Cultural Changes
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Cultural Changes
September 6, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We should finally now confess that we weren't eager to devote an entire program to the media aftermath of 9/11.
BOB GARFIELD: As more than casual observers of media overkill, we didn't wish ourselves to flog a horse that is already being quite pummeled in most every other media channel on earth. In the end, though, we decided that our responsibility is no different than any other media outlet -- to consider the questions most relevant and most resonant to our audience, and this week there is no debate about what that topic is.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:With the understanding that a certain part of our listenership would quickly abandon us for music or sports or just plain silence, we decided to take the long hard look that only a year's perspective can furnish, because one of the phenomena we discovered in surveying the mass media implications of calamity is that short, superficial looks can yield distorted results.
BOB GARFIELD:One of the first questions after the planes hit was: What would happen? What would happen to New York? To the perpetrators? To the economy? And beyond all of the immediate ramifications of catastrophe -- to us? If the Kennedy assassination marked the end of American innocence -- as is widely accepted --and the Vietnam War and Watergate supposedly turned us cynical -- what of 9/11? If it was a transforming event, if it was historical turning point -- what precisely would turn? The answer from most everybody's lips was: the culture.
NEIL SMELSER: 9/11 will go down in American history as one of the profound cultural traumas that will imprint itself on the cultural memory of the society, about which we will not be able to forget.
BOB GARFIELD: Neil Smelser is professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.
NEIL SMELSER:And which will have the same significance of events such as the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, perhaps the Great Depression -- all in different ways of course, but which imbed themselves in the national consciousness, and you really can't think about the society or the culture in the same way as you did before.
BOB GARFIELD:Academics were by no means alone in that assessment. Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair magazine declared a seismic change and, echoing a Time Magazine essay by Roger Rosenblatt, predicted "the end of irony." In Hollywood, various potentates bade farewell to violent entertainment and to all things trivial. On September 13th, TV producer Bryce Zabel was to have had a meeting pitching USA Networks on a mini-series called World War III. The meeting and the project were canceled as irrelevant. Warner Bros. stopped the October release of an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick about a firefighter seeking vengeance against terrorists. It was deemed just too gratuitous in the wake of real terror. In the somber, self-reflective, post-9/11 environment, said movie producer and former Universal Studios chief Tom Pollock, he, quote "Wouldn't even pitch a comedy, because everything and everybody had changed." [SHOOT 'EM UP MOVIE SOUNDTRACK PLAYS] Everything and everybody had changed -- until about February when Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage was released. Despite mostly lousy reviews, it's done 54 million dollars so far. The somber, self-reflective Austin Powers in Goldmember has done more than 200 million dollars. Oh, and by the way, the Osbournes, and oh, by the way -- American Idol. Network TV ratings since 9/11 for the first time in 15 years are up!
BRYCE ZABEL: The landscape doesn't look dramatically different.
BOB GARFIELD: TV producer Bryce Zabel, author of the stillborn World War III, is president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
BRYCE ZABEL: The truth of the matter is the American public wants to look at their programming primarily for entertainment. They know they can get the news from news channels but they tend to look for entertainment from the rest of the dial.
BROOKE KENNEDY: Society is pretty much going back to being who they are, and I think they went back fairly fast. I think they have the same appetite for the same entertainment and actually it's sort of insatiable. It's just -- it's amazing. [LAUGHS]
BOB GARFIELD:Brooke Kennedy is an executive producer of the CBS drama Third Watch about New York police and firefighters. Her show, owing to its subject matter, was among the pop culture creations explicitly affected by 9/11; the writers and producers had to balance the narrative duty to acknowledge the attacks without appearing to be disrespectful or exploitive.
BROOKE KENNEDY: I mean we knew certain topics that we wanted to stay away from immediately. I mean we wanted to stay away from collapses -- things that we had done in the past. You know -- you're afraid to go near those things! You're afraid to fictionalize somebody's pain.
