How television and literature wrestled with 9/11

0:00Major world events often find their way into our culture in the forms of books and movies. So as we continue our coverage this week of the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we wanted to look at how that day has been reflected across literature and television. To do that, we're joined by the host of our Book of the Day podcast, Andrew Limbong, and NPR's Criticate Large Eric DeGens. Welcome to both of you. Hey Sasha. Hey, thanks. TV feels to me like the right place to start here because most of us who remember that day experienced the attacks on our TV screens. And last weekend on the show, we aired a round table about how 9-11 has been portrayed in film and how with a couple of exceptions, Hollywood has largely avoided depicting the attacks. Eric, how do you think TV has done in terms of the events of that day or beyond? How blunt has it been? Yeah, I think TV struggled to deal with the attacks in a direct way. There were a few TV shows that tried. 24 was a show that's about an intrepid agent who

1:03tries to track down various conspiracies. We're both professionals. You know that I can force this information out of you, but I'm running out of time. It was already set to debut and then 9-11 happened and they actually delayed the debut of that show. But eventually there were some controversies over how they showed government agents torturing people to get information. People in this country are dying and I need some information. Are you going to give it to me? And we'll have to start hurting you. And in fact, I talked to experts in interrogation who went to the producers of that show and also homeland another show that was inspired by the 9-11 attacks asking them to tone down their depictions villainy in the Middle East and also tone down the effectiveness of torture because it's not effective. And they had found that officers in the field were torturing people based on stuff they saw on TV thinking that these were techniques that actually worked. It's having an existing city-ass effect actually. Exactly. It's playing out real life. And there was also a show on FX called Rescue Me that was centered on firefighters in New York

2:03who were coping with PTSD in the aftermath of 9-11. They had colleagues that they had worked with who'd been killed. There are people out there whose lives are never going to be the same. Fathers and mothers and kids. Everyone who waited and prayed on that day for someone to just come home for work. And we even had an animated show called Number One Happy Family USA which debuted many years later on Prime Video but it was a cartoon about a young Egyptian American boy growing up in New Jersey right after 9-11. It was based on the life of the co-creator, Rami Yusef growing up in New Jersey in the aftermath of 9-11 and dealing with Islamophobia. In terms of fiction, you might remember that at one point the big name novelist Ian McEwen talked about how 9-11 almost made writing novels seemed trivial. The what had happened on that day seemed so unimaginable at the time

3:05that what could novelist possibly think up that could exceed it. But there were some works of fiction that came out of that day. Andrew, would you run through some of those? Yeah, shout out to Ian McEwen. I think he published that piece immediately in the aftermath of 9-11. Right? And so I'm not even sure if he'd agree with it now because he'd go on in a couple years to write Saturday which is very much a post 9-11 response book about the war in Iraq. And so that was him digesting it. And you know kind of like what Eric was saying about scripted TV. It just took some time to really figure out how to do it which what's the angle, what's the right way to approach it. And so in literary fiction at least authors took a few years but when they came they came. I'm just going to rattle off a few titles. You got Don DeLilis, Falling Man, Claremont's The Embrace Children, Jonathan Safranfowers, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But if you wanted to just think broadly about 9-11 and the US reaction afterwards, there's a ton of literature that we can put under the umbrella of like post 9-11 lit. Colleo Torsanius, The Kite Runner, which is the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

4:08It doesn't mention the attacks but it was published in 2003. It was a publishing book. It was a publishing book. But then even even brought it out some more. I think you can put the rush of post apocalyptic literature in this umbrella as a way of something that is speaking allegorically to the mood that we were feeling post 9-11. In the YA world there's the Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series. For the grown-ups there was a Kormach McCarthy's The Road, which I think is a very dark and dusty post 9-11 novel. Eric, in terms of TV, you were talking about how some of the shows had to tone down what they depicted. And some of them later, including 24 in Homeland, some people said they were as Lama Fobic, they were too US-centric. As you said, they displayed torture as effective. Do you feel like there have been shows that became correctives to those in a sense later? Well, I do think that just overall there was much more sensitivity in film and TV and how they were depicting certain kinds of villains.

5:08And whether or not they were going to attach villainy to specific types of people, actually the most prominent example I can think of is in film when you think about Top Gun Maverick. That was a film where the bad guys were in some unnamed distant country that looks like it might have been Middle Eastern, but you don't really know. They never really knew. I don't think. So there was a little more sensitivity about what might happen, the unintended consequences. We saw Late Night Hosts come on and talk about the days events in a really emotional way. David Letterman and John Stewart, they were breaks in production for their shows, but they came back relatively quickly and they both had these really emotional monologues that are now like a tradition in the Late Night space. There's no other way really to start the show than to ask you at home the question that we ask the audience here tonight and that we've asked everybody that we know here in New York since September 11th and that is, are you okay? And we pray that you are and that your family is.

6:10And you know, I saw Alton Brown, for example, from the Food Network, talk about how the food networks popularity came from people wanting comfort food and television after 9-11. Well, what a trickle down effect of 9-11. Andrew, I've covered Guantanamo for years and I have a bookshelf with at least a half dozen books written by former Guantanamo prisoners. They're usually memoirs or autobiographies. It's almost become a zone mini genre. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it's sort of a naturally fitting way to document these painful incidents. I'm interested in your thoughts on the memoirs about this. Yeah, it's not too obvious about it. It's like memoirs have the added oomph of being true, right? Or it's important to be true. And it serves as a kind of counterpoint to what Eric was talking about right now. On the day of 9-11, you had all this role in coverage and you got to see like the towers fall over and over and over again. In comparison, Guantanamo Bay and a bunch of the other US response to the to 9-11 that happened after happens in this kind of like black box, right? It's sort of impenetrable. You can't really

7:12figure out what's going on. You weren't seeing footage daily of what was going on. And so I think these memoirs came out at a time post the 9-11 like America embracing each other, right? And we're in, you know, into deaths of the war on terror and everybody is, you know, losing interested in like having their eyes open to what the country and the government is doing in their name. And so I think that's where nonfiction release shines, where it reports to show like the truth of what's actually happening that you aren't seeing in the short term. That is Andrew Limbong, the host of our Book of the Day podcast, and also Eric Degins and Pierre's Criticant Large. Thanks to both of you. Thank you. Thank you.