Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema

The End of the World

Describing 9/11 fiction, Kristiaan Versluys claims that ‘on the whole, the narratives shy away from the brute facts, the stark “donnee” of thousands of lives lost. As an event, 9/11 is limned as a silhouette, expressible only through allegory and indirection’ (2009: 14). As we have seen, however, this argument about the post-9/11 novel is not true of post-9/11 cinema, in which the attacks are directly depicted in a number of (albeit guarded) ways. Yet, like the post-9/11 novel, and as Man on Fire and Syriana suggest, some films may be read as indirect representations of, or informed by, 9/11 that extend the ways in which those attacks and their aftermath might be described and, most importantly, understood. It is in these mainstream Hollywood feature films, once removed from events, that the work of bringing together seemingly conflicting political positions in order to broker hegemony can be seen. Indeed, this work – replete with ambiguity and contradiction, but undertaken nonetheless – is a central concern of the remainder of this book. While analysis following distinct parallel lines continues, with certain films depicting torture, and Iraq War films and history films maintaining a counter-hegemonic position and resisting recuperation, these are examined alongside mainstream feature films such as In the Valley of Elah (2007), Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close (2011) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) that undertake the work of seeking hegemonic reconciliation between politically irreconcilable positions.

Ideological criticism regards representation as a veiling of another reality; for example, the image of the firefighter or policeman and his ascension, a trope observable in a number of films analysed here, is a figure grounded in religious narrative and folklore that allows 9/11 to be phrased in a redemptive way. As such, ideological criticism is already considering representation to be functioning allegorically. One of the earliest ways in which 9/11 was allegorised was in the designation of the World Trade Center site as ‘Ground Zero’, a term first used on the evening of 11 September by CBS News reporter Jim Axelrod and, a little later the same day, by NBC News reporter Rehema Ellis, who said: ‘We’re now just a block away from the World Trade Center and the closer we get to Ground Zero the harder it is to breathe and to see.’ In the film The Guys (2002), discussed in the next chapter, a character describes Ground Zero as ‘reminiscent of a nuclear winter’; and as we shall see, the mise-en-scène and cinematography of much post-9/11 cinema has an apocalyptic look. The term originates in a military context, where ‘Ground Zero’ is used to refer to the epicentre of the detonation of a nuclear weapon, and entered popular usage in journalistic descriptions of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Here, in short measure, we can see the ideological service to which allegory can be put, in this case amplifying the size and scale of the attacks (9/11 is equivalent to Hiroshima), as well as the potency of the threat (Iraqi WMD could lead to a nuclear strike on a US city); in both cases, the allegorical dimension may license an aggressive and expansive foreign policy. As John Dower notes, after 9/11

Ground Zero became code for America as victim of evil forces – alien peoples and cultures who, ‘unlike ourselves,’ did not recognise the sanctity of human life and had no compunctions about killing innocent men, women and children. […] To an extent almost impossible to exaggerate, ‘Ground Zero 2001’ became a wall that simultaneously took its name from the past and blocked out all sightlines of from what and where that name came. (2010: 161)

While Dower’s point is that the use of the term is intended to evacuate history – the Year Zero effect – this preferred reading of the allegorical figure did not go unchallenged. In Parallel Lines, documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport travels to Los Alamos, the site of nuclear testing during World War II, as a way of drawing attention to the ways in which the use of the term ‘Ground Zero’ belied a number of contradictory realities, not least straightforwardly jingoistic accounts of World War II (see Dower 2010: 151–61). As Philip E. Wegner notes,

Allegories enable complex or abstract historical processes to take on a concrete form. Indeed, allegories often offer figurations of these historical movements before the emergence of a more proper conceptual or theoretical language. Allegorical representations also have the capacity to condense different historical levels and conflicts into a single figure, enabling a kind of relational thinking that is not as readily available to other forms of expression. (2009: 7)

As Wegner notes, the allegorical figure is dialectical: speaking of an event through recourse to another event, seeking simplicity but often, unwittingly, revealing layers of further significance. In this chapter I wish to consider one particular allegorical response, namely the indirect address of 9/11 through films that depict the end of the world.³¹ An apocalyptic sensibility can be traced back to the initial response to the attacks themselves, when the description of the event as a national catastrophe was a central feature of news coverage. Following this, in the immediate aftermath, as well as making the term ‘Ground Zero’ central, the mass media reported on a series of anthrax attacks and published a number of speculative accounts suggesting that terrorists planned to use smallpox and ricin to poison water supplies, shoot down civilian planes with surface-to-air missiles and explode ‘dirty’ bombs in crowded city centres. The discursive amplification of the terrorist threat – which conjured any number of apocalyptic scenarios – served a crisis mentality underpinning a culture of fear.

