Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4

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Introduction to Reconstruction 11.4, “War on Terror by Other Means: The Media Industries after 9/11” / Graham Barnfield and Philip Hammond

<1> This Reconstruction supplement is the latest phase of a process that, formally speaking, began as the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center crept into view. One of the supplement’s editors, Phil Hammond, organized the September 2010 Screens of Terror conference at London South Bank University, to initiate a discussion of how the news and entertainment industries had responded to the crisis. Many of the conference contributions were collected in Hammond’s anthology, published on September 11, 2011.[1] Meanwhile both editors set to work on compiling a special issue of Journal of War and Culture Studies (JWACS) dedicated to the same theme.[2] Upon being deluged with thoughtful contributions, we decided to pursue the discussion further within Reconstruction. The e-journal is an ideal venue for this endeavor, both due to its large readership – many outside the academy – and due its past and future commitments to interrogating such questions, evidenced by Cultural Productions of 9/11, edited by Christopher Schaberg and Kara Thompson (Reconstruction 11.2),] and a forthcoming issue entitled (In)Securities.

<2> Despite these themed publications, and others like them, it makes little sense to write of the 9/11 attacks in isolation. One obvious reason for this is the official response to them, often referred to as the War on Terror – a changing yet seemingly permanent state of militarization and conflict, at home and abroad. The prevalence of such circumstances means that debating 9/11 and the War on Terror should not be confined to the academy. Nor should they need the artificial framing device of anniversaries to attract attention (not least because the very texture of public life is now shot through with mourning and historical commemorations). Moreover, the undesirable character of "life during wartime" demands a practical response capable of transcending an unacceptable present. This means taking stock of the situation, in a way that acknowledges continuities stemming from the pre-9/11 world, whether in terms of the alleged causal relationship between the terror attacks and US foreign policy, or by noting how existing unease and ennui became generalized in their aftermath (see Bill Durodié's preface to this supplement).

<3> While the editors were angered by the global situation, our research interests in the media industries also influenced the focus of this journal supplement. Although the essays collected here do engage with, say, international relations or with the sociology of risk, our primary concern has been with how such themes have been – and are being – mediated through cultural production. At the onset of the War on Terror, Judith Butler pithily summarized one key problem: "These events led public intellectuals to waver in their public commitment to justice and prompted journalists to take leave of the time-honored tradition of investigative journalism." [3] To which she might have added the prediction that "our" entertainers would also fall in line behind the war effort (see the snapshots provided in Francesca Negri’s discussion of 24 in this issue). Over time, however, real developments in post-9/11 media have proven less predictable.

<4> This supplement is organized around the different spheres of news and drama, or non-fiction and fiction, in audiovisual media. This traditional division appears increasingly arbitrary, given both the tendency for fictional storylines to be "ripped from the headlines" and the growing convergence of journalism with the entertainment industries. In the "news" subsection, we see examples of print and broadcast journalism falling between different expectations about their wartime conduct: they have not been reinforcing US/western hegemony wholesale, but nor have they acted as an independent and critical Fourth Estate, speaking truth to power. Indeed, under scrutiny, the messy day-to-day workings of newsgathering enterprises contradict the predictions made by their friends and foes alike.

<5> Drawing partly on her own experience of being "embedded" with the British military in Iraq, Janet Harris critically examines UK television news coverage of a particular post-invasion operation: the "Charge of the Knights," launched in March 2008 by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to restore order in Basra. Harris argues that journalists reported the actions of the occupying Western forces purely in terms of a "war" discourse, without considering the broader role of the military in politics and governance. This narrow discursive framing prevented journalists from explaining adequately to the public what "their" military was doing in Iraq, as well as foreclosing larger questions about the roles and responsibilities of so-called "nation-building." [4]

<6> Issues of framing are also explored by Jonathan M. Bullinger and Andrew J. Salvati, for whom the prosecution of the War on Terror has been facilitated, in part, through a process of branding. The present-day authority of the United States is bolstered by appealing to a simplistic version of the Second World War ( "BrandWW2") in order to use this legacy to legitimate present-day actions. Since brands, it is claimed, can co-opt consumers’ loyalty, this element is reinforced within today’s increasingly interactive, partnered, and synergy-based military-entertainment complex. Building upon the mythology constructed by prominent children of "the greatest generation", a cultural memory is reduced, packaged, and sold back to the audience as a branded representation left to stand in for historical complexity. Bullinger and Salvati conclude by looking at semi-docudrama works that connects collective memory and electronic forms of mass media. BrandWW2 is reductive already, its efficiency furthering the needs of the military-entertainment complex. One indication of a lack of real conviction behind the…War on Terror is the proportion of its supporting arguments that take the year 1945 as their starting point.

