On 11 September 2001, terrorists hijacked four passenger planes and used them as weapons against civilian targets in the US. Two of the planes were flown into each of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, another was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. A total of 2, 948 people were killed as a result of the attacks, including over 400 police officers and firefighters.
1 The attacks produced a series of spectacular and shocking images – the planes flying into the buildings, people jumping to their deaths, lower Manhattan disappearing into an apocalyptic cloud of ash and dust – and prompted an outpouring of uncertainty, anger, patriotism and grief that shaped the first decade of the twenty-first century in US culture and politics. In the days following the attacks political leaders walked the rubble of Ground Zero, rallying rescue and construction workers and building a consensus in support of war. By early October, Afghanistan, a nation accused of harbouring members of al-Qaida (‘The Base’), the terrorist organisation responsible for the attacks, was bombed and invaded, heralding the beginning of over a decade of continuous war. Within weeks, wide-ranging legislation was introduced in the US that dramatically expanded federal government power and endorsed widespread surveillance measures at home and abroad. The legacy of these events, or simply ‘9/11’, as the attacks and the events that followed quickly became known, has been considerable. David Simpson claims that 9/11 has ‘both reproduced and refigured culture’ (2006: 18), and Richard Gray considers the events ‘a defining element in our contemporary structure of feeling’ (2009: 129). Thirteen years after the attacks, and with a particular focus on US cinema, it is the aim of this book to examine the reproduction and refiguration of US popular culture post-9/11.
2Mark Redfield describes the use of the abbreviation ‘9/11’ as ‘a blank little scar around which nationalist energies could be marshalled’ (2009: 1), and it is these ‘nationalist energies’ as they shape post-9/11 cinema that I wish to describe. In an age of globalisation, high immigration, rapid technological change and the fragmentation of political consensus, the concept of national identity is contested; but I will argue that it remains useful. The work of Benedict Anderson describes the synthetic and relatively recent ‘invention’ of the modern nation state and the ways in which national identity results not just from the establishment of territorial borders but also as a result of the cultivation of a history, tradition and culture based on shared attitudes, habits, feelings and assumptions (1983: 111). A key aspect of Anderson’s argument is that modern communications (in his case the print media, in my case the cinema) are essential in creating this ‘imagined community’ among strangers from a disparate range of geographical, social and ethnic backgrounds (1983: 46). More prescriptively, David Miller offers five facets to any given national identity: first, a shared belief and mutual commitment; second, a sense of shared history; third, a particular territory; fourth, an active participation in the community; and fifth, a distinct public culture (1995: 21–47). Similarly, Stanley Allen Renshon claims that national identity is predicated on shared
ways of seeing and understanding the world, the use of language and the cultural frames embedded in it, and the web of relationships and experiences that provide the internal skeleton upon which later external experience is built. (2005: 3)
As these different models show, the imagined community within a particular time and place is brought together through lived experience meshing with social practice. The cinema is a form of cultural production in which Miller’s different facets can be seen to reinforce one another: films distributed over a national territory, audiences actively seeking out and participating in a distinct public culture, the regimens of genre and the cycles of entertainment responding to the audience’s preferences and shared historical reference points, and so on. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie write that
individual films will often serve to represent the national to itself, as a nation. Inserted into the general framework of the cinematic experience, such films will construct imaginary bonds which work to hold the peoples of a nation together as a community by dramatising their current fears, anxieties, pleasures and aspirations [and as a result those in a given society are] thus invited to recognise themselves as a singular body with a common culture. (2000: 6)
Conceptualised this way, individual characters act as ciphers for different ideological positions, with narratives seeking resolution for conflict and contradiction within the story of the nation, and with viewers offered specific points of view and modes of identification that shape and steer them to interpret events according to the wider national narrative. The findings of a Harris poll commissioned by the Bradley Project on America’s National Identity in 2007 showed that 84 per cent of those surveyed believed that there is a unique US national identity based on shared beliefs and values, and 76 per cent of respondents reported that despite the great ethnic diversity in the US there is still a uniquely American culture. My argument in this book is that this strong investment in the idea of the nation can be related to the events of 9/11 and a number of films that evidence a making, unmaking and remaking of US national identity in the decade following the terrorist attacks.