A sceptic might point to the fact that US popular culture is, and has long been, replete with apocalyptic scenarios, and it is true that a distinct cycle of films depicting the end of the world originated in the late 1990s (as well as at numerous other points in Hollywood’s history). However, I wish to argue that the diverse cycle of films appearing from the mid-2000s, including War of the Worlds (2005), I Am Legend (2007), The Mist (2007), Cloverfield (2008), The Happening (2008) and The Road (2009), all contain references that key their respective apocalypses into the experience of 9/11. In The Road, for example, documentary film footage of clouds of dust from 9/11 was composited into the background of one scene, with the film’s director, John Hillcoat, stating:

We deliberately used America’s real apocalyptic zones. We went to New Orleans to shoot our interior shots in a ruined shopping mall in post-Katrina New Orleans. We used the strip mines in western Pennsylvania […] these places were not hard to find. There’s a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape. (Quoted in Chiarella 2009)

Here we see a literal coming together of the real and the figural in a way that corroborates the view that many of these films solicit a response that relates what is onscreen to 9/11. This raises the questions: How do the end-of-the-world films relate to this discourse and the wider culture of fear? Do they perpetuate or challenge a patriotic nationalism? And how might reading them as allegories of 9/11 help us understand the wider popular cultural response to 9/11 mid-decade?

Released in June 2005, War of the Worlds is an adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel and tells the story of a devastating alien invasion of Earth. With an estimated budget of $132 million, the film grossed $591 million worldwide, making it one of the most commercially successful films discussed in this book. J. Hoberman argues that War of the Worlds alongside two other films by director Steven Spielberg – The Terminal (2004) and Munich (2005) – constitutes a long-form engagement with 9/11, a ‘trilogy of terror’ that is laced with preoccupations related to the terrorist attacks and their aftermath (2006: 20). Upon the film’s release numerous reviewers corroborated Hoberman’s view that the film sought to activate memories of 9/11 (see Atkinson 2005). The film’s opening sequences are set in New Jersey, separated from Manhattan by the George Washington Bridge crossing the Hudson. In a widely carried promotional interview for the film Spielberg stated that the images of people fleeing across the bridge on 9/11 were a ‘searing image that I haven’t been able to get out of my head’, and this choice of location both activates a memory of 9/11 and maintains some respectful distance between those events and the alien attack. The depiction of the attacks includes clouds of grey dust and clothing falling to the ground, explicitly calling on memories of the media coverage of 9/11, especially those of the people falling from the World Trade Center and crowds fleeing as the Twin Towers collapsed. Unable to understand what is happening, Ray Ferrier’s (Tom Cruise) daughter, Rachel (Dakota Fanning), asks her father ‘is it the terrorists?’ The allusions continue: missing person posters can be seen in numerous scenes, and, as Kirsten Moana Thompson observes, ‘people ask each other, “Did you lose anyone?”’ (2007: 147), a common turn of phrase after 9/11. Later in the film, a woman on a loudspeaker proclaims to a crowd waiting to board a ferry that no more donations of blood are needed, echoing accounts that healthcare professionals at Ground Zero had to turn away willing donors. A number of reviewers considered this way of recalling 9/11 to be in poor taste, indeed ‘pornographic’, suggesting that the images were challenging and unsettling (see Kellner 2010: 131). However, closer examination suggests something more familiar from earlier chapters at work.

The depiction of bodies turned to dust is perhaps the most resonant of the references to 9/11, and here the mise-en-scène is directly modelled on documentary footage of the terrorist attacks. Indeed, correspondences between Etienne Suaret’s WTC – The First 24 Hours and War of the Worlds are too many to be coincidental. Following 9/11, the dust produced by the collapse of the World Trade Center became a public health issue that was handled with wariness by the mass media. Reporters wrote about the dangers of poor air quality in lower Manhattan, especially as experienced by rescue and salvage workers, but rarely commented on the fact that many of those killed in the World Trade Center had simply disintegrated with the building, their bodies becoming part of the dust cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan. Although evidenced by the numerous missing person posters and funeral services conducted with empty coffins, this difficult fact was rarely addressed directly.

