The enthusiasm and predictions in the early 2000s that multicultural actors like Vin Diesel would soon unseat Hollywood’s white male crimefighter has yet to come to pass. Rather than sustain a new trend, Diesel , along with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, now 52 and 47, respectively, remain exceptions, with few younger versions of themselves waiting in the wings. They both have enjoyed enormous success, and Diesel , in particular, able to reap incredible financial benefit from the Fast and Furious franchise, begun in 2001 and now comprising eight films, with a ninth due out in 2020.1 The same can be said of the XXX films, with Diesel now owning the collective rights to the franchise.2
Diesel opted out of the 2005 sequel, XXX: State of the Union (2005), which starred rapper Ice Cube as Darius Stone that performed poorly at the box office, some attributing its failure to the absence of Diesel and/or Ice Cube’s limited appeal.3 Diesel returned to the franchise in 2017 with XXX: The Return of Xander Cage —the character lured back from his self-imposed exile to help rein in diabolical forces inside the nation’s intelligence services. Indicative of the new normal, the film features a corrupt CIA director as the ideal homegrown enemy. After all, in addition to 24 and Homeland leaving the impression that the agency is awash in uber-traitors, another CIA operative of the era, Jason Bourne , was forced to stay on the run to hide from his former employer (out to contain or kill him) in that franchise’s five films.
Audiences have been increasingly conditioned to suspect not only governmental and political bureaucracies, but also other social institutions—any entity slow to act versus Hollywood’s best action heroes . As Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence assert, “Careful deliberation, knowledge of law, and mastery of book learning are usually presented in monomythic materials as indicators of impotence or corruption.”4 While American audiences may interpret the rogue “outsider” as the epitome of individuality and autonomy, international audiences (often responsible for the lion’s share of the earnings for the above franchises) may “read” these films as confirmation of long-held suspicions about American behaviors.
Since these homegrown enemies are usually in league with the foreign threat of the moment, for most of the past two decades that has been represented by a Muslim or Middle Eastern terrorist . What happens, then, when those identities are woven into the American crimefighter on screen? Besides prompting intense cognitive dissonance, it also engages a reaction similar to what impacts African American crimefighters discussed earlier; to have existed in American and Hollywood history for so long as the deviant Other in need of arrest, it seems challenging to then trust a black crimefighter to vanquish the nation’s Others. An American crimefighter with identities linked to the Middle East or Islam triggers similar suspicions about his or her ability to represent a nation that so often perceives him or her as the national security threat most in need of containment or eradication. Such an outcome occurred in 24, just one of numerous examples among Hollywood stories, in which CTU analyst Nadia Yassir was immediately suspected of being a mole given her Arabic last name—an impression exploited by a hacker who left clues on her computer to trigger such a reflexive response.
Arabs, Persians, and Muslims as Crimefighter Heroes
As 9/11 fades further into the collective memory, Hollywood storytellers have gradually introduced what Rolf Halse terms “counter-stereotype s” and Evelyn Alsultany describes as “simplified complex representations.” Both terms describe the attempt to create “good” characters to counter-balance the terrorist stereotype . Such characters, though, often lack dimensionality and merely become the “difference that makes no difference.”5 Such supporting characters in crime stories range from a victim of a hate crime that warrants police action or a refugee struggling to adjust, as in Homeland , but included in the other numerous films and TV shows under review. Such characters, though, are merely presented as further opportunities for the normative hero to right a wrong, but which still relegates the Other to the margins in his or her own conflict. Alsultany asserts that even positive representations meant to offset historically harmful ones—from the orientalist exotic to the prevailing terrorist—can produce meanings that often maintain the continuance of exclusion.6 As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note, such a representation of the Other “leads to the treatment of complex political issues as if they were matters of individual ethics.”7 That translates into either the “model minority ” serving as an exemplar who rises above harrowing circumstances or the heroic efforts of a crimefighting hero to ameliorate the Other ’s suffering, with either scenario doing little to disturb the larger social or political burden.
There are profound differences of how Muslims practice their faith—as varied as there are interpretations of Christianity or Judaism. Similarly, the Middle East is a vast region of diverse cultures once ensconced in the blanket and pejorative descriptor of “the Orient.” Any discussion here is not meant to compound its use as a one-size-fits-all descriptor of such characters in Hollywood history but to understand why it is so often used as a convenient shorthand. Too few American viewers may know that Iranians are not Arabs or that not all Arabs are Muslims .8 Such prevailing reductionism was made worse in the wake of President Trump ’s 2017 executive order, dubbed the “travel ban,” for people entering the United States from seven Muslim -majority countries.9 Trump referenced the 9/11 attacks in part as justification even though none of the hijackers came from the listed countries; moreover, more contemporary threats such as ISIS exist in the countries that he exempted (arguably for political and/or business reasons).10
One notable exception to the track record of such one-dimensional portraits appeared in The Siege , the 1998 film briefly discussed earlier, featuring a Middle-Eastern FBI agent who had to contend with the frightening reality of a modern-day internment camp for people of Middle Eastern backgrounds. Like Agent Frank Haddad (portrayed by the Lebanese American actor, Tony Shaloub ), the majority of those interned were American citizens but whose loyalties had come under suspicion. Haddad ’s dilemma of having to straddle two cultures is evident in two key scenes. One involves an exchange between him and a Middle Eastern prisoner, a suspected terrorist, who calls Haddad a “woman” (meant as an insult) for shirking his “duty” to his people, to which Haddad fires back, “Someday, I’ll tell you what your people did to my village.”11
The second scene involves Haddad ’s rage after learning that his son has been put into the camp, confronting his boss: “My wife told them who I was. How many times did I put [my life] on the line,” referring to his service to the nation. “We’re American citizens … [yet] they knocked her down, they took him out of my home!”12 Vowing to stay inside the camp with his son, he refuses his boss’s request to come back to work, noting defiantly, “This is where I belong,” adding that he refuses to be the bureau’s “sand nigger” any longer.13 Later, when circumstances change, he proves himself to be a dutiful cop who helps combat the nation’s “foreign” enemies, along with an overzealous American major general.
