Conspiracy

This chapter explores a range of films – including political documentaries, web-based conspiracy films and big-budget Hollywood thrillers – that seek to reveal a more complex reality to be found by resisting, refusing and digging through the officially endorsed accounts of 9/11 described in the last chapter. This response can be understood as an extension of the critical and questioning perspectives found in the films described in chapter one. The chapter also indicates how, when faced with no outlet or opening in the wider culture, such a response became inward looking, suspicious, browbeaten and paranoid. As always, cultural production is here understood to be part of wider processes of ideological struggle, with different groups, aligned with different political perspectives, striving to determine or contest reality. As with chapters one and two, which depicted parallel responses to 9/11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, ideological struggle from 2003 through to mid-decade is traced in relation to critical left-liberal documentaries and the unruly political consciousness-raising of the conspiracy films (chapter three) vying with and provoking a cinema of conservative reaction and reassurance (chapter four).

One the most profound and enduring responses to 9/11 has been the introduction of legislation on an almost unprecedented scale. Only a week after 9/11, George W. Bush was granted power by Congress to ‘use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks’ (see Prince 2009: 174). Six weeks later, Congress passed the United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (or PATRIOT Act), which set up or re-engineered a number of federal organisations, tasking them to prevent future attacks. Further legislation followed in November 2002, with the passing of the Homeland Security Act and the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, an evocatively named umbrella organisation designed to gather federal agencies together, improve lines of communication between them, and extend their jurisdiction and power in order to ‘protect our homeland and safeguard our rights’ (see Etzioni 2004: 1). The act allowed government agencies such as the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance and detain suspects without charges or due process, as well as permitting the monitoring of credit card transactions, mobile phone calls and web activity. In January 2003, ‘the White House described these changes as “the most significant transformation of the United States Government since 1947”, the year the USA National Security Act created the CIA’ (Kaplan 2008: 15). Supported by the majority of Americans, and with the war in Afghanistan dominating the front pages of newspapers, the clandestine, quasi-legal and far-reaching consequences of this legislation would remain unexamined until later in the decade.¹⁸ Alongside this legislation, and extending the terrain in which the debate about security and civil rights would play out, in 2001 and 2002 the Justice Department drafted a series of memos – a ‘legal shield’ according to Prince (2009: 176) – that claimed that the US laws and the Geneva Conventions that banned the use of torture did not apply to the struggle with al-Qaida (see Greenberg and Dratel 2005). This is discussed in more detail in later chapters, but it is mentioned here to indicate how a certain reality began to cohere in the aftermath of the attacks, with licence given for the military and other government agencies to work at the edges of legality, and in transgression of a number of constitutionally protected rights.

Another profound response to 9/11 was the extension of the ‘war on terror’. In early/mid-2002, a concerted effort was made to convince the American public that it was necessary to open another battlefront, this time in Iraq. As with Afghanistan, the mass media rallied around the flag; Stephen Prince notes that between August 2002 and March 2003 the Washington Post ‘ran nearly 140 front-page articles on Iraq, and all but a handful made the administration’s case for war’ (2009: 179). The US invasion began in March 2003, and in May, in a gesture that consciously emulated scenes from the Hollywood film Independence Day (1996), Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in a Lockheed S-3 Viking jet plane and wearing full flight gear, with a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner hanging behind him as he congratulated the troops.

However, Bush’s photo opportunity was generally agreed to ‘have been misjudged and failed to persuade’ (Sardar and Davies 2002: xi), with the media reporting that the ship was stationed off the coast of San Diego and that Bush could easily have travelled to it by helicopter, and this response indexed a widely held scepticism with regard to the war in Iraq. Even before the invasion, large-scale anti-war protests at home and abroad had signalled the strength of feeling against the use of military force. Conflicting views were rife: at a concert in London, Natalie Maines, lead singer of Texas band the Dixie Chicks, criticised Bush and quickly became embroiled in a war of words in which strong pro- and anti-war positions were articulated (the controversy is recorded in the documentary Shut Up and Sing (2006)). The investigative reporting of Seymour Hersh (2004b) – much of the research for which was undertaken during this period – was published as 26 stories in the New Yorker and drew attention to the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, a lack of post-war planning in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the use of dubious intelligence related to purported Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons, and, perhaps most significantly, described prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib military prison. Hersh’s work is indicative of a culture that had the will, wherewithal and eventually a public outlet for descriptions that moved beyond the ‘unity’ discourse.

On 6 October 2003 a Time magazine feature article described the difficulties faced by US troops on the ground in Iraq and pointed to the lack of preparation of any post-invasion nation-building strategy. The article was given the headline ‘Mission Not Accomplished’. As these examples indicate, from 2003, and with the events of 9/11 extended to include massive security legislation and two stalemated wars, the wider culture, and by extension the cinema, began to be shaped more evidently by competing/parallel views of 9/11: one supportive of the wide-reaching legislation and extension of the ‘war on terror’, the other suspicious, resistant and increasingly paranoid. Two films usefully mark this stark separation: DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).

The Showtime television film DC 9/11: Time of Crisis was shown on 7 September 2003. A minute-by-minute dramatic reconstruction of the attacks, and a blow-by-blow account of decision-making in the days following, the film focuses on 9/11 as experienced by George W. Bush (Timothy Bottoms), Donald Rumsfeld (John Cunningham), Dick Cheney (Lawrence Pressman), Condoleezza Rice (Penny Johnson Jerald) and Special Counsel to the President Karen Hughes (Carolyn Scott). The film provides a concise and straightforward account of the events of the day, with Bush depicted as a heroic leader, protective husband and devout Christian who effectively responds to the crisis and who reads the Bible and asks his colleagues to lead meetings with prayers. Upon hearing of the crash of United 93 Bush growls, ‘We’re going to kick the hell out of whoever did this’, later stating, ‘We’re going to get the bastards’. The film’s clarity in the way it depicts events and the ideologically sympathetic view of the president’s response is something of a hallmark of screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, a conservative Republican who attended the Beverly Hills Summit described in the introduction.¹⁹ Tellingly, Chetwynd was given support from the White House for DC 9/11, including an interview with Bush.

