Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema

2 The focus here is on US films and their relation to a US national context. This does not discount the possibility that the readings presented in this book may also serve to explain how these films shape culture and politics in different national contexts. However, wider claims of this sort would need to be treated on a case-by-case basis. Also, the avowed focus on US cinema should not be taken as a claim that this cinema has privileged status; a range of non-US film productions related to 9/11 are ably examined by other scholars (see Cilano 2009).

3 Cynthia Weber challenges the ways in which initiatives like the Bradley Project seek to neatly bracket American national identity; Weber has set up an archive of testimonies which evidence the difficulty of settling national identity (see Weber 2011).

4 Bill Maher, host of the show Politically Incorrect on US network/cable channel ABC, suggested that the terrorists’ willingness to die for a cause they believed in meant that they did not merit the widely used descriptor ‘coward’. Maher has claimed that as a result of this statement, and under pressure from advertisers including FedEx and Sears Roebuck, his contract was not renewed.

5 Suaret has made a number of films related to 9/11, including Loss (2002), Billy Green 9/11 (2003) and Collateral Damages (2003).

6 To my knowledge, the only other filmmaker adding references to 9/11 to a film in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was Martin Scorsese, who placed the Twin Towers in the closing montage sequence of Gangs of New York (2002).

7 Intriguingly, the monologue (which appears in amended form in the novel) was taken out of the script at the request of Touchstone who felt it would make Monty unsympathetic, only to be reinstated at Lee’s insistence (see Massood 2003: 9).

8 In the photographs collected in Aftermath (Meyerowitz 2006) Ground Zero is subject to a strongly materialist scrutiny alive to the ways in which a symbolic register might be used to convey a critical and complex sense of what has happened. Here the process of making the site safe and clearing up the rubble is shown as laborious hard work, not heroism, and photographs such as the one showing a batch of retrieved weapons, including World War II machine guns, are thought-provoking and complex.

9 The only person to vote against the resolution was Congresswoman Barbara Lee. In 2012, the Guardian newspaper website published an interview in which Lee explained the reasons behind her decision.

10 At the time of the film’s release this was claimed to be the only film footage of the first plane strike. It is undoubtedly the best-quality footage, but a video shot by Pavel Hlava and a sequence of still frames taken by Wolfgang Staehle also recorded the event. Conspiracy theories related to 9/11 often question the provenance of this piece of footage, especially how Naudet was able to react so quickly to the plane’s approach and the way some formal elements of the photograph such as the shadows don’t correspond to the position of the sun.

11 McNally’s photographs were published in two Time/Life books (Sullivan 2001; Editors of Life 2002) and appear in other commemorative collections that celebrate the role of the emergency services (Sweet 2002; Smith 2002).

12 To better fit this prevailing ideological discourse, plans for a statue modelled on the Ground Zero Spirit photograph proposed to show the flag being raised by a Hispanic-American, an African-American and an Anglo-American firefighter.

13 Man on Fire’s director, Tony Scott, also made Déjà Vu (2006), which describes a terrorist bombing and the use of sophisticated surveillance technology in order to shift time so that the attack can be prevented. The film’s themes were deemed by many to be informed by the events of 9/11.

14 With hindsight, it became clear that many details surrounding Lynch’s capture and rescue (including accusations that she had been sexually assaulted) were intentionally manipulated to conform to the captivity narrative; indeed, Lynch herself has been vocal in disputing some of the facts in her ‘authorised’ biography (see Martyn 2008: 124–64).

15 The Dakota Fanning character is the daughter of a white American woman who is married to a Mexican man. No explanation is given to indicate how this mixedrace relationship resulted in a child with such light colouring.

16 An irony here is that Brian Helgeland, who wrote the script for Man on Fire, also adapted the screenplay for Mystic River. Helgeland’s Man on Fire script retained the Italian setting of the source novel, but Tony Scott insisted the action be moved to Mexico (where the film was shot on location) in order to avoid the film feeling like a ‘period piece’, a decision that clearly ‘raced’ the final film and brought it in line with the framework of the captivity narrative.

17 The Brave One, which depicts a female vigilante figure, might be considered a partial exception.

18 The full reach of the agencies empowered by this legislation – as well as the widespread abuse of surveillance technology – would not be fully known until some years later. See, for example, ‘The NSA Files’ on the website of the British newspaper, the Guardian.

