3

Hollywood, Terrorism and the Myth of Special Forces

During the 1980s and 1990s Hollywood found for itself an increasingly profitable market in films dealing with terrorist movements and dramatic military responses, usually involving special forces such as Army Rangers, Delta Forces or Navy SEALs, collectively termed Special Operations Forces (SOF). Terrorism and counter-terrorism narratives became popular in a range of Hollywood movies from the 1970s to the late 1990s, before a major transformation came with the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The spectre of international terrorism now seemed all too real and close to home. It was as if a large civilian population instantly became an army of unplanned instant extras in a violent horror movie. With planes being turned into missiles by suicide bombers and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsing in clouds of dust and smoke, the event almost became, in A.O. Scott’s words, ‘a movie scenario made grotesquely literal’.¹

The attacks certainly did not occur in an imaginary vacuum. Many of Hollywood terror films released in the decades prior to the 9/11 attacks had been anchored in crime, disaster or action genres. Action movies such as Black Sunday (1977), The Delta Force series, Executive Decision (1996), The Sum of All Fears (2002) and the Die Hard franchise proved especially popular in representing ‘terrorism’ through tropes involving civilians as victims not of natural disasters or invading aliens but ‘evil’ terrorist nemeses. The terrorists always receive their inevitable come-uppance by resolute counter-terrorism forces, often led by super-masculine action heroes but aided, on occasions, by supportive women. Collectively, these movies served as uncanny examples of cinema’s capacity to prophesy future events at a time when intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI struggled, by the 1990s, to make sense of mountains of data on terrorist organizations.²

The action genre proved a major prism through which to view international terrorism. It provided a series of fast-paced narratives in which little time is given to the actual motivations of the terrorist nemeses or even to the main heroes, who are driven on by the sheer momentum and pace of events.³ Action movies also provided cinematic support for an emerging discourse of ‘counter-terrorism’ across a range of federal government institutions that eventually became centralized in the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. However, the internal dynamics of the genre have led to the growing opportunity, as I shall argue in this chapter, of SOF forming the basis of a post-Rambo cinematic myth. Such a myth is centred on the insertion and extraction of small groups of highly trained warriors in overseas operations, fulfilling a calibrated, but decisive, counter-terrorism role. The myth became complicated, though, by the increasing sophistication of modern military technology and the growing centrality of intelligence over special operations, leading to increasing anxieties over technology threatening human agency in modern unconventional warfare.

The Rambo myth was really part of a popular mystique surrounding Sylvester Stallone’s performance in three highly popular movies in the 1980s: Rambo: First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988). The myth started to run out of steam during the following decade and the supposed ‘age of Rambo’ was really quite short-lived. It was rooted in an assertive cult of masculinity that many critics have linked to an angry mood of denial among some American film audiences that there was any real American ‘defeat’ in Vietnam.4 The mood dovetailed with the aspirations of President Reagan in the early 1980s to restore American military assertiveness and, as he portentously declared, to make ‘America great again’ (a slogan later borrowed by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election). Reagan famously remarked in 1982, in the context of a hijacking in Beirut, ‘After seeing “Rambo” last night I know what to do next time it happens.’ The hyper-masculinity of Rambo and the new Reaganite conservatism appeared closely related and mutually beneficial. Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action 2 in 1985 even started with a clip of Reagan declaring his wish to discover, once and for all, if any prisoners were still being kept in Vietnamese prisons. Both the Rambo and Missing in Action films sought to win on screen a war what the United States had lost on the ground, epitomized by John Rambo asking Colonel Trautman in Rambo: First Blood Part II, ‘Do we get to win this time?’.

Rambo is an enraged warrior familiar from literature: Achilles, for instance, angered by the murder of his friend Patroclus or Beowulf, bent on revenge after Grendel’s mother killed Aeschere, King Hrothgar’s most loyal fighter,. The theme of anger in the Rambo movies resonated with the debate on the destructive effects of battlefield shock and trauma in Vietnam, as well as the apparent failure of the Vietnamese government to repatriate all prisoners of war.⁵ Rambo: First Blood Part II and Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action were essentially captivity narratives that were deeply embedded in American literature and the western genre, most notably John Wayne’s The Searchers (1956) and later amplified by the captivity of members of the American embassy in Tehran between 1979 and early 1981.

Captivity narratives have played a significant role in the history of empires for they personalize overseas events for domestic audiences.⁶ They suggest victimhood and powerlessness on the part of those in captivity and do not, alone, provide a longer-term vision for any future order. They usually become displaced by more assertive military myths that move beyond revenge towards the prosecution of wider strategic goals: Achilles eventually leaves his tent to fight and defeat the Trojans and Beowulf resolves to go down into the deep to kill the monster once and for all. For Hollywood too, the Rambo myth became progressively displaced by myths of counter-terrorist action, indelibly shaped by the model Israeli operation against Palestinian and German guerrillas at Entebbe in 1976.

In this chapter I will examine Hollywood’s response to terrorism in two sections. The first section will look at the impact of international terrorism in the six films Black Sunday (1977), Executive Decision (1996), Clear and Present Danger (1996), The Siege (1998), Swordfish (2001) and The Sum of All Fears (2002). In the second section, I will examine the formation of the Rambo myth and the degree to which Hollywood after 9/11 has succeeded in moving beyond it by looking at films centred on intelligence and operations by special forces. I will conclude by looking at two films focused on the hunt for Osama bin Laden – Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty (both released in 2012) – as well as the recent film Eye in the Sky (2015) that deals with the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations.

Hollywood and international terrorism

Hollywood has, since the late 1970s, tended to focus on terrorism largely (though by no means exclusively) as a foreign phenomenon. Action films before then had vigilante activities of the San Francisco cop ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan (played by Clint Eastwood) in Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force 1973, The Enforcer 1976 and Sudden Impact (1983) or disaster movies such as Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974) and The Cassandra Crossing (1976).7 The disaster subgenre proved, for a period in the 1970s, to be a substitute for real-life terrorism, focusing as it did on big budget spectacles involving massive casualties and a few characters that audiences could get to care about. Towering Inferno, with its dramatic spectacle of a skyscraper on fire, was especially important for preparing audiences for real-life terror attacks such as 9/11 as well as providing tropes easily transferrable into terrorism movies when the subgenre took off in the 1980s and 1990s.

The essential problem with most terrorism narratives was their failure to supply a credible and coherent myth of national unity like the war genre during and after the Second World War. Terrorism tropes did not reinforce the American Dream beyond a negative idea of terrorists challenging certain core American values, a notion that becomes complicated when we include domestic terrorism narratives. As I have suggested elsewhere, Hollywood did not focus solely on externally based terrorism in its action movies of the 1970s to 1990s, for there was a spate of films concerning both ‘New Left’ terrorism in the 1970s and terrorism from the far right from the early 1990s onwards.⁸ The narratives of domestic terrorism movies were generally eclectic and no clearly identifiable domestic terrorism subgenre really appeared, certainly in comparison to the more numerous terrorism action movies focused on Palestinian and jihadist terrorists. None appear to have had much impact on US public opinion, which, as one survey reported in 2009, consistently believed, during the period 1994–2008, that terrorism was externally based and represented a critical threat requiring international action and the use of torture to extract information from potential suspects.⁹

Movies depicting terrorism were usually sustained by heightening emotions of fear and anxiety in audiences before these are eventually overcome by the application of massive counterforce. This ensured that terrorism in Hollywood cinema became, in Prince’s words, a ‘rhetorical term that creates its own kind of theatre and makes the characters feel they are caught up in events that are more significant than they actually are’.10 They were degenerate types of fantasy narrative that had difficulty according with mainstream national myths such as those in westerns and war movies. This would be eventually confirmed by the relatively muted public response to the ‘war on terror’ waged by the Bush administration after 9/11. This was a ‘war’ that never secured the same sort of mythological status as the national mood of revenge in the wake of Pearl Harbor; it was not really a war in the proper military sense of the term with a coherent centre of gravity but an ideological construct to cover an enhanced counter-terrorism reliant less on civilian law than military tribunals to prosecute terrorist suspects.¹¹

The terrorist movie subgenre in the 1980s and 1990s certainly created victims, such as the passengers on a hijacked airliner, with whom cinema audiences might establish a momentary identification. But these victims were eclectic groups that failed to generate the sort of ethnic and religious identification that the Israeli passengers had secured in the series of films on the Entebbe raid in the late 1970s, relying as these did on Jewish stereotypes and memories of the holocaust. Not until the 9/11 attacks and the resulting 2006 film United 93 (dir. Paul Greengrass) did a hijacking movie evoke similar emotions of national identification as the passengers fought back to overcome the Al Qaeda hijackers, apparently crashing the plane in the process. Greengrass broke some of the unstated rules concerning the depiction of terrorism in Hollywood features by showing ordinary civilians taking the initiative rather than waiting to be rescued by a special forces unit, that in this instance can never come.

