Teaching through Feelings and Personal Beliefs: 9/11 as Case Study

When I first conceived of a course on post-9/11 cinema, I was responding to my own personal experience. The pressing nature of the event on my consciousness (as a former New Yorker and a critic of popular culture) meant that every film I saw related to 9/11. For example, while watching Spiderman (Sam Raimi, 2002), I was stunned by the destruction of the Roosevelt Island tram, which I took often as a teenager. I wondered how post-9/11 audiences would respond to images of destruction, and I began thinking about how this example could help students theorize the representation of violence and understand the complex relationship between text and audience.

Members of the press have criticized the TV sitcom Friends because it is set in New York but goes on "as if Sept. 11 never happened." ¹ But Friends did not go on as if nothing had happened. The show strategically placed patriotic and pro-New York imagery throughout episodes in the 2001-02 season, including FDNY T-shirts, a U.S. flag on Joey's wall, and doodles of the Statue of Liberty in Joey's apartment. Art on a coffeehouse wall was obviously patriotic and then later subtly so. First, an American flag and then a painting of "Uncle Sam" pointing his finger appeared. Later, in the 2002-03 season, a red, white, and blue abstract painting was seen in this prominent spot on the set. ²

While dialogue on Friends may never have referred to 9/11, the mise-en-scène certainly did, implying that "the friends" were "going on with their lives" (as Mayor Giuliani had instructed) by expressing patriotism but not changing their everyday routines. Thus, Friends participated in a visual patriotism that contributed to a larger pro-war political stance against terrorism. As I developed my course, I hoped students would understand through this example the ideological taken-for-grantedness of patriotic ideology and pro-war imagery in popular culture. Even the film Sweet Home Alabama (Andy Tennant, 2002) seemed to reference 9/11. The sexual banter and tension in screwball comedies can often be read against the grain as hostility and violence, but in the post-9/11 context Sweet Home Alabama seemed to invite this reading. ³ In the penultimate scene, for example, the estranged couple reunites on a beach during a thunderstorm while the man uses lightning rods to draw a lightning strike. He is an artist who markets glass sculptures produced when lightning hits the sand, but the lightning might just as easily strike the characters. For me, this scene's violent expression of the character's anger paralleled vitriolic anti-Muslim sentiments in U.S. culture, evident in hate crimes and in President Bush's good-versus-evil rhetoric. Mirroring Charles Ramírez Berg's argument that cinematic science fiction aliens signify Latino immigrants not as the only meaning of film aliens but as an important metaphor in a culture that struggles with anxieties about immigration, Latino immigration in particular, I read the violent anger in Sweet Home Alabama as an expression of a larger violent anger circulating in U.S. popular and political culture. ⁴

In my course, I wanted to connect explicit (Spiderman), implicit (Friends), and tangential (Sweet Home Alabama) popular culture references to 9/11 as a way to give students both a critical distance from those representations and a methodology with which to articulate their own perspectives on the events. Additionally, I planned to look at independent and activist video as a way to challenge and create a critical dialogue with more mainstream representations. However, for the most part, this is not what occurred when I taught "Post-9/11 Cinema: A Cultural History of the Present" in the spring of 2003 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Most students did not care about the Roosevelt Island tram or the complexity of audience response; rather...