As a preface to the film we see Rumsfeld addressing a meeting on the defence budget. He argues with congressmen for a bigger spend to combat the threat of North Korea and terrorism: ‘there’s no social security without national security’, he growls, implying that al-Qaida were already the target of neoconservative policy in the period preceding 9/11 (with Congress applying the brakes and preventing them getting tough with terrorists). In a later scene, upon learning of the attack, Condoleezza Rice is shown reacting to the words ‘al-Qaida?’ with a stern nod, suggesting that the government was already in a state of preparedness. Further rhetorical flourishes – Bush states at one point that the response will be robust and bloody, stating ‘no “slap on the wrist” game this time’ – imply that the Clinton administration had been too soft on terrorism, a trope that would reappear later in The Path to 9/11 (2006). The film also uses throwaway dialogue – ‘we’re very constrained when it comes to domestic intelligence’, ‘the whole system of immigration must be rethought’ – to offer a post hoc argument for the necessity of a radical overhaul of domestic security.

In its revision of the popular view that Bush had failed to act in a suitably presidential way during 9/11, the film opens with him receiving the news of the attacks whilst reading to children on a school visit. In contrast to the way this scene is presented in Fahrenheit 9/11, Bush is shown processing the information and stoically continuing with the lesson, the implication being that he does not wish to upset the children. He then makes a series of decisive phone calls: grounding planes, ordering military jets to fire on unresponsive civilian aircraft, reassuring and directing key advisors. In these scenes Bush is presented as a strong man, often leading wavering and emotional women (with Laura Bush, Rice and Hughes all beneficiaries of his largesse and comfort). Here the film conforms to the masculinist designs identified in post-9/11 discourse by Susan Faludi (2007). By 2003, of course, the orderliness and timeliness of Bush’s reaction to the attack had been subject to considerable scrutiny, with even the 9/11 Commission Report casting considerable doubt on the efficacy of his, and the wider federal government’s, reaction to 9/11. Here we see the schism between official discourse and a more complicated version of reality that informs the web-based and Hollywood-produced conspiracy films discussed later in this chapter.

DC 9/11 has relatively high production values for a television film, with the budget allowing for CGI inserts of Air Force One, the mobilisation of military personnel and the hiring of mid-range character actors. Careful attention is given to the editing together of news footage of the attacks and the re-enactment of key events involving the main players. In the scenes following the attack on the Pentagon, for example, the sequence showing Rumsfeld helping survivors is an almost shot-by-shot reconstruction of news coverage. In the dramatic reconstruction of Bush’s address of the commemoration service at the National Cathedral, Timothy Bottoms delivers Bush’s speech but the cutaways are to archive film of George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. This combination of actual footage and dramatic reconstruction works in ways similar to that described in relation to 9/11 and In Memoriam, with the powerful and shocking news footage and amateur video subsumed within a narrative that embodies coherence, order and meaning. Here, the clear ideological direction of the film is layered into the film record of the event, turning the archival record to the task of maintaining support for the neoconservative discourse of vengeance and war. The ideological design can be seen especially in the ending, which functions as a distillation of the logic of the unity films described in the previous chapter. Here, a dramatic reconstruction of Bush’s address to Congress is cut into news footage of the address; cutaways include Lisa Beamer (widow of Todd Beamer, presumed to have led the passenger fight-back on United 93), the crowd and players at an ice hockey match which has been stopped so that they can watch the address (these ordinary sports fans functioning as a surrogate for the television viewer), images of flags, the labours of rescue workers and missing person posters. Aligned with this patriotic montage, Bush’s comment ‘either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’ is emphasised with a standing ovation in Congress and at the ice hockey game. The final shot of the film is of actual news footage of Bush telling the story of how he carries the shield of Port Authority police officer George Howard, who was killed on 9/11, which he claims motivates and justifies his responses to the attacks. This sequence arguably exemplifies the imbrication of a closing down of alternative responses and a cementing of a neoconservative view of 9/11 and its aftermath. Through classical continuity editing techniques the potentially unsettling meanings of film and photographs of the event are constrained and a conventional narrative structure provides resolution that brings together collective grief, nationalist anger and wholesale support for (a further) war.

Placed alongside DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, Michael Moore’s polemical documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 is a reminder of the inflammatory and divided political climate that had developed in the three years after 9/11. Released theatrically to 869 screens in June 2004, the film grossed just short of $120 million at the US box office, took another $100 million worldwide and won the Palme d’Or for Best Picture at the Cannes Film Festival. The highestgrossing documentary film ever made, it was deemed by David Holloway ‘the most important film of the era’ (2008: 104). Thomas Doherty claims that Fahrenheit 9/11 is ‘less a motion picture documentary than a Molotov cocktail tossed at the Bush administration’ (2007: 413) – a judgement Moore would no doubt endorse, with the director stating that his film sought to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush in late 2004. However, the film’s journey to the screen was troubled: given the controversies invoked by its partisan and adversarial stance, Disney Corporation-owned Miramax refused to distribute the film, with Miramax co-founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein stepping in to buy the rights and market it under the tagline ‘The film they did not want you to see’ (see Weber 2006: 117).