One of the problems with the terrorism subgenre was its generally fantastical quality prior to 9/11. The 1977 film Black Sunday (dir. John Frankenheimer), for instance, made good use of the disaster formula as it focuses on an attempted Palestinian terrorist attack on the Miami Super Bowl with a huge hot air balloon – the Goodyear Blimp – packed with a bomb and thousands of steel flechettes. The attack is aimed at assassinating the president of the United States along with some 80,000 spectators and marks a significant expansion in the scale of a terrorist attack.¹² The movie sees terrorism in the United States as a form of blowback from involvement in overseas military operations, in this instance the Palestinian-Israeli war in the Middle East.

The film starts in Beirut where Mossad mounts an attack to kill several Palestinian leaders in an operation based on the real-life Operation Wrath of God. It emerges that the group planning the Miami attack is Black September, though its driving force is an embittered vet, Michael Lander (Bruce Dern). The film never gives any serious reason why Black September would want to widen the conflict to the United States (one terrorist imagines eventually bombing the White House), beyond wanting to identify the United States more closely with Israel. However, US security personnel largely discount Kabakov’s warnings of the dangers and allow the Super Bowl game to go ahead. The Blimp flies over the game since it has cameras that ensure the game can be watched on television; it is only Kabakov who saves the day by diverting the balloon so that it explodes over the sea.

From the vantage point of the ‘war on terror’ post 9/11, Black Sunday portrays a naïve America needing the counsel and expertise of the battle-hardened Mossad agent Kabakov. The US political establishment seems limp and dilatory when it comes to dealing with hardened and fanatical terrorists – even the vulnerable and uninformed president in the Super Bowl looks like President Carter. Frankenheimer’s film transferred into the terrorism genre a trope from the Dirty Harry crime series in which weak police chiefs and city mayors fail to stand up to maniac serial killers.13

The myth considerably diverged from historical reality. Terrorism did not dominate US policy during the Reagan, George Bush or Clinton administrations of the 1980s and 1990s, though there were rising fears in intelligence circles of possible terrorist attacks in the United States. Following the 1983 Beirut bombing the United States largely avoided an active counter-terrorism role internationally until its involvement in Somalia ten years later. Americans continued to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but these were far from the US heartland. In 1983 both the US embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut were struck by suicide bombers, and later the same year the US embassy in Kuwait was bombed; while TWA flight 847 was hijacked to Beirut, where the hijackers killed US navy diver Robert Dean, an incident that appeared in Chuck Norris’s Delta Force in 1986. In April the same year the United States bombed Libya in retaliation for a bombing of a discotheque in Berlin, an action that was widely credited to causing the Qaddafi regime to bomb Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988 killing 243 passengers and 16 crew.

As far as Hollywood was concerned terrorism remained locked in a world of fantasy with few narratives driven by real military and political events. The terrorism action genre began to become more mainstream by the 1990s, with a series of profitable blockbusters involving terrorists gaining initial control over public spaces such as airliners, buildings, ships, trains, buses or prisons; terrorizing their captives and making impossible demands before facing inevitable retribution at the hands of specialist hit squads or lone heroes in the mould of Bruce Willis, Wesley Snipes or Steven Seagal. These narratives were largely cut adrift from wider political debate about responding to terrorism and had simplistic plot lines and implausible scenes of violence. Unless a major star such as Bruce Willis, David Suchet or Alan Rickman could rise above these constraints, the movies tended to rely on technological wizardry and increasingly spectacular special effects to sustain audience interest.

A good example of this trend in the 1990s was Executive Decision (1996) directed by Stuart Baird. The movie features the usual Arab terrorist squad led by fanatic Nagi Hassan (David Suchet) which hijacks a plane bound to Washington from Athens. The film had the novel spectacular trope of an anti-terrorist squad led by Lieutenant Colonel Austin Travis (Steven Seagal) boarding the plane while it is still in the air. Nagi plans to blow up the bomb-laden plane over the United States in a suicide mission. There is a desperate purpose behind the aerial boarding, which goes wrong and Travis falls to his doom, though the other squad members make it on the plane and eventually kill the hijackers.

The surprising decision to dispense with Seagal at an early stage suggested that film producers were beginning to realize that a fantasy narrative dependent on a lone masculine action hero was looking rather tired. In their heyday in the 1980s, action movies with a terrorism theme had been a means of perpetuating the lone hero recalling earlier westerns and war movies involving actors such as John Wayne, Audie Murphy and Gary Cooper. By the late 1990s, such male and largely white action heroes had decreasing credibility in a world fascinated by both celebrities and female action heroes such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien franchise; Jamie Lee Curtis’s female cop in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1990) and Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft in Lara Croft Tomb Raider (2003) and Wanted (2008).

Hollywood tended to solve the problem of terrorist motivations by falling back on the tried and tested trope of money and basic criminal intentions Most of the cinematic terrorists of the post–Cold War era of the 1990s are primarily motivated by money.14 The film Clear and Present Danger (1994) attempted to introduce some sort of political dimension by focusing on US counter-terrorism strategy in relation to drug trafficking. The film, directed by Philip Noyce, was based on a Tom Clancy novel and featured CIA operative Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) chasing a Colombian drug cartel. The cartel resorts to terrorist methods once it comes under attack by an American special forces team sent to sabotage its operations. Ryan is appointed CIA deputy director and finds out about the covert war being waged against the drug lords, a war, it emerges, that has the support of the president (Donald Moffat) who considers the cartels a ‘clear and present danger’, a principle first enunciated by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes in 1919 to define the circumstances in which there can be limits to First Amendment freedoms of speech, press or assembly.

Clear and Present Danger added some complexity to the usual terrorist action subgenre while also warning that any policy of counter-terrorism, unless unchecked, could undermine the American constitution and threaten civil liberties. Jack Ryan is a hero whose capacity for seeking out the truth is never in any doubt, though he does not have sole claim to this position since the other obvious heroes are the US special forces team sent to Colombia under its mysterious CIA operative John Clark (William Dafoe). They blow up some of the cartels’ laboratories which leads to them retaliating by attacking a CIA team when it arrives in Bogota. In a scene reminiscent of urban insurgent war, the cartel guerrillas attack the CIA column driving into the city from the airport from roof tops. Only Ryan escapes and the massacre leads to a dramatic escalation when a US jet launches a laser-guided bomb to destroy the cartel’s compound, a scene that serves as a portent for later drone attacks.

The fairy-tale action scenes are compounded by Ryan’s discovery of documentary proof linking the president’s National Security Advisor James Cutter (Harry Yulin) and the Deputy Director of Operations Bob Ritter (Henry Czerny) with the covert anti-drug war in Colombia, ensuring that they will eventually face, along with the president, a Congressional investigation. Constitutional niceties and the separation of powers, in this instance, ensure that right will win out given that it is the president and his henchmen who are the real ‘clear and present danger’.

Clear and Present Danger failed to investigate the morality of the CIA’s ‘black ops’ as opposed to the ‘special ops’ led by Clark. One of the drug cartels in Colombia led by Ernesto Escobedo is effectively destroyed by the end of the movie, along with his henchman, the wily Colonel Felix Cortez, formerly of Cuban intelligence. It is Cortez who strikes a bargain with Cutter to assassinate Escobedo, take over control of the cartel and limit the supply of drugs entering the United States, so enabling the president to say he has ‘won’ the war on drugs. None of this comes off by the end of the movie, though how far Ryan wins is disputable too.

