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Posted on 09/29/2001 5:11:06 PM PDT by Pokey78

YOU just knew that something had irrevocably changed; a veil had fallen; a ratchet had turned; a light had gone on. We watched the massed Hollywood stars pretend to be a call centre and go through their choking party pieces on behalf of Oscar Aid - the New York telethon. And we knew we'd never look at them the same way again.

To say that it was the most mawkish, phoney, embarrassing, ersatz, saccharine, candlelit freak show ever is, perhaps, to overburden a fortnight that's already ponderous with ultimate adjectives. But it was an awakening.

All of us have spent the best part of a decade being uncritically fascinated and tickled by these people. Their vain, grandiose, deformed lives have lain on the sofa of our indulgence. How could we not have seen that Calista's waist measurement, Tom's sexuality and Arnold's world view didn't amount to a hill of beans?

Well, it took a real-life disaster to blow away the collective hubris of special effects and ego disasters. We now know that a real fireman is more inspiring, compelling and worthy of our attention than Sly dressed up as a fireman.

Hollywood has taken the attack badly. Predictably, the moguls and stars have reacted with hysteria, as if it were all directed at them.

Immediately, Pearl Harbor and Travolta's Swordfish were pulled from cinemas. If you missed them, then they did you a favour. Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest film, Collateral Damage, has been put on indefinite hold and the trailer destroyed on his orders. Typically, he couldn't just shelve it: it had to be vaporised. Men in Black II is having a new ending - the original took place in the World Trade Center. Jackie Chan's Nosebleed is being scrapped, as is something called Flight Plan. Last year, in this quarter, Hollywood had 68 films in production. At the last count, this year there are only 16.

Almost anything with an explosion, offices, planes or extreme violence is being pushed back, including Jennifer Lopez's Tick Tock, Anthony Hopkins's Bad Company and Spielberg's Time Machine, in the hope that cinema-goers have short memories. There is a belief that it will all be big bang business as usual after a decent interval. This misses the point, failing to catch the lay of the zeitgeist.

Everything is changing. Some of it is ridiculous, such as the BBC proscribing Bob the Builder from its radio playlist. Or it is amusing, such as the toy makers nervously reconsidering Christmas and binning a plane that knocks a building to smithereens, preferring new action heroes such as Billy Blazes, a New York fireman. Out, too, goes Hasbro's planned game involving kids shooting guns that give each other the biological "pox". Actually, I rather want one of those.

In the pleasure gardens of the West there has been a universal and catastrophic sense of humour failure. You must have noticed the deathly absence of the usual tasteless jokes that infest the e-mail after big news. And who'd be a cartoonist at the moment? They must be drawing hawks and doves in their sleep. Television channels are cancelling topical comedy shows on the assumption that you can't be both topical and funny at the moment. Six shows have already closed on Broadway: pessimists are predicting there may be only two left by Christmas. In an effort to reawaken interest, stars are getting together to sing New York, New York in Times Square for a desperate television commercial. London is considering something similar for Shaftesbury Avenue.

The shockwaves have moved out to shake up more distant bits of culture, too. Coca-Cola pulled all its advertising in most countries in the first week of the attack, while others, such as Renault and the army, have been forced to re-edit campaigns to remove inappropriate imagery. Only the brave, such as Ryanair, have dared to touch on the topic that has dominated the moment, launching a discount flights deal with the words "Let's fight back".

Modern art that fetishes death and violence, suddenly looks . . . well, empty and artless, while the thudding jingoism of the Last Night of the Proms isn't appropriate. It's as if the whole of culture had been slapped and shown itself in the mirror to see what a ridiculous painted little trollop it has become.

Silvio Berlusconi, in a typically Italian fit of exasperation, cut to the chase and said, bottom line, this is a war between civilisations, ours and theirs: they got atonal chanting and women in tents; we got the high renaissance and game shows with topless housewives. He was right, but in the wrong way. This isn't the western canon, arm-wrestling the east. It is about us having to take a fundamental look at what our civilisation has become, and whether it is doing what we want and need it to do. The answer has to be a resounding no.

It has grown cynically decorative and we've complacently agreed that culture is a synonym for entertainment. We've become consumers, not epicureans. We applaud people who market things rather than make things.

What the terrorist attack and looming war have shown us is that we have a civilisation that has lost the tools or the talent to be serious, to keep a straight face or conjure up gravitas. Suddenly bereft of a cheap joke, or cosy irony, we search for profundity. And it's not there. Profundity is something that even a score of A-list superstars can't fake.

Of course the Hello!-ocracy will be back. But with luck they'll be fewer and better and we'll care less. For this brief fortnight, magazines selling celebrity effluvia have seen their sales plummet while newspapers with real news have soared. At least we still seem to be able to tell the difference. And, for the first time, the most searched-for words on the internet aren't Britney Spears or "celebrity sex". They are Nostradamus and Osama Bin Laden - not an attractive couple, but at least a serious start.

Centuries rarely start on time. Queen Victoria lived one year into the old 20th century before closing her era and opening the floodgates for a decade of artistic experimentation and genius: Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Delius, Janacek, Freud, Einstein, Gaudi, Lloyd-Wright and on and on, including the birth of Hollywood. It was the most culturally fecund decade since the renaissance and it formed the template for the next 100 years.

Is the age we're living out the final emaciated decadent day? It's too early to say but perhaps the twin towers might be the true beginning of the 21st century. The big bang that heralds a new way of seeing.

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