Did 9/11 make us better people?
If you want to feel old, just consider this: we’re officially now closer to 2040 than we are to 2001. Edging, as we are, towards the 20th anniversary of 9/11 — a moment that will prompt no shortage of first-hand remembrances and media flashbacks — it is one of those milestones that cannot help but also do this: make soup itself of our own years. For anyone over, let’s say 35, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are the defining global event of our lifetimes. A single day’s events that not only continue to reverberate in umpteen ways two decades later ( just look at the situation in Afghanistan today), but dominated the news in a way that wouldn’t happen again until … well … the recent global pandemic.
“Where you were on 9/11” and “Where were you when you heard” offer echoes of the question that once haunted another generation: “Where Were You When JFK Died?”
Something I have always found as interesting, however (and perhaps this speaks to my inner dramatist), is the question: What was happening in 2001 before that tragic day. The months, weeks and, yes, even the day prior. Before the lights dimmed. Particularly in pop culture.
Looking back, it is amazing to me that so much of 2001 was consumed with headlines circling the biggest divorces in eons: Tom and Nicole (Cruise and Kidman). They broke up earlier that same year, remember? (A saga
eventually ending with Kidman signing off with this pithiest of quips: “Well, I can wear heels now.”) It was the year, too, that Björk wore that gloriously wacko swan dress to the Oscars. The year Britney and Justin (Spears and Timberlake) donned those matching double-denim get-ups to another awards show. (A photo that lives on — and on — and has taken on a crueler meaning now.)
Apple introduced the iPod. Ditto: 2001. Aaliyah died tragically at age 22 in a plane crash in August. Bill Clinton served his final days as president, while Hillary was sworn in as a senator (one chapter in a continuing story that would reap ever more chapters).
As the world inched closer to 9/11, Mariah Carey was on the publicity trail for her car-crash of a film “Glitter,” which would have the mischance of actually being released on 9/11. “Could there be a worse day for that movie to come out?” she said later.
In New York City, on Sept. 10, the paps were very busy, indeed, catching Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor together — the latter having arrived for his 30th Anniversary Celebration show at Madison Square Garden. This image of the two dead icons live on, in part, because of an urban legend that La Liz escaped Manhattan after 9/11, getting into a rental car with both Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando and supposedly driving all the way to Ohio.
Wild, right? It is a story that continues to rev up repeatedly, but is shot down by Tim Mendelson, a close friend and trustee of Taylor’s estate, who was with her that week at Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel. (The real story is actually just as good! Taylor, he told People magazine, spent those days with Debbie Reynolds, whose husband Eddie Fisher, Liz had once stolen in one of the biggest scandals of Hollywood. Reynolds, who was friends with Taylor by then, moved into the St. Regis with her, taking over one of the suites rented out by Taylor!)
Here, in Toronto, the biggest story on Sept. 10 was one that involved Matthew McConaughey, if you recall. McConaughey saving a woman’s life, that is! At the Film Festival! Underway then! When a woman went into a seizure during a screening, McConaughey gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
“It was no big deal, she needed help and I was there,” the star later said.
The news cycle for him was destined to be a short one, though. By the next day — by the time the planes had hit the World Trade Center — all of TIFF had been upended, the hysteria building, people sobbing openly in the lobbies of hotels.
(I remember seeing Ben Kingsley crying at the Four Seasons.)
But that was then. Poring through the September 2021 issue of Vanity Fair, out now, built around the theme of the fin de siècle, 20 years ago, I was struck by one article in particular that zeroes in on the culture of restaurants at that turn of the millennium — and one restaurant that represented the zenith of New York City nightlife then. Moomba. Ring a bell? Laurence Fishburne and Oliver Stone were investors. The Hilton sisters seemed to come with the place.
In 1998, Leonardo DiCaprio — in the blinding glare of intense “Titanic” fame — visited four times in a single week. “Dark, crowded, loud, and uncomfortable”: how ex-Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl remembered it.
“Splashy restaurants open, most of them close, people move on. Yet Moomba provides a window into a weird and weirdly influential era in New York dining,” we are told. Fascinatingly, Moomba shut down mere months before 9/11, almost a harbinger of doom itself. And as one observer tells Vanity Fair now, “From one day to the next, the whole thing looked gauche.”
That is how it felt — in those days and months that followed 9/11. The world had changed.
The superficial was out. Until it was not, of course. The aughts would, after all, also be the same decade to usher in the birth of TMZ, the heyday of gossip blogger Perez Hilton, and the explosion of reality TV, people feeding on a steady tabloid diet of starlets including Britney and Jessica (Simpson) and Lindsay (Lohan).
If there is anything that human beings are good at it, after all, it is marvellous mass amnesia. It’s been something I have reflected on a lot recently, especially when hearing some of the more earnest declarations that this pandemic is changing humankind in some fundamental way. LOL. That people will be nicer. Less petty. (People are people, I believe.)
What was life like before 9/11? Turns out, perhaps, it was a lot like life after 9/11.