In the immediate political climate following 9/11, the idea of a repeat performance of an American crimefighter who is Arab, Muslim , or with any link to the Middle East became even harder to imagine. Hollywood was so resistant that it seemed reminiscent of the darkest days of McCarthyism , when fear drove studios to blacklist writers, directors, and producers without much proof other than the mere suggestion of a communist affiliation , usually from frightened others who “named names.”14 However, more recently, several shows have begun to feature a handful of Middle Eastern or Muslim crimefighter s, as in Quantico , briefly discussed in Chap. 6. NCIS: New Orleans added an Iranian (or Persian) character to the cast.
Another notable series featuring such a character is FBI , which CBS launched in 2018 and is still in production. Omar Adom “OA” Zidan , portrayed by Zeeko Zaki , is a Muslim agent whose family emigrated from Egypt—a fact that replicates the actor’s own biography. His partner is also a rarity, the white female, Maggie Bell (Missy Peregrym ), although Bell and Zidan remain rather thinly developed characters, owing more to the show’s creator, Dick Wolf , whose track record includes Law & Order and several other similar TV procedurals that emphasize crime’s prosecution more than three-dimensional characters. Bell is supposedly a grieving widow and a competent agent, while Zidan is known to have previously spent two years as an undercover agent with the DEA but now warned, “you’re no longer undercover tracking terrorists making your own rules.”15 He is also particularly eager to show how serious he is about catching criminals, especially if they are Muslim , as in episode two when he aggressively hunts down a terrorist who recruits vulnerable female teens through social media, with Zidan complaining that he sees his faith too often “weaponized.”16
The actor portraying Zidan argues that the mere existence of a high-profile Muslim crimefighter on a hit TV series is making a real difference. Zaki was in the sixth grade when 9/11 happened and endured the usual backlash experienced by other Muslim Americans , which he countered by being a “model Muslim .” Once an actor, he auditioned for the usual array of terrorist roles, knowing that most “protagonists have been written as primarily white, straight, cisgender men,” which he says left him out. After Zaki was sent the script for the FBI pilot by his manager, who suspected they were looking for a Latino actor, Zaki auditioned and won the role. The character was revamped, Egyptian Arabic was woven into the dialogue along with references to a wise grandfather back in Egypt. Zaki asserts that the “broken practice” of not including enough non-normative characters would be greatly improved “by having more diverse writers,” along with “greater imagination and risk from talent reps, casting agents, directors, producers and studio executives to change their conception of what lead actors look like.”17
The Looming Tower Looks Back (and Forward)
Another more expansive view of a Muslim crimefighter was showcased in The Looming Tower , an original production from Hulu in 2018.18 The 10-episode series—based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Lawrence Wright (also a co-producer of the series)—prominently features the FBI agent , Ali Soufan (briefly included in Chap. 8), as portrayed by Tahir Rahim , a French actor of Algerian descent. More than a buddy or a token Other without impact, Soufan is essential to the narrative. The series recounts the failure of the CIA to share information that Soufan , among others, could have used to piece together the al Qaeda plot, perhaps preventing the 9/11 attacks. Soufan’s FBI boss and mentor is John O’Neill , portrayed in the series by Jeff Daniels ; O’Neill is killed on 9/11 just after leaving the FBI to take over security for the World Trade Center. Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard ) is supposedly a composite character, although multiple sources claim he is the real-life CIA officer , Michael Scheuer .19 Scheuer is also married to the CIA official, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky , often dubbed the “Queen of Torture,”20 apparently the model for Diane Marsh (Wrenn Schmidt), who continues to communicate with Schmidt even after he is removed from his post.21 At times Schmidt and Marsh serve as much as the series’ antagonists as the terrorists, and replicate many of the behaviors detailed in the 9/11 commission’s findings about CIA culpability.
FBI Agent Ali Soufan (Tahir Rahim) hunting down suspected terrorists. Screen shot from The Looming Tower, Hulu
In the series Soufan forcefully argues for an expanded role in other investigations, given his understanding of Arabic and the cultural environment that might foster al Qaeda loyalty. Early scenes depict Soufan ’s tepid relationship with his Lebanese culture and Muslim faith, as he expresses surprise at seeing his sister now wearing a hijab; he also is romancing a Caucasian special education teacher rather than the Lebanese nursing student his mother would prefer. As the series progresses, Soufan begins praying at mosques while abroad and being increasingly disturbed by what he perceives (at a London mosque) as a lecture about turning outward to rid the world of impurities. While 24 and Homeland embraced a dismissive portrait of Islam as a whole, Soufan strives to balance the religion’s inherent goodness with its perversion by extremists; it is similar to Klansman dishonoring Christianity when they burn crosses before perpetrating violence against African Americans.
When Soufan is shown confronting Abu Jandal , a Yemeni member of al Qaeda , he exposes the fact that many jihadists have never even read the Koran . Soufan then brings his own copy and reads passages to Jandal , including one that instructs how the taking of an innocent life is akin to killing mankind. The readings eventually move Jandal , who begins to cry and agrees to cooperate, subsequently providing vital information. In this manner, such characters are also able to educate viewers about their “difference,” and in Soufan ’s case, one that is not only vital to thwarting threats to national security, but also that embrace him as a crimefighting hero who risked his life in the line of duty. Soufan embodies that rare commodity in Hollywood of being both the Other and an American patriot.