Clear and Present Danger lacked the moral certainties of most previous action movies even if it was only vaguely driven by historical realism. The real Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, who at the height of his career, supplied some 80 per cent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States and was estimated to be worth $30 billion, died during the making of the movie in a shoot-out with Colombian security forces on 2 December 1993. A total of 25,000 people attended his funeral, suggesting that the drug cartel had considerable popular support in Colombia, a dimension the film does not explore. In 2015 the TV series Narcos finally started documenting Escobar’s rise and fall in a series released through Netflix, paying some attention to his obvious popularity in Colombia despite his war with the state.

American counter-terrorism policy was starting to expand by the time Clear and Present Danger was released. The first bombing of the Twin Towers on 26 February 1993 was a wake-up call, though exactly how to respond remained a difficult question to answer. Over the next few years, the main agency authorized to handle domestic terrorist attacks was the FBI, though this led to considerable tensions between the FBI and CIA and rivalry with the State Department over who was to take the lead in responding terrorist threats. The splits also reflected differing outlooks towards the preservation of civil liberties.15 The FBI had its own internal divisions, exacerbated by the controversial figure of John O’Neill, the special agent in charge of counter-terrorism until he was forced to leave in August 2001. O’Neill, who died in the 9/11 attack on the twin towers, had, by 1998, created an Al Qaeda desk in his division (some years in advance of Alec Station in the CIA). He was increasingly warning before his death of the possibility of a mass terrorist attack inside the United States.

O’Neill’s position was not only undermined by hostile forces inside the FBI but by a recalcitrant CIA, wary of sharing intelligence information with a rival it viewed as an upstart in the field of foreign intelligence. The agency was fearful that any prosecutions that resulted from any intelligence it shared with the Bureau would compromise its relationship with foreign intelligence services. A report by the inspector general in 2005 found that some fifty to sixty people inside the agency knew that at least two of the 9/11 plane hijackers were inside the United States but never bothered to inform the FBI.¹⁶ This was an intelligence failing on a major scale that would only gradually emerge from revelations over the following few years and has not as yet formed the narrative of a Hollywood movie.

Prior to 9/11, there were certainly hints of significant rifts inside the huge US intelligence community, which by 2007 employed over 100,000 people and had a budget of $50 billion, considerably more than what the US federal government spent on energy, scientific research or the prison system.¹⁷ For Hollywood, the FBI had been an arm of government usually deserving of praise; it had been Hoover’s G men, led by the incorruptible Eliot Ness, who had helped to bring the mobs into some sort of control in the 1930s, while the 1945 propaganda movie The House on 92nd Street recounted the FBI’s important role in hunting down Nazi agents in America during the Second World War.

During the Cold War the FBI largely avoided being associated with foreign espionage. It focused on domestic issues, launching in 1956 its counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) that, by 1960, had already investigated a staggering 430,000 individuals and political and civil groups. COINTELPRO would later be used to track and follow many involved in the anti-war coalition in the 1960s as well as the Black Panthers, though its activities here never made it to the cinema screen.18 The FBI’s generally heroic image was further sustained by The FBI Story (1959), the 118-episode television series The Untouchables from 1959 to 1963, while the 1987 movie The Untouchables in 1987, starring Kevin Costner as hard-nosed family man Eliot Ness, confirmed the Bureau as an apparently incorruptible agency.¹⁹

The FBI’s positive cinematic was maintained into the 1990s, with some luck given the way the Bureau handled the ‘siege’ at Waco, Texas, in 1993. Following the withdrawal of ATF agents, the FBI brought in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, later reinforced by tanks, leading to the death of seventy-six Branch Davidians including twenty children. This might have turned into a public relations disaster but, fortunately for the FBI, the events at Waco were dwarfed by the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

Compared to the FBI, the CIA had a far more negative image on screen, especially by the latter stages of the Cold War. It was not until 1995 that the Agency first employed Chase Brandon to organize its relationship with the movie industry, leading to more positive images in movies such as Enemy of the State (1998) and The Sum of All Fears (2002).²⁰ Prior to this, the CIA was often portrayed negatively by Hollywood. The 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor had CIA operative Joe Turner (Robert Redford) on the run after it emerges he has threatened a rogue element inside the agency which has a plan for the USA to take over the oil fields in the Middle East. Turner evades CIA hitmen who behave like the mob and eventually survives to fight another day. In the years after Watergate, the Agency seemed the embodiment of corrupt secretive government working against the national interest, an image only later rectified by CIA hero Jack Ryan in movies such Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994) and The Sum of All Fears (2002). The secrecy rendered its activities suspicious and part of a conspiracy, while the FBI, following the death of Hoover in 1975, seemed both visible and accessible, with operatives frequently working with clear FBI labels on brightly coloured orange garb.

The contrasting screen imagery of the FBI and CIA was evident in The Siege in 1998 (dir. Edward Zwick), a film partly scripted by the writer and journalist Lawrence Wright and influenced by the rifts in the intelligence community following the first bombing of the Twin Towers in 1993. The FBI in the movie are headed by Anthony ‘Hub’ Hubbard (Denzel Washington), the third time a black actor was placed in a leading policing/intelligence role in American movies in the 1990s.²¹ The movie drew on events in both Afghanistan and the Middle East to construct a fictional jihadist terrorist leader in the form of an Iraqi Sheikh, Ahmed ban Talal, modelled broadly on bin Laden. It also referred to specific events such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, news footage of which appears at the start of the movie. The title of the movie recalled the earlier film State of Siege by Costa Gavras depicting the draconian state response to the Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay. Of all the films released in the twenty years of so before the 9/11 attacks, The Siege was the most alarming in the way it suggested that counter-terrorism was a dangerous path down to a military or garrison state and the destruction of democratic liberties.

The Siege was really just another action movie. It has Ahmed bin Talal kidnapped by a hands-on General Devereaux (Bruce Willis), prompting a series of jihadist counter attacks by suicide groups working underground in New York. Three armed men with explosives tied to their bodies hijack a bus in Brooklyn which they blow up when the media arrive to report the event. But the movie also has American soldiers marching in Brooklyn, apparently inspired by the French paras marching into Algiers in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.22 The film moved, though, beyond the simplistic format of the evil terrorist nemesis to an exploration of underground terrorist cells in New York that mount a series of attacks following the capture of the leading mastermind bin Talal, a sort of American variant of Osama bin Laden.²³ The movie stands out as the one cautionary tale in the terrorism action movies made by Hollywood before 9/11.

Even before the 9/11 attacks, it was evident there were growing problems with the action movie genre and signs of a backlash against ever more complex and ambivalent characters. This was exemplified by the fantasy action film Swordfish (2001) directed by Dominic Sena and starring John Travolta and Halle Berry. The movie had an unusual opening speech by the superspy Gabriel Shear (Travolta) who purports to be waging war against terrorism, but is little different to his supposed enemies. Gabriel complains of the lack of realism in the ‘American cinematic vision’. He praises the film Dog Day Afternoon, as ‘Arguably Pacino’s best work, short of Scarface and Godfather Part 1, of course’. The problem with the film was that ‘they didn’t push out the envelope. Now what if in Dog Day, Sonny REALLY wanted to get away with it? What if – now here’s the tricky part – what if he started killing hostages right away? No mercy, no quarter. “Meet our demands or the pretty blonde in the bellbottoms gets it in the back of the head.” Bam, splat! What, still no bus? Come on! How many innocent victims splattered across a window would it take to have the city reverse its policy on hostage situations? And this is 1976; there’s no CNN, there’s no CNBC, there’s no internet!’.

