Pain and Release in Unexpected Places

A few days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, I happened to watch “Stand by Me,” Rob Reiner’s 1986 film about a group of boyhood friends spending a lazy summer in a small town during the late 1950s. I was surprised by the resonance of the ending, in which the adult narrator reports that one of his pals recently died when he walked into a fast-food restaurant, tried to break up a knife fight between two strangers and instead was stabbed in the neck.

The sad tale of a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to do good and ending up the victim of a maniac wielding a knife, left me far more deeply moved than I was when I first saw the movie 15 years ago. This time I couldn’t help thinking of the passengers on flight 93, ordinary but heroic Americans who lost their lives confronting knife-wielding killers and trying to prevent even worse mayhem. “Stand by Me” has nothing to do with terrorists, airplane hijackings, the World Trade Center or Muslim fundamentalists, and yet it took on new meaning in the days after those tragic events.

At this very moment, everyone in Hollywood is trying to gauge how audience responses to entertainment will change in the aftermath of last month’s assaults. They’re shuffling release schedules, canceling projects, nervously awaiting the public’s verdict on already completed movies. They are right to be perplexed, but I cite the example of “Stand by Me” to suggest that it isn’t going to be easy to anticipate audience sensitivities. Something as world-shaking as a terrorist conflagration sets off complicated, mysterious reverberations; a tragedy on this scale changes everything--and that includes audience reaction to movies--in ways that are profound but completely unpredictable.

Movies have always gained or lost significance as a result of events in the real world. The untimely death of River Phoenix, who played the boy who grew up to be the victim of the knife-wielding assailant in “Stand by Me,” added a poignancy to that movie even before Sept. 11, 2001. After he died of a drug overdose, the celluloid images of him as an innocent, cherubic 12-year-old were instantly and forever altered.

Ordinarily, audience reevaluation of movies is a much slower process that accompanies gradual social change. Resistance to the antiquated racial attitudes of “Gone With the Wind” or other movies of the 1930s didn’t erupt all at once. It took many years for large numbers of people to recoil from the depiction of the scatterbrained slave, Prissy, played by Butterfly McQueen.

To take another example, when I saw the restored version of “Vertigo” a few years ago, audiences hooted in derision when Kim Novak resists the drastic physical make-over that James Stewart proposes to her, and he exclaims in frustration, “Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.” I doubt that anyone laughed at that line when the movie was released in 1958, and you probably couldn’t pinpoint the day or year when people started to snicker. The growing awareness of feminist concerns took many years to crystallize; only then could a large public identify that moment as a hallmark of insensitivity on the part of the character--and the filmmakers as well--even as it reflected the era it was made in.

It’s far less common for a single incident to trigger fundamental changes in how audiences perceive a movie, but the terrorist attacks are unparalleled in our history. Clearly our feelings will not remain quite as raw as they are at this moment, but I suspect this national trauma will dramatically alter how we approach an evening’s entertainment, and the studios understandably feel worried and confused.

I saw the violent urban thriller “Don’t Say a Word” on the night of President Bush’s address to Congress in which he warned of a major new military offensive, and so I was feeling particularly anxious when I went into the movie theater. The movie heightened my anxiety in ways that I found nearly unbearable. I should say that I ordinarily enjoy thrillers, and I’m not as bothered by violence on-screen as some of my critical colleagues.

Nevertheless, “Don’t Say a Word” was too much for me to tolerate at this particular moment of vulnerability--even though it’s a completely apolitical movie. The villains are a vicious gang of jewel thieves, not a cadre of political fanatics. Yet this story of thugs terrorizing, murdering, kidnapping a group of ordinary citizens--in New York City, no less--still hit too close to home.

Many scenes in the movie take on meanings that the filmmakers couldn’t have imagined a few weeks earlier. When the injured wife (Famke Janssen) strikes back at one of her attackers, her retaliation touches a nerve. Although I certainly understand the impulse that led the audience to applaud that scene, it made me uncomfortable, because it got me thinking about how vigilantism may gain a new and unwholesome legitimacy as the U.S. retaliates against our enemies.

The fact that the object of Janssen’s rage happens to be African American made me even more uncomfortable. A month ago, this casting might have gone unnoticed. Now, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, as we’re reading about hate crimes against Arab Americans, this casting of a minority actor in a role designed to have the audience screaming for blood smacked of disturbing racial insensitivity. Entertainment has suddenly become infinitely more complicated, and to my mind, “Don’t Say a Word” is simply too inflammatory to provide a pleasurable viewing experience.

So what kinds of movies seem inviting right now? Some people will suggest that light comedies are the answer, but even they aren’t automatically free of reverberations. Ed Burns’ “Sidewalks of New York,” a wry dissection of romantic relationships without a political bone in its body, was postponed because the idea of a comic romp set in New York seemed insensitive to release while people were still digging through the city’s rubble. Miramax chose to go ahead with the release of “Serendipity,” a frothy comedy about two lovers trying to find each other in the Big Apple. Yet the notion of blithely jetting off to New York for a romantic weekend, as Kate Beckinsale does midway through the movie, seems almost ghoulish at this particular moment in time.

Comedies are not the only elixir for shell-shocked viewers. Tearjerkers may draw a surprisingly broad audience in the coming months, because men and women alike can be more easily moved to tears by stories that dramatize convincing examples of human nobility or selflessness. I only hope Hollywood doesn’t go overboard with treacly, feel-good movies that coarsen and simplify the emotions we’re all feeling.

There’s another kind of film that may entice audiences--lush period films that transport us to exotic places far removed from our troubled era. Upcoming movies like “The Affair of the Necklace” (set in the court of Louis XVI), “Gosford Park” (a murder-mystery in an English country house during the 1930s), “Charlotte Gray” (a World War II-era romance), or “The Count of Monte Cristo” (based on Alexandre Dumas’ classic tale of revenge) may offer welcome diversion from the apocalyptic horrors we’re confronting.

The first movie I saw after the Kennedy assassination was “Tom Jones,” which became an unexpected hit in late 1963 and early 1964. An English movie based on an 18th century classic novel probably wouldn’t have been first on anyone’s list of likely box office bonanzas, but it served as a delicious tonic at a time of numbing national grief. Not only was it witty and ravishing to watch, but Henry Fielding’s perfectly plotted tale provided the pleasing sense of order and coherence that we craved while the world seemed to be spinning into chaos.

Lushly mounted historical films need not be mindless. “Tom Jones” underscored the inequities in English society, but in a way that wasn’t overly threatening or disturbing to viewers in 1963. That might be a good model to bear in mind today.

Audiences still want to be provoked and moved by the stories that are presented on-screen, but creative filmmakers are going to have to find a subtler language to address our concerns during this time of unspeakable tragedy and terror. *