9/11, Film, and Bad Film Criticism: Part I
Film Criticism can be a tricky thing. It can take the form of a vague or artificial argument about the symbolic value of x character or y dialogue, or othertimes it can become a series of reports regarding numbers of audience or film techniques involving aspect ratios with discussions regarding aesthetic techniques like shot compositions, mise-en-scene, or mounted/versus handheld. Hopefully this isn’t anything new to those who are reading this, in fact in rhetoric or composition, consideration of audience is an integral aspect in the crafting of a piece of writing. So, I found myself in an interesting spot the other day when I came across this tidbit: We Are Special, We Are Safe: America’s Self-Image On Camera since 9/11.
If you haven’t already had the chance, or didn’t know about it; first, I would like to highly recommend the reporting by Chris Ip about Vice media, titled The Cult of Vice, that was published on Columbia Journalism Review’s website. One distinct point I came away from the reading of Ip’s writing was the discussion of the aesthetic style that Vice has crafted in its news documentaries and how Vice’s self-image and relationship to Millennials has allowed it to become a recently wealthy enterprise. What struck me as odd about this was that I am part of the demographic that this trend is supposed to represent, but Vice’s news enterprise has not thus far managed to draw me in. But maybe I’m not the type of Millennial that they attract; I tend to be drawn to The Atlantic, New Yorker, and New York Times for my source of news. It was after reading Chris Ip’s piece that I decided to take a peek, and that was when I came across Rod Bastanmehr’s piece about 9/11 and America’s psyche as represented in films post-9/11. What follows from here is the first part of a series that will be appearing on The Means of Mental Production: 9/11, Film, and Bad Film Criticism.
Part I: Collateral Damage and Spider-Man
Bastanmehr begins his discussion with Spiderman (2002) starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst and Collateral Damage (2002) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Prior to discussing these two films, at the end of the introductory section, Bastanmehr writes:
It would be a fair inference that from this premise his measurement of intellectual validity in evidence is that the evidence would demonstrate a sort of signaled attempt to match audiences with a work or film that enacts a form of catharsis or therapy for the watcher. He identifies Collateral Damage (2002) and an unreleased Jackie Chan film as the first Hollywood directed attempts to match new tastes in its audience, pointing to the plot points that would make them unpalatable post-9/11; Schwarzenegger’s film because of a terrorist bombing in Los Angeles and Chan’s film being about a window washer foiling an attack at the World Trade Center.
Though he is correct about Hollywood’s decision-making process regarding these films, what is missing is the fact that the movie-making process is a time consuming endeavor; often taking months to craft, shoot, and edit a film, which is then followed by a marketing campaign for the film’s release. Script writing, production, and other aspects of Collateral Damage’s production would have taken place before 9/11, which makes the delays to the film’s release, along with the subsequent edits, part of a major movie studio’s attempt to tailor its film for the current audience. On this point Bastanmehr is correct, Hollywood did indeed attempt to cater to its post-9/11 audience. Though Bastanmehr uses Collateral Damage as an example of Hollywood beginning to stall post-9/11, a lost point of inquiry would be to discuss the fact that the film wasn’t successful and why, considering that the film deals with terrorism and represents the catharsis of a lone hero engaged in a vengeance plot. It might be considered an intuitive leap to suggest that Collateral Damage was primed to offer a catharsis to the audience in the form of symbolic vengeance, something metaphorically akin to the quick and successful campaign in Afghanistan post-9/11. Maybe the film didn’t succeed because its terrorists represented a war soon to be overtaken by a brand new one: the War on Drugs being replaced with the War on Terror.
However, to prove my claim about audience non-engagement with Narco-Terrorists would require evidence, maybe a collection of aggregated data from viewers of the film that provided testimony pointing towards that claim. Or one could draw from critics who wrote about the film to glean attitudes in the historical moment. A quick cursory glance at critics on the film, courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes, reveals the film to be generally un-liked due to a confluence of problems: the lack of narrative or overall film quality measured against the pantheon of Schwarzenegger’s action films, questions of the genre’s relevance and the mediocrity of the film, or the film’s relationship to the recent events of 9/11 and what it means to be a viewer of this type of film in light of new changes. A few examples —
The problem isn’t that the movie hits so close to home so much as that it hits close to home while engaging in such silliness as that snake-down-the-throat business and the inevitable shot of Schwarzenegger outrunning a fireball.
- Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune
It’s the stuff of every mediocre action movie ever made and enough to make you wonder if it isn’t finally time for the genre to die a quiet, dignified death.
- Connie Ogle in the Miami Herald
Despite its action-in-a-can mentality, the movie’s generic roots gain a new post-terror specificity that lend it an almost bombastic relevance it was never meant to have.
- Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe
The first two reviews both generally did not appreciate the film, while the last was favorable and was coded as a fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes as a review. While this type of analysis isn’t the normative practice of most journalistic enterprises, something simple like a critic quote could have generated more rhetorical effect for the link between evidence and the overall trend that Bastanmehr attempts to make in his writing. Another simple method deployed in basic rhetoric would be to use statistics: for example, the overall budget for Collateral Damage was 85 million dollars while its box office take was 78.3 million dollars. In normal industry parlance, a film is a success if it generates double the budget, due to the revenue split between theaters and studios in regards to ticket sales (most deals being an even split). The argument Bastanmehr makes would have more credibility with just that one statistic.
