How television and literature wrestled with 9/11

Eric Deggans

Andrew Limbong

Over the past 25 years, books and television series have reflected the events and fallout from 9/11 in both direct and indirect ways.

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

Major world events often find their way into our culture in the forms of books and movies. So as we continue our coverage this week of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we want it to look at how that day has been reflected across literature and television.

To do that, we're joined by the host of our Book of the Day podcast, Andrew Limbong, and NPR's critic-at-large, Eric Deggans. Welcome to both of you.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey, Sacha.

ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Hey. Thanks.

PFEIFFER: TV feels to me like the right place to start here because most of us who remember that day experienced the attacks on our TV screens. And last weekend on the show, we aired a round table about how 9/11 has been portrayed in film and how, with a couple of exceptions, Hollywood has largely avoided depicting the attacks.

Eric, how do you think TV has done in terms of the events of that day or beyond? How blunt has it been?

DEGGANS: Yeah, I think TV struggled to deal with the attacks in a direct way. There were a few TV shows that tried. "24" was a show that's about an intrepid agent who tries to track down various conspiracies.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "24")

KIEFER SUTHERLAND: (As Jack Bauer) We're both professionals. You know that I can force this information out of you, but I'm running out of time.

DEGGANS: It was already set to debut, and then 9/11 happened, and they actually delayed the debut of that show. But eventually, there were some controversies over how they showed government agents torturing people to get information.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "24")

SUTHERLAND: (As Jack Bauer) People in this country are dying, and I need some information. Are you going to give it to me? Or do I have to start hurting you?

DEGGANS: And in fact, you know, I talked to experts in interrogation who went to the producers of that show and also "Homeland," another show that was inspired by the 9/11 attacks, asking them to tone down their depictions of villainy in the Middle East and also tone down the effectiveness of torture because it's not effective. And they had found that, you know, officers in the field were torturing people based on stuff they saw on TV, thinking that these were techniques that actually worked.

They were...

PFEIFFER: It was having this insidious effect, actually...

DEGGANS: Exactly.

PFEIFFER: ...(Inaudible) real life.

DEGGANS: And there was also a show on FX called "Rescue Me" that was centered on firefighters in New York who were coping with PTSD in the aftermath of 9/11. They had colleagues that they had worked with who had been killed.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "RESCUE ME")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) There are people out there whose lives are never going to be the same - fathers and mothers and kids, everyone who waited and prayed on that day for someone to just come home from work.

DEGGANS: And we even had an animated show called "#1 Happy Family USA," which debuted many years later on Prime Video, but it was a cartoon about a young Egyptian American boy growing up in New Jersey right after 9/11.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "#1 HAPPY FAMILY USA")

SALMA HINDY: (As Sharia Hussein) This is a time for us to be ourselves.

RAMY YOUSSEF: (As Hussein Hussein) Being ourselves will get us in a super max prison for life.

DEGGANS: It was based on the life of the co-creator Ramy Youssef growing up in New Jersey in the aftermath of 9/11 and dealing with Islamophobia.

PFEIFFER: In terms of fiction, you might remember that at one point, the big-name novelist Ian McEwan talked about how 9/11 almost made writing novels seem trivial, that what had happened on that day seemed so unimaginable at the time that what could novelists possibly think up that could exceed it.

LIMBONG: Yeah.

PFEIFFER: But there were some works of fiction that came out of that day. Andrew, would you run through some of those?

LIMBONG: Yeah. Shoutout to Ian McEwan.

I think he published that piece immediately in the aftermath of 9/11, right? And so I'm not even sure if he'd agree with it now - right? - because he'd go on in a couple of years to write "Saturday," which is very much a post-9/11 response book about the war in Iraq, right?

And so that was him digesting it. And, you know, kind of like what Eric was saying about scripted TV, it just took some time to really figure out how to do it, which - what's the angle?

What's the right way to approach it? And so in literary fiction, at least, authors took a few years, but when they came, they came, right?

