THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’ AND AMERICAN FILM 9/11 Frames per Second Terence McSweeney McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 3 27/05/2014 10:57 Dedicated to Olga © Terence McSweeney, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12.5pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9309-2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9310-8 (webready PDF) The right of Terence McSweeney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 4 27/05/2014 10:57 CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1. The Lives of Others: Vulnerability in Post- 9/11 American Cinema 32 2. Boots on the Ground: The New Millennial Combat Film as Cultural Artefact 59 3. ‘Masters of our own Security’: Redemption through Violence in the Post- 9/11 Action Genre 81 4. Turning to the Dark Side: Challenging American Mythology in the Superhero Genre 111 5. Remaking 9/11: Imagining the Unimaginable in the Alien- invasion Film 135 6. Decade of the Dead: Zombie Films as Allegory of National Trauma 157 7. The Rise and Fall of Empires: The ‘War on Terror’ as Allegorical Moment in Historical Film 175 McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 5 27/05/2014 10:57 THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’ AND AMERICAN FILM Conclusion 199 Bibliography 210 Select Filmography 231 Index 239 vi McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 6 27/05/2014 10:57 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1 The construction of the World Trade Center seen in The French Connection 7 Figure 2 The reason why the tragic images of 9/11 seemed ‘just like a movie’ 7 Figure 3 The actual images of the destruction of the Twin Towers felt like some special effect conjured up at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) 8 Figure 4 Tom Hanks as the ‘falling man’ in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 13 Figure 5 While it appears to offer an ideologically neutral perspective on the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker envisions the conflict as a distinctly humanitarian enterprise 13 Figure 6 Man of Steel was one of many films to re- enact the collapse of the Twin Towers 17 Figure 7 Distraught crowds fleeing the wall of dust after the collapse of the World Trade Center 18 Figure 8 The face of the West in Zero Dark Thirty 45 Figure 9 Constructing a heroic mythology for the new millennium in United 93 50 Figure 10 Act of Valour reduces complicated geo- political issues to a shooting gallery reminiscent of a video game 65 Figure 11 Sargeant James in The Hurt Locker returns home 71 vii McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 7 27/05/2014 10:57 THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’ AND AMERICAN FILM Figure 12 Rambo: the iconic figure of American masculinity and military prowess in the 1980s re- emerges in the post- 9/11 decade 92 Figure 13 The reconfiguration of an icon inCasino Royale 100 Figure 14 The ever- mobile Jason Bourne in The Bourne Ultimatum 106 Figure 15 ‘The things that worry us these days’: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight 121 Figure 16 The extent of the destruction at the site of the World Trade Center 121 Figure 17 Marvel Avengers Assemble attempts to mediate the changed perception of America between World War Two and the post- 9/11 era 132 Figure 18 Remaking 9/11: War of the Worlds 143 Figure 19 Perhaps the most potent synecdochal image of the war on terror being brought into the homes of ‘normal’ Americans 145 Figure 20 Is Cloverfield a reincarnation of a B- movie monster, a cynical manipulation of traumatic imagery, or a film that provides audiences with an opportunity to experience and deconstruct 9/11? 151 Figure 21 George Romero still proves himself to be a ‘radical critic of American culture’ in Land of the Dead 167 Figure 22 The spectre of 9/11 haunts the frames of the post- apocalyptic I am Legend 170 Figure 23 Reconsolidating fears of a monstrous and sexually deviant Muslim Other in 300 187 Figure 24 One of the central Master Symbols of American history is portrayed in The Alamo 193 Figures 25 Roland Emmerich made White House Down in an and 26 attempt to ‘move on’ from the trauma of 9/11 201 Figure 27 Pacific Rim reveals that 9/11 and the war on terror remained of significant interest to filmmakers and public alike 204 Figure 28 An aerial view of Ground Zero taken in the days after 9/11 205 Figures 29 Adam & Steve (2005): before and after 9/11 208 and 30 viii McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 8 27/05/2014 10:57 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A book of this size and scope would not have been possible without the help and support of a large number of people. I would like to thank the staff and students at Southampton Solent University for their support and encourage- ment, in particular Donna Peberdy, who has always been there for me, not just in this project, but throughout my career. I would also like to give credit to the staff at the British Film Institute Reuben Library and the often uncelebrated role they play in the formation of manuscripts like this one. I consider myself fortunate to have been a part of the team at Edinburgh University Press (EUP) that includes Gillian Leslie, Jenny Peebles and many others. I would also like to thank several members of my family: my mother, who has always been a constant source of support; my father, who introduced me to film; and my two beloved sons, Harrison and Wyatt, who continue to help me rediscover film. Thank you also to my nephew, Lewis McSweeney-Terry, for his insights into a generation now very far removed from my own. Above all, my loving and always patient wife and proofreader, Olga McSweeney, who is the inspiration for so much that I do and who knows her way around commas better than anyone else I know. ix McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 9 27/05/2014 10:57 McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 10 27/05/2014 10:57 INTRODUCTION The films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other artistic media. What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions – those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film While the precise definition of post- traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] is contested, most descriptions generally agree that there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts, or behav- iours stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the events. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory Every history really is two histories. There is the history of what actually happened, and there is the history of the perception of what happened. The first kind of history focuses on the facts and figures; the second concentrates on the images and words that define the framework within which these facts and figures make sense. W. L. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror. The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present 1 McSWEENEY PRINT.indd 1 27/05/2014 10:57 THE ‘WAR ON TERROR’ AND AMERICAN FILM Just forty- eight hours after two hijacked jet airliners struck the World Trade Center (WTC) on 11 September 2001, the trailer for Sam Raimi’s upcoming Spider- Man (2002) was hurriedly withdrawn from cinemas all across America. The short teaser, shot exclusively for marketing purposes and not consisting of scenes meant for inclusion in the final film, had shown the perpetrators of a smoothly orchestrated bank robbery fleeing in a helicopter. They fly through the skies over New York until their celebrations are abruptly brought to halt, as somehow they become suspended precariously in mid- air, high above the city streets below. As the camera slowly pulls back, it reveals that they are actu- ally caught in a giant spider’s web, trapped between the imposing Twin Towers still dominating the Manhattan skyline. Not only was the trailer removed, but all of the film’s posters in which the World Trade Center could be seen reflected in Spider- Man’s eyes were also recalled. The distributor, Sony Pictures Entertainment, released a press statement, asserting, Due to the devastating events that took place yesterday [11 September 2001] and out of respect for those involved, Sony Pictures Entertainment is requesting that all Spider- Man teaser posters and trailers be taken down and returned to the studio. Our profound sympathy goes out to the friends and families of those who have lost loved ones in this tragedy. (Sony Pictures Entertainment cited in Grossberg 2001) The removal of the trailer for Spider- Man proved to be the opening shot in a protracted cultural battleground that continued throughout the post-9/11 decade and beyond. In the years that followed, American cinema had a distinctly problematic relationship with the traumatic events of 11 September 2001. As we will see, 9/11 was paradoxically both erased from the cinema screens and returned to in film after film.