Terror cleansing
Since Sept. 11, pop culture has been purging itself of anything potentially insensitive. But who decides what "sensitive" is?
By Chris Colin
Oct. 19, 2001 | We'll never know what would have happened if Universal Studios hadn't deleted the throwaway line containing the word "terrorism" from the 20th anniversary edition of "ET: The Extra-Terrestrial," to be released in 2002.
The post-Sept. 11 sanitizing of American pop culture seemed tasteful, even impressive, at first. A horrific tragedy had occurred, and the gatekeepers of mass media took it upon themselves to spare us the usual onslaught of crudeness. Who among us, softened by crying and late-night CNN, didn't wonder that first week if mainstream culture had finally, miraculously, grown up? On TV and the radio, the normal din vanished and instead we saw and heard maturity. We felt incredible grief, of course, but also sublime pride -- the firefighters, the blood donations, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani -- and the country's formerly coarse, mindless, vapid commercial noises were right there raising the bar for civilization.
Then that first week ended. News services got their footing and started looking for the big picture. The big picture, at least until the bombing, was ourselves: How were we coping? How would we change? The media chose to answer by taking its own temperature. Hollywood, we were told, was tearing up its violent scripts. Video game manufacturers were deleting representations of the World Trade Center. Radio conglomerates were suggesting playlists more appropriate to the times. Mass media had sent itself back to the drawing board.
For the rest of us, our critical faculties slowly eased back into place and we started to have doubts about culture's new maturity. Gamers complained about game modifications. "I'd like to remember the New York skyline with the towers there," the St. Paul Pioneer Press quoted one as saying about Microsoft's PC Flight Simulator. "A much better memorial would be the towers left in place with Old Glory at the top flying at half-staff." Movie nuts felt the same: The New York Post noted that only 22 percent of Hollywood.com users voted in favor of deleting images of the World Trade Center from movies. In the sport of kings, the people behind the Belmont Breeders' Cup had to rethink their hasty revision of the official logo -- according to the New York Daily News, fans missed seeing the World Trade Center image in the skyline. Finally, we wanted to know, did Clear Channel really ban John Lennon's "Imagine" from the airwaves? In truth, despite dozens of articles to the contrary, the company only issued a recommendation to that effect; but this was beside the point.
The point, it seems, lay somewhere in the shifting space between civilized restraint and hypersensitivity. Where, in that continuum, lay the deletion of anything remotely terror-related from popular culture? We didn't entirely miss the Jerry Bruckheimer previews, but we didn't look forward to 10 years of insipid, peaceful pablum, either. Over a month later, we still haven't responded clearly to the current dilution of America's entertainment stimuli.
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It may be dumb but it's fast: Pop culture had already begun cleansing itself by the afternoon of Sept. 11. "As soon as [the attacks] happened," Arnold Schwarzenegger told Jay Leno about a violent film that had been in the works, "the first thing I did was I went to the phone and I called Warner Brothers."
Other calls got made, too. It was widely reported that hip-hop group the Coup scrambled to change their album artwork, a representation of the World Trade Center exploding. According to the Houston Chronicle, Russell Athletics draped a "God Bless America" banner over a New York billboard that had previously promoted sweatshirts with the suddenly grim line, "Yes, New York. It Comes in Black." And the Los Angeles Times reported that among the movie releases being delayed was "Sidewalks of New York" -- a comedy, no less -- apparently for fear that the city wasn't ready to laugh at itself.
According to the New York Times, DC Comics has "indefinitely postponed publication of one violent comic and rewritten forthcoming stories to eliminate references to terrorism." The Detroit News reported that "24," a Fox TV show, cut a scene showing an airplane exploding in flames. Even the fashion world had to adjust, frantically revising anything resembling terrorist chic. The International Herald Tribune reported that Diesel had renamed its striped denim line from "Scars and Stripes" to "Stars and Stripes."
Advertisers scrambled as much as anyone. The Houston Chronicle reported that the American Association of Advertising Agencies sent out a memo urging members to "exercise sensitivity."
"We have taken a look at everything we do to see if it can be misinterpreted somehow," Stan Richards, of Dallas ad agency the Richards Group, told the Chronicle. "The last thing advertising wants to do is offend people."
Journalists, too, heeded the call. Stebbins Jefferson wrote in the Palm Beach Post: "What the country needs now is not legal censorship but the self-discipline of producers and customers to avoid the Ground Zero where the entertainment industry ignores the negative consequences of products that could encourage troubled minds to commit violence."
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