ABC’s The Path to 9/11, Terror-Management Theory, and the American Monomyth

On September 10–11, 2006, ABC/Disney aired a two-part movie titled The Path to 9/11 to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The film won an Emmy award in 2007 for editing and was nominated for six others. While drawing its emotional underpinning from the attacks themselves, most of the film is devoted to what are presented as key events leading up to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and in particular to the activities of an antiterrorism task force that included FBI agent and terrorism expert John O’Neill (whom the docudrama casts as its central heroic character, although it has multiple heroes). Earlier events explored in considerable detail include the bombing of the WTC in 1993, the pursuit and arrest of alleged terrorists in various parts of the world, the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the struggle of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban, the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and unsuccessful attempts to kill Osama Bin Laden prior to the 9/11 attacks. The production devotes considerable attention to conflicts among U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic officials in the time period between the first WTC bombing and the collapse of the towers in September, 2001.

A Convergence of Theories

A number of complementary theories help to explain the profound appeal of The Path to 9/11. The first is what James W. Carey calls the “ritual” view of communication, which “is directed…toward the maintenance of society in time, not [toward] the act of imparting information but [toward] the representation of shared beliefs”; communication is “the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action” (18–19).

The second is John Fiske and John Hartley’s treatment of television as “bardic.” In the bardic view, television does not merely recount events (be they factual or fictional) but (in the tradition of bards) offers meaning that is derived at least in part from “a process which offers myths with which we are already familiar and seeks to convince us that these myths are appropriate to their context” (112). Because it “constantly strives to claw back into a central focus the subjects of its messages,” the bardic mediator naturally emphasizes some features—myths—of its subject at the expense of others, but the bardic emphasis usually occurs at a latent or connotative level, so the mythic features of its subject need not be “consciously apprehended by the viewer to have been successfully communicated” (87).

For example, Philip Green discusses the frequent inclusion in network news broadcasts of anecdotes, or human-interest stories, which tacitly assert “how decent ordinary Americans are” (29). He claims that “these anecdotes, in the world of television, are the glue that holds together the uneasy American Amalgam of muscular nationalism, rugged individualism, and communal conformity” (29). Of course, what is latent in some texts might explicitly be stated in others. Green writes of the lead up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003: “By February’s worldwide antiwar demonstrations, CNN’s website was reporting that ‘antiwar rallies delight Iraq,’ and every mention of the Mideast on CBS was accompanied by the logo, ‘Showdown with Saddam,’ surrounding an American flag” (37).

Studies of terror management theory yield a third perspective, which deals directly with the effects of mortality-salient events such as the 9/11 attacks. Central to its conceptual framework is the notion that reminders of people’s own mortality elicit specific, predictable behaviors. According to Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg, terror-management theory “posits that the juxtaposition of a biological predisposition toward self-preservation…with the uniquely human awareness of the inevitability of death gives rise to potentially overwhelming terror,” which is managed by “construction and maintenance of cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about the nature of reality that infuse individuals with a sense that they are persons of value in a world of meaning” (27).

Worldviews are fragile...