Hollywood's Metaphors
By DAVID STERRITT and MIKITA BROTTMAN
This month's cataclysm symbolically represents
not just an attack on America and the American way of life, but an
assault on the forward-looking, short-term, money-fueled mode of
thought that is the driving force behind the Western entertainment
industry.
Perhaps that fact, coupled with the ungraspable enormity of the
tragedy, will now compel us to look beyond Hollywood for our narratives
and metaphors. Attempts to evoke the magnitude of the horror demand a
return to the more primitive, magical modes of thinking more
characteristic of early art, literature, and religion. Who needs
Schwarzenegger when we have the terrors of Dante and Hieronymous Bosch,
or the infernal nightmare revealed to St. John in his original vision
of the Apocalypse?
If this appalling tragedy does lead to significant shifts in
the nature of popular entertainment, the open question is how long
those changes will last. Will it be a few months, while the culture
industry regroups its forces and rejiggers
its ideas for new ways of exploiting a public hungrier than ever for
comforting fantasies? Or will a reconfigured set of psychological needs
and social demands produce new, relatively enlightened approaches to
mass-marketed diversion and to the effects such entertainment
inevitably has on popular mindsets?
The first, more cynical answer is more likely, although the appalling
novelty of these terrorist attacks may produce upheavals more lasting
than we can currently predict.
David Sterritt is a film critic for The Christian Science
Monitor and a professor of theater and film at the C.W. Post campus
of Long Island University.
Mikita Brottman is a professor of liberal arts at the Maryland
Institute College of Art.