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A comprehensive critical survey of the impact of 9/11 on Film, written by some of the foremost scholars in American cinema.American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 is a ground-breaking collection of essays by some of the foremost scholars writing in the field of contemporary American film. Through a dynamic critical analysis of the defining films of the turbulent post-9/11 decade, the volume explores and interrogates the impact of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' on American cinema and culture. In a vibrant discussion of films like American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Spectre (2015), The Hateful Eight (2015), Lincoln (2012), The Mist (2007), Children of Men (2006), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), noted authors Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many others consider the power of popular film to function as a potent cultural artefact, able to both reflect the defining fears and anxieties of the tumultuous era, but also shape them in compelling and resonant ways.Key FeaturesFifteen original essays by some of the foremost scholars in American CinemaFeatures essays on the key films of the era, along with many that have previously been overlooked in scholarly literatureThe volume is critically informed but vibrant and engagingIncludes chapters by Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many othersCase StudiesAmericanEast (Hesham Issawi, 2008) American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014)Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015)Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014)Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Stephen Daldry, 2011)Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007)Halloween II (Rob Zombie, 2009)The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)The Kingdom (Peter Berg, 2007)Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)Marvel Avengers Assemble (Joss Whedon, 2012) U.S Title The AvengersPearl Harbour (Michael Bay, 2001)The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mira Nair, 2012)RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)RoboCop (José Padilha, 2014)The Siege (Edward Zwick, 1998)Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2011)The Walk (Robert Zemeckis, 2015)The War Within (Joseph Castrello, 2005)Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
This [The Mist] has become a rather potent metaphor for where I think humanity is poised at the moment. It becomes a total microcosm of our culture and what we're going through. The divisiveness. The fact that reasonable people are getting ground up in the machinery and agendas of the unreasonable people who are in power. The extremists are holding sway and the rest of us are just getting dragged along for the ride.ti
Frank Darabont (2007: 28)
At some point we may be the only ones left. That's okay with me. We are America.
George W. Bush (quoted in Woodward 2002: 81)
The science fiction and horror genres have often been read as manifestations of the prevailing fears and anxieties of the cultural moments in which they are made. Whether we consider Weimar-era German cinema (see Kracauer 1947; Kaes 2011), post-Second World War Japanese science-fiction film (see Yomota 2007; Tsutsui 2004) or the cycle of alien invasion narratives produced by the American film industry during the first decades of the Cold War (see Booker 2000; Starck 2010), genre films frequently emerge as visceral and potent cultural artefacts and not, as they are often regarded in the mainstream press, superficial and shallow frivolities. In a similar vein to the examples provided above, this chapter regards the science fiction and horror films produced during the ‘War on Terror’ period as profoundly affectual documents which bear a compelling testimony to the era. While on the surface they often appear to have no apparent connection to the tumultuous events of the decade, they function as telling allegories, able, for one reason or another, to engage with their turbulent age often in ways more resonant than many films which attempted to portray the period directly (see Lowenstein 2005).
The conflict which came to be known as the ‘War on Terror’, instigated by the administration of President George W. Bush in 2001 and continued by his successor Barack Obama, was the first war of the twenty-first century and an event of profoundly global reach and implication. While the majority of its military operations were undertaken in Afghanistan (2001–14) and Iraq (2002–11), this volume turns its attention to another vitally important front of the war, the films produced by the American film industry in the first decades of the new millennium. Now, more than fifteen years after the events of 11 September 2001, it is clear to see that these films not only function as a uniquely telling and resonant cultural battleground in which conflicting ideologies were projected for all to see, but were also able to shape the cultural imaginary of post-9/11 America in a range of compelling ways. While the ‘War on Terror’ was officially brought to an end by President Obama in 2013, it is one that is still fought in the films about the conflict which continue to be made today.
This edited collection is an attempt to interrogate and explore the complicated relationship between film and society in these turbulent ‘War on Terror’ decades. It seeks to make a contribution to the remarkable body of work which already exists that examines the symbiotic exchange between national identity and the politics of cinematic representation (see Kracauer 1947; Wood 1986). How far films are able to reflect and influence the cultures and times in which they are made remains a matter for continued debate, but what is clear is that much of the cinematic output of the post-9/11 era is deeply immersed in the tumultuous environment which saw the films produced.
The authors of this volume, many of whom are the foremost scholars in their field, have already made considerable contributions to the study of American film and culture.
