Introduction
In The Forever War, Dexter Filkins, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, describes his feelings on visiting Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001:
Walking in, watching the flames shoot upward, the first thing I thought was that I was back in the Third World. My countrymen were going to think this was the worst thing that ever happened, the end of civilization. In the Third World, this sort of thing happened every day … I don't think I was the only person thinking this, who had a darker perspective. All those street vendors who worked near the World Trade Center … When they heard the planes and watched the towers fall they must have thought the same as I did: that they'd come home.Footnote 1
Filkins is here recalling his prediction (made on 11 September 2001) that the collapse of the Twin Towers would provoke an insular and hysterical response. Distancing himself from this predicted reaction, Filkins remembers identifying instead with a group of people – living in the US but with experience of the Third World – for whom the violence would in some way be recognizable or familiar, just as it was for him as a result of working abroad as a reporter. Filkins's “doubled” response – imagining initial shock as well as the possibility of the emergence of something more complex and qualified – points to the way in which 9/11 might be said to propagate a sense of the interconnectedness of the globalized economy, and to the already established and often unequal relation between the US and other nations. Filkins here gestures to the way in which coming to terms with the 9/11 attacks will require not only an examination of America's relationship with the wider world but also a willingness to examine the relationship between self and other in America's diverse and differentiated society. This article explores the emergence of this more complex and qualified response as it appeared in the narrative structure and film form of Hollywood movies made in the aftermath of 9/11.
In general terms, the media provided the kind of reaction Filkins had forecast. Numerous scholars have described how jingoistic and patriotic responses quickly framed the terrorist attack in binary terms – good versus evil, us versus them – as a way of consolidating a wider move towards war, first in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq.Footnote 2 One example must suffice to illustrate the prevailing culture of the time: in an analysis of the reporting of the attacks in Time, April Eisman describes how on 12 September 2001 the magazine included an article by Lance Morrow, a professor of journalism at Boston University, titled “The Case for Rage and Retribution.”Footnote 3 Morrow called for a war of the “civilized” on the “uncivilized,” driven by the cultivation of rage and hatred:
Let's have rage … [a] policy of focused brutality … America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness – and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred … Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started.Footnote 4
Although clearly presented as an opinion piece, the fact that a mainstream news journal was willing to publish Morrow's politically extreme views seems symptomatic of a wider discourse revealing itself at that moment. Neither was this discourse strictly limited to the news media; wider scholarly paradigms such as Samuel Huntingdon's pre-9/11 thesis that the post-Cold War world would be defined by a “clash of civilizations” were also called into play to similar effect.Footnote 5
Alternative points of view, some of which shared Filkins's desire to move beyond these limited and limiting formulations, were also articulated. For example, Susan Sontag wrote a short polemical column in the New Yorker, published on 24 September 2001, that suggested that the attacks might have been a consequence of previous US alliances and actions, especially the continued bombing of Iraq after the first Gulf War. In contrast to Morrow's call to arms, Sontag's attempt to establish rational cause and context, and to figure the event as the result of some form of interrelationship between the US, the perpetrators of the attack, and the wider world, was quickly censured, with Sontag the victim of considerable vitriolic condemnation.Footnote 6 This hostility towards Sontag is symptomatic of a mood of prevarication and denial with regard to the set of connections that 9/11 had inevitably unearthed, and especially in relation to any move to figure the terrorists in terms anything other than binary. This prevailing cultural mood – seen clearly in George W. Bush's Manichean construct, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” – ensured that Filkins's sense of a complex, dialectical relation between the US and the wider world was subsumed by the wider media discourse.Footnote 7
It is possible to track this dominant tendency from the realm of news reportage and political rhetoric into the popular culture at large. Again, numerous scholars have profiled how television series such as 24 (2001–10) and a range of feature films in a number of different genres used prejudicial constructions of cultural otherness to underwrite and permit belligerent, vengeful, and often unlawful but condoned action.Footnote 8
In The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America, Susan Faludi argues that that the core myth called upon in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was one founded on the historical experience of colonial settlement and expansion, and in particular the ways in which conflicts and contradictions stemming from the struggle between white European settlers and Native Americans were negotiated. A key aspect of this mythology is the captivity narrative, in which a white American woman is abducted and terrorized by Native Americans, necessitating both rescue and retribution.Footnote 9Saving Jessica Lynch (2003), Man on Fire (2004), Rambo (2008) and Taken (2008), for example, all feature captivity/revenge narratives in which America (as imperiled white woman or child) is constructed as a victim exposed to a predatory foreign threat. In each case, the justified and necessary response to the threat is shown to be one of retributive violence.
