentaries, newspaper features, many books, and newly-released declassified documents focus on what happened, how it changed the country, and what it means today. “It became unpatriotic to suggest that there was anything wrong with the United States.”Īs with most momentous anniversaries, the period marking 20 years after the terrorist attacks of Septemhas inspired a frenzy of retrospection-especially because it coincides with the US withdrawal in defeat from a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan that began because of the attacks. “It became unpatriotic to suggest that there was anything wrong with the United States,” Spigel told me.
Patriotism the last bastion movie#
“After the attacks of September 11, traditional forms of entertainment had to reinvent their place in US life and culture,” Lynn Spigel a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University wrote in her 2004 American Quarterly essay “ Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” “n the weeks following September 11, the industry exhibited (whether for sincere or cynical reasons) a new will toward ‘tastefulness.'” Our pop culture reoriented its messaging around 9/11 in a way not seen since the World War II era when splashy posters, radio celebrities, and movie stars would urge Americans to do all they could to support the troops abroad and root out potential enemies at home.
As the 1984 Lee Greenwood song that spiked to the top of the charts after 9/11 so memorably put it, they wanted to show they were each “proud to be an American.” The Disney Channel aired red, white, and blue-tinged spots with its biggest stars, the music industry rewarded artists for extremely patriotic songs, and the process of torturing of suspected terrorists became a television show and thus normalized.
Within weeks, maybe even days, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the entertainment industry mobilized to show that it too was outraged by what happened. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
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