Hollywood and Terrorism

James Harrison

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master's of Arts

Communications & Culture

York University

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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. r^$iTi$ifiii iv Abstract Having produced nearly one hundred films on the subject, Hollywood has a fascination with terrorists. A staple of the action genre, terrorist films share a common fundamental plotline wherein evil terrorist schemes are thwarted by American heroes. Through fantasy, these films provide an allegory for affirmations of American national mythology, demonstrating the triumph of American values and virtues over various challenges. This study examines the Hollywood terrorist film throughout its history in terms of its melodramatic and mythological qualities, analyzing both the "Terrorist" and "Hero" characters as expressions of fantasy in America. Examining the terrorist films that followed 9/11 reveals the effects of the representational challenges that Hollywood faced in regards to terrorism, American mythology, and fantasy as a result of the impact of this ' event on American culture V Table of Contents Abstract iv Introduction: American Imagination, from Dream to Nightmare 1 Chapter One: The Role of the Hero will be Played by America 5 Playing the Hero's Role with Reluctance 8 Showing Compassion toward Innocents 9 Selfless in the Face of Danger 10 Dutifully Bound to his Values 11 A Servant of Society 12 Free-Thinking and Rebellious 13 A Cowboy at Heart 16 The Embodiment Heterosexual Masculinity 17 Physiology and the Impact of Reaganism 18 A Skilled Gunfighter :..:.. 30 A Suffering Patriarch 31 Wounded in the Course of Action 34 The Other Side of the Coin: Terrorist-Heroes 36 Chapter Two: The Terrorist: from Real to Reel 40 Villainy in America: Contemporary Anxieties 41 Germans (Nazis) 43 The Soviet Union and Communism 46 Islamic Fundamentalists 50 Passing Threats 54 Melodramatic Villainy; characterizing the terrorist 60 The Terrorist's Cause 62 The Body of the Terrorist 66 Female Terrorists 68 Mind of the Terrorist 71 Madness and Villainy 72 Villainous Sexuality 74 Homosexuality and Villainy 76 The Imaginary Terrorist 79 Chapter Three: Film after 9/11, 9/11 after Film 81 The Event: 84 Terror on Television 84 9/11: "Like a Movie" 89 Fantasy turns to Trauma 91 Trauma turns to Fantasy 92 The Aftermath: 93 9/11: The Movie 93 So how does the rest of "9/11: The Movie" unfold? 95 Full Circle: 9/11 in the Movies ..99 The Terrorist on Film after 9/11 102 Revenge: 107 Terrorists Dressed as Ores, Warlocks and Goblins 107 Time for Heroes 108 New Perspectives: Ill 2002 and After Ill 2007 and Beyond 114 Trauma Fades 117 vi References: 122 Filmography: 129 1 Introduction: American Imagination, from Dream to Nightmare Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, was the first film to depict a terrorist plot. Since then, Hollywood has produced nearly one hundred films that address the subject of terrorism, and shows no signs of stopping. While it may seem as though the terrorist film has come a long way from Sabotage to a film like The Sum of All Fears (2002)—developments in special effects, and filmmaking generally, have certainly escalated the visual spectacle of the films— the plot of these films remains essentially unchanged. Terrorist films subscribe on the whole to a standard plotline that proceeds in the following manner:

Without warning, a terrorist (or terrorists) emerges with a bang: A bomb goes off in a crowded shopping centre, a violent hijacking takes place, or a nuclear device is detonated. The film's conflict is set in motion by an initial act of violence that signifies the potential for more. The terrorist villain gets the attention of the world with the initial act, and if his demands are not met, his next act—already set in motion—will be exponentially more devastating. With terror in full-force, and the nation paralyzed with fear, a hero (or heroes) emerges to track down the terrorist, kill him, and finally foil the terrorist plot, only narrowly averting disaster. Along the way the hero resolves his own issues: he brings his family back together; he falls in love; he redeems himself for a wrongdoing.

These films are incredibly successful with American audiences, who flock to theatres to see the same plot executed in marginally different ways, but at the same time terrorism is real, and real terrorists threaten real lives. In 2008, terrorism is to some serious degree considered the single greatest threat to the American public, who is living under an administration that has declared global war against it. This peculiar dichotomy raises one principal question: given the putative threat of terrorism, why does the American public so enjoy a good terrorist film? 2 The answer that this study proposes is that the Hollywood terrorist film is a presentation of fantasy for American audiences, providing a diegetic world in which American national myths can be negotiated and reified.

America imagines itself on film, a fantastic ideation that is positively self- affirming. Americans go to the cinema to watch their national identity legitimated on the screen through complex narratives. It is precisely this notion that is noted by Boggs and Pollard in "Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism." They write:

Terrorism has become a vital source of narratives, fantasies, and myths that contribute so much to highly entertaining cinema, with its international intrigue, exotic settings, graphic violence, and the putative conflict between good and evil. Scenes of terrorist and counterterrorist activity have a natural cinematic appeal, above all in the US where the gun culture, civic violence, crime sprees, and a flourishing war economy permeate the landscape. (2006; 337)

In watching a Hollywood-made terrorist film, audiences view a subtle allegory that attempts to situate national and social practice into moral structures. The narrative mode that the terrorist film utilizes to achieve this function is melodrama, a pervasive mode of popular culture narrative that employs emotionality to provide an unambiguous distinction between good and evil through clear designations of victimization, heroism and villainy. (Anker,2)'

Peter Brooks suggests that the use of the melodramatic narrative creates a text that is

"morally legible," creating a Manichean opposition that places the values of the intended audience squarely within the realm of good (50). In melodrama, as Brooks suggests,

"things cease to be merely themselves ... they become the vehicles of metaphors whose tenor suggests another kind of reality" (9). In Hollywood's terrorist films, characters, conflicts, and events take on additional levels of meaning beyond mere presentation, 3 collectively forming a morality play that expresses a particular interpretation of American values.

This study offers a thorough account of two principal melodramatic characters— the hero and the villain—as they appear throughout the body of terrorist films released to date. The traits common to the amalgam of each of these characters is identified and considered on the basis of its expression of American mythology in relation to the coincident cultural environment.

The first chapter, "The Role of the Hero will be Played by America," examines the manner in which the Hollywood terrorist-fighting hero comes to be emblematic of a virtuous national character. The motivations for the ways in which the terrorist-fighting hero's personality and physicality have changed over time become apparent, borrowing from cultural contexts that shaped national identity.

The second chapter, "The Terrorist: From Real to Real" considers the construction Hollywood's terrorist villain as having been drawn from both reality and melodrama. The terrorist character effectively absorbs the anxieties of the culture that demonizes him, and is subsequently vanquished by a heroic member of it. Throughout this chapter, he is shown to be a device for representing potential threats to American values. As these potential threats metamorphose throughout history, so too does the terrorist villain's visage.

Chapter three, "Film After 9/11, 9/11 After Film," addresses the psychoanalytic and representational issues raised as a result of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 9/11 dealt a great blow to American national identity, debasing America's mythic insuperability and creating challenges in representing the terrorist-fighting hero. Similarly, problems emerged in representing the terrorist villain in a new context, wherein the terrorist character ceased to be a mere sounding board for America's potential anxieties and became a real threat. Post-9/11, several attempts were made to resolve these characters in Hollywood, with mixed results. 4 This chapter centrally raises the notion that the spectacular terrorist films made before 9/11 provided the only point of reference for the interpretation of reality on 9/11, resulting in a melodramatic interpretation of real events. Drawing on psychoanalytic concepts, I examine the attempts at resolving the trauma of 9/11 through fantasy and film, illuminating the interdependence of American film and American culture (Sobchack, 281).

The terrorist-fighting hero provides an appropriate starting point for analysis, establishing a national identity and a Manichean opposition onscreen as well as providing an antonymic point of reference for the terrorist villain. 5 Chapter One: The Role of the Hero will be Played by America In Hollywood films, terrorism is merely a foil for the heroic figure. What brings an audience to theatres to see films with terrorists are the celebrity figures employed in thwarting them: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Sean Connery, Jamie Foxx, and others who, cast unrelentingly as near superheroes, are the principal vehicles of adventure cinema.

The division of screen time gives preference to the hero over the terrorist villain. "In terms of visual style, action films consistently foreground their protagonists as the camera follows the hero's movements through space and frames him at the center of visual spectacle" (Gallagher, 208). This imbalance is interesting because of the two principal characters, the terrorist is the one with a real-life referent; the hero is purely fictional. After all, in the real world where motion picture production and movie screenings are common, terrorists exist in various forms, and terrorist attacks occur, with no such heroic interventions. Without denying the possibility that real persons might hold heroic stature—certainly terrorist plots have been foiled due to the hard work and bravery of such types, working in military or state intelligence—these heroic persons remain largely unknown, and thus provide almost no point of reference for the film hero (Klapp, 1962).

Instead of drawing from reality, Hollywood's terrorist-fighting hero is a character composed of traits considered exemplary in the culture in which he appears. Richard Slotkin, writing about gunfighters, suggests:

Like his folkloric ancestor, the hero of modern mass-culture myth is offered as the embodiment of certain natural and historical principles or forces, as an idealized representation of his people's characteristic traits, and as a model for emulation (497)

a condition that could be applied to the terrorist-fighting hero as well. For Slotkin, historical events coalesce into the actions of heroes, whose 6 inner life—his or her code of values, moral or psychic ambivalence, mixtures of motive—reduces to personal motive the complex and contradictory mixture of ideological imperatives that shape a society's response to a crucial event. (14)

Hollywood's heroes come to embody a national character. They are avatars for America, and elicit a reading on the basis of their creator's interpretation of the national identity. The expression of national identity in the hero is an idealized one. The hero comes to represent the nation and by proxy the noble forces of good, fighting against challenges to national hegemony in a variety of forms. These "challenges" -whether political, military, cultural, or social—come to be inflected in the terrorist-enemy, positioning the hero and the terrorist in Manichean opposition; the hero representing "good."

The placement of American national identity in a Manichean opposition is emblematic of what Elisabeth Anker calls "American melodrama":

An abstract yet cohesive collective body, signified by the qualities of virtue and goodness implied in the ideals of freedom and democracy; the collective body is under attack from an evil "other," a villain, and this condition necessitates a retaliatory act of heroism (23) and sanctions the exercise of state power, both in America and abroad.

In the same vein, Russell Meeuf writes that,

Melodrama can be seen as an important means through which U.S. cinema has structured its narratives and the primary way the culture has addressed challenges to its own conception of itself as morally righteous.(n.p.)

It is crucial that the terrorist-fighting hero be perceived as good. Moral righteousness in the terrorist-fighting hero achieved through melodrama not only rationalizes American culture and assuages criticisms, but also "defines the hero's ultra- 7 violence as legitimate through its juxtaposition against illegitimate violence used for obviously immoral ends" (Meeuf, n.p.). In James Cameron's True Lies (1994), this notion becomes a point of comedy. Helen Tasker (Jamie Lee Curtis), having recently discovered that her husband Harry (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a spy, asks him if he has ever killed anyone. He replies, "Yeah, but they were all bad." As the film's hero, Harry is able to commit acts of spectacular violence because he subscribes to particular values and sentiments that are widely received as righteous, thus reinforcing Manicheanism from an American perspective.

The hero in terrorist films is shouldered with the immense weight of representing the vast and heterogeneous United States as a unitary whole. This is performed by the invention of a character widely received by audiences as average, and generally representative of American values—an image that certainly does not capture the average American (for example, the average American is female, yet there are no females functioning onscreen as terrorist-fighting principal protagonists).

The action hero—of which the terrorist-hero is a sub-type—has been described by Russell Meeuf as a "suffering patriarch," which alludes to the role of masculinity in the construction of heroism in Hollywood. This character very closely mirrors a heroic model identified by Douglas Holt and Craig Thompson as the "man-of-action hero." For Holt and Thompson, the man-of-action hero resolves the conflict in American heroic masculinity between the hard-working "breadwinner," and the liberated "rebel" heroes by combining them, and eluding the negative connotations associated with each contributing model (427). They describe the man-of-action hero in terms of the myth that he satisfies:

At the root of the man-of-action hero is the distinctively American idea that individuals with vision, guts, and a can-do spirit can transform weak institutions, invent wildly creative contraptions, build fantastic new markets, and conquer distant infidels. (428)

The man-of-action hero is precisely the one seen fighting terrorists in Hollywood; an idealized fantasy of American heroism created by men feeling emasculation in an 8 increasingly insipid environment of consumer capitalism (Holt & Thompson, 425). The notion of fantasy reflects the allegorical tone, and establishes the appeal, of these screen heroes, who reflect a positive national, social, and moral fantasy onto moviegoing audiences.

Terrorist-fighting heroes are remarkably homogeneous throughout the corpus of films that depict them. Several traits can be afforded to all terrorist-fighting heroes expressing a politicized rendering of America's self-image. The following traits have been encoded into the terrorist-fighting hero, each trait explored here in terms of its portrayal, with specific examples decoded and discussed in terms of their representation of the myth of the national body.

Playing the Hero's Role with Reluctance The characterization of the terrorist-fighting hero as reluctant to assume his role undercuts the image of America and Americans as unnecessarily aggressive and assists in the expression of a larger political sentiment of America as pacific and merely defensive in nature. Aggressiveness is not a particularly positive trait, so the reluctance and passivity of the terrorist-fighting hero enforces moral legibility, by downplaying it. The hero's reluctance legitimates the violence he commits towards terrorists, by depicting it as necessary; a last resort.

Terrorist-fighting heroes do not relish their roles, nor do they enjoy killing people. They must be drawn into combat by evil, and must act in defense." They certainly vocalize their reluctance by continually questioning their actions; grumbling, and complaining through their missions.

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is but one such hero, complaining his way through the four films of the Die Hard series. McClane externalizes his internal monologue throughout the films so we can understand what he is thinking. We are privy to his own running commentary: "Oh, John, what the fuck are you doing? How the fuck did you get into this shit?" in Die Hard; "Oh man, I can't fucking believe this. Another basement, another elevator. How can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?" in Die Hard 2: 9 Die Harder. In the third film, Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1996) McClane complains about having a bad hangover. In Live Free or Die Hard (2007), he continues with sarcastic quips as he mimics his superiors: "All you gotta do is go pick up a kid in New Jersey, and drive him down to D.C. How hard can that be, huh? Can't be that hard, no, can it?" McClane's reluctant heroism is exemplary of the general attitude of the terrorist- fighting hero.

Reluctant heroes appear in a number of terrorist films as "average joes" caught up in terrorist plots and forced into action out of necessity. The protagonists in Saboteur (1942), The Rock (1996), Executive Decision (1996). Bad Company (2002), and United 93 (2006), are all civilians (without significant military training) who grudgingly assume heroic roles when faced with adversity posed by terrorist villains. In each of these films, scenes are dedicated to the hero's questioning of his newly acquired heroic role.

Showing Compassion toward Innocents Once the terrorist-fighting hero is brought into action, he is capable of using deadly force to thwart terror. This violence is contrasted with the hero's compassion towards innocents. The heroic force is directed towards evil, without the threat of collateral damage to innocent civilian lives. Within the hero, therefore, we find an explicit polarization between a selfless and compassionate human being and a mechanized, duty- bound killer. Fantastic heroes like Robocop and the Terminator represent limiting conditions of this dichotomization; they are actually part-machine.1" The two-faced hero chooses which facet to present based on the moral status of the people he encounters. The compassionate, "human" side presents itself to family; and to innocent civilians caught in the fray—these types typically unmistakable in their appearance. The hero's efforts would appear pointless or problematic if he were to kill his enemies by putting innocent lives at stake. As a result, the hero's task is not simply to kill terrorists but also to rescue those threatened by them, this often requiring him to be in dangerous or lethal situations in order to ensure the safety of others. While in a large body of films including Die Hard, True Lies, and Air Force One (1997) his enemy is a remorseless killer, the 10 terrorist-fighting hero has a hard exterior but a soft inside. Empathy separates him from the monsters he battles.

In Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005) a hero like Avner (Eric Bana) from, shows his compassion toward innocents when he saves a little girl from becoming collateral damage in an assassination that he and his team have planned. Avner's squad of Israeli terrorist-hunters has planted a bomb in a telephone in the office of Mahmoud Hamshari (Yigal Naor), the man thought to be the head of Black September, the terrorist group involved in the Munich massacre: once the phone is answered, the bomb will be armed and can be remotely detonated by the assassins waiting in a car outside. However, it is not Hamshari but his daughter (Mouna Soualen)—not supposed to be home at the time— who answers the phone. Unwilling to kill this innocent in the process of executing her father, Avner frantically races to his cohorts who have the detonator (out of sight of their target) to abort the mission.

The terrorist-fighter hero's compassion is often so great that it extends even to the villain. In Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) chases a terrorist, Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd), cornering him atop the Statue of Liberty. After a fight, Fry is left dangling precariously from the torch. Kane rushes to save him, extending an arm in aid in the face of Fry's repeated attempts to frame, maim, and kill him. Extension of compassion to the very man that has caused him so much anguish exemplifies the essential good-heartedness of the terrorist-fighting hero; thus the dramatization of compassionate acts are devices that help to establish his moral status.

Selfless in the Face of Danger Part and parcel of the hero's compassion is a lack of concern for his own well-being. In order to save others, the hero places himself in harm's way. While he has no actual desire to be injured or killed, he recognizes that placing himself in a dangerous situation is the only way that he can save others, and from his perspective, at the critical turning point of the terrorist action film, others are more important to the hero than he is to himself. There is a clear effort to downplay self-interest as a motive for the hero's action, 11 performed through the elimination of selfish causes for action throughout each film. The clear demonstration of his selflessness is but one example of the expression of this mythology in action. Terrorist-fighting heroes go above and beyond awareness of danger or precautionary action, inserting themselves into situations where they risk (and sometimes suffer) severe injury or death for the benefit of others.

In Stuart Baird's Executive Decision, Lt. Col. Austin Travis (Stephen Seagal) leads a commando team that covertly boards a Boeing 747 from a Stealth bomber, to combat terrorist hijackers. Something goes wrong with the docking mechanism connecting the aircraft. Travis surrenders his own life, saving his team in doing so, by shutting the hatch between the two planes while he is still outside of it. He falls to his death so that the mission may proceed. Another example of heroic selflessness can be observed in Paul Greengrass's docudrama United 93, a film that chronicles the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. The passengers decide to take back the plane at great peril, which results in the plane's crashing in a deserted field, instead of at the intended target, which was presumably the White House. The heroic sacrifice for others is precisely what makes United 93 a story worth telling in Hollywood.

Dutifully Bound to his Values Heroes are disposed to act because they find themselves in situations where they must take action because innocent people are in danger. Heroes accept these thankless tasks because they must be done.

In Live Free or Die Hard, McClane remarks that is he acting heroically simply because; "there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it." McClane also iterates the thankless nature of being a hero, having donned in Live Free or Die Hard the role of the hero for the fourth time:

You know what you get for being a hero? Nothing. You get shot at. A little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy. You get divorced. Your wife can't remember your last name. Kids don't wanna talk to 12 you. Get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy.

Here McClane clearly stipulates that he in no way benefits personally from his heroic exploits (and cannot be accused of self-serving behavior). Yet he continues to act heroically, placing himself in danger over and over again because he feels obliged to protect the society that he values, even if it rejects him. McClane, and other terrorist- fighting heroes, feel a duty to act when society is threatened because they are able to do so; ability creates necessity.

Before film heroes overcome their initial selfishness and adopt a selfless attitude, they may be motivated by promises of money, freedom, or acclaim. But these sorts of material interest are shed in the course of their missions. The heroes of both Michael Bay's The Rock and Michael Caton-Jones's The Jackal (1997) are convicts who have been promised a pardon provided they give aid in thwarting terrorist plots. Throughout the films, these heroes are tested; they encounter situations where they could opt out of their heroic responsibilities, but each maintains his heroic status, even if it might involve potentially sacrificing his immediate goals. Ultimately, the hero must act in dutiful service of a greater good, whatever the cost.

The notion of duty is inextricably linked to traits of reluctance and selflessness. The hero overcomes his reluctance for the sake of duty, and his selflessness is a surrender of personal motivations. Hollywood's tradition of depicting heroes as self-abnegating for a "greater good" has roots in Puritan religious philosophy, which establishes duty in a moral context, legitimizing action (Holt & Thompson).

A Servant of Society The moral is equated with the national in the terrorist-fighting hero's involvement in the public service. As Anker describes, American melodrama structures narratives in such a way that America as a unified ideological body is shown as virtuous and good (25). Expressions of patriotism signify an adherence to virtuous values. Anker writes 13 The American people's virtue extends naturally from their practice of democratic freedom; decency and righteousness are intertwined with the designation "freedom loving people." American ideals of freedom, free markets, and democracy serve to reinforce the ideal of an honorable and politically unified nation of virtuous common folk. (25)

The Hollywood terrorist-fighting hero himself shares and upholds American values, virtues, and ideologies, and as a result he often actively involved in doing so through employment with an American public service.

John McClane is a New York Police officer; Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck, Harrison Ford) is an analyst for the CIA in Patriot Games (1992) and The Sum of All Fears; Collateral Damage's (2002) Gordy Brewer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a New York Firefighter; Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) is the head of the FBI's counter-intelligence task force in The Siege (1998); In The Peacemaker (1997), Thomas Devoe (George Clooney) is Lt. Colonel in the US Army. Generally these terrorist-fighters occupy middle to lower level jobs in public service. These characters are working-class figures, not bureaucratic "stuffed shirts" or "desk jockeys" associated with aloof and effete authority. Occupying a low rung on the ladder in government service means that the heroes are bound to labour. Their position subject to authority makes their subsequent heroic actions believable, because practical, often justifying their use of firearms and the killing of terrorists.

Free-Thinking and Rebellious Despite his attachment and responsibility to authority, the hero is not likely to simply toe the line. As a true American, he obeys only the tenets of the constitution. Rebelliousness in the face of authority led to the formation of the country when America asserted independence from Britain in 1776. It is part of his Americanness, then, that makes the terrorist-fighting hero willing to step out on his own to save the day, defying the authority of his unknowledgeable superiors who insist on doing things "by the book." Jeffords 14 notices this trend during the Reagan era, a period wherein the demonization of "big government" located institutional bureaucracy as a focus of "impediments to justice" (58). She uses Die Hard to exemplify this (59): on one side, McClane is a low-level New York Police detective, operating outside of his jurisdiction when, aided by an off-duty street cop and a plucky young chauffeur, he decides to take on terrorists who have taken over his wife's office building. In addition to battling the terrorists, McClane and company have to contend with the bureaucratic meddling of various forces along the way. Deputy Police Chief Robinson (Paul Gleason) thinks that McClane is interfering with official Police operations, and threatens to arrest him; two bumbling FBI agents deactivate the power to the building (which is what the terrorists actually want) and actually fire at McClane before finally wrecking their helicopter. Eventually it is only McClane and his band of individualist rebels who are able to thwart the terrorists, while bureaucracy proves its impotence, all of its efforts failing to help and possibly even worsening the situation. This theme continues throughout the Die Hard series of films. Again, while Jeffords would locate this kind of pro-individualist mythology in the Reagan Presidency, it is in fact a trend that pervades much of Hollywood's history, notably as the outlaw hero in westerns, as the anti-hero in films such as Easy Rider (1969), the Dirty Harry series, and film biographies of famous American rebel-heroes like Patton, (1970), and Mac Arthur, (1977).

The Peacemaker features Thomas Devoe, an outspoken and highly decorated soldier who refuses to play by the rules. We are introduced to Devoe as he sits in a hearing to justify an enormous bar tab he incurred at a strip club during an operation. Identified as a rebel, he does not relent, interrupting a conference moments later. Devoe's unorthodox tactics (including tying up and interrogating a banker) meet with derision from US authorities, affirming his individualist rebel-hero stance and his willingness to get the job done at any cost.

In Edward Zwick's The Siege, Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) defies General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis)—in charge of New York City after Martial law is declared—by superseding his authority and arresting him for the torture and 15 murder of a suspected terrorist. Hubbard has at this point already killed the terrorist cell leader, and his defiance of the authority that failed to protect the city illustrates the superiority of his rebel methods.

In The Sum of all Fears, Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) hijacks a government teletype machine to communicate an (unauthorized) message to Russian President Nemerov (Ciaran Hinds) in order to avert nuclear war.

James Marshall (Harrison Ford) in Air Force One is established early on as a rogue president, delivering an unsanctioned and controversial speech in Moscow at the start of the film. As terrorists hijack the presidential aircraft, he refuses to abandon the plane, his staff, his family, or his own individualism—a technical dereliction of presidential duty.

The examples of rebel terrorist-fighting heroes as remarkable individuals are endless. Action heroes like McClane, various Schwarzenegger manifestations, and James Bond, among others, are known for their rebellious and individualistic tactics that get the job done. Their methods, although effective, are often considered dangerous and foolhardy, and tend to cause destruction to the surrounding landscape. Their rebellious devil-may-care attitude enshrines them as popular, beloved, and respected as they act to defy corrupt and controlling bureaucracies and their anti-social agendas. Holt and Thompson's man-of-action hero is described as embodying "the rugged individualism of the rebel while maintaining their allegiance to collective interests, as required of breadwinners," (428) which aids in explaining the strange dichotomy between "Service" and "Individualism" (conformity and rebellion) that we see manifested in the hero's behaviour. The individualist aspect of the terrorist-fighting hero resolves his attachment to public service, ensuring that the hero does not appear as a mindless vehicle of state power, an issue that Jeffords notes is overtly dealt with throughout the action cinema by numerous films that demonstrate free-thinking human individualism can put conformist enterprises to good use (54). 16 A Cowboy at Heart Holt and Thompson draw on Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation, which discusses the infiltration of the gunfighter myth into numerous facets of society, to locate their man-of- action hero as emerging from the narratives of the Wild West. They posit that this cowboy hero is at the core of terrorist-fighting action heroes like James Bond, Dirty Harry, and various characters played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Steven Seagal (429). Robynn Stilwell asserts that Die Hard hero John McClane can be considered a Cowboy-type hero, writing:

McClane may be a policeman in the story, but he is really an older hero type, the cowboy-not the historical cowboy, of course, but the Hollywood version. In their first radio conversation, Hans accuses McClane of being 'Just another American who saw too many moves as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshall Dillon?' McClane replies, 'I was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers, actually. I really liked those sequined shirts.' Not only does he not deny his identification with these movie cowboys; he also chooses, however ironically, to be identified with the most artificial kind of move cowboy of all, the singing cowboy in the sequined shirt. His parting shot to Hans, 'Yippee-kiy-ay, motherfucker!', is a reference to Rogers's cowboy yodel. (558)

McClane's appropriation of the gaudy TV cowboy demonstrates the simulation and abstracted borrowing of the Old-West that contemporary action heroes perform. Roy Rogers—a singing cowboy character played by Leonard Slye who appeared in hundreds of films and his own television show—is the least authentic cowboy, performing the role in hyperbole. At the same time, he was perhaps the embodiment of American patriotic mythology, commonly known as the "King of the West."

