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.
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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.
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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 War in Iraq is not what bothers the public. American imperialism remains, on some level, justified in the minds of both the elites and the general public in the
United States.
As we consider the ways in which the American hegemonic response to September 11th has sustained itself through both the Bush and Obama administrations, it is worth returning to the fascination with the visual spectacle of the World Trade Center collapse. If the towers’ collapse is indeed reminiscent of something seen in a film, then what can film tell us about how we 4 mediate and understand September 11th? Do non-Eurocentric filmic mediations tell us something different?3 If our response to September 11th was to consider how it reminded us of the big- budget Hollywood films, then clearly it is worth interrogating the ways in which film structures our understanding of the world and how we interpret it. We can, for example, consider how
Hollywood – itself a “massively industrial, ideologically reactionary, and stylistically conservative form of ‘dominant cinema’” according to Robert Stam and Ella Shohat – contributes to this “us versus them” narrative present in the American collective consciousness
(7). Films such as Collateral Damage and The Time Machine were, for instance, delayed in their release due to content that was feared to resonate too strongly with the traumatic nature of
September 11th. Though it is natural that Hollywood would want to avoid such insensitivity, such a desire to avoid revisiting this psychic wound has also meant that mainstream Hollywood films have, and (generally) continue to avoid investigating the difficult questions behind September
11th. Of course, the problems of representation of 9/11 in Hollywood films is in itself difficult, as any traumatic event, Cathy Caruth argues, “brings us to the limits of our understanding” because it cannot be easily represented or mediated in a coherent fashion (4). However, even with this difficulty, I would argue that the temporal distance from September 11th, there still seems to be little appetite in Hollywood for critically looking at the attacks. Because popular culture helps us understand and narrate the events of society, it is worth investigating how films from both
Hollywood as well as from abroad both reinforce and contest dominant representations of terror.
In this interrogation, we can create a space that allows us to interrogate the American response to
September 11th.
At the moment, very little exists in terms of scholarship on post-9/11 terrorism in film.
Aside from individual scholarly essays in journals that respond to particular films, no 5 comprehensive texts exist that address the works in a broader context.3 Portraying 9/11 (2011), edited by Veronique Bragard, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg, brings together a set of essays concerned with representations of September 11th, but it casts its net wide, choosing to examine all types of artistic representations, such as comics, novels, and theatre. As a result, the only two essays in the collection that examine film are focused on World Trade Center and
United 93. And while other collections exist that explore issues of post-9/11 terror from a postcolonial perspective, they often do not focus on representations in art, instead opting for sociological perspectives on terror.
If we are to more fully understand the ideological ramifications behind the Hollywood mediation of September 11th, it is necessary to look at how those in other countries have responded to the United States’ “War on Terror.” This thesis, then, compares filmic representations of September 11th and the War on Terror between Hollywood films and non-
Eurocentric responses. In doing so, I hope to elucidate some responses to September 11th that offer a counter-narrative to the predominant one in the United States. It is through this awareness of and engagement with these non-Eurocentric texts that we can perhaps begin to more meaningfully articulate the answers to questions such as “Why do they hate us?”
In order to begin producing answers to such questions, the first chapter of this thesis outlines my theoretical approach to looking at these films. My approach focuses on a combination of postcolonial theory and trauma theory – a combination which I believe offers an opportunity to both understand how the traumatic effects of September 11th reverberated around the world, and how those reverberations are explored by non-Western films. In Chapter one of this thesis, I establish my theoretical foundation that I will use for the rest of this thesis. 6
Chapter two examines the Hollywood films United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) and
World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006) to establish how dominant Western cinema represented
9/11. Released five years after the attacks, these are the first two mainstream American films to deal directly with September 11th, and therefore are useful to contrast with the non-Eurocentric films I discuss in the two later chapters. Both Greengrass and Stone show the difficulties in and limits to representing September 11th, particularly when the psychic wound has not fully healed.
I argue that both directors ultimately reinforce conservative Western discourses on terror by circumscribing the event of September 11th to that day alone and choosing to avoid providing any larger historical context surrounding the attacks. Furthermore, I argue that the films, by celebrating the heroics of predominantly white, Christian Americans, produce narrow understandings of community and belonging.
Chapter three looks at the Alain Brigand’s omnibus film 11’09”01, which contains 11 short films by filmmakers from different countries, each representing their own perspectives of the attacks. Released roughly a year after September 11th, the films provide a much different, and oftentimes much more raw response to 9/11 than what is found in Stone’s and Greengrass’ film.
I look at three broad narratives that emerge in the different short films: narratives that explore aestheticizations of September 11th, narratives of paranoia, and narratives that place September
11th within a broader historical context. These three types of narratives, I argue, destabilize
September 11th from its position in mainstream Western discourses as an ahistorical event and ultimately open up spaces to critically engage with the postcolonial response to September 11th.
The fourth and final chapter examines Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan, a film that explores issues of the Indian diasporic community in the United States in the context of the “War on Terror.” My Name is Khan follows a Muslim Indian man with Asperger’s Syndrome named 7
Rizwan Khan as he immigrates to the United States and marries a Hindu woman named Mandira.
Using David Gregory’s ideas about the geographic dimensions to the “War on Terror,” as well as
Sara Ahmed’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I argue that the film uses geography and emotion together to explore how both are deployed in order to develop narrow conceptualizations of citizenship and belonging in the “War on Terror.” My Name is Khan also, I contend, posits a way to break out of these colonial binaries by showing how different minority groups within the United States have shared histories based in oppression and suffering. In doing so, the film suggests that a more emotionally literate population that understands these shared experiences can forge new alliances and coalitions that can fight together against institutional discrimination and inequality.
Finally, I will conclude with a discussion about the necessity to more fully investigate representations of terrorism in film, not only in the context of responses to the United States’
War on Terror, but also in the context of other terrorism and political violence taking place around the world. I also offer potential points of departure from this study so that we may more closely examine the way spectacles of violence are produced around the world.
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Notes
1 I will be using the terms “September 11th” and “9/11” interchangeably throughout this thesis to refer to the terrorist attacks. Though the two terms can be used to imply different things, both will be used here to simply refer to September 11th, 2001, unless otherwise indicated. 2 Morrione uses the example of the Department of Homeland Security, noting that “the major objection of most Democrats to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was related to the lack of unionization afforded to its employees and not to due process/constitutional issues such as respecting the ‘zones of privacy,’ proper procedure for trying the accused, or profiling” (163). No one, then, was willing to debate the premise of the power Homeland Security was being granted, as September 11th inherently justified it. 3 I am using Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s definition of Eurocentrism in Unthinking Eurocentrism: “Eurocentrism sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West; it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements – science, progress, humanism – but of the non-West in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined” (3). 4 At the time I write this, an edited collection titled Screening Terror is slated for release in 2012 and can potentially add a productive voice to this conversation.
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CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW
Through the mediation of postcolonial and trauma theory discourses, I formulate my theoretical approach to examine representations of terrorism in recent films. Together these two theories are critical for both critiquing Eurocentric terrorism discourses and also understanding how the trauma suffered as a result of the terrorist events of 9/11 has been used to reinforce or contest these discourses. This chapter thus establishes my theoretical approach to understanding the films, and also makes clear how terrorism is not an ahistorical act, but is instead a product of complex historical and social forces. My point is not to offer a cause-and-effect narrative of U.S. imperialism and the blowback from American foreign policy decisions that resulted in the
September 11th attacks.1 Rather, I want to highlight the necessity in understanding these forces in order to more fully elucidate my interpretations of the films World Trade Center, United 93,
11”09’01, and My Name is Khan. Furthermore, issues of globalization are worth discussing when considering the fact that advances in technology have allowed for the images and footage of September 11th to be quickly circulated around the world. Therefore, globalization is pertinent to not only understanding terrorism and other political violence, but also in examining how people consume media. Placing postcolonial and trauma theory in dialogue allows me to interrogate the differences between American and non-Western filmic responses to September
11th.
Postcolonial Theory
I want to first establish the definition of postcolonialism that I will use throughout my thesis. Robert Young, in his book Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, provides a useful way for framing this approach: 10
The postcolonial is a dialectical concept that marks the broad historical facts of
decolonization and the determined achievement of sovereignty – but also the
realities of nations and peoples emerging into a new imperialistic context of
economic and sometimes political domination. […] The postcolonial also
specifies a transformed historical situation, and the cultural formations that have
arisen in response to changed political circumstances, in the former colonial
power. The term ‘postcoloniality’, by contrast, puts the emphasis on the
economic, material and cultural conditions that determine the global system in
which the postcolonial nation is required to operate – one heavily weighted
towards the interests of international capital and the G7 powers (57).
Young’s definition and approach to postcolonial theory and studies is useful in that he situates
Marxist thought at the center of anti-colonial struggles. He argues that Marxism is a foundational part of postcolonial theory, as it outlines the system of domination impressed upon people by imperialist systems. Postcolonial theory combines Marxism and international politics in order to think of how alternative economic systems can be developed through popular consensus. His analysis of anti-colonial struggles is marked by the way Marxism was adapted differently by different thinkers in ways that reflected their local political struggles. The centrality of Marxist thought in his definition of postcolonial theory is of interest to me because, as I will argue below, it is important to consider the ways in which Western capitalism and globalization have contributed to engendering terrorism and also circulating the footage of 9/11. While certainly not wishing to flatten every instance of violence and terror to be a result of Western capitalism, we must still be willing to consider the material conditions that give rise to fundamentalist violence. 11
Doing so helps destabilize September 11th from its ahistorical position and instead frames it as part of the broader historical forces that in part stem from Western imperialism.
Edward Said locates this Eurocentrism and Western power in a discourse he refers to as
“Orientalism” in his eponymous foundational study. For Said, Orientalism is a set of knowledge that represents an uneven power structure in which the East is always defined by its relationship to the hegemonic West. It is, he argues, more “a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply a positive doctrine” (42). Orientalist discourse frames Orientals as inherently lazy, irrational, and untrustworthy human beings whose belief systems and actions cannot be understood by those in the West. This pervasive discourse, Said shows us, is embedded deeply into our Western unconscious, and as a result, fundamentally structures the ways in which those in the West see and understand the world. Said traces this discourse back to the 17th century and studies of the Orient up through the 1970s (when he wrote Orientalism), demonstrating that the structure of Orientalist thought had remained consistent throughout history, even if specific knowledge and facts about different areas in the East have given us a better idea of the varied cultures there.
Said’s ideas about Orientalism are important because they help to show the ways in which Orientalist discourses have allowed the West to justify its imperialist actions, and also how terrorism can be seen as a response to this imperialism. We can see its incarnation in the “us versus them” Bush narrative mentioned in the introduction, which promulgated the point of view that the terrorists’ motivations were based on a hatred of Western freedoms. This caricatured the terrorists as irrational and angry, and the subsequent military response and torture of suspected terrorists resonate as colonialist dehumanization – an example of which the photos of Abu
Ghraib quite clearly demonstrate. An Orientalist ideology justifies these acts of violence and 12 humiliation, because, even if the Bush administration insisted that it was only the work of a “few bad apples,” the pictures no doubt speak to the broader issue of dehumanization and degradation that takes place through indefinite detention and torture. Said thus gives us a way to critically engage with representations of terrorism and to be aware of how films may, intentionally or not, perpetuate Orientalist representations and discourses that help strengthen and continually justify
Western discourses on terror.
This Western fear of violence that the Middle Eastern (read: Muslim) Other can potentially enact on the United States of course, is not a violence that comes out of thin air. As
Žižek argues in Violence, the logic of capitalism produces what he calls “‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functions of our economic and political systems” (2). He posits that we cannot attribute violence as simply being committed by “evil” people, but instead must understand violent acts as part of “the self-propelling metaphysical dance that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life development – catastrophes”
(Violence, 12). This can certainly be seen in our technologically interconnected world, in which the seemingly stable boundaries of the nation-state are becoming destabilized with the proliferation of global capital, transnational corporations, and the resulting increase in migrant patterns. The proliferation of all three of these things have, according to Arjun Appadurai,
“produce[d] a potential collision course between the logics of uncertainty and incompleteness, each of which has its own form and force” (Fear, 9). This understanding and incompleteness is borne out of the shattered illusions of what the nation-state appears, for some, to promise: notions of national purity. The influxes of minority immigrations searching for work, or transnational corporations that have no loyalty to the country, demonstrate that this national purity is indeed a myth. For Appadurai, this destabilization has a direct causal relationship with 13 the various sites of violence, be they ethnic cleansing, terrorism, or other forms of political violence. The erosion of national boundaries leaves majoritarian groups anxious, fearful of losing what power their majority status provides. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, globalization can be seen as a root cause of fundamentalist violence: “As
I have imagined, in the New World Order – or hot peace – the hyphen between nation and state comes looser than usual; and that in that gap fundamentalisms fester” (373).
It is important to discuss globalization then, because it gives us a clearer understanding of how and why fundamentalist violence erupts. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their book
Empire, argue that fundamentalism is not a reaction to modernity, but instead symptomatic of the changing world order brought on by globalization. Thus, fundamentalist violence can be seen as a reaction to a global economic system that appears to be a vehicle for perpetuating a Western value system.2 They argue that “current global tendencies toward increased mobility, indeterminacy, and hybridity are experienced by some as a kind of liberation, but by others as an exacerbation of their suffering” (150). We must therefore resist the Orientalizing tendency to see
Islamic fundamentalism as a desire to return to some sort of “pre-modern” time, but instead perceive it as an outcome of the West’s imperialist initiatives.
Trauma and the Postcolonial
While the connections between postcolonial theory and trauma theory may not seem clear upon first glance, both theoretical approaches together have much to offer. Looking at the two theoretical discourses together is particularly germane when we consider Roger Luckhurst’s observation in The Trauma Question that our culture is “saturated with trauma” (2). Luckhurst sees these traumatic responses manifest everywhere, from government inquiries to bestselling 14 novels. Trauma is, then, an important part of how we understand and navigate our lives. Though
Luckhurst’s remark is confined to Western responses to trauma, a postcolonial approach is also a productive way to understand how non-Western groups react to trauma in their own lives, as well. This is potentially fruitful, particularly in terms of interrogating non-Eurocentric responses to violence, as trauma theory can help us to understand how the systemic oppression resulting from imperialism and colonialism is embedded in the pasts of non-Western cultures. In doing so, we are more fully able to grasp why such responses have diverged from Western responses to the trauma of September 11th. As I show below, this will help engender new discussions about
September 11th that can potentially contextualize it within a history of colonial and imperialist violence.
Though not the first to address trauma, Freud certainly laid the foundational framework for theorizing it. Both in his work with Josef Breuer, and then later in his work Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud outlines some of the physical and mental symptoms of trauma and what exactly provokes these manifestations. In many ways, post-Freudian trauma theorists have continued to work within Freud’s framework, taking his initial ideas in different directions in order to fill in the gaps left by his theories. While his work has been discredited in the social sciences, Freud’s work on trauma theory was no doubt instrumental in establishing some of the key ideas that remain a part of trauma studies, such as issues of repression, the manifestation of traumatic symptoms, and potential treatments. An overview of the trajectory of trauma studies from Freud to the present day would obviously not be feasible, nor relevant to my discussion, but, I do however wish to lay out some of the important points Freud makes, and discuss how more contemporary theorists have taken up his ideas in ways that are useful for this project. 15
Trauma, Cathy Caruth argues, is “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to an event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Unclaimed 11). As Caruth argues in her edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory, the experience of trauma is “solely in the structure of the experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (4-5). Caruth’s description of the traumatic experience succinctly summarizes Freudian ideas about trauma and the psyche’s resistant nature in integrating a traumatic experience into one’s memory. For Freud, the traumatic event is traumatic because the patient unexpectedly experiences an event that bears too much stimuli for the psyche to handle (Beyond 21). Events that we are unprepared for, that fall outside the everyday range of activity, Freud argues, overwhelm us with stimuli and cannot be integrated into our psyche. As a result, we suffer from delayed and uncontrolled flashbacks
(such as hallucinations). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud defines these flashbacks as the
“repetition compulsion.” This compulsion to repeat is the mind’s constant revisiting of these traumatic memories in order to “master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (26). According to Freud, this repetition compulsion arises out of a desire to belatedly try to prepare the patient for the traumatic event. The significance of the repetition compulsion, according to Caruth, is that it is the attempt to deal with one’s own survival of the event: “Repetition, in other words, is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died, but more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one’s own survival” (Unclaimed, 62).
There are, of course, difficulties in trying to make sense of the trauma and our survival.
That is, language fails to completely capture the experience of the traumatic event. Trauma, then, 16 demonstrates the limits to grasping an event that remains indescribable. Thus, it is only through psychoanalysis, Freud argues, that one can “work through” the trauma. Freud and Breuer, in
Studies on Hysteria, discuss the necessity of “abreaction” through psychoanalysis, which is a cathartic expression of the repressed memories of the traumatic event (Studies, 8). Abreaction is no doubt difficult to achieve, and it is even more difficult to imagine that a film could ever produce a widespread catharsis that would help those traumatized by September 11th “work through” their pain. Instead, it is worth considering how film attempts to grasp at representing the traumatic event, but also the ways in which this representation fails. If film, through the immediacy it provides in its visuals, can explore the trauma of September 11th, it is important to think about how the films attempt to achieve representation and what it means when they fail to do so.
