The twin towers of the World Trade Center billow smoke after hijacked airliners crashed into them on Sept. 11, 2001. (Henny Ray Abrams/AFP/Getty Images)

This essay is part of a week-long series looking at themes and trends of pop culture in the 2000s.

There are iconic events in every decade, but few on the scale of what we witnessed on Sept. 11, 2001. The aerial attacks killed 3,000 people, put the U.S. in crisis mode, rocked financial markets and created an existential panic. Writers, musicians and filmmakers spent the decade exploring, in one way or another, the grievances that could have inspired such an audacious act of hatred.

Writers, musicians and filmmakers spent the decade exploring, in one way or another, the grievances that could have inspired 9/11.

Artists felt a need to respond, first on editorial pages. Describing the strikes on the World Trade Center, British novelist Martin Amis mused, “That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.”

Many of the early essays were like that — brimming with poetic impressions but rather short on insight. The event was impossible to absorb. What people needed most — Americans especially — was a psychological balm. That came on Sept. 21 with America: A Tribute to Heroes, a memorial concert for 9/11 victims that aired on all four major U.S. networks. The lineup of luminaries included Neil Young, U2 and Mariah Carey, but the most commanding voice was that of Bruce Springsteen, whose pre-9/11 lament My City of Ruins became a post-9/11 anthem. Less than a year later, the Boss followed up with the heavy-hearted album The Rising, which told stories of downed firefighters and other victims, but implored America to soldier on.

Springsteen’s government certainly soldiered on. Less than a month after the attacks, the U.S. Army swooped into Afghanistan with the aim of smoking out the putative plotter of the attacks, Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Thus, 9/11 evolved into the morally complicated War on Terror, and the image of two smouldering Manhattan office towers gave way to footage of U.S. planes showering bombs on Kabul.

At the same time, there was an increased appetite among Westerners to understand enigmatic countries like Saudi Arabia (which produced most of the 9/11 terrorists) and Afghanistan. One of the most illuminating pictures of this period was Kandahar, a harrowing quasi-documentary about Canadian filmmaker Nelofer Pazira’s quest to find her sister in Taliban-run Afghanistan.

By the end of November 2001, Western allies — Canada among them — had unseated the Taliban. But Bin Laden remained at large. America soon cast its gaze westward to Iraq, implicating Saddam Hussein in the global terror network and bellowing about his weapons capabilities.

The Iraq campaign, which commenced in March 2003, inspired a spate of anti-war films. Almost all of them have tanked at the box office, the lone exception being Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). A brash chronicle of America’s march to war in Iraq, Fahrenheit 9/11 is less a documentary than an ad hominem attack on one George W. Bush. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and earned more than $200 million US in worldwide box office, but I see those facts as an endorsement of its politics rather than its quality.

Fahrenheit 9/11 was a fervent but facile exercise — not least because it portrayed pre-invasion Iraq as some sort of desert idyll. But the film hinted at a culture of secrecy in the Bush administration, a fact that was becoming increasingly evident in media reports, which focused on the subject of torture.

Ironically, unsparing cruelty had gone prime time in November 2001, with the hit show 24. The series revolves around Jack Bauer, an American counter-terrorism agent who uses savage interrogation techniques (e.g. beatings, electric shocks, suffocation) to gain life-saving information. At the risk of sounding glib, Jack made torture seem exciting. Films like Syriana (2005), Rendition (2007) and Redacted (2007) took a less favourable view. The final word on American torture may well be Errol Morris’ doc Standard Operating Procedure (2008), which details the insidious treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, a dark episode that tested the resolve of even the most ardent hawks.

The Iraq war alienated many people — pacifists, artists, continental Europeans — but the U.S. wasn’t the only country involved. George Bush had convinced his “special” friend, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to play along — this despite the fact that nearly one million Britons protested in London in February of 2003. This vast show of disapproval was the backdrop to Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005). The plot revolves around an encounter between a hawkish London doctor and a frenzied attacker, a brilliant metaphor for this vengeful new era. The danger became all too real for Londoners on July 7, 2005, when a group of Islamic dissidents set off a series of co-ordinated bombings on the city’s transit system, killing 56 and injuring more than 700. What spurred these men to commit this act of terror? Britain’s presence in Iraq.

The “quagmire” in Mesopotamia has claimed many lives — primarily soldiers and Iraqi civilians, but less direct participants, too. In his 2006 single Harrowdown Hill, Thom Yorke recounts the fate of David Kelly, the British weapons expert who testified that his government had exaggerated the likelihood of Saddam having weapons of mass destruction. In 2003, Kelly’s body was found in the English forest of the title; like a number of observers, Yorke challenges the claim that the scientist took his own life (“Don’t walk the plank like I did / You will be dispensed with”).

Many artists have tried to answer the question: what are Muslims thinking? The CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie, which launched in 2007, explores the clash of traditions in a Canadian setting, satirizing widely held prejudices about Islam. Preaching tolerance through gentle humour, Little Mosque is one of the bravest shows to emerge this decade. Mohsin Hamid took a more sinister tack in his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a gripping tale about a Pakistani Muslim seduced, then repulsed, by the permissiveness of American society.

As the decade draws to a close, the retaliatory fires set after 9/11 — Afghanistan, Iraq, the general War on Terror — continue to burn. The conflict will undoubtedly inform culture in much of the next decade.

In his novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), American writer Ken Kalfus uses the World Trade Center attacks as a backdrop to a cruel divorce. Joyce and Marshall Harriman are bent on mutually assured destruction — that is, until the final act. The novel ends with an alternate history — namely, news of Bin Laden’s capture. Kalfus casts this as a great unifying event, for the Harrimans as well as the country. What Kalfus is really doing is playing on our desire for payback, and mocking the idea that the arrest of a single man could bring closure to a decade of bloodshed.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC News.