Fahrenheit 9/11 suggests how the public sphere had been co-opted by a self-serving political elite and how seductive media images and spin had been used to exploit the events of 9/11 in order to embark on an imperialist war in the Middle East. For Moore, this political malaise could be traced back to the period preceding 9/11. Bush is presented in the film not as a heroic father figure who will protect the nation but as an incompetent selfinterested politician serving a social and economic elite. Indeed, it is implied that Bush is a borderline sociopath, solemnly declaring to journalists that terrorism will be thwarted one moment and inviting them to check out his golf swing the next. The Bush family is shown mired in a web of vote rigging, oil industry and high finance cronyism and dubious connections to the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia (the country from which the majority of the 9/11 hijackers came). Moore’s film clearly found a sympathetic audience, but nevertheless Bush was re-elected, the success of the film and the election result clearly marking the divide across US culture and politics.

In contrast to the way in which DC 9/11 begins its account of 9/11 on the morning of the attacks (with neoconservative politicians in a state of readiness), Fahrenheit 9/11 opens with a preface that recounts the events surrounding the controversial election of Bush in 2000. Moore asks, ‘Was it a dream or was it real?’ It is a rhetorical question that points to an epistemological crisis – an uncertainty in the mechanism for producing knowledge related to 9/11 – that is displayed by the films described in the remainder of this chapter, all of which, in their different ways, seek to articulate a sense that the official version of events – as presented by politicians, the 9/11 Commission and the mass media – is untrustworthy, unreliable and unstable. For many, reality had slipped. Fahrenheit 9/11 digs below mainstream discourse by showing footage from inside the House of Representatives that reveals mainly African-American congressmen and women being prevented from raising objections to the manipulation of the electoral roll in Florida because their objections lack a constitutionally necessary endorsement from the Senate. In a Kafkaesque detail typical of the ironic tone of the film as a whole, presidential candidate Al Gore is tasked with silencing the dissenting voices (thereby assuring he will lose the election). This sequence reminds the viewer that post-9/11 political realities have a significant prehistory. In its recounting of this legalistic procedure the sequence also depicts politics directly, and in the taking up of an angry and ironic position in relation to this procedure, makes clear its moral judgement that the system itself is self-interested and corrupt. This preface is followed by the film’s opening credits, which are intercut with footage of politicians having make-up applied before appearing on television, a simple montage sequence that draws attention to the way in which media images are constructed, thereby presenting Moore’s film as a debunking of this selfserving manipulation of reality.

Fig. 6: Secretary of State Colin Powell prepares for a media appearance: Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

In keeping with this iconoclasm, the film undertakes a concerted unravelling of the media realities surrounding post-9/11 military interventions: the invasion of Afghanistan is presented in a pastiche of The Magnificent Seven (1960); the build-up to the war in Iraq is detailed through rapid-fire montage sequences that encapsulate how the repetition of the claim that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons turned questionable intelligence into exploitable reality; footage of the ‘shock and awe’ phase of the Iraq War used by the mainstream media is contrasted with images of civilian casualties, as well as US troops speaking openly about indiscriminate killing sprees conducted to heavy metal soundtracks; Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ stunt is edited together in a montage sequence with US casualties resulting from a roadside bomb. There is a clear agenda here: the ideological work done to exploit 9/11 and gain consent for war is craven and opportunist, the film argues, and the underlying reality is bloody, messy and unsavoury. Moore implores: don’t trust what you are told and don’t believe what you see. This sentiment is carried across into the other films described in this chapter.

This suspicion of the image extends to the way the film shows the events of 9/11. In contrast to the repetition of the footage of the planes striking the Twin Towers in the initial media coverage and the documentary films described in earlier chapters, Fahrenheit 9/11 avoids showing the attacks directly, preferring instead a black screen and the sound of the strikes followed by video of ordinary people’s shocked reactions. A refusal to use the iconic images may well be the result of a feeling that these images had, by the time of the film’s release, become overdetermined by the discourses described in chapter two. By turning to the reactions of ordinary people, Moore takes as his starting point a moment in which the human responses of shock, sympathy and fear had yet to be co-opted into a call to arms. The decision not to show here gives shape to the film as a whole, which contrasts mass media representation with the experiences of ordinary people: this was praised by a number of critics, including David Holloway, who commends how the film gives voice to

the soldiers, families of soldiers, conscientious objectors, school kids, writers, pundits and analysts, FBI agents and policemen, politicians, bereaved victims of 9/11, ‘senior’ and other concerned citizens [whose views form] a decentralized republic of voices arrayed against Bush. (2008: 102)

According to this reading (which requires that we overlook for the moment the domineering, often hectoring, presence of Moore himself), Fahrenheit 9/11 can be placed alongside documentaries such as Seven Days in September and Parallel Lines.

