Michiko Kakutani

Remember? Ten years ago Don DeLillo wrote that the attacks of Sept 11 would change ?the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years.? The historian Taylor Branch spoke of a possible ?turning point against a generation of cynicism for all of us,? and Roger Rosenblatt argued in Time magazine that ?one good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony.?

They were wrong, of course. We know now that the New Normal was very much like the Old Normal, at least in terms of the country?s arts and entertainment. Blockbuster video stores placed warnings on some films??in light of the events of Sept 11, please note that this product contains scenes that may be disturbing to some viewers??but violent pictures continued to top most-rented lists. Despite rumours of their demise, black humour and satire, too, remained alive and well on Saturday Night Live and The Onion, which ran headlines like ?Rest of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection for New York.?

Ten years later, it is even clearer that 9/11 has not provoked a seismic change in the arts. While there were shifts in the broader culture?like an increasingly toxic polarisation in our politics, and an alarming impulse to privilege belief over facts?such developments have had less to do with 9/11 than with the ballooning of partisanship during the Bush and Obama administrations, and with unrelated forces like technology, which gave us the social media revolution of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and which magnified the forces of democratisation, relativism and subjectivity.

Economic worries?sparked by 9/11 and amplified by the 2008 Wall Street meltdown?accelerated trends already in place, including the Internet?s undermining of old business models in music and publishing. Warier than ever of taking risks, Hollywood looked even harder for special-effects extravaganzas that could readily find a global audience, and Broadway doubled down on shows starring big-name celebrities that could guarantee box office.

In response to 9/11, the artistic community quickly mobilised. Jane Rosenthal, Craig Hatkoff and Robert De Niro put together the Tribeca Film Festival to help revitalise a ravaged Lower Manhattan. And musicians including Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, the Who and Jay-Z did a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. Such works served useful purposes?cathartic commemoration, therapeutic expression, public rallying?but in retrospect, many of them now feel sentimental or heavy-handed. Later on, anger over the war in Iraq and worries about the erosion of civil liberties under the Bush war on terror would produce a wave of politically engaged movies and plays?including Michael Moore?s Fahrenheit 9/11 and David Hare?s Stuff Happens; unfortunately, a lot of it turned out to be obvious or shrill. Some eloquent or daring works of art about 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq eventually did emerge?most notably, Kathryn Bigelow?s harrowing film The Hurt Locker, about a bomb disposal squad in Iraq; Gregory Burke?s haunting play Black Watch, based on interviews with soldiers who served in Iraq with a Scottish regiment; Amy Waldman?s novel The Submission, which explored the fallout of 9/11 on American attitudes toward Muslims; Donald Margulies?s play Time Stands Still, about the Iraq war?s effects on two journalists and their relationship; and Eric Fischl?s Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture commemorating those who fell or jumped to their deaths from the twin towers (it was removed from Rockefeller Center after complaints that it was too disturbing, too soon).

Compelling as such works are, however, none was really game-changing. None possesses the vaulting ambition of, say, Francis Ford Coppola?s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now, or the sweep of DeLillo?s Underworld, which captured the entire cold war era. Instead, these 9/11 works feel like blips on the cultural landscape?they neither represent a new paradigm nor suggest that the attacks were a cultural watershed. Perhaps this is because 9/11 did not really change daily life for much of the country. Perhaps it?s because our ADD nation?after the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK in the ?60s, and decades of violence on 24-hour news?has become increasingly inured to shock.

Some critics have argued that not enough time has passed for artists to gain sufficient perspective on 9/11. Tolstoy, after all, wrote about Napoleon?s invasion of Russia more than 50 years later; in this respect, it may be decades before larger narratives surface as animating ideas in ambitious works of art. Then again, Picasso created Guernica in 1937, only weeks after the savage bombing of that town during the Spanish Civil War. In the meantime, a lot of post-9/11 culture seems like a

cut-and-paste version of pre-9/11 culture?or a more extreme version of it. Indeed, pop culture has slid so far into the slough of celebrity worship and escapist fluff that the antics of the Kardashian sisters now pass as entertainment. Sensationalism continues its march, and so does the blurring between news and gossip. James Patterson, Michael Crichton and John Grisham continued to dominate best-seller lists. Even things thought, after 9/11, to be verboten soon made a comeback: In Cloverfield (2008), the Statue of Liberty is decapitated as a monster trashes the city.

