2. 9/11 and the Upskirt Decade

Wrestling for freedom

The dedication of 1 Night in Paris

While I’ve been working on Upskirt Decade, I’ve been surprised at how little 9/11 has come into it. After all, this is a book about the noughties with a strong focus on the US: surely the signal geopolitical event of that decade in that nation ought to be turning up with reliable frequency? And yet, it rarely seems to figure.

One small exception to that is the image above, which comes from the 2004 commercial release of 1 Night in Paris, the Paris Hilton sex tape issued by her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon (she’s consistently said this happened against her wishes). The porn film was, for reasons I struggle to reconstruct, dedicated “IN MEMORY OF 9/11/01… WE WILL NEVER FORGET.” Because how better for the victims of terrorism to be remembered than with grainy night-vision footage of a young woman having horible sex?

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Also from 2004, there’s a rather sweet contribution from Britney Spears in People magazine. Britney chose 9/11 as “the moment that defined her” for a feature marking the title’s thirtieth anniversary (I haven’t seen the original yet so am relying on the NBC report):

“One of the most significant things that's happened in the last 30 years was the tragedy of Sept 11. I was on my way overseas on that sad day and I couldn’t get back to the USA right away, and I was very worried about my brother who was in New York. During this time when the whole world was grieving, I just wanted to go home and be with my family and appreciate life even more.”

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There’s one woman in Upskirt Decade who would have been more closely involved with the 9/11 aftermath, if her career hadn’t already been on the slide. WWE wrestler Chyna (real name Joan Laurer) was still on the roster, but had been sidelined since May, which is why she doesn’t appear in the episode of Smackdown from 13 September 2001. The event was one of the first significant entertainment events after 9/11 — maybe the first significant entertainment event after 9/11, and it would be unsurprising if that’s true since wrestling has always been a medium that wastes absolutely no time incorporating real-world shocks into its fiction.

There’s something undeniably kitsch about wrestlers solemnly honouring the flag, in costume. WWE proprietor and promoter Vince McMahon is playing the carnival barker when he gives the speech in the video above. All the same, there’s sincerity in the showmanship, and while I remember being scornful of this at the time (considering it bad taste and self-aggrandising, which are very much the core values of sports entertainment), after the Manchester bombing and the attack on the Bataclan, I’m less sceptical about the idea that pop culture is a front of resistance against fundamentalism.

Wrestler Marc Copani as Muhammed Hassan

Three years after 9/11, WWE introduced Muhammad Hassan, an Arab wrestler who antagonised the crowd by complaining about post 9/11 prejudice. Hassan — real name Marc Copani, and not in fact Arab but rather Italian-American (and there’s a whole bunch of stuff you could say here about the shifting boundaries of American “whiteness”, which had largely absorbed Italian Americans by the start of the 21st century, but which still held someone like Copani at enough racial distance that he could play the Other). Copani was a great heel and his WWE career went well for about eight months, until a terrorism storyline coincided with the London bombings:

“A controversial terrorist skit in a match featuring Hassan happened to air at the same time as the July 2005 London terrorist bombings. In the match, Hassan began to ‘pray,’ summoning five masked men, dressed in black shirts, ski-masks, and camo pants, armed with clubs and piano wire.”

That was too much real life even for wrestling to absorb. Copani was written out and lost his wrestling career. He later told an interviewer that he was “heartbroken” by this: “I put everything I had into the WWE, and had it all taken away from me. I just withdrew from wrestling all together.” At the same time, he recognised that his character’s portrayal of Arab-Americans was “unfair, inaccurate and biased” and considered losing his place in WWE to be ultimately a blessing. He’s now the principal of a junior high school in New York.

Sarah x

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This is a bonus issue of Upskirt Chronicles — I’ll be sending out the one email next week as usual. I’d love to hear your memories of how pop culture dealt with 9/11, so please reply or leave a comment.