Yet despite such efforts by the media and popular cultural production to hem critical thinking and harness powerful feelings of loss and anger to the desire for vengeance and the call to wage war, there is evidence that the counterdiscourse signalled initially by journalists such as Filkins and Sontag persisted, and was in fact, through subsequent events and over time, amplified. For example, the popularity of the best-selling book Why Do People Hate America? (2002) is a clear indicator that many ordinary Americans had, as Filkins had forecast, been prompted by events to question and reexamine their relationship with non-Americans.Footnote 10 In particular, readers were steered to consider how countries in the Middle East and Europe might view the US in critical terms, and, most importantly, why this might be the case. While the relationship figured by the book's title is phrased in adversarial terms – emphasizing how a discourse of hate was operative in popular culture – Sardar and Davies refuse a binary reasoning and instead construct a series of logical and reasoned answers to the question posed.Footnote 11 The success of their book suggests that almost immediately, and through popular nonfiction rather than the channels of mainstream news coverage, there was a search for an understanding of otherness and difference.
This countertendency can also be seen in popular television series such as Battlestar Galactica (2003–9), which explores scenarios related to identity, humanness, religion, otherness, and the use of war and torture, in ways that are typified by ambiguity. In stark contrast to the early seasons of 24, and as Goulart and Joe note,
Battlestar Galactica challenges average citizens to think about the potential merits of the perspectives they oppose and the drawbacks of perspectives they embrace. In commercial television – the dominant entertainment medium in the United States – this is a relatively recent development.Footnote 12
The patterns of thought and reactionary pleasures offered to audiences by the captivity/revenge movie were also challenged from within Hollywood. Cynthia Weber, for example, contrasts In the Bedroom (2001) with Collateral Damage (2002), noting that the former works “to dislodge the moral certainty of vengeance.”Footnote 13 Other films that offered qualified and ambiguous renderings of the desire to revenge include Mystic River (2003), Gone Baby Gone (2007) and Traitor (2008).
Generally speaking, it is true that Filkins's “darker” perspective (for “darker” read critical and questioning) was sidelined in the mainstream media in the period immediately following the attacks, but this is not to say that it was completely curtailed. As the illustrative examples listed above indicate, the work of those willing to criticize and question formed the grounds on which a different perspective began to take shape. It is precisely the development of this different perspective as it appeared at the margins of mainstream filmmaking that I wish to focus on for the remainder of this article.
Scenarios of obligation in 25th Hour
In contrast to the revenge and captivity narratives that Faludi argues were dominant in the period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 25th Hour offers an alternative perspective. Rather than relying on binary constructions of cultural difference, 25th Hour is unflinching in its examination of the reciprocal and fraught relation between self and other.
The film, which tells the story of New York drug dealer Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) and his last day of freedom before submitting to a lengthy jail term, was not initially intended as a 9/11 project. In fact, Lee brokered the deal to film David Benioff's turn-of-the-millennium novel (published in 2000) with Touchstone Pictures well before the attacks. Lee shot the film in thirty-seven days during the early summer of 2001, and brought it in on a modest budget of $15 million. With postproduction work about to begin, the terrorist attacks shook America to the core. While the producers of Spiderman (2001) and Collateral Damage (2002) were discussing how to digitally manipulate their prints to remove references to 9/11 (both films had shown the World Trade Center), Lee's production team discussed how to create a post-9/11 mood around the existing script that would encourage a reflective rather than a belligerent response.Footnote 14
The dramatic opening sequence of 25th Hour was one of the main additional elements. The sequence begins with abstract patterns of blue light framed by a cityscape at night. Long-time Lee collaborator Terence Blanchard's score, a classical rendition of Irish and Arabic folk music, lends a powerful cry of pain and suffering to the images and it is this cry that calls, or summons, the viewer into the film (a similar score is used in the documentary 9/11 (2002)).Footnote 15 As the sequence unfolds, the cityscape is shown to be New York and the light is seen to be emanating from Ground Zero, where an installation of eighty-eight searchlights was placed between 11 March and 14 April 2002, creating a “Tribute of Light” in remembrance of the attacks. The final shot of the sequence shows lower Manhattan in long shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, the bridge providing a line of sight across and into the city. This latter shot is carefully chosen as it presents the viewer with a perspective found in a number of iconic photographs of the towers (including postcards showing the towers before the attacks, photographs taken by shocked New Yorkers as the attacks happened, and photographs taken afterwards of the space the towers used to occupy). The distinctive point of view offered by the film's opening sequence – a musical score of mixed ethnic provenance, the foregrounding of an abstract and solemn act of commemoration, and a view of New York that activates a sense of the imbrication of past and present – presents the viewer with something like a call to reflect and understand.