It hardly needs to be said that September 11th was traumatic. The psychic wound opened by the attacks was repeatedly inflamed through the ubiquitous imagery and footage of the World
Trade Center collapse. It is not surprising, then, that even those who did not directly experience the attacks, nor knew anyone involved, still in some way felt traumatized. Jenny Edkins, in
Trauma and the Memory of Politics, argues that what can be traumatic is not simply the event itself, but, rather, what the event means to our national identity as well as our safety as a nation.
She argues that “[w]hat we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger” (4).4 Along the lines of Caruth, who argues that surviving is traumatic, Edkins also shows us how, even if we were not directly experiencing the attacks, we still, as a nation, suffer from the aftermath of surviving them. E. Ann Kaplan, in her discussion of 17 the September 11th trauma, also argues that “the reader or viewer of stories or films about traumatic situations may be constituted through vicarious or secondary trauma” (39). As we watched the towers collapse, then, we were suddenly struck with the traumatic realization that our nation was not impregnable like we had imagined. Those watching on television, even if they were on the other side of the country, still witnessed the destruction of edifices that symbolized
America’s status as a global, economic powerhouse. In its collapse, the threat of America’s status in the world, as well as its ability to protect its citizens, were called into question. Edkins and Kaplan are both useful in discussing the issue of trauma, as it helps us conceptualize ways of understanding trauma that go beyond personal grief. In looking more broadly at national trauma, the reaction of the United States and the discourse on terror that emerged after September 11th can be read as a reaction to this event. This ultimately enables readings of films that allow us not only to discuss the difficulties of visually representing trauma but also how Hollywood and non-
Western films alike address the United States’ reaction.4
The Freudian repetition compulsion, within the context of cultural trauma, is a useful point of departure in considering how the actions taken by the United States after September 11th demonstrate how trauma theory is applicable to the American hegemonic response. In her essay
“Remembering Relationality: Trauma Time and Politics,” Edkins posits that traumatic events are a threat to State powers in the sense that trauma potentially undermines its claim to legitimacy:
“Trauma is clearly disruptive of settled stories. Centralized, sovereign political authority is particularly threatened by this. After a traumatic event what we call the state moves quickly to close down any openings produced by putting in place as fast as possible a linear narrative of origins” (107). There is, in other words, a potential that out of trauma, the stories that had maintained the power of the State will be called into question or seen as inherently false, thereby 18 prompting a political rearrangement that might disrupt this established order. In order for the
State to retain its power, there is both a need to fashion a narrative that can tell people how they should be interpreting the event. For the United States, which David Simpson describes as a
“culture of commemoration,” the country “was already primed to resort to sanctification and personalization in the cause of upholding the image of a flourishing civil society and providential national destiny” (31). Simpson argues that after September 11th, there was no rupture or break with the pre-9/11 ideological system, only continuity. Thinking back to Morrione’s “Semiotic black hole” mentioned in the introduction, it is worth considering how the wound of September
11th allowed the United States to justify its hegemonic power through regressive detainment and racial profiling policies, as perhaps an expression of the anxiety we failed to exhibit prior to
September 11th.5 Such actions, then, are part of a national response to a national trauma. The response of detainment further fed into the narrative that the country was attempting to round up potentially “evil” enemies that lurked within the borders of the country.
In considering not only the United States’ immediate response to September 11th, but also the long-term effects of its actions, Freud’s ideas of melancholia and mourning are also relevant to consider. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud outlines the difference between the two, arguing that mourning uses ceremony or ritual to act out the pain of a loss, thereby allowing one to attach their energies to a new object. Melancholics, on the other hand, are unable to find attachment to a new object, resulting in a continued open wound. This is worth thinking about in the context of trauma and September 11th for a couple of reasons. In terms of the period of reflection that took place directly after 9/11, the country transitioned quickly from simply grieving to assigning blame and seeking retaliation. This has, in this context, resulted in a failure to mourn, as there was no appetite in the mainstream press or the Bush administration to reflect 19 on what historical forces could have prompted the attack.6 Thus, the combination of trauma and melancholia are useful to think about here, as trauma served as the rupture in linear time, an indescribable pain in the American psyche, upon which the American hegemonic response was placed. Our failure to “work through” this trauma and to reflect on it has meant that we remain melancholic, never fully able to come to terms with the attacks. This melancholia has continued to influence the American response to terrorism.
The phrase “September 11th” or “9/11” then, in the context of this “culture of commemoration” that Simpson refers to, is important to consider when attempting to understand how both the trauma and resulting melancholia of the September 11th attacks continues to inform the United States’ hegemonic reaction and representation of the events. Marc Redfield, in his book The Rhetoric of Terror, argues that the phrase “September 11th” denotes a “futural inflection of trauma” that “may also be read in the name-date – the month-day minus the year.
When we add the year, we fix the date in calendrical history; when we omit it we obtain the vibrant urgency of a date that recurs, that insists on its recurrence” (21). We see it in the phrase
“Never Forget,” which it instructs us to keep open the wound of 9/11. In doing so, we recall the interpretation of what the date means – and more than likely, this means that one will recall the day “everything changed” as we were attacked by freedom-hating terrorists.7 The way the signifier 9/11 functions in Western discourses on terror is, then, important to consider as we think about how the films in this thesis represent September 11th.
Reservations have been raised as to how useful trauma studies are to postcolonial readings. Trauma theory has often been criticized in terms of its tendency to homogenize the traumatic experiences, often failing to take into account the past histories of colonial people. In her essay “Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies,” Irene Visser observes some of the 20 potential pitfalls of postcolonial trauma theory. Particularly problematic, Visser argues, is that trauma theory remains a predominantly Western paradigm. This can be seen, she argues, both in trauma theory’s foundation in Freudian psychoanalysis and the fact that it has been used mainly in terms of understanding the Holocaust and slavery in the Americas. Freud’s theorization of trauma is too universal for postcolonial studies, and its “lack of historical particularity sits uneasily with postcolonialism’s eponymous focus on historical, political, and socio-economic factors in processes of colonization and decolonization” (273). Along with this lack of historical particularity, there is a fear that trauma theorists may incorrectly attempt to impose Western models of trauma on cultures that handle these psychic disorders in different ways. Along these same lines, Visser also points out that distinctions such as individual trauma, secondary trauma, or cultural trauma also need to be more thoroughly reworked for a postcolonial analysis in order to “counter the movement to a trivialization of trauma” (280).
Visser’s points are certainly well-taken. It is important that any time we are analyzing texts from a culture that is not our own, we must understand our exegetical limits as outsiders.
Therefore, it is necessary to contextualize analyses of cultures we do not belong to within a historical framework, and understand the limits to the claims we can make in such analyses.
Furthermore, it is important to recognize that Western models of trauma may not be suitable for non-Western cultures, nor are all models of trauma (individual, vicarious, cultural) experienced with the same level of intensity.8 However, it is also important to recognize that, at the same time, I am not attempting to delineate a model for understanding trauma from a postcolonial perspective. Instead, I am more interested in understanding how trauma theory can usefully tell us things about the Western response to September 11th, as this will help me draw distinctions between Western and non-Western filmic responses. Furthermore, I think it is also important to 21 note that we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that trauma can ever be truly “abreacted” for the postcolonial subject. As mentioned earlier, we can never move “beyond” colonialism; the postcolonial subject is always constituted by the systematic oppression of colonialism, even if they never experienced direct colonization. There will always be an affective residue that continues to inform postcolonial societies on the violence and oppression they have, and continue to, experience.
Michael Rothberg proposes some useful ways for thinking about how to expand trauma theory to work on a more globally inclusive scale and therefore avoid the seeming narrow focus on Western trauma that Visser points out. Working off Caruth’s assertion that trauma is built into the “structure of its experience,” Rothberg sees potential in a cross-cultural understanding of trauma that is engendered through a recognition of this common structure. Rothberg argues that trauma theory, in order to break out of its Eurocentric tendencies, “ought to have something to say about the kinds of events that tend to produce traumatic effects – especially if one traumatic history can provide the grounds for future acts of violence” (150). We can therefore use trauma theory as a means of helping to excavate painful histories that might be buried in the past by attempting to understand how people around the world experience and deal with traumatic events.
Rothberg’s assertion is useful for this project as it forces us to consider more closely how global economic and media structures produce both trauma and representations of it. Rothberg points out the necessity to use trauma theory to question “the structures and interests at stake when certain traumatic events circulate globally and others remain more closely tied to local or private contexts” (150). What then, can be said about the hyperaccessibility of the footage of the
September 11th attack, especially in terms of the United States media and economic power? What 22 issues does this raise in terms of understanding the political ramifications of this footage being so quickly spread and easily accessed? While such questions are obviously too large for a project of this size, looking at how the films I analyze intersect in terms of postcolonial theory, globalization, and trauma theory will hopefully provide a starting point for further discussions.
Thus, as we consider the responses to the footage of not only those in the United States, but also those around the world, we are reminded once again of how globalization made possible this almost instantaneous spread of footage, especially when we consider that a staggering 2 billion are estimated to have watched the footage the day of the attacks (Redfield 27). This is an important statistic to consider. Both globalization and trauma theory demonstrate in different ways how traditional boundaries between sovereign nations can be contested, questioned, and therefore rendered unstable. Globalization does this through a technological connectedness and an increased flow in capital around the world. Trauma, as Edkins points out above, can threaten sovereign powers and potentially engender new communities and political arrangements that also transcend these boundaries. Judith Butler identifies the potential for new communal identities when she argues that “I am as much constituted by those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless and faceless deaths form the melancholic background for my social world, if not my
First Worldism” (46). Butler points out how we should find solidarity with all victims of violence, not simply the violence that affects the Western body. In my next chapters, I will look at both the Western hegemonic responses to September 11th in the form of two Hollywood films directly about September 11th – United 93 and World Trade Center – and the ways in which they deal with the trauma of the September 11th violence potentially prevents such a communal rearrangement. I will then look at how 11’09”01 and My Name is Khan both create potential spaces for such political and communal shifts 23
Notes
1 Osama bin Laden’s letter explaining why Al-Qaeda was driven to attack the United States is a useful starting point for understanding what historical forces engendered this blowback. This is, of course, not a justification of bin Laden’s reasoning (as the killing of innocents under any circumstance is indefensible), nor is it a suggestion that the history he provides is not without above critique. Rather, I am arguing that it is a useful place to begin to understand how blowback contributed to this justification.
2 This is not, Hardt and Negri argue, simply true of Islamic fundamentalism, but Christian fundamentalism as well. This is an important point to considering as we try to disabuse ourselves of the notions that Islam represents some sort of return to a medieval theocracy (150).
4 As other commentators have noted, there is also something traumatic about seeing something such as an airplane – a part of our everyday lives that symbolizes our modernity – be used against us to specifically attack the WTC Towers, which is another symbol of our modernity.
4 For a concise description of cultural trauma, see Jeffrey Alexander’s essay “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma” in the edited collection Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkley, University of California Press, 2004).
5 This lack of anxiety and preparedness became clearer once it was reported that a memo had passed Bush’s desk titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
6 Indeed, in a speech before Congress on September 20, 2001, President Bush encouraged everyone to “live their lives,” which, of course, was followed up by a call for our “continued participation and confidence in the American economy.”
7 Redfield observes that the term “Ground Zero” does something similar, as well. In that it simultaneously recalls and subordinates the Hiroshima bombing as “an other ground zero,” the term also “points to the future: to the nuclear bomb that, since the 1950’s, has hung in American skies, waiting to fall. […] Invoking the nuclear threat, it imagines the future as past, and as imaginable” (23, emphasis original).
8 At the same time, it is important not to police the boundaries too heavily, as that potentially leads to denigrating the suffering experienced by others.
24
CHAPTER II: SEEKING CLOSURE: THE HOLLYWOOD RESPONSES
David Simpson notes that the New York Times 9/11 memorial “Portraits of Grief,” in which the Times ran brief remembrances of some of the people who died either in the towers, the planes, or during the rescue efforts, provided overly sanitized glimpses into the victims’ lives:
None here cheated on her spouse or abused his children, or was indifferent to
community activities. One tends of course to speak only good things of the dead,
but even within the expected bounds of memorial decorum, the notices seem
formulaic. They seem regimented, even militarized, made to march to the beat of
a single drum (23).
The act of remembering, particularly in terms of ceremonies and memorials, is inherently political. To produce a coherent memorial or ceremony demands that some details be remembered while others be left out, otherwise the memorial has no narrative, no logic that tells us how an event is to be interpreted. Simpson observes that the snapshots of the victims were so narrow in focus that they were “clearly being put to work in the cause of a patriotic momentum”
– a momentum that would engender a sense of community amongst ourselves, so that we would stand behind the United Sates’ response, as it was indeed a community to which we all belonged.
Community is a necessary part of framing an event, as a large willing community will be more likely to accept the premise of your memorial than small scattered groups of people who feel as if they have nothing in common with each other. The Bush administration’s military retaliation against Afghanistan and Iraq were thus so unflinchingly accepted by the American public because we had been left feeling as if our one large community had been victimized by the September 11th attacks. The trauma of the events were quickly memorialized by the U.S. 25 government in a way that made us believe we were all victims and that retaliation would help us deal with the pain and anger of the violence we had experienced.
The first two mainstream American films to directly deal with September 11th, Oliver
Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) and Paul Greengrass’ United 93 (2006) both utilize community in similar ways as they attempt to memorialize September 11th. Though the two films differ in both their content, narrative structure, and overall presentation of events, they are both cautious and narrow in their approaches to addressing the attacks, choosing to remember
September 11th as a moment of common humanity and heroism between American citizens. As the films mourn the tragedy of September 11th, they also frame its memory to celebrate the community of its viewers, who are, in this case, American audiences. Obviously, a commemoration of the innocent Afghans and Iraqis killed in the American military strikes is not in the interest of Greengrass and Stone. Instead, a “self/other” binary is necessary for this constructed community of Americans as victims. This notion of framing and community are particularly important to consider when analyzing these films because, as Orly Lubin writes,
“[t]he community also determines both the structure and the content of the testimonies of the traumatic event so that they will cater to the needs of the community. That is to say, it reaffirms its own coming to be, its norms and morals, and its function as a collective supplying a site for the individual" (125). A traumatic event, according to Jenny Edkins, “is clearly disruptive of settled stories” and thus threatens the foundations of the community, as it exposes the foundation as nothing more than illusory (107). Ceremonies, memorials, and other forms of remembering put in place linear narratives that frame the event in particular ways. Problematically, the ways in which the Bush administration sanctified the American community after September 11th and framed the country as a victim of violence at the hands of so-called freedom hating 26 fundamentalists became a way to justify the United States’ military retaliations and the crackdown on civil liberties. As we will see, both Stone and Greengrass engage in the same type of memorializing we saw from the Bush administration, and in doing so, reinforce conservative political stances regarding September 11th and the “War on Terror.”
World Trade Center
Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center tells the true story of two Port Authority police officers, Will Jimeo (played by Michael Pena) and John McLoughlin (played by Nicolas Cage), who are trapped under the rubble of the collapsing South Tower. The film alternates between
Jimeo and McLoughlin struggling to survive for twelve hours under the rubble and the reactions from their respective wives, who struggle to cope with their husbands’ whereabouts and potential deaths. It also includes a subplot that follows the ex-marine Dave Karnes (played by Michael
Shannon), who leaves his job as an insurance salesman in Connecticut and drives to New York
City to help find survivors in the rubble and there, eventually finds Jimeo and McLoughlin.
Stone, by his own admission, set out to make an apolitical film. In an interview with the
British Film Institute, Stone criticized those who tended to politicize everything:
I don’t believe the intellectuals of Europe are really in touch with people. They
are so politicised [sic] by 9/11. It’s not their fault. It’s anti-Bush, pro-Bush, anti-
Iraq. They’ve lost sight of something. […] They politicise everything. Every
move has to be seen through political glasses. They’re insane. I’m not a political
filmmaker Goddamnit! I’m a dramatist and always have been” (BFI).
Considering that the presentation of McLoughlin and Jimeo’s story in World Trade Center primarily celebrates the heroism of McLoughlin, Jimeo, and Karnes, Stone does try to mostly 27 avoid taking a political stance. However, while the story of the officers’ rescue is indeed incredible, this of course does not mean that Stone’s film is as apolitical as he would insist.
Indeed, while World Trade Center is more or less a generic family melodrama and avoids any engagement with the broader context of September 11th; this does not mean it is apolitical. E.
Ann Kaplan argues that through melodrama, “the spectator is introduced to trauma through a film’s themes and techniques, but the film ends with a comforting closure or ‘cure’. Such mainstream works posit trauma (against its reality) as a discrete past event, locatable, representable, and curable” (“Melodrama” 204). Through a conventional narrative with a clearly linear storyline that proceeds uninterrupted, Stone uses melodramatic conventions to help viewers make meaning of the trauma of September 11th. It is, of course, unavoidable that any film about September 11th has some sort of implicit ideological stance. In World Trade Center, the national trauma and anxiety present after 9/11 is effectively displaced onto the struggles taking place in the film, most notably the crisis of the potentially damaged family structure of the two officers. We can, therefore, look at the trope of the family as a metonym for nation as a useful way to understand this film: When the two officers’ families are threatened, the nation is threatened, as well. The film’s celebration of the officers’ eventual rescue, then, can be read as an attempt to work through this trauma and attempt to reconfigure the nation as whole, again – and, to go back to Kaplan’s point, make this trauma “curable.”
