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POST 9-11 HOLLYWOOD
INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY US FILM CRITICISM
EMBEDDED-VIDEO, SCREENSHOT ILLUSTRATED SCHOLARSHIP
PRESENTING ATHEISM AND THE MODERN AMERICAN SCREEN
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FEATURED FILMS AVAILABLE ON DVD
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A Rationalist/Atheist Perspective on War Criminality & the Crisis of Faith in Post 9-11 American Cinema
*update January 15th, 2010
In Michael Moore's seminal Fahrenheit 9/11, the first film to voice political dissent during the Bush-led War on Terror, then President George W. Bush voices his belief that God intended each individual to be free and that this is a concept on which he bases his foreign policy - such being the invasions of Afghanistan and the disastrous occupation of Iraq.
In the initial years of the Obama Administration which ended the Bush-led War on Terror, though not exactly the War on Terror itself, Presidential notes exchanged between Bush and such as then Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (forced to resign because of the Abu Ghraib scandal) were leaked to the press, revealing Biblical drawings and passages used as inscriptions on the notes, a clear indication that for Bush, the War on Terror was just as much a Holy War as it was for his adversary Osama Bin Laden: indeed, early in the War on Terror Bush had been critically excoriated for referring to the US campaign as a "Crusade", a deliberate reference intended to placate the evangelical Religious Right, whose vote - guaranteed in consultation with Bush's closest advisor Karl Rove - had swept him into office. It was a case of one President's God vs. one terrorist's Allah over theist validification, in the end only birthing a popular tide of political atheism and dissent..
During the immediate post 9/11 years, there were no new American films made with terrorism as a theme: it was considered taboo as a subject in American film, just as the early years of the equally ill-fated Vietnam War era had seen no films made about the actual Vietnam experience (with only two exceptions) until after it had been "resolved". After the first film made on the subject of 9/11, United 93, a depiction of the doomed heroes of Flight 93 and a film which brought the theme of crisis management into the fore-front of post 9/11 disaster cinema before it would embrace the monster movie in Cloverfield, and several tentative flirtations critical of War on Terror policy - The Manchurian Candidate, V for Vendetta and Lord of War - Hollywood would wait until 2007 before launching a rash of films on terrorist subjects. These films - including such as Death of a President, Charlie Wilson's War, Civic Duty, Infinite Justice, The Kingdom, A Mighty Heart, Redacted, Rendition, Traitor and Body of Lies - coincided with three documentaries - The Road to Guantanamo, Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side - which cumulatively concluded that the Born-Again Bush Presidency was in effect potentially prosecutable for war criminal action over the same foreign policy that Bush had said was a direct result of his belief in God. Simply put: God had failed America and the Christian Presidency was an international disgrace to the advance of secular humanist peace - indeed Bush's last action as President (reported in the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side) was to exempt anyone in his government from war criminal prosecution, with new President Obama reluctant to delve deeper into the matter despite increasing public pressure to do so.
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THE AMERICAN CRISIS OF FAITH
MELODRAMA POPULAR POST 9/11
Failures of War on Terror Christian Presidency Result in Crisis of Faith throughout post 9/11 Hollywood
On the one hand, the forces of Theist belief fought on with conventional Messianic myth - birthing the likes of Die Hard 4.0, Terminator: Salvation and through into Avatar.
NAZI HUMANISM
AS GENRE
Hollywood's theism was cemented, and the public placated, in the shameless pandering to orthodox Catholicism of the Dan Brown adaptation Angels & Demons, a film which side-stepped the War on Terror disenchantment that had led Academy Award winner Oliver Stone to denounce the Bush Born-Again Christian Presidency in his satirical biopic W. - a harsh assessment of the fusion of Church and State in American politics - to frame faith in opposition to the scientific rationalism of such authors as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, whose atheistic books had become best-sellers. But Angels & Demons had nothing new to offer, demonizing the sole atheist character as immoral and restoring the validity of theist belief with escapist grandeur and pseudo- science fiction nonsense. Christians leapt onto the crisis-of-faith bandwagon however, re-asserting Intelligent Design theories in the eschatological science fiction of The Day the Earth Stood Still and I am Legend, both remakes of rationalist originals.
However, the Atheist challenge to the seeming thematic supremacy of theist spirituality also saw a revival, found in the populist comedy of Year One - which cross-blended the American National Lampoon comedic tradition with that of the British Monty Python - and the rival anti-eschatological rationalism of Knowing as well as the rational moral examinations of religious ethical conundrums in The Box. Still, it was in perhaps the strangest of genres that atheism asserted a distinctly rationalist secular humanism - in a series of revisionist Holocaust cinema works which deserve the title "Nazi Humanism". It was in such films as Valkyrie, Defiance, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Good, The Reader and Inglourious Basterds that the ethical ramifications of human free will, the supremacy of humanity and the irrelevence of God were assessed in ways which embraced the complexity of human nature, behavioural socialization and sexuality in ways the Christian Crisis of Faith films ignored in favour of a simplistic Good vs. Evil dichotomy.
In this, the Nazi humanist genre was most ironic - it took the most apparent case of binary good and evil and restored to it a level of psychological complexity which made the short-lived mini-genre a virtual philosophical treatise on secular humanism for the post 9/11 environment, re-interpreting Nazism and the Holocaust from within a framework of humanist empathy: at least until Quentin Tarantino brought such complexity to the level of polished exploitation junk culture in the hit Inglourious Basterds. But empathy for an "enemy" labelled "evil" was a problematic in the immediate post 9/11 years, with the first film empathetic to the 9/11 hijackers - The Hamburg Cell - denied outright any US cinema release.
FOR A COMPLETE PERSPECTIVE ON TERRORISM IN AMERICAN FILM BEFORE, DURING & AFTER THE WAR ON TERROR, SEE:
Terrorism in American Cinema: An Analytical Filmography, 1960-2008
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