On release in December 2002, 25th Hour would have played in New York cinemas alongside exhibitions of photographs such as this is new york and low-key but successful Broadway productions like The Guys.Footnote 16 In contrast to these texts, the opening sequence of 25th Hour encourages an undoing of preconceptions and expectations. There is no montage sequence of missing-person posters and heroic firefighters, no detailed description of communal grieving and therapeutic healing. Instead the film's opening credits seem to wish to prime the viewer to subject the characters and events of its narrative to considerable critical scrutiny.
In keeping with this, the film's mise en scène depicts the city through the understated use of a dark, steely-grey colour palette. One reviewer observed that the “bleached colours suggest a city covered with ashes,”Footnote 17 while another noted, “Lee's use of space expertly evokes the general air of a city bereft.”Footnote 18 What is significant about 25th Hour is that it adopts this darker, more critical, view of New York at a time when the mass media and other popular cultural texts were celebrating the sharing of loss and the coming together of community. Writing in the New York Times, Stephen Holden identified 25th Hour as one of a group of films that, in contrast to the dominant tendency, sought to acknowledge a dark, complex side to New York, especially in its refusal to surface over the complex questions of individual responsibility and racial difference.Footnote 19
It may well be the case that the use of this kind of mise en scène in the depiction of New York had became something of a cliché by mid-decade, providing a backdrop to In the Cut (2003), the first season of CSI: New York (2004), Flightplan (2004), The Interpreter (2005), and The Brave One (2007), for example. But what is significant about 25th Hour is that it is a precursor to this shift and that it layers this depiction of New York with a complex and searching narrative about identity and difference.
At the heart of the film in this respect is an examination of the dynamics of personal responsibility, with each of the main characters – Monty Brogan, Jacob Elinsky (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Frank Slaughtery (Barry Pepper) – wrestling with alienation, regret and guilt. At key moments of hiatus in the narrative, Monty, Jacob and Frank are privileged with a shot in a mirror in which they contemplate their “distorted or fractured reflection” in the light of their desire/need to change themselves and their acknowledgement of the difficulty of achieving this change.Footnote 20 The characters' respective existential crises are in part driven by earlier life decisions and experiences, thus reinforcing the film's commitment to a thematic and narrative design set on interrogating the relationship between past and present.
Each character is carefully contextualized within their respective social and ethnic milieus – Irish Catholic and working-class in the case of Monty and Frank, Jewish and middle-class in the case of Jacob. Monty's marriage to the Puerto Rican Naturelle Riviera (Rosario Dawson), and his friendship with the Russian Kostya Novotny (Tony Siragusa), extends the range of ethnicities in play within the core dramatic narrative. This uneasy and unstable cosmopolitanism provides the backdrop for the film's central focalizer, Monty Brogan's personal journey. The key sequence here is the scene in which Monty stares at his reflection in the toilet of his father's bar.Footnote 21 As Monty looks in the mirror, his reflection (an angry alter ego) subjects him to a misanthropic rant that attacks the homeless, blacks, Jews, the NYPD, the Church, Jesus Christ, Chelsea homosexuals, Bensonhurst Italians, rich Upper East Side wives, Hasidic Jewish diamond traders, Russian mobsters, Korean grocers, Pakistani and Sikh taxi drivers, Wall Street brokers, Enron, Cheney and Bush, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, his friends, his girlfriend, his father and Osama bin Laden.Footnote 22 The rant also indicates that Monty suspects both Naturelle and Kostya of betrayal, a suspicion perhaps founded on their racial difference.Footnote 23 Monty's alter ego's rage-fuelled invective – effectively blaming others for anything and everything – is a tactic that enables him to avoid negotiating the unpalatable fact that he has “been living high on other people's miseries.”Footnote 24 It can also be read as an articulation of the violent, Manichean discourse prevalent in the aftermath of 9/11, whereby all others are subject to criticism and complaint and no self-reflection is undertaken.
