[Even—perhaps
especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our
AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy
September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to
a special memorial post this weekend.]
On the strengths
and limitations of three post-9/11 cultural works.
1)
Foer’s Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer’s second
novel, Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), is narrated by Oskar Schell, a 9
year-old boy whose father was skilled in the World Trade Center attacks. In
creating this complex, compelling, wonderful young narrator and his voice and perspective,
Foer brings to life a profoundly human and universal side to the attacks and
their aftermath—questions both of loss and grieving and of the persistence of
love and inspiration. But it feels to this reader that Foer wasn’t able to
imagine a successful story for that narrator to narrate, and the resulting novel
comes to feel both repetitive and, at times, manipulative, using rather than
illuminating this tragic moment.
2)
Binder’s Film: Filmmaker Mike Binder wrote and
directed Reign Over Me (2007),
a film that stars Adam Sandler as a man who lost both his wife and daughters in
the WTC attacks and Don Cheadle as the former college roommate with whom
Sandler forms an unlikely but mutually beneficial friendship. Although many reviewers found
the film’s use of 9/11 in service of what becomes a relatively
light-hearted dramedy troubling, I’d call that a strength—not every story from
or about history is an epic, after all. But ultimately, Reign rules or falls on the back of Sandler’s performance, and I
just don’t think the comedian is up to the challenge; his character comes to
feel (as his so often do) more like a collection of mannerisms than a fully realized
human, and if an epic isn’t necessarily called for, humanity certainly is.
3)
Bruce’s Album: C’mon, you didn’t think I could
write a post on post-9/11 art and not include Springsteen’s The Rising (2002), did ya? Bruce
says that he decided to create the album after a man
on the street yelled out to him, in early 2002, “We need you now!”; whether
the story is true or not (Bruce is nothing if not a literary storyteller), it
most definitely captures the album’s ambitious and to my mind achieved goal of representing
the wide and deep swath of emotional, psychological, spiritual, individual, and
communal responses to the attacks. Nearly every song on the album goes in a
different direction, yet at the same time there’s a clear and compelling unity
across them all. It’s certainly the case that some of the songs are a bit on
the nose (I’m looking at you, “Waiting on a Sunny Day”),
but many are among the Boss’s best—and taken as a whole, I don’t know that
there’s a better 21st century rock album, nor a better artistic
response to 9/11.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?
Speaking of Bruce and 9/11, I wrote an article "Meeting at Bruce’s Place: Springsteen’s Italian American Heritage and Global Notions of Family," which focused on his appearance as the opening act for the 9/11 benefit. It appears in a sweet little anthology: Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture: A Decade and Beyond of Insights and Challenges edited by Denis Barone and Peter Covino.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that, Nancy! Definitely an extended moment that shifted Bruce's role and identity, within American culture and within his own career.
ReplyDeleteBen