Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)

IN FOCUS: The Long Shadows of 9/11 Science Fiction, Thrillers, and the War on Terror Introduction by WILL BROOKER, editor eptember 11, Jacques Derrida observed, had by October 2001 already become “a date or a dating that has taken over our pub- lic space and our private lives.” The very process of naming transformed the attacks of the previous month into “an event that truly marks, that truly makes its mark, a singular and . unprec- Sedented event.”1 Ten years later, the terrain has changed. It is harder now simply to repeat the mantra “9/11,” like a recurring nightmare or a conjuring spell, “over and over again as if its singularity were so absolute that it could not be matched.”2 Two important recent books on the im- pact of September 11 on fi lm and popular culture—Stephen Prince’s Firestorm and Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell’s Re- framing 9/11—demonstrate even in their subtitles that the single date is no longer enough to capture the complexity of the United States’ relationship with terror over the past decade, and that the black-and- white signifi er of “9/11,” its digits so neatly recalling both the phone number for US emergency services and the formerly standing tow- ers, is no longer enough to contain all the ethically gray areas within and around that opposition.3 Prince’s volume covers not just 9/11 but “American Film in the Age of Terrorism,” while Reframing 9/11 reposi- tions the once-monumental, singular date in broader terms of “Film, Popular Culture and the ‘War on Terror.’” From the cover onward, those quotation marks around “war on terror” retain a skeptical dis- tance from the Bush administration’s attempt to narrate and justify its actions in terms of military urgency. 1 Jacques Derrida, interview with Giovanna Borradori in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Ter- ror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–86. 2 Ibid., 147. 3 Stephen Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 2009); Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, eds., Reframing 9/11: © 2011 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713 P.O. Press, © 2011 by the University of Texas Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror” (London: Continuum, 2010). www.cmstudies.org 51 | No. 1 | Fall 2011 145 Cinema Journal 51 | No. 1 | Fall 2011 It is now difficult, and rightly so, to talk of 9/11 as a singular, monumental, unprec- edented, and unmatchable event—an event so unique and unnameable that it lies beyond words and can only be gestured to through numbers. Prince declares in his opening pages that he will study not just the attacks on the United States in 2001 but their “legacy—the Iraq War, controversies over warrantless domestic surveillance, forcible rendition, Abu Ghraib and policies of torture—how did American film respond to and portray these issues?”4 Reza Aslan’s foreword to Reframing 9/11, similarly, argues that the “simple story of us versus them has become muddled. Wiretapping. Waterboarding. Constitutional vio- lations. The narrative that Americans constructed to help make sense of 9/11 no longer seems as straightforward and uncomplicated as it so often does in the movies.”5 From these opening gambits, both volumes introduce a third factor into the dynamic. They will explore not just the relationship between the swift, shocking horror of the 2001 attacks and the United States’ more sustained, but arguably no less brutal, response, but also the relationship between this contemporary cultural territory and the stories it tells about terror: the relationship between the horrific theater of Septem- ber 11 (which so many observers described as feeling “like a movie”6), the official and unofficial narratives of the subsequent “war,” and the popular fictions that articulate, reflect, negotiate, and even inform these real-world events. That relationship is, as may already be clear, equally complex and open to debate. Prince presents it in terms of cinema’s response to political issues: he describes the “imprinting of the post-9/11 world onto American film,” the “absorbing” of “9/11 into existing story conventions,” and the ways in which a TV show “translates into popular culture the political stance of the Bush administration.”7 The implied model is of popular narrative as a willing, receptive medium, a cultural Silly Putty onto which real-world events transfer themselves. Aslan suggests a politically loaded process of transference, arguing that popular narratives translate and simplify to serve the dominant interests: “[I]t was cinema, and popular culture in general, that . helped cast the disturbing events of 9/11, and the even more disturbing events that followed, into an easily accessible, easily digestible story, one in which everyone had a role to play, as either hero or villain, good or evil, ‘with us’ or ‘against us.’”8 Yet other accounts suggest a two-way dynamic. Director Robert Altman blamed Hollywood for setting a template for the terrorists of September 2001 to follow, claim- ing that “these people have copied the movies.”9 Lance Rubin’s essay on adaptations of Philip K. Dick after 9/11 argues that “the films . are not simply reflections of events and conditions but participate in shaping audience judgments.”10 Other scholars see 4 Prince, Firestorm, 2. 