In fact, several prominent novels dealing with 9/11 drew heavily from earlier classics. Ian McEwan?s Saturday, which captures the precariousness of post-9/11 daily life, reads like a contemporary variation on Virginia Woolf?s Mrs Dalloway. Jonathan Safran Foer?s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close features a hero named Oskar, who resembles the hero of the same name in Gunter Grass?s The Tin Drum. And Mohsin Hamid?s chilling novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist?which recounts the effect 9/11 has on a successful Pakistani immigrant?borrowed the structure and central themes of Camus?s novel The Fall. Why this eagerness to pour new content into old vessels?

No doubt this is why many powerful works to emerge about 9/11 and its aftermath have been documentary or fact-based. In the past, with traumatic subjects like Vietnam and AIDS, this has been the trajectory over time: News accounts and witness testimony give way to memoirs, which in turn give way to more metaphorical works of the imagination.

In terms of narrative scope and harrowing drama, no novel has yet to match The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright?s nonfiction account of the events that led to 9/11. Terry McDermott?s book Perfect Soldiers drew a portrait of the real 9/11 hijackers that was far more compelling than the crude jihadi stereotype in John Updike?s Terrorist. Alex Gibney?s documentary Taxi to the Dark Side similarly provided a more indelible portrait of the dark side of the war on terror. The straight-up documentary ?9/11 possesses a raw power totally lacking in Oliver Stone?s World Trade Center.

Sept 11 and the emotions it generated?fear, anger, a desire for revenge?also fueled the success of several entertainment franchises. The hit counterterrorism show 24, its co-creator Joel Surnow told the New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, was ?ripped out of the zeitgeist of what people?s fears are?their paranoia that we?re going to be attacked.? The series frequently used torture as a way of gathering intelligence; it depicted the fight against terrorism much as members of the Bush administration did: as a struggle for American survival that required all means necessary.

For that matter, fantasy epics? pitting good versus evil in stark Manichaean terms?dominated the box office in the last decade: among the top-grossing films were Avatar, two installments of The Lord of the Rings, three installments of Harry Potter and The Dark Knight. Superheroes like Spider-Man and Iron Man ruled, and so did vampires. There was a lot of intellectualising about all this: arguments that the fantasy boom embodied Americans? need for escapism after 9/11; that superhero sagas offered audiences a way to process the tragedy; that vampires, like terrorists, pose a deadly threat but often hide in plain sight. Steven Spielberg said his 2005 remake of War of the Worlds reflected post-9/11 anxiety. Time?s Richard Corliss described the Joker in The Dark Knight as ?the terrorist as improv artist.? And bloggers compared Voldemort and his Death Eaters in Harry Potter to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

It?s too easy, however, to see every recent pop culture phenomenon as a metaphor for combating terrorism. Voldemort sprang from J K Rowling?s imagination well before 9/11. The Tolkien novels, like Batman, Spider-Man and many of their superhero brethren, predate 9/11 by decades, as do the first Star Wars movies.

Other artistic creations?unrelated to 9/11?took on new depth or new meanings. Christo and Jeanne-Claude?s monumental project The Gates, conceived in 1979 and only realized in 2005, threaded Central Park with 7,500 gates wrapped in saffron fabric, turning that great communal space into a work of art that was at once visionary and interactive, ephemeral and enduring. The largest public art project in the city?s history, it became, for many New Yorkers, a symbol of hope, of transcendence, of healing after 9/11.

?It?s not that everything is different after 9/11; it?s more that we look at the same stuff through a different prism,? says Kate D Levin, the city?s cultural affairs commissioner. In the case of The Gates, she adds, something that had ?nothing to do with 9/11, something that was completely about aesthetics? became ?that much more profound.?