However, as Monty vents his spleen, cutaways show the people who are the victims of his tirade, New Yorkers who look directly at the camera. In the early part of the sequence these New Yorkers appear to function as illustrations/embodiments of Monty's alter ego's invective but as the sequence progresses these caricatures give way to more objective, almost documentary-style portraits and then, finally, to images of neighbourhoods that give a sense of the city as the sum of its many parts. The sequence asks the viewer to reconcile Monty's alter ego's perspective with the presence of actual New Yorkers, encouraging an undoing of his reductive stereotyping, in what amounts to a complex triangulation of difference. The sequence draws to a close with Monty telling his alter ego in no uncertain terms “No, fuck you” – effectively accepting that this kind of response is inadequate and instead resolving to take responsibility for his own actions. In a theme that runs throughout the film, with people in positions of authority (a drug dealer, city financier and a high-school teacher) shown taking advantage of those in less powerful positions than themselves, Monty acknowledges that he has behaved unethically.
A key sequence here (added to the film after 9/11) has Frank and Jacob (themselves similarly embarked on journeys of self-discovery) discussing Monty's drug dealing in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero. Jacob makes a convincing argument that Monty's drug dealing has not been without negative consequences and both men express that they feel culpable in Monty's crimes through having done nothing to stop him. The music used at the start of the film reappears in this sequence, combined with a zoom out of the window in which Ground Zero is shown in a documentary style evocative of the photographs of Joel Meyerowitz.Footnote 25 Avoiding the temptation to treat Ground Zero as hallowed ground or to use it to underpin rallying cries to war, Lee here connects Monty's personal narrative of a growing awareness of the negative consequences of his past actions to the eerie sodium-lit emptiness of Ground Zero and in doing so makes explicit the way in which this personal narrative is given wider allegorical resonance.Footnote 26
Set in the course of one day, the film shows key moments of Monty's life in flashback and this structure creates a strong sense of before and after, of lost opportunities, and of regret. As the key moments within the film's narrative analysed above indicate, 25th Hour indexes the need, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, for self-reflection and the taking of personal responsibility, especially with regard to how actions in the past lead to consequences in the present. Monty comes to recognize that his past behaviour has harmed others and that he must break the cycle by acknowledging this, atoning for his actions, and pledging to take a different course in the future. This structure – operating in the realm of the personal – lends itself to be read as something of an insistence that the events of 9/11 should also give cause for reflection about America's past. While the dominant tendency was to insist that Ground Zero was a place and time from which history would start (with the attacks detached from any historical perspective), 25th Hour tells a story of how past events cannot be effaced or repressed, and how these events will both shape and determine future courses of action.
Having constructed this difficult reality, the film offers the viewer two possible endings to consider. On the day Monty is due to go to prison, one ending has Monty and his father driving west together and we see Monty starting a new modest life and, with time, raising a family. This is the conventional Hollywood ending that would give the film uplift, activating as it does a deep-seated mythology of manifest destiny. Yet easy closure of this sort would simply continue the eschewal of personal responsibility that the film has shown to be the root cause of a wider social and cultural malaise, and, by extension, a causal factor in the terrorist attacks themselves. Monty must serve his time, the film's logic suggests, if he is ever to get back to those values and experiences that his criminal behavior has led him to let drift. As such, the film ends with Monty's father ignoring the road west and taking his son to prison, indicating how, if America is to build a fair, egalitarian, socially democratic society, individual Americans must refuse the myths of self and nation proffered by the mainstream media in the days, weeks and months following 9/11, and instead take responsibility for themselves and their actions.
Through the selection of this seemingly more pessimistic ending, 25th Hour commits to what I wish to call a “scenario of obligation.” Monty is required to acknowledge how his own actions impinge on those around him, strangers marked by racial and social difference, and to change his behaviour, at great personal cost, in order to maintain the well-being of these people. At the film's close, the New Yorkers who were subject to racial slurs in Monty's alter ego's earlier rant reappear and wave to him as he leaves the city. As he finds peace with himself and accepts his punishment, his hatred of others dissipates and the dispossessed of the city wish him well. They do not express pleasure at his fate, but in their hailing of him they point to a reciprocity and sense of community that goes beyond the neat and tidy constructions of multiculturalism that dominated media and wider cultural commentaries in the aftermath of 9/11. As such, the film's scenario of obligation establishes a sense of reciprocity and community amongst those groups who had been subject to a general anger and suspicion based on their racial difference. However, the film retains a well of anger for those, like Monty, who are deemed to have similarly exploited their positions: corrupt corporations (Enron, Worldcom), capitalists (stockbrokers, diamond traders), terrorists (Bin Laden), and politicians (Bush, Cheney) are identified as the root cause of the problem and remain culpable.