As series’ producer Dan Futterman notes, “The prospect of making a show about a Muslim-American hero —a teenage immigrant from Lebanon who probably these days would have a hard time getting into the country and who is one of the most patriotic people that I know—was irresistible to me.”23 The Jewish Futterman admits to being captivated by how “Soufan was working so hard to rescue his religion from people who are hijacking it.”24 Soufan , also one of the series’ producers, calls it a “public service.”25 While Soufan ’s inclusion represents a step forward in representations of the Middle Eastern or Muslim Other, several critics argue that the series also wipes out much of the deeper perspective of Wright’s book. The series moves away from the book’s primary focus on who planned the attacks, which also meant omitting “decades of Arab history,” and shifts the focus to the American intelligence officials who failed to stop them.26
White Males Still Take the Lead
Despite the small steps forward that the above portrayals might represent, let alone the experiments and pioneering efforts of dozens of black, brown, and female crimefighter characters covered in this book, the white male remains the enduring titan of most Hollywood storytelling, especially in roles as cops, agents, spies, and other enforcers—before and after 9/11. This is particularly true of shows on broadcast/network television, which is most susceptible among delivery systems to having to meet the popular demands of mainstream audiences and achieve consistent ratings to stay “on the air.” As such, there is a tendency to continually repeat a winning formula from the past, especially among the proliferation of cop dramas and spy sages that dominate Hollywood storytelling, regardless of platform.
Reboots abound to provide familiar characterizations with vaguely updated conflicts or cosmetic, contemporary makeovers. The Sipowicz character from NYPD Blue , discussed in Chap. 3, is being revived for late 2019 with a reboot that features the original’s son, Theo (Fabien Frankel ), trying to earn his detective shield by solving his father’s murder. Theo Sipowicz will reportedly be another “hard-drinking, hard-headed and quick-witted cop.” Another familiar face—the white male half of the hit series Castle —Nathan Fillion is starring in another Dick Wolf series on CBS, The Rookie , with Fillion as a character who uses a mid-life crisis to reinvent himself as an LAPD cop .
Dick Wolf is also responsible for the show, Chicago PD , which premiered on NBC in 2014 and is still in production. It features a Dirty Harry knockoff as its central character, Hank Voigt (Jason Beghe ), who dispenses the familiar brand of street justice —no longer as a temporary solution but his go-to methodology —perhaps an apt fit in a post-Bauer universe, along with its particular performance of white masculinity . Voigt has a ready-made cage in the bowels of the precinct where he frequently beats up suspects to yield confessions, rarely showing any other interrogation skill beyond intimidation and brute force. Unlike the “ticking time bomb” trope that drove Bauer to extremes or the inner demons that informed the action of Shades of Blue ’s Wozniak , Voigt is pure reaction; a paper cut-out of a thug with a badge. As in the season three finale, after Voigt hunts down his son’s killer, he has the killer dig his own grave—and despite urgent pleas from a colleague to stop—he sends her away, shoots the killer, and buries him in the freshly dug ground. Rather than Voigt charged with murder after the body is discovered, another colleague takes the blame (and is later killed in prison, the secret lost with him). The show is one of the network’s major hit series, which testifies to its ability to satisfy many viewers’ cathartic need for vengeance at the expense of justice. Given the Chicago setting, Voigt ’s use of violence to fix a city whose South Side is overrun with gang violence seems contradictory and gratuitously exploitive. Rather than show any background or context that might include grinding poverty, systemic racism , or the nation’s failed War on Drugs —themes investigated in the HBO series, The Wire , discussed below—Chicago PD falls short of even Bauer ’s formula. While Bauer behaved badly chasing down terrorists, Voigt is shown punishing street criminals who anger him or intrude on his turf, with little “policing” in defense of the larger society or nation.
Another long-running franchise that continues the reign of white male protagonists is NCIS , which stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service .27 The original version was launched on CBS in 2004 and is now in its sixteenth season (having reached 350 episodes). Mark Harmon (also the show’s executive producer) is Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs —a post-9/11 character and a former Marine sharpshooter. In its premiere episode, meant to introduce the characters and the show’s style, Gibbs takes charge, overruling a Secret Service agent aboard Air Force One and hiding a body from FBI agents (who call Gibbs and his crew “cowboys”), as the FBI is wrongly convinced the deadly poisoning is a terrorist act by al Qaeda .
The first spin-off was NCIS: Los Angeles (2009-present), with “G” Callen, the senior (white) agent played by Chris O’Donnell paired with his black partner, Sam Hanna (LL Cool J ). Yet another spin-off, NCIS: New Orleans (2013-present), showcases Dwayne Pride (Scott Bakula ), who is frequently in the crosshairs of bosses who regularly disapprove of his rogue methods. As mentioned above, this show recently added a Middle Eastern agent , Hannah Khoury (Necar Zadegan ), but whose “difference” has been largely unexplored or lived up to the show’s initial advertising of her as “a seasoned agent who specialized in international counter-intelligence.”28 If anything, she has thus far been depicted as a nurturing figure to match Pride ’s role as the crew’s mentor and father figure. Capturing the spirit of the rogue’s approach, Pride congratulates an agent’s first time in the field, telling Sebastian Lund (Ron Kerkovich ), “I’m proud of you, Sebastian … you risked your life to save others [and] I heard you even threatened to go a little rogue.” Sebastian takes that as a compliment, noting, “Guess that means I’m finally becoming a real agent!”29
Another long-running show, Blue Bloods , debuting in 2010 and now in its ninth season, attests to the staying power of its “comforting” portrait of the Reagans , a multigenerational Irish police family.30 The show’s main star is Tom Selleck as Frank Reagan , a wise, benevolent potentate of a police commissioner, who keeps a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt on his wall for inspiration—fittingly as Roosevelt created the office of commissioner as one of his last acts as New York’s governor. The show also features his father, also a former commissioner, along with his crimefighting offspring. The youngest son, Jamie Reagan (Will Estes ) is a uniformed Ivy-Leaguer who chose to don a blue uniform than practice law, and who often plays the supporting cast member to the foregrounded battles between his sister, Erin Reagan Boyle (Bridget Moynahan ), a rising star of an assistant district attorney, and their frequently rogue detective brother, Det. Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg), who prefers street justice over adhering to the rules. Like most other rogues, he often dominates the show’s emotional core and most plot trajectories.
