Erasing the Towers

When it comes to Hollywood, the claim that “life imitates art” has become the popular cliché of the past several years. When President Bill Clinton launched air strikes against Iraq during the height of the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, the press had a field day comparing the situation to the Robert DeNiro satire Wag the Dog, in which the fictional president commissions the production of a fake war in order to ward off scandal. A year later, when two high school students murdered more than a dozen of their peers at Columbine High School, the movie industry was quickly assailed for films such as The Basketball Diaries, which were said to have served as the model for the shootings.

It is interesting, then, that in the wake of last week’s attack on the World Trade Center, Hollywood has chosen to copy the “real-life events” that television and movies are so often said to anticipate: images of the twin towers, like the physical structures themselves, have been wiped out. Films set for release this month that allude in any way to terrorism or show the World Trade Center have been postponed until at least the spring; an album cover depicting the destruction of the New York skyline has been pulled; even the opening credits for TV’s “Friends” and “Law & Order” are being edited so as not to include the image of the city’s Twin Towers.

For the time being, these actions make sense, not only in the name of good taste, but as a way to partially alleviate the emotional, psychological and spiritual turmoil being experienced by so many Americans. ABC executives made the correct decision in cancelling last Saturday’s scheduled airing of The Peacemaker, the 1998 film which depicts George Clooney and Nicole Kidman working to prevent a nuclear attack on New York City’s United Nations building. Likewise, Sony Pictures acted wisely in pulling previews of its upcoming Spiderman. The cartoonish preview concludes with the superhero snaring an enemy helicopter in a “spider web” stretching between the two Trade Center towers.

Yet at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if Hollywood is going too far in censoring itself. What exactly is being gained by pretending that the World Trade Center didn’t stand as one of the most recognizable symbols of America’s greatest city?

Certain omissions make sense for the coming weeks, but erasing the towers from the movies and network television may in the long term do more harm than good. The American public is about as likely to forget this attack as it is the explosion of the Challenger, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ’40, or the event to which this attack has been most frequently compared, the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. Eliminating the World Trade Center from all upcoming films and non-news TV programs won’t cause anyone to forget the pain resulting from Tuesday’s attack. If anything, such a response could be considered a form of filmic denial, inflaming, not mitigating, the country’s collective anxiety.

Furthermore, trying to eradicate the World Trade Center from public memory in the current scenario is tantamount to disrespect for the dead. Television and movies provide valuable historical documentation of the period in which they are made—what does it say about our country if its first response is to eliminate the World Trade Center from the record? The image of those two buildings standing strong against the New York sky reminds us not only of what once stood as symbols of America’s political and economic power, it reminds us of the thousands of lives lost and the millions of tons of rubble which now sit in their place. Until some sort of memorial can be erected at the site of the towers, their image should serve as a monument to the dead and the relatively peaceful world America thought it had achieved.

The image of the World Trade Center will also have the vital power to tear us away from any inclination to forget our vulnerability, the hatred for America that exists in so many other parts of the world. Just as pictures of the Berlin Wall remind us of a time when political division and fear brought the world to the nuclear brink, images of the World Trade Center will focus our anger and sadness into action against terrorists. To erase those images would allow America to push last week’s tragedy from its immediate consciousness, thereby diminishing its long-term capacity to prevent similar attacks.

Landmarks, and vanquished landmarks in particular, have a unique power over the public’s conscience and imagination. Hollywood clearly knows this; in the past, it has packed theaters with people eager to see the destruction of the White House and Empire State Building (Independence Day), the Eiffel Tower (Deep Impact), and the Statue of Liberty (Planet of the Apes). At a time when our fascination with such images must be harnessed in order to memorialize a real-life disaster of epic proportions, Hollywood is instead eliminating those images from view. Doing so is a mistake, one that misinterprets Americans’ strength and their need to remember this catastrophic event.

The United States is now confronting the vision of those two great buildings collapsing violently in on themselves. It is certainly capable of remembering them as they once stood.

Nathan K. Burstein ’04, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Leverett House.