From Pacifists to Cowboys to Torturers: The Different Representations of the US Military and Intelligence Agencies in Post-9/11 American War Films

The horrifying images of the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, in which three thousand civilians were killed, have become some of the most famous images ever committed to film or television. In the decade following the attacks, a wealth of war films were released, including Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007), The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009) and Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) amongst many others. Many films from this period of US cinema addressed both the 9/11 attacks as well as the US military’s conflicts in various countries suspected of harboring terrorist groups. When analyzing the ways the military and intelligence agencies (such as the CIA) are represented in some US films from this period, it becomes clear that such representations changed over just a few years: Redacted showed the military to be polarized–a place for pacifists, rapists and murderers. The Hurt Locker later depicted successful soldiers as having a “gung ho” attitude, and the military as a permanent fixture in Iraq. Finally, Zero Dark Thirty included scenes of CIA torture, which is suggested as being necessary and justified. Surprisingly, however, the ways the military and intelligence agencies are represented in these films did not necessarily mirror the political change that was occurring.

Revisiting Bob Dylan’s Tarantula in a Rough and Rowdy Time

This is a review article of Bob Dylan’s 1966/71 prose work Tarantula in the broader context of his ongoing socially and politically critical contributions to music, literature and visual culture.

Aesthetic Heathenism: Pagan Revival in Extreme Metal Music

Neopaganism, briefly defined as the attempt to reconstruct and reinterpret pre-Christian heritage, is not confined to purely religious movements. A romanticized view of ancestral religion particularly expressed through an extensive use of mythological elements adapted to a contemporary context now represents a fundamental part of certain scenes that utilize them to construct a primordialist view of the past. Pagan metal makes use of religion and mythology as a form of cultural capital to suggest cultural distinctiveness in order to create an alternative antimodern, conservative discourse to mainstream culture. Artists attempt to forge and empower a new identity shaped by language, music, style, behavior and values when they, for instance, dwell on old myths which they recontextualize according to their own agenda. Starting from an exploration of American and European pagan revivalist movements, this paper pinpoints the main characteristics of the relationship between Neopaganism and musical expression by evoking and commenting on textual and non-textual evidence in an attempt to offer a paradigm for understanding the intersections between spirituality and popular culture.

Challenging the Dominant Discourse: Khan’s My Guantanamo Diaries and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror

This study juxtaposes Mahvish Rukhsana Khan’s powerful memoir My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me (2008) with the post-9/11 rhetoric of political leaders and the mainstream media in the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In her work, Khan exposes the extreme, dehumanizing conditions endured by military prison detainees – many of whom Khan argues were falsely arrested – and advocates for their right to receive fair hearings. The several examples of evident torture revealed by the interviewed detainees throughout the text contrast sharply with the rhetoric from speeches and interviews of early twenty-first century American political leaders, such as President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and the news coverage from neoliberal media outlets like CNN and Fox News. Similarly, the brutal representations in Khan’s memoir contrast with the largely positive depictions of torture in popular films and television programs. To support the validity of Khan’s claims, the article will also consider the available War on Terror-era interrogation logs from the Guantanamo Bay military prison camp. This study seeks to illustrate the ability of prevailing power structures to interpellate consumers of mass media while simultaneously suggesting that literature possesses a unique potential to challenge dominant discourses, as it has done throughout history. Finally, this paper argues that works by Khan and other Muslim American authors have the power to disrupt the current racist and xenophobic episteme and challenge the ideological consensus fostered by mainstream media.

Filming Change: Civil Rights through the Lens of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and To Kill a Mockingbird

The 1960s were a turbulent decade in the United States. Significant social changes, especially in the realm of antiracism and antisexism, were afoot. Concurrently, in an echo to such dramatic social change, popular culture was also evolving. This article examines two relevant films to evaluate their ability to perform a moral critique of gender and racial politics in the 1960s. Alongside an analysis of social and political trends and Supreme Court cases, I compare two critically acclaimed industry films, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), to better understand cultural and political reforms in the 20th century.