TV in a time of terror: Watching the tube with September 11 in mind
Alleva, Richard
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva TV IN A TINE OF TERROR The channels are changing It was a hinge event. A door has been closed, a lock snapped shut. Everything taking place in this...
...Or whether "a dot-com executive" can trade "the stress of big-city life for the comforts of her Hallmark-card hometown" in "The Ellen Show...
...And on every network and channel, as TV critic James Endrst reminds us, "episodes have been edited, movies have been pulled, premiers have been delayed—all in the name of sensitivity, a sense of decency, and an acknowledgement of the all-consuming psychological impact the tragedy has had upon the country...
...One thinks of the Preston Sturgis film, Sullivan's Travels, in which a socially conscious drone of a film director learns that the prisoners on a chain gang get more relief from a good cartoon than they ever could from the collected works of Upton Sinclair...
...Allah is American...
...God bless America...
...And when a page has turned, a new era begun, people may rightly expect certain conditions and facets of everyday life to change, too...
...Watching this televised event, which employed the music and rhetoric of the civil rights movement, I couldn't help thinking that the terrorists are right to fear us, but they don't know how to do anything but aggravate precisely what they fear: the all-embracing, custom-exploding, ethnicity-diluting modernity of America...
...Jehovah is American...
...Of course, so will many movies and novels, but no sensible person expects fiction, films, poems, and paintings to reflect indefatigably the news of the day...
...Your kneeling to the east will become an American custom...
...First, the old lightweight movies were genuinely lightweight...
...There on our tiny screens was an America struggling to tell America what America is...
...Well, those parents and wives went to the movies anyway, and apparently were grateful for hours of distraction in the dark...
...Friends" and "Frazier" sometimes come across as comic illustrations of New York magazine articles about the foibles of urban life, while "Law and Order" quite deliberately rings variations on crime stories that appeared in newspapers mere months ago...
...They may even expect showbiz to change, for escapist entertainment does not escape history...
...The imam, introduced by Oprah and embraced by Mayor Giuliani, said it all when he intoned, "There is but one God...
...For instance, at the "Spirit of America" memorial rally, broadcast on CNN on September 23, you saw the one thing above all other American things that earns the wrath of the sort of medieval monomaniacs who planned the attack: the infuriating inclusiveness of America, the eternal American yes-weinclude-you-too, the Whitmanesque embrace given by a country that says, "Come and become us and yet remain yourself...
...David Letterman dropped his irony act to express his horror, and his guest, Dan Rather, shed tears...
...I think of the movies released right after Pearl Harbor...
...in a well-appointed kitchen, then rising for an embrace that Commonweal 14 November 9,2001 puts all their problems to rest...
...But, in the next four months or so, while the news shows may make TV more translucent than ever with their investigations of Osama bin Laden and their documentaries about Islam and the destruction now being rained down on Afghanistan, the fictional programs may come to seem irrelevant to the point of offensiveness...
...But the parallel between 1942 and 2001 breaks down in at least two respects...
...When broadcasting news, it is a window on the world, and even its fiction is filled with references to recent events and current opinion...
...But we do expect this of TV because TV is translucent...
...Everything taking place in this country before September 11 now seems part of a prewar golden age...
...They were so far removed from reality that they didn't offend reality...
...While American wives and parents of early 1942 then had to worry that their husbands and sons would meet terrible fates abroad, they were being invited by Hollywood to also worry about Joan Crawford and Bette Davis finding love in A Woman's Face and Now, Voyager...
...We now have comedy and drama bursting with topicality (aids, homosexuality, rights of privacy, child molestation) and latter-day realism (cuss words, close-tographic sex, hand-held camera work, etc...
...At the "Spirit of America" rally, with its prayers led by Catholic and Buddhist priests and Protestant ministers and Muslim imams and Hindu holy men and Jewish rabbis, we saw in spectacular fashion a paradox, perhaps the chief paradox of America: a country, resolutely secular in its political underpinnings and increasingly secular in its cultural style, subsumes and depends on a population that still, in large part, looks to organized religions (sometimes very stern, exclusionary religions) for spiritual strength...
...But TV fare of the last fifteen years seems to be the sort of stuff Sturgis's hero dreamed of making before his epiphany...
...There's no real melting pot here to boil you...
...Cuttingedge" content plus simple-minded resolutions equal smugness...
...After such spectacle, such nationally broadcast soul-searching and proclamation of identity, how are we to care about fifteen-year-old Molly of "Maybe If s Me" achieving normalcy when her "parents...are dizzy, grandma...hides food around the house, and her twin sisters...are terrors...
...The West Wing" rushed into production a season opener that showed its fictional president coping with terrorism...
...Commonweal 16 November 9,2001...
...The prancing little Hindu elephant god, Ganesha, will one day have a TV program such as Barney the Dinosaur's...
...Mayor Giuliani showed up on "Saturday Night Live" to let producer Lome Michaels and his cast know that there is always time for comedy...
...The very date has already become a sort of catch phrase...
...The new television season has had to revise itself virtually on the spot...
...And show-business smugness is the last thing an audience living on its nerve-ends wants or needs...
...A delusion, of course...
...Third Watch" dispensed with fiction for its season opener to present a documentary tribute to the real firefighters and rescue workers who gave their lives when the towers collapsed...
...Your yarmulke or your yashmak needn't be discarded...
...Second: during the last few weeks we have seen television as it has never been before...
...If television shows were to begin to give us the comedy and tragedy of that paradox, a vitality and a variety might appear on our television screens worthy of an audience that has begun to treat dayto-day living as something more precious and more evanescent than it seemed before September 11...
...they will become American things...
...But, someday, after all the re-edited and delayed programs have been aired, could we have curiosity come to the fore as well as sensitivity and decency...
...Most of the fictional TV shows, even some of the news programs, throughout the next few months will be radically out of sync with what the American public (and much of the rest of the world) will be living through...
...Trouble is, too much of the topicality seems to be congratulating itself for just being there on the small screen, and too many "cutting-edge" episodes conclude with two people having heartto-hearts at 2 a.m...
...The Buddhist sounding of Om during meditation is already American (thanks in part to a Jewish-Buddhist-homosexual New Jersey poet named Allen Ginsberg...
...Real tears on "The Letterman Show...
...It is right that this should happen and it would have been shocking if it had not...
Vol. 128 • November 2001 • No. 19