Scholars have pointed out the various conservative political strands that run through
Stone’s film. Critics such as Arin Keeble and Marc Redfield have pointed to the symbolic linkages between Christianity and patriotism that we see primarily in the scenes with Dave
Karnes. Redfield, along with Ceylan Özcan and Gerry Canavan, have also identified the way in which World Trade Center deals with the trauma of 9/11 in terms of both spectacle and in terms 28 of the damage done to national identity. While all critics have, in some way or another, concluded that the film proffers a conservative viewpoint of September 11th, the threat to the stability of the family has remained relatively untouched in these analyses. Because Jimeo and
McLoughlin’s families play such a large role in the film, however an analysis of the familial structures can help us elucidate how the trauma of September 11th is manifest in Stone’s film.
The opening sequence of World Trade Center, beginning in the early morning of
September 11th, establishes the “pre-9/11” placidity of a New York City morning. Because the audience already knows that this will not be a typical day, the sequence serves as a frame of reference for understanding the drastic and abrupt changes that soon take place. The film captures McLoughlin and Jimeo preparing for work before moving to capture more broadly New
York City as it greets the day – wide angled shots of the cityscape along with shots of individual streets and New Yorkers going about their mornings emphasize the normalcy and mundaneness of this morning. In establishing this seeming normalcy of September 11th, the story’s focus is circumscribed to the ways in which September 11th reverberated within the lives of everyday citizens and disrupted these everyday routines, rather than making a broader statement about the global ramifications of the attacks. Moreover, by remaining focused on McLoughlin, Jimeo, and their families, World Trade Center uses the family as a symbol for the idea of “community.” In knowing that the two officers are simply regular people, it becomes easier for the audience to identify with them as part of their community. By accepting them into this imagined community, the officers and their families become metonyms for the everyday American, who in some way, has been affected by September 11th. The pain, both physical and mental, experienced by the characters can thus be read as the marks of collective trauma. The struggle surrounding the 29 officers’ rescue becomes, then, an effort to assign meaning to the event, to resettle the disrupted
“settled stories” to which Edkins refers.
The focus on survival becomes the primary means through which these “settled stories” are re-settled. Avoiding the CGI spectacle inherent in representing the attacks, the planes hitting the towers and much of the aftermath from those explosions remains under erasure. We see neither plane hit the buildings; the first plane’s shadow is shown passing over other buildings, but the actual impact happens off-screen, with only the sound of impact and the subsequent shaking of the ground to signal it. The second plane hits the South Tower while McLoughlin and
Jimeo are already in the North tower, so we once again only hear the impact and see the shaking ground and buildings. The film also captures a “floater” who jumps from the wreckage of the
North Tower, but cuts away before he or she actually lands. Through these erasures, Canavan notes, World Trade Center’s focus remains “always on survivors, especially on their faces: a long parade of bruised, bloody, teary, shocked, ash-covered, screaming, but nonetheless alive faces” (127, emphasis original). And, as Özcan notes, the focus on the McLoughlin and Jimeo and the story of their survival allows Stone to examine the “courage, resilience and endurance on the micro level” of the two officers and “thus attribut[e] to the macro—the American nation as a whole. The towers will get wounded and collapse; the men—as miniature organic symbols of the towers—will get wounded but survive” (209).
Though avoiding the re-creation of the attacks might have been out of both respect for the victims and their families, as well as a fear of criticism and opprobrium by critics and the general public, it nonetheless also has the added effect of framing Jimeo and McLoughlin’s story as one of survival. The two officers, shrouded in near darkness and caked in blood, occupy a substantial amount of time onscreen (primarily through close-ups of their faces), effectively emphasizing 30 their struggle while simultaneously linking this bloody aftermath to September 11th in vivid ways. Their scenes consist mostly of banal conversations about their everyday lives, primarily regarding their families. We find out through these conversations that McLoughlin is married with four children, while Jimeo’s wife is pregnant with their first child. These conversations are juxtaposed with scenes of the two wives struggling to cope with the unanswered questions of their husbands’ whereabouts – a further reminder of how Jimeo and McLoughlin’s deaths threaten the stability of the family. This focus on the officers and their families creates a sense of urgency, as a failed rescue implies not simply a personal tragedy for the officers’ loved ones, but also implies a fracturing nation, as well.
Once Stone has established the dire situation that both the officers and their families find themselves in, we are introduced to Sergeant Dave Karnes. In real life, Karnes, along with another rescue worker, found McLoughlin and Jimeo and alerted rescue teams to their whereabouts. In World Trade Center, Karnes is rendered as a rather one-dimensional character whose convictions and motivations come strictly from his devout Christian faith. Karnes occupies little time on screen, and his dialogue, for the most part, is rather terse and almost always religious in nature. In Karnes’ first appearance, he is standing around a television in an office, watching CNN’s report on the attack. On the television, Bush is at a press conference while text under him reads “Bush Vows To ‘Hunt Down’ Those Responsible For Attacks.” The camera cuts back to Karnes, who abruptly announces to everyone in the room “I don’t know if you guys know it yet, but this country’s at war.” The decisiveness with which Karnes proclaims this is immediately followed by a scene of him sitting in a pew at a Pentecostal church, where we see a shot of a bible opened to the book of Revelations, as well as a shot of a large cross hung on a blank, white wall. Both shots speak to the gravity of the situation and the seeming necessity of 31 religion and faith in giving direction to dealing with September 11th. It is here that Karnes ultimately decides to drive down to assist in the rescue efforts at Ground Zero. Speaking with a pastor about his decision, Karnes rebuffs the pastor’s remarks that he should rethink his choice:
“I spent my best years with the Marines. God gave me a gift to be able to help people, to defend our country, and I feel Him calling on me now for this mission.” Though Karnes’ faith underwrites his personal rescue mission, the exchange subtly and intentionally equates the
Marines (and, by extension, the United States military) as being able to offer the same sort of salvation Christianity promises its followers.
Through the persistent religious motifs that define Karnes, the film establishes a binaristic division between the West’s Judeo-Christian value system and the Middle Eastern
Other’s Islamic value system. Though after September 11th, the Bush administration emphasized that Islam is a peaceful religion, instead maintaining that it was only fighting against fundamentalist violence, Bush’s “faith-based presidency” no doubt resonates through Karnes’ actions, making it difficult to see Islam as anything less than a monolithic, homogenous religion.
And though Redfield wonders if Karnes is ironically framed as a religious nut by Stone, the point remains that the narrative logic relies on Karnes’ motivations as a devoutly religious man in order to bring about closure. In the context of the struggle to restore the family (and nation) back to its former self, Karnes’ devout Christian faith is an integral part of leading this restoration.
The film’s Christian theme gives, then, credence to Bush’s own evangelical Christian convictions and, as a result, reinforces Bush’s Christian devotion as a necessary quality of leading the nation through September 11th.
The focus on Karnes imputes him with these leadership qualities, conflating him with that of a Christian savior as he reaches Ground Zero to assist in the rescue efforts. Though rescuers 32 are being sent home for the night because it is almost dark, Karnes slips by, discreetly avoiding detection. With the smoking wreckage of Ground Zero in the background, he tells a firefighter,
“[i]t’s like God made a curtain with the smoke, shielding us from what we’re not yet ready to see.” The statement, rather obtuse in meaning, certainly makes sense within the context of
Karnes’ own religious fervor. The meaning of this traumatic devastation, in other words, can be made clear only through religious faith, and a belief that there is some sort of divine plan for this seemingly random violence. Religion then becomes a way to narrate the events and place them within some sort of context, essentially giving meaning to a trauma that defies such signification.
Karnes frames his heroism in terms of his religious convictions, which in turn legitimates mainstream Judeo-Christian belief systems as a prism through which September 11th can be understood. Placing this religious narrative on top of the trauma simplifies September 11th as a
Manichean struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness (both in terms of good versus evil and, more sinisterly, in terms of skin color). This is what Judith Butler describes as a framework that “works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation” (Precarious Life 4).
The film’s proposed meaning of the September 11th attacks become clearer as Karnes begins his search for survivors with the other Marine. While they search the wreckage,
McLoughlin and Jimeo, near delirium at this point, experience separate visions containing
Christian imagery, implicitly connecting Karnes’ rescue efforts with religious faith.
McLoughlin’s vision is rather subtle -- he sees his wife calling him back from the brink of death, as if she is some sort of divine being. Jimeo’s vision of Jesus Christ bearing a bottle of water, is far less ambiguous. This vision is particularly notable in that it is prompted by a beam of light from Karnes’ flashlight, as he stands on top of the rubble looking for survivors down in the 33 crater. Karnes becomes a more literal savior at this moment, because while he does not singlehandedly rescue the two officers, he has clearly reached them at a crucial time, as both are in critical condition by the time they are removed and probably would not have lasted until morning, when the rescue efforts would resume. This religious imagery implies, then, that
Christianity provides its followers with the sort of conviction necessary to achieve extraordinary results, even if one is not – like Karnes’ refusal to abide by the curfew – following the rules.
After the two officers are rescued, the film ends with a scene two years later, where
McLoughlin and Jimeo attend a barbeque held in their honor. This ending, in which the two families celebrate their heroism and survival, illustrates a feeling of a restored unity and togetherness, of the meaning of what we were before “not yet ready to see,” in the words of
Karnes. This is further driven home by Nicolas Cage’s voiceover, which reminds us of the meaning of 9/11 (and the film’s meaning, as well): “9/11 showed us what human beings are capable of, the evil, yeah sure, but it also brought out a goodness we forgot could exist. People taking care of each other, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. It’s important for us to talk about that good, to remember, because I saw a lot of it that day.” As we think back to
Karnes’ comment about the meaning of 9/11, it seems that this, according to Stone, is what
September 11th can teach us.
Through this narrative closure, the film problematically denies audiences the opportunity to think retrospectively about the complex geopolitical factors that helped produce the attacks in the first place or to consider other alternate responses to September 11th. Though trauma produces what Edkins terms “trauma time” – the “openness that trauma produces” – the film’s closure reinforces the “linear, narrative time that suits state or sovereign politics” (108). Whether or not he is aware, Stone reinforces a Judeo-Christian value system as a necessary component of 34 dealing with and “working through” the trauma that ultimately proffers a conservative understanding of the attacks. Through Karnes’ Christian-inspired heroics, the crisis of the family is averted. The community is restored, and with it, a sense of normalcy and a return to the everyday is, as well. Through the potential destruction of the nuclear family, and the threat to future generations of U.S. citizens (symbolized by the two officers’ children), the film draws a binary between Christianity and Islam, and ultimately justifies the Bush administration’s actions after September 11th, particularly in terms of the military’s action in response to the attacks.
United 93
Much like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Paul Greengrass’ United 93 takes a narrow look at September 11th, dramatizing the United 93 plane crash in Pennsylvania. The film not only focuses on the heroics displayed by the passengers on United 93, but also follows the communications between air-traffic control at Boston, Cleveland, and Newark, the aviation authorities at Hendren, and the U.S. military. While World Trade Center, in many ways, is like a family melodrama, Greengrass’ film is much faster and more frenetically paced, accomplished in part through frequently shaky camera movements and scenes composed of slickly edited rapid- cut shots. Furthermore, Greengrass mixes both actors and actual participants from the different agencies who experienced the confusion and chaos firsthand (most notably Ben Sliny, the head of the FAA). Through this casting, along with pacing and filming techniques, United 93 produces a documentary aesthetic that attempts a realistic portrayal of the confusion and terror experienced by both the passengers in the plane as well as the behind-the-scenes difficulties and confusion experienced by the different government agencies on the ground. By concentrating on this confusion, the film, which begins early on the day of September 11th, 2001, is similar to
World Trade Center in that it refuses any sort of engagement with the dynamics of the past that 35 might open up a space to reflect critically on September 11th. United 93 further avoids a critical look at 9/11 by orientalizing the terrorists on board the plane and rendering them as less human and as abstractions with whom we couldn’t possibly identify. By often failing to translate their speech for viewers, Greengrass denies them a voice and also denies us any chance to even begin to understand the motivations behind their actions. In doing so, the film perpetuates Orientalist stereotypes, functioning as a type of text that Edward Said describes as “a nexus of knowledge and power creating ‘the Oriental’ and in a sense obliterating him as a human being” (27).
Furthermore, in exploring the fundamental failures of the different agencies on September 11th, the film tends to draw a distinction between a pre-9/11 naiveté and a post-9/11 preparedness – implicitly justifying the Bush doctrine’s preemptive strikes as well as its creation of the
Department of Homeland Security.
One of the ways in which the film reinforces the Bush doctrine is through the opening scenes, which immediately establish the differences between the terrorists and the U.S. civilians who will be on the plane. The film opens with a black screen and a voice softly reading Arabic before cutting to a dimly lit hotel room, where we see a young Arab man sitting on a bed (who we then immediately identify as one of the terrorists) reading aloud from the Qur’an. A second
Arab man enters the frame shortly after and tells the man on the bed “[i]t’s time.” Two things are notable about this scene. One is that it immediately associates September 11th with Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism, eschewing any political grievances the terrorists might have.
Secondly, the statement “[i]t’s time” is the only thing subtitled for the audience – whatever was being read from the Qur’an remains untranslated. This is a consistent practice throughout the film, meaning that we, as the audience, only understand select phrases from the terrorists. We can safely assume that most members of the audience are probably not fluent in Arabic, and so 36 the decision to only partially translate the terrorists’ conversations makes the audience
Orientalize them as they project their own anxieties about what the terrorists are saying onto their un-subtitled conversations. Thus, this lack of subtitling, which helps add to the dramatic tension later in the film, particularly in tense moments where the terrorists are arguing with both each other and with the other passengers on the flight, produces two intertwined effects. One is that it makes both the terrorists, and Islam, appear as unknowable, irrational, and a dangerous threat. Secondly, through this apparent irrationality, the film feeds into an anti-Islamist discourse that sets up a reprisal of a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam.
The tension and anxiety present from this opening starkly contrasts with the following scene that takes place at the Newark International Airport. It is here where the camera, as a passive spectator, captures the hustle and bustle of the airport, introducing us to the pilots, stewardesses, and passengers of United 93 as they exchange banal conversation with each other.
Through this presentation, the film immediately draws a distinction between the unknowable terrorists and the instantly knowable U.S. citizens, with whom the audience instantly identifies.
And though the film does not develop any substantive background stories for any of the characters, the audience nonetheless find themselves developing attachments to them as future victims of the terrorists. Such scenes of normality are made ominous -- Captain Dahl’s comment that it is a “beautiful day for flying” is particularly ironic -- as the audience already knows what will happen. It is apparent from the beginning of the film that everyone on the plane is doomed, yet the audience continues to watch not because we want to see what happens, but rather, because we empathize and identify with them. Like in World Trade Center, these everyday people are part of our community. 37
While we watch as the passengers on Flight 93 calmly board the plane and prepare for take-off, the film cuts to the more chaotic Boston Air Traffic Control Center, where confusion about a lack of response from American Airlines flight 11 – the first plane to hit the World Trade
Center – begins to surface. This confusion is, of course, frustrating to viewers who already know what happens, meaning that the audience becomes even more acutely aware of the failures of these agencies and their difficulty in obtaining solid intelligence regarding what is happening.
The failure of these agencies becomes clear when one of the air traffic controllers in Boston remarks that American 11 disappeared from his radar and a following scene in the Newark command center shows the plane hitting the North Tower through a pair of binoculars. Minutes later, when the second plane hits the South Tower, we watch it take place through a television screen tuned to CNN. The frustrations the audience may feel as they witness the cluelessness and confusion of the air traffic controllers reinforces a feeling that September 11th was an unprecedented event for which we could not possibly have been prepared. The failure of the agencies to properly understand what was going on before it was too late, as well the military’s sluggishness with getting planes in the air to shoot down the rogue United 93, if need be, illustrates the failures of a “pre-9/11” complacency and mindset, ultimately justifying Bush’s actions after the attacks, particularly in terms of its militarized response.
While the film admonishes these institutional failures, it simultaneously elevates the everyday American as the hero and guardian of the nation’s safety. In a moment of tension before the passengers rush the terrorists, rapid cuts between different passengers who begin saying the Lord’s Prayer – implying the passengers are all “good Christians” with the same type of superficiality Simpson identifies in the “Portraits of Grief” – are interspersed with shots of the terrorists at the front of the plane repeating (untranslated) prayers of their own. It is another 38 moment of orientalizing, one that gives particular meaning to the upcoming struggle. “[T]hat
Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient,” Said argues in
Orientalism, and in these juxtaposed scenes of prayer that the Western struggle against terrorism is made much clearer and more legible by framing it as a threat to a uniquely Christian, Western way of life. The terrorists (and their religion), then, once again are foregrounded as inherently irrational and unable to be understood, and we are reminded that their motives for the hijacking seem based solely in religious doctrine. The, final moments of the film, when the passengers charge the terrorists, play out the tension between Christianity and Islam – a conflict that more broadly mirrors many cultural representations of the War on Terror and its purpose. In doing so, a stark contrast is drawn between the failures of the different government agencies to protect the country and the ability of the passengers to do the same.
