Reflections Upon the War on Terror in British and American Screen Science Fiction
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HAOL, Núm. 22 (Primavera, 2010), 117-124 ISSN 1696-2060 EXTRAORDINARY RENDITIONS: REFLECTIONS UPON THE WAR ON TERROR IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN SCREEN SCIENCE FICTION Alec Charles University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected] Recibido: 25 Abril 2010 / Revisado: 10 Mayo 2010 / Aceptado: 13 Mayo 2010 / Publicación Online: 15 Junio 2010 Abstract: As the Cold War influenced forty Solaris (1972) as their response to Stanley years of screen science fiction, so the shadow of Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) in a celluloid version of 9/11 informs popular science fiction in the early the space race. Today, Hollywood imagineers twenty-first century. The destruction of New feature on the payroll of the Pentagon, and even York has recurred in such films as The Day Osama Bin Laden (known to be a fan of popular After Tomorrow, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds American culture)1 appears to have raided and I Am Legend. Like The Invasion, the latter American blockbusters for his ideas: indeed he pair reinvent Cold War fables – Invasion of the specifically seems to have been inspired in his Body Snatchers, War of the Worlds and The apocalyptic plotting by Tom Clancy’s Debt of Omega Man – for the neoconservative age, Honour – a story in which a terrorist crashes a while 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Jericho civilian airliner into the U.S. Capitol Building in and the remade Survivors witness a resurgence Washington, DC.2 in post-apocalyptic concerns redolent of Day of the Triffids. While Star Trek: Enterprise turned Slavoj Žižek has written of the events of 11 its franchise’s traditional liberalism into an September 2001 as cinematic in their exercise in jingoistic paranoia, Battlestar spectacular nature3 and Bin Laden’s particular Galactica (another restored relic of the Cold debt to Clancy was acknowledged by CNN War) has presented a much more ambiguous and when, on 11 September 2001, the news station problematic vision of democracy’s battle with chose to interview the novelist as part of its fundamentalism. The reimagined Doctor Who coverage of the attacks on the World Trade and Heroes have advanced similar arguments Center. As Michael Gove wrote in The Times on against the totalizing pseudo-utopianism of the 12 September 2001: “the scenario of a Tom crusader or the jihadist and in favour of the Clancy thriller or Spielberg blockbuster was establishment of a pluralist consensus. now unfolding live on the world’s television Keywords: 9/11, screen science fiction, Doctor screens.”4 Indeed the relationship between Who, post-apocalyptic concerns, jingoistic screen fantasy and the events of 9/11 was paranoia. underlined, in the most extraordinary way, by ______________________ the debut episode of Chris Carter’s X-Files spin- off, The Lone Gunmen which, in March 2001, 1. CLASHES OF CIVILIZATIONS, WARS had depicted a terrorist attempt to fly a hijacked OF WORLDS airliner into the World Trade Center. olitical situations have often advertently Just as history echoes science fiction, there has paralleled and exploited those of fantasy been a similarly strong reciprocal trend for Pspace. Both John F. Kennedy and Ronald science fiction to reflect contemporary historical Reagan recognized the power of ‘science situations. As far back as H.G. Wells’s The War fiction’ concepts (from NASA to SDI) as of the Worlds (1898) we have witnessed science rallying cries during the Cold War – just as the fiction’s expressions of urgent geopolitical angst Soviet authorities launched Andrei Tarkovsky’s – in this case, concerns over the sustainability of © Historia Actual Online 2010 117 Extraordinary Renditions Alec Charles imperial hegemony: “The Tasmanians … were century the resistance in occupied Iraq.10 entirely swept out of existence in a war of Spielberg’s film is one of several recent extermination waged by European immigrants blockbusters which present the al-Qaeda attacks … Are we such apostles of mercy as to and the War on Terror as the defining topics of complain if the Martians warred in the same twenty-first century screen science fiction. Like spirit?”5 The Day After Tomorrow (2004), I Am Legend (2007) and Cloverfield (2008), Spielberg’s War Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of The of the Worlds depicts the destruction of the War of the Worlds famously revisited Wells’s postmodern American metropolis. Cloverfield is narrative to play upon contemporary anxieties particularly striking for the way in which its about the imminence of world war, while Byron visual style (exclusively performed through the Haskin’s screen version of 1953 saw Los lens of a hand-held camcorder) recalls the shaky Angeles devastated in an enactment of prevalent news footage of 11 September 2001. fears of Soviet invasion and nuclear holocaust. Half a century on, with its ravaged cities, Other films focus on the reactionary crashed jets and underground alien terror cells, transformation of American society since 11 Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) September. Set in Washington DC, Oliver has updated Haskin’s Cold War allegory as a Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion (2007) revises the fable of the War on Terror. anti-Communist politics of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to The scope of Spielberg’s adaptation recalls imagine western pluralism transformed into a Wells’s insight that “this isn’t a war … It was fundamentalist Utopia by forces which are at never a war, any more than there’s a war once alien and insidious: a world in which the between men and ants.”6 This is of course the violence of Iraq and Darfur are unknown – in reality of contemporary conflict: the current which “there is no other”– and in which situation is one in which, as Tumber and therefore “humans cease to be human.” Webster suggest, “militarily the USA is beyond challenge.”7 This sense of disequilibrium has Even Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the been palpable since the collapse of the Soviet Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) draws superpower in the early 1990s – and indeed timely parallels between McCarthyism and since the first Gulf War (1990-91), a conflict contemporary American paranoia; Chris which, according to Jean Baudrillard, was “won Carter’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008) in advance … We will never know what an makes a related point when it self-consciously American taking part with a chance of being juxtaposes images of George W. Bush and J. beaten would have been like.”8 More recently, Edgar Hoover – while James McTeigue’s V for Aijaz Ahmad’s depiction of the War on Terror Vendetta (2006) envisages the Orwellian has advanced uncanny echoes of Wells’s tyranny of a post-War-on-Terror Britain. interplanetary war: “Such is the asymmetry of power in our time: those who rule the universe Even superhero flicks have examined America’s shall be victorious against … the most wretched continuing moral crisis, most obviously the of the earth.” 9 unambiguous depiction of the arms industry’s exploitation of the War on Terror in Jon Spielberg’s humans start off as the victims of a Favreau’s Iron Man (2008). Heralded by a surprise terror attack (like the people of New poster displaying a burning city skyscraper, York in September 2001) but they end up as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) casualties of an invasion by forces whose advances a similarly problematic perspective technological superiority mirrors the upon the crusade against an uncompromising overwhelming military imbalance which and irrational terrorism in its representation of characterizes the War on Terror – and thus come the twilit Utopia of the vigilante – a state of to resemble the citizens (and insurgents) of Iraq. emergency in which civil rights are suspended What goes around comes around: the imperial and one which, the film finally emphasizes, power becomes politically equivalent to its must not be allowed to solidify into a new world former Tasmanian subject. Indeed when in order. Meanwhile, the opening of another comic Wells’s original novel a shell-shocked book adaptation, Tim Story’s Rise of the Silver artilleryman envisages a mode of underground Surfer (2007), sees an alien strike cause an guerrilla warfare against the alien invaders, the aircraft to crash into a Manhattan skyscraper. scenario uncannily anticipates by more than a The film goes on to critique extreme rendition: 118 © Historia Actual Online 2010 Alec Charles Extraordinary Renditions the torture of a terror suspect by U.S. agents at to read the 9/11 catastrophe as a blessing in an isolated military base. Perhaps most disguise ... This utopian perspective is one of the problematically, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen undercurrents that sustain our fascination with presents an alternative history, a dystopian and disaster movies: it is as if our societies need a apocalyptic vision of unending war and major catastrophe in order to resuscitate the America’s remorseless struggle towards global spirit of community solidarity.”13 Jameson and hegemony. Žižek’s interpretations expose a post- catastrophic utopianism which we might also 2. RECONSTRUCTIONISM observe in Tony Blair’s declaration on 2 October 2001: “The kaleidoscope has been These films invoke apocalyptic concerns that shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will have lain dormant since the end of the Cold settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this War. Similar anxieties are discernible in the world around us.” CBS television series Jericho (2006-2008) and in the BBC’s Spooks: Code 9 (2008) – both set Blair’s geopolitical opportunism anticipates the in the wake of nuclear terror attacks. While denouement of the Hollywood adaptation of Spooks: Code 9 witnesses the obliteration of Douglas Adams’s The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to London, Jericho addresses the aftermath of what the Galaxy (2005) which flourishes a utopian it dubs “the largest terrorist attack in the history Earth built to replace the planet obliterated by of the world” – the nuclear devastation of the Vogon demolition fleet.