Against this caesura, Spielberg makes explicit the connection between the grey dust and destroyed bodies, and places this at the heart of a family melodrama in which a father must decide how to explain what has happened to his children. Returning home after witnessing the initial attacks, in which many people have been killed, Ferrier’s children see their father covered in dust and want to know what it is. Ferrier refuses to explain and retreats into the bathroom, where he frantically tries to clean himself. Ray’s inability to wash off the dust or explain what has happened to his children presents 9/11 as something that cannot be washed away, expressed in language or moved beyond: the experience remains raw and terrifying. Like the focus on serious physical injury and the ability to endure pain depicted in World Trade Center, this returning of the corporeal to dust works to renew the signifier 9/11, and to reactivate memory of the initial traumatic impact of the attacks. As such, a key element – dust/bodies – is used to sustain a high pitch of anxiety and terror many years after the initial frightened reaction to the attacks has ebbed away. This aspect of the film can be read in relation to the continued centrality of a culture of fear in mid-decade politicking. For example, a key voting constituency that helped re-elect George W. Bush in 2004 was the so-called ‘security moms’, whose vote went to the candidate most committed to protecting the nation’s children from terrorism. Peter Stearnes observes that

Fig. 11: Bodies turned to dust: War of the Worlds (2005)

after 9/11, sales of home protection devices went up massively […] The reaction was understandable, given the level of anxiety, and it allowed people to ‘do something’; it also reflected the high degree of personalisation in the reactions to the attack, as Americans somehow merged terrorism with other concerns. (2006: 215)

Here, fear generated by the terrorist attacks was used to reinforce the dominant ideological response. This meshing of fear and everyday life helps explain the tone and tenor of the films discussed in this chapter, which imagine ordinary, mundane scenarios torn apart by terrifying, all-powerful forces (with the dust/body trope a distillation of this logic). It was unlikely that Americans living away from the major cities were ever in any real danger, and yet, the fear was widespread. Unlike the British and Spanish responses to the terrorist attacks on London and Madrid, which stressed the continuation of everyday life and actively resisted the calls for a military response, the fearful reaction of Americans is said by Stearnes to be the equivalent of a ‘panic attack’, which precipitated a ‘fear-induced excess of belligerence’ (2006: 218). As we shall see, the film’s narrative corrals this powerful combination of anxiety and inarticulacy and turns it in a conservative direction.

But it is the nature of allegory to be imprecise. As such, while many readings of the film focused on the aforementioned correspondences with the experience of 9/11, including the resonance of dust/bodies, other interpretations traced a different allegorical trajectory, this time related to the war in Iraq (see Newman 2005: 83; Vest 2006: 69). Lester D. Friedman argues that War of the Worlds

provides dramatic examples of what it must have been like for Iraqi civilians during the American invasion/liberation of their country. The ‘shock and awe’ created by the aliens in War of the Worlds resembles the panic generated by the American military more than it does the devastating, but as yet singular, attack on the World Trade Center. (2006: 159)

Undeniably, the film can be plausibly read in this way. However, my argument is that the film returns to the traumatic shock caused by the experience of 9/11 and imbricates this with the vicarious experience of the Iraq War as victim. Taken together, the sense of the US as a victim of terrorism on 9/11 combines with the placing of the nation into the role of victim of the ‘war on terror’, thereby serving to distract from the fact that the US is perpetrator in the latter. War of the Worlds compounds this sense of victimisation through the use of other generic images of atrocity: dead bodies shown floating in a river recall news photographs of the genocide in Rwanda; a line of dialogue – ‘When they flash that thing, everything lights up like Hiroshima’ – compares the alien weapons to nuclear bombs. These references call on the experience of genocide and nuclear war to amplify senses of victimhood. Critique, then, in the form of an allegory of the invasion of Iraq is made subordinate to this vicarious victimisation. As these elements of the film come together, the politically positioned and distinct responses to 9/11 – what this book has called parallel lines – converge, drawn together into a single post- 9/11 trope that although replete with contradiction serves to bring critical responses to 9/11 under the command of hegemonic discourse.