The kneejerk tone of the film led critics to attack it as ‘dumb and incoherent’,²⁴‘a nasty explosion down at the plot works’²⁵ and ‘very silly’.²⁶ But the film, from a rather more distant perspective, can be seen to mark a crossroads in the action adventure genre. There were several possible ways for film producers to sustain audience interest: increasingly graphic violence of the Tarantino kind; a mixture of action with dark comedy, leading to features such as Mr and Mrs Smith (2005) and The Tourist (2010); a third was greater awareness of civil liberties and legal dimensions of counter-terrorism measures, as in the case of The Siege (1998). A fourth possibility was increased historical realism, though this was not especially obvious in Hollywood at the end of the millennium.²⁷

Hollywood’s confusion over the action genre was evident in one of the more popular films released in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, The Sum of All Fears, based on another Tom Clancy novel. The film was released in early 2002 despite being shot before 9/11. Grossing $193 million on a budget of $68 million, the film accorded with the post-9/11 mood, largely because it portrayed the ultimate nightmare terrorist attack in the form of an atomic bomb detonated in Baltimore, destroying most of the city even though the visiting president manages to escape. While the actual nuclear explosion is shocking to watch, this is, in the end, another fantasy action film. The chief nemesis is not a jihadist or Arab terrorist but a scheming Nazi in the form of Professor Dressler (Alan Bates) who plans a nuclear war between the United States and Russia to ensure an eventual Nazi victory.

The fantastical nature of the terrorist plot certainly ensured the film’s success; at the initial press screening, the audience were reported to have sat in ‘riveted silence’. With the image of a mushroom cloud rising over Baltimore, the film was a stark reminder of the potential for mass terrorist attacks, though it failed to explore with any serious realism the likely outcome of any such attack. No one seems to suffer from the effects of radiation; the president’s rushed but successful escape from the stadium seems absurd; while there is little sense of the mass casualties that would ensue from such a device exploding over a major city.28 The movie at least avoided allegorical treatments of terrorism such as Steven Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds in 2005, where alien Martians attack New York aided by a dormant underground network and Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves) in 2008 where an alien monster attacks New York, brings down skyscrapers and defeats the US military.

Moving beyond Rambo: Special forces and the killing of bin Laden

The action movie genre picked up within a few years of 9/11 and has become once more a major part of contemporary Hollywood film making. None of Hollywood’s action movies have quite been able to generate the sort of cinematic mythology surrounding Rambo in the 1980s. This myth, certainly in the first two of Stallone’s films Rambo: First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II, was important for transforming the status of veterans via a ‘stab in the back’ myth to explain the poor reception many vets received on returning to the United States. It proved a successful money-spinner for Hollywood while also appealing to feelings of public guilt over the poor treatment received by veterans when returning back from the conflict.

Rambo was a military myth, in contrast to the science fiction myth forged at roughly the same time around the Star Wars movies of George Lucas. The first three of the Star Wars films – Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) – provided a major cinematic myth of American rediscovery following the trauma of defeat in Vietnam. As John Hellmann has suggested, the movies offered the ‘potential power … to energize Americans to move forward from that experience with a modified conception of their character and destiny’. The citizen soldiers led by Luke Skywalker, accompanied by the noble savage Wookie, are a reincarnation of the American revolutionary frontiersmen fighting imperial redcoats, transformed in Lucas’s movies into faceless, helmeted white drones under the control of the dark Nazi-type figure of Darth Vader.²⁹

The science fiction fantasy of Star Wars, aimed as it was at general family viewing, could never address the full implications of US military defeat, or the anger of many returning veterans. It was at best a fantasy of ultimate American values prevailing against dark faceless enemies. By contrast, the Rambo movies appealed to more specific masculine fantasies, evidenced by the way the movie myth ended up considerably different to the original Rambo: First Blood novel of Canadian-American writer David Morell (published in 1972).³⁰

Rambo is a complex young man of 19 trained in jungle warfare but finds he has no place in the insular society of the United States. The novel is a taught confrontation across the generations and between the military and the police as Rambo comes up against the figure of Wilfred Teasle, the police chief of the town of Madison, Kentucky. Rambo sticks in the throat of the angry and frustrated Teasle, a disappointed figure from an earlier generation of conventionally trained American warriors. Rambo with long hair and dirty clothes looks like a vagrant and a hippie and conflict quickly ensues as Teasle tries to run him out of town. Rambo is arrested and a fight ensues in the police station jail, where Rambo kills two cops before escaping, completely naked and with no weapons, out into the woods. Teasle gives chase but fails to realize he is really taking on a former Special Forces soldier now turned insurgent. Rambo secures the gain help from an illegal distiller and his son, who give him clothes and a rifle. After further killings and a dramatic escape out of a disused mine, Rambo gets back into Madison where he destroys half the town before his former Army colonel and father figure, Trautman, kills him after vainly pleading with him to give himself up.

There is no suggestion here of a large masculine body, but a rather sad tale of a traumatized ex-soldier. Rambo is also more of a crack shot than a resourceful man of the frontier as he is portrayed in Rambo: First Blood.31 In the novel, he kills some of Teasle’s police officers rendering him close to being a lone terrorist rather than a victim of an indifferent or incompetent civilian establishment. In the film version, Rambo relies on a large knife as a weapon together with wits and resourcefulness, killing almost no one but causing huge destruction. Here were the key ingredients for a new screen myth of a primeval warrior engraining previous myths of self-reliant frontiersmen, battling an indifferent urban elite but engraining primordial values behind American national purpose.³² In such a context, Rambo becomes less a distinct character than an example of a mythical ‘chord’ that Robert Ray has argued forms the typical approach of Hollywood to cinematic myth creation, drawing as it does on ‘refracted, superimposed mirror images held together by the audience’s complicity in their formation and recognition’. Other examples of these kinds of chords are Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and serve as vital reminders of Hollywood’s capacity to bind together mythic impulses from different ideological standpoints, unlike other cinemas such as France in the era of the new wave.³³

Rambo: First Blood certainly works as a test of manly endurance. We know Rambo has to break out of the police station as flashbacks on screen remind us that he has been captured and tortured by the Vietnamese, in a manner not so different to the three friends in The Deer Hunter. We also know that he will survive the endurance test of going down a disused mine to escape from the incompetent National Guard squad sent to kill or capture him. The only real surprise is perhaps the sheer scale of destruction as Rambo blows up large parts of downtown Madison. Along the way, we encounter a few things to remind us of Rambo’s experience with guerrilla warfare, such as the deadly NLF-style trap of sharpened stakes that impales one policeman (though not fatally), a device first encountered in The Green Berets (1968).

Rambo is not, strictly speaking, a guerrilla but a Special Forces soldier, trained in counterinsurgency, though some of his techniques, such as traps with pointed spikes, emulate the NLF in Vietnam. This dimension is blurred in Rambo: First Blood but becomes clearer in the Rambo: First Blood Part II, where Rambo, once released from jail term, is sent on a mission back to Vietnam to locate American prisoners of war. Rambo’s mission derived from an urban myth that Vietnam was still holding American prisoners. Only 592 prisoners had actually returned to the United States after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 during Operation Homecoming. This left 1,350 American prisoners of war who were still missing along with a further 1,200 reported as killed in action.

Rambo: First Blood Part II, released in 1985, grew out of this myth and drew some of its audience impact in the United States from the continuing belief of many vets that Vietnam was deliberately concealing the truth about the prisoners it was still holding. Veteran organizations expressed exasperation over the slow pace of negotiations with the government of Vietnam and the absence of completely reliable information, not helped by the fact that there were no proper diplomatic relations at this time between the United States and Vietnam. This provided fertile ground for a right-wing conspiracy theory to develop suggesting a plot by the US government to conceal the truth. This time, the main culprits are less the police than civilian federal administrators who say one thing and do another while trying to control things by computerized technology.34

Parachuting into Vietnam, Rambo loses most of his equipment but establishes contact with a Vietnamese intelligence operative, the mixed-race woman Ca Bao (Julia Nickson). She leads Rambo to a camp where he finds some US prisoners and rescues one, taking him back to the location where a helicopter is due to pick him up. But the mission is aborted by Murdoch once he hears that Rambo has rescued a prisoner. Rambo and the prisoner are betrayed and left to be picked up by the advancing Vietnamese. He is tortured by a Russian interrogator, though Ca Bao helps Rambo escape. He destroys most of the camp and rescues the prisoners, seizes a helicopter and gets back successfully to Thailand. He angrily confronts Murdoch after shooting up the computer equipment in his office. He has unwittingly exposed a conspiracy in higher sections of government to prevent any serious action being taken to free the prisoners in Vietnam, and the film ends with him expressing his injured patriotic feelings to Trautman. The movie provides a strong contrast to the successful revelations of executive misdemeanour a few years earlier by two Washington Post journalists in All the President’s Men (1976).³⁵

