American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The Fragmented Kaleidoscope [1st ed.] 9783030426774, 9783030426781

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American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy The Fragmented Kaleidoscope Thomas J. Cobb

American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy “The course of American foreign policy is never smooth—including in the movies. Thomas Cobb deftly takes us inside the films to show the tension between America’s ideals and its quests for power, between the national and the international, and between American exceptionalism and a declaration of the universal for all of us.” —Professor Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

Thomas J. Cobb

American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy The Fragmented Kaleidoscope

Thomas J. Cobb Stourbridge, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-42677-4    ISBN 978-3-030-42678-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Matty Anderson / EyeEm, Getty Images Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book intends to offer reflections on American film’s allegorisation of US foreign policy. It is designed for Film Studies, American Studies and International Relations scholars and is written with the purpose of addressing how examples of Hollywood cinema capture schismatic patterns of American statecraft. The “cultural diplomacy” of the title, a reference to Hollywood’s role in furthering US hegemony and attracting overseas audiences, frequently hinges on films which purvey multifaceted representations of American power. I contend that films as various as Spaghetti Westerns and War pictures have framed the elastic quality of the US national narrative and elicited an almost synesthetic approach to culture and politics. Much of my analysis is influenced by the elucidation of political allegory presented in Richard Slotkin’s 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America and contains similar observations on the synergetic aspects of Hollywood productions. My argument diverges from Slotkin’s approach in its evaluation of the political dynamics of American film based on a combination of Film Studies and International Relations methodologies. Ranging from the triangulations of the Clinton era to the identitarian nationalism of Trump’s presidency, this exploration claims that Hollywood productions possess affinity with the International Relations theorist Walter Mead’s idea of a ‘kaleidoscopic’ American foreign policy. It further argues that allegory has grown in importance when it comes to translating contradictions in American statecraft to the screen. This process became v

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catalysed by the trauma of the 9/11 attacks and the onset of the War on Terror. All chapters focus on Hollywood films which evidence contradictory allegories of a key International Relations concept. From the challenges facing Joseph Nye Jr.’s theory of soft power in a cycle of post-9/11 productions to the vitiation of Wilsonianism in two late 2000s blockbusters, disjunction and changing reflections consistently manifest in US foreign policy’s allegorisation. Although in some films these disjunctions and evolving representations are resolved and rationalised, in others they culminate in a dysphoric reflection of American statecraft and US society. Hence, allegories of diplomatic contradiction are tonally variable, differing in their response to the contemporary political scene. Moreover, this book intends to foreground the kaleidoscopic nature of American society and politics through insight into the political chemistry contained in numerous examples of American film since the 1990s. It is written with the hope of engaging Film Studies, American Studies and International Relations scholars through showcasing how US cinema can be employed as a tool for understanding the mercurial facets of US diplomacy.

Acknowledgements

I feel privileged to have benefitted from the encouragement and inspiration of many throughout the development of this project. I am particularly appreciative of Professor James Chapman, Dr James Walters and Professor Scott Lucas for their time and energy in engaging with and challenging my ideas and for the sharing of their enthusiasm for film’s political resonance. I thank my employers and colleagues at Coventry University for facilitating a positive environment for the tutoring of novice academic writers. I am further grateful to my employers and colleagues at the University of Birmingham, who have given me the opportunity of teaching on modules that synergise with my research interests. I would also like to thank Edward Jackson; our meetups during the writing process generated direction and inspiration. A special mention must go to the ‘old boys’ I know from the University of Leicester whose humour continually lends perspective. I am grateful to my godfather, Edward Neve, who has always taken a keen interest in my intellectual pursuits. I thank my mother, Jane; my father, Jeremy; and my sister, Ellen, who continue to be the best immediate family support network possible. Finally, I express gratitude to the three dogs, whose barks and howls provided the mood music for my writing.

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Contents

1 Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence of Diplomatic Contradiction in Political and Allegorical American Film  1 The Common Fallacy of Hyperpartisanship: Dispelling the Ubiquity of Hollywood’s ‘liberal’ Animus   4 The Competing Schools of Methodology Regarding Allegory  18 References  29 2 Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic Presidency 35 The Restyling of American Liberalism: Clintonian Triangulation in The American President  36 The Wilsonian/Jacksonian Fusion in Independence Day  48 Presidential Renditions of Triangulation in Clinton’s Second Term  56 References  61 3 Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-­Century War Film and the Millenarian Remaking of Global Meliorism 65 Three Kings: Escalations of Unilateral Idealism  66 Three Kings and the Centrist Adaptation of Global Meliorism  76 Alternate Reifications of Equilibrium: The Global Meliorism of Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down  83 Tears of the Sun: The Outer Limits of the New Global Meliorism  94 References 101 ix

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4 Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in Cinematic Engagements With the War on Terror107 Skewed Power: The Disjunctive Americas of 25th Hour and Fahrenheit 9/11 109 Team America and the Malleability of Soft Power 120 Harbingers of the Hamiltonian: Failures of Soft Power Exemplarism in Batman Begins and Syriana 133 References 143 5 Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal Occupation in No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood149 No Country for Old Men and the Anarchy of Exporting Neoliberalism 151 There Will be Blood and the Schisms of Neoconservative Intervention 165 References 181 6 Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to Liberal Internationalist Failure187 The Dereliction of Wilsonianism in The Dark Knight 188 Avatar and the Consummate Contradiction of Foreign Occupation 206 References 222 7 Stasis: The Continuation of Contradiction in the Age of Malaise and Populism229 The Normalisation of Malaise: The Late Obama Era 232 Trump’s Presidency: The Continuation or End of Kaleidoscopic Diplomacy in American Cinema? 239 References 249 Index255

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1

The botched drug deal in No Country for Old Men (IMDCB n.d.) Plainview’s collapsing oil derrick in There Will be Blood (Dix 2016) The Dark Knight’s ‘Ground Zero’ (Shortlist 2019)

157 177 200

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CHAPTER 1

Shifting Kaleidoscopes: The Presence of Diplomatic Contradiction in Political and Allegorical American Film

Over the course of two feverish days in January 2017, a set of contrasting events in Washington D.C. encapsulate the divides of contemporary American political life. On January 20, at the traditional setting at the West Front of the United States Capitol Building, President-elect Donald J. Trump delivers a fiery inauguration speech, wrought with the vein of transgressive populism that had been central to the tenor of his presidential campaign. Despite having trailed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by almost three million votes in the popular vote in the November 2016 presidential election, Trump (2017) asserts the mantle of majority rule, propounding that “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People”. In additional grandiose remarks, he portrays disconnects between the experience of America’s patriotic citizenry and its decadent elite. Trump blames a Washington that “flourished” while “the factories closed”, a dissonance protracted by an establishment which “protected itself, but not the citizens of our country” (ibid.). Seguing from the rhetoric of provincial resentment to language of blood and soil nationalism, the new Republican standard-bearer promises to halt an “American carnage” (ibid.). He substantiates this agenda with “an oath of allegiance to all Americans” before bemoaning a litany of policies maintained by Washington’s implicitly erstwhile governing class: in protectionist overtones, Trump laments “enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry”; how American taxpayers have “subsidized © The Author(s) 2020 T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_1

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the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military”; finally, and perhaps most important to the anti-immigration dimension of Trump’s campaign, he cites the “ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs” (ibid.) as chief causes for vituperation. The subsequent day of January 21 in Washington D.C. sees opposition to this message. A ‘Women’s March’ pugnaciously repudiates President Trump, an animus of indignation echoed by emulative protests in capitals across the West. Whilst the march foregrounds anger over the 45th president’s attitude to women, it encompasses a broader fear of white nationalism. The manifesto of the Women’s March expresses belief in the importance of “immigrant and refugee rights regardless of origin” by rejecting “mass deportation, family detention” and “violations of due process” (San Diego Free Press 2017). Speeches delivered by major Hollywood celebrities signal this sense of cosmopolitan solidarity absent from Trump’s address. Film actress Ashley Judd (quoted in Sanchez 2017) chastises a plethora of attitudes given social license by Trump’s presidential campaign, listing “racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege” as flagrant signs of the new president’s bigotry. Star of The Avengers Scarlett Johansson (quoted in Ruiz 2017) elicits fears of “a country that is moving backwards and not forwards”. The documentary maker and political activist Michael Moore (quoted in Ruiz 2017) claims “here’s the majority of America, right here. … We are here to vow to end the Trump campaign.” The speeches by Hollywood icons are supplemented and substantiated by the civil rights activist Angela Davis (quoted in Reilly 2017), who reminds of a country “anchored in slavery and colonialism”, containing a dual legacy of “immigration and enslavement”. Elected politicians such as the liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts vaunt the battle against this dimension of American history, which has been romanticised by the Trump-supporting movement of the Alt-right. Warren (quoted in Reilly 2017) champions a “vision to make sure that we fight harder, we fight tougher, and we fight more passionately than ever”. The two political scenes described might be said to underline a conventional polarity in the United States’ perception of itself in the world, signifying a country divided between parochial Republican reaction and internationalist Democratic progressivism. Indeed, their hyperpartisanship might be seen as contrary to the earlier writing of International Relations

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theorist Walter Russell Mead and his more multifaceted understandings of US political dynamics. Mead’s 2001 book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World foregrounds foreign policy as connected to the diverse nature of the United States’ pluralist democracy by putting forward four ‘schools’ which have dominated the schema of American diplomacy. It cites the ‘Hamiltonian’, a school orientated around the interests of the business class which takes its name from the 1790s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton; the idealism of the ‘Wilsonian’, a philosophy of spreading democracy descended from a “missionary” tradition in the nineteenth century (Mead 2001, 151) and honed in World War One by President Woodrow Wilson; the ‘Jeffersonian’, a principled disinterest in global affairs based on the statecraft of the author of the Declaration of Independence, founding father and president, Thomas Jefferson; finally, the ‘Jacksonian’, a realism named after the populist antebellum president Andrew Jackson that caters to the nationalist sensibilities of America’s heartlands.1 Foreign policy matched the “representative nature of American society”, forging an equivalence “between the political strength of the given schools and their weight in the nation” (ibid., 95). In an interview with The Economist, Mead (quoted in The Economist editorial 2010) specified that “some of our greatest presidents—FDR for example—were able to move freely within all four of the foreign policy schools”, illuminating the reductive tendencies behind hyperpartisan understandings of US diplomacy. In contrast to a rival nineteenth-century tradition of European “continental realism”, American foreign policy has historically been “more like a kaleidoscope, whose images, patterns, and colors alter rapidly and apparently at random” (Mead 2001, 36). The first premise of American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The Fragmented Kaleidoscope is that examples of American film from the 1990s to the 2010s convey similarly contradictory foreign policy dynamics, encompassing genres as various as the Western, war film and science fiction blockbuster. Analyses give primacy to the role of International Relations theories in Hollywood film, from the relevance of Bacevich’s ‘new American militarism’ for a cycle of post-9/11 action pictures to the resonance of Niebuhr’s warnings against idealism in the Revisionist Western No Country for Old Men (2007). By utilising this interdisciplinary methodology, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy demonstrates that US film presents treatments of foreign policy analogous to the

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concepts of Mead, illustrating sites of both political intersection and ideological friction. The second premise of this book is that incidences of popular political allegory have encapsulated the spirit of Mead’s theories by spearheading variegated approaches to ideology, juxtaposing clashes and arbitrating compromises between different philosophies and beliefs. From the eclectic war satire of Three Kings (1999) to the outrageous puppet comedy of Team America: World Police (2004), American filmmakers have evinced bold and unconventional ways of illuminating interplay of International Relations concepts. As will be evidenced in this book’s third and fourth chapters, discussion surrounding realism and idealism is very much present in the former film while rivalries between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power are abundant in the latter. The altering and fluid paradigms of this allegorical symbolism, testified in recent blockbusters like Black Panther (2018), indicate the mercurial role Mead’s shifting kaleidoscope plays in American cinema, with musings on foreign policy finding new forms of expression. Beginning with the centrism of the Clinton era before moving to the changed political climate of the post-9/11  years and the sense of malaise fostered by the Great Recession, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy traces how filmmakers have regularly recalibrated modes of political commentary in order to allegorise corresponding ‘collisions’ within International Relations. Examining and deconstructing Hollywood’s ‘liberalist’ reputation reveals this level of nuance, a quality I elicit in the next section.

The Common Fallacy of Hyperpartisanship: Dispelling the Ubiquity of Hollywood’s ‘liberal’ Animus A broad spectrum of political opinion has frequently emphasised the liberalist outlook as central to modern Hollywood filmmaking, attributing a spirit of progressive dissent to America’s most culturally potent industry. A clear foundation for this understanding is provided by the right-wing film critic Michael Medved. His 1993 book Hollywood VS.  America: Popular Culture And The War On Traditional Values casts doubt on Hollywood’s ability to reflect the ideological victories of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush years, excoriating a countercultural infiltration of the film industry that had become inherent from the late 1960s and

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manifesting in work “separate from the domestic mainstream” (Medved 1993, 235). Medved’s analysis encompasses moody biographical dramas like Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), films which exceed in influence comparative to patriotic blockbusters like Top Gun (1986) and Die Hard (1988). Prevailing shibboleths of modern American filmmaking are said to include “antipathy to the military” and “association of capitalists with criminality” (ibid., 219–221). Yet Medved, in an effort to avert accusations of indiscriminate extrapolation, emphasises positive exceptions in “Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and ‘40s” such as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and the 1933 George Cukor picture Dinner at Eight, which, in a stark aversion to the leftist bent inherent in modern productions, portrayed businessmen “in a highly sympathetic light” (ibid., 221). The centrist political scientist Joseph Nye Jr., who originated the theory of ‘soft power’ in 2004, contrastingly highlights that liberalism in Hollywood films has functioned as a disseminator for democratic values, rarely framed in partisan hues. He also judges it as essential in currying favourability of America abroad, an appeal achieved through illustrations of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. Rather than bemoaning the absence of a patriotic identity like Medved, Nye (2004, 17) praises the internationalist role of American cinema, tangible in productions which purvey a “harsh portrait of American institutions”. Nye uses the cynical courtroom drama 12 Angry Men (1957) as a case study which signifies the potency of a “liberal society”, where “government cannot and should not control the culture” (ibid.). The acquiescence of the Czech Communist government to the film, which was ostensibly allowed distribution because of anti-­ American content, backfired, fostering emulation amongst Czech dissidents of the United States’ vibrant democracy. Nye quotes the Czech director Milos Forman (quoted in Nye Jr. 2004, 17), who observed “if that country can make this kind of thing, films about itself … that country must have a pride and must have an inner strength, and must be strong enough and must be free”. Nye admits how (2004, 15) Hollywood filmmakers can contravene these internationalist appeals in “movies that show scantily clad women with libertine attitudes or fundamentalist Christian groups that castigate Islam as an evil religion”. Yet American pictures are also capable of promoting qualities “that are open, mobile, individualistic, anti-­establishment, pluralistic, voluntaristic, populist, and free” (ibid., 47). Ultimately, films

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with these maxims could signal the virtues and vices of American society, an openness which deflected stigmatisations of cultural propaganda or brazen radicalism. Examples of allegory in iconographic genres, such as the Western, suggest that Hollywood filmmakers have garnered recognition by scholars for spreading distinct critiques of America’s institutions and political maladies with oblique methods, a sensibility which can transcend production context and the exigencies of catering to certain audience demographics. George Stevens’s Giant (1956), a Classical Hollywood Western which delineates the arc of a wealthy Texan family over the twentieth century, exemplifies this richness of subtext. On the surface, Giant is an epic portrayal of the American West, suffused with dramatic conventions of romance and generational conflict. The film’s protagonist of Texan patriarch, Jordan Benedict, is forced to overcome a petty rivalry with local nouveau riche oil baron and former employee, Jett Rink, all the while facing problems and tragedies confronting his immediate family. Giant’s greater resonance, however, is in its allusions to a Texas plagued by contests between the expansionist dispositions of a historic white settlement and a newer, progressive standpoint. The former shibboleth is expounded upon in a brief scene where Benedict’s East Coast wife, Leslie Lynton, refers to the nineteenth-century annexation of Texas as a theft while the latter outlook recurs in subplots involving the state’s non-white citizens. Implicitly countering the Jim Crow racism prevalent in both the diegesis of Texas and the contemporaneous 1950s of Giant’s release, Stevens draws attention to Lynton’s efforts to educate impoverished Mexican children and an interracial relationship forged between a Latino woman and Benedict’s son, Jordy. Monique James Baxter (2005, 161) notes Giant’s significance in being “the first major motion picture to explore the effects of Jim Crow legislation on Mexicans in Texas”. Its subtle political encoding, and a dramatic epilogue in which Benedict’s interracial family are rejected from a diner, signals its “studies of miscegenation, paternalism and racism” (ibid., 171). A different Western perhaps attests to the power of coded divides between a reactionary realism and a benevolent, anti-establishment idealism in regard to production context and cultural milieu. Produced under the freewheeling artistic ethos wrought by the “New Hollywood” studio system of the late 1960s, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) purveys a sensibility tonally oppositional to the grandeur of Giant’s Manifest Destiny themes. George Roy Hill’s picture presents a comparatively

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bathetic portrait of two roguish bank robbers who eventually perish in Bolivia, an off-kilter journey heightened by a somewhat incongruous Burt Bacharach soundtrack. The late 1960 thaw in Hollywood filmmaking, begotten by the scrapping of the socially conservative 1930 Hayes Code, pervades a more radical subtext than the offbeat rhythm suggests. In being a product of an environment cited by Geoff King (2002, 41) as widening “the bounds of possible expression” and celebrating “moral ambiguity and complexity”, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid quietly comports several anti-Vietnam and anti-corporate allusions within its narrative, indicating an anti-establishment spirit. The iconoclasm of the Revisionist Western, a sub-genre which emerged in Lyndon Johnson’s second term and offered “critical reflections on the Western’s status and relationship to contemporary culture” (Nelson 2015, 67), infuses this animus. Michael Coyne (1997, 148) interprets the populism of Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s robberies as symbolic of a revolt against the “increasing corporatism of American society”. In foreign policy terms, the gaucheness of their deaths in Bolivia cemented an anti-­ imperialist critique of Vietnam’s dubious foundations, encapsulating “adventurism in an alien culture Americans were ill-equipped to comprehend” (ibid., 148). In the duo’s invocation of the anti-war/anti-­ establishment attitudes of the New Left and the sacrifice of American troops in Vietnam, they “formed innocents abroad, non-conformists, dropouts and casualties of military violence” (ibid., 148). Yet despite these notable case studies, Nye’s idea of a Hollywood which serves to underline American democratic openness discords with incidences of multifaceted political dynamics in films. Tony Shaw’s Hollywood’s Cold War (2009), which delineates the proximity between the ideological goals of American governments and popular Hollywood film, captures this diffuseness. Foreshadowing a scope which encompasses deceptively frivolous comedies with Cold War subject matter like Ninotchka (1939) and the overtly jingoistic blockbuster, Red Dawn (1984), the introduction to Hollywood’s Cold War observes how “certain films sought bluntly to instill hatred of the enemy among the American people, while others tried in a more measured fashion to persuade Third World audiences of the virtues of Western-style democracy” (Shaw 2009, 5). It is a plausible argument that several landmark Hollywood films manifest both these qualities of the Jacksonian and Wilsonian, revealing patterns which exclude simple interplays of racial and social liberalism with internationalism. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a

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production which both elicited the contradictory progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and sparked a revival of the Klu Klux Klan, relates to a context illustrative of this ‘kaleidoscopic’ nature. Wilson is a president widely recognised as the progenitor of an American idealism in foreign policy. His outline of a democratic future for a post-war Europe in 1917 seemingly aimed to harness what Peter Wilson (2011, 332) defines as “an optimistic doctrine which seeks to transcend the international anarchy” in order to “create a more cosmopolitan and harmonious world order”. Nonetheless, the idealist Wilson found affinity with the overtly white supremacist vision of The Birth of a Nation. Barely over two years before the president promised to “make the world safe for democracy” on the cusp of America’s entry into the First World War, he became enthralled by a revisionist history which rhapsodised his own country’s democracy at its most iniquitous. The narrative of The Birth of a Nation, which revolves around the relationship between a Northern and Southern family initially riven but eventually reconciled by the tumult of the Civil War and reconstruction, galvanised the Virginia-born Wilson. A possible reason for this galvanisation was its provoking of the ‘Jacksonian’ aspects of his persona, a nativism unveiled in Wilson’s book A History of the American People (1902). Griffith’s film borrows admiringly from this telling political text, using Wilson’s language of vituperation against the “veritable overthrow of civilization in the South” and his stress on the need for “the Klu Klux Klan to redeem the South” (Ambrosius 2007, 690). Lloyd E. Ambrosius considers this mythology in light of Wilson’s own legacy as a diplomatic idealist, an admixture that created a “nexus between liberalism and racism” (ibid., 689). This blend was licensed by Wilson’s own enthusiastic response to the screen dramatisation of his writing and the ‘collisions’ of his subsequent policy agenda. Mark E. Benbow corroborates Wilson’s (quoted in Benbow 2010, 509) reaction to The Birth of a Nation’s parodies of black enfranchisement during the 1870s and its explicit glorification of white nationalism, authenticating a remark by the president that the cinematic rendition of his earlier writing was “like writing history with lightning” and “terribly true”. Against the fallout of the First World War and the arbitration of the Treaty of Versailles, the president pursued a combination of policies which expressed discord between this deep-seated emphasis on racial hierarchy and his lofty idealism. Peter Wilson (2011, 332) describes a “campaign to put national self-determination at the heart of the 1919 peace settlement”, bound “by a common morality with its bedrock in basic human rights”.

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President Wilson exposed the selectiveness of this liberal internationalism, however, when he nullified independence requests from the colonial satrap of Vietnam, attesting to an idealism which sought democracy for white Europeans only.2 Despite the salience of this example, one does not need to solely examine connections between Hollywood films and the contradictions of political icons like Wilson to understand that veins of ideological dissonance have featured as a significant staple of American cinema. Even without reference to their surrounding political milieus, Hollywood productions have frequently displayed fissures analogous to those revealed by The Birth of a Nation’s distribution. The author of the seminal cultural history Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (1992), Richard Slotkin, explicates these tropes. His research on the ‘combat’ and ‘platoon’ films released over the course of the Second World War arguably demonstrates a variation on the nexus of liberalism and racism so marked in Wilson. Slotkin cites the complex dynamics of Bataan (1943), a war picture set on the titular province of the Philippines where US prisoners were forced on to a death march by the Japanese imperial army in 1943. The ethnic difference of the platoon showcased in Bataan, which encompasses both white and African American troops, meaningfully coincides with contemporaneous political developments at home and abroad. Slotkin (1992, 320) connects the integrationist ethos with the “emergence of a new African-American political movement which took a more militant stance on civil rights” and the “fundamental contradiction between racialism and the values of democracy” brought to light by the Axis powers. He further writes of other discrepancies which speak to a concurrent relationship between America’s progress on civil rights and scorched earth militarism abroad. Bataan claims a “moral victory for a melting pot America” and an “idealized America” (ibid., 326). But the evils of Japan’s imperial army, who prove a “moral and ideological problem” and necessitate an America where “democracy is virile, not effete” (ibid., 326), juxtapose this solidarity with something more akin to Mead’s idea of the Jacksonian, the hard-nosed realist school in Special Providence’s schema of foreign policy philosophies. Bataan both incorporates the provocative symbolism of ‘Yankee Salazar’, a Filipino scout who is lynched by the Japanese in an interpretable allegory of the American South’s Jim Crow laws, together with a passionate endorsement of total war against the Axis Powers. This latter

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perspective is conspicuous in the implied martyrdom of Bataan’s climax, where Sergeant Bill Dane digs his own marked grave and engages Japanese troops in a battle to the death. Subsequent to a final shot of Dane firing and laughing directly at the camera, an onscreen coda eulogises “the heroes of Bataan”, whose “sacrifice made possible our victories in the Coral and Bismarck Seas”. Perhaps Bataan’s greatest novelty for the war genre, not to mention the spectre of political contradiction in American film, is in how it purveys this message alongside a subtle critique of US domestic bigotry. The sombre undercutting of the Jim Crow South implicit in Salazar’s death and the progressive normalisation of black military integration fuses with a Jacksonian message of patriotism, offering a civic nationalist rendition of Mead’s school which signifies the collective unity fostered by “honor, concern for reputation, and faith in military institutions” (Mead 2001, 244–245). Slotkin’s 2001 article ‘Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality’ stresses the reciprocity between a multiracial America and conservative values of Jacksonian nationalism in the war genre. He detects a synthesis tangible in platoon films as individually distinctive as “Bataan (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1946), Fixed Bayonets (1951), All the Young Men (1960), The Dirty Dozen (1965), Platoon (1986) and Saving Private Ryan (1998)” (Slotkin 2001, 469). Summating the motifs of these pictures, Slotkin notes how the “melting pot” invokes “the idealized self-image of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy, hospitable to difference but united by a common sense of national belonging” (ibid., 469). Slotkin’s list of platoon films, which sets the allusive war commentary of The Dirty Dozen and the bitter Vietnam drama Platoon alongside the reverential ‘man on a mission’ narrative of Saving Private Ryan, conveys that cognitively dissonant blends of interracial cooperation and Jacksonian realism have manifested in ways far from uniformly propagandistic. The ambivalence of allegory has been especially indicative in this regard, rendering political contradiction in a provocative and compellingly elliptical fashion. Problematic and unwieldy dichotomies have been connoted by allegorical pictures where partisan leanings and open standpoints are hard to identify, leading to narratives conditioned by ideological incoherence rather than reconciliation. A cycle of films which emerged from the ‘Mexico Western’ phenomenon of the late 1960s, a subcategory of Revisionist Western also explored thoroughly by Slotkin, display this ambiguity. In drawing on the chaos resultant from US involvement in

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Vietnam and the multi-ethnic fraternity foregrounded by the platoon film, Mexico Westerns such as Major Dundee (1965) and The Wild Bunch (1969) purveyed a “disillusioned” mood, translating “the political and ideological paradoxes of the Vietnam War into mythic terms” (Slotkin 1992, 561). Major Dundee follows the misadventures of a Union Calvary officer lured into Mexico by a rogue Apache leader, a revenge mission narrative which engenders alternations between the demands of savage war and the compulsions of Wilsonian idealism. Despite being set during the late stages of the American Civil War in 1864, director Sam Peckinpah renders this literal context peripheral through employment of several Vietnam alluding motifs. Dundee, who is initially stationed as the head of a POW camp for a tactical error at the Battle of Gettysburg, assembles an army redolent of the 1960s culture wars to hunt down the Apache leader Charriba. His cavalry is composed of white Confederate prisoners and manumitted African American slaves, an incongruity evocative of the nativist Alabama governor George Wallace and the dissent borne from the disproportionate conscription of African Americans in the US army. The most salient ‘collisions’ of Major Dundee’s storyline, however, come to light when the titular protagonist supports Mexico’s citizenry against the colonialist designs of the French empire. This context references a real life historical backdrop marginal to the American Civil War, where French Emperor Napoleon III aided the proxy Mexican monarch Emperor Maximilian I in exchange for imperial influence. Yet this period milieu is less central than the interpretable allegory behind Dundee’s decision to raid a village populated by rebels who recognise the exiled president Benito Juarez as Mexico’s true leader, underlining imagery symbolic of America’s conflicted role as modern hegemon. Dundee’s sympathy for the rebels, further, elicits parallels with the United States’ attempts at currying favour with nationalist movements over the course of the Cold War. Shortly following the platoon’s arrival in the village, Dundee’s men cancel their raid and instead opt to share their dwindling rations with the Juarists in a fashion suggesting American benevolence in the third world. Trooper Tim Ryan, who sporadically narrates in voiceover, remarks, “We entered the village to take away their horses. … But instead gave away our own. … And they were never more thankful.” The welfarist outlook celebrated here resonates with the foreign policy historian Walter McDougall’s notion of “Global Meliorism”. To McDougall (1997, 173), the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the impoverished theatre of Southeast

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Asia as a liberal opportunity to “feed the hungry and promote democracy abroad”. The progressive agenda of the latter leader had its corollary in a statecraft which aimed to leave Vietnam with “schools and hospitals and dams” and “the international version of our domestic Great Society programs”, ambitions nullified by the military violence of “pacified villages and body counts” (ibid., 190). The instability of this combination, which recalls the aforementioned synthesis of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian schools, pervades several developments in Dundee’s odyssey through Mexico. Dundee’s welfarist approach to the Mexican rebels clashes with his identity as American soldier and chief obligation to kill Charriba, a tension heightened through his relationship with an Austrian widow formerly married to a Juarist doctor. Shortly after Dundee meets the widowed Teresa Santiago at a fiesta commemorating the American aid, former West Point rival and Confederate POW Benjamin Tyreen reminds Dundee of the discrepancy between his flirtation with liberal internationalism and the violence necessitated by his mission. Referencing earlier dialogue which mocked Dundee as a “tyrant” and “jailer”, Tyreen interposes the euphoria of the Mexican village’s emancipation with the judgement that Dundee lacks the “temperament to be a liberator”. This wrestling with the Wilsonian/Jacksonian dichotomy, encapsulated in mise en scene which shifts from the asceticism of Dundee’s POW camp to the comparative Jeffersonian utopia of the Mexican village, speaks to a dilemma of American self-image replicated in the Vietnam conflict. In a false apotheosis foregrounded in the Austrian Teresa, Dundee’s dalliance with the Mexican cause attempts to promote nation-building at its most ideal through aiding a group of villagers who happen to praise American hegemonic might. These mores, however, do not apply to the Apache, who instead meet the hypocrisy of savage war. The dysphoric conclusion of Major Dundee evidences the failure of this flawed triangulation. Although Dundee’s cavalry eventually succeeds in executing Charriba, French forces repel his army from Mexico, eliciting a configuration where the principles of Wilsonian self-determination and American empire are denied co-existence. If the prospect of defeat by French troops nullifies Dundee’s efforts at disseminating Global Meliorist tenets to Mexico, the siren song of a captured American flag exhibits the humiliation of the tough-minded Jacksonianism which incurred his punitive expedition. Moved and appalled by the sight of an American flag possessed by France’s army, Tyreen forgoes his Confederate allegiances by

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wresting this patriotic symbol from the enemy, only to be shot in the stomach and forced to distract French troops in a final gesture of martyrdom. Fittingly, Dundee’s return to an America grieving the assassinated Lincoln renders his revenge mission and support for Mexican independence bathetic, an anti-climax connotative of Vietnam’s political incoherence. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), a narrative deemed in a 1999 article by the Film Studies theorist David Cook (quoted in Matheson 2013, 225) as expressive of the “issues of violence in American society and American foreign policy”, fragments Mead’s kaleidoscope further. Like Major Dundee, the first scenes of Peckinpah’s iconic Mexico Western elucidate the spectre of a culture war. Peckinpah opens his picture in the vanishing desert spaces of 1911, introducing a landscape which bears the homogenising imprimatur of industrialisation and the forces of moral and cultural reaction. He additionally couples this subtext with coded references to an indiscriminate violence relevant to The Wild Bunch’s 1969 release year. One of gang leader Pike Bishop’s first sights upon his arrival in a small Texas frontier town is of a group of children enthralled by a battle between a scorpion and ant nest, a grotesque spectacle depicted in unflinching close-up shots. The fight between the ants and scorpion, which is later capped with a shot of the ant nest being immolated, invokes an aura of desensitisation deriving from American violence at home and abroad. The atmosphere of division resulting from this desensitised aura manifests in Bishop’s robbery of a railroad office. Bishop’s robbery occurs against the backdrop of a temperance parade, a mise en scene which sees lawlessness quintessential of the late 1960s refracted by a conservative backlash synergetic with Middle America and Nixon’s silent majority. This battle between agitation and authority materialises cathartically in a subsequent shootout, where the deaths of numerous civilians and various members of Bishop’s own gang invite allegorical interpretation. Slotkin (1992, 598), who applies the resonance of the shootout on a holistic basis to US foreign and domestic policy, judges the carnage as emblematic of “the urban battles of Tet, and of Detroit and Newark”. The relevance of ‘Tet’, or more broadly the backdrop of Vietnam, increases throughout Peckinpah’s film at the expense of its domestic allegory. Its narrative employment of Mexico returns to and heightens the collisions of foreign policy introduced by Major Dundee, playing on imagery symbolic of America’s diplomatic schizophrenia. This is above all

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foregrounded in the bunch’s perceived affinity with the peasant family of Mexican gang member Angel. Bishop and his men come to sympathise with Angel’s family and their village’s plight at the hands of vicious Mexican general Mapache. Yet Angel’s jealous killing of Mapache’s girlfriend Teresa, a woman formerly romantically involved with him, precludes deliverance from this tyranny. This murder confines Bishop to a political triangulation analogous with Dundee’s alternating military goals. His gang is compelled to steal American armaments for Mapache as compensation for the murder of Teresa, a Faustian pact which torments and depresses Angel. In an exchange of dialogue which follows a series of hedonistic rituals at Mapache’s palace, Bishop contemplates using the money gained from the robberies as compensation for Mexico’s benighted peasants, a compromise solution which bears resemblance to America’s political contortions in Vietnam. Angel, who wholly rejects the idea, invokes the Viet Cong’s repudiation of what Slotkin conceives as “a classically liberal solution, akin to the peace process offered by Lyndon Johnson in his Johns Hopkins address of April 1965, in which the North Vietnamese and VC were to give over their revolution in exchange for a massive program of American economic aid” (ibid., 602). Johnson’s flawed synthesis of Global Meliorist methodology alongside Jacksonian militarism has been interpreted in The Wild Bunch’s climax, which, as in its opening sequence, deconstructs the caprice of American political life through a mass shootout. Peckinpah prefaces the allegorical power of this shootout with a plot development which emphasises the unwieldy synthesis of realism and idealism prevalent from the early stages of the Vietnam conflict, a cognitive dissonance which specifically applies to the United States’ collusion with South Vietnam’s pro-American dictatorship. After the completion of the weapons theft, Bishop and his men return to find Angel tortured and humiliated by Mapache as punishment for securing ammunition for his townspeople. A rapid succession of events associable with American diplomacy in Southeast Asia emerges when Angel has his throat cut by Mapache. In a perceivable allusion to the American-sponsored assassination of President Diem in 1963, the South Vietnamese dictator long supported by the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations, Bishop shoots Mapache to avenge Angel and atone for the de facto dictator’s abuses. The fin de regime connotations of Mapache’s death are not celebrated by the impoverished peasantry so familiar to Angel, reflecting a Viet Cong political sensibility which treasured sovereignty over Global Meliorism.

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This repudiation of a paternalistic internationalism manifests in the village’s acquiescence with the deaths of almost all of Bishop’s gang, a tragedy allegoric of the false American belief that reform could coexist with militarism. Slotkin writes on the myopic thinking and naiveté implicit in the bunch’s wipeout, an encapsulation of “the failure to understand the power and complexity of the political culture in the South no less than in the North” (ibid., 610). There is also a broader emphasis on a schizophrenic unity of Jacksonian violence and reformist Wilsonianism, ill-­ conceived and ill-applied by American policymakers abroad. The films in American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy could be said to variously reinforce, observe and scrutinise the complex patterns of diplomacy cited in these case studies from the Classical and New Hollywood eras, alternately synchronising and disassembling relationships between Mead’s schools. Much of this configuration of foreign policy, I argue, is dependent on the period of release. The second chapter of this book, for example, assesses satirical and action-orientated films from the Clinton years, an epoch underpinned by a presidential administration which vaunted the fruits of American globalisation and political moderation. Films explored in this chapter tend to adhere to this outlook, finding attractive fashions of reconciliation and rapprochement. A decade later, select pictures encompass comparatively schismatic renditions of American statecraft, allegorising the imperial overstretch incurred as a result of American military expenditure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chapter 5 evaluates this contrasting mise en scene by using two Revisionist Westerns to gauge implications of ‘collapsing scenery’ surrounding the George W. Bush administration. Much of these analyses are undergirded with contextualisation on corresponding developments within Hollywood’s production context, touching on the accords and fallouts which occurred between studio heads and the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. In this regard, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy functions as a chronicle of the cultural and industrial changes that political tumult has wrought on American filmmakers over the past twenty-five years. It is the interrogation of an amassing trend of political allegory, however, which forms the central part of my examination of this recent history. Spanning from the explicitness of gritty war pictures to the nebulous coding of independent productions, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy posits that the increasing presence of allegory has anchored a cinematic discourse adjusting to and broaching critique of American

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foreign policy contradiction. The impact of the 9/11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror has commonly been attributed as a source of this acceleration of allegory, a shift explicated by a plethora of Film Studies academics. To Frances Pheasant-Kelly (2013, 2–3), the hauntingly, seemingly ahistorical memory of the pre-9/11 world encouraged alternatively “oblique meditations of 9/11”, with gradual commentary on “environmental catastrophes, and economic recession becoming discernible across a range of genres”. Pheasant-Kelly substantiates this claim through detailed analysis of fantasy and comic book franchises such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and Christopher Nolan’s cycle of Batman ‘reboots’, films which could be termed “dark and nihilistic and invariably espouse a subtext of death” (ibid., 7.) In a fashion similar to how “the noir films of the 1940s and 1950s emerged from the political instabilities of the Second World War and the Cold War”, “the darkness of post-9/11 cinema … encapsulates the contemporary zeitgeist” (ibid., 7). Terence McSweeney exemplifies this expansive reading of post-9/11 allegory’s potential by comparing symbolic pictures from the 2000s with more literal-minded apprehensions of the War on Terror. Listing genre archetypes which range from the ‘torture porn’ horror of Hostel (2005) to historical drama in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), he stresses allegory’s ability to “function as a site of sustained and interrogative discourse on the era” and underline “vivid encapsulations of the prevailing ideological debates of the decade” (McSweeney 2014, 20–21). The achievements of allegorical filmmaking surpassed reverential dramatisations of recent history such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) and the Jonathan Franzen adaptation Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011). These films’ sole focus on the immediate drama of the September 11 attacks eliminated the imagination borne by political allusion through their attempt to “reify 9/11 as an almost ahistorical moment”, “providing an elaborate erasure of political and historical context” (ibid., 20–21). Douglas Kellner, like McSweeney, expresses approval of the possibilities of allegorical cinema, but he differs in viewing the encoding of political disquisition as a comprehensive phenomenon, capable of transcending confines of explicit narrative and subject matter. In Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era, Kellner (2010, 27) interprets a “transcoding” of “the political discourses of the era” across a range of genres, including conservative films that echoed “Bush and Cheney discourses on foreign policy and militarism”, liberal productions

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that were “critical of Bush-Cheney foreign policy”, and pictures that were noticeably unpartisan. Kellner views the third type as typified by more symbolic fare such as the Revisionist Western and literary adaptation No Country for Old Men (explored in Chap. 5), which formed an example of a picture “multilayered, and open to multiple readings” (ibid., 27). It is in this space, one implicitly of ambivalence, where meaning and political debate proves most rife. Yet this novel category ranks lower in importance than Kellner’s emphasis on an American cinema where contemporaneous partisan rivalries are reified, updating his and Michael Ryan’s 1988 work Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. In that collaboration, the authors posit that films of the Reagan era as different as E.T. (1982) and Salvador (1986) act as “cultural forces at work in contradiction to the hegemonic conservative bloc” (Kellner and Ryan 1988, 12). Likewise, the overall picture painted by Kellner in Cinema Wars is one of a Hollywood environment consisting of a constructive hyperpartisanship. He describes a “contested terrain that reproduces existing social struggles” (Kellner 2010, 2). He also praises 2000s Hollywood cinema as “comparable to the so-called Hollywood Renaissance of the late 1960s and 1970s” (the New Hollywood period), owing to the “surprisingly many critical films that engage with the issues of the day” (ibid., 2). Other scholars of cinematic allegory during the post-9/11 era, however, have been sceptical about its ideological intentions and the healthy combativeness Kellner purports as part of its cultural content. David Holloway posits that mainstream American films which address the War on Terror subordinate politics to the primacy of spectacle, resulting in a shallowness which merely rationalises American intervention abroad. Evaluating pictures as individually distinctive as Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), he cites the prevalence of “an allegory lite”, where “controversial issues can be safely addressed because they can be ‘read off’ stories by the viewer … the other attractions on offer are sufficiently compelling or diverse, that the viewer can enjoy the film without needing to engage at all” (Holloway 2008, 90). The allegorical quality therefore becomes nullified by the requisite spectacle provided by Hollywood filmmakers, neutralising dissent in favour of a marketable centrism. Guy Westwell also perceives this centrism, but instead views it as integral to all forms of mainstream Hollywood engagement, irrespective of spectacle. Popular American film, whether allegorical or literal, seeks

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“hegemonic reconciliation between politically irreconcilable positions” (Westwell 2014, 94). A picture such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where the traumatised state of post-9/11 New York is juxtaposed with an American grandfather’s painful memories of bombing Dresden, builds on “folklore that allows 9/11 to be phrased in a redemptive way”, showing how the “allegorical dimension may license an aggressive and expansive foreign policy” (ibid., 95).

The Competing Schools of Methodology Regarding Allegory What typifies my approach to allegory? Do Hollywood films which serve this function portray and encode partisanships which engender helpful political catharsis, as Pheasant-Kelly, McSweeney and Kellner hypothesise? Or are they, as Holloway and Westwell imply, just pragmatic brokers of political disputation, hollow fig leaves of soft power which shield militarist neoconservative agendas? There are merits and shortcomings to both these schools of thought. The former model deftly considers the amorphous dimension of allegory, gauging its presence in a variety of genres and popular cinema franchises. I fundamentally agree with Kellner’s understanding that allegorical meaning lies beyond the ambit of science fiction and fantasy films, becoming something of indeterminate character. Yet Pheasant-Kelly, McSweeney and Kellner dwell less on the possibility that allegory can ratify, as well as critique, dominant hegemonic ideas surrounding American statecraft, largely focusing on films which perform as ‘counter-narratives’. Holloway and Westwell’s arguments, on the other hand, while perceptive, foreclose the chance that any form of allegory can serve a subversive role, painting as centrist swathes of American cinema that can be seen by others to deliver critique. The position of American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy is that the allegorical phenomenon is variable in its political purpose, sometimes favouring Westwell’s label of “hegemonic reconciliation”, on other occasions championing images more critical. The dramatic shift from the pro-­ American war films released in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to the hard-bitten political tastes of a cycle of late 2000s blockbuster and independent films reveals a diverse cinematic landscape. Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down (both 2001), which are the subject of analysis in the latter half of Chap. 3, illustrate a different outlook to late Bush and

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early Obama era allegorical pictures that include There Will be Blood (2007), The Dark Knight (2008) and Avatar (2009). Invoking a key case study exposes the limits of the hyperpartisan framework for deciphering coded political meaning. Three Kings, a film which explores the fallout from the end of the First Gulf War, displays political inflections which go beyond a mere critique of George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. The early scenes of David O. Russell’s film evidence a social liberalism and scrutiny of American hegemonic might redolent of the countercultural comedy M*A*S*H* (1970), showcased in vulgar, satirical vignettes where US troops celebrate the end of a war fought for stability over human rights. Withstanding this commentary, Three Kings’s second act presents problems more ‘Clintonian’ in manifestation, depicting an intervention by four US troops which possesses synergy with the liberal interventions of the late 1990s. Tropes of American-led globalisation further cement the film’s relevance for both Bush’s Realpolitik and the Clinton era’s Pax Americana, providing a comprehensive glance at problems concomitant with realism, idealism and the neoliberalism rationalised in the wake of America’s post-Cold War windfall. A methodological approach orientated around alternating dichotomies, pioneered by Film Studies scholars who detect political meaning in Hollywood films, influences and inflects the analyses in this book. Ian Scott (2011, 20–21) interprets Hollywood political films as likelier to consider “the key ideological tensions at the heart of the republic” alongside endorsements of “liberalism and democracy”. This dichotomous vision is encompassed within the work of the Film Studies academic Michael Coyne, who uses juxtapositions originally fashioned by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to frame his research field. Conditioned by a series of “paradoxes” listed by Schlesinger, American films with political content assimilate conflicting dynamics that were “at the heart of American history, society and culture” (Coyne 2008, 12). Schlesinger’s list (quoted in Coyne 2008, 12) is cited below: . Experiment versus Ideology 1 2. Equality versus Tolerance of Inequality 3. Order versus Violence 4. Conformity versus Diversity 5. Materialism versus Idealism 6. America as ‘Redeemer Nation’ versus America as One Nation Among Many.