The values and traits of the cowboy hero are engrained in the terrorist-fighting heroes of Hollywood. Harry Tasker shows his cowboy sensibility in True Lies when he 17 commandeers a police horse, and rides him up to the roof of a hotel in pursuit of a suspect. Through gunslinging, shootouts, and sheriff vs. outlaw plots, most terrorist films seem to play in the shadow cast by Old-West mythology. The rebel/authority "man's man" created in the western permeates all of America's heroes, on and off screen.

Indeed this Cowboy heroism is ensconced in the presidency. Ronald Reagan's early career was as a film actor, and he was cast in several roles as an Old-West gunslinger. Similar uses of western mythology can be noted in George W. Bush's rhetoric in the wake of 9/11. Bush utilized phrases borrowed from the mythology of the American West, such as demanding Osama Bin Laden's body "Dead or Alive,"(Aretxaga, 141) invoking wanted posters from Hollywood's Old West.IV

The terrorist hero is a sponge for American nationalist mythology, constituted on the basis of the absorption of an imagined national identity. This identity has been subject to considerable change over the decades, particularly in reference to changing threats to American hegemony, but at the heart of every terrorist-fighter is the red, white, and blue, rhinestoned spirit of Roy Rogers.

The Embodiment Heterosexual Masculinity Throughout this chapter, I have referred to the terrorist-fighting hero as a "he," because the terrorist-fighting hero is, at least to date, unrelentingly male. This phenomenon speaks volumes in terms of what it suggests about the American national identity and its supporting mythology. A product of the regnant patriarchal society is the symbolic weight of a masculinity that marks goodness, patriotism, and American values. In Hollywood's terrorist films, we become involved in a mythological significatory trinity: heroism, patriotism, and masculinity; wherein the presence of each sign connotes the others. As a result, to be considered heroic, the "American hero" must express an authentic heterosexual machismo. For Roger Abrahams, "A hero is a man whose deeds epitomize the masculine attributes most highly valued within such a society" (341). Abrahams's observation gets to the bottom of heroism, in a trend that stretches cross- culturally; the exhibition of masculine traits and deeds characterize the hero as such. That 18 said, the cultural environment has changed significantly, and the concept of manliness has manifested itself accordingly in the hero. Masculinity is expressed in the terrorist- fighting hero through several routes: his physiology, his sexuality, his gunfighting ability, and his role as a father.

Physiology and the Impact of Reaganism The construction of the hero onscreen relies on showcasing muscularity and the use of phallic signifiers. However, the body of the hero has become the battlefield on which America has attempted to resolve its political conflicts. The body of the hero, the terrorist-fighter included, has undergone significant changes in relation to social and political events in America. Susan Jeffords offers a detailed account of the waxing and waning of the "hard-body" in Hollywood films across the Reagan era, observing through films like First Blood Part I (1982) and The Terminator (1984) a notable increase in the musculature of screen heroes during the Reagan presidency,. For Jeffords, the hard body is indicative of what she calls the "Reagan Imaginary":

From its appearance in the early 1980s as the resuscitated body of the Vietnam war era, to its articulation in the mid 1980s as a re- masculinized foreign policy heroic, to its exteriorization and critique in the late 1980s in order to "reveal" a more sensitive and emotional interior, to its configuration in the early 1990s as a "family" value, to its resurfacing in 1992 as an aging but still powerful foreign and domestic masculine and national model, the hard body has remained a theme that epitomizes the national imaginary that made the Reagan Revolution possible.(192)

Jeffords's relation of the body of the hero to the national imaginary that brought about Reaganism suggests the value of the hero's physicality as emblematic of America. According to Jeffords, "These hard bodies came to stand for not only a type of national character—heroic, aggressive, and determined—but for the nation itself'( 25). The relation between morals and muscles can be made easily on the basis of American 19 Manicheanism, prompting Yvonne Tasker's assertion that Arnold Schwarzenegger's "physical health remains a signifier of moral health in western culture" (81).

For Slotkin, the hard-bodied hero can be considered as reflecting a want for strength by the American public, after a castrating loss to the nation in Vietnam that occurred just years prior to the Reagan era (497). The ideal body would change over the course of the Reagan years, indeed as it had previously, and has since. The Reagan and post-Reagan (Bush) years are particularly pertinent to this particular study, because they show an exponential increase in Hollywood's depiction of terrorism, which had only been treated in a handful of films before the Reagan era.

Before Reaganism, there was little concern for and no real attempt to showcase the physical strength of the hero. Of course the hero was certainly depicted as physically attractive (which suggests a degree of physical fitness) and capable of holding his own when it came to physical contests, but his body was not fetishized. Heroes up until the Reagan era were generally fully clothed, with a uniform or suit used to define their bodies as masculine. Into the 1970s, as censorship standards relaxed (the Production Code was abandoned in 1967), the action films of the 1980s put the bodies of their heroes on display. The worship of the male body developed a fetish-like quality—something that would have to be negotiated in the coming years. Jeffords argues convincingly that Ronald Reagan was emblematic of the kind of hard body figure that Americans idealized in the 1980s, virile, muscular, and thus symbolically suggestive of national strength (25). Hulking Reagan-era action heroes, played by stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, and Seagal dwarfed the "manly"—but less gigantic—heroes of previous decades (Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Steve McQueen, John Wayne). Muscles were exposed as shirtless (or at the very least, sleeveless) heroes battled evil. Throughout the Reagan era the hard-bodied hero would figure prominently in the conventions of the emerging action genre, and as the Reagan era came to a close, he would decline. For Robynn Stilwell, 20 Die Hard is unmistakably a product of the socio-political atmosphere of the USA in 1988. It was an election year: the selection of Ronald Reagan's successor would be seen as either an affirmation or a rejection of the policies of a president who was at once one of the most loved and one of the most loathed in American history, and, it must be remembered, a president who had been one of the most popular film stars in Hollywood, an actor who specialized in playing such archetypal American good guys as cowboys. (556)

In terms of its representation of the masculine hard body, Die Hard sits on the fence. Jeffords describes the decline of the hard body that occurred as we moved into the Bush presidency. Referring to the immediate post-Reagan years, she writes:

The hard body films that emblematized a renewed national and international strength have been repudiated, not for a return to the soft body of the Carter years, but for the creation of a body in which strength is defined internally rather than externally, as a matter or moral fiber rather than muscle fiber. (136)

Numerous factors present themselves as potential reasons for the decline of the hard body at the end of the Reagan era, but principally three: the (end of the) cold war, the presumed threat of homosexuality, and an attempt to resolve some of America's domestic issues.

The Cold War resulted in a massive arms race and display of power on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union; a metaphorical flexing of national muscles, which brought about the hard bodied hero to begin with. Into the 1980s, the two countries appeared to be more or less in a stalemate of mutually-assured destruction. While he was born of a need to strengthen the body to stand up to the "hard" Soviet Union, the hard- bodied hero in Hollywood is indicative in his decline of the rejection or subversion of this contest, de-valuing Soviet hyper-masculinity. The individualism essential to America's 21 national imaginary was challenged by the idea of the machine-like Soviet muscleman, and manifested itself on the screen prior to the decline of the hard-bodied hero. Jeffords brings to light the rejection of Soviet automatism through the example of Sgt. Yushin (Voyo Goric) in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) (105). Yushin is the only character in the film who is physically larger and stronger than Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), and an archetypal Soviet hard body. Rambo is able to beat Yushin by using his intellect; the ability to think critically and independently is a trait that the Soviet Yushin decidedly lacks. In play here is the notion that it is only in the hands of the clever (American) individualist that muscle actually proves beneficial. The Soviet hard body, for all its hardness, has become a mindless machine that is no match for a free-thinking American. In this light, the shrinking of the American hard body some years later is indicative of a rejection of this mindless mechanization, in a return to natural and authentic masculinity that marks the Soviet hard body as an "over-compensation." Jeffords draws parallels between a decline in musculature and the rejection of "muscular" technology—big guns, robotics, steroids, and nuclear arms—as symbolic of America's rejection of anti- individualist Soviet practices. She writes,

Coproduced then with the hard body is a complimentary theme of anti-mechanization that reinforces the sense of the Male hard body as "natural," not manufactured, and individual, not mass-produced. (105)

The notion of having a body that was "authentic" was important into the last gasps of the Cold War, and the expression of an authentic masculinity was negotiated throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s. Orrin Klapp's analysis of "The Clever Hero" defines a Ulysses-like type characterized by

relative smallness and weakness against a larger opponent help to cast him in his role. There should be a disparity in size between the antagonists. He is at his best when persecuted by an apparent superior who thinks he has him beaten, cornered, captured, or 22 scared, and then, suddenly, it is the little fellow who is laughing. It helps if the opponent is overconfident, a bully, pompous, overbearing, or slightly stupid, for then he falls more readily and his gullibility emphasizes the trickster's cleverness. Complacency and pride, together with strength and cruelty, prepare an ideal opponent for the clever hero, for we have not only a fighter who is vulnerable, but a bully whom the crowd dislikes. There is a tactical situation, then, which has the following elements of advantage for the small hero: For the audience, who are individually not strong, it proves that "brains," or even a mere trick, will triumph over "brawn. "(1954; 27)

Heroes of the late 1980s and early 1990s begin to appear on film as well-muscled clever men of smaller stature, a far cry from the supermen of years prior. Their size is exchanged for an intelligence that manifests itself in the form of guile, wit, and humor.

Philippa Gates supplies an analysis of the state of the masculinity of the hero into the 1990s. Gates describes the mid-1990s decline of the hyper-masculine male in favor of a more intelligent and emotionally sensitive hero, using Stuart Baird's Executive Decision to exemplify this paradigm shift:

In Executive Decision (1996), the muscle man and expected hero of the film (Steven Seagal) is killed off early on and the smarter, less physical man (Kurt Russell) takes over the role of hero. (2006; 147)

Gates qualifies this change in a later passage, asserting that the importance of the hero's physicality may have waned, but it is still quite present.

Despite the shift to the cerebral, the American Hero, nonetheless, must be a man or woman of action, and the new smarter and more sensitive detective must always learn to be somewhat physical and violent before he can successfully defeat the villain. (2006; 158) 23 The official end of the Cold War in 1989 only expedited the softening of the hard body to an "average" body in Hollywood. The hard body was now no longer needed to stand up to the Soviet threat, but it is important to recognize that this body was in decline years earlier.

The second major (and related) factor in the move to a smaller hero was the widely claimed threat of homosexuality. The Puritan foundation of American culture has created a cultural context in which homosexuality is perceived as a deviant, sinful, and inappropriate lifestyle. In this environment, behaviour denoting homosexuality or homoeroticism connotes moral depravity and deficiency.v This prejudice persists widely in America, even today, and has continued to inflect characters in American melodrama.

Gay culture underwent a hyper-masculinization with the adoption of motorcycle culture at the end of World War n. In the 1970s and 1980s, gay culture embraced bodybuilding through venues such as Gold's Gym in Los Angeles, with the result that both hyper- and hypo-masculinity became signifiers of homosexuality. Harry Benshoff writes:

The long standing public image of the queer as effeminate fairy who one might ridicule but had no reason to fear was supplemented by the more ominous image of the psychopathic child molester capable of committing the most unspeakable crimes against children. The fact that homosexuals no longer seemed so easy to identify made them seem even more dangerous, since it meant that even the next-door neighbour could be one. The spectre of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted cold war America. (127)

The conflation of the inauthentic hyper-male with the "weak" homosexual implied the need for a return to a "genuine" masculinity. The depiction of the Soviet hard body as inauthentically hyper-masculine suggests that perhaps the "likening" of homosexuality and Communism asserted by Senator McCarthy in the early 1950s was still present in 24 American society. In addition, the newly discovered threat of AIDS, discovered in 1981 (CDC) and stigmatized as a "homosexual disease," added a "deadly dimension" to homosexuality. Hyper-masculinity was suddenly rejected as being a possible signifier of homosexuality, leading filmmakers to consciously avoid the fetishization of the muscular male body onscreen. The sudden "tainting" of hyper-masculinity with connotations of homosexuality ultimately encouraged the softening of the heroic body. In effort to distance the hero from the now eroticized hard body, Hollywood heroes reassumed the more "authentic" figure of the male that had dominated the screen throughout the 1950s, a well-muscled, but distinctly regular hero who was powerful, yet without the greased-up eroticism of years prior. Under-muscled characters were effeminate, and over-muscled characters were inauthentic, possibly homosexual, and over-compensatory.

Finally, the softening of the hard body has been considered to be a result of a need for America to address its domestic issues. Jeffords comments on the use of the soft(er) white male hero, suggesting that a more sensitive hero was required to maintain white patriarchy, redeeming its blunders in Vietnam, during the Civil Rights Movement, and in response to feminism. The hard-bodied hero of years past was too reminiscent of the white male as historical oppressor, so the softening of this image attempted to provide a kinder, gentler, racist patriarch (125).

In many ways, the physical size of the terrorist-fighting hero mirrors the size of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, which saw a glut of terrorist films, the terrorist-fighting hero was the authentic male; a slightly polished version of the average male American, complete with flaws. Terrorist-fighting heroes do not rely on hard bodies, superpowers, or cybernetic enhancements. The notion that the average American is enough to combat terrorists both celebrates the average American, and denies elevating the terrorist's status to supervillain.

Returning to Die Hard, a film hitting theatres as the Cold War was in its death throes and as Reagan, now having served his two terms, was moving out of office, we can see that it exemplifies the changes taking place in the body of the hero. The casting of 25 Bruce Willis in this role provides an excellent example of Klapp's clever hero, McClane being perhaps among the earliest characters to exhibit this new image. Willis offered a considerable deviation from the hyper-masculine heroes of years just prior. He is only somewhat muscular, played up by his costuming in a tank top displaying his arms, and occupies a middle space of authentic (cowboy) masculinity, asserting his genuine machismo over the other characters in the film. Willis is neither tall nor overly muscular—a sprite in comparison to Rambo and the Terminator—this despite the film's attempt to emphasize his muscularity by "having McClane strip to his vest in the first fifteen minutes" (Stilwell, 559). Still it is not McClane's brawn that wins his battles, as he comes up against the larger hard-bodied Aryan fraternal supermen Tony (Andreas Wisniewski) and Karl (Alexander Godunov), and not requiring physical strength to defeat the dandy Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). Instead McClane utilizes practical intelligence, and outwits the terrorists one by one. His newly "authentic" male body clashes with various other body types and perseveres. The villainous Aryan brothers exemplify the old-style hard-bodied hero, now considered inauthentic. The film takes careful steps to demonstrate this hyper-masculinity as such, and ultimately establishes McClane, the "real" man, as superior. Killing Tony, McClane attempts to wear his shoes, having lost his own earlier—but they do not fit. He quips: "Nine million terrorists in the world and I gotta kill one with feet smaller than my sister." With the size of one's feet being a commonly understood mythological folk measure for penile length, and penile length as a symbol of masculinity (McCary), the inclusion of this scene in the film is one blatant attempt among many in the film that seeks to establish the superiority of McClane's brand of masculinity over the various forms espoused by the film's villains.

By the end of the 1980s, it was not the size of the hero, but his authentic (hetero)sexuality that seemed to be of the utmost importance and the signifier of true masculinity; and thus of heroism. Maurice Yacowar comments on Die Hard's portrayal of McClane as the authentic male hero, and draws some examples from the film that serve to illustrate his macho heterosexuality: 26 Consistent with the film's demeaning of woman are the passing bits of gratuitous sexism. McClane catches the stewardess's eye. He glances at overstretched tights at the airport and an undressed woman in the next tower. He ritually pats a pin-up by the power panel. This sexist is a man's man. He laughs off a man's kiss at the party. (4)

In this new world, the male hero's physical presence is replaced by his sexual (and sometimes sexist) presence. The authentic male is the hero of terrorist stories, amplifying the heroism of the terrorist-fighter through the identification with the mythology of masculine America. Lydia Potts and Silke Wenk write that,

As visual media and political discourse suggest daily, it is necessary to reestablish masculinity and Male virtues—in order to defend the interests of the "civilized world." Masculinity thereby performs itself once more as representing "humanity" and "civilization"—at the same time denying and de-naming gender, (460) a sentiment which reaffirms the relation between masculinity as a means of representing American hegemonic mythology.

Building from Stephen Neale's "Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema," Philippa Gates maintains that Hollywood action films often involve an elemental intimacy between male characters that is shown to be unambiguously non-sexual. Even the slightest hint of homoeroticism between male characters is perceived as unacceptable, and must be vehemently denied, often by expository confirmation of the men's heterosexuality. Gates writes;

Hollywood often places two men at the center of the film as buddies; however, there is a decided disavowal of any eroticism between the two through an emphasis on the hero's heterosexuality (through his attractiveness to women or the presence of a girlfriend 27 or wife) and a focus on Male intimacy as occurring only in the line of duty when fighting the enemy. (2001; 67)

Gates here suggests that the inclusion of a female interest for the hero in action films, superfluous to the actual plot, is simply to defuse any suspicion of erotic intimacy between men. Given the heterosexist bias of action cinema, the hero's status would be undermined by homosexual reference. Typifying a character as homosexual or inclined towards homoeroticism positions him, in fact, as distinctly non-heroic or even villainous. Mainstream America continues to experience a fairly widespread homophobia, as homosexuals are considered to oppose or challenge America's national myths.vl Not only have homosexual lifestyles been long considered "subversive" and closely associated with Communism, thus anti-American, but homosexuals have been declared as prompting a challenge to mainstream America's "family values" by numerous right wing religious and political leadersvu. In addition, as America's national identity is very closely associated with masculinity and sexual virility, the stereotypical notion of the effeminate (and thus womanly and weak) homosexual undermines the national identity in-general. The homosexual remains an enemy of America, opposing and undermining America's national machismo, and as a result is a common trope for the characterization of villainy in Hollywood (Benshoff, 2004; Russo, 1987; Tasker, 1993). America remains years away from negotiating a national identity that includes homosexuals; homosexuality and heroism remain diametrically opposed, so it presumed to be rather important that Hollywood heroes be made distinctly heterosexual.

The embrace of John McClane and Sgt. Powell at the end of Die Hard is a shining example of the attempt to demonstrate male intimacy without erotic connotations. After communicating by radio throughout the film the two men finally meet—and even hug— under the watchful eyes of McClane's wife (who quite humorously gets tossed to the side at McClane's sighting of Powell). Powell then advises McClane's wife to "take good care of him" and surrenders him to her; an intimate moment between two men in a historical and cultural environment where strict divisions between intimacy and eroticism had (and still have) to be made. To dissolve even the potential for homoeroticism 28 between McClane and Powell, both men are characterized as married, and although only McClane's actually appears onscreen, we are given considerable information on Powell's wife, who is pregnant: solid evidence of his heterosexuality. Both men are characterized as staunch traditional heterosexuals in order to deny any traces of homoeroticism that might exist. Sgt. Powell's absentee wife is an exemplar of the filmmaker's conscious effort, having no real significance to the story aside from establishing Powell as a (heterosexual) family man.

Throughout the terrorist-film genre female interests mollify instances of male bonding in similar ways. Heroes of terrorist films are commonly depicted as married men, in keeping with the all-American family values that a terrorist-fighter should embody. In addition to Die Hard, the protagonists of Air Force One, Patriot Games, Munich, The Kingdom (2007), The Rock. True Lies. Syriana (2005)—as well as "real- life" non-combat terrorist film heroes in United 93 and World Trade Center (2006)—are all married men; and in very few of these films does the marital status of the hero play significantly into the plot beyond qualifying him as a practicing heterosexual.

These marriages are not necessarily happy ones. Die Hard hinges around the recent separation of John and Holly McClane. In True Lies, hero Harry Tasker discovers his wife has been having an affair with a used car salesman posing as a spy. In a slightly more contemporary take, Bad Company's Jake Hayes (Chris Rock) has a long-time girlfriend (categorically speaking, a wife) Nicole (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon) who leaves him early in the film because his life is going nowhere. These three couples are brought back together in the course of the conflict between hero and terrorist in each film. Meeuf comments on the importance of the family man in the contemporary action cinema:

While the films are getting more complicated in terms of gender relations and the importance of the family, these complications are almost always resolved (at least temporarily) through the imperative to kill the racialized villain who threatens the White family.(n.p.) 29 Terrorist films consistently place the wife or children of the hero in a situation where they are need of rescue, this rescue redeeming the broken family relationships as well as evidencing the hero's commitment to helping others. In the action melodrama, the terrorist threat becomes a background for the resolving of problems within the domestic sphere. Meeuf draws on Yvonne Tasker's work to explain how a threat can unite people:

Yvonne Tasker's claim in "The Family in Action" that the recent focus on family is an extension of the adventure film's concern with intense relationships forged in spectacular action.(n.p.)

Scores of dead terrorists seem to accomplish what no amount of family counseling could.

Heroes who are unaffianced or unmarried allow for the development of a romance throughout the film, a popular subplot in the action cinema. This common occurrence is exemplary of Tasker's suggestion. In terrorist films that involve romantic subplots, a love interest is introduced early in the film; the hero and love interest get to know one another as the plot unfolds, experiencing "spectacular action" together. Ultimately, in some sort of "damsel-in-distress" situation which typically undersells the female, the hero and his love interest come together by the film's end.

Films such as Saboteur, Navy Seals (1990), Speed (1994), Broken Arrow (1996), Executive Decision, and The Sum of All Fears portray a hero who, through saving the world, manages to get the girl. This story is repeated as well, of course, throughout the entire James Bond oeuvre from 1962 to 2008.

Whether wife or love interest, female protagonists exist in terrorist films as testaments to the hero's heterosexuality and create situations where weak persons are in need of rescue. Generally the love interest allows for more screen time to be dedicated to a romance subplot, whereas the portrayal of wives seems chiefly concerned with communicating the hero's love and commitment. 30 A Skilled Gunfighter American heroes use guns, practicing their constitutional right while demonstrating their capacity to protect the nation. The hero derives power from his gun. As with the six- shooter carrying cowboy heroes of old, "a man without a gun is a woman"(Boatright, 144). There is a logic in having the hero armed in order to fight heavily armed terrorists, but the gun in terrorist films is a facilitator of action. Its principal function is to enable the hero to dramatically kill the bad guys.

The gun is both a phallic and phallogic signifier; it functions both as a symbol and as a device of power. The male action hero uses a gun as a means of demonstrating both his power and his masculinity (so intertwined in signification that it is difficult to parse the two).

The pistol, the modern six-shooter, is the preferred weapon of most terrorist fighters. Standard issue for most police officers, FBI agents, and spies (among the preferred career choices for most terrorist-fighters), handguns are easily concealed yet effective. Kylo-Patrick R. Hart and Brian Anse Patrick suggest the moral connotations of a character's choice of weaponry, observing that most villains primarily utilize automatic guns, while "the forces of good are associated with more traditional weaponry— handguns and rifles—which require greater precision, discretion, and skill from the operator" (93).

In the late 1980s, and early 1990s terrorist-fighting heroes (and action heroes in general) explored an array of weird and wonderful weapons (often acquired from the villain); a fetishization of emergent heavy weaponry. As bodies hardened, the hero's weapons became larger and more powerful. With the decline of the hard body—usually equipped with a machine gun or two—the hero returns to the pistol as weapon of choice. Along with the body that possesses it, the gun as phallic signifier seems to have changed to accommodate changing ideologies.

This should not be confused with a moderation in gender politics. The gun reduces in size in the 1990s, as the bodies do, for the sake of male authenticity, not 31 because it becomes any less a phallic signifier. One need only look at the evolution of female action heroes, who first appeared in the form of what Susan Bordo has called "cinematic cross-dressing" (in Brown, 53). Jeffrey Brown has noted that early female action heroes like Ripley in Aliens (1986) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) took on a mannish form, assuming the hard-bodied figure of their male counterparts and arming themselves similarly. While both the male and female hard bodies softened by the mid-1990s, the females have held on to their big guns. The phallic iconicity of the big gun maintains the (phallic) power of the female action hero while allowing for a softening of the female body that makes her more sexually attractive. The male fetishization of both the female hero and the gun implies the complex fantasy that has made these films so popular, that of a powerful, aggressive, attractive woman who knows how to handle a big gun.™1

A Suffering Patriarch The terrorist-fighting hero is more often than not a family man. Fatherhood is a testament not only to the hero's heterosexuality but also to his virility. This does not necessarily entail that the father gets along with his wife, or that he has a good relationship with his child—a point which is commonly resolved through the course of his terrorist-thwarting. Meeuf writes,

the action film protagonist we now commonly see is a suffering patriarch. The hero's failures as a father tend to escalate into crises of national security. He must learn throughout the film to juggle his domestic and heroic responsibilities, (n.p.)

The establishment of the hero as father has a dual function. It establishes a degree of heteronormativity in the hero, marking him as a regular American family man living out some iteration of the post-nuclear family. Secondly, it provides the hero with unselfish motivations for his actions. The blind nationalism behind protecting the country is deferred through the protection of a family (who just happen to live there). Meeuf cites a scene in Collateral Damage that emphasizes that what is bad for the nation is bad for the 32 family. When protagonist Gordy Brewer's wife and son are killed in a terrorist blast, they are merely "collateral damage" in an attack intended to harm CIA officials and military personnel. This attack harms both the family and the nation (through the symbolic weight of the attack), perhaps suggesting that these two institutions are inseparable.