The film ends with the struggle in the cockpit, as one of the terrorists, buckled into his seat and resisting the passengers grabbing at him, sends the plane into a nosedive toward the ground. The film cuts to a black screen moments before impact, denying us any sort of narrative closure, as well as refusing to visually reproduce the plane crash. This abrupt black screen gives way to white text that reads “[d]edicated to the memory of all those who lost their lives on
September 11, 2001.”1 In this way, the black screen recalls the traumatic wound opened by the
September 11th attacks, while at the same time tightly circumscribing our memories to focus on only those who lost their lives, instead of the various broader contexts surrounding September
11th. Though closure is denied, the dedication at the end of the film memorializes the victims in a specific way, one that avoids politicizing the death of any victims of September 11th. The traumatic wound remains open only so that we can keep their memories alive, but not so that we 39 may use these memories as a means of making political statements that criticize the nation’s response to their deaths.
Conclusion
Jenny Edkins argues that:
Our existence relies not only on our personal survival as individual beings but
also, in a very profound sense, on the continuance of the social order that gives
our existence meaning and dignity: family, friends, political community, beliefs.
If that order betrays us in some way, we may survive in the sense of continuing to
live as physical beings, but the meaning of our existence is changed (4).
Both World Trade Center and United 93 draw a comparison between the pre-9/11 sense of ordinariness and the traumatic rupture that signifies a significantly changed post-9/11 atmosphere. The two films highlight the heroism of everyday Americans, mirroring the dominant narrative established by the Bush administration after September 11th. As Lee Jarvis observes, the Bush administration’s narrative "introduce[d] the twinning of victimhood and heroism" that framed 9/11 as a "normative rupture" (51). In other words, this narrative implied that September
11th was like an event never before experienced, a break in history that demanded extraordinary action. The aporia opened by the attacks, this traumatic space, needed to be filled by a narrative that reassured the American public of their continued safety in the country. The heroism and valor displayed by rescue workers was co-opted into the administration’s own drumbeat toward war, and the meaning assigned to the trauma told us that September 11th marked an unprecedented attack on an American value system and an American way of life. Five years after the attacks, the narrative twinning that Jarvis identifies is reinforced by Greengrass’ and Stone’s 40 films. The disruption of the quotidian that we see memorializes September 11th as a unique, ahistorical event, and also makes use of the everyday in order to build a sense of community for memorializing the attacks. These two filmic memorials, through their selective frameworks, offer a retrospective look that differs little from the framework the Bush administration made use of in its own selective memorializing shortly after the attacks.
41
Note
1 Interestingly, this text was originally supposed to read: “America’s war on terror had begun,” but was eventually replaced for seeming too jingoistic. Though it’s unclear as to whether the choice was made by Greengrass alone, it does provide a revealing insight into the purpose of the film.
42
CHAPTER III: RE-IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: ALAIN BRIGAND’S 11”09’01
Released a year after September 11th, Alain Brigand’s omnibus project 11’09”01 features eleven short films, each from a director hailing from a different country. With the stipulation that the directors must make a film that was eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame, each, they were otherwise had free reign to produce a short that responded in some way to September 11th.
The end result is a multinational set of responses that illustrate a variety of textured interpretations and reactions to September 11th that -- given the rather rapid release of the omnibus film -- also provide a set of reactions that are more immediate and raw in nature than the films discussed in Chapter Two. Furthermore, the set of films, arranged in this omnibus format, form a constellation of responses that contest the notion of 9/11 as a monolithic signifier.
The omnibus form itself works to dislodge 9/11 as such a signifier through its form, which, functioning as both a single text as well as many, complicates the desire to assign a single meaning to September 11th.
Furthermore, the omnibus’ form inherently rejects traditional Hollywood aesthetics, and, in doing so, opens up possibilities for varied filmic responses that also contest dominant aesthetics and ideologies of Hollywood films. This is due in part to the fact that these collections of films, according to David Diffrient, “problematiz[e] conventional paradigms of authorship and nationhood” (19). 11”09’01 thus complicates the idea that a singular viewpoint can be assigned to the meaning of 9/11, especially by a national cinema, as the form of the film itself does not allow viewers to come away with a singular meaning. Moreover, as Mark Betz argues, the
“omnibus from itself thus produces a kind of spectatorship qualitatively different from that of the narrative feature film” (231). The spectator, Betz argues, puts the films in conversation with one 43 another, providing a much different viewing experience from that of the traditional feature- length film.
Peter Matthews of the British Film Institute criticizes Brigand’s efforts as “inescapably crass – and perhaps more so than such official propaganda as the recent television documentary
9/11, whose straightforward tear-jerking at least gave the American public the type of catharsis it recognizes,” ultimately concluding that the entire project “virtually defines bad faith” (32). As this review directs its scorn at Brigand’s project, it unwittingly makes an interesting point about trauma and September 11th. For Matthews, the problem with Brigand’s project is not that it necessarily attempts to make a provocative statement about September 11th, but that it does so without properly allowing enough time to pass: “At this brief distance in time, no one has the perspective needed to digest the terrible reality or assign it a confident meaning, so even a better movie would still be awful” (32). The incomprehensibility of trauma seems, for Matthews, to demand greater temporal distance before any serious attempt to analyze the events can be made.
The question then becomes this: if not enough time had passed to properly mourn September 11th and deal with its psychic wounds, how do the films in this project use these wounds as a means of producing viewpoints that are alternate to the hegemonic Western one? Though each film in
11”09’01 I examine engages uniquely with September 11th, they fall into three broad categories.
One group of films addresses a response to September 11th by placing the attacks within a larger historical continuum, attempting to destabilize 9/11 from the ahistorical position it occupies in much of Western discourses on terror. The second set of films deal more with depicting the actual events in New York City, with the third set of films dealing with the ensuing paranoia and the targeting of Muslims in the days and weeks after the attacks. This chapter, then, recognizes the multivalent voices that emerge in the different films while attempting to examine the 44 different ways in which filmmakers respond to 9/11 and how they differ from the hegemonic responses of the Hollywood films discussed in the previous chapter.
Before discussing some of the films in 11”09’01, I first want to turn to a time and space motif that, I think, frames the way in which audiences are to interpret these films. The film opens with a starry black background, upon which a series of white analog clocks, each with a section of a continent etched in them, float across the screen, eventually coming together to form a two- dimensional world map. On the map, a red dot blinks to denote the location of New York City.
While the hour hands for each clock differ based on its time zone, the minute hands are uniformly set to :48 (a slightly incorrect reference to the impact of Flight 11 at 8:46 A.M.). Such an image signifies a singular impact of the first plane across time zones. The singularity that this graphic symbolizes, I would argue, collapses time and space, recalling the ways in which globalization, through its interconnectivity, has flattened both temporal and spatial dimensions.
In other words, regardless of the spatial distance signified by these time zones, or by the map itself, 11’09”01 implies a global linkage and interconnectedness.
This graphic of the map returns between the films, although each time without the clocks.
The red light on New York City continues to blink while the filmmaker’s home country is highlighted in white. This, to me, suggests a couple of things. The repetitive introduction of this graphic before each film continues to emphasize the global nature of the attack and that its reverberations go beyond a clearly demarcated East versus West geographic dichotomy, and thus attempts to dissuade Western viewers from engaging in Orientalist caricatures of Middle Eastern and South Asian countries. It further implies that there are multiple perspectives that exist in these reactions. Instead of the reaction to September 11th being a choice between siding with either Western victims or Middle Eastern terrorists, the map produces a third possibility – that of 45 a more nuanced, global perspective that takes into account each country’s particular relationship not only to the United States, but to the other countries throughout the world. There is, of course, the problematic potential that by locating the films within these specific geographic locales, the graphic may in fact only essentialize and reinforce simplified notions of national identity, cultural identification, and the reaction to September 11th. However, because the filmmaker’s country and the setting of their film are not always the same, and also because the variety of responses emphasize the transnational nature of Brigand’s project, the point remains that no country maintains one singular point of view, and that different perspectives on 9/11 can thus be explored outside of the filmmaker’s country of origin.
Aestheticizing 9/11
Samira Makhmalbaf - Iran
Keeping in mind this global perspective, as well as the link between globalization and terrorism, I would like to turn to Samira Makhmalbaf’s “God and Construction” (the only film with a title in the set). Makhmalbaf’s film, set in Iran, looks at a camp of Afghan refugees’ reactions to September 11th. The film opens with a grainy, documentary style shot of refugee men taking water out of a well via a pulley system as a voice in the background yells “[h]urry up! America wants to bomb Afghanistan! Let’s build a shelter.” The next shot cuts to children in the camp stomping on wet clay as others push the clay into brick molds and set them out in the sun. The extreme poverty of the refugees’ situation renders them particularly vulnerable, as it becomes readily apparent that the shelter being built is completely insufficient to withstand
American military force. The refugees’ vulnerability produces an interesting juxtaposition 46 between their vulnerability to American military action, and innocent American victims of
September 11th.
This powerlessness also calls attention to the fluidity of national boundaries. By situating the characters as Afghan refugees in Iran, Makhmalbaf highlights the complicated notions of homeland and identity. The refugees are without any sort of apparent government assistance, and in the rocky, desolate terrain, appear to remain unincorporated into Iranian society. Their seeming liminality highlights the fluidity of national identity as well as a more complicated understanding of the Other. She challenges viewers to consider what it means to see the Afghan Other inhabiting the space we attribute to the Iranian Other. For the viewer, this is a moment of disruption, as the seemingly concrete categorizations of different bodies come undone. What remains unanswered in the film is the question of how the refugees ended up in
Iran. And because 11’09”01 foregrounds globalization as one of the primary issues it associates with terrorism, whatever assumptions are made about the refugees’ backstory will perhaps consider how globalization contributes to the displacement and migrancy of others.
While the children continue to help make bricks, an Afghan teacher walks through the village, calling them to follow her to school so she can explain “an important event.” What is immediately notable about the teacher is her physical appearance. Though veiled, she is nonetheless only modestly covered, as her face remains exposed. Young and articulate, she tells the children: “You can’t stop atomic bombs with bricks.” It is an interesting moment in which the Afghan Other is made legible to Western audiences through this young woman. This legibility is achieved through the agency and power she wields walking through the Afghan community. Confident and forceful in her exhortations that the children need to attend class, she destabilizes Orientalist stereotypes of Arab women as powerless and oppressed. Instead, the fact 47 that Western audiences are able to relate to her from their perspective thus positions viewers as sympathetic listeners to her narrative. This sense of connectivity displaces September 11th as a monolithically Western event and instead illustrates its importance to all people around the world.
It is during class that the teacher tries to convey the importance of what has taken place in
New York City. She tells the children that a “big incident took place in the world” and asks
“[w]ho knows anything about it?” The children begin raising their hands and contributing answers. One tells her, “[s]omeone dug a well and two people fell in and died.” After the teacher prompts the children to think of a “more important event,” another child speaks up to say that her
“Auntie” in Afghanistan was buried up to her neck and stoned to death. After she urges them to think of a “more important global incident,” another child raises his hand and guesses that a
“flood came and everyone was killed.” Unable to get the children to understand, the teacher finally explains that planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers. Unsure if this explanation even resonates with them, she tells them to look outside at the brick kiln’s chimney.
This, she explains is what a tower looks like.
For the children, the representation of the World Trade Center is literally unimaginable.
Their imagination is confined to events in their daily lives. As the distinction is highlighted between the children’s parochial understanding of what constitutes an “important event” versus the teacher’s understanding, it becomes apparent that part of the children’s failure to understand the importance of the attacks is rooted in the fact that their lack of material wealth restricts their imagination. In the sense that the World Trade Center has come to symbolize global capitalism and the West’s access to this capital, the children symbolize how this unequal access manifests in the material conditions of their lives and in their inability to understand the importance of global 48 events. The chimney’s failure to replicate the World Trade towers, therefore, points to how global capitalism is inherently exclusionary in its distribution of resources. And by laying bare this situation, Makhmalbaf further highlights the fact that even though the children are unable to properly understand the attacks, such an understanding needs to be achieved. The threat of harm from the American military requires not only a grasp on the severity of the issues from their standpoint, but also a grasp on the issues from the viewer’s standpoint. That is, Makhmalbaf forces viewers to understand that there is no monolithic them at whom the United States directs its weapons. In believing there is a monolithic Middle Eastern enemy, the West fails to recognize the innocent and vulnerable who ultimately suffer as a result. Instead of understanding
September 11th as an attack on us that necessitates a response against a unified threat in the East, a more nuanced understanding of the situation is required.
The elliptical final scene of the film engenders this understanding. Unable to get the children to comprehend the severity of September 11th during a moment of silence in the classroom, she has them stand by the chimney to pay their respects instead. One of the final shots is of the children standing at the chimney’s base, staring up and imagining it is the Twin Towers.
The teacher tells them, “[t]hink of all those people in the towers who died under the rubble.” The camera, angled from the perspective of the children, captures the smoking chimney foreground against a blue sky. Watching the children standing in silence offers an opportunity for the viewer to reflect, as well. What the teacher asks of the children is also asked of them. This is not simply a moment in which we think about the World Trade Towers reaching into the sky but also a moment in which the audience remembers their collapse. The violence and death signified by this collapse symbolically enters the refugee camp. That is, the violence and death seen in the attack on the World Trade Center is a violence that will be potentially repeated in their camp. 49
The destruction of this chimney is entirely likely when considering how potential military strikes threaten the refugees. The First World body under the World Trade Center rubble, at this moment, is no different than the Third World body under the rubble of a brick bomb shelter. In both cases, the two have experienced unwarranted pain and death. Thus, the power in
Makhmalbaf’s film is that it requires the viewer’s active engagement with their imagination in order to understand this commonality. The Afghan teacher functions as a link between Western audiences and Afghan refugees, making clear that both have in common a shared sense of vulnerability that transcends national boundaries.
Alejandro González Iñárritu - Mexico
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s piece is a collage of audio and video coverage of the
September 11th attacks. Iñárritu’s short refuses a narrative or linear logic, choosing instead to use the collage effect as a means of mirroring the chaos experienced during the attacks. As Cathy
Caruth has argued, the mark of trauma is the seeming preternatural “delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Unclaimed 11). The traumatic experience, beyond our control to ever fully grasp and assimilate into our psyche, for
Iñárritu, is likewise unable to ever be represented onscreen. Through the collage effect, Iñárritu makes clear the powerlessness of spectators, as they can only watch while he chooses when and at what times he wants to bring in audio or video from the attacks. In doing so, his film illustrates the futility of ever trying to aestheticize the attacks, as attempted aestheticizations can never do justice to the event, and instead only paper over its traumatic parts.
Iñárritu’s presentation, while defying representation, takes advantage of the televisual medium to explore the hypermediated presentation of 9/11. His short, through its use of raw 50 footage, self-consciously calls attention to the visual nature of both television and film and highlights the artificiality of a medium that often relies on a seamless relationship between it and the viewer. This is accomplished through the denial of visual and aural pleasure, and in this denial, the audience is never allowed to comfortably settle into viewing his work. Instead, they are always made aware of the fact that the televisual medium is one of artificiality and that it relies on this seamless relationship between viewer and medium in order for a story to be told.
When this relationship is disrupted, as it is in Iñárritu’s short, there is no attempt to place a story upon the traumatic wound and settle a disrupted story. By directly engaging with this wound, what emerges is the potential for an alternative politics that contests the sovereign powers whose interest, as Jenny Edkins notes, is in quickly assigning meaning to a traumatic event in order to reassert its right to power (Trauma, 107).
The critique of artificiality is made clearest by the black screen that remains for almost the entire film. Iñárritu’s lack of visual cues and signifiers is bewildering, as all that can be heard are tense, orchestral strings layered with snippets of discordant audio from a mixture of what appears to be emergency calls, radio broadcasts, and cell phone conversations, along with the distinct sound of both bodies and debris hitting the street. The audio plays long enough for the audience to understand its content, but cuts out quickly enough to maintain this sense of chaos.
These non-diegetic sounds provide auditory glimpses into the “real” – the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept referring to the experience that lies outside symbolic representation through language. In terms of trauma and the real, Jenny Edkins argues that the real “is traumatic, and has to be hidden or forgotten, because it is a threat to the imaginary completeness of the subject” (12). The real, in other words, threatens a symbolic order that societies rely on to sustain their hegemonic power. The personal nature of the cell phone calls, with many containing 51 deeply personal audio such as messages left by those about to jump, makes this audio ghostly and ethereal, bringing viewers to an uncomfortably close to the trauma. This is further bolstered by the visual footage Iñárritu does include, such as brief, roughly half-second shots of “floaters”
– people who jumped from the towers. This is notable because such shots were, as Claire Kahane notes, “withdrawn from the reruns in the United States, as if too much to re-present as spectacle”
(110). She later notes that “images of live people becoming falling bodies were too real, opening the viewer to a mimetic identification with trauma that was intolerable” (111). Iñárritu exposes viewers again to what had been quickly hidden by the media spectacle after the towers were initially hit. In these shots – shown intermittently throughout, with no sense of rhythm of timing dictating their appearance – what becomes apparent for viewers is that they are seeing people frozen in a moment. Though technically alive in the photos, each person is now, of course, deceased. For Iñárritu’s audience, the shots of the floaters, moments before their deaths, places them in a similar position as the spectators on September 11th – powerless to do anything except watch.
