CULTURE OF DENIAL

JUST days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a column ran in these pages saying how pop culture would be transformed by the carnage at the World Trade Center. “The terrorist attacks may have brought to a close a decade of enormous frivolity and escapism,” observed the writer. “Maybe Hollywood will recognize that Americans suddenly view the world as a more serious place. There’s a new moral gravity out there.”

That, alas, was me, blissfully unaware that it would take more than a horrific catastrophe to quench our thirst for the madcap antics of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Star Jones Reynolds, Jessica Simpson and all the other bobble heads bouncing around our celebrity universe. When it comes to frivolity, escapism and a lack of moral gravity, we haven’t lost a step, have we?

When supposed JonBenet Ramsey suspect John Mark Karr flew back from Thailand recently, the media were on the plane, breathlessly monitoring his consumption of king prawns and champagne during the flight. After months of frenzied Internet conspiracy theories about their daughter’s whereabouts, Tom and Katie are on the cover of Vanity Fair, cuddling baby Suri. In fact, when I made a sweep of my local newsstand the other day, the fan-rags were filled pretty much with the same sex ‘n’ suds sensationalism as in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Five years ago, the stories were about Julia Roberts reportedly romancing a married cameraman on the set of “Ocean’s Eleven,” Kate Winslet breaking up with her hubby (“Marriage Overboard!”) and “American Pie 2” starlet Natasha Lyonne going on a booze binge the night she was busted for drunk driving.

The faces are different today, but the exclamation points are the same. FHM has a scantily clad Janet Jackson on its cover, boasting “I’ve never worn so little!” US Weekly has a photo of a frumpy Jessica Simpson, with the tagline: “Dumped! Jessica’s First Post-Nick Romance Backfires.” And In Touch questions: “Angelina Looks Pregnant Again: Will Another Child Solve Her Problems With Brad?”

Is it any wonder so many of us put on our wishful thinking caps, hoping that all this fascination with glitz -- and the trashiness behind the glitz -- would mercifully evaporate? But the truth is that the trauma of Sept. 11 did not change us, not so much because we live in a culture of superficiality as because we are imprisoned in a culture of hyperactivity. We’re so inundated by juicy bites of information -- both serious and tawdry -- that we don’t have the psychic attention span to emotionally involve ourselves in much of anything. What we’re really good at is denial.

IN this atmosphere it’s hardly surprising that Sept. 11 has the sound of distant thunder, treated with great solemnity but rarely given a thought in our daily lives. There has been a small cluster of admirable films and TV shows that responded to the terrorist massacre. But the closer their stories have been linked to the actual events, the more cautious and respectful -- and dramatically timid -- they have been. Even a filmmaker like Oliver Stone, who has made a career out of torching all sorts of sacred cows, was defanged in “World Trade Center.”

The events of Sept. 11 have been anointed in heroic balm, its victims sanctified either for their ordinariness (as in “United 93”) or for their stouthearted stoicism, as in “World Trade Center.” The subject is still too sensitive for artists to have any dramatic free rein -- we’ve had authenticity, but precious little poetry. The rest of our culture is awash in irony, sarcasm and the self-flagellation of reality TV, but the respect for the Sept. 11 dead prevents artists from exploring the blindness, delusion and foolish human behavior that make for great drama.

If Ray Nagin was raked over the coals by “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, who billowed with sanctimonious outrage, trying to beat an apology out of the New Orleans mayor after he called ground zero a “hole in the ground,” imagine what would happen to a filmmaker who dared to offer a less-than-heroic cast to the characters involved in the tragedy. (Writers apparently are allowed more leeway than public officials, which is why Nagin was called on the carpet while Ann Coulter got away with sneering at the Sept. 11 widows in one of her books, calling them “self-obsessed” publicity seekers, adding, “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”)

If movie history tells us anything, the first great Sept. 11 movie will seemingly have little to do with Sept. 11. By the laws of artistic physics, the more distance you put between your movie and an actual event, the more dramatic freedom you have.

The great 1970s movies inspired by Watergate and Vietnam -- and the paranoia and loss of trust in government those events inspired -- were films like “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor,” projects rooted in the crime and thriller genre that, on the surface, had scarcely any political references.

Accordingly, the projects that seemed to have the most to say about Sept. 11’s impact on our culture have been thrillers, namely the TV hit “24” and Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.”

“That movie offered a really stark glimpse of a society, not unlike ours, that had completely broken down,” says film historian David Thomson. “There were passages in the film that really made you feel the hopelessness -- whether it came from terrorists or from a horrible hurricane like Katrina. ‘24’ is certainly a post-Sept. 11 TV show. Here is this popular TV program that introduced the idea of torturing people to get information before we even knew what was going on in our own internment camps.”

Many observers viewed this year’s “V for Vendetta” as an allegory about our war against terrorism, with liberals applauding and conservatives jeering its portrayal of a terrorist hero dynamiting Britain’s Parliament. But even that film was carefully set in the future to escape being labeled a direct attack on what many believe are the Big Brother-like anti-terrorist tactics of the Bush administration.