The sexual politics in play establish the hero as an authentic alpha-male protector. To balance the delicate masculinity in play in these films, the hero's offspring is traditionally female, with some exceptions. This concession, running against the traditional belief that real men produce male children, is important in its own right because it is made on the basis of maintaining a larger symbolic structure that upholds the macho myth. In a literal trade-off, the production of male offspring is forgone in favor of the daughter, most importantly because the introduction of a male child would complicate the masculine mythology in the stories. A hero's male child requiring rescue undermines the the myth of American heroic masculinity more than a female child does, since of all people— the myth would proclaim—the son of the hero should be as his father is, capable of rising to the position of hero when required (Jeffords describes Reagan [the father] and [H.W.] Bush [the son] in terms of "genetic continuity" [65]1X). Portraying a hero's son with a weakness would be akin to an attack on the masculinity of the hero himself. Father and son duos rarely exist on the Hollywood screen, and generally this is only in the context of the son assuming the role of the aged father. A strong son and a strong father would create an oedipal competition that is far more easily avoided than resolved. Since the protagonist of terrorist films is the father, and it is relatively rare that the protagonist dies, these sexual politics are better averted through female offspring. The heroes of Air Force One, Die Hard, Munich, Patriot Games, The Peacemaker, and True Lies are all fathers to daughters. Exceptions which prove the rule are Arlington Rd. (1999) and Svriana, wherein the protagonists are killed and the existence of a son creates an opportunity for the work of the heroes to be picked up by the offspring. This can be said as well for the heroes in United 93. In Collateral Damage, Gordy Brewer has a son, but he is killed quite early in the film. A notable and anomalous exception worth discussing is that of The Kingdom, wherein the protagonist, FBI agent Ronald Fleury 33 (Jamie Foxx), has a young son. The existence of Fleury's son seems out of the ordinary in a terrorist film which conforms precisely to the conventions of the subgenre in every other way possible. However, The Kingdom still manages to avert becoming tangled in the sexual politics that male offspring bring with them: Fleury's son Kevin (TJ Burnett) is very young, and as such poses no oedipal threat to his father; furthermore, the action in the film takes place in Saudi Arabia and not on American territory, so Kevin remains out of the reach of terrorists throughout the film—thus there is no scenario in which he requires rescue. Since much of The Kingdom deals with similarities across vastly different cultures, a staunch comparison is made through the friendship forged between Ronald Fleury and Saudi Police Colonel Faris Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom). Despite their cultural differences, they bond as family men and work together in foiling a terrorist plot, delivering the message that many Arabs actually support American Manichaean values. In a sense, the death of Al Ghazi may be a symbolic death of the father in lieu of Fleury's death, but it is suggested that the goodwill shared between the two men will persist into the next generation. In a more macabre scene, the torch passes across generations as we see the dying arch-terrorist Izz Al Din (Uri Gavriel) impart some words of wisdom to his 15-year-old grandson, assuring him that,"We will kill them all."x

A daughter is dramatically easier for a counterterrorist hero for a second reason: as the hero battles terrorists, he fights to protect the meek. Very generally, these are the women and children. To some real extent, innocent civilians in terrorist films are feminized, adult male victims remaining muted in favor of women and children. Situating the hero as father to a daughter gives him an additional—and vital—"damsel in distress" to rescue (as it seems that unfailingly the hero's family becomes involved with his terrorist-fighting work). Protecting weaker women from evil males is a common theme in Hollywood film in general, and emphasizes both the masculinity and hero-status of the protagonist. The inclusion of the hero's daughter adds a sexual dimension to evil, as the hero father fights to protect the chastity of his child. 34 Wounded in the Course of Action Wounding the hero can accomplish much dramatically. Balance can be brought to the unreality of a situation wherein one man manages to thwart or kill scores of heavily armed terrorists. If the hero were to emerge victorious and completely unscathed, with such odds, the dramatic situation might appear unrealistic in the eyes of film viewers."1 Since a viewer's excitement depends on suspension of the knowledge that the hero will survive through to the end of the story, the hero cannot be invincible; nor can he seem to be an Everyman if he fails to bleed or suffer pain as anyone else would do in his place. The terrorist-hero even dies from time to time, because as the average man, he is fallible.

Steve Neale's essay "Masculinity as Spectacle" introduces an additional reason for the wounding of the (male) hero. For Neale, the wounding of the hero's body is a tactic of reducing the erotic presentation of the hero's body for the male viewer through an appeal to sadism. He writes,

In a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the Male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another Male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed. The mutilation and sadism so often involved ...are marks both of the repression involved and of a means by which the Male body may be disqualified, so to speak, as an object of erotic contemplation and desire. (22)

Neale's assertion points to the diffusion of homoeroticism associated with looking at the hero. Wounding, torturing, or maiming the hero maintains the masculinity of both him— maintaining him as a non-erotic object—and the viewer, who is just as vulnerable to a fear of homoeroticism. The wounding of the action hero maintains—and often emphasizes—his status as heroic.

If the hero sustains a serious wound—one that would take him effectively "out of action"—it must be at the film's climax. In the world of onscreen terrorist fighting, the hero can sustain such an injury in the final moments of the film, with certain restrictions. 35 First, the injury must be achieved through heroic means: in the process of thwarting a villain, or in the process of rescue wherein the hero sacrifices himself to injury in order to achieve his goal. Secondly, if the hero is seriously injured, he must find the wherewithal to overcome the pain or handicap of his injury to still save the day in the end. Thirdly, even if the hero is seriously injured—shot, stabbed, or beaten—it is rare if he does not survive to fight another day.

Interesting exceptions are Arlington Rd., Syriana, and United 93, in each of which the protagonist hero is killed at the end. United 93, based in real tragedy and thus a sensitive matter for some viewers, draws on the discourse of heroism while avoiding any depiction of the protagonist heroes's wounding. Arlington Rd. intentionally defies this trope for a specific dramatic effect."11 Syriana's political message allows for the death of its protagonist in an attempt to get at the root causes of terror.

A crucial aspect of the wounding of the hero is that his wounds should not compromise his masculinity or his attractiveness. Therefore, the hero can receive any manner of flesh wounds, but none that castrate him and none that render him ugly. Wounds that will heal completely or others that will become manly scars are quite acceptable, whereas severely disabling injuries simply don't—and can't—happen. The hero is seldom spared a certain degree of bodily pain and suffering in his fight against terror. Beaten, bruised, dragged, thrown, cut, shot, tortured, burned, caught in an explosion, nearly drowned, heroes show an incredible resilience. The tolerance for pain, long considered a manly asset, is a trait well developed in the hero. Heroes don't let their injuries stop their missions, and they most certainly never cry.

Even in a film like Syriana, where hero Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is interrogated and tortured (in a horrifying sequence that culminates in the removal of his fingernails with a pair of pliers), he refuses to surrender information, and after some elliptically implied recovery can resume his mission.

John McClane suffers all manner of injuries throughout the four Die Hard films including: walking on broken glass, leaping off buildings and out of various vehicles, 36 being beaten to a pulp in brawls with terrorists, and, in the climactic scene of Live Free or Die Hard, shooting a bullet through himself in order to kill the villain.

McClane, perhaps the screen's most frequently injured hero, does not let his injuries slow him down, sometimes limping his way to victory. His character in particular is indicative of a stereotypical wounded terrorist-fighting hero, bruised, bleeding, and broken by the film's end, his injuries incurred in the line of duty on the road to victory. This cues viewers that heroism is neither easy nor for the faint of heart.

The Other Side of the Coin: Terrorist-Heroes The adage "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" makes the concept of terrorism a matter of perspective/111 On occasion, Hollywood produces a film wherein "terrorists" cross the Manichaean border and become heroes.

America, and thus Hollywood, has been rather sympathetic towards certain terrorist organizations as opposed to others however, sympathetic portrayals of terrorists are not the same as terrorist heroes. In order for the terrorist to become a hero in a Hollywood film, he or she must conform to the basic conventions of the American melodramatic hero.

Terrorist heroes are misunderstood freedom fighters. In keeping with a typical Manichean conflict in films depicting terrorist heroes, it is those who label the hero as a terrorist that are themselves evil—persons simply utilizing the propaganda of terrorism to defame political dissidents. Terrorist heroes appear as the protagonists of many films where the government has instituted a totalitarian regime of state-sponsored terror. One of the earlier examples is the film Red Dawn (1984), wherein a group of teenagers launch an insurgent-style campaign against the Soviet Army, which has attacked and occupies the Southern United States. The all-American teenagers, defending their homeland and avenging the death of their father at the hands of evil Soviet invaders, provide perhaps the most morally legible account of the terrorist hero to date. All subsequent films about the terrorist hero remain slightly more complex morally, since terrorism took on more serious connotations after the Cold War ended, and emerged as a principle threat to America. The 37 insurgent-style violence in Red Dawn—the use of IEDs, selected ambushes, and tactics meant to debase numerical and technological handicaps—is vaguely reminiscent of the insurgent violence occurring against American troops in the Middle East (Afghanistan and Iraq) presently, but it is quite unlikely that Hollywood, or Americans in general, would consider Jihadist insurgents as heroes.

In the film Brazil (1985), Terry Gilliam's acerbic retro-future parodies the totalitarian state as convoluted and inefficient, and demonstrates with great comedy the approach taken towards terrorism in the 1980s. Archibald "Harry" Turtle (Robert De Niro) is a terrorist, railing against the needless bureaucracy that the film satirizes so well, yet he is quite friendly and aids the protagonist Sam (Jonathan Pryce). As the audience we identify strongly against the totalitarian bureaucracy, and thus we find Turtle a cheeky hero.

A similar, yet increasingly complicated case of the terrorist hero appears in the film Children of Men (2006) when we are introduced to "The Fishes," a "terrorist" organization fighting a totalitarian government for the rights of immigrants. As the audience, we begin to empathize with them. They appear to have the right intentions, and according to them the government has perpetrated many of the activities (IRA-style bombings) attributed to them as a means of debasing their cause. While some members of the group eventually turn on the protagonist, the political movement is generally understood as being good.

The Jackal sees a rehabilitated terrorist—ex-IRA sniper Declan Mulqueen (Richard Gere)—given a reprieve from prison to track down the deadly assassin known as "The Jackal" (Bruce Willis) before he assassinates the First Lady. Declan's sordid past is quickly swept aside for the duration of the film, and care is taken to establish him as heroic and good through his actions. Several other films see rehabilitated terrorists cast as terrorist fighters, such as John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) in The Rock, and James Dove (Jeff Bridges) in Blown Away (1994). Despite being criminals, these characters 38 turn out to have hearts of gold, and use their terrorist/criminal tactics only against those defined clearly as enemies throughout the film.

Swordfish (2001) depicts another interesting terrorist with the right intentions. Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) stages a dramatic robbery, strapping bombs to hostages— some of which detonate—and making a daring escape with large amounts of money belonging to the US government. Shear is, for all practical purposes, a terrorist. However, there is a slight twist to Swordfish that complicates its moral legibility. Shear is involved in a renegade anti-terrorist organization, the so-called "Black Cell" that is a secret wing of the US government. Shear intends to use the money that he steals to finance international anti-terrorist activities, including action against states sponsoring terror. Shear makes his philosophy clear. He considers America to be at war with "Anyone who impinges on America's freedom." Shear continues:

Terrorist states, Stanley. Someone must bring their war to them. They bomb a church, we bomb ten. They hijack a plane, we take out an airport. They execute American tourist, we tactically nuke an entire city. Our job is to make terrorism so horrific that is becomes unthinkable to attack Americans.

At the time of its release, perhaps it was easier to find the morally corrupt Gabriel Shear as a villain, or at the very least he remained on uncertain ground. Four months after the film's release, 9/11 happened, and Shear became a hero. He was, after all, fighting for America and attempting to protect the country from terrorists on the verge of attack. Shear's sacrifice of a handful of civilians to ensure America's safety may have seemed excessive at the time, but in a post-9/11 world this sacrifice is now common sense.

Finally, the Wachowski brothers's film V for Vendetta (2005) establishes an even more complex terrorist hero, and one that is unconventional in a variety of ways. In the film, V (Hugo Weaving), a masked superhero-of-sorts, operates in a fascist future- Britain. Driven by personal revenge, V commits wanton acts of terrorism against this government. Since the government is depicted as evil, V as terrorist appears as the lesser 39 evil of the two. Despite some morally questionable acts, V manages to preserve his status as hero throughout the film. He is politically and morally complex, but his combined charisma and his enlightenment, as well as the evil of the regnant government, almost seem to justify his terrorism. V is most certainly lacking in many heroic characteristics, and as a declared homosexual he challenges the conventions from the start—a fact which may have made this film unpalatable in homophobic America. V remains an intriguingly charismatic yet morally and conventionally challenged character, and thus is perhaps difficult to place clearly in the hero category.

If what makes one a terrorist is in fact a matter of perspective, then Hollywood film's mode of portraying the terrorist can be as either hero or villain. The tropes of the hero can become somewhat complex, but he is limited to solid concepts of Manichaean good and patriotism, which permit and lead the terrorist hero to act in the name of a greater good. If this greater good is not judged as such by the audience, then it would be impossible to depict the terrorist as a hero. We should be mindful of this when it comes to considering the various banners and causes under which terrorists operate onscreen, and the ways in which we as audience come to evaluate a cause as worthy or unworthy of a resort to terrorism. 40 Chapter Two: The Terrorist: from Real to Reel The construction of the mythic terrorist can be understood as a circular dialogue within popular culture involving both the news media and Hollywood. Both entities have historically built—and subsequently adopted—a popular image of the terrorist. This feedback loop means that the popular image of the terrorist is only slightly modified by reality. New real-life terrorist attacks simply add additional information to an existing popular body of knowledge. As a result, the real-life terrorist does not appear onscreen. What does, rather, is the myth of the terrorist. The terrorist myth is composed based on the motifs of real terrorists, current anxieties in America, and the tropes of villainy inherent to American melodrama. The construction of the terrorist character onscreen feeds back into the terrorist myth, impacting the interpretations of the terrorist in both the news media and in reality, an interplay that Baudrillard notes in The Transparency of Evil.

Unlike Hollywood's terrorist-fighting hero, the Hollywood terrorist has a clearly visible real-life referent. Terrorists do exist in real-life and are widely considered to be villains in contemporary society. Although the dramatization of the terrorist draws on real life, reality remains but one of many factors that contribute to the image of the terrorist onscreen. In Hollywood film, the peculiarities of American melodrama powerfully inform all villains, and thus the terrorist villain inflected with traits widely considered undesirable or evil in American society. In some cases, the adaptation of a real-life villain into a dramatic one can involve a glib—or at least selective—appropriation of traits, compiled to produce maximum melodramatic results. This distortion has been criticized for its ultimate effects in reality. For example, Jack Shaheen's work on Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood criticizes filmmakers for their characterization of Arabs as "belly-dancers, billionaires, and bombers" (2001, 13). Shaheen's assertion is that this negative depiction can have tangible effects on a population's view towards Arabs, an outcome which suggests the danger of interpreting reality on the basis of melodrama.

This chapter will consider the terrorist-villain of Hollywood films as a composite of reality and melodrama, and will attempt to explain his character traits in relation to this 41 fusion. The first section of this chapter offers an exploration of the process of infusing the terrorist villain with contemporary anxieties throughout history. This establishes reality as a source for the terrorist villain, and explores what is and what is not appropriated in the course of the adaptation of the terrorist for the screen, and why. The second section explores the constitution of the terrorist as a villain in American melodrama. The sections that follow explore various cinematic manifestations of terrorist villainy, identifying various modes through which he is characterized: politics, physiology, and psychology.

Villainy in America; Contemporary Anxieties American film is heavily invested in the anxieties of everyday Americans. If a filmmaker can link the audience's everyday fears to the action depicted in his or her film, the dramatic experience can be heightened. Reference to contemporary events in a film also draws an audience, eager to experience a perhaps "monstrous dose of reality" (Sontag, 32) from the safety of the theatre. Hollywood's terrorist assumes the visage of a threat to America. Terrorists on film have historically been characterized on the basis of contemporary threats, be they foreign or domestic. Typically, for maximum audience impact, the terrorist characterizes the single-most dangerous potential threat to America at the particular moment of his appearance. This notion borrows from Denning's assertion about spy fiction, proposing that "Since the turn of the century, spy thrillers have been 'cover stories' for our culture." For Denning, these are

collective fantasies in the imagination of the English-speaking world, paralleling reality, expressing what they wish to conceal, and telling the 'History of Contemporary Society'. Thrillers use cover stories about assumed identities and double agents, and take their plots from cover stories of the daily news; and their tales of spies, moles, and the secret service have become a cover story, translating the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth century into the shadow world of secret agents. (1) 42 Denning's notion about the spy thriller—just one subgenre in which the terrorist villain is found— substantiates the construction of the terrorist villain as a reflection of contemporary cultural anxieties.

Depicting a potentially threatening group as terrorists is an exercise in myth- making. Roland Barthes situates myth as the presentation of political motivation via a seemingly innocent presentation of fact. "We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature," (129) says Barthes,

In the . . . [mythical] system, causality is artificial, false; but it creeps, so to speak, through the back door of Nature. This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious— but because they are naturalized. In fact, what allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one... the myth consumer, takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system.(131)

The use of the figure of the terrorist as a mythical construction presents a villain in terms of a factual system, but semiologically it works to villainize the particular group to which the terrorist belongs without naming these political motivations. Onscreen, then, the terrorist calls up a mythological structure wherein a potential political is naturalized in a villainous character. Effectually, this alibi is a thin but politically powerful exercise in hegemony, denying the existence of the prejudice that it seeks to communicate. The use of myth in the depiction of particular groups as terrorists allows for filmmakers to take advantage of public anxiety without necessarily having to account for the political consequences of doing so. Terrorists depicted are not officially affiliated with enemy groups or nations, although they may, to the audience, be considered to be representative members of them. 43 Like most things in Hollywood, terrorists come and go. If a potential threat becomes an active one, then the terrorist is abandoned in favor of an overt villain (generally speaking, enemy soldiers). The terrorist villain is relevant only in the liminal space between peace and war. In many ways, the characterization of the terrorist in Hollywood suggests war is to come. The terrorist myth may serve a function in preparing for a wartime consideration of a particular group as enemy.

Why project a potential threat to an audience through the construction of a terrorist character for the screen? Threat induces trauma in the threatened. Portraying threat through mythology allows for an experience of trauma without imminent danger. Doubly, the trauma of reality is dampened by the film screen, allowing for the safe observation of a potential threat (in the theatre), delivered in a less threatening format (myth). Goffman's Frame Analysis discusses the notion of re-keying experience— placing events in different contexts to change the way in which they are perceived— which accounts for the value of these simulated experiences (43).

In his analyses of professional wrestling in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1980s, Jeffery Mondak suggests a trend in both popular culture and foreign policy to characterize villains on the basis of foreign threats. He states that, "during each of those periods, professional wrestling interpreted foreign affairs as a simple dichotomy in which the United States represented good while foreigners represented evil"(146). Professional wrestling and Hollywood films can be located within the same popular mass entertainment discourse, and as such it is no surprise that their characterization of villainy is quite consistent as an outlet for resolving a nation's anxiety through violence.

Germans (Nazis) Terrorists first appear onscreen in the 1930s, amidst rising global concerns over Germany's increased militarism. Two films by Alfred Hitchcock; Sabotage and Saboteur present pro-fascist terrorist infiltrators intent on causing disruption in both England and America. Both films were made and set in the immediate prewar environments of the countries in which they were produced (England and America respectively, shortly before 44 each country became involved in World War II), ideal circumstances for depicting anxieties toward Germany through the terrorist figure. The terrorists in both films are never specifically identified as German, but their accents and names make this ambiguity rather transparent.

The screenplay of the film Saboteur was modified to resonate with American audiences by its relation to contemporary events. In the film, the group of terrorists destroys a ship as it sits in dock in New York Harbor. The saboteurs, disguised as a news crew, start a fire on the ship, eventually causing it to capsize. Just months before the film's release, the USS Normandie, sitting in dock in New York Harbour for retrofitting into a troop carrier, caught fire, capsized, and ultimately sank. At the time, suspicions abound that this was an act of sabotage perpetrated by Germany. Hitchcock actually utilizes the news footage of the sinking Normandie as a stand-in for his sabotaged ocean liner, playing his audience off this recent event by recreating it while indulging the paranoia associated with it.

After World War II, The Nazi became an established and incontrovertible enemy of America; easily interpreted by audiences as a villain. A sinister look and a German accent appeared to be all that was necessary to achieve this effect. Nazis after the war appear primarily onscreen not as terrorists, but as fiendish soldiers and holocaust perpetrators; an overt enemy in a combat situation—there was no longer a need to use myth to portray the German enemy, and thus no need for the terrorist character onscreen.

However, the characterization of terrorists as German in Hollywood would continue, notably throughout the James Bond series of films, as the actors playing archvillains aped Adolf Hitler's persona to properly express themselves as evil; of particular note is Sir Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) in Moonraker (1979), a character very closely resembling Hitler in both appearance and ideology.xlv As well, the Die Hard series depicts German villains, introducing us to two members of the Gruber family as archvillains, German brothers Hans (Alan Rickman) and Simon (Jeremy Irons)— appearing separately in two films in the series—accompanied by a motley crew of Aryan 45 henchman, aptly referred to by the film's hero as the "East German all-stars." Finally, The Sum of All Fears features a Neo-Nazi terrorist organization with the intention of starting a war between America and Russia.

These more modern German terrorists, existing in a postwar environment, can be thought of as representative substitutions for more present threats. During the years in which the Bond films depicted German/Nazi-esque characters, Germany posed little threat to the United States, or to anyone else, having been decimated during the war and occupied by both American and Soviet forces. Russia existed as the predominant threat to America at this time, and the use of the image of the totalitarian German terrorist may allude to the new Soviet threat. Robert MacDougall's writing on the notion of "Red Fascism" may suggest this claim's validity:

Adler and Paterson argue that American policy makers "casually and deliberately articulated distorted similarities" between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia both before and after the war. This "misleading analogy," they maintain, made it easy for the American public to transfer its hatred from Hitler's Germany to Stalin's Russia, thwarting any possibilities of greater understanding or accommodation between the two cold war powers.(59)

It remains common practice in Hollywood to construct new villains on the basis on established ones.

In considering the terrorist character as a vehicle for the expression of contemporary anxieties, Die Hard's villain Hans Gruber may initially appear somewhat out of place as a German terrorist in the late 1980s. On the other hand, Stilwell claims that at the time of Die Hard's filming, one of America's largest economic competitors was West Germany (Gruber is specifically identified as West German). Perhaps Germany did pose a new threat to America. Maurice Yacowar suggests that Die Hard's use of a German villain may be an act of substitution, acting as a metaphor for a revisionist version of the Vietnam War. He describes Gruber as "a sophisticated business-type (the post-war Nazi?)" and suggests that "to conceal the film's denial of Vietnam, the villains are drawn from broader traditions. The chief killers are two Aryan brothers, who evoke the Hollywood Nazi" (2).

When faced with the task of making The Sum of All Fears in the immediate wake of 9/11, the filmmakers abandoned the Arab villains depicted in the source novel, presumably over concerns that audiences would consider this insensitive. Instead, filmmakers resorted to the old standard Nazi villain, drawing on a wider tradition of established villainy to play the role. A large-scale Neo-Nazi terrorist organization such as the one featured in the film is not known to exist, and as such the use of neo-Nazis in The Sum of All Fears remains a rather transparent substitution for an Arab-based threat on the minds of filmgoers at the time.

The Soviet Union and Communism The end of World War II saw the start of the Cold War, shifting the principal threat to the United States from Germany and Japan, to Soviet Russia and Communism more generally. This again created the environment—one of potential (cold) threat—wherein a threat to the United States could best be expressed in terrorist form.

The USA and the USSR became nuclear superpowers, cleaving the world into communist and democratic regimes. The world was divided directly through the centre of Berlin, and the competition between the two powers became an ideological contest to prove the superiority of one system over the other. Extensive money and resources were devoted to expanding and/or maintaining the reach of the superpowers's respective ideological systems; an argument that elevated to the point where the world was threatened with by the notion of "mutually assured destruction."

Due to this situation, America took issue with any domestic instances of Communism for fear that infiltration by Soviet spies could convert sympathetic Americans, toppling the system from within. The House Committee for Un-American Activities (HUAC), which in the years surrounding the war had been concerned with 47 Nazi propaganda and German-American activity, turned its sights on ferreting out subversive Communists embedded in American Society. Allegations of Communist propaganda and support sparked an inquiry into the Hollywood film industry. Briley notes that "with congressional investigations questioning Hollywood's loyalty, the film industry was quick to demonstrate its Americanism with a host of anticommunist films" (227).

The era of McCarthyism can be considered one of the darkest moments in the . history of both film and free speech. During this period the Communist became caricatured in two main roles; the foreign Communist villain and the American subversive villain. While fascist-style uniforms were enough to vilify the foreign Communist, the American subversive had to be endowed with more subtle queues to situate him as evil. Many films were altered to varied extents to incorporate Communist villains— many German villains were changed to Communists—in the form of spies, saboteurs, and terrorists. I Married a Nazi (1940, title later changed to The Man I Married) was reconstituted into I Married a Communist (1949, title later changed to The Woman on Pier 13). The Whip Hand (1951) didn't even require re-shooting to change Raymond Burr, the film's Nazi villain, into a Communist one (at the behest of studio director Howard Hughes) (MacDougall, 69). As with their Nazi forebears, a bad Russian accent and a sideways glance seemed to be sufficient to identify the villain.