19 Mark Wheeler offers snapshots of the political commitments of a number of Hollywood politicos, including Lionel Chetwynd, who is co-chair of the Wednesday Morning Club, a regular informal gathering where Hollywood’s conservatives meet with Republican leaders (2006: 154).

20 9/11: Press for Truth (2006) is a film based on Paul Thompson’s detailed timeline compiled from mainstream news sources. Like Fahrenheit 9/11, the film often appears on lists of conspiracy films, though Stephen Prince objects to such classification and argues that the film ‘does not proffer a conspiracy theory of the attacks; instead, it argues that much has been covered up, denied, or obfuscated’ (2009: 150). The film is also notable for the appearance of the ‘Jersey Girls’, four women from New Jersey whose husbands were killed on 9/11, and who were instrumental in pressing for the 9/11 Commission to be formed, as well as subjecting the investigation to intense scrutiny (protesting the appointment of Henry Kissinger as chair, for example) (see Olmsted 2009: 214–17).

21 Another conspiracy theory has it that no Jewish people were killed in the attack and that the attacks were the work of Mossad, though racist scapegoating of this sort rarely appears in the popular web films/documentaries.

22 In his book Counterknowledge, Damian Thompson (2008) argues that the wider political culture has failed to maintain adequate standards of empirical, rational, logical reasoning, which have been degraded under exposure to ‘non-empirical, non-rational, illogical reasoning or counter-knowledge’; (see debates over intelligent design, the MMR vaccine, and so on).

23 The Complete 911 Timeline is available on the History Commons website.

24 The different versions of Loose Change do pull away from the more outlandish conspiracy theories, and this trajectory towards more plausible accounts can also be seen in the different iterations of the three web films Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007), Zeitgeist: Addendum (2008) and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011).

25 There is a range of post-9/11 conspiracy films whose titles refer to the feature film V for Vendetta (2005), including Vendetta 9/11; Vendetta: Past, Present and Future; Remember, Remember, the 11th of September; and V for Vendetta Goes to Washington. These films, which have disparate release dates and exist in numerous versions, and the wearing of the masks worn by the central character at political demonstrations, indicate how a political anger related to 9/11 has been extended to a wide range of political issues, from anti-globalisation to the Arab Spring.

26 I am grateful to Sebastian Horn, who gave a paper on Syriana at the ‘Screens of Terror’ conference at Southbank University in 2010. Horn’s elegant plot summary provided a basis for my more prosaic account here.

27 The released version ends with the more sober ‘dedicated to the memory of all those who lost their lives on September 11th, 2001’.

28 The exploitation film Stairwell: Trapped in the World Trade Center (2002) was not given a theatrical release, indicating the difficulty of directly depicting events. The film used footage shot for the film Hellevator (1999) about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

29 In Memoriam, which includes shots of falling people and an image of a dead body on the ground, is an exception here. In DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a key scene shows George W. Bush visiting a hospital containing burn victims and amputees. Here serious injury is seen to justify retributive political policymaking in the lead-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Brottman (2004) notes that there was an appetite for these images, with the website Ogrish.com (no longer accessible) showing film of people falling from the towers and body parts.

30 David Holloway argues that the same tendencies can be found in collections of photographs related to 9/11 (see 2008: 131–2).

31 Other cycles of post-9/11 films have been read allegorically, including the superhero film (see Faludi 2007; Pollard 2011) and the horror film (see Maddrey 2004; Magistrale 2005; Blake 2008; Briefel and Miller 2011; Wetmore 2012).

32 Here the film is ostensibly faithful to the source novel. Iain Johnstone, for example, observes that Wells considered War of the Worlds to be a critical comment on British foreign policy, especially the wholesale extermination of the people of Tasmania (see 2007: 307).

33 A child abduction/child abuse cycle, including Keane (2004), Flightplan (2005), Freedomland (2006), The Changeling (2008) and Gone Baby Gone (2007), can be read as a similar, and connected, allegorical response to 9/11.

34 This highly religious worldview also gives rise to what has been called a New Atheism that is associated with the work of Richard Dawkins (2006) and Christopher Hitchens (2007), among others.