The ‘imagined community’ being described in this book is that of the US, which since the struggle for independence from British colonial rule in the eighteenth century has established a raft of shared attitudes, habits, feelings and assumptions. Describing this ‘imagined community’ in just a few paragraphs is a challenge, but one way to approach this challenge is to consider US national identity as predicated on three interrelated realms of experience, with each realm having its own specific history and complex set of relations with the other realms. First, many early settlers who travelled to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did so to escape religious persecution and as a result maintained a firm commitment to a particular faith – primarily Protestantism, but also Catholicism and Judaism – and to the freedom to express their religious beliefs. Many of these early settlers were also driven by a strong providential sensibility that imagined America as a promised land and placed them, as a religiously distinct group
and as nascent Americans, in the role of God’s chosen people. With time, these two facets of US national identity, grounded in religious belief and historical experience, shaped political institutions, popular culture and social practices in the form of a strong commitment to faith and to freedom (of religion, of speech, and in a more general idealistic sense). Second, alongside these religiously rooted sensibilities, the revolutionary struggle for independence from British colonial rule in the eighteenth century resulted in the drafting of a framework for national self-determination using the political and philosophical principles of the Enlightenment, especially those of universal rights, egalitarianism and liberalism (as well as fear of executive power). With time, this struggle resulted in the establishment of political institutions founded on democratic principles and republican federalism. From a different point of origin to that of religious persecution and providence, these experiences further compounded a commitment to freedom in a political sense, as well as a commitment to a series of checks and balances across the political system. Together, carried by settlers and lawmakers, these impulses shaped the further settlement of the North American continent, thus grounding the idea of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny in the historical narrative of the nation and fostering a rich, culturally specific mythology. Third, throughout the history of discovery, settlement, colonisation, the struggle for independence and the move west, capitalism has provided the primary mode of economic and industrial organisation. In different forms, from colonial mercantilism and slavery in the early period, through monopoly capitalism in the early twentieth century, to neoliberal variants in the late twentieth century, capitalism has formed a structural base for a society that endorses the market and rewards risk-taking, competition, speculation, entrepreneurialism, innovation and the pursuit of profit in ways that underpin and inflect the previous two realms.
Writing in 1917, and attempting to somehow capture the spirit of a distinct US national identity resulting from these three realms of experience, William Tyler Page published the American’s Creed – a ubiquitous feature of US civic life that is still used as part of the naturalisation and citizenship ceremonies undertaken by those wishing to become US citizens. The Creed reads:
I believe in the USA as a Government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign states; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its flag; and to defend it against all enemies. (Quoted in Renshon 2005: 60)
Renshon observes that Page’s Creed is predicated on political principles but also implicitly acknowledges historical process and the necessity of strong emotional – even existential – attachment, and that this evinces how the US ‘imagined community’ is bound by a combination of abstract ideas, the memory of violent historical struggle and lived experience.
It is, of course, necessary to question this rather too neat and tidy account, but first I wish to explore how this conventional sense of national identity played a role in the initial response to 9/11: indeed, how 9/11 might be said to have brought fully into focus – to literally have ‘made’ – this version of national identity (after a lengthy period of contestation). For example, during the reporting of the terrorist attacks the caption on the US television news channel CNN read simply ‘America under attack’: a clear indication of how the attacks were presented as something that threatened the nation, collectively and without differentiation. Similarly, the pronouncements of shared feelings of national shock made by news presenters – often utilising the collective identifiers ‘we’ and ‘us’ – indicated how viewers were asked to imagine themselves as belonging to a unified national community threatened by external forces. The US flag, known colloquially as the Stars and Stripes, was the most visible symbol of this spirit of national togetherness. Wal-Mart reportedly sold 116,000 flags on 9/11 and 250,000 the following day (see Huntington 2004: 3), and the flag appeared as television logos, on tie pins worn by news presenters, and flew over public buildings, private businesses and private homes: the flag’s ubiquity signalled the widespread activation of a deep-seated patriotism.
