The Avengers

The Avengers, which has had the biggest US opening in history, climaxes with towers crumbling and mayhem in Manhattan. Squeamishness, it seems, is shortlived in Hollywood.

Mad terror in the streets as flying whatsits and killer robots from outer space ricochet off and, more often, crash through 70-story skyscrapers. Mighty towers crumble; concrete chunks spray from the screen. Total Sensurround: the theatre itself shakes as the non-stop cosmic battle-cum-pinball game that is The Avengers reaches its climax in a digital midtown Manhattan.

It’s complete mayhem and, reader, I confess that I enjoyed every minute of this ear-splitting, brain-jarring, inordinately protracted cataclysm – even though something similar, if on a far smaller scale, occurred a bit more than 10 years ago, six blocks from my home. On 11 September 2001, planes crashed, buildings collapsed, and debris rained. Some were buried alive, others ran stunned and screaming through New York’s concrete canyons.

My neighbours saw jets flying so low over Church Street it seemed they’d be landing in Battery Park. I was out of town that day and so, like most of the world, watched the World Trade Center fall (again and again) on TV. When I managed to make my way back home two nights later, passing through a series of checkpoints, escorted at times by national guardsmen, I found that my neighbourhood shopping street dead-ended in the colossal pile of rubble dubbed Ground Zero. Chris Evans as Captain America in The Avengers Chris Evans as Captain America in The Avengers. Photograph: Zade Rosenthal /Marvel

You may remember Hollywood’s initial response to that trauma. In the year of our Kubrick 2001, all those disaster movies had finally come home to roost and the industry imagined itself implicated. Only days after the Event, the studios reported an FBI warning that they could be Bin Laden’s next target; on 21 September, a rumour swept Los Angeles that they were! Releases were delayed, movies re-edited, projects cancelled. There were solemn promises that motion pictures would henceforth be a "kinder, gentler" form of entertainment.

Audiences, though, were not buying it. A few people felt chastened, but many, many more yearned for vicarious payback. The Washington Post reported that "heroic combat movies" such as Rambo were "flying off Blockbuster shelves". By early October, when US and British forces launched "Operation Enduring Freedom" to invade Afghanistan, the studios prepared to unleash whatever military films were on their shelves. For the first six months of 2002, US box-office charts were topped by one war movie after another, including Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers and The Sum of All Fears.

Not since the mid-1980s Reagan-era flurry of Vietnam movies had the combat film been so viable or so visible. How lucky for Hollywood that the success of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan had inspired so many successors, including, once the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the media drama known as "Saving Jessica Lynch". The invasion of Iraq was one sort of displacement; the movies were another. As demonstrated by the sound and fury of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the Events of 9/11 were to be avenged but not relived. Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds, which made effective use of the new template for urban disaster, was reviled by pundits for "exploiting" 9/11 as entertainment. Still, recasting the Events as Martian invasion was far more appealing to audiences than the straightforward cinematic representations of 9/11 that, a year later, marked the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

No one was looking forward to the Paul Greengrass docudrama United 93, set inside the fourth hijacked plane that crashed in rural Pennsylvania en route to the White House. Even the trailer was problematic, in one case prompting the audience in a Manhattan theatre to mimic the movie’s narrative arc by spontaneously banding together to storm the projection booth and stop the film.

United 93 took only $31 million in the US and barely qualified as one of the year’s 100 top-grossing movies. Opening a few months later, Oliver Stone’s monumentally hyped World Trade Center failed to get a single Oscar nomination and grossed a relatively modest $70 million. Released in early 2008, Matt Reeves’s low-budget Cloverfield (cleverly rated PG-13 for "violence, terror, disturbing images, and sublimated 9/11 fears") made more money than both combined. Cloverfield was even more blatant than War of the Worlds in appropriating 9/11 as the basis for a deliberately cheesy horror film.

New York critics were not entertained by Cloverfield – in part, because Reeves’s use of amateur technology struck some as too real. Nor did local reviewers show much enthusiasm for the designated 9/11 tenth anniversary commemoration, the lachrymose Extremely Loud and Unbearably Close – apart from the pleasure some fellow members of the New York Film Critics Circle took in learning the movie would be previewed too late to qualify for our voting. (Audiences did not reward it either. Domestic grosses were $46 million.)

That autumn, I found less direct and hence more evocative 9/11 imagery in Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s "ultra-realistic" account of a worldwide epidemic (coincidentally, the top US box office attraction during anniversary week) and the shot in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia where a rogue planet smashes into the earth at the same velocity as a jet hitting the World Trade Center. But, I admit, I was primed to find 9/11 in The Avengers.

After the movie was previewed in Paris, and before it was shown in New York, a journalist from Le Monde emailed me for a comment on the giddy, unrepentant delight this 3D superproduction took in pulverising Manhattan. I don’t think I would have missed the reference, yet, with regard to the grand finale, even local reviewers were far more apt to cite the example of The Transformers than 9/11. (In fact, to my knowledge, none of them did.) The French journalist was reminded of 80s movies in which the US got to refight and win the Vietnam war. Was it the death of Bin Laden, he wondered, that freed Hollywood "to destroy Manhattan again for fun"?

The preview I attended was held 48 hours before the well-marked first anniversary of the day Obama took out Osama, but I don’t believe the elimination of the mega criminal behind the events of 9/11 is the key to the film’s imaginative re-enactment. It’s a bit late in the day to cite the Walter Benjamin bromide that human "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure", but it is true that, as America looked forward to ridding itself of George W Bush, Cloverfield successfully integrated 9/11 into Hollywood’s spectacular regime.

The Avengers, which last week enjoyed the biggest North American opening in history, recasts 9/11 in the Bush years’ dominant movie mode, namely the comic book superhero spectacular – albeit with a heavy dose of irony and added stereoscopic depth. But more fundamentally, The Avengers demonstrates how completely 9/11 has been superseded by another catastrophe, namely the financial meltdown of September 2008. To the extent that the movie has any sort of social content (or any content), it offers a flattering view of America’s best as a group of eccentric individualists bamboozled into saving the world (economy) by the unflappable Samuel L Jackson’s black dude of mystery. But even this Obama-iste reading is a bit of a stretch.

The medium is the message. Hollywood felt threatened by 9/11 in 2001 but impervious to financial disaster in 2008. Three days after Lehman Brothers went bust, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg assured investors that movies were "recession-proof". Of course, the industry did not allow for the simultaneous erosion of the DVD market and the public’s discretionary income. The Avengers has less to do with the terror of falling buildings than falling grosses. The palliative for that goes by the name 3D. Bombs away: The Avengers is 9/11 as you’ve never seen it!