Further elements confirm that this synthesis is central to the film’s overall direction. As already noted, in much post-9/11 cinema, including many of the films described in this book, the depiction of relations between parent and child often work allegorically.³³ Holloway describes how strained relations between parents and children stand in for a wider anxiety regarding the state/citizen, with the former failing to protect the latter on 9/11 (2008: 110). Arguably, the mainstream media deals with this anxiety by reinforcing a conservative discourse, most obviously by placing Bush (and a number of people in positions of authority) in the reassuring role of father/protector (see Faludi 2007: 147–8). Aligned with this, the need to protect children also licenses revenge films such as Man on Fire (see chapter two). But even in these formulations, a negative dialectic remains. As Holloway notes, the allegory speaks to a bald fact: the state had, indeed, failed to protect its citizens, leaving many Americans with the difficult task of having to explain 9/11 to their children (see Holloway 2008: 110). This anxiety is central to the post-9/11 disaster film cycle, including War of the Worlds.

As noted, Ferrier is the film’s main focaliser, a blue-collar worker, skilled crane operator and union man who is separated from his wife and is shown to be emotionally immature. Ferrier has a troubled relationship with his (near estranged) children, who are visiting him for the weekend when the aliens attack. The casting of Dakota Fanning as his daughter reiterates the dynamics already described in relation to Man on Fire: Fanning’s porcelain complexion, blue-veined skin and plucky gregarious attitude signals a morally and aesthetically pure whiteness that stands as a symbol of an imperilled USA. At first, Ferrier (in denial himself) attempts to protect his children from what has happened, refusing to explain what the dust that covers him signifies. Ferrier then resolves to flee the city and return the children to their mother’s house in Boston, a journey narrative observable in a number of post-9/11 post-apocalyptic films, including I Am Legend, Children of Men (2006) and 28 Weeks Later (2007) (see Aston 2008). As the family travel north by car they are caught in chaotic scenes as they try to cross the Hudson. Here the exodus from New York turns to anarchy, with people fighting each other in desperation. Ferrier’s car is stolen by the mob, and his children see him reduced to helplessness. After accusing his father of cowardice, Ferrier’s son leaves to join the forces fighting against the aliens. By the mid-point of the film, the vulnerability of Ferrier is raw and clearly taps a cultural anxiety not fully alleviated by media images of strong fathers and patrician leaders.

Now alone, Ferrier and Rachel are offered refuge by a stranger, Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), who threatens Rachel in a number of ways, including talking blackly about the future (Ferrier does not want his daughter to hear that there is no hope), telling of his plan to fight the aliens (which will imperil them all) and viewing Rachel with a predatory gaze (leading some critics to suggest he is a paedophile) (see Faludi 2007: 10; Holloway 2008: 92–6). In response, Ferrier blindfolds his daughter and kills Ogilvy, stating: ‘I can’t let my daughter die because of you.’ For most of this sequence we adopt Ferrier’s point of view (seeing Ogilvy, the aliens and his daughter through his eyes), but when the murder takes place (offscreen), the point of view shifts to Rachel as she attempts to block out the sound of the killing. The sequence – a fraught scenario set out in a complex point-of-view system – is extremely dark for a mainstream blockbuster, and the moral quandary is a challenging one (Munich takes its central character into similar territory). However, War of the Worlds backs away from creating what might be called ethical deadlock – a situation with no clear way out – preferring instead to legitimate Ferrier’s actions by depicting Ogilvy’s character in the most negative terms. Ultimately, the killing is justified and the scene rehearses what Richard Slotkin terms ‘regeneration through violence’ (2000: 5), thereby aligning War of the Worlds with a strong father/revenger discourse.

Fig. 12: Parental anxiety and the ‘father-protector’: War of the Worlds (2005)