The work of deconstructing the mythmaking of the mass media coalesces in the latter part of the film into a clear anti-war stance. Moore uses the rhetorical device of giving voice to ordinary Americans as they describe their experiences of the iniquities of post-9/11 policies. In relation to this the story of Lila Lipscomb forms a central thread: Lipscomb is the mother of a mixed-race family who live in Flint, Michigan (the location of Moore’s earlier film Roger and Me (1989)). She works at an agency designed to get unemployed people back to work. While raising a US flag outside her house, she tells Moore that the military is a good way for poor people to escape poverty and that two of her children have served. In this early appearance Lipscomb’s comments are part of an argument about how those in lower social-economic groups are exploited by military recruiters, with the poor fighting (and dying) to maintain the interests of the elite. Later in the film, we hear from Lipscomb again and learn that her son, Michael Pedersen, has been killed in Iraq (a cause he no longer believed in). Now, the anti-war Lipscomb (sharing Moore’s view that the poor should not be exploited in this way) makes a journey to Washington to petition politicians to bring the war to an end. It is a significant moment in the film in emotional terms but is also revealing of the logic shaping left-liberal responses to 9/11: namely, that the system has been hijacked by a corrupt group who no longer respect the values of ordinary Americans. The solution: overthrow this corrupt group (by electing John Kerry?) and reassert a truer US national identity from below (measured here in relation to Lipscomb’s multicultural family and their sense of honour and duty). The problem here is that the people Moore depicts as victims of capitalism are at the same time commended and celebrated for their patriotic and dutiful behaviour under capitalism, thereby forming a paradox: they proudly serve the system that exploits them; indeed, they embody the finer values of that system. Thus, the military can remain a driver of social change, but it is engaged in the wrong war. The film presents its critique from within the system, so to speak, in what might be called counter-patriotism. As Holloway puts it,

The film’s representation of the Bush administration as freakish and aberrant, and its populist valorizing of existing institutions as the route back to a normative and equitable political culture, were typical of a lot of liberal war on terror commentary, in that the film fetishized the American political system, separating it off from the broader structures of capitalist power in which representative democracy is enmeshed. (2008: 104)

Similarly sceptical, but more specific in her critique, Cynthia Weber argues that ‘what makes Fahrenheit 9/11 such an incendiary experience is that it is imbricated in every one of the themes it critiques’ (2006: 116). Furthermore,

for all their disagreements, George W. Bush and Michael Moore agree on two fundamental issues. The first is that even in the increasingly morally uncertain post-9/11 era, one can hold on to a morally certain vision of America and Americans (hemispheric terms that euphemistically and some would argue imperially stand in for the citizens and state of the USA in both Bush’s and Moore’s constructions of some collective US subject, what I prefer to call a US ‘we’). Of course, their moral visions of a US ‘we’ clash, but they are morally certain visions nonetheless. (2006: 113)

That liberal critique here seeks to recuperate the system as a whole will be explored in greater depth in later chapters. Indeed, the taking of a critical view while arguing around to a position where the system as a whole is valorised and thereby stabilised can be taken as an illustration in miniature of the wider process charted in some of the later chapters of this book in which parallel or competing political viewpoints are reconciled, or converge, through the work of cultural production.

Unsurprisingly, Moore’s film attracted a lot of critical attention, with a number of reviewers describing it as ‘dividing the nation’. One response was the production of the documentary Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain…Begins to Die (2004), which aimed to refute the main lines of Moore’s argument. However, scholarly comment has been largely sympathetic to the general political direction of the film, reserving criticism for Moore’s manipulative rhetorical style and factual overreach (see Porton 2004; Briley 2005; Doherty 2007; Stuckey 2007). Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight the film seems prescient on a number of issues, as Robert Brent Toplin notes:

Serious and troublesome revelations have come to public attention about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush Administration’s incorrect association of Saddam Hussein with the events of 9/11 […], excesses of the Patriot Act, suffering by Iraqi civilians and American troops in the war zone, problems associated with a back-door draft through service in the National Guard, and many other subjects raised in the film. (2005: 9)

Further, images of US soldiers putting hoods on POWs while referring to them as ‘Ali Baba’ and using sexual innuendo clearly prefigure the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, with Moore commenting that ‘immoral behaviour breeds immoral behaviour’. Here the film gestures towards the way in which the complex ethical issues related to torture would emerge as a central preoccupation of post-9/11 cinema (see chapter seven).

When the certainty of the account of events offered in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is placed alongside Moore’s demand that viewers challenge everything that they have seen and heard about 9/11, we have a useful index of the deeply unstable political and cultural climate surrounding the events of 9/11 in 2004. That both ways of approaching the event are in effect mainstreamed is significant. Fahrenheit 9/11 is indicative of how critique moved from the margins (a handful of zero-budget documentaries, a single Hollywood film, and so on) to a central position in the highest-grossing documentary in history.

On 27 November 2002 the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (or 9/11 Commission) was formed and given the task of examining how and why the 9/11 terrorist attacks had taken place and what might be done to prevent further attacks. In July 2004, after months of hearings conducted without support from the White House, The 9/11 Commission Report was published. The report identified what it called ‘failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management’ (Kean and Hamilton 2004: 339), particularly in relation to the responses of, and communication between, the FBI and CIA. However, the report was widely felt to be too little too late, especially for the way in which it offered too orderly an explanation of the motivations of al-Qaida (without examining how the organisation was funded via Pakistan and Saudi Arabia), too neat a description of the unfolding of the attacks on 9/11 and the government response and a general reticence in identifying any significant shortcomings or culpability related to those in positions of responsibility in the period leading up to the attacks. The report claimed that ‘that September day, we came together as a nation. The test before us is to sustain that unity of purpose and meet the challenges confronting us now’ (2004: xvi). Against the backdrop of the kind of deeply divided public opinion expressed in the films described in this chapter, the Commission’s consensus-seeking report was felt by many to be inadequate, leading to a search for alternative explanations.

