9/11 was like nothing else, ever.

Pop culture is like everything else, ever. Familiarity is comforting: That’s why movies get remade and Billboard hits sound like other Billboard hits.

It’s only natural that pop culture, for the last 15 years, has tried to comfort us about 9/11 in the best way it knows how: by taming it, domesticating it, making it fit into familiar tropes and uplifting formulas. This is not, necessarily, bad. When people — or cultures — undergo a shock, they search above all else for a way to process it.

“You take it, and you try to cut it down to size, something that will make sense,” says Harvey Greenberg, a New York psychoanalyst and pop culture writer (“The Movies on Your Mind”).

Those of us who lived through that day in 2001 still remember the sense of utter chaos, blind panic, as unimaginable things began happening, one after another: skyscrapers collapsed, airplanes plummeted, tsunamis of smoke barreled up Manhattan streets, traffic became paralyzed for 100 miles in each direction. Fear and disorientation overwhelmed us. Anything, it seemed, might happen next.

In moments of panic — psychologists say — we tend to blindly, feverishly search for parallels, analogies. Our minds rifle through our store of memory, looking for any clue that will give us a context, an explanation, a guide to surviving the crisis.

What our minds do in seconds, pop culture has been doing for a decade and a half. It’s been searching its storehouse for familiar ways to frame the narrative.

Former Hackensack Record newspaper photographer Tom Franklin didn’t seek to create an icon of pop culture when he happened to shoot, on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, three firefighters hoisting an American flag amid the World Trade Center ruins. But that image quickly took on a life of its own: reproduced on murals, coins, statues, figurines, postage stamps.

Of all the eloquent pictures that emerged from that day, why this one in particular? Almost certainly, because it bore a phantom resemblance to another image: the famous “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” photo from World War II. Never mind that the situations were hugely dissimilar. The Iwo Jima picture captured a moment of triumph. Franklin’s image conveyed — what? Pathos? Resilience? Defiance? No matter. It seemed familiar — and that above all was what was needed in the months immediately following 9/11. The unspoken message: We’ve been through this before and survived.

A year later, on his album “The Rising,” Bruce Springsteen framed 9/11 in familiar Springsteenian terms: working-man heroes saying goodbye to their girls, as they do what a man’s gotta do.

“I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher,” sings a firefighter’s lady in “Into the Fire.” “Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire.”

It’s said that Springsteen was inspired to create his album a few days after the attacks: A stranger rolled down his car window and said, “We need you now.” If we “needed” Springsteen after 9/11, maybe it was because of the special brand of first aid he offered: continuity.

It took five years for Hollywood to tackle 9/11 head-on. The two big films that came out in 2006 were both hero narratives — one of the things Hollywood does best. There were, of course, 9/11 heroes — even if more of us experienced the day as stunned bystanders or, more tragically, as victims or grieving relatives. But if you want your movie “World Trade Center” to star Nicolas Cage and attract a mainstream audience, you will choose a fact-based story about two firefighters who heroically kept each other alive in the rubble for more than 12 hours.

The year’s other 9/11 film, the well-made “United 93,” about the 40 people who deliberately brought a hijacked airliner down over Shanksville, Pa., was less histrionic. But both films ultimately did the familiar Hollywood pivot: crafting a feel-good movie out of a feel-bad subject.

The same thing could be said about another, weirder 9/11 movie. “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2011), based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, tried to mix 9/11 and cute — another reliable Hollywood commodity. A 9-year-old kid with Asperger’s syndrome (Thomas Horn) mourns for his father, a 9/11 casualty, by roaming the city having wistful interactions with different New Yorkers in what one critic called “a quest for emotional blackmail, cheap thrills, and a naked ploy for an Oscar.”

Unlike a theater screen, TV can’t overwhelm with size. The crushing horror of the World Trade Center attack doesn’t necessarily come through in TV movies and documentaries. But what TV can address, especially in the new “long-form” arrangement that has become popular in the past 15 years, is time.

The excellent “Homeland” (2011-present), partly by virtue of its drawn-out, episodic format, captures some of the low-level trauma we’ve suffered in the 15 years since 9/11. “Homeland” is about our abiding fear of attack at home — and the dread that our ever-morphing, never-ending Middle East wars, like the twists and turns in the story of turncoat soldier Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) and suspicious CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), might just go on and on and on.

Comedy, another TV staple, was thought to be forever off the table when the first plane hit the first building. Actually, it didn’t take too long for the wisenheimers to weigh in on 9/11 — with varying degrees of taste.

“Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants” was the first new “South Park” episode to air after the attacks (Nov. 7, 2001). In a 2004 “Arrested Development” episode, Tobias (David Cross) talks of his failed marriage in these terms: “Well, I don’t want to blame it all on 9/11, but it certainly didn’t help.” Seth MacFarlane (who himself narrowly avoided being on one of the hijacked 9/11 planes) has especially pushed the envelope. When the diabolical baby Stewie, in a 2010 “Family Guy” episode, is asked his favorite holiday, he promptly replies “9/11.”

Inappropriate? Maybe so. But humor, too, is a coping mechanism, and yet another way that pop culture does what it does best: cutting the worst cataclysm most of us have ever known down to familiar, manageable size.

“Humor helps us,” says Greenberg, the pop culture writer. “Sick jokes are a way of distancing ourselves. It’s a way of saying, If I can laugh at it, I’ve mastered it.”

9/11 REFERENCES IN POP CULTURE

It was an epic event. It produced an epic response. Here is just a small sample — hardly complete — of how 9/11 has turned up in film, music, TV and other popular media.

SONGS AND ALBUMS

>> “My Blue Manhattan,” Ryan Adams

>> “I Can’t See New York,” Tori Amos

>> “I Was Here,” Beyonce

>> “Mychal,” Black 47

>> “Undivided,” Bon Jovi

>> “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag,” Charlie Daniels Band

>> “On That Day,” Leonard Cohen

>> “Safe and Sound,” Sheryl Crow

>> “Illume (9-11),” Fleetwood Mac

>> “What More Can I Give,” Michael Jackson

>> “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (The Angry American),” Toby Keith

>> “Freedom,” Paul McCartney

>> “Harbour,” Moby

>> “The Rising,” Bruce Springsteen

>> “Didn’t They?” Taylor Swift

>> “Rules,” Wu-Tang Clan

>> “Let’s Roll,” Neil Young

THEATRICAL AND TV MOVIES

>> “The Guys” (2002)

>> “Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story” (2003)

>> “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004)

>> “United 93” (2006)

>> “World Trade Center” (2006)

>> “Metal of Honor: The Ironworkers of 9/11” (2006)

>> “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” (2008)

>> “The Hurt Locker” (2008)

>> “The Tillman Story” (2010)

>> “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2011)

>> “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012)

BOOKS

>> “Forever,” by Pete Hamill (2003)

>> “Pattern Recognition,” by William Gibson (2003)

>> “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005)

>> “The Things They Left Behind,” by Stephen King (2005)

>> “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,” by Ken Kalfus (2006)

>> “Everyman,” by Philip Roth (2006)

>> “Terrorist,” by John Updike (2006)

>> “Falling Man,” by Don DeLillo (2007)

>> “Bleeding Edge,” by Thomas Pynchon (2013)

TV

>> “Family Guy” (repeatedly)

>> “Fringe”

>> “Homeland”

>> “Rescue Me”

>> “The Sarah Silverman Program”

>> “The West Wing”

>> “The Wire”

>> “Third Watch”