The two Rambo films in the 1980s were crucial to the transformation of the cinematic image of veterans, which had been almost uniformly negative during the 1970s. In Fiend with an Electronic Brain (1971), for instance, criminals plant an electronic device into the brain of a veteran to turn him into a zombie; while in Rolling Thunder (1977), a veteran uses his military skills to exact violent revenge on some criminals who have murdered his wife and family.³⁶ Even The Deer Hunter shows veterans reacting in either a very passive way by clinging on to whatever values they have known from before their tour of duty or going down a road of self-destruction like Christopher Walken’s Nick. Rambo: First Blood Part II, however, did not relate to the actual historical war in Vietnam, and was more concerned with winning on screen what had been lost on the ground, epitomized by Rambo’s famous line to Trautman, ‘Do we get to win this time?’³⁷

Rambo: First Blood was by no means the first film to portray returning war veterans resorting to massive violence back in hometown America. Welcome Home Soldier Boys in 1971 (dir. Richard Compton) had four returning veterans setting out by car across the United States for California. After a series of humiliations, they end up in Hope, Texas, which they lay waste with an array of weaponry: the Texas governor declares a state of emergency and sends in troops who eventually shoot the four vets down, though not before they have shot down a helicopter with an RPG. The vets in the end failed and the film, too, unsurprisingly failed at the box office, since it could not garner any huge following for what really appears a madcap venture by four crazed gunmen lacking any of the superman appeal or revenge motive of the Rambo kind. The success of Rambo became inextricably linked to the screen presence of Sylvester Stallone; the advertising of the films was enormously successful in raising audience expectations by focusing simply on the name ‘Stallone’.38 The film hinges on the promise of delivering the goods by letting the audience know in advance that he will succeed against an evil enemy.

Rambo: First Blood Part II established Rambo as a screen icon by the middle 1980s, making over $300 million at the box office on a film budget of $25.5 million; a huge increase over the $47 million earned in the United States ($125 million worldwide) for Rambo: First Blood. The movies certainly gave considerable life to action movies in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, despite being dismissed by some liberal critics such as British producer David Puttnam as a ‘despised genre’.³⁹ There would be several emulations such as Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action (1984), though this was more of an anti-communist film than a stab-in-the-back movie, with the main enemy being the communist government of Vietnam rather than a weak Washington bureaucracy. Norris’s character Colonel Braddock escapes from a Vietnamese prison camp and accompanies a government team sent to Vietnam to investigate whether any more prisoners are being held. He goes out at night in Ho Chi Minh City to find the evidence before returning to Thailand to organize a mission to free the prisoners. Costing just $1.5 million to make, Missing in Action earned Cannon Group MGM, $6.5 million in the United States and a $22,812,411 worldwide.

By the late 1990s, there was still no discernible alternative myth to the Rambo myth of a decade earlier. Conventional war movies did not accord with the modern experience of warfare and provided at best, as in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), moral precepts for the young on how to live on in a post-war world. One other possible form was the special forces combat movie, which had been glamorized in fictional terms in the 1980s in movies such as Delta Force but remained fictional given the actual experiences of US Special Forces in arenas such as Iran in 1979 (Operation Eagle Claw) and Somalia (Operation Restore Hope) in 1993, the latter reaching the screen in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down in 2001. It was not until the successful killing of Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad in May 2011 that any serious possibility presented itself of a special forces cinematic myth, though, as we shall see later, this became complicated by the political controversy surrounding the CIA intelligence operation that revealed bin Laden’s whereabouts.

The Rambo myth was more or less laid to rest as far as Hollywood was concerned with Katherine Bigelow’s movie The Hurt Locker (2009), though Stallone only actually retired in 2016 at the age of 69.40 Set in Iraq, The Hurt Locker usurps Rambo’s simplistic triumphalism by exposing the addictive and depersonalizing features of modern war The movie’s central character is Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), who heads a three-man bomb disposal squad in Baghdad during the height of insurgent attacks in 2006–2007. James has to disarm road bombs containing huge quantities of ordnance; he finds the challenge of this addictive, despite being dressed in a hot and heavy blast suit that almost reduces him to a robot. James finds sleeping in the blast suit’s helmet comforting, suggesting that his role has more or less taken over his unstable identity; he returns on leave but finds relations with his wife difficult and is locked into the adrenaline-fueled excitement of his job back in Iraq. James approaches his task in a gung-ho and improvisational manner, in this regard resembling at least some aspects of Rambo, for he is by no means an entirely orthodox military professional.

The title of the film ‘Hurt Locker’ refers to the category of trauma known as ‘Shell Shock 2’ where the victim is in close proximity to the deafening noise of an explosion. The victim is enclosed by very loud noise that is also preceded by long periods of menacing silence. It is not surprising that one of James’s ways of coping with this is by listening to deafeningly loud heavy metal music, which also helps him construct an outer veneer of fragile masculinity. Out of this dark maelstrom into which James has wandered there are few warm features, though he displays some affection for an Iraqi boy selling fake DVDs and is distraught to find later that he has been tortured and killed. James displays an almost unlimited bravado in the way he tackles the bombs and is admiringly called a ‘wild man’ by his commanding officer. At heart, he is insecure and uncertain of his identity and hardly a conventional war hero, and accords more with previous Hollywood films portraying the pointless and addictive quality of war such as Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977) where Sergeant Steiner (James Coburn) cannot wait to return to the Russian Front in 1943 even if this means leaving the arms of a beautiful nurse.

The Hurt Locker suggested that modern unconventional warfare does not really sustain traditional heroic myths of individual prowess, but rather team work aided by robust intelligence and sophisticated military technology in which there is no room for a ‘wild man’ such as James. This would become evident a few years later with two films depicting the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty. In both movies the focus is less on the activities of one individual than a group of military professionals, aided by extensive intelligence and advanced military technology. We are a long way from the romantic frontier image of Rambo in the forest or jungle; the imagery continues many of the precepts of the special operation examined in the last chapter, centred on detailed intelligence, constant rehearsals, high motivation and tight planning to ensure a successful extraction. This was also a strategic rather than a tactical special operation, requiring authorization at the highest levels of government and a weighing up of the probabilities of success or failure.

This was a narrative convention, interestingly, that had never been fully embraced by Hollywood. Many of the action movies involving special forces still had a star as the heroic team leader, such as Chuck Norris in Delta Force (1986) or Bruce Willis in Tears of the Sun (1993), while the long shadow cast by movies such as The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch led the industry to highlight the anti-social and deviant nature of weaponized small group formations. They might be highly motivated men skilled in firearms and other weaponry but they were all also, very often, desperados out for loot or personal revenge. Hollywood tended to be less keen to release films of small highly trained teams under the tight and unquestioned control of their commanders, such as some of the post-war British special operations (exemplified especially well by the taut naval adventure Above Us the Waves in 1955) or even the highly motivated and cohesive Israeli team that attacked Entebbe in 1976. There was little scope in such movies to appeal to the usual conventions of the American war movie: hectic and fractured relationships with women, aggressive rifts between individuals in the team, doubts about the purpose of the mission and queries about the leadership capacities of the group’s commander (always resolved by the end of the movie).

These problems have become clearer with the increasing pace of technological change in modern warfare that threatens to undermine traditional representation of special operations of the kind examined in the last chapter. Satellite and drone imagery ensure that almost all the group’s action can be viewed by their command and control in real time, including a special White House operations room set up to view the 2011 operation to kill bin Laden. This operation was notable for the apparent absence of drones and constant viewing of potential targets from the air, though the massive expansion of drone warfare has ensured that modern special operations have become increasingly absorbed into US counter-terrorism strategy, pivoted around an interlocking nexus of intelligence, electronic surveillance, the constant evaluation of teams of senior political decision-makers and, finally, the insertion of a Special Forces team if the target is deemed too high grade to be eliminated by a bomb or drone missile. Even the Special Forces teams take on many of the features of robots with their body armour; with the continuing growth in artificial intelligence they may even become proper robots in the course of the next few decades.

