Imagining America at War

Morality, Politics and Film

Cynthia Weber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: History

Ten films released between 9/11 and Gulf War II reflect raging debates about US foreign policy and what it means to be an American.

Tracing the portrayal of America in the films Pearl Harbor (World War II); We Were Soldiers and The Quiet American (the Vietnam War); Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down and Kandahar (episodes of humanitarian intervention); Collateral Damage and In the Bedroom (vengeance in response to loss); Minority Report (futurist pre-emptive justice); and Fahrenheit 9/11 (an explicit critique of Bush's entire war on terror), Cynthia Weber presents a stimulating new study of how Americans construct their identity and the moral values that inform their foreign policy.

This is not just another book about post-9/11 America. It introduces the concept of 'moral grammars of war', and explains how they are articulated: Many Americans asked in the wake of 9/11 – not only 'why do they hate us?' but 'what does it mean to be a moral America(n) and how might such an America(n) act morally in contemporary international politics? This text explores how these questions were answered at the intersections of official US foreign policy and post-9/11 popular films.

It also details US foreign policy formation in relation to traditional US narratives about US identity 'who we think we were/are', 'who we wish we'd never been', 'who we really are', and 'who we might become' as well as in relation to their foundations in nationalist discourses of gender and sexuality.

This book will be of great interest to students of American Studies, US Foreign Policy, Contemporary US History, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies.

1 Introduction

On a Saturday after that Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I extracted myself from my cocoon of newspaper, television, and radio reports long enough to go to the cinema. I was not alone. Record numbers of people in the West flocked to cinemas in the weeks after the terrorist tragedies. I (a US citizen living in Britain) went to my neighborhood cinema because I sought an escape from catastrophe and a return to calm. There I lost myself in an extravagant production in which—for a full two and a half hours—no one died. My sense of normalcy was temporarily restored, at least until I was exiting the cinema. Lulled as I was back into my old routines, I did what I usually do on leaving: I turned to the rack of advertisements masquerading as free postcards targeted at teens and 20-somethings. Among the images of the hip and the cool that Saturday was a photograph of a landing craft filled with Royal Marine Commandos outfitted in camouflage, their fingers on the triggers of their automatic weapons, their boat speeding through the open seas toward what one suspects is a foreign shoreline. The caption read, "Please take your seats. The show is about to start."

I could not have found this post-September 11 mixing of military recruiting and cinematic troping more chilling. Instantly, the postcard ruptured my sense of having accomplished a momentary escape from reality, reminding me that I was merely awaiting the next reel/real to roll in what would become known as the "war on terror'" and that the cinema was as much a battlefield in this war as were the ruins in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. and the cities and countrysides of the soon-to-be bombed Afghanistan and, later, Iraq.

Alerted as I was by this advertised fusion of cinema and war, from that day forward I began paying a lot more attention to films. I was especially interested in films that were playing in US cinemas between 9/11 (a moment when US foreign policy was being rethought) and the following summer (by which time the new Bush Doctrine of Preemption had cemented itself as a cornerstone of US foreign policy).

What I found was that it was not only the unfolding of official US foreign policy options that could be traced in these post-9/11 films (all of which were produced prior to 9/11 but released or re-released thereafter). More interesting, to me at least, was that a selection of these films was linked to an ongoing public debate in the United States that took on grander proportions after 9/11. That debate revolved around what is arguably a foundational question of US-ness—what does it mean to be a moral America(n)?—with the hemispheric term America(n) euphemistically (and some might say imperially) standing for the United States of America and its citizens.

September 11, 2001 arguably rendered another rethinking of US morality possible, for the events of that day shook US self-understandings to their very core: about who "Americans" are, about what "America" represents to the rest of the world, and about what Americans and America might be in this new, new world order. Yes, US citizens were traumatized by the events of 9/11, unable to put into words what September 11 meant for them and to them (Edkins, 2001, 2003), but even more striking than what US citizens could not articulate immediately after 9/11 was what many of them repeatedly posed as the simple question: Why do they hate us?

This question, like all us-them questions, has the power to fix who "we" are in relation to "them," something the Bush administration's official response—"we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world" (Bush, 2001a) and "they" are "the axis of evil" (Bush, 2002a)—certainly tried to do. However, in the moment of September 11, this question also offered the possibility for rethinking who we are, who they are, and what the relationships between us and them might be, as the glut of unofficial commentaries and political protests by many US citizens evidenced. Understood in this way, September 11 is a liminal moment in US history, not so much as a trauma that requires a national therapeutic response but rather as a "confrontation" (Lowenstein, 2001) or an "encounter" (McAlister, 2001) with questions that haunt US relationships both between self and other and with(in) the self (Weber, 1999). As such, these questions have the capacity to place America and Americans at the threshold of a "moral remaking" (Roseneil, 2001), culminating in the question, Who might we become?