In realigning and augmenting 25th Hour in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Lee sought to register and decipher the experience of 9/11 through the mechanism of a complex and challenging narrative of critical reflection, guilt and atonement. Monty's personal journey can be read allegorically, i.e. that America has been governed by bare-toothed capitalism (of which drug dealers are metonymic), opportunist and self-interested politicians, and corrupt corporations and financial institutions, and that the protection and maintenance of a system comprising and sustaining these interests has required the condoning of clandestine, often terrorist, actions, as well as the supporting of repressive regimes in the Middle East and Latin America. Implicit here is the belief that activities in the past have played a role in shaping the circumstances of the present, that 9/11 constitutes a form of return for the repressed. Monty's decision to face up to these difficult facts (rather than blaming others who have had little power or role in defining this reality) models what might have taken place in the aftermath of 9/11 to a more productive end than the jingoistic calls to arms that shaped popular cultural discourse.Footnote 27
It should be noted, however, that despite the film's existence, mainstream offerings of escape, elision, revenge and retribution (often founded on prejudicial constructions of cultural otherness) remained the preferred mode in Hollywood. Upon its release the film was not successful at the box office and reviewers accused 25th Hour of opportunism and insensitivity, as well as heavy-handedness. In interview, Lee expressed disappointment that Touchstone left the film to languish without a suitable marketing budget, only reaching 460 screens at its most visible; in contrast, and with references to 9/11 safely expunged, Spiderman opened on 3,500 screens. The complex narrative of 25th Hour is indicative of a desire to search for more critical and productive ways of understanding 9/11. However, the commercial failure of the film is evidence of how, in the months immediately following the attacks, mainstream popular culture was unwilling to look directly at the scars left in the cityscape of New York and to acknowledge the ways in which these scars pointed to the need for posing difficult questions and searching self-scrutiny.
Scenarios of obligation in Rendition
The next film I wish to examine, Rendition, directed by South African Gavin Hood, goes some way towards extending the scenario of obligation found at the heart of 25th Hour to people outside the US. Released in 2007, Rendition was produced and distributed within a significantly changed cultural and political context. David Holloway identifies 2004 (leading to the 2006 congressional mid-terms, in which the Democrats took control of Congress and the Senate) as the beginning of the end of widespread support for the government's foreign-policy commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq.Footnote 28 Feeding this fracturing of consensus were the controversies regarding extraordinary rendition and prisoner abuse at Bagram airbase, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.Footnote 29 These news events, and the wider shift in public opinion, prompted a widespread reappraisal of initial responses to 9/11, especially in relation to questions of identity and the relationship between the US and the wider world.Footnote 30 As David Simpson notes,
The reception of the Abu Ghraib photographs is the most recent reminder that there are no absolute boundaries between them and us, just as there are no simple identities: the culture of torture, as we shall see, is among the most empirical of all instances of the fragility and instability of imagined perimeters.Footnote 31
Simpson goes on to claim that in the “complex responses” to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal there are “small signs of hope for a recognition of the boundary problems not yet circumscribed by the traditional languages of outrage and defense.”Footnote 32 For the remainder of this article I will try to ascertain if this proposition holds true in respect of a reading of the film Rendition.