For the moment at least, counter-terrorism still relies on the availability of highly trained and rehearsed SOF teams, ready to be inserted at short notice to assassinate or kidnap key targets as well secure access to vital electronic intelligence data. This role emerged in the two features released a year after the 2011 Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Seal Team Six (also called Code Name Geronimo) and Zero Dark Thirty. Both movies capitalized on the short-lived sense of triumphalism in the United States as a figure seen as ‘public enemy number one’ finally eliminated by the forces of law and order, almost on the lines of a G men hit on a 1930s mobster. The movies appeared before the well-researched 2013 documentary Manhunt (dir. John Woo) on the CIA operation to find bin Laden after his disappearance from Afghanistan at the end of 2001. They were released two years before the final appearance, at the end of 2014, of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, revealing a systematic failure by the CIA to reveal the full scale of its ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that appeared to be in breach of the 2005 UN Convention Against Torture as well as considerable evidence to suggest that such torture usually failed to produce reliable intelligence.41 Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty also came out at a controversial time politically in the United States, as doubts were raised on the effectiveness of counter-terrorism strategy in the wake of decision of the Obama administration to begin a major troop drawdown from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The movies approached the Abbottabad raid from considerably different standpoints. The first, Seal Team Six, was a TV movie directed by John Stockwell and first shown on the National Geographic Channel. It was released by Harvey Weinstein’s company Voltage Pictures and, as the title suggests, focused on the Special Forces team sent to kill bin Laden. This was essentially an action movie, though its small budget and time span of 90 minutes ensured that little could be covered in any detail and a number of narrative threads were left unpursued in a rambling script.

The film starts not with the 9/11 attack but a Seal Team patrol walking through a narrow gulley in Afghanistan. The patrol encounters some civilians and is fired on from above; a firefight ensues and some guerrillas are killed before a woman explodes a bomb killing one of the team. The incident might have been lifted from any number of Afghan-related action movies; it acquaints us, though, with the squad’s leader Stunner (Cam Gigandet) who will go on to lead the team at Abbottabad. Stunner has to cope with more than just a Seal Team but a drunken wife back home who has been having an affair. He attempts to sort her out, though we never learn the outcome, only that he has to put this all out of his mind as he is tasked with the new mission in Pakistan. SEALs are, in this movie at least, men of the action hero type, who cannot allow domestic considerations to influence their performance in the field. This is a trope considerably different to some of the movies released on drone warfare in the last few years, especially Good Kill (2013) that accords with research evidence suggesting that the world of drone pilots is often a demoralizing and topsy-turvy one, involving night-time hours, alcohol abuse and acute stress on home life.42

Seal Team Six is a laddish film with limited roles for women. Apart from Stunner’s wife the only other female role is the CIA ‘threat analyst’ Vivian (Kathleen Robertson), who features in the movie’s brief foray into the CIA intelligence operation to locate bin Laden. Vivian is hampered by a doubting CIA chief (William Fichtner) demanding ‘actionable intelligence’ and preferring to carry on discussion in the male toilet from which Vivian is conveniently excluded. The boss seems fairly positive that bin Laden was killed in 2007 and Vivian has the task of demonstrating the near certainty (she eventually settles on 95 per cent) that bin Laden is inside the Abbottabad compound. Her standpoint is aided by a team of undercover CIA agents driving around Peshawar attempting to track bin Laden’s courier al-Kuwaiti, leading to a car chase and a brush with the Pakistani police, who are told to stand off by a Pakistani intelligence agent conveniently arriving in the nick of time.

Unsurprisingly, Seal Team Six had limited characterization, predictable tropes and a pedestrian narrative.⁴³ The movie attempts to cling onto the action movie genre in which a SOF team actually get to win this time, even though audiences know the final outcome is never in any doubt. Much of the focus is on the assembling of the team and its insertion in state-of-the-art stealth Black Hawk helicopters. We at last get to see the faces of the men as they are on their way to Pakistan though for the rest of the time they are hidden behind helmets making them look drone-like. This is a mission in which little is left to chance and we are a long way from the autonomous special forces and SAS teams of the Second World War working their own way out of difficult situations. The raid goes ahead with tight precision which we see largely through ghostly POV shots of the SEAL’s night-vision goggles, though external to the compound one of the stealth helicopters crashes and has to be blown up. The local population wakes up and is held at bay; another Mogadishu-type situation is avoided and the team make their get-away. The film ends with the wrapped body of bin Laden sinking into the Arabian Sea.

Perhaps with greater funding and a more imaginative script a better action movie of the Abbottabad raid might have been made. As it was, the producers ended up with a narrative that almost entirely overlooked the protracted decade-long CIA intelligence operation to identify the whereabouts of bin Laden. The commonly accepted narrative is that the CIA made an initial breakthrough in 2007 through bin Laden’s courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whose real name was Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed (and a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). Long thought to have died in 2001 after fleeing from the Battle of Tora Bora, he was credited with being alive in Pakistan and very possibly linked with bin Laden after the interrogation of the Guantanamo detainee Hassan Gul in 2004.44 Eventually the National Security Agency tracked Kuwaiti’s calls to Pakistan; but it was only in 2010 that a Pakistani ‘asset’ tracked him to Peshawar and later Abbottabad. Driving a white Suzuki jeep, he became easily identifiable, though much of the intelligence appears to have been of the Sigint rather than Humint, based on the tracking of cell phone conversations.⁴⁵

Bigelow’s film weaves these details into a rather unorthodox narrative of a female CIA operator. It was work in which women often appear to excel, requiring as it does tenacity and persistence. Called the ‘sisterhood’ in John Woo’s Manhunt, the world of this group is vastly different to the glamorized movie myth of fearless intelligence agents such as James Bond or Jack Ryan. Theirs is a tedious enterprise performed by what Susan Hasler, one of the women involved, describes in her novel Intelligence as intelligence ‘alchemists’, implying that these are activities that are not properly scientific in the modern sense but medieval, ensuring that formally rational paths of investigation are dictated by intuition and the myth of an eventual magical breakthrough. The women had a low-status position in the Langley hierarchy; this is changing rapidly as women now make up nearly 50 per cent of all CIA operatives, even if few are as yet in senior positions. In the years following 9/11 the CIA established the group commonly known as Alec Station (it never amounted to more than two dozen operatives) focused exclusively on finding bin Laden. Much of the work involved the painstaking task of sifting through mountains of raw intelligence ‘slag’ in order to find the odd nugget hard intelligence ‘gold’, to use two more of Hasler’s fictional terms.⁴⁶

Mistakes were often made, and by 2006 Alec Station was wound up and some of the women intelligence operatives put out into the field to liaise more closely with counter-terrorism operations at the local level. This is the point at which Zero Dark Thirty starts as we encounter one of the women operatives known as Maya (Jessica Chastain) who assists in the interrogation of a jihadist detainee known as Ameer. We learn in the movie that the detainee is never going to be released and the torture includes sleep deprivation, waterboarding, beatings and closure in a wooden box, as well as being forced to crawl like a dog on a lead (an image that recalled the earlier scandal over torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2004). Criticized for being a form of ‘torture porn’, the scene is one of the most graphic in cinema since Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1960) and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966). More importantly, Zero Dark Thirty implies that torture of this kind can be a means of securing high-grade intelligence, even though Obama’s CIA director Leon Panetta later admitted that the real whereabouts of the courier al-Kuwaiti came from a detainee not held by the CIA.47

Maya shares the same obsession with conflict as Sergeant James in The Hurt Locker, and has no personal life outside the Agency. She proves more resilient than her colleague Dan, who quits as the continued use of torture takes its emotional toll. She has what seems to be a single-minded personal mission to hunt out bin Laden to secure some sort of justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, who are invisible and only heard as ghostly voices at the start of the film on a blank screen. But is this the real motivation? We never really get inside the mind-set driving Maya. The release in 2014 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture suggests a considerably different picture. The person who most closely resembled Maya was reputedly very competent in following up leads and appears to have been more active in the enhanced interrogation of detainees than Maya who merely hands Dan a jug of water for waterboarding.⁴⁸

Whatever the exact truth, Jessica Chastain’s Maya emerges as less a feminist icon than another Hollywood tough girl, who has abandoned the allures of motherhood and domesticity for a career in a largely masculine world. The tough girl is never usually that tough compared to male tough guys, and this is true of Maya.⁴⁹ She is not an actual warrior of the G.I. Jane-type even if she is close to the warriors in the Seal Team who will go out to kill bin Laden. She helps brief them on the mission and is there when then they return with bin Laden’s body, which she checks with a triumphant expression. She only evinces real emotion when she boards a military plane to fly home; the lone passenger on board indicating her special status, though she can never be viewed as a serious hero in what is an unheroic form of war.