In contrast, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006, released as a film three years later) takes the same figure/allegory of a father and child attempting to survive and provides an even bleaker view, showing ‘the young child’s awful vulnerability to the predations of the post-apocalypse (extreme cold, starvation, illness, rape, slavery, cannibalism) and the likely death of the father who protects him’ (Holloway 2008: 110). The novel and film also contain a dramatic scenario equivalent to the one faced by Ferrier, but instead of a regeneration through violence the son persuades his father that the threatening stranger should not be killed, thereby seeking an ethical course of action that resists the clear-cut through-line offered in War of the Worlds. Similarly, an equivalent scenario in Right at Your Door (2006) shows a struggling writer working from home, whose wife is caught in a chemical/biological terrorist attack as she travels to work. Following instructions from the authorities the writer seals himself and, unknowingly, a Mexican handyman working for a neighbour in his house. The wife survives the attack and manages to return home, and in the fraught scenes that follow, with the wife demanding entry, the husband reasons to her that because she is probably contaminated he must refuse her entry in order to protect the life of the stranger. Here the ethical stakes are finely poised, with no (morally) clear course of action available to any of the characters. This spare, difficult pitting of one person against another, and an insistence that every course of action will result in harm, stands in sharp contrast to War of the Worlds, and prefigures the kind of scenario that gives shape to the torture films discussed in chapter seven.

The film’s conclusion ties these different elements together. As noted, at the film’s start Ferrier is depicted as dysfunctional, with his family disintegrating as a consequence of his failure to adopt a suitably patriarchal blend of action, authority and maturity. Sheldon Hall notes that many of Spielberg’s films ‘revolve around incomplete, dysfunctional or disintegrating families and around weak, absent, abusive or irresponsible fathers or father figures’ (quoted in Williams and Hammond 2006: 167). However, where Spielberg’s earlier films, including Duel (1971), Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), remain relatively qualified in their redemption of the patriarchal status of their central characters, War of the Worlds is more affirmative. Through the violent defence of his daughter, Ferrier begins the process of reclaiming his position as head of the family. As the alien threat succumbs to the common cold virus, the film ends with Ferrier delivering his daughter to his mother, safe in a Boston brownstone, and discovering that his son has also reached safety. James Aston offers a persuasive reading that, as well as consolidating an overarching patriarchal logic, this fantasy of repatriation also taps into ‘media attention given to New Yorkers and the need of being with or finding loved ones in the aftermath of 9/11’ (2008). In combination, then, these facets of the film – the recall of 9/11 as traumatic shock, the placing of the protagonist in the role of victim and the activation of the father/protector role – indicates that although elements of War of the Worlds may seem left-liberal in inclination, the wider operations of the film provide order and coherence, and a clear way through the action for the viewer that aligns them with the conservative discourse.

The way in which War of the Worlds shows the re-establishment of patriarchal authority and closes with a redemptive image of the reunited family, combined with the placing of Americans in the role of victims of atrocity, shadows the elements of the film that might be read in relation to critique. The malleability of an allegorical rendering of 9/11 permits the convergence of left-liberal and right-wing positions, producing a synthesis that – while seemingly incompatible if expressed as clear political statements – is reconciled allegorically. War of the Worlds, then, is a useful indicator of the way in which left-liberal responses are held alongside right-wing constructions in the mainstream feature film, and this, in turn, is indicative of the operation of hegemony in relation to 9/11 more generally. A critical perspective will, if it defers too much to the dominant ideological frame – in this case a sense of vicarious victimisation and remasculinisation – lose its critical purchase.

Adapted by director Frank Darabont from a Stephen King novella first published in 1980, the apocalyptic horror film The Mist (2007) occupies much the same territory as War of the Worlds. However, the film’s relatively low-budget ($18 million), semi-independent production set-up (financed by Dimension Films and shot and edited by the production crew from the television series The Shield (2002–08)) and willingness to venture into territory unexplored by the wider cycle helps to set in relief the operations of more mainstream fare.

The film is set in the small town of Bridgton, Maine. With its white picket fences and neatly tended gardens, Bridgton has a 1950s feel that recalls the opening sequences of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). As with that film, outward appearance belies dark undercurrents and conflicts. The night after a violent thunderstorm, David Drayton (Thomas Jane), a graphic artist, and his eight-year-old son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), drive into town. While they are at the local supermarket a mist descends that sets the scene for a claustrophobic narrative in which the supermarket is besieged by an array of supernatural creatures. The mist can be read allegorically in relation to the dust cloud seen on 9/11. Characters in the film describe it variously as a pollution cloud caused by a chemical explosion, a harbinger of the apocalypse and death itself. It is eventually revealed, in contrast to the dust in War of the Worlds, that the mist is the result of a military experiment gone wrong. As the characters desperately try to survive, their struggle can be read as an allegory of the political tensions and divisions in US society during the mid-2000s.

