[October 8th
marks the 50th
anniversary of the Weather
Underground’s Days of Rage protests
in Chicago. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Weathermen and other
domestic terrorists—a fraught but important term, I know—leading up to a
weekend post on 21st century events.]
On three cultural
texts that reflect three different visions of domestic terrorists (some
SPOILERS in what follows).
1)
The Dark Knight Rises
(2012): The villains in many action films (or at least their sinister plans) could
be described as domestic terrorists, but that’s never been more accurate than
it is for Tom Hardy’s
Bane in the final film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Bane doesn’t
just start his culminating attacks on Gotham City with a series of domestic
terrorist bombings; he also weds those attacks to an anarchist philosophy
that makes clear that he sees himself as a terrorist in the most overtly
political senses of the term. While Hardy’s talents, combined with the usual
depiction of Gotham as a deeply troubled place in need of serious reform, make
his perspective (if not his famously muffled voice) at least somewhat
understandable, he is still clearly a villain—and, we eventually learn, one
whose domestic terrorist acts are actually undertaken for the benefit of a
greater villain who cares nothing for his philosophies. This is what we might
call the 21st century comic book film vision of domestic terrorism:
somewhat thoughtful and purposeful, but ultimately villainous and in need of
heroic opposition.
2)
Fight Club (1999): David
Fincher’s film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel
features many twists and turns (most of which I’ll try not to spoil here for
the few who don’t yet know them), but its culmination is an elaborate, highly
orchestrated act of interconnected, domestic terrorist bombings against the
city in which its characters reside. Like everything else in the film, and
doubly so given the stunning revelations about those protagonists that have
immediately preceded it, that set piece is ambiguous in tone—but in my reading,
there’s no question that we are meant to watch and appreciate the bombings more
as a beautiful crescendo (as our hero and heroine do) than as a disturbing or
villainous act of destruction and mass murder. At the end of the day, Fight Club is the story of a boring,
constrained everyman in desperate need of shaking free from those shackles—and those
bombings, like the character
of Tyler Durden who orchestrates them, represent the potent culmination of
his successful escape. That’s a heroic, or at the very least an entirely sympathetic,
vision of domestic terrorism.
3)
American
Pastoral (1997): As I hope this week’s series has made clear, somewhere
in the shades of gray between villainous and heroic lie most of the acts of
domestic terrorism in our nation’s history: sometimes more toward the
villainous side (such as Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing), sometimes a
bit more toward the heroic (as with the environmental terrorists I highlighted
yesterday), but always part of the fraught and contingent realities of
political, social, individual, and cultural contexts. As I trace in that hyperlinked
blog post above, few literary works engage those complex contexts with more
depth and power than Philip Roth’s American
Pastoral, a novel with a Weather Underground-like domestic terrorist
bombing at the center of its multi-layered narration, structure, chronology,
plot, family, and depiction of 20th century American history. As I wrote
in this post, I agree with the critiques of Roth around themes of gender
(among others); but at his best, he’s one of our greats, and American Pastoral is his best novel and
one of our best cultural representations of domestic terrorism.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories of domestic terrorism you’d highlight?
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