Real-life horrors change views on terror in movies

NEW YORK -- The World Trade Center toppling in "Deep Impact." Terrorists taking over an office building in "Die Hard." The White House and Empire State Building blowing up in "Independence Day."

Suddenly, none of it seems so crazy.

Since hijacked jets smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, our whole idea of "imaginary" has been permanently transformed. The manufactured effects of "disaster" movies now look like network news footage. A paranoid thriller such as Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor" -- in which a jumbo jet destroys the U.S. Capitol during a joint meeting of Congress -- resembles a mere variation of current events.

"It's the role of artists to presume what hasn't yet happened," says Edward Zwick, who directed "The Siege," a 1998 release about the government invoking martial law in New York after a terrorist campaign runs rampant.

"There is a rueful feeling at having been told at the time of 'The Siege' that what we showed was implausible. Had we tried to show what just happened it would have been considered even more implausible."

Life and art

Art and real life have long engaged in a kind of marathon, overtaking each other and occasionally running side by side. The artist's quest to stay ahead is constantly challenged by the ever accelerating plots within history.

With nothing in their own lives to compare the bombings to, many people inevitably looked to the arts and popular culture. References were made to everything from Dante's "The Inferno" to "Independence Day."

Among the various cancellations and postponements this week, Fox pulled a planned broadcast of "Independence Day," long dismissed as among the most mindless of blockbusters.

The space race of the 1960s turned any number of old science fiction novels into pseudo-historical documents. And Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," published in 1952, seemed to anticipate both the civil rights movement and the rise of black nationalism.

The Monica Lewinsky affair changed the 1998 film "Wag the Dog," in which the president fabricates war with Albania to divert attention from a sex scandal, from satire to prophecy. When President Clinton ordered missile attacks against Afghanistan and the Sudan three days after confessing to his relationship with the White House intern, some critics referred to it as a "Wag the Dog" ploy.

Catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust, change how we experience and even interpret art. Franz Kafka's "The Trial," unfinished at the time of the author's death in 1924, ends with Joseph K. succumbing to his punishment for an undetermined crime. When Orson Welles made a film version, in the 1960s, the character fights back.

"I don't think Kafka could have stood for that (a passive surrender) after the death of 6 million Jews," Welles later explained, saying he considered K. to be Jewish.