This frustration manifested in an increasing visibility of conspiracy theories that offered alternate views of 9/11. Peter Knight argues that the US is a nation where conspiracy thinking runs deep (widespread paranoia regarding British subterfuge and dissembling during the American Revolution is an early example) and that this has given rise to a ‘conspiracy culture’ that has shifted and modulated over time. Knight observes that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a number of conspiracy theories appeared, especially in Europe and the Middle East (2008: 167–8). However, it was not until 2003 that these were identified as a distinct phenomenon in the US, surfacing in radio broadcasts, on websites and as books (see Hufschmid 2002; Jones 2002; Marrs 2003; Fetzer 2007; Griffin 2008). Those who endorsed the conspiracy theories, including a number of celebrities such as Charlie Sheen, David Lynch and Rosie O’Donnell – in combination with a loose coalition of 9/11 sceptics – were given the label the ‘9/11 Truth Movement’, and this ‘movement’ formed part of the wider anti-war and anti-Bush protests gathering momentum in 2003–04 (see Pollard 2011: 21–2). Central to this movement was the production of a number of independent documentary films made by enthusiastic amateurs and/or groups that were produced and released on the web or via commercial and non-commercial distribution channels. Titles included 9/11: In Plane Site (2004), Painful Deceptions (2005), Zeitgeist (2006) and The Elephant in the Room (2008), but the best known and most widely viewed of this group is Loose Change.²⁰

This film was made by Dylan Avery in his home in Oneonta in the Catskill Mountains, about four hours’ drive north of New York. According to Avery, the film began as a script for a fictional thriller, but as he researched the story he felt he had unearthed a real conspiracy, and along with his friend (and ex-soldier) Korey Rowe he further developed the film, first as a 30-minute documentary released in early 2005, and then as a 60-minute version released in September 2005 (known as Loose Change – Original Web Release). A number of further versions followed, including Loose Change – Final Cut (2007, 128 min.) and Loose Change 9/11 – An American Coup (2009, 99 min.). Initially distributed for free using Google Video (where it was viewed over seven million times), the film has subsequently appeared on YouTube, as well as having a DVD release (with an encouragement to freely duplicate and disseminate copies). Distributed thus, it is estimated that the film has been viewed over seventy million times (Avery claims over a hundred million), a figure that justifies the assertion made in an August 2006 Vanity Fair article that Loose Change ‘just might be the first Internet blockbuster’. Although the film attracted significant press coverage worldwide, most journalists dismissed it as unethical, politically reactionary and/or deluded. However, the impact of the film was considered significant enough to merit a rebuttal by the US government, which published an online article debunking Loose Change in 2009. This and other web-based challenges to the conspiracy theories notwithstanding, according to one estimate onethird of the US population (and over half of those under the age of thirty) believed that the official version of 9/11 was some kind of cover up, and it is this deeply held suspicion that explains the phenomenal success of Loose Change and other 9/11 conspiracy films (see Olmsted 2009: 1).

So what is the conspiracy that Loose Change purports to reveal? The numerous versions of the film, and the filmmakers’ reluctance to pull together the different pieces of the puzzle into a coherent whole, ensure that this is not an easy question to answer. Across its numerous versions the film makes many claims that run counter to official accounts, the most dramatic of which is that because jet fuel burns at a temperature lower than the melting point of steel, the impact of the planes (and resulting fires) could not have destroyed the World Trade Center. It follows, then, that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of a controlled demolition. In a similar vein, it is claimed that the lack of CCTV records showing the plane strike on the Pentagon, combined with an amount of debris incommensurate with a plane crash, is evidence that the damage was caused by a cruise missile or military drone strike. It is also claimed that United 93 did not crash in Pennsylvania and that the phone calls made from that plane were faked. The government is also accused of failing to heed warnings that the attacks were imminent and, in order to create confusion, of conducting military exercises on 9/11 involving the interception of hijacked civilian planes. Other ‘loose ends’ that the film draws attention to include the shipping of debris overseas before it could be examined forensically, the transfer of money to hijacker Mohammed Atta via the Pakistani secret service (ISI) (and with CIA knowledge), that a number of the 9/11 hijackers are alive and well and that the flying skills of the hijackers were not good enough to have controlled the planes as they did.

A number of explanations of these reconfigured facts are then offered, including that the attacks were a ‘false flag’ operation by the Bush administration and/or oil corporations, who, as Peter Knight notes, ‘had much to gain from the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and were looking for – perhaps even willing to engineer – a modern-day Pearl Harbor in order to gain support for their pre-existing war plans’ (2008: 170). Another possible motive offered is that the attacks allowed an elaborate insurance scam to take place (it is claimed the Twin Towers were packed with asbestos that would have cost $1 billion to remove) and/or that the attacks concealed an elaborate heist of gold and/or state secrets held in vaults in the World Trade Center or buildings nearby.²¹ A special issue of the journal Popular Mechanics scrutinised a number of the seeming disparities described in the film and found them to be explicable without recourse to any of the wider conspiracy theories; the findings of the journal were published on the web and as a book (Editors 2005). It is the intention here not to engage with specific claims but rather to demonstrate how critical writing on conspiracy theory might help us to understand the phenomenon of 9/11 conspiracy culture.

