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Introduction to Part Four The terrorist attacks of 9/11 tested the resilience of America in many areas, even in popular culture. The heavy loss of life at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon evoked a complex reaction of grief, anger, and bewilderment in the American people. The difficult moment generated all sorts of anxieties about the future of America. Still, it was surprising how quickly the media commentators turned to the question of the future of popular culture. Within a day or so, the experts were speculating about how 9/11 would change the course of movies and television. They were all sure that it would, and quickly a consensus emerged that American pop culture would shake off years of irony and cynicism and return to the kind of patriotism and championing of traditional values that characterized World War II movies. A few voices cautioned against jumping to conclusions so soon after the shocking events, and it was hard not to detect a hint of special pleading in the media prophets. Many seemed to be certain that the effect of 9/11 would be to bring about whatever changes in American pop culture they themselves had long desired. I found it strange that people were worrying about the future of movies and television at a time when many more important issues were at stake. I remember wondering, “On December 8, 1941, did anybody care how Pearl Harbor was going to affect their favorite movie stars?” Subsequent research has taught me that in fact concerns about popular culture, especially the movie industry, did surface almost immediately after the U.S. entry into World War II. I should have realized that in a moment of national crisis, the fate of movies and television would be on the minds of many Americans. In my work on the subject, I had noticed that cultural issues had begun to trump political issues in the United States or, rather, that cultural issues had become the new political issues. The fact that the future of movies and television came up so frequently in the anxious discussions about the consequences of 9/11 was proof that culture had become a central concern in twenty-first-century American public discourse. I did, at least, immediately realize the importance of the post-9/11 271 272 9/11, Globalization, and New Challenges to Freedom debates about pop culture. Accordingly, I began to collect articles on the subject as they appeared, especially from my favorite source, TV Guide. My archival efforts saved many prophecies that might have otherwise gone down the memory hole of history, particularly since the people who made them have little motivation to recall them today. I quote extensively from this mini-archive in chapter 9. The story of the relation between 9/11 and popular culture has much to teach us, and I can touch on only a few of the principal issues in this part. First and foremost, the many predictions made in September 2001 about the fate of films and television provide an object lesson in the unpredictability of popular culture. The media pundits predict one thing; the creative people in the media often go off in an entirely different direction. To give just one example: In the fall of 2001 many experts were saying that 9/11 would spell the doom of reality TV programming. But a decade later, reality TV is more prevalent than ever. In retrospect, the premature obituaries for reality TV look like a case of wishful thinking. The pundits who confidently predicted its demise disliked reality TV and used the occasion of 9/11 to deal it what they hoped would be a deathblow. This is a good example of how members of the cultural elite who take it upon themselves to pronounce sweeping judgments on popular culture often turn out to be out of touch with the American people. These pundits talk about popular culture as if it were something monolithic and easy to comprehend in simple formulas. They want to say, “X has happened in the real world; Y will be the result in popular culture.” But the responses to 9/11 in American film and television illustrate the fact that popular culture can be a very complex phenomenon that often confounds the simplifications of the experts. Pop culture does not march in lockstep with the world around it. That is another way of saying that pop culture remains a realm of human freedom. Because movies...

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