By Gwen C. Katz
Inexorably, nostalgia grinds on, ingesting and crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable, homogeneous slurry. The ironclad law stating everyone in their 30s must get obsessed with resurrecting childhood media assures no decade can escape. But as said threshold creeps through the 80s and 90s and draws unavoidably closer to the 2000s, remembering the era fondly is requiring more and more ludicrous amounts of cognitive dissonance. Rife with war, fearmongering, and recession, and the 2000s were not a fun decade to live through, especially as a teenager.
Nostalgia culture’s defenders assert that we can just jettison the bad stuff. Forget the politics, wars, recession, and so on and just enjoy the Nu-Metal and clear plastic electronics. But is that really possible? Can you simply excise popular culture from the context in which it was created? I submit that you cannot, and while that’s true for every era, the politics of the post-9/11 era invaded our everyday lives so pervasively as to make it a particularly futile exercise in sophistry when you’re talking about the 2000s.
It is impossible to overstate how completely 9/11 dominated the American popular consciousness in the 2000s. COVID is the only subsequent event that has had the same impact, but while COVID has been diligently written out of the cultural record by movies, TV, and music, 9/11 was everywhere. Bands sprinted to the studio to record tribute songs in genres ranging from country to punk rock. Disney aired spots where Whoopi Goldberg and Hillary Duff held candles and flags. It was impossible to go online without seeing a picture of a bald eagle shedding a single tear.
While these examples have mostly been forgotten today, the influence of the attack was not limited to the immediate flash-in-the-pan responses. All media of the 2000s was made in light of 9/11, the Bush administration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their many repercussions. Let’s look at some examples.
One of the most highly-rated TV shows of the 2000s was 24, which premiered two months after 9/11 and ran for a tidy 9 seasons, from 2001-2010. In keeping with the trends of the era, it was presented as a gritty, realistic espionage show, as opposed to the fantastical James Bond-style spy stories of the 90s.
By “gritty and realistic,” I mean “there was a lot of torture.”
Jack Bauer interrogates suspects—who are typically handcuffed to a chair and helpless—by electrocuting them, suffocating them, shooting them, injecting them with pain-inducing drugs, and threatening to stab out their eyes and murder their families. (Here’s a typical one from Season 5, which received 100% positive critical reviews.) And it works. He always gets a confession, the suspects are always guilty, the intelligence is always correct, and he always stops the terrorist plot in the nick of time.
Antiheroes who do bad things are a television staple. But Jack Bauer was not written as an antihero. In the post-9/11 era, the image of a tough American white man brutalizing a terrorist was a potent power fantasy for Americans hellbent on revenge. In Season 7, testifying before Congress, he openly admits that he has committed acts of torture that violate the Geneva Conventions, but insists that he did what needed to be done to save American lives. The scene presents him as a brave, resolute man of action and Congress as paper-pushing bureaucrats who endanger everyone by getting in his way.
24 existed as an important lynchpin in a vast media ecosystem designed to valorize US military and intelligence counterterrorism operations and, especially, to promote the narrative that it’s morally correct to use whatever methods are necessary to stop terrorists—especially torture. And indeed, between 2001 and 2009, American public opinion about torture shifted drastically, from majority opposed to about even. It is, of course, impossible to determine how much of that shift was caused by 24, but that is precisely my point—it is impossible to extricate the TV show from the political landscape.
The military and the media acted as a feedback loop. The military committed human rights abuses, which caused the sycophantic media to defend those abuses, which caused the military to commit more of them. When the Guantanamo Bay story broke, soldiers claimed they’d seen the acts on 24.
By 2007, the Bush regime was coming apart at the seams. Support for the Iraq war had steadily eroded, and Bush’s troop surge that year was overwhelmingly unpopular. Two juggernaut film franchises also launched in the twilight years of the Bush administration: Transformers in 2007 and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008.
Both franchises received heavy assistance from the US military. The military provided access to planes, tanks, and other equipment, and in return, the studios allowed the Pentagon to vet their scripts. Philip Strub, director of entertainment media at the DOD, explains in the linked Guardian article that propaganda was the explicit purpose of this relationship: “Our desire is that the military are portrayed as good people trying to do the right thing the right way.”