Pay Cable and Quality TV Experiments
After Homicide: Life on the Street , the critically acclaimed show from the 1990s covered in Chap. 6, no show has garnered more praise for its honest and multifaceted depiction of big city crime than The Wire —launched by HBO in 2002 and ending in 2008. The show used each season to investigate a particular aspect of the social and political ills that victimize Baltimore , especially its hardest hit populations, along with spotlighting the failure of the institutions that exist to contain or correct such problems. While subsequent seasons explored troubles from broken schools to inefficient city government, the first season was devoted to the workings of a handful of police characters pitted against an entrenched, organized drug-dealing network ravaging the city’s west side. Novel for a crime series, the cops’ time is split between the street and their desks, pouring over tedious paperwork necessary for wire taps and warrants, which remains an essential element of actual police work. Its lead character is a troubled, divorced Irish homicide detective, James McNulty (Dominic West ), who is familiar yet more complicated than his brethren still populating most broadcast and pay cable TV crime shows. Moreover, McNulty is also surrounded by people who better reflect the contemporary realties of an urban police department , with African American bosses whose characterizations are developed beyond mere tokenism.
The series included a black-white buddy team, but its white cowboy is evenly matched with a more savvy and smarter black partner—both throwbacks to their kick-ass ancestors but whose methods often do more harm than good. The team’s apparent leader is a street-wise and methodical black female, Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn ), whose agency is not tempered by the usual gendered limitations, and her lesbian relationship is shown to be a source of love and support instead of previous representations’ portrait of deviance . She and her cohorts are allowed the occasional rogue act, as in one scene in which they pummel a particularly noxious drug dealer who spewed enough vile epithets at them, pushing push them beyond their usual restraint.
The Wire also showed the layers of urban neglect and bureaucratic corruption as constant, while a few tenacious and dysfunctional cops who, as McNulty admits, love their jobs despite the personal costs, wanting to do the right thing through small, tactical moments rather than grand (and often hollow) gestures. Even the show’s drug dealers are nuanced and varied, from young, compromised teens who could be engineers or doctors if circumstances were different; they are shown being lured to dealing drugs for the steady flow of cash, but which does little to change their circumstances—not living long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labor. One mid-level drug dealer is shown sneaking off to a college microeconomics class to better himself, while another street dealer is glimpsed taking care of neighborhood kids and helping them do their homework—as much victims of the interlocking systems of racism , poverty, as the cops are hamstrung by budgetary problems. Unlike most network crime shows, though, The Wire provided no catharsis for good toppling evil and included enough characters of color to reorient what constitutes the normative perspective, making space for “difference” that could challenge the white gaze amid a battered environment equally disturbing to both cop and criminal alike.
The series was created by David Simon , a former police reporter, and Ed Burns , a former homicide detective. Simon has been described as an “authenticity freak” who insisted the show be shot on location in Baltimore , along with using non-actors to heighten the sense of realism .31 Such an approach was not meant to fetishize the city’s decay for a white knight to clean up, but to provide an unvarnished portrait of cops and criminals locked in a dark and frustrating stalemate. As Laura Miller and Rebecca Traister note, the show “indulges in neither sentimentality nor moral goading.”32 Although one of the most critically acclaimed shows on American television, they concluded that it was “not very American,” as “American culture is a perpetual pep talk, trafficking in tales of personal redemption and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. We don’t do doom.”33 Such a conclusion may help explain why the series, although an immense critical success, had limited mainstream appeal .
A series for network TV that tried to imitate The Wire was Southland of the early 2010s and briefly discussed in Chap. 5 with Regina King’s feisty female detective . The show also featured three white male colleagues that were familiar but with some complicating twists. The well-heeled Ben Sherman (Ben McKenzie ) joined the LAPD to make a difference but gradually becomes the most jaded and corrupt; John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz ) becomes addicted to painkillers and tries to keep his gay identity under wraps; and Sammy Bryant (Shawn Hatosy ) is a cop torn between his conscience and lawlessness as an approach to the mean streets. The show struggled to find a home and consistent audiences, abruptly canceled by NBC prior to the airing of its second season, then picked up by basic cable’s TNT Network from 2010 through 2013.34
Continuing the experiments begun by HBO in the 2010s, platforms known primarily as delivery systems to house or stream previously released content were increasingly creating original content. Netflix ’s Narcos and Hulu ’s The Looming Tower attest to such experiments in more complicated characters and less predictable storylines. Amazon too is currently offering its version of a more complex LAPD detective with its original production, Bosch , an adaptation of the detective fiction of Michael Connelly , who also serves as the series’ scriptwriter. Harry Bosch ’s biography sets him apart from most detectives as the son of a prostitute who was brutally killed, and which left him struggling in the foster care system. Executive producer Henrik Bastin describes Bosch , portrayed by Titus Welliver , as having had the darkest of childhoods. “As he grows up and becomes a man, Harry could have become a criminal [but] he chose to go toward the light and save other people,” relentlessly pursuing justice for all types of victims, including those society often discounts or discards. Welliver describes his character as a “hunter” who “plays to his own drum”—the epitome of the lone wolf . Connelly , who created the character also describes him as a “warrior,” but also acknowledges that he must also be a rogue, noting, “There’s a noble bargain to police work. It’s very hard to play by all the rules and still get your man,” or so it seems in Hollywood.