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Coyne (2008, 9) briefly mentions the existence of these dichotomies in films “expressly political in content without being chiefly set in the realm of US politics”, including Casablanca (1942) and 12 Angry Men (1957). Yet both his and Scott’s methodology is heavily diegetic in its predominant discussion of pictures containing only explicit political content and set within the mainland United States. Scott (2011, 16) draws attention to representations with “very direct settings, characters and/or references to politicians, political institutions and political history”, while Coyne (2008, 9) stipulates that films with “political subtexts” are “of only tangential pertinence” compared to the prioritisation of “film narratives chiefly about American politics”. Both Coyne’s employment of Schlesinger’s dichotomies and Scott’s perception of a multifarious political landscape parallel a list of conflicting American principles delineated by Samuel Huntingdon. Echoing Scott’s view of a divide between America’s democratic ideals and the bathos of its political shortcomings, Huntingdon (2014, 297) specifies a discrepancy between “American ideals” and “American institutions”. He further highlights a gap between what he called the American populace’s “liberal, democratic individualistic, and egalitarian values” and states of “national cognitive dissonance, which they have attempted to relieve through various combinations of moralism, cynicism, complacency and hypocrisy” (ibid., 297). The list below eventually extends these societal divisions into the realm of America’s foreign policy, illuminating rivalries analogous to the postulations of Schlesinger (ibid., 311): Self-interest versus ideals Power versus morality Realism versus utopianism Pragmatism versus principle Historical realism versus rationalist idealism Washington versus Wilson Much of the films in American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy mirror Huntingdon’s blurring of the line between foreign and domestic policy, encapsulating interplays applicable to both America’s domestic mise en scene and the International Relations landscape. The American President (1995), a satirical drama which opens the analysis of this book’s second chapter, introduces a Clintonian figure attempting to square the liberal and conservative divides of Congress through a crime bill which appeals to

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both Republicans and Democrats. Later scenes bring this trope of triangulation into the realm of foreign policy, exuding an oddly portentous commentary on the more febrile scenarios of the Clinton presidency. This rendering of both the foreign and domestic dimension is most symbolically reflected in the Coen Brothers’ Revisionist Western No Country for Old Men. A film I deem central in accelerating the role of allegory in mainstream American cinema, No Country for Old Men’s nihilistic getaway narrative is set in the West Texas of 1980, a conservative milieu which can be read as a condemnation of the neoliberalism incarnated in Reagan’s presidency. But numerous scenes also broach a foreign policy subtext, namely through images of gang violence which appear proximate to the scenes of sectarian carnage plaguing Iraq during Bush’s second term. Conventional separations between the foreign and domestic in the politics of American cinema are therefore hard to underline, catering to broad and allusive interpretations. Hollywood film has moreover portrayed Huntingdon’s gulfs within American statecraft, connoting intra-administration rivalries and a cognitive dissonance within contemporaneous US governments. Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch serve this allegorical purpose, showcasing disconnects between the Jacksonian sphere of America’s conduct in the Vietnam War (principally foregrounded in figures such as United States Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay and General William Westmoreland) and the adherence to a Global Meliorist outlook (evinced in the various token gestures of Lyndon Johnson towards the Hanoi government). Casablanca (1942), a film released soon after America’s entry into the Second World War, illustrates the limitations of confining the attribution of political symbolism in motion pictures to broad, societal rivalries, rather than intra-administration ones. The divergence between the views of film critic Richard Corliss and film historian Richard Raskin conveys the allegorical fluidity of Michael Curtiz’s classic romantic drama. Casablanca follows the exploits of Casablanca nightclub owner and American expatriate Rick Blaine, a narrative arc which signals a sense of comity with the United States’ very recent entry into the war against fascism. Blaine’s proprietorship of an upscale gambling den hides a past of gunrunning to forces opposed to the revanchist ambitions of fascist Italy and Spain in the 1930s. The drama of Blaine’s chance meeting with former lover, Ilsa Lund, and the eventual protection of Ilsa and Czech fugitive husband Victor Laszlo from Vichy French forces, were viewed in a 1973 article by

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Corliss (quoted in Raskin 1990, 157) as allegoric of America’s journey from isolationism to internationalism: President Roosevelt (‘casa blanca’ is Spanish for ‘white house’), a man who gambles on the odds of going to war until circumstance and his own submerged nobility force him to do so (read: partisan politics) and commit himself—first by financing the Side of Right and then by fighting for it. The time of the film’s actions (December 1941) adds credence to this view, as does the irrelevant fact that, two months after Casablanca opened, Roosevelt (Rick) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Lazlo) met for a war conference in Casablanca.

Raskin responds to this broad interpretation with research based on the American government’s conflicted policies towards Vichy France. The setting of Casablanca, which of course belonged to Vichy France’s empire, augurs a symbolism which stresses clashes of realism/idealism occurring within the Roosevelt administration, conveying an allegorical meaning less heroic than Corliss’s reading of a triumph over partisan self-interest and provincial isolationism. Raskin (1990, 153) points out that the United States maintained relations with Vichy France until 1942, a decision of Realpolitik testified when Roosevelt “strengthened US ties to Vichy by elevating American representation to the full ambassadorial level”. Raskin goes on to describe “the withholding of official recognition by the State Department and White House” of the Free French forces, along with the administration “denying De Gaulle’s organization the slightest moral prestige”, factors which meant that the film’s political resonance stemmed more from “the central role of the Vichy/Free French polarity” than the “isolationalism/involvement interpretation” (ibid., 157). The case studies in American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy allegorise similar elements of intra-administration contradiction, a friction justified by literature from International Relations theorists and historians of diplomacy who have covered the vicissitudes of America’s post-Cold War hegemony. Andrew Bacevich, whose analyses are invoked throughout this book, acerbically remarks on the mercurialness of President Clinton’s foreign policies, typified in the 1999 military intervention in Kosovo. Deriding the left’s anti-war stances during the Vietnam War and the muted reaction by progressives inside and outside the Clinton administration, he perceives how the “reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960s has given way to a more nuanced view … progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda” (Bacevich

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2005, 25). This shift in political configuration is well encapsulated by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke (2004, 97), who comment on Clinton’s “migration from idealism to Realpolitik”. Chapter 2 of this book, which explores the subtext of Clintonian triangulation in mainstream Hollywood cinema, draws on this shifting kaleidoscope of foreign policy disposition. The majority of subsequent chapters evaluate films released during George W. Bush’s presidency, a period conditioned by emphases on the virtues of preemptive war, democracy promotion and American economic preponderance. The first two of these facets were characterised in the National Security Strategy of 2002 (George W.  Bush Whitehouse archives n.d.), which promised synthetic aims to “champion aspirations for human dignity” and “prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies, and our friends with weapons of mass destruction”. The concepts of theorists as distinct as the ‘end of history’ prognosticator Francis Fukuyama and the foreign policy analyst Anne-Marie Slaughter are applied to American films which premise this unwieldy dichotomy of human rights and preemptive warfare, encompassing the pictures No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood and The Dark Knight. For all the cognitive dissonance of the liberal interventionist and neoconservative tenets which drove American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, the text which has so far most aligned US statecraft with Hollywood cinema adopts an approach based largely on singularity. Cynthia Weber’s International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (2013, 2) employs Hollywood case studies as illustrations of “IR myths” and the “building blocks of IR theory”. The Science Fiction blockbuster Independence Day (1996) is defined as a “neo-idealist tale of international cooperation in the post-Cold War era” (ibid., 51). It is a fitting categorisation in a book which presents a cinema which reifies ideology rather than deconstructs it—various chapters deal with material besides IR philosophies, such as realism, idealism and constructivism, comprising consideration of ‘gender’ and ‘environmentalism’ as integral cinematic subtexts. It is the normalisation of IR theory and myths, however, which forms the crux of Weber’s thematic engagement. Weber posits that examples of Hollywood cinema make IR theories and myths “appear to be true” (ibid., 2). Cinema plays a role in turning diplomatic ideas into a widely accepted reality, because “IR theory relies upon IR myths in order to transform its culturally produced stories about the world into common sense about the world that we take for granted” (ibid., 4).

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Readers of Weber’s book are thus taught that cinema texts ratify understandings of ideologies such as globalisation and anarchism, disseminating easily accessible messages for mainstream American viewers. Although intended primarily as an educational tool and not a polemic against what Weber perceives as a homogenous ideological grounding in Hollywood, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction has much in common with Weber’s 2006 book Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film. This text explores a series of films spanning the early 2000s, focusing on militaristic depictions in Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down (both 2001), but also the surveillance culture in the science fiction thriller Minority Report (2002). Weber (2006, 6–8) argues that this cycle of films provides both “episodes of humanitarian intervention” and “justified vengeance”, collectively informing “how a moral America casts its character and constructs its interpretative code for understanding itself”. Despite the cognitive dissonance implied in the combination of “humanitarian intervention” and “justified vengeance”, Weber critiques a Hollywood output of rehabilitative character, portending Westwell’s theorisation of a “hegemonic reconciliation”. Weber notes how trauma inculcates a championing of US hegemonic might in multiple films released in the wake of 9/11; yet I would contend that even the most propagandistic pictures, which in many cases fall under Weber’s scope of analysis, can purvey tropes of political contradiction. Tears of the Sun (2003), an action picture which concludes the analysis of this book’s third chapter, is a picture underpinned by the melding of political fissures. Antoine Fuqua’s film revolves around a U.S. Navy SEAL team’s rescue mission in Nigeria, a mission catalysed in importance by the endangerment of Dr Lena Fiore Kendricks, a US citizen and widowed daughter-in-law of an American senator. The Global Meliorist connotations of American rapport with the developing world fuse with the War on Terror inflected depiction of the Muslim villains, who are engaged in an insurrection against Nigeria’s Christian rulers. Ideas of American benevolence alternate with subtexts of a Manichean war against all, signalling contrived reciprocities between a neoconservative mentality of Wilsonian liberation and a parochial perception of the post-9/11 world order. The films to be explored express these discrepancies, a heterogeneity of political complexion matched by my multifarious understanding of what constitutes allegorical meaning. So far, I have introduced a milieu which encompasses fully allegorical films (No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood)

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from the late 2000s and ‘literal-minded’ pictures from the 1990s and early 2000s (Three Kings, Behind Enemy Lines). Although I posit that the political facets of American film have become increasingly allegorical in response to events such as 9/11 and the Iraq War, I also propose the caveat that binary separations of ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’ film (a dichotomy hinted at by Scott and Coyne) deprive us of nuanced ways of underlining political symbolism. Definite ‘markers’ which separate allegorical, subtly inflected films from pictures which deal with literal political diegesis are hard to establish when multiple films straddle both these categories. Syriana (2005), a picture focalised in Chap. 4 of this book, evinces such fluidity. Stephen Gaghan’s geopolitical thriller follows the politics of oil through interwoven narrative strands featuring stories of terrorism, corporate greed and gestures of political reform. On the surface, these arcs concern American predations for oil and its corruption of policies at home and abroad. Yet they purvey a coded meaning for contemporaneous US policy during the Iraq War, invoking clashing interpretations of Hamiltonian mercantilism and soft power. The competing aims of Bryan Woodman, an energy analyst who urges an Arab kingdom to adopt progressive reform, and the Realpolitik of the CIA, present a fragmenting of Mead’s kaleidoscope synergetic with the George W. Bush administration’s contradictory diplomacy. Film Studies methodologists who have studied allegory nevertheless champion an approach which values marriage between the ‘volume’ of political content contained in a film and the subtle associations that can made by the viewer. Christensen and Haas typify this by championing balance between categories of political content and intent. They argue that “audiences may understandably recoil from movies that combine heavy doses of both political context and ideological cant” but also posit that peripheral films which use politics “as a convenient ploy to invoke other themes” seem “marginal at best” (Haas and Christensen 2005, 8–9). Ernst Giglio contests this system through a hierarchy which favours the “political message” over content. Giglio (2004, 53–54) queries how “audiences would be able to sort out the more significant messages from the less important ones” and contemplates the “significance of the political message among other material in the film”. Deriding a focus on a “quantity standard for the political material in a film”, Giglio instead proposes dividing films into categories of “intent” and “effect”. In the former category belongs patently non-allegorical pictures such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016:

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Obama’s America (2012). The latter bracket of ‘effect’ involves a broader array of pictures, alternating between transparent and ambiguous messages. Transparent pictures include Brokeback Mountain (2005), Milk (2008) and The Kids Are Alright (2010). Giglio views the comedy-drama Forrest Gump (1994) and Charlie Chapman’s A King in New York (1957) as films which elicit “ambiguous interpretations” (ibid., 58). Although Giglio notes that “the political rests in the eye of the beholder rather than any textbook definition” (ibid., 65), his methodology still gives weight to the quality of explicitness—the detection of effect requires assessing a film’s level of politicisation on the basis of how much it provokes audiences and critics, a measurement which favours literal political diegesis. It is his gauging of viewer and audience response, rather than his outlook on narrative and mise en scene, which betrays Giglio’s emphasis on a symbolic cinema which somehow retains non-allegorical characteristics. I judge the allegorical phenomenon to have more sources of causation than political intention and audience reaction, a sensibility corroborated by James Combs and Adam Lowenstein. Combs (1993, 7) cites the importance of analysing films whether for “overt or covert political meaning” and argues that the viewing experience entails “the unobservable process of political learning, the acquisition of ideas and images which in diffuse, long-term, and often unconscious ways affect people’s attitude towards politics”. Lowenstein’s 2005 book Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film (quoted in McSweeney 2014, 21) echoes this almost synesthetic perspective by stressing the salience of “allegorical moments”, which entail “a shocking collision of film, spectator and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted and intertwined”. From the symbols of American soft power in Team America: World Police to the immolated oil derrick in There Will be Blood, this is the understanding of allegory which underpins my analysis. The chapter structure below underlines allegory’s increasing emergence and indicates that each chapter is framed either by the opinion of a political scientist, foreign policy historian or International Relations theorist, contextualising the thematic orientation of the films to be examined. Chapter 2, ‘Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic Presidency’, stresses mainstream Hollywood’s role in coming to terms with the political manoeuvrings of the Clinton presidency. Beginning with a quote on the Clinton administration’s synthetic governing style by

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political theorist Stephen Skowronek, this chapter postulates that the Hollywood of the 1990s adopted tropes which translated the Clinton administration’s tactics of ‘triangulation’ into the diplomatic realm. It achieves this through focalising a series of films which in some way draw attention to necessary adaptations in the American presidency, encompassing The American President, Independence Day, Air Force One (1997) and Wag the Dog (1997). It posits that a unilateral idealism is central to the politics of these productions and their purveyance of foreign policy ‘corollaries’ to the Clinton administration’s domestic preemptions of American conservatism. Chapter 3, ‘Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-Century War Film and the Millenarian Remaking of Global Meliorism’, foregrounds the role of David O. Russell’s 1999 satire Three Kings in implying an updating of the welfarist internationalism applied under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The second half of this chapter features analyses of the post-9/11 war pictures Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down, which both look back on the liberal interventions of the 1990s as symptomatic of an intersection of Global Meliorism and unilateralism. I contend that the rushed releases of these films refracted memories of the 1990s in a way which facilitated the dramatic departures of George W. Bush’s neoconservative agenda, licensing volatile shifts with notions of bipartisan precedent. This chapter finishes with the proposition that this semblance of consensus was spoiled by 2003’s Tears of the Sun, a picture with celebrations of militarised Global Meliorism affinitive with the Bush administration’s electoral coalition. Chapter 4, ‘Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in Cinematic Engagements With the War on Terror’, examines productions which muddy Joseph Nye Jr.’s dichotomy of hard and soft power and demonstrate the challenges facing a centrist alternative to the Bush administration’s War on Terror. The failure of ‘soft power’ values is underlined in productions such as the urban drama 25th Hour (2002) and the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Team America: World Police, however, forms the centrepiece of this synergy through its allusions to the contrivances involved in attaining a palatable variant of Nye’s idea of ‘smart power’. Batman Begins and Syriana (both 2005) reinforce stronger feelings of dissensus surrounding the cultivation of smart power, broaching schisms raised by American diplomacy and, in the case of the former film, heightening the potential of allegory as a way of delineating foreign policy contradiction.

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Chapter 5, ‘Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal Occupation in No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood’, juxtaposes criticism on the nation-building dimension of neoconservatism by Francis Fukuyama with the contrasting allegories of two Revisionist Westerns. I argue that the Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson, who respectively directed No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, reify neoconservatism’s pernicious relationship with neoliberalism. Ultimately, this chapter emphasises how the return of the Revisionist Western in the late 2000s serves to mirror a toxic fragmentation of Mead’s kaleidoscope and speaks to the failed diffusion of free markets evident in the War on Terror. Chapter 6, ‘Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to Liberal Internationalist Failure’, evaluates two late 2000s blockbusters which typify the arrival of allegorical critique in mainstream Hollywood cinema and present colliding diplomatic interests. Central to this analysis is the spectre of a backlash against the Wilsonian and Global Meliorist ideologies exploited by neoconservatives, a subject explored by the foreign policy analyst Anne-Marie Slaughter and the historian Walter McDougall. The Dark Knight and Avatar portray collisions of hard and soft power, as well as realism and idealism, which match the cognitive dissonance illustrated in the late stages of George W. Bush’s presidency. The limits of a militarised liberal internationalism manifest in each of these films, resonating with the multilateral realism championed in Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory. Finally, Chapter 7, ‘Stasis: the Continuation of Contradiction in the Age of Malaise and Populism’, looks back on the findings of the earlier chapters and concludes that fragmentation and collision have been maintained, a stance corroborated by a cycle of independent and mainstream films released in the 2010s. These pictures, which appeared during the late stages of Obama’s presidency, echo remarks by Andrew Bacevich on the interminability of American militarism and reinforce states of diplomatic incompatibility. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) normalises a foreign policy cognitive dissonance through the viewpoint of a child growing up in the 2000s, while Captain America: Civil War (2016) comments on disjunctions relatable to the Obama era. Contrastingly, the comic book adaptations Black Panther (2018) and Joker (2019) signal how evocations of contradiction have become entwined with the racial tensions and socioeconomic rivalries provoked by Trump, portending more ideologically charged cinematic incarnations of International Relations dichotomies.

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Notes 1. Out of all of Mead’s schools, only the Jacksonian has been systematically applied to Hollywood cinema in research. In ‘The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture’, Gearóid Ó Tuathail discusses the prevalence of the Jacksonian in Behind Enemy Lines, a 2001 war film concerned with a unilateral intervention in Bosnia. He cites the film as a “Jacksonian storyline”, due to tropes which emphasise “remasculinisation through the transcendence of trial and tribulation” (Ó Tuathail 2005, 358–359). Engagements with the Jacksonian are further evident in Carter and Dodd’s 2011 article ‘Hollywood and the “War on Terror”: Genre-Geopolitics and “Jacksonianism” in The Kingdom’, which builds on Ó Tuathail’s readings. The two authors judge Peter Berg’s war film as part of a cinematic milieu “that closely adhered to the Jacksonian perspective on international affairs” (Carter and Dodd 2011, 110). Ó Tuathail’s observations return in the second half of Chap. 3. 2. Robert Joseph Gowen (1973, 133) writes on the refusal of Ho Chi Minh’s request for Vietnamese independence, a sobering result for the nationalist leader’s “first significant foray into the international arena”. Ho’s appeals, although “couched in Wilsonian language”, failed to forestall Wilson’s capitulation to the empires of Britain and France (ibid., 133).

References Ambrosius, Lloyd E. 2007. Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American Democracy and International Relations. Diplomacy & Statecraft 18 (4): 689–718. Bacevich, Andrew. 2005. The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War. New York: Oxford University Press. Baxter, Monique James. 2005. Giant Helps America Recognize the Costs of Discrimination: A Lesson of World War II. In Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’ Connor, 160–172. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Benbow, Mark E. 2010. Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning’. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9 (4): 509–533. Carter, Sean, and Klaus Dodds. 2011. Hollywood and the ‘War on Terror’: Genre-­ geopolitics and ‘Jacksonianism’ in The Kingdom. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (1): 98–113. Christensen, Terry, and Peter J. Haas. 2005. Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Films. Armonk, North Castle, New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc.

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Combs, James. 1993. Introduction: Understanding the Politics of Movies. In Movies and Politics: The Dynamic Relationship, ed. James Combs, 3–26. New York City and London: Garland Publishing. Coyne, Michael. 1997. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. London and New York City: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2008. Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen. London: Reaktion Books. George W. Bush Whitehouse archives. n.d. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ nsc/nssall.html. Accessed 16 July 2019. Giglio, Ernst. 2004. Searching for the Political Film. In Hollywood Raises Political Consciousness: Political Messages in Feature Films, ed. Michael Haas, 47–66. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Gowen, Robert Joseph. 1973. Ho Chi Minh in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: A Documentary Footnote. International Studies 12 (1): 133–137. Halper, Stefan, and Jonathan Clarke. 2004. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holloway, David. 2008. 9/11 and the War on Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Huntingdon, Samuel. 2014. American Ideals versus American Institutions. In American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays, ed. G.  John Ikenberry and Peter L. Trubowitz, 7th ed., 297–322. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2010. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-­ Cheney Era. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. King, Geoff. 2002. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New  York City: I.B. Tauris. Matheson, Sue. 2013. When You Side With a Man, You Stay With Him! – Philia and the Military Mind in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). In Love in Western Film and Television: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails, ed. Sue Matheson, 235–257. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McDougall, Walter A. 1997. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With The World Since 1776. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. McSweeney, Terence. 2014. The ‘War on Terror’ and American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mead, Walter. 2001. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Abingdon: Routledge. Medved, Michael. 1993. Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Nelson, Andrew Patrick. 2015. Still In the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969–1980. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs.

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Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. 2005. Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture. Geopolitics 10 (2): 356–377. Pheasant-Kelly, Frances. 2013. Fantasy Film Post-9/11. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Raskin, Richard. 1990. Casablanca and United States Foreign Policy. Film History 4 (2): 153–164. Reilly, Kaitlin. 2017. These Are The Most Extraordinary Speeches From The Women’s March. Last modified January 22, 2017. https://www.refinery29. com/en-gb/2017/01/137289/best-womens-march-speeches-quotes. Ruiz, Michelle. 2017. The Most Inspiring Moments From the Speeches at the Women’s March on Washington. Vogue, January 21, 2017. https://www. vogue.com/article/best-moments-speeches-womens-march. Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. 1988. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. San Diego Free Press. 2017. From the Women’s March on Washington: Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles. Last modified January 17. https://sandiegofreepress.org/2017/01/womens-march-washington-guiding-vision-definition-principles/#.XXJjgyhKjIU. Sanchez, Ray. 2017. Here’s What Celebrities and Activists Said in Fiery Women’s March Speeches. CNN, January 21. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/21/ politics/womens-march-speeches/index.html. Scott, Ian. 2011. American Politics in Hollywood Film. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shaw, Tony. 2009. Hollywood’s Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 2001. Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality. American Literary History 13 (3): 469–498. The Economist editorial. 2010. Seven Questions for Walter Russell Mead, January 16. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2010/01/16/ seven-questions-for-walter-russell-mead. Trump, Donald. 2017. The Inaugural Address. Whitehouse.gov. Last modified January 20. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/theinaugural-address/. Weber, Cynthia. 2006. Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2013. International Relations Theory: An Introduction. 4th ed. Hove: Psychology Press. Westwell, Guy. 2014. Parallel Lines: Post 9/11 American Cinema. New  York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, Peter. 2011. Idealism in International Relations. In Encyclopedia of Power, ed. Keith Dowding, 3–26. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications.

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Filmography Air Force One. 1997. Directed by Wolfgang Peterson. USA: Columbia Pictures. All the Young Men. 1960. Directed by Hall Bartlett. USA: Columbia Pictures. The American President. 1995. Directed by Rob Reiner. USA: Sony Pictures. Avatar. 2009. Directed by James Cameron. USA: 20th Century Fox. Bataan. 1943. Directed by Tay Garnett. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Batman Begins. 2005. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Behind Enemy Lines. 2001. Directed by John Moore. USA: 20th Century Fox. The Birth of a Nation. 1915. Directed by D.W. Griffith. USA: Epoch Producing Co. Black Hawk Down. 2001. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Columbia Pictures. Black Panther. 2018. Directed by Ryan Coogler. USA: Walt Disney Studios. Born on the Fourth of July. 1989. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Universal Pictures. Boyhood. 2014. Directed by Richard Linklater. USA: IFC Films. Brokeback Mountain. 2005. Directed by Ang Lee. USA: Focus Features. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. 1969. Directed by George Roy Hill. USA: 20th Century Fox. Captain America: Civil War. 2016. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. USA: Walt Disney Studios. Casablanca. 1942. Directed by Michael Curtiz. USA: Warner Bros. The Dark Knight. 2008. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Die Hard. 1988. Directed by John McTiernan. USA: 20th Century Fox. Dinner at Eight. 1933. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Dirty Dozen. 1967. Directed by Robert Aldrich. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. 2011. Directed by Stephen Daldry. USA: Warner Bros. Fahrenheit 9/11. 2004. Directed by Michael Moore. USA: Lionsgate films. Fixed Bayonets. 1951. Directed by Samuel Fuller. USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Forrest Gump. 1994. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. USA: Paramount Pictures. Giant. 1956. Directed by George Stevens. USA: Warner Bros. Independence Day. 1996. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: 20th Century Fox. It’s a Wonderful Life. 1946. Directed by Frank Capra. USA: RKO Radio Pictures. Joker. 2019. Directed by Todd Phillips. USA: Warner Bros. The Kids Are Alright. 2010. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko. USA: Focus Features. A King in New  York. 1957. Directed by Charlie Chaplin. USA: Archway Film Distributors. Kingdom of Heaven. 2005. Directed by Ridley Scott. United Kingdom/Germany/ USA: 20th Century Fox. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. 2001. Directed by Peter Jackson. New Zealand/USA: New Line Cinema. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. 2003. Directed by Peter Jackson. New Zealand/USA: New Line Cinema.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. 2002. Directed by Peter Jackson. New Zealand/USA: New Line Cinemas. Major Dundee. 1965. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: Columbia Pictures. Malcolm X. 1992. Directed by Spike Lee. USA: Warner Bros. M*A*S*H*. 1970. Directed by Robert Altman. USA: 20th Century Fox. The Manchurian Candidate. 2004. Directed by Jonathan Demme. USA: Paramount Pictures. Milk. 2005. Directed by Gus Van Sant. USA: Focus Features. Minority Report. 2002. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: 20th Century Fox. Ninotchka. 1939. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. No Country for Old Men. 2007. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. USA: Miramax. Platoon. 1986. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Orion Pictures. Red Dawn. 1984. Directed by John Milius. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Saving Private Ryan. 1998. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA.  DreamWorks Pictures. Syriana. 2005. Directed by Stephen Gaghan. USA: Warner Bros. Team America: World Police. 2004. Directed by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. USA: Paramount Pictures. Tears of the Sun. 2003. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. USA: Sony Pictures. There Will be Blood. 2007. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. USA: Paramount Vantage. Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros. Top Gun. 1986. Directed by Tony Scott. USA. Paramount Pictures. 12 Angry Men. 1957. Directed by Sidney Lumet. USA: United Artists. 25th Hour. 2002. Directed by Spike Lee. USA: Buena Vista Pictures. 2016: Obama’s America. 2012. Directed by Dinesh D’Souza. USA: Rocky Mountain Pictures. Wag the Dog. 1997. Directed by Barry Levinson. USA: New Line Cinema. A Walk in the Sun. 1945. Directed by Lewis Milestone. USA: 20th Century Fox. War of the Worlds. 2005. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Paramount Pictures. The Wild Bunch. 1969. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: Warner Bros./ Seven Arts. World Trade Center. 2006. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Paramount Pictures.

CHAPTER 2

Triangulation: Unilateral Idealism in the 1990s Cinematic Presidency

In the afterword to the 1997 edition of his redefining study The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, the political theorist Stephen Skowronek was explicit about the heterodoxy he viewed as central to the Clinton presidency’s functioning. Skowronek (1997, 453) argued that Clinton was a “preemptive president” and belonged to a club of leaders who could thrive on “brazenness”, “maneuver around the ideological spectrum” and “confound the standard labels”. Mainstream Hollywood cinema reflected the corollaries of this position in American foreign policy through an uneven concert of cosmopolitan internationalism and Jacksonian unilateralism, chiming in with the centrist ‘triangulation’ of Clinton’s presidency. A spate of productions, frequently with an American president at their centre, variously delineated escapes from the stigmatised memory of the 1960s counterculture, a foreign policy philosophy which synchronised unilateralism and multilateralism and an America capable of delivering military heroics alongside democracy promotion. I begin highlighting this allegorical process with an application of Skowronek’s ‘theories of presidential leadership’ to The American President (1995), an interplay I consider foundational in the creation of a cinematic animus revolving around Clintonian triangulation and its implications for American statecraft. I follow this with an assessment of the ‘unilateral idealism’ in Independence Day (1996), a blockbuster which purveys centrist combinations of Wilsonianism and Jacksonian militarism. I conclude with © The Author(s) 2020 T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_2

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brief examinations of the synergetic, but tonally oppositional, qualities of presidential drama in Air Force One and Wag the Dog (both 1997). This chapter therefore charts the shifting kaleidoscope of Clintonism in 1990s American cinema, gauging collisions of Wilsonianism, Jacksonianism and free-market globalisation. Such interactions, although screened against the relatively benign backdrop of a peacetime America adjusting to its post-Cold War windfall, portended saliences which would materialise more palpably in the post-9/11 era. Thus, the nucleus of contemporary foreign policy allegory could be said to have emerged in the second half of the 1990s, a precedence which belied the ‘holiday from history’ reputation of the Clinton years.1

The Restyling of American Liberalism: Clintonian Triangulation in The American President The American President opens with a series of shots which portray the traditional iconography of the stars and stripes, most memorably juxtaposing a bust of the American eagle and a painting of George Washington with the genteel strains of an orchestral soundtrack. Yet the camera also hovers over portraits of more polarising American heads of state, ranging from the one-term President Taft to the pugnacious Andrew Jackson. Director Rob Reiner subsequently proceeds to disaffirm the holistic praise of American leadership through scenes of political posturing. This is displayed in the portrayal of Democratic president Andrew Shepard, a leader who lost his wife to cancer the previous year. Entering the oval office in angst over his bid for re-election, Shepard confronts and encodes a world in which the progressive ideals of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society must adapt to a milieu of neoliberal globalisation and right-wing resurgence. This political reality unfolds as Shepard treks from the Oval Office to the White House press corps with his personal aide Basdin. In a rapid exchange of dialogue, Shepard promises attendance at an event scheduled with American fisheries to Basdin and dismisses concerns that he gave a speech upsetting his own Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, Lewis Rothschild. Rothschild, who next confronts the president, expresses frustrations which hint at a liberal animus and indicate exasperation at a concessionary part of a proposed address on a crime bill aimed at placating the president’s conservative opponents. Critiquing oratory which seems portentous of Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address

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and its admonishment that the “era of big government is over” (Clinton 1996), Rothschild complains that Shepard amended the speech to declare that “America can no longer afford to pretend that they live in a great society”. He further agonises over Shepard’s removal of a paragraph on handgun removal in a speech designed to promote a crime control bill, a capitulation to libertarianism defended by the president as “prudence”. Shepard’s fixation on pragmatism points to a doctrine of liberal compromise, a caution he feels he must maintain because of, not in spite of, a “63% approval rating”. The montage of presidents which precedes these tensions, initially perceivable as a halcyon celebration of the past, becomes tonally ambivalent in light of this, presenting men who ranged from high-­ minded visionaries (showcased in paintings of Woodrow Wilson and LBJ) to pusillanimous accommodationists (perhaps Taft, who was accused of betraying the progressive cause by his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, best fits this label). For all the vividness of these contrasts, the democratic volubility of Mead’s kaleidoscope, at least at this point, lacks congruence with the elitist grandeur of the drama. Although later Mead’s analysis becomes more applicable to Reiner’s picture, the exclusive focus on presidential governance of these scenes invites the use of a methodology based on another quadruple list of principles, that of Skowronek’s categorisations of executive power. Originally published in 1993, Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton concludes that four models of leadership best reflect the varying effect and political tenors of individual US presidents who range from groundbreaking to middling to historic failures. Its chapters focalise three recurring governing orientations, beginning with the politics of ‘reconstruction’, a category of transformative leadership embodied in Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln which repudiates ‘vulnerable’ regimes; this is followed with the politics of ‘articulation’, a governing stance which restores the tenets of an earlier, reconstructive president, typified by Lyndon Johnson’s effort to achieve the Great Society heralded by the liberal political shift under FDR; the third category headlined by Skowronek is the politics of ‘disjunction’, an asymmetrical model lacking connection with the American electorate and given regrettable precedent by the one-term wonders of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. In the afterword of The Politics Presidents Make, Skowronek (1997, 449) concludes with a fourth category of “preemptive leaders”, emblematised by Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton,

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non-ideological figures who did not set out to “establish, uphold, or salvage any political orthodoxy”. Throughout The American President, the fluidity of Shepard’s professional and personal fortunes encompasses clashes between the politics of reconstruction, articulation and preemption, demonstrating a kaleidoscopic variation on Skowronek’s leadership models. If the president’s public truncation of his party’s core shibboleths connotes the outlook of a preemptive leader, his relationship with environmental lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade privately exudes the politics of articulation and reconstruction, simultaneously seeking to revitalise vestiges of an outmoded Great Society liberalism and assert the vulnerability of a conservatism preeminent from the Reagan era. Pushing Shepard towards passing environmental legislation which will substantially reduce carbon emissions, Wade sarcastically praises the “impressive distinction” of the incumbent administration’s acknowledgement of global warming, a tepidity of concern implicitly inculcated by years of conservative Republican domination. As the film’s drama develops, Shepard’s romance with Wade brings the opportunism of Clintonian governance into conflict with something more visionary, a dichotomy which resonates with the political dynamics of the 1990s. The threat of disjunction, the one maladaptive symptom of presidential governance cited in Skowronek’s analysis, emerges in the arrival of Republican presidential candidate Senator Bob Rumson, who exploits Shepard’s connection with Wade to malign the incumbent’s ethics and social mores. Insulting Shepard’s new girlfriend in private as the “first mistress” and championing in public the resumption of “traditional American values”, Rumson’s attachment to moral purity prompts memories of the 1990s culture wars which threatened to mortally wound the Clinton administration. Such frictions were tangible when the Democratic Party lost both houses of Congress in 1994 to a resilient conservative insurgency and during the impeachment proceedings which occurred in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal unveiled by Republican-­ appointed Independent Counsel Ken Starr. Fittingly released in 1995, a year that had seen the Republican Party equipped with majority status in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in forty years, the fluctuating understanding of US politics personified in The American President’s contrasting characterisations possesses synergy with the confluence of events that had dominated the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Before gauging this interplay in Reiner’s film, it is worth contextualising how the liberal

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quiescence of Shepard’s worldview was given foundation in the first half of the 1990s. Clinton’s campaign for president had begun with a promise to counteract the neoliberal economic policies and militaristic predilections that had been hallmarks of the Reagan years. This was portended in an October 1991 stump speech (quoted in Edwards 2015, 42) which stipulated “we cannot build a safe and secure world unless we can make America strong at home” and warned of the “economic, political, and spiritual failure” which caused the Soviet Union’s collapse, a fate inescapable if the United States did not “take care of our own”. An address by Clinton in April 1992 (quoted in Ifill 1992) renewed this theme of domestic neglect in its excoriation of the “biggest imbalance in wealth in America since the 1920s right before the Great Depression” and “a loss of ‘economic leadership’”. Clinton’s electoral victory in November 1992 and first two years in office, however, did not herald a return of the kind of reconstructive authority Skowronek detects in the transformative presidencies of Lincoln and FDR. Controversy over the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a three-country accord negotiated between the United States, Canada and Mexico during the final stages of the George H.W.  Bush administration, encouraged animosity among what Posadas (1996, 435) cites as a “strange coalition composed of organized labor, environmentalists, the radical right, the protectionist left and some very specific powerful business groups”. Yet the most problematic aspect of NAFTA was its alienation of Clinton’s traditional Democratic constituents, a schism which manifested when “relations between the White House and organized labor deteriorated” (ibid., 437). To Posadas, Clinton rationalised this repellence because “unions were not likely to abandon the rest of his legislative agenda” (ibid., 437), thus ignoring his campaign rhetoric of welfarism and social protection. On other fronts, the Clinton administration was accused of satiating the appetites of the Democratic Party’s far left, long desirous of liberal reform after twelve years of Republican rule. In the realm of social attitudes, the Clinton administration’s policy of non-disclosure for gay and lesbian Americans serving in the armed forces, summarised in the compromise policy of ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’, “scuttled the new administration’s hope at proper civil-military relations” according to P.W.  Singer (2008, 4). A reform bill designed to provide universal healthcare for all Americans met with opposition from libertarians, conservatives and centrist Democrats. Nicholas Laham (1996, 7) contextualised this lack of political

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unity, a dissensus stemming from legislation “opposed by the healthcare industry, which represents a major source of financial support for incumbent lawmakers”. The unwieldiness of Clinton’s domestic programme was echoed in the sphere of foreign policy and its concurrent collisions of continuation and breakage with previous Republican administrations. This pattern was lugubriously exemplified in a commitment to Somalia inherited from the George H.W. Bush administration, an intervention which ambassador to the UN and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (quoted in McDougall 1997, 201) saw as an expansion of humanitarian relief and engineered towards a “restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning and viable member of the community of nations”. The militarisation of this mission, which emerged in the additional goals of capturing warlord Mohamed Aidid, elicited palpable political discomfort, a malaise which crystallised in the October 1993 downing of a Black Hawk helicopter and the killing of eighteen American soldiers. Neoconservative Charles Krauthammer (quoted in Hyland 1999, 57) remarked on the open-­ endedness of Clinton’s prolongation of the Somalia operation and the repudiation of US hegemony by anti-American insurgents, stating that “famine relief is one thing, nation building is another”. The nation-­ building stressed by Albright jarred with other foreign policy stances adopted during Clinton’s first two years in office. Shortly after the Somalia disaster, Clinton declined to intervene against the Rwandan genocide in April 1994, where 800,000 ethnic Tutsis perished in a national population of eight million (Wilentz 2008, 338). Elsewhere, Clinton attempted to synthesise idealism with pragmatic Realpolitik. In Haiti, Clinton sought to restore to power the democratically elected John Bertrand Astride, who was overthrown in a military coup in 1991. In a fusion of the Monroe Doctrine’s realism with the language of humanitarian intervention, Clinton (quoted in Hyland 1999, 65) implored Americans to realise “when brutality occurs close to our shore, it affects our national interests and we have a responsibility to act”.2 This agenda, again, pleased no one and attracted consternation from realists of the ousted Bush administration such as former Secretary of State James Baker (quoted in Hyland 1999, 65), who bemoaned another “open-ended operation”. The farcical scenes of the intervention, which saw US troops assaulted by rock-throwing mobs (Mastanduno 1997, 57), cemented, for William G.  Hyland, Haiti’s legacy as “part of an

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anti-Clinton litany, along with Bosnia and Somalia, a three-part indictment of his management of foreign affairs” (Hyland 1999, 65). By the time of the ‘Republican Revolution’ in November 1994, a set of conservative successes in elections for the House of Representatives and Senate augured by the leadership of “Contract with America” author Newt Gingrich, it looked as if the Clinton era was entering a fundamentally disjunctive stage.3 The president’s combination of actions resembled the “cross purposes” Skowronek (1997, 126) understands as conditioning failing presidencies, which lack a “consistent and compelling political rationale for reconstructing the polity”. The governing rhythm of Andrew Shepard in The American President largely reflects the necessity of a preemptive pattern for developing US foreign and domestic policy, indicating an environment where decisions hinge on prudence, popularity and personal whim at the expense of vision, sincerity and party solidarity. Although in the first act Shepard seeks to ensure he has enough legislators to pass his moderate crime control bill, Rob Reiner’s picture never explicitly references which party has a majority in Congress, an exclusion of information which highlights its centrist leader’s role as prognosticator of public opinion. Other emphases on preemptive leadership transpire more allusively. In signals that the New Deal coalition which dominated the reconstructive presidency of FDR is unpalatable for a time of greater press scrutiny and right-wing malevolence, Shepard’s Chief of Staff and best friend A.J. MacInerney wryly comments that “if there had been a TV in every living room sixty years ago, this country does not elect a man in a wheelchair”. A later Republican effort at scandalising Shepard’s administration implies conservatism’s power at setting the agenda and derailing the chances of liberal revival. In the second act, Rumson utilises an old photograph of Wade, obtained from the FBI, as a political weapon. The photo shows Wade protesting against the Reagan administration’s policy of ‘constructive engagement’ towards the apartheid regime of South Africa outside an American embassy, an act of iconoclasm additionally toxified by the picture’s foregrounding of a US flag burning. The image undoubtedly employs a different political backdrop to the draft-dodging leitmotifs which dogged Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Yet it nevertheless conjures an affinity with the stigmatised memory of countercultural protest which Clinton was forced to neutralise, drawing attention to the ‘un-­ American’ animus castigated by the conservative voices who publish and disseminate the photograph.

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Against this backdrop of partisan vituperation, Shepard’s approval ratings dramatically decline from a robust 63% to eventually bottoming out at a lacklustre 41%. The costs of his romance with Wade suggest the necessary hegemony of preemption as a doctrine of American governance, prioritising retreat from hubristic efforts at reconstructive overstretch. The Clinton administration’s adoption of ‘triangulation’, a strategy coined by the president’s friend and advisor Dick Morris, adhered strongly to a preemptive school possessing comparable fears of ideological baggage and political purity. Journalist William Carroll summarised the novelty of triangulation in the second half of Clinton’s first term, defining a political approach “neither liberal nor conservative but somewhere above” (Carroll 1996). This asynchronous governing framework was typified by “stolen Republican proposals on crime, budget deficit, welfare and family values”, a co-option blatant in 1996 when Clinton signed a Republican welfare reform Bill “rejected by influential liberal Democrats including Ted Kennedy, Pat Moynihan and Chris Dodd” (ibid.). Clinton’s finding of a viable middle way in foreign policy subtly mirrored his domestic exercises in political apostasy. Forgoing the isolationist undertones of his 1992 campaign and the vacillations of his first two years as president, events in 1995 augured a greater emphasis on unilateral military action under Clinton and policies which evidenced an intersection of Jacksonian belligerence with Wilsonian internationalism. This change crystallised in the decision to launch airstrikes on Bosnian Serb targets in the Yugoslav War, a policy opposed by the multilateral United Nations (Daalder 1998). The securing of the Dayton accords in November 1995, a peace agreement arbitrated a few months after the bombings and overseen by the US, fostered a ceasefire for the three-year conflict in the Balkans, seemingly validating what Albright (quoted in Sterling-Folker 1998, 278) later called “assertive multilateralism”. This doctrine propounded, in Sterling-Folker’s (1998, 278) words, “a pragmatic global solving”, which relied on “the societal tendency to assume that American interests and values are universal”. The dubious effects of triangulation and a preemptive presidential style which elides wholesale commitments to realism or idealism pervade The American President’s most memorable moments, connoting a politics based on unprincipled, impulsive synthesis. The inhabiting of the Shepard role by Michael Douglas, an actor famed for his iconic portrayal of Reaganite yuppie Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), perhaps further adds to the sense of an interminable neoliberal and conservative Republican

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consensus. If the first act captures Skowronek’s (1997, 455) notion of a preemptive leader who employs measures “contrary to the positions presumed to be held by liberalism’s traditional constituents”, a reflection on a raid in Libya elicits synergies with an equally controversial opportunism in Clintonian diplomacy. As with the segueing from reverence to self-interest of The American President’s opening, the Libya intervention indicates a discordance beleaguering the preemptive presidency. The first display of incongruity emerges when news of a Libyan assault on an American military installation prevents Shepard taking Wade on a nighttime tour of the White House. Initially, the attack seemingly accentuates the crux of The American President’s drama, purveying irreconcilability between the president’s romantic ideals and his obligations as commander in chief. Yet a dramatic musing by Shepard in the Situation Room establishes the true salience of the Libya crisis for the president’s psyche, pointing to a morbidity starker than the Eros versus Thanatos style dichotomy created by the crisis’s interruption of his date with Wade. The president contemplates a bombing raid on Libyan intelligence headquarters, an assault he fears will engender collateral damage and kill ‘custodial staff’. After deliberating with the military brass, Shepard approves the attack. This decision attracts praise from Leon Kodak, the president’s Deputy Chief of Staff. In the subsequent scene in the Oval Office, Kodak celebrates the popularity that can be consolidated by the raid and a strategy of triangulation which could deflect from Shepard’s ‘lack of military service’ and highlight a decisiveness that is ‘very presidential’. A melancholic response by Shepard rejects this preemptive mantle. He finds sorrow in the reality that the intervention may result in civilian casualties, delivering a somewhat maudlin reframing of Stalin’s famous aphorism, “A single death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic”: Somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor is working the night shift at Libyan intelligence headquarters. And he’s going about doing his job because he has no idea that in about an hour he’s going to die in a massive explosion. He’s just going about his job, because he has no idea that about an hour ago I gave an order to have him killed. You’ve just seen me do the least presidential thing I do.

Shepard’s unease with this militaristic co-option of triangulation resonated three years after The American President’s release. The Clinton administration’s ordering of a cruise missile attack on an Al Shifa

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pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998 reflected tropes of Shepard’s dealing with the Libya crisis, underlining uncomfortable proximities between political opportunism and militaristic preponderance, alongside preemptive calculation and symptoms of bipartisan continuity. Operation Infinite Reach, the name for the airstrikes employed against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for al-Qaeda plotted bombings of US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, occurred shortly after President Clinton addressed the Monica Lewinsky scandal in his grand jury testimony (Hersh 1998). The minute effect of these offensives halted neither the momentum of al-Qaeda nor the Islamist cause. This prompted the military historian Andrew Bacevich (2005, 19) to label Clinton’s military preferences as “signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places”, accelerating a “tempo of U.S. military intervention … nothing short of frenetic”. In an article published in the left-leaning magazine The Nation, journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens drew analogues between the political tenor of Operation Infinite Reach’s chief proponent and the remarks Shepard delivers in The American President. He illustrated this through reference to a 1998 address by Clinton at Martha’s Vineyard (quoted in Hitchens 2005, 397), which, in an unromantic resemblance to Shepard’s course of action and cognitive dissonance, employed sentimentality and empathy to rationalise cruise missile attacks against the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant: I was here on this island till 2.30 in the morning, trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift. I believed I had to take the action I did, but I didn’t want some person who was a nobody to me—but who may have a family to feed and a life to lead and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there—to die needlessly.