Maya is a product of an era of the CIA when women had to fight hard to be taken seriously. As another operative from this period told Peter Bergen, most women at Langley ‘had to be the toughest SOBs in the universe to survive. And the rest of the women were treated as sexual toys’.⁵⁰ In Zero Dark Thirty, Maya establishes a friendship with another woman CIA operative called Jessica, who in real life was Jennifer Matthews, a CIA operative who ended up based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Matthews arranged to meet a potentially important intelligent lead, the Jordanian Humam al-Balawi, at the CIA Forward Operating Base at Camp Chapman in Khost on December 30, 2009. The meeting went disastrously wrong when Balawi blew himself up, killing Matthews together with six other CIA operatives and contractors. The meeting exemplified that misjudgement and lax security arrangements could have fatal consequences, though it led to a rapid escalation by the CIA of drone strikes in Pakistan.⁵¹

Zero Dark Thirty certainly confirmed the point made by some strategists that unconventional warfare cannot be linked exclusively to Special Forces since it depends on a range of other agencies, especially intelligence.⁵² However, there is also a sense that the movie is desperately attempting to retain as much of a human dimension to modern counter-terrorist warfare as possible, given that this warfare is defined by an ever more sophisticated and depersonalizing technology, rendering it ever more ‘post heroic’. The faces of the SEALs are shown in the helicopter flight to Abbottabad and they display at least some human qualities. Likewise, when the team actually enter the Abbottabad and reach bin Laden’s room, one SEAL actually calls out ‘Osama! Osama!’ before killing him. But the authenticity of this has been questioned as there was almost certainly too much noise for this to have occurred.53

We are offered a momentary glimpse of a screen monitoring the SEAL mission showing a Black Hawk from high above: this is clearly a drone, though at no point are drones formally acknowledged to have been used in either the ‘hunt’ for bin Laden or the actual mission to kill him. Some analysts have suggested that drones proved vital to the ultimate success of the Abbottabad operation, very possibly the elusive batwing RQ-170 used for eavesdropping on electronic conversations.⁵⁴ But drone warfare is a difficult form of war to depict cinematically given its depersonalized qualities. It recalls much of the inhuman and alien imagery of ‘bad guys’ in sci-fi feature such as Star Wars and Battlestar Gallactica, except that the drones are now operated by Americans attacking human targets in peripheral third world states such as Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Using drones threatens to undermine the idea that there was any human intelligence–driven ‘hunt’ for bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty marginalized the actual operation to kill bin Laden to little more than a final chapter, rendering this less an action movie than an intelligence thriller.

Zero Dark Thirty was a remarkably positive film for the CIA, for all the scenes of torture. Tony Shaw and Tricia Jenkins have seen the movie, along with Argo (2012) as one of the most successful portrayals by Hollywood of the work of the CIA since the Agency went properly into the sphere of public relations in the late 1990s.⁵⁵ The film grossed over $130 million at the box office and has clearly helped shape the public perception of the Abbottabad operation, though it ran into intense criticism for the way it handled the torture scenes. Senator John McCain and the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Diane Feinstein attacked the film for endorsing the use of torture, and the liberal American writer Naomi Wolf charged Kathryn Bigelow with being a latter-day Leni Riefenstahl for the way she had made a film that glossed over human rights abuses and served as propaganda for the CIA.⁵⁶ Steve Coll also suggested that the scenes involving stealth helicopters could only have been shot with the cooperation of the Department of Defense.⁵⁷

As the criticism mounted, Mark Boal attempted to defend the film by asserting that it was ‘depicting slice of American history’ and ‘the essence of what happened honestly’.⁵⁸ He shifted the focus from torture to the figure of Maya, whom he upheld as a heroic figure of cerebral intelligence: ‘Technology played a part’, he said in one interview, ‘and many people contributed, but at the end of the day it was thought’, going on to imply that there was ‘a little bit of Joan of Arc in Maya’.⁵⁹ This hardly accorded with the previous idea of the film as a serious form of historical realism, especially as Maya is a composite figure within the CIA with only a slender relationship to the actual intelligence operation that discovered bin Laden’s compound.

Zero Dark Thirty failed relatively poorly in the Oscars in 2012, winning just one Oscar for best sound editing and losing out to Argo, which had the advantage of embracing another America captivity myth. The film had clearly failed to create any convincing female intelligence hero, though there was a strong implication in Boal’s defence of the film that it was trying to elevate the very field of intelligence at a time when this too is likely to be transformed by advancing technology, not least in the area of spy drones. It is hard to see any credible Rambo figure emerging out of the world of intelligence onto cinema screens, though Zero Dark Thirty can at least be given some credit for heightening the role of women in intelligence agencies, a trope repeated in the film The Imitation Game (dir. Morten Tyldum) in 2014 about the work of Alan Turing and the intelligence analysts at Bletchley Park.

The cult of intelligence and cerebral heroes doubtless has some appeal to educated film audiences in an era of anti-intellectual right-wing populism. It is hard to see it evolving into a cinematic myth of intelligence-based counter-terrorism. The problem is exemplified in the 2015 British thriller Eye in the Sky (dir. Gavin Hood), produced by the Canadian company Entertainment One. This has been one of the most penetrating features to date on the moral complexities of drone warfare, suggesting too that films made out of the controlling aegis of Hollywood can go farther in the interrogation of this kind of warfare.

The film is set in varied locations in London, the United States and Kenya. A combined British and American counter-terrorist team are searching for an Al Shabaab terrorist group that has killed an undercover British/Kenyan agent in Nairobi. The British are led by determined Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) operating out of the headquarters in Northwood in North London, while the American drone operators, seen sporadically from the outside, are in Utah. Many images of life at the local level in Nairobi are viewed from a Reaper drone.

It is the British rather than the Americans who are leading this operation and intelligence suggests that another attack is being planned, comparable to the real attack in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi on 21 September 2013 resulting in seventy-one deaths. Colonel Powell becomes convinced that a suicide operation is now in preparation, especially after the movie switches into sci-fiction mode when an agent on the ground releases a tiny micro air vehicle (MAV) or insect drone that flies inside the house of the suspected terrorist group and films the plotters from the rafters. So far, no government, including the United States, has admitted to developing such a device, though it seems that prototypes of this sort of MAV mimicking an insect can be potentially used to collect intelligence in the form of film footage and DNA data from any humans it lands on. Given the rapid pace of technological development in drone warfare, what is currently still sci-fi might soon become reality in a few years, though there are some serious problems in developing such tiny vehicles which are liable to be blown in the wind, get caught in spider webs or end up being observed if they are not completely silent. Controlling such vehicles also seems difficult. Eye in the Sky portrays this as being relatively easy, with an undercover agent operating it from his laptop sitting on the ground. The MAV in the movie eventually runs out of battery life. Once again, it is hard to see how any such tiny drone can function for any length of time given the power needed to sustain it in flight.

Powell, even more than Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, is able to operate with almost 100 per cent certainty that the target is an Al Shabaab cell when the MAV sees the group saying prayers and putting on explosive vests. Military intelligence, though, still works in a world of relative probabilities. Getting suitable authorization for the strike proves tedious and protracted, as civilian politicians constantly push decision-making upwards. Both the British Foreign Secretary, suffering from stomach trouble in Singapore, and the US Secretary of State, playing table tennis in China, are contacted before the final authorization is secured in a movie about the internationalization of military decision-making. There is a juxtaposition of point with counterpoint in this debate that, as M.L.R. Smith has noted, avoids caricaturing either side and does not paint the simplistic humanitarian in an automatically favourable light.60 Those espousing such views end up being portrayed just as cynical and self-interested as those they oppose, though this overlooks one serious dimension missing in the movie, the viewpoint of the terrorists themselves and the reasons for their radicalization. From a directorial angle, introducing this would doubtless complicate an already fairly unwieldy movie; but in a broader sense it might have been possible to contrast the white female jihadist with Helen Mirren’s Colonel Powell, serving perhaps as a form of terrorist doppelganger.

