On this day in 2001, four passenger planes were hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists. Two crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Another was against the Pentagon, as the last plane crashed into the field after a passenger revolt. 2,977 civilians were killed in the attacks, in addition to 19 terrorists involved.
The attacks, planned by Osama bin Laden, sparked a war on terror that lasted two decades and included the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is estimated that up to 4.6 million people have died because of the war against terrorism.
Culturally, 9/11 also had a huge impact on the arts. After a relatively peaceful decade around the world, 9/11 brought a state of anxiety to the United States. Terrorism has become a common fear, while many Muslims in Western countries have experienced decades of growing Islamophobia.
Art is immediately affected after the attacks. Many items were postponed that included visual references to the destroyed towers or showed scenes with terrorist actions on airplanes or in New York.
A famous example is the Disney animated film Lilo & Stitch. Originally, the movie had a scene where many of the characters hijacked a Boeing 747 plane and flew it into downtown Honolulu. The scene was edited to replace the plane with an alien spaceship.
The 53rd Primetime Emmy Awards were postponed from September 16 to October 6, but were postponed again on November 4 when the United States began bombing Afghanistan on a second date.
In the trailers and posters of the next movie said Spiderman The images of the Twin Towers were taken, while the film by Martin Scorsese Gangs in New York It was delayed for a whole year to finally be released in December 2002.
In music, the US release of indie-rock legends The Strokes’ debut album “Is This It” has been delayed, with the song “New York City Cops” replaced by the B-side “When It Started.” “, fearing that the American public will not appreciate the lyrics critical of the city’s police officers.
There are many other examples of similar changes. But the impact of 9/11 continued throughout the 2000s and beyond. Novelists discuss how the attacks changed the national mood, from Don DeLillo’s postmodern champion novel “Falling Man” (2007) to Jonathan Safran Froer’s precocious debut “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2005).
In the cinema, the disaster movie World Trade Center (2006) by Oliver Stone, starring Nicolas Cage, is as predictably ruthless and manipulative as one could imagine. A better attempt to find the people of the event from the hand of United 93by Paul Greengrass, focuses on the uprising of the passengers on the fourth plane and is made in collaboration with the families of the passengers.
The anxiety and violent patriotism that follows attacks on the United States is well illustrated – intentionally or unintentionally – in Clint Eastwood’s film _American Sniper (2014). Eastwood’s biopic on the life of Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in American military history, includes many new tropes of faceless Muslims being killed on screen for the audience’s enjoyment. It’s a trope mocked in some Oscar-winning segments The Hurt Lockerby Katherine Bigelow.
Perhaps the best film to capture the atmospheric change caused by 9/11 is not American. Four Lions (2010), by British comedian Chris Morris, depicts a group of sinister terrorists planning an attack on the London Marathon. The film, in which Riz Ahmed plays the lead role, perfectly captures the madness of extremism and the Islamophobic atmosphere in the United Kingdom.
