Since the 1970s, Hollywood action thrillers have eagerly simulated the pyrotechnics delivered by terrorist plots while avoiding the politics that animate insurgent violence. That the studios are so adept at manipulating fear – tutors in spectacular orchestrations of destruction – animated some stringent self-criticism in the wake of 11 September 2001. Hollywood, proposed Robert Altman, had “set the pattern.” Bin Laden merely tagged along. “Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie. How dare we continue to show this kind of mass destruction in movies?” But like other assertions that everything had changed, or must change, in the wake of 9/11, Altman's call for cinematic restraint was not borne out by subsequent events. After a brief struggle to figure out quite how to translate the events of that day onto the big screen, Hollywood soon reverted to form – big on action, shy of politics.
In Firestorm, Stephen Prince offers the first full-length survey of US film and television production in what he terms the “age of terrorism.” Setting out to appraise filmmakers' responses to the events of 9/11 and their aftermath, Prince maps a roughly chronological approach onto a more thematic categorization of productions. After a preliminary survey of Hollywood's historical relationship with terrorism, he examines narrative filmmakers' immediate (if sometimes oblique) responses to 9/11 before turning to the torrent of polemical documentaries that soon followed. Here Prince considers not only Michael Moore's wildly popular Fahrenheit 9/11 but also the rash of low-budget conspiracy-theorizing productions that circulate largely online and nontheatrically amongst “truth-out” true believers. Subsequent chapters turn to documentary film and the Iraq war, television's variegated response to terrorism – in the form of drama series, documentary features, and docudrama specials – before the author delivers a final summative verdict.
Firestorm succeeds more as chronicle than as critique. Prince offers a thorough overview of the post-9/11 filmic landscape but his key strength lies in synopsis rather than in interpretation. Privileging evenhandedness as an attribute of film and criticism alike, he strives for moderation to the point of blandness. Without a strong overarching thesis, Prince expends most energy on challenging factual distortions and deficits of balance. He thus quibbles with the tendentious evidence proffered by conspiracy documentaries and laments the rank partisanship of television productions like ABC's The Path to 9/11 (broadcast on 10 and 11 September 2006) that torched the Clinton administration for its pusillanimous approach to Bin Laden and al Qaeda in the 1990s without lambasting Bush's laggardly response to warnings that an attack was imminent in the summer of 2001. Troubled by the White House's unconstitutional excess in countering terrorism thereafter, Prince nevertheless criticizes the makers of critical documentaries on the Iraq war for a premature rush to judgment: “the history of this war may yet hold surprises,” he cautions (232).
Despite the incendiary material under discussion, Prince's prose remains flat. Points are methodically belabored, but no critical spark ignites. Firestorm's overarching claim is that the “age of terrorism,” far from rendering certain genres obsolete, has generated a profusion of responses – some lamentable, others laudable. Overall, Prince considers independent documentary filmmakers to have produced the most moving and thoughtful responses to traumatic events, while television drama has most egregiously valorized extrajudicial violence, nowhere more so than in 24's celebration of torture as the surest method to defuse ticking time bombs. While Prince finds a handful of studio productions meritorious (notably Steven Spielberg's “morally complex” Munich and Paul Greengrass's United 93), he devotes curiously little attention to Hollywood's forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, shoehorning a brief discussion of these films into the concluding chapter.
As a result, Firestorm never fully reckons with why the cinematic response to the “war on terror” has been so belated and anemic, or else so crudely belligerent, like Brian de Palma's Redacted – a production that grossed just $65,000. Prince notes the profound American public aversion to war-themed fare, observing flatly that “viewers seemed to be saying collectively that they didn't wish to be reminded about the war when they went to the movies” (303). But how do we explain this resistance? Does it tell us more about the checked-out character of US public disaffection with seemingly interminable conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan or about the inadequacies of films that have not fully decided what to say about “the situation”? Perhaps these phenomena are symptomatic of a broader malaise that afflicts Prince himself. Like the aimlessly liberal producers of films such as Lions for Lambs, Prince is clearly troubled by counterterrorist “excess” but uncertain where, and whether, to direct his fire.