To Hitchens (2005, 398), the synergetic aspects of Clinton’s speech attested to a kind of bipartisan hyperreality which renewed elements of Reagan’s presidency, specifically his “recycling lines from bad movies to justify policies—like Star Wars—that were as wicked as well as fantasy-­ driven”. The coupling of Sudan’s bombing with “a huge appropriation for a Star Wars program … contained in Clinton’s much-ballyhooed budget deal” (ibid., 398) merely corroborated his case that the cinematic underpinnings of the Martha’s Vineyard address papered over a presidency premised on the ratification of the consensus built under the Reagan-Bush years.4

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If the connections between Shepard’s angst over the Libya intervention and Clinton’s dramatic pathos over Operation Infinite Reach undermine the resentment of preemption connoted in screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue, the third act of The American President offers no amelioration of this marring of political message. The deceptive portrait of a liberal presidential reconstruction which masks the dominance of preemption is central to the final moments of Reiner’s film. Reiner builds towards this subterfuge through an ever-closer intertwining of the personal and political. When Shepard opts to shelve his proposed environmental legislation in exchange for securing votes on his tepid crime bill, Wade is fired from her lobbyist job for failing to persuade the administration to facilitate a change in policy. Feeling dejected, Wade declares to Shepard that “you have bigger problems than losing me—you’ve just lost my vote”. Understanding that both the president’s legacy and love life are in a state of disarray, the idealistic assistant Rothschild urges Shepard to provide “genuine leadership” and repudiate the scepticism of 59% of Americans who “have begun to question your patriotism”. The oration Shepard delivers to the White House press corps as a result of this imploration combines a transformative liberal programme with a parochial invocation of American exceptionalism, encapsulating the Film Studies scholar Ian Scott’s (2011, 252) notion of a political culture in Hollywood films wedded to “crudely patriotic visions of institutional rhetoric and behaviour as part of the norms in political life”: For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was, to a certain extent, about character. And although I’ve not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I have been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation—being president of this country is entirely about character. For the record, yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, but the more important question is: ‘Why aren’t you, Bob?’ Now this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, ‘Why would a Senator, his party’s most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the Constitution?’ Now if you can answer that question, folks, then you’re smarter than I am, because I didn’t understand it until a few hours ago. America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, ‘You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.’ You want to claim this land as the land of

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the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

After he castigates Rumson for smearing his relationship with Wade and lambasts focus groups orientated around the interests of “middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time”, Shepard finishes with an outlining of his revitalised political agenda: Tomorrow morning, the White House is sending a bill to Congress for its consideration. It’s White House Resolution 455, an energy bill requiring a twenty percent reduction of the emission of fossil fuels over the next ten years. It is by far the most aggressive stride ever taken in the fight to reverse the effects of global warming. The other piece of legislation is the crime bill. As of today, it no longer exists. I’m throwing it out. I’m throwing it out and writing a law that makes sense. You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and hand guns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door-to-door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns. We’ve got serious problems, and we need serious people. And if you want to talk about character, Bob, you’d better come at me with more than a burning flag and a membership card. If you want to talk about character and American values, fine. Just tell me where and when, and I’ll show up. This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up. My name is Andrew Shepherd, and I AM THE PRESIDENT!

John Heyman (2018, 74), whose book Politics, Hollywood Style: American Politics in Film from Mr. Smith to Selma (2018) considers the prevailing themes of the American political film, views Shepard’s retorts as a “several-years-later response to George H.W. Bush’s attack on Michael Dukakis’ ACLU membership in the 1988 presidential campaign”. This oratory, which revels in stopping “being so moderate”, fulfils a “liberal fantasy of sorts” (ibid., 89). The Jacksonian undertones of Shepard’s speech, however, render its political configuration somewhat more complex. On the surface calling for liberal reconstruction, Shepard’s dialogue nevertheless operates as a feat of triangulation through its affinity with the pugnacity of America’s patriotic heartlands, showcased in lines which uncritically elevate “the land of the free” and the necessity of a “fight” to secure free speech and civil liberties.

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The constitutional, cultural and personal underpinnings of Shepard’s refutations speak to a disposition redolent of the diplomatic characteristics ingrained by the legend of Andrew Jackson. It is not the gentlemanly demeanour of FDR or even the overbearing aggression of LBJ recalled in Shepard’s arc, but rather the grievances of the Democratic Party’s founding president, who, like Shepard, lost his wife early on in his presidency and faced conflict with the fastidious mores of Washington’s establishment insiders.5 Skowronek categorises Jackson as a reconstructive leader due to his reframing of the presidential office as an independent bulwark against the predations of minority and elitist interests. Although Shepard’s defiance of legislative gridlock possesses debt to Jackson’s reconstructive definition of executive authority, a legacy typified in measures employed against targets of frontier vituperation such as Native Americans and which mocked “executive deference to the legislature” and “judicial and constitutional authority” (Skowronek 1997, 142), the cultural aspects of Shepard’s reach for the Jacksonian are rhetorically preemptive, enabling deflection from accusations of liberal elitism. Shepard’s references to an America where residence depends on “advanced citizenship” matches the exclusionary and parochial facets of Mead’s understanding of the Jacksonian. This articulated a perspective which sees “American exceptionalism not as a function of the universal appeal of American ideas, or even as a function of a unique American vocation to transform the world, but rather as rooted in the country’s singular commitment to the equality and dignity of individual American citizens” (Mead 2017). By vaunting values of meritocracy and rugged individualism, Shepard parries likely accusations that his policy on global warming constitutes a foray into a suspect cosmopolitan internationalism and that his position on gun control amounts to a frightening expansion of ‘big government’. In a rebuke of the liberal predilections of welfarism and ‘handouts’, Shepard admits that American citizenship shouldn’t be “easy” and, in its engendering of trials and tribulations, becomes something to be earned rather than bequeathed. The repudiation of entitlement evident in this speech, which is closer to the philosophy of Jesse Helms than George McGovern, reminds of Clinton’s simultaneous co-option and marginalisation of the Republican right soon after the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. Speaking at a Memorial Prayer Service for the victims of Timothy McVeigh’s assault on the Federal Government, Clinton (quoted in American Rhetoric website

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2019) reconnected with his Southern roots by reminding the Oklahoman audience that as the respective Governor and First Lady of Arkansas, he and Hillary Clinton had been “your neighbors for some of the best years of our lives”. He furthered this rapprochement with heartland America through invoking the fiery language of Jacksonian nationalism, warning “that the fellow Americans beyond this hall” have “the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil … forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life” (ibid.). Regarded by Peter Keating as a turning point in Clinton’s presidency, the Oklahoma City bombing speech enabled the possibility of a centrist revival, a staking of political ground helped by the Republican legislators who “made fools of themselves defending militias” (Keating 2010). Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address, a speech famed for its acknowledgement of big government’s decline, arguably consolidated this fortune. Clinton artfully juxtaposed the patriotism of Richard Dean, “a Vietnam vet who had worked in the Oklahoma City Federal Building” (ibid.), with the parsimony of Republican representatives who had facilitated the shutdown of the Federal Government the previous year. Conservative stigmatisation of government had prevented recognition of Dean’s heroism, because, as told by Clinton (quoted in Keating 2010), he “continued helping social security recipients”, but “was working without pay”. Clinton and Shepard both highlight that Jacksonian symbolism must safeguard liberal idealism. The president at the centre of Independence Day brings this dynamic into greater relief in a grandiose foreign policy context, reifying an International Relations landscape which subordinates liberal internationalism to the exigencies of Jacksonian identity.

The Wilsonian/Jacksonian Fusion in Independence Day The first act of Independence Day portends the test of a cooperative vision previously contemplated by Ronald Reagan at the Geneva Summit of 1985. Reagan’s hypothesis to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the USSR and the United States would unite in the event of an alien invasion (Lewis 2015) jars with images which imply American hegemonic control and only fleetingly depict the reactions of a nondescript outside world. The opening shot is of the American flag placed on the moon by Neil Armstrong in 1969, a feat of prowess celebrated by a downward pan

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towards a plaque commending NASA’s effort. Especially noticeable are the capitalised letters “WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND”, an endearingly utopian rationalisation which director Roland Emmerich immediately belies through the trajectory of an alien invasion storyline. The sudden appearance of an alien spaceship flying towards Earth, juxtaposed with the patriotism of the flag and plaque display, indicates that the pacifistic sentiments of American space travel in the 1960s run counter to a struggle that will be militaristic in quality. The concurrence of Armstrong’s arrival on the moon with the dysphoria of Vietnam perhaps underlined the ineluctability of a cognitive dissonance in the American psyche of the 1960s. Independence Day, however, is unabashed about the ease with which the USA of the 1990s can achieve a seamless transition from dovish idealism to Jacksonian unilateralism. Emmerich signals this through introductions to characters embedded within the multifarious political fabric of mid-1990s America, presenting transcendence of mise en scene which contrasts the fatalistic footage of contemporaneous cityscapes in Russia, China and Europe, all locations under the yoke of alien incursion. David Levinson, a nerdy satellite technician, decodes a signal which he interprets as a countdown timer for an attack by the extra-terrestrial visitors and promptly flees his collapsing home city of New York with his father; Captain Steve Hiller, a Marine pilot and resident of California, expresses scepticism at the West Coasters’ excitement at the prospect of meeting the aliens and urges caution to his girlfriend and stepson; Russell Casse, an unemployed Vietnam veteran who languishes in rural Arizona, has his bizarre claims of alien abduction and sexual abuse given credibility by a news media frenzied by the otherworldly arrivals. To Julie Webber, whose article ‘Independence Day as a Cosmopolitan Moment: Teaching International Relations’ evaluates the Science Fiction blockbuster’s foregrounding of the realism/idealism paradigm and its suitability as a pedagogic text for IR students, the geographical sweep of Emmerich’s film alludes to the United States’ sectional divisions. Webber (2005, 386) notes “the stereotypical representations of different cultural responses to the presence of aliens in the earth’s atmosphere”, a process crystallised in how the renditions of New York and Los Angeles “demonstrate the two cities positions in the American unconscious”. Whereas “New York represents the realist (and hysteric) response to the attack” through “car crashes and widespread panic and gawking”, LA reacts with “acceptance”, an agreeableness typified by the “welcome wagon from the top of a building” which “encourages the aliens to join the nation” (ibid.,

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387). Webber’s analysis hints at more than a mere reliance on American cultural stereotypes of coastal neurosis. Her detection of dichotomy also overlaps with much of the arguments around foreign policy purveyed by Mead, who identified how American diplomacy was influenced by various sectional interests. The vast land mass of the United States is key to the existence of “the idealistic and/or populist voices in its foreign policy”, ingrained by the fact that “the thickly populated, overwhelmingly industrial states of the Northeast and the Middle Atlantic regions and the isolated, lightly populated states of the Rocky Mountains and the southwestern deserts have different foreign policy interests” (Mead 2001, 42). Independence Day illustrates an overcoming of these differences through an inexorable ride towards a civilised, politically correct form of the Jacksonian. Emmerich complements the inclusion of the Jewish Levinson, the African American Hiller and the unemployed Casse, all characters traditionally outside the white frontier iconography of Jacksonian individualism, with the shift delineated in the implicitly moderate President Thomas J. Whitmore.6 In an inverse of Shepard’s political situation in the first act of The American President, Whitmore is initially portrayed as a Gulf War hero who has buried his Jacksonian patriotism under a pattern of ineffectual leadership, declining to invoke his military past for means of political triangulation. Dialogue witheringly delivered by a television pundit on Whitmore’s White House TV showcases his distance from ordinary Americans and resonates with the president’s political malaise. To his chagrin, the real life American political reporter Eleanor Clift, who appears as herself, remarks, “They elected a warrior and they got a wimp!” A catalyst for dispelling this ‘wimp factor’ becomes tangible when the alien invaders begin to attack major cities across the United States, threatening the American-led ‘New World Order’ forged at the end of the Cold War. The escorting of Whitmore to Area 51, the much mythologised harbour of alien spacecraft routinely stereotyped as a haven for sinister conspiracies in the popular media, occasions the film’s more humorous moments, comedy which derives especially from the asocial scientist Dr Brackish Okun. Yet Area 51 also operates as a hub for Independence Day’s central characters’ embrace of the Jacksonian, a process which culminates when Levinson, Hiller, Casse and Whitmore all find their own uses on the base. After Levinson discovers a method for uploading a computer virus to an alien spaceship held at Area 51, he proposes the idea that he and Hiller should use the vehicle as a Trojan horse to enter and destabilise the mothership orchestrating the earth’s destruction; Casse, perhaps recalling his

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past service in Vietnam but above all vengeful towards the alien sexual abuse he allegedly suffered years ago, decides to join a dramatic air battle in the sky in a collaboration with soldiers across the world; finally, the president himself, in an audacious display of democratic egalitarianism, opts to participate in this aerial conflict as he is a ‘combat pilot’ who ‘belongs in the air’. Whitmore’s rediscovered rapport with Jacksonian America materialises against a backdrop which reminds of, but also structurally scrambles, the existence of various motifs in The American President. His self-enlistment occurs soon after the onscreen death of his wife and First Lady Marilyn Whitmore, who suffered mortal injuries when leaving the White House in a separate aircraft to the president. Like the galvanisation of Shepard, the memories of bereavement prompt appreciation of a fighting spirit emblematic of America’s patriotic heartlands. Whitmore’s honorific rendition of Mead’s school further overlaps with Shepard’s adoption of triangulation through its contrast with a Jacksonian policy comprehensively destructive and unrestrained in scope. In The American President, Shepard’s co-option of the Jacksonian ingeniously uses Rumson as a foil for his long-established political moderation and condemns an extremist outlook underpinned by libertarian policies on gun ownership and healthcare. Similarly, in a scene prior to Levinson’s breakthrough realisation of how the Americans can eliminate the aliens, Whitmore’s moves towards a centrist employment of the Jacksonian become defined against the danger of policy prescriptions weighted in ideological purity. Secretary of Defence Albert Nimzicki, a figure of Strangelovian quality, encourages the president to launch a nuclear attack against an alien saucer poised above Houston. The bombing, which is rationalised on the basis that Houston has been evacuated, destroys the city without demolishing the alien ship. Nimzicki’s recommendation invites comparison with the darkest aspects of the Jacksonian school, striking synergy with Mead’s (2001, 221) observation that “once wars begin, a significant element of American public opinion supports waging them at the highest possible level of intensity”. Mead goes on to describe how scorched earth policies such as “the unprecedented aerial bombardments of World War II, culminating in the greatest single acts of violence ever perpetrated by human beings—the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—were all broadly popular in the United States” (ibid., 221). Nimzicki’s endorsement of annihilating cities on American soil, however, seems to erase the Jacksonian school’s

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distinction between what Mead calls the domestic “inside of the folk community” and the foreign “dark world without” (ibid., 245). Whitmore’s oration to the American pilots about to take on the fleet of alien outsiders, which occurs subsequent to his firing of Nimzicki, restores a commonsensical understanding of the Jacksonian’s militaristic dimension. The speech considers American unilateralism as foundational for the eventual resurgence of liberal internationalism, a corollary only securable if the United States fights for its existential right to survive: Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world, and you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. Mankind. That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution … but from annihilation. We’re fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice: We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Whitmore’s stress that Americans are currently fighting against annihilation and not tyranny and oppression speaks to the “realism” of the Jacksonian school, a facet grounded in “faith in military institutions” and the absence of a Wilsonian will to “convert the Hobbesian world of international relations into a Lockean political community” (ibid., 244–245). Nevertheless, the closing remarks of the president’s speech hint that internationalism can be achievable in the event of absolute military victory. Fusing unilateralism with language of multilateralism, Whitmore segues seamlessly from the consolidation of American democracy to its universalisation by proclaiming the Fourth of July as a global call for the rescue of civilisation. The International Relations theorist Cynthia Weber, whose book International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction shares Julia Webber’s view of American cinema as a method of pedagogy in IR, interprets the narrative developments in Independence Day as a short-circuited rendition of Kegley’s concept of ‘neoidealism’. Neoidealism posits that a harmonious international society stems directly from “drawing a domestic analogy”, meaning that “moral progress occurs within democratic

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sovereign nation-states” and forms the nucleus for an “international society of democratic states” (Weber 2013, 47–49). In reclaiming America’s late eighteenth-century state as a holdout of promise for a liberated world order, Whitmore champions a political grammar where “US domestic society is extended globally”, becoming “the orderer of international life” (ibid., 55). This serves as an enlightening mirror of neoidealism’s ideological fissures, elucidating questions around whether Kegley’s theory “would be seen to confuse the extensions of one state’s domestic society with an international society” and mistakes “US post-Cold War leadership” for “international society” (ibid., 55). Independence Day’s climax, however, suggests that international comity is just as likely to be facilitated by military engagement as American unilateral leadership and builds on the centrist Jacksonianism steadily assimilated by Whitmore. In anticipation of the final air battle between alien and mankind, Emmerich briefly shifts focus to the ‘Iraqi desert’, a location that has become a beacon for collaboration between former colonial masters and marginalised nations. It is established that the threat of annihilation has created an accord between Western states and their former colonial satellites, showcased in tents which include both European and Arab troops. An upper-class British air officer, subsequent to acknowledging that “we’ve lost a Belgian contingent in the Sinai”, is told by an Arab soldier of a message in Morse code. In medium shots outside the tent, the Arabs and British gather to read of a proposed American counteroffensive, an idea which induces one British officer to comment derisively, “it’s about bloody time!” The humour and quasi-utopianism of this sequence, which takes place on the soil of a pariah state sanctioned by America’s real life contemporaneous government, points to a transcendence of difference only achievable under the fear of global apocalypse. Its elimination of distance between imperial centre and colonial subject, a process accelerated by the uniformity of militarism, is echoed in the holistic national benefits the climatic aerial battle provides for Whitmore’s United States. This set piece crystallises praise of an inclusive Jacksonianism through commemoration of the ethnic minorities of urban America and a white rural underclass left behind by globalisation. Emmerich foregrounds the importance of the former demographic when the Jewish Levinson and the African American Hiller sabotage the mothership and enable Whitmore’s pilots to destroy the hub of alien rearmament. According to Emmerich’s recollections on Independence Day’s reception in a November 2016

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interview with The Guardian (quoted in Beaumont-Thomas 2016), the heroism of these characters reified a dynamic which “no one saw … an African American man, a Jewish man, and a white-bread politician saving the world as a team”. The overshadowing of this progressivism by Independence Day’s nationalism, a quality which gave Emmerich a reputation as “Mr Superpatriot” (ibid., 2016), perhaps corresponds with a modern phenomenon surrounding the Jacksonian explicated in Mead’s book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy And How It Changed The World. Mead (2001, 230) speaks of a “new Jacksonianism” that is “no longer rural and exclusively nativist”, embodied in a bland homogeneity symptomatic of the “homeowner on his modest suburban lawn” rather than the “homesteading farmer and the log cabin”. “A popular culture of equality and honor” transferred to “African American culture”, which had evidenced “the role of Jacksonian values” through “the increasing presence of African Americans in all military ranks” (ibid., 236). This encapsulation of civic nationalism, an ethos of integrationism encoded when Hiller and Levinson arrive back on earth to greet the president and their families with celebratory cigars, has its mirror image in the martyrdom of Casse, whose death forms a wry nod to the victims of 1990s globalisation. A contrasting farewell to a bygone age of the provincial Jacksonian, Casse’s death becomes ineluctable reality when his last remaining missile jams before the weapon port of the mothership. Consequently, he realises immediately that he can only annihilate the mothership if he sacrifices himself by flying into the weapon port. After he emotionally sends a final message to his children back on earth, a close-up shot displays Casse exclaiming to his alien abusers, “hello boys, I’m back!” Emmerich next cuts to the cheers on the Area 51 base which greet the vaporisation of Casse and the demolition of the alien fleet, a  salvation forged in the wake of white working-class sacrifice. Does the demise of Casse but the fortune of Levinson and Hiller portend a new world order where only the socially and financially secure survive? Are these plot resolutions derisive towards the quotidian “land of the free” so invoked by Shepard’s final speech? Or are they a logical consequence of what he defines as an America where rights are dependent on earning “advanced citizenship”, an exclusionary ideology which elicits neoliberal as well as nativist connotations? I posit that the political configurations in this conclusion represent lynchpins affinitive with the fluid politics of the Clinton era. In manifesting a Jacksonianism which integrates the urban and ethnic as patriotic heroes but acknowledges the

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travails of America’s left behind classes, Independence Day recalls one of the aims of Clinton’s presidential candidacy, namely the stoppage of “the politics of identity”, which had subsumed “the moral core of liberalism” (Edsall n.d.). Clinton’s successful attraction of white lower income ‘Reagan Democrats’ back to the Democratic fold in 1992, which withstood the impact of the populist third-party candidate Ross Perot, meant that he became the “first Democratic presidential candidate since 1980 to carry the white working class” (Kilgore 2016).7 This result, which felt increasingly jarring against the Hamiltonian dimension of neoliberal globalisation intensified in Clinton’s presidency, was reconciled with the Democratic Party’s maintenance of support from big business and minority voters, a pattern of triangulation possibly as contrived as Whitmore’s unilateral idealism. Twenty years after Independence Day’s 1996 release, its 2016 sequel Independence Day: Resurgence was screened against a political climate hostile to the fissures disguised and the centrism vaunted in the 1990s. Clinton’s mediation of interest between working-class patriots and corporate America was inapplicable in a presidential contest which pitted his wife Hillary Clinton, a candidate stereotyped as an incarnation of the cosmopolitan internationalism embraced by America’s coasts, against Donald Trump, peculiar vanguard of the protectionist heartlands. Fittingly, Emmerich, who returns to direct the sequel to his 1996 blockbuster, initially conveys the Trumpian anxieties of ‘one world government’ or ‘globalism’ instead of extra-terrestrial terror. The synthesis heralded in Whitmore’s Fourth of July speech soon proves outdated in a landscape where the Jacksonian/Wilsonian fusion has created the ground for policies of unadulterated multilateralism. This political homogenisation has emblems in Emmerich’s incarnation of the UN, which serves to defend the peace among nations that has existed in the years since the alien invasion of the 1990s, and an American head of state suspiciously synergetic with the contemporaneous presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. President Whitmore, who has long been out of office, is a comparatively peripheral figure haunted by memories of the 1996 war, no longer the figure of cool, centrist moderation. When 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole (quoted in la Ganga 1996) attempted to co-opt Independence Day in his campaign against Bill Clinton by citing its Manichean victory of “good over evil” and celebrations of “leadership” and “America”, he did more than reveal a rhetorical clumsiness unpromising for his electoral prospects. He missed

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the triangulation at the heart of Independence Day’s narrative and the political dexterity of the fictional president, who was closer to the Arkansan incumbent in career trajectory than any Republican challenger. Clinton’s second term would further evidence triangulation tropes in American cinema, a centrist phenomenon ironically polarised in the popularity of two tonally variant representations of the modern presidency.

Presidential Renditions of Triangulation in Clinton’s Second Term The motifs of unilateral idealism and preemption respectively central to Independence Day and The American President play large roles in two very different productions released in the first half of Clinton’s second term. Air Force One (1997), a high concept blockbuster which revolves around an American president’s fight back against terrorist hijackers, insinuates that a multilateral order can only be preserved with unilateral American action. An early scene in which the film’s fictional president James Marshall attends a diplomatic dinner in Moscow signals this emergent configuration. The event undergirds the idealism of multilateral cooperation with military triumph, showcased in Marshall and Russian President Stolicha Petrov’s commemoration of the capture of Kazakhstani dictator General Ivan Radek by American and Russian Special Forces. Petrov, who warns of the “suppression of democracy” and “a new Cold War”, reflects an internationalism redolent of what Douglas Brinkley (1997, 116) calls the Clinton administration’s doctrine of “democratic enlargement”, contained in the belief that “the United States was duty-bound to promote constitutional democracy and human rights everywhere”. This ratification of US power and democratic proliferation becomes surreal when Petrov praises Marshall as “one of the world’s greatest leaders” and an arbiter of justice against the dictator who is now “in prison”. The radical equality between idealistic collaboration and military preeminence at work here breaks down when Marshall admits that America should have acted against Radek sooner, elucidating dilemmas of conflict prevention and human rights prominent across Clinton’s two terms. Marshall’s dialogue connotes this theme: Let’s speak the truth. And the truth is, we acted too late. Only when our own national security was threatened did we act. Radek’s regime murdered over 200,000 men, women, and children, and we watched it on TV.  We let it ­happen. People were being slaughtered for over a year and we issued economic

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sanctions and hid behind the rhetoric of diplomacy. How dare we? The dead remember. Real peace is not just the absence of conflict, it’s the presence of justice. And tonight I come to you with a pledge to change America’s policy. Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons and to those who would use them: your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate, and we will no longer be afraid. It’s your turn to be afraid.

Interestingly, Marshall treats Russia as a passive bystander in relation to Radek’s regime and declines to invite President Petrov to participate alongside the United States as a military equal. With the platitudes to a multilateral era of post-Cold War amity already established in the cordial reception given the president and the homage paid to the victims of Radek, the speech finishes with a Jacksonian pugnacity which proves dominant in the remainder of Air Force One’s narrative. When the plane carrying the president home to the United States is hijacked by Radek loyalist Ivan Korshunov, Marshall employs skills previously acquired in a tour of duty in Vietnam. This Jacksonian dimension obscures the president’s promise to uphold international law against human rights abusers and heightens in a climax which sees Korshunov thrown into the Caspian Sea and the president safely arrive home with his family. Perhaps Donald Trump (quoted in McAfee 2015) underlined the prioritising of Jacksonian unilateralism over Wilsonian internationalism in Air Force One when he interpreted Marshall as a character “who stood up for America” in the midst of his campaign for the Republican party’s nomination and when he later borrowed the film’s score to celebrate his 2016 election victory (Mullin 2016). Wag the Dog, in contrast, lends itself less easily to right-wing co-option through a narrative which attributes the Jacksonian’s primacy to cynical preemption. The subject matter of Barry Levinson’s 1997 satire revolves around a fake war fabricated to save an incumbent president from electoral disaster, posing a transgressive synergy with the contemporaneous Monica Lewinsky scandal and the attendant triangulations of foreign policy which followed in its wake. The character of spin doctor Conrad Brean makes this topicality palpable when he persuades Hollywood producer Stanley Motss to help rescue a president caught seducing an underage ‘firefly girl’ in the heat of an election year. Brean’s cajoling encompasses Jacksonian memories which range from the arcane to the atrocious. He rapidly cycles through mercurial references to James Polk’s acquisition of the Oregon territory from Britain in the 1840s; the battle cry of “remember the

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Maine” which instigated the Spanish-American War of 1898; “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”, the slogan of frontier veteran William Henry Harrison’s successful 1840 presidential campaign; finally, and most uncomfortably, the iconic Vietnam era photograph of the “naked girl covered in napalm” appears onscreen in conjunction with Winston Churchill’s “v for victory” gesture and the five marines “raising the flag” on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. Brean rationalises the invocation of these disparate images as proof that “war is show business” and tells Motss that only a cinematic phony war (euphemised as “pageant”) can salvage the president’s reputation. The preemptive nature of a later reference to Reagan’s October 1983 invasion of Grenada, an intervention which distracted from the Beirut bombings which occurred a few days prior to this event, further connects the phony war project with a spirit of prudent, nonpartisan triangulation. Wag the Dog’s portrayal of militarism as a distraction from domestic disarray only grew in relevance over the course of 1998 and 1999. The airstrikes on Khartoum and the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in August 1998 elicited a piece from a journalist which compared “the latest news out of Washington” to the “plot of the movie Wag the Dog” (Wayback Machine 1998) and posited that Levinson’s film functioned as a “reference point in the debate over Clinton’s motivations”. Similar observations were renewed in December of that year. Clinton’s aerial bombings of Iraq, which occurred at the beginning of his impeachment trial, prompted recitations of “Wag the Dog” and claims that the policy had a “political linkage” (Wilgoren 1998). The fact that Motss’s production simulates a US invasion of Albania, however, means that Wag the Dog has its closest affinity with the Kosovo War which succeeded the resolution of Clinton’s impeachment trial in early 1999. Described pithily by Independent journalist Julia Reed as “Wag the Dog Three” (Reed 1999), the Kosovo War had its catalyst in the persecution of Serbia’s Albanian minority by dictator Slobodan Milosevic and augured a drift from Kupchan and Trubowitz’s (2007, 8) category of a “liberal internationalism” grounded in “leadership through multilateral partnership rather than unilateral initiative”. The unilateral element of the conflict, which was underpinned in its execution under NATO rather than UN auspices, was leant a rationale of Wilsonian benevolence by co-participant British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 1999 Chicago speech (quoted in Henig 2001, 55), which promised a “millennium where dictators know that they cannot get away with ethnic cleansing or repress their people with impunity”.

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The propagandistic production in Wag the Dog presages aspects of this unilateral idealism. Motss exploits liberal humanitarian sensibilities when he casts a young American teenager to play the fake role of an Albanian orphan left destitute and hunted by terrorist reprisals. Yet despite this, Motss’s film displays a Jacksonian quality comparable to the defensive agendas assimilated by Presidents Whitmore and Marshall. When Brean proposes that the picture should have a Wilsonian character and advertise American ‘liberation’, Motss points out the limits of this pretext and opts for the delineation of a defensive war fought for the US homeland, against terrorists who want to “destroy our way of life”. This Jacksonian facet escalates in necessity when the CIA disputes a conceit of Motss production, specifically the lie that the Albanian government has planted weapons of mass destruction in Canada. Seeking to prolong the war for partisan reasons, Brean and Motss mine a staple Jacksonian myth of post-Vietnam America by inventing the legend of an American soldier left behind on Albanian soil.8 In scenes which recall the efforts of populist politicians who spoke of POWs left behind in Vietnam long after the 1973 ceasefire, the spin doctor and producer concoct a narrative surrounding a man “trapped behind enemy lines” and tell country singer Johnny Dean (played by Willie Nelson) to write a song about the soldier, maintaining popularity with a folksy Jacksonian parochialism. If there is a recurring theme in the triangulations of the 1990s presidential film, it is this idea of the Jacksonian as serving a ‘regime consolidating’ function. The next chapter continues examining this capricious centrism within the satirical war picture Three Kings and a cycle of post-9/11 productions containing foreign policy dynamics demonstrative of equilibrium, renewing a focus on the combustible mixture of idealism, materialism and military potency driving America in the unipolar era.

Notes 1. The term “holiday from history” was employed in a January 2002 article published by The Economist editorial, entitled ‘What September 11th really wrought’. This compared the relative benignity of the Clinton era with the febrile mood of the post-9/11 psyche (The Economist editorial 2002). 2. The Monroe Doctrine, which was thought by many historians to be authored by President James Monroe’s Secretary of State and presidential successor John Quincy Adams in 1823, is principally remembered for its opposition to European colonisation of the Western hemisphere. To the

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American legal scholar John Bassett Moore (1921, 31–33), the doctrine was notable for engendering the “growth of an American system” and encouraging “reciprocal non-interference”. Although there are scholars who detect impulses of idealism in the Monroe Doctrine, it is chiefly regarded as realist in its nationalism and interest in an American sphere of influence. 3. Essentially a mid-term election manifesto, the “Contract with America” was authored by Newt Gingrich and Texas Republican representative Dick Armey and promised to voters, in Peter Feuerherd’s words, “to reform Congress, enact welfare reform and tax cuts, among other items” (Feuerherd 2018). 4. A broader attack on the Clinton administration’s maintenance of neoliberal and Reaganite policies can be found in Hitchens’s 2000 book No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. This book castigates triangulation as a “traditional handling of the relation between populism and elitism”, hinging on “an edifice of personal power” (Hitchens 2000, 21–24). 5. Andrew Jackson is now frequently interpreted as an icon of conservative nationalism, a labelling possibly accentuated by parallels made with President Trump’s populist tropes (Baker 2017). Yet the scrutiny surrounding Andrew Jackson’s marriage to divorcee Rachel Jackson, along with rumours of cohabitation prior to their nuptials, invites greater comparison with the vituperation prompted by the freewheeling background of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Historian Ann Toplovich (2005, 3) discusses the personal attacks on Rachel Jackson (formerly known as Rachel Robards), who was smeared as “a Jezebel, an adultress” and “a bigamist”. Rachel Jackson’s death in December 1828, which came soon after a fierce presidential contest between her husband and incumbent John Quincy Adams, stemmed from a “heart broken by the heartless attacks of Jackson’s enemies” (ibid., 3). Far from connecting Jackson’s previous careers as a military general and self-reliant planter to any regnant social conservatism, Toplovich suggests that the Democratic Party, in regard to Andrew and Rachel’s marriage, used “the changing moral views on personal, romantic choice of a mate between 1790 and 1830 in order to shape their story to their advantage” (ibid., 3). This socially liberal dimension of Jackson’s presidency points to the inevitable crosscurrents involved in drawing analogues between the Jacksonian movement of the past and its conservative Republican remoulding in the present. 6. Whitmore’s party affiliation is never explicitly referenced in Independence Day. 7. By employing statistics taken from national exit polls in the two American presidential elections of the 1990s, Teixeria and Abramowitz provide a nuanced reading of Clinton’s recapturing of the white working class. They note how he “averaged only 41 percent across his two election victories” with this demographic and prevented “these voters from siding with his

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Republican opponents in large numbers, eking out one point pluralities among the white working class in both elections” (Teixeria and Abramowitz 2009, 11). 8. Figures such as the populist presidential candidate Ross Perot, who Mead (1999, 16) considers emblematic of the Jacksonian’s animus against “entrenched elites”, led the charge against presidential neglect of missing POWs in Vietnam throughout the 1970s and 1980s. A project incepted by Perot in 1969 (Mintz n.d.), the sanctification of the left behind POW was furthered by Reagan as Governor of California and the wife of Perot’s 1992 running mate, Sybil Stockdale. Sybil Stockdale’s organisation of a “League of Wives of American Prisoners of War” and Reagan’s rhetoric against the North Vietnamese engendered, according to Rick Perlstein (2013), “a right-wing variant of the Watergate-induced dread about whether anyone in Washington could be trusted”.

References American Rhetoric website. 2019. William Jefferson Clinton: Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial Prayer Service Address. Last modified January 19. https:// www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/wjcoklahomabombingspeech.htm. Bacevich, Andrew. 2005. The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War. New York: Oxford University Press. Baker, Peter. 2017. Jackson and Trump: How Two Populist Presidents Compare. The New  York Times, March 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/ us/politics/donald-trump-andrew-jackson.html. Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. 2016. How We Made Independence Day: Interviews by Ben Beaumont-Thomas. The Guardian, November 8. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/08/how-we-made-independence-day-rolandemmerich. Brinkley, Douglas. 1997. Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine. Foreign Policy 106 (Spring): 110–127. Carroll, William. 1996. Clinton Wants Historic Image of Thinker’s President. The Irish Times, August 24. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/clinton-wantshistoric-image-of-thinker-s-president-1.79677. Daalder, Ivo H. 1998. Decision to Intervene: How the War in Bosnia Ended. Brookings, December 1. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/decision-tointervene-how-the-war-in-bosnia-ended/. Edsall, Thomas Byrne. n.d. The Protean President. The Atlantic. https://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/ar chive/1996/05/the-pr otean-pr esident/376585/. Accessed 13 April 2019.

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Edwards, Jason. 2015. Foreign Policy Rhetoric in the 1992 Presidential Campaign: Bill Clinton’s Exceptionalist Jeremiad. Communication Studies Faculty Publications 50: 32–53. Feuerherd, Peter. 2018. The Midterms That Changed America. JSTOR DAILY, September 17. https://daily.jstor.org/the-midterms-that-changed-america/. Henig, Stanley. 2001. To War For a Just Cause. In The Kosovo Crisis: The Last American War in Europe? ed. Tony Weymouth, 39–58. London: Pearson Education. Hersh, Seymour. 1998. The Missiles of August. The New  Yorker, October 5. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/12/the-missiles-ofaugust. Heyman, John. 2018. Politics, Hollywood Style: American Politics in Film from Mr. Smith to Selma. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Hitchens, Christopher. 2000. No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations Of William Jefferson Clinton. New York: Verso. ———. 2005. The Clinton-Douglas Debates. In Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays, ed. Christopher Hitchens, 379–399. New  York: The Nation Institute. Hyland, William. 1999. Clinton’s World: Remaking American Foreign Policy. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. Ifill, Gwen. 1992. The 1992 Campaign: Clinton’s Standard Speech: A Call for Responsibility. The New  York Times, April 26. https://www.nytimes. com/1992/04/26/us/the-1992-campaign-clinton-s-standard-campaignspeech-a-call-for-responsibility.html. Keating, Peter. 2010. Remembering Oklahoma City, and How Bill Clinton Saved His Presidency. New York Magazine, April 19. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/04/remembering_oklahoma_city_and.html. Kilgore, Ed. 2016. The End of the Clinton Era of Democratic Politics. New York Magazine, November 10. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/11/theend-of-the-clinton-era-of-democratic-politics.html. Kupchan, Charles A., and Peter L. Trubowitz. 2007. Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States. International Security 32 (2): 7–44. Laham, Nicholas. 1996. A Lost Cause: Bill Clinton’s Campaign for National Health Insurance. Westport, Connecticut: Greenport Publishing Group. Lewis, Danny. 2015. Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion. Smithsonian Magazine, November 25. https:// www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/reagan-and-gorbachev-agreed-pausecold-war-case-alien-invasion-180957402/. Mastanduno, Michael. 1997. Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S.  Grand Strategy after the Cold War. International Security 21 (4): 49–88.

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McAfee, Melonyce. 2015. Harrison Ford has a Fan in Trump. CNN, December 11. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/11/entertainment/harrison-forddonald-trump-air-force-one-feat/index.html. McDougall, Walter A. 1997. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With The World Since 1776. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Mead, Walter. 1999. The Jacksonian Tradition And American Foreign Policy. The National Interest 58 (Winter): 5–29. ———. 2001. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2017. The Jacksonian Revolt: American Populism and the Liberal Order. Foreign Affairs, January 20. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/unitedstates/2017-01-20/jacksonian-revolt. Mintz, John. n.d. Perot Vietnam Role Disputed. The Washington Post. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/06/06/perot-vietnamrole-disputed/a35f82d7-2281-49df-ab37-56e0face31d2/?utm_term=. b5e372a2ff3e. Accessed 23 April 2019. Moore, John Bassett. 1921. The Monroe Doctrine. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 26: 31–33. Mullin, Gemma. 2016. Victorious Donald Trump Walks Out to Air Force One Movie Soundtrack as He’s Elected President. The Mirror, November 9. https:// www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/victorious-donald-trump-walksout-9224156. Perlstein, Rick. 2013. The Enduring Cult of the Vietnam ‘Missing in Action.’ The Nation, December 3. https://www.thenation.com/article/enduring-cultvietnam-missing-action/. Posadas, Alejandro. 1996. Nafta’s Approval: A Story of Congress at Work ‘From International Relations to National Accountability’. ILSA Journal of Int’ & Comparative Law 2 (2): 433–451. Reed, Julia. 1999. Welcome to Wag the Dog Three. The Independent, April 11. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/welcome-to-wag-the-dogthree-1086640.html. Scott, Ian. 2011. American Politics in Hollywood Film: 2nd Revised Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Singer, P.W. 2008. How The Real World Ended ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’. Foreign Policy at Brookings, Policy Paper no. 6 (August): 2–15. Skowronek, Stephen. 1997. The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sterling-Folker, Jennifer. 1998. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Assertive Multilateralism and Post-Cold War Foreign Policy Making. In After the End: Making U.S.  Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War World, ed. James Scott, 277–304. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Teixeira, Ruy, and Alan Abramowitz. 2009. The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class. Political Science Quarterly 124 (3): 391–422. The Economist Editorial. 2002. The Mood of America: What September 11 Really Wrought. January 10. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2002/ 01/10/what-september-11th-really-wrought. Toplovich, Ann. 2005. Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The Robards-­ Jackson Backcountry Scandal. Ohio Valley History 5 (4): 3–22. Wayback Machine. 1998. Wag the Dog Back in Spotlight. August 21. https://web. archive.org/web/20120915020805/http://articles.cnn.com/1998-08-21/ politics/wag.the.dog_1_people-from-terrorist-activities-dogs-militar ystrikes?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS#. Webber, Julia. 2005. Independence Day as a Cosmopolitan Moment: Teaching International Relations. International Studies Perspectives 6 (3): 374–392. Weber, Cynthia. 2013. International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction. 4th ed. Hove: Psychology Press. Wilentz, Sean. 2008. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008. New York: Harper Perennial. Wilgoren, Jodie. 1998. Attack on Iraq: Voices; Around the U.S., Cynicism And a Showing of Support. The New  York Times, December 17. https://www. nytimes.com/1998/12/17/world/attack-on-iraq-voices-around-the-us-cynicism-and-a-showing-of-support.html.

Filmography Air Force One. 1997. Directed by Wolfgang Peterson. USA: Columbia Pictures. The American President. 1995. Directed by Rob Reiner. USA: Sony Pictures. Independence Day. 1996. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: 20th Century Fox. Independence Day: Resurgence. 2016. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: 20th Century Fox. Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros. Wag the Dog. 1997. Directed by Barry Levinson. USA: New Line Cinema.

CHAPTER 3

Equilibrium: The Turn of the Twenty-First-­ Century War Film and the Millenarian Remaking of Global Meliorism

In 1997, the International Relations theorist and historian Walter McDougall argued that Global Meliorism had returned to American political life. This philosophy derived from the liberal internationalism of the FDR and Truman administrations and was central to the United States’ post-war occupations in Japan and Germany. It saw opposition to the United States as “in great parts the products of oppression and poverty”, and rationalised a foreign policy based on “promoting democracy, defending human rights, and fostering economic growth” (McDougall 1997, 208). For many in the Democratic Party, Lyndon Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War led to the discrediting of this doctrine, a disgrace amplified by the collision of a welfarist outlook with Jacksonian militarism. To McDougall, the foreign policy of the 1990s sought to redeem this error by implementing “the purest Global Meliorist agenda to date” (ibid., 198). This had ironically been embodied in the presidency of Bill Clinton, a former draft dodger and purported moderate from Arkansas who had ended up pursuing the “quixotic goal of state-building in marginal, chaotic countries like Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia” (ibid., 203). David O. Russell’s satirical action film Three Kings (1999) and a cycle of war pictures released at the dawn of the twenty-first century contradict McDougall’s view in their reification of efforts towards rehabilitating Global Meliorism for an era of unipolarity and neoliberalism. This chapter demonstrates how they address the liberal interventionism of the 1990s © The Author(s) 2020 T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_3

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and portray attempts at engineering an ever-closer equilibrium between the Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian schools. It predominantly focuses on how Three Kings heightens the unilateral idealism introduced in the previous chapter and encapsulates a Global Meliorism synthesised with Jacksonian characteristics. I revisit this interplay in a section revolving around the patriotic war pictures Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down (both 2001), again revealing the ideological importance of the Clinton years. I conclude this chapter with a coda on Antoine Fuqua’s 2003 action film Tears of the Sun, a critical and commercial failure which speaks to the limits of Hollywood’s endorsement of the updated Global Meliorism against the ‘shock and awe’ of the Iraq War.

Three Kings: Escalations of Unilateral Idealism Three Kings’s offbeat opening presents an indictment of the fragmented kaleidoscope papered over by the successes of the Gulf War. It begins with a subtitle displayed across a black screen, stipulating, “March 1991. The war just ended.” The epochal connotations of the statement are counterbalanced by a tracking shot which shows Sergeant First Class Troy Barlow running at the bottom corner of the screen. After Barlow stops and spies a lone Iraqi soldier in the distance, he glances off-screen and asks casually to a fellow soldier, “Are we shooting people?” The desultory delivery of this line makes it seem as if actor Mark Wahlberg is talking to the film’s production team. In having Barlow break the fourth wall, director David O. Russell sets up an atmosphere of collusion that undermines the successful image of the First Gulf War. This bathetic sensibility continues when Barlow sees that the Iraqi soldier has a weapon, revealed in a POV shot from his riflescope. After shooting the soldier in the neck, Barlow and his comrade, the Southern racist Private Conrad Vig, head to gauge the shot’s impact. The sight of the dying Iraqi soldier, who lies on the floor gargling blood, prompts Vig to exclaim, “Congratulations my man, you shot yourself a raghead!” The desaturated quality of the cinematography employed by Russell for its “blown out” look, combined with the dying soldier who stares towards the camera, lends the scene a dreamlike feeling of unreality.1 Its nihilism feels analogous to the writing of Bacevich’s The New American Militarism (2005, 218) and its detection of a Jacksonian chauvinism applied to less-­ developed nations in the aftermath of President George H.W. Bush’s announcement of a ‘New World Order’:

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The Post-Cold War military encounters that have sent Americans soldiers hurrying from Panama to the Persian Gulf and points in between have produced not only changes in tactics, organization, and hardware. They have also produced a new mindset … an imperial America will have need for military officers with just the right touch when it comes to meting out fear, violence and money to pacify those classified in former days as wogs.