On 12 September 2001 a photograph taken by Thomas E. Franklin, and subsequently labelled
Ground Zero Spirit, was published in
The Bergen Record and then syndicated to newspapers and broadcast on national television. The photograph, also published on the cover of
Newsweek on 24 September, shows three firefighters raising the Stars and Stripes amidst the ruins of the World Trade Center, thereby offering its viewers an image of heroism, bravery and, considering the deaths of a large number of rescue workers, self-sacrifice. The sentiment of Page’s American’s Creed, in which ‘American patriots sacrifice their lives and fortunes’ in defence of their country, is in plain view. The photograph self-consciously recalls an earlier propaganda photograph called
Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima, which shows a hard-won US military victory in the Pacific during World War II (see Westwell 2008). In US cultural memory, World War II is remembered as a collective and moral national endeavour in which ordinary Americans, so-called ‘citizen soldiers’, sacrificed their lives in pursuit of patriotic and idealistic goals. This sense of World War II is imbricated with the photograph of Ground Zero – a profoundly unstable location on 12 September in both a literal and a symbolic sense – and this imbrication allows 9/11 to be placed within a redemptive national narrative familiar to all. This utilisation of the cultural memory of World War II, and the logic that attends it, was reinforced in newspaper reports and television coverage that linked 9/11 with the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In these reports the sense of innocence violated and the need for military retaliation (indeed revenge) associated with this earlier event were quickly appropriated as a suitable model for responding to 9/11 (see Landy 2004: 86–7).
This combination of a jingoistic sense of national identity and a desire for retribution pervaded official discourse. In a defining speech made on 20 September 2001, President George W. Bush used a combination of nationalist and religious rhetoric to argue for the need to go to war. John M. Murphy notes how Bush self-consciously echoed the famous ‘four freedoms’ speech made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II and placed 9/11 ‘in a biblical context through quotation of the opening of the 23rd psalm, [thereby] shaping the meaning of 9/11 as a passage through the valley of the shadow of death yet simultaneously assuring [his listeners] that the Lord was with [them]’ (2003: 609).
To take another example, between 2001 and 2002, the toy manufacturer Hasbro reported a 46 per cent increase in sales of GI Joe action figures: a neat demonstration of how a tried and tested signifier of national identity was used to anchor and direct imaginative play for the next generation of Americans during a moment of crisis (see Martin and Steuter 2010: 70). Similarly, Hallmark, a major US greetings card retailer, circulated a memo on 17 September to managers in its retail stores advising how they might reposition 75 existing products, including cards showing the Stars and Stripes and the ‘Everyday Heroes’ range, in order to capitalise on post-9/11 patriotic sentiment (see Jackson 2005: 20). By 24 September the company had launched the ‘Together We Stand’ series, which gave prominence to clear iconic symbols of US national identity such as the US flag, the American bald eagle and the Statue of Liberty. Notwithstanding the threat of anthrax spores placed in the post between September and October 2001 in ‘the eleven months following September 11, consumers purchased nearly 6.5 million patriotic cards, with Hallmark sales up 75% on the previous year’ (ibid.). The purchasing, giving and receiving of cards in the wake of the attacks signifies myriad ways of expressing kinship, condolences, gratitude, and so on, but it also serves as a clear example of how national identity is constituted through and by cultural artefacts and social practices. Evelyn Alsultany notes that
In the weeks after 9/11, patriotic advertising campaigns flooded highway billboards, radio, magazines, newspapers, and television. Some corporations used the tragedy directly or indirectly to market and sell their product. General Motors launched a campaign, ‘Keep America Rolling,’ offering zero percent financing deals on new cars and trucks. The New York Sports Club encouraged New Yorkers to ‘Keep America Strong’ by joining the gym on September 25. Some corporations, such as AOL/Time Warner, MSNBC, Ralph Lauren, Sears, and Morgan Stanley advertised that they would not be advertising, instead buying advertising space on billboards, magazines, and television to express their condolences, solidarity, and an inspirational message. (2007: 593)
These examples show how 9/11 was made to serve the construction of national identity as a feature of the thick social relations of family and community.