Deftly cross-cutting between Cape Town, Chicago and Washington, DC, as well as North Africa, Rendition attempts an ambitious mapping of geopolitical space via international air travel, rendition flights, long-distance telephone calls and intertitles that place the viewer in discrete (but connected) national contexts. A steely-grey Washington, DC appears to stand in stark contrast to a sun-burnished North Africa, marking a clear divide between the West and the Arab world, but the film works to undermine this neat separation as the brutal work of water-boarding and electrocution is shown to have consequences far beyond the North African prison in which it takes place. On a number of occasions in the film the usual markers we might expect from a Hollywood movie to denote a transition from one time frame or geographical location to another are not deployed, leading the viewer to experience moments of disorientation as characters appear to have slipped from one realm to another. The effect of this (and the film's elliptical narrative structure) is to collapse the safe distance between “us” and “them,” between America and the wider world, and here the film shares a mise en scène with Syriana (2005), whose tagline “everything is connected” might serve to sum the organizing principle in play.Footnote 33
Responding to the news that a US citizen has been killed in the suicide bombing that is shown in the film's opening sequence, CIA director Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), whose character is a cipher for the sort of hawkish, initial responses to 9/11 described earlier in this article, authorizes a rendition order with the words, “they got one of us.” The Manichean thinking is quickly called into question through the layering in of multiple points of view, in particular that of Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhall), a CIA analyst based in North Africa who joined the agency after 9/11. Freeman is shown in hospital after the suicide bombing with the blood of a fellow American on his clothes. The shot is held longer than average, giving the viewer time not just to recognize Freeman and register his anguish but also to see the injured civilians who have also been caught up in the bombing. Later, Freeman directly refuses to consider this killed CIA colleague one of “us,” stating that they were not friends and thereby refusing the easy allegiance expected to exist along national lines in favour of a more reciprocal relation with the otherness. (Notably, Freeman is also shown to be having an affair with a North African woman).
Tasked with overseeing the interrogation of “rendered” Egyptian-born US resident Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), Freeman becomes increasingly hopeless and cynical as he realizes that the torture is not working, indeed that it is actually precipitating a cycle of violence that is counterproductive. The film's mid-point consists of a hiatus where all the characters, including Freeman, are shown in moments of introspection. In these sequences, a strong noirish contrast is used to drop faces into half-shadow, signalling moral quandary and the high stakes in determining future courses of action within an intricately constructed scenario of obligation. After a period of soul-searching, Freeman acts on his conviction that the rendition and torture are unethical and arranges for the release of El-Ibrahimi at the cost of his career.Footnote 34
What is also distinctive about Rendition is the space given to the film's other characters. Freeman's personal journey, for example, is mirrored by the experience of Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon), as she struggles to discover what has happened to her husband. In ways comparable to A Mighty Heart (2007), Isabella is shown to be a woman capable of rational action, political lobbying, emotional strength and resourcefulness. In this respect, the film moves beyond 25th Hour's tendency to attribute agency and action to male protagonists only. The motives of the suicide bomber, Khalid El-Emin (Moa Khouas), are also presented in some detail (his brother died under torture and interrogation by the secret police) and in telling his story, and showing him victim to both social deprivation and manipulation by a clandestine political/religious group, the film commits to figuring terror in more human (and knowable) terms. The film also humanizes the head of the secret police, Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), who is shown conducting his brutal work but also wrestling with mundane family problems, in particular his daughter's refusal to agree to an arranged marriage. Through this cosmopolitan approach to point of view, the film extends the scenario of obligation to an American other Anwar is an Egyptian citizen with a green card) and to a Third World other, in this case, a suicide bomber politicized by the brutal treatment of his brother at the hands of the secret police, and manipulated by Islamic extremists. The reciprocal relationship demanded in 25th Hour – a nonreductive, fraught but honest communion with the other – is here rolled out across national borders and boundaries.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Rendition is the design and organization of its narrative structure. At first glance it seems that the film's multiple perspectives have been ordered according to the conventional rules of continuity (with characters in different locations inhabiting the same time frame). However, a pivotal sequence at the film's close has Abasi (in search of his daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach), who has run away from home with terrorist, -Emin) climbing the stairs to Khalid's apartment. At the same time, Fatima descends the stairs. The viewer expects the two characters to meet but they do not and there is a realization that they are ascending and descending the stairs at two different moments in time. What has thus far been presented as a parallel narrative strand is revealed instead to be a flashback to events that took place a week earlier. With this information revealed, the viewer is able to piece together the puzzle and work out that the bombing that begins the film is, in fact, the work of El-Emin, and that Fatima has also been killed in the same explosion.Footnote 35 The film's structure here points to the way in which actions will have (often unforeseen) consequences, with Abasi's role as torturer of El-Emin's brother resulting eventually in the death of his daughter. Not only this, Abasi's attempt to trace Fatima has in fact been futile, he is not preventing terrorism as the narrative has momentarily led us to believe, he is actually only dealing with its aftermath.
