Another Mushroom Cloud, Another Smoking Gun

Maureen Ryan posts today about the recent spate of mushroom clouds on network TV. Heroes, 24, and Jericho have all shown us a mushroom cloud this season, and Ryan wonders what is causing this confluence.

Obviously I wouldn't be posting about this if I thought the answer was "it's a coincidence." I posted some thoughts in her comments, but I thought I'd flesh them out a bit more here.

I think this epidemic of mushroom clouds is related to collective increased anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th. Mushroom clouds hearken back to the Cold War, of course, but in the current environment they also serve as a stand-in for a simpler time, a time when we knew who our enemies were. The Commies were the bad guys, they ran Russia and Cuba, and they were going to try to kill us by launching hundreds of nuclear bombs at us. The world was going to hell, and we were all going to die, but at least there was comfort in knowing who was going to do it.

Theses days things are much more complicated. The bad guys are everywhere (even in the US!) and they're trying to kill us by sneaking liquid explosives on to our planes, or flying those planes into our buildings, or God knows what else. They don't necessarily run countries (though some of them do) -- they live in caves, or slums, and when we attack them they melt away into the crowded streets and barren hills of the world. The world is still going to hell, but now we have no idea how it's going to get there.

So our Cold War duck-and-cover anxiety has been replaced by a different type of anxiety, one that is more free-form and harder to pin down. But if you listen to the media and the government, it's very real and immediate, and we need to be vigilant all the time because you never know who is going to strike, where, or how.

Given the way the world is today, is it that surprising that our collective psyche has a desire for a simpler, easier to comprehend, enemy? I think it's part-and-parcel with the recent increase in torture-porn, an issue David Edelstein examined a year ago. In a world where real-life bogeymen lurk around every corner, we ask our entertainers to scare and shock us as a way to subconsciously work through our fears.

But here's the thing -- it's been over five years since September 11th, and the images of the planes hitting the towers (or just about anything else related to that day) are still too painful and gut-wrenching for many people to deal with. Look at the "is it too soon" discussion that surrounded the release of United 93, or how instantly freaked out everyone was in the minutes after Corey Lidle's plane crashed into a building on upper east side. It's even worse when these images find their way to a commercial setting -- take a look at this this ad by Le Fondation Nicolas Hulot and tell me how it makes you feel.

As much as people don't want to see the towers falling in an ad, I'll wager they don't want to see them falling in a TV drama, either. But the spectre of terrorism brought to our shores by the attacks of September 11th still lies over much of the country, and that includes our diversions. Savvy entertainers know they can increase their relevance by tapping into the zeitgeist, but since they can't use the Twin Towers, they use the last generation's bogeyman, the threat of nuclear annihilation, as a proxy.

I'm not saying it's a conscious decision. There aren't television executives sitting around going, "damn, I wish we could work a storyline about terrorists crashing a plane into a big building in a major city. But I don't want to be thought of as a crass opportunist, so I'll go with a mushroom cloud instead." I think that when TV writers are searching for the scariest thing they can think of, they go with the thing that scared the crap out of us for the last fifty years, because they know, instinctively, that they can't use the thing that's done it for the last five.