This form of militarised mercantilism emerges in a montage reflective of a Hamiltonian and Jacksonian dominance. It begins with a series of medium shots depicting American soldiers weightlifting and partying against the strains of Rare Earth’s ‘I just wanna celebrate’, images connotative of economic and military virility. The coarseness of these sights foregrounds the forgetting of the Wilsonian dimension used to rationalise the First Gulf War, jarring with George H.W. Bush’s castigation of Saddam Hussein’s regime as “Hitler revisited”, embodied in a “totalitarianism and brutality that is naked and unprecedented in modern times” (quoted in Bose and Perotti 2002, 146). The marginality of Bush’s Wilsonianism becomes deducible when Russell introduces the platitudinous commentary of journalist Adriana Cruz. A dizzying pan around her reporting makes obvious the all-­ consuming verve of the victory, a mood indulged by her exclamation that “music is high and spirits are soaring”. Cruz then echoes the Bush administration’s early rhetoric by stating to a group of soldiers, “They say you exorcised the ghost of Vietnam with a clear moral imperative”. When an interviewee boasts, “We liberated Kuwait”, cheers and crass gesticulations undermine the notion of a “moral imperative”, an absence of altruism which accentuates in the montage’s climax.2 Russell culminates his medley of images in a tent filled with drunken soldiers singing Lee Greenwood’s patriotic country anthem ‘God Save the USA’. Leading the chorus is Barlowe, who appropriates a Keffiyeh for headwear. He surrounds himself with soldiers who wave torches as if they are in a rock concert, adding to the exuberant emphasis on America’s military ‘hard power’. The remainder of the montage shifts tone by ending the rendition of ‘God Save the USA’ and hinting at the need for an alternative to the Jacksonian and Hamiltonian accord so far foregrounded. As Russell freezes the frame on Barlow, the music switches to Public Enemy’s rap song ‘I can’t do nuttin for you man’ while subtitles wryly reintroduce the soldier as “Troy Barlow, new father”. The anti-establishment animus of Public

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Enemy’s song and its departing from the nationalistic revelry of ‘God Save the USA’ can be seen to rebuke the conservative Republicanism of the Bush administration, its evocation of racial difference showing the domestic discord that lies underneath the celebrations of imperialism. Tony Gradeja (2006, 212) signals this accentuation of contradiction by detecting it in the “incongruous mix” of the preceding songs, which portend “a sense less of unity than of unease, not harmony but dissension—the audible dimensions of the ambiguity of this war”. Gradeja’s premise of ‘dissension’ becomes clear in the subsequent introduction of Major Archie Gates, a somewhat Clintonian character who personifies drifts towards unilateral idealism. He initially appears having intercourse with a youthful reporter inside a bunker, a libidinousness soon contextualised with subtitles laconically noting, “Archie Gates, retires in two weeks”. His roguishness crystallises when Gates’s superior, Colonel Ron Horn, and Cruz (who is meant to be under Gates’s supervision) exasperatedly enter the bunker, engendering a culture war between the military brass and Gates’s libertarian hedonism, a kind of centre-left populism redolent of the backlash against Clinton’s impeachment. To Tim John Semmerling (2006, 128–129), the treatment of Three Kings’s female journalists creates a “remasculinization” that serves to “analogize journalism with the feminine”, a correction to a Vietnam War context “when journalists were blamed for sowing the seeds of indecision and dissent on the homefront”. Yet this reading, temporised within the ‘pooling’ context of the Gulf War, negates Gates’s own allegoric qualities and occludes the explicitly 1960s based libertarian hedonism in these scenes.3 M*A*S*H’s Korean War setting (intended, however, to parallel the experience of the Vietnam War for its 1970 release) and scenes of male-­ driven debauchery offer an analogous frustration with the framework of limited war. Leo Cawley’s (1990, 72) analysis of Robert Altman’s film is equally applicable to Three Kings: The resentment of military bureaucracy in the main characters is a trivialising surrogate for the rebellion and antiwar feeling of the Vietnam years. But antibureaucratic struggle keeps cropping up in M*A*S*H and elsewhere as little folks discover they don’t like the system. Their struggles with superiors serve as a surrogate for more principled conflict. Among other things, this acts as a surrogate for conflict over principle.

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Three Kings differs from M*A*S*H*, however, in its fusion of countercultural revolt with an interventionism synthesising unilateralism and nation-building idealism, resembling the mixture of heterodoxy and hedonism prevalent in the post-1994 Clinton administration. In an admonishment which follows the night of debauchery, Horn tells Gates that “this is a media war … you better get with the program” and rebukes the idea that Saddam Hussein’s retention of power means that the war was pointless, asking if he wants to “go in and do Vietnam all over again”. This exchange conveys the search for an alternative to an early 1990s myopia, reflecting Mastanduno’s (1997, 57) description of an era where commentators “searched in vain for a pattern to U.S. interventionist policy since the end of the Cold War”. A plot development which reframes the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian facets within a context of blue-collar populism undercuts this malaise, providing visions of intervention symbiotic and inclusive. Three Kings’s central characters find in the prospect of Kuwaiti gold refutations of the multilateral realism pursued by the George H.W. Bush administration, renewing the reconciliations between Mead’s schools located in Independence Day. The interests of Barlowe, Vig, Gates and the recently introduced Sergeant Elgin (contextualised as “Sergeant Elgin, on a four month paid vacation from Detroit”) intersect over a ‘treasure map’ retrieved from a captured Iraqi soldier’s buttocks. In the process of realising that a unilateral venture in post-ceasefire Iraq may secure them ‘Kuwaiti bullion’, the men have exchanges which reveal the ethnic and geopolitical divisions consequent from the Bush administration’s awkward combination of multilateralism and realism. Vig confesses that he doesn’t know “why we use this pro-Saudi, anti-Iraqi type language”, reminding of the undemocratic coalition of countries allied with the United States against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The African American Elgin adds to this dissensus when he defines Kuwait as “the Arab Beverly Hills” and exclaims that “Saddam jacked” Kuwait for the gold highlighted on the treasure map. Khatib (2006, 69–71) views the “multi-ethnic army unit” formed by these men as symptomatic of a “Democratic microcosm of the United States”. A montage which reveals the men’s “day jobs” back in the United States illustrates their distance from the elitism of Republican rule. Barlow, who works as an office clerk, embarrasses himself by spilling black ink all over his white shirt in front of his colleagues. Elgin’s work as a baggage handler at Detroit airport is also bathetic, juxtaposing the character’s alienation from Bush’s New World Order with the numbing routine of his

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daily work. The final flashback shows Vig in his home state of Texas, firing a shotgun at a totalled car. Upon the flashback ending, Vig guilelessly observes to Gates, “I don’t have a day job sir”. The small humiliations of these scenes recall George Lipsitz’s description of American life since 1973. He outlines how “the US defeat in the Vietnam War, deindustrialization, changes in gender roles and the rising emphasis on acquisition, consumption and display” had “characterized the increasingly inegalitarian economy of the postindustrial era” (Lipsitz 2013, 98). Like the national unity forged at Area 51 in Independence Day, the unilateralism of Gates’s project papers over class divisions and the different foreign policy interests driving disparate sections of the United States. Its purpose is comparable to the International Relations theorist William Appleman Williams’s (1972, 43) understanding of the Spanish-­ American War’s cathartic launching of US power, linking “prosperity, social peace, and foreign policy”. This process, although seeking to supplant the broken kaleidoscope so evident in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, becomes mercurial through encompassing motifs of Jacksonian militarism and Hamiltonian globalisation. When Elgin, Barlow and Vig engage in a game of ‘shooting practice’ on the way to Karbala, the ineluctability of the former school emerges when one of the men shoots a ball rigged with C4. As a consequence of this incident, Gates takes the men to see the bodies of Iraqi soldiers destroyed by American bombs, reinforcing his ambivalence towards the Gulf War’s Jacksonian dimension. The sight of the dead officers recalls the work of the political scientist John Mueller (1995, 92), who underlined the annihilation inflicted on Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait. Mueller invoked the journalists who “said the most bodies they saw at any one place was 40 and estimated that a total of 200 to 300 may have died”. The shot of the soldiers is further synergetic with the context of Three Kings’s release year of 1999, resonating with Steven Lee Myers’s (quoted in Roberts 1999, 117) description of the “11 weeks of increasingly intense bombing” part of the Kosovo campaign that year. These mercurial alternations between whimsy and violence were not present in John Ridley’s original screenplay for Three Kings, which instead resembled a more orthodox action picture. Russell, who subsequently took on the project, altered this vision and replaced the film’s original title of ‘Spoils of War’ after researching the aftermath of the First Gulf War. He associated the eclectic atmosphere of post-ceasefire Iraq with tonal and

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genre variation in an interview with Combustible Celluloid Magazine in 1999 (quoted in Anderson 1999): The war to me itself wasn’t very interesting. What was interesting was the moment everybody stopped paying attention. And that was very fertile for making a movie. They broke out the yellow ribbons. Meanwhile, these guys are partying—drinking liquor out of mouthwash bottles, because no liquor was allowed in Saudi Arabia—and 60 miles away there’s a democratic uprising. Which to me, was a mind-blowing opportunity for a movie that felt like M*A*S*H (1970) in some parts, and really powerful drama in other parts. Because you start out with the M*A*S*H partying, they go for a joyride, and now they’re in the middle of something more serious. It has to become a very human fable for me, at the end. There’s a face. It’s not a computer grid of a bomber. It’s some guys who hate Saddam as much as we do.

The Karbala sequence, which is recounted by Russell in the latter part of the interview, adds to the incongruity by including references distinct from the comedy of M*A*S*H*. It further places the portrayal of a “democratic uprising” against the Jacksonian’s unilateral populism and the Hamiltonian’s economic utilitarianism, reinforcing facets which compete with the Wilsonian view that “order must also be based on principles of democratic government and the protection of human rights” (Mead 2001, 139). These inflections of the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian, coupled with Three Kings’s heist premise, hew closely to the narrative of Brian G. Hutton’s 1970 war picture Kelly’s Heroes. A picture which displays comparable collisions between a countercultural spirit of rebellion and Jacksonian militarism, Hutton’s film follows a group of American soldiers on a private mission behind enemy lines in Vichy France and in search of 14,000 gold bars stored in a French bank. Led by Private Kelly, a former lieutenant wrongfully blamed for a botched infantry assault, the soldiers allude to the hedonism of the Vietnam anti-war movement through several scenes of promiscuity (they enjoy the company of French prostitutes) and subversive idiosyncrasies (Oddball, a drugged platoon commander, mirrors the drop-out hippie culture). Russell’s employment of the Beach Boys’ hit song ‘I Get Around’, in a fashion not dissimilar to how Hutton plays Lalo Schifirin’s soulful theme song ‘Burning Bridges’ over scenes of mass bombing against German positions, illuminates disjuncture. Referencing the prospect of meeting Karbala’s inhabitants, Gates boasts of “hitting them with the blinding power of American sunshine” while ‘I

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Get Around’ plays, a song which symbolises a freedom of action available to the American hegemon and lacking in the Iraqis oppressed by Saddam’s troops. The group’s arrival in Karbala promptly signals the disharmony resultant from this bombast. In slow motion, a medium shot from the jeep shows raggedly dressed Iraqi boys running elatedly at the sight of the American troops. The juxtaposition of this with a shot of an American flag located on the back of the men’s jeep connotes the false promises of liberation. Gates, who yells that they have “orders from President Bush”, soon attempts to calm the groups betrayed by the caprice of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. The welcoming appearance of Saddam’s opposition makes the shamefulness of this defusing acute; a number of Shia rebels appear in Western clothing, conveying amenability to regime change. A low-angle shot of an insurgent proclaiming liberation from a rooftop amplifies this cacophony of pro-American attitudes. Vig, who stands guard while his men search for the gold, watches awkwardly as the Iraqi civilians clamour for their emancipation. In Jean Baudrillard’s essay, ‘The Gulf War did not take place’ (1991, 32), the author speaks of a conflict where “what is it at stake … is war itself”, a state where “it is not beholden to have an objective but to prove its very existence”. The reaction of Iraqi rebels to a truck accident underlines this symbolism and sense that the war has been a simply vicarious exercise. The long shot that films the truck’s entry into Karbala emphasises its distance from the penitence and poverty of the town, a mirage-like emblem of modernity elevated above the destitution of ordinary Iraqis. The truck is fired on by Saddam’s soldiers and crashes in a manner that would not be amiss in a generic action picture. It topples over, unleashing a torrent of milk that floods the town square. Russell attenuates the bombast of the crash through the Iraqi civilians who try to drink the milk, dispelling any notion that the accident’s aftereffects are going to continue the first act’s comedy. They invoke the sanctions employed against Saddam Hussein’s regime and the decline of sanitation for the rural and urban poor in Iraq, an inequity exacerbated by Saddam Hussein’s Baath party’s simultaneous attainment of higher salaries and non-rationed goods.4 As posited in Combustible Celluloid Magazine’s interview with Russell, the key to conveying these horrors is tonal alternation, with the recreated horrors of 1990s Iraq working alongside a disinhibited countercultural tone. The subtext of a 1990s era globalisation influential on both the

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American soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts adds to this medley. After Gates realises the gold is located in an underground bunker, he and his men find a group of soldiers enjoying a variety of American commodities. The first shot inside the bunker depicts a soldier exercising on an aerobics bike against a mural of Saddam Hussein kissing the cheek of an Iraqi child. The juxtaposition highlights the guards as imbibers of America’s capitalistic hegemony, a quality corroborated by the scene’s broader mise en scene—computers, other gym equipment and TVs are revealed as the camera pans around the room. These displays of globalisation cater to the Americans’ material desires. They also serve as palliatives for a domestic malaise at home. In one shot, a TV broadcasts the beating of Rodney King that took place in March 1991, an incident that becomes drowned out by the hyper-capitalist mania of the bunker. Chris Holmlund (2008, 242) comments on this erasure of political incongruity and its applicability to a contemporaneous milieu of US economic dominance, noting how Russell indicts “late-nineties consumerism” and expresses that “love of expensive ‘stuff’ transcends national boundaries”. Other aspects of the scene indicate the divisiveness of this single-minded Hamiltonianism. The robbery of Saddam’s guards, who appear humiliated by Gates and his men, mirrors Jeremy Brecher’s (2002, 3) argument against the creation of a “global village” during the Clinton presidency. He contemplates the prospect of a “global pillage”, where “uncontrolled economic forces and powerful economic factors are able to devastate the people of the world and their local and global environments”. The global village becomes, in the context of the bunker, a symbol of discontent. In one moment, Gates chastens Saddam’s troops for their love of American ostentation by turning the music off, labelling it as ‘bad’ for them. His belittling leaves the soldiers petty recipients of the morsels of American-­ led globalisation, humiliating Saddam’s troops with a hierarchal reminder of US cultural and economic power. A need to amend the fissures resultant from an iniquitous relationship of realism and idealism, as well as between economic self-interest and liberal internationalism, becomes additionally exposed when the men attempt to steal the gold without becoming involved in Karbala’s politics. As this theft occurs, Russell cuts to a family of hostages who are flanked by Baathist soldiers. The use of this crosscutting contrasts the men’s materialism with the brutality of post-ceasefire Iraq. Viewers are next compelled to watch a systematic exercise in collaboration with the Saddam Hussein regime, illustrated in shots of Iraqi troops who stand in long, antlike lines

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to deliver the gold to a blue Humvee. When the men return to Karbala’s square and view the rebels made to kneel by dictatorial force, Russell again adopts genre heterogeneity to indicate a shift in political configuration. The political dichotomies of the 1969 Revisionist Western The Wild Bunch recur in the prospect of a tense standoff. In The Wild Bunch’s finale, outlaw Pike Bishop’s struggle to provide Global Meliorism for his fellow gang member Angel’s Mexican compatriots collides with the Realpolitik of his work for local dictator Mapache. His failed effort to play off the right-­ wing Mexican junta and the Mexican rebels against each other lends an inevitability to a lethal gunfight launched in the wake of Angel’s execution and which kills almost all central characters involved. This dynamic of cognitive dissonance is also located in how Russell presents the brutal murder of an Iraqi mother by a soldier employed in Saddam’s army. The moment is comparable to the casus belli of Angel’s death in The Wild Bunch, with the nihilism of Saddam’s Iraq taking the place of Mapache’s junta. Much as Bishop was forced to witness the execution of Angel after a weapons deal with Mapache’s army, Gates and his men watch helplessly as the mother is killed in front of her husband and daughter in stark slow motion. The mother’s death, which signals the end of collusion with Saddam’s rule and connotes the Global Meliorist imploration that the United States should “deploy its assets to lift up the poor and oppressed” (McDougall 1997, 208), contains the similar fin de regime connotations of Angel’s death yet the aftermath is somewhat different. In their initiation of a shootout, Gates and his men embark on a humanitarian intervention illustrative of modern warfare’s unpredictability. Their abandonment of realism begins when Gates wrestles an AK-47 off a member of Iraq’s National Guard only for it to shoot the soldier in the foot. The fatalistic tone that accompanies this move has affinity with Baudrillard’s 2002 essay The Spirit of Terrorism (quoted in Dixon 2004, 4) and its notion of a pre-9/11 “universal attraction” to violent spectacle in American cinema, an “acting out” that “is never very far away, the impulse to reject any system growing all the stronger as it approaches perfection or omnipotence”. Whilst Gates’s action lacks the nihilism Baudrillard is emphasising, his attempt to save the insurgents is similarly destructive, with Barlow only surviving because of Kevlar and the rapid takedown of Saddam’s soldiers. To Elizabeth E. Martinez (2013, 35), the men’s journey towards intervention evidences disconnect “between theories of just war and the actual

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conduct of war”. Echoing the methodologies of Just War theorists such as Christopher Walzer, Martinez argues that Three Kings revolves around whether “war is a game of action or of justice” (ibid., 35). The former emerges in the “occupational and professional imperative” of the soldiers while the latter manifests in their decision to “make a difference in the outcome of the war” by intervening in Karbala (ibid., 35). This dichotomy, which mirrors the Jacksonian and Wilsonian divide, is tangible in a set piece which updates a memorable sequence from Kelly’s Heroes for the unipolar 1990s. Invoking a scene where Kelly’s men cross a minefield in order to escape encroaching Nazi troops, circumstances force Barlow to drive through a desert full of landmines whilst being attacked by mortars containing tear gas. When Barlow’s driving topples the getaway vehicle and forces the Iraqi rebels to exit, the men’s altruism and the reality of modern war become more discordant from one another. This unwieldiness is encapsulated by the tracking shots that follow Barlow trying to save two Iraqi children fleeing the effects of the tear gas. Subsequent close-up shots show the children’s feet narrowly missing strategically placed landmines, creating disjointedness between Barlow’s rescue attempt and the stark brutality of the mise en scene. The prevalence of landmines recalls a salient collision in Clinton’s second term. Clinton’s refusal to sign a landmine treaty in 1997 was rationalised as “a line I simply cannot cross” (quoted in CNN 1997) due to opposition from a recalcitrant Republican Congress and the administration’s reliance on landmines placed in the Korean Peninsula against Kim Jong II’s dictatorship. When Clinton was castigated by Nobel Prize-­ winning activist Jody Williams (quoted in Davis and Selvidge 2015, 176) as “neither a leader or a statesman”, the crisis conveyed the difficulty of synthesising Global Meliorist ideals with the demands of American militarism. Appropriately, Barlow’s rescue attempt ends with his humanitarianism nullified—after he grabs hold of the fleeing children, a group of Iraqi soldiers knock him to the ground and take him into custody. The second half of Three Kings resolves the fissures threatening the fulfilment of a Global Meliorist agenda through a kaleidoscopic approach, initiating this process with scenes of collaboration between Gates and a group of pro-­ capitalist Shia.

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Three Kings and the Centrist Adaptation of Global Meliorism Three Kings departs from The Wild Bunch and Kelly’s Heroes in its moving beyond the fin de regime conclusions of both those pictures. Whereas Peckinpah’s film climaxes with Bishop’s last stand against Mapache and Kelly’s Heroes ends with the American seizure of gold, in Three Kings, the scenes that succeed the shootout and Karbala raid see Gates and his men grow to embrace a contradictory concept of intervention. These structural and tonal differences can be seen as anchors for Three Kings’s distinct allegorical focus. If the nihilistic endings of The Wild Bunch and Kelly’s Heroes capture the miasma of Vietnam, then it is arguable that the mercurial nature of Three Kings’s later scenes offers a valuable mirror to the political rivalries of the 1990s. In 1999, the neoconservative Charles Krauthammer (quoted in Rising 2003, 218) illustrated the hyperpartisanship that surrounded the Global Meliorist doctrine when he lambasted the draft dodging president’s conduct of the Kosovo War as “recapitulating the disastrous gradualism of Vietnam”. In Three Kings’s second half, Gates attempts to achieve a form of Global Meliorism contrary to the realism of his vituperative superiors. In the process, he synthesises, in Clintonian fashion, the 1990s orthodoxies of neoliberal globalisation and liberal intervention. This fusion first becomes visible when Gates and his men arrive at the underground shelter of the Shia rebels fighting Saddam, an ambit that presents an idyll of cosmopolitan accord. The interior of the shelter is in the manner of a religious hall, an atmosphere amplified by a Shia shrine that occupies the centre of the room. The growing affinity between Gates’s men and the rebels averts any implications of sectarian tribalism. Elgin kneels and prays with a group of Shia Muslims despite being a Christian, while Vig learns of the importance of shrines for the dead in Shia culture. It is not the egalitarianism of religion that is central in this scene, however, but the liberal commonalities between Gates and the grieving Amir, the husband of the mother executed in the Karbala sequence. Amir notes the fact that he studied at an American university and returned to become a successful hotelier before the war where “you guys all bombed our cafes”. His Westernisation encapsulates what Marc Mulholland (2012, 282–285) describes as the “bourgeois liberty” of the post-1989 era, signalling “the revolutionary impetus” of a “clear commitment to spreading free-market democracy”. Such a thrust was integral to the Global Meliorism of the 1990s and its postulations that “revolution, terrorism,

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and other ethnic, racial and religious hatred … are in great part the products of poverty”, requiring American “power, prestige, technology, wealth and altruism” (McDougall 1997, 208). The university educated Amir reflects these positive effects by purveying a “new man” persona, embracing what Penny Griffin (2015, 152–53) sees as the “particular coding of masculinity to draw men into consumer culture” and promote “emotional availability and domestic capacity”. He also embodies Joseph Nye Jr.’s (2004, 11) notion of “soft power”, the liberal ideal of American hegemony as the promotion of “universal values”, along with “values and interests that others share”, creating “relationships of attraction and duty”. Rowe (2007, 51) perceives these qualities of soft power in Gates and his men. He notes their “respective sympathy with the Iraqi dissidents”, which serves to “perform a narrative of cultural hybridity that unmistakably argues for greater understanding of other peoples as an alternative to unilateral globalization and US militarism”. Yet this view, which interprets the hard and soft power facets of American hegemony as inherently separate, ignores the kaleidoscopic basis of Gates and Amir’s military collaboration. After deciding that his men will help the Iraqis cross the Iranian border in exchange for support in finding Barlow, Gates forms a coalition with Amir which blends militarism and cosmopolitanism. Their partnership moves Gates’s unit away from their blue-collar backgrounds and reorients them towards an image of white-collar progressivism. A brief montage indicates this rapprochement. In a series of shots, the Americans get to grips with AK-47s found by Amir and the Shia, bonding over their shared appreciation of the weaponry. The combination of militarism with business, hard with soft power, and Western liberalism with conservative religion signals a centrist imperialism befitting for the post-ideological 1990s. This reciprocity of political belief has its inverse in the discordance of the subsequent torture sequence, which rebukes both the realism of the First Gulf War and the militarised Global Meliorism developed under Clinton. This rebuke is delivered by the Iraqi soldier Said, who uses a mixture of pantomime and personal tragedy to taunt the imperial foot soldier Barlow. Said’s first rhetorical question to Barlow scrutinises the cultural dimension of neo-imperialism. He asks, “What is the problem with Michael Jackson?” before imitating the musician’s iconic tropes with outrageous laughs and glove gestures. He then segues from this to outright polemic, lambasting Barlow for the culture that made Michael Jackson “cut off his fucking face”, making him

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“the pop king of sick fucking country”. When Barlow responds that “he did it to himself”, Said slaps his face with a paper clipboard, castigating his “main man” for defending the nation that “make the black man hate himself just like you the Arab and the children you bomb over here”. The ghettoised language of Said and his accusations of a racial hierarchy return to the dissension of Three Kings’s early scenes. His interrogation therefore deprives the Karbala intervention of its rebellious and countercultural facet, realigning Barlow with a white supremacist, WASP-­ controlled caricature of George H.W. Bush’s New World Order. To Kitaeff (2003), these appropriations were ideologically dubious. This was because Said “rejects dominant U.S. social values” whilst simultaneously possessing “a role that ultimately recuperates Western culture and, more specifically, hegemonic US ideology”. Yet this quality of perverse emulation also forms an overture to arguments critical of American foreign policy’s straddling of cultural hegemony with military bombast. Said next asks if the US army is coming back to help Iraq’s children and admonishes Barlow for only supporting a rebellion after entering Iraq for ill-gotten wealth. Possessing a less authoritarian demeanour than the troops he works with, Said’s playfulness both affirms and scrutinises the power of American hegemony. He follows his lecture to Barlow with violence, as, in several close-up shots, he electrocutes the American and watches his suffering in a staid, lugubrious manner. The unpredictable dynamics of Said’s behaviour, to Ira Jaffe (2008, 79), undercut a wisdom that “the soldier thrives on incongruity”. The Michael Jackson anecdote, especially “its specter of self-erasure”, adds to a “hybrid cinema” concerning “hybrid identity” (ibid., 79). The salience of incongruity becomes explicit when Said tells of the American firepower that killed his wife and one-year-old son, a barbarity confirmed in a flashback of a cot crushed by debris caused by US bombing. The acknowledgements of disarray are leant additional unease when Russell cuts to dreamlike renderings of Barlow’s home life. A tracking shot of Barlow’s wife and daughter walking outside in a prosperous 1990s suburbia signals a harmonious world wholly removed from Said’s brutality. This is next counteracted by a nightmarish, though still hypothetical, image of Barlow’s wife and daughter thrown back by an explosion akin to what killed Said’s son. Barlow’s contemplation of this tragedy underlines a more subversive side to Said’s character than Kitaeff’s view of him as a recuperation of American cultural hegemony. Barlow, like Amir, has his new man embrace of suburban modernity and capitalistic sophistication

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placed against the horror of personal loss. He cannot reconcile this persona with Said’s trauma and cries as the soldier describes how American warfare destroyed his family. In arriving at this position, Barlow realises the political schizophrenia of the Michael Jackson anecdote, reflecting a cognitively dissonant hegemon undecided on whether its power is for altruism or economic self-interest. Said exposes the inability to reconcile these dispositions in another talking point which questions the First Gulf War’s rationalisation of stability. This critique begins while a visual flashback to Barlow cavorting with his wife plays onscreen. As this occurs, Said speaks over the flashback, telling the American of how the Reagan administration taught the Iraqi army English and how to use weaponry. Realpolitik, it would seem, played a role in increasing Iraq’s power and fomenting its annexation of Kuwait, negating whatever moral credit the United States could gain from repelling Saddam’s army and bombing Iraq. Barlow tries to duck these revelations by rationalising the war’s Jacksonianism from a Global Meliorist perspective. He notes that “too much bombing” could not negate the seriousness of “saving Kuwait” and that protecting the Arab nation would “keep the world stable”. Retorting, Said questions the US commitment to ending pariah regimes around the world and concludes his torture by pouring oil into Barlow’s throat, an act of violence prompted by the American’s platitudes of ‘stability’. The nature of this exchange, which encompasses castigation of both the realist and idealist poles, grounds the scene further in the kaleidoscopic unipolarity of the late 1990s. For some academic scholars, however, this bricolage of ideology has fervid associations with the Second Gulf War. To Pat Brereton (2012, 193), the torture sequence forms an “excessive image”, which serves as an “objective correlative to dramatize a secret history that is not played out until much later”. Matthew Alford (2011, 80), lambasting Three Kings for its fusion of the Jacksonian and the Wilsonian, postulates that Russell suggests “the problems of Iraq can be solved, and only solved, by the application of US force”. This stance is anchored with “humanitarian rhetoric” and “assumptions of benevolence”, facets which had “ideological consistency with the 2003 Iraq War” (ibid., 81). In a 2003 interview conducted by The New  York Times’s David Edelstein, Russell (quoted in Edelstein 2003) decried neoconservative readings of his film’s moral stance by claiming its purpose was in “pointing out the hypocrisy of our intervention”.

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Although Brereton and Alford’s detection of an overlap in political configuration is not incorrect, the neoconservative background noise of the late 1990s and its effect on the Clinton administration’s political direction establishes more contemporaneous synchronicities. The inception of the think tank ‘Project for a New American Century’ in 1997, which included future Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld amongst its members, allowed greater neoconservative influence on the complexion of foreign policy in Clinton’s second term. The Kosovo intervention was preceded by Clinton’s signing of the PNAC sponsored Iraq Liberation Act, a bill that called for a long-term policy of removing Saddam Hussein from power and for more material support of the Iraqi opposition.5 It could be argued therefore that Three Kings’s rendition of the Shia rebels hews as close to this neoconservative agenda as the remoulded Global Meliorism of the 1990s. The positive reviews which greeted Russell’s film in 1999 did not pick up on this political affinity, but some critics did notice the undercurrents of 1990s globalisation and anti-Realpolitik. Despite faring poorly at the box office by only grossing $108 million worldwide of its $48 million budget, Three Kings looked set to achieve an acute cult following when reviewers such as Empire’s Ian Nathan (n.d.) complimented on its “violent, blackly comic, ultra-cool, anti-war satire”.6 Roger Ebert (1999) shared this interpretation of Russell’s film as politically potent. Praising its subtext of American-led globalisation, he commented that, “Three Kings is startling in the way it shows how the world is shrinking and cultures are mixing and sharing values”. The build-up to Barlow’s rescue pervades the globalisation touched on by Ebert’s review but it also indicates, contrary to Nathan’s perception of an ‘anti-war satire’, that this process must be coupled with a militarised Global Meliorism. This is evident in a scene where Gates, Vig and Elgin talk with an Iraqi rebel who desires to open a hair salon. Rowe (2007, 51) notes the cultural amorphousness of this rebel’s representation. He observes that hairdressing, “a traditionally respected profession among the Kurds … hints at Kurdish affiliations, displaced from the main population centers of Northern Iraq to the film’s setting in southern Iraq”. This “deliberate confusion of different dissident groups” serves to “achieve cinematic economy” and makes the dissidents “more accessible to the US soldiers”, due to their suffusion with “US multiculturalism”. I would add that this interplay reinforces a milieu where regime change complements an imported liberal capitalism. Vig’s opinion that Iraqis

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believe “America is the great Satan” is rebuked by Amir, who comments that “they don’t care if they cut American hair, Sunni hair, Shiite hair … they just want to get rid of Saddam”. The subsequent montage, which portrays the men walking by cheering Shia vagrants, further purveys cosmopolitanism through the song ‘Stop Ou Encore’ by the Belgian musician Plastic Bertrand. For all the countercultural elements of the music, Gates’s mission resembles a centrism that bears comparison to the Clinton administration’s attempt to rehabilitate the liberal activism of the Kennedy and Johnson years. The men’s pro-business provision of Global Meliorism can be interpreted as emblematic of the “tough minded” tradition of Schlesinger’s “vital centre”, a belief evinced by Strom (2001, 193) as “the promotion at home and abroad of constitutional practices based on individualism and free enterprise”. In updating this centrism, Gates’s mission acknowledges the necessity of neoliberalism for America’s deliverance of Global Meliorism, a quality elucidated in Three Kings’s imagery of an entrepreneurial Iraqi opposition. The aftermath of Barlow’s rescue cements this dynamic, namely in its expulsion of a ‘left behind’ reactionary Jacksonian class. Following the rescue, both Barlow and Vig are shot by a stray sniper, a shock assault which leaves only Barlow alive. Subsequently a series of shots show the Shia rebels burying the Southerner, a multicultural redemption suffused with liberal internationalist sentiment. To Semmerling (2006, 157), Vig’s funeral absolves “his prior ignorance and prejudices” and “is ameliorated by the knowledge that many more Iraqis died in relation to this single American loss”. Jude Davies (2005, 411–412) contrasts this by viewing his arc as part of an “imperialistic deployment of multiculturalism”, embodied in a “trajectory from white racist to would-be Muslim” and the encompassing of “multiple and sometimes contradictory poles of Americanness”. Davies additionally implies that Vig’s departure is cynical, making the “troubled, blue-collar white collar guy” part of a “defunct national myth” (ibid., 415). Read in this light, the gun wound sequence’s focus on Barlow serves to perform an ideological occlusion of Vig from the group’s mission, indicating that Gates’s countercultural masculinity, Barlow’s new man sensitivity and Elgin’s spirituality offer a better palatability with the Iraqi people. Vig’s redneck identity makes his demise inevitable, an outlier to a progressive imperium.7 These tropes of blue-collar nationalist sacrifice of course applied to Independence Day, where Casse’s death formed a dramatic emblem of the ‘left behind’ American Jacksonian. Tamed and domesticated within a context of cosmopolitan idealism, the Jacksonian’s cultural

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components are discarded in favour of its pure military hard power, restoring equilibrium to an interventionism hinging on American unipolarity. Indeed, the death of the authentically Jacksonian Vig portends that the only nationalism allowed in this emerging foreign policy landscape will be civic, safely compatible with Global Meliorist idealism and free-market neoliberalism. In Three Kings’s final scenes, the exit of the rebels across the Iraqi-Iranian border becomes filled with notions of rapprochement between realists and liberals, as well as between soldiers and journalists. The arrival and actions of reporter Adriana Cruz reflect this change. In a series of tracking shots, Cruz films with a sensitivity that contrasts with the gaucheness of her early encounters with the celebrating troops, both reporting on the men’s breaking of international law and the refugees’ desperation. Even when the scene is dramatically interrupted by Ron Horn and the US army, the narrative climaxes with an accord that conveys Global Meliorism’s primacy in 1990s diplomacy. The troops that storm the scene are all filmed with a handheld camera, a fraught style that accentuates the tumult. The dissimilarity between the serious Horn and the rebellious Gates renews the film’s broader allegory of the 1990s era arguments between staid, conservative realists and liberal interventionists. In a series of medium-angle close-up shots, Russell alternates between the sober-minded, cold realism of Horn and the emotional idealism of Gates. Gates’s imploration to Horn that he can “return the gold, save some refugees, get that star” serves to resolve the narrative disequilibrium but also illustrates the opportunistic centrism of the updated Global Meliorism. Gates’s triangulation seems most invocative of the philosophies of democracy promotion and Hamiltonian globalisation that, especially to Walter Mead, had been central to America in the 1990s. Mead (2001, 304–305) notes how, during the Clinton era, “Hamiltonians and Wilsonians dominated the civilian offices in the executive branch”, a control counteracted by Jacksonian influence on “military institutions and the Congress”. Horn’s eventual decision to accept both the repatriation of the gold to Kuwait and the refugees’ escape shows the essential power of the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian schools whilst pointing to a fundamental mollification of military power. This reconciliation emerges when the Iraqi refugees finally cross the border. In a wide-angle shot of the desert landscape, emotive music plays over the refugees fleeing the country as the realist Horn watches in acquiescence. The scene is one of centrist

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compromise, unifying the militaristic, liberal interventionist, and pro-­ business dimensions of American foreign policy for a successful deliverance of the Global Meliorist doctrine. The 1990s updated Global Meliorism for an era of increasing unilateralism in International Relations and a world dominated by American-led globalisation. Three Kings’s final montage shows how this ideological reconfiguration became an attractively centrist position. Exuberant soft rock music plays over freeze-frames of the men, superimposed with a subtitle that tells of their “honourable discharge … thanks to the reporting of Adriana Cruz”. The montage then reveals the men’s glamorous post-­ discharge lives; Gates works as a stuntman on a Hollywood film set; Barlow comes home to his family and starts running his own carpet store; finally, Elgin boards a plane to work with Gates. The juxtaposition of this prosperity with the compassion seen previously posits a 1990s style, third way alternative to realism. The final subtitles note that “the gold was returned to Kuwait” but “some was missing”. Global Meliorism is at once a means for humanitarian alleviation but also self-glorification and economic advancement. A cycle of films rushed into release following 9/11 manifest divergent glances at this multifaceted kaleidoscope, chiming in with possibilities and portending schisms unleashed by the ideological predilections of the neoconservative era.

Alternate Reifications of Equilibrium: The Global Meliorism of Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down Like Three Kings, the subject matter of both Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down revisits military ambitions circumscribed by the caution of George H.W. Bush’s administration. Ian Scott (2011, 192) considers their respective narrative focuses on America’s entanglement in the Yugoslav Wars and involvement in Somalia as associable with the Gulf War angst of Three Kings, contending that all three films “contemplate political choices, diplomatic engagement and military intervention … the major global issues that immersed the US in the 1990s”. The late 2001 releases of Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down, however, complicate these affinities with more febrile thematic connections. The impact of the 9/11 attacks licensed a filmmaking milieu which embellished accords between a cosmopolitan welfarism stereotyped as part

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of Hollywood social attitudes and a vengeful amelioration of the trauma wrought to America’s domestic psyche. This combination of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian emerged from the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (known commonly as MPAA) and former special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, Jack Valenti, who recycled the militarised Global Meliorism that was applied by his Texan protégé to Vietnam after meeting with George W. Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, in November 2001. Valenti’s rhetoric was strangely synergetic with the process of “linking democracy and American security” cited by Caverly (2010, 594) as central to the neoconservative foreign policies of the incumbent Bush administration. The MPAA head exhorted filmmakers to convey that “America has clothed and fed and sheltered millions and millions around the world without asking for anything in return”, while also reinforcing the need to “avenge the 9/11 attacks” and urging that “benevolence is a word that must be struck from our vocabulary” (quoted in Alford 2011, 25). Military support for the making of both Behind Enemy Lines and Black Hawk Down perhaps complemented this latter Jacksonian animus, infusing their releases with what Robb (2004, 27) calls a “relentless campaign to covertly manipulate our opinions about world politics”.8 Although in production prior to 9/11, set late in Clinton’s first term and revolving around a region unrewarded by the quixotism of George H.W. Bush’s New World Order, Behind Enemy Lines manifests an updated Global Meliorism resonant with the War on Terror’s political syntheses. As in Three Kings, the first act of John Moore’s film presents drift from a multilateral realism central to the early 1990s, gradually adopting a model of intervention both liberal and nationalistic. Moore prefaces these dissensions, however, with images evocative of the horrors inflicted on Bosnia by Serb and Croatian nationalism. These tragedies are delineated in a medium shot of a lone soldier digging a grave and a subsequent close-up shot of the same individual walking towards crowds of troops organising mass burials. It is initially ambiguous whether these burials are being enacted by perpetrators of genocide or the bereaved community of the dead. This ambivalence becomes accentuated by the overlaid voiceover of a British newsreader, who notes that “the much-criticized Cincinnati accord has bought a ceasefire to Bosnia and appears to be holding”. In spite of this change, the US military remains “in a high state of readiness, eager to answer the call”. The film abruptly switches attention to an aircraft carrier on the Adriatic Sea, where, for all the pulsing vulgarity of a non-diegetic electronic music

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soundtrack, the stultifying framework of limited war becomes clear. Chris Burnett, a bored and insouciant Navy pilot from the Midwest, speaks casually about wanting to work for Bill Gates and famous music stars after a mission is aborted. His shamelessly mercenary approach is underpinned by an isolating landscape in which war has become merely symbolic, a loss of purpose showcased when he decides to play with an American football in a fashion not too dissimilar from the antics displayed on the journey to Karbala in Three Kings. Goofily attempting to catch the ball after launching it from the aircraft carrier landing pad, Burnett’s childlike behaviour possesses an affinity with Bacevich’s (2005, 22–23) emphasis on a post-­ Cold War era in which war is “experienced vicariously”, a culture where “technology-as-panacea has knocked away much of the accumulated blood-lust sullying war’s reputation”. Yet as the appraisal of modern warfare unfolds in Behind Enemy Lines, there are markers of less critical understanding of American unipolarity, differing from the barbed satire of Russell’s film. Director Moore’s endorsement of unilateralism is fervid to the extent that Clinton’s aerial bombardment of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in 1995, a shift in policy which was preceded by the American undermining of the UN embargo against giving weapons to besieged Bosnian forces and hinged on “significant air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets” (Peceny and Sanchez-Terry 1998), is insufficient for the creation of a stable world order. This ideological purity, implicitly refracted through the military capability demonstrated in 1999s Kosovo intervention and its culmination of the Balkan wars, becomes tangible in a conversation between Burnett’s commanding officer, the American Admiral Reigart and the French Commander of NATO naval forces in the Adriatic, Admiral Piquet. The meeting between Reigart and Piquet evinces poor rapport, conspicuous in somewhat ominous dialogue which references American pilots straying towards the demilitarised zone (where NATO aircraft are prohibited) and the necessary involvement of the media’s coverage of the ‘conflict’. The stifling nature of this limited war, an atmosphere with shades of the journalistic undercutting which ruined the prosecution of Vietnam for right-wing observers, becomes moreover overt in wry comments delivered by Burnett. In an unsentimental farewell to the Wilsonian idealism which underscored America’s eventual entry into the Second World War and the ‘New World Order’ rhetoric establishing the conclusion of the Cold War, Burnett reflects to a fellow pilot that, “everybody thinks they’re gonna get a chance to punch some Nazi in the face in Normandy, but

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those days are over”. In a subsequent exchange with subtle echoes of Horn’s early dispute with Gates in Three Kings, Burnett is chastised by Reigart for his blasé attitude and decision to leave the Navy in two weeks. Burnett’s retort to Reigart’s admonishments invokes the Jacksonian fighting spirit and blames a circumscribed Wilsonianism for his feelings of malaise. He admits, “I didn’t want to be a cop. … And I certainly didn’t want to go walking a beat on a neighbourhood nobody cares about.” The fragments of the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian which precede the eventual arrival at a unilateral Global Meliorism are, if anything, more bombastically on display than in Three Kings. Burnett and close friend Lieutenant Stackhouse are soon assigned an aerial reconnaissance mission by Reigart, a routine exercise at first filmed to the song ‘Buck Rogers’ by the Britpop band Feeder. The song’s lyrics foreground, as with Russell’s use of the Beach Boys’ ‘I Get Around’ during the American entry into Karbala, a palpable sense of geographic mobility and material acquisition, signified in the adorning of the ‘Buck Rogers’ figure who owns ‘a brand new car’, with ‘leather seats’ and a ‘CD player’. They additionally point to a vein of quiet desperation, showcased in nebulous refrains which propound connotations of romantic renewal, voicing, “I think we’re gonna make it, I think we’re gonna save it, so don’t you try and fake it, anymore”. The duality evident in the Feeder song, between the solipsistic self-­ interest of economic virility and needy inclinations towards collective solidarity, becomes thematically integral when Burnett and Stackhouse’s F/A 18F SuperHornet is downed by a surface to air missile fired by local Bosnian Serb military forces. The men eject from their plane shortly after taking photos of mass graves in the forbidden demilitarised zone and parachute to ground near the haunting sight of a defaced female statue. The statue’s ‘two faced’ state, with one side left unscathed and the other crumbling, implies the capricious political dynamics prevalent in Bosnia, a theatre where the fig leaf of multilateral protection papers over a political ambit plagued by sectarian violence. Burnett’s experience of this deceptive environment, which is pervaded by the post-Vietnam era Jacksonian trope of the left behind POW, grows to affirm the necessity of a human rights orientated foreign policy. Shortly following the discovery and execution of Stackhouse by pro-Serb militarists, Burnett hides from encroaching troops in a ditch filled with bodies of Bosnian soldiers, coming face to face with the most egregious excesses of Serbian irredentism. Director Moore parallels Burnett’s increasing education about atrocity and a part of the world he thought “nobody cares

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about” with Reigart’s rebellion against the pro-European chain of command prescribed by Piquet. In arguments back on the aircraft carrier, Reigart contends to Piquet that the saving of Burnett, a man “behind enemy lines”, is of greater importance than the French commander’s support for the much hallowed “peace process”. Adding populist overtones, Reigart further warns that vetoing Burnett’s rescue will upset the “American people”, who “want their pilot back”. The shifts undergone by Burnett and Reigart respectively hint at their accommodations of the Wilsonian and the Jacksonian schools, establishing ground for a unilateral rendition of Global Meliorism. The original story of Behind Enemy Lines in the 1995 downing of American Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady over Bosnia, the film’s largely mixed critical and academic interpretations and the promotional context behind Moore’s production, however, underline the purest reifications of Jacksonian populism.9 Roger Ebert (2001) critiqued Moore’s portrayal of O’Grady’s escape as consisting of “rueful grins, broad smiles, and meaningful little victorious nods”. Adam Smith (n.d) of Empire magazine scrutinised Behind Enemy Lines’s “triumphal spin”, along with its “creeping hand of propaganda” and “flag-waving histrionics”, nationalist spasms which nevertheless didn’t spoil a “great deal of brash, ballistic fun”. In November 2001, Stephen Holden (2001) of The New York Times complimented the “relentless buzzing energy” and how Moore’s picture “plays into the new spirit of gung-ho militancy that has swept the nation since Sept. 11”. His writing gauged a message that conveyed, “Judicious flouting of the rules is sometimes the nobler choice” (ibid.). This flaunting of Jacksonian unilateralism, suspiciously condoned in the United States’ preeminent liberal newspaper, has been foregrounded in academic readings of Behind Enemy Lines. Alford (2011, 55) writes on how Moore signals “the importance of using American force for humanitarian reasons, regardless of international constraints”. It is Piquet, an opponent to “justice” and the film’s real “villain”, who tries to “smear the American national character”, embodying the “Europeans and international organisations” who are “unwilling to back up their agreements with force” (ibid., 54–55). William Van Watson (2008, 56) considers Behind Enemy Lines as typical of an “exercise in mindless, falsely triumphant empathy”, which meant Moore’s production belongs to a category of “self-congratulatory Hollywood products”. More explicit in the detection of Jacksonian thought is an article by Gearóid Ó Tuathail, titled ‘The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the

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Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture’. From the start of his analysis, Ó Tuathail (2005, 356) puts forward the idea that Behind Enemy Lines “is characterized by impatience with the pragmatics of multilateral diplomacy, and strong desire for the pleasures of unilateral action and morally righteous violence”, serving to mirror “the feeling of post-9/11 militarism”. In his novel connection of the Jacksonian to motifs of “remasculinisation” located in Burnett’s escape from Bosnia, Ó Tuathail draws attention to the “conflicting principles” at the heart of Moore’s narrative, focalising “war versus geopolitics, action versus talk, the uncomplicated and direct versus the complex and bureaucratic” (ibid., 359–360). The fluidity of Ó Tuathail’s analysis, which encompasses mention of the preemptive war adopted by neoconservatives and the partisan skulduggery of the 2004 election, attests to a picture with an ideological significance extending beyond its 2001 release. Yet Ó Tuathail’s dichotomies lack discussion of the fusionist elements contained in both the Bush administration’s foreign policy and Behind Enemy Lines’s storyline, missing Mead’s own ‘kaleidoscopic’ message in its singular emphasis on the Jacksonian school. The contrasting reality of synthesis is tangible in George W. Bush’s political arc, adding nuance to Ó Tuathail’s categorisation of the president as an exemplar of “war values” (ibid., 361). In his first presidential campaign, Bush had dismissed “nation-building” and propounded that “troops ought to be used to fight and win war” in an October 2000 debate with Democratic Party nominee Al Gore (quoted in Fukuyama n.d.). His State of the Union address in January 2002 underscored a conversion wrought by the onset of the War on Terror and assimilated what Caverly (2010, 594) cites as the neoconservative belief in “the enervating effects of democracy on the creation and use of state power”. Although remembered as Bush’s “Axis of evil” speech because of its castigation of pariah states and harbinger of unilateral force against “regimes that sponsor terror”, the address also lauded the “liberated Afghanistan” achieved as a result of American-led regime change the previous autumn (Bush, 2002). Because of this intervention, Afghan women were “free” and no longer “forbidden from working” by the overthrown Taliban government (ibid.). This progress was internationally ratified in the “Islamic street” which “greeted the fall of tyranny with song and celebration”, proving that “America will always stand firm for the non-­ negotiable demands of human dignity” (ibid.).