Michael Billig observes that this outpouring of nationalist sentiment belies a national identity that is usually unspoken and taken for granted (1995: 5–6). For Billig this nationalist outpouring is only possible as a result of what he calls ‘banal nationalism’: a form of (largely disavowed) nationalism that keeps national identity in a state of constant readiness. Billig writes that ‘the metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building’ (1995: 8). And, as he notes, the everyday, or ‘banal’, nature of this form of nationalism should not lead one to underestimate the leverage it has, especially during times of crisis, where this nationalism ‘primes’ the charge to war (1995: 7). In public appearances Bush made it known that he carried the badge of a rescue worker called George Howard who had been killed on 9/11; this talismanic object – a powerful piece of nationalist mise-en-scène – sided him, and his statements, with the everyday lived experience of a federal employee and that employee’s sacrifice. A symbol of ‘banal nationalism’ – the identification badge of a government employee – became richly significant and primed the nationalist and patriotic discourses that led the country to war.
The scant examples I have considered thus far – news photographs, children’s toys, greetings cards – indicate that cultural production during and immediately after the terrorist attacks offered a strong, unified version of US national identity, including a particular view of a shared national history. But what role did the cinema play? Did the cinema respond similarly to bolster and reiterate this prevailing view? Marilyn B. Young reports that in October 2001 forty Hollywood executives attended a two-hour discussion at the White House with Chris Henick, deputy assistant to the president, and Adam Goldman, associate director of the Office of Public Liaison; at this meeting, Leslie Moonves, president of CBS, is reported as saying, ‘Tell us what to do. We don’t fly jet planes, but there are skill sets that can be put to use here’ (2003: 256). A second meeting, known as the Beverly Hills Summit, followed on 8 November, at which
a smaller group of Hollywood executives, along with representatives of the television networks, labor unions, and Cineplex owners as well, responded to an invitation from Karl Rove, senior White House advisor, for a more focused and high-powered discussion of how Hollywood might help the war effort. (Ibid.)
This meeting was ‘co-hosted by two stalwarts of Liberal Hollywood: Sherry Lansing, chair of the Paramount Pictures film division, and Jonathan Dolgen, head of Viacom’s entertainment group’ (Cooper 2001). While it is unusual for politicians to call upon filmmakers with the express aim of petitioning them to create a sympathetic cultural context for a specific policy agenda, it seems that this is exactly what Rove hoped to achieve. He asked Hollywood executives to enshrine in forthcoming films and television shows the sevenpoint message
that the war is against terrorism, not Islam; that Americans must be called to national service; that Americans should support the troops; that this is a global war that needs a global response; that this is a war against evil; that American children have to be reassured; and that instead of propaganda, the war effort needs a narrative that should be told […] with accuracy and honesty. (Ibid.)
Attendees at both meetings noted that the World War II propaganda films of Frank Capra might provide a model of ‘the kind of patriotic, pro-America film and television production desired by the White House’ (Prince 2009: 80). However, as Jean-Michel Valantin notes, care was also taken to avoid any direct request for the production of propaganda; indeed, it is reported that Rove ‘implored Hollywood producers and directors not to dramatise the “war against terrorism onscreen”’ (2005: 90).
The release schedules of late 2001 and early 2002 suggest that Hollywood producers did indeed seek to manage the flow of cultural production in response to Rove’s request. Their first step was the removal of anything that might be seen to have a direct reference to 9/11, or similar events: the Twin Towers were removed from
Serendipity (2001),
People I Know (2002) and
Men in Black II (2002), as well as the promotional material for
Spider-Man (2002) (see Schneider 2004: 30). Even a film that might be said to align with the dominant discourse, such as
Collateral Damage (2002), an Arnold Schwarzenegger action film that tells the story of a firefighter who seeks revenge on terrorists responsible for the death of his family, had its publicity materials toned down and was held back from release until 10 February 2002 (see Pollard 2011: 8–9).
