Exploiting 9/11

Just after 9/11, America was saturated with sentiment. The sheer volume of prayers and donations was a testament to the sincerity of the American people. For a while, the media joined in on the act, honoring the sacrifices made and reminding us of the victims' families. We mourned with our newspapers, our televisions, our President. But in the three-year wake of 9/11, the media has begun to manipulate that mindset into a well-oiled machine for producing Nielsen ratings, poll points and box-office bucks. Sept. 11 should still be a sensitive subject, but that sensitivity has been compromised to suit the needs of an impatient entertainment industry.

In the first few months after 9/11, Hollywood was quick to halt all things terrorist-, Twin Tower- or airplane-related from hitting theaters. Collateral Damage, a Schwarzenegger action flick about a fireman whose family was killed in a terrorist bombing, originally had an opening day a few months after 9/11 but was postponed until 2002. A trailer for the first Spider-Man, in which Spidey spins a giant web between the Twin Towers to net bank robbers in a helicopter, was retracted almost immediately.

But today, new shows like LAX and Threat Matrix are using airport security and national security as their respective ratings rousers. The new F/X Network series Rescue Me chronicles the rough-edged lives of FDNY firemen post-9/11. The list gets longer and the audacity even stronger. Television, our former medium of compassionate unity, has now soothed us onto our sofas for the commercial break.

Take, for example, TNT's summer miniseries The Grid, which focused on a special taskforce dedicated to averting the efforts of an international terrorist cell. One of the protagonists, Jane McCann, lost her husband in the attack on the World Trade Center. Or take F/X's Meltdown, an original movie that plays on fear—maybe for nostalgia's sake—by asking what would happen if terrorists took control of a U.S. nuclear facility. The title is especially appropriate, considering what is happening to the ethics of entertainment.

Such blatant sensationalisms of 9/11 slithering out of the Holly-woodwork ignore the fact that, for many families, emotional repercussions are still raw.

For this reason, we still and always will owe remembrance to those who died; the question is simply whether we should mind who's profiting from our remembrance. While we wait on that answer, however, all signs of respectful restraint in the media seem to be taking a nose dive... straight into the World Trade Center.