This can be clearly seen in the film’s depiction of religion. Deadly flying insects manage to break the windows of the supermarket, but Mrs Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a fanatically religious local woman, appears to be saved because she prays as the attack takes place. Carmody claims that the creatures are God’s way of punishing a fallen mankind, while also vehemently denouncing stem cell research, abortion and sexual immorality. Her survival seems to legitimate her views, and she gains the confidence of other survivors, who together call for a human sacrifice by way of expiation. The group capture and stab a soldier before throwing him outside, where he is killed by a praying-mantis-like creature. With Carmody now calling for a child sacrifice, Ollie Weaks (Toby Jones), the mild-mannered, effeminate assistant manager of the supermarket, shoots her dead. The depiction of this strongly religious response – one character states, ‘If you scare people bad enough they’ll turn to whoever offers a solution’ – models the wider culture of fear but also suggests that this way of reacting to crisis is hysterical and unfounded. Indeed, by the film’s logic, it merits violent suppression.

However, The Mist’s anti-religious stance is exceptional, especially when read against the wider cultural/religious response to 9/11, which, as already noted, was underpinned by a Christian value system. Bush called for a crusade against the evildoers responsible and, in what Stuart Croft calls the ‘crisis narrative’ constructed after 9/11, religious rhetoric gave shape to the understanding of the ‘war on terror’ as a battle against a rising, allencompassing evil (2006: 27–33). Although criticism of this rhetoric led to statements that Islam was to be considered a peaceful co-religion with Christianity, with only Islamic fundamentalism a force of evil, the sense of Christian religious purpose and providential meaning continued to adhere to policy statements and to circulate in the wider culture. Indeed, between 18 September and 15 December 2001, one million Americans signed up to a National Prayer programme, with Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2002, stating: ‘Many, including me, have been on bended knee. The prayers of this nation are a part of the good that has come from the evil of September the 11th, more good than we could ever have predicted’ (quoted in Croft 2006: 91).

Fig. 13: The violent suppression of Christian fundamentalism: The Mist (2007)

With less prominence in the media, Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson ‘interpreted the events of 9/11 precisely as the just desserts of “sinful” American hedonism and materialism’ (King 2005: 49). Peter Stearnes argues that this response can be traced back to an American tradition stemming from the experience of European Christian sects exiled to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who longed for God’s apocalyptic judgement of a sinful mankind so that the fallen might be punished and the chosen saved (see 2006: 64–72). According to this interpretation, precisely the one pilloried in The Mist, 9/11 was a God-given punishment, ‘a cleansing destruction of centres of government and urban decadence’ (King 2005: 49). This apocalyptic sensibility can be seen in the sixteen bestselling Left Behind novels released from 1995 by Christian evangelists Tim La Haye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The books, which, according to Jonathan Vincent, saw a sixty per cent increase in sales following 9/11, have also been turned into films (Left Behind (2000), Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002) and Left Behind: World at War (2005)), as well as inspiring other films such as 2012: Doomsday (2008) (2010: 45). Certainly, the initial code-name for the ‘war on terror’ – ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ – would not be out of place in this kind of religio-fiction.

Like the conspiracy films described in chapter three (with which they share some territory, especially the belief that the federal government is evil, or at least deeply untrustworthy), these novels and films, and the wider sensibility of religious hysteria, have been widely dismissed as marginal and without merit. However, although often given short shrift, an apocalyptic sensibility seems to be habitual and ingrained in US popular culture. Ian McEwan observes that this belief in end-time biblical prophecy, or ‘premillennial dispensationalism’, ‘extends from marginal, ill-educated, economically deprived groups, to college-educated people in the millions, through to governing elites, to the very summits of power’ (2008).³⁴ Kevin Rozario notes that ‘according to a Time/CNN poll conducted in 2002, a quarter of all Americans believed the events of 9/11 were predicted in the Bible. The same survey found that 59 percent of Americans expected the world to end as prophesied in the Book of Revelation’ (2007: 185). This sensibility can be traced into post-9/11 film plots. For example, In I Am Legend, scientist Robert Neville (Will Smith) searches for a cure for a disease that has turned the world’s population into flesh-eating zombies/vampires. Crucially, the disease is the result of a mutation of a genetically engineered variant of the measles virus, which it was hoped would cure cancer. The film’s sombre mood and persistent sense of loss, as well as scenes of panic in New York, arguably activate a connection to 9/11. The final scenes of the film have Neville finding a cure in part through scientific enquiry but only because he has tempered his scientific zeal with a commitment to an unquestioning religious or spiritual belief (as marked by the arrival of a devout Latin American woman who has travelled to New York following a sign from God, and the film’s butterfly motif, which suggests some kind of divine intervention). Neville martyrs himself in defence of the vaccine and his surrogate nuclear family, who as a result of his actions escape to a religious community in Vermont. The ending of the film asserts a need to annihilate difference (the zombies figured as threat) driven by a powerful, religiously inflected self-belief. Similarly, The Reaping (2007), Knowing (2009), The Book of Eli (2010) and Legion (2010) all have apocalyptic religious narratives in which fundamentalist Christian religious views are shown to have foundation (belief in the supernatural and in God is encouraged) and positive purpose (the apocalypse provides grounds for the betterment of humankind). As seen in an earlier chapter, in World Trade Center, Dave Karnes, the former US Marine who helps to rescue the two police officers trapped in the collapsed Twin Towers, decides to join the search party while sitting in church under a large crucifix reading the first page of Revelation. Although in War of the Worlds any sense of a religious dimension remains dilute (Morgan Freeman’s voice-over notwithstanding), it remains the case that the near-end times provide the catalyst for the shouldering of patriarchal responsibility.