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Synergetic with the journey of an administration whose leader had once hoped that “our European friends become the peacemakers in Bosnia and the Balkans” (CBS News 2000), Burnett’s encounters in Bosnia move him past collusion with a failing multilateralism to a unilateral conception of Global Meliorism. In one sequence with shades of the minefield set piece in Three Kings, Burnett witnesses two children running and jumping over tripwires around an abandoned factory, a casual barbarity requiring American redress. Like Gates’s collaboration with the secular insurgency pioneered by Amir Abdullah and his like-minded pro-business Iraqi comrades, Burnett further finds Bosnian Muslims immersed in American culture and patriotism. For much of Behind Enemy Lines’s third act, Burnett is supported by a youth who loves the music of rap artist Ice Cube. The youth helps Burnett evade the pro-Serbian faction, eventually guiding him to an extraction point outlined earlier by Reigart. Moore concludes his film with reconciliation between realism and idealism, allegorised in the rapprochement between the paternalistic father-­ figure Reigart and the wayward son Burnett. Finally rescued by his commander after being thought dead, Burnett boasts of retrieving the pictures proving the continuance of genocide. The embers of the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian, previously flickering in Burnett’s insouciance towards Reigart, become secondary to Wilsonian aims. This is finally signalled when Burnett tells Reigart that he is rescinding his resignation letter and will not leave the Navy for a more lucrative job. Just before the end credits, Moore complements Burnett’s decision with subtitles noting that Reigart proudly resigned from his post for insubordination, a professional martyrdom which serves the convergence of liberal and Jacksonian philosophies. Black Hawk Down, a production held in contempt by some critics for depicting a “black enemy … virtually faceless” (Schwarzbaum, 2002) and endorsing “jingoism” (Mitchell, 2001), is easy to interpret as a convenient vehicle for an emergent post-9/11 militarism. George W.  Bush, who invited twenty congressmen to a screening of the film in January 2002, drew the lesson from Ridley Scott’s production that Clinton’s hasty exit from Somalia in 1993 “emboldened America’s terrorist enemies” and “led directly to al Qaida’s attack on September 11” (Slotkin 2017). On closer inspection, however, Black Hawk Down reifies criticism of the militarised Global Meliorism concomitant with the president’s post-9/11 foreign policy, posing a ‘break’ with the contentedly kaleidoscopic politics of the films explored earlier in this chapter. Cynthia Weber (2006, 65) defines

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Scott’s 2001 war picture as the “polar opposite to Behind Enemy Lines” because it reverses Burnett’s “moral conversion from pessimistic realism to enlightened idealism”; yet the disintegration of a multifaceted diplomacy is also central to its cautionary tale. Black Hawk Down is set in Somalia in October 1993 and revolves around an American-led peacekeeping mission assembled to prevent a civil war and famine instigated by warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. An opening montage delineates the absence of domestic stability precipitant of America’s military assistance, showcased in images of starvation and subtitles which contextualise the prevalence of “famine on a biblical scale”. Over shots of Red Cross brigades offering water and alleviating the plight of the destitute, subtitles continue to give information on the rationale for American involvement and the necessity of “20,000 US marines” who ensure “food is delivered, and order is restored”. According to the subtitles, chaos has ensued because of the marines’ departure. Aidid has declared war on the “remaining U.N. peacekeepers”, including “Pakistani soldiers” and “American personnel”, necessitating the presence of Delta Force, Army Rangers and the “160th SOAR”, who “are sent to Mogadishu to remove Aidid and restore order”. The montage ends with an observation that the extension of the American mission beyond three weeks meant that “Washington was growing impatient”, a subtitle which Scott portentously juxtaposes against a battle-scarred landscape. Implied in the chronology of this opening is the underwriting of the U.N.’s multilateralism by the United States’ military hegemony, eliciting connection between American Jacksonian bombast and a beneficent world order. At least for the first act, a number of key characters assigned to police the Somali capital of Mogadishu and kill Aidid profess confidence in this fusion. The arrest and quizzing of criminal Somali businessman Osman Atto by General William Garrison reveals an America impervious to self-doubt and assured in its provision of both Jacksonian firepower and Global Meliorist welfarism. Garrison, while exchanging Cuban cigars, questions Atto on his selling of guns “to Aidid’s militia”. In retort, Atto explicates the American naiveté of seeking to eliminate Aidid after only six weeks in the country and promising rewards of “$25,000” to Somalis who capture or kill the warlord, invoking the Jacksonian frontier imagery of the “gunfight at the K.O.  Corral”. Garrison, who amusedly responds that it is in fact the “O.K.  Corral” Atto is referring to, threatens that “we are not leaving Somalia until we find him”, a resoluteness which leaves Atto unimpressed.

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Against the diegetic sounds of helicopter rotors, signifying American military domination, the accosted businessman reminds of the sweep of history and the reality of “a tomorrow without a lot of Arkansas white boys’ ideas in it”. Upon being told that the Somali conflict is “our war”, Garrison resorts to Wilsonian rhetoric, admonishing Atto that the death of 300,000 Somalians is “genocide”. The cinematography suffusing this discussion is of dark and murky complexion, as if reflecting a fundamental moral ambiguity. It also heightens a divide between the exigencies of endless war and the steadfast belief, advocated by both liberal interventionists and neoconservatives, in the United States’ ability to implement democracy with immediate effect and safeguard international stability on its own terms. This discrepancy establishes precedence in the interactions of Garrison’s military underlings and is located in exchanges between the idealistic Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann and more cynical comrades. Reacting with horror to the mockery of Somalians by fellow 75th Rangers, Eversmann speaks of a population with “no jobs, no food, no education, no future”. He propounds that the military can either “help, or we can sit back and watch a country destroy itself on CNN”. Eversmann’s interactions with the cynical Delta Force soldier Norm ‘Hoot’ Gibson, however, render this choice a false dichotomy. Awkwardly trying to start a conversation before heading out on the mission, Eversmann contemplates the fantasy of Mogadishu as a holiday destination, an idyll feasible because of its ‘beautiful beaches’ and ‘beautiful sun’. This vision, the assumed culmination of a campaign of American economic and democratic influence, meets dissuasion from Hoot, who warns, “once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that shit goes right out the window”. Survival and victory in conflict, far from a conduit for what the Canadian neoconservative academic Michael Ignatieff (2003) calls a “liberal imperialism” and “empire lite”, is an end in itself, worthy of paramount consideration. Black Hawk Down hence portrays a world where, in contrast to the previous pictures explored in this chapter, war is divorced from cosmopolitan ideals and unpalatable as a vehicle for progressive change. Although the build-up to the Mogadishu raid shares elements in common with Three Kings and Behind Enemy Lines, namely in the hedonism and exuberance of the troops about to brace battle, the cathartic synthesis attained in the earlier films is denied by Scott. The bulk of Black Hawk Down’s narrative focuses on the fallout from the real life botched raid, a disaster symbolised in the destruction and collapse of the titular ‘black

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hawk’ helicopter in central Mogadishu. Hoot’s lesson that survival exceeds the importance of nation-building becomes vindicated in scenarios hinging on disjunctions between America’s military potency and human rights orientated liberal imperialism. Aidid’s troops, who are depicted as less scrupulous about the protection of life than the Americans, confound US forces by using women and children as human shields. A scene in which the American pilot Michael Durant (who was held captive for eleven days in real life) is questioned and held captive by warlords generates parallels with the interrogations of Said in Three Kings. This dynamic emerges in dialogue which undercuts American soft power and stresses that “in Somalia, killing is negotiation”, insisting on a landscape of endless war, where “there will never be peace”. Crucially, there is an absence of the countervailing strand of cosmopolitan and neoliberal Global Meliorism celebrated in Gates’s collaboration with the Shia, reflecting a politically homogenous milieu of ‘zero sum’ militarism. In a humiliating inversion of the hierarchy dominant in Black Hawk Down’s opening scenes, Scott’s film climaxes with the Americans requesting UN employed Pakistani and Malaysian soldiers for backup and retreating to a safe zone at a stadium. Black Hawk Down revisits in detail one of the most scarring diplomatic disasters during Clinton’s first two years in office and indicates the limits of an American imperium synthesising welfare with warfare. At the same time as purveying the small ‘c’ conservatism implicit in the latter critique, Scott’s film expresses sympathy for the professionalism of the soldiers trapped in the Mogadishu conflict and refrains from attributing the failures of the intervention to the alienation wrought by American hard power or cultural ignorance. Schismatic thinking is a blameless product of war’s exigencies and the dualistic objectives of a confused political brass, a lack of culpability tangible in the closing scenes. Hoot renders bare his belief in the reputational exceptionalism of the soldier and his own cognitive dissonance to Eversmann in the epilogue, commenting that the general public “don’t understand … that it’s about the men next to you. That’s all it is.” He couples this with his own aloof stance when Eversmann makes a gesture of solidarity, cryptically warning the sergeant, “Don’t even think about it, all right? I’m better on my own.” To a subset of film journalists and critics, the vulnerabilities visible in Black Hawk Down provided both catharsis and valuable lessons for an America traumatised by the 9/11 attacks. USA Today critic Mike Clark (2001) observed how Black Hawk Down attains this quality through

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“ironic screen timing reminding us of a battle that turned many against American troop commitment”. He moreover praised Scott’s film “as memorable as the ones that established his reputation” and especially liked how the representation of the Somalia operation “extols the sheer professionalism of America’s elite Delta Force” (ibid.). A similarly positive overview by The Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers (2002) placed Black Hawk Down in a cycle of militaristic pictures which included Behind Enemy Lines and emphasised the “richly detailed script” of Scott’s film, which made “the parallels to the current situation in Afghanistan striking and horrific”. Other reviewers were less sanguine about Black Hawk Down’s reverence towards American soldiers and its potential as an educational tool. Time Out London (n.d.) acknowledged that Black Hawk Down conveyed the “confusion and cock-up” of the “misadventure” in Mogadishu, but bemoaned that the “complicated and contradictory political context” became offset by the “odd Somali perspective”, which was “grossly inadequate”. Lisa Schwarzbaum (2002) of Entertainment magazine noted the powerful timing of Scott’s picture for a “generation defined by 9/11/01”. This did not excuse, however, its “faceless” portrayal of native Somalians and lack of “recognition of individual souls”, an emotional detachment incongruent with “the daily thumbnail profiles of the Sept.11 dead” (ibid.). Schwarzbaum’s hint of a jarring with post-9/11 America has been gauged by Film Studies scholars who have looked at Black Hawk Down’s propagandistic and political dimensions. An analysis by James I. Matray (2002, 177) argues that its distrust of liberal internationalism meant that Black Hawk Down “reflects the kind of neo-isolationalism that was driving the ethnocentric and unilateralist foreign policy of the current Bush administration before September 11, 2001”. Perhaps because of its dissonance with the new climate resultant from the 9/11 attacks, Black Hawk Down “falls short in educating viewers on how the United States should behave in modern world affairs” (ibid., 177). Contrastingly, Weber (2006, 72) considers the film fitting with the political mise en scene created by the War on Terror and confirmatory of a bipartisan consensus that “moral Americans are humanitarians”. Its only incompatibility with neoconservative foreign policy stems from its advocacy of “a myopic Americanism” and “not a universal humanitarianism” (ibid., 72). A 2017 article by Slotkin echoes this lack of philosophical unity. Titled ‘Thinking Mythologically: Black Hawk Down, the “Platoon Movie”, and the War of Choice in Iraq’, Slotkin’s article traces the mores of Black

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Hawk Down to the platoon films first highlighted in his 1992 book Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. The “Black-on-Black” encounters noticeable in confrontations between African American troops and Somalian insurgents employ the “ideological premises laid down in Bataan in 1943”, subsuming undercurrents of American racial heterogeneity within a Manichean battle against a mono-­ racial and homogenous enemy (Slotkin 2017). For all this eclecticism of ideology, Slotkin distinguishes Black Hawk Down for its nonfulfilment of the Bush administration’s Wilsonian agenda. At the end of the picture, there is no “regeneration” of “America’s commitment to making the world safe for democracy” (ibid.). Slotkin concludes with the observation that “Bush may have psyched himself up for war by replaying the White-against-Black scenario of Black Hawk Down”, but provides the caveat that “Three Kings and Independence Day” (both films which respectively foreground the export and consolidation of American democracy) might make equally palatable viewing for “those educated to recognize and respond to the new Islamic enemy” (ibid.).

Tears of the Sun: The Outer Limits of the New Global Meliorism The fissures interpreted in Black Hawk Down undermine the synergy Bush saw in its rendition of Clintonian foreign policy, belying the idealism so integral to America’s post-9/11 military ventures. Yet the picture that did more to counteract the viability of productions like Scott’s film and Behind Enemy Lines delivers the most hawkish endorsement of militarism’s co-­ option of Global Meliorism. Tears of the Sun (2003), a film which revolves around a US Navy SEAL detachment’s attempt to resolve a civil war in Nigeria, received a largely negative reception from critics and performed disastrously at the box office, grossing only $85 million worldwide compared to its $75 million budget (The Numbers website n.d.-a). The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw derided Antoine Fuqua’s picture as a “fantasy of short term, pain-free military intervention” (Bradshaw 2003), a reification of convenience echoed by Empire magazine’s Nick De Semlyen (n.d.) and his lambasting of a film consisting of “moral wish-­ fulfillment—a slick apology for US foreign policy”. Such accusations might equally be levelled at the reconciliations achieved at the end of Three

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Kings. Yet the timing of Tears of the Sun’s release in 2003, a year when the post-9/11 mood of retribution slowly became subsumed by the reality of imperial overstretch and insurgency in Iraq, may have inflected the perspectives of these critics as much as the inclusion of a pro-interventionist message.10 Fuqua’s film accelerates the established pattern of films depictive of growing rapprochements between the Jacksonian and Wilsonian schools. As in David O.  Russell’s picture and Behind Enemy Lines, its opening scenes focus on attitudes of American self-interest and a diplomatic agenda absent of the Global Meliorist animus. Tears of the Sun begins with a montage delineative of political tumult, clear in images of violence inflicted by a military coup d’état and the assassination of the Nigerian president and his family. The voiceover of a British newscaster, a presence directly comparable to the reporter’s contextualisation of the Balkan conflict at the opening of Behind Enemy Lines, informs the viewer of the context. Nigeria is a country of “two-hundred and fifty ethnicities”, but the chief tension emerging from the coup revolves around “Fulani Muslims in the north and Christian Igbo in the South”. The reporter comments that the latter group are “fearing ethnic cleansing” and “searching for sanctuary wherever they may find it”. Although the oppression of the Igbo seems to warrant a response from the international community, the assignment of Lieutenant A.K. Waters and his Navy SEAL team is strictly limited to the safeguarding of American lives. A briefing scene on board the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman speaks to a landscape of sectarian violence in Nigeria, encoded in exposition surrounding local militia who “kill anyone who goes to a different church”. There is also a candid admission that the United States has been supplying the Fulani “for far too many years”, raising parallels with the ‘blowback’ resultant from policies such as the American support of the anti-Western, Islamist Mujahideen against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The internal politics and mistakes of Realpolitik, however, are of peripheral concern, as Waters and his team are told their primary mission is to rescue Lena Fiore Kendricks, an American citizen by marriage and the widowed daughter-in-law of a US senator. Their secondary objective is to rescue two nuns and a priest who run a missionary, “if they so choose to leave”. The rigid parameters of the Nigeria operation draw on the Jacksonian’s provincialism and the anxieties of a parochial America, fearful only of threats to its own citizenry and Christian brethren. The overarching

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importance of Kendricks, a European woman and American citizen endangered by warring African factions, further overlaps with the racist mythos of what Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation (1992, 14) calls the “captivity narrative”, an “adventure story” descended from the mores of seventeenth-­ century colonial America. Slotkin posits that the captivity narrative concerns the vulnerability of a woman of European descent, traditionally kidnapped by Native Americans, who “symbolizes the values of Christianity and civilization that are imperilled in the wilderness war” (ibid., 14). The repeated employment of this framework, which Slotkin views as most striking in the writing of the nineteenth-century frontier novelist James Fenimore Cooper, underlines “the fundamental ideological and social oppositions dividing the society of Jacksonian America by projecting them backward into a fictionalized past” (ibid., 15). Slotkin’s analysis of Black Hawk Down highlights that the Jacksonian disposition of this historical allegory can also be applicable in representations of modern warfare, a synergy crystallised when the author notes that the depiction of Somalians is “like the Comanches or Apaches in a Western … they are seen as hyper-­ violent primitives” (Slotkin 2017). Waters’ entry into Africa shares aspects of this narrative DNA. Sent to retrieve a white European redolent of the captivity narrative, the Caucasian protagonist warns an African woman to be silent when American military forces arrive. Director Fuqua offsets the potential for an overt racial hierarchy through the conventions of the platoon film, illustrated in the noticeable number of African American troops in Waters’ contingent. It moreover counteracts the Jacksonian dimension through the behaviour of Kendricks and her rejection of the captivity narrative. Kendricks refuses to leave her hospital without Nigerians who want to leave their country, undercutting the realism of Waters’ operation with Global Meliorism’s welfarism. The alliance of religion and internationalism symbolised in Kendricks’s collaboration with a priest and two nuns additionally connects Christian mores with an interventionist foreign policy, a synchronicity originally posited in Mead’s (2001, 151) view of Wilsonianism as descendent from a “missionary” tradition in American statecraft during the nineteenth century. This synthesis, which is synergetic with the Bush administration’s dual fidelities to neoconservatism and American evangelism, becomes increasingly promoted as Tears of the Sun’s narrative develops. It is complemented by a milieu elucidative of one of the War on Terror’s most febrile theatres and in urgent need of Christianised American democracy. The sectarian

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resentments of Boko Haram, a radical Islamist sect which targeted Nigeria’s “religious and ethnic faultlines” (Agbiboa and Maiangwa 2013, 380), are represented in the predations of a newly installed military leader who pursues a policy of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Christian Igbo population. Despite initially sticking to the realism of his assignment by turning away Kendricks’s refugees upon arrival in the exfiltration zone, Waters soon changes his mind because of the new regime’s barbarity. During his escape flight from Nigeria, he observes that the missionaries and patients left behind at the hospital complex have been killed and the area immolated. As a consequence of seeing this carnage, Waters decides to turn back and save the turned away refugees from persecution, broaching a policy of pro-Christian counterinsurgency analogous with the post-9/11 Bush administration’s military aid and economic support for religiously divided countries such as The Philippines.11 The parochialism of the American predilection for Nigeria’s Igbo Christians is combined, however, with a mercurial rendition of Wilsonianism and Global Meliorism. This fosters an equilibrium ratified in Tears of the Sun’s climax. In the film’s third act, Waters discovers that one of the refugees he is escorting is Arthur Azuka, the surviving son of the president assassinated in the coup which has wrought misery on Nigeria. It is also revealed that his father, Samuel Azuka, was the tribal king of the Igbo, meaning that Arthur is the only member left of this royal bloodline. The opportunity of reinstating the son of the country’s previously democratically elected leader gives the convenient option of avoiding a full-­ blown American occupation, eliciting memory of the kind of quick intervention visualised by George W. Bush and his neoconservative acolytes in the build-up to the Second Gulf War.12 The fusion of liberal democratic conventions with authoritarian monarchy, conspicuous in the idea that Arthur should take the presidency rather than hold free elections, moreover overlaps with schismatic visions of the new Iraqi regime. Michael Rubin and Harold Rhode, neoconservative academics who worked within the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and expressed sympathy with the plans of Shia exile Ahmed Chalabi, advocated restoring “the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, with King Hussein’s brother Prince Hassan on the throne and Chalabi as prime minister … which would effectively return Iraq to its pre-1958 government” (Packer 2005, 108). Tears of the Sun’s conclusion touches on another trope of neoconservative duality through its juxtaposition of Jacksonian firepower with fantasies of American-led liberation. The final sequence depicts Waters, Kendricks

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and the refugees heading for the Cameroon border where the US navy are waiting to ensure their safety. In the course of their escape, the Fulani give chase and manage to kill several of Waters’ troops. Waters, Kendricks and the refugees are protected from harm, however, when US fighter pilots arrive overhead to bomb and immolate the entire Fulani army. Fuqua soon follows several shots of the razing with the relief experienced by Waters and Kendricks, who, as they leave via helicopter, watch crowds of Igbo cheer Arthur as their leader. Their intervention’s extermination of Fulani insurgents and creation of a new political foundation for Nigeria conveys the essential elasticity of the ‘shock and awe’ approach of warfare, enabling both a quick American exit and the implementation of a pragmatic programme of democracy for the third world. Fuqua closes his picture with a famous quote by Edward Burke which stipulates, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Such moral fortitude seems rich in a film which betrays Burke’s conservatism through a radical, optimistic and flexible portrayal of what US militarism can achieve. This quixotic politics encompasses elements of the films analysed earlier. Tears of the Sun’s subject matter invokes a similar African milieu to that of Black Hawk Down, while its presentation of what Reed (2003) calls “an indictment of the deplorable U.S. policies that aided in the murderous ‘ethnic’ cleansing of nearly one million Africans in Rwanda in 1994” makes it relatable to the concerns over genocide evident in Behind Enemy Lines. Its justification of what Alford cites as a “new imperialism” and a military “informed by deeply entrenched values of democracy and multiculturalism” additionally draws on the globalisation undercurrents visible in Three Kings. But in spite of these affinities, the production context and content of Fuqua’s film points to a picture more overtly embracing of the neoconservative worldview and less interested in the Clintonian operations focalised by those other pictures. Within the same year as Tears of the Sun’s release, actor Bruce Willis, who played Waters, promoted US actions in Iraq by performing blues songs in Telafar for American troops and offered $1 million for the capture of Saddam Hussein (BBC 2003). Robert K. Chester’s analysis of Fuqua’s film evokes these strains of pugnacity. The American Studies academic examines a film which “conjoins themes complementary to the ‘Bush doctrine’ with an intercession into diasporic politics”, celebrating a “cooperative, multiracial US military capable of delivering Christian Africa from the rapacious ethnic hatreds that drive Tears of the Sun’s Islamic enemy” (Chester 2013, 142–143).

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The sectarian preferences implied as central to Waters’ intervention by this reading reflect a reconfiguration of the updated Global Meliorism and the reintegration of a Jacksonian school previously rendered peripheral in Three Kings’s epilogue. Mead’s diplomatic philosophies, eventually subjected to centrist reconciliation in Russell’s film, annoyed critics when alternatively melded for Tears of the Sun’s pro-neoconservative aesthetic. The distinctive political permutations of the turn of the twenty-first-­ century war film and its variable critical reception attest to a vein of cinema deeply impacted by the vagaries of US foreign policy. The next chapter assesses how a plethora of productions released late in Bush’s first term and early in his second mirrored disjunctions emergent from the War on Terror by reconfiguring the bipartisan amity forged in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks and the liberal hawkishness vaunted by the MPAA head, Jack Valenti. It also traces the outgrowth of a cinema increasingly reliant on allegory, encoding the realities of militarism through more outlandish and disinhibited representations than the political reflections so far explored.

Notes 1. In a 1999 interview with Combustible Celluloid magazine, Russell (quoted in Anderson 1999) explained that ektachrome stock was chosen for its capturing of a “digital look” that drew from the First Gulf War being “the first war to really have color pictures in newspapers”. He elaborated on the “color Xerox quality” of the pictures, which is “very contrasty and kinda blown out”. Reflecting the impact of this aesthetic method, the 2000 DVD edition of Three Kings includes a warning preface explaining the desaturated cinematography. 2. Perhaps the discrepancy between Wilsonian rhetoric and realist policy was best expressed when George H.W. Bush (quoted in Graham-Brown 1999, 18), in the build-up to the Gulf War in 1990, refused to send “one single dime of the United States taxpayers’ money to Iraq” soon after his castigation of Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait. For contextualisation of the dictator’s retention of power at the end of the First Gulf War, Bowen and Dunn (1996, 12–13) comment on “what at first had seemed like victory for a new just and stable order”, culminating in “no more than the reestablishment of the status quo ante”. 3. The ‘pooling’ context of the First Gulf War, which dictated that journalists be grouped with American soldiers at all times, is described by Kellner (quoted in Reese 2004, 251) as a “militarization of consciousness”. The worrisome aspects of the practice were conveyed when reporters such as

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Ted Koppel (quoted in Zeinart and Miller 2005, 85) observed in 1991 that the close proximity to battle was like a “dream” and when George H.W. Bush (quoted in Vanhala 2011, 48) commented in a spirit of reciprocity, “I learn more from CNN than I do the CIA”. 4. The injustices of these economic and political dynamics are detailed in Graham-Brown’s 1999 book Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (180–85). 5. Explicit detail of the Iraq Liberation Act is provided by Congress. gov (1998). 6. The Numbers Website (n.d.-b) contains information concerning Three Kings’s box office performance. 7. Similar motifs of betrayal towards Jacksonian America recur in Chapter Five’s analysis of the ideological fissures in the Revisionist Westerns No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood. 8. Ridley Scott (quoted in Robb 2004, 91) joked that he would have had to title Black Hawk Down “Huey Down” without military assistance. 9. The most obvious ‘Jacksonian’ facets behind the making and promotion of Behind Enemy Lines were established when producer John Davis (quoted in Robb 2004, 181) admitted that script changes were made to accommodate the military and enable a realistic rendition of Grady’s story. He described the film’s premise as “Top Gun meets The Fugitive” and advertised the “high-tech elements that go into how warfare is waged today”. 10. Tears of the Sun’s US release was on March 3, 2003, roughly two weeks before the launch of the Second Gulf War. Fuqua’s production possibly possessed more resonance for the UK reviewers cited in this section because its UK release date was on September 12, 2003, long after the beginning of Iraq’s occupation and the proliferation of armed insurgencies against American and British troops (IMDB n.d.). 11. The opening of Southeast Asia as a “second front” in the War on Terror is discussed by Frida Berrigan (2003), who writes on the deploying of American troops in the “Philippines for training and joint military exercise in late 2001 and early 2002”. An amount of $78 million “in new military aid” was additionally guaranteed. 12. Anticipating an intervention of a few months duration and requiring less troop numbers than the estimate of several hundred thousand American soldiers provided by General Eric Shinseki, the Iraq invasion was marketed as a war of convenience by its neoconservative proponents. An article by Major Matthew R. Hover (2012, 341) in The International Review of the Red Cross journal specifies Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz’s stress that 30,000 troops would be enough to pacify Iraq. His article also underlines the short-sighted omissions of the “cultural, ethnic and religious differences between the occupier and the occupied populace” (ibid., 341).

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Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. 2005. The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture. Geopolitics 10 (2): 356–377. Packer, George. 2005. The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq. New  York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Reed, Rex. 2003. Rape, Pillage, Jungle Trek, Soaring Music. The Observer, March 24. https://observer.com/2003/03/rape-pillage-jungle-trek-soaring-music/. Reese, Stephen D. 2004. Militarized Journalism: Framing Dissent in the Persian Gulf Wars. In Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. Stuart Allen and Barbie Zelizer, 247–265. Abingdon: Routledge. Rising, George. 2003. Stuck in the Sixties: Conservatives and the legacies of the 1960s. Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris. Robb, David L. 2004. Operation Hollywood: How The Pentagon Shapes And Censors The Movies. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. Roberts, Adam. 1999. NATO’s Humanitarian War Over Kosovo. Survival 41 (3): 102–123. Rowe, John Carlos. 2007. Culture, US Imperialism and Globalization. In Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S.  Culture and the New Imperialism, ed. Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller, 37–59. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Schwarzbaum, Lisa. 2002. Black Hawk Down. Entertainment Weekly, January 10. https://ew.com/article/2002/01/10/black-hawk-down/. Scott, Ian. 2011. American Politics in Hollywood Film. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. De Semlyen, Nick. n.d. Tears Of The Sun Review. Empire Magazine. https:// www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/tears-sun-review/. Accessed 22 June 2019. Semmerling, Tim John. 2006. Evil Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 2017. Thinking Mythologically: Black Hawk Down, the ‘Platoon Movie,’ and the War of Choice in Iraq. European Journal of American Studies 12, 2 (summer): https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12000. Smith, Adam. 2002. Behind Enemy Lines Review. Empire Magazine. https:// www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/behind-enemy-lines-review/. Accessed 27 June 2019. Strom, Sharon Hartman. 2001. Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press.

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The Numbers website. n.d.-a. Tears of the Sun (2003): Theatrical Performance. https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Tears-of-the-Sun#tab=summary. Accessed 15 June 2019. ———. n.d.-b. Three Kings (1999): Theatrical Performance. https://www.thenumbers.com/movie/Three-Kings#tab=summary. Accessed 20 June 2019. Time Out London. n.d. Black Hawk Down Review. https://www.timeout.com/ london/film/black-hawk-down. Accessed 20 June 2019. Travers, Peter. 2002. Black Hawk Down Review. Rolling Stone, January 4. https:// www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/black-hawk-down-192632/. Van Watson, William. 2008. (Dis)solving Bosnia: John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines and Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land. New Review of Film and Television Studies 6 (1): 51–65. Vanhala, Helena. 2011. The Depiction of Terrorists in Hollywood Blockbuster Films: 1980–2001. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Weber, Cynthia. 2006. Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film. Abingdon: Routledge. Williams, William Appleman. 1972. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Zeinart, Karen, and Mary Miller. 2005. The Brave Women of the Gulf Wars. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Twenty-first Century Books.

Filmography Bataan. 1943. Directed by Tay Garnett. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Behind Enemy Lines. 2001. Directed by John Moore. USA: 20th Century Fox. Black Hawk Down. 2001. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Columbia Pictures. Kelly’s Heroes. 1970. Directed by Brian G. Hutton: USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Independence Day. 1996. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: 20th Century Fox. M*A*S*H*. 1970. Directed by Robert Altman. USA: 20th Century Fox. Tears of the Sun. 2003. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. USA: Sony Pictures. Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros. The Wild Bunch. 1969. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. USA: Warner Bros./ Seven Arts.

CHAPTER 4

Reconfiguration: Hard and Soft Power Rivalries in Cinematic Engagements With the War on Terror

In his 1990 work Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, the political scientist, Joseph Nye Jr. (1990, xvi), postulated that the future of American power depended on “cultural and ideological appeal” and the maintenance of a “healthy and open society”, alongside “military strength” and a “strong economic base”. The sustenance of these hegemonic qualities hinged on the “soft power resource”, the sources of power based on “American culture” and “transnational production” (ibid., 192–193). Ultimately, Nye (ibid., 178) thought these forces could collectively supplement the “traditional wisdom of realism and its concern for the military balance of power”. Fourteen years later in 2004, the consequences of the Iraq War prompted Nye to update his notion of “soft power”. Voicing the critique that the neoconservative attempt to instal free-market democracy in Iraq had focused “too simply on substance and not enough on process”, Nye (2004, 15) emphasised soft power’s premise of attraction. The United States could appeal to Muslim populations through getting “others to admire your ideals and want what you want”, embodied in the promulgation of concepts such as “democracy, human rights and individual opportunities” (ibid., x). Nye (ibid., 46–47) cited soft power’s historic success in various examples of culture (particularly American film) containing “subliminal images and messages about individualism, consumer choices, and other values that have important political effects”. These conveyed

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“American values that are open, mobile, individualistic, anti-­establishment, pluralistic, voluntaristic, populist, and free” (ibid., 46–47). Similar conversations were renewed in Bush’s second term. The “Princeton Project on National Security”, a bipartisan initiative stewarded by George P. Schultz and Anthony Lake, concluded that American strategy should be directed towards “common interests” (Ikenberry and Slaughter 2006, 17), encompassing a range of “formal and informal multilateral tools” based on “private networks, rules, norms and shared expectations” (ibid., 28). According to Nye (2009, 160), this sought to temper a militaristic “hard power” with soft power’s championing of “attraction” and form an intelligent combination called “smart power”. Nye’s concepts of soft and smart power posited a moderate alternative to the neoconservatism dominant in the 2000s. Yet an array of films released on the cusp of the Iraq War’s imperial overstretch, incorporating both literal and allegorical representations, demonstrated the challenges to centrist reconciliation and reconfigured the Wilsonian/Jacksonian fusion once propounded by Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The first section of this chapter looks at Spike Lee’s post-9/11 drama 25th Hour (2002) and the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, productions which render landscapes of Hamiltonian elitism and belie what Nye praised as the attractiveness of cosmopolitan American democracy with narratives of alienation. The centrepiece case study of this chapter that follows, however, takes on the problems of America’s post-9/11 diplomacy in an indirect and offbeat sense. Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s 2004 satiric comedy Team America: World Police’s premise of Thunderbirds style marionettes fighting global terrorism places soft power against an anarchic world of regime change and preemptive war. These collisions are echoed in the final section’s analyses of the superhero blockbuster Batman Begins and the geopolitical thriller Syriana (both 2005), films which mirror hard and soft power’s discrepancy and establish disequilibrium. Moreover, the political encodings of Batman Begins portend an increasingly symbolic direction to American cinema’s addressing of the War on Terror, auguring shifts towards a wholesale embrace of allegory central in the second half of the 2000s.

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Skewed Power: The Disjunctive Americas of 25th Hour and Fahrenheit 9/11 Based on a 2001 novel of the same name by David Benioff, Spike Lee’s New  York set drama 25th Hour was shot in the summer of 2001 and “reworked” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (Keeble 2017). Its US release date in December 2002 and distribution in European cinemas during the early months of 2003 (IMDB release info n.d.), somewhat fittingly, coincided with the loss of both respect and soft power the United States incurred in the build-up to its military invasion of Iraq. 25th Hour’s opening scenes and broader narrative are synergetic with this fall from grace, resonating with Nye’s (2004, 35) underlining of the decline in American “attractiveness” resultant from the “controversial security policy” ingrained in preemptive war. Lee captures this alienation with an opening title sequence depictive of post-9/11 New  York’s dysphoria. Immortalising the mood of sorrow experienced by his home city in the months following the 2001 attacks, Lee repeatedly draws attention to the “Tribute in Light” art installation created in March 2002, a set of twin beams projected up to four miles into the sky from Ground Zero which echoed the shape and orientation of the Twin Towers during the nighttime (9/11 Memorial & Museum 2018). The Tribute in Light is the sequence’s only explicit reference to 9/11’s impact as Lee includes no footage of the acts of bravery and solidarity displayed on the streets of New York in the wake of the attacks. As Westwell (2014, 32) notes, Lee shows “no missing person posters and heroic firefighters, no detailed description of communal grieving and therapeutic healing, and no Stars and Stripes”. A portentous score by jazz composer Terence Blanchard compounds the solemnity wrought by the loss of life within the Twin Towers and the visible absence of collective recovery, evoking a New York melancholic and uncharacteristically subdued. The verisimilar qualities of this title sequence are soon juxtaposed with a tragedy comparably small-scale. Thirty-one-year-old New Yorker Monty Brogan, who has recently been sentenced for selling drugs to financially support his recovering alcoholic father’s bar, is about to go to prison. Sitting on a bench overlooking the Hudson River on his last day of freedom before the start of a seven-year jail sentence, Brogan’s daily routine takes on the aura of a countdown to doom, complemented by the trauma of the 9/11 attacks. To Stephen Prince (2009, 81), this narrative structure combines tragedies of the “personal and the collective” by using 9/11 as

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“a means of creating an emotional framework to surround Brogan’s story” and as a way of realising the spectre of “lives whose trajectories did not follow their full and expected arc”. Lee’s film is likewise distinct in its refusal to portray post-9/11 New York as a place of cosmopolitan renewal and resilience, purveying an oppositional ambience to the “open, mobile, individualistic, anti-­ establishment, pluralistic, voluntaristic, populist, and free” milieu Nye (2004, 46–47) celebrates as the best expression of America’s soft power culture. The antithesis to these dimensions of freedom is of course most obviously located in Brogan’s impending imprisonment, but it is also conspicuous in the attitudes of 25th Hour’s characters. Unlike the majority of Lee’s traditionally black and disadvantaged cinematic protagonists, Brogan is a white man from an Irish American family who wasted the opportunity of a scholarship to a prestigious school in his adolescence. His younger Puerto Rican girlfriend Naturelle Riviera and close friends Jacob Elinsky and Frank Slattery are similarly suffused with decadence, leading existences connotative of the iniquitous relationships prevalent under America’s neoliberal model of capitalism. Riviera, who Brogan initially suspects of having reported him to the Drug Enforcement Administration detectives, is revealed to have used Brogan’s drug money for shopping sprees and overseas trips. Elinsky, an introverted high school teacher who works in Brogan’s former school, has enjoyed a life of financial security thanks to wealthy parents from Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Slattery, a friend Brogan has known since the age of three, works as a trader on Wall Street and knows how to make a profit from America’s unemployment rate. These characters illuminate injustices of America’s economic consensus deemed too taboo and unseemly to mention in light of the 9/11 attacks. Slattery’s brokerage office and its mise en scene feature a shot of a ‘wanted: dead or alive’ poster of Osama bin Laden, synthesising an overtly Hamiltonian context of financial hegemony with the hard power orientated punishment championed by Jacksonian America against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The primacy of an American economic Social Darwinism and its subsuming of post-9/11 New York’s need for vengeance pose synergy with David Harvey’s essay ‘Cracks in the Edifice of the Empire State’, which cited neoliberalism as responsible for fostering Islamist insurgency. In this treatise on a post-9/11 cognitive dissonance and warning against jingoistic response to terrorism, there is a stress on the need for self-­ awareness surrounding the dislocating effects of American neoliberal

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capitalism. Harvey (2002, 59) reflects on the struggle to “raise a critical voice as to what role the bond traders and others might have had in the creation and perpetration of social inequality either locally or world-wide”. Kolko’s 2002 book Another Century of War (quoted in Westwell 2014, 36) builds on this reading by referring to the Twin Towers simply as “Wall Street”, thus implying that the Islamist terrorists were losers in the game of free markets and competition vaunted by the United States. The skyscrapers’ local relationship with New York City, a subtext perceivable in 25th Hour, moreover crystallised a domestic microcosm of this dynamic, expressing an “urbanism that disdained the city and its people” (ibid., 36). Harvey and Kolko’s analyses convey that ignoring the impact of American neoliberalism is shortsighted when considering the sources behind Islamist terrorism. 25th Hour’s New York overlaps with these readings by connoting the impossibility of mining soft power against a cutthroat landscape of deregulated capitalism, but it also pervades dimensions uncontained in these polemics by foregrounding possibilities of alienation in cosmopolitan America’s secular hedonism. Around the forty-minute mark of Lee’s production, the facets of American hegemony thought to counteract the effectiveness of US soft power, such as the purveyance of “glitz, sex, violence, vapidity and materialism” (Nye Jr. 2004, 47), manifest in a montage equally emblematic of a fragmentation of Mead’s kaleidoscope. In the ‘fuck you’ sequence, Brogan stands in front of a mirror in the toilet of his father’s bar and vituperates the chaos he sees in contemporaneous New York, implying that his own downfall derives from multiple enclaves of US society. Amongst his initial targets are indigent panhandlers “smiling at me behind my back”, “the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs” and the homosexual “Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps”. This intolerant rhetoric is more redolent of the American evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s blaming of 9/11 on liberal secularism (Goodstein 2001) than the neoconservatism of the George W.  Bush administration. It comes uncomfortably superimposed over images of the demographics Brogan berates, eliciting the quality of an atavistic Jacksonianism which possesses hatred for the openness and vibrancy of the United States’ modern melting pot. The cinematography which suffuses the groups Brogan purports to despise is of muted complexion, a look achieved through the incorporation of different types of stock (Shotonwhat? n.d.). Its ‘bleached’ appearance, which is comparable to the ektachrome stock cinematography employed in Three Kings,

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deprives the New York which surrounds the various stratum of much of its colour and reinforces Brogan’s feelings of antipathy. Lee’s dwelling on the unattractive side of America’s national character evokes a countervailing animus to the Bush administration’s platitudes of unity in the days subsequent to the 9/11 attacks, undercutting what Wasserman (2011, 359) describes as a “sense of collective belonging” used to “justify measures including the creation of a state of emergency, the surrender of various privacies in the name of security, as well as acts of war and incidents of torture”.1 Brogan feels contempt for Korean grocers and Jewish Hassidim attracted to the United States’ entrepreneurial dynamism and religious freedom, but he also disdains the hard power of the NYPD and “their penis violating plungers”, transgressions licensed by a “blue wall of silence”. The Hamiltonian predilections of America’s financial sector are further subject to Brogan’s venom. Subsequent to a medium shot of traders conversing and doing business, Brogan lambasts the “self-styled masters of the universe” and “Michael Douglas, Gordon Gekko wannabe motherfuckers, figuring out new ways to rob hardworking people blind”. He additionally reminds viewers of the corporate Enron scandal overshadowed by the War on Terror, attributing collusion on the part of the Bush-­ Cheney administration and exclaiming, “Send those Enron assholes to jail for fucking life”.2 The final moments of the montage only become more cacophonous in their apportionment of blame. Brogan cites his hatred of the contemporaneous paedophilia scandal within the Catholic Church and blasphemously claims his time in Otisville will be of considerably greater duress than what was suffered on the cross by Christ. These refutations of traditional American piety are jarringly succeeded with a castigation of “Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and backward ass, cave dwelling fundamentalist assholes everywhere”. Lee then rapidly shifts from recent footage of bin Laden and the architects of the World Trade Center’s destruction to Brogan’s personal disagreements with close friends and family. The montage culminates with Brogan recanting his rant against the entirety of New York City (summarised as this “rat infested place”) by coming to the realisation that he can only blame himself for his ruination. The analysis of this sequence in Westwell’s book Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema evinces an unadulterated form of the military hard power employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Westwell (2014, 33) foregrounds “an articulation of the violent, Manichean discourse prevalent in

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the aftermath of 9/11, whereby all others are subject to criticism and complaint and no self-reflection is undertaken”. Yet it is equally interpretable that the nihilistic, cynical and indiscriminate hatreds of Brogan’s rant jar with the uniformity of Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ mentality and broach the impossibility of political equilibrium for subjects of America’s domestic and foreign policy. Although Brogan’s arrival at a position of personal responsibility rejects chimeras pursued by the nativist right and the anti-globalisation left, the incentive for a holistic, introspective look at the demons resultant from the United States’ political and economic hegemony retains its relevance throughout 25th Hour’s narrative. The darker consequences of US global influence, implicit in the fluidity of Nye’s (2004, 31) understanding that the attractiveness of America’s economic preeminence could coexist with “hard power” behaviours of “inducement” and “coercion”, are relatable to moments which see the trauma of 9/11 solipsised within a context of neoliberal capitalism. Notable for being one of the few extended parts of Lee’s film without Brogan, a key scene revolves around a visit to Slattery’s apartment by Elinsky. The interior of Slattery’s apartment, which is befitting of a man who works on Wall Street, features exercise bikes and other tropes of American self-improvement. Initially immersing the viewer within this privilege, Lee shows Slattery and Elinsky drinking and socialising. Topical subtexts, however, soon emerge from this seemingly routine fraternisation. Slattery and Elinsky’s conversation returns to the personal and political juxtapositions of 25th Hour’s opening scenes through intertwining Brogan’s plight with the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks, a synthesis reintegrated both visually and dialogically. Lee abruptly reveals that Slattery’s apartment overlooks the site of Ground Zero. Against a protracted medium shot of Slattery and Elinsky observing where the towers used to stand, the conversation shifts from a discussion of the apartment’s unfortunate location (Slattery remarks that his property’s cost means that he would refuse to move even in the case of another terrorist attack) to a debate over whether Brogan’s release in seven years’ time will mean anything to the men. Similar to his devil may care attitude to the morass of Ground Zero, Slattery urges Elinsky to be insouciant towards Brogan and rejects the idea that they will meet him after he has served his time in prison. The aim of the evening, to get Brogan drunk, should distract from the likelihood that they will never “see him again”. When Slattery concludes his argument with the admonishment that Elinsky should “wake the fuck up”, the camera zooms in on