As indicated by my own encounter with that fateful postcard, one important site in which this debate is staged is in cinemas, where the theaters of wars and the theaters of film are sometimes startlingly conjoined. Indeed, thinking about September 11 is almost impossible without thinking about film, whether one saw the events of that day in person or on television. A New York City resident who watched from the streets as planes flew into the twin towers told me her first thought was, "Someone is making a movie."¹ This blurring of reality and film—of real time and reel time—was endlessly repeated on CNN Headline News. Below its images of the twin towers collapsing, it ran a ticker tape that included not only the names of those known to have died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania but of Hollywood movies past and (then) future that depict similar events, films such as Executive Decision, The Siege, The Peacemaker, and Collateral Damage (Bhabha, 2001). Because Hollywood appeared to have foretold the future of terrorism better than the US government, the Pentagon formed the 9/11 Group. This Group was composed of Hollywood filmmakers and directed to brainstorm about future terrorist scenarios to better aid the Pentagon in securing the US homeland (Panorama, 2001). And commentators as diverse as such intellectuals as Slavoj Zizek (2002) and such scriptwriters as Michael Tolkin (2001) crowded onto the editorial pages with their testimonies of how the events of September 11 confirmed the postmodern collapsing of the real and the hyperreal, of reality and film. In all these ways, film functioned as a metanarrative for experiencing September 11.

Alongside its metanarrative function, mm served other important functions in relation to 9/11 and its aftermath. In the weeks after the terrorist attacks, US movie-goers who may (like me) have been craving an escape from the realities of war and a return to normalcy all too often found themselves caught up in national debates about the status of the war on terror merely by going to the cinema. Was the war on terror "another Pearl Harbor," as governmental officials from the President on down declared? As 9/11 morphed into Pearl Harbor in US discourse, what did it mean to See the re-released film Pearl Harbor in the cinema just after 9/11? Was this a patriotic act? Was it a search for a strategic response to 9/11 (Zakaria, 2001)? Was it an act of mourning for the loss of US innocence, again (Crepeau, 2001)? Was it a moment of rekindling and reclaiming of historical moral outrage (Morrow, 2001)? Whatever it was, viewing Pearl Harbor in September 2001 was rarely (if ever) an escape from reality.

Pearl Harbor is a clear example of how a film circulating in post-9/11 America provided not a metanarrative for September 11 (9/11 is like film) but a specific historical and moral narrative about September 11 (9/11 is like this film and the historical events and moral codes it depicts). It might seem that Pearl Harbor is an exceptional case, for it is a film that happens to portray a specific historical event that was explicitly linked by many US citizens in and out of government to the war on terror. Yet, interestingly, so too were many other films that were produced prior to, but released or re-released, after 9/11. The rerelease of the film Kandahar in November 2001 coincided with the Bush administration's claim that the plight of Afghan women was among its justifications for overthrowing the Taliban regime. Just about any film depicting military conflict or terrorism resonated with US audiences, regardless of its historical setting, from the Vietnam War film We Were Soldiers to the humanitarian intervention disaster Black Hawk Down to the revaluing of America's humanitarian mission in Behind Enemy Lines to the postponed Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle about terrorism, Collateral Damage. And, of course, the tale of preemptive justice in Minority Report—released less than one month after the Bush Doctrine of Preemption became official US policy—was first linked to homeland security and later linked to the removal of Saddam Hussein (Lithwick, 2002; Lott, 2002; Edelstein, 2002a).

This selection of post-9/11 films marks a site in which official US foreign policy converged with popular symbolic and narrative resources to confront the "United States" with questions about its individual, national, and international subjectivities, especially in relation to the war on terror. Sometimes (as in the official rendition), traditional US moralities are confirmed in this cinematic space; at other times, they are confounded there. Either way, popular and official discourses of September 11 converge in this space to enable the production, reproduction, and transformation of everemerging US individual, national, and international subjectivities.²

Imagining America at War traces the unfolding of this encounter and the subjectivities it produces. It argues that between 9/11 and the following summer (when the United States and a very few of its allies made the decision to invade Iraq in what became known as Gulf War II), who Americans were as citizens and what America was as a national and international space was not only in flux (which it always is) but in crisis. The shock many US citizens felt by the events of 9/11 led to a national debate about what it means to be American individually, nationally, and internationally, and the terms of this debate were primarily moral. For US citizens, this debate wasn't just about what we ought to do in response to 9/11; it was about who we are—about how our responses to 9/11 morally configure us (a collective form of inclusion in the US nation) as individual, national, and international subjects and spaces.