The James Bond series of films again responded to contemporary threats, shifting from depictions of German villains to Russians. These new Russian villains, although often employed in the higher ranks of the Soviet infrastructure, were never depicted as acting at the behest of Soviet leadership: a Russian-based terrorist organization in From Russia With Love (1963); A Soviet-trained drug dealer in Live and Let Die (1973); A rebel Soviet General in Octopussy (1983), The Living Daylights (1987), and yet again in Goldeneye (1995). Soviet terrorists are rogue generals and Stalinesque leaders of evil organizations. The presentation of Soviet terrorists is almost entirely confined to the James Bond series from 1963-1995. It seems that perhaps for a brief period of time there appeared to be an effort in Hollywood to veil the demonization of the Soviet regime, 48 perhaps in the spirit of reaching a diplomatic resolution—1977's The Spy Who Loved Me even features Bond working cooperatively with the Russians.

The macho bravado that came with the 1980s and the Reagan Presidency brought about Soviet villains that showed all the trappings of a hot-war style villain. The Soviet terrorist all but disappears in favour the enemy soldier. Films like Red Dawn, Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rocky IV (1985), and Rambo III (1988) all depict Soviet enemies, pitted against American might in open combat.

There are questions surrounding what factors may have influenced the change in the consideration of the Soviet threat from passive to active. For one, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a hawkish attitude towards Communism—the so-called "Reagan doctrine" (Krauthammer, 1985), rejecting Detente concessions. Anti- Communist policy resulted in direct military action in Libya and Grenada, and indirect action in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Angola. The war against Communism was effectively hot at this point (Tirman, 1999).

Alternately, the notion of using the terrorist myth as a tactic of trauma aversion may in some ways explain the changes in depiction. With a powerful government in office actively opposing the Soviet Union, perhaps the changing tide which spelled the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union (Glasnost and Perestroika began in 1985) bolstered America to create fantasies of active combat with the Russians. The American public's own bluster regarding an imminent victory in the Cold War may have actually lessened the degree to which trauma was implied by the Soviet threat, allowing it to be depicted as a wartime enemy.

Once the Cold War ended (1990), Soviet terrorists re-emerged, but in a new form. The image of the Soviet terrorist was first re-visited in 1995's Goldeneye. The first Bond film in six years, Goldeneye features a Cossack rebel agent (Sean Bean) teamed up with a rogue Soviet General (Gottfried John) to hijack a satellite-borne weapon. It is unlikely that these "Soviet" villains act as substitutes for other more contemporary threats despite an end to the Cold War, as no new significant potential threats appeared to exist at the 49 time. More probable is a return to the initial passive threat posed by the Soviet Union, now in the form of militancy on the part of its fragmented republics and radicals seeking re-unification. The shattered Soviet Union raised anxieties, particularly in regards to rogue groups getting hold of weapons of mass destruction (Woolf, 2008).

These terrorists were Soviets for all practical purposes, continuing to assume the visage of the Soviet terrorist. In Air Force One, a group of terrorists hijack the presidential aircraft in order to negotiate the release of their leader, General Radek (Jurgen Prochnow), who is being held by Russian authorities. Radek is described in the film as a radical ex- Soviet military dictator, with nuclear weapons at his disposal. Up until 1996, nuclear weapons remained scattered through the former Soviet states— Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan—before being returned to Russia, and global concerns over so-called "loose nukes" were widespread (Betts, 1998). General Radek and his men are a direct product of the anxieties over such concerns.

The Peacemaker also addresses the issue of loose nukes, and the fear that they could fall into the hands of terrorists. A train in Russia is transporting nuclear warheads— presumably returning them—when it is hijacked and the warheads stolen. Behind the robbery is a group from another former Socialist (and Soviet) state making headlines at the time, Bosnia. That the principal terrorist (Marcel lures), a former piano teacher who observed his wife and child being killed by snipers during the siege on Sarajevo, is a somewhat sympathetic character perhaps suggests that Russia's loose nukes are the real threat. Additionally, the Russians depicted in the film are uncooperative and secretive, and in one scene a US military helicopter is actually shot down by a Russian-operated SAM site.

The World is Not Enough (1998), another installment in the James Bond series, depicts a similar situation. An ex-KGB terrorist, Renard (Robert Carlisle), travels to a former ICBM site in Kazakhstan to steal weapons-grade plutonium, with plans for detonating it in a hijacked Russian nuclear submarine, causing a meltdown in the Bosporus, killing millions, and disrupting oil shipments. Again, the emphasis on a Soviet- 50 derived threat is clear. Soviets trained the terrorist, produced and neglected the nuclear material, and built the submarine that threatens the rest of the world. Russia, irresponsible through the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is still the clear enemy.

Islamic Fundamentalists Through the dwindling of the Soviet Union , a new threat began to emerge; one whose actual modus operandi was centred in terrorist activity. Islamic fundamentalists perpetrated numerous terrorist incidents, beginning in the late 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, terrorists championing the Palestinian cause enacted a number of high-profile acts: the 1972 Munich Massacre, the 1975 Raid on the OPEC headquarters, and the 1976 Entebbe Airport Incident. In many ways, the style of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic terrorists was simply appropriated by Hollywood in order to demonize other groups. It was not until the late 1990s that Islamic terrorism received attention as a credible threat to America, a threat that obviously culminated on September 11, 2001.

John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday (1977) is perhaps the earliest Hollywood film to broach the subject of Islamic terrorism. The film depicts a plot by Black September to detonate a flechette-based bomb at the Superbowl. The film drew brief attention to Islamic terrorism, but became quickly overshadowed by anxieties over Soviet activity such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Still, a steady stream of B films appeared depicting Islamic terrorists in the late 1980s such as Delta Force (1986), Death Before Dishonor (1987), Terror Squad (1987), and Rapid Fire (1989). 1990's Navy Seals recreated these films in a major theatrical release, although it failed to ignite much public interest.

The 1990s onwards saw an escalation of terrorist activity, including bombings of embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, The Khobar Towers, and the USS Cole in port at Aden. In 1993, Islamic terrorism breached the borders of the United States, with the semi-successful bombing of the World Trade Center. Boggs and Pollard assert:

By the late 1980s, with the Cold War in its death throes, cinematic terrorism— following a hiatus of nearly two decades—moved onto 51 new ground, turning to the Middle East where Arab/Muslim militants were locked in battle with Israel and, to a lesser extent at the time, the US. These groups replaced Communists and kindred time-honored demons as larger-than-life screen villains.(2006; 338)

While the authors certainly identify a general trend of re-emergent terrorism, America was experiencing a moment in history through the 1990s where no clear principal enemy existed; a flirtation began with numerous potential threats—ex-Soviet Republics, South American drug cartels, and Domestic terrorists—in addition to Islamic terror. The myriad faces of the terrorist in the late 1990s are truly an expression of this fact. However, it can certainly be maintained that after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing Islamic terrorists received increased attention, appearing in several popular films.

In True Lies, a Palestinian terrorist group, "Crimson Jihad," poses a nuclear threat to America. Director James Cameron, when asked about his choice of villains for the film, denied stereotyping Arabs: "I just needed some convenient villain. It could have been anybody. I could have picked Irish terrorists" (Shaheen, 2001; 504). Cameron's suggestion of convenience is widely suggestive of the increasingly threatening role that Islamic terrorists played after 1993, and additionally, of the role that contemporary threat plays in the casting of the Hollywood villain.

Executive Decision hinges around an aircraft hijacking by Arab terrorists intent on flying to Washington DC and detonating a nerve-gas bomb there. Executive Decision references the numerous airplane hijackings by Islamic extremists throughout the 1990s; however, the film raises the stakes on these hijackings, bringing them to America and adding a weapon of mass destruction to heighten the threat. Ironically it would be a spectacular threat of this kind that actually became a reality on 9/11.

In both True Lies and Executive Decision, Islamic terrorists were merely inserted into the current Hollywood mold of the terrorist character; a construction which itself had initially been formed by borrowing traits from Islamic terrorists. As a result, one can 52 easily imagine both films featuring Soviet or German terrorists in the place of the Islamic terrorists shown.

Edward Zwick's The Siege marked a significant change in the portrayal of terrorism onscreen, taking from emergent information about the operational mode of Islamic terrorism that was revealed after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The film capitalizes on anxieties over the cell-structure of Islamic terrorism, where clandestine operatives can be called into action, functioning without the need for an organizational hierarchy. Alluding strongly to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, The Siege depicts attempts by various branches of government service (the FBI, the CIA, the Military) to stop a series of terrorist cells committing bombings in New York City, a scenario that might have seemed "ridiculously impossible" at the time (Boggs & Pollard, 2006; 343); looked at after 9/11, The Siege appears to have a prophetic quality.

Boggs and Pollard also suggest that Zwick's portrayal of Islamic terrorists is "a far more variegated picture of Muslim terrorists and their cultural milieu than can be found elsewhere in Hollywood cinema," somewhat accurately portraying both the modes and ideology that Islamic terrorists adhere to (343). However, Boggs and Pollard continue, suggesting that

At the same time, Zwick carves a portrait of Islamic terrorism that turns out to be more fearsome than what one is likely to find in real life. Operatives are fiercely dedicated to their work, driven by some combination of religious and political fanaticism, moved by genuine claims against US policies and actions spanning many years. They gladly commit acts that bring destruction and panic to an entire city, using methods of random violence that recognize few if any ethical restraints.(ibid.)

The Siege's more realistic depiction of Islamic terrorists does not disqualify them from operating according to the conventions of the Hollywood villain. 53 By the end of the 1990s America had educated itself to some degree about Islamic terrorism in the process of searching for a new threat to replace the now-defunct Soviet enemy. As a result, the potential threat of Islamic terrorism seemed heightened. Throughout the late 1990s, the threat posed by Islamic extremists rose, but it remains arguable as to whether or not Islamic extremists ever assumed the position of being the primary potential threat to America until after 9/11. If Hollywood is any indication, more Americans than Arabs were cast in terrorist roles between 1994 and 2001. Domestic terrorism following the 1995 Federal Building Bombing in Oklahoma City may have proved a far more immediate threat than Islam (or at the very least, domestic terrorism rivaled Islam for the status of "principal threat to America"). No films depict Islamic extremists as terrorists from 1999 to 2001.

On 9/11, it became abundantly clear that Islam had become the principal threat to America. Islamic terrorists would not appear again on Hollywood screens until 2004's acerbic, marionette-acted Team America: World Police.

It is important to note a distinct change in representation post-9/11, lest one conclude that, on the basis of what has been discussed previously, we can take the absence of Islamic villains in Hollywood at this time to signify that the threat posed by Islam had waned. The collective psychological trauma caused by 9/11 dramatically changed the cultural environment in America, altering the way in which the culture represented threat. The terrorist character no longer housed a latent threat to America; terrorism itself had become the threat. The fluid face of the terrorist hardened into a single image, one that was unfailingly Islamic (Arabic in particular). The films about terrorism that were released in the years immediately following 9/11 all originally called for Islamic terrorist villains, but were replaced by old standard terrorist characters— Colombians, Neo-Nazis, and Soviets. Hollywood used these historical faces of the terrorist in substitution for the Arab terrorists who suddenly had become too semiotically complex to be portrayed in Hollywood's terrorist role. 54 Passing Threats Hollywood has projected three main characterizations of terrorist threat, Germans, Soviets, and Islamic extremists. In addition to these, numerous smaller threats have been manifested as terrorists. These various potential threats seem to have come and gone, dismissed as insignificant or overshadowed by more pressing issues.

At the end of the Vietnam War, returning soldiers received a chilly reception from the American public, and had numerous difficulties re-assimilating themselves into American society. Faced with their share of problems (post-traumatic stress disorder and drug addiction), these veterans were quickly labeled by the American public as mentally disturbed and dangerous, as baby-killers and as drug abusers. The loss in Vietnam and the widespread political distaste for the war not only meant that Vets were damaged as a result of Vietnam, but also brought an unpleasant reminder of the war. It appeared that if the soldiers were not returning home victorious, the rest of America would have preferred them not to return at all (Greene, 1989).xv In the 1970s, many films begin characterizing villains by depicting them as mentally disturbed veterans. Films like Welcome Home, Soldier Boys (1972), Open Season (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Taxi Driver (1976), My Friend Needs Killing (1976), and Vigilante Force (1976) demonized veterans as rapists and murderers (Berg, 1986). The terrorist even adopted the veteran's visage briefly in the late 1970s, suggesting that veterans were, in themselves, considered a threat to the nation. In The Enforcer (1976), Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) battles against a gang of ruthless Vietnam veterans who terrorize San Francisco by setting off explosives, killing police, and kidnapping the mayor. In Black Sunday, a Black September operative works with a suicidal Vietnam veteran, Michael Lander (Bruce Dern), to build a bomb that will attach to the blimp he is to pilot over the Superbowl. Lander is depicted as emotionally scarred, disgruntled, and susceptible to evil influence. By 1974 a national effort was mobilized to aid and rehabilitate Vietnam veterans, and in 1982 First Blood introduced a veteran hero (Sylvester Stallone), mistreated by the authorities in small town America, who marked a redemption of the veteran as misunderstood and sympathetic, a hero, not a villain.™ 55 Hollywood has also produced a number of films about the Irish Republican Army, a known terrorist organization. These films seem to differ significantly from other presentations of terrorists. Many films depicted IRA activity while delving into more nuanced social or psychological aspects; portraying IRA or ex-IRA affiliates as sympathetic heroes. IRA films centre on a few main themes. One is that of the reformed IRA member attempting to find peace in his life (The Boxer, 1997; The Jackal; Borstal Boy, 2000). Another rationalizes "terrorist action" by offering a sympathetic view towards Irish suffering (The Dawning, 1988; In the Name of the Father, 1993; Some Mother's Son. 1996; The Devil's Own, 1997; The Wind that Shakes the Barley, 2000). A third type uses the IRA as a backdrop for conflicted romances (The Quiet Man, 1952; Ryan's Daughter, 1970; Cal, 1984; The Crying Game. 1992). Films such as Michael Collins (1996), and Bloody Sunday (2002) address the conflict in Ireland from the perspective of a civil rights issue. Only a handful of films presents the Irish terrorist as having the "evil enemy" status that has been so readily awarded to the Arab terrorist. Tom Clancy's Patriot Games and Stephen Hopkins's Blown Away are perhaps the only two major motion pictures to present Irishmen as conventional and unequivocal terrorist villains, however in both films the terrorist villains are shown to be "too extreme" for the IRA. IRA members compete with various other villainous organizations in attempting to obtain a mysterious silver suitcase in Ronin (1998), but remain peripheral throughout the film

One must surely wonder why the depiction of the IRA in Hollywood film contrasts with that of other "freedom fighters" such as Palestinian terrorists. One possible explanation is that Hollywood was guided by sympathy toward the IRA's predicament on the part of the large Irish population in the United States; indeed, much of the funding for IRA activities came from supporters in America (Duffy). With a significant Irish population—especially in key distribution areas like New York, Chicago, and Boston—to complicate the IRA's position through debate, what develops is a morally complex, humanist account of the IRA, whereas the very small Arab population in America (and in particular the dearth of Arabs in Hollywood) offers very little counter 56 discourse. Revisiting James Cameron's notion of the "convenient villain," the Arab proves far more "convenient" than the Irishman because in America he is, not only cinematically but in many additional ways, the Other.

The 1990s brought a search for a post-Soviet enemy. For years the United States had meddled—diplomatically, militarily, and covertly—in the affairs of South American nations. Left-leaning governments revived old concerns over Communism, making South America a hotbed for threats within striking distance of the United States. What's more, South America proved to be the epicenter of the world's illegal drug trade, and militant cartels often used violence to preserve their businesses. America's "War on Drugs" had been launched officially in 1970, with South American drug lords appearing in Hollywood shortly after. The 1973 James Bond film, Live and Let Die, was perhaps the first motion picture to portray such a threat, featuring a drug smuggling terrorist from the fictional Caribbean island of San Monique. By the late 1980s, threat from South America was increasing exponentially, as the United States undertook military anti-Communist and anti-drug operations in El Salvador, Grenada, Honduras, Bolivia, Panama, Colombia, and Peru (Wikipedia). In 1987, the Iran-Contra affair scandalized the US government's covert sale of weapons to Iran in order to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua (Wolf). In 1989, Colombia's Medellin drug cartel (headed by Pablo Escobar) declared "total and absolute war" on the Colombian state for signing a treaty with the United States that allowed for the extradition of Colombians to America on drug charges. The Medellin cartel resorted to terrorist activity in an attempt to force the Colombian government's hand to abandon extradition.

Numerous Hollywood films addressed issues of South American threats in single plot lines. Terrorist villains were drug lords involved in politically charged situations, often involving corrupt American officials. Again it is a James Bond film, License to Kill (1989), that first addresses these subjects. The villain, Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi), is a renowned drug smuggler operating from the fictional Latin American "Republic of Isthmus." Sanchez buys stinger missiles from the Contras and threatens to shoot down US Airliners if the DEA interferes with his smuggling operations. The plot of Die Hard 2 57 hinges on the extradition to America of a rebel South American military type with links to drug cartels. Gen. Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero) is aided by a rogue US military Colonel (William Sadler) who is angered by the US government's arrest of a man who has, in his words, "the guts to stand up to Communist aggression." Both films pair the Colombian cartel threat with concerns emerging from the Iran-Contra affair.

Varying threats in South America are again merged in 1994's Clear and Present Danger. The film's villains are members of a drug cartel lead by an Escobar-like drug lord, Ernesto Escobedo (Miguel Sandoval). In a plot that is again equal parts Colombian- cartel war and Iran-Contra affair, the drug smugglers are ruthless gangsters who resort to terrorist-style bombings and assassinations in order to achieve their goals.

The Islamic terrorists initially written into the script of Collateral Damage were replaced with Colombian Drug Lords, in no small part because Damage was originally scheduled for release only shortly after 9/11. Russell Meeuf writes:

The decision to move the action of the film from Libya to Colombia is an interesting one. It was mostly likely a decision made to distance the film from the culturally sensitive issue of Middle Eastern terrorism, but it involves the film in the issue of US intervention in South America, which, as Barry Rubin points out, has been traditionally far more violent and oppressive than US intervention in the Middle-East (98). As this fact is little known in the culture, and the film keeps a safe distance from historical specificity, however, it seems likely that the move to Colombia was intended to focus the story on a "generic" exotic nation to serve as the backdrop for a Western story about terrorism, (n.p.)

As with The Sum of All Fears, Collateral Damage's proximity to 9/11 results in the substitution of Islamic terrorists with older terrorist characters. 58 Of the myriad threats explored on film in the 1990s, most emphasize the external nature of evil, suggesting infiltration into America by foreign entities. Despite this focus, the 1990s also used the terrorist character to explore domestic threats. Films like Under Siege (1992), Speed, Sudden Death (1995), Broken Arrow, and The Rock depicted villains who had been "formerly employed" in government service, all of them somehow "wronged" by an unsympathetic bureaucracy.

Concerns emerged in the Reagan era over the impact of "big government" on the American populace, creating scenarios where the hero's efforts were stymied by bureaucratic interference (Jeffords, 19). This theme continued into the 1990s, but instead of depicting the institutions themselves as villains, films focused on the monsters created by big government. In many ways, the films of the 1990s seek to repudiate the public service, and destroy the negative by-products created by previous mismanagement of the country (during the George H. W. Bush era). Domestic anti-government terrorists tend to act out of revenge, as did Timothy McVeigh, who claimed that his 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was in retaliation for the government raids in Waco and Ruby Ridge (Hamm). Boggs and Pollard argue that:

Home-grown terrorists like those associated with local militias and other rightwing groups—the same circles that produced and nurtured the Oklahoma City bombers—rarely find their way into mainstream pictures since domestic terrorism is understood as having little to do with US global priorities. The emphasis on alien demons, moreover, is congruent with longstanding Manichean views of world politics where problems are framed in such a way as to encourage military "solutions." (2006; 347)

Arlington Rd. attempts to depict more realistic domestic terrorists, not merely disgruntled civilians performing a terrorist role (much in the same way that The Siege authenticates Islamic terrorists as compared to previous films). The film's villains are American right- wing fundamentalists intent on committing a terrorist act. The story makes clear reference 59 to the incident at Ruby Ridge— A raid on the home of Randy Weaver by Federal Marshals that went horribly wrong, resulting in a violent standoff—and in addition, allusions to the Oklahoma City bombing are evident as foreground to the plot. A more realistic portrayal of domestic terrorism was terrifying, heralding back to the McCarthy era, when Communists were ostensibly indistinguishable from regular Americans. Despite this influx of films with increased realism and anxiety over issues within the domestic sphere, America's introspection ended on September 11, 2001 when Islamic groups turned America's attention as the predominant threat to the nation.

Although Asian Countries have periodically posed threats to America, Asians seldom appear as terrorists. The German-Japanese Dr. Julius No (Joseph Wiseman) was a Hilteresque archvillain who threatened the world in Dr. No (1962), the first James Bond film. Clashes with Asian Communists in Korea and Vietnam certainly made Asian Communists plausible threats to America. However, hot wars between Asian Communists activated this threat and in general the terrorist character is reserved for potential threats only; thus Asian Communists, as active threats, did not qualify. As-a result of this, Asian Communists are frequently depicted as wartime adversaries instead of terrorists.

The exception is the recent portrayal of North Korea, a developing potential threat in the new millennium. North Korea's Stalinesque Communist regime and large military force, as well as the American administration's concerns over the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, have spawned what now seems a global concern, spurred by President George W. Bush's inclusion of North Korea in his "Axis of Evil." As a potential threat to America, North Koreans have since been included and affiliated with terrorism in two films. Always an early adopter of potential threats, the James Bond series responded with Die Another Day (2002), portraying a North Korean Colonel (Will Yun Lee) intent on destroying the minefield between North and South Korea to enable an invasion. The only other film to date to depict North Koreans as terrorists is the action- parody Team America: World Police, in which Korean head of state Kim Jong-Il collaborates with Islamic terrorists to launch a worldwide attack with "weapons of mass 60 destruction." Although the film is a parody, the choice of North Koreans as terrorists is indicative of the potential threat elicited by North Korea at the time.

Melodramatic Villainy; characterizing the terrorist From vaudeville-era knaves to the western film's outlaw to the monster of horror films, the melodramatic villain is a fictional figure composed of a calculated web of signifiers, drawing on cultural histories and popular anxieties, and always easily reducible to a Manichean evil. The melodramatic villain allows for what Peter Brooks calls "moral legibility" and in this way tends to be composed of signs with a certain transparency, easily interpreted by the audience. These signs rely on cues based in the popular semiotic sphere.

The antonymic nature of melodrama is worth mentioning, since the basis for the construction of villainy is the espousal that in the discourse of Manicheanism the subject always occupies the position of "good." When vilifying someone, the tendency is to establish them as Other by establishing (what are often crude and unrealistic) binary oppositions. White (Good) and Black (Evil); Right (Good) and Left (Evil); Honest (Good) and Crooked (Evil); Compassionate (Good) and Apathetic (Evil); Sane (Good) and Deranged (Evil); Straight (Good) and Gay (Evil); to name a few. American culture, as a result, sees villainy in terms of what it is not.

While real events (contemporary to the time period filmed) often set the agenda forming the identity (at the very least, the nationality) of the villain onscreen, the villain remains strictly presented in a melodramatic fashion. That said, we see the same "black hat" melodramatic villain as we did in Victorian theater, although placed in a variety of costumes and nuanced to embody a contemporary threat.

Hollywood has a tendency to create the archvillain as a foil for the hero. The hero fights his way through various henchmen to arrive at a final showdown with the archvillain. The creation of the archvillain in film relates to a larger trend of the expression of Manichean opposition through personification. The most elementary example is biblical; good and evil personified into God and the Devil. Recent history has 61 yielded portrayals of inimical world leaders as archvillains (notably Hitler and Stalin), characterized on the basis of biblical signifiers of evil. These historical portrayals have certainly played a role in characterizing subsequent fictional archvillains; a comparative allusion to Hitler is often more than enough to identify a villainous character.

Hollywood film's preference for melodrama means that it is disposed towards the use of archvillains in the creation of scenarios that are morally legible. While most terrorism inarguably occurs without melodrama in real life, the media (reliant on the melodramatic form) eagerly gravitates towards figures like Carlos the Jackal and Osama Bin Laden; men who can be considered terrorist masterminds. Boggs and Pollard suggest that, contrary to the basic reality of terrorism,

Media culture upholds a simplistic "madman" thesis of global terrorism, obsessed with small pockets of evildoers—larger-than- life villains like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic—prepared to destroy Western values. (2006; 336)

The melodramatic mode is thus preserved through terrorist films by the creation of fictional terrorist masterminds, and a corresponding hierarchy of villains: archvillains, major henchmen, and minor henchmen. Henchmen are in general identified only by uniform, have little to no speaking roles, and are easily dispatched by the hero early in the story. Major henchmen appear in stereotypical roles such as the muscular enforcer, the femme fatale, the weapons specialist, and the brainy scientist. Assuming exaggerated stereotypical appearances and personalities, combinations of these stock character types appear in most action films, terrorist films included.

The archvillain is perhaps the most interesting character. Henchmen perform his bidding, in service of his cause. It is widely assumed that by virtue of being at the top of a villainous hierarchy, the archvillain is the most evil persona on view; he commands other agents of evil. The antithesis of the archvillain is the hero, a character who works expressly against the archvillain's interests. In melodrama, the archvillain character provides a personification of evil. In watching his eventual destruction, audiences 62 exercise fantasies of moral superiority. In the wake of 9/11, the importance of assigning blame became of the utmost importance. Jon Bird notes that:

Writing in the New York Times five days after the event, the novelist Mary Gordon declared 'To have an enemy with no name and therefore no face, or even worse, a name and face that can only be guessed at, is the stuff of nightmare.' (2)

In a sense the archvillain is America's "straw man." He offers a clear source for threat; providing a fantasmal resolution for audiences when eliminated.

