2002: A SINGLE SHARD by Linda Sue Park
“Eh, Tree-ear! Have you hungered well today?”
“TV on the Radio remain a true Event Band, and the sign o’ the times they capture here isn’t audacious hope, or fierce revolution: It’s confusion. They’re the house band for a country that has no idea what’ll hit it next, and Dear Science is a jagged landscape of self-doubt, Bush-hate, and future-fear. And once in a while, you still get some of their optimism.”
-from Pitchfork’s original 2008 review of Dear Science (it got a well-deserved 9.2)
I guess there's nothing really wrong with 2002 medalist A Single Shard, the tale of a young boy in 12th-century Korea trying to apprentice himself to a renowned celadon potter. The book isn't for me, though; the story moves fast enough, but I don't really care about any of the characters or whether they're going to make it as potters. Sitting at the dinner table with my wife and expressing my frustration that I had absolutely no topic to write about for this book, she asked me “well, what was happening in the world when the book got the medal?” And I immediately, instinctively replied “well, of course, it was the year that America learned to laugh again,” because my brain is broken. That's how I always refer to the year 2002, of course. My comedy partner I and would always refer to 2002 by that name on our podcast as well. And it's because we were all collectively recovering from an event that I like to think of as “the 9/11 of pop culture”. I'm referring, of course, to 9/11.
I'm sorry that I like joking about 9/11, an event that is objectively not funny at all because 3,000 people died. But as we entered a global pandemic in 2020 and “a whole-ass 9/11's worth” of Americans started dying every day as our government begged us to just kind of try and ignore it, the idea of 3,000 people dying only once and having an outsized effect on the following two decades of American governance began to seem adorable.
When 9/11 happened, I was starting my freshman year of high school. Obviously, the attacks represented a key pivot point in American empire and the expansion of the internal state security apparatus, the reverberations of which are still felt, every day, in 2024, in our politics and our travel and our tax dollars and the structure of our government. But the impact on pop culture remains endlessly fascinating to me, and not just because we got at least one extremely good pop-punk band as a direct result of the attacks. The podcast my friend and I hosted was about comedy that had aged poorly, which made it easy to find subjects for discussion, as comedy is the narrative art form that ages the fastest and is most pegged to its specific time. But the comedy in the decade, or even the five years after 9/11, was a truly incoherent mishmash of Americans trying anything and everything to make ourselves laugh, as we had no idea what was funny anymore. Examples from this era that my friend and I watched include the Steve Martin/Queen Latifa racial slapstick comedy of manners Bringing Down The House (massive hit), the Dreamworks animated racial slapstic comedy of manners Shark Tale (massive hit, Oscar nominee), the overly rapey comedy Wedding Crashers (massive hit), the overly scatological and overly rapey National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (flopped but launched the film careers of both Ryan Reynolds and Kal Penn), the movie Bruce Almighty where Jim Carrey becomes God (still the highest-grossing Carrey vehicle of all time), the animated physical comedy of Dane Cook’s Harmful If Swallowed, Retaliation, and Vicious Circle albums (sold out stadiums across the country), and the Jeff Dunham comedy special where Jeff Dunham has a ventriloquist dummy that’s the skeleton of a dead suicide bomber (to this day still the Guiness World Record holder for the highest-selling comedy tour of all time).
But none of those are really about 9/11, they were cultural ripple effects from the general unmooring of our social psyches due to the attacks. It turns out that we've also made a lot of movies directly about 9/11 as well. Back in 2016, Chapo Trap House's Felix Biederman wrote a piece for Current Affairs detailing the funhouse reflections of our emotional responses to the attacks as seen in three very different films: Reign O'er Me (the one where Adam Sandler plays a screaming intellectually disabled man whose family died in the attacks), Zero Dark Thirty (the one where torture is good), and United 93 (the strongest of the three, in Biederman's opinion, although part of his review is just relief, considering how terrible and overwrought the actually tight and claustrophobic thriller could have been).
“No one likes to talk about their insane mixture of rage, confusion, and fear, the way we felt mortal terror while becoming fully erect at the possibility of bloody revenge. It’s too shameful to admit that we craved some form of domination, both of ourselves and others…The world is smoldering with ruins created as a result of our fear. That fear is the thing we chose to remember least about 9/11. Our films tell us stories about emotional closure, whether it’s Adam Sandler finally getting laid or Jessica Chastain weeping cathartically after we killed the big bad guy. Now, nativism rages in the country we declared “united” 15 years ago, and three civil wars take place in the part of the world we said we would democratize. Films will tell you the story you want to hear, but it helps if you’ve been lying to yourself the whole time, too.”
