Scenes of Mayhem Are Too Close to Home

TORONTO —  The last thing you expect--or want--to see coming out of a darkened movie theater is a mob of quiet people gathered in front of a TV set above the popcorn machines and soda fountains. This means something very bad has happened in the Real World.

Whatever those filing out of press screenings on the morning of Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival expected to see on the lobby monitor of the Varsity Theater Complex on Bloor Street, it wasn’t the image of blasted, mortally wounded World Trade Center towers. Dazed, frightened, incredulous, no one could come up with anything to say that wasn’t being said by others.

“My God,” one woman was heard saying, “this can’t be happening.”

“I know. It’s like a movie,” her friend replied.

It was something you thought about, if only for a minute or so before the horrific dimensions of last week’s terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon could sink in. No question about it. This did seem like a movie. Closer to the point, it seemed like one of dozens of movies made throughout the last century in which calamity, man-made or otherwise, decimates large cities, including--make that especially--New York.

“Earthquake” leveled Los Angeles. “Armageddon” wiped out Paris. And how many times has Godzilla crushed Tokyo? But if what Susan Sontag has termed the “imagination of disaster” has a citadel, it is New York City. Whether it’s a giant ape (“King Kong”), meteorites from outer space (“Deep Impact”), melting polar ice from global warming (“A.I.”), alien spaceships (“Independence Day”) or mutant shockwaves (“X-Men”), New York has been picked on by pop culture as an epicenter for apocalypse.

Maybe Hollywood was tapping into a primal urge shared by moviegoers in the great suburban multiplex to see big cities in general, and New York in particular, brought down to size. The more outrageous or frightening the circumstances depicted on the big screen, the cozier audiences seemed to feel with watching the Empire State Building blasted to bits in “Independence Day.” After all, such things could never happen in the Real World, right?

But such things have happened. And right now, those popcorn visions of mass destruction don’t seem very much fun.

When reality trumps imagination, it’s always a shock. But in the aftermath of the horrific events, the shock seems especially acute and far-reaching. The whole notion of making entertaining spectacle out of mass destruction now seems trivial and indulgent at best, insensitive and tasteless at worst.

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to respond to this frightening new wave of terrorism. Within a day of the attacks, films deemed too close to real-life anxiety and grief were pulled from the fall release schedule or were postponed indefinitely. “Collateral Damage,” with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a firefighter who takes matters into his own hands when terrorists kill his family, has been shelved. And the release of many more movies may be put on hold.

One could understand why “Big Trouble,” initially scheduled to open today, was placed in suspended animation. This adaptation of humor columnist Dave Barry’s farcical thriller by director Barry Sonnenfeld (“Men in Black”) has a motley crew of characters chasing down, among other things, a suitcase containing a thermonuclear device that somehow winds up in Miami International Airport on a baggage rack.

But why delay “Sidewalks of New York,” originally scheduled to open today? Granted, actor-director Ed Burns’ comic roundelay of lonely Manhattanites seeking love may contain poignant reminders of a cityscape now cruelly disfigured. But wouldn’t such a comedy be considered a bracing tonic for the shattered nerves of real-life New Yorkers and many others?

And yet, one thinks back to a romantic comedy set in New York that was among the more popular items screened during the Toronto festival. “Kissing Jessica Stein” is a charming, winsome fable about a nice, high-strung Jewish girl (Jennifer Westfeldt) who explores bisexuality with a comparably nice, high-strung art gallery owner (Heather Juergensen). The film created enough buzz after its initial screenings before the events of Sept. 11 to get one more screening the next night.

People laughed with the film for the most part. But whenever an establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline with the intact World Trade Center came into view, one could hear a few sighs in the audience. And when a full shot of the twin towers appeared, there was even a gasp. Maybe we aren’t quite ready to remember the way things were so soon. (“Sidewalks” also was screened in Toronto, but its run ended before the terrorist attack.) Another Toronto entry whose fate seems uncertain is “The Heist,” David Mamet’s hard-boiled thriller with such vivid tough guys as Gene Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Ricky Jay and Danny DeVito bantering about the art and craft of big-score thievery. It’s an old-fashioned caper movie with some of Mamet’s most robust dialogue in years. “Money’s very important,” DeVito’s crime boss snarls. “That’s why they call it money.”

Funny stuff, but here’s why one wonders whether “The Heist” will make its Oct. 19 premiere. The movie’s central set piece is an elaborate theft of gold from a delivery plane while it’s taxiing on the runway. It’s a detailed, planned-out operation during which, among other things, airport security is compromised and an explosion is set off near the runway as a distraction. And there’s the matter of where all this is taking place: Boston’s Logan Airport.

It would be a pity if Mamet’s sly, well-forged entertainment becomes another casualty. (Warner Bros. has said nothing about the fate of “The Heist.”) But it may well be that, along with so much else, the very nature of mass entertainment has been transformed indefinitely, perhaps indelibly, by recent tragedy. No one, least of all the movie industry, can blame us for not being in the mood for the kind of in-your-face, blood-and-guts spectacle that crowds the multiplexes even beyond the summer.