The implications for Abasi's character are clear enough but perhaps this play with narrative structure can be read more ambitiously. For much of the film the viewer is made to feel that they are immersed in the kind of dramatically charged and time-critical situations that typify television shows like 24 or films like Unthinkable (2010). These situations tend to show that it is necessary to be violent towards one person (usually a terrorist) in order to ensure the safety of others (i.e. torture is shown to be necessary and to work and to be in the interests of the greater good). The narrative twist in Rendition actively challenges this logic, with the events under investigation being shown to have already happened, and with the act of attempting to investigate/prevent them using violent means furthering the likelihood that they will be repeated. As such, Rendition's clever structure contrasts markedly with the sharp caesura that the events of 9/11 are usually deemed to represent and suggests instead a continuity of violence, with both sides locked into an escalating struggle.
Through the complex knitting together of multiple perspectives and this formal play with narrative time and space, Rendition makes a genuine attempt to contextualize the war on terror in a suitably complex way and to engage with otherness, not least by describing a scenario of obligation between individuals that moves beyond national borders and boundaries. This willingness to acknowledge antagonism between and amongst Americans, as well as across national borders and boundaries, and into the realm of different national and racial identities is only possible, I wish to argue, as a result of a more general revision of senses of self and nation after 9/11 and after the unsuccessful war on terror.
As Susan Sontag and Judith Butler (engaged with Levinas) have argued, how we represent the other is an act of great consequence.Footnote 36 Both films described in this article have scenarios of obligation at the heart of their narratives that require their viewers to engage in a deeply empathetic mode of identification. Following the films' central protagonists as they attempt to figure where their obligation lies and how meeting this obligation will entail considerable personal sacrifice, the combination of detailed mise en scène and complex narrative structure calls the viewer to reflect upon the experience of 9/11 and its aftermath, and its fracturing and remaking of US identity in the twenty-first century.
David Simpson writes that, following the publication of the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, “the neat distinctions between them and us, between civility and barbarism, [could not] be mouthed as confidently as they once were.”Footnote 37 And,
The photographs do not show that we are all monsters, nor do they confirm that the tortures can be blamed on a few morally delinquent soldiers; they open a disturbingly ambiguous territory in between, where the question remains a question not yet resolved and not easy to resolve.Footnote 38
In this article I have demonstrated how 25th Hour and Rendition refuse prevailing calls for revenge and xenophobic constructions of otherness and instead attempt to figure this “ambiguous territory in between.” Each film, from its own distinct vantage point, acknowledges the urgent need to reappraise the relationship between self and other, while also recognizing that this process will be fraught and predicated on a necessary sacrifice in which inherited, conventional and instinctual behaviour will not suffice.Footnote 39 It is my contention that this process of reappraisal and reexamination of the relationship between the US and the rest of the world is one of the most significant legacies of 9/11.
Ultimately, there is an ethical question in play here that both films seem conscious of. Cynthia Weber notes the importance of settling a national identity disrupted by the experience of 9/11 in ways that are ethical; that is, in ways that do not corroborate and reproduce the violent scenarios that underpinned and precipitated the terrorist attacks and the moves to war that followed them. For Weber,
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” or an “encounter” with questions that haunt the US relationship both between self and other and with(in) the self.Footnote 40
It is my contention that just such “questions” are at the heart of the two films examined in this article. Through the staging of “scenarios of obligation” as core elements of their narratives both films seek to challenge conventional modes of identification between “us” and “them” in a post-9/11 context. Through formal play with narrative form (in 25th Hour's alternative ending and Rendition's elliptical narrative structure) both films also suggest that any challenge to conventional Western ways of thinking about the post-9/11 world will require an interrogation of filmmaking convention. Weber goes on to claim that “these questions have the capacity to place America and Americans at the threshold of a ‘moral remaking,’ culminating in the question, Who might we become?”Footnote 41 I hope this article has demonstrated how in different but related ways 25th Hour and Rendition offer possible answers to this question.
