“It Was Like a Movie,” Take 2: Age of Ultron and a 9/11 Aesthetic

In 2010, I wrote of World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006) that “the difficulty for Hollywood filmmakers in representing the World Trade Center catastrophe is that the notion of a consensus of memory of 9/11 seems to render the image beyond the conventional modes of representation.”¹ How does Stone, I asked, “make a movie of a day that already played out like a movie?”² What he achieves is to variously employ the generic tropes of the Hollywood disaster movie to enable a traumatic event to be represented with some notion of resolution. Stephen Keane asserts, “Whether human or environmental, alien or accidental, most of all disaster movies provide for solutions in the form of a representative group of characters making their way towards survival.”³ The pleasures for the audience of the disaster genre are, then, within the spectacle and special effects of the catastrophe and the plot line, which sets up a “who will survive” mystery. The form and rhythm of World Trade Center adopt characteristics of the 1970s disaster movie, providing a familiar and nostalgic hook for its audience so that, strangely, World Trade Center will seem like a feel-good movie no matter what played out in real life. In his discussion of 1970s disaster movies (e.g., Towering Inferno [John Guillemin, 1972], The Poseidon Adventure [Ronald Neame, 1972], Earthquake [Mark Robson, 1974]), Nick Roddick notes their generic traits: the disaster must be “diegetically central,” “factually possible,” “largely indiscriminate,” “unexpected (although not necessarily unpredictable,” “all encompassing,” and “people must believe it could—very well might[—]happen to them.”⁴ In the post-9/11 environment Roddick’s list becomes an ironic description and a chilling list of the events in New York City. For the filmmaker the scene is already set; 9/11 is already a disaster movie, waiting to be made.

In this essay I discuss Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015) and its repetition of destroyed city imagery as what James N. Gilmore calls an “aesthetic of wreckage.”⁵ He suggests that in post-9/11 superhero films the repeated image of urban destruction signifies that “something has changed: the city is no longer a site to be saved but rather to be sacrificed; 9/11 imagery is no longer prevented … it is permitted.”⁶ Such permission, I argue, is granted to genre films, in particular in the parallel universe of the recent superhero cycle where urban destruction has taken on what I call a 9/11 aesthetic. It is an aesthetic designed to affect its audiences through its special-effects sound and images. There is in these movies a repetitive set of sounds: helicopter blades; emergency services sirens; screaming and shouting, particularly the phrase “Oh my God”; and a repetitive set of images: aerial shots of a devastated modern city; vertically falling high-rise tower blocks; emergency responders, particularly firefighters; stunned, injured people; people running from dust clouds; falling debris and falling paper. These effects echo and often replicate the images of 9/11 in extraordinary detail in a way that is not seen in more realist cinema. It is in genre, particularly disaster and superhero films, that these repetitions can be identified.

Steve Neale sees something reassuring in genre films: “The existence of Hollywood genres means that the spectator, precisely, will know that everything will be ‘made right in the end’—that everything will cohere, that any threat or any danger in the narrative process itself will always be contained.”⁷ More recent superhero films have not conformed to this notion of reassurance, though, and the hero cannot always save the day. Batman (Christian Bale), for instance, could not save Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal) from dying in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2009), and any resolution found at the end of the Marvel superhero cycle of films is undermined by the final, extra scene in which the teaser for the next film leaves this one more open ended than we had thought. For instance, in the middle-credits scene of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thanos, a cyber...