Culturebox: Disaster Movies

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culturebox Disaster Movies The four brilliant 9/11 films that get overlooked. By Bill Wyman Updated Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011, at 7:25 AM ET From the fall of Troy to the bombing of Hiroshima, the response of artists to tragedy and cataclysm has been wide and varied. In the years since 9/11, we've seen everyone from Bruce Springsteen (The Rising) to Don DeLillo (Falling Man) try to make sense of the senseless in one way or another. As the 10th anniversary looms, the New York Times has published an almost comically long list of 9/11-related arts events. I can't help wondering: Have these last 10 years helped us understand the tragedy any better? One of my former colleagues at NPR, Renee Montagne, explored the idea that we're expecting too much too soon in an interview with Kurt Vonnegut on an earlier 9/11 anniversary. One of Vonnegut's most searching works, Slaughterhouse-Five, was inspired by events nearly a quarter of a century earlier, when he'd witnessed Britain's firebombing of Dresden, a horrific extinguishing of innocent life as well as the physical obliteration of a gem of a city. Vonnegut, stymied by the cognitive dissonance between the bravado of so many books and movies about the war on the one hand and the moral hellscape he'd seen, found he couldn't write about it at the time. It took an offhand remark from a fellow soldier's wife decades later to focus his thinking. "His wife was listening to us, and she blew her top," Vonnegut recalled in the interview. "She said, You were nothing but babies then! That was the key. War is in fact fought by children, not Frank Sinatra and Duke Wayne. I started over again." That apercu focused his response to the event. (It also gave him the subtitle of his book: "The Children's Crusade.") To continue reading, click here. Bill Wyman is the former arts editor of NPR and Salon. More at www.hitsville.org. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Are There Any Republicans Who Actually Like Jon Huntsman? Saletan: The Stunning Success of America's Drone War Against al-Qaida Bogus Study Suggests Your Career Choice Is Influenced by Hormones Experienced in the Womb	Advertisement
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