The Terrorist's Cause Understanding evil is crucial to the public psyche. When terrible events occur, inquests, investigations and special committees are formed to solve the perhaps unanswerable question: why? In Hollywood film, and in popular culture in general, these questions need answers. When it comes to terrorist incidents, evil is the only explanation. All Possible alternative explanations must be dismissed. As a result, the rationality of the villain must be discernibly opened to question. Haidt and Algoe discuss one of the tenets of Baumeister's "myth of evil"—which discusses the conventions for depicting evil in literature and film—as

denying the motivations of the "evildoer"; that is, people resist seeing any coherent reasons for the perpetrators action, beyond sadism (the enjoyment of doing evil things) and greed (the desire for money and power).(323)

This denial is one of the golden rules of melodrama: the reasons motivating the action of the villain can simply not be shown to be justified.

An interesting exploration of causal factors can be found in Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon. Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) attempt a bank robbery which ends up going horribly awry. Throughout the film, director Sidney Lumet presents, for our consideration, all manner of possible rationalizations as to why these two have been 63 driven to robbery, and a catalogue of their insufficiencies as explanations. We learn that the men are Vietnam veterans (leading to considerations of post-traumatic stress and relating to the general treatment of veterans at the time5™1); that they are ex-cons; that there are political issues at stake (Sonny rallies the crowd gathered outside the bank in his famous "Attica" chant); that insanity may play a role (according to testimonies from persons close to Sonny); that homosexuality is a motive (we meet Sonny's lover Leon [Chris Sarandon]); that there is a dysfunctional home-life in the background (we are introduced to Sonny's perpetually aggravating wife Angie [Susan Peretz]); that long ago there was a "bad childhood" (we meet Sonny's overbearing mother [Judith Malina]); and that religion is a key factor (Sal makes a comment about Jesus). In a way, Dog Day Afternoon plays on the audience's search for a cause in viewing apparent melodrama. Lumet plays with his audience, inundating them with causes, to the point of confusion. The question of "why?" seeks to resolve the traumatic eruption of the real, which must be symbolically reconstituted into the symbolic order.

The terrorist villain's cause is allegedly political, but the melodramatic structure of Hollywood films prohibits any legitimization of terrorist action, so any political motivation offered by the terrorist villain must be somehow de-legitimized. Consequently, the political motivations of terrorists are intentionally mined for more acceptable rationalizations. It should be maintained though, that a general trend exists to de-legitimize the villain in general, and that despite the specific devaluing of the terrorist's political cause, it is never in favour of a rationalization that could be interpreted as somehow validating his actions. Meeuf writes:

As Jim Kitses points out, the device of at least superficially dramatizing both sides of a conflict in an action film is a cliched "old trick":

You know the drill — the villain suggests he and the hero are alike: America too practices terrorism. [...] the terrorist is 64 allowed to voice grievances, but ultimately the point of view remains decidedly with the home team"(29). (n.p.)

In films portraying terrorists, the political cause becomes a mere mask for the melodramatic terrorist villain's presence and personality, which must be neutralized by the hero throughout the course of the film. In films like Die Hard, Goldeneve, and Live Free or Die Hard the alleged political actions of the terrorist villain are revealed to be a ruse for large scale robberies. Greed and thievery de-legitimate political causes while still legitimating the hero's violent action against the terrorists. Revenge explains away the terrorist politics of the villains in Patriot Games, Blown Away, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, and The Rock. Brian Gibson alludes to these sentiments, observing that:

Irish terrorism is only discussed in either criminal or military terms -never political-in Clancy's thriller Patriot Games. Clancy's intent is to deromanticize terrorism and bolster FBI director William H. Webster's statement that terrorists are mere criminals and "cowardly marauders" (n.p.)

Rationalization of the terrorist cause can also be accomplished by portraying the villain as a sufferer of any number of "psychological disorders" (homosexuality often set up by these films as such a phenomenon). The political becomes a mere delusion of deranged madmen in Dr. No, Moonraker, Speed, Blown Away, and others, although only to the point where it acknowledges their criminality. Mental disorders are confined to those who connote evil and suggest agency.

The only time political causes seem to provide explanations in themselves is when they are extreme, and historically grounded. These causes are well-known enough that they are automatically discounted as unjustifiable. Neo-Nazis, Soviet reformationists, and Islamic Jihadis are the only villains with causes understood to be inarguably evil, and in their case no further justification is needed. Boggs and Pollard comment on Hollywood film to similar ends, suggesting that in films about terrorism: 65 The demonized Other appears as a monolithic culture of thuggish male warriors who relish violence, directed mostly against innocent civilians, and who lack motives beyond hatred and jealousy. Despite their lack of intellectual sophistication and political strategy, however, such warriors are depicted as a grave threat to the very foundations of civilized society. (2006; 347)

Boggs and Pollard's sentiments are suggestive of the precise reduction to acceptable rationalizations discussed here. But what if, as in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), there is no reason to be found? Boggs and Pollard suggest that the media portrays Jihadic violence as occurring without cause:

Media culture has spawned an entirely new category of human being—a category of terrorist that ostensibly captures the essence of contemporary Jihadic violence. The personality type exists beyond history, beyond politics, beyond psychology, a type so irredeemably evil and irrational that no normal mode of interpretation is possible. Even historical Commies and fascists were typically shown to be motivated human beings with certain ideas, interests, and identities—craven beings, to be sure, but still part of an intelligible universe. Even hardened criminals and drug addicts may be regarded as subject to social and psychological analysis, whereas "terrorists" are people whose sole purpose is to cause great pain and suffering. It follows that the modern terrorist amounts to nothing more than a cancerous intrusion into an otherwise healthy body politic, immune from standard legal sanctions and efforts at rehabilitation. (2006; 350)

Islamic terrorists seem to emit a quasi-political, semi-religious motivation that never seems to hold much water. It may be that the persona of the Islamic terrorist, since he already considered "Other," is a reason in itself. Islamic terrorists have become their own 66 rationalizations, their positioning as enemy and as other providing a Manichean explanation; they are readable as simply pure evil.

The Body of the Terrorist In melodrama, semiotic expressions of evil are encoded into the villain's physicality. The audience must be able to distinguish the villain from both the hero and the surrounding bystanders at first glance. The melodramatic villain is cast in a certain light, and has a certain sinister look about him. The villain's appearance both identifies him as evil and serves to demean him in some way. Historic portrayals of evil based themselves almost entirely in various notions of otherness, and as a result many of the semiotic conventions used to identify the villain accomplish both identification and abasement at once.

In the preceding section, the characteristics of the terrorist villain are discussed in relation to historical threats to America. An easy way to identify and demean a villain is to utilize a symbol of alterity. Often this contrast is racially determined, easily parsing white Americans from a foreign threat. When the villain is white, he is made abject by more subtle characteristics: Aryan features; a Russian accent; facial hair; a scar or other deformity, etc.

Differentiation between hero and villain along racial or ethnic lines polarizes the characters easily, particularly in the case of films about international terrorism, where it is assumed that terrorist acts are committed against America by foreign invaders. The demeaning aspect of the display of racial/ethnic alterity is an issue of particular interest to Jack Shaheen, who writes about the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood. Shaheen (2001) identifies hundreds of examples of the negative portrayal of Arabs/Muslims on film, and derides Hollywood for its use of race as a means of expressing villainy under the guise of depicting "real events." Despite his criticisms, race continues to play a primary role in melodramatic construction.

In the creation of the onscreen villain, the physical is hyperbole. Grotesque villains are both easily identified as evil, and shown to be somehow deficient, or flawed 67 when compared to heroes. Of course the most obvious (and sensational) examples can be found in the James Bond films. According to Tricia Jenkins:

Many of Fleming's villains, in both the novels and the films, possess sexual deviancies and physical abnormalities demarcating them as degenerate enemies. Stromberg, in The Spy Who Loved Me, possesses webbed hands; Scaramanga, in The Man with the Golden Gun, sports three nipples; Kidd and Wint, in Diamonds Are Forever, are homosexual henchmen, and in the cinematic version of the story, Blofeld dresses in drag. (309)

Ian Fleming, well known for his portrayal of the deformed villain, is merely one of many writers to do so. This can be considered standard practice in picturing the villain. Posture and stature are other ways of coding the villain, generally in relation to the body of the hero.

Despite the profundity of deformed terrorists in James Bond films, and in melodrama generally, most of the films that depict terrorists tend not to depict them as grotesque. It may be the case that the villains of Bond films tend to fall on the side of the fantastic, and in an effort to produce the effect of depicting "reality," screenwriters do not resort to this level of theatricality in their depictions of most terrorists. It may also be the case that in regards to matters of terrorism, nationality seems to play a heightened role in villainy, and the simple depiction of a terrorist as nationally or racially other is enough to both identify and demean the terrorist.

At the same time there is a definitive look to the terrorist villain. He is usually of average size, although occasionally smaller. He possesses little physical prowess, and relies on hired henchmen to exact brute force. There is a definite sense in which his face communicates a sinister agenda, a conniving mind, and a cold ruthlessness, yet at the same time it betrays a veiled cowardice. Facial hair, in the form of dark, trim, goatees are common, lending a devilish air to his visage. 68 Alan Rickman's portrayal of Hans Gruber in Die Hard lends well to the typical terrorist archvillain. Robynn Stilwell describes Gruber this way:

He is Lucifer: intelligent, elegant and seductive, with a hint of sexual deviance in his androgyny. His appearance—neat beard, greying temples, light hazel eyes overemphasized by eyeliner, and beautiful clothing in shades of grey—and his slightly twitchy way of moving reinforce the traditional image.(558)

Gruber's appearance also alludes to the Nazi, his grey uniform andiascist aesthetic recalling an earlier image of evil. He is also German, which of course only adds to this symbolic interpretation.

It is the suggestion of some scholars that the portrayal of the villain's physicality addresses sexual politics common in Manichean conflicts. Films that pit a hero against a villain are a contest of power, and sexual power is one route by which to demonstrate this (and for many the most important one). This is accomplished through the male hero's feminizing of his opponent, and often this theme is manifested in contests over women. "Dundes's (1997) psychoanalytical contention that the language and imagery of war is essentially sexual" (Frank, 635) locates power in masculinity: Dundes writes, "One proves one's maleness by feminizing one's opponent" (12). As a result both the sexuality and the virility of the villain are always in question. The grotesque or weak body of the villain marks him as repulsive to women. His physical flaws mirror his psychological flaws, equating outward and inward deficiency.

Female Terrorists Many terrorist films include a femme fatale among a group of henchmen, but she is almost always subservient to a male villain. The femme fatale is clever, wicked, and willing to exploit her femininity—through seduction and feigning innocence—for gain. The femme fatale seems to be the only female villain depicted in the action cinema, and the uniformity of this character makes her a cliche. 69 The female terrorists in films like Swordfish, Collateral Damage, I Spy (1999), Munich, and Live Free or Die Hard, initially appear friendly towards the heroes of the films, in traditional femme fatale form. At a point in each film, the femme fatale betrays the hero, revealing her allegiance with the terrorist archvillain. In both Collateral Damage and Swordfish the female terrorist's affiliation with the archvillain is well known, and through the film her allegiance seems to shift towards the side of the hero, ultimately proving to be a ruse by which she obediently deceives the hero.

An interesting case can be found in Black Sunday, the principal villain of which is Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller), a terrorist operative. Presumably because she was a woman, she was spared in a Mossad raid on a Black September compound, wherein her colleagues were killed. She later seduces a deranged Vietnam veteran into helping her plan and attempt to carry out a large scale attack on the Superbowl. Dahlia is an archetypal femme fatale, except that she appears to act with masculine forthrightness. It can be assumed that at one point in time, before the assassination of her colleagues, she likely did assume the subservient role of the femme fatale. With her fellow terrorists dead, Dahlia assumes the position of the archvillain. In essence, she is merely a femme fatale henchwoman who has recently lost her male archvillain leader. It is important to realize that despite Dahlia's role as the principal villain, she is acting out an attack orchestrated at an earlier point by a (presumably male) archvillain, and she is not a free- thinking, decision-making, archvillain in herself.

A second case is Selena Perrini (Francesca Neri), the terrorist villain of Collateral Damage. Selena at first appears to be the wife of a terrorist known as "El Lobo." Posing as the frightened wife of a madman, she convinces hero Gordy Brewer to take her back to America, to aid El Lobo's capture. In reality, it is Selena and not her husband Claudio (Cliff Curtis) who is El Lobo, and who has exploited Brewer to obtain entrance to the US State Department building in which she plans to detonate a bomb. Selena is Hollywood's first female terrorist mastermind; a femme fatale archvillain. The film exploits the assumptions audiences make about females as innocent and merely subservient to male archvillains; without a beat audiences accept Selena's betrayal of her husband for a 70 complete stranger and when she turns out to be the archvillain are shocked. Ultimately we buy Selena's story far too easily, assuming, as convention dictates, that archvillains must be male.

Female villains are shown to be evil through their demonstrated rejection of the domestic values expected of women. The femme fatale rejects the obedient, domesticated roles of dutiful wife and caring mother. Meeuf discusses this in reference to the film Collateral Damage:

Just before Gordy recognizes Selena as El Lobo, Selena tries to get her son to join her on a trip to the restroom, a trip that we learn retrospectively is designed to aid her and her son's escape from the explosion. Yet when Gordy offers to watch her son, and she realizes that the boy could not be taken with her without raising suspicion, Selena leaves him behind, an act which we learn later amounts to the sacrifice of one's child for a radical ideology. Selena becomes, in other words, a politically monstrous mother, a woman whose commitment to terrorism violates some of the most serious feminine taboos. Rather than fulfilling her expected role as an apolitical woman, she instead reveals herself to be an uncaring mother. This is accentuated after Selena is discovered to be El Lobo, and her demure and feminine personality gives way to a display of hyper-masculine martial arts brutality and murder.(n.p.)

In a manner of speaking, Meeuf reveals that behind Selena's feminine mask, there is a man. Thus, this female terrorist is situated between genders. American melodrama, although it emasculates villains as a means of demeaning them, is typically concerned wholly with a battle between good and evil men. Female terrorists must first become men, before they can then be demeaned as lesser than heroes. A feminine and docile woman is the preferred character for the hero in American melodrama, accentuating the hero's masculinity by functioning as a trophy, or as a means of producing offspring. 71 Women, in the conventional sense, are not shown as villainous in themselves; it is only when they reject their gender roles and become men—competition—that they can become evil.

Mind of the Terrorist Michel Foucault wrote extensively about the characterization of unfavorable traits in the context of mental illness. In Foucault's mind, power and knowledge operate in tandem, with knowledge utilized to construct and affirm normative power structures (175). Foucault's approach allows for the examination of the psychology of the terrorist in terms of situating him within a power structure. The terrorist must be rationalized as deviant in order to maintain existing hegemonies of power.

While Foucault does not address the terrorist directly, he writes at length regarding the use of knowledge (science or pseudo-science) as a means for the justification of the excise of power; to define, constrain, imprison, alienate, and otherwise control criminals; the insane; homosexuals; and any other persons who challenge cultural hegemony. In this sense, the terrorist as outsider must be seen under the rubric of knowledge-power to justify his actions.

Jacques Lacan would suggest that society's unfavorables tend to adopt the position of the "objet petit a" as something trauma-inducing that needs to be re-inserted into reality via the symbolic. Very much in line with Foucault, the discourse which emerges surrounding such characters is a sort of psychic rationalization. The actions of villains, real and fictional, are widely considered "beyond the pale," and as a result concerted efforts are applied to situate them within a discourse that somehow explains—but is careful not to justify—their behaviour. Attempts to explicate the psychology of the villain both reaffirm and justify the Manichaean sentiments that have already associated with him/her. Like the physical representation of the villain, the psychology of the villain serves to identify, demean, and explain evil. The notion that a villain could emerge from within our society is repressed, usually by showing him to be foreign. In cases where the 72 villain emerges from within, he is cast as innately flawed and evil, alleviating public responsibility for his villainy.

Madness and Villainy One of the principal psychological interpretations of the villain is that he suffers from any one of a number of psychological disorders; psychosis, schizophrenia, sociopathy. America can only interpret terrorist villains who threaten and/or take lives as being psychologically disturbed. This serves to both explain the terrorist's existence and demean him and diminish the validity of his alleged cause. For the very same reasons, historical enemy leaders are similarly characterized as being insane.

In Dr. No, James Bond questions the archvillain's mental health after learning of his plan: "World domination. The same old dream. Our asylums are full of people who think they're Napoleon. Or God." Thus, the terrorist's madness becomes a fantasmal resolution to the economy of desire to delegitimize the villain. A rational villain would disrupt the psychic "reality" imposed in American society, which understands evil actions as illegitimate. In the case of the terrorist, Jeff Victoroff provides an in-depth account of the literature supporting "the popular opinion that terrorists must be insane or psychopathic (Hacker 1976; Cooper 1977; Pearce 1977; Taylor 1988)." He writes:

Rather, most of the literature attributing clinical mental disorder to terrorists speaks of the remorseless personality type, psychopathy or sociopathy (Taylor 1988). Cooper (1977, 1978), for example, states that terrorists, like psychopaths, are ruthless "out-laws" and "outcasts" who adhere to an anomalous scheme of values out of tune with that of the rest of society and that there is a "near identity of this fundamental characteristic in both the psychopath and the terrorist." Pearce (1977) stated that terrorists were sociopaths acting antisocially due to "superego lacunae," meaning gaps in self-monitoring. (10) 73 That he finds no conclusive evidence suggesting that real terrorists suffer from psychological disorders (15) does not prevent this myth from persisting in Hollywood, equating the terrorist and more generally the villain or archvillain with the insane.

Psychoanalysis leads us towards the deconstruction of the terrorist and the rationalization of his actions on the basis of environmental factors he has experienced. The Boys from Brazil (1978) seems most aptly to mythologize the psychological underpinnings of evil. We learn that former Nazis are attempting to recreate Hitler by installing cloned children into the identical familial settings that Hitler experienced growing up. The film begins as the Nazis prepare to assassinate the fathers of all the Hitler clones, at the precise age that Hitler's own father died. What drives this film is the perceived threat of mini-Hitlers all over the world. While unspoken, the inference made is that Hitler's perhaps rocky childhood was the motivating factor for his subsequent reign of terror. It is not unusual that the villain, the terrorist especially, is located within the discourse of a troublesome childhood, as if it should some way explain his actions.

Victoroff outlines the findings of psychologist David Hubbard who, in 1971, conducted a series of unstructured interviews with "skyjackers," identifying five common traits: (1) a violent, often alcoholic father; (2) deeply religious mother; (3) sexually shyness, timidity, and passivity; (4) younger sisters toward whom the terrorist acted protectively; and (5) poor social achievement (Victoroff, 7). All attempts at establishing a general psycho-social profile for the terrorist have been made under spurious circumstances. However, Hollywood film, forever the bumbling psychoanalyst, has a tendency to put up the family life/childhood of the terrorist (and the villain in general) as a rationalization of his evil acts.

However, the characterization of the terrorist as insane or as having had traumatic experiences must never actually justify, legitimate, or de-criminalize terrorist acts in Hollywood film. It must be clearly conveyed that this villain had a choice of whether or not to be evil, and when faced with adverse circumstances did not possess the strength of character to overcome them. The line to walk is narrow; the terrorist's actions must be 74 rationalized, but certainly not justified on this basis, lest he become a hero/martyr. The terrorist's insanity cannot be so severe as to de-legitimize the hero's act of killing him. With judicial courts allowing those with "extreme psychological disturbance" to avoid prosecution, the insanity of the terrorist is typically distanced from clinical mental illness, and is relegated to a flaw in character.

Villainous Sexuality In line with depictions of the villain as physically and psychologically flawed, signification of villainy wanders into the realm of expressing flawed sexuality. I have already made mention of the psycho-sexual contest that is manifest within Manichean dialogues that tends to reduce many conflicts to machismo competitions. It is this contest that frames the depiction of sexuality in the terrorist villain.

Representing the terrorist villain as sexually flawed demeans him in relation to the normative hero, and the so-called "abnormal" sexuality of the villain serves as a marker for evil. Enormous efforts are made in the construction of the Hollywood villain to depict him as either impotent or homosexual, in contrast with the virile heterosexuality of the hero. Much of this symbolism is expressed in the physicality of the villain, as discussed previously. Grotesque or effeminate villains are unappealing to women, and are depicted as impotent. This impotence is not necessarily physiological, but often is due to a lack of effectiveness or power in seduction. In Hollywood, a contest of sexual/seductive prowess between the hero and villain tends to be a microcosm of the power relations in the larger plot. James Bond films caricaturize these relations. In a typical film, both Bond and the villain attempt to seduce the same woman, a contest which Bond always seems to win. This consistency is noted by Bennett and Woolacott, who maintain that, "Bond's appeal consisted partly in the ways in which the organization of the novels enabled questions of nation to be transposed onto those of sexuality"(28). For Bennett and Woolacott, Bond's sexual potency became representative of power in Britain. In many ways, Bond's seduction of women has little to do with them, and far more to do with shifting power relations globally. In Goldfinger (1964) the villain, Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe), is a fat, unappealing man with a sexual perversion towards gold. The film presents a microcosmic sexual contest between Goldfinger and Bond over Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). Tricia Jenkins describes a scene in which Goldfinger's impotence becomes clear:

Goldfinger is not for his lack of trying. In one scene in which he and Pussy are sitting outside his Kentucky ranch, Goldfinger begins to seductively stroke her arm in an unmistakable attempt at foreplay. However, Pussy makes it clear that there is to be ' 'no trespassing" on her body, after which Goldfinger quickly removes his hand. This attempt at seducing Pussy, which never occurs in the novel, clearly marks Goldfinger's sexual ineptness and undesirability.(314)

While Galore is supposed to be a lesbian (overtly in the Fleming novel, and quite subtly in the film adaptation) a suave, macho Bond manages to seduce her and turn her against Goldfinger by the climax of the film. Goldfinger loses both the sexual contest and the larger battle, ultimately having his plot to rob Fort Knox foiled and then being killed by Bond. Goldfinger is subjugated and undone precisely due to the sexual power of the hero.

Sexual impotence is a trait that the terrorist constantly attempts to reverse. Through the megalonianiacal agglomeration of wealth, power, and technology, he compensates for his lack of sexual power. Common to dramatic narratives is the seizure of a woman (often the love interest of the hero) by the villain, who attempts to seduce her. Often the villain's impotence is expressed through his resort to clumsy and mechanical means of seduction, all of which ultimately fail.

The villain's impotence results in his methods of seduction being backwards, mechanical, and entirely repulsive to the captive "damsel in distress." The woman's repulsion at the display of the villain's masculinity reveals his impotence, and can motivate him to violence (this is also the profile of many serial rapists). His pre­ occupation with resolving his impotence is ultimately his downfall—the definitive example of course being King Kong (1933)—at the hand of a hero and any manner of phallic weaponry.

At the climax of the Miller/Rodriguez film Sin City (2005), hero Hartigan (Bruce Willis) actually castrates the rapist villain "The Yellow Bastard" (Nick Stahl), violently ripping off his mechanized replacement genitals with which the villain had intended to rape Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba). This actual castration by the hero exists at least symbolically for the villain across melodramatic narratives; the hero both asserts his masculinity and shows the villain's masculinity to be non-existent, fake, or impotent.

Homosexuality and Villainy Associated with anxieties over masculinity and virility is the threat of homosexuality and homoeroticism in homophobic Western society. If male sexuality provides a signifier for power, then the male homosexual provides a veritable challenge to male power. Amidst the hero's fears of losing power, the homosexual threatens to "feminize" the "ordinary" male through rape—a fear of castration, as described by Freud (1993). Portraying the villain as homosexual signifies him quite readily as evil, as well as posing a threat to the heteronormativity of the hero. Carla Freccero writes:

In Sex and Conquest, Richard Trexler, a social historian, describes what he calls a regime of penetrative penality that understands the anal penetration of males by males in heteronormative contexts as a form of punishment for various crimes, especially theft.1 Here sodomy is a form of humiliation, the subordination of an inferior male (the penetrated) to a dominant one (the penetrator).(453)

The threat of anal rape is a genuine psychical threat to the heterosexual male (in the sense that it is widely feared, as opposed to widely practiced), and is depicted as a tactic of domination and humiliative emasculation in Western popular myth. The homosexual villain presents both a threat to the hero, and a means of identifying the villain as evil. 77 In Manichean dialogues, which take their basis from Christian religious doctrine (in which homosexuality is considered sinful), the homosexual is located firmly on the side of evil. By creating a homosexual villain, it is quite clear that he operates against God, and thus against good. (Russo, 133)

Both Benshoff (2004) and Tasker (1993) address these issues specifically, providing thoroughgoing histories of homosexuals on film. While the initial representations of monsterism or villainy reveal a deviant or incompetent sexuality, the homosexual on film in the first half of the twentieth century was effeminate—a harmless "sissy"—and as a result did not represent a considerable threat. As gay culture began to express itself though the hypermasculine, the threat of homosexuality was rekindled.

This (re)emergent threat becomes interpreted along identical lines to that of other contemporary "subversives"; the Communists. A number of cases of homosexual spies and defectors in Britain solidified fears of sexual deviance being related to criminality and treason, and subsequent investigations by the FBI and HUAC sought to ferret out homosexuals from public service (MacDougall, 70). Communism and homosexuality became mutually inclusive, each one standing as a sign for the other; both standing as a sign of evil.

The late 1940s to the early 1960s depicted homosexuals as villains in numerous films, notably in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), and Spartacus (1960). A popular theory that Hitler was a homosexual attests to the attempts to frame evil in the context of homosexuality, as well as the ease of doing so. Unsurprisingly, the depiction of Hitler as effeminate is widespread throughout wartime propaganda. In framing Hitler as homosexual, his perceived power is reduced, demeaning him (and paradoxically creating him anew) as a threat.

Few archvillains are depicted as openly homosexual in action cinema, but the homosexual villain has not disappeared entirely from the screen, reifying the homophobia of American film audiences each time. Films like Diamonds are Forever, Deliverance (1972), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Mystic River (2003) replay 78 the homosexual as a frightening figure. According to Vito Russo: "In 1968, Time speculated that Hollywood was 'using' homosexuality more and more as a subject because they had 'run out of conventional bad guys'"(186).