This amending and repositioning of already completed films which might be seen to have direct links with 9/11 served to head off accusations that Hollywood was behaving in an unduly political way or seeking to ‘cash in’ on the event. With these measures in place, as J. Hoberman observes, the production slate of late autumn 2001 and early 2002 was amended in such a way as to amplify the dominant discourse described earlier in this chapter. For Hoberman, war films such as
Behind Enemy Lines (December 2001),
Black Hawk Down (January 2002),
We Were Soldiers (March 2002) and
Windtalkers (June 2002) depicted the US as victim and showed the moral imperative of military intervention, thereby corroborating the wider call to war (2002: 45); with the exception of
We Were Soldiers, these films received considerable assistance from the Pentagon in exchange for script changes to ensure favourable representation of the military, a clear indication of the political alignment of the films (2002: 46).
Black Hawk Down’s release date was brought forward by ten weeks to 30 December 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz attended the film’s premiere and endorsed the film, while Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White claimed that ‘the values portrayed here are absolutely authentic. They represent the core Army ethic of courage and selfless service’ (see Robb 2004: 59–66, 91, 181–2).
We Were Soldiers also received a well-publicised White House screening, with Bush, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove expressing favourable opinions (see Kozaryn 2002), and a week after the film’s release the cover of
Newsweek borrowed the title to provide an elegiac frame for its story of US casualties in Afghanistan. This high-profile cycle of films (which show modern warfare as a moral imperative in defence of human rights and as a justified response to vicious and unprovoked attack) – along with the careful, tactical treatment of any direct address of the attacks – aligned neatly with Rove’s directive and served to discursively amplify the dominant ideological response to 9/11: a nationalist call to arms.
The nationalist sentiment was further maintained through the decision to hold some films back. For example, Buffalo Soldiers, a warts-and-all satire of US military corruption in West Germany in the late 1980s, was completed in November 2000 and the film played at the Toronto International Film Festival on 8 September 2001. Here, the film’s producers persuaded Miramax to handle distribution in the US in a deal clinched on 10 September 2001. Though contractually obliged to release the film within a year, Miramax delayed for fear of appearing anti-American and alienating potential viewers. Against this backdrop, the film was finally released in July 2003 with little by way of marketing, and hence virtually no critical or commercial traction. Similarly, The Quiet American was originally scheduled for release in the autumn of 2001, but was held back until 24 November 2002. Based on Graham Greene’s anti-war novel exploring the CIA’s clandestine role in Vietnam during the period of decolonisation following World War II, the film was shelved by Miramax because, according to co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, the studio felt it could not ‘release this film now; it’s unpatriotic.
America has to be cohesive and band together. [Nobody has] the stomach for a movie about bad Americans anymore’ (quoted in Thompson 2002).
As these examples indicate, pre-existing views (both pro-war and antiwar, and indicative of a range of opinions) were managed in order to segue with patriotic constructions of US national identity, and in particular a call to arms that led to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Concerted self-censorship practised by studios like Miramax ensured that films that challenged or questioned this reality were pushed to the margins. As such, Hollywood played a significant role in the production and maintenance of a belligerent response to 9/11. Chapter two describes how this nationalist filmmaking – a form of entertainment in support of war – continued through 2002 and into 2003 (see also Kaplan 2005: 16).
Of course, given ethnic and racial difference, different and conflicting religious traditions, political radicalism, capitalist competition, and tension between regional and national allegiances, US national identity is intrinsically tenuous and fragile (see Gitlin 1995; Krakau 1997; Renshon 2005). Even a cursory glance at US history (the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, the Civil War, the Great Depression, Vietnam) reminds us of this. The three realms of experience underpinning the US’s ‘imagined community’ – Christian faith, Enlightenment political philosophy and capitalism – have fostered significant contradictions and conflicts. Indeed, the US national motto –
E pluribus unum: out of many, one – stresses unity and togetherness yet also points towards difference and a process of struggle. Todd Gitlin observes that historically speaking, ‘the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is at war with itself; as the abolitionists insisted, the liberty of the slave owner steals the happiness of the slave’ (1995: 48). The novelist John Updike attempts to capture the same contradiction by describing America as a ‘conservative country built upon radicalism’ (quoted in Bigsby 2006: 27). Clearly, then, US society is shaped by powerful centrifugal forces that will threaten any attempt to foster a singular, shared ‘imagined community’. In the early stages of the 2007/08 presidential campaign, Barack Obama chose not to wear a US flag tiepin, arguing that the flag had become a substitute for true patriotism, a symbol with powerful implicit meanings that were not being subjected to critical inquiry. His actions were controversial, but as his election to president demonstrates, his stance was appealing to many Americans and pointed to the way in which the bringing together of an imagined community is never straightforward.