And the Jacks Keep Coming
Three years after the series 24 concluded in 2014, a new version premiered, 24: Legacy, but proved less successful without Bauer in the lead role. The new show featured an African American hero, Sgt. Eric Carter (Corey Hawkins ), an Army Ranger whose unit killed a terrorist leader , forcing him and the other rangers to assume new identities to protect them from retaliation by al Qaeda . In the series Carter joins forces with CTU’s former director Rebecca Ingram (Miranda Otto ) to prevent another imminent terrorist attack on US soil. The show was abruptly canceled, however, with one reviewer suggesting the political mood had shifted and the show’s premise no longer relevant. The timing of the original 24 in the fall of 2001 was more in tune with a nation that had just experienced 9/11, but by early 2017 when the sequel aired, viewers were perhaps still digesting Trump ’s provocative week-old travel ban. “A nation once united by fear is now sharply divided, with a least half the country ardently opposed to any ‘Muslim ban,’” and “its implied links between Muslims and terrorism.”35 As of mid-2018, though, several former producers from both the 24 and Homeland were reportedly working on a new “prequel” that is intended to showcase the adventures of a young Bauer just starting his career; although the politics have changed, the show’s original white hero is apparently still worthy of resurrection after all.36
Another iconic white rogue who demonstrates persistent staying power is John McClane , with the 2013 version of Die Hard ending with the phrase, “it’s hard to kill a McClane.”37 Nearly a dozen years after the third sequel, McClane, still embodied by Bruce Willis , returned in Live Free or Die Hard in 2007. This version focuses on cyber warfare, or “virtual” terrorism, as described by the hacker, Matt Farrell (Justin Long ), who becomes McClane’s nerdy sidekick and the love interest of McClane’s daughter. The plot pivots on a former defense department programmer who tried to sound the alarm about the nation’s vulnerability to the 9/11 attacks, claiming that after he threatened to go public, the defense department tried to destroy him. In the end, McClane and Farrell stop the homegrown terrorist , with action sequences more than a coherent plot dominating the story.
Box office was strong enough to bring McClane back in 2013 for Good Day to Die Hard , which makes references to his endurance as an “American cowboy,” now in Russia to support his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney ) who is on trial there. The son is actually a covert CIA agent working on “a matter of national security,” which he and his father then tackle together, vanquishing a handful of double-crossing Russian scientists and greedy oligarchs. The fifth sequel is currently in production, announced in late 2018 with the title of McClane,38 and with its storyline set to bounce back and forth between a present day McClane and his younger self.
Another popular Jack belongs to Tom Cruise , as in the title character from the 2012 film, Jack Reacher . It tells the story of an ex-military cop whose help is enlisted by a Pittsburgh homicide detective to help track down a former military sniper who has already killed five random targets. The film’s character is the brainchild of British novelist Lee Child , who has written 23 novels in the Reacher series—the films having been adapted from two additional short stories.39 The sequel, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016), is about Reacher helping Army Major Susan Turner (Colby Smulders ), who is framed for treason by a government conspiracy that prompts them to work together to exonerate both of them as fugitives of the law. As one reviewer notes, “Reacher is one of those enigmatic, borderline mystical types who surface out of the haze to handle villainy with boundless intelligence, weapons mastery and annihilating violence.”40 Much of the mystery about Reacher is rooted in his nomadic existence—he has ho home, family, job, or even a change of clothes, as he literally “rides off in a white T-shirt,” working odd jobs until the next dark crisis needs his special skills. As John Lanchester explains, Reacher “fights on behalf of the good,” but his penchant for violence brings him “very close to being a bad guy.”41 For the purposes of this book, however, Reacher , being totally detached from any formal law enforcement or government agency, is more akin to The Equalizer films or Ray Donovan (the Showtime series), who are professional “fixers” and “clean-up” crews—more mercenary than dispatched agent as an extension of nation.42
The success of the first Reacher film could also be attributed to its timing, released in the wake of Cruise ’s box office hit, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), the fourth film in the Mission Impossible franchise, with Cruise as Ethan Hunt. There have been six films to date with two in the works slated for 2021 and 2022 premiers, respectively.43 The first film, Mission Impossible (1996), picked up the basic premise of the original television series, which ran from 1966 through 1973; the film transforms the independent spy agency known as the Impossible Missions Force into a US government entity. In Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), the unit is disbanded, given its “total disregard for protocol” and unorthodox methods. After US and British intelligence agencies are rife with the usual cadre of self-serving bureaucrats and traitors, Hunt and his crew must destroy the Syndicate—an experiment set up by an MI6 chief that went terribly wrong, with an ex-agent now after billions to fund a global “terrorist superpower.” The former CIA director, first trying to contain Hunt , then after being promoted to IMF boss, warns Hunt in the next installment, Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018), not to “go rogue” again.
Jack Ryan: The CIA’s Captain America
Another influential and enduring screen Jack is Tom Clancy ’s quintessential Cold War hero, Jack Ryan, who has also been described as “an enduring feature in American culture .”44 Like Reacher , Ryan too is adapted for the screen from best-selling novels. Ryan’s screen debut was in The Hunt for Red October (1990) with the same director as Die Hard and with Alec Baldwin in the lead role, having to grapple with a dangerous threat that the US Navy must repel. But only Ryan grasps the truth: that a Soviet submarine commander is not trying to unleash missiles at US targets but to defect and bring his advanced submarine with him.
Patriot Games followed in 1992 with Harrison Ford as Ryan, an ex-CIA analyst now working as a professor, but drawn back into service to help stop IRA attacks on the British royal family as well as his own. Ford starred again as Ryan In Clear and Present Danger (1994), but now as the acting CIA director who gets embroiled in a secret (and illegal) paramilitary operation to take down a Colombian drug cartel (a thinly veiled Medellín ). Ryan’s efforts also expose a conspiracy involving a greedy businessman, a treacherous national security adviser, a duplicitous CIA underboss, and a president who tries to cover it all up. Ryan defies the president and vows to testify about what he knows before the Senate oversight committee.
