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  • Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema by Guy Westwell
  • Cynthia A. Young (bio)
Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema by Guy Westwell. Columbia University Press. 2014. $27.00 paper; $80.00 hardcover; $26.99 e-book. 240 pages.

Even as the smoking embers of the World Trade Center still glowed, cultural critics began pondering the impact of September 11, 2001, on US popular culture. In both academic and popular sources, authors wondered whether the attacks would set US popular culture on a new path, one that would represent a decisive break with the cultural trends that came before it. In the years that followed, the answer to both questions was typically yes, with critics disagreeing on the shape and scope of the break rather than its existence.

What is refreshing about Guy Westwell’s Parallel Lines: Post 9/11 American Cinema is that he holds up for scrutiny this and other clichés driving post-9/11 cultural discussions.1 Resisting the polarities that often accompany such discussions—post-9/11 media either reinforced the Bush-Cheney imperial agenda or resisted it—Westwell argues that US film engaged in a “process of making, unmaking, and (most crucially) remaking US national identity.”2 US film did [End Page 156] represent the terror and confusion that followed the 9/11 attacks, but these representations were informed by long-standing political and cultural debates, particularly those around feminism, liberalism, and multiculturalism.3 The book’s title, taken from one of the independent films Westwell analyzes, is a metaphor for the conflicting perspectives shaping the early post-9/11 period. While some films responded to 9/11 with an uncritical nationalism, others began to explore the internal divisions and political and military policies that precipitated the attacks. Later in the decade, US film would try to merge these parallel lines to “[reconcile] political difference in service of hegemonic renewal.”4 Indebted to Antonio Gramsci’s theories on ideology and Benedict Anderson’s notion of an imagined community, Westwell explores the push and pull of ideological struggle as filmmakers and audiences alike sought to understand what responses to 9/11 revealed about US national identity.5

Westwell, a senior lecturer in and director of the Department of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, previously authored War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line, which is a kind of prequel to this volume.6 There, relying again on Gramsci and Anderson, Westwell mines the US “cultural imagination of war,” showing how Hollywood has historically been complicit in US war making, including the Bush administration’s successful early attempts to enlist Hollywood’s support for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.7 Written nearly a decade after War Cinema, Parallel Lines takes a more nuanced approach, expanding the first book’s archive to include documentary and alternative media. Considering films such as 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002), Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004), Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2001), Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005), Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007), Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004), Parallel Lines (Nina Davenport, 2004), and In Memoriam: New York City 9/11/01 (Brad Grey, 2002), Westwell tracks the ebbs and flows of Hollywood and alternative media’s depiction of the attacks themselves and the so-called War on Terror that followed them. Perhaps because of the amorphous, brutal, and often covert nature of the War on Terror, film has not presented a united front, as it had in previous wars, particularly World War II. Immediately after 9/11, Westwell contends, cinema was already expressing both support for and opposition to dominant post-9/11 narratives, particularly those regarding whether the United States was an innocent victim of or complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Consisting of an introduction and nine chapters organized by themes including “Uncertainty,” “Unity,” “Conspiracy,” “Torture,” “The Iraq War,” and “The Return to Ground Zero,” Parallel Lines maps a kind of cultural reconciliation. The first half of the book is concerned with identifying the parallel lines of response to and narration of the post-9/11 era. Uncertainty and ambivalence vie with neoconservative patriotism and celebration of the “American way of life.” As wars in...

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