Often, encounters with homosexual villains appear in modern comedic situations: Dumb and Dumber (1994), Dirty Work (1998), Let's go to Prison (2006), and Talladega Nights (2006) all place male protagonists in humorous encounters with homosexual villains, crudely suggestive that sexual assault by another man is cause for laughter.

Terrorist villains are not commonly portrayed as openly homosexual, but tropes of homosexuality are still used to feminize and demean them. Hans Gruber and his henchmen from Die Hard are prime examples. Stilwell writes about the effeminacy of the principal Die Hard villains:

The three primary villains—Hans, Karl and Theo—are all tall, but very slender. Although they are individually quite different, they are each suggestive of emasculation or effeminacy by Reagan-era standards. Theo is represented as a typical computer nerd, in wire- rimmed glasses, jumper, jeans and tweed jacket. Karl, played by the ballet star Alexander Godunov, appears somewhat gangly: his muscularity is hidden by a loose black sweatsuit which makes him look much thinner than he really is. And with his elegant double- breasted suit accentuating the extreme narrowness of his body, Alan Rickman portrays Hans Gruber as a fashion model; he is interested in clothes and concerned about his appearance, and even his neatly styled hair becomes a symbol of control.(559)

Gruber's effeminacy is made clear by his dandified appearance and demeanor. He wears designer suits and eyeliner, and is culturally sophisticated. His main henchmen Karl and Tony are large Aryan brothers with effeminate features, Karl with long blonde hair (the actor, Gudonov, was a former Soviet ballet dancer) suggesting a feminine quality. When the hero McClane kills Tony, he attempts to take his shoes, only to find that they are too 79 small for him. His comment about the Terrorist's small feet subtly feminizes his opponent.

Gates, referring to first name Hawkins's Classics and Trash, traces the conative path from high-culture to homosexuality to villainy:

Any knowledge of 'fine arts' such as the opera or the ballet, and certainly any interest in matters intellectual, is virtually bound to mark a male character as either a sissy (by implication a homosexual), an ineffectual intellectual (a wishy-wasy liberal), a doomed and damnable Faust-type scientist, or a sinister, un- American villain (2006; 256)

The certain link in American culture with refinement and effeminacy is likely a more generalized contempt for the bourgeoisie and a paranoid correlation between wealthy liberals and communism, as expressed most prominently in the McCarthy era. Regardless of whether terrorist characters are depicted as overt homosexuals, homosexual allusions foreground attempts at humiliating the enemy. In American popular culture, it is the fact that labeling a straight person as gay is considered a serious insult. Ramazani observes:

The tight fit between normative gender stereotypes and the American fantasy of moral and physical purity is cogently summarized by a navy photograph showing antigay graffiti on one of the many bombs destined to fall on the Taliban "fags." (121)

In the wake of September 11, 2001, analyses of newslore and folklore positioned enemies like Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban in a discourse of sexual humiliation, by suggesting either their abnormal sexuality or their penetration by American weapons (Frank, 2004; Freccero, 2002; Norton, 1991; Ramazani, 2002).

The Imaginary Terrorist The terrorist character is an exercise in psychical resolution through fantasy. While terrorists are quite real, they exist in our minds and in our films as abstractions, equal 80 parts real and imaginary. The facts of the terrorist are contorted to suit the mold of the melodramatic villain, which can be thought of as an invention based on denial. The melodramatic villain projects the evils lurking within ourselves and our society outwards onto a character which we can other, distance ourselves from, and jeer at. Our desire to lash out violently at reminders of our own anxieties is legitimized through the creation of an incontrovertibly evil terrorist character that begs violent intervention.

The terrorist in reality is treated similarly. Baudrillard, writing on the spectacle of the 9/11 attacks, remarks "They did it, we wished for it" (2002; 5), reminiscent of our gleeful destruction of buildings by terrorists in countless action films. In a sense, our repressed fantasies of destruction play out in the hands of the terrorist. The terrorist soaks up our anger, frustration, malice, and hatred.

The positioning of the terrorist into the mode of the melodramatic villain allows for a complete disavowal of our own terrorist thoughts and feelings. Because the melodramatic villain is already situated in an antonymic position, he becomes the ultimate catch basin for our denials. As we watch the hero thwart the melodramatic terrorist villain, we symbolically assassinate the negative aspects in ourselves that we have located within him; an incredibly therapeutic experience. So it may be that the terrorist we see onscreen is as much "us" as it is "them." 81 Chapter Three: Film after 9/11,9/11 after Film According to the 9/11 Commission Report, September 11, 2001 "was a day of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States" (xv). American jetliners hijacked by Al Qaeda Terrorists were crashed into two major US landmarks— the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and the World Trade Center in New York City. The more extreme event of the two was the tragic collapse of World Trade Center, killing 2973 people in all (9/11 Report, 311). The event marked the first attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, and the first attack on the American National Territory since the War of 1812 (Chomsky, 11). On September 11, 2001, America changed forever.

An account of the facts of the day provides little in the way of a sense of 9/1 l's impact symbolically, psychologically, sociologically, economically, and politically. An enormous outpouring of cultural production on the subject flowed from the moment the dust settled, as writers, artists, musicians, politicians, and others offered hundreds of accounts, analyses, and attempts to deal with the event. Ultimately, no single work seems capable of capturing the reality, the scale and scope, and the sheer horror of the event; not for lack of trying or talent. Susan Sontag's characterization of the event as a "monstrous dose of reality"(32) could refer to a psychoanalytic "return of the Real," a reaffirmation of radical contingency—that anything could happen at any time—through an event which challenges our symbolic reality. Sontag's statement might also be construed on a political level, labeling 9/11 as a bursting of the American hegemonic bubble, an introduction to its citizens of the monstrous world around them. Finally, Sontag's description of the event could simply suggest its sheer magnitude (in all its possible iterations). 9/11 cannot be contained. Murray Pomerance aptly characterizes the spectacle of terror, writing:

The image of disaster permits us to stand back from it and gasp, a reaction of such complete uninvolvement, even superiority, that we stun ourselves into guilt by experiencing it as beautiful. Then, quickly, we leap into sensitivity for the families of the dead; hero worship of the brave workers who must dig through the rubble; 82 virulent and blind hatred of all aliens everywhere who must be thinking in their unknown abodes how to attack us once again. (59)

Pomerance reflects the jarring visuality of 9/11 that lends, and was lent so well to—and by—Hollywood film. Like its precursor King Kong, it is a spectacle that is too large to be captured by the likes of man.

Howard Stein attempts to offer "a preliminary psychological understanding of the causes and meanings of the September 11 attacks."(187). He suggests that:

Through language people attempted to wrest some control out of the incinerating inferno. Language, in turn, offers a key to underlying fantasies upon which action became based. In the United States, and among its allies, old and new, the weeks that followed elaborated the stories, and from them, prepared for action: e.g., "Pearl Harbor all over again"; "Freedom has been violated"; "Ground Zero" (the site of the attacks, initially desecrated, now a sacred place, named for the sites of the first atomic bombs); "911" (the date of the attack [9/11/2001] conflated with the emergency phone number); "It happened here"; "Freedom has been violated"; "a different world after September 11"; "America will never again be the same"; "America is brought to its knees—in prayer"; "American crusade"; "democracy and freedom versus fanaticism and terrorism."( 188)

What remains of September 11, 2001; rubble, ground zero, commemoration ceremonies, grieving families, wars, writing, art, images, newscasts, video, and films—all attempts at containing the spectacle—do not seem to accurately portray the entirety of 9/11, yet as a public, we certainly do seem to have a gestalt of the event, conjured in full at the utterance of two numbers ("nine-eleven").

It is for this reason that I've decided not to include a graphic description of 9/11, nor of my personal experience of that day (which was by no means unique, or even very 83 interesting). 9/11 remains uncontainable, yet ominous in our collective memory, and any attempt that I might make at describing the scene would be incomplete, irrelevant, presumptuous.

The narrow focus of this essay dictates that 9/11 be reduced to a cultural event to be analyzed for its significance, influence, and reference. This should by no means suggest that 9/11 was not in fact a terribly tragic real event, but there is a tendency within cultural studies to reduce life events into cultural phenomena which could be interpreted as a marginalization of tragedy. 9/11 irrefutably impacted the sphere of cultural production, by inducing artists to comment on the state of the nation and reflect upon America's place in the world. The shock to America afforded through this unprecedented act undoubtedly also stymied cultural production, silencing critical discourse—now considered seditious; erasing controversial material—now thought to be insensitive. Expressive potential seemed lost in a rising nationalist tide of a country that was, to mix metaphors, circling the wagons.

The spectre of 9/11, in particular the spectacularly collapsing twin towers, has cast a long shadow across America from New York City to Los Angeles, creating an environment wherein all things must be re-considered on its basis—-"post-9/11." Post- 9/11, Hollywood's depiction of terrorism as a convenient dramaturgical threat in its blockbuster action films now seemed inappropriate and insensitive, and awash in problems of exactly how it should be represented. 9/11 did not easily conform to Hollywood plots: no hero averted disaster at the last minute; the day was not saved; and the ending was not a happy one. Laid bare was America's overconfidence in itself as safe, detached, and strong; it was now subordinated by the day's events to a set of self- aggrandizing myths. If we can consider 9/11 as an instance of the "return of the real,"xvm then post-9/11 changes in American culture can be read as attempts to reconstitute the symbolic reality that 9/11 called into question. Zizek suggests that, "The shattering experience of September 11 ultimately served as the device which enabled the hegemonic American Ideology to 'go back to its basics,'" (2002, 47) which seems to be an accurate reflection of the post-9/11 cultural environment in America. 84 This Chapter examines four stages of 9/11 's effect on the depiction of terrorism in Hollywood film—post-9/11 Hollywood film generally, as well as the post-9/11 cultural/ideological environment. The first section deals with the impact and influence of the event itself, the media events, and its relation to film. The second section explores film in the immediate post-9/11 environment. The third section elucidates the depiction of 9/11 in Hollywood, and the final section reflects on some of the more recent films made on the subject of terrorism as critical approaches to the subject. 9/11 's journey began and ends with Hollywood films. The films that presupposed 9/11 became reality on 9/11 and the trauma of this event was then re-encoded into the films made post-9/i 1; performing the country's collective stages of shock, revenge, and consideration. Films about terrorism inevitably broach the subject of 9/11, and their treatment of terrorism can be viewed as an expression of the predominant attitude towards 9/11 in America at the time of their releases.

The Event:

Terror on Television The collapse of the World Trade Center produced an image that burned into the minds of Americans. Jetliners, at full speed, crashing into the towers in fiery salvo; the towers, clear in the sunlight, fuming like lit cigarettes; people leaping to their deaths from the towers in frenzied escape attempts; the collapse of the towers, clattering downwards in an immense roar of debris and dust—one after the other. The obscuring cloud drifting across lower Manhattan; punctuating the silence brought about by the tragedy that had just unfolded.

Not even the media seemed to be able to capture the entirety of the event. Footage of the attacks themselves, the first attack specifically, was only captured by tourist cameras. The best video footage on the ground at the foot of the towers came from filmmakers (Julian and Gedeon Naudet) who were filming a documentary about New York Firefighters. Press arrived in time to film the second plane crashing into the WTC, 85 and their ensuing collapse; there is very little video pertaining to the Pentagon attack, or to the crash of United Airlines Flight 93.

The 9/11 media spectacle continued for days after the attacks, as television stations played the limited video footage of the event in an unrelenting loop. The Towers fell again and again before our eyes. Regular programming was temporarily suspended giving way to constant coverage of the event. The collapse of the World Trade Center was nothing short of spectacle. Alison Young's description of the aftermath in New York City alludes to a city traumatized by image:

With memorial images immediately flooding the city: messages on walls, stencils on sidewalks, the 'Portraits in Grief printed each day in the New York Times - thumbnail sketches of the missing and the dead. Such a drive to imagine loss is consonant with a crucial aspect of the event: that those who saw the attack (in person or through media coverage) emphasized its visual impact (the sight of the planes' collision with the towers, the towers' devastating collapse, and the later sense of a hole or wound in the skyline of the city. (30)

Witnesses, families, politicians and celebrities were asked for their comments. Understandable questions such as "who?", "why?", and "how could this have happened here?" were asked, investigated, and debated.

America mourned, surrendered some of its civil rights in order to combat terror, and engaged in violent military incursion into Afghanistan, believed to be harboring Osama Bin Laden, the man alleged to be the mastermind behind the attacks.

After the dust had settled, the academic community attempted to process 9/11. Distraught New York intelligentsia attempted to make sense of America forever changed. Diana Taylor writes: 86 The collapse of the World Trade Center created a giant hole in lower Manhattan and an even larger one in the U.S. imaginary. Language of lack—lack of good information, lack of security, and lack of medical readiness in the face of biological terrorism— flooded the public sphere. Lacks cry out for redress, and holes, as everyone knows, need to be filled. (448)

The shock of 9/11 reverberated throughout the country. Events like these simply did not happen in America. Douglas Kellner accurately states that:

Suddenly, the vulnerability and anxiety suffered by many people throughout the world was also experienced deeply by US citizens, in some cases for the first time. The terror attacks thus had material effects, attempting to harm the US and global economy, and psychic effects, traumatizing a nation with fear. (44)

His sentiments accurately describe the sudden "puncturing" of America's cultural hegemony. America, despite its status as reigning superpower was, for perhaps the first time since Pearl Harbor, afraid. How many more attacks would there be? Terrorists could be anywhere, plotting anything, and the United States— despite its might—would be powerless to stop them. The tremors of fear radiated further across the United States as letters laden with anthrax spores reached senators and news stations, killing five and infecting seventeen. America's own systems were being used against it. America was under attack. America was at war.

This sudden "monstrous dose of reality" had a traumatizing effect on America, something that Susan Sontag would suggest we not ignore, criticizing the Bush administration's attempts at psychotherapy:

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a 87 day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K.(32)

America lived not only in a state of trauma (the combination of fear and grief), but also in a state of humiliation. Infallible America had been shown its own vulnerability, a thought that was hardly in line with its machismo cultural hegemony. Many scholars have noted that the phallic iconicity of the World Trade Center effected a symbolic castration of America. Helene Cixous went so far as to suggest that:

The towers embodied phallic power in all its.ever disquieting complexity: there is nothing as fragile as the erection, properly or figuratively. The T.T. were the figure par excellence of triumphant, therefore threatened, power. To tower over: as soon as one towers one attracts castration. The T.T. figure combines the theological, the political, the economic, the sexual, and the erotic.(431)

While Zizek derides scholars like Cixous for suggesting that the towers were waiting to be destroyed (2002, 51) castration as metaphor for 9/11 continued to be discussed by scholars, many awarding less significance to the towers themselves as phallic objects and instead viewing the attacks as symbolically castrating. Vincent Ramazani observes that:

Whether or not one wishes to accord any significance to the phallic iconicity of the World Trade Center, it is obvious from the administration's pronouncements following the attacks that the collapse of the towers was experienced as emasculating, although "humiliating" is the term that the press prefers to use to describe the sudden wound to our national pride. (118)

The gender politics in America in light of 9/11 were examined extensively on the basis of America's hegemonic masculinity. Howard Stein describes the World Trade Center attack as a rape scene, writing: 88 As I watched the countless replays of the second jet approaching and penetrating, then exploding, the South Tower, the attacks upon the Twin Towers felt to me like an immense rape scene: the two jets as vicious phallic thrusts piercing vulnerable tissue. Yet, the Twin Towers were themselves proud, audacious, American phallic thrusts into the technological New York City and American skyline. Symbolically, it felt as if the attacks (instruments of projective identifications) were intended to turn symbolic American "maleness" into "femaleness," and in turn to transform the feminized adversaries of America into potent, triumphant males. The collapse of both towers into a mass grave shows how far the symbolism of (national) castration or emasculation can go.(193)

With America facing emasculation, many have suggested that the response to September 11 was heavily motivated by a desire to reclaim America's masculinity. Russell Frank's examination of internet folklore concludes with similar ends, suggesting that:

If, as Goodwin and Ellis (2002) argue, the destruction of the WTC was understood, at least subliminally, as a symbolic castration of America, it stands to reason that the revenge fantasy would take the form of reasserting American masculinity while emasculating the enemy. (24)

As a result, the ensuing "War on Terror" became, as Diana Taylor suggests, a "testosterone driven" response (448).

Understanding America's reaction to 9/11—one of humiliation and trauma—is necessary in order to obtain a clear view of the environment in which terrorism in film could exist. Prevailing notions of both terrorism and film changed on 9/11, and films about terrorism, as had been made in the past, simply would never be made in the same manner again, now having to shoulder 9/11 's full weight. Perhaps the most significant factor that motivated this change was the way in which the spectacle of terror on 9/11 very closely mirrored scenes from Hollywood action films.

9/11: "Like a Movie" In the wake of 9/11, we can read scholar after scholar quoting eye-witnesses describing the event as "like a movie" (Lane, 79).X1X Despina Kakoudaki notes that:

Neal Gabler's editorial for the 16 September issue of the New York Times, "This Time, the Scene Was Real," thematized this process of visual recognition: "The explosion and fireball, the crumbling buildings, the dazed and panicked victims, even the grim presidential address assuring action would be taken—all were familiar, as if they had been lifted from some Hollywood blockbuster. (110)

For years, American films have pitted America and its heroes against evil terrorists. America sometimes suffered some collateral damage, but always succeeded in defeating the terrorists by the end of the film. These films maintained the hegemonic myths of American heroism, invincibility, and power. The message from America to itself was: "No one messes with us." It was perhaps precisely the fact that these types of events had been imagined, and then came to life that made them so shocking. Suzannah Radstone suggests that:

In recent commentary the attacks of September 11 emerge as "unimaginable." What needs to be acknowledged, here, is the cultural specificity of this response. What rendered these attacks "unimaginable" was precisely what had previously been imagined. The "dominant cultural imaginary" of the United States has been shaped, in part, by fantasies of impregnability and invincibility, and, dreadful as the events themselves were, it was also the puncturing of these fantasies that contributed to the shock of September 11.(458) 90 We even learn that, in regards to 9/11, Saddam Hussein is alleged to have commented:

When we watched what was happening in America for the first time, we thought it might be another American movie. Later we found out that it was a real movie. (Bell-Metereau, 145)

Director Robert Altaian's early suggestion that "the current wave of violent movies had "created the atmosphere" that "set the pattern" in which terrorists thinking and acting out mass destruction could thrive," (Stein, 190) placed the burden of guilt on the very apparatus through which the event was being cognized: film.

For many scholars, the relation between 9/11 and film was a point of profound interest, and one that warranted further investigation. Both Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard situate disaster films in the realm of fantasy. America had relished in fantasies of its own destruction, until 9/11 when they became real; for Zizek this was akin to "when we get too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns into disgust at the Real of the bare flesh" (2002; 6). With 9/11, America came too close to the cinematic renditions that it had previously enjoyed so freely. For Zizek, the pre-figuring of the 9/11 attacks in Hollywood film imply "the twisted logic of dreams—poor people around the world dream of becoming Americans—what do Americans dream of? A global catastrophe that would shatter their lives" (2002; 17).

Like Zizek and Baudrillard, those taking a Lacanian approach understood 9/11 as an oft dreamt-of fantasy become real; an intrusion of the image into reality. Aretxaga summarizes these sentiments: "Fantasy constitutes a scenario within which real action can take place and be interpreted. What was unimaginable was then not the attack itself, but that the fantasy of the attack could materialize"(140). Baudrillard's commentary describes this relation perfectly, suggesting that "the spectacle of terror forces the terror of the spectacle upon us" (2002; 30). 91 Fantasy turns to Trauma In psychoanalytic thought, the need to place events in a narrative structure is considered to be a coping mechanism for the traumatized.xx Psychoanalytic philosophy suggests that the mind makes constant attempts to narrativize the amorphous and unpredictable real into a symbolic reality.xxl We narrativize a world that operates on the basis of radical contingency—wherein anything could happen at any time—resulting in occasional "eruptions" of the real—elements which do not fit in to, or challenge, the present construction. Psychoanalysts suggest that upon encountering such an "eruption," the unconscious mind immediately attempts to reconstitute its constructed symbolic reality in order to absorb the eruption. Often this can result in a "paradigm shift," as the mind attempts to maintain a fragile reality atop a contingent real. Narrative structure, then, is a way of staging the real into a symbolic reality. When we create fictional narratives, in a sense we are operating in the realm of fantasy; creating perfect "closed" narratives that do not fall subject to the radical nature of the real, upon which our reality rests. Fantasy is reality once removed, and as such is the realm wherein the trauma of the real can be artificially resolved.xxu

Film provides a forum for the playing out of fantasy; the focus on melodrama and narrative structure provides an apparently perfect symbolic reality, continually resolving any eruption of the real in the course of ninety minutes. It follows that film is an exercise in therapy, providing a controlled environment in which we can experience trauma, with the principle firmly in place that conflict will resolve itself by its end. Todd McGowan describes film as projecting a fantasmal screen in front of the gaze, upon which the logic of desire is falsely resolved:

Most films do not sustain the logic of desire throughout the narrative. Instead, they retreat from the deadlock of desire.. .into a fantasmatic resolution. Fantasy provides a screen in front of the gaze, allowing the subject to avoid its trauma...Through fantasy, the subject imagines a scenario in which the desire of the other, the objet petit a, becomes clear.(36) 92 Hollywood film is the literal screen that presents the metaphorical screen for the gaze. Films provide fantasmal stages for the playing out of America's desire to triumph over imagined adverse situations. The depiction of terrorism onscreen, pre-9/11 was the fantasmal creation of conflicts to be solved by the film's end, sating America's desire to prove its mettle in the face of catastrophe.

Staging the threat of disaster in America and then averting it, is an exercise in fantasy for the nation. America's fantasies are not so much of its own destruction specifically, then, but of its heroism in the face of that destruction, and of its ability to avert or overcome collapse.

Trauma turns to Fantasy The images previously reserved only for fantasmal relief through fictional film became real on 9/11, when the real provided us with, as Zizek notes, "a special effect which outdid all others, since—as Jeremy Bentham knew—reality is the best appearance of itself (2002,11).

The real had returned: the spectacle of terror turned on its head, becoming the terror of the spectacle. Vast destruction in America had been played out in fantasy on film, and that fantasy then provided the only referent for the experience come true. Kakoudaki suggests that "understanding the real events in terms of their fictional paradigms stems from an inability to find appropriate language to describe what is going on" (145). On 9/11 fantasy became real, and the only appropriate referent for understanding was the originary fantasy. Kakoudaki has commented that "It is ironic to have to explore the unprecedented reality of this attack in terms of a kind of deja vu," (110) introducing the inversion of fantasy's role that occurred.

The trauma of 9/11—the trauma of fantasy become reality—resulted in the attempt to reconstitute this eruption into a narrative symbolic reality returning to the very Hollywood films which had initially conveyed the fantasy. Put simply, Hollywood films imagined terror attacks in America, and when attacks actually happened, those films served as the only point of reference for their interpretation. Linda Williams characterizes 93 Freud's "unheimlich" (uncanny) as "something once familiar that has become strange and frightening" (1981; 67); perhaps Freud's unheimlich poses an apt metaphor for 9/11's emergence from Hollywood.

The Aftermath:

9/11: The Movie Since 9/11 was the stuff of the movies, 9/11 became as a movie.

The problem of using film, which is fantasmally resolved—that is, the narrative is perfect and closed—to read real events should then be clear. Film becomes problematic when it is expected to be both the outlet for relief of trauma, and the interpreter of new traumas.

The interpretation of 9/11 based on film created a real event that quickly adopted the melodramatic structure of the Hollywood films that imagined it. The result is a phenomenon— "9/11: The Movie"—a term which I will use to describe the broad attempts within American society to place 9/11's events into a real-life melodramatic narrative, as though reality were supposed to unfold like one of Hollywood's terrorist films.xxm Anker writes:

In the United States, the September 11 crisis unfolded through a narrative trajectory of injury, pathos, and moral retribution. The U.S.'s initial response to the terrorist attack was a nationwide empathic victimization, a collectively experienced pain in response to unjustified suffering perpetrated by an evil villain. (22)

—observing the use of melodramatic narrative structure in 9/11 and the ensuing responses being applied in the news media, and by US politicians. What she does not specifically state is that the cultural reference for this interpretation was to be found in Hollywood stories. Labelling these events "9/11: The Movie" suggests that the American reaction to the events sought to redeem America by resolving the trauma of the attacks in the style of a Hollywood blockbuster. "9/11: The Movie," is an effectual re-fantasizing of fantasy; the attempt to put 9/11 back into our heads, and out of our world. But in many ways 9/11 was not "like a movie." Where was the hero to stop the terrorist plot and deliver a catch-phrase? Where were James Bond, Jack Ryan, and John McClane? What about the happy ending? If this were in fact a Hollywood film, it couldn't end like this. In order for 9/11 to be read as a movie, the attacks could only be the opening scenes of "9/11: The Movie" which had all the expository trauma of similar films like Independence Day (1996). The 9/11 attacks now became the gut-wrenching opening scene of a Hollywood film, and needed to be resolved accordingly.

If 9/11 was anything like a movie, then it was far from over. The dramatic structure of the Hollywood film, (now become?) the structure of reality, insisted upon a proper resolution. Melodrama called for the emergence of clearly defined good heroes and evil villains. Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein became the diabolical leaders, with the Taliban and Al Qaeda as their backing evil organizations. President Bush, Tony Blair, and Donald Rumsfeld emerged as heroes, backed by an army of hero-soldiers, fighting for freedom.