But, of course, we didn't just culturally process 9/11 by making movies that were literally about 9/11, we also made movies that were allegorically about 9/11, and we also made a lot of movies that were just about scary things happening on planes. Max Read, author of the brilliant newsletter Read Max, dug into the catalog earlier this year to see if Hollywood had made one definitive “9/11 movie” or franchise of movies, on a scale or with any comparable cultural impact to the Japanese film industry making Godzilla, a film franchise - they're still making movies! Like, pretty good movies! - that was ultimately a cultural processing of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a two-part essay, and the whole thing is worth reading, but here are Read's six classifications of potential 9/11 film:
“I propose that there are at least six categories of movies that could feasibly be described such:
Movies that are specifically about 9/11 or its immediate aftermath
Movies that are “about 9/11” to the extent that they are about “the Global War on Terror,” literally or metaphorically, including the following subcategories:
Movies that are about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Movies that are about the C.I.A.
…where the C.I.A. is good
…where the C.I.A. is bad
Movies that are about vague American misadventures in the Middle East
Movies that are about new regimes of policing, surveillance, and security
Movies that use alien invasion or possibly supernatural destructive force as a 9/11 stand-in
Movies that are about 9/11 but process it as mainly being about planes and/or airports
Superhero movies
‘90s movies that are about 9/11, somehow [e.g. Deep Impact or Independence Day are kind of about 9/11]”
Read has solid examples of each one, and is especially complimentary towards the Spielberg adaptation of War Of The Worlds, calling it “one of the most viscerally terrifying depictions of mass catastrophe imaginable, even if it is truly funny watching Tom Cruise do his best to act like a ‘a normal guy’ who ‘has anxiety’ and ‘human feelings’ instead of a Cleared Theta Clear who has complete control over matter, energy, space, and time.” That movie and the first Cloverfield film - which is obviously influenced by Godzilla - are, in Read's estimation, probably the films that get closest to Definitive 9/11 Movie status1 But nobody gets to full Godzilla status: one of Read's proposed theories is that “9/11 was a tragedy of a different category and scale and coming in a vastly different historical (not to mention cultural and commercial) context than Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, so there can't really be a 9/11 movie with the same artistic legacy.
The list of candidates, though, is a great read, because of all of the different ways you can identify and define a “9/11 Film”. So what happens with the 9/11 books? A Single Shard was in the can before the attacks, so obviously there's no expectation that it was going to address 9/11 either literally or allegorically. But we've read so many books that have introduced children to horrifying historical events or challenging issues, both directly and indirectly, and the magnitude of 9/11's influence on all aspects of American culture could not be ignored. In the twenty-some years since the towers fell, how many of the Newbery medalists were “9/11 books?”
Zero?!?!?!? The answer is zero? Are you kidding me?
This is a bumper that ran on the Disney channel after 9/11 where the stars of various Disney properties explained how patriotic they were feeling after 9/11, and how inspiring it was to see our country come together and how they expressed themselves in response:
Look, it’s a lie, and it’s a lie meant to comfort children, and I get it. The things we united on the quickest after 9/11 were “invading the Middle East” and “letting the government spy on us so they could also spy on brown people” and in some parts of the country “beating up any brown people we saw”. We were scared and confused and grieving and angry. But this is the Disney channel, and everyone can use a little distraction, so I get it. But if there was anywhere I was expecting to find a mature, thoughtful, complex processing of 9/11 for children, it was the roster of Newbery medalists. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, we got medieval Korean bildungsroman (which was more just a case of poor timing), followed by medieval Europe bildungsroman, followed by a stupid book about a talking mouse, followed by a Japanese immigrant family and an errant bear trap, followed by the book where nothing happens. No medalist has covered it yet, and it’s a gaping hole in the Newbery canon. The great children’s 9/11 novel is still out there waiting to be written, as I continue to deepen my knowledge of celadon pottery.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1998 medalist, Out Of The Dust by Karen Hesse.
Interestingly, there is also an easy reading of the second Cloverfield film, 10 Cloverfield Lane, as a COVID movie that came out four years before COVID. Even if you couldn't see that coming - as nobody who saw the movie in 2016 could - the movie still rules and is easily the strongest of the series so far.