Content area
Full Text
In 2010, I wrote of World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006) that "the difficulty for Hollywood filmmakers in representing the World Trade Center catastrophe is that the notion of a consensus of memory of 9/11 seems to render the image beyond the conventional modes of representation."1 How does Stone, I asked, "make a movie of a day that already played out like a movie?"2 What he achieves is to variously employ the generic tropes of the Hollywood disaster movie to enable a traumatic event to be represented with some notion of resolution. Stephen Keane asserts, "Whether human or environmental, alien or accidental, most of all disaster movies provide for solutions in the form of a representative group of characters making their way towards survival."3 The pleasures for the audience of the disaster genre are, then, within the spectacle and special effects of the catastrophe and the plot line, which sets up a "who will survive" mystery. The form and rhythm of World Trade Center adopt characteristics of the 1970s disaster movie, providing a familiar and nostalgic hook for its audience so that, strangely, World Trade Center will seem like a feel-good movie no matter what played out in real life. In his discussion of 1970s disaster movies (e.g., Towering Inferno) [John Guillemin, 1972], The Poseidon Adventure [Ronald Neame, 1972], Earthquake [Mark Robson, 1974]), Nick Roddick notes their generic traits: the disaster must be "diegetically central," "factually possible," "largely indiscriminate," "unexpected (although not necessarily unpredictable," "all encompassing," and "people must believe it could-very well might[-]happen to them."4 In the post-9/11 environment Roddick's list becomes an ironic description and a chilling list of the events in New York City. For the filmmaker the scene is already set; 9/11 is already a disaster movie, waiting to be made.
In this essay I discuss Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015) and its repetition of destroyed city imagery as what James N. Gilmore calls an "aesthetic of wreckage."5 He suggests that in post-9/11 superhero films the repeated image of urban destruction signifies that "something has changed: the city is no longer a site to be saved but rather to be sacrificed; 9/11 imagery is no longer prevented . . . it is permitted."6 Such permission, I argue, is...