Just - I'm just going to rattle off a few titles. You've got Don DeLillo's "Falling Man," Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children," Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close."

But if you want to just, like, think broadly about 9/11 and the U.S. reaction, you know, afterwards, there's a ton of literature that we can put under the umbrella of, like, post-9/11 lit, right? Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner," which is the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. It doesn't mention the attacks, but it was published in 2003. And it was...

PFEIFFER: Yeah, gut-wrenching book, beautiful gut-wrenching book.

LIMBONG: Yeah. But then even broadening out some more, I think you can put the rush of, like, post-apocalyptic literature in this umbrella as a way of something that is speaking allegorically to the mood that we were feeling post-9/11, right?

In the YA world, there was the Suzanne Collins' "Hunger Games" series, right? And for the grown-ups, there was Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," which I think is a very dark and dusty post-9/11 novel.

PFEIFFER: Eric, in terms of TV, you were talking about how some of the shows had to tone down what they depicted. And some of them later, including "24" and "Homeland," some people said they were Islamophobic. They were too U.S.-centric. As you said, they displayed torture as effective. Do you feel like there have been shows that became correctives to those, in a sense, later?

DEGGANS: Well, I do think that just overall, there was much more sensitivity in film and TV in how they were depicting certain kinds of villains and whether or not they were going to attach villainy to specific types of people. Actually, the most prominent example I can think of is in film, when you think about "Top Gun: Maverick." That was a film where the bad guys were in some unnamed distant country that looks like it might have been Middle Eastern, but you don't really know, and they never - (laughter) you know, they never really named it, I don't think.

So there was a little more sensitivity about what might happen, the unintended consequences.

We saw late-night hosts come on and talk about the day's events in a really emotional way. David Letterman and Jon Stewart, you know, there were breaks in production for their shows, but they came back relatively quickly, and they both had these really emotional monologues that are now, like, a tradition in the late-night space.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE DAILY SHOW")

JON STEWART: There's no other way really to start the show than to ask you at home the question that we asked the audience here tonight and that we've asked everybody that we know here in New York since September 11, and that is, are you OK? And we pray that you are and that your family is.

DEGGANS: And, you know, I saw Alton Brown, for example, from the Food Network, talk about how the Food Network's popularity came from people wanting comfort food and television after 9/11.

PFEIFFER: Wow. What a trickle-down effect of 9/11.

DEGGANS: Yeah.

PFEIFFER: Andrew, I've covered Guantanamo for years, and I have a bookshelf with at least a half dozen books written by former Guantanamo prisoners. They're usually memoirs or autobiographies. It's almost become his own mini genre.

LIMBONG: Yeah.

PFEIFFER: I mean, it seems like it's sort of a naturally fitting way to document these painful incidents. I'm interested in your thoughts on the memoirs about this.

LIMBONG: Yeah, to not be too obvious about it, it's like, memoirs have the added oomph of being true - right? - or purporting to be true. And it serves as a kind of counterpoint to what Eric was talking about, right? - how, on the day of 9/11, you had all this rolling coverage, and you got to see, like, the towers fall over and over and over again.

In comparison, Guantanamo Bay and a bunch of the other U.S. response to 9/11 that happened after happens in this kind of, like, black box, right? It's sort of impenetrable.

You can't really figure out what's going on. You weren't seeing footage daily of what was going on.

And so I think these memoirs came out at a time post the 9/11, like, America embracing each other, right? And we're in - you know, in the depths of the war on terror, and everybody is, you know, losing - it's like having their eyes opened to what the country and the government is doing in their name.

And so I think that's where nonfiction really shines, where it purports to show, like, the truth of what's actually happening that you aren't seeing in the short term.

PFEIFFER: That is Andrew Limbong, the host of our Book of the Day podcast, and also Eric Deggans, NPR's critic-at-large. Thanks to both of you.

LIMBONG: Thank you.

DEGGANS: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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