The film concentrates on a major obstacle to the launch of the drone strike, a young Kenyan girl selling bread close to the target area. As with Drones and Good Kill, the issue now revolves around mathematical probabilities, though Powell bullies one of the analysts into producing data suggesting that the probability of collateral damage is under 40 per cent, a massaging of data to produce fake news. The strike is made, but a second strike is ordered to ensure the definite kill of the white British jihadi recruit to the Al Shabaab cell. The young girl selling bread also dies, though the full impact of this is lost in the political propaganda derived from pre-empting another terrorist strike on a friendly African state. Eye in the Sky mixes serious realism with some more fantastical sci-fi tropes to suggest how advancing surveillance and drone warfare progressively eliminates the protracted kind of intelligence gathering depicted in Zero Dark Thirty. But Mirren’s Colonel Powell has a number of important similarities with Chastain’s May in the sense that both women act as major galvanizers of rather inert and cautious male-dominated bureaucracies. Both are highly motivated to defend homeland and both are single-minded, too, in their determination to seek out a terrorist enemy, with neither displaying any doubt or uncertainty that this is an ethically justified form of warfare.

Moreover, both Zero Dark Thirty and Eye in the Sky are burdened by the notion that modern military technology is in the process of transforming unconventional warfare as electronic intelligence progressively increases the level of certainty. But for the moment at last, major decisions still have to be made by those at the top of command structures, though this is a form of warfare in which there are few heroes of the traditional kind. Indeed, the most likely candidates for hero status in Eye in the Sky are really the ground-based intelligence operative Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi), constantly evading capture by Al Shabaab and whose life story and motivations remain unexplored.

Summing up

In this chapter I have suggested that one major cinematic myth to emerge from the American defeat in Vietnam was that of Rambo, a myth that helped define a series of action movies in the 1980s and 1990s. These movies were intensely masculine and formed a revitalized cinematic myth of the American homeland. The myth broadly dovetailed with the Star Wars franchise, centred on sci-fi fantasies centred on an apparently remote community, ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ forced to defend itself against dark impersonal totalitarian forces. The community recalls James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales of the American west, with its own rather old-fashioned warrior hero in the form of Luke Skywalker, aided by the wise counsels of the Chingachagook figure Obi Wan Kenobi. Rambo, by contrast, is a lone angry warrior in modern-day America, seeking revenge and atonement for past maltreatment of US vets by a weak senior command and duplicitous Washington bureaucracy. He has no wise counsel to aid him in the original novel, though in the film series he listens to the advice of his father figure of a former commanding officer, Colonel Trautman.

Both the Star Wars and Rambo myths helped revitalize the Hollywood action genre, though their temporary success raises questions about the durability of their mythic power. Craig Chalquist, drawing on the work of Ursula Leguin, has suggested that Star Wars borrowed traditional mythic themes and lacks the capacity to generate a truly authentic and transformative myth of its own. The Star Wars franchise might be an enormously and enduring form of popular entertainment, but is at best, Chalquist has argued, a sub-myth rather than a proper myth since it fails to lead to any serious rituals and ‘wisdom teachings’ capable of transforming the wider culture.61 The same point can clearly be made about the Rambo films that have proved successful at the box office without necessarily leaving behind any durable cinematic myth, beyond the image of the lone modern warrior ready to use decisive force.

Chalquist’s argument is rather overstated. It is pivoted around an ethnographic idea of myths which define the makeup and identity of pre-industrial and agrarian societies, where stories of heroes are passed down by word of mouth and the symbolic power of myths is closely linked to religion. In a media-dominated society such traditional myths may at first sight not be easily sustained, though in many cases the same mythical stories get handed on but in constantly changing forms, as in the case of action movie heroes.

The actual death of Rambo, like that of Mark Twain, may well prove, though, to be premature since, as an action sub-myth, it is one over which Hollywood seems destined to lose control. Plans are afoot in Bollywood for an Indian re-make of Rambo starring the movie star Tiger Shroff, while Chinese cinema also has its own version of Rambo in the form of ‘Wolf Warrior’ who is a kind of fusion of Rambo, John McClane from Die Hard and Jack Bauer in 24.⁶² These developments confirm the global reach of the Rambo movie series, though it is unclear how a distinctive Rambo character will be maintained as it becomes copied and emulated by other cinemas around the world.

The decline of Rambo in Hollywood in the aftermath of the last Rambo movie in 2008 occurred at a time when another rebooting of the action genre was starting to take place. This renewal of the action genre occurred in a context of increasingly technological forms of warfare, the decline of counter-insurgency in the wake of the draw-down from Iraq and Afghanistan and the cultural transformation of many major American institutions traditionally involved in counter-terrorism, such as the CIA, leading to women becoming an increasingly important component of a work force that had previously been white and male.

The counter-terrorism film thus seems set to emerge as another important subgenre of the action genre in Hollywood. It emerges at a time when public support for the ‘war on terror’ went into decline as the counter-insurgency being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq appeared to produce few clear political pay-offs, despite the high number of American casualties. In May 2013 President Obama redefined the policy as one that continued to seek to destroy terrorist networks, but was no longer an open-ended or destined to continue indefinitely.63 This was, in some respects, a move back towards the criminalization model dominant before the 9/11 attacks, occupying what Guelke has seen as an unstable middle position between accommodation, on the one hand, and suppression on the other.⁶⁴ Most terrorism in the United States continues to be viewed, though, as externally driven.

The new form of counter-terrorism action thriller, exemplified by Zero Dark Thirty and Eye in the Sky, is increasingly realist in orientation and based, very often, on actual events, though they are unlikely to be proper ‘journalism’ given that feature films usually require that documentary elements are kept to a minimum. Such films tend to made for relatively well-educated audiences, raising as they do ethical questions behind such issues as assassinations and drone strikes. They represent an extension into the action movie genre of a style of film making that has hitherto tended to be confined to the upper end of the science fiction genre, exemplified by ‘cerebral sci-fi movies’ that stretch back a long way to Solaris (1972), Blade Runner (1982) and Dune (1984); but exemplified more recently by films such as District 9 (2009), Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014). These movies can be contrasted to more mainstream blockbusters such as Star Wars and The Matrix in that they seek, as Scott Thill has suggested, to interrogate ‘the blurred line between waking life and lucid dreaming’.⁶⁵

It is difficult to predict, at this stage, where the cerebral action subgenre will go in contemporary Hollywood. Much will be shaped by the wider political climate in the United States that has become intensely polarized politically with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. This is unlikely to lead to a full culture war between Hollywood and the White House or the American right. However, the intense political divisions present film producers with educated audiences in at least parts of the United States such as the East and West Coast that is estranged politically from narratives suggesting any sort of benign presidency. At the same time, these audiences will, quite possibly, be more willing to accept the positive, if not democratic, credentials of institutions such as the FBA and CIA as crucial mechanisms to restrain presidential power.⁶⁶

Given such receptive audiences, the cerebral action movie in the mould of Zero Dark Thirty and Eye in the Sky will, in all likelihood, become increasingly mainstream in Hollywood, though it is unlikely to take an especially liberal form. Such movies look set to engage with increasingly anxious tropes of robotic and drone warfare.⁶⁷ We have here a dramatic contrast to the post-war phase of Hollywood war movies that celebrated ever more sophisticated technology as well as linking it to heroic male prowess (movies about the air force, for example, and the skill of its pilots, such as The Right Stuff and Top Gun). The cerebral action movie is unlikely to go as far as suggesting that this technology is actually breaking down, as in Apocalypse Now (1979), but rather to suggest that it to some degree fulfils prophecies of the Terminator series that robotic forms of war essentially deny human agency.