Spectators are not only denied narrative cohesion, but closure, as well. The penultimate moment of the film layers a variety of sounds played at an increasing volume, before cutting to two clips of the towers silently collapsing. After this footage, the film cuts to a black screen as soft orchestral music plays while the background slowly turns white with black Arabic writing that translates to “[d]oes God’s light guide us or blind us?” appearing on screen. Iñárritu leaves viewers with this open-ended question, refusing any sense of narrative closure – as if any could possibly exist for his film, anyway. The traumatic witnessing the spectator has endured, coupled with this open-endedness, signifies not a “working through” or abreaction of trauma, but instead a sense of mourning. For Freud, mourning is a “reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the 52 loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (237). Mourning is thus a prolonged engagement with a traumatic event, one that does not allow for a sense of “closure” that one finds through abreaction. The lack of narrative, along with the twinned chaotic audio and shots of “floaters” denies an easy opportunity to make meaning out of September 11th. In essence, the monolithic signifier 9/11, signaling the Western hegemonic response to September 11th, is denied its power through this reengagement with the wound. Iñárritu’s film is perhaps, then, what David Simpson may have desired when he wonders if the “worldwide outpouring of sympathy” after September 11th was an occasion for an alternate political arrangement, “a utopian moment, an opening” (166).
Instead of closing the wound through military retaliation, pieces like Iñárritu’s offer the possibility for a sustained engagement with this trauma, potentially engendering a new set of politics.
Paranoia Narratives
Idrissa Ouedraogo – Burkina-Faso
Idrissa Ouedraogo’s short tells the story of a young boy, Adama, in Ouagadougou,
Burkina-Faso as he tries to earn money to help pay for his sick mother’s medication. The story begins on September 11th, as news of the attacks is broadcast on radios in the background while
Adama and his father discuss what little money they have to pay for his school supplies. The film then cuts to September 24th, where Adama – now having stopped attending school to help his family make money – sells newspapers about bin Laden, shouting to passersby to read about the
“brains behind September 11th.” The front page of the paper advertises the $25 million bounty on bin Laden’s head, and Adama quickly realizes that a man standing near him, dressed in Muslim 53 garb, closely resembles the picture of bin Laden. The rest of the story focuses on Adama and his friends’ efforts to catch the man who they think is bin Laden in order to secure the bounty and pay for his mother’s medication.
The bin Laden doppelganger functions as a metonym for the greater anxieties produced from September 11th. The Muslim man, who is only identified as such through his dress, is a visual signifier of such anxieties. Seen only from afar, he is not given a voice or sense of agency, but is instead rendered as a two-dimensional figure. Such a lack of subjectivity illustrates how
Islamaphobia has led to the Muslim as an empty signifier upon whom the audience projects their fantasies and paranoias. While the film is endearing in the sense that it appears to be about nothing more than a group of boys whose overactive imaginations lead them on a hunt for someone who is probably not bin Laden, Ouedrago’s film nonetheless produces uncomfortable moments when it draws connections between the overactive imagination of a set of young boys and overactive national imaginations. While the boys’ Othering of the Muslim is perhaps more innocent, it resonates with Western viewers in uncomfortable ways.
The boys’ fantasies place viewers in a more uncomfortable role as they begin more closely surveilling the bin Laden figure. Borrowing a camcorder from one of their parents’, the boys begin spying on the Muslim, gathering evidence to prove his existence. Through the camera’s shaky eye, the audience watches him from a distance as he prays in a clearing. As the viewer’s spectatorial eye becomes one with the camcorder’s, it puts the audience in the uncomfortable position of becoming the panoptic gaze, voyeuristically peering from afar. This reflexivity creates a moment of striking contradiction, where the audience is made aware of their gaze’s power to assign blame and guilt while they are simultaneously left unsure whether who they are watching actually is Osama bin Laden. What they are experiencing, then, is not simply 54 surveillance, but instead acts of profiling. And this profiling, instead of being stereotypically performed by police officers, is committed by everyday citizens.
This profiling is part of the widely noted turn toward the militarization of the everyday that took place after 9/11. Stephen Graham observes this militarization in the urban space’s shifting function to that of a “battlefield,” a concept that, Graham notes, “thus permeates everything from the molecular scales of genetic engineering and nanotechnology through the everyday sites, spaces and experiences of city life, to the planetary spheres of space or the internet’s globe-straddling ‘cyberspace’” (279-280). Such militarization plays out in a literal sense like the boys’ scheme of how to capture bin Laden. Armed with rope, guns, and spears, they head back to the same place they saw the man the previous day, knowing that he “goes there every afternoon” – again, the routine and everyday are of significance, here. Unfortunately for the boys, what they witness when they arrive is the man getting into a taxi to head toward the airport. They chase him on foot, but are denied entry to the airport, and can only watch as the plane, presumably with him on it, flies off into the distance. With tears streaming down their cheeks, Adama says “Bin Laden, come back, please,” while another friend, clearly aware of what large fortune they have lost, says dejectedly, “[n]ow he’s going to get caught somewhere else.”
Regardless of whether or not it was actually bin Laden or a doppelganger, what Ouedrago demonstrates is how Western hegemony and its demonization of the Muslim Other has proliferated and manifests in different ways across the globe. The “War on Terror,” then, permeates daily life throughout the world, even in seemingly remote areas of the world.
Globalization has thus not only played a role in the impoverishment of African nations, but also the reason why the boys are even aware of what happened in the United States, or of bin Laden’s existence. Ouedrago’s film, then, illustrates the complex relationship between global poverty, 55
Western hegemony, and the ways in which the “War on Terror” ultimately benefits from such poverty.
Historical Narratives
Youssef Chahine – Egypt
Youssef Chahine’s contribution, in which the director plays himself, takes place on
September 10th, 2001, in New York City, where Chahine is about to shoot the World Trade
Center for part of his film before he is stopped by the police for not having the proper authorization. The next scene takes place at a press conference on September 12th, where
Chahine is supposed to talk about his film. However, he tells reporters that “[a]fter yesterday’s catastrophe, I can’t just talk about an actresses’s dress or the film in general.” Canceling the press conference, he sits outside, looking into the ocean when the ghost of an American soldier named Danny, killed by a bomb in the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983, climbs out of the water and sits next to him. As Avery Gordon argues in Ghostly Matters, the ghost is “not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life,” a “form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course” (8). The ghost, then, is not simply an individual figure that returns to haunt us, but instead part of a broader, postcolonial history that often remains repressed only for parts of that history to return at different times. The ghostly American soldier both signifies this history and also symbolizes the dominant forces that simultaneously repress it.
The significance of the soldier in the film is not simply to serve as a prop for Chahine to criticize the vested imperialist interests of the American army. Rather, Chahine’s point is that 56 while the individual soldier’s death is tragic, he is also at the same time part of a larger system of what Slavoj Žižek describes as a system of “objective violence,” which is the “violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things” (Violence 2). In other words, the Western political and economic systems that sustain our societies often come at the expense of those in other parts of the world who are subjected to large swathes of violence so that our societies can continue to operate. To make this point, Chahine takes the soldier to a Palestinian home where a young suicide bomber is about to leave for his mission. The young man straps himself with explosives and drives away in his jeep, eventually detonating the bombs at his destination. After the explosion, the film cuts to footage of actual video footage from the aftermath of suicide bombings. The chaotic footage cuts between medics and stretchers, the remains of an edifice that had been blown up, and victims being taken away. This intrusion of this real footage in the film is, of course, jarring and unexpected, and mimics the surprise carnage and violence of actual suicide bombings, serving as a reminder that this is a regular occurrence for those in other parts of the world. The implicit connection made here is that the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is far more complex than a Manichean conflict between the two countries, but instead that the fighting implicates Western countries and their foreign policy in it, as well.
Such a point is made when the film cuts back from this footage and Chahine talks to the parents of the bomber. The parents explain that “[e]very Palestinian wants to fulfil [sic] himself in that way” and that “[t]hey [Israel] attack us with tanks and missiles. We have only rocks. The
Israelis fool everyone. They attack us and pretend to be the victims. And that fool Bush lets them decide who the terrorists are.” Following this explanation, the documentary footage intrudes again, as the father, in a voiceover, describes the violence Israel regularly commits against
Palestinians while the footage displays it: “Imagine them destroying your house. Or imagine 57 olive trees planted by your ancestors being uprooted by their bulldozers before your very eyes.”
In his request for the viewer to “imagine” this destruction and violence, the film makes the
Western spectator aware of their comfortable position as one who has, more than likely, never experienced such violence. And while the film uses this documentary footage to fill in these blanks, it nonetheless draws attention to the fact that these visuals are inadequate substitutes for the violence that Western audiences will more than likely never experience. By identifying these limits of the imagination, Chahine’s point is that the Western spectator must be willing to recognize that acknowledging violence and the complicated histories that often underwrite these violent acts is in itself a political gesture. Selective remembering does nothing to stop the suffering experienced by innocents around the world. When suffering and violence is attributed to only two groups – perpetrators and victims – it threatens to potentially decontextualize this pain, when it instead must be placed within a larger historical context. As Judith Butler argues in
Frames of War, “war seeks to deny the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other, and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements based on the recognition of a shared precariousness” (43). In placing the Palestinian and Israeli violence in a broader context, Chahine refuses the reductive logic of a “good versus evil” battle between the two countries, and, in doing so, also illustrates the artificial and constructed nature of the term “terrorist.”
This point is made in an exchange between the American soldier and Chahine following the discussion with the parents. Though the soldier can understand the violence against those occupying their country, he at the same time cannot understand the violence against innocents in the World Trade Center attacks or the bombings in Tel Aviv. Chahine explains to him that
“America and Israel are democracies. The citizens choose the political system which suits them. 58
For the suicide bomber it’s obvious that those citizens are responsible.” The point is, then, that one must be aware of how elections of politicians with particular interests produce such systemic violence, and it is this systemic violence that the suicide bombers react to. Thus, when the soldier points out that America is “defending its own interests,” Chahine angrily responds “[d]efending them at whose expense? Always that of others.”
In the final scene of the film, Chahine visits the grave of the dead soldier in Arlington
National Cemetery, standing in front of his grave with Danny’s fiancé and father. At this point, the ghost of the dead suicide bomber appears and angrily asks, “[y]ou visit the tomb of a soldier who wanted me dead?” Chahine’s answer, “[y]ou’re victims of human stupidity,” is not a condemnation of their individual actions, but, rather, refers to the stupidity of those in power, whose own shortsightedness and greed leads to this violence. Thus, the bomber’s final statements “[r]emember my mother’s eyes? If humanity means anything to you, never forget them” are important to consider. The point is that if anything is to change, both the living and deceased must be memorialized as victims of traumatic systemic violence generated through the current economic and political systems.
Ken Loach – United Kingdom
Ken Loach’s contribution, like Youssef Chahaine’s, also takes advantage of documentary footage in order to situate September 11th in a larger historical context. In Loach’s short film, an unnamed Chilean refugee (played by Vladimir Vega) sits at a desk writing a letter to the survivors of the World Trade Center attacks. The letter tells the story of his September 11th, when, on September 11th, 1973, a U.S. supported military coup overthrew the democratically elected, socialist government of Salvador Allende. Loach’s story is not only emotionally 59 affecting in the way he delivers the experiences of the hope held by the Chileans after the election and their subsequent suffering under the new military government, but it is also interesting in that it calls attention to the fact that the phrase “September 11th” does not only refer to September 11th, 2001, but, that it also refers to other acts of violence and suffering. The story of the refugee, then, highlights the fact that the U.S. victims of September 11th are not the only ones to have suffered, but instead that the date is saturated with violence and suffering, and that at least some of this suffering has been at the hands of the United States and its interests.
In telling the story of the Chilean suffering, Loach not only illustrates how the attacks on the United States are not only part of a broader history, but also how September 11, 2001 has overwritten other memorializations. David Simpson points out that though it appears the date of
9/11 was not chosen by the terrorists to mark any sort of historical anniversary, it has nonetheless caused us to rediscover other momentous historical events in our efforts to understand the attacks. He argues that “[i]f this is not the metaphysical irony or the mark of some devilish and well-informed intelligence, then it is a sign that our culture is saturated with such coincidences, that almost any date would bring up other anniversaries, any of which could be come significant in the light of a supervening event” (14). However, while such other anniversaries may have come to light, Loach’s film illustrates the larger problem that the suffering endured on
September 11th, 2001 has blocked out these other events.
Loach’s film appears, then, as an effort to wrest control away from the Americanization of 9/11. As Tania Roy has argued in regards to the comparisons made between 9/11 and the
Mumbai 11 July 2006 attacks, “9/11 is hyper-mnemonic, recalling the singularity of the events in
New York with such insistence that all other dates, times and places vanish; or the reverse, each renewed appeal to the memory of the attacks inaugurates a hyperbolic forgetting" (316, emphasis 60 original). For Roy, what is problematic about comparisons drawn between the United States attacks and the Mumbai attacks is that 9/11 functions as an idiom that overshadows interpretations and reactions to the Mumbai attacks, funneling them through the prism of the
United States viewpoint and its response. This problematically obfuscates historical contexts behind the Mumbai violence – a point Marc Redfield makes when he argues that the phrase
“September 11th” “imposes knowledge and amnesia, knowledge as amnesia” (18). While
Loach’s concern obviously lies with an event that took place prior to September 11th, 2001, the problem remains the same – the United States 9/11 discourse obscures other tragic, violent historical events.
In order to counter the “Americanization” of the 9/11 signifier, Loach employs a testimonial format, in which the refugee tells his story through documentary footage with his voiced-over narration of the events. The presentation of the events through archival footage presents an interesting way of staging memory, particularly when compared against the mainstream films such as World Trade Center and United 93. Roxana Waterson, discussing the importance of documentaries in memory transmission, argues:
The maker of a documentary enters into a dialogical relationship with the
participants, the nature of which we, as audience, can certainly to some degree
intuit or find clues to in the finished product. Perhaps that is one of the reasons
why we still may feel as if we have had a kind of personal contact with a
documentary’s participants, even if at one remove (69).
The documentary, then, opens up an intersubjective space where the audience develops a relationship with those in the documentary in a way different than a film telling a clearly 61 fictional story. In terms of Loach’s short, the grainy documentary footage gives the audience glimpses of the “real,” and when Western viewers witness this footage, they also witness the ways in which we are part of a system that has maintained their privileged position through an imposition of violence and suffering of others.
The climactic moment in which this point is driven home is when Loach interrupts footage of the Chilean coup with President Bush’s speech in front of Congress on September
20th, 2001. In the clip, Bush says “[o]n September 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country, and night fell on a different world. A world where freedom itself is under attack.” Immediately after, the film cuts back to the grainy footage of planes dropping bombs in Chile, as the refugee says, “[o]n September 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.” By turning Bush’s hardline rhetoric against itself, it, like Chahine, illustrates how history is selectively remembered and its presentation artificial. In condemning the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as threats to American freedoms, such rhetoric obscures the fact that this “freedom” has been secured through the oppression and suffering of others. In seeing footage of the violence wrought by the coup – one of the most startling images is a man lying on the ground with his brains spilling out of his forehead – the audience understands on an affective level the pain experienced by others in the name of U.S. interests. Thus, not only is history selectively presented, but Loach also makes an implicit connection between the U.S. meddling and September 11th, 2001, that this meddling has resulted in the blowback of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
The Chilean refugee’s story has eerily similar qualities to the United States’ reaction to
September 11th, 2001. He describes the torture he and others endured at the hands of torturers taught by American soldiers: "They called me a terrorist, sentenced me to a life in prison without 62 a trial or defense,” as well as the way Kissinger brushed off complaints of this torture as nothing more than “political science lessons.” This torture, as well as the U.S.’s cavalier attitude toward it is reminiscent of the indefinite detainment and questioning of many Middle Eastern and
Southeast Asian U.S. citizens after September 11th. The notion of what constitutes a terrorist, like in Chahine’s film, is again called into question. This is particularly resonant as the refugee ends his letter: “Soon it will be the 29th anniversary of our Tuesday, 11th of September, and the first anniversary of yours. We will remember you, I hope you will remember us.”
What emerges as a central concern in Loach’s film is that memory and memorials of the
United States’ 9/11 will obscure the suffering of those outside of its borders. Loach’s film is, then, not interested in engaging in a “calculus of suffering,” to use Naomi Klein’s phrase (148).
Instead, Loach’s film is a reminder that while the violence committed on September 11th, 2001 was no doubt abhorrent and that the victims should be properly mourned and remembered, it must not be forgotten that the event exists on a historical continuum. In other words, the film stresses the need to remember and understand the broader historical contexts from which events emerge, as it is only in doing so that people of different cultures can begin relating to each other as humans, rather than abstractions. Much like Makhmalbaf’s film, Loach demonstrates how any innocent person is a potential victim of violence, and it is this vulnerability that we must keep in mind as we elect our leaders.
Conclusion
David Simpson argues that “[e]very imagining of the other is an encounter with the self: they are us” (136). The proliferation of the “War on Terror” and of the ever present specter of international terror that haunts our daily lives and routines is, in other words, a reflection of us. 63
Though the United States approached September 11th as if it took place in a vacuum, the bogeyman of terrorism and fundamentalist Islam are indeed reflections of us – they emerged as responses to the U.S. and Western hegemony. And, as we saw in the last chapter, such a view has gone unrecognized by Hollywood cinema, as it chose to tread lightly and focus narrowly on the heroics of the U.S. community after September 11th. The varied points of view, coupled with the varieties of aesthetic choices in the group of films, allows us to see the ways in which film can be used to critique and contest the hegemonic views produced by World Trade Center and
United 93. Brigand’s project, then, gives us an opportunity to see how others reflect themselves back at us.
