Mediating Terror: Filmic Responses to September 11Th, 2001 and the "War on Terror"

MEDIATING TERROR: FILMIC RESPONSES TO SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2001 AND THE "WAR ON TERROR" Christopher Barnes A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2012 Committee: Khani Begum, Advisor Stephannie Gearhart © 2012 Christopher Barnes All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Khani Begum, Advisor This thesis applies both postcolonial and trauma theory to explore filmic responses to September 11th and the “War on Terror.” I examine the Hollywood films United 93 and World Trade Center and compare them to the omnibus film 11”09’01 and the Bollywood release My Name is Khan in order to understand the different ways in which each work portrays the trauma of September 11th as well as each film’s unique attempt to memorialize the attacks. Both trauma theory and postcolonial theory, I argue, help illuminate the different ideological responses to September 11th. I contend that the two Hollywood films both evacuate the surrounding context from the attacks and instead use the trauma of September to celebrate American heroism, ultimately reinforcing conservative notions of what motivated the attacks, as well as who can claim U.S. citizenship, and by extension, who can claim victimhood. This is contrasted with 11”09’01 and My Name is Khan, both of which return context to September 11th and also attempt to use the trauma as a means of potentially forging new alliances with disparate communities both within the United States and across the globe. It is by examining how the trauma of September 11th continues to inform discourses on terrorism that there exists the potential to contest mainstream discourses on terror and also form more potentially liberatory alliances with different groups of people across the globe. iv v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first and foremost like to thank my committee members Khani Begum and Stephannie Gearhart, not only for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on my thesis, but also for challenging me intellectually throughout my time at Bowling Green. I also want to thank Bowling Green friends for making my life in Ohio far more bearable. I must also thank my close friends Harry, John, and Franklin for helping make graduate school a far less isolating place by reminding me that there is life outside of it. And, of course, none of this would be possible without the loving support and encouragement from my parents, Alan and Kathy, my sister Sara, and Cooper. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ..... ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I. LITERATURE REVIEW................................................................................ 9 CHAPTER II. THE HOLLYWOOD RESPONSES ............................................................ 24 Restoring the Family in World Trade Center ............................................................ 27 Clash of Religions in United 93................................................................................. 35 CHAPTER III. RE-IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: ALAIN BRIGAND’S 11”09’01 ...... 42 Aestheticizing 9/11 .................................................................................................... 45 Paranoia Narratives.................................................................................................... 52 Historical Narratives .................................................................................................. 55 CHAPTER IV. THE GEOGRAPHIC AND EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES OF MY NAME IS KHAN .......................................................................................................... 64 CHAPTER V. CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................... 88 WORKS CITED ........ ........................................................................................................... 98 1 INTRODUCTION The traumatic footage of the attacks on September 11th, 2001 and their aftermath, particularly of United Airlines Flight 93 crashing into the South Tower, is seared into the collective American psyche. This footage, playing constantly on cable news networks in the hours following the attacks, emphasized the visual nature of how most Americans, as well as others around the world, experienced September 11th1. Consumed in a manner that print media could never offer, the visual spectacle the attacks produced has not been lost on many commentators and scholars. Indeed, as Jean Baudrillard argues in The Spirit of Terrorism, the collapse was a spectacle of symbolic violence, a “Manhattan disaster movie” where “the twentieth century’s two elements of mass fascination are combined: the white magic of cinema and the black magic of terrorism; the white light of image and the black light of terrorism” (30). Baudrillard is obviously not alone in such an observation; in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek notes how the collapse of the Twin Towers “could not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes in the catastrophe [sic] big productions” (15). This fascination with the attacks on the towers as a filmic spectacle speaks to the ways in which the way we see and interpret the world is structured by our visual culture. The footage of the attacks has received countless plays on television and remains available all over the Internet to be viewed at one’s leisure. The traumatic event, viewable any time one desires, speaks to the ways in which our globally connected world can circulate such imagery at nearly instantaneous rates. Reminiscent of the Freudian repetition compulsion, the seemingly looped footage of the planes hitting the towers and the towers’ collapse have become what Deems D. Morrione refers to as a “semiotic black hole,” a “collision of a fatal event and a perfect object that not only results in the multiplication of banal discourses and events under one sign…but a restructuring of 2 the geo-political universe in which the event takes place” (163). Morrione’s point is that the traumatic collapse of the towers not only completely eclipsed all other newsworthy events, but also served as a way for the United States government to justify their fear-based actions and initiatives that eroded civil liberties and legal protections.2 The visceral feelings experienced when one sees the carnage of September 11th and its aftermath, even viewed ten years later, is a testament to the affective power of such imagery and to the ways in which it affects our emotions and state of mind. As a “semiotic black hole,” September 11th has obviously fundamentally altered much of both citizens’ everyday lives as well as the foreign policy actions of the United States. However, as Zizek argues, perhaps this sentiment is wrong. On a basic level, nothing has changed. He argues that in the United States’ response to September 11th, the country “opted to reassert its traditional ideological commitments: out with the feelings of responsibility and guilt towards the impoverished Third World, we are the victims now!” (47, emphasis original). There is, I believe, certainly truth to this argument. The “War on Terror,” though ostensibly concerned with fighting terrorism around the globe, has led to an increasingly militarized mindset amongst both citizens at home as well as in our progressively more stringent foreign policy. The “War on Terror” can, then, also be seen as an imperialist project, designed to use American hegemony to export Western democracy and a Western neo-liberal economic system to previously closed-off Middle Eastern countries. This reassertion of Western hegemony is embedded into the fabric of our everyday lives, placing us in, as Mitchell Gray and Elvin Wyly argue, “a culture of intensified (yet routine and almost mundane) militarization” that “now pervades daily life” (330). The events of September 11th highlighted the vulnerability of the country, prompting further discussions by pundits and politicians about the ill-preparedness of major American cities to 3 handle biological attacks, or the difficulty in finding homegrown terror cells operating in the country. We, then, must always be on the lookout for the suspicious Other that threatens our way of life. This line of thought is founded on the Bush administration’s essentializing “us versus them” mantra that was seen in their declaration that “[y]ou are either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” as well as the paranoia that the Other has blended into society, potentially threatening to wreak havoc at any moment. For the most part, the United States has still failed to move beyond this discourse on terror and its rather narrow understanding of the attacks. Sankaran Krishna observes that even the sinking approval rating for the Iraq war does not represent some sort of new consciousness on America’s role in the world. Instead, he argues, the “U.S. opposition to the current war in Iraq has increased because it has not gone according to expectations of a quick and painless (for Americans) victory, not because we now realize that many of the original justifications for launching the war have turned out to be lies” (136). What is implied in Krishna’s statement is that the American public still views American military forces as doing a necessary deed of exporting democracy to Iraq, and thereby Westernizing it. For the opposition to the Iraq War to be concerned more with this failure to secure Iraq as quickly as promised implies that the imperialist nature of the

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