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Ground Zero and an isolated American flag. Alongside a renewal of Blanchard’s haunting score, the scene ends with shots of construction workers removing debris from the World Trade Center. There are several ways of reading Elinsky and Slattery’s exchange. One CNN reviewer saw the Ground Zero backdrop as grimly complementing Monty’s bad luck and posited that “since the movie’s theme is about a man’s life being blasted away, the metaphor is obvious” (Clinton 2003). Yet there is a darker interpretation to be drawn from this mise en scene. Slattery emphasises that Brogan, like those killed in the World Trade Center, will be gone from his close friends’ lives, forever eradicated from their social milieu. The final focus on the efforts of the construction workers captures the sense that the economic activity and routines of New York will continue irrespective of 9/11’s collective tragedy and Brogan’s personal one. As Elinsky stares out of the window at Ground Zero, his denial and incipient grief for Brogan seems to take on the grandiosity of national allegory, transplanting his feelings of dislocation to the trauma inflicted on the United States’ most iconic city. Slattery, in contrast, personifies the film’s cold face of American capitalism and an aloofness disconnected from the universalist appeals of soft power and the Wilsonian school.3 His focus on living in prime real estate and consolidating his wealth, rather than the remnants of human tragedy lying right in front of him, reminds of the World Trade Center’s original aegis of Hamiltonian commerce and the quest for US economic primacy that was echoed in numerous controversial foreign policy initiatives since the building’s inception. This re-association of the pre-9/11 world with a mercantilist form of diplomacy was touched on in a 2002 article by Tito Tricot, which outlined the other ‘September 11th’ significant in the annals of US statecraft. On September 11, 1973, coincidentally the same year as the World Trade Center’s construction, a coup in Chile endorsed by the Nixon administration resulted in “innocents murdered” and the overthrow of “the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende” (Tricot 2002). The military government of Augusto Pinochet which replaced the socialist Allende promptly embraced what Valdes (1995, 1–3) defines as “the Chicago School of Economics”, a neoliberal doctrine anticipatory of “assaults on the state, the denigration of government intervention, the celebration of rapid enrichment, the ‘yuppie’ boom, and complete disregard for social policies”. It is this sinister Hamiltonian dimension, more so than the atavistic Jacksonianism of Brogan’s rant, which is most insidious

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in Lee’s vision of post-9/11 New York, prevailing over soft power values of “democracy, human rights and individual opportunities” (Nye Jr. 2004, x). Fittingly, the going away party which culminates Brogan’s last day turns sour when Slattery is told by his convicted friend that he wished he invested his drug money in the stock exchange, an aspiration forever foreclosed by the draconian ‘Rockefeller’ laws of New York State. 25th Hour’s epilogue portends a state of perennial disequilibrium for post-9/11 America. The geographic contrasts and wishful fantasies of Brogan’s exit from New York illuminate an allegory of disjunction, rendering a United States incapable of reconciling the cosmopolitanism of its cities with the rugged individualism of its heartlands. Brogan’s car journey to Otisville begins with images repudiative of the ‘fuck you’ sequence’s misanthropy. While his father, James Brogan, drives him, the protagonist sees individuals from various ethnic and social groups waving goodbye to him. Infused with a vein of magical realism, it is ambiguous whether these people (who Brogan notably lambasted earlier in the picture) are really appearing or if they are in Brogan’s imagination. The undercurrent of unreality heightens when Brogan’s father contemplates the idea that the two men can go ‘west’ instead of heading to jail. In an ethereal monologue, Brogan is told of the wonders of a world ‘west of Philly’, visualised in wide-angle shots of him and his father walking through desert landscapes. Within this dreamlike segment, the viewer sees Brogan start a new life in a small western town, eventually inviting Riviera over to marry and live with him. The fantasy culminates with a surreal gathering where an elderly Brogan discloses his past to the family he has built together with Riviera. He has created a life, which in Brogan’s father’s words, “came so close to never happening”. All of this, however, emerges as mere wish thinking. The penultimate image of Lee’s film is of James Brogan’s car skipping the bridge to the west, foreclosing the window of escape thought possible to the frontier. This epilogue prompts multiple readings. On one level, the fantasy is a modern reification of the ‘safety valve’ theory, a creed immortalised in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 ‘frontier thesis’ . Ellen Von Nardroff (1962, 123–124) explains Turner’s work through detail of the “virgin or semi-improved lands” and the “economic egalitarianism” thought achievable from the cultivation of the frontier hallowed in America’s nineteenth century, a world where the “gap between rich and poor appeared slight compared to the Old World”. Brogan’s flight emits the purifications integral to Manifest Destiny ideology in its discarding of the city’s decadence

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and the orientations of Hamiltonian financial elites, providing the viewer with what Wasserman (2011, 366) defines as “stock images of American idealism: the road trip, the sublime desert, and the frontier as a locus for rebirth”. Yet if read more contemporaneously, Brogan’s new life envisions a reformulation in a region synergetic with the foundations of Bush’s electoral coalition in the Rocky Mountain West and Deep South, framing a quotidian repudiation of the “Cowboy Diplomacy” (Schneider 2002) championed by neoconservatives and anathema to multilateral critics of US statecraft. The interracial marriage between Riviera and Brogan transcends the alienation consequent from this outlook in ephemerally depicting a united America, its abrupt nullification attesting to a United States still searching for common ground. Although not in any way allegorical, Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 furthers this inability to achieve reconciliation and pervades additional vitiations of soft power wrought by the Hamiltonian school. Another foray into the state of the nation post-9/11, Moore’s picture opens with an extended pre-credits sequence which presents the 2000 presidential election as a plutocratic takeover enabled by a reactionary media and elitist governing class. The first shots of Democratic Party nominee Al Gore and Hollywood celebrities assuming a liberal victory in the pivotal state of Florida are, like Brogan’s emancipation outside of New York, imaginary ephemera, quickly eclipsed by the story of Republican resurgence. Moore outlines how the Fox News correspondent John Ellis, the first cousin of Republican presidential nominee George W.  Bush, distorted the race through publically unveiling reports predicting a Republican win in the state of Florida. This apparent nepotism is further evidenced by various other figures who played an integral role in getting Bush to the White House: Bush’s Florida campaign co-chair Katherine Harris, who presided over the statewide recount of votes which lasted until December 2000; Bush’s brother Jeb, who governed the state of Florida; finally, the advantages underlying Bush’s candidacy apotheosise in the officiating of Republican triumph by a conservative Supreme Court. In a portent of the sense of unreality later felt on 9/11, Moore replays images of Al Gore’s illusory victory celebrations and observes: “None of this was a dream. It’s what really happened.” This is succeeded with the oppositional scenario of a nightmare, displayed in Al Gore’s ratification of his own defeat as outgoing vice president and president of the Senate in January 2001. Moore juxtaposes this

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humiliation with footage of Democratic African American representatives of congressional districts in Florida protesting their constituents’ disenfranchisement to no avail, signalling the United States as an inequitable polity which, in atavistic Jacksonian fashion, operates as a white majoritarian democracy. The undercurrent of nihilism is reinforced when Moore chronicles how Bush, who took office against crowds of protestors and controversy, wasted the opportunity for a conservative hegemony not available even in the Reagan era. Republican control of both houses of Congress was squandered through the loss of a Senate seat in June 2001 and the president going on vacation multiple times.4 Ending the aura of bathos, the pre-credits montage culminates with a description of Bush going to sleep “on a bed of fine French linens” on the night of September 10, 2001. The title sequence which follows reveals senior members of Bush’s administration engaging in interview preparation to sinister music, foregrounding the febrile environment soon to be initiated by the post-9/11 world order. The rest of the narrative delineates the tumult of Bush’s first term in ways sensational and filtered in unreality, attesting to what Christensen and Haas (2005, 235) describe as a “growing conflation of reality and cinematic imagery”. Indeed, Moore’s employment of satire frames Bush’s aforementioned ‘cowboy diplomacy’ through some of the United States’ most traditional sources of entertainment, including clips excerpted from the 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven and the 1950s detective series Dragnet. The theme music from the former film is comically employed to convey America and Britain’s preparation for invading Afghanistan while moments from Dragnet amplify the strangeness of a segment covering the exit of members of the Bin Laden family from the United States immediately after 9/11. Moore’s focalisation of what Nye (2004, 47) calls “the line between information and entertainment”, also, however, alternates with more quotidian imagery. Subsequent to exploring the Afghanistan intervention, Moore shows domestic advertisers hyping the terrorist threat for mainstream American audiences. Reverential interviews with gun marketers by reporters elicit the Jacksonian school’s dominance in US life, a pugnacity echoed by coverage of small towns preparing for total war. Moore’s scrutiny of Bush’s domestic policies towards terrorism further probes a milieu affinitive with Mead’s (2001, 183) description of Jacksonians who “believe that the deep, good heart of the American will instinctively repel any threat to their cherished democracy” and who disdain the Jeffersonian admonishment that “popular passion can endanger

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the very democracy that it wants to protect”. One of Moore’s interviewees pontificates a kind of Pavlovian effect resultant from the creation of “endless threats” and the reciting of the Defcon alerts scale. In another interview, a congressional representative remarks that the Patriot Act, a bill approved almost unanimously by Congress and which authorised unprecedented powers for intelligence agencies, was passed without being read by representatives, along with numerous other acts of legislation. This kneejerk quality renews in Moore’s outlining of the Iraq conflict’s early stages. A seemingly incongruous clip of the American pop star Britney Spears expressing unquestioning faith in the president’s conduct of the war establishes the subsuming of soft power resources under a culture of Jacksonian patriotism. Additional implications of bipartisan militarism manifest in excerpts showing Democratic support for the war and the simpering media coverage of Bagdad’s invasion. The assault is praised by one commentator as “truly historic television and journalism” while one reporter describes the combat as “electrifying”, language symptomatic of what Bacevich (2005, 32) defines as the post-9/11 military’s “compelling affirmation of American Exceptionalism”. Yet much as in 25th Hour, it is the corporatism of the Hamiltonian which exercises greater control over American society. A substantial portion of Moore’s documentary extrapolates business links between Bush and the Bin Laden family to warn of the unhealthy relationships stemming from US reliance on foreign oil. A scene set in Washington D.C. relates this anxiety to a domestic context through dramatising Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the US economy. Initially interviewing policy experts who make observations about Saudi oligarchs’ investments in American corporations and banks, Moore soon finds himself accosted by secret service agents for filming near Saudi Arabia’s embassy. Although the agents are civil to Moore, a voiceover commentary by the director injects the scenario with an animus of 1970s paranoia redolent of All the President’s Men (1976) and The Parallax View (1974) through remarks on the Saudi ambassadors’ “six man security detail” and how the “Saudi elite own seven percent of America”. Moore’s battle with Disney, the parent company of Fahrenheit 9/11’s distributor Miramax, perhaps illustrated a real life microcosm for the latter comment’s fear of crony capitalism and what Everett (2012, 114) summarises as “right-leaning ideologues’ control and influence strategies”. Upon being asked about the Disney company’s attempt to pull his film from distribution in a June 2004 “Dateline NBC” interview with Matt

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Lauer, Moore (quoted in Everett 2012, 115) lamented “censorship by a corporation”, “fewer and fewer companies owning all our media” and the consequences of “fewer and fewer voices in a democracy, in a free society”. Although Moore’s film ultimately appealed to the sentiments of anti-war European audiences in its winning of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival (BBC 2004), his responses to Lauer implied that its affectations of radical politics and successes of cultural rapprochement were strictly aberrational in the milieu of American entertainment. To Nye (2004, 51), popular culture’s origination in private hands meant its soft power could undercut “the exact policy outcomes that the government might desire” but Fahrenheit 9/11 argues that corporate America precludes these crosscurrents. Moore’s sense of discord between his populist dissent and the Hamiltonian class manifests in a third act comprised of geographic shifts. Within this segment, the director connects footage of chaos caused by the Iraq occupation to the economic insecurity of his home state. Moore comments that recruits are found in places “devastated by the economy” such as his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Speaking to a careers advisor who helps individuals on welfare move into work, Moore hears of how Flint used to be “jobs central” but the pressures of deindustrialisation made the military “an excellent option for the people of the city of Flint”. The director’s encounter with Lila Lipscomb, the bereaved mother of a son killed in Iraq, emphasises the tragic outcome of using war as a safety valve for the dispossessed. The exploration of this vicious circle, reflecting the source of America’s Jacksonian soldier class in neoliberalism, builds to an epilogue which bemoans Bush’s exploitation of the disenfranchised. Ending with a lengthy quotation from George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), Moore sees an administration co-opting “poverty and ignorance” for a conflict “meant to be continuous”. Fahrenheit 9/11’s alternation between critiques of the Iraq War’s conduct and sympathy for Jacksonian America sullied its ideological consistency in the eyes of various commentators and Film Studies academics, attenuating its appeals against the hard power employed by the Bush administration. The ‘liberal hawk’ journalist Christopher Hitchens (2004) castigated Moore’s description of pre-war Iraq as a “peaceable kingdom”, a notion disseminated by “Moore’s flabbergasting choice of film shots”, in which “children are flying little kites”, shoppers are “smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed”. The Michigan

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section, meanwhile, added to Hitchens’s perception that Moore “was a provincial isolationist”, fixated on the “capitalist nature of American society” and the “military industrial complex”. To Westwell and Alford, Moore’s visit to Michigan instead signified the incompatibility of class solidarity and anti-war activism. Westwell (2014, 67–68) notes, how, in Moore’s hope that Democrat John Kerry (a Senator who voted for the Iraq War) can win the presidency in 2004, he serves to “recuperate the system as a whole”, a conciliatory attitude mirrored by his love for Flint’s citizens’ “patriotic and dutiful behaviour under capitalism”. Alford (2011, 154) complements this reading by scrutinising the “hermetically sealed American-centric universe” of Flint and its distraction from the “critique of US power”. It seems that this fragmented approach, to borrow Bacevich’s (2005, 4) words on the myopia of the anti-Bush left, engenders an “exercise in scapegoating that lets too many others off the hook and allows society at large to abdicate responsibility”. This cognitive dissonance is integral to the centrepiece film of this chapter, Team America: World Police, a comedy which underlines hard power’s dominance and the dubiousness of soft power diplomacy.

Team America and the Malleability of Soft Power Like Three Kings, Team America opens with a simulacrum that creates dissonance between the universalising rhetoric of American exceptionalism and a pugnacious culture of militarism. As the opening titles of Stone and Parker’s picture appear onscreen, a militaristic drumroll parodies American ambitions towards global preponderance. Team America’s first image, resembling the artifice of Barlow’s breaking of the fourth wall, carries an inauthenticity that paints the American hegemonic perspective as solipsistic. A picture postcard rendition of contemporary Paris appears whilst the sounds of an accordion lend an unsophisticated parochialism to the cosmopolitan setting. This insularity is compounded by onscreen subtitles which explain for audiences, “Paris, France … 3, 635 miles east of America”. As a French puppet appears onscreen and exclaims “sacre bleu” in front of the city, Stone and Parker draw back to reveal that this backdrop forms a puppet show within their own cinematic puppet show—a wide-angle shot exposes the scenery and puppet to be part of a piece of street theatre in a three-dimensional, mockingly fantastical modern Paris.

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A pan around the setting displays whimsy, connoted in the portrayals of effete French puppets that alternately converse, ride bicycles and carry baguettes to a genteel orchestral score. The tonal contrast with the militarism of the opening titles, besides setting up a discrepancy between hard and soft power, mirrors Robert Kagan’s dichotomy of ‘Americans’ from Mars and ‘Europeans’ from Venus. Writing on 30 March 2003 just after the launch of the Iraq War, Kagan’s essay “Of Paradise and Power” (2003) commented on the Manichean cultural differences that had risen between the United States and its transatlantic allies towards the launch of the invasion. He saw a multilateral Europe embracing “a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation” that championed “a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity”. This realisation of Immanuel Kant’s “perpetual peace” contrasted with a war resigned United States. This alternate hegemon exercised “power in a Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defence and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might”. This cultural gulf is tangible in Team America’s satire of America’s soft power resources, particularly the action films that destabilised the United States’ appeal to the Islamic world before the 9/11 attacks. The harmonious images of daily Parisian life, which bear comparison to Kagan’s picture of emasculated European identity, are brought to an end when a French boy bumps into an elderly man dressed in Islamic headdress. The portent of the encounter signals how soft power resources can hew closely to America’s ‘Mars’ perspective of an anarchic world order. A low-angle POV shot from the child’s point of view suffuses the man in dark, febrile tones— a soundtrack of Arabic chanting parodies a history of skewed Muslim representation in American cinema, a phenomenon of pre-9/11 blockbusters such as True Lies (1994) and The Siege (1998). This satire connotes the diverse, conflictive nature that forms the cultural resources of soft power. As Nye (2004, 15) himself notes and concedes, “American popular culture often worked at cross purposes to official government policies”, a trait embodied in “Hollywood movies that show scantily clad women with libertine attitudes or fundamentalist Christian groups that castigate Islam as an evil religion”. These results vitiated “government efforts to improve relations with Islamic nations” (ibid., 15). Before continuing to assess how this disjuncture is presented in Team America, it is worth contextualising this analysis with examples of how

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soft power has relied on aspects of American ‘hard power’ to secure hegemony. To Christopher Layne (2010, 73), even the understanding of a “good” form of soft power is to ignore its co-morbidity with military intervention. Layne notes how the liberal dimensions of soft power are “rooted in the Wilsonian tradition” and have always relied on “the foundation of the USA’s hard power”, thus making the theory “a polite way of describing the ideological expansionism inherent in US liberal internationalism”, an expansionism that “led to disasters like Vietnam and Iraq”. The complexity of evaluating the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ form of soft power, and the struggle to sustain this theory as a counterbalancing force to American hard power, is typified in examples such as the film industry’s response to the 9/11 attacks. Did the rushed release of Black Hawk Down (2001) purvey soft power because it portrayed the Somalia intervention as benevolent in intention and outwardly humanitarian? Or did its presentation of warfare and politically timed promotion mean it had more in common with the “fight against evil” narrative endorsed to the MPAA by Bush advisor Karl Rove (quoted in Alford 2011, 14)? This ambiguity is compounded when considering MPAA head Valenti’s (quoted in Alford 2011, 25) wish for a cinematic culture that reflected an America that “clothed and fed and sheltered millions and millions around the world without asking anything in return” and “educated hundreds of thousands of people all over the world in our universities”. Did this outlook possess affinity with Nye’s (2004, 45) praise of “high cultural contacts” and “academic and scientific exchanges” during the Cold War? Or was this use of soft power a mere fig leaf for a hawkish advertisement for military power, a stance discussed in Chapter Three’s foregrounding of Valenti’s (quoted in Alford 2011, 25) later comments that American film should promote the need to “avenge the 9/11 attacks” and that “benevolence should be struck from our vocabulary”? Viewed against this post-9/11 context, soft power, far from forming an attractive political culture for the purpose of winning hearts and minds, can be seen to have had concurrence with the very militarism Nye wished to avoid. The delays and re-edits of productions that explicitly portrayed terroristic violence (such as the 2001 Arnold Schwarzenegger action picture Collateral Damage, which was forced to replace Libyan terrorists with Columbians) further conveyed how abrasive staples of American filmmaking had become tarnished by the events of that day (ibid, 95). Team America, which encodes interaction between popular cinema and

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terrorism, illustrates how Hollywood’s cultural resources became disturbingly congruent with the trauma of the 9/11 attacks and War on Terror. After it is revealed that the elderly Muslim is carrying WMD and meeting other insurgents, Team America continues to signal the more destructive implications of American cultural influence. Perhaps echoing Baudrillard’s (2001, 6) view that the 9/11 attacks had been portended because “countless disaster movies bear witness to this fantasy”, havoc ensues when Team America arrive via jet plane and helicopter to terminate the group. A Kung Fu duel between team member Chris and one insurgent moreover indicates proximity between cinematic portrayals of violence and modern terrorism. The two engage in a stylised fight reminiscent of the martial arts sequences from the 1999 science fiction blockbuster The Matrix, a parody rendered in the ludicrousness of the fight. Akin to the marionettes seen in Thunderbirds, the puppet strings of these figures are transparently visible, thus robbing their battle of narrative credence. A frenetic musical score highlights the fight’s lunacy as the two scrap in circles, never exchanging fists. In spite of this bathos, the scrap encapsulates the incendiary nature of much of America’s soft power resources. The fight scenes in Team America were choreographed by cinematographer Bill Pope, who worked on comparable (though tonally oppositional) sequences in The Matrix and the 2002 superhero blockbuster Spiderman (IMDB n.d.). Zizek (quoted in Hammond 2007, 3) attributed the title of a post-9/11 themed 2002 essay collection, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”, to The Matrix, which in turn borrowed that phrase from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981). It could be argued that the blockbuster Spiderman was also involved in the post-9/11 consciousness—an already released trailer of Spiderman spinning webs between the Twin Towers was promptly removed from circulation after the events on September 11.5 Robert Altman’s (quoted in The Guardian editorial 2001) opinion that “the movies set the pattern” summarised these unwelcome intersections of popular culture and collective trauma. Rebecca Bell-Metereau affirms this idea through updating Eco’s (1995) reference to an “Ur-Fascism” in American cinema. Bell-Metereau (2004, 147) expands on Eco’s theory by citing “militaristic movies” anticipatory of a “déjà vu” on 9/11. Blockbusters such as Independence Day (1996) and the war epic Pearl Harbor (2001) value “sacrifice, obedience, the cult of the hero, and the doctrine of constant warfare” (ibid.).

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It would be easy to interpret Team America’s coarseness as solely reflective of these perceptions of cinematic nationalism. Yet, in its composition of men and women from different regions and backgrounds, the titular anti-terrorism force also comes suffused with the cosmopolitan Wilsonianism that had rationalised the Bush administration’s goal of bringing liberal democracy to the Middle East. There is Joe, a starry-eyed quarterback from the University of Nebraska; the aforementioned Chris, a tough-minded soldier from Detroit; Lisa, a psychology expert with insight into the mental neuroses of Islamic terrorists; Sarah, a clairvoyant from California who claims to be able to gauge emotions with exactitude; Carson, Lisa’s sensitive fiancé. As a group made up of individuals from both red and blue states, what unites Team America is their embrace of what Ryan Bishop (2013, 113) calls the “US geopolitical strategy that had been justified by the invocation of ‘freedom’, showing how clearly the two complement and reflect one another”. The necessity of this fusion becomes clear soon after Team America accidentally destroy the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, and when Lisa’s boyfriend Carson is murdered by a terrorist. Subsequently, the action heads to New York, where a Broadway play showcases the talents of Gary Johnston, Carson’s potential replacement and lynchpin for the disparities of hard and soft power. The play, titled ‘Lease: the Musical’ (a parody of the drama Rent, a play based on the lives of AIDS sufferers), is a bizarre exercise in liberal identity politics. Gary, who leads a number entitled ‘Everyone has AIDS’, laments the departures of everyone from his ‘grandma’ to his dog ‘ol Blue’. For all the differences with the militarism pervaded by Team America previously, Gary’s acting is reverential in tone, connoting patriotic duty. This quality is affirmed in Gary’s encounter with Team America head Spottswoode (possibly a crude play on the surname of Roger Moore era Bond director Roger Spottiswoode), who praises his reputation as an “all-­ American actor who graduated Iowa University summa cum laude with a double major in theatre and world languages”. The effete, liberal arts background of Gary continues to be treated without irony when Spottswoode invites him to Team America’s base in Mount Rushmore and tells the actor, “that some people out there want you dead” and “it’s not who you are Gary, it’s what you stand for”. Spottswoode’s view of Gary’s cosmopolitan liberal identity as concomitant with a hard power orientated nationalism is comparable with much of the Bush administration’s bipartisan rhetoric. A speech by Bush a year after the launch of Operation Iraqi

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Freedom (quoted in Davidson 2012, 146–147) co-opted the language of secular humanism and liberalism to advocate military occupation: We who stand on the other side of the line must be equally clear and certain in our convictions. We do love life, the life given to us and to all. We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life, tolerance, freedom, and the right of conscience. And we know that this way of life is worth defending. There is no neutral ground—no neutral ground—in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, life and death.

Davidson (2012, 147) notes the essentially “liberal mission” this speech delineates. Its universalism disguises a philosophy that demonises “swathes of the population” and denounces them as “the antithesis of life”.6 David Simpson (2006, 6–7) additionally describes this phenomenon as the “attribution of nihilism or nothingness” to Islamist terrorism, which could be reduced to “the result of jealousy, of them wanting what we have and destroying it because they cannot have it … an intransigent fundamentalism wholly foreign to our professed ethic of tolerance”. Spottswoode’s approval of Gary’s actor identity matches this liberal solipsism in its self-gratifying praise of American democracy and cultural freedom. It achieves further ratification once Gary arrives at Team America’s headquarters inside Mount Rushmore (a hideout located in George Washington’s mouth). His meeting with the bereft psychology expert Lisa offers the clearest indication of the liberal rationalisation of a terroristic nihilism, shown in her explanation of a jihadist psyche that derives from a “malignant narcissism, usually brought on during childhood”. Because its production context overlapped with the launch of the Iraq War, it is easy to interpret Team America as a satire of a post-9/11 hysteria that had infiltrated American cultural life. Its makers affirmed this quality, purveying the distinctly unpartisan mockery contained in their work on the South Park series. Stone and Parker believed that making a partisan anti-Bush picture was futile and commented that Bush was not a “target”, as “in America, you only have to walk 10 feet to find it” (quoted in Brett n.d.). Yet for all this contrarianism, Team America’s political commentary is more nuanced than the insouciance these statements suggest. Gary’s encapsulation of liberal soft power resources highlights this quality. The

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idea that soft power only ratifies the Wilsonian dimension of the Bush administration’s neoconservative foreign policy is further conveyed in its musical montages. One such number, a country song entitled ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’, plays over shots of Gary exploring Washington D.C. and contemplating whether to join Team America’s upcoming mission in Cairo. The imagery forms a paean to the democratic and civic virtues of American life. Whilst Gary visits the historic Abraham Lincoln statue and Washington monument, the jangling tones of ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ add a distinct nationalism to the sites. The chorus lyrics illustrate this tone: “Freedom isn’t free, it costs folk like you and me, and if we don’t all chip in, we’ll never pay that bill”. Gary’s reverence towards the historical sites can be seen as a reflection of H.W. Brands’ (1998, vii–viii) premise of an exemplarist tradition in foreign policy, the idea that the United States, by virtue of its example, provides a role model of a “humane, democratic and prosperous society”, that views “perfecting American institutions and practices at home” as “a full-time job”. This idea is of course affinitive with Nye’s soft power in its stress on the attractiveness integral to American hegemony. The opposite of exemplarism is the “vindicationalist” perspective, an outlook that emphasises “active measures” and “military might” through rejecting the “utopian” thinking that America could lead through democratic example (ibid., vii–viii.) Brands’ dichotomy between intervention and an America based on democratic exemplarism, however, contrasts with Nye’s own belief in a synthetic ‘smart power’ that can combine these two philosophies. The exemplarist imagery of America’s democratic founders and their juxtaposition with the militaristic lyrics of ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ indicates the potentially collusive nature of soft power. As the montage progresses, Gary moves from the deified icons of American history towards the Vietnam War memorial. While this transition occurs, the lyrics pugnaciously reference “all those war vets” and ask rhetorically, “if someone asked you to fight for freedom, would you answer the call”. The bombast here recalls Ian Scott’s (2011, 252) notion of a political culture in Hollywood films wedded to “crudely patriotic visions of institutional rhetoric and behaviour as part of the norms in political life”, a purveyance of democratic exemplarism that here is lent an overt tone of militarisation. Comparable syntheses were manifest in the actions and pronouncements of George W. Bush’s administration, compromising Nye’s claim that smart power poses a break with the politics of neoconservatism. At a

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February 2003 speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the president lauded Iraq’s “proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people” (Bush 2003). He further hoped for “internal reform, greater politics participation, economic openness, and free trade” across the wider Middle East (ibid.). These paeans invoked the essential principles of soft power and what Nye (2004, 5) cites as the intention for “others to want the outcomes you want” and a politics that “co-opts people rather than coerces them”. Even the hawkish National Security Strategy of September 2002 (George W.  Bush Whitehouse archives n.d.), which reminded that “the United States has long maintained the option of pre-­ emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security”, adhered to these shibboleths. The document’s simultaneous endorsement of “effective public diplomacy to promote the free flow of information and ideas to kindle the hopes and aspirations of freedom” (ibid.) matched the language of Nye (2004, 11) in its references to what the theorist calls “the universalistic culture” of American soft power. It also possessed synergy with what Nye (ibid., 99) specifies as soft power’s long-termism and how “its resources often work indirectly by shaping the environment for policy, and sometimes take years to produce the desired outcomes”. Various neoconservatives, inside and outside the Bush administration, had advocated similar techniques to make the case for a post-Saddam government in Iraq. Before he became a Middle East advisor to Dick Cheney, the foreign policy specialist David Wurmser urged understanding of Shia opposition groups in Iraq, who he thought could become a “foundation of liberalism and civil society”, and embodied Western ideals of “financial independence and relative autonomy” (1999, 78). Private contact with the main Iraqi opposition in exile, the INC, was integral to this public relations effort. The spirit of co-option Nye foregrounds as necessary for soft power was therefore carried over into the Bush administration’s planning of the Iraq War. The agenda of Middle East experts Harold Rhode and Michael Rubin in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans enabled fraternisation between neoconservatives and members of the INC over the prospects of a Shia-led democracy in Iraq. The journalist George Packer noted the surreal nature of this collaboration by referring to “the convergence of ideas, interests and affections between American Jews and Iraqi Shia” as “one of the more curious subplots of the Iraq War” (Packer 2005, 109). The liberal interventionists who supported both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also embraced a synthesis of hard and soft power. Bacevich

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(2005, 25) notes the role of left-wing, non-governmental human rights groups who had been attracted to the military interventions of Iraq and Afghanistan because they mirrored their own “calls for US intervention abroad to relieve the plight of the abused and persecuted”. The Canadian human rights advocate and academic Michael Ignatieff (2003) evinced this Wilsonianism by calling for an intervention that involved “European participation in peacekeeping, nation-building and humanitarian reconstruction”, coupled with “influence, example, and persuasion”. Fittingly, the diverse representations of soft power in Team America display both its expansiveness and limitations. At its best, as embodied in the ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ montage, soft power successfully rationalises American hard power through the refrains of American democratic and cultural exceptionalism. At its worst, as seen in the opening sequence, it results in amplification of cultural difference and resentment of American influence, an effect that results from the explicit collusion of soft and hard power. The struggle for equilibrium between hard and soft power suffuses the remainder of Team America’s narrative and reinforces the latter’s fundamental unreliability. Its caprice is further implied when a song speaks to Zahran and Ramos’s (2010, 20) claim that the state “cannot fully control its soft power resources”, which are located in “large corporations, sports stars, pop cultural symbols, and a number of civil society groups”. “America, Fuck Yeah”, which first features after Gary agrees to join Team America’s mission and plays over the journey to Cairo, showcases soft power’s unwieldiness. Although the chorus caters to the neoconservative ideal that only military force can deliver free-market democracy with its boast that America is “coming to save the motherfucking day”, the volatile relationship between hard and soft power becomes clear in the fuller version of the song which plays over the end credits. Here, the lines provide a litany of diverse soft power resources, which are listed in lyrics that often only amount to single word nouns. The aggressive delivery of the song nevertheless militarises and connotes control over the otherwise anarchic character of these resources; given recognition are ‘books’, ‘the internet’, and ‘liberty’, but also ‘McDonalds’, ‘Wal-Mart’, and ‘porno’. The incongruity these references possess with each other lauds American hegemony in a bipartisan fashion. Indeed, despite the disparate cultural resources mentioned, the song is a ‘warts and all’ celebration of America, embodied in its simultaneous acknowledgement of historical crimes such

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as ‘slavery’ and praise towards the contributions of ‘immigrants’, ‘Democrats’, and ‘Republicans’. In this comprehensive paean to American potency, soft power is inextricably wedded to US military and economic dominance, whitewashing a political history built on cognitive dissonance and moral hypocrisy. Walter McDougall (1997, 209) comments on this discrepancy in regard to the dissemination of Global Meliorism—he notes the danger of “sermons about human rights, fair trade, the environment, and sexual and family issues” that “only invite foreigners to remark on the poverty, crime, drugs, pornography, collapse of the family, inequality, and travesties of justice that characterise American society”. In its celebration of American democracy imperialised, “America, Fuck Yeah” possesses affinity with this hubristic vision, thus drawing soft power resources close to the militarised Global Meliorism portrayed in Three Kings. It also reflects McDougall’s fear that American cultural influence pervades sordidness, personifying a configuration where hard power and hedonism suffuse soft power’s premise of attraction. Fittingly, when Gary uses his ‘acting skills’ to gain entry to a Jihadi den in Cairo, he finds a bar resembling the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars (1977), filled with Islamists who drink and enjoy the company of a belly dancer. It seems mocking of the neoconservative belief that America’s staunchest opponents can become imbibers of its hegemony, caricaturing what Lloyd C. Gardner (2005, 27) describes as an imperium where “no one lives outside of the empire’s power”, safeguarded by “a new military, one able to strike quickly with shock and awe any place in the world”. The fiercest rebukes of this worldview come from the soft power purism of The Film Actors Guild (who call themselves by the acronym F.A.G.), a group of left-wing Hollywood celebrities who seek to build a multilateral world free from American intervention. Their background mirrors what Ben Dickenson (2006, 75) describes as a “liberal crisis” in Hollywood celebrity culture. This tension had begun with the triangulations of the Clinton administration in the 1990s yet had become apotheosised in the celebrity protests that followed the launch of the War on Terror. Denouncing the Bush administration’s neoconservatism, an October 2002 speech by Tim Robbins (quoted in Dickenson 2006, 75) criticised “our fundamentalism”, which was “cloaked with patriotism and the claim to spread democracy around the world … the business of diverting attention from Enron and Halliburton”.

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In Team America, this animus against American intervention first emerges in a news montage that introduces some of F.A.G.’s leading celebrity members, who are all impersonated by puppets. There is F.A.G. head Alec Baldwin, who visualises a world “with compassion not violence”; the aforementioned Tim Robbins, who blames “the corporations who financed Team America”; and most comically of all, Sean Penn, who provides an anecdote about a trip to pre-invasion Iraq. Echoing the representation of pre-2003 Iraq in Fahrenheit 9/11 that was lambasted by Hitchens, Penn remembers “flowery meadows, rainbow smiles and rivers made of chocolate where the children laughed and danced and played with gumdrop smiles”. These celebrities embrace what can be defined as the constructivist dimensions of soft power. The nature of this approach was specified by Ted Hopf (1998, 176), who summarises an understanding of foreign policy that “assumes selves, or identities, of states are a variable” and “likely depend on historical, cultural, political, and social context”. Constructivism transcends these factors by promulgating, in Kubalkova’s (1998, 193) words, “a universal human experience” that “leads to a very different understanding of states and states’ relations”. This makes foreign policy a product of “individuals whose acts materially affect the world” rather than a government’s self-interest or predilection for a specific political ideology (ibid., 194). In divorcing soft power from other forms of state power and instead making themselves agents of the political process, F.A.G. offer a constructivist definition of Nye’s theory that is averse to smart power’s pragmatism. This is encapsulated in their plan to create an international advisory committee that can bring an end to the need for US intervention. In the Californian headquarters of the Film Actors Guild, Baldwin reveals his plan for F.A.G. members to be keynote speakers at an international peace conference headed by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, a decision that is greeted with applause. For all the uncompromising adoption of soft power’s emphasis on “institutions, values and culture” (Nye Jr. 2004, 8) here, the goals ironically resemble, in terms of grand ambition, the neoconservative agenda for democratising the Middle East. There is further, despite F.A.G.’s pacifist credentials, the compulsion to use violence. This contradiction is noticeable in a puppet George Clooney’s boast that “we’ve all done action films … if anyone tries to get in our way, we’ll show just how tough us actors really are”.

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The climax of Team America, which takes place at the international peace conference in Kim Jong-il’s palace, signals not just how F.A.G.’s monolithic form of soft power is a failure, but also how much of its purveyance of American liberal values gives inadvertent legitimacy to neoconservatism’s democratising vision. After battling his way through a series of fanatical Hollywood celebrities, Gary arrives on a stage in front of the world leaders. He interrupts Alec Baldwin to warn that the conference is a front for Kim Jong-il’s grand plan to cause nuclear war, only for Baldwin to prompt boos and cries of anti-imperialist derision from the audience. What the centrist Walter Mead (2001, 30) describes as the “kaleidoscope of American foreign policy” is reflected in a speech delivered by Gary in response to Baldwin: We’re dicks! We’re reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong-il is an asshole. Pussies don’t like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes—assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way, but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much, or fuck when it isn’t appropriate— and it takes a pussy to show ‘em that. But sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves, because pussies are only an inch-and-a-half away from assholes. I don’t know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don’t let us fuck this asshole, we are going to have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit.

The scatological references here allegorise the various ideological differences that percolated International Relations debate in the post-9/11 era—there are the dicks, the neoconservative hawks willing to intervene preemptively at any cost; the pussies, purist soft power constructivists who favour multilateral institutions and wish to avoid war, instead preferring the pacific stances of America’s Western European allies; and the assholes, those pariah states who routinely flout international law. For all their differences, the dicks and pussies can agree on their shared preservation of America’s partisan rivalries and democratic norms. The world leaders who applaud Gary’s speech understand this dynamic, as do the rest of Team America, who laud his oration. The speech was lifted from a drunk met by Gary earlier in the picture and the populist wisdom spouted here celebrates American foreign policy’s often sectional nature; Mead (ibid., 41) notes the “influence of local

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and parochial perspectives in the foreign policy process” and the “dicks, pussies and assholes” speech is almost folksy in its ode to the United States’ political pluralism. In my view, Gary is making an argument for American democracy as the best experiment in government, and a modified smart power as the best model of statecraft. To James Gow (2006, 567), Gary endorses a “Constructivist-Realist interpretation of International Relations, where security issues are defined by the intersubjective interaction of interests, ideas and values, gauged against necessity”. The speech reflects that “interests and values need to be protected with force”, a consensus ironically echoed by the Film Actors Guild, “who begin as adherents of a liberal world order”, but “resort to violence in an attempt to block Team America’s trying to stop Kim and his plot” (ibid., 568). In this sense, F.A.G.’s degeneration is a warped, metropolitan mirror of the neoconservative aim to defend a liberal world order with unilateral militarism. The final moments of Team America, which also see the group prevent nuclear war and Kim Jong-il impaled by a Pickelhaube, acknowledge the hierarchy that must take the place of F.A.G.’s fanatical form of soft power; Lisa admits her love for Gary by noting he had her “at dicks, pussies and assholes” before the bombastic strains of “America, Fuck Yeah” play over the end credits, affirming that American military force and soft power resources will work in collaboration, if not quite in unison. Team America’s aversion to direct critiques of the War on Terror attracted disappointment from various critics. Roger Ebert (2004) thought that Team America’s refusal to take an explicit political stance against the War on Terror pervaded “nihilism”. Picking up on comments from Stone and Parker that urged voters to “stay home” before the 2004 election, Ebert anthropomorphises Team America as a “cocky teenager, who’s had a couple of drinks before the party … they don’t have a plan for who they want to offend, they just want to be as offensive as possible”. This epitomised a cynical opportunity to “sneer at both sides”. Peter Bradshaw (2005) of The Guardian offered a less vituperative variation on this theme. He conceded the film was “defiantly funny”, but pointed out its “immaturity” and the possibility that “a certain kind of rock-ribbed Republican could well enjoy the film a great deal”. Yet these reviews missed the crucial observations of Team America’s narrative, namely its allegorisation of the bipartisan consensus surrounding intervention that had been reinforced in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as well as the difficulty of employing soft power in the War on Terror era.7

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Batman Begins and Syriana renew these concerns and also exhibit motifs from films explored earlier in this chapter, presenting an America where hard power, and frequently the Hamiltonian, jar with softer applications of diplomacy.

