Action Cinema After 9/11

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

by Lisa Purse
sumber: https://fttreading.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/actioncinema-after-911/

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is prompting

much reflection in the media on both the events of that day and
what has happened since. How Hollywood responded is also on
peoples minds, as Peter Bradshaws overview piece in The
Guardian today illustrates. Its true to say, though, that
Hollywoods response has been the subject of media and
academic attention for much of the intervening decade since
2001. In one of the earliest published books on the
subject, Wheeler Winston Dixon offered a succinct
summation of Hollywoods immediate reaction:
In the days and weeks after 9/11, Hollywood momentarily abandoned the hyperviolent
spectacles that dominated mainstream late 1990s cinema. Films were temporarily shelved,
sequences featuring the World Trade Center were recut, and family lms were rushed into
release or production . . . Predictably, however, this reversal of fortune did not last long, and
soon Hollywood was back to work on a series of highly successful crash and burn movies.
(Dixon 2004: 3)

But it is in the very crash and burn, explosion filled action

movies Dixon characterizes as a return to the norm that one finds
a more complicated picture than one might expect of what
Hollywood did next.

Here, as elsewhere in Hollywood

output, allegorical explorations of the post-9/11 world emerged,
such as the puppet satire Team America: World Police (2004),
and SpielbergsWar of the Worlds (2005). But the much more
prevalent trend was what David Holloway calls modish
references to 9/11, Iraq or Afghanistan, or associated locales and
themes (2008: 75). This reminds me of something Michael
Wood said about the passing references to World War II in early
post-war Hollywood: that the world of death and war and
menace and disaster is really there, gets a mention, but then is
rendered irrelevant by the story or the star or the music (1975:
1718). For example, why open Transformers (2007) on a
military base in Qatar, if the action quickly returns to US soil?
Similarly Iron Man (2008)s choice to begin in Afghanistan works
to add a modish pertinence to Tony Starck (Robert Downey Jnr)s
arms dealing and the manner in which he learns the error of his
ways (incarceration by terrorists); once Starck escapes the
terrorists the action is focused once more on US soil. In both
cases noisy spectacle replaces any thought about the locations and
political implications of the films respective opening settings.
Equally, some films could be argued as somewhere between
allegory and modish reference where to
place Cloverfield (2008), for example, or attack-on-home-soil
films such as Law Abiding Citizen (2009)?
I think a more easily discernible trend in post-9/11 action cinema
is a developing unease about the viability of notions that are
normally at the heart of the action film: heroism and a just war.
Heroism as a cultural idea gained renewed currency in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11, stories abounding about people who
had risked their lives or died trying to rescue others. Here were
acts of human sacrice and bravery that could be heralded

unproblematically as heroic, and which were duly eulogised. But

the discourse of patriotic heroism was problematised by what
happened next. The military interventions by the US and its allies
after 9/11 were initiated in the face of anti-war demonstrations
and debates about their legal mandate. In the years that followed
growing collateral damage statistics and revelations about
prisoner mistreatment at Guantnamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and
about the rendition of terror suspects put pressure on any notion
of a just war and called into question the heroism of implicated
military personnel, while the reduction of civil liberties flowing
from the 2001 Patriot Act and the rising US and Allied troop
casualties further muddied public opinion.

In Shooter (2007), Vantage

Point (2008), theBourne films (2002, 2004, 2007)
and Salt(2010), amongst others, the just war of maintaining
national security turns out to be a dirty and corrupt business,
with the hero forced to attack the very government forces he
thought he was fighting with. Uncertainty about the true nature of
the central protagonists supposed heroism returns as a
pronounced trope in this period: for example, Bournes amnesia
and Salts narrative of double and re-doubled agents repeatedly
defer confirmation of the true allegiances of the hero;
in Inception (2010)s dream levels the subconscious mind of hero
Cobb (Leonardo di Caprio) unleashes dark forces that threaten
the lives of the rest of his team; and [*spoiler alert*] Source
Code (2011)s Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) struggles to carve
out a space for heroic action in a parallel worlds narrative that
refuses to resolve its central conflict, revealing Colter at the end
as both a physically impaired, comatose veteran and the bright-