64
CHAPTER IV: THE GEOGRAPHIC AND EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES OF MY NAME
IS KHAN
Since the mid-1990’s, there has been noticeable growth in Western interest in Bollywood cinema. The growth of South Eastern diasporic communities in Western countries has helped to create a larger transnational demand for Bollywood films to the point that North America now makes up 25% of Bollywood’s overseas revenue (Mahmood and Mitra). The purchasing power these overseas audiences wield is certainly not lost on Bollywood directors. As Aswin
Punathambekar has noted, the “shift [in Bollywood’s globalization], beginning in the mid-
1990’s, in the mutually constitutive relationship between commercial Hindi cinema and Indian immigrant communities” should be looked at as “an integral part of the cultural imaginary of
Hindi cinema” rather than simply “markets catalyzing the ‘globalization’ of the Hindi film industry, or as communities seemingly starved of cultural resources” (152-153). Directors are, in other words, not simply exporting Bollywood films to these diasporic communities, they are instead making films for them.
The Bollywood film My Name is Khan (2010), directed by Karan Johar, reflects the growing purchase that transnational issues have in the minds of these diasporic communities. A film about prejudice and profiling in a post-9/11 America, My Name is Khan tells the story of
Rizvan Khan (played by Shahrukh Khan), an American-Indian Muslim man with Asperger’s
Syndrome, who, after growing up in Mumbai, moves to the United States to live with his brother in San Francisco. Khan eventually falls in love with and marries Mandira (played by Kajol
Devgn), a Hindu hairdresser, and moves to the (fictional) town of Banville with her and her young son Sameer (Sam, played by Arjan Aujla). Their lives are disrupted by the September 11th attacks, and in its aftermath, the Khan family begins experiencing racial and religious prejudice, 65 eventually culminating in Sam’s death at the hands of bullies during a schoolyard fight. Blaming
Khan for Sam’s death, Mandira tells Khan that she no longer wants to be with him. She says sarcastically that the only way she will take him back is if he finds the President of the United
States and tells him that he is not a terrorist. Taking her seriously, Khan sets out on a cross- country journey to do just that.
I argue that by tracing Khan’s life through his childhood in Mumbai to his adult experiences in both a pre- and post-9/11 America, the film maps India's colonialist past onto a post-9/11 America in order to show how dated colonialist practices continue in the “War on
Terror.” To accomplish this, the film traverses two seemingly disparate, yet actually intertwined landscapes: that of geography, and that of emotion. Specifically, I want to look at how the film explores the ways that both geography and emotion often work in conjunction to produce particular notions of citizenship and belonging. Khan’s experiences in his journey across the U.S. demonstrates the ways in which emotion and geography are mobilized in similar ways – as a means of constructing similarities and differences between groups of people. The film also argues for the necessity of a more nuanced understanding of emotion as a means of contesting such rigid boundaries. In finding a common ground through emotions such as pain and suffering,
My Name is Khan explores the potential to forge new alliances between marginalized minorities in order to combat institutional discrimination and injustice.
Space
Space is inextricably linked to ideas about citizenship and belonging. We define ourselves as belonging to “here,” and those who belong over “there” are considered to be in some way different from us. David Harvey has argued for the importance of studying space 66 within the postcolonial context, noting that “[t]ransformations of space, place, and environment are neither neutral nor innocent with respect to practices of domination and control. Indeed, they are fundamental framing decisions – replete with multiple possibilities – that govern the conditions (often oppressive) over how lives can be lived” (44). I want to discuss the production of citizenship through space in My Name is Khan in terms of what David Gregory refers to as
“imagined geographies.” Space produces hierarchies of power, as Harvey notes, and studying it can therefore reveal how power and oppression manifest in lived spaces. “Imagined geographies,” a phrase, Gregory notes, that originally shows up in Edward Said’s Orientalism, implies that narratives and cultural texts can help create and shape the ways we think about different areas of the world. An analysis of these narratives and texts, therefore, helps identify the ways they reproduce dominant and oppressive power structures within these spaces. He refers to Said’s critical discussion of Orientalist discourses that help produce these hierarchies, the “imaginative geographies of ‘the Orient’ [that] had combined over time to produce an internally structured archive in which things came to be seen as neither completely novel nor thoroughly familiar” (18). As Said has argued, Orientalism is:
a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic,
sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of
basic geographical distinction…but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by
means such as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological
analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also
maintains (12, emphasis original).
In referring to Orientalism as geopolitical in nature, Said helps us understand how the discourse produces and sustains these unknown geographical spaces that reside in the Western 67 imagination, spaces that are often little more than tabula rasas. These spaces are, Gregory argues, performative in nature, as the discourse produces the effects that it names” (18, emphasis original). Orientalism is, in other words, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a point Said makes when he observes that within the discourse, “‘they’ become ‘they’ accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from ‘ours’” (54).
Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of September 11th as some sort of temporal break between a "pre" and "post" 9/11 when the ways of designating who is "with us" or "with the terrorists" (to use President Bush's phrasing). Such formulations contain rather familiar spatial, colonialist constructions of space, seen most clearly in the U.S. administration's use of the phrase
"Axis of Evil." Gregory identifies this colonial production of space when he pointedly asks: "For what else is the war on terror other than the violent return of the colonial past, with its split geographies of 'us' and 'them,' 'civilization' and 'barbarism,' 'Good' and 'Evil'?" (11). The "War on
Terror" depends on colonialist productions of space, on a "here" versus "there.” Effaced and obscured by these imagined geographies are the complicated and painful emotions that come with colonial subjugation.1 To say that such subjugation (and decolonization) are traumatic processes is saying nothing new. Rather, I am interested in how My Name is Khan attempts to rescue these histories and return to them the pain and suffering that is often erased by the colonial imagination. By emphasizing the emotional experiences of those who inhabit these spaces, the film critiques the construction of the monolithic "Other" spaces as well as the construction of those who purportedly inhabit it.
In its opening scene, the film plays with the tendency to view the Muslim body as a monolithic threat. Before viewers know anything about Khan (including his autism), he is introduced through a close-up of his fingers typing on a keyboard, followed by another close-up 68 of the computer screen bearing President Bush’s travel itinerary. Viewers only see a quick shot of the side of Khan’s face and are thus denied the feeling of visually “knowing” him. Instead, in these opening shots, Khan is not so much a person as a generic, symbolic threat. This feeling continues as the film cuts to a shot of Khan’s back as he walks toward the entrance of the San
Francisco International Airport and stands in line at security, mumbling prayers in Arabic, eventually drawing the attention of the TSA agents, who pull him aside for questioning. The audience recognizes Khan as what Sara Ahmed, in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, terms a “hated body,” a body that evokes a sense of fear or threat and “endows a particular other with meaning or power by locating them as a member of a group, which is then imagined as a form of positive residence (that is, as residing positively in the body of the individual)” (49).
Ahmed’s use of “imagined” is significant, here, as the brown body, seen looking at President
Bush’s itinerary, plays on the imagined threat of a potential terrorist attack based on skin color and religion. It is not until one of the security officers finds an Autism Notice card in Khan’s bag that the viewers, as well as the officers, are clued in to the fact that such fears and anxieties are unnecessary. The film uses such a tense moment to demonstrate how particular bodies generate different, culturally constructed emotions.
If colonialist productions of space are little more than cultural constructions, there is a potential to read the ways we are taught to feel about and experience these spaces as cultural constructions, as well. In thinking about the emotional experiences of different spaces, Ahmed's discussion of emotions becomes useful. Ahmed looks at "how emotions operate to 'make' and
'shape' bodies as forms of action, which also involve orientations toward others" (4). Ahmed further argues that “[e]motions are after all moving...[they are] not only about movement, they are also about attachments...what moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in 69 place, or gives us a dwelling place...[that] connects bodies to other bodies” (11). In other words, emotions are not discrete and localized within a body. They instead circulate, and through this circulation, connect people and build communities. In determining how emotions circulate between bodies, Ahmed is also interested in how emotions are culturally determined and how they are used to shape the way we think about other bodies -- what Ahmed describes as
"affective economies," where "objects of emotions circulate or are distributed across social as well as psychic fields" (45). Ahmed, in other words, posits that emotions should not be thought about purely in terms of biological, bodily reactions. Instead, she argues that emotions are produced through complex historical and cultural interactions that inform our emotional reactions. Thinking about emotions in cultural instead of biological terms provides a way to consider how they can be used as tools of imperialism that perpetuate hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. And, in drawing attention to the ways in which emotions are forms of cultural memories, it potentially opens up resistance to these problematic cultural constructions.
My Name is Khan further complicates Muslim stereotypes by rescuing the histories that are erased through monolithic, homogenous categories such as “Muslim.” In doing so, the film shows how emotions are indeed constituted both historically and culturally. Khan’s background story establishes him as a sensitive boy growing up, and contrasts this sensitivity with the persecution of Muslims in Mumbai. The predominantly Muslim neighborhood in which Khan’s family lives is subjected to a violent mob attack by Hindu rioters during the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1983. Though not directly discussed by the film, the violence can be traced back to India’s partitioning after British decolonization, and becomes a way for My Name is Khan to highlight how geography and borders are not only inherently artificial – Indians become Pakistanis by 70 virtue of a new border put in place – but also how these borders mobilize hatred in the first place.
Khan’s mother, after hearing him mindlessly repeating anti-Hindu rhetoric he overheard in the aftermath of the violence, explains to him, “There are only two kinds of people in this world.
Good people who do good deeds. And bad people who do bad. That's the only difference in human beings.” She explains the animus between Muslims and Hindus is based on nothing more than arbitrary differences, and that they share a fundamental humanity that he must not forget.
Through this background story, the film highlights early on how geography and bodies are intertwined in such ways that geography becomes a justification to attack certain bodies that don’t “belong.” The film frames this colonialist past as not specific to particular geographic locales, but instead as part of a much larger global history.
In many ways, the neoliberal state in which we currently live utilizes emotion and geography in remarkably similar ways to past colonialist practices. In her discussion of the ways in which emotion needs to be a recognized part of any progressive political movement, Liz
Philipose identifies neoliberal imperialism as a force that ultimately alienates us from ourselves:
"The neoliberal, colonial self of the western world is impaired in its ability to focus on one of the best indicators of whether or not we live a collectively good life -- our emotional responses"
(76). The difficulty one has in understanding others’ emotions arguably stems in part from the fact that neoliberalism, she argues, is “not collective at all; rather, it consists of a loose group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers” (68). If neoliberalism structures us to think about ourselves as individuals and not as collective groups, there is a greater chance for a lack of compassion toward groups that we deem different from ourselves. Neoliberalism, which
Philipose identifies as having "foundations in colonial knowledge," thus continually structures our worldview and affects our emotional capacities in ways that reproduce the colonial 71 geographies identified by Gregory. Regardless of whether or not one talks about more traditional notions of colonialism (such as the British occupation of India) or the neoliberal imperialist project that characterizes the "War on Terror," our lack of empathy toward others makes us complicit in reproducing these colonial geographies.
Understanding emotions as cultural constructions rather than as biologically produced thus opens up interesting parallels to Gregory’s "imagined geographies” in terms of how we relate to other bodies. Emotions, like geography, help establish a "here" and "there" and determine which bodies we feel comfortable with and which make us, and by extension, the nation, feel threatened. When someone comes from a place deemed unfamiliar or unsafe in some way (such as the Middle East after September 11th), emotions such as hatred are deployed not only based on skin color, but also on whether those bodies can be traced back to these orientalized spaces. The slur “Paki,” for instance, hurled at multiple people in My Name is Khan, affirms the ways that emotion and geography often come together to designate someone as a threat. “Paki” does not rely on geographical specificity to function as an effective slur, but, rather, uses Pakistan as a metonym to mobilize particular feelings about both a larger geographical region as well as the particular histories embedded in that region, ultimately to designate some bodies as subhuman and hated.
If Mumbai is a space of religious tension and colonialist violence, then a pre-9/11 United
States is presented as its opposite. Khan’s brother Zakir eventually leaves Mumbai for America to attend college at the University of Michigan. After their mother passes away, Khan joins
Zakir, who now lives in San Francisco with his wife Hasina. Zakir is a “rags to riches” story, as he explains to Khan, “I am the biggest dealer for Mehnaz Herbal Products. Because this is
America. Here, the harder you work, the more successful you get." This rather romanticized 72 version of America highlights the stark differences between the quality of life for South Asian minorities before and after September 11th. Zakir’s story reminds viewers that before September
11th, South Asians were generally considered to be a “model minority” who was never considered suspect. Zakir represents the successful economic and social integration into
America, and his story appears as a triumph of multiculturalism, validating the idea of America as a “melting pot.” Zakir gives Khan a job working for him, thus making his own similar transition into the melting pot that is symbolically completed by Khan’s courtship of and eventual marriage to Mandira. The couple, along with Mandira’s son Sam, move to Banville, where Mandira opens a beauty salon. Economic and social integration appear complete here, as well. The Khans’ life seems to be very much storybook-like, expressed through montages of the family going about their daily lives and spending time together. Mandira and Khan’s different religious beliefs are treated as a non-existent issue, as their daily religious rituals never interfere with each other’s observances. Religion is relegated to the personal and domestic space, something that is never anyone’s business, and is never discussed by others. Unlike the religious violence Khan experiences in his childhood in Mumbai, his life in America appears to be free of this sort of conflict and tension between different religions.
This domestic bliss and the rather invisible nature of the Khan family’s status as a minority is interrupted by the September 11th attacks. The personal and domestic nature of
Khan’s religious beliefs becomes a public spectacle when he, Mandira, and Sam attend a candlelight vigil for those killed in the attacks. Though Mandira and Sam are, like the rest of the attendees, dressed in street clothes, Khan wears a thawb and kufi (an ankle-length tunic and a short, rounded hat, respectively), visually marking him as the Muslim Other. This difference becomes even more apparent as the crowd stands together in a moment of silence and Khan 73 begins to murmur a traditional Islamic prayer in Arabic. As he does so, those near him in the crowd begin to turn and stare, as others walk off in anger. In a voiceover, Khan notes, "In the
Western world, history is marked simply by BC and AD. But now, there is a third distinction.
9/11." The film treats September 11th as a temporal break, a moment in which the relatively invisible nature of Khan’s ethnicity and religion are gone.
While Khan may treat September 11th as a temporal break, the film demonstrates how the anger directed at Middle Eastern and South Asian minorities after September 11th operates on previous geographic and emotional Orientalist discourses. A montage of reactions to September
11th follow the candlelight vigil: shots of newspaper headlines declaring a “War on America,” the trashing of an electronics store in Dearborn, Michigan, the harassment of Sikhs who are mistaken for Muslims. The Khan family and those around them also struggle to deal with the profiling and slurs after September 11th, as Mandira’s salon loses business, Sam is teased mercilessly at school, and Zakir’s wife Hasina’s hijab is ripped off her. Of course, one of the most tragic outcomes of this anger is Sam’s death at the hand of school bullies, an encounter prompted in part by his best friend Reese’s own anger over the death of his father – a war reporter killed while in Afghanistan. Reese tells Sam, "You people are nobody's best friends. All you people care about is your damn jihad or whatever." By referring to Sam as “you people,”
Reese categorizes Sam as part of an imaginary, monolithic enemy he cannot fully understand, evidenced by Reese’s “or whatever.” “You people,” in this case, means you Muslim people, you who are not one of my people, you who are not part of my country. This hateful speech turns into a brief scuffle between the two, before a group of older boys standing nearby decide to pile onto
Sam. Calling him an “Osama lover,” “Osama’s son,” and a “bloody Paki,” the slurs from these bullies tie together hate and geography, assigning Sam to a group of “Others” from somewhere 74 outside the U.S., whose bodily pain and screams are of little importance. This is ironic, of course, because Sam is not Pakistani nor Muslim, further demonstrating how the ties between geography and hate rely only on one’s perceived belonging to a hated group. It is not until Sam is unconscious that the bullies realize they have gone too far, and threaten Reese to secrecy.
While the hate crime against Sam demonstrates how the complex relationship between geography and emotion produces hate between white society and minorities, it is also shown to exist within minority communities themselves, as well. As Mandira struggles to deal with Sam’s death, she takes her pain out on Khan, blaming his last name for the fact that Sam was targeted in the first place. While visiting the soccer field where Sam was beaten, Mandira repeats “[w]e killed him” softly to herself until exploding in rage at Khan: “I should never have married a
Muslim man! If Sam had been a Rathod [Hindu] he would have been alive today. He was a
Khan, so he died. He died because of you. He died because of your name.” Though both are
Indian, Mandira uses Khan’s religion to mark him as an “Other,” recalling the similar divisions in Khan’s childhood in Mumbai. The film uses the emotional pain of Mandira and Reese to illustrate how easily it can turn into hatred. Pain is, according to Ahmed, "not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history" (34, emphasis original). The hatred directed at both Sam and Khan, while in some ways personal, at the same time represents anger towards something larger. After all, Sam was not responsible for September 11th or Reese’s father’s death, and Khan’s last name was not responsible for Sam’s death. In both cases, the hatred aimed at Sam and Khan exposes how different emotions rely on sedimentations of the past, of opinions and beliefs already held about a particular group of people. Hatred circulates precisely because it is able to treat groups as homogenous. When Mandira sarcastically orders Khan to find the
President and tell him “Mr. President, my name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist,” she highlights 75 how easily the Muslim and the terrorist are conflated, as well as how such beliefs, after
September 11th, are so widespread that only significant changes in Western discourses on terrorism can change them.