Harbingers of the Hamiltonian: Failures of Soft Power Exemplarism in Batman Begins and Syriana Batman Begins is a 2005 comic book adaptation and ‘reboot’ of the Batman franchise which combines a thorough origin story for the titular superhero with grandiose political subtexts. McSweeney (2014, 116) describes this instalment as part of a trilogy which “offers timely meditations on the efficacy and ethics of torture, revenge, vigilantism, pre-­ emptive violence and extraordinary rendition, with the war on terror as a compelling and ever-present metaphorical backdrop to its narrative”. What heightens the resonance of the first entry of Christopher Nolan’s Batman saga, however, is a portrayal of the fissures of American diplomatic identity experienced under neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Beginning somewhat incongruously in the South Asian country of Bhutan, Batman Begins’ probing of recent US political memory conveys the difficulty of fostering equity between exemplarism and vindicationalism, or soft and hard power, in the George W. Bush years. The first scenes of Nolan’s film revolve around Bruce Wayne’s release from a Bhutanese prison and tutelage under Ra’s Al Ghul (who for the first act uses the alias of Henri Ducard), a leader of an organisation known as the ‘League of Shadows’.8 Ghul’s ideology is built on a pursuit of vengeance anathema to the rule of law. Having lost his wife to a wanton act of violence, Ghul sees himself as capable of training Wayne to confront the criminal nihilism which resulted in the death of his parents and “the impossible anger strangling the grief”. The catharsis of this training is interspersed with flashbacks which explain why Wayne chose to travel and abandon his billionaire lifestyle in his home of Gotham City, exposition which allegorises an America coming to terms with an international reputation for inequity and Social Darwinism. Charting perceptions incipient in the protagonist’s childhood, Nolan outlines Wayne’s gradual realisation that much of Gotham’s crime derives from the city’s state as a dystopia redolent of America’s nineteenth-century Gilded Age, insufficiently protected under the hegemony of Hamiltonian elites. In a scene which takes

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place on Gotham City’s monorail prior to the traumatic death of his parents, Wayne’s father tells him of people “less fortunate than us enduring very hard times”. He is further told that Gotham’s monorail emerged from the efforts of Wayne Enterprises, the wealthy conglomerate run in the Wayne family name, which built a “cheap transportation system to unite the city”, with business headquarters Wayne Tower at the centre of the network. The subsequent death of Wayne’s parents highlights that this philanthropy is not enough to prevent criminality and provide social justice. In a later flashback sequence depicting Wayne in his early twenties, a stage in life where he remains grief-stricken, Nolan attributes causation to socioeconomic problems rather than the maniacal evil evinced in Burton’s Batman (1989).9 A courtroom scene reveals that the killer of Wayne’s parents is Joe Chill, a lowly criminal formerly employed by mob boss Carmine Falcone, who is keen to testify against Gotham’s criminal syndicates in exchange for parole. Although Wayne plans to shoot his parents’ assailant when parole is granted, his assassination plot is nullified when one of Falcone’s underlings murders Chill in broad daylight. After this event, Wayne’s childhood friend Rachel Dawes chastises him for resenting the rule of law and wishing Chill dead. To lecture Wayne, Dawes drives him through streets smarting from a ‘depression’, purported to be ‘history’. To Dawes, overlords like Falcone merely exploit economic dislocation, “preying on the desperate” and “creating new Joe Chills everyday”. Wayne’s education is soon furthered when the flashbacks culminate with him discovering his own company’s role within what Nye (2004, 41) defines as America’s “center of globalization”. Reeling from Dawes’s talk and a failed attempt at accosting Falcone, Wayne decides that travelling the world will enable him to grasp the psychology of desperate criminals. The narrative is brought full circle to his meeting with Ghul when he tries to steal software from Wayne Enterprises in Bhutan. Allying with impoverished thieves, Wayne is arrested by the local police and ironically castigated for trying to rob his own company. The indifference to Wayne Enterprises’ transnational power displayed in the botched heist reifies a warning by Nye (ibid., 42) that “U.S. standards and practices … have encountered puzzlement or even outright hostility” and provokes those who “want to resist or reshape globalization”. The flashbacks collectively illuminate the range of problems vitiating the image of America for other nations. They especially focalise what Nye cites as the “cultural decline that some pessimists proclaim”, evidenced in

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the US’s poorer performance in the realm of “job security” and “income equality” compared to other parts of the developed world (ibid., 57). The dualistic allegory of Wayne’s eventual rejection of The League of Shadows, however, shows that configurations of hard, soft or smart power cannot easily alleviate this image. After successfully completing his martial arts training, Wayne is told that he must execute a criminal to be fully initiated. The League also expects him to lead an invasion of Gotham, “a city that has become a breeding ground for suffering and injustice”. In a dramatic about-face, Wayne engages in a fight which causes the League’s headquarters to burn down and knocks his mentor Ghul unconscious. On one level, Wayne’s exit from The League of Shadows signals the danger of a smart power hinging on relativism and embracing those alienated by US power for the sake of rapprochement. The “common interests” (Ikenberry and Slaughter 2006, 19) Wayne incorrectly identified in The League of Shadows possess analogies with the Reagan administration’s co-option of the anti-Western Mujahedeen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Tellingly, screenwriter David S. Goyer (quoted in McSweeney 2014, 117) noted that Ra’s Al Ghul’s villainy was based on “Osama Bin Laden”. The American Wayne’s training under the Asia based League of Shadows illustrates an inversion of the nucleus for Islamism’s formation created by Operation Cyclone, a CIA programme which enabled the training of “future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-­ making and other black arts” (Pilger 2003). Initially viewed by Wayne as an arbiter of justice, The League of Shadows instead recalls the Reagan administration’s crudest acts of Realpolitik in the third world and a claim by the Republican president that the Nicaraguan Contras “are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers” (quoted in Boyd 1985). The similar cultural and military collaborations integral to America’s assistance of the Mujahedeen against “godless” Communism is redolent in the League’s ideological purity, reflecting the foundation of a “blowback” resultant from the support of Afghan “freedom fighters” (Johnson 2002, 23). Wayne’s withdrawal from Ghul’s organisation purveys synergy with the disrepute surrounding this episode in light of the 9/11 attacks and what diplomat Peter Tomsen (2011, 198) summarises as “the export of Wahhabi radicals to Afghanistan”. Besides observing the missteps which foreshadowed the trauma of September 2001, Wayne’s falling out with The League of Shadows invites oppositional interpretations associable with the contemporaneous Bush era. Like the chaotic F.A.G. in Team America, members of Ghul’s sect can

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be read as anti-American inverts of a Manicheanism tangible in the War on Terror, adopting an unadulterated hard power against the influence of American militarism and neoliberal dominance. Ghul’s endorsement of the death penalty and stress on force debatably refracts the post-9/11 employment of the Jacksonian, mirroring Mead’s (2001, 255) citing of a philosophy which “takes a broad view of the permissible targets in war”. Discovering the errors of punishments synergetic with the primitivism of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Wayne’s rejection hinges on a preservation of legal and humanitarian norms. In a prime example of allegorical dualism, The League’s falling out with Wayne captures both the animus of al-Qaeda’s Central Asian antecedents and Bush’s black and white “with us or against us” stance regarding terrorism. When Wayne decides to adopt the Batman persona, there are ideations that previous incidents of foreign policy cognitive dissonance and current states of disequilibrium can be allayed through rational fusions of hard and soft power. Upon being extricated from Bhutan by Wayne family butler Alfred Pennyworth, Wayne envisions becoming a “symbol” that can be “incorruptible” and “everlasting” because “people need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy”. Interpreted in the wake of Wayne’s refusal to sanction capital punishment, the protagonist’s emphasis on symbolism reminds of Brands’ (1998, 250) stress on the “exemplarist” principle in US diplomatic history, “a policy that, while inviting other countries to follow the American example, wouldn’t force them to do so”. The implication that the Jacksonian facet of US hegemony will be circumscribed further champions what Nye (2004, 143) lists as soft power’s “strengths of openness, civil liberties and democracy”, cemented with the rejection of policies “such as capital punishment”, which “reduce the attractiveness of the United States in other countries”. Wayne’s cultivation of military technology renews the impression of a centrist combination of hard and soft power. Through comical exchanges with Wayne Enterprises scientist Lucius Fox, Wayne learns of bulletproof armour and an experimental bridging vehicle known as the tumbler, items he soon employs as his superhero costume and batmobile respectively. In a jokey synthesis of the hard power of Wayne Enterprises’ weapons manufacturing division and the private resources of his company’s commercial dimension, Wayne claims that he is borrowing the armour for “cave diving”, thus disguising his crime-fighting ambitions with the fig leaf of frivolous consumerism. His sophisticated blend of capitalistic dynamism and unilateral action contrasts with the single-mindedness of the film’s second

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act villain, psychiatrist Jonathan Crane (known as ‘The Scarecrow’), an antagonist who tests a ‘Fear Toxin’ on asylum inmates and wishes to induce Gotham into a state of mass hysteria. Defined against this opponent, Nolan’s incarnation of Batman posits an alternative to kneejerk Jacksonianism and the anxiety dominating America’s post-9/11 landscape. It is arguable, however, that such centrism merely consolidates neoconservative and neoliberal shibboleths. Wayne’s belief that he should harness military technology non-lethally to disrupt criminal operations and save civilians recalls the utopian idealism of the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ conceived in the 1990s, a vision developed by Defence Department official Andrew Marshall. Bacevich (2005, 167–168) explores how Marshall sought methods of “adapting war to specific technological changes”, in order to make “protracted struggle and gratuitous slaughter … a thing of the past”. In seeking to mirror an age “characterized by unprecedented transparency and connectivity”, the RMA championed an America which “wished to see itself as a benign, liberal, and progressive hegemon” (ibid., 170). This harmonious rendition of warfare was visualised in the build-up to Iraq’s invasion and revolved around “precision air power supplemented by small, lean and agile ground forces” (ibid., 173). It is moreover plausible that Batman Begins complements this internationalist suffusion of Jacksonian violence with a hard power reframing of the Hamiltonian and militarisation of neoliberalism. Toh (2010, 127–128) considers how the private weaponry of Wayne Enterprises promotes “a matrix of consumer desire”, designed to grant “military hardware a consumer-­friendly façade”. This interplay is indicated in the “Batsuit and Batmobile”, which simultaneously “operate as emblems of the military-­ industrial complex” and “desirable consumer items”, a dual function which “encapsulates the militarization of popular culture” (ibid., 128). As in Team America’s conclusion, Batman Begins’ third act features images of reconciliation which mask a safeguarding of hard power. When Ghul returns to vaporise Gotham’s water supply with Crane’s fear toxin, an attack to be accomplished through a ‘microwave emitter’ stolen from Wayne Enterprises, Nolan introduces distinctly allegorical dangers. As soon as Ghul hijacks Gotham’s monorail system and places the microwave emitter on a carriage heading towards the source of Gotham’s water supply at Wayne Tower, Batman is faced with the prospect of horrors which parallel real (the demolition of a skyscraper resembling the World Trade Center, in this case Wayne Tower) and imagined (the chemical weapons attacks conceived of in the build-up to the Iraq War) traumas. He

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eliminates these threats through the support of police officer Jim Gordon, who demolishes the monorail track leading to Wayne Tower. Batman’s defeat of Ghul, whose planned use of American weaponry for chemical attacks recalls the Reagan administration’s collusion with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s as well as the Mujahedeen, nevertheless pushes the superhero’s credo of non-lethality to its limits. Once equipped with the knowledge that the vaporiser cannot hit Wayne Tower, the caped crusader leaves Ghul on board the runaway carriage to die, safe in the knowledge that although he declined to save his former mentor, he didn’t directly kill him either. Toh (2010, 133) views the saving of Wayne Tower as establishing a fresh “covenant for the post-9/11 era”, protecting a “symbol of economic prosperity in the service of social liberalism” with “unilateral force”. The epilogue makes it clear, however, that Batman’s battle with Ghul is just the beginning of a process which threatens centrism with new menaces to stability. Batman’s final conversation with Gordon (now promoted to lieutenant) mentions the likelihood of ‘escalation’. Gordon details the reality of protracted conflict with Gotham’s criminals by warning that “We start buying semi-automatics, they buy automatics … we start buying Kevlar, they buy armour piercing rounds”. The film finishes with resignation to endless war through the tease of the Joker’s ‘calling card’, foreshadowing the darker overtones of its sequel The Dark Knight (2008). The disequilibrium vitiating soft power and exemplarism in the geopolitical thriller Syriana is more dysphorically manifest than the comparatively tidier resolutions of Batman Begins. This geopolitical thriller opens in Tehran with an off-colour variant on Nye’s premise of ‘attraction’, showcased in CIA veteran Bob Barnes’s methods of eliminating Middle Eastern arms traffickers. Barnes is first depicted currying favour with Iranian weapons dealers through alcohol consumption and discussions surrounding liquid MDMA, a drug which supposedly has its ‘world capital’ in the historic city of Tehran. Presenting dynamics inverse to the hedonistic alienations of 25th Hour and Team America, Barnes’s rapport with his targets touches on a dissident strain within the Islamic republic, broaching what Abdolmohammadi (2015, 15) describes as a “virtual square” where “young Iranians exchanged ideas and points of view, facilitating the growth of a huge undercover movement made up of heterogeneous ideas”. Such rapprochement, however, is merely a means for Barnes’s goal of political assassination. The opening concludes with the rigged bombing of two Iranian arms traffickers, a nullification of soft

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power further compounded when Barnes finds out the individuals are Iranian intelligence agents and not private operators. Stephen Gaghan’s 2005 film weaves a mosaic of competing storylines surrounding the global importance of the oil industry and encompasses characters as various as intelligence agents, American oil executives and unemployed Pakistani migrants. The strand of its narrative most synergetic with soft power’s attenuation concerns the Oxford educated Prince Nasir, the foreign minister and son of an Emir who has started orienting his undemocratic kingdom away from US energy giant Connex oil and towards new business dealings with China. A tragic event at a private party hosted by Nasir’s father in Spain, which entails the accidental death of American energy analyst Bryan Woodman’s son, leads to a concomitant vision of political reform. After he offers Woodman oil interests worth $75 million and the position of economic advisor as reparations for the death of his child, Nasir professes that he wants to improve his country. He outlines his desire to simultaneously adopt liberal democracy and break from the West’s sphere of influence to Woodman: I want to create a Parliament. I want to give women the right to vote. I want an independent judiciary. I want to start a new Petroleum exchange in the Middle East and cut the speculators out of the business. Why are the major oil exchanges in New York and London anyway? I’ll put all of our energy up for competitive bidding. I’ll run pipe through Iran to Europe, like you proposed. I’ll ship to China. Anything that achieves efficiency and maximizes profits for my people. Profits, which I’ll then use to rebuild my country.

These ambitions are associable with Nye’s ideal of smart power through their reconciliation of Woodman’s American know-how with the endorsement of self-governance for former colonial satellites. Implicit in Nasir’s worldview is that democracies such as the United States and Britain, although perhaps exemplarists models for his future democracy, will lack the vindicationist rights contemporaneously exercised by the Bush and Blair administrations in Iraq. This independence of action is articulated economically by Nasir and is notable in his refutations of ‘New York’ and ‘London’. His agenda offers a reification of what Wade (2011, 353) calls the “multipolar governance dilemma”, where “larger numbers of states with larger differences in their preferences, interests, and beliefs make cooperation more difficult to achieve and sustain”.

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The countervailing pressure of America’s Jacksonian constituents, who rely on Arab purchases of US arms for job security, shows the obstacles to attaining distance from Western neo-imperialism and the incompatibility of political emulation and economic disassociation. Nasir tells Woodman of the power of the American president, who “rings my father and says I’ve got unemployment in Texas … Kansas … Washington State”. He comments how, because of this cajoling, “One phone call later, we’re stealing out of our social programs in order to buy overpriced aeroplanes”. The militarisation and control of Middle Eastern affairs hinges on the support of US workers, a configuration which mirrors William Appleman Williams’s (1972, 15) view that “America’s domestic wellbeing depends on ever such sustained, ever-increasing overseas economic expansion”. The oligarchical complexion of Nasir’s father’s government, which in many respects reminds of the decadence of America’s signature Gulf ally Saudi Arabia, reinforces the Realpolitik long enervative of US soft power in Arab states. At least from the experience of Nasir’s pro-Western dictatorship and its dealings with the United States, the Wilsonian appeals of democracy promotion applied in the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions are secondary to an emphasis on Hamiltonian commerce. The effect of this American pursuit of wealth and economic security on Middle Eastern society is of primary importance in Syriana’s narrative and belies the democratising themes of George W. Bush’s second inaugural address (2005), a Wilsonian speech which foregrounded “the expansion of freedom in all the world”. Nasir complements the marginality of this vision in a discussion with his supporters which reflects America’s preference for hard power as well as the Hamiltonian. He observes, “When a country has five percent of the world’s population but spends 50 percent of the world’s military spending, that country’s persuasive power is in decline”. This language directly matches Nye’s (2004, 18–19) argument that American foreign policy since the Second World War “gradually increased the political and social costs of using military force for conquest”, “contradictory effects” notably unmitigated by “the information revolution near the end of the century” and the “revolution in military affairs”. The exigencies of hard power and the Hamiltonian, along with the consequent degeneration of soft power, are also connoted through more subtle developments. An early meeting between Barnes and his CIA overseers elicits debate around the dissident underbelly of Iran, a country thought to contain “students marching in the streets” and the potential to

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become a “natural cultural ally of the US”. This rapprochement is idealised in the imagining of a “nice, secular, pro-Western, pro-business government”. The exchange is surveyed by the Committee for the Liberation of Iran, a pressure group likely based on the real life “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq”, a non-governmental organisation which was  populated with former government officials and elected politicians such as Reagan era Secretary of State George Schultz and Senator John McCain (NNDB: tracking the entire world n.d.). The contextualisation of Iran is redolent of a similar analysis in Nye’s 2004 book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. The author details Iran as an example of a state which indicates soft power’s “contradictory effects on different groups in the same country” (Nye Jr. 2004, 52). These discrepancies were evident in the 1994 fatwa issued against satellite television dishes by Iran’s “highest-ranking cleric”, who denounced “a cheap alien culture” and the “moral diseases of the West” only a decade before mass demonstrations in favour of democracy “followed the spread of private American TV broadcasts” (Nye Jr. 2004, 51–52). The juxtaposition of the Committee for the Liberation of Iran with the exposition surrounding Iran’s pro-American populace meanwhile seems to capture what Tony Smith (2009, 64) calls “the historical evolution of liberal internationalism” and the Wilsonian element of neoconservatism which helped rationalise the Iraq War. The revealed identities of two of the Committee for the Liberation of Iran’s members, however, prove that the soft power and Wilsonian orientated language of this meeting operate as a mere fig leaf for the Hamiltonian. Gaghan later establishes that the CEO of Killen Oil, Jimmy Pope, and the head of a Washington D.C. based law firm, Dean Whiting, support the Committee’s goals. These individuals are also involved in a storyline concerning a merger between global energy giant Connex and Killen oil, which is speculated as the “world’s twenty-third largest economy”, and lobby vociferously against Prince Nasir’s takeover. The Committee therefore, far from existing for Wilsonian means, is suffused with the same worldview which prompted the CIA sponsored coup against Iran’s fledgling democracy in 1953 and its secular leader Mosaddeq. A head of state with a “reputation as a liberal democrat and ardent nationalist” (Gasiorowski 1987, 262), Mosaddeq’s rule clashed with British oil interests and was succeeded, thanks to American sabotage, by the authoritarian Shah. The primacy of economics over democracy is further reinforced by the downward spiral of two unemployed Pakistani migrants, father Saleem

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Ahmed Khan and son Wasim, who lose their jobs in a Gulf oil refinery because of Nasir’s decision to export to China and the Connex-Killen merger. Wasim, as a consequence of his unemployment, becomes persuaded by a cleric to launch a suicide bombing against a local Connex-­ Killen tanker. The ‘zero sum’ nature of American foreign policy in the Middle East is perhaps most implicit, however, in the downfalls of Barnes and Nasir, whose deaths at the hands of the CIA illustrate an intersection of hard power and the Hamiltonian. After the CIA discovers that a local Hezbollah agent plans to broadcast their intentions to kill Nasir, they decide to portray Barnes as a rogue agent and set him up as a scapegoat for an upcoming drone strike. Although Barnes heads to the Middle East and reaches Nasir, the bombing is given the green light and kills both men. The interests of Whiting, who lobbied for Barnes’s ostracisation and sanctions against Nasir, are served in an ending where, in Westwell’s (2014, 78) words, “corporate sharp practice meshes with the condoned illegal CIA operation”. The exemplarist democracy visualised by Nasir, a leader Woodman (who narrowly survives the drone strike) once cited as potentially transformative as Ataturk, is nullified because of Realpolitik. The films explored in this chapter establish the impossibility of centrist reconciliation through dissonances surrounding the purposes of America’s cosmopolitan democracy, soft power and cultural attractiveness. The Revisionist Westerns at the centre of the next chapter fragment Mead’s kaleidoscope further and build on these disjunctures through signalling disconnect between neoliberalism and Wilsonian idealism. They also synthesise the polemicism of Syriana with the allegorical methods of Batman Begins, purveying more symbolic reifications of diplomatic disarray and changing delineations of political contradiction.

Notes 1. The “platitudes of unity” mentioned in this sentence emerged on September 17, 2001, only six days after the 9/11 attacks, when George W.  Bush addressed an audience at the Islamic Center of Washington D.C.  In language inverse to the xenophobia of Brogan, the president counted “millions of Muslims amongst our citizens” and observed that “Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country” (Bush 2001). 2. Kevin Phillips (2004, 3) writes on the relationship of the energy company Enron with the Bush family dynasty and its involvement with “the first

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national Bush administration, the six years of George W. Bush’s governorship of Texas, and the first year of his Washington incumbency”. He further speculates that the Bush family’s business dealings with Enron encompassed imperial aims, signalled in aspirations for “intensified commitment to U.S. control of Iraqi and Caspian oil supplies” and “large-scale privatization of support functions hitherto performed by the U.S. military” (ibid., 150). Enron’s bankruptcy in November 2001 and the discovery that the corporation had defrauded investors circumscribed these plans although the subject of corporate collusion would return in “debate over government plans to award contracts to rebuild war-and sanctions-ravaged Iraq” (ibid., 151). 3. This animus is more nihilistically manifest in the next chapter’s analysis of No Country for Old Men, a Western which entails a similarly dark foregrounding of the Hamiltonian school. 4. The loss of a Republican Senate seat in Vermont on June 2001 occurred through the defection of moderate Jim Jeffords and dealt a blow to the “opportunity for conservative hegemony” mentioned in the previous sentence. Nicholson (2005, 343) writes on how this loss gave the Democratic Party “control of the Senate by a one-vote margin” and renewed “split partisan control of the executive and legislative branches”. 5. Pat Stephen Keane (2006, 92) details this in his book Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe. 6. Comparable co-options of secular humanism and idealism become evident in There Will be Blood and The Dark Knight. 7. A similar fatalism and failure on the part of the left to achieve a liberal alternative to intervention manifests itself in Chapter Six’s analysis of The Dark Knight. 8. For the first act of Batman Begins, Ra’s Al Ghul is falsely identified as a mysterious decoy and not the man harbouring the alias of Henri Ducard. Although Ducard does not admit that he is Ghul until the film’s third act, I have decided to label him as this character for the sake of clarity and minimising confusion. 9. In Burton’s 1989 blockbuster, Wayne’s parents are killed by Jack Napier, the prior alias of the iconic villain The Joker.

References Abdolmohammadi, Pejman. 2015. The Revival of Nationalism and Secularism In Modern Iran. LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series 11 (November): 5–20. https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64581/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_ Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_LSE%20Middle%20East%20 Centre%20Papers_Abdolmohammadi_Revival%20of%20nationalism%20 Iran_2015.pdf.

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Alford, Matthew. 2011. Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy. London: Pluto Press. Bacevich, Andrew. 2005. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. New York: Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. ———. 2001. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. BBC. 2004. Moore Film ‘Won Cannes on Merit.’ May 23, 2004. http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3740939.stm. Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. 2004. The How-to Manual, the Prequel and the Sequel in Post-9/11 Cinema. In Film and Television After 9/11, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon, 142–162. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. Bishop, Ryan. 2013. Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boyd, Gerald M. 1985. Reagan Terms Nicaraguan Rebels ‘Moral Equal Of Our Founding Fathers.’ The New  York Times, 23 July. https://www.nytimes. com/1985/03/02/world/reagan-terms-nicaraguan-rebels-moral-equal-offounding-fathers.html. Bradshaw, Peter. 2005. Team America: World Police Review. The Guardian, January 14. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jan/14/team-americaworld-police-review. Brands, H.W. 1998. What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brett, Anwar. n.d. Matt Stone, Team America: World Police: Interviewed by Anwar Brett. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/01/13/matt_stone_ team_america_interview.shtml. Accessed 12 July 2019. Bush, George W. 2001. Islam Is Peace Says President. George W.  Bush White House Archives. Last modified September 17. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html. ———. 2003. Full Text: George Bush’s Speech to the American Enterprise Institute. The Guardian, February 27. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2003/feb/27/usa.iraq2. ———. 2005. Second Inaugural Address. Bartleby, January 20. https://www. bartleby.com/124/pres67.html. Christensen, Terry, and Peter J. Haas. 2005. Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Films. Armonk, North Castle, New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc. Clinton, Paul. 2003. Review: A Thoughtful, Timely ‘25th Hour.’ CNN, January 11. http://edition.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/09/ review.25th.hour/index.html. Davidson, Joanna. 2012. Humanitarian Intervention as Liberal Imperialism. POLIS Journal 7 (Summer): 127–164.

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Dickenson, Ben. 2006. Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush. New York City: I.B. Tauris. Ebert, Roger. 2004. Team America: World Police Review. RogerEbert.com, October 14. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/team-america-worldpolice-2004. Eco, Umberto. 1995. Ur-Fascism. The New  York Review of Books, June 22. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/. Everett, Anna. 2012. Movies and Spectacle in a Political Year. In American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations, ed. Timothy Corrigan, 104–124. Rutgers, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Gardner, Lloyd C. 2005. Present at the Culmination: An Empire of Righteousness? In The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach in on US Foreign Policy, ed. Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young, 1–31. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc. Gasiorowski, Mark J. 1987. The 1953 Coup D’Etah In Iran. International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (3): 261–286. George W. Bush Whitehouse Archives. n.d. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ nsc/nssall.html. Accessed 16 July 2019. Gow, James. 2006. Team America World Police: Down-Home Theories of Power and Peace. Millennium Journal of International Studies 34 (2): 563–568. Hammond, Phillip. 2007. Media, War and Postmodernity. Abingdon: Routledge. Harvey, David. 2002. Cracks in the Edifice of the Empire State. In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, ed. Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, 57–68. New York: Routledge. Hitchens, Christopher. 2004. Unfahrenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore. Slate Magazine, June 21. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/06/ the-lies-of-michael-moore.html. Hopf, Ted. 1998. The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory. International Security 23 (1): 171–200. Ignatieff, Michael. 2003. The American Empire; The Burden. The New  York Times, Jan 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/the-american-empire-the-burden.html. Ikenberry, G.  John and Anne-Marie Slaughter. 2006. The Princeton Project on National Security: Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security In The 21st Century: Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://www2.world-governance.org/ IMG/pdf_0080_Forging_a_World_of_Liberty_Under_Law.pdf. IMDB. n.d. Bill Pope. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0691084/. Accessed 10 July 2019. IMDB release info. n.d. 25th Hour (2002): Release Info. https://www.imdb. com/title/tt0307901/releaseinfo. Accessed 30 June 2019.

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Johnson, Chalmers. 2002. American Militarism and Blowback: The Costs of Letting the Pentagon Dominate Foreign Policy. New Political Science 24 (1): 21–38. Kagan, Robert. 2003. First Chapter: ‘Of Paradise and Power.’ The New  York Times, March 30. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/books/chapters/of-paradise-and-power.html. Keane, Pat Stephen. 2006. Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe. New York: Columbia University Press. Keeble, Arin. 2017. Why Spike Lee’s 25th Hour Is the Most Enduring Film About 9/11. The Conversation, September 8. https://theconversation.com/ why-spike-lees-25th-hour-is-the-most-enduring-film-about-9-11-82020. Kubalkova, Vendulka. 1998. Reconstructing the Discipline: Scholars as Agents. In International Relations in a Constructed World, ed. Vendulka Kubalkova, Nicholas Onuf, and Paul Kowert, 193–201. Abingdon: Routledge. Layne, Christopher. 2010. The Unbearable Lightness of Soft Power. In Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical, and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox, 51–82. Abingdon: Routledge. McDougall, Walter A. 1997. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With The World Since 1776. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. McSweeney, Terence. 2014. The ‘War on Terror’ And American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mead, Walter Russell. 2001. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. Abingdon: Routledge. Nicholson, Stephen P. 2005. The Jeffords Switch and Public Support for Divided Government. British Journal of Political Science 35 (2): 343–356. NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. n.d.. https://www.nndb.com/ org/387/000166886/. Accessed 30 July 2019. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 1990. Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New  York: Public Affairs. ———. 2009. Get Smart: Combining Hard and Soft Power. Foreign Affairs 88 (4): 160–163. Packer, George. 2005. The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq. New  York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Phillips, Kevin. 2004. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. New York: Penguin Group. Pilger, John. 2003. What Good Friends Left Behind. The Guardian, September 20. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/20/afghanistan.weekend7. Prince, Stephen. 2009. Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Schneider, William. 2002. Cowboy Diplomacy. The Atlantic, March 1. https://www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2002/03/cowboy-diplomacy/377769/. Scott, Ian. 2011. American Politics in Hollywood Film. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shotonwhat? n.d. 25th Hour (2002). https://shotonwhat.com/25thhour-2002. Accessed 29 June, 2019.  Simpson, David. 2006. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: University of Chicago. Smith, Tony. 2009. Wilsonianism After Iraq: The End of Liberal Internationalism? In The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tony Smith, 53–89. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Guardian editorial. 2001. Altman says Hollywood ‘Created Atmosphere’ for September 11, 18 October. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/ oct/18/news2. Toh, Justine. 2010. The Tools and Toys of the War on Terror: Consumer Desire, Military Fetish, and Regime Change in Batman Begins. In Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror”, ed. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, 153–166. New  York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Tomsen, Peter. 2011. The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, And The Failures Of Great Powers. New York: Public Affairs. Tricot, Tito. 2002. Remembering September 11 1973. The Guardian, September 16. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/16/pinochet.september11. Valdes, Juan Gabriel. 1995. Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Nardroff, Ellen. 1962. The American Frontier as a Safety Valve: The Life, Death, Reincarnation, and Justification of a Theory. Agricultural History 36 (3): 123–142. Wade, Robert H. 2011. Emerging World Order? From Multipolarity to Multilateralism in the G20, the World Bank and the IMF. Politics and Society 39 (3): 347–378. Wasserman, Sarah. 2011. No Place Like Home: 9/11 Nostalgia and Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. In REAL 27: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature/States of Emergency—States of Crisis, ed. Winfried Fluck, Katharina Motyl, Donald E.  Pease, and Christoph Raetsch, 355–367. Tuebingen: Narr Verlag. Westwell, Guy. 2014. Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema. New  York: Columbia University Press. Williams, William Appleman. 1972. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Wurmser, David. 1999. Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein. Washington DC: The AEI Press.

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Zahran, Geraldo, and Leonardo Ramos. 2010. From Hegemony to Soft Power: Implications of a Conceptual Change. In Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox, 12–31. Abingdon: Routledge.

Filmography All the President’s Men. 1976. Directed by Alan J. Pakula. USA: Warner Bros. Batman. 1989. Directed by Tim Burton. USA: Warner Bros. Batman Begins. 2005. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Black Hawk Down. 2001. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Columbia Pictures. Collateral Damage. 2001. Directed by Andrew Davis. USA: Warner Bros. The Dark Knight. 2008. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Fahrenheit 9/11. 2004. Directed by Michael Moore. USA: Lionsgate films. Independence Day. 1996. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: 20th Century Fox. The Magnificent Seven. 1960. Directed by John Sturges. USA: United Artists. The Matrix. 1999. Directed by The Wachowski. USA: Warner Bros. No Country for Old Men. 2007. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. USA: Miramax. The Parallax View. 1974. Directed by Alan J. Pakula. USA: Paramount Pictures. Pearl Harbor. 2001. Directed by Michael Bay. USA: Buena Vista Pictures. The Siege. 1998. Directed by Edward Zwick. USA: 20th Century Fox. Spiderman. 2002. Directed by Sam Raimi. USA: Sony Pictures. Star Wars. 1977. Directed by George Lucas. USA: 20th Century Fox. Syriana. 2005. Directed by Stephen Gaghan. USA: Warner Bros. Team America: World Police. 2004. Directed by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. USA: Paramount Pictures. There Will be Blood. 2007. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. USA: Paramount Vantage. Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros. True Lies. 1994. Directed by James Cameron. USA: 20th Century Fox. 25th Hour. 2002. Directed by Spike Lee. USA: Buena Vista Pictures.

CHAPTER 5

Fragmentation: The Deconstruction of Neoliberal Occupation in No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood

In February 2006, famed pronouncer of the ‘end of history’ and former neoconservative Francis Fukuyama lambasted the Bush administration’s departure from traditional conservative understandings of foreign policy. He described how an “ambitious social engineering—which in earlier years had been applied mainly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare”, had become manifest in an “American activism”, where “transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering” (Fukuyama 2006a). Yet, when examined closely, the problems confronting American hegemony resulted from more than an abandonment of American realism. Fukuyama’s attribution of a welfarist outlook to Bush’s foreign policy ignored the implementation of neoliberalism that had been central to the early stages of Iraq’s invasion and the reckless policies of deregulation which would soon culminate in the 2008 financial crisis. Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer’s privatisation of Iraq’s formerly state-owned enterprises, disbanding of its national army and mass firing of its civil servants climaxed in mass unemployment and insurgency, attenuating the neoconservative championing of democracy promotion. This cognitive dissonance was unrealised by those attacking Iraq’s administrative apparatus as “an overbearing state using coercion to oppress its society” (Dodge 2010, 1281). By 2007, American cinema started encapsulating rifts of cutthroat capitalism and a political idealism, attesting to schisms that mirrored the © The Author(s) 2020 T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_5

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disjuncture between neoliberal deregulation and neoconservatism’s Wilsonian dimension. Two films directed by The Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson typify this fragmentation through elements of the Revisionist Western sub-genre that was dominant in the Vietnam era. No Country for Old Men, a sanguinary adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, and There Will be Blood, an intense rendition of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 work Oil!, provide narratives that capture how neoconservatism’s idealism sits incongruously with its simultaneous endorsement of the undiluted, raw competition of neoliberal ideology. These pictures renew the intersections of idealism and realism prevalent in post-9/11 American cinema. Yet these are inflected in a way befitting the “collapsing scenery” of Bush’s second term, echoing a context of low presidential approval ratings, economic anxiety and imperial overstretch. The latter two conditions, reinforced by an amassing sub-prime mortgage crisis and the failure to create liberal democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, find expression in frontier contexts deconstructive of American hegemonic authority. The 1980 setting and cat and mouse plot of No Country for Old Men delineate subtexts of capitalist greed and sectarian violence evocative of the late 2000s political zeitgeist. There Will be Blood, which traces the growth of oil baron Daniel Plainview’s empire from the close of the nineteenth century to the late 1920s, presents an avaricious brand of Manifest Destiny associable with the ideological predilections behind the Second Gulf War and Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority. Both these pictures share a commonality with other Westerns released in 2007, such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the remake 3:10 to Yuma. What distinguishes No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, however, is their deconstruction of dynamics relevant to the convulsions of Bush’s second term. The role of allegory takes on a more ideological bent due to these two Oscar winning productions and their enhancement of the reconfigurations outlined in the previous chapter. This marks an inflection point where the allegorical phenomenon surpasses the importance of films which critique the failures of the War on Terror through realistic representations, a process reflected in the less conspicuous successes of 2007s Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah.

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No Country for Old Men and the Anarchy of Exporting Neoliberalism The Coen Brothers open their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel with a montage of wide-angle shots depicting the languid beauty of a West Texas dawn in 1980. Despite the possible affinity of the Sunbelt setting and year with the conservative realignment of Reagan’s first election victory, a melancholic voiceover reveals how Middle America is becoming besieged by new, nihilistic forces. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a man bemused by his own failure as a law enforcement officer, delivers a monologue that mourns a shift from moral idealism to arbitrary violence. Whilst the camera remains focused on pastoral sites that include desert landscapes and isolated farms, Bell delineates the changing conventions of his hometown. He tells how he has held the job of sheriff since the age of twenty-five, after inheriting the role from a long line of fathers and grandfathers. The West Texas of 1980, however, contrasts with the earlier periods where “some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun”. The crimes too have escalated; after contemplating his tenure, Bell morosely recounts the story of “a boy he sent to the electric chair” for murdering a fourteen-year-old girl. Though Bell mentions that the crime was categorised as “a crime of passion”, he comments that, “There was no passion to it”. He quotes the perpetrator, who stated that he had “been planning to kill somebody for as long as he could remember” and “was going to hell”. Bell concludes this anecdote while the arrest of hitman Anton Chigurh occurs onscreen. Even though the antagonist’s face is barely visible, the final lines of Bell’s voiceover signal Chigurh’s potential danger—he confides to the viewer that the hired killer will commit violence, acknowledging, “That the crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure”. Bell’s sense of a dissonance between a bygone American idealism and a new, assertive nihilism is overt in the visual subversions of Chigurh, whose appearance expresses layers of ideological contradiction.1 Chigurh’s fashion sense, an odd combination of jean jacket with a mop-top haircut, makes him appear preternaturally alien, a bizarre amalgamation of rugged individualist and radical. A performance by Spanish actor Javier Bardem accentuates this duality by blurring the line between foreigner and American, contrasting with the Vietnam veteran depicted in McCarthy’s novel.2 This incongruity of Chigurh’s character, encompassing

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otherworldly outsider and American capitalist, is mirrored by two dramatically different executions performed by the character. The first execution by Chigurh occurs in a Texan police station. Before the killing, a medium shot foregrounds the young officer who arrested Chigurh. The officer, who talks on the phone with his superior, is unaware of Chigurh approaching from behind. Interrupting the conversation, Chigurh places his handcuffs around the police officer’s neck and drags him to the floor. His facial expression becomes maniacal as he strangles and cuts the officer’s neck with the jagged chain that connects the handcuffs, causing a pool of blood to soak the floor beneath them. Chigurh’s second murder is emphatically dissimilar. After exiting the police station, Chigurh finds a vehicle to escape the crime scene and comes across a lone driver. Treating the man as if he were part of a herd of cattle due for meat processing, Chigurh produces a cattle gun and uses it to murder the individual with a clinical shot to the head, moving from fanatical violence to a display of raw, brute capitalist efficiency. Academic critics of McCarthy’s novel have generally viewed this violence as a harbinger for the neoliberalism institutionalised by the Reagan administration, purveying a ruthless cull of America’s ‘small-c’ conservative working class. To Dierdra Reber (2016, 157–158), Chigurh’s cattle gun functions as “a metaphor for capitalist culture”, that represented its “central and reigning logic”. Malewitz (2014, 164) speaks of Chigurh’s use of both the handcuffs and cattle gun as a model of capitalist ingenuity, emphasising a metaphor for “an individual strategy for working class survival in an era of disappearing social safety nets”. Jonathan Elmore and Rich Elmore (2016, 169) draw parallels between Chigurh’s murderous treatment of the Texan locals and Foucault’s understanding of a neoliberalism that framed “human interactions as economic choices, choices about how to use one’s limited resources to achieve one’s desired ends”. The conservative dissensus created by Chigurh’s violence is evident in sections excluded from the screen adaptation. Though in the novel, Bell signifies right-wing inclinations by strongly condemning abortion and the derision of rednecks by Texan liberals (a social conservatism interestingly absent in the film adaptation), he scorns the rapid pace of technological and economic change engulfing 1980 America. Bell admits to fearing a trans-border gun trade that allows cartels to copy the police’s “new technology”, conceding “tools that comes into our hands, comes into theirs too” (McCarthy 2005, 62). He later recounts his experience of attending college under the GI Bill of the mid-1940s, a time that contrasts

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favourably with “the hell in a handbasket” world of 1980, embodied in the litany of “rape, arson, murder” and “drugs” that corrode the Texan landscape (ibid., 96). The cinematic adaptation encodes the long-term impact of these disjunctions, especially for the War on Terror, through the aesthetic and thematic properties of the Revisionist Western. According to Michael Coyne (1997, 3), this kind of Western undercut the conventional mores of genre archetypes that “sanctified territorial expansion, justified dispossession of the Indians, fuelled nostalgia for a largely mythical past, exalted self-­ reliance and posited violence as the main solution to personal and societal problems”. This revisionism is prevalent in Bell, a man fearful of a new capitalist culture that vitiates the more old-fashioned frontier codes of honour and community. Although the Coen Brothers did not specify an explicit political allegory to No Country for Old Men, its declinism makes it rich in symbolism. It shares this characteristic with a plethora of other Revisionist Westerns released in 2007. Though not all of them have the ideological salience of No Country for Old Men, they share its deconstruction of the Western’s traditional American exceptionalist mythos. Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford lampooned the democratic populism of the American West by representing famed outlaw Jesse James as a withdrawn depressive whose exploits proved to be largely fraudulent or nefarious. James Mangold’s remake of the 1957 Western 3:10 to Yuma focused on a captured outlaw and the Stockholm syndrome he displayed for his rancher captor, a state of trauma that undermined the liberating promise of the frontier. As will be underlined in the second half of this chapter, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood portrays an avaricious brand of Manifest Destiny that allegorised the neoliberal motivations for the Iraq occupation. Several academics associate the cynical nature of these pictures with a litany of failures attributed to the Bush administration in its second term. In these readings, the associations give primacy to the tumultuous reconstructions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet there are also invocations of the neoliberal economic policies that the Bush administration sought to export in these interventions and that, domestically, led to the economic collapse of 2008. Dina Smith (2012, 173) describes this series of Westerns as having “moved beyond simple revision. … Suffering from an Oedipal crisis that gets narrativised in stories about impotence, failure and dying fathers”, a fixation that results in “displaced allegories for a failed war and administration”. To Douglas Kellner (2010, 12–15), There Will be Blood focalises

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“the destructive effects of greed and predatory capitalism”, while No Country for Old Men reflects an “anxiety ridden era” where “socioeconomic insecurities and crises are intensifying”. Stacey Takacs sees evidence of allegory in American TV during the 2000s through examining the feminist journalist and author Susan Faludi’s (2007) notion of a paternalistic “terror dream” in post-9/11 American life. Takacs (2010, 153) argues that this patriarchal state of mind, which “gripped the United States in the wake of 9/11” and “took the peculiar form of a Wild West fantasy of frontier violence, captivity, and rescue”, became central to television Westerns Saving Jessica Lynch (2003) and Deadwood (2004–2006). Whilst having different political orientations, both these productions captured the anxieties of the terror dream. Saving Jessica Lynch “used Western imagery to frame the invasion of Iraq as a defensive struggle to rescue civilization from savagery”, while Deadwood, contrastingly, “used Western conventions to interrogate the logics of Manichean morality and militarised heroism underwriting the Bush administration’s turn to war” and present an “anti-heroic depiction of life on the frontier” (Takacs 2010, 153). This seemingly disparate thematic web of a hubristic American capitalism, fallen patriarchy and radical visions of post-9/11 intervention is synergetic with the fallout from the Bush administration’s failed attempt to implement neoliberalism and democracy in Iraq. By the time of Bush’s second term in 2005, plunging approval ratings signalled the administration’s weakness at home and abroad. Perceptions of inertia stemmed from its inability to solve the civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq, an embarrassing mishandling of social security reform and the belated response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans (Balz 2007, 35). The nexus of fallen patriarchy and imperial anxiety detected by Takacs had its own dramatic expression in an article caricaturing the Bush administration’s difficulties by Peggy Noonan, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. In the piece, entitled ‘A Father’s Tears’, Noonan extrapolated circumstantial details surrounding outgoing governor of Florida and younger Bush scion Jeb Bush’s farewell address to the Floridian Congress in December 2006. The journalist speculated that the sight of a crying George H.W. Bush at the ceremony had roots in the consensus that the Iraq invasion made his older son wrong “in the great decision of his presidency” (Noonan 2006). Clearly, this political disarray inspired a degree of dramatic conjecture. Analysing No Country for Old Men against this context makes it easier to

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see why Film Studies academics such as Kellner, Smith and Takacs draw thematic associations between the new plethora of Revisionist Westerns and the policy failures thought to be enveloping the Bush administration in the late 2000s. Malewitz (2014, 164) briefly touches on this quality concerning McCarthy’s novel, noting how the 1980 setting served to explain “the more exaggerated conditions of post 9/11 neoliberalism by returning to its primal scene”. In translating this setting into visual images of despair and nihilism, the film adaptation of No Country for Old Men creates contradiction between modern neoconservatism’s idealistic propounding of democratisation and a Social Darwinism incarnate at the beginning of the Reagan era. Indeed, Bell’s misery about the greed he sees dissents from the modern neoconservative belief in the potential of American democracy and economics to rehabilitate damaged societies. His reticence offers what Cant (2008, 139) interpreted as “a mythoclastic assault on America’s exceptionalist vision of itself”, a view heightened in resonance because “his vision of humanity as irredeemably ‘fallen’ is, of course, conservative in the older sense of that much contested word”. The discrepancy between what Bacevich (2005, 78) calls the “neoconservative lore” of Reagan’s victory in 1980 and the economic dislocations of neoliberalism is deconstructed in No Country for Old Men through the introduction of Llewellyn Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran whose discovery of drug money properly begins the film’s storyline and allegorises the bipartisan allure of neoliberalism’s promise. Judged against the fatherly Bell’s staid style of conservatism, the younger Moss is the wayward son whose Reagan Democrat identity mirrors neoliberalism’s domestic appeal, forming with Chigurh and Bell a triumvirate of differing political reactions to this ideology. The first image of Moss appears directly after Chigurh’s first murder and consists of a prolonged close-up shot depicting the veteran peering through the scope of a hunting rifle. Moss, in his Vietnam veteran identity and rancher garb, resembles an emblem of a blue-collar, Jacksonian America. He embodies the theory’s domestic as well as wartime traits, personifying the ethos of what Walter Mead (2016b) classifies as a “folk community”, bound by “an honor driven egalitarianism and fiery nationalism”. It is worth contextualising the Jacksonian animus in relation to No Country for Old Men’s 1980 set political allegory. Tough-minded and unsentimental Jacksonian ideals of patriotism and blue-collar populism enabled support for Reaganism, and the consequent vicissitudes of neoliberalism, from the traditionally Democratic working class. Joanne Morreale

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(1991, 41) notes the Jacksonian support for Reagan’s domestic policies that emerged from “the populist themes” of Reagan’s first presidential campaign and its vision “of a struggle between the common man and powerful interests that threaten to encroach upon the individual”. Jacksonians also fostered backing for Reagan’s foreign policy, which promised an analogous struggle against the Soviet Union and what Laurence French and Magdaleno Manzanarez (2004, 126) calls the “Jacksonian-­like extra-legal methods” used to support insurgencies in El Salvador and Nicaragua. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration sought support from Jacksonian America for a more grandiose agenda of preemptive war and democracy promotion in the Middle East. Simultaneously at home, Republican proponents of neoliberalism rationalised a housing bubble that would have dark implications for blue-collar America. The consequences of both these forces would eventually repel the Bush administration’s Jacksonian constituents. In terms of neoconservatism, Mead (2016a, 61–62) notes how a schism was enshrined in Jacksonian America’s rejection of the Iraq War’s status as a “Wilsonian nation-building project”, along with its concomitant withdrawal of support for the conflict’s aims to “restore peace and security to the United States” and end “serious threats to America”. This disintegration received coverage in Fukuyama’s 2006 book After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads, which specifies the “alliance of neoconservatives and Jacksonian nationalists, who for different reasons accepted the logic of regime change in Baghdad” (2006b, 7–8). The disaffection of Jacksonian nationalists became clear in an overambitious occupation that alienated “red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are the ones fighting and dying in the Middle East” through pushing them “back toward a more isolationist foreign policy” (ibid., 7–8). Moss’s Reagan Democrat and Jacksonian image creates an interrogation of the contradictory sources of support behind the modern neoconservative coalition. Indeed, his discovery of the site of a botched drug deal indicates a collision between the interests of the Jacksonian and the unintended consequences of neoconservatism’s neoliberal dimension. A shot containing this allegorical meaning is displayed below (Fig. 5.1): The crime scene visible in this shot connotes the avarice and indiscriminate violence that has so far been thematically explicit. Yet beyond its indictment of an early 1980s greed, the carnage of the site functions as an overture to the dysphoria of the post-9/11 era. The internecine warfare between Sunni and Shia occurring in the mid-2000s is encapsulated in close-ups of the deceased, bloodied Mexican drug dealers that Moss

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Fig. 5.1  The botched drug deal in No Country for Old Men (IMDCB n.d.)

towers over. To Jim Welsh (2009, 77), who also visualises a War on Terror subtext in the carnage of the mise en scène, these images “fit the murderous wastelands of Iraq or Afghanistan”, and more broadly implied an “allegory concerning the murderous anxieties consequent upon terrorism and Neocon America”. Moss’s theft of abandoned drug money associates the rise of the Bush presidency’s miasma with the origins of neoliberal economic practices. It epitomises the spirit of what David Harvey (2005, 159) calls “accumulation through dispossession”, a set of actions that underline the “primitive” nature of modern capitalism. Harvey (ibid., 159) describes this as resplendent in occurrences of market liberalisation, including “the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations” seen in contemporary Mexico and China. Moss, in abandoning a dying Mexican who tells him of the money’s location, perpetuates this racially hierarchical economy. The 1980 setting further invokes Harvey’s notion of a “New Imperialism” (2003, 180) that had been incentivised by the 1970s decline of Keynesian economics as well as “an internal class structure that blocked any large-scale application of surplus capitals towards social reform and infrastructure investments at home”. A POV shot of a satchel hidden underneath a tree, taken of course from Moss’s perspective, permeates this shift with a Faustian sensibility. The Edenic quality of the sight adds a biblical nature to the unforgiving economics engulfing West Texas, but it also conveys, like Chigurh’s earlier killings, a fundamental ambiguity. Jarrett sees the hubris of Moss’s robbery as suffused by the philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr’s theory of an

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‘original sin’ incarnate from America’s post-war position as a world hegemon. He emphasises how Niebuhr (quoted in Jarrett 2009, 68) stressed the foolhardiness of those with “boundless social optimism” and who “underestimate the peril of anarchy in both the national and international community”. The error of Moss, according to Jarrett (2009, 69), is to “believe this myth of original American innocence”. Does Moss’s theft mirror the understandings of Niebuhr and Fukuyama, who both arrived at the conclusion that good intentions proved most deleterious in foreign policy? I propound that the forces of globalisation and neoliberalism, implicit in subsequent events, preclude such an interpretation. After returning to join his wife, Carla Jean, at their trailer park home, Moss descends into guilt over the dying man and heads back to the site after dark. This decision has disastrous consequences. Moss finds that the Mexican is dead and becomes spotted by two cartel members, setting off the chain of events that prompts the hiring of Chigurh to kill him. It seems, on superficial glance, that Moss’s compassion and inconsistency prove his undoing. This is the argument of Jarrett, who foregrounds the realism/idealism dichotomy as part of No Country for Old Men’s post-9/11 salience. Jarrett (ibid., 69) contends that Moss’s “naïve belief that he can take the money yet return with water to restore his innocence” means that the narrative “encapsulates the paradoxes of the foreign policy of an American empire vacillating between the paranoid self-interest of Chigurh and Bell’s democratic idealism”. Yet there are elements that tie Moss’s doom to an America disorientated by economic change. Shortly before Moss leaves for the site, Carla Jean refers to her work at Wal-Mart, thus prefacing his action with a reminder of their place in the emerging neoliberal economy. In the novel it is revealed that Moss first met Carla Jean within one of this corporation’s stores, further framing his life within a neoliberal context of late capitalist consumption (McCarthy 2005, 131–132). The drug cartel’s pursuit of Moss highlights the sacrifice of America’s blue-collar at the altar of neoliberal globalisation. In both embracing a culture of risk capitalism and attempting to rescue the benighted Mexican, Moss damns himself with an ideological inconsonance at the root of the United States’ modern dilemmas. This collision between the neoliberal economic order and the exercise of American power to forestall atrocity was integral to the interventionism portrayed in Three Kings and Behind Enemy Lines. Those films, however, allegorised a centrism unavailable to the harsh politics of Moss’s Texas.

