‘Gettin’ Dirty’: Tarantino’s Vengeful Justice, the Marked Viewer and Post-9/11 America

Andrew Schopp argues that the representation of morality and history in Inglorious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015) is a particularly complicated and distinctly post-modern one, inherently connected to the American vision of the world after 9/11. His analysis of Tarantino's texts from the perspective of justice, civilisation and revenge make an invaluable contribution to existing commentaries on Tarantino's work. He also considers their status as allohistorical narratives (commonly referred to as alternative history) which encompasses an awareness of the fact that Tarantino’s films are seemingly divided into a unified diegetic world in which a significant number of his characters reside (see Reservoir Dogs [1992], Pulp Fiction [1994], Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight) and the films that these characters might go to see in this alternate universe (Death Proof [2007], Kill Bill: Volume One [2003], Kill Bill: Volume Two [2004]). On the surface a range of interrelated strands connect his films like the branding of Red Apple cigarettes, characters being related to each other i.e. the Vega brothers in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, Sergeant Donny Donowitz in Inglourious Basterds being the father of filmmaker Lee Donowitz in True Romance (1993), and recently ‘English’ Pete Hickox in The Hateful Eight being an ancestor of Archie Hickox in Inglorious Basterds, but this fluidity is complicated even further both by Tarantino’s liberal appropriation of material from other sources as inspiration and they way the films seem to both reflect, engage and even comment on each others' narratives.

Training the Body Politic: Networked Masculinity and the ‘War on Terror’ in Hollywood Film

Adam Knee continues this discussion of the action/adventure genre in Chapter Seven, "Training the Body Politic: Networked Masculinity and the 'War on Terror' in Hollywood Film", offering a detailed analysis of the representation of masculinity and agency in two Hollywood films, Unstoppable (2010) and Source Code (2011), which exhibit striking similarities at a range of levels, from their narratives to deeper structures of gendered character function, theme, and geo-political perspective that, he contends, are a manifestation of distinctly post-9/11 American concerns. Like Vincent M. Gaine's chapter on James Bond, Knee analyses both the variations inherent in the genre in the wake of 9/11 and the consistencies of the parameters of American mainstream film, and, more specifically, a developing conceptualization of modes of disciplined masculinity necessitated by the nation’s 'War on Terror' narrative. Knee then concludes with a comparative analysis of a pre-9/11 film and its post-9/11 remake in which these parameters are brought to the fore: the original Paul Verhoeven RoboCop (1987) and RoboCop (2014) directed by José Padilha.

Responding to Realities or Telling the Same Old Story? Mixing Real-world and Mythic Resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

In Chapter Two "Responding to realities or telling the same old story? Mixing real-world and mythic resonances in The Kingdom (2007) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012)" Geoff King also explores the specificity of post-9/11 American film by situating his two case studies in a rich cultural and historical landscape. As he argued in his seminal Spectacular Visions: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (2000), King maintains than many American films can be read as simultaneously of their time and as a part of the American mythological tradition. While the Western genre is long gone as a cultural force, traces of its DNA remains embodied in many contemporary American films, and both The Kingdom and Zero Dark Thirty demonstrate the efficacy of the cinematic medium to embody cultural understandings of the 'War on Terror' era at the same time as they evoke the tropes of the American frontier narrative, despite being set very firmly in the contemporary Middle East. Like American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty proved to be one of the most culturally resonant films of the period, but King largely sidesteps the well-travelled debate about whether the film endorses torture or not in favour of a detailed reading of how Bigelow's affectual drama (and also Peter Berg's The Kingdom) imposes fictional or mythic-ideological frameworks onto their real-world narratives (see Westwell, McSweeney, Chaudhuri).

Refracting Fundamentalism in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012)

In Chapter Five Mendes and Bennett argue that while Mira Nair's 2012 adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 2007 award winning novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist also places the experience of a Muslim, Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), at the centre of the narrative, this is problematicised by the compromises of adapting the complicated and morally ambiguous source on which it is based for the demands of the mainstream market. Mendes and Bennett concede that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a rare example of an American film which breaks free of the America-centric view of the 'War on Terror' and in doing so destabilises the habitual privileging of American subjectivity and authority, but adhering to many of the tropes of the thriller genre results in a film in which much of the moral relativity of Hamsin's novel becomes lost in translation.

Nowhere Left to Zone in Children of Men (2006)

In Chapter Fourteen Redmond contends that Alfonso Cuarón's richly symbolic dystopian drama Children of Men is a film haunted by the dread of both the traumatic diegetic incident that leads to the film's storyline (women not being able to conceive children for some unexplained reason) and the events of 9/11, which leaves its mark on the film's narrative and imagery in a range of ways.