The task of meeting the President is far easier said than done, as Khan quickly learns. His plan to meet President Bush is constantly thwarted, symbolizing the difficulties Muslim-
Americans have in finding a voice in the American government and mainstream political discourse. One of these telling moments takes place when Khan shows up to a "Feed Africa" fundraiser, where President Bush is scheduled as the keynote speaker. As he approaches the ticket table, the woman behind the desk skeptically looks at him. Before he can say anything, she tells him: "For dinner with the President, it's $500, you know." Though Khan immediately offers the $500, he is met with a second line of questioning: "What church are you from?" Khan is confused and the woman explains that it is a "Christians only event." Protesting, Khan points out that the poster says "it's a fundraiser for the drought in Africa," but is rebuffed: "For Christians, honey." The exchange, while highlighting the troubling intersections of class and American politics, further illustrates how religion also can be used to grant or deny others access to such power, as well. Though Khan never actually confirms his religious affiliation, his accent and skin color automatically deem him something other than Christian. Their conversation illustrates how even if President Bush stressed that the "War on Terror" was only about fighting Islamic fundamentalism, and never a fight against Islam as a whole, it nevertheless, through its colonial geography, produces a binaristic division between Christians and non-Christians, a divide no doubt further deepened by Bush's vocality about his own Christian beliefs. The result is symbolically summarized by the fact that Khan is denied entry to the event: only those with 76
"proper" Christian beliefs have access to the President, while all others, in this instance, are excluded from the body politic.
These issues of race, class, and citizenship are further articulated at Khan’s next stop in
Wilhemina, Georgia, a fictional town that becomes the film’s locus for exploring the development of new potential communities. A black, rural farming town of 204 people,
Wilhemina consists mostly of wooden shacks and a single small church where the town meets on
Sundays to pray. Marked as both poor and black, the town, when juxtaposed with Khan’s experience at “Feed Africa,” further emphasizes how class and race are both imbricated in access to political power. While the town of Wilhemina appears to be full of devout, "good" Christians that share President Bush's beliefs, the townspeople still remain on the margins, thus making clear the way that not only religion, but race and class are also determining factors in who
"belongs" to the nation and who remains on its outside. The historically marginalized African-
Americans, coupled with the newly marginalized South Asian minority in the post-9/11 landscape, becomes a way for the film to use the site of Wilhemina as a space to explore potentially new coalitions based upon a shared sense of oppression and a desire for social justice and change.
Wilhemina is important because it links together, on both the local and global levels, the emotional pain experienced by both African-Americans and South Asian Americans. After arriving in Wilhemina, Khan is taken in by the family of Mama Jenny and her son Joel. Over dinner, Khan and Jenny bond with stories of their own personal losses: For Khan, it is the loss of
Sam, and for Jenny, it is the loss of her son James, who was killed while on tour in Iraq. Khan bonds not only with Mama Jenny and Joel, but also with the town during a memorial service at the church for the soldiers killed in Iraq. At the memorial, Mama Jenny places a picture of Sam 77 in the corner of her picture of James while Khan’s voiceover narrates the gesture: “Mama Jenny has added Sameer’s name to the list of martyrs.” The use of the word martyr is interesting, not only for its obvious religious connotations (particularly after September 11th), but also for its ambiguity in this context. In what sense are both Joel, killed while on duty, and Sam, killed by a hate crime, similar in their martyrdom? It is arguably through such ambiguity that the term
“martyr” is stripped of its religious significance and used instead to imply a shared sense of sacrifice. Though both are killed for different reasons, there is a sense that for both Joel and Sam, their deaths, while tragic, can serve some greater purpose. Thus, when the church joins together at the end of the memorial to sing “We Shall Overcome” (a personal favorite of Mandira’s, the audience learns earlier in the film) there is a sense that the meaning of overcoming is twofold: overcoming one's own personal pain, and also making that pain understood by the broader
American society, much in the way the Civil Rights Movement made visible their grievances.
The song “We Shall Overcome” symbolically links the pain of those dealing with their personal losses to the broader struggle for economic and social justice. My Name is Khan reappropriates “We Shall Overcome” from a song that represents the Civil Rights Movement to one that encompasses the struggle for justice for all minorities within the U.S. The personal significance it has for Mandira – it gives her determination to deal with being a single mother in
San Francisco when her husband leaves her with no money – as well as the significance it has for
Mama Jenny, Joel, and Sam, as they all deal with their personal grief, is implicitly marked as part of the fight against the structural oppression of economic and social inequality that comes at the hands of U.S. racism and British colonialism. Such shared emotional pain offers the potential to engender a new consciousness, because, as Phillipose notes, "we can read emotions as clues about the ways that structural violence operates and shapes political subjectivities" (63-64). That 78 is, emotions can be used to help expose institutional discrimination and violence. “We Shall
Overcome” links these seemingly disparate groups of Indian Hindus, Muslims, and African-
Americans in their fight for social justice. The song resonates with members of all three groups, and through this resonance, is able to make one’s pain legible to not only people within one group, but also to groups who might otherwise appear to have little in common with each other.
For both African-Americans and Indian-Americans, there is a sense of pain and cultural trauma based in both U.S. and British-sponsored oppression. For African-Americans, this shared sense of identity and community is founded in the pain and trauma of both slavery and the failures of Reconstruction and a continued marginalization in society.2 Khan's life in Mumbai also signifies a sense of segregation -- as evidenced by the fact that his neighborhood is destroyed with no feeling of legal recourse to be had -- that recalls the trauma and pain of the
British colonization of India as well as its violent and traumatic decolonization. For both Mama
Jenny's family and Khan, these traumatic pasts echo in the present. Both are marginalized by society, with seemingly little access to the power to institute any widespread changes.
After introducing how these similarities can help form the basis for new communities, the film further juxtaposes them with the colonialist methods of bodily production and citizenship. I want to point to two moments in particular where this happens. The first is when Khan leaves
Wilhemina and heads to the University of Southern California's campus where President Bush is scheduled to speak. During his visit, Khan goes to a mosque to pray, where he overhears a fundamentalist leader, Dr. Faisal Rehman, organizing a group of his followers to carry out a terrorist attack: "I have no problems with the Christians or the Jews. In fact, I have no problem with our Hindu brothers too...I get angry only when this same grace is not reciprocated toward us
Muslims. My blood boils when Israeli Jews massacre our Palestinian brothers. Or when Hindus 79 in India cut our women and children to pieces with their swords. That's when my blood boils."
The rhetorical strength of Rehman's salvo relies on the fact that it treats these different groups as monolithic and homogenous. Hate, Ahmed notes, "cannot be found in one figure, but works to create the outline of different figures or objects of hate, a creation that crucially aligns the figures together, and constitutes them as a 'common threat'. Importantly, then, hate does not reside in a given subject or object. Hate is economic; it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement" (44). This production of the signifier is both colonialist and, to return to Gregory's geography, performative, as the signifier's strength comes from the repeated utterances of people like Dr. Rehman. The film exposes, then, how both the “War on Terror” and fundamentalist violence are two sides of the same coin, as they both rely on homogeneity to create distinctions between one group and another. Khan complicates the homogenous “Muslim” signifier when he runs out of the mosque after arguing with Dr. Rehman about his interpretation of the Qur'an and calls his sister-in-law to get the number for the FBI so he can report Dr.
Rehman's terror cell. Khan occupies a paradoxical position as both a suspect Muslim “Other” while he is at the same time the "good" and "responsible" citizen who is on the lookout for the terrorist "Other" that threatens the U.S.
Though Khan acts as the "good" citizen, his skin color and accent nonetheless render him as a potential threat, regardless of how pure his motives may be. While at the presidential rally,
Khan is standing in a crowd of people waiting to see President Bush. As the President greets the crowd, Khan yells out repeatedly "Mr. President! My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist!"
The people nearby misunderstand Khan, believing that he is instead claiming to be a terrorist, and as a result, Khan is subsequently swarmed and subdued by the Secret Service. Though the rally is chaotic enough that it is possible that Khan is simply innocently misheard, it is not 80 difficult to see that, in a predominately white crowd, Khan stands out in ways that immediately mark him suspect and makes the "terrorist" label stick more easily. Khan's arrest, subsequent imprisonment in solitary confinement, and torture is ironic, considering the previous scene in which he actually reports legitimate terrorist activity. However, much in the same way that Dr.
Rehman relies on the colonialist production of monolithic categories to produce signifiers of hate, the “War on Terror,” of which Khan is a victim, is justified by colonialist geographies of hate, as well.
The discourses on terrorism and belonging circulate, however, not only through personal, face-to-face interactions but are also reinforced through larger apparatuses such as the media.
This is seen most clearly when a couple of Indian college journalists, while standing close to
Khan as he tries to get President’ Bush’s attention and is captured, hear him more clearly. While
Khan is held indefinitely, tortured, and questioned about his non-existent connections to Al-
Qaeda, the two students, Raj and Komal review the footage and debate whether or not they should pursue the story. While Raj expresses his interest, Komal is hesitant:
Komal: Yes, but why are we after this story? Listen, Raj. This can't be our project. I don't
want to get into this Khan story. I'm scared.
Raj: Scared because he is a Khan? If he was a Khanna, you wouldn't be, right?
Komal: What do you mean?
Raj: You know what I'm saying, Komal.
The exchange between Raj and Komal highlights the tendency for Hindus and Muslims to revert back to old suspicions against each other, much in the same way that Mandira blames Khan for
Sam’s death. Had this story been about someone with the last name Khanna (a Hindu name) instead of Khan (a Muslim name), Komal would have no problems pursuing the story, as she 81 would be certain of his innocence. However, because it is about Khan, Komal appears to be hesitant in digging into the story and potentially unearthing information that confirms her suspicions that he is a terrorist. The scene highlights not only the ease with which stereotypes about Muslims are accepted unquestioningly, but also how Asians must fight against stereotyping each other.4
What becomes apparent in this hesitancy is how the sense of independence and autonomy that journalists are supposed to have is compromised by the “War on Terror” and its Manichean worldview that ultimately forces people to choose sides. Raj and Komal decide to shop around the footage to news agencies in hopes that someone will take up Khan’s story. However, no reporters appear interested in Khan’s plight. It becomes apparent that a fear of speaking out against government actions paralyzes the different news agencies, lest they be accused of sympathizing with terrorists. This is most clearly embodied in the last visit by Raj and Komal with Bobby Ahuja at the news station PBC. During their visit, Ahuja explains that his schedule is too busy to take up the story. Spying a picture on his desk of Ahuja wearing a turban, Raj inquires as to whether or not the photograph had been taken before 9/11. When Ahuja confirms that it was taken prior to 9/11, Raj responds, “They confused a Sikh for a Muslim and you changed your entire life. And here [Khan’s case], they are not even treating a Muslim like a human, and you aren’t able to change your schedule?” Raj’s question exposes the unspoken fears that are part of the decision-making process for news outlets when choosing what to investigate and cover, especially when Indians are making those decisions. For Ahuja, however, his more personal fears stem from the fact that he will be labeled unpatriotic like the other (white) newscasters that Raj and Komal approached, but, that he will also once again be targeted as an enemy of the state, as someone whose appearance and accent indicate that he does not belong. 82
However, by attempting to blend into the background and not speak out, feelings of hate circulate and cement these colonialist discourses. After meeting with Raj and Komal, Ahuja has a change of heart and leaves a message on Raj’s answering machine instructing him to watch the news the next day. The report not only brings light to Khan’s story but also problematizes the homogeneity of the term Muslim. During the report, Ahuja interviews Khan’s brother and sister- in-law, who point out the hypocrisy behind the “War on Terror” and Khan’s persecution. Zakir brings up the fact that Khan had contacted them about needing the FBI’s number to report Dr.
Rehman, concluding: “I mean, we are told to report suspicious characters, participate in protecting the country from extremists. And then when we do that, we’re just put into jail, like my brother? The question over here is not why he’s trying to meet the President. The question is what’s wrong with an ordinary citizen wanting to meet the President?” This hypocrisy points to the way the “War on Terror” operates: it enlists all citizens to protect the country’s borders through the colonial geography of “here” and “there,” but it is precisely through these geographies that justifies its surveillance and indefinite detention of some of those same citizens.
In asserting that Khan is simply an “ordinary citizen,” Zakir contests the narrow construction of citizenship under the “War on Terror,” a construction that often excludes those who are non- white and non-Christian.
The non-existent case built to justify Khan’s indefinite detention galvanizes others across the nation, signifying how it is only through a forceful rejection of catchall labels that such reductionist categories can be overcome. Khan’s story garners an outpouring of sympathy and outrage at his treatment, and upon his initial release from prison, a small group has formed to show their support. His story resonates across the country: Hasina begins to wear her hijab again; a Hindu motel owner celebrates (albeit, for moneymaking purposes) the fact that Khan was at his 83 motel and dons a sweatshirt that reads “My name is Jitesh and I am not a terrorist”; the Muslim store owner in Dearborn who is constantly verbally harassed and heckled stands up to the harasser. These are moments of empowerment and agency, where pride in one’s culture and one’s cultural traditions serves as a way to contest labels such as “terrorist” and strengthen support networks.
This celebration of community culminates with Khan second trip to Wilhemina after seeing on television that Hurricane Molly is pummeling the town. The parallels to Hurricane
Katrina are unmistakable, not only in terms of the storm, but also in terms of the fact that, like
Katrina, it is African-Americans who suffer the hurricane’s wrath the worst. Katrina, Henry
Giroux argues, shattered fantasies long held by conservatives about a colorblind society, instead graphically revealing through media coverage those who are most often excluded from government assistance: “African-Americans who occupy the poorest sections of New Orleans, those ghettoized frontier-zones created by racism coupled with economic inequality” (308). The contemporary manifestations of inequality and the exclusion from the state that define neoliberal governance in some ways resemble older, colonialist practices that push the “Other” into spaces where their suffering is invisible to the rest of society. In this sense, Wilhemina is one of
Gregory’s “imagined spaces” within the United States, a space of exclusion where unwanted bodies have been pushed to and subjugated by poverty and a lack of upward mobility. Khan’s return to Wilhemina, then, implicitly links the small Georgian town to Mumbai in the sense that both spaces are underwritten by a similar colonialist logic. The outcome of such logic is the same sense of exclusion for both the Muslims in Mumbai and the blacks in Wilhemina. The victims of
Katrina are, Giroux asserts, victims of “[g]lobal neoliberalism” who “now occupy a space shaped by authoritarian politics, the terrors inflicted by a police state, and a logic of disposability that 84 removes them from government social provisions and the discourse and privileges of citizenship” (309). The widely criticized failures of the Bush administration to properly prepare for and assist victims during Katrina is repeated in Wilhemina, as it becomes apparent that no government aid will be arriving to help the town as they struggle to survive the storm. The victims of Hurricane Molly are disposable in the same way that both the victims of Katrina were.
Their suffereing parallels the disposability of Muslim victims of the Hindu-Muslim riots in
Mumbai and Muslim victims of hate crimes after September 11th, further cementing the common trauma and violence experienced by the different communities.
While the situation in Wilhemina exposes the ways that colonialist practices continue in the present day, My Name is Khan uses this moment to explore how a shared sense of trauma and sympathy produces a new, shared sense of responsibility and empathy amongst different groups.
After word spreads that Khan is in Wilhemina assisting the town, the PBC news crew shows up to cover the disaster. As the media once again exposes this example of government negligence and malfeasance, it engenders an outpouring of support, culminating in a large swath of concerned citizens traveling to Wilhemina to help -- many of whom appear to be Muslim, Indian, or both. And as the hurricane ends and the water settles, a reporter describes what the rescue efforts have sparked: “Following the example of Wilhemina, towns are being adopted across the country. And while our military is tied up in Iraq, reconstruction of these towns has been taken on by ordinary Americans.” In the reporter’s statement is a subtle critique of the government’s skewed priorities – that while it concentrates its resources in arguably needless wars abroad, it fails to take care of its own citizens. The rescue efforts in Wilhemina symbolize the beginnings of potentially new alliances and coalitions of people, built upon a feeling of empathy and similar histories of U.S. and European-led colonialism and institutional racism. 85
The film’s ending uses the election of Barack Obama (played by Christopher B. Duncan) to mark a potential break from this institutional discrimination, as symbolically shattering traditional race-based alliances. As the President-elect tours the damage in Georgia, Khan attends a rally he holds in front of the statehouse. The moment is marked by an uncertainty as to whether or not he will meet the President (Obama is shown earlier in the film watching an interview
Khan gives after the Wilhemina rescue), and as Obama ends the rally and leaves, it appears that this will be the case. However, once word spreads that Khan is in attendance, Obama’s car turns around, and he heads back on the stage to meet Khan. After exchanging pleasantries, and upon
Khan’s surprise that Obama already knows his name, Obama recites his phrase back to him:
“Your name is Khan, and you are not a terrorist.” The fact that Obama, who himself has come to symbolize progress in U.S. race-relations, repeats Khan’s phrase back to him signifies its entry into mainstream political discourse. Moreover, the fact that Obama makes an effort to meet with
Khan further signifies a break from the inaccessibility of the Bush administration and its lack of compassion for minority citizens. Obama’s own mixed racial heritage, coupled with his recognition of Khan and Mandira’s struggles, suggests the forging of new racial alliances based on shared values of humanity that are borne out of compassion for one another. As Obama addresses the crowd one last time, Mandira, in a voiceover, reflects: “Our Khan has managed to achieve, with his love and humanity, what my hatred could never achieve.”