35 A number of therapists were concerned about funding being diverted from projects helping poor people and/or children with mental health issues (see Seeley 2008: 156).

36 It is said that the images of a falling man (which appear as pictures in Foer’s novel) are modelled on photographer Lyle Owerko’s photographs, but they are also very similar to the better-known photographs by Richard Drew that came to public prominence after the book’s publication.

37 On IMDb it is claimed that an early draft of the script had Oskar’s grandfather regaining his ability to speak at the end of the film, something that would have made the film’s redemptive arc even more pronounced. The hesitation indicated by the decision not to use this version recognises that such clear-cut resolution requires further ideological work.

38 The television series Rescue Me (2004–11) undertakes an extended examination of PTSD resulting from the experience of 9/11 – the central character is haunted by those killed on 9/11, literally so – and in seasons 1 and 2 any therapeutic solutions are treated with considerable scepticism. In the difficult-to-categorise Live from Shiva’s Dancefloor (2003), directed by Richard Linklater, avant-garde New York tour guide Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch is shown responding to 9/11 via a New Age therapeutic philosophy. His suggestion that Ground Zero be made into a nature reserve for buffalo is indicative of the film’s irreverent and distinctive take.

39 The bear-trap scene appears in flashback in Saw to provide backstory for a female protagonist, and the scenario was used to make a short film, subsequently titled Saw 0.5, which is available on YouTube.

40 Though, as with Syriana, there is a danger here of relying on the over-simplifying left-liberal presumption that poverty is the crucible of terrorism when, in fact, the majority of 9/11 terrorists were not from socially deprived backgrounds.

41 Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris produced a book to accompany Standard Operating Procedure (Gourevitch and Morris 2008), as well as writing an extensive blog for the New York Times.

42 The television series Battlestar Galactica (2004–09) is often contrasted with 24 as offering a nuanced exploration of the torture debate (see Goulart and Wesley 2008).

43 The 2008 Report of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody, is 232 pages long with 1,800 footnotes. The Torture Papers (2005) contains 1,249 pages of documents (Greenberg and Dratel 2005). The Torture Archive, which sponsored the film Torturing Democracy (2008), has a website that includes a searchable database of more than 7,000 original documents, running to over 100,000 pages.

44 The war in Afghanistan has not been so widely covered by US documentary filmmakers, though Restrepo (2010) is worthy of note.

45 The perceived left-liberal bias of this first wave of documentaries in this cycle prompted the production of the avowedly right-wing documentary Buried in the Sand: The Deception of America (2004), which claims that the war in Iraq is a positive and moral intervention.

46 Control Room (2004), a documentary that shows al-Jazeera’s reporting of the Iraq War, contains a scene in which a US military press officer realises, to his shame, that his shocked response to seeing images of dead American soldiers being broadcast is completely different from his less troubled response to seeing dead Iraqi children on screen.

47 Two US television series – Over There (2005) and Generation Kill (2008) – and two British films – Battle for Haditha (2007) and The Mark of Cain (2007) – are also set in Iraq and provide useful points of comparison. Fewer films represent the war in Afghanistan, examples including Lions for Lambs (2007), The Objective (2009) and Brothers (2009).

48 The political expediency of the PTSD paradigm can be seen in the decision not to extend such diagnosis (and attendant resources) to those caught in war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere (see Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 282). PTSD is a resolutely American condition, something confirmed by the depiction of US UAV/drone operators as the latest group to suffer PTSD (in 5000 Feet Is the Best (2011), for example).

49 David Holloway provides an excellent and succinct summary of the main frameworks used by historians to understand 9/11 (see 2008: 7–31).

50 Micah Ian Wright’s ‘remixed’ World War II propaganda encourages its viewers to be similarly sceptical of the way World War II was used to encourage support for the ‘war on terror’.

51 The opening sequence of the HBO television series John Adams (2008) shows slaves tending the fields around the White House, and it is difficult to recall a corollary for this in pre-9/11 representation of US political history.

52 When in 2008 Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) held their own ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings and over two hundred US soldiers, alongside numerous Iraqi and Afghan civilians, testified to their experiences of the war, the mainstream media did not cover the event. The hearings are available on YouTube and are transcribed in a single-volume book (Glantz 2008).