To contrast the woeful underperformance to downright catastrophe that was Collateral Damage, Bastanmehr highlights the flip side of audience tastes he believes is symbolic of the time period: superhero movies. As he writes —
Yet it was superhero movies that would come to define the decade that followed, thanks to a renewed interest in a world delineated into heroes and villains.
Moving beyond simple name dropping though, he cites a specific scene from the film as evidence of his example: towards the end where New Yorkers defend Spider-Man by pelting the villain with rocks and other assorted items as a distraction and deterrence. But there are a couple problems with his analysis. First: it isn’t specific enough. Earlier, he said that Hollywood was attempting to negotiate how to be a therapy outlet for the American audience, but Spider-Man was conceived, written, and shot all prior to 9/11. Because of the attacks, Sony had to do some reshoots and other small editing, but the majority of the film remained intact. What happens with Spider-Man and Collateral Damage is rather the opposite effect of his first claim about Hollywood negotiating how to be the therapist: both of these films were made prior to the events and their receptions are more indicative of audience tastes rather than a conscious effort by Hollywood to cater to a post-9/11 audience, or at least the constraints that were in place due to the timelines that film-making operates under. Now, it may be possible that the scene that Bastanmehr describes was re-shot after the attacks, but if that is true, it would need attribution and evidence of the truth of that claim. He doesn’t provide that attribution or evidence because he never made that claim of the re-shoot, but if he is offering the scene as evidence, it could go one of multiple ways of interpretation: two main viewpoints could be 1) the scene resonated with audiences but the intended resonance was not for a post-9/11 audience because the scene was conceived prior to 9/11 or 2) the scene was re-shot with 9/11 in mind so as to provide a cathartic moment to audiences in light of the attacks. Both of these points would add to the discussion, but he doesn’t make them, but rather leaves it vague.
As was discussed earlier, another method to make the argument or some of the claims that Bastanmehr makes, would be to use statistics. One simple comparison: Collateral Damage vs Spiderman. Collateral Damage was made on a budget of 85 million and grossed 78.3 million, making it a loser. Spider-Man’s budget — 140 million: Spider-Man’s Box Office gross — 821.7 million. Write those numbers out, and you have a simple case that American Audiences were more interested in consuming the delineated heroes that Bastanmehr writes about in the article. But numbers also cut two ways.
If you look at the box office grosses of all movies in 2002, you get a different picture than the one Bastamehr describes. The top 15 grossing films of 2002 were (in descending order and domestic box office only [in millions]): Spider-Man (403.7), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (339.8), Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (302.2), Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets (261.98), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (241.4), Signs (227.96), Austin Powers in Goldmember (213.3), Men in Black II (190.4), Ice Age (176), Chicago (170), Catch Me If You Can (164), Die Another Day (160), Scooby-Doo (153), Lilo & Stitch (143), XXX (142). Now, first: Lilo & Stitch deserved more money than the paltry 14th spot on this list only because Stitch is cute and fluffy, but outside of that apropos comment, not a lot of superhero action going on here. But if we look at it closer, his point about a world delineated by heroes and villains holds up — big winners in the year 2002 show Tolkien’s novel had a good turn, along with Rowling’s boy-wizard turned savior. But what about films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Should we just throw out some nonsense claim that the reason it did so well was because American audiences were desperate for a film about family and provided some escapist entertainment. What about Star Wars? A film about the impending war that would completely shatter and destroy an entire galactic republic and from it would rise the authoritarian empire featured in the earlier films apparently resonated with audiences in the months following 9/11, but for me to say audiences craved a symbolic transformation from democracy to authoritarianism would be inflammatory to some and prescient to others, depending on your political or philosophical leaning. However, my bet is that Star Wars is Star Wars, so people were going to see it no matter what and will see it again this upcoming Christmas, so maybe we could say the same thing about Spider-Man, which comes from one of the highest visible properties of Marvel Comics.
So, where does this leave us? First off, the relationship between 9/11 and Hollywood is much more complicated then just naming films and then describing why you think they fit in, but secondly, Rod Bastanmehr is onto something, but not something that could be fit into a single column on July 5th, or at least not with any intention of doing good film or film industry criticism. What we can take away from these two films, Spider-Man and Collateral Damage, is to think about how audience taste suddenly changed post-9/11, but not how Hollywood was able to turn on a dime and change two distinct year+ long productions to fit new audience tastes with one succeeding and the other failing, it is more likely that Spider-Man might have just been the better film without 9/11 changing everything. What is needed though is something more thorough and rigorous in criticism then simple one-offs that appear in a Vice column 24 hours after the American independence day. To be continued…
Pre-cognition of Part II: Superheroes and the bank heist of the century.
-P.S. Moonshy