Kellner suggests that post-9/11 the Media and the Bush administration (as well as the Jihadists) "Manichized" the terrorist enemy, employing a "spectacle of terror" which, in Kellner's view, "conjure[d] the military response that eventually followed" (51). Kellner suggests the unfolding of 9/11 as film:

The September 11 terror spectacle looked like a disaster film, leading Hollywood director Robert Altman to chide his industry for producing extravaganzas of terror that could serve as models for spectacular terror campaigns. Was Independence Day (1996) - in which Los Angeles and New York were attacked by aliens and the White House was destroyed - the template for 9/11? The collapse of the World Trade Center indeed had resonances of The Towering Inferno (1975), which depicted a high-rise building catching fire, burning and collapsing, or even Earthquake (1974) 95 that depicted the collapse of entire urban environments. For these two Hollywood disaster films, however, the calamity emerged from within the system in the case of the first, and from nature itself in the second. In the September 11 terror spectacle, by contrast, the villains were foreign terrorists obviously committed to wreaking maximum destruction on the US and it was not certain how the drama would end or if order would be restored in a "happy ending."(43)

So how does the rest of "9/11: The Movie" unfold? The president rallies the people, who in the name of all that America represents—the forces of good, liberty, freedom, and God—do whatever it takes to search out and kill those who threaten those values.

President James Marshall, addressing a crowd of dignitaries in Air Force One after the capture of the rogue terrorist General Radek, delivers a speech outlining his government's stance on terrorism. He says:

Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid.

Marshall's address draws on broad themes of morality and bravery. Ironically, Marshall's words come just before his plane is hijacked by terrorists and Marshall is forced to put his money where his mouth is and save the day.

Marshall's reassuring bravado is eerily similar to George Bush's statement to the press at Barksdale Air Force Base shortly after learning of the 9/11 attacks, saying, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be 96 defended ... Make no mistake: the U.S. will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts" (Anker, 32).

Bush formally addressed the nation that evening, calling upon its citizens to be steadfast in defense of America. He said:

A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. (White House)

Bush's battle cry echoes President Thomas Whitmore's (Bill Pullman) heartfelt speech before the climatic battle with space invaders in the film Independence Day:

Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist.

With these words, Whitmore launches an attack on those who have decimated American landmarks (the aliens), and Bush launches an attack on Afghanistan for the very same reason: freedom. Like the "War on Terror," Independence Day depicts a "world effort" against terror; although in both cases overzealous American nationalism seems to override any sense of a global discourse, in favor of American patriotism. President Whitmore finishes his speech with a call to global Americanism:

And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day! 97 The involvement of the entire world comes off as unconvincing in the film, since the entire film is situated within America, follows the actions of Americans, and shows the rest of the world (also under attack) in brief montage only.

Similar attributions could be made towards comments by President Bush. Indeed, Bush, too, makes mention of a global effort in his speech, stating: "America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism"(White House). However, events such as the United States incursion into Iraq, unsanctioned by the United Nations, and the infamous draping of the American flag over a toppling statue of Saddam Hussein revealed the insincerity of the US government's discourse that euphemized American imperialism under the auspices of global freedom.

Unfortunately, where Independence Day wraps up in roughly two hours with the destruction of the alien enemy mothership (which of course conveniently controls all the smaller aliens), "9/11: The Movie" may not yet be at an end. Bush's famed "Mission Accomplished" speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln after the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq saw the mothership—the terrorists's homeland—in ruins, and if Independence Day was any indication, smaller groups of enemies, like insurgents and terrorist cells, would naturally retreat. "Mission Accomplished" was supposed to be a glorious final scene, as the leader brought the world together to celebrate the heroes of victory, recalling the final scene in the original Star Wars trilogy, in which the triumphant heroes are decorated for their courage in an ensuing victory celebration. The reality of the situation was interpreted on the basis of the structure of a Hollywood film.

Terrorists were being understood as the characters we had seen in films like The Siege and True Lies. In the chapter discussing the terrorist villain, I suggested that the use of the terrorist mode on film was one reserved specifically for the depiction of potential threats to America throughout history. In contrast, I have also suggested that once a threat becomes active the terrorist character disappears in favour of a war-time enemy. After 98 9/11, the lines that once existed between potential and active, terrorist and enemy soldier became interminably blurred. No longer was the terrorist character simply a mannequin, dressed in the latest threats; the terrorist himself was the enemy. Potential and active threats metamorphized into a single entity through the United States's declaration of "War on Terrorism." Suddenly, the terrorist's face on film matched the face of real terrorists, and real terrorism, actively perpetrated on US soil, was America's principal opponent. Unlike film cycles with Russians or Nazis wherein the move to active threat spawned the production of war films, terrorists had no army, and no country to invade. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq serve as attempts to pursue the narrative of conventional warfare, considering 9/11 to be the new Pearl Harbor—a cowardly attack by an enemy who had declared war. 9/11 brought the threshold between reality and fiction to the height of confusion.

Aretxaga cautions against the use of fiction in reading reality as it pertains to the War on Terrorism. He observes the transference of terrorist film narratives into news reports and political dogma:

What we are witnessing now, I want to suggest, is the materialization of this fictional reality of Terrorism, as an actual enemy of war: the displacement of this fictional reality from the screens of the movie theaters onto the screens of the television newscasts. What we are assisting now, and experiencing, is the entrapment of political life into virtual reality, at least at a new scale. (146)

"9/11: The Movie" (which included the War on Terrorism) was being understood as a dramatic narrative. Elisabeth Anker makes a direct assertion that the melodramatic mode had infiltrated reality. Having performed an in-depth analysis of the media coverage surrounding 9/11, she notes that "The media images of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks demonstrated melodrama's discursive production of national identity" (26). For Anker, the use of "American melodrama," which tailors Manichean 99 dichotomies to suit American hegemonic interests, suggests the positioning of 9/11 's reality within the American melodramatic mode. She writes:

The ubiquity of the melodramatic narrative throughout the coverage should demonstrate both its force as a cultural method of meaningmaking as well as its ability to quickly and convincingly define this event. (36)

It is quite clear that an attempt to resolve the initial trauma of the 9/11 catastrophe, resulted (not necessarily intentionally) in the narrativization of events as they happened, borrowing from a mode reserved for fictional works. The dramatic structure of Hollywood film provided the guide, being a convenient relatable experience. This expectant structure was eventually undone, as the real challenged this structure. Popular support for the War on Terrorism (presently in both Iraq and Afghanistan) ended the moment that the dramatic structure did not resolve itself in reality. The public expected a happy ending, but it didn't get one. Instead the War on Terrorism drags on, while American troops slowly die at the hands of insurgents, and with little quantifiable progress. Many pundits have suggested that the war in Iraq is actually un-winnable, and as a result the question of troop withdrawal has become a major political issue, virtually framing the 2008 Presidential election. Bringing the troops home may serve, as it did in Vietnam (a situation eerily similar in terms of the attempted narrativization of reality), as some sort of consolation prize, which could explain the growing desire among the American public to withdraw forces from the Middle East.

Full Circle: 9/11 in the Movies In the years following 9/11, a number of films began to broach the touchy subject of putting 9/11 onscreen. Spike Lee's 25th Hour (2002) offered an intense moment of silence as cameras panned over Ground Zero. Films like The Guvs (2002), The Great New Wonderful (2005), and Reign Over Me (2007) pondered the lives of those affected by 9/11. The news media spectacle of 9/11 flattened into numerous films utilizing the 100 footage, from experimental artistic endeavors to documentary of the event to scathing political commentary.

Hollywood has produced two big-budget films that are actually about 9/11; United 93 and World Trade Center. Both of them docu-dramas, both arrived in theatres five years after the event, sparking concerns from many that it was "too soon."

United 93 focuses on the infamous eponymous "flight that fought back"; the true story of passengers who allegedly stood up to their hijackers and caused the plane to crash without hitting its target (which is generally assumed to have been the White House). Writer/Director Paul Greengrass pieced together plot details and some dialogue from recorded phone calls, black box information, and interviews with the victims's families. He weaves a reconstruction of the event from start to tragic finish. Greengrass makes every attempt to make a film that would be construed as tasteful—to the point where it seems elusive—not showing much in the way of onscreen violence, and attempting to do positive service to the memories of the actual Americans on the flight.

Greengrass's film comes closest to the depiction of terrorism on film pre-9/11. In fact, the events behind the plot of United 93 closely resemble a Hollywood film. An airplane hijacked by terrorists with a sinister plan, thwarted with a tragic twist. The valiant passengers on Flight 93, for their actions, emerge as Manichean heroes. It is no surprise that the particular case of Flight 93, which duplicated the dramatic structure of a film like Air Force One, or Executive Decision (save for its final moments), was the most readily dramatized of all 9/11 events, and a point of enormous interest to the American public (having also spawned a made-for-TV movie, and several documentaries). For Boggs and Pollard, United 93 seems to garner support for the "War on Terrorism" by melo-dramatizing the event. They write:

In the end—Greengrass's film conveys a starkly polarized world where cruel, sadistic terrorists filled with irrational hatred attack innocent Americans, who in this case exhibit tremendous courage once their plane has been taken over, as they begin fighting the 101 hijackers. Of course no one really knows what took place aboard United 93 that fateful day, but the consensus view (adopted by Greengrass) shows passengers and crew as heroic martyrs struggling valiantly as they unwittingly unleash one of the first salvos in the war on terrorism—in the process saving the White House from almost certain devastation. (2006; 346)

World Trade Center was directed by Oliver Stone. Stone's film dramatizes the experiences of two Port Authority Police officers (Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena) dispatched to the World Trade Center on September 11. The two men are among the few who became trapped under the rubble of the collapsed buildings and survived. Stone's film also presents us with a euphemized plane crash (shown only as a play of shadows) and a collapse that is obscured by dust. As with United 93, World Trade Center focuses on a microcosmic event-the encounter of two officers with the collapsing buildings—that (more or less) fits into a dramatic narrative structure. While the collapse of the World Trade Center was certainly more spectacular than the two men's experience, the film is incredibly specific in its focus on this smaller personal story, a tale that seems almost insignificant in light of the day's events. Where United 93's ending leaves audiences somewhat conflicted, World Trade Center seems to have a happy ending amidst the tragedy, as both officers survive.

Stone's film expresses quite clearly a patriotic testament to American heroism, and co-operation in the face of adversity. The film is not centrally about the collapse of the World Trade Center (it could just as easily have been about men trapped in a mine); it is about heroism: heroes trapped, keeping each other alive through their heroism, being discovered by unlikely heroes, and, rescued by an entire battalion of heroic rescue workers, returning to heroic wives and children who have suffered throughout the ordeal.

Both Stone and Greengrass have removed themselves from the actual narrative events of 9/11 in favor of focusing on smaller narratives that satisfy a dramatic structure. Both United 93 and World Trade Center explore perhaps the most positive events of the tragedy. It can be rightly assumed that a film dramatization of the entire events of 9/11 will never be made. Yet, it already exists. 9/11 was made filmic on the day that it happened. The reaction by filmmakers like Stone and Greengrass (and presumably more to come) can be considered as self-imposed tunnel-vision, keeping our gaze away from the cinematic spectacle of terror—the smoking towers- in favor of positive stories. Stein suggests that the

homogenizing narratives of the September 11 calamity are supposed to be experienced as the entire story. They contain and enforce the cultural fiction about what and who are significant and what and who are not. For instance, the official heroes of September 11 are the firefighters, the police, and the emergency medical personnel. (193)

9/11 's plot was one of tragedy, not melodrama. As such it is not appropriate for use in Hollywood. The 9/11 film's careful use of melodrama conjures American heroism and resilience in the face of tragedy to reassure a nation plunged quite suddenly into self- doubt and to reify the patriotic fervor in which America celebrated itself for having "survived" the attacks.

The Terrorist on Film after 9/11 The first films to broach the subject of terrorism post-9/11 were already in production before it happened. The Schwarzenegger vehicle Collateral Damage, the adaptation of Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, and the Jerry Bruckheimer buddy-action comedy Bad Company, all had their release dates pushed back due to their terrorist content (Dixon, 3). Each film underwent some degree of alteration in light of 9/11. Much of this involved re-cutting the films to avoid shots of the now non-existent World Trade Center. The screenplays for The Sum of All Fears and Collateral Damage had originally called for an Arab villain, a prominent face of the terrorist onscreen in films of the 1990s like True Lies, The Siege, and Rules of Engagement (2000). It seems plausible that in the wake of widespread fear and trauma, the old fare of typical American action films 103 seemed inappropriate. Perhaps America needed time to mourn, hence the delayed releases. Perhaps the sight of terrorists onscreen would bring back memories of 9/11, and would simply be too much for people. One thing is certain, the terrorist's normal role in Hollywood, and in reality, had been thoroughly debased. Terrorists assumed their conventional Hollywood roles in the films immediately following 9/11, however the now actively-threatening Islamic terrorist was removed from these films; replaced by various well-established potential threats. Depicting Islamic terrorists became highly problematic, since they did not seem to fit into any of the character niches of American melodrama. The Islamic terrorist had effectually become a war-time adversary, yet at the same time was in fact, "a terrorist," a role reserved for the depiction of a potential threat. As a result, they simply were not portrayed.

Additionally interesting is the removal of the World Trade Center—formerly a prominent element of the iconic New York City skyline, displayed profusely on film and television to establish location (Mitchell, 767). This effort not only saw a removal of the World Trade Center's image from forthcoming productions, but additionally, sequences displaying the towers were re-cut for all successive airings of older film and television. Popular Television programs like Sex and the City and The Sopranos edited their opening credits sequences to remove images of the Trade Center. The Simpsons episode "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" (1997) was shelved indefinitely due to its featuring of the World Trade Center. It later aired, without the WTC scenes (Simpsons Archive). Scores of other films, television shows, print advertisements, albums, and video games underwent alteration or outright cancellation due to World Trade Center or terrorism-related content.xxlv It would seem as though all trace of 9/11 needed to be erased from public memory.

And so it was done. The World Trade Center, for all its painful memories, was clipped from culture, its trace abolished. Even the news footage of the planes hitting the Center and its resultant collapse—footage that was watched over and over in the attempt to make sense of what had happened—was eventually shelved. America wanted the World Trade Center to have never existed. 104 When Collateral Damage, The Sum of All Fears, and Bad Company finally debuted, the reception was a mixed one.

Collateral Damage hit number one at the box office for only one week, and its worldwide gross of $78, 353, 508 fell below its $85 million production budget. Bad Company also fell just shy of its $70 million production budget. The film, widely considered to be a flop, didn't chart higher than number four at the box office. The Sum of All Fears, on the other hand, did extraordinarily well, grossing close to $200 million worldwide, more than doubling its production budget of $68 million (The-Numbers).

A cursory explanation of why Collateral Damage and Bad Company did poorly and The Sum of All Fears did so well could find many reasons: poor acting; lackluster plots; cliche imagery. The Sum of All Fears had to its advantage a pre-established audience, being not only a prequel for previously successful films but also an adaptation of a popular novel.

However, there may be other factors in play. Perhaps Collateral Damage's terrorist attack and the attempted nuclear detonation in Bad Company were simply too tame in a post-9/11 world. Meeuf writes:

Rather, I think that Collateral Damage simply fails to conform to the new "realities" of the United States'^ hegemonic discourse of terrorism, realities that call for even more direct and violent military action and a more vehement articulation of the good/evil rhetoric... The film, in short, doesn't go far enough in advocating a broad military deployment against terrorism.(n.p.)

Meeuf s suggestion indicates the problematic nature of depicting terrorists post-9/11. The fact was that America had moved terrorism into a category of active threat through the War on Terror. Collateral Damage's old-style potential-threat terrorists were decidedly outdated, and thus uninteresting. Baudrillard writes of the World Trade Center that "One can imagine nothing equivalent that would be worth destroying" (2002; 50). In view of 9/11, it may simply be that the terrorist acts in Bad Company and Collateral Damage seemed to pale in comparison to the 9/11 attacks. The Sum of All Fears offered something more. In the film, terrorists successfully detonate a nuclear device in Baltimore. This act, post-9/11, is positioned on a trajectory of escalating violence; it was worse than 9/11. The Sum of All Fears provided a fantasmal expression of the "next" threat, the new "worst thing that could happen" (correctly surmised by the film's title) and this proved intriguing for American audiences. Jonathan Markovitz quotes Kenneth Turan in an attempt to get at the reasons behind the film's success:

Maybe, just maybe in a world where newspapers are running front­ page stories about the horrific possibilities of an India-Pakistan nuclear war that could instantly kill as many as twelve million, people are going to see The Sum of All Fears because they want to have a sense of what is at stake in a world where nuclear arms show no sign of going away. (207)

Turan's thoughts are apt. What he does not explicitly say is that the American public's curiosity was spurred by a desire to become educated about possible terrorist threats (paralleled by the boom in sales of Korans immediately after 9/11, as Americans struggled to know and understand their enemy) (Zizek 2002, 34). This is yet another example of America imagining its own destruction, in this case perhaps partly motivated by a desire to become informed about possible threats to homeland security (In the wake of September 11, 2001, the US military recruited Hollywood screenwriters to brainstorm possible terrorist threats, targets and solutions [Aretxaga, 10]). "Nuking" Baltimore provided a convenient playing field for fantasy, since, as some critics joked, "Baltimore is a complete dump and no one would miss it much if it were leveled by a nuclear weapon" (Queenan, 12). Staging a nuclear attack on Baltimore, an "unimportant" American city (the novel upon which the film is based originally called for the device to be set off in Denver, a city perhaps held as slightly more valuable in the eyes of 106 American audiences), allowed for a regnant fantasy while averting recent traumatic allusions that would undoubtedly have been conjured if a bomb had gone off in, say, New York or Los Angeles. It is clear that director Phil Alden Robinson took care not to invoke 9/11 in his film. Despite the nuclear explosion, the audience is given very little graphic depiction, and the consequences of a nuclear explosion seem to be completely ignored (Maher, 3). Rebecca Bell-Metereau rebukes Robinson, writing:

Apparently, for this filmmaker, what is more important than depicting war or terrorist acts in a realistic way that might upset people is portraying war in an uplifting and encouraging way that will inspire more people to go to more mo vies. (144)

She also raises the issue of radiation poisoning, suggesting the film's complete and utter ignorance of any realistic lasting effects:

Only one person—an Arab peasant—is shown suffering any consequences as a result of radiation poisoning. The hero Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) doesn't even have to lose any hair, let alone suffer cancer or radiation sickness, even though he drove through firestorms and was thoroughly dusted with radioactive ash.(159)

Not displaying the expected scores of charred bodies or the gruesome effects of radiation expected in such an occurrence helped to avert the spectre of 9/11 from descending on the film. That The Sum of All Fears allowed for the playing out of an intriguing "what-if" scenario in fantasy, correctly avoiding traumatic references, seems to be a more plausible explanation for its success. Boggs and Pollard's assertion that

The al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon inevitably heightened public fascination with terrorism, fueled by mounting fear and paranoia, and this was destined to inspire a new cycle of films in which powerful images of on-screen terrorism dramatize elements of real-life terrorism that nowadays conjures the threat of weapons of mass destruction (2006; 336) 107 locate the public interest in a film like The Sum of All Fears in post-9/11 fear and paranoia.

In spite of controversy raised by the 2002 terrorist films, and an obvious public interest in the subject, none of the 2002 films about terrorism grossed among the year's top ten, losing out to fantastic films like Spider-man, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (all 2002).

Revenge:

Terrorists Dressed as Ores, Warlocks and Goblins Although anything arousing thoughts of 9/11—Islamic terrorists and the World Trade Center—was abolished from portrayal in the mainstream media, the American public expressed a silent wish for revenge, evidenced by such things as Internet memes circulated post-9/11 that depicted or suggested brutal acts of violence projected towards Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Arabs in general. Frank suggests that this "newslore.. .expresses emotions that were too raw to be covered in the news media and thus functions as both an outlet for those emotions and a protest against the decorousness of the press" (633). In addition to creating newslore, Americans turned their attention to fantastic melodramatic narratives that presented conflicts that could easily be thought of as allegory for the War on Terror. Bell-Metereau notes that "In 2002, half of the top ten highest-grossing films were fantasy or children's films" (155). Films like Spider-man, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings loosely recapitulate 9/11, in fantastic scenarios: The Green Goblin, the villain in Spider-man, is a flying bomber. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry battles a mysterious figure—Tom Riddle—who has been staging attacks at Hogwarts (a minion of the evil Lord Voldemort). Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers presents us with a large scale attack on the human fortress of "Helm's Deep" by hordes of Ores. The 9/11 hijackers become the Green Goblin; Tom Riddle is to Lord Voldemort as Mohammed Atta was to Osama Bin Laden; and aside from the convenient title, The Two Towers presents a large scale battle to protect the innocent 108 from the forces of evil from a far away land, the very summation of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent 'War on Terrorism'.

So while terrorist films momentarily waned (after the terrorist films in production pre-9/11 were released, terrorists did not appear again on film until 2004), terrorist-like fantasy films ruled the box office, providing safe and trauma-free experiences of 9/11, with a revisionist twist. The American public's thirst for revenge was sated by watching good white men fustigate monstrous invaders on the silver screen; a fantastic revenge via fantasy.

Time for Heroes The Bush Administration's "War on Terrorism" united the concepts of terrorism and war. Kellner observes a distinct change in mainstream news coverage that suggested the patriotic fervor which 9/11 had spurned. America, now having collected itself, was on the war path. Kellner writes:

From September 11 to the beginning of the US bombing of Afghanistan in October, the US corporate media intensified war fever and there was an orgy of patriotism such as the country had not seen since World War II. Media frames shifted from "America Under Attack" to "America Strikes Back" and "America's New War" - even before any military action was undertaken, as if the media frames were to conjure the military response that eventually followed. (51)

In light of this attitudinal change, the US military took an active role in the production of war films in the wake of 9/11, lending funds and equipment (nothing new for the US militaryxxv). Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001), at a time when other films were being delayed, was actually rushed to theatres (Markovitz, 201). Black Hawk Down chronicles the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. The plot centers around the downing of two United States helicopters and the ensuing attempted rescue of their crews, widely 109 considered one of the US military's most ineffectual missions, leaving eighteen American soldiers dead.

The soldiers battle hordes of Muslim fighters in a Somali battle theatre where there is no distinguishing between civilians and combatants. Authors like Markovitz criticize Scott's portrayal of the conflict, suggesting that it

recuperates the collective memory of this raid—to claim it as a success and as a stunning example of the valor and heroism of US soldiers. In the process, the film works to rejuvenate myths about the benevolence of US foreign policy and to fortify the ideological foundations for future military campaigns.(212)

Markovitz discusses the film as being without context, drawing attention to the tendency in Hollywood film and in American political discourse to frame all American conflicts in Manichean terms, disregarding contextual information that might contradict such a portrayal. He reminds us of the events that formulated the reasons behind Somali anger towards the United States special forces, culminating in

a truly disastrous mission during which the US forces destroyed a building in Mogadishu where members of Aidid's clan (the villain of the film) were meeting to discuss a peace agreement with the United Nations. The US military killed fifty-four people in that attack, and then, when faced with retaliatory gunfire, the special forces fired missiles at residential areas, thus succeeding in "making enemies of all the Somalis" (217)

—just one among many such factors which undoubtedly contributed to their treatment of the downed American soldiers in the infamous Battle of Mogadishu (the point at which Scott allows us to enter the narrative). The Somalis in the film appear faceless; "a pack of snarling dark-skinned beasts" (Mitchell, El) stalking towards the downed Americans like George A. Romero's zombies. Without context the Somalis appear as savage enemies. 110 As a result, the slaughter of scores of them later in the film appears heroic—in the context of a rescue—instead of tragic.

Black Hawk Down was directed by super-director Ridley Scott—Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Hannibal (2001)—whose trademark graphic intensity painted a picture of combat that maintained a comic-book like visuality. The film's depictions of graphic violence and the fetishizing of US military equipment appear to be an extended recruitment commercial for the "War on Terrorism.'""™

The focus of Scott's film, and the reason that the military showed such an interest in it, is the portrayal of the American soldier as the rescuing hero.xxvu In the context of 9/11, the image of heroic Americans rescuing their fallen comrades from evil Muslim extremists and attempting to protect freedom and maintain peace becomes a typology for the World Trade Center and the ensuing "War on Terror." Again, the creation of a wartime depiction of the terrorist is observable. Black Hawk Down effectively wages war on a terrorist enemy, the first realistic film of its kind to do so. Black Hawk Down fared far better at the box office than any of the conventional "terrorist films," in part due to its shift in the characterization of the terrorist from potential to active threat.

In addition to Black Hawk Down, similar tales of revisionist military heroism emerged in 2002 and 2003, in films covering most major American military conflicts (BHD depicts Somalia): World War II (Hart's War. 2002); Vietnam (We Were Soldiers. 2002); and Bosnia (Behind Enemy Lines, 2003). All of these films can be thought of along the same lines as the fantasy films discussed previously. Instead of fantastic scenarios, 9/11 and the War on Terror manifest in prior military conflicts. The thematic emphasis on American heroism and the legitimization of American military action in these films certainly demonstrates a working out of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism both on the Hollywood screen and in the minds of Americans. Ill New Perspectives:

2002 and After Films after 2002 took on a different tone. While revisionist fantasy/historical epics continued to exact increasingly obvious violent revenge scenarios towards Muslims in films such as Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Alexander (2004), and 300 (2006) (an effective combining of Lord of the Rings and Black Hawk Down into further typological structures), films about terrorism began to take on a more "global" viewpoint.

Several potential factors can be discussed as contributing to this shift. For one, by 2004-2005, with no new terrorist attacks on American soil, the trauma of 9/11 had faded slightly from collective memory. Secondly, after 9/11 America began learning about Islam, Terrorism, and the Middle-East; part of the healing process of 9/11 involved education about the contributing socio-political factors that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. Thirdly, after the 2004 Presidential elections, popular support for President Bush and military involvement in Iraq waned (particularly in light of the "intelligence failures" that asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the increasing death toll on US forces). An ideological shift in America moved it away from the insular Republicanism that it had collectively embraced after 9/11, and if film was any indication, America suddenly began to explore causal factors, including its own global presence as cause.

