I am a historian, but you don’t need a PhD to realize that Americans and Brits learn most of what we know about the world from the movies.
When most people think about World War II, for example, we think about the first few minutes of Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, or this summer, we are discovering the critical role of the chief Allied meteorologist, Captain James Stagg, through the new film, Pressure. We learned all about Vietnam from Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. And Glory did more to make the Civil War feel accessible and immediate than even the best histories on that seminal conflict.
Which is why it’s not only dispiriting but, frankly, deeply concerning that even now, a quarter of a century later, we’ve had so few movies about the attacks of September 11, 2001.
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True, Oliver Stone gave us World Trade Center, and Paul Greengrass United 93, both celebrations of ordinary Americans making extraordinary sacrifices on that fateful day. But other than these two dramas and a handful of notable documentaries, the great cultural machine that, for nearly a century, had told us the stories we needed to hear to make sense of ourselves and the world went largely silent. In fact, the last feature film on 9/11 was made over a decade ago, with none currently in the pipeline.
Why?
It’s a fascinating question, one that’s likely to keep future historians busy.
You can blame it on progressive sensibilities, a DEI mindset, and not wanting to risk being accused of Islamophobia by producing movies that make Muslims look like the bad guys.
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You can blame it on post-modernism, which favors irony and metaphor over direct engagement with difficult topics. When asked why he’d never made a movie about 9/11, for example, Spielberg replied that he had: 2005’s War of the Worlds, which features many scenes of urban devastation, but which does very little to help us think seriously about one of the most challenging moments in American history.
You can blame it on the way movies are financed these days, with money coming in from investors all over the world, including from countries that aren’t really interested in heralding the values of the West.
But whatever the reason, the bottom line remains the same: By failing to make movies that grapple with the reasons for and the responses to 9/11, Hollywood has made America and its allies weaker, more vulnerable and less safe.
How so? Let us count the ways.
First, look at the rates of enlistment to the U.S. armed forces. In 1986, for example, Navy recruiters saw a whopping 500% spike in young people eager to enlist — they had all watched Top Gun and left the theater thinking that naval service was not just worthy but desirable. Enlistment numbers remained solid throughout the 1990s and immediately after 9/11, but the early 2000s showed a drastic decline with the recruiting crisis reaching its peak in 2022-23.
Hollywood’s failures, however, run even deeper.
No serious person, patriotic as they may be, could argue that Hollywood has any obligation to reflect this ideology or that. But most serious people should argue that filmmakers are artists, and as such are at their finest when they grapple with the most pressing eras of their time. We consider Casablancaa classic, for example, in large part because it was filmed and released in the middle of World War II, giving us unforgettable characters that resonated with us precisely because they were forced to ask themselves who we were fighting and why.
And when artists stop asking these questions seriously, moral confusion ensues.
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We knew the Nazis were bad because we had decades of movies exploring their wickedness. And even if we couldn’t agree on the scope of American military engagement in Southeast Asia, no serious Hollywood filmmaker thought it wise to glorify the Vietcong or their supporters. The result was a culture that could have robust disagreements about important questions without losing track of the fact that America was a benevolent nation doing its best to safeguard freedom, democracy, and the other virtues of Western civilization.
When Hollywood went silent and stopped making thoughtful movies about our wars, it created a huge cultural vacuum. And because nature abhors a vacuum — life, as a famous Hollywood movie once put it, always finds a way — that vacuum was filled by conspiracy theories. Crackpots like Alex Jones and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can only thrive because people need stories to help them make sense of the world, and if serious filmmakers won’t tell them, then the lunatics sure will.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the same filmmakers who had so shamefully failed to wrestle with our recent history added insult to injury by showing up en masse, in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, to advocate not for America and its challenges but for Gaza, currently governed by a terror group that shares an ideology with the Jihadis who attacked us 25 years ago this month.
This is all very depressing. But if you’ve watched even a handful of good, old-fashioned Hollywood movies, you know that a setback in act II almost always becomes an opportunity in act III. The same technology that gave us AI slop can also be used to tell more ambitious stories more cheaply.
All we need now is a hero, some enterprising young director who could look back to that grim day in September and deliver an informative and inspiring film. And if Hollywood had taught us anything, it’s that heroes are never in short supply in America.