3 Although
Buffalo Soldiers and
The Quiet American were marginalised, the existence of these films points to the presence in culture (and in society at large) of oppositional and critical perspectives. In chapter one I describe how the straightforward nationalist discourse that came to prominence in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was subjected to criticism and remains so. As such, any presumption of a straightforward top-down relationship where conventional forms of US national identity are reproduced and reinforced in popular culture is simply wrong. The processes at work are not simply those of iteration, reiteration and amplification, but more those of a constant making, unmaking and remaking. This book details numerous instances of the national identity made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 being unmade and remade: documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport’s iconoclastic road trip from West to East in
Parallel Lines (2004), the raising of an inverted Stars and Stripes to signal national emergency in the closing sequence of
In the Valley of Elah (2007) and the reflection of a troubled CIA agent’s face in the glass of a framed US flag in
Zero Dark Thirty (2012) (see cover image).
Struggle, then, is central to any discussion of US national identity, and is a defining term for this book. In film studies, analysis that is driven by an explicit impulse to comment on political struggle is often referred to as ideological criticism. The term ideology is shorthand for the ‘relatively well-systematised set of categories which provide a “frame” for the belief, perception and conduct of a body of individuals’ within a particular time and place (Eagleton 1991: 43). Utilising this term, and the Marxist philosophy that frames it, the work of Theodor Adorno and others associated with the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s sought to question how processes of political struggle related to culture and how film served to legitimate (and in some cases critique) ideology.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, ideological criticism in film studies was underpinned by the ideas of French philosopher Louis Althusser. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and structuralism, Althusser attributed greater agency to culture than classical Marxist versions of ideology, and sought to explain how ideological apparatuses – such as education, the church and popular culture – shaped consciousness or subjectivity. Influenced by Althusser’s ideology critique, the editors of the influential French film journal Cahiers du cinéma produced a typology for detailing the different relationships between film and ideology (see Editors 1972): ‘category A’ films reproduced the dominant ideology in unadulterated form, ‘category B’ films actively refused the dominant ideology, and so on. Acknowledging the fact that popular entertainment cinema often failed to clearly align with neatly demarcated political viewpoints, the ‘category E’ film was said to reproduce the dominant ideology but to do so in an ambiguous manner. As this typology sought to demonstrate, the determining of the relationship between films and any given political landscape is not straightforward.
A parallel though overlapping strand of ideological criticism is associated with the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used the term ‘hegemony’ to describe how ideology is shaped by powerful (or hegemonic) groups seeking consent from less powerful groups for the widespread adoption of their view of the world. This consent is often refused or hard won, and consequently culture is evidence of, and bears the marks of, ideological struggle. Conceived of thus, ideological criticism sought to identify how struggle appears within film texts (a ‘category E’ film bears the marks of such struggle) and across cycles of films and genres. This Gramscian approach has inflected a number of works that examine post-9/11 cinema (see Birkenstein et al. 2010; Dixon 2004; Prince 2009), with the title of Douglas Kellner’s Cinema Wars (2010) indicative of the general approach, and this book occupies similar territory.
