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  • Critiques of Popular Cultural Representations of 9/11
  • Marita Gronnvoll (bio)
Terrorism Tv: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America. By Stacy Takacs. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2012.
Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre. Edited by Véronique Bragard, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. 2011.

It should come as no surprise to critics and consumers of popular culture that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were, in many ways, a media event. While a few thousand trapped in planes and smoking buildings experienced the attacks firsthand, and millions of New Yorkers witnessed the events from their city streets, billions more know of the events only through screens of various sizes, and through the page. Since that time, public figures and public intellectuals have engaged in an interpretive tug-o-war to define, or not define, this starkly emotional event, which has come to be encapsulated in the ideographic moniker “9/11.” Cultural critics as diverse as Bill Maher and Susan Sontag paid the price early on for daring to posit “unacceptable” viewpoints, while seemingly the [End Page 155] vast majority of mediated information conformed to political and public sentiments that decontextualized the attacks, classifying them as unprovoked “evil.” What has been written in the past decade, either representing the events of 9/11 or critiquing those representations, could fill several libraries. For this essay, I will examine two books, recently published, that give scholarly treatment to representations of 9/11.

The books reviewed for this essay have in common that they take popular culture seriously as a barometer for public attitudes, and do not get caught up in critical nihilism where they see popular culture as only repressive or progressive. Where they differ is that one focuses its rich, theoretical mining on television as a potential vehicle for shoring up hegemonic ideologies, while it simultaneously opens avenues for critique of those ideologies. The other aims for breadth as opposed to depth (not that its approach should be considered shallow) as it scrutinizes other forms of popular culture: namely, comics, literature, film, and performance.

In the introduction to Stacy Takacs’ impressively researched book, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America, the author states her position in contrast to those who would view media as a part of a vast conspiracy to control the masses:

While there is clearly a political-economic convergence of interest between Hollywood and Washington, however, the recourse to conspiracy to explain this convergence oversimplifies very complex processes of social control and implies the public plays no role in the formation, maintenance or alteration of power relations. The biggest flaw in this conspiracy theory is its assumption that military-media coproductions always achieve the desired ideological effect—support for the United States and its military.

(17)

Throughout her book, Takacs demonstrates the ways in which popular television post-9/11 swung from jingoistic programming that primed the public to accept draconian policies from the Bush administration to a proliferation of programming that critiqued the administration and its hawkish war record. This shift suggests that public attitudes, and the relentless profit motive for commercial television, played at least as important a role in programming themes as did administration spin.

As Takacs resists easy classifications of “news” programming vs. “entertainment” programming, the chapters often include analysis of both, side by side. As she notes in the introduction, “Rather than reimpose some false distinction between information and entertainment, nonfictional and fictional programming, my approach is to treat all program types as simultaneously entertaining and informative” (20). The result is a fascinating and persuasive analysis of militainment, [End Page 156] and the subsequent resistance to militainment, as the years placed psychic distance between public attitudes and the event we refer to as “9/11.”

In chapter one, “9/11 and the Trauma Frame,” Takacs scrutinizes news reporting on the event and discusses the ways in which news media participated in creating what Giorgio Agamben has referred to as a permanent “state of exception.”1 She argues,

The news media’s construction of 9/11 as an “exceptional” experience of unprecedented “dimensions” ripped the events from their historical context and permitted...

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