The 2004 comedy Team America: World Police was an unsparing parody of America's military unilateralism. Made by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (infamous harbingers of controversy), the film featured marionettes instead of actors, playing out a Reagan-era style action film reminiscent of The Delta Force series of films. The film plays on America's ignorance involving Islam and Arabs in general, displaying caricatured terrorists who wear turbans, sport beards, and say nothing save for "Durka durka Mohammed Jihad." While the film did quite well at the box office, more than doubling its production budget, and taking in over $50 million worldwide (The- Numbers), one wonders if the parody in the film was lost on a portion of its audience left relishing racism and revenge. Still, if Team America divided the American film viewing 112 audience, providing revenge fantasies for some, it at least marks a turning point in the emergence of a more critical American audience to some degree.

Steven Spielberg's Munich perfectly captures the deflation of the revenge cycle. The film opens with the hostage taking and eventual massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terror organization Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Based on true events, the film then follows Avner (Eric Bana), an agent for the Mossad and a team of agents who have been clandestinely recruited to assassinate those responsible for planning the "Munich Massacre." Spielberg gives us a film about revenge as a taste that turns from sweet to bitter. By the end of the film, Avner is lost regarding the morality of his mission, the vision of which has become confused along the way. The moral of this film speaks to America, involved in a War on Terrorism, warning against blind retaliation.

As with Team America, Spielberg's morally complex message might have been lost on most of the American public. For a Spielberg film, Munich did quite poorly domestically (under $50 million), despite its international success (taking in over $80 million) (The-Numbers). Regardless, the film's moderate success domestically and the very fact that it was made in the first place contributed to a changing psychological environment in America, setting the stage for what was to come.

Stephen Gaghan's Syriana provides perhaps the best example of the emergence of a more balanced portrayal of terrorism on film. Delving deep into the inner workings of the oil industry, Syriana mines the causal factors that contribute to the rise of terror driven by religious fundamentalism. Syriana's tagline, "Everything is connected," (IMDB) aptly summarizes a film that would like to draw the causes of terrorism back to America, the petrochemical industry, and greed.

The film draws a broad swath across the world linking greed with poverty; poverty with religious fundamentalism; and fundamentalism with violent fanaticism. One plotline follows a laid-off Pakistani oil-worker, Wasim Khan (Mazhar Munir) to his eventual training and indoctrination as a suicide bomber. The film ends as Khan drives a 113 missile-laden boat into a large ship (an allusion to the USS Cole bombing). Throughout the film, Gaghan takes care to show his audience that this end result (Khan's attack) has been contributed to by international politics, government operations, and large business transactions.

The aim of Syriana is perhaps to demonstrate that "what goes around comes around," turning a critical eye on America's foreign policy as a contributing factor in anti-American terrorism. Syriana's scathing critique of the American Government links its operations in the interests of corporate greed with the eventual harming of its populace. Business prospers at the cost of creating terrorists, and it is the American people who ultimately suffer.

Jack Shaheen, who has extensively analyzed and criticized the portrayal of Arabs in Hollywood film, celebrates Munich and Syriana, suggesting that these films "forcefully and eloquently argue that unabated power and unconstrained violence serve to expedite terrorism and prevent peace" (2006, 73). Shaheen celebrates Gaghan's and Spielberg's portrayals of Arabs as human; a novel approach in Hollywood film and a cause Shaheen has been supporting for years.

In 2006, several films emerged addressing terrorism as a more complex phenomenon. V for Vendetta and Children of Men depicted terrorist organizations operating in post-apocalyptic near futures. While not protagonists per se, terrorists occupy a sympathetic position in these films, and care is taken to explore the foundations of their action. V for Vendetta in particular explores the adage, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." The terrorist "V" is introduced as a complex character motivated by revenge, his endeavours morally and historically complicated, born of circumstance, and his violent actions typically without glamour.

Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men portrays peace activists turned terrorist as a problematic organization fighting for immigrant rights in a post-apocalyptic Britain. An IRA-style cafe bombing early in the film is attributed to them, but later denied by their leader Julian (Julianne Moore), claiming that the attack was the work of the government 114 in an attempt to discredit them. They turn from friendly to inimical upon the death of Julian, now planning to commit murder in order to gain control over a hostage (Clare- Hope Ashitey) to use her as a political tool. Cuaron's film presents a complex and fluid face of terrorism, additionally depicting a Jihadi-esque protest by detainees in an immigrant detention camp. Terrorism resonates between good and evil in Children of Men^ and the contributing factors make it appear as somewhat of a runaway train that initially had good intentions, perhaps a prescient reading of contemporary terrorism.

And so began an age of wiser portrayals of terrorism in Hollywood. One can only hope that the re-education of America in the face of trauma has forced some lasting self- reflexivity. America has experienced similar lessons as researchers delve into foreign policy. Threats to America in recent years—Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden— have been exposed as Frankenstein's monsters, direct products of America, run amok. If the films of the last few years are any indication, perhaps America is, for the first time, becoming conscious of itself as a world power, and will be mindful of the immense butterfly effect that it has on the world.

2007 and Beyond In the past year, Hollywood has continued to release films about terrorism, with some significant changes occurring, and a decisive split in filmmaking styles and ideology. As the failing mission in Iraq becomes more apparently politically unpopular, terrorist films in the vein of Syriana continue to display terrorism from a critical perspective, censuring the US government's use and abuse of threats of terror as a means of social control. Films such as Charlie Wilson's War, Lions for Lambs, and Rendition (all 2007) are political thrillers that critically address the issues raised by 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror. Charlie Wilson's War chronicles the 1979 campaign by the eponymous senator to give arms to the Afghan Mujahideen in order to fight invading Soviets, a group that ultimately spawned Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Lions for Lambs follows the exploits of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and the political decisions in the United States that affect them, and Rendition is an extremely critical look at the US policy of "Extraordinary Rendition" wherein suspected terrorists are deported to countries that practice torture. 115 Each of these films attempts to display the role of detached American political and personal interest in the lives of ordinary citizens, both in America and around the world.

These films present the terrorist in more realistic ways than previously depicted, now distanced from the archvillain model previously assumed. Terrorists become more ignorant than evil, as well as less primitive and disorganized. For the first time care has been taken to show audiences more accurate portrayals of terrorists. The threat of terrorism seems to have subsided in lieu of domestic evils which ultimately seem to be the root causes of it.

The heroes in these films are different as well. They are neither action heroes nor terrorist-fighters. In the above cases, the antagonists in the films are not terrorists, but shady US bureaucrats. The emphasis on conscience characterizes these new heroes as compassionate global citizens, perhaps representative of a sea change in American politics, and a critique of the jingoistic Bush Administration.

Another 2007 film, A Mighty Heart, examines the emotional states of someone feeling the effects of global terrorism. When her husband is held hostage by terrorists in Pakistan, Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie) is powerless to help him. The search-and-rescue efforts in the film are realistically left to the authorities. Despite efforts to save him, Mariane's husband is eventually executed, leaving behind a pregnant Mariane who must overcome her fear and grief. This film differs greatly from the conventional terrorist film; the hero does not fight the terrorists physically, but rather must stand up to terror emotionally/psychologically. The film actually contains very little in the way of violent action, and the actual abductors/executioners are never shown on camera. In many ways, A Mighty Heart expresses a universality of human suffering due to terrorism. One scene depicts Mariane being interviewed a short time after her husband's tragic death. She takes care to point out that her husband was simply one of ten people kidnapped and executed by terrorists in Pakistan that month, which emphasizes it as a common experience. The film provides an in-depth explanation of the global politics of terrorism in Pakistan while stressing an empathy with the many non-American victims of terrorism around the world, 116 and seemingly expressing a more informed view than the jingoistic ideology expressed in more conventional terrorist films.

However, if the above films could be considered "Democratic" films, there certainly are a number of "Republican" films made in 2007 that demonstrate a regression to old habits. Terrorist films in the action genre have returned to their formulaic presentation of American hegemony. Films like Live Free or Die Hard and The Kingdom hark back to films of the 1990s, as arch-villains battle all-American heroes.

Very recently, there seems to be a distinct impetus in much of America to resurrect old heroes. The release of Live Free or Die Hard, more than ten years after the last installment is merely the tip of the iceberg. Rocky and Rambo return, as Sylvester Stallone gives us additional installments of each popular series. Chuck Norris and Hulk Hogan have received increased attention in campy projects such as thetruthaboutchuck.com and Hogan's revival of American Gladiators. In combination with the establishment of new "origin films" for popular heroes like Batman and James Bond (the first-installments of each seeking to recreate the series from the beginning), and even the re-formation of defunct yet popular rock bands seems to emphasize America's search through the past for heroes. Alex Williams, writing on the return to what Jeffords would call "the hard-bodied hero" suggests that:

This is a moment in American history bedeviled by a sinking economy, the possibility of environmental catastrophe and violent conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. So it's not surprising to see men who were raised on cartoonish images of the fictional John Rambo taking out more Soviet soldiers in two hours than the Afghan Mujahideen did in a decade show an appetite for characters who tend to fix even big problems with room-clearing brawls, monosyllabic wisecracks and large-caliber firearms.(2)

Jeffords's hard body allegedly developed in relation to the Reagan Revolution in order to combat a Communist threat. The growing trend in revisiting the past for heroes may in 117 fact raise new heroes without an enemy to fight. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, has already set his muscle (formerly used to battle terrorists onscreen) against global warming. The danger exists that these hard bodies could require satiation in violent conflict. An army in search of an enemy can only have disastrous consequences.

Trauma Fades Is the shock that 9/11 caused to the American conscience finally gone? Six years of healing seem to have returned things to normal. The police state and the culture of fear in America seem to have waned, and with no new terrorist attacks on America, the threat of terrorism seems to be shelved in favour of environmental concerns and celebrity gossip. Bill Ellis, writing on disaster humor, suggests:

Once the threat of the disaster is no longer imminent, and once rescue work has dealt with the most pressing needs, the nation's attention turns from the emotional jobs of assisting the injured and comforting the bereaved to the practical tasks of cleaning up the physical damage and assigning blame, internally and externally. The disaster, in short, shifts from being present to being part of the past. Such a shift requires mental adjustments on several fronts, in particular, the need to "name" the most threatening elements of past events as a way of filing them away in memory. (2)

Ellis's notion of the link between the mental adjustment from present to past and entertainment also applies to the process of recuperation in America after 9/11, as seen on Hollywood screens.

The true litmus test of this proposition can be observed on film. Is the American public ready for 9/11 's iconography to be shown on film? The answer seems to be yes.

Michael Bay's Transformers (2007) appears to utilize imagery from both 9/11 and the War on Terror to increase the film's dramatic effect. This film benefits from Department of Defense support; its largest Hollywood project since Black Hawk Down. 118 It would seem that where Black Hawk Down evinced government-supplied ideology in the immediate wake of 9/11, Transformers does the very same thing some years later, in a slightly updated context. Given the criticisms of Black Hawk Down's historical revisionism, Transformers, as a science-fiction story, seems to adequately avert the reality that somewhat undermined Black Hawk Down's mythology.

Our first encounter with the robotic villains in the film takes place in the Middle East, the epicenter of the War on Terror, as one of the robots launches an attack on a US military base in Qatar. A second terrorizing robot appears shortly after and attacks the surviving troops, now making their way across a rocky desert terrain. Attacks by insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq have claimed the lives of many American soldiers stationed in the Middle East to fight the War on Terror.

As with the War on Terror, the battle which begins in the Middle East, if not properly dealt with there, comes to America. As attackers came from the Middle East on 9/11, the evil transformers (the Decepticons) next initiate attacks in America. The film itself centers entirely on America and Americans, abolishing the rest of the world from the diegesis.

If this iconography appears too ambiguous or subtle, one scene above all others solidifies the analogy. In this scene we watch as the film's arch-villain Megatron, transformed in a large airplane, flies into a busy office tower. The camera follows from the outside of the building as Megatron, still visible through the building's windows, crashes clear through the building and out the other side. The iconography of this scene is situated quite clearly as referential to the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks, playing on the brief but oft repeated traumatic spectacle of the event, as captured by the media. Associating the Decepticons with terrorists adds an allegorical level to the film Transformers. Notably, the heroes in the film are the Autobots, transformers who assume the form of American cars and trucks, who work closely with the US military and some middle-class American teenagers to battle the Decepticons. 119 The film Cloverfield (2008) features a large ambiguous monster terrorizing and decimating New York City. The monster sequences, filmed using handheld cameras, obscure the actual monster in falling debris and smoke, very closely resembling the images captured at ground zero as the World Trade Center collapsed.

The "skyscraper-sized" monster of this film could be easily interpreted as the World Trade Center itself—possessed by the evil of terrorism—executing its wrath upon the city. The use of a clearly legible, traceable visual spectacle of terror in both Transformers and Cloverfield is utilized to increase the films's emotional impact, perhaps allowing those who were not in New York City on the day of the 9/11 attacks to experience the event as though they were, but from the safe distance of fantasy. 9/11 has shifted from a present event to a past one, and by virtue of it being in the past, it can now be enjoyed as entertainment. What is Cloverfield really but "9/11: The Ride"? The 9/11 iconography builds interest, and exemplifies the completion of the traumatic stages that saw 9/11 transform from fantasy to reality, and back again. The process seems to have taken six years to complete. If 9/11 can now act as a device for the construction of fantasy, then it joins the ranks of previous traumas like Pearl Harbor as a symbolic object, rather than a real event. America's media-oriented trauma cycle seems to have accomplished the subversion of trauma and re-ordered its symbolic reality to absorb 9/11 in the course of just six years. The evidence can be seen in clearly in Hollywood films about terrorism during this period, which perhaps further solidifies Hollywood film as a driving force in media, and a clear expression of the cultural Zeitgeist in America.

Notes:

I Melodrama is widely considered to be the primary narrative mode used in US cinema, news coverage, and political discourse, and certainly structures the terrorist film. For further reading, see Anker, 2005; Bratton, Cook & Gledhill, 1994; Brooks, 1995; Gallagher, 1999; Gledhill, 2002; Lang, 1989; Meeuf, 2006; Williams, 1998. II Reluctance to involve oneself in action is a trait of heroes well beyond terrorist-fighters. Films such as Shane (1953), First Blood: Part I (1982), and Troy (2004) feature incredibly powerful heroes who must be provoked into action. 120

III The heroes of terrorist films have not appeared as cyborgs to date, which evinces a politicized mythology in play, proffering the notion that the average muscular American is enough to combat any number of nefarious terrorists. IV Mark Crispin Miller discusses the use of the expression of mythology from the old West in post-9/11 American politics in "Saddam and Osama in the Entertainment State." v Homosexuality was officially considered a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973, when it was removed from the DSM. vl See Fone, B. Homophobia: A History for a detailed historical account of homophobia in America. vu A recent and rather appropriate example can be noted in the comments made by Republican Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern, who has suggested that homosexuality poses a greater threat to America than terrorism. vm To take this thought further, feminine Female action stars seem to have successfully offset the reversion to regarding the body of the action hero as a sexualized object as outlined by Stephen Neale. Modern Female stars actively invite a sexualized gaze towards their body. Positioning the action hero as Female allows for this gaze to exist without the lingering "threat" of homoeroticism. 1X This is precisely the case in the film Red Dawn (1984) where two brothers collaborate to fight against the Soviet invasion of America after the capture and eventual execution of their father by Russian soldiers. x It is implicit here that the son (and not the daughter) carries on the family name, and with it, the feud. xl Of course, these Hollywood films are works of fiction, so they can be understood an unreal to begin, however, they must preserve their verisimilitude within the film's context. Hollywood films generally operate on the basis of realism (or sometimes magical-realism) as opposed to reality. xu Arlington Rd.'s (1999) original screenplay placed the film's action in the past, from the perspective of the protagonist's son investigating his father's peculiar death, exposition that would overtly resolve the issue of the death of the hero by replacing him with a son (which additionally explains why the hero in Arlington Rd. has a son instead of a daughter)—this storyline was cut in the theatrical release. xm In a real-life example, in the late 1980s a distinct effort was made to label the Nicaraguan Contras, operating as terrorists but in support of US interests, as "freedom fighters" or "revolutionaries" instead of "terrorists" or "mercenaries" (Jeffords, 62). X1V Describing the James Bond films as a "series," refers to James Chapman's consideration of these films as a series, based on their formulaic use of plots, characters and themes (19). While these films were made by different people, over a vast history of cultural environments, the Bond formula is uniformly applied to each film. The expression of this formula throughout history, in changing environments, makes the body of Bond films a coherent group; the expression of the Bond formula in each film expressing the cultural environment of its time. xv There is significant debate over the degree to which this actually occurred. Authors such as Lembcke (1998) and Lyons (1998) suggest that narratives of protesters spitting on veterans and calling them "baby- killers" is a highly exaggerated myth used to demean anti-war protestors. Despite this, Veterans inarguably had difficulties re-integrating into society, and Hollywood's treatment of veterans after the war certainly supports this general attitude. XV1 See McGregor (1993) for a more thorough discussion. xvu Taxi Driver (1976) and the Enforcer (1976) are among the best examples. See McGregor (1993) for a more through-going analysis. xvm Zizek describes the return of the real effectually in Looking Awry. 1991. xix This sentiment is reiterated by Aretxaga (2001), Baudrillard (2002), Kellner (2004), Natoli (2007), Young (2007), Zizek (2002). xx See Zizek's "Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire" in Looking Awry. 1991, 29. XXI Throughout this essay, I utilize a philosophical precept proffered by both Lacan and Zizek that distinguishes an amorphous and contingent "real" from a constructed symbolic "reality," that the reader should note to avoid confusion. Baudrillard makes a similar distinction between the Real and the Simulacrum—which could easily be substituted for the term "reality." xx" An illustrative example would be a child assumes a powerful avatar in a video game, offsetting his or her powerlessness in his or her actual life. This is the nature, and the point, of fantasy. 121 xxm Linda Robertson makes a similar claim about the Persian Gulf War, suggesting that "the use of the broadcast press during the Persian Gulf War provides another example of the military 'producing' a movie using commercial venues to promote its own message"(178). XX1V For a complete list, consult The Black Vault's "List of Audio-visual entertainment affected by the September 11, 2001 Attacks." MVSee Boggs & Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: US Militarism and Popular Culture (2007). XXV1 Black Hawk Down's (2001) production was extensively assisted by the US military, to the point where US military personnel were actually deployed to Morocco to assist with filming. Eight helicopters and one hundred US Army Rangers were among those sent, US Army helicopter pilots actually flying the helicopters in the Battle scenes. The premiere screening drew high ranking US officials, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz (Markovitz, 211). xxvu jms sor). 0£ revjsjonjst redemption on film has been noted in past iterances, specifically Susan Jeffords's assertion that in the 1990s films sought to resolve issues faced by White Males—Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Feminism.(1994). References:

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25th Hour, The (Spike Lee, Touchstone, 2002)

300 (Jack Snyder, Warner Bros.,2006)

Air Force One (Wolfgang Petersen, Columbia 1997)

Alexander (Oliver Stone, Warner Bros., 2002)

Alien (Ridley Scott, Twentieth Century Fox, 1979)

Aliens (James Cameron, Twentieth Century Fox, 1986)

Arlington Rd. (Mark Pellington, Screen Gems, 1999)

Bad Company (Joel Schumacher, Touchstone, 2002)

Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, Twentieth Century Fox, 2003)

Birds, The (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1963)

Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, Revolution Studios/Jerry Bruckheimer, 2001)

Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, Paramount, 1977)

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, Warner Bros., 1982)

Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, Paramount, 2002)

Blown Away (Stephen Hopkins, MGM, 1994)

Borstal Boy (Peter Sheridan, Strand Releasing, 2000)

Boxer, The (Jim Sheridan, Universal, 1997)

Boys from Brazil, The (Franklin J. Schaffner, Twentieth Century Fox, 1978)

Brazil (Terry Gilliam, Universal, 1985)

Broken Arrow (John Woo, Twentieth Century Fox, 1996)

Cal (Pat O'Connor, Warner Bros., 1984)

Charlie Wilson's War (Mike Nichols, Universal, 2007)

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, Universal, 2006)

Clear and Present Danger (Phillip Noyce, Paramount, 1994)

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, Paramount, 2008)

Collateral Damage (Andrew Davis, Warner Bros., 2002)

Crying Game, The (Neil Jordan, Miramax, 1992) Dawning, The (Robert Knights, Lawson Productions, 1988)

Death Before Dishonor (Terry Leonard, Starz/ Anchor Bay, 1987)

Deliverance (John Boorman, Warner Bros., 1972)

Delta Force, The (Menahem Golan, MGM, 1986)

Devil's Own, The (Alan J. Pakula, Columbia, 1997)

Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, United Artists, 1971)

Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, MGM, 2002)

Die Hard (John McTiernan, Twentieth Century Fox, 1988)

Die Hard: With a Vengeance (John McTiernan, Twentieth Century Fox, 1995)

Die Hard 2: Die Harder (Renny Harlin, Twentieth Century Fox, 1990)

Dirty Work (Bob Saget, MGM, 1998)

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, Warner Bros., 1975)

Dr. No (Terence Young, United Artists, 1962)

Dumb and Dumber (Peter Farrelly, New Line Cinema, 1994)

Earthquake (Mark Robson, Universal, 1974)

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, Columbia, 1969)

Enforcer, The (James Fargo, Warner Bros., 1976)

Executive Decision (Stuart Baird, Warner Bros., 1996)

First Blood Part I (Ted Kotcheff, Tri-Star, 1982)

From Russia With Love (Terence Young, United Artists, 1963)

Goldeneye (Martin Campbell, MGM/United Artists, 1995)

Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, United Artists, 1964)

Great New Wonderful, The (Danny Leiner, First Independent, 2005)

Guys, The (Jim Simpson, Universal, 2002)

Hannibal (Ridley Scott, MGM/Universal, 2001)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, Warner Bros., 2002)

Hart's War (Gregory Hoblit, MGM, 2002)

/ Married a Communist [The Woman on Pier 13] (Robert Stevenson, RKO, 1949)

I Married a Nazi [The Man I Married] (Irving Pichel, Twentieth Century Fox, 1940) I Spy (Pieter Van Hees, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 1999)

In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, Universal, 1993)

Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, Twentieth Century Fox, 1996)

Jackal, The (Michael Caton-Jones, Universal, 1997)

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, RKO, 1933)

Kingdom, The (Peter Berg, Universal, 2007)

Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, Twentieth Century Fox, 2005)

Let's Go to Prison (Bob Odenkirk, Universal, 2006)

License to Kill (John Glen, MGM/United Artists, 1989)

Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, MGM, 2007)

Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton, United Artists, 1973)

Live Free or Die Hard (Len Wiseman, Twentieth Century Fox, 2007)

Living Daylights, The (John Glen, MGM/United Artists, 1987)

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema, 2002)

MacArthur (Joseph Sargent, Universal, 1977)

Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston, Warner Bros., 1941)

Man With the Golden Gun, The (Guy Hamilton, United Artists, 1974)

Michael Collins (Neil Jordan, Warner Bros., 1996)

Mighty Heart, A (Michael Winterbottom, Paramount Vantage, 2007)

Moonraker (Lewis Gilbert, United Artists, 1979)

Munich (Steven Spielberg, Dreamworks SKG, 2005)

My Friend Needs Killing (Paul Leder, Cinema Producers Center, 1976)

Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2003)

Navy Seals (Lewis Teague, Orion, 1990)

Octopussy (John Glen, MGM/United Artists, 1983)

Open Season (Peter Collinson, Columbia, 1974)

Patriot Games (Phillip Noyce, Paramount, 1992)

Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, Twentieth Century Fox, 1970)

Peacemaker, The (Mimi Leder, Dreamworks SKG, 1997) Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, Miramax, 1994)

Quiet Man, The (John Ford, Republic, 1952)

Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, Tri-Star, 1985)

Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, Tri-Star, 1988)

Rapid Fire (David A. Prior, Action International, 1989)

Red Dawn (John Milius, MGM/United Artists, 1984)

Reign Over Me (Mike Binder, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2007)

Rendition (Gavin Hood, New Line Cinema, 2007)

Rock, The (Michael Bay, Buena Vista/Jerry Bruckheimer, 1996)

Rocky IV (Sylvester Stallone, MGM/United Artists, 1985)

Ronin (John Frankenheimer, United Artists, 1998)

Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1948)

Rules of Engagement (William Friedkin, Paramount, 2000)

Ryan's Daughter (David Lean, MGM, 1970)

Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, Gaumont British, 1936)

Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1942)

Shane (George Stevens, Paramount, 1953)

Siege, The (Edward Zwick, Twentieth Century Fox, 1998)

Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, Orion, 1991)

Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, Dimension Films, 2005)

Some Mother's Son (Terry George, Columbia, 1996)

Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, Universal, 1960)

Speed (Jan de Bont, Twentieth Century Fox, 1994)

Spider-man (Sam Raimi, Columbia, 2002)

Spy Who Loved Me, The (Lewis Gilbert, United Artists, 1977)

Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951)

Sudden Death (Peter Hyams, Universal, 1995)

Sum of All Fears, The (Phil Alden Robinson, Paramount, 2002)

Swordfish (Dominic Sena, Warner Bros., 2001) Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, Warner Bros., 2005)

Talladega Nights (Adam McKay, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2006)

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, Columbia, 1976)

Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, Paramount, 2004)

Terminator, The (James Cameron, Orion, 1984)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, Tri Star, 1991)

Terror Squad (Peter Maris, Video Treasures, 1987)

Towering Inferno, The (John Guillermin and Irwin Allen, Twentieth Century Fox, 1975)

Transformers (Michael Bay, Dreamworks SKG, 2007)

Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, Warner Bros., 2004)

True Lies (James Cameron, Twentieth Century Fox, 1994)

Under Siege (Andrew Davis, Warner Bros., 1992)

United 93 (Paul Greengrass, Universal, 2006)

V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, Warner Bros., 2005)

Vigilante Force (George Armitage, United Artists, 1976)

We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, Paramount, 2002)

Welcome Home, Soldier Boys (Richard Compton, Twentieth Century Fox, 1972)

Whip Hand, The (William Cameron Menzies, RKO, 1951)

Wind That Shakes the Barley, The (Ken Loach, Pathe, 2000)

World Is not Enough, The (Michael Apted, MGM, 1998)

World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, Paramount, 2006)