[Even—perhaps
especially—recent, painful, and controversial events and topics demand our
AmericanStudying. So this week, I’ll offer a handful of ways to AmericanStudy
September 11th, 2001, and its contexts and aftermaths, leading up to
a special memorial post this weekend.]
On the most
salient aspect of an underappreciated, premonitory film.
Director Edward Zwick
made three films with Denzel Washington, and it’s fair to say that each was
less successful and significant than the one before. Glory
(1989), their first collaboration, is an undisputed American masterpiece, did
hugely significant historical
and cultural work, and stands as perhaps the greatest film yet made about
the Civil War. Courage Under Fire (1996),
their second collaboration, was far less prominent, but nonetheless won a ton of
awards and remains one of the best films made about the first Gulf War. And
then there’s The Siege (1998), a
film that, despite the combined star power of Washington, Bruce Willis, and
Annette Bening, lost an
estimated $30 million at the box office and has, as far as I can tell,
disappeared entirely from our cultural landscape and collective memories.
That disappearance
is pretty strange—not because the film is brilliant or anything (although I don’t
think it’s bad at all, and it features great performances from the three leads
as well as future Monk star Tony Shalhoub), but
because this 1998 movie foreshadowed and predicted so, so thoroughly the 2001
terrorist attacks and nearly all of the events, debates, and revelations of
their aftermath. [SPOILERS FOLLOW:] The film’s Islamic terrorists are members
of an Al Qaeda-like group that was trained in Afghanistan by CIA agent Bening
before turning against the United States; after their attacks on New York City,
debates ensue over the best ways to respond, with military officer Willis favoring
civil liberties restrictions, illegal detention and torture, and other methods
of what FBI agent Washington
calls “shredding the Constitution just a little bit”; and the film thus
becomes at one and the same time a thriller about stopping the terrorists and
one about the battle between these opposed American perspectives on an
unfolding “war on terror.”
All of those elements
and themes remain highly salient for our contemporary society, of course. But
there’s one particular plot thread that resonates strikingly with the late July
2015 moment in which I’m writing this post: after declaring martial law in New
York City, Willis’ general instigates a forced internment of most of the city’s
Arabic and Muslim American residents (including the son of Shalhoub’s FBI agent
character). In the aftermath of the mid-July, Chattanooga, Tennessee killings
of five US servicemen by what seems
to have been a radicalized Muslim American, retired General
Wesley Clark advocated for precisely such an internment program. (To be
clear, Clark officially advocated for only interning “radical” Muslim Americans—but
that’s the ostensible goal of Willis’ program in The Siege as well, and I’m quite certain such an effort would cast
just as wide and indiscriminatory net in reality as it does in the film.) While
part of me finds it impossible to believe that we’re even talking about
interning Americans once more, another part recognizes—as, years before 9/11,
did Zwick’s film—that such extreme, dark responses to tragedy remain a part of
our national identity, and one with which The
Siege helps us engage.
Last
AmericanStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? 9/11 contexts and analyses you’d share?
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