Written between World War I and World War II, Gramsci’s work adhered to the Marxist principle that society consists of groups that have political power and those that do not, with the latter oppressed by the former. According to Marxist orthodoxy the class that controls the means of production have the ability to instil, via culture, a worldview – or ideology – that is shared by all but which serves only their interests. The primary function of ideology, then, was to dupe those disadvantaged by the system into supporting it and granting it their consent. In contrast, Robert Bocock argues that Gramsci wished to demonstrate how
the relationship between these two is not conceived of as being such that one, the material, the economic, determined the other, the realm of culture and ideologies. Rather Gramsci sees the relationship between the material, productive base, and the cultural sphere as being a complex, reciprocal one in which human beings mediate between the two zones. (1986: 79)
According to this line of reasoning, people’s beliefs are not
something manipulated by capitalists, or put into the minds of the masses by them, but rather they flow from the exigencies of everyday life under capitalism. The workers, and others, hold the values and political ideas that they do as a consequence of both trying to survive, and of attempting to enjoy themselves, within capitalism. (1986: 32)
According to Gramsci, then, ideology is not just the smokescreen that those with political power use to veil their vested interests (though it is this as well), but is the consensus view of things, the end result of a dynamic, complex interaction between individuals, social groups, institutions and power structures. Gramsci’s account of ideology retains a Marxist commitment to culture being shaped differentially, with the powerful able to exert their will, but nuances this by drawing attention to the ways in which powerful groups will maintain their position by making concessions to, and accommodations of, competing groups and positions. Gramsci describes the position of power attained by the ruling class as hegemony, a dominant position underpinned by economic and political power but also hard won in the sphere of culture. In order for change to take place – whether it be incremental and within the system or revolutionary and with the intention of replacing the system – hegemony must be unsettled: there must be some form of counter-hegemonic struggle. For Gramsci, this struggle is not restricted to political conflict – the ballot box, the picket line, the barricades, and so on – but extends to the lived experience of everyday life, with popular culture an important arena in which counter-hegemony can take shape. The range of films discussed in this book – Hollywood blockbusters, semi-independent feature films and small-scale documentaries – reflects the diversity of views in any modern polity as well as the different roles they play in reproducing and challenging power through the shaping of the popular imagination.
As noted, much of the writing on 9/11 tends to adopt a ‘quasi-Gramscian’ approach in which right-wing films are contrasted with left-liberal films, and with struggle between the two posited as offering two competing ideologies, doing battle to establish hegemony (see Slocum 2011). Kellner, for example, argues that post-9/11 cinema agitates for the election of Barack Obama and that the Obama ascendency constitutes a left-liberal ideology replacing that of a neoconservatism under Bush. However, it is important to retain the kernel of political/structural analysis that shapes Gramsci’s thinking. The Marxist bottom line has it that the system – in this case US liberal democracy and capitalism – will produce a self-serving ideology, and that, following Gramsci, this ideology will be flexible enough to allow change to take place without the status quo fundamentally altering, that is, hegemony will be brokered and concessions will be made in order to continuously maintain it. So, the question is not one of either this (neoconservative) ideology or that (left-liberal) one; more, the question is what kind of deal will be brokered to establish an equilibrium that will maintain things more or less as they are? In spite of a decade of politically partisan skirmishing across popular culture, hegemony holds; despite, or even because of, Obama’s election, the status quo has been maintained. This book reveals how films and cycles of films that appear to lock horns and be irreconcilable with one another, politically speaking, partake in a process of making, unmaking and (most crucially) remaking US national identity in response to a moment of crisis. The early chapters indicate how individual films and cycles of films might be said to adopt an adversarial relation with clear-cut political positions, but as the book progresses it will be shown how post-9/11 cinema seeks mechanisms for reconciling political difference in service of hegemonic renewal, especially in the realm of mainstream feature film production. Here it is necessary to recall Richard Maltby’s (1982) argument that Hollywood is a ‘cinema of consensus’ and that, although its films display a ‘commercial aesthetic [that] is too opportunistic to prize coherence, organic unity, or even the absence of contradiction among its primary virtues’ (Maltby 2003: 35), it will generally align with any given hegemony. As will be shown, this process is rarely straightforward: entertainment cinema amplifies, negotiates with, escapes from and imagines utopian alternatives to the status quo, but in the end it will err to the political centre.