<7> Like the news media, the nascent entertainment industry battalions of the war effort have struggled to find a cohering and coherent message. In the realm of filmed entertainment, a period of initial unease gave way to a more candid endorsement of open-ended retaliation for 9/11, if not the Bush doctrine itself. Yet other ideas found a more complex expression. Arin Keeble illustrates this well in a detailed consideration of how Hollywood movies that were committed to the small-scale, personal and human responses to the 9/11 attacks could fit in with the pro-war agenda. Lacking what Butler (2004: 148) calls shock and awe manufactured and made more visual for the benefit of Fox and CNN, the films United 93 (2006) and World Trade Center (2006) nevertheless threw up screen archetypes well-suited to inflicting revenge on their nebulous yet threatening attackers. In the process, both docudramas’ ordinary yet hypermasculine protagonists set the scene for retaliation against an irrational foe characterized by mysterious superstitions and ruthless coordination.

<8> According to Yulia Ladygina, significant countervailing tendencies were at play in Russia. Partly through official control and manipulation of the media, President Vladimir Putin was able to win domestic and international support for military operations against Chechen rebels by opportunistically linking the conflict with the global War on Terror. Yet criticism has, Ladygina argues, come from an unexpected source: the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, whose reputation is as a staunch Russian nationalist. Through a close textual analysis of Mikhalkov’s 2007 film 12 – a Russian reworking of Sydney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1959) – Ladygina suggests that critics are quite mistaken in assuming that this is pro-Putin movie. Instead, she uncovers the subtle and complex ways in which the text critically reflects on the lessons for contemporary Russia of both US multiculturalism and Soviet-era multi-nationalism.

<9> And so to 24, the Fox TV ur-text of the War on Terror. The long-running "real-time" ordeals of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and his victims concluded for US audiences on May 24 2010, putting an end – according to producer Howard Gordon – to all of Bauer’s bad days. Jack survived beyond his final hour of screen-time, probably paving the way for a future feature film. During his week of fictional adventures, spanning almost 10 years of broadcasting, Bauer had been both praised for deterring real-life terror attacks and condemned for encouraging real-life torture. (Fellow fictional spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) has made repeated mentions of the uselessness of torture on Burn Notice – a TV show which claims actual "burned" spies as its technical advisors – but few seemed to notice.) In a subsection of this supplement, three authors tackle the iconic figure and the terror alert-prone milieu around him.

<10> If even the most unstoppable American hero had to stop, it was not before setting certain examples. In the first of these, as Mike Dillon explains, it was to embody an indestructible set of American values – Bauer-power, so to speak. Much has been made of the protagonist’s propensity for torture (which left one of your editors feeling queasy when Jack threatened to feed a suspect half a beach towel in order to later yank out the semi-digested remains, with guts and trachea attached). Amid the TV-safe levels of body horror, it is easy to lose sight of Jack’s unique ability to withstand torture, including a near-fatal heart attack. For Dillon, Jack’s extreme constitution acts as a new model of national identity.

<11> National identity is often a process of exclusion. Rolf Halse shows this to be the case using a close reading of Season 4, where the idea of an American Muslim family is shown to be a contradiction in terms. Disloyal to the land that enriched them, the Araz family are also portrayed as incapable of sustaining familial bonds among themselves. Halse locates the basis for this stereotypical representation in the long history of Orientalism as a means of interpreting – and pillorying – an Eastern "Other". Finally, closing the subsection on 24, Francesca Negri locates the show within the twin traditions of conspiracy theory and the wild – yet civilizing – man of the Wild West as an American icon. Arguing that the "paranoid fear of the ‘inescapable catastrophe’ is still alive", Negri treats Jack Bauer as finding his moment not just through the misdeeds of George W Bush, but from the preliminary work done by (the real) John Wayne and (the fictional) Fox Mulder.