Conclusion
There is a temptation here to pursue a teleological line of argument in which these two films are used to mark a trend in popular culture that – ten years on from 9/11 – indicates that the US is now more willing and capable of questioning the “relationship both between self and other and with(in) the self.”Footnote 42 Douglas Kellner, for example, claims that a progressive, liberal vision of US national identity has, by the late 2000s, come to dominate and that in this new cultural climate the success of Slumdog Millionaire at the 2009 Academy Awards “constitutes a rejection of the narrow nationalism and chauvinism of the Bush-Cheney years … [and marks] a yearning for diversity, complexity, critical vision, and sympathy for the marginalized and oppressed.”Footnote 43 A note of caution must be sounded, however. There are some grounds for claiming that in the complex aftermath of 9/11 – especially in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib – US popular culture did provide opportunities for filmmakers to ask difficult questions about self and other, and to resist and interrogate the way in which prejudicial constructions of national, ethnic, religious and cultural otherness had been used to bind together a narrow and jingoistic response. Yet these limited opportunities should not be overstated. For the most part, the types of film (and journalism, critical writing, and other popular cultural production) that offered this more complex perspective were limited to the margins of the mainstream.Footnote 44 Neither of the films I have described in this article played to large audiences in the US and neither received favourable notices, in fact film critics expressed considerable hesitancy and frustration with precisely those elements that I have described and lauded in my analysis above.
What is more, the recent furore regarding the building of an Islamic cultural centre (referred to in the media as a mosque) near Ground Zero and the continued questioning of the citizenship of Barack Obama suggest that the greater willingness to consider and accommodate otherness found in the films under description here has not yet reached a point where it can be said to be central to media and cultural discourse. It might, then, be more accurate to say that there remains a dialectical tension in US popular culture regarding the depiction of the relationship between self and other and that this tension can be resolved in ways that are searching and complex – as evidenced in the films examined above – and in ways that close down complexity and harden narrow versions of US national identity.
One example must suffice to demonstrate how this dialectical tension is a continued feature of popular cultural production. The science fiction blockbuster I Am Legend (2007) tells the story of scientist Robert Neville (Will Smith) as he searches for a cure for a disease that has turned the world's population into flesh-eating zombie-vampires. The film's somber mood and persistent sense of loss, as well as scenes of panic in New York, activate a strong connection to 9/11. Released in 2007 but set five years in the future, the film's mise en scène also features a half-built Freedom Tower (based on the design then set to replace the World Trade Center). Contextualized thus, the zombie-vampires are presented as an irreconcilable existential threat that can only be tackled with violence, and the final scenes of the movie have Neville finding a cure and then martyring himself in defence of the vaccine and his surrogate nuclear family (a woman and her son who, as a result of his actions, escape to a religious community in Vermont). In sacrificing himself in this way Neville tempers his scientific zeal with a commitment to an unquestioning religious or spiritual belief (as marked by the film's butterfly motif). The ending of the film, then, lends itself to be read as an allegory of the need to annihilate difference (figured as threat) driven by a powerful, religiously inflected, self-belief, and there is a strong correlation here between the symbolic and ideological operations of the film and the tendencies described – by Sontag and others – in the initial mainstream media's response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Intriguingly, an alternative ending for the film was also produced and made available as a DVD extra. In the alternative ending Neville realizes that the zombie-vampires are capable of loving relationships comparable to those of humans. This fact goes some way to undoing their irreconcilable difference and leads Neville to facilitate the return of one of the zombie-vampires he has been using as an experimental subject. The film's mise en scène (in particular, photographs of the zombie-vampires that recall the Holocaust and suggest that Neville may have behaved unethically in his search for a cure), and a redeployment of the butterfly motif as a symbol of the need for communication between humans and zombie-vampires, redirect the narrative towards a resolution in which difference is accepted and some culpability in the violent confrontation of the two groups is accepted.
The two endings of I Am Legend – one broadly in correspondence with the narrow jingoistic perspectives that were dominant in media discourse in the period immediately after 9/11 and which remain extant, and the other engaging with difference and otherness in a more complex way – are a clear indication of a dialectic tension still in play in US popular culture late in the 2000s. In the earlier part of the decade, and in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a Manichean construction of cultural difference was the preferred option. By mid-decade – as films like Rendition indicate – the cultural sphere had shifted enough to allow room for more complex articulations and iterations of cultural difference and otherness to appear on the margins of the mainstream. Yet, as the decision to choose which ending for the release version of I Am Legend indicates, reductive, reactionary and prejudicial discourses are never far from the surface and closure in relation to 9/11 looks like it may well be founded on this particular discourse rather than on the ethical “confrontation” or “encounter” called for by Weber and others.