As already noted, The Mist engages head on with ‘end times’ theology in its plot, actively refuting it – indeed, through the killing of Carmody, suggesting that the religious viewpoint would be better eradicated. There is no brokering of compromise here, no consensus-seeking gathering of the different parts into an uneasy whole. This is in line with the film’s uncompromising narrative structure in general. For instance, it becomes apparent that rather than some form of divine retribution, the lethal mist – and the terrifying creatures contained therein – is the consequence of experiments by a military-industrial complex seeking to harness supernatural energies to form weapons, a conceit that can be read in relation to Chalmers Johnson’s concept of ‘blowback’, namely, that clandestine actions of the CIA and the military eventually have consequences in the form of unanticipated and unpredictable events. The Mist also contains the central father/child dynamic as found in War of the Worlds. However, the father is relatively passive and while trying to escape finds that he and his son are about to succumb to the monsters in the mist. Rather than submit to this fate, he uses a pistol to kill his son and the others escaping with him, before (now without bullets) awaiting his fate. At that point the fog clears and the military arrive. Where a more conventional film might show the townsfolk banding together in the face of the threat, The Mist shows people to be divided, with tensions playing out in relation to geographical, racial, class, religious and gender difference. In this sense the supermarket (which Aviva Briefel and Sam J. Miller claim is a symbol of consumer society (2011: 8)) might be read as an attempt to map the fraught and irreconcilable forces shaping US popular and political culture after 9/11: an allegory of the difficulty of brokering and maintaining consent for any of the forms of nationalism on offer. The film rejects outright, through the treatment of the issue of religion, the strident, patriotic nationalism of the neoconservatives. In addition, the military are shown to be the source of the problem and are ineffectual in dealing with the situation. Nor does the film seek a ‘conscience liberalism’ position, in which some kind of concession to right-wing positions might permit the brokering of consensus, but rather allegorises the divisive cultural politics as they play out in the post-9/11 culture of fear, before following this through to the bleak apocalyptic ending, in which the townsfolk, through their failure to cooperate, produce the conditions of their own downfall. This pessimistic rendering of political realities can also be seen in other horror films, including Dawn of the Dead (2004), Land of the Dead (2005) and the television film Homecoming (2005), forming a cycle that recalls the apocalyptic scenarios identified by Robin Wood in a strand of 1970s horror film that he argued had progressive potential. For Wood, in films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968),

the apocalypse, even when presented in metaphysical terms (the end of the world), is generally reinterpretable in social/political ones (the end of the highly specific world of patriarchal capitalism)…and this is progressive in so far as their negativity is not recuperable into the dominant ideology, but constitutes, on the contrary, the recognition of that ideology’s disintegration and its untenability, as all it has repressed explodes and blows it apart. (1986: 191–2)

In general, this kind of explosive, radical political energy remained marginal in post-9/11 cinema, being found only in semi-independent horror films like The Mist, with the centre-ground ceded to films such as War of the Worlds, in which the recognition of demonstrable political differences was accommodated in the allegorical figure of the nuclear family in peril.