Mandira’s reflection, while based in the personal, can be extrapolated to a broader look at the different ways emotions are used to produce notions of citizenship and belonging. Indeed, it is emotions and “affective encounters,” Ahmed argues, "that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which 'gives' the subject an identity that is apart from others (for example, as the real victim or as the threatened nation)” (52-53). Mandira’s statement highlights how 86 emotions can “stick” to particular groups, and how the emotion of hate produces feelings of separation that not only push individuals apart, but also feed into a neoliberal production of citizenship that pushes groups apart. My Name is Khan tracks a development of community based on suffering and pain that then gives way to love, an affective bond that then brings these different communities together.
We are not past a colonial moment. My Name is Khan attempts to show how the colonial past resurfaces in the present “War on Terror.” The “imagined geographies” of “here” and
“there” in turn generates emotions and feelings that further reinforce an “us” versus “them” mentality. For diasporic Indians, these issues are no doubt even more germane, considering the
7/7 London bombings and the 2008 Mumbai attacks, both of which further reinforce the paranoia surrounding the Muslim body and the threat of the “Other” who resides within. My Name is
Khan draws parallels between the ways that both geography and emotion are intertwined, and reinforce rigid spatial boundaries and ideas about citizenship. The film, through the death of Sam and the suffering of Mandira and Khan, bears witness to a family’s personal suffering that is produced through structural violence. In bearing witness, My Name is Khan demonstrates how shared feelings of pain and empathy can produce a feeling of community with different groups that offer the potential to combat this violence. The use of pain and trauma, as seen at
Wilhemina, points to the ways that different marginalized groups that may not feel as if they have anything in common can indeed find common ground in their suffering at the hands of neoliberal governance and economic policy. To produce the sort of widespread change that offers the potential to break out of colonial binarisms, My Name is Khan posits that an emotionally literate citizenry might be the answer.
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Notes
1 For Gregory, advancements in military and visual technology have produced a new sort of Orientalist technological gaze: “Modern cartographic reason, including its electronic, mediatized extensions, relies on these high-level, disembodied abstractions to produce the illusion of an authorizing master-subject. It deploys both a discourse of objectivity – so that elevation secures the higher Truth – and a discourse of object-ness that reduces the world to a series of objects in a visual plane” (54). Essentially, even though a technovisual gaze allows us to “see” more of a foreign country, the gaze removes from view the citizens who actually live there, instead opting to capture buildings or objects deemed worthy of interest. In removing any actual human element from our vision, we are less likely to see those inhabiting the country as what Judith Butler calls “precarious lives.” 2 For more information on how slavery and the failures of Reconstruction helped form an African-American identity, see Ron Eyerman’s Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.) 3 My sincere thanks to Khani Begum for explaining this point to me.
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CHAPTER V: CONCLUSIONS
Though the films discussed in this thesis are about September 11th, they are, on a more fundamental level, about community – about finding and rebuilding it out of the chaos and trauma of 9/11. Intimately tied to this notion of community is that of memory. The process of remembering, of who and what is included and excluded in these memories, is what helps form the basis for the communities of which we consider ourselves a part. It is a process that determines how we connect to others and how, in turn, they connect to us. Jenny Edkins argues:
What we call politics takes place in the smooth, homogenous linear time of
narrative forms with origins and end points. It takes place in the context of the
nation-state, an imagined community of people with a shared history and culture
and shared values or goals. Memory and commemoration are important -- indeed
vital -- to the production and reproduction of this context (229).
Memorializing September 11th, and choosing what is to be remembered and forgotten about it, inherently reifies certain feelings of community and belonging. The United States’ official response to the attacks evacuated much of the historical context surrounding them, instead treating the event as what Lee Jarvis describes as a "temporal break." Though as I write this in
June 2012 there has been seemingly little change in Western discourses on terrorism across both the Bush and Obama administrations, it is worth noting that the process of memorial and memory is never fully sedimented. Indeed, memorialization and commemoration are ongoing sites of struggle and contestation, and as all the films in this thesis demonstrate, there are a variety of ways to remember September 11th. What is arguably one of the most vital parts in the process of remembering is that the past must not simply be relegated to the past. That is, if we 89 allow traumatic events to be placed within this "smooth, homogenous linear time" that Edkins describes, then we lose the opportunity to challenge the linear narratives of sovereign powers that ultimately benefit from burying this history. Ultimately, what is at stake in these ongoing contestation is the issue of whether or not these powers, and the inequality and oppression they produce, are going to be challenged, and if any sort of radical change can be enacted.
David Simpson wonders if such a moment to challenge the state powers has passed, however: “If so, if there was on September 12, 2001, and for some time thereafter, such a potential for the making of common cause, has it been lost forever by the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing brutalities it has perpetrated on both the enemy and the homeland?” (167). There was undoubtedly strong feeling that the trauma suffered on September 11th demanded some sort of retaliation by the United States. Most problematic in the response, however, was the Bush administration’s move (and the media’s complicity in helping them do so) to place this trauma within this smooth, linear time. The trauma of September 11th contained the potential for the
United States to ask difficult and painful questions about its own culpability in producing this violence. Instead, the attacks were simplified into a narrative of good versus evil, a narrative for which the only response could be military retaliation. What is important to think about as we consider the different possible responses the United States could have had to 9/11 is how trauma can be used to not only potentially destabilize established power structures but also how it can be used to reinforce them. The response to the trauma of September 11th – an invocation of harsher national security measures in the name of safety and protection – is not a surprising move. What is more insidious, however, are the ways in which trauma has been used to fortify state powers in ways that make it nearly impossible for a debate to be had about alternative responses to the
September 11th attacks. As Edkins has noted, trauma disrupts the “settled stories” of the state and 90 requires a cohesive, linear narrative to prevent any challenges to the state’s power. The military response to the September 11th attacks was meant to hold responsible the masterminds of the violence, and in doing so, provide closure to the American people. This exemplifies the ways in which trauma may not only provide openings for critical reflection, but may instead be used to justify a continued expansion of state powers in the name of “national security.” And if we think again about Deems D. Morrione’s description of September 11th as a “semiotic black hole,” one where the “Twin Towers have made it possible to elide discussions about due process and spying or even about extant terrorist threats,” then it does indeed appear that the moment for radical change long ago passed (162).
Film provides an interesting opportunity to study how trauma affects notions of community, as well as how these cultural narratives are disseminated to wide populations around the world. Much in the way that September 11th was, for practically the entire world, an event experienced either through footage shown on the television or downloaded from the Internet, film is uniquely positioned to aestheticize an event whose raw footage had been repeated ad nauseum. Film must, then, obviously deal with how to visually memorialize such a traumatic event. Similarly to how some footage from the attacks was censored by the media (footage of people falling to their deaths was taken off air), films struggle in their own ways to decide what can and cannot be shown, as well as how best or most tastefully approach 9/11. Though both film and literature struggle with how to represent what is otherwise unrepresentable, there is something particularly interesting about how film must accomplish such a task. As mentioned in the introduction, the amount of responses to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers that invoked comparisons to special effects in films points to the fact that film helps structure our understanding and interpretation of the world in a unique way. 91
In this thesis, I have attempted to show how the varied filmic responses to September 11th continue to provide thoughts on how we may go about enacting change out of the trauma of 9/11, even if the moment for such radical change seems to be far in the rearview mirror. While the films appear to be all rather distinct in nature – Hollywood films, a Bollywood film, short films from various countries – they are all concerned with learning what September 11th can teach us about ourselves and how we relate to others. As Chapter One demonstrated, the Hollywood films
World Trade Center and United 93 are narrowly focused on September 11th. They both celebrate the heroics of American citizens (who are even more narrowly defined as predominantly white and Christian), and in doing so, ultimately justify the U.S.’s “War on Terror” and further reinforce the binary of “us” and “them,” as well as the binaries of freedom and democracy versus religious fundamentalism. Both Hollywood films discussed in this thesis rely on a similar theme of simplification that tries to direct the pain and trauma of September 11th toward the Middle
Eastern Other who threatens our everyday lives and routines. In World Trade Center, this is accomplished by attempting to return a sense of normalcy to the family unit that is otherwise potentially fractured as a result of 9/11. In United 93, though its ending does not attempt to provide the same sense of closure as does World Trade Center, the film nonetheless posits a clear distinction between victim and aggressor, ultimately simplifying the process of assigning blame and victimhood.
Alain Brigand’s 11”09’01, as I discussed in Chapter Two, uses the omnibus genre in order to complicate the process of delineating an “us” and “them,” as well as a “here” and
“there.” Moreover, the omnibus genre rejects the linear narratives seen in United 93 and World
Trade Center by providing the viewer with a variety of perspectives. In doing so, Brigand’s work ultimately demonstrates that there exists no fully encompassing, objective truth about September 92
11th. Instead, the films themselves, along with the space and time motif seen in the DVD menu and in the transitions between the different shorts highlights how there is no tidy way to distinguish between the simple binaries of good and evil or freedom and terrorism. 11”09’01 attempts to capture the globalized, interconnected nature of our relationships with each other, and in doing so, highlights how we exist in a global community that cannot be separated by monolithic terms such as East and West, or North and South. Though World Trade Center and
United 93 try to sustain the boundaries between us and them, the films in 11”09’01 demonstrate how quickly such distinctions fall apart. The group of eleven films show not only the varied responses that exist to September 11th (again muddying the claim that one can only either be on the side of the United States or with “the terrorists”), but also provide crucial context and perspectives to the complex events that helped produce the attacks. The three types of films examined in the set – those that aestheticize, historicize, and deconstruct the “War on Terror” – all attempt to place September 11th within different contexts that allow it to be more fully examined in a critical light. The films destabilize the monolithic signifier that is “9/11” by placing it within a broader context of Western state-sponsored terrorism, as is seen in Ken
Loach’s short film, or how Western global capitalism produces violence against innocents in other parts of the world in ways similar to the violence on September 11th, as Samira
Makhmalbaf shows us.
Like 11”09’01, My Name is Khan, as we saw in Chapter Four, also attempts to complicate the notion of who belongs and who is excluded from the national imaginary. In connecting Khan’s life as a Muslim growing up in post-Partition India to his experiences in a post-9/11 America, the film makes a clear connection between the British colonialism involved in India’s partition and the U.S. “War on Terror” in order to show how both operate on similar 93 colonialist and imperialist logic. More than doing this, however, My Name is Khan posits a way out of such logic by recognizing how minority groups – specifically, in this case, Asians and
African-Americans – suffer at the hands of Western white elites who benefit from the continued economic and social oppression of these groups. The film uses the traumatic pasts of enslaved
African-Americans and Indians living in post-Partition India to show how both groups’ pasts are part of a larger history of Western oppression. In doing so, the film shows that a mutual recognition of how such traumatic pasts can produce new communal arrangements that offer the potential to fight against those who have vested interests in the status quo. The film uses (then)
President-elect Barack Obama as a potent symbol of these new alliances. Though at the time I write this, President Obama has arguably done little more than reinforce the status quo, the film’s point nevertheless stands. It is only through a wider recognition of how the neoliberal state continually reproduces structural oppression in order to maintain its hegemony that we can fight for a more equal and just society.
After the release of United 93 and World Trade Center, there has been a peculiar dearth of films that directly address 9/11. This is due in part, I would argue, to the shift in focus toward the war in Iraq, as evidenced by films such as The Hurt Locker (2008) and The Messenger (2009) both of which address the war in Iraq without addressing the ways in which September 11th is imbricated in it. The films instead focus on the traumatic tolls war takes on soldiers and their families, evacuating the political in favor of the personal. While such a perspective is necessary to explore, it calls into question exactly why these stories continue to be told while critiques of the U.S. response to September 11th seems to be more broadly avoided. Though a lack of temporal distance from the attacks could easily be cited as one reason, there exists, I would argue, space to further explore this issue and examine other potential underlying causes. 94
Director Michael Winterbottom’s film Road to Guantanamo (2006), a docudrama about the “Tipton Three,” is an example of a film about the problematic Western response to
September 11th that was both critically acclaimed and commercially unsuccessful. In many ways,
I believe, Road to Guantanamo captures the struggle of politically controversial films on 9/11 to remain a financially viable product. This, then, raises inherent questions as to why films such as
Winterbottom’s struggle while the appetite for more apolitical films such as United 93 and World
Trade Center have been more commercially successful. Though such issues are outside the scope of this thesis, they are worthy of further exploration. What are the potential reasons for the lack of interest in films such as Winterbottom’s? How can postcolonial and trauma theory be useful in exploring this lack? There is more work to be done as well in exploring how the political economy of Hollywood and films about 9/11 intersect. What are the broader implications for a culture that seems so disinterested in delving into such an important event? How do large, commercial industries such as Hollywood constrain our ability to produce critical, reflective films on difficult issues such as September 11th?
The intersections between postcolonial theory and trauma theory thus offer the potential to explore such questions and also continue to further explore the devastating effects of oppression and subjugation of (Western) global capitalism. Postcolonial theory’s Marxist roots and its desire to recover the voices lost to colonialism and imperialism allow us to more thoroughly interrogate the multitude of causes behind September 11th, as well as critique the U.S.
“War on Terror” and its imperialist roots. Trauma theory in part allows us to understand how the violence of September 11th engendered a crisis of community in the United States, and how the rebuilding of communities and the attempt to understand what it means to be an American after
September 11th influenced mainstream Western discourses on terrorism. Furthermore, trauma 95 theory not only helps us explore the Western response to September 11th, but also more fully understand what Slavoj Žižek refers to as “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (Violence 2). In other words, we are more fully able to examine how the violence and oppression of others that sustains Western hegemony is experienced by non-Western bodies, and also how such responses to this oppression manifest in literature and film. By combining postcolonial theory and trauma theory, then, we can develop more textured readings of film and literature that help us to continually break down the boundaries between self and other that are sustained by the “War on Terror.”
It is the job of theory to investigate these issues and to provide critiques that offer the potential for contesting the established power structures that produce such violence in the first place. Theory, as Simpson argues, “offers an important alternative understanding, outside the neoliberal consensus, of what may be entailed in moral vigilance and moral action” (128).
Postcolonial theory and trauma theory not only rescues the voices of those who have been silenced, but also provides important insights into how we can understand the imperialist logic behind the West’s response to terrorism, and how such logic is built into our everyday lives, so much so that it often appears as unexceptional and unworthy of reflection. For example, what
David Gregory refers to as “vanishing points,” sites like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay that are “non-places for non-people,” appeared as logical extensions of the U.S.’s efforts to combat terrorism (“Vanishing Points” 10). These sites obviously did not appear out of thin air, but instead are produced through a “state of emergency” that was justified by September 11th and allowed the Bush administration to disregard the rule of law concerning imprisonment and torture. Indeed, camps such as Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib are inherently justified as being preemptive strikes against future acts of terrorism. They are the outcome of colonial and 96 imperialist logic that is so ingrained in the Western psyche that there has been relatively little outcry by the general public in regards to indefinite detention. These camps mask their violence by insisting that they only detain suspects who threaten a Western way of life. We see further attempts in the U.S.’s attempts to shield citizens from the real effects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the same way that the public is denied encounters with dead American soldiers, as well as the ways in which combat has been outsourced to private sector contractors and robots that make it even more difficult to ascertain both the financial and human costs of the wars. It is the role of theory, then, to attempt to unmask how these power structures operate and how we can contest the narratives that justify such imperialist violence.
Finding a new common ground amongst the different, seemingly disparate groups of people throughout the world is one of the ways that this can be accomplished. The forging of alliances between such groups offers the potential to contest problematic Western grand narratives. By rewriting Western history in ways that acknowledge the struggles and oppression of its minority groups, the potential for a new sense of ethics emerges. In Precarious Life, Judith
Butler asks: “Is there a way that we might struggle for autonomy in many spheres, yet also consider the demands that are imposed upon us by living in a world of beings who are, by definition, physically dependent on one another, physically vulnerable to one another?” (27).
Butler’s question is of vital importance. As nations continue to invoke “national security” as justification for increased surveillance and suppression of human rights, the notion of what constitutes a “terrorist” – a slippery term to begin with – becomes increasingly necessary to interrogate. It is only by continuing to operate on the baseless assumptions that those who practice Islam, those who have brown skin and certain accents, pose potential threats that we only reproduce the same sorts of conditions that justify the abuse of human rights across the 97 world. To some degree, we are all at risk of finding ourselves as the “Other,” of being engulfed within a shadowy national security system that operates with near impunity. And as long as the colonial logic of the “War on Terror” goes unquestioned, there remains the possibility that any of us, no matter how safe and privileged we feel, may vanish into the shadows.
98
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