Writing in the early to mid-1960s, and contributing to a series of wider reflections on the breakdown of post-war consensus in the US, Richard Hofstadter coined the term ‘paranoid style’: a ‘style of mind’ prone to ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’ (2008: 3). He wrote that for the conspiracy theorist,

the enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman…Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. (2008: 32)

Hofstadter attributed the rise of a paranoid style to a certain kind of political demonology (a fear of the political class and ruling elite) and argued that those who are drawn to conspiracy thinking are usually located on the political margins. In Avery and Rowe’s film the US government is described in exactly these terms, and the filmmakers’ social and geographical location would fit Hofstadter’s profile, with their investment in conspiracism (as a form of delusion) possibly stemming from their marginalisation; it is telling that in Nina Davenport’s documentary, Parallel Lines, conversations with a range of disenfranchised people show them to be heavily invested in conspiracy theories related to 9/11. Timothy Melley, writing in the late 1990s, extends and refines Hofstadter’s argument with his idea of ‘agency panic’. For him, in the post-war period ‘control has been transferred from human agents to larger agencies, institutions, or corporate structures’; this has resulted in ‘intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or selfcontrol – the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been “constructed” by powerful external agents’ (2000: 5, 12). This anxiety manifests in contradictory ways:

‘paranoid’ interpretations…stem from a desire to think sociologically about agency while simultaneously retaining a concept of individual action that is at odds with sociological work. They sometimes amount, then, not only to a self-defensive posture in the face of external controls, but to a fraught and paradoxical defense of liberal individualism itself. (2000: 23)

The paradoxical desire to acknowledge the death of subjectivity and launch a rear-guard action to save said subjectivity fits closely with much of the discourse around 9/11 and conspiracy culture, as well as Loose Change, which replaces the complex factors leading into and through 9/11 with a closed, comprehensible world. Avery and Rowe claim that a powerful structural conspiracy has hoodwinked the entire world and yet conclude by demanding that viewers follow their (liberal individualist) lead and act to unveil this conspiracy and bring those responsible to justice.

One sequence in the film relates to the claim that the towers were destroyed by a controlled demolition and can be used to indicate how the conventions of film form and a certain kind of paranoid reasoning are brought together in ways that segue with Hofstadter’s and Melley’s claims. Here, the film deploys a range of techniques commonly associated with documentary filmmaking: montage sequences of news footage, talking heads, rostrum shots of documents and, in the 2009 version, short stylised animations, which are blended together in a loose, associative editing style. A great deal of material from the initial live broadcasts of the attacks (in which news readers and commentators speculate on what has happened) is brought together in these sequences and treated as reasoned judgement, rather than often poorly thought-through first impressions. The film notes that no other similar building in history has collapsed as a result of fire, a scientist testifies to the presence of thermite (which accelerates and intensifies an explosion), and an official report about the collapse by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is said to have ignored these difficult facts. Here the film follows conventions that Richard Barkun observes are central to conspiracist literature, namely, the mimicry of ‘the apparatus of source citation and evidence presentation found in conventional scholarship’ (2003: 7). The viewer’s attention is drawn to telling details of evidence such as the puffs of smoke that precede the collapse of the towers, which it is claimed are the result of controlled explosions. Although it is presumed that such details speak for themselves, the ‘evidence’ is usually augmented with arrows indicating where to look or a voice-over directing interpretation. This ‘reasoning by anomaly’, as Prince calls it (2009: 161), is a technique common to all 9/11 conspiracy films, and allows suspicion of the official version to germinate and grow. If one small detail can be presented as evidence, the film argues, then this can then be scaled up, pointing to a wider conspiracy. The film is also cut to a fast tempo, making it difficult to order facts, challenge them and spot logical inconsistencies (many of which appear readily on a second viewing). As such, the ‘evidence’ is adjoined to misdirection in the cultivation of the film’s claims of a conspiracy.²²

Writing before 9/11, Knight had observed that ‘a quasi-paranoid hermeneutic of suspicion is now taken for granted by many Americans, including the scholarly community’ (2000: 10) and that this postmodern paranoid style is expressed in

an eclectic and often contradictory manner, as part entertainment, part speculation, and part accusation […] Whatever else it might have become, conspiracy theory is an integral part of the infotainment culture at the turn of the millennium, hovering somewhere between committed belief and the culture of consumption. (2000: 44, 45)

For Knight, ‘conspiracy theories are now less a sign of mental delusion than an ironic stance towards knowledge and the possibility of truth’ (2000: 2) and this ironic stance is almost a form of half-belief in which ‘consumers of conspiracy don’t really believe what they buy, but neither do they really disbelieve it either. Often people believe rumors with a provisional commitment, believing them as if they were true’ (2000: 48). The way Loose Change’s soundtrack combines two modes of rhetorical address is indicative here. The film’s voice-over (Dylan Avery in earlier versions, television actor Daniel Sunjata in the 2009 version) consists of a mild, almost monotone, voice that marshals the film’s evidence in such a way as to encourage the viewer to answer in the affirmative a number of rhetorical questions. Is the official account inadequate? Should we be suspicious? Is there a conspiracy here? This sensible-sounding reasoning is adjoined to a more distanced, even ironic, tone, indicated by the use of a rock- and hip-hop-inflected soundtrack that keys the film to a subcultural terrain associated with rebelliousness and marginal groups (albeit a terrain that is now thoroughly co-opted). This blend seems to ask that viewers believe earnestly in what is being said while at the same time finding the experience hip, and thereby ironic.