The Pentagon’s influence on these franchises was (and is) far-reaching. They provided lists of military equipment that they wanted the films to showcase, which are often mentioned by name in the films. The rise of the PG-13 blockbuster, which dominated the box office in the 2000s, accompanied an incredibly aggressive military recruitment campaign working to fix a personnel crisis that deepened as the Iraq war lost popularity. For teens in the 2000s, recruiters hanging around high schools and aggressively courting teenagers with promises of signing bonuses and free college was a ubiquitous experience. Getting teen butts into seats at these military propaganda films was another important tool in their toolbox.
Using Iron Man to launch the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a curious decision. In the comics, he was a C-lister at best. But for the Pentagon, it was a perfect choice. Tony Stark is a military contractor. The film depicts the US military in action in Afghanistan and features extended sequences of Tony Stark fighting terrorists. “Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain and I personally guarantee, the bad guys won’t even want to come out of their caves,” he says in a scene tailor-made to make military action look cool. Incidentally, this was the year when the military contractor Blackwater caused a major scandal by killing a bunch of Iraqi civilians.
Some may object that Tony Stark swears off making weapons later in the film, but this is the barest of fig leaves. He spends the rest of the franchise making weapons. His entire super power is making weapons. He doesn’t want to stop making weapons—he just wants the good guys to have them (it’s us, the good guys are us). As we are repeatedly shown, in the hands of the right people, weapons work—Tony Stark literally drops into an Afghan village and uses his advanced weaponry to take out precisely all of the terrorists and precisely none of the civilians, fixing everything (we presume; the village never appears again). Tony Stark echoes Jack Bauer as a tough American doing what needs to be done to stop the terrorists and keep America safe.
Another extremely popular show during the 2000s was CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. First airing in 2000, it ran 16 seasons and spawned four spin-offs. While police procedurals were already popular, CSI cast police investigations in a scientific light. Its investigators use science fiction-like technology and techniques to recover DNA and reconstruct photos from the tiniest traces. Like 24, the investigators on CSI never err and always get the perp. And it, too, has had a major impact on culture, leading juries to place a high amount of trust in police evidence that in reality is biased and unreliable.
While modern America is beginning to recognize the role of procedurals as copaganda that helps whitewash the reputation of police departments. In the 2000s, positive perceptions of police in America hit their peak. Police, along with firefighters, were valorized as heroes of 9/11. The decade’s widespread fear created fertile ground for the modern surveillance state to germinate under the Patriot Act. Shows like CSI helped reinforce the perception of police departments as dedicated public servants and sent the message that law enforcement needs CCTVs and DNA databases because that’s how you catch bad guys.
While detectives like Miss Marple mostly investigated cases in their own social strata, CSI’s investigators often delved into subcultures of various obscurities: Furries, dwarves, vampires, Buddhist monks, and so on. These episodes, with their distinct tone of gawking-at-the-weirdos, fit into the same trend as the generic Middle Eastern terrorists of 24 and Iron Man: A pushback against diversity and towards othering.
Diversity was a major topic in the 90s. TV shows like Captain Planet featured international casts and a why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along ethos. While the 90s approach had plenty of flaws, it stands in sharp contrast to the 2000s. The pushback against diversity was already starting to gain steam at the beginning of the decade, but the paranoia of the post-9/11 era pushed it into high gear. The idea that people of different races and nationalities are just like us and could be friends gave way to the view that anyone unfamiliar was weird and probably dangerous, and that what we really needed was a strong, reassuring white man to keep us safe.
No franchise demonstrates this better than Star Trek. While the Trek shows of the 90s expanded the franchise’s diversity, putting a Black man and a white woman in command, Star Trek: Enterprise walked it back and put a white man back in the captain’s chair. Jonathan Archer, with his laid-back attitude, pet dog, and lack of basic understanding of the other cultures he interacts with, is a distinctly Bush-era captain. The drawling good ol’ boy chief engineer, Trip Tucker, also evokes Bush.
Star Trek: Enterprise was in production before 9/11 (it debuted just two weeks afterwards), but in its wake, it doubled down hard. In the Season 2 finale, a space probe launches a destructive surprise attack on Earth in a clear callback to 9/11. (The probe’s choice of target—Florida—has since made the scene unintentionally funny.) In response, a troop of Marines is stationed on the Enterprise. “I can’t wait to get in there, Captain, and find the people who did this,” says Trip, “And tell me we won’t be tiptoeing around.” Archer responds, “We’ll do what we have to, Trip. Whatever it takes.”
If TV and movies were steeped in the influence of 9/11, things like fashion and consumer electronics may seem like safe targets for nostalgia. But, setting aside the question of whether we really need to bring back velour tracksuits with “JUICY” printed on the butt, consumption was just as deeply entwined with politics as media. One of the Bush administration’s greatest fears following 9/11 had nothing to do with death tolls, war, or future attacks—it was the fear that Americans might stop spending money.
