‘Our’ Violence Versus ‘Theirs’

It is the great cliche, bad-movie shot of our time. Two men of different races are running like Olympic track stars through the beveled glass doors of an urban foyer. Behind them, an enormous, soulless office tower glowers impassively. It could be day, it could be night. We might be in Los Angeles or New York or maybe Chicago. Location is irrelevant. Predicament is all.

And so they run, these two men we’ll call Gibson and Glover, or maybe Tucker and Chan, looking frightened but never panic-stricken--scared but heroic all the same. At each step, time itself seems to conspire against them. They move in the freeze-frame, slow-motion agony of nightmare.

And then, at the precise moment when it would be logical for these running men either to escape or to be engulfed, a gigantic explosion rips through the skyscraper behind them, transforming it into a fiery monster, a dragon of architecture, belching concrete and mortar, steel and glass.

This shot, repeated endlessly in sometimes imaginative variations, is one of the things that drove me out of movie criticism at the close of the 1990s, after a decade-long run. In the past 15 years or so, thanks in part to the computer-effects revolution but mostly to the desire of our movie producers to appeal to their own degraded notions of teenage boys and the insatiable foreign action market, our culture has marinated in mindless, epic violence. In testosterone, to give it a name.

You know the roll call: “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard.” “The Rock.” “The Matrix.” “Mission: Impossible.” “Face/Off.” “Con Air.” Each vigilante plot line so disposable it is almost impossible to remember a half-hour after the end title rolls by, but functioning according to a received set of values, including the idea that there is good violence and bad violence. And that here in America, our violence is good violence because it has come from us.

What happened at the World Trade Center was not good violence by anybody’s standard of measurement. Though vigilante in spirit--for what is a vigilante if not someone who takes some highly personal and idiosyncratic notion of cosmic justice into his or her own hands?--it was “their” violence, not ours. And it was violence with consequences, something rarely dramatized in the exploding funhouse of American movie culture. Violence with anguished aftereffects, seen in the faces of people who could have been any of us as they walked from makeshift hospital to makeshift hospital, or waited by the phone, wan masks of disbelief, trying to find out if the people they came home to, or went to movies with, were still alive.

A few years back, a massively successful film called “Independence Day” was marketed to the world in print ads and trailers with an image of the White House detonating like a cherry bomb. It was an arresting visual effect, well executed from a technical standpoint and, like most of what we see on TV and in movie houses, meant to be nothing more than good, clean fun. We know now how nearly that image managed to come to life a few days back, and we can speculate as to the even wider political ramifications of the moment if it had.

Instead, the executive branch is still going about its business, which is mainly the work of reacting to the fantasy stuff of recent American action films brought to horrifying life.

Meanwhile, studio executives scurry to adjust their release schedules like cockroaches caught in the hot fireball reality of our current moment. Fantasy is carefully sealed off from reality, as TV executives paint the twin towers out of shows set in New York, then run them against news programs still crammed with a thousand angles of death at ground zero. Blockbuster films such as “Spider Man” and “Men in Black 2” rethink, revise and reshoot their New York endings, while the remaining “terror plot” formula films are suddenly as devalued as a bad stock.

On AM radio, that other bastion of disgruntled masculinity, the airwaves resonate with cries for indiscriminate vengeance. Harsh, squawk-box voices advocate apocalypse of the thermonuclear and petrochemical varieties. We are all trapped inside a real-world “Die Hard” script, while the braying chorus of the shock-jock bully boys demands that we entertain as serious solutions the self-righteous codes of conduct proposed by our movies and TV.

As immediate shock has given way to wholly justified outrage, their cry has begun a fitful and uncharacteristic migration to more reputable and less exclusionary outlets. To newspapers of record and network TV. It is the cry of “our” violence, which is always appropriate and moral, against “their” violence, which is categorically without motivation and insane. A cry of thunder and blood. Redemption and purgation. And firepower, always firepower.

And testosterone.