Trying to see shades of Sept. 11 in our fragmented pop culture is something of a fool’s errand. By and large, pop culture is not shaped by big one-time events so much as by more intimate occurrences, just as many of the best socially conscious songs -- starting with Bob Dylan’s work in the ‘60s -- have been inspired by personal stories, not sweeping events.

You could also argue that historic events today don’t pack the wallop they once did, since they are so quickly chewed over and transformed into cheesy cliche by our voracious media machine.

The world of new technology, which in many ways is the most strikingly different part of our post-Sept. 11 universe, has made us so over-connected that we have trouble processing real, traumatic tragedy. It quickly becomes so over-analyzed that it loses its potency by losing its singularity.

I spend a lot of time around showbiz executives who, through their Blackberries, iPods and other electronic devices, are totally plugged into the world. But they are so distracted they often appear cut off from any real engagement with today’s culture. This fragmentation is just a fact of life in our world, which has so many hundreds of niche channels and radio formats that we rarely get to share a common reaction to a cultural event.

“There are so many different venues for entertainment that you don’t have to be exposed to any serious thoughts if you don’t want to -- there’s no one guy like Walter Cronkite to watch,” says writer-director Paul Weitz, whose “American Dreamz” was a cheeky satire about the convergence of politics, terrorism and show business. “The sheer proliferation of media makes it hard to make judgments or really be engaged in the world. You wonder -- if Watergate happened today, would people really all be irate or would they just be watching some other channel?”

The sad truth is that it takes a tragedy of epic proportions -- like a terrorist attack on our soil -- to dislodge us from our separate byways. In our cultural lives, we are spinning off in a million directions, always preoccupied by a new scandal or Internet sensation, only occasionally drawn together by a hit TV show or a blockbuster film.

Sept. 11 is something we all know, a gloomy icon of fear and dread. But it remains unapproachable, off-limits to artistic daredevilry. So our brash pop culture, as it always does, has moved along, restlessly searching for something exciting and new, something sexy and beautiful, something that will take our breath away without scaring us half to death.

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If you have questions or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The more things change ...

When comparing what ranked at the top of our cultural barometers five years ago and what the nation is drawn to now, one thing becomes clear: The attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t really change the entertainment pursuits of Americans all that much. Although there are two notable exceptions -- Oliver Stone’s tribute film “World Trade Center” and journalist Thomas E. Ricks’ “Fiasco,” a dissection of the war in Iraq -- there is little other indication on bestseller lists, billboard charts, box office tallies or Nielsen ratings that artists and the public who seeks out their work have been shaped by the tragedy.

BOOKS

Aug. 28, 2006

Hardcover fiction

1. “Judge & Jury,” James Patterson and Andrew Gross

2. “Ricochet,” Sandra Brown

3. “Into the Storm,” Suzanne Brockmann

4. “The Messenger,” Daniel Silva

5. “The Ruins,” Scott Smith

Hardcover nonfiction

1. “Marley and Me,” John Grogan

2. “Fiasco,” Thomas E. Ricks

3. “The World Is Flat (Updated and Expanded),” Thomas L. Friedman

4. “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” Nora Ephron

5. “Cesar’s Way,” Cesar Millan and Melissa Jo Peltier

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Sept. 10, 2001

Hardcover fiction

1. “Valhalla Rising,” Clive Cussler

2. “Envy,” Sandra Brown

3. “Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas,” James Patterson

4. “The Smoke Jumper,” Nicholas Evans

5. “Hemlock Bay,” Catherine Coulter

Hardcover nonfiction

1. “The Prayer of Jabez,” Bruce Wilkinson

2. “Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany,” Stephen E. Ambrose

3. “Who Moved My Cheese?” Spencer Johnson

4. “John Adams,” David McCullough

5. “Crossing Over,” John Edward

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MUSIC

Sept. 9, 2006

1. “Danity Kane,” Danity Kane

2. “Idlewild” (soundtrack), OutKast

3. “Back to Basics,” Christina Aguilera

4. “Amar Es Combatir,” Mana

5. “The Cheetah Girls 2” (soundtrack), the

Cheetah Girls

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Sept. 8, 2001

1. “Now,” Maxwell

2. “Project English,” Juvenile

3. “Now 7,” Various Artists

4. “Songs in A Minor,” Alicia Keys

5. “Celebrity,” ’N Sync

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MOVIES

Aug. 25-27, 2006

1. “Invincible”

2. “Talladega Nights”

3. “Little Miss Sunshine”

4. “Beerfest”

5. “World Trade Center”

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Sept. 8-9, 2001

1. “The Musketeer”

2. “Two Can Play That Game”

3. “Jeepers Creepers”

4. “Rock Star”

5. “The Others”

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TV

Aug. 21 -- 27, 2006

1. Emmy Awards, NBC

2. “60 Minutes,” CBS

3. “CSI,” CBS

4. “CSI: Miami,” CBS

5. “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl,” ABC

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Sept. 3-9, 2001

1. “20/20 Wednesday,” ABC

2. “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” (Friday) ABC

3. “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” (Tuesday) ABC

4. “Everybody Loves Raymond,” CBS

5. “Dateline NBC,” (Tuesday) NBC

5. “NFL Sunday Postgame,” Fox

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Sources: Publishers Weekly, Billboard 200, Exhibitor Relations/Los Angeles Times, Nielsen Media Research