One of the more important areas which were effected were public sensibilities to the military and to mass destruction. Still healing from the wounds of the tragic events from the year before, I talk about how Hollywood would have to change with the times in order to remain relevant.
*****
Godzilla vs. Bin Laden: The Re-Evaluation of the Hollywood Blockbuster (2002) July
By Pete Bauer
I took my daughter to the local public library the other day and found that they had recently added DVDs to the things one could check out. I wasn't in the mood for anything thought provoking, I wanted some mindless drivel. It had been an extremely long work week and I needed some mental down time. So, I picked out one of the biggest, expensive and unsatisfying examples of Hollywood drivel I could find, 1998's GODZILLA.
Ever since the terrible events of 9/11 I've been wondering how that would spill into the public's cinematic appetite. Since that day, I had not seen an abundance of philosophical changes coming from Hollywood (Sum of All Fears, Collateral Damage), so I wondered if anything had really changed. I wondered if something as truly horrifying as what happened in New York and Pennsylvania last September was going to have any lasting impact on the movie-going audiences. I thought that, if America had not truly lost its soul over the past 200 years, we would, as a people, no longer need the irrelevant fluff we so eagerly purchased from the media outlets previously in order to fill our lives. That films, television and books would some how take on a more meaningful purpose. I was afraid to think that our decades of excess living in a land where generations had lived with a war-less history, that we would have lost ourselves irrevocably to the baser urges of mankind.
And then I watched GODZILLA.
It was while watching this super-fictional attack on the New City of the north that I finally noticed the stark differences between "what was" and "what is" after 9/11. There was no escapism for me in watching a monster destroy people-filled buildings, or the military flying through the city in a desperate attempt to save human lives. And the jokes of the political ramifications of a Mayor ordering the evacuation of the city now seem so hopelessly out of place... almost offensive when considering what Mayor Guiliani dealt with when real-life terror impacted his city.
What used to be found as amusement or flights of fancy, such as destroying skyscrapers or blowing up well known landmarks, are now so morally inappropriate, so misplaced, so hollow and weak that it cemented in me how the world had truly changed. Prior to that awful day we were so distant from true life horror that it took a gigantic monster destroying a larger than life city to merely whet our appetite. Now, it's almost embarrassing to think that anyone would find such a story entertaining.
Years of the consistent devaluing of human life, of adding body count for cinematic impact instead of layering the true human stories that fill each of those dead bodies, culminated in the fact that we thought of it as nothing very important to watch a monster wreak the largest of body counts, for people to be stomped on like insignificant bugs. And that the killing of men and women serving in the armed forces was somehow an effective punch line.
Oh, how things have changed.
Does that mean there should be no more monsters in the movies? Of course not. But, what I hope it means is that America, and perhaps the world, are more in touch with the substance of their existence and to expect more from their escapism... to layer the stories with a touch of humanity as well as entertainment... that we have moved permanently above the expectation that the highest we should expect from our entertainment is the lowest form of our existence.
At least, I hope so.
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