BOB GARFIELD:One of the assumptions was that the entire nation's nerves were rubbed so raw, much popular fare would be rendered unbearable --especially anything with inherent attitude -irreverence, condescension, irony. Essayist Roger Rosenblatt.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Before September 11th and for the last, I don't know, 5, 7 years -- the sense of things being ironic - that everything was to be greeted with a smirk, you know kind of twist to the lips, became a modus operandi to greet all of experience, and so when I-- and you and everyone else saw what happened on 9/11 it just occurred to me that that would wipe the smirk off most people's face.
BOB GARFIELD:Well there was, briefly, a de-smirking of America. David Letterman took a hiatus and returned -- minus jokes -- with a distraught Dan Rather. Comedy Central ran an on-screen banner for the Red Cross Victims Relief Fund. Politically Incorrect's Bill Maher was excoriated and his show ultimately canceled after a remark that besmirched the U.S. military. And then the smart alecks such as Comedy Central's ultra-ironic Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned. [LAUGHTER] [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
JON STEWART: What, what about reports of atrocities that are being committed by the Northern Alliance? I mean we, we've seen some images in the newspaper that are very disturbing.
STEPHEN COLBERT: Ohhhhh, no you haven't. [LAUGHTER] Friend - could never [SIGHS] communicate what I've seen. Let me tell you -- I'm right here, and-- and -- Oh-ho! [SHOUTING] That is disturbing! [LAUGHTER] That is what I call an atrocity! Op-- nope--sorry - stand corrected. That is an atrocity. [LAUGHTER] The-- Oh, wait a second. Sorry -- I thought you were done. No, [LAUGHTER] you, you were committing an atrocity. Kudos. That is - that is truly atrocious. [LAUGHTER]
BOB GARFIELD: Jeffrey Ross is a New York City standup comic.
MAN:I'm a college-educated guy, and oftentimes I would say what am I doing -- making people laugh for-- help sell drinks for comedy club owners -- is this really what my life's calling should be? And with the risk of sounding corny-- when something like this -no, not like this -- when this happened, the job description became clear to me for the first time -- human beings are made to mourn and then move on -- and the comedian's job is to help people move on. When you're ready -- you come to us -- but we're here.
BOB GARFIELD:And people did come back, because after the storm, the waters eventually find their level, and that level is never much changed. Even cataclysm does not turn our cultural worlds upside down for long -- nor our home lives, nor our work lives, nor even, necessarily, our patriotism. Chris Gwynn of FridgeDoor.com sells refrigerator magnets.
CHRIS GWYNN: After September 11th there was just a huge surge in demand for anything patriotic. We went from selling pretty much zero in August to in September we sold about 8,000 patriotic magnets; October we sold about 20,000 pieces. Then November it started to go down. We sold about 5,000 pieces; and then December 4,000; January 3,000; and then it just sort of leveled back to -- not nothing, but-- we might sell a hundred a month now. The people that we bought from still have warehouses full of patriotic items that they're trying to sell at any price.
BOB GARFIELD:When conspicuous display of patriotism turns out to be a blip, it's obvious that the gears of social change turn very slowly, so we should take care of what conclusions we draw. Here's a scene from CBS Third Watch -- two cops gazing at the scarred tableau of lower Manhattan.
FE
MALE COP: I don't think I'll ever get used to it.
MALE COP: What?
FE
MALE COP: The downtown skyline. You think it'll ever be normal again, boss?
MALE COP: What's normal?
FE
MALE COP: The way it was.
MALE COP: No.
BOB GARFIELD: Good acting; nice dialogue; and a poignant definition of normal. But consider the metaphor: the New York skyline is indeed changed forever. It's also, strictly speaking, counting all the rooftops. 99 percent the same. [THEME MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers; engineered by Dylan Keefe and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl. And this week we say a grudging farewell to our beloved assistant producer Sean Landis without whom it sometimes seems this show would not be possible.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sean-- please don't go? What can grad school give you that we can't?!
BOB GARFIELD: Eventually a job with decent pay, reasonable hours and a future? -- Nah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- Nah. [LAUGHTER] Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG] [FUNDING CREDITS] ************
September 6, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We should finally now confess that we weren't eager to devote an entire program to the media aftermath of 9/11.