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The fact that Moss cannot both take the money unnoticed and rescue the dying Mexican, nor escape the malaise of his Vietnam veteran status, captures the futility of neoconservatism and neoliberalism’s appeal to Jacksonian America, felt towards the end of Bush’s second term. Indeed, both Moss and Bell cannot reconcile their Southern hospitality with the drug cartel’s steadfast, unrelenting determination—the final lines of Bell’s monologue see him acknowledge: “I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. … But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand.” The redundancies of Jacksonian America and Wilsonian idealism are simultaneously evident in Bell, whose maladjustment is implied in the film and book title’s allusion to W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, a work that eulogised the unchanging moral order of the holy city.3 Saxton and Cole (2012, 101) argue that the Bell of Cormac McCarthy’s novel realises the impossibility of this moral order, shown in his relinquishing of “masculine expectations” and understanding that his longing is for a “mythical era when strong, white men, enforced a clear, unquestioned morality”. Though the Coen Brothers deprive Bell of his literary counterpart’s social conservatism and racism, the screen translation shows how his nostalgia for the idealistic rule of his patriarchal forebears does nothing to prevent neoliberalism’s dislocating effects. Unlike the technological ingenuity of Chigurh, who utilises a tracking device hidden in the stolen satchel to decipher Moss’s position in the West Texan countryside, Bell’s vision of a principled American order is outmoded against forces that transcend borders, locality and conventional understandings of morality. This sense of inertia is pithily evident when Bell searches Moss’s trailer park home following an investigation of the botched drug deal site. Bell and accompanying Deputy Wendell arrive just hours after Chigurh has already visited, only to discover a half-drunk bottle left at the trailer. In a close-up shot, Bell despondently drinks the remainder of the bottle of milk that was once Chigurh’s, an act which contrasts the two characters and their renditions of frontier conventions. Bell’s bathetic emulation anchors the powerfully hidden nature of Chigurh, who forms a kind of twisted embodiment of Adam Smith’s notion of an ‘invisible hand’ in human affairs. An instance of repetition encapsulates the preternatural ubiquity of his screen presence—Bell stares at a silhouette of himself on the TV screen, a childlike action that Chigurh performed only hours earlier. He is doomed to be Chigurh’s mere shadow,

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never to understand the new transnational capitalism gripping the West Texan landscape. If the opening of the picture deconstructed the idealism of neoconservatism, then this frustration of Bell undercuts its realist championing of national security. Arne De Boever’s 2009 article, “The Politics of Retirement: Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men after September 11” articulates this idea. To De Boever (2009), a “politics of retirement” thematically grounded the central characters and suggested the failures resultant from the Bush administration’s interventions. This theme is of course explicit in Bell but is also located in Moss, “a retired welder”, and his wife, Carla Jean, who is “declared retired by her husband after he finds a satchel full of money” (ibid.). Chigurh is the exception, but even he dallies with this subtext, due to his prime activity consisting in “retiring or killing other living beings” (ibid.). In constructing this argument, De Bouveur borrows from Judith Butler’s refutation of a concept called ‘final control’. This concept revolves around a state of cognitive dissonance, namely the hope that the United States could defend itself in the wake of 9/11 whilst retaining its capitalistic hegemony. To Butler (2004, xiii), the 9/11 attacks proved that “radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty, are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part. … No final control can be secured, and that final control is not, and cannot be, an ultimate value.” De Boever echoes Butler’s fatalism by citing the centrality of “the act of retirement” in the Coen Brothers’ picture, an act “especially necessary when faced with the inhuman terror embodied by Chigurh that escapes the limits of law and order’s humanist presuppositions” (ibid., 2009). By transferring Butler’s theory to the foreign policy allegory of No Country for Old Men, De Boever signals an America resigned towards a position of endless war. It is arguable that Chigurh’s market amorality engenders this condition, providing a lineage between America’s paeans to global free markets and the spectre of anti-American violence. This view is shared by Stephen Tatum, who detects political meaning in Bell’s fearful relationship with the trans-border drug trade, suggesting a friction created by neoconservatism’s co-option of neoliberal economics and Jacksonian nationalism. Tatum (2011, 87) reflects on an incoherent policy that “seeks to eliminate borders and barriers so as to accelerate the flows of peoples, drugs, capital, and commodities”, and simultaneously establishes “a barricaded border or militarized regulatory framework” needed “to discipline this space”.

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Bell and Chigurh’s differences highlight this contradiction of neoconservative ideology. Whereas Bell presents a rooted America based on communal ties, the law and national security, Chigurh personifies a globalised capitalism indifferent to the lives of the ordinary Texans he meets and frequently murders. Almost in the fashion of a cosmopolitan expatriate, he rarely speaks to other Americans and remains perennially emotionally detached from the Texan soil—if not for his haircut and incongruous dress sense, he would convey a businesslike aloofness. Judged in this light, “the act of retirement”, incarnated most obviously by Bell, takes on its own protectionist implications. Chigurh’s foreignness adds to the seriousness of this subtext—like the ease with which the 9/11 hijackers entered America and Islamic movements infiltrated post-invasion Iraq, his unpunished acts of murder become reminders of American vulnerability in an era of mass globalisation. This dichotomy is most clearly established when the hitman visits a gas station store and quizzes the owner. The scene, filmed disquietingly without music, sees Chigurh bemuse the middle-aged owner by asking him questions about his personal history. It is the first time Chigurh speaks and his voice lacks emotion and intonation, especially when compared to the storeowner’s geniality. He begins by coldly mocking the storeowner’s southern folksiness but later interrogates him about his family history, asking if he has “lived here his whole life”. The storeowner can only respond with a bewilderment and repetition that compounds his helplessness. Upon learning that the storeowner inherited the business from his father-­ in-­law, and has only migrated from Temple, Texas, Chigurh derides him by claiming he “married into” his business. These insults climax in a proposed coin toss where, in Chigurh’s words, the storeowner stands to gain or lose “everything”. He postulates to the storeowner that he has been “putting it up his whole life” and thus must choose between heads and tails. Although the storeowner calls the right side, Chigurh’s interrogation shows his remorseless disregard for human life in West Texas. What is the meaning of the coin toss? Chigurh’s framing of it as an exercise in choice perhaps fetes the new culture of risk capitalism. At the same time, the game’s fatalism possesses a sinister otherness that is hostile to the man’s small-town, parochial interests. The coin toss, besides implying Chigurh’s amalgamation of capitalist individualist and merciless arbiter of human life, undercuts the storeowner’s embrace of economic and familial security over liberty, fusing the ethos of neoliberalism with the more contemporary threat of anti-American insurgency.

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This endangerment of the ‘small-c’ conservative elements of the Republican Party’s electoral base is accentuated by Chigurh’s distortion of American religiosity, a facet further damaged in There Will be Blood. Chigurh’s combination of fatalism and individualism resembles the “hideous schizophrenia” warned of by neoconservative Paul Berman in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Berman (2003, 81) propounds that an American reconciliation of religion and capitalism had long galvanised the founder of Islamist extremism Sayyid Qutb and his descendants in al-Qaeda, who thought, “religion together with a capitalist economy” was “preposterous”. Berman moreover notes that America’s simultaneous championing of “religious sentiment” and “commercial materialism” had heightened this alienation, resulting in a perceived “calamity to the world” (ibid., 81–82). Chigurh’s violence mirrors the nightmarish consequences that stem from this fusion of American capitalistic mores and religious principles, haunting those who ineffectively rationalise the hideous schizophrenia. Unlike Chigurh’s obeisance to the coin’s cutthroat logic and his game’s absolutist essence, other characters cannot square the vagaries of amoral chance with their own Christian obligations. Moss cannot steal the money and perform charity for the dying Mexican; neither can the storeowner both adhere to his small-town values and repudiate Chigurh’s contempt for the fact that “he has been putting it up his whole life”. To Dierdra Reber (2016, 157), this supremacy of ideological purity made Chigurh a kind of angel of death for neoliberal ideology, “the perverse holy spirit of capitalist risk culture in which the foundational practice of risk taking is distilled to its starkest terms as a wager between life and death”. In apotheosising this capitalist risk culture whilst terrorising ordinary Americans, Chigurh establishes connection between neoliberal America’s ideological makeup and the rise of Islamic insurgency. The co-morbidity of these themes, and their dual manifestation in a War on Terror context, becomes most prominent in the scenes that follow a dramatic encounter between Chigurh and Moss. After tracking Moss to a border town hotel, Chigurh engages in a gunfight that spills on to the street, resulting in both characters suffering bullet wounds. Chigurh’s alleviation of his injury is a model of capitalistic ingenuity and terroristic violence. Trying to create a distraction in order to steal goods from inside a pharmacy, he pours oil over a piece of cloth, places it inside a car fill cap, and ignites the material with a lighter.

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Chigurh’s method recalls the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) employed against American troops in Iraq. Yet the theft it enables also connotes his aggressive self-sufficiency, a characteristic highlighted in a subsequent scene where Chigurh alleviates his wounds with items stolen from the pharmacy. The contrast with the bed-ridden Moss, who has his bullet wounds nursed in hospital, suggests the emasculation of America’s Jacksonian identity. The immobilisation of this blue-collar Vietnam veteran fits the consequences of a neoliberal, antigovernment agenda that would fuel insurgency against Jacksonian Americans in Iraq, a descent delineated by Chigurh’s primal libertarianism. The ‘sucker punches’ of No Country for Old Men’s final scenes dramatically signal this sense of overture. A sorrowful fate descends on Moss, who, to Bell’s dismay, dies at the hands of a cartel after meeting his wife and mother-in-law in Odessa. Later, there are direct implications that Carla Jean, but also far more ironically Chigurh, falls prey to breaking the ‘rules’ which govern the Texan landscape. After returning to her deceased mother’s home in Odessa, Jean encounters Chigurh waiting for her. Whereas in the novel Jean succumbs to his game of coin toss and fatally loses, she refuses it wholesale in the cinematic adaptation and instead rebels against its premise. Following this, a long shot shows Chigurh wiping his shoes on the doormat, a ritual of preservation performed in previous killings. In murdering Jean before his requisite game, Chigurh breaks his own self-made rules and moral framework. Yet the imagery that succeeds this apostasy indicates that Chigurh’s brand of neoliberalism will have dominance beyond the 1980 mise en scène presented. A dramatic accident conveys this epochal sensibility. After Chigurh leaves the vicinity of Jean’s family home, a close-up shot shows him driving through a sun-kissed suburbia, a locale that contrasts with the abrasive images of deserts and ranches of the opening images. Amplifying this disconnect is the colloquial ‘sucker punch’ thrust on Chigurh’s character. A sudden car crash punishes Chigurh for violating his rules—he omits to look at a junction and collides with an oncoming car, culminating in a physical vulnerability hitherto unseen in the character. Chigurh wanders from the crash with a compound fracture that makes his bone protrude from his arm, a state perilously close to the fate of death long personified by his executioner image. The abrupt event looks akin to a deus ex machina that has come to bring karmic repudiation on Chigurh for violating his shibboleths. Yet for all the proven instability of Chigurh’s contradictory

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philosophy, the moments that follow this accident prove his nihilism’s contagiousness. As Chigurh walks in a daze, two teenage boys run to help him, so suggesting that there are limits to his violence. Chigurh gives one of the boys money in exchange for a shirt to use as a sling and tells them “you didn’t see anything”. Chigurh’s mercy towards the teenagers has only ephemeral meaning next to the significance of the scene’s ending—as a wounded Chigurh flees into the homogeneity of the Texan suburbs, a long shot displays the boys fighting over the money, a sign that this contagious form of risk capitalism will descend on future generations. The shot’s lack of non-diegetic music (the sole noise onscreen is that of the boys yelling) renders it uneasily elliptical in tone, heightening the sense that Chigurh’s nihilism will have no logical conclusion. This immutability, viewed from the perspective of the film’s release year of 2007, resonates with the context of an amassing sub-prime mortgage crisis and the consequences of neoliberal occupation in Iraq. The image of the boys fighting over the cash, coupled with the money’s connotations of Reaganite avarice, again reinforces an analogue between the fratricidal violence occurring in the Middle East and the neoliberalism incarnated at the dawn of the Reagan era. The misanthropic image appears an overture to America’s own contemporary malaise, and in its imprimaturs of sectarianism and greed, dilemmas of domestic and foreign policy. In the end, the only major character we know survives both in Cormac McCarthy’s novel and in the Coen Brothers’s film adaptation is Bell, a man who perceives decline and accepts that his career has been a failure. The final scene sees Bell speaking to his wife about two dreams he had the previous night, quietly allegorising the futility of resisting Chigurh’s evil. In the first one, he attempted to meet his father in town, but gauchely lost money there instead, reinforcing his impotence in the face of neoliberal hegemonic dominance. The second dream shows how this force robbed Bell of his ancestors’ confident rule, encompassing further states of paternal drift. Bell recounts how he headed to retrieve firewood while his father went ahead, affirming, “I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there … and then I woke up”. A few seconds after this line, the picture fades to black. Unlike his departed father, whose disappearance subliminally inverts Bell’s failure to rescue the prodigal son Moss, the former sheriff has proved incapable of bringing harmony to his home region. Lost in a state of lethargy, he rejects the activist notions of Faludi’s terror dream by waking up

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and declaring withdrawal from the violence he sees. His hopelessness resonates with a free-market culture that sabotaged American authority in Iraq. No Country for Old Men illustrates the neoliberal origins of the Bush administration’s difficulties in the Middle East. Belying neoconservatism’s later synthesis of Jacksonian nationalism and Wilsonian idealism, the Coen Brothers portray an economic context that has dark implications for America’s prosecution of the War on Terror. This pattern continues in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood, an adaptation which deals with the strains of ideological incoherence wrought by neoliberal capitalism’s depredations.

There Will be Blood and the Schisms of Neoconservative Intervention Beginning in 1898, a time when the United States had embarked on imperial forays into Spanish-held Cuba and the Philippines, There Will be Blood presents a schizophrenic form of American imperialism taking place in the domestic context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century oil industry. This narrative, like No Country for Old Men, allegorises the failure to reconcile neoliberal economics with neoconservatism’s promises of democratic renewal. Much as the Coen Brothers conveyed this disconnect through the juxtaposition of Chigurh’s amorality with Bell’s longing for the moral authority of his father’s era, the twenty-minute opening sequence of There Will be Blood revolves around a similar dichotomy, this time between duelling notions of Social Darwinism and an expansionist idealism. The opening shot of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film foregrounds this theme of contradiction in its display of a desert suffused simultaneously by ennui and the grandiosity of Manifest Destiny. This incongruity is tangible in the melancholic violin score (performed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) that plays over a vast desert landscape, a juxtaposition that suffuses the site of American expansionism with connotations of instability. Protagonist Daniel Plainview, who first appears in the interior of a mining pit, continues this sense of duality. He pervades both the failed paternal authority seen in Bell and the machine-like capitalist solipsism personified by Chigurh. In a medium shot, grey cinematography permeates his aggressive dig for oil, an action fuelled by undertones of misanthropy. Method actor Daniel Day Lewis invests Plainview with a

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discontented disposition, a morose entrepreneur relatable to Chigurh’s joyless rendition of Reaganite individualism. What becomes most apparent from Plainview’s oil extraction is its Sisyphean nature. In subsequent shots, Anderson tracks the arduous process of Plainview attempting to use a rope and bucket to extract oil from the mining pit. The tone is one of darkly resigned fatalism, a conception of Manifest Destiny denuded of Jeffersonian utopia. The bathos that follows signifies this, as a vertiginous high-angle shot shows Plainview pulled down by the weight of the oil bucket, directly back into the tunnels of the putrid mining pit. This routine conveys a cognitively dissonant quality, illustrative of the gulf between American exceptionalist ideals and the arduous struggles which marked the United States’ rise to economic primacy. One can further elucidate this alternation between idealism and realism through examining how There Will be Blood invokes the late nineteenth-­ century crisis of American identity. This is underlined by Kris Woods (n.d.), who views There Will be Blood’s narrative as an especially potent rendition of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Woods sees the 1890s beginning as concerning “the final stage of westward expansion”, “marking the end of manifest destiny”. A palliative for this imperial dilemma is indicated by Plainview’s spirit of competition, which is emphatic of a Social Darwinist belief in the redemptive power of predatory capitalism. This animus can be perceived as figurative for the neoliberalism institutionalised by successive American administrations in the late twentieth century. Just as Social Darwinism conditioned conversation over foreign policy in the late nineteenth century, neoliberalism has dominated discussion over the direction of US statecraft since the post-1989 era. G. John Ikenberry (2014, 539) refers to the “doctrines of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism” that supplanted memories of how “notions of national security and economic security emerged together in the 1940s, reflecting New Deal and World War II thinking about how liberal democracies would be rendered safe and stable”. The end of frontier setting in There Will be Blood is evocative of a similarly changing political epoch, drawing parallels between the founding of Plainview’s oil empire and the context of an America losing its myth of isolationist innocence overseas. In further combining this compensatory expansionism with a late nineteenth-century subtext of Social Darwinism, the sequence displays elements relatable to the neoliberalism applied in post-invasion Iraq.

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As the montage proceeds to show the ascent of Plainview’s business in 1902, the growing industrialisation of Southern California appears as a crucible for modern capitalism’s birth, drawing parallels with the Edenic site of the botched drug deal in No Country for Old Men. Instead of the anti-climax that capped Plainview’s first extraction of oil, a tracking shot speeds towards an oil derrick, implying endeavours manic in ambition. This disposition becomes moreover evident when the camera arrives at the interior of the mining pit. A high-angle shot shows Plainview and a co-­ worker bathed in a pool of oil, an image that has its putridity belied by a change in Greenwood’s score—previously dysphoric in the 1898 segment, the soundtrack consists of higher notes and imparts a mystical aura, sanctifying the otherwise faecal appearance of Plainview’s activity. Ethereal overtones are present in a medium shot of a hyperventilating Plainview gently supported by a co-worker, an image that portrays the men’s economic prowess as a state of collective rapture. The volatile aspects of these images show, like Moss’s theft, the struggle to synthesise the ruthlessness of modern capitalism with the idealised frontier of the American West. A medium shot of an oil worker cradling his baby son above the pit indicates this undercurrent of profanation, supplanting the father’s paternal benevolence for the hegemony of dark, capitalistic greed. Like the trans-border capitalism beginning in Cormac McCarthy’s West Texas, Plainview’s business conveys how the worship of unrestrained capitalism deprived America of much of its moral authority. The sequence concludes with the accidental death of the father and Plainview’s adoption of his baby son, reinforcing the theme of an idealised West sabotaged and perverted by Hamiltonian mores. In order to understand the political meaning of this cycle of paternal failure and Social Darwinist philosophy, which offers a more complete allegory for neoconservative contradiction than the analogous tropes provided in No Country for Old Men, it is worth examining There Will be Blood’s production context. After re-reading The Jungle (1906), Upton Sinclair’s novel on the early twentieth-century meatpacking industry, Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness author Eric Schlosser obtained the rights to Oil! and became interested in this later Sinclair novel’s distillation of American power. In a February 2008 interview with The New York Times, he argued that the novel offered a perceptive take on US geopolitics, expressing, “Southern California was the Kuwait of the Jazz Age”, and embracing Oil!’s “major themes”, including the “corrupting power of oil money” (quoted in The New York Times 2008).

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The language here, particularly the reference to Kuwait, seems redolent of the anarchic tone that underlined both the screen content and production context of Three Kings. Indeed, Kuwait was of course memorably mentioned as “the Arab Beverly Hills” by Elgin. Yet unlike Three Kings’s satirical presentation of American neocolonialism as a glamourised Clintonian third way, translating Oil’s politics for 2007 would make There Will be Blood closer in substance to the less centrist context of the neoconservative Bush years. The adaptation process highlighted this updating. The majority of Sinclair’s novel focuses on Bunny, son of oil magnate James Arnold Ross (altered to the character of Plainview in Anderson’s film), and his relationship with Paul Watkins, a radical socialist who wishes to overthrow the forces of capitalism taking over southern California. Yet when Anderson took over the project from Schlosser and began writing the screenplay, he supplanted this strain of labour activism in favour of another dimension in Sinclair’s novel. The reciprocal relationship between religion and capitalism embodied in the partnership between Ross and Paul’s preacher brother Eli would instead take centre stage. In a January 2008 interview with media website AVFilm, Anderson casually admitted the blatant parallels of this juxtaposition and its obvious thematic affinity with American neo-imperialism and the religious right. He commented, “That you know you’re walking into a film about an independent oilman and a guy that runs a church”, but acknowledged that this allegorical quality could manifest subtly, through avoiding “big, long speeches that would help in paralleling or allegoricalizing, if that’s a word” (quoted in Modell 2008). Much as David O. Russell’s promotion of Three Kings foregrounded its eclecticism over commentary on 1990s foreign policy, Anderson and Schlosser marginalise There Will be Blood’s political subtext. Yet despite this, the narrative decisions, mise en scène and cinematic homages of Anderson’s film make its allegory explicit. This becomes evident when Anderson revisits Plainview’s empire in 1911, nine years after the ending of the opening sequence. The first scene in this year begins with an address by Plainview that reconciles frontier ideals with ambitions of industrialisation. As the image of father and son slowly fades into a close-up shot of Plainview in 1911, the voice of the entrepreneur becomes audible for the first time. He claims he has “travelled over half our state to be here tonight” before listing the projects organised by his business. After the camera eventually moves from Plainview, his talk becomes more like a political rally than a promotion of

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his business. Revealed to his left is his adopted son, now aged nine years old and given the initialled name of H.W. H.W.’s presence enables his surrogate father to cast himself as a “family man” and adds respectability to his intimidating appearance. This morality comes juxtaposed with entrepreneurialism—Plainview presents himself as an individualist, capable of “my own drilling”, who can offer a “brand of family very few oilmen can understand”. As it becomes clear that the town hall Plainview is addressing is full of socially conservative rural Californians, his language increasingly seems an attempt to pass an ideological litmus test, as well as a vainglorious effort at self-promotion. These affectations, so palpably associated with the moralism of the Republican right, are made uneasy by the sheer unpleasantness of Plainview’s manner and character. His domineering appearance, and reliance on his son as a moral prop, gives a demagogic impression, which is supplemented with imperious rhetoric. Plainview boasts that his competitors “won’t be there when it comes to the showdown”, militarising the petty quarrels of the oil business to impress the townspeople. David Denby discerns a discrepancy between Plainview’s small-town audience and the impersonal nature of his empire. In this analysis, “the thrown-­ together buildings look scraggly and unkempt, the homesteaders are modest, stubborn, and reticent, but, in their undreamed of future, Wal-­ Mart is on the way” (Denby 2012, 90). This corporate authoritarianism and clash of the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian is implicit in moments that convey Plainview’s rapacity; his flanking by business advisor Fletcher, who stands protectively in various medium shots, lends his speech an authoritarianism that blends uneasily with its flirtations with the populism of religion and family. The scene culminates in anarchy as the townspeople aggressively question the veracity of Plainview’s promises whilst the oil baron leaves haughtily, declining to drill the town on grounds of “too much confusion”. Although the majority of There Will be Blood takes place some seventy years before the annus mirabilis of Reaganism in No Country for Old Men, the nexus of ideas presented in this scene ironically offers a more modern allegory for the effects of neoconservative ideology and its different constituencies of support. This is resplendent in motifs that create parallels between Plainview’s artificial family dynasty and the ideological direction of the George W. Bush administration. The name of Plainview’s adopted son is H.W., a coded reference to George H.W. Bush that inverts the order of the Bush family tree. Kellner (2010, 15) treats this inversion

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polemically, citing its inclusion as part of “an allegory about the Bush family and its vicious quest for money and power, culminating in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s invasion of Iraq—in part for oil—and resulting in blood”. Yet it is arguable that this reference is as deconstructive as it is polemical, evoking meaning from the contradictions within Plainview’s ideological branding. Plainview’s difficulty in reconciling his oil empire with the religiosity of the townspeople encapsulates the journey of a Republican party seeking closer alliance between neoliberal economic doctrine and conservative religion. If the early scenes of No Country for Old Men included incidents that symbolised the problematic relationship between Jacksonian America and neoliberal economics, then the dichotomy presented in this case hinges on a similar schism within neoconservative ideology. To Woods (n.d.), Plainview’s courting of Christianity and family values resembled the pressure of groups such as “the moral majority, a movement dedicated to ensuring core Christian values were part of the New Right in the 1980s”. This offers an observation on the “fundamentalist religious groups” that “held significant sway over the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004” (ibid.). Critics frequently praised this element, with Dave Calhoun of Time Out (2008) viewing the film as reflecting “then and now, the power of the church”. Empire magazine’s Helen O’Hara (2008) notes Anderson’s focus on “the wider forces of religion and capitalism and the role they’ve played in America’s development”. At the time of There will be Blood’s release, this collaboration seemed most salient in foreign policy. Bacevich (2005, 146) postulates that the Bush administration’s expansionism offered a “necessary adjunct to the accomplishment of Christ’s saving mission” and cemented the coalition for the “new American militarism”. Yet there was also discord within this coalition. The ambitious post-9/11 goals of transforming Islamic societies and pariah states often repelled prominent evangelicals who deemed Islam and democracy incompatible, a tension evident as early as Bush’s first term. Martin Durham (2006, 208) comments on how the  leading religious figure Franklin Graham was criticised by the Bush administration for denouncing “Islam as an evil religion”, an attitude that vitiated the aims of political and economic change in the Middle East. In 2003, Ralph Reed and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell wrote a letter expressing concern over support for negotiations between Israel and Palestine, a cause that would, in Pat Robertson’s words, expose the administration “to the wrath of the lord” (quoted in Durham 2006, 208).

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There Will be Blood, however, is less focused on the friction stemming from neoconservatism’s Wilsonian idealism than the ideology’s dangerous export of market economics. Marc Mulholland (2012, 289) remarks on the primacy of this ideological tenet in the Iraq invasion, specifying the “export of bourgeois revolution on the point of US and allied bayonets”, and the tumult of an occupation that combined “American business led avarice and neo-conservative fervour”. Critics implied the relationship between business and religion in There Will be Blood to be symbolic for the Bush administration’s domestic electoral coalition but did not detect a comparable foreign policy allegory. The sole exceptions were articles in Vanity Fair and The Economist, yet these pieces concentrated more on topicality than content. The former acknowledged, “With its price tickling $100 a barrel at press time, and the U.S. allegedly not waging war for it all over the Middle East, there couldn’t be a better time to make a movie out of Oil!” (quoted in Sperb 2012, 211). The latter saw “the Bush dynasty as the perfect foil” for Anderson’s drama, and wryly commented that the “lust for oil is something far more dangerous than creating the makeshift towns of Plainview’s day” (The Economist editorial 2008). A duality of allegory applied to No Country for Old Men’s ‘getaway’ narrative, a storyline overladen with both the domestic and international implications of the neoliberalism instituted in the early 1980s. A similarly multifaceted meaning emerges from Plainview’s partnership with town preacher Eli Sunday, Anderson’s version of the Eli Watkins character in Sinclair’s novel. The fact that Eli’s socialist brother Paul only has a cameo in Anderson’s film updates Sinclair’s polemic for a post-1989 context of neoliberal hegemony. It also makes Plainview and Eli’s relationship, and thus the relationship between American capitalism and religion, the centre of ideological conflict. The first meeting between Plainview and the Sunday family takes place in a landscape not wholly unlike the “wastelands of Iraq and Afghanistan” described in Jim Welsh’s (2009, 77) analysis of No Country for Old Men. The location is forbidding, as conveyed by a wide-angle shot that shows Plainview and H.W. marching towards the primitive, dilapidated site that is the Sunday ranch. A return of the ennui-ridden violin score that opened the picture adds to the austerity of this Western environment, markedly contrasting the whimsy that suffused the Sunday ranch in Sinclair’s novel. Whereas in that text, son Bunny exudes excitement over his first sight of the ranch and Sunday family, enthusing as if “he were approaching the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln” (Sinclair 1927, 87), the

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tone of Anderson’s film is deeply uneasy, a quality signified by a subsequent dinnertime meeting. The penurious setting of the meeting, a cramped kitchen no bigger than a log cabin, is rendered more ascetic by the introduction of Eli Sunday. Sunday, who dominates Little Boston’s civic life, is a character shrill in tone—played with a boyish entitlement by actor Paul Dano, the preacher watches Plainview with uncomfortable disdain. His quizzing of Plainview’s reasons for being in Little Boston, along with his demands of $10,000 for his ominously titled “Church of the Third Revelation” in exchange for oil rights, gives him an irascibility that is darker than the decadence of his incarnation in Oil! Whereas in Oil!, Plainview’s first meeting with the Sundays sees the family descend into a religious frenzy in response to an earthquake (ibid., 92–95), the depiction here is less absurd and more saturnine, connoting ideological friction. The caprice conjured by Eli Sunday has resonance when applied to the Bush administration’s own contradictory foreign policy. Besides appeasing their domestic evangelical constituencies, various neoconservatives in the Bush administration had appealed to various elements of Iraq’s religious population long before March 2003. David Wurmser, who served as a Middle East advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, urged a rapprochement with Iraq’s Shia in his 1999 work Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein. Attacking the realist use of “Iraq” as a “bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism”, Wurmser (1999, 70) argued that the path to stability in the Middle East lay with the oppressed Shia majority who had no freedom under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government. He voiced the possibility of Shi’ism’s “Western affinity”, a quality embodied in “shrine cities” and “Shi’ite institutions” that “were powerful bases for civil society” and for a “tradition of political decentralization in Iraq” (ibid., 76–78). Four years later, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority failed to achieve this quixotic model of democracy. The CPA alienated the Sunni Iraqi populace by embarking on an indiscriminate policy of “de-­ Baathification”, which removed all civil servants, government workers and soldiers who had worked for the previous regime (Dobbins et al. 2009, 4). Khalid Mustafa Medani (2004) cites this policy as a form of “state building in reverse”, leading to “rampant unemployment, lengthy gas lines, sporadic violence and an uncertain political future”. The neoliberal belief that free markets “contain the key to human wellbeing” would be as central to the neoconservative planned occupation  as democratisation, an

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essential and concomitant part of a policy that would purportedly ensure “a liberal democratic beacon to steer the Arab world away from Islamic fundamentalism” (ibid.). In No Country for Old Men, the impossibility of fusing neoliberal economics with civil society and Christian morality suffused the early Reagan era in contradiction. The allegory in There Will be Blood, despite its period setting, has more contemporary resonance. The business relationship between Sunday and Plainview places Berman’s notion of a ‘hideous schizophrenia’ in a neocolonial context, resonating with the contest between neoconservatism’s Wilsonian aspirations and the CPA’s economic predilections. A later opening of an oil derrick might be seen to draw on the former facet of the Iraq occupation, portraying an imperialism associated with the human rights-orientated rationale castigated by Fukuyama. After being informed by H.W. that Abel Sunday’s young daughter Mary is routinely beaten, Plainview uses this as an opportunity to publicly embarrass the patriarch. This humiliation begins with a medium shot showing Plainview standing with Mary and H.W. before a crowd of Little Boston’s congregation. He refers to Mary as a “proud daughter of these hills” and even delivers paeans that are socialist in tone, proposing to Little Boston “we pray together, we work together, and if the Good Lord smiles kindly on our endeavor, we share the wealth together”. This reformist impulse recurs in the celebratory dinner that follows. Whilst having dinner with Abel Sunday near the oil derrick, a chance meeting with Mary gives Plainview the chance to advocate his creation of social change. He talks to Mary about her new dress, a gift from him to celebrate the oil derrick’s opening and Little Boston’s escape from penury. Projecting his power over the town’s religious codes and advertising Little Boston’s cultural modernisation, Plainview asks Mary rhetorically, “Your daddy doesn’t hit you anymore, right?” He repetitively boasts of “no more hitting” directly in front of Abel, who watches ashamedly. Plainview’s repudiation of Little Boston’s social conservatism becomes explicit in the scene’s final moments, where he taunts Abel’s piety by continually swigging from his own whiskey flask. Plainview’s aggressive reformism recalls the aims of liberals who sought a programme of progressive nation-building. To Michael Ignatieff, it was “liberal imperialism” that should have driven the Bush administration’s War on Terror. This was the ideal that a post-9/11 American empire could become “the last hope for democracy and stability alike”, a quality accentuated by America’s role as “empire lite”, “a global hegemony whose

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grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known” (Ignatieff 2003). The pro-War on Terror journalist Christopher Hitchens (2005) amplified this pugnacious perspective, praising a “battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism”, that would enhance the “secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society”. The foreign policy analyst Anne-­ Marie Slaughter, who opposed the Iraq War for its unilateralism but supported the Afghanistan intervention, provided similar, though more tempered, rationalisations. Slaughter (2009, 105) argued that it was “permissible to free a society from the iron grip of a government bent on the destruction or virtual suffocation of a significant portion of its own population—whether an ethnic group, as in Rwanda, or all women, as with the Taliban in Afghanistan”. If Plainview’s reforms are read as coded references to the Bush administration’s interventions, they not only fit the welfarist imperialism derided by Fukuyama. Indeed, they also undermine what Walter Mead (2004, 90–91) cites as the Bush administration’s “revival Wilsonianism”, an outlook driven by a foreign policy “more specifically Christian” that jettisoned “liberal secular humanist values in foreign policy”. Plainview’s undercutting of the Church of the Third Revelation’s social conservatism potentially mirrors Fukuyama’s belief that neoconservatism had descended into an out of touch secular liberalism. Yet it is more arguable that Plainview’s reformist agenda is a mere fig leaf for the Social Darwinism of his business empire, a method of subterfuge that suspiciously resembles the paeans to democratisation that disguised the pursuit of neoliberal economics in Iraq. This deceit is evident in another speech Plainview delivers to Little Boston. Before the address even begins, Anderson illustrates an authoritarianism that prompts comparison with the heavy-handedness of the CPA. Meeting in a private office with business advisor Fletcher, Plainview is informed that “one holdout” has refused to turn up. In an indication of his disdain towards these instances of political difference, Plainview muses that the individual or “holdout” that refused to come, an elderly man named William Bandy, will “come round”. Fletcher and Plainview’s contempt for their opposition recalls the words of Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, who used the term “dead-enders” to mock disenfranchised former employees of Iraq’s government who had resorted to insurgency. This implied, to Anne M. Whitman (2016, 91), that “these were isolated fanatics trying to fight for a regime that had already been defeated”.

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Plainview’s opponents are subject to a similarly fatalistic attitude. This sensibility is palpable in the oil baron’s address, which takes place in a barn adjoining his office. It begins with Plainview speaking to a crowd of bemused, raggedly dressed citizens. Repeating almost verbatim the beginning of his earlier pitch, he boasts that he has travelled “halfway across the state to be here and see about this land”. Plainview’s disingenuous intent becomes clear through a series of juxtapositions. His address eventually descends into voiceover format when it plays over a tracking shot of oilmen arriving at Little Boston’s train station, creating a montage that plays against his dialogue. The effect of this juxtaposition underscores the discrepancy between the progressivism Plainview propounds and his agenda of privatisation. As Plainview tries to “dispel the extravagant rumours about what my plans are”, the oilmen walk in a cocksure fashion towards Little Boston at nightfall, an image that befits the animus of a nighttime raid. Plainview’s speech repeatedly counteracts these implications of rapacity and militarisation—he speaks of the social renewal oil can bring to Little Boston, rhapsodising about the benefits of ‘education’ and ‘wonderful schools’. Despite the benevolence of Plainview’s language, these promises again collide with the cold aggression of his empire. Wide-angle shots display Plainview’s oilmen in a field full of tents, pondering the riches of the oil derrick they see before them. The encampment of tents, and their battlefield like appearance, undermines the soft power of Plainview’s language, encoding contradiction and dissonance. The next few lines of Plainview’s address disguise his oil empire’s abrasive qualities by promoting aspects of the Global Meliorism exemplified in Chap. 3. Plainview argues that, “no child in Little Boston should look on a loaf of bread as a luxury” before a pan across the Little Boston fields. As this vista appears onscreen, he continues to muse on the possibilities of “irrigation”, “cultivation”, “roads” and the village having “more grain than they know what to do with”. These paradisiacal ambitions are scrutinised in the scene’s final moments. Eli Sunday asks off-screen “if the new road will lead to the church?”, a concern Plainview mollifies by claiming, “That will be the first place it leads”. Greenwood’s score descends into melancholy as this exchange occurs, adding a sense of dysphoria to Plainview’s influence. Because of Plainview’s welfarist designs for Little Boston, much of this scene’s content has an affinity with Kevin Phillips’s understanding of the Bush administration’s neoconservatism. Phillips (2004, 297) draws

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parallels between the neoconservative zeal towards Iraq and President Lyndon Johnson’s Global Meliorist synthesising of a “latter-day U.S. manifest destiny and a personal compulsion to match Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the usual Texas style”. Much like Plainview’s proposals of civilisation, irrigation and cultivation, Johnson promoted “democracy in Saigon” and “a $1 billion program for electrification in Indochina’s Mekong delta valley” (ibid., 297). This constituted “an adventure in nation building”, and a liberal idealism that offered a “naïve preview of what his neoconservative heirs would promise the Tigris-Euphrates Valley nearly four decades later” (ibid., 297). Yet There Will be Blood conveys how this idealism was obviated by the American occupation. Much as the Vietnam War betrayed a dissonance between the Great Society rhetoric that underpinned the US presence and the illiberal realities of the South Vietnamese junta, Paul Berman’s Utopian ideal of a “beachhead of Arab democracy in the Middle East” (Packer 2005, 58) became incongruous next to the economic shock therapy of Paul Bremer’s CPA. An analogous incongruity applies to the juxtaposition of Plainview’s Wilsonian rhetoric with the arrival of his imperial foot soldiers. The surreptitiousness of their entrance recalls the words of Walter LaFeber (2006), who cynically called the Bush administration’s Iraq intervention “a way to disguise regime change with the rhetoric of Wilsonian democracy”. Plainview’s rule, like the CPA, concerns democratic reform only if it comports with notions of economic hegemony. This outlook becomes clear in a dramatic oil strike set piece, highlighting how an avaricious culture deprived the United States of its benevolent paternalist promises to the Middle East. What literalises this meaning is the accident’s first victim in Plainview’s adopted son H.W., who is on Little Boston’s signature oil derrick at the same time as a gas explosion. A tracking shot shows Plainview racing to the site frenetically, as the fraught tone, staccato rhythm and loud volume of Greenwood’s score intensify the trauma of the accident. A warlike atmosphere emerges when an oil-drenched Plainview finally finds H.W., who has become deaf from the explosion. In a medium shot of Plainview yelling at the traumatised H.W., the sound is muted with the dramatic exception of Greenwood’s score. Plainview’s solipsism and the sound, however, soon return to dominate the scene. After placing H.W. in his office, Plainview watches the fiery derrick admiringly. A series of wide-­ angle shots portray him standing in awe next to his bewildered business advisor, Fletcher, who he disparages for undue moroseness. Plainview asks

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him what he is “so miserable about”, when “there’s a whole ocean of oil underneath our feet and no one can get at it except for me!” Implications of Plainview’s maniacal greed and the allegorical potency of the oil derrick are detectable in the image below, which was used as part of There Will be Blood’s poster campaign (Fig. 5.2). Plainview’s selfishness is inextricably associated with his worship of the oil derrick which has disintegrated in the above image, a sight redolent of the Twin Towers’ collapse. The derrick’s conflagration therefore has the appearance of a perversely dualistic cassus belli, one that juxtaposes the oil-­ motivated subtext of the United States’ Iraq occupation with 9/11 style imagery that connotes the United States’ own domestic trauma. To Guy Westwell (2014, 100–104), who sees the simultaneous use of post-9/11 and Iraq War motifs in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) as producing a sense of “victimisation”, such juxtapositions in Hollywood cinema merely promote reconciliation, aligning them with “conservative discourse”. Yet the result in There Will be Blood is polemical. In associating the Twin Towers style destruction of the collapsed derrick with Plainview’s neocolonialism, Anderson denotes an American hegemony based on a primal, nihilistic exhilaration. The destroyed site recalls the language of Lloyd

Fig. 5.2  Plainview’s collapsing oil derrick in There Will be Blood (Dix 2016)

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C. Gardner (2005, 27), who comments on how the codenamed “shock and awe” culture of the Iraq invasion displayed a “theological tone not confined to the Christian Right”. Plainview’s rapture at the immolated derrick, coming so soon after his progressive promises to Little Boston, further reminds of the Wilsonian “smokescreen” Bacevich (2005, 201) describes as part of neoconservative ideology, a mask for “armed might to secure American pre-eminence across the region, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf”. The conclusion of Anderson’s film, like No Country for Old Men, is resigned to this nihilism. Yet whereas the bathos of the Coen Brothers’ picture lay in the quietude of Bell’s monologue, Anderson ends with a tone of sound and fury, one that allegorises the destruction wrought by modern capitalism on Bush’s electoral coalition and the identity of post-­ invasion Iraq. The final scenes of There will be Blood flash forward to 1927 and are set in a mansion owned by a retired Plainview. Though this is the closest Anderson’s film comes to overlapping with Oil!’s time period, as Sinclair’s novel ends in 1924, the content of this epilogue again differs markedly from its original source material. It is worth specifying these differences. Oil!’s ending revolves around the funeral for the socialist Paul Watkins, who has been killed by a hypodermic needle after being beaten to near death by an anti-communist mob. Though Bunny desires a “Red funeral” for his friend, he must endure Eli imposing his “majestic authority” in a Church of the Third Revelation ceremony, a macabre occasion that occurs concurrently with conservative Republican president Calvin Coolidge’s electoral landslide (Sinclair 1927, 547). The ending inextricably connects Eli with the malevolent forces of American capitalism, as he and Bunny’s father Ross treasure the “opportunity to enslave and exploit labour” (ibid., 548). However, as S.  Brent Rodriguez-Plate (2012, 55) illustrates, Anderson inverts this alliance, ending with “a shocking, violent assertion of capitalist dominance over religion”, one that departs from Sinclair’s understanding of the two “in close allegiance”. Plainview and Eli Sunday’s last meeting takes place in an ostentatious bowling room within Plainview’s mansion. Sunday, who finds a drunken Plainview on the floor, wakes him with inspiring anecdotes about Little Boston. The town has come to embrace the modernity brought by Plainview’s industry—Sunday is a radio evangelist, who broadcasts nationally for religious American audiences; William Bandy’s grandson is

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embarking on a career in Hollywood and thus has different values to the parochialism Plainview first encountered from his family. Although Bandy and Sunday’s elevation to capitalistic modernity seems to make Little Boston emblematic of the neoconservative dream, desperation underwrites Sunday’s visit. Urgently needing money and seeking to rekindle his partnership with Plainview, he mentions his discovery of oil beneath the abandoned Bandy homestead. In order to finalise an agreement to drill the area, Plainview stipulates that Sunday must recant his belief in the lord, and repeatedly proclaim, “I am a false prophet and God is a superstition!” After Sunday performs this utterance several times, Plainview admits “those areas have already been drilled”. He proceeds to lambast Sunday with histrionics, comparing the Bandy tract to the “blood of the lamb” that “he drinks up”. Like the image of the fighting boys towards the end of No Country for Old Men, the misanthropic greed that underpins this scene resonates with the destructive trajectory of American neoliberalism in the late 2000s—Sunday descends into tears over Plainview’s deceit and bemoans “the recent panic in our economy”. Anderson’s film finishes with a cathartic divorce between religious conservatism and untrammelled capitalism. In a series of long-angle shots, Plainview chases and throws bowling balls at the preacher. Plainview proclaims “I am the third revelation” before culminating his assault with a brutal murder, achieved through repeatedly smashing Sunday’s head with a skittle. Afterwards, Plainview sits while his butler enters the room to investigate the commotion. The final image of There Will be Blood is a long shot of Plainview next to Eli’s dead body—the oil baron states “I’m finished” before Greenwood’s score concludes on a jaunty riff, a tone oppositional to the melancholia that opened the picture. Read as an allegory for the Bush administration’s fracturing electoral coalition, Plainview’s jettisoning