Movies & TV

Not really what you're after, but the movie The Rock with Cage and Connery is from 1996 and it is extremely pre-911, just no possible way it could be made afterwards. It was a big budget blockbuster about US marines going rogue and aiming chemical weapons at San Francisco. If it had been made 10 years earlier, it would have been ex-soviet mercenaries, if it had been made 10 years later then it would have been Arab terrorists, and if it was made today, the marines would have been aiming chemical weapons at Portland and they would be the good guys. Instead however, it was made in that short few years when America had no "real" enemies and so the only bad guys powerful enough to do bad guy things to America was the US military itself.

Does anyone else have any good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?

Farscape, and it handled it in a very interesting and unconventional-at-the-time way. 9/11 happened about midway through its run. The main character John Crichton is a human "IASA" (generic-brand NASA) astronaut who's shot through a wormhole into some unknown distant part of the universe. The series arc is about him coping with the wild and wondrous and dangerous greater universe and trying to find his way back home.

The mid-00s media landscape was fucking dire. All gray-brown military aesthetics, pro war, pro torture propaganda, and Islamophobia. It was the era that birthed the cancer that is the modern Call of Duty franchise. I was exposed to it an an impressionable age and it took years to deworm my brain.

it was pretty stark. prior media was very happy to lucky, like the biggest fear was not being fulfilled in work, "selling out" to be a corporate "drone", being inauthentic.

then suddenly everybody has a single tear falling down their cheek, like Lee Greenwood himself had just been beheaded on TV and America would never be innocent and abundant again with free trips to the sundae bar at the buffet.

now we all had to get tough and hard to face an existential enemy nobody knew existed 20 minutes ago and send our big, beautiful boys to fight the baddies over there or else we'd be fighting them in the streets over here in the parking lot of the cheesecake factory after church.

its a testament to the control a few have over mass media that the tone shifted with such agility.

It was definitely a shift. But a stark one. I'd like to point out that there was another shift but a more subtle one that occurred with the collapse (via illegal dissolution) of the USSR and the end of the cold war with capitalist victory and end of history.

I'd say collectively the two shifts dealt a death blow to ST as a franchise. I lost interest in ENT very early on by the second season. There's really no coming back from that kind of liberal restoration.

any good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?

Sopranos literally got darker after 9/11, cinematography became all shadows

Thank Jehova, that Final Fantasy 7 came out 4 years before, else I wouldn't be as influenced towards protecting the environment as I am!

edit: also, Captain Planet. Making polluters (usually businesses) the antagonists. Literally only something the 90s could have done. Now Captain Planet would be the antagonist stopping the good guys from making profit!

Not an answer to your question, but man, the fucking torture scenes from that era! Even Enterprise had at least one where the Vulcan woman gets sci-fi tortured.

Gundam 00 is very post 9/11 but with an interesting perspective where the terrorists are also the protagonists.

The original CSI started in 2000, I'm surprised they didn't shoehorn terrorism into that show.

good examples of that happening in shows that spanned that shift?

not good, so much as apt, but back when I was a lib I thought it was really neat how you could sense the cultural shift in the writing of The West Wing, especially during and after Isaac and Ishmael

I knew a guy on AIM two decades ago who blamed 9/11 for ER enshittifying, but I haven't watched that show since a rerun of the episode where (cw: gore)

It didn't shift, as it is present throughout having started in 2003 but the Battlestar Galactica reboot was basically the War on Terror in space. It took what Enterprise did and dialled it up to 11. Its batshit looking back on it now.

That was the Battlestar Galactica reboot too.

Resident Evil 3 -> Resident Evil 4.

Terrorist organization, integrated by zealot "peasants", kidnapped the president's daughter, formed their own paramilitary organization, and had future plans for biologic terrorism. All under the nose of the whole world. Meanwhile, during the whole game, you control a Secret Service officer.

Yeah. Post-9/11 coded. With the stereotypes and all that.

Still, they keept the anticorpo message in future games. And, later, Leon becomes an alcholic with ptsd.

Oh, and the same can be said of RE 5. But, at least, you got this secret dialogue from Chris.

I think a whole essay can be made around this tonal shift in RE. If only I had more time...