BOB GARFIELD: As more than casual observers of media overkill, we didn't wish ourselves to flog a horse that is already being quite pummeled in most every other media channel on earth. In the end, though, we decided that our responsibility is no different than any other media outlet -- to consider the questions most relevant and most resonant to our audience, and this week there is no debate about what that topic is.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:With the understanding that a certain part of our listenership would quickly abandon us for music or sports or just plain silence, we decided to take the long hard look that only a year's perspective can furnish, because one of the phenomena we discovered in surveying the mass media implications of calamity is that short, superficial looks can yield distorted results.
BOB GARFIELD:One of the first questions after the planes hit was: What would happen? What would happen to New York? To the perpetrators? To the economy? And beyond all of the immediate ramifications of catastrophe -- to us? If the Kennedy assassination marked the end of American innocence -- as is widely accepted --and the Vietnam War and Watergate supposedly turned us cynical -- what of 9/11? If it was a transforming event, if it was historical turning point -- what precisely would turn? The answer from most everybody's lips was: the culture.
NEIL SMELSER: 9/11 will go down in American history as one of the profound cultural traumas that will imprint itself on the cultural memory of the society, about which we will not be able to forget.
BOB GARFIELD: Neil Smelser is professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley.
NEIL SMELSER:And which will have the same significance of events such as the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, perhaps the Great Depression -- all in different ways of course, but which imbed themselves in the national consciousness, and you really can't think about the society or the culture in the same way as you did before.
BOB GARFIELD:Academics were by no means alone in that assessment. Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair magazine declared a seismic change and, echoing a Time Magazine essay by Roger Rosenblatt, predicted "the end of irony." In Hollywood, various potentates bade farewell to violent entertainment and to all things trivial. On September 13th, TV producer Bryce Zabel was to have had a meeting pitching USA Networks on a mini-series called World War III. The meeting and the project were canceled as irrelevant. Warner Bros. stopped the October release of an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick about a firefighter seeking vengeance against terrorists. It was deemed just too gratuitous in the wake of real terror. In the somber, self-reflective, post-9/11 environment, said movie producer and former Universal Studios chief Tom Pollock, he, quote "Wouldn't even pitch a comedy, because everything and everybody had changed." [SHOOT 'EM UP MOVIE SOUNDTRACK PLAYS] Everything and everybody had changed -- until about February when Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage was released. Despite mostly lousy reviews, it's done 54 million dollars so far. The somber, self-reflective Austin Powers in Goldmember has done more than 200 million dollars. Oh, and by the way, the Osbournes, and oh, by the way -- American Idol. Network TV ratings since 9/11 for the first time in 15 years are up!
BRYCE ZABEL: The landscape doesn't look dramatically different.
BOB GARFIELD: TV producer Bryce Zabel, author of the stillborn World War III, is president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
BRYCE ZABEL: The truth of the matter is the American public wants to look at their programming primarily for entertainment. They know they can get the news from news channels but they tend to look for entertainment from the rest of the dial.
BROOKE KENNEDY: Society is pretty much going back to being who they are, and I think they went back fairly fast. I think they have the same appetite for the same entertainment and actually it's sort of insatiable. It's just -- it's amazing. [LAUGHS]
BOB GARFIELD:Brooke Kennedy is an executive producer of the CBS drama Third Watch about New York police and firefighters. Her show, owing to its subject matter, was among the pop culture creations explicitly affected by 9/11; the writers and producers had to balance the narrative duty to acknowledge the attacks without appearing to be disrespectful or exploitive.
BROOKE KENNEDY: I mean we knew certain topics that we wanted to stay away from immediately. I mean we wanted to stay away from collapses -- things that we had done in the past. You know -- you're afraid to go near those things! You're afraid to fictionalize somebody's pain.