eyed, healthy hero that saves the day (interested readers might
like to check out Dan Norths piece on the film).
Some action films harbored ambitions to engage with the post9/11 world more explicitly, placing their protagonists in relatively
naturalistic Middle East settings and at the apex of conict (in
one way or another) in order to explore more explicitly the
intricacies, tensions and pressures of the situation, films like The
Kingdom (2007), The Hurt Locker (2008) and Green
Zone (2010). Each of these demonstrates in its own way the risks
inherent in this noble endeavour, the way in which the action
films generic framework its focus on individual endeavour
rather than social context, its tendency to polarize characters into
heroes and villains, its wish-fulfilment resolutions achieved
through physical violence risk a failure to express the
complexity of the post-9/11 world. I discuss both The
Kingdom and The Hurt Locker in Contemporary Action
Cinema, but would like to make some brief observations
about The Kingdom in the space available here to demonstrate
what I mean [once again, here be *spoilers*].
Having emphatically linked its fictional world with the real post9/11 context via a remarkablecontextualizing opening
montage, The Kingdom follows the endeavours of a team of FBI
investigators hunting the bombers of a US compound in Saudi
Arabia. The film is at its best communicating small moments of
conflict and tension in the interactions between the US team and
the Saudi police forced to chaperone them: both parties draw our
sympathies and understanding. But genre conventions are
already in sway that gradually blunt the nuanced treatment the
opening promised. The set-up immediately establishes that this is
a revenge narrative, the US team keen to avenge the killing of one
of our own. Early images of their grief and anger at the death of a
FBI colleague killed in the compound attack prepare us to cheer
them on in the revenge mission, a mission which will,
incidentally, quickly push them to disregard national border
controls and political and cultural sensitivities. The film initially
pays a kind of lip service to Saudi sovereignty, but the Saudis are
quickly co-opted into the cause, as foot soldiers for the FBI team.

The film draws heavily on the buddy action formula to bring

together its primary protagonists, FBI team leader Fleury (Jamie
Foxx) and his Saudi counterpart Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom).
Antagonism shifts to awkwardness and then to respect in the
course of their joint detective work, until a striking declaration by
Al Ghazi affirms his allegiance to the US teams cause, and works
to reiterate the primacy of the revenge narrative:
I nd myself in a place where I no longer care about why we are attacked. I only care that one
hundred people woke up a few mornings ago and had no idea it was their last. When we catch
the man who murdered these people I dont care to ask even one question. I want to kill him.

The phrases I no longer care about why and I dont care to ask
even one question betray a response to terrorism which is much
more emphatically in line with the action films revenge trope
than with the opening credit sequences evocation of complex
causality. Thought and analysis have been rejected to be replaced
by violent retribution as the only possible outcome. This moment
is indicative of the way that generic conventions gradually
upstage the films other ambitions. Al Ghazis words
(echoing both the jingoistic language of the Bush administrations
war on terror discourse and the desire to deliver some form of
retribution that many have felt after 9/11 and other subsequent
terrorist atrocities) prepare us for the action films conventional
narrative resolution a culminating violence while pointing
away from the real-world realities of anti-terrorist strategies,
which must include intelligence gathering and analysis as well as
more direct forms of action.
Thus aligned, Al Ghazi becomes Fleurys action buddy in a final
extended shoot-out that gives all six of the investigators the four
Americans and the two Saudis the opportunity to give vent to
their desire for revenge, to express a violent heroism in place of

more sedentary or reflective modes of investigative action. And in

another long-standing convention in Hollywood action movies,
the racial Other in this case (in a conflation of ethnic and
national difference that Hollywood frequently falls into) the Saudi
Al Ghazi must be sacrificed for the US heros cause.
The Kingdom is in my view an underrated action movie, notable
for its ambitions as much as for its failings (the terrorists are
cyphers that draw on familiar racist stereotypes, while the Saudis
and Americans can only bond over family ties and US popular
culture, rather than on the basis of mutual cultural respect). The
films tensions genre and wish-fulfilment versus the realities of
real-world geopolitics are certainly indicative of the challenges
action movies faced in the decade following 9/11. But given
Hollywoods reliance on wish-fulfilment and familiar genre
reference points, these tensions may also tell us something about
the negotiations Hollywood has generally had to make during the
last ten years, as it shaped the relationship between its fictional
universes and the real world beyond.