Most Americans have probably experienced something like the loss of their First Worldism as a result of the events of September 11 and its aftermath. What kind of loss is this? It is the loss of the prerogative, only and always, to be the one who transgresses the sovereign boundaries of other states, but never to be in the position of having one's own boundaries transgressed. The United States was supposed to be the place that could not be attacked, where life was safe from violence initiated from abroad, where the only violence we knew was the kind we inflicted on ourselves.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side
Bob Dylan, ‘With God on our side’ (1963)
It is only to be expected that the art a nation produces primarily engages with the issues that preoccupy that nation. Furthermore, in all likelihood, those texts that a nation produces will privilege the experiences of its own people, whether out of cultural relevance or economic necessity. It hardly needs to be said that for the most part the Italian film industry tends to make films about the Italians, the Japanese film industry about the Japanese and the American film industry about the Americans. However, the way that these texts articulate both the experiences of their own people and the people of other nationalities is of central importance to understanding the culture in which they are made. The following chapter explores the representation of identity and vulnerability in American film of the post-9/ 11 era. By looking at American cinema of this decade one is able to discern the presence of patterns in dominant cultural representation practices. Throughout its history American cinema has rarely offered sympathetic images of the Other, those figures who do not correspond to what a society defines as its ‘norm’ whether in terms of race, nationality, gender or sexuality.
Robbie: What is it? Is it terrorists? Ray: These came from someplace else. Robbie: What do you mean? Like, Europe? Ray: No, Robbie, not like Europe!
War of the Worlds (2005)
If I thought we were safe from attack, I would be thinking differently. But I see a gathering threat.
George W. Bush (Anonymous 2003a)
The New York events have radicalized the relation of images to reality, in the same way as they have radicalized the global situation. While before we dealt with an unbroken abundance of banal images and an uninterrupted flow of spurious events, the terrorist attack in New York has resurrected both the image and the event … But does reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One could almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image … It is as if they duel, to find which is the most unimaginable.
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism
In the preceding chapters we have seen how American cinema has been reluctant to represent the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 directly on the screen and how, when the events have been portrayed, it has been in a very particular fashion, thematically and aesthetically. Dramatisations of the two hijacked airliners striking the World Trade Center and the extent of the death and destruction experienced on 9/11 have remained a persistent taboo in American film. If depicted at all, the moments of collision themselves have been portrayed through the use of a black screen and original sound recordings of the real-life transmission (see Zero Dark Thirty and Fahrenheit 9/11) or authentic news footage recorded on the day (see United 93 and World Trade Center). This erasure is almost certainly an expression of the prevailing understanding that 9/11 was such a traumatic event that it could never be accurately portrayed, very much akin to the belief that it is impossible to truthfully represent the inconceivable trauma of those who experienced the Holocaust.
We of the twenty-first century, although unable to believe in the literal reality of such heroes, nevertheless still dream our myths onward, clothing them in modern dress … We dream them onward, give them colorful costumes, and pseudoscientific origins, but we no longer consider them real. Or do we?
Don LoCicero, Superheroes and Gods: A Comparative Study from Babylonia to Batman
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
Dick Cheney, appearance on NBC's Meet the Press
It is possible to discern a great deal about a society from its heroic mythology. Just as the Ancient Greeks had tales of Hercules, Achilles and Theseus, late nineteenth-century America turned to mythologised stories of Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett and Jesse James. In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, contemporary Western culture found its heroic ideals embodied in comic-book heroes like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. These icons authenticate and endorse prevailing social values and behaviours in texts that both reflect and influence the cultures in which they are produced. As Richard Slotkin observed, ‘The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the “national character”. Through myths the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants, in such a way and with such power that our perception of contemporary reality and our ability to function in the world are directly, often tragically affected’ (1973: 3). Slotkin's use of the term ‘tragically’ indicates an awareness of the power that mythology, in its disparate forms, has over society. In this chapter we consider perhaps the most explicit manifestations of contemporary mythology – the superhero film. Indeed, the first decade of the new millennium saw itself described as the ‘superhero decade’ due to the sheer number and influence of these narratives (Gray and Kaklamanidou 2011: 1).
The intrusions of September 11 broke the dead bolt on our protective myth, the illusion that we are masters of our own security, that our might makes our homeland impregnable, that our families are safe in the bower of our communities and our women and children are safe in the arms of their men.
Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America
We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.
George W. Bush (2002b)
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 it was widely speculated that film genres built on excessive and gratuitous violence would become redundant, rejected by audiences who had no further desire to receive vicarious thrills from entertainment that continued to glamorise brutality or trivialise the loss of human life. Yet the decade that followed revealed this to be only partially true, as American cinema refused to forgo depictions of violence. Rather than eschewing 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror, the action genre subsumed the prevalent fears and anxieties of the new millennium into its narratives, which manifested themselves primarily as threats to the nation and the family, the erosion of traditional forms of masculinity and patriarchy, and the traumatic effects of violence not just on the victims, but also its perpetrators. This chapter attempts to ascertain how far the action genre incorporated the discourse of the war on terror into its narratives. Certainly not all of the films of the genre are explicitly connected to 9/11 and the war on terror (although a great many are), but emerging post-9/ 11 debates on masculinity, the legitimacy of revenge and America's role in international affairs provide context for the genre just as the aftermath of the Vietnam War had served as a framework for action cinema twenty years before. As Susan Jeffords and many others have observed, the defining action films of the 1980s, starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris, can be persuasively seen as an articulation of and an engagement with Reaganite political philosophies and muscular representations of American power.