9/11 Film and Media Scholarship

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—media events themselves—have generated an enormous volume and variety of cultural and critical production. For scholars, the challenges of analyzing this complex and dynamic array of material are daunting. Examining a number of recent publications, the following review essay illuminates three particular and persistent critical challenges. The first is how to manage and make sense of the sheer volume of images and narratives that have appeared and circulated through an increasingly complex media ecosystem. The second is how the institutional transformation of that ecosystem, occurring concurrently with the political and military actions being analyzed, should potentially refigure critical approaches to post-9/11 media. The third is how scholars might understand and engage with the new technologies, fragmentation, and interactivity increasingly characterizing twenty-first-century media.

Which film and media productions should be included in scholarly discussions of the post-9/11 era? "Terrorism," of course, is a term notoriously difficult to define and unavoidably freighted ideologically. Guiding remarks here is the presumption that an inextricable relationship exists between political violence as a complex category of action and mediation as a process of framing such actions and perceptions of their meaning. Yet public attention characteristically withholds close scrutiny of specific media forms and practices in debates about terrorism; that reluctance arguably betrays a wider unwillingness to examine systematically the roles of media in shaping the meaning and experience of social life. Indeed, an oddity about both the critical and wider public attention paid to media and terrorism is how siloed—by media platform or disciplinary approach—that attention has remained. Essential to the discussion that follows is consideration of how those silos and disciplinary approaches frame the legacy of 9/11 in recent Film and Media Studies scholarship.

9/11 Filmographies.

An indispensable initial step taken by several scholars has been the cataloging of film, television, and other popular culture productions over the past decade; this has been important historical and even political work. Stephen Prince's Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism balances an attempt to shape a filmography of the era with critical insights and context.¹ This is a broadly conceived study that intelligently weaves together threads of various topical and generic productions, from fictional narratives and documentaries of terrorism to treatments of the Iraq War and related television programming. Ultimately, Prince extends the ambit of his study by exploring how action and horror films mark the years from 2001 to 2009, the year the book was published.

Drawing such boundaries for both filmographies and their critical justification is what makes many of the titles under review here so important. While some earlier, typically shorter works did begin to examine media responses to 9/11—Wheeler Winston Dixon's collection Film and Television after 9/11 is a notable example from 2004—recent studies have developed more of a critical distance from the events of 2001.² As Prince's subtitle conveys, his book attempts to craft a fuller cultural history of film for the "age of terrorism." The challenge here is choosing which films to include or exclude and positing allegorical or otherwise indirect connections between specific titles and wide-ranging themes or ideas. Prince is particularly adept at crafting a coherent critical narrative for the years he examines. But it is a daunting critical task to justify the interpretive links between readings of individual films—Hollywood's cinema of terrorism—and claims regarding a nearly decade-long period of cultural history.

Thus Prince requires that we ask not only whether but also how the so-called torture-porn films of the Saw and Hostel franchises negotiate cultural anxieties about torture rooted in the actual experiences of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and unknown black sites. Prince is hardly alone here. Douglas Kellner's Cinema Wars similarly posits this connection, but does so without saying more than that the films occurred at the same time that the "Bush-Cheney administration was constructing apparatuses of torture" around the world, which perhaps does not go far enough in interrogating the cultural significance of torture.³ The...