<12> Of course, the papers presented here represent a necessarily broad church. While most are critical of the War on Terror, there’s little clear consensus beyond that. No-one is treating it as a "just war" deserving uncritical support and no-one claims that the 9/11 attack was an "inside job" orchestrated by the U.S. government. This tradition – of hostility to militarism while simultaneously rejecting conspiracy theories – has some honor behind it. For instance, H.G. Wells predicted the full horror of aerial warfare yet refused to see its instigators as a cabal seeking complete control. Writing in 1921, he rejected the "thesis of a gradual systematic enslavement...[which] presupposes an intelligence, a power of combination and a wickedness in the class of rich financiers and industrial organizers such as this class does not possess, and probably cannot possess. A body of men who had the character and the largeness of imagination necessary to overcome the natural insubordination of the worker would have a character and largeness of imagination too fine and great for any such plot against humanity." [5] Commenting on the ruling elite of his day, Wells was right to combine a description of the urge to dominate with an observation of the rot seeping from within. It is apposite that his description of these contrary dynamics, of pursuing influence while losing control, resonates with our experience of the post-9/11 media industries.

<13> A similar view is implied in the closing essay of the supplement, which was one of the surprises to come our way in the course of our discussions with prospective authors. Despite the variety of interpretations of the show noted above, we did expect contributors to treat 24 as a typical – if not constitutive – War on Terror text. We did not expect the rebooted Batman franchise to be interpreted in the same way, but were wrong-footed here on more than one occasion. [5] In the closing essay, Barbara Wopperer analyses the way that The Dark Knight, a mainstream Hollywood movie, provided an opportunity to consider the ethics of counterterrorism, not merely in the context of the War on Terror, but as a more timeless moral dilemma. Needless to say, this is not the last word on the subject and future discussion is encouraged, here in Reconstruction and elsewhere. Future wars, on the other hand, are strongly discouraged.

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank Maitrayee Basu, who worked extensively on manuscript preparation; the University of East London for providing Graham Barnfield with a small grant for assistance with transcription; Marc Oullette for his sharp editorial comments and insightful overview of the project as it took shape; and to Helena Scott of the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages, University of Westminster for her work in talent-scouting potential contributors. The work of the anonymous reviewers who commented on the contributions here is also greatly appreciated.

Endnotes

[1] Screens of Terror: representations of war and terrorism in film and television since 9/11, Bury St Edmunds: Abramis Academic, 2011. ISBN 9781845495015. Print.

[2] Journal of War and Culture Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, September 2011; ISSN 17526272; online ISSN 17526280.

[3] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London & New York: Verso, 2004; p.xi. Print.

[4] Issues of framing are not confined to this paper. For instance, Katy Parry reports the results of a major study of Iraq war news photographs in the British press, focusing on the difficult questions raised by the depiction of civilian casualties. On the one hand, the most pro-war popular UK tabloid – the Sun – virtually "disappeared the dead," fulfilling its own propagandistic prediction that Iraq would be the first "clean" war. Other papers did show the human cost of the invasion for Iraqi civilians, sometimes deliberately setting out to elicit outrage and empathy from their readers. Yet on the other hand, as Parry acknowledges, showing the horror of war in this way can sometimes produce a kind of voyeuristic war porn, in which the Other appears only as helpless victim. On balance, one can argue that if British "mainstream media" news has taken sides in the War on Terror, it has often done so with a lack of real conviction. See Parry, "The First ‘Clean’ War? Visually Framing Civilian Casualties in the British Press during the 2003 Iraq Invasion", in Angela Smith and Michael Higgins (eds.), Reporting War: a special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies, Volume 5, forthcoming in 2012. Print and online.

[5] H.G. Wells,‘Preface’, When The Sleeper Wakes, London: Phoenix, 2004 edition; OP 1921; pp.3-4. Print.

[6] See also Fran Pheasant-Kelly, "The Ecstasy of Chaos: Mediations of Terrorism and Traumatic Memory in The Dark Knight" in Journal of War and Culture Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, September 2011. Print and online.

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