BOB GARFIELD:One of the assumptions was that the entire nation's nerves were rubbed so raw, much popular fare would be rendered unbearable --especially anything with inherent attitude -irreverence, condescension, irony. Essayist Roger Rosenblatt.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Before September 11th and for the last, I don't know, 5, 7 years -- the sense of things being ironic - that everything was to be greeted with a smirk, you know kind of twist to the lips, became a modus operandi to greet all of experience, and so when I-- and you and everyone else saw what happened on 9/11 it just occurred to me that that would wipe the smirk off most people's face.
BOB GARFIELD:Well there was, briefly, a de-smirking of America. David Letterman took a hiatus and returned -- minus jokes -- with a distraught Dan Rather. Comedy Central ran an on-screen banner for the Red Cross Victims Relief Fund. Politically Incorrect's Bill Maher was excoriated and his show ultimately canceled after a remark that besmirched the U.S. military. And then the smart alecks such as Comedy Central's ultra-ironic Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned. [LAUGHTER] [SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
JON STEWART: What, what about reports of atrocities that are being committed by the Northern Alliance? I mean we, we've seen some images in the newspaper that are very disturbing.
STEPHEN COLBERT: Ohhhhh, no you haven't. [LAUGHTER] Friend - could never [SIGHS] communicate what I've seen. Let me tell you -- I'm right here, and-- and -- Oh-ho! [SHOUTING] That is disturbing! [LAUGHTER] That is what I call an atrocity! Op-- nope--sorry - stand corrected. That is an atrocity. [LAUGHTER] The-- Oh, wait a second. Sorry -- I thought you were done. No, [LAUGHTER] you, you were committing an atrocity. Kudos. That is - that is truly atrocious. [LAUGHTER]
BOB GARFIELD: Jeffrey Ross is a New York City standup comic.
MAN:I'm a college-educated guy, and oftentimes I would say what am I doing -- making people laugh for-- help sell drinks for comedy club owners -- is this really what my life's calling should be? And with the risk of sounding corny-- when something like this -no, not like this -- when this happened, the job description became clear to me for the first time -- human beings are made to mourn and then move on -- and the comedian's job is to help people move on. When you're ready -- you come to us -- but we're here.
BOB GARFIELD:And people did come back, because after the storm, the waters eventually find their level, and that level is never much changed. Even cataclysm does not turn our cultural worlds upside down for long -- nor our home lives, nor our work lives, nor even, necessarily, our patriotism. Chris Gwynn of FridgeDoor.com sells refrigerator magnets.
CHRIS GWYNN: After September 11th there was just a huge surge in demand for anything patriotic. We went from selling pretty much zero in August to in September we sold about 8,000 patriotic magnets; October we sold about 20,000 pieces. Then November it started to go down. We sold about 5,000 pieces; and then December 4,000; January 3,000; and then it just sort of leveled back to -- not nothing, but-- we might sell a hundred a month now. The people that we bought from still have warehouses full of patriotic items that they're trying to sell at any price.
BOB GARFIELD:When conspicuous display of patriotism turns out to be a blip, it's obvious that the gears of social change turn very slowly, so we should take care of what conclusions we draw. Here's a scene from CBS Third Watch -- two cops gazing at the scarred tableau of lower Manhattan.
FE
MALE COP: I don't think I'll ever get used to it.
MALE COP: What?
FE
MALE COP: The downtown skyline. You think it'll ever be normal again, boss?
MALE COP: What's normal?
FE
MALE COP: The way it was.
MALE COP: No.
BOB GARFIELD: Good acting; nice dialogue; and a poignant definition of normal. But consider the metaphor: the New York skyline is indeed changed forever. It's also, strictly speaking, counting all the rooftops. 99 percent the same. [THEME MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers; engineered by Dylan Keefe and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl. And this week we say a grudging farewell to our beloved assistant producer Sean Landis without whom it sometimes seems this show would not be possible.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sean-- please don't go? What can grad school give you that we can't?!
BOB GARFIELD: Eventually a job with decent pay, reasonable hours and a future? -- Nah. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- Nah. [LAUGHTER] Mike Pesca is our producer at large, Arun Rath our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from National Public Radio. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG] [FUNDING CREDITS] ************
Produced by WNYC Studios