In Sum of All Fears (2002) Ben Affleck is Ryan but made young again, this time battling to stop neo-Nazis from detonating a nuclear bomb at the Super Bowl that would provoke a war between the United States and a post-Soviet Russia. The last feature-length film was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) with Chris Pine as the character whose biography is completely rewritten to move beyond Clancy ’s Cold War roots. This time he is a financial genius who completes his doctorate in economics at the age of 19 before joining the Marines after 9/11, later injured in Afghanistan. He then joins the CIA as an analyst, soon uncovering a nefarious plot by a Russian oligarch to engineer a run on US banks that would plunge the nation into economic chaos.
An updated Jack Ryan with John Krasinski as the venerable cultural hero in the 2018 production from Amazon Video. Screen shot from the official trailer
In all his incarnations, there are some elements of Ryan’s characterization that remain intact. This new Ryan maintains the character’s trusted moral standards, being accused by a former Wall Street colleague of being a “self-righteous boy scout.” Even his boss, James Greer (Wendell Pierce ), chides Ryan for his earnestness and “merit badges.” Ryan balks at Greer ’s sidestepping the rules to “borrow” Suleiman’s phone from collected evidence, as Greer instructs, “Sometimes you got to break a few rules just to get the job done.” Ryan, though, like Hollywood crimefighters before him, is not above breaking the rules but for reasons he considers worthy, as in sweet-talking a colleague into freezing Suleiman’s bank accounts against Greer ’s orders. On another occasion Ryan ignores another order to shut down online communication with Suleiman, as Ryan is convinced it is better to string him along.
Ryan is shown to have learned empathy that had been missing from most CIA characters of the past, first to show compassion for refugees and victims caught in the crossfire. While Bauer tortured detainees, Ryan leaves such tasks to others, remaining unsullied by such malicious behaviors. While at a detention center in Yemen, Ryan hears whimpering from a prisoner on the other side of a steel door he passes in the hall but tries not to notice. When he has his first chance to interrogate his own detainee, whom he thinks is a mere bodyguard (but later turns out to be Suleiman), Ryan congenially shares his meal with his subject. Shadowing Ryan throughout the first season, however, is the more familiar CIA “interrogator,” Matice (John Hoogenakker ), a gritty Texan who dons a shemagh instead of a cowboy hat and is the one to kidnap, interrogate, and kill on the nation’s behalf, putting a bullet in one of the last co-conspirators in the season finale.
The first season also ends with Ryan eschewing a promotion to replace Greer who is headed to Moscow as deputy station chief. Ryan had already proved to be no careerist, having already walked away from a lucrative Wall Street career to dedicate his life to serving his country. He aptly eschews this type of ambition, which has proven time and again to be an unattractive quality for any American everyman hero. In the season finale, he considers accepting the plane ticket left by Greer to join him in Moscow, which also sets up season two (due to premier in late 2019). Greer may be Ryan’s boss, but he is also his screen “buddy .” Compared to Ryan’s idealism, Greer is a cynical, wise-cracking, former station chief who is not happy to be back at Langley. Greer tries his best to contain Ryan’s exuberance; although a brilliant analyst, Ryan is much too eager to share his theories and bypass agency protocols. Greer , though, is on hand to also help Ryan transition from nerdy desk jockey to the story’s action hero .
A novel aspect of Greer ’s character is his conversion to Islam, which he initially did for his ex-wife but now slowly reconnecting with his faith, including to pray over the dead body of a suicide bomber who nearly killed him and Ryan. The two men bond by eventually divulging their closely held secrets. Greer ’s is rooted in Karachi where he stabbed and killed a Pakistani army official who was threatening to imprison him, the fallout having sent him home to head up Ryan’s group of fellow analysts—quite a comedown for a man of action. Ryan’s secret dates back to when he was a Marine in Afghanistan, having befriended a local orphan whom he included in an evacuation flight out of the village; once on board the helicopter, though, the boy pulled a pin out of a grenade, killing all the Marines on board except Ryan.46
A more complicated subplot involves the French police, as they chase Suleiman’s brother to his childhood home in Paris. One officer complains to Greer that France cannot keep absorbing Muslims into their society, as they are taking over his country “from the inside,” which prompts Greer to conspicuously get out his prayer beads. The implication is that the French are struggling with change, while Greer is an African American male who has overcome racism to become an officer in the CIA and a recent convert to Islam—another American able to adapt and reinvent himself. Spending time with Ryan is the French police captain, Sandrine Arnaud (Marie-Josée Croze ), who explains that her country has an entire generation of Muslims with no jobs and no prospects, with Ryan wondering out loud how the educated Suleiman would choose such a dark path. She reminds Ryan that a piece of paper does not change how Muslims , despite being French citizens, are viewed in France as the Other . In America, she says, one can be an African and an American; or she adds, a Mexican American , Italian American, or Chinese American. “In France, there are no hyphenates, you are either French or not,” she explains.47 Both of these French views—the xenophobic and the empathetic—capture prevailing sentiments in France, but the deeper legacy of France’s colonization of Muslim North Africa is rendered here in a reductionist shorthand that only exists to set up the American context as progressive by contrast.48 Greer and Ryan not only have short memories, but also as highly individuated characters bear no culpability for their nation’s othering ; in this way, they are able to service as avatars for America’s best intentions.
Moreover, rather than a post-racial universe, those hyphenated American identities Arnaud lists are laden with hidden hierarchies of inequities, which her character, as a foreign observer, is set up to admire from the outside. But Ryan and Greer pretending not to know better is meant to advance the notion of America as a united front, when the inconvenient truth tells a different story. While some of the ethnicities Arnaud mentions have been absorbed into the mainstream, as discussed in Chap. 6, rendering obsolete the need for a hyphenated identity (other than for the sake of cultural pride), others have not, with a hyphenated difference often assigned to them to mark them as the Other .
