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9/11, A Decade Later

November 10, 2010 By Wendell Collins

A Decade Later, Le Deluge

Last night my girls and I watched Edward – I mean Robert Pattinson – in Remember Me.All we knew about the movie was that there was Edward/Robert, plus the loss of a loved one by the main character, Edward/Robert, who also happened to be the executive producer of the movie and of course the star attraction. (Pierce Brosnan barely made the third page of credits!)

(My youngest asked me my preference the other day, Edward (the vampire) or Jesse (the werewolf) and hands down, Edward the Pale One won. But in his post (mid) Twilight career, can Edward handle death without the hereafter, especially at the hands of terrorists? Methinks not.)

Nevertheless, we were all surprised to see 9/11 so prevalent in a 2010 movie like Remember Me much less a teen heartthrob flick. A few years after 2001 there was the predictable spurt of 911 aftermath movies – United 93 and World Trade Center, e.g. -- but Ground Zero has been quiet in Tinseltown in the past few years. Was it that writers and producers take that long to get a script off the ground? Or was there more deference to the memory of those lost in 9/11 to not make financial gain off the story?

Probably the latter. Still, it struck us as odd. (The movie was odd too, although it wasn’t as bad as you might imagine).

Compared with movies, more novels with a post-9/11 connection have emerged. The first one out of the gate, pretty quickly in terms of how long it takes to get published from start to finish, was Emperor’s Children, a bold jump right into the angst of New Yorkers in a Twintowerless world. Then more recently, Let the Great World Spin told the stories of the summer of 1974 when tightrope walker Philippe Petit spanned the great gap between the towers, among other parallel adventures. This was great writing in the vein of Crash and Magnolia, but with disparate characters whose messy stories meshed more cleanly.

And now we have Freedom, Franzen’s frenzied foray into the fiefdom once ruled by David Foster Wallace. Turns out the two were best buddies and sometime competitors before Wallace’s untimely death from suicide. (Freedom’s main male characters have a similar love/hate relationship.) Franzen’s great novel, The Corrections, was more readable and in many cases laugh out loud funny, while Freedom is a master of its own reverse Universe, one in which 9/11 cramps the party lifestyle of the protagonists’ son.

Freedom also takes on treehuggers, Teapartiers, date rape, aging yuppies, immigrants, politics of all stripes, the music scene, the Midwest and Northeast and everything in between. In fact, nothing is sacred, 9/11 included, except perhaps women’s college basketball.