The 9/11 Effect: Time Travel and Redecorating Shows

There's a lot of time travelling going on in this summer's movies, and it provides a window into what's really bothering us right now. In Tom Cruise’s latest move, Live, Die Repeat: The Edge of Tomorrow, the entire plot relies on his ability to go back and forth in time to try to solve a key problem in the present. In X-Men: Days of Future Past,  we see the same thing: Wolverine is sent to the 1970s to stop an event which will have devastating consequences for the future. Both are attempts to re-write history, to prevent the present from ever happening. Science fiction fans may recall that this used to be the greatest sin of all in time travel. Anyone who went back in time had to be very careful not to change anything, since that could result in a domino effect, preventing people from being born, governments from being elected, wars from being won. It was considered a form of temporal genocide. But this summer, killing the future is explicitly the goal. So why such a huge change?

I suspect that 9/11 is the culprit. In the years since the attack, Americans have come to see the rest of the world as a scary and hostile place. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been traumatizing, and appear to be unwinnable. It appears that American citizens who leave the country are at risk, and can be killed in terrible ways, which will be broadcast. During this period, Americans reacted as individuals do when confronted with terrifying situations: they regressed and withdrew.

The best proof of this comes from what happened on cable television. In the 2000s, The Learning Channel (TLC) stopped showing programs about the rest of the world and got rich broadcasting home renovation programs. Food, redecoration and makeovers became the big winners for ratings, which led to copycat programs on other lifestyle channels. These shows were signs that Americans were withdrawing into themselves, the television equivalent of nesting and cocooning. The outside world was terrifying, so it was time to go home and stay there. Television provided the opportunity to remake the home, the meals, our faces and wardrobe, over and over again. Live, redecorate, repeat.

Those shows appealed mostly to women, but men also found a way to withdraw. Before 9/11, National Geographic specials and The Discovery Channel broadcast programs that took place all over the world. National Geographic specials took viewers to the ends of the Earth, to meet Pygmies and other tribal peoples,  to explore mysterious ruins, and of course to see nature in all of its glory. During the 1990s, I worked as a writer and producer of documentary series for The Discovery Channel. Back then, Discovery was a science and nature channel, but liked to feature stories of adventure, too. So, I worked on series that featured explorers searching for Cleopatra’s Palace in Egypt, as well as historical documentaries that featured stories from all over the world, such as the Titanic’s sinking, the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, and warships being dragged through the African Jungle.  The world was our oyster, and it didn’t matter much if the main characters were Americans.

But after 9/11, the appetite for stories from around the world dried up. Both National Geographic and Discovery shifted their focus to stories that occur in America. What’s amazing is that the appetite for strange people and places remains, but now it is being satisfied by focusing solely on Americans. The naked tribal people are now white Americans roughing it in the bush ( Naked Afraid). The adventurers are crab fishermen in Alaska (Deadliest Catch), or guys who live off the land (Yukon Men). When viewers want to see strange cultures and people, they no longer expect ( or want) to go to the Amazon. Instead, they sit back and marvel at American hillbillies (Moonshiners), the Amish (Breaking Amish) little people (Little People, Big World) , or the morbidly obese (My 600-lb Life). Americans have the same interests as before, but they want to satisfy them all on their home soil, since the rest of the world is too scary to visit, even virtually.

American popular culture has been imploding since 9/11, and the effects are being seen in the movies, too. The reboots of Planet of the Apes and Star Trek have both placed new emphasis on Earth, rather than the more exotic settings of their originals ( such as the Earth in the far future, or outer space). In Star Trek, the plots of both movies have hinged on events at StarFleet on Earth, and, like 9/11, there is a city-destroying attack in the second movie. In Live, Die, Repeat, we meet aliens who can invade Earth from space, but lack the ability to fly once on Earth, making them an earthbound threat ( which makes no sense, of course). The emphasis on Earth in these movies ( and many others), is part of this 9/11 effect. With the exception of Star Wars, which seems like a fairy tale, we don’t want stories that take us far from home. However, on movie screens, we can admit what we don’t want to admit in reality: we feel like we are being invaded, and we don’t know how to fight back. As the ISIS debacle in the Middle East proves, the last decade’s efforts to ‘solve’ the terrorism problem by invading Afghanistan and Iraq have not worked. The present seems terrible, and we don’t know what to do.

But unlike reality, the movies can give us the answer we so desperately desire. Oddly, the solution is not the invention of a new weapon that will kill off the invaders. Perhaps our experiences in the last decade have shown us that there is no magic bullet, no drone or technology that will fix this mess. So the movies propose a different answer: stay home, and change time itself. Make it so that this whole nightmare never happened. Time has replaced space as the battleground. If only 9/11 had never ocurred. If only we hadn’t invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. In the movies, those wishes are coming true, as our heroes stay home, but travel in time to stop the invasions.

If only it were so simple in real life….

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker and writer in Toronto. www.milton2.tv.

stephen.milton@yahoo.ca