At one level, then, Loose Change is risible – significant mainly for its symptomatic nature, pointing to political marginalisation, agency panic, understandable scepticism and no small amount of narcissistic posturing. But it may be worth entertaining a less dismissive interpretation. Writing in the mid-1990s, as part of a wider engagement with postmodernism and globalisation, Fredric Jameson argued that ‘conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt…to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system’ (quoted in Wegner 2009: 172). In this argument, the paranoiac’s search for meaning, what Jameson calls ‘a poor person’s cognitive mapping’, may well lay the groundwork for cognitive mapping proper, with a properly dialectical and materialist sense of history emerging as a result. Although Knight is sceptical of this possibility in his 2000 work, in a journal article written in 2008, he notes how online resources such as The Complete 911 Timeline (sic) are indicative of a conspiracy theorising that embraces complexity and may offer insight into structural historical process.²³ Loose Change does not obviously display such potential, but in the piecing together of a series of companies, people and interactions that are at best nepotistic and self-serving and at worst conspiratorial, the film is informed by a desire to map and note connections. The film’s position in this networked culture requires it to be willing to make amendments and changes as each version is produced, with, for example, Loose Change: Final Cut containing no mention of the use of cruise missiles, no close analysis of the World Trade Center being demolished using controlled explosions, and no questioning of the crash wreckage at the Pentagon. This last instalment is also wary of stating what the overarching, if any, conspiracy might be. Loose Change 9/11 – An American Coup, the 2009 version, begins with a long preamble seeking historical precedent, including the Reichstag fires, secrecy around the Manhattan project, JFK’s assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the My Lai massacre. These events are not explicitly linked together but are instead used to gesture to a certain way of thinking about history, which in finding precedent presumes a predicative power to understand contemporary events. The list of precursor events gestures towards a relatively sophisticated view of the past, which acknowledges that the state has been capable of illegal and secret actions, a view articulated (without the dressing of conspiracy thinking) in the history films described in chapter nine. Thus, the multiple versions of Loose Change speak to an awareness of the shifting purchase on the popular imagination of those conspiracy theories that might be said to retain some coherent and plausible relationship with the (visual) evidence, and in the main the film avoids the more outlandish conspiracies posited to explain the attacks.

Knight argues that conspiracy thinking reached its peak around the fifth anniversary of the attacks, noting that ‘as with the belated flowering of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories in the late 1960s, the troubling reality of contemporary events provokes the need to posit retrospectively a primal scene of conspiracy as a symbolically necessary origin for present woes’ (2008: 181). As such, 9/11 conspiracy theories retrospectively explain what happened on 9/11 during a period of uncertainty five years afterwards. According to a May 2006 Zogby poll, 42 per cent of Americans claimed to believe that the US government and the 9/11 Commission ‘concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks’ and that ‘there has been a cover-up’ (see Sales 2006). Similarly,

A 2006 Scripps Howard poll found that 36 percent of Americans believed the government had orchestrated the attacks, 16 percent said the World Trade Center had actually been destroyed by hidden bombs, and 12 percent said the Pentagon had not been hit by an airplane but by a missile. (Pollard 2011: 21–2)

A majority of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 believe these theories (see Olmsted 2009: 1). These statistics indicate how conspiracy culture has become mainstreamed. In a way not seen in the 1990s – when conspiracy theory seemed reducible to a pithy quote on an expensive T-shirt – the political earnestness of contemporary conspiracy culture appears to fit Jameson’s hunch that there may be something positive in the desire to question and challenge and be suspicious (hence Knight’s about-face). I do not suggest that Loose Change is an example of conspiracy thinking with possibility, but I do feel that at the saner end of the spectrum a certain politically engaged, angry desire for truthfulness has been politically significant.²⁴ Or, as Melley puts it, conspiracy theory provides ‘important representations of global capitalist networks’ and ‘instead of being merely a comforting form of misrepresentation, conspiracy theory is a reductive (or “degraded”), but still useful, form of political representation’ (2000: 9).²⁵

Fig. 7: ‘Ask questions, demand answers’: Loose Change: An American Coup (2009)

A film that can be profitably read into this cultural context is Syriana (2005), a complex, multi-stranded espionage thriller. Like Fahrenheit 9/11, Syriana is an avowedly left-liberal and political film, which grossed almost $95 million worldwide, the strong box office an indicator of the appetite for political fare in the multiplex mid-decade. The film was co-produced by Participant Productions (now known as Participant Media), a production company set up in early 2004 by Jeff Skoll, a former president of eBay, with the avowedly philanthropic aim to ‘entertain audiences first, then to invite them to participate in making a difference’; a sister company – TakePart.com – allows viewers to discuss issues raised in their documentary and feature films (Participant also helped to fund Standard Operating Procedure, (2008) discussed in chapter seven). As with the grassroots documentary films described in chapter one, here we see a further indication of how some level of independence from the mainstream licenses stronger political statements. As the film’s production context indicates, Syriana was intended to engage its audience and draw out reflections on the wider geopolitical landscape pertaining to oil, the Middle East and, inevitably, 9/11. Here I wish to examine a number of aspects of the film that illustrate its politics, linking to other examples of post-9/11 cinema.

As already noted, a number of responses to 9/11 pointed to the way the event made visible a series of connections linking US action (past and present) to the wider world, and this might be considered the primary aim of the film’s multi-stranded narrative, which offers a complex view of the alliances, deals, betrayals and interconnections between the CIA, Middle Eastern powerbrokers, energy analysts, oil industry moguls, high-powered lawyers and Pakistani migrant workers in the Persian Gulf. Four core plotlines run in parallel. First, corporate lawyer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is tasked with scrutinising the merger of two US oil companies, Connex and Killeen. Connex has been refused drilling rights in Syriana, a fictional Gulf state, but by purchasing Killeen will gain access to drilling rights in Kazakhstan. Holiday discovers that Killeen bribed Kazakh officials to secure these rights and arranges for a representative from his law firm and another from Killeen to be scapegoated in order to ensure the illusion of due diligence and allow the merger to proceed. Second, Syrianian Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who is about to inherit the throne, is keen to reform the country by lessening US influence and adopting progressive social and political reforms. Nasir employs US energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) to help him achieve this goal. However, US pressure leads the Emir to choose a different son to take charge, and Nasir plots a coup but is killed by the CIA. Third, CIA agent Robert Barnes (George Clooney) is tasked with arranging the assassination of Nasir but is thwarted (and tortured) by previously friendly Iranian agent Mussawi (Mark Strong), who is now sided with Nasir. Barnes’s allegiances shift and he travels to Syriana to warn Nasir of the plot against him but is killed in a US drone strike. Fourth, a young Pakistani immigrant called Wasim (Mazhar Munir) loses his job when Connex loses its contract, and in desperation joins a madrasah, where he becomes radicalised. The film ends with Wasim conducting a suicide attack on a Connex-Killeen tanker.²⁶