Finally, Ryan is that everyman who knows better and senses more than his superiors. After a Sarin gas attack in France, the American defense secretary concludes that it does not directly threaten the United States, thus, dismisses any action. Engaging another common trope of unfeeling bureaucrats versus intuitive and righteous foot soldiers like Ryan, he argues, “This is not a French problem, this is a world problem.”
What Jack is Telling America (and the World)
The original Clancy creation presented as a national savior was not lost on Reagan ,49 and 35 years later, the new series remains similarly invested in American exceptionalism . As a reviewer for The Atlantic notes, Ryan remains “a Cold War fantasy,” adding, “If Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American way, Jack Ryan stands for capitalism, the family unit, and a strong skepticism when it comes to politicians of any stripe.”50 Similarly, presented as a “clash of civilizations ,” another reviewer criticizes the show’s refusal to “challenge the narrative of noble American involvement and intervention abroad.”51 Arguably, the show includes several moments that both affirm and contest such assumptions. As Marouf A. Hasian noted about Maya in Zero Dark Thirty , this Ryan series is similarly “ideologically sutured together as a vehicle for American exceptionalism .”52
Ryan remains as beloved as McClane and as durable as Bauer , but with more profound connections to the nation’s best intentions and what it thinks it should be. McClane was its most casual defender, the hapless everyman cop—a revamped Adam for a New World —an American hero his European (and Old World) foe seriously underestimated. Bauer on the other hand, was a character that matched the trauma of 9/11 for many Americans, acting on behalf of a wounded nation out for revenge, mired in paranoia about us versus them, and often forsaking the long-standing goals of openness and a vow to progress. While Bauer was the American crimefighter on the edge of ruin, the new Ryan is here to make him likeable again by returning to his rightful roots and recovery of innocence—if not for the CIA, then for the agent who represents the nation’s best intentions and that forgives its worst mistakes. A dangerous world still threatens the homeland and the globe, but the 2018 Ryan seeks to regain his senses and return to posing as the reluctant defender who patrols the world answering cries for help or helping without doing harm, at least not on purpose. Like classical Hollywood figures, the Amazon version is a throwback, but also a step forward. In always looking to the next frontier, Ryan walks a path embodied by similar American heroes dating back centuries, and as always individuals severed from context.
The familiarity of these characters who adapt to changing domestic pressures and shifting geopolitics is what Hasian called a Foucauldian “effective truth, a constitutive nationalist ‘truth.’”53 Although Hasian was describing Maya , the concept can be applied to rogue crimefighters dating back to Dirty Harry, who already walked a well-worn path first established and expanded by the hundreds of frontier heroes and reckless cowboys who came before him. It is a reassuring, looping narrative that affirms the nation’s ideals, but also a story devoid of documented history or alternative remembrances. In the end, and despite Ryan’s perfect blending of a soldier’s scars, a scholar’s doctorate, and a patriot’s dedication to duty, he represents only what America wants projected to the world. It is unfortunate that this latest makeover does not re-engineer Ryan to use his moral courage and intelligence to interrogate and learn from a much more complicated and checkered past.
Superheroes for a Superpower
If mere mortal crimefighters ever fail to guard the nation, then a slew of American superheroes are increasingly available to do the job. Given their enhanced powers, though, which defy the American everyman approach baked into the redeemable rogue character, most are beyond the scope of this book, except for one: Captain America. Like a Jack Ryan with a shield, his alter ego, Steve Rogers , was an everyman before he was a superhero—the personification of a globocop whom borders cannot contain; he is ever polite when he has to hurt someone and a defensive player who avoids being belligerent. Captain America was engineered to be a super soldier by genetically modifying the scrawny and very human Steve Rogers into a secret weapon to be used against the Axis powers during World War II . He was armed with super strength and an invisible shield—emblazoned with a white star surrounded by white and blue rings that protects his body and doubles as a lethal projectile.
By the 1950s he was redrawn again within the comic book universe to battle the communist-inspired Red Skull. Although the continuity of his character in the confusing maze of the Marvel universe is complicated and also beyond the scope of this book, aspects of his history are undeniably linked to the other more human crimefighters under study here. Moreover, unlike Superman or Mickey Mouse who remain unchanged by design, never growing old or out of style, Captain America is ever reimagined to tackle the latest threat to America—now the incessant and uncontained War on Terror . Similar to ordinary American crimefighters, Steve Rogers /Captain America too is a reluctant hero , never an aggressor or bully looking for a fight, but ever-responsive to pleas for justice and ready to fight on behalf of those vulnerable others.
In Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), the story traces the creation of the character (portrayed by Chris Evans ) and his service in World War II , which ended when his plane crashed, leaving him in frozen animation until found and transported to a modern-day New York. At the film’s close, he is greeted by the director of the superspy agency54 that soon puts him back to work saving the world. In Captain America: Civil War (2016), he joins a band of other superheroes, only this time rather than the obedient soldier, Captain America goes rogue. Some of the Avengers’ missions have righted wrongs but also killed innocents and left a wake of destruction. As a “group of US-based, enhanced individuals who routinely ignore sovereign borders,” warns US Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt ), they must be put under greater supervision and agree to an accord that will determine when their services will be dispatched.55 As Ross explains to them, they are certainly owed an “unpayable debt” for risking their lives to rid the world of threats, but while some see them as heroes, “there are some who would prefer the word vigilantes .”56 Tony Stark /Ironman (Robert Downey , Jr.) thinks the Avengers should be reined in, “if we’re boundaryless, we’re no better than the bad guys.”57 Rogers /Captain America boldly disagrees, claiming the United Nations is run by people with agendas, and agendas change. “We may not be perfect, but the safest hand is still our own,” he concludes.58 In this way, Rogers /Captain America echoes the decades-long debate among American politicians, with “America first” sympathizers accusing the UN of fostering a global government that could supersede or impair US directives. On the other hand, the UN was built on American soil, and established the United States as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council with impressive powers (and a track record) that attest to its hegemony .59
Captain America (Chris Evans) leading the Avengers in battle. Screen shot from the 2011 official trailer for Captain America: First Avenger from Marvel Entertainment
Many scholars have studied Captain America and whether he still adheres to the blind patriotism that inspired his creation in the 1940s, or if he has evolved into a superhero who simply hates bullies. As the above 2016 film implies: he dislikes politicians, ignores bureaucrats, and acts at his discretion, convinced he knows what is best for the nation, and by extension, the world—much like every other American rogue crimefighter under review in this book. J. Richard Stevens asserts that Captain America “has been reborn each time to epitomize an updated sense of patriotism, American society and power.”60
Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence see a more comprehensive relationship, one less reflective of a prevailing zeitgeist and more didactic and consequential. Along with other popular culture titans, Captain America is representative of a type of “American civil religion,” which is capable of inculcating Americans and the nation’s allies (those who accept the concept of America as “leader of the free world”) into absorbing American priorities. What they call the “Captain American complex,” includes “employing nondemocratic means to achieve democratic ends,”61 and those ends are being accomplished by someone who must “transcend the legal order.”62
Moreover, as Jewett and Lawrence assert, “like the gods, they are permanent outsiders to the human community.”63 Working off Joseph Campbell’s archetype analysis of world mythology , the authors see the roots of this new monomyth of American popular culture dating back to the nineteenth century cowboys. They also point out that a previous hero such as Superman or the Lone Ranger traditionally apprehends his miscreant then “delivers the evildoers to the police rather than killing them or dishing out his own punishment.”64 Similar to Jewett and Lawrence’s warning that the monomyth’s escalating distrust of those entrusted with power, my book argues that the American rogue crimefighter is frequently the judge, jury, and executioner, as government and other institutional leaders are increasingly suspect, as are legal or scientific experts, to name a few, with extensive training and verified experience. The effect is similar to what Jewett and Lawrence warn about the system’s unraveling if further erosion to democratic processes continues—and whether perpetrated by superheroes, globocops or US presidents.
The example of Jack Ryan above, however, shows a retreat from such a fatal trajectory as a matter of self-preservation—a purposeful correction within the hegemonic process. Bauer risked going one step too far, while a new Ryan is back to restore the reliability and moral compass of the white knight who can obscure the regenerative violence so coded into the DNA of the rogue crimefighter . To that end, his white, male privilege and embodiment of a nation can maintain its dominion by once again hiding in plain sight. Just as Ryan denies being anything more than an analyst, the US foreign (and domestic) policy he represents can continue claiming to be only about benevolent policing on behalf of the national and global greater good.
The Last Rogue Standing
Thus, for better or worse, Hollywood’s rogue crimefighter continues to be perceived as the nation’s “fictional” guardian, protecting the invented collective, or to borrow Anthony Giddens ’s phrase, the “bordered power-container” with “demarcated boundaries … sanctioned by law,” which confers on cops and other authority figures the control over “the means of internal and external violence.”65 In an ever-volatile world of strained geopolitics and the failure of the nation-building experiments related to the Bush Doctrine, America’s rogue crimefighter continues to be dispatched to sketch out new lines in the sand, especially in the Middle East, where the so-called “clash of civilizations ”66 is most evident. Carl Boss and Tom Pollard draw a similar conclusion, noting that with the lack of an ambitious state propaganda apparatus, popular culture often does the heavy-lifting, embracing what they call “military virtues” and transmitting them “not only through movies but TV and video games,” which are “today more deeply entrenched in American society.”67
The existence of a “rogue” mentality within a wider national context has not gone unnoticed by a variety of authors, commentators, and Hollywood storytellers, which keep churning out rogues or that seize on the currency of the “rogue” label, as in Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation or Rogue One: A Star Wars Story another. In Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions , the former Reagan administration economist, Clyde Prescowitz , argues that the nation’s rogue behavior after 9/11 undermined its image as the global “good guy,” with its roots in “our mythology and the dominance of our culture,” which he dubs a “peculiar … brand of ‘soft imperialism.’”68 Law professor Karen J. Greenberg , author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State , sounds a similar alarm about American overreach. Still others warn about the nation’s reliance on go-it-alone scenarios that they believe threatens rather than ensures the global peace—a mindset that undergirds American popular culture , which in turn informs and influences political rhetoric and behavior, as this book has stressed.
Collectively, they are worried about a system gone increasingly rogue and one now in the hands of a president routinely described as a rogue himself. Trump boasts of his status as an outsider to government, although he is not the first to leverage this popular approach to running for office. It remains a particularly curious and uniquely American strategy for seeking the government’s highest-ranking job: to claim to want to be part of government (at its highest level) while denigrating its very existence or utility; even to boast that one has no interest, no expertise, and no experience in government to prove to American voters how ideally suited one is for the job. While Trump certainly is indicative of many themes examined in this book, it is not any one president or popular culture icon that is the issue. Rather, it is the accumulation of the myths and their deployment on behalf of American hegemony that is the more perennial and pernicious problem. Having these tools in the hands of the current president, in part a popular culture invention as a reality TV star,69 only makes the problem more patently obvious, but it is by no means eradicated once Trump is no longer in office.
It is the uncritical acceptance of and preference for rogues as the epitome of an effective American agent—on and off screen—who must forsake the system to make the system work that is most disturbing. Such a contradiction reveals a schism long baked into the nation’s operating philosophy and first noticed by foreign visitors as far back as Tocqueville to current international heads of state. Whatever the next turn, the white rogue crimefighter seems likely to endure, given this book’s chronicle of how difficult it is for challengers to disturb his dominion. As long as he can, he will remain an influential and myth-soaked figure who is best able to capture the strains and moral fog of America’s best (and worst) intentions, and whose end goal is to preserve and extend the nation’s fabled “exceptionalism,” at home and abroad.