A number of different we's compete for star billing in this debate as it is screened in post-9/11 cinema. These use's differ not only in terms of whether they describe individual or collective Americans or Americas. More interestingly, these we's vary in how each articulates a different inflection of US morality. Are we or should we be heroic, hurt, humble? Films from Pearl Harbor to Collateral Damage to Minority Report all offer different answers to this question by constructing distinct US we's. Indeed, there are as many we's in post-9/11 cinema as there are post-9/11 films. What these different we's do is anchor distinctive "moral grammars of war"— codes or contexts (or both) about the good and the bad that structure narratives of interpretation about war.³ So, for example, in every case, the we's of post-9/11 cinema stand for a US-ness that is being constructed at the intersections of cinema, national trauma, and US foreign policy decision making but are portrayed as if US citizens and US-ness itself were already fixed, firm identities. Yet who we are or should be and how this we should guide our morality in a post-9/11 world—toward humanitarianism or toward vengeance, for example—is expressed differently in each film and in official and popular discourses about each.

Imagining America at War explores how these various US we's were mobilized in post-9/11 cinema to construct US individual, national, and international subjectivities as well as diverse historical trajectories for "becoming a moral American" and a "moral America." It traces the "official story" of US moralities by reading post-9/11 films not in order of their release dates but in order of the historical situations they portray. It argues that, read together, Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers, Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down, Kandahar, Collateral Damage, and Minority Report constitute a specific trajectory of US morality from past to present to future. This official morality tale unfolds in four parts, which might be subtitled as follows: who we think we were/are; who we wish we'd never been; who we really are; and who we might become.

Who we think we were/are recounts past US-ness through the World War II film Pearl Harbor, slipping into who we think we are with the post-9/11 morphing of the events of Pearl Harbor with those of 9/11. Who we wish we'd never been is the story of US involvement in Vietnam, patriotically renarrated through a mixture of traditional and contemporary US moralities in We Were Soldiers. Who we really are is a two-part morality tale: on the one hand, it is the story of US humanitarianism, whether expressed in episodes of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s (such as it is in Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down) or in the new millennium through the Bush administration's reading of Kandahar. On the other hand, it is the celebration of justified vengeance in response to the tragic loss of home and family, as depicted in Collateral Damage. Finally, who we might become is an open-ended tale about making moral choices in our policy decisions and in our personal lives, as seen in the more critical futuristic film Minority Report.

What this four-part "official" rendering of becoming a moral America(n) clearly shows is how dependent moral understandings are on historical codes and contexts, on how the "grammar" of the story is as important as its narrativity. What is missing from this story so far are the specific characters who enact this US morality. Who are these we's, and where do they come from?

Imagining America at War argues that to understand the character(s) of US morality, one must investigate the character(s) of and in the US family. Fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters all figure predominately in cinema, and post-9/11 cinema is no exception. By examining precisely how these family characters are drawn in post-9/11 cinema, it is possible to get indications of how the official moral character of the United States is drawn, individually, nationally, and internationally. For, if the nation is a narration (or, in this case, a screening of various visual and narrative forms; Bhabha, 1990), it is always also a narration of the family (Sommer, 1991; Berlant, 1997; Flunt, 1992). In other words, [the desire for] the domestic of state and of nation is always already [the desire for] the domestic of home (life).

What this means for the trajectory in post-9/11 cinema for becoming a moral America(n) is that official public history alone does not tell this story. For what the moral history of the US is about is the moral movement within and between the imagined character(s) of the family and the nation. So, for example, Pearl Harbor is not only about World War II; it is about the gendered and sexualized codes required to produce the US imaginary of "the traditional family." We Were Soldiers is about how the patriarchal promises of WWII could not be translated into US foreign policy outcomes in Vietnam. Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Dow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Who we think we were/are
• 3 Who we wish we'd never been
• 4 Who we really are (humanitarians)
• 5 Who we really are (vigilantes)
• 6 Who we might become
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index