A number of critical terms have been used to describe the plot’s complexity, including ‘mosaic film’ (Pisters 2011: 175), ‘polyphonic film’ (Bruns 2008: 189) and a shift from Hollywood’s preferred ‘single-hero pattern’ to ‘the multi-protagonist format’ (Azcona 2010: 5). Whatever label is selected, it is clear that through this commitment to complexity Syriana seeks to show how politics, economics and military power work in a symbiotic way. The representation of corporate structure, via the Holiday character, is quite clearly driven by dismay at the Enron and Worldcom corruption scandals and the role of Dick Cheney in Halliburton (a large corporation that received billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts for nation-building in Iraq), as well as pointing to the recession of 2009 (see Mayer 2004). As one of the characters states: ‘Corruption is our protection; corruption keeps us safe and warm […] Corruption is why we win.’ This corporate sharp practice meshes with the condoned illegal CIA operation that seeks to support an unelected ruler in order to maintain a foreign country in ways sympathetic to US national self-interest. As such, each element of the film lends further complexity to the picture portrayed in order to indicate how corruption and criminality – driven by the desire to secure power – are systemic. As Knight notes, although we may be sensible to disbelieve conspiracy theories in the main,

given all that we have learned about the less than democratic operation of government in the United States, it is a not unreasonable working hypothesis that there exists a clandestine or tacit collusion of vested interests that verges on a conspiracy. (2000: 31)

Reviewing the film, Ryan Gilbey observed that ‘handheld camera, erratic editing and occasional loss of focus conspire to create the illusion of documentary’ (2006). But this seems reductive; this is not simply a question of what Roland Barthes labelled ‘reality effects’ (1986), but more a coherent political aesthetic, containing a number of fully realised technical motifs that interact with the complex narrative design. Each of the film’s locations – Kazakhstan, Geneva, Tehran, Beirut and Washington – is shown through a series of floating handheld shots with very little by way of intertitles to indicate geographical specificity or temporal shifts. As such, cinematography and editing serve to demonstrate the fluid, interconnected relations between contemporary geopolitical spaces. This way of showing spatial complexity combines with the use of occasional high-angle/extreme long shots that establish these distinct but connected locations in ways that emphasise context and a lack of individual agency. María del Mar Azcona notes that this combination of complex plot and politicised, coherently repeated technical motifs requires the viewer to

acknowledge the complexity of forces that shape our world and the moral ambiguity of our response to them. The resulting sense of disorientation is particularly unnerving since this confusion, carefully knitted as it is with the film’s relentless suspense, shatters any hopes for the feasibility of meaningful individual action and highlights the precariousness and futility of human agency in the midst of multiple and unpredictable forces. (2010: 133)

For Azcona, the film’s ending (Bryan with his family; Bennett with his father) ‘is not a triumph of family values over the network logic but the only alternative left for damaged and powerless subjects’ (2010: 135). Here we see something like the structural view of things articulated by Loose Change, and perhaps also Fahrenheit 9/11, but without the possibility of the individual intervening and even prevailing.

Fig. 8: Subjects in context: Syriana (2005)

Temenuga Trifonova argues that where 1970s conspiracy thrillers such as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the President’s Men (1976) ‘presuppose a secret conspiratorial power endowed with agency’, in post-9/11 conspiracy films such as Syriana ‘the conspiracy is no longer a secret power, but part of the very structure of contemporary global relations’ (2012: 122). One criticism of this way of describing the abuse of power is that those wielding power are no longer held responsible. However, although in Syriana the full consequences of each individual’s actions may never be fully known to them, certain powerbrokers – namely politicians and corporate leaders, and an acquiescent middle management – are shown to be in a position to understand and therefore be held accountable for the consequences of their actions. In contrast to the 1970s conspiracy films, as well as Loose Change and even Fahrenheit 9/11, Syriana does not presume a cabal of sinister conspirators in high office but rather represents the system working with its own inevitable force and logic. As such, the film does not maintain that small-scale intervention – such as voting Bush out of office – will be corrective. On the contrary, it suggests that wholesale progressive social change of the type envisaged by the new (and by the end of the film, dead) sheik is the type of change that is really needed. Writing in 2003, Douglas Kellner called for more films in the mould of Syriana that displayed a ‘dialectical and contextualising optic’ that might offer audiences not just a clear sense of the problem but also potential solutions (2003: 44). Arguably, films such as The Interpreter (2005), The Constant Gardener (2005), Michael Clayton (2007), Traitor (2008) and Fair Game (2010) sought to provide such a view, with Mark Cousins observing that the immediate post-9/11 tendency towards escapism has given way to a ‘new engagement with reality’ (2006). Alongside the more outlandish conspiracy films such as Loose Change, this cycle of complex political conspiracy films pursued the notion that ‘everything is connected’, implying that historical realities can be mapped out and untruths and abuses of power challenged. Set against this cycle of films that seek to show complex global power relations and express the difficulty of individual human agency, the films described in the next chapter are governed by the contrasting desire to maintain a parochial relationship with the events of 9/11.