Post-9/11 Power and Responsibility in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Moving to the science fiction genre, but remaining within the field of allegory, Chapter Thirteen sees Christine Muller scrutinise one of the most economically successful and culturally impactful genre variations to emerge from the American film industry in the last two decades, the renaissance of the superhero film. While it is an emergence which has been criticised by many (see Alan Moore's criticism of it as a "cultural catastrophe" in Flood, 2014), its impact has been so profound that to dismiss it seems imprudent, and, as Richard Gray and Betty Kaklamanidou observed in their The 21st Century Superhero Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film (2011), in many ways the 2000s were the 'decade of the superhero' (Gray and Kaklamanidou 1). Indeed, one can deal a great deal about a culture by its heroic mythology. Just as the ancient Greeks had tales of Hercules and Achilles, late nineteenth century America turned to mythologised stories of Wyatt Earp and Davy Crockett, in the twentieth century and into twenty-first, western culture found its heroic ideals embodied in comic-book heroes like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man. In Muller's chapter, "Post-9/11 Power and Responsibility in the Marvel Cinematic Universe", she considers the relationship between the superhero film and the tumultuous post-9/11 era, exploring the ideological function of superhero narratives. Muller looks at how the Marvel Cinematic Universe often returned to trauma in a variety of forms in their films which frequently emerge not as bloated blockbusters empty of resonance, but texts which engage with the decade in deeply revealing ways (see DiPaolo and McSweeney). Far removed from the cartoonish fantasyscapes of Salkind era Superman (1977) or the increasingly extravagant excesses of Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher's Batman years, the real world set Marvel Cinematic Universe films, beginning with Iron Man (2008), are deeply immersed in what we might call the ongoing 'War on Terror' narrative. While some writers have dismissed the genre as perpetuating hegemonic ideological systems (see Hassler-Forrest) Muller argues that they are able to, at times, offer more than the conservative world view they are primarily associated with. The defining events of the 'War on Terror' era thus become replayed in the MCU through the melodramatic spectacle of the superhero genre.

‘You be very mindful of how you act’: Post-9/11 Culture and Arab American Subjectivities in Joseph Castelo’s The War Within (2005) and Hesham Issawi’s AmericanEast (2008)

Petrovic asserts that The War Within (directed by Joseph Castrello based on a screenplay by Tom Glynn and the Pakistani American actor-writer Ayad Akhtar who also plays the lead role in the film and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his play Disgraced [2013]) and Hesham Issawi’s AmericanEast are two of very few American films to centralise the experience of American Muslim lives in their narratives and portray their characters with a sense of humanity and cultural sensitivity instead of crudely drawn caricatures.

The Mythic Shape of American Sniper (2015)

If one has any doubts about film's ability to function as a both a barometer and a catalyst of national discourse one only needs to turn to Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, here discussed by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in the opening chapter of the volume. Lawrence and Jewett return to the terrain of their ground-breaking and influential works on the relationship between American film and culture, The American Monomyth (1988) and The Myth of the American Superhero (2002), in "The Mythic Shape of American Sniper (2015)" in which they explore how far Eastwood's film can be regarded as reaffirming the tropes of heroic narratives about American wars, or whether it offers a challenge to them. Their lucid and multi-layered engagement with the figure of Chris Kyle, both the person and the film's vivid incarnation of him, examines the reasons why the film has resonated so profoundly with vast sections of the American public to the extent that it was not only able to earn more money at the domestic box office than every single war film set in Iraq and Afghanistan before it combined, but as of writing is now the most financially successful American war film ever made. More complicated than many gave it credit for American Sniper marks a shift in how the 'War on Terror' has come to be remembered and creates a very different vision of the conflict compared to films like Battle for Haditha (2007) and Redacted (2007). It is arguably part of a conscious effort to reframe the events of the Iraq War and reclaim the conflict in the national imaginary in a very similar way to the process in which Hollywood engaged with the Vietnam War in films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986) and more recently We Were Soldiers (2002). The cumulative effect of these portrayals, both of the Vietnam War and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the depiction of the American soldier as the primary victim of their respective conflicts, not, as one might expect, the Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghanistanis who died and were wounded in their hundreds and thousands, if not millions.

American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11

The conflict which came to be known as the ‘War on Terror’, instigated by the administration of President George W. Bush in 2001 and continued by his successor Barack Obama, was the first war of the twenty-first century and an event of profoundly global reach and implication. While the majority of its military operations were undertaken in Afghanistan (2001–14) and Iraq (2002–11), this volume turns its attention to another vitally important front of the war, the films produced by the American film industry in the first decades of the new millennium. Now, more than fifteen years after the events of 11 September 2001, it is clear to see that these films not only function as a uniquely telling and resonant cultural battleground in which conflicting ideologies were projected for all to see, but were also able to shape the cultural imaginary of post-9/11 America in a range of compelling ways. While the ‘War on Terror’ was officially brought to an end by President Obama in 2013, it is one that is still fought in the films about the conflict which continue to be made today....

Traumatise, Repeat, Finish: Military Science Fiction (Long) after 9/11 and Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

The collection then concludes with Steffen Hantke's illuminating analysis of Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow from a variety of critical perspectives: discussing elements of self-reflexivity, star persona, the film's distinctly ludological central narrative conceit (on this point he offers an analysis of how this narrative strategy functions as a commentary on the idea of "getting it right the next time") to the melange of 'War on Terror' and 'greatest generation' themes presented throughout the film. Hantke makes the case that while it proved commercially underwhelming on original release, Edge of Tomorrow is worthy of critical reappraisal and analysis.