To head this off, there was an aggressive push for consumerism. In remarks made soon after 9/11, Bush urged people to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and Dick Cheney told them to “stick their thumb in the eye of the terrorists…and not let what’s happened here in any way throw off their normal level of economic activity.” These remarks blindsided an American people who were ready to tighten their belts and plant victory gardens. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich opined that “spending seems like an odd way to demonstrate patriotism.”
Corporations responded by inundating the public with patriotic advertising designed to send the message that buying their product was your patriotic duty. (I, a disaffected 14-year-old, kept a collection of the most egregious examples, which I have since lost, much to the dismay of archivists, I’m sure.) GM promised to “keep America rolling.” The Super Bowl redesigned its logo. Flag-branded products flooded the market, including prom dresses, sneakers, and tweezers (“Tweeze with Pride! God Bless the USA!”). Does putting a babe in a red, white, and blue sexy Santa outfit on the cover of a holiday gift guide somehow fight the terrorists? Apparently!
The messaging worked. Americans spent. But as the two wars dragged on, this only created a glaring disconnect between the suffering and death happening overseas and the cars, clothes, and tech gadgets on parade at home. In 2008, a lieutenant colonel in Baghdad expressed his frustration: “We’re at war, America’s at the mall.”
Immediately after 9/11, the current of aggressive patriotism met with surprisingly little pushback. Nearly the entire country fell into lockstep unity in the weeks after 9/11. Bush’s approval rating spiked to 90%, and 80% of Americans displayed an American flag. The Star-Spangled Banner hit the Billboard Top 10. The media’s eagerness to give the Bush administration a messy blowjob devolved into unintentional self-parody, such as People Magazine naming then-70-year-old Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “Sexiest Cabinet Member” in 2002.
This patriotic sentiment was spontaneous, but it was also aggressively enforced through both peer pressure and top-down authority. After 9/11, politically incendiary songs were banned from many radio stations, including Rage Against the Machine’s entire catalog. When Natalie Maines, lead singer for the Dixie Chicks—one of the most popular country bands at the time—made a comment about being ashamed of the President in the leadup to the Iraq War, they were blacklisted from the industry for more than a decade.
But Bush’s subsequent power grab quickly burned through this goodwill, and as it became clear that the Iraq War had been started under false pretenses and that it was going to be a quagmire, a vocal and growing counterculture began striking back against the narrative of patriotic war. By the mid-2000s, this view was mainstream enough that in 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Padme Amidala could say “So this is how liberty dies—to thunderous applause.”
The poster child of this pushback is Green Day’s 2004 album, American Idiot, and to a lesser extent, its 2009 followup, 21st Century Breakdown. Both are squarely aimed at Bush’s patriotic jingoism; the paint running off the American flag references the common bumper-sticker slogan “These Colors Never Run.”
But if American Idiot represents the better side of 2000s culture, the landscape is dire indeed. The countercultures of the 60s and 70s were dynamic and politically engaged. That of American Idiot is cynical and stultifying. While it snidely critiques the powers that be, it neither takes nor inspires any actual action, and offers no alternative beyond wearing a lot of eyeshadow and sulking. (Pop-punk’s successors eschewed the political message to focus entirely on eyeshadow and sulking. Yes, I’m saying that 9/11 is responsible for emo.) Coming into political awareness just in time for Bush v. Gore to inform us that our vote, in fact, didn’t count, the youth culture of the 2000s had a nihilistic ethos of learned helplessness. Empowered youth culture would not return until the Obama campaign and “Yes We Can.”
The takeaway here is not just “everything has a dark side,” although that’s indubitably true. Rather the point is that culture and politics are inextricably interlinked in a two-way web of influence, and while that’s true in every era, in the wake of an event as momentous as 9/11, this influence both kicked into high gear and manifested in particularly nasty ways. Jingoistic patriotism. Xenophobia and othering. Crass consumerism. Cynical nihilism.
But hey, at least we had clear plastic electronics.
Gwen C. Katz is the lead developer and wolfmaster of Nightwell Games, as well as an author, artist, and former mad scientist. She lives in Pasadena, California with her husband and a revolving door of transient animals. Her upcoming game, Surradia, is a deduction game that unravels the disappearance of three magical artists in interbellum France. You can visit her game studio at nightwellgames.com.