5 Reza Aslan, foreword to Birkenstein, Froula, and Randell, Reframing 9/11, xii. 6 See, for instance, Karen Randell, “‘It Was Like a Movie’: The Impossibility of Representation in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center,” in Birkenstein, Froula, and Randell, Reframing 9/11, 141. 7 Prince, Firestorm, 285, 308, 246. 8 Aslan, foreword, xii. 9 Robert Altman, quoted in Aslan, foreword, xii. 10 Lance Rubin, “Cultural Anxiety, Moral Clarity, and Willful Amnesia: Filming Philip K. Dick after 9/11,” in Birken- stein, Froula, and Randell, Reframing 9/11, 183. 146 Cinema Journal 51 | No. 1 | Fall 2011 popular culture as a space of conflict and negotiation. John G. Cawelti’s afterword to Reframing 9/11 credits the preceding chapters as “a vital part of that ongoing work” to “understand the ways in which dominant discourses prevail and alternative voices can be heard.”11 Alex Evans, in the same volume, suggests a metaphor closer to the combat zone than the negotiating table: a territory riddled with fault lines that create cracks in hegemonic meaning. “There are political battles of reading,” he proposes, adding, “I suspect they are so often so ferocious because it is realized that this is one very promis- ing place where cultural change may happen.”12 To map that minefield of conflict, interaction, and negotiation—the relationship between “9/11,” the “war on terror,” and popular culture, over a ten-year period—is well beyond the scope of this In Focus. Rather, this collection of six short essays has a more modest purpose: to examine closely a series of case studies from the science fiction and thriller genres (and from the overlap between those categories), across both film and television (again, with a significant overlap in texts like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), in the context of the September 11 attacks and their sociopolitical legacy. These essays are short, targeted bursts, carefully aimed and tightly focused. Through close analysis of individual texts, they offer a provocative engagement with the broader issues raised above. Derek Johnson’s study of 24 (Fox, 2001–2010) refuses any easy answers—that the show is a reflection of post-9/11 anxieties, a product of conservative media, or, indeed, an influence on attitudes toward terror and torture— recommending instead that we “recognize a host of interrelated social, industrial, and historical phenomena in which culture emerges.” Bob Rehak, similarly, identifies a matrix of factors that shaped the reimagined ending of Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009). Like Watchmen itself, Rehak’s conclusion remains open to multiple possibilities, rather than closing down the interpretive options. The other essays share an interest in popular fictions that engage with the ethical dilemmas of the past decade through various degrees of allegory, disguise, and remove: from the spacebound religious conflict ofBattlestar Galactica (SciFi, 2004–2009), through the near future (and recent past) of The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox, 2008–2009), to the more “realist” contemporary thrillers A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005) and the Bourne trilogy (Doug Liman, 2002; Paul Greengrass, 2004, 2007). These narratives place their viewers in the gray area between polar antinomies of good and evil, right and wrong, “us” and “them.” They leave us in the fog of Jason Bourne’s memo- ries, a fog which, as Vincent M. Gaine suggests, clears only to reveal his own (and our own) guilt, and in the silent, strained family reunion at the end of A History of Violence, which, as Liz Powell notes, problematizes not just the protagonists’ present and future but also what we and they presumed of their previous lives. The Sarah Connor Chronicles plays explicitly with temporal loops, flashbacks, and flash-forwards that whittle away certainty into a multiple-choice, multiple-perspective view of truth and history. Many of the other stories considered here also recognize the repetitive nature of trauma prompted by the events of 9/11, and the experience of being caught between past 11 John G. Cawelti, afterword to Birkenstein, Froula, and Randell, Reframing 9/11, 212. 12 Alex Evans, “Superman Is the Faultline,” in Birkenstein, Froula, and Randell, Reframing 9/11, 124. 147 Cinema Journal 51 | No. 1 | Fall 2011 terror and the fear of greater terrors yet to come.

Load more