Karl Rove’s attempt to gain the ideological advantage of having the world’s most powerful entertainment industry work with the grain of a neoconservative policy agenda was an attempt to actively broker hegemony, if you will. And, on the face of it, it would appear that many of those involved in the production of popular culture readily shouldered this work. Yet, as I will demonstrate in chapter one and at a number of other points in this book, cultural production was already taking place in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that would lead to the production of films that addressed 9/11 in a critical way, prefiguring much of the challenge, critique and contestation that would come to define post-9/11 cinema. Structurally, and by way of orientation, this ideological struggle – a central focus of this book – can be considered by reading chapter one and chapter two in parallel; indeed, these two chapters serve to map the parallel lines – or two clearly politically differentiated responses to 9/11 – to which the book’s title refers. In later chapters, although acknowledgement of political struggle will continue to be given, attention will shift to the ways in which post-9/11 cinema often seeks to bring together and accommodate both positions, to broker hegemony out of cultural/political conflict. Throughout, national identity is taken to be a central – though partial – element of ideology but one that might be said to be metonymic – that is, revealing of the wider operation of ideology in any given moment. As such, the following chapters offer an explanation of how, more than ten years after 9/11, the US reveals a sense of self via popular culture, and how this fraught revelation is a marker of wider political struggle.
I wish to guard against the danger that ideological criticism can create a misleading sense of polarisation, and I do not wish to present hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggle in an overly neat way. Indeed, films such as
We Were Soldiers, which seem to function as robust incarnations of a conservative and (in early 2002) prevalent construction of US identity, are, in fact, relatively thin on the ground and – with the exception of
Black Hawk Down – were not particularly successful at the box office. Similarly, the critical viewpoint adopted in
The Quiet American (and temporarily silenced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11) is hardly typical either. I have used films in the introduction – and as a structuring element of the book – to put the process of struggle in stark relief. However, films will usually fall somewhere in between, seeking to reconcile conflicts and contradictions replete in the events they depict in a dynamic (a Marxist might say dialectical) way. As such, although a marked separation between different, and competing, versions of US national identity can usually be identified, there are also significant points of convergence and contact, often resulting in conflict and incoherence, but also embodying compromise and consensus. US national identity, then, results from the drawing together of seemingly oppositional political viewpoints/tendencies in ways that reconcile and accommodate their differences in preference for a shared, common ground. This is what interests me most: as struggle subsides equilibrium returns.
Each chapter of this book addresses a key theme in post-9/11 US cinema: loss and uncertainty (and a feeling of unreality) in chapter one; unity films and revenge films in chapter two; conspiracy films in chapter three; the return to and direct representation of 9/11 in chapter four; visions of the end of the world and disaster in chapter five; the predominance of a discourse of trauma and therapeutic recovery in chapter six; the depiction of torture in chapter seven; the representation of the war in Iraq in chapter eight; the way in which the experience of 9/11 has shifted senses of history in chapter nine. This thematic approach is organised according to a loose chronology that indicates how films and cycles of films have mirrored wider cultural shifts and tendencies as the decade has unfolded. For example, the revenge films examined in chapter two, including Collateral Damage and Man on Fire (2004), are read as part of the initial hegemonic response to 9/11, and it is argued that this cycle of illiberal films activates patriotic and jingoistic senses of US national identity and advocates vengeful retribution, thereby corroborating the move to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Iraq war films examined in chapter eight, including Iraq in Fragments (2006), appear late in the decade and can be read as counter-hegemonic and as more properly belonging to a period of rising anti-war sentiment and political realignment in late 2008, in anticipation of the election of Barack Obama. This chronological approach will necessarily give way at times to a more free-ranging discussion of key themes – of which revenge and war are good examples.
Taken together, the different chapters build a picture of how, in negotiating post-9/11 political and social realities, the US cinema has been multi-fold: on the one hand, producing countless films that serviced the dominant discourses associated with 9/11 and sought consent for a banal nationalism and support for an ever-expanding ‘war on terror’, and on the other, delivering many films that in their political engagement and aesthetic and generic variety are almost without precedent. Against this polarised filmmaking there are also numerous examples of a post-9/11 cinema that sought to pull discrete political positions together, to acknowledge historical complexity and yet also renew nationalist sentiment and re-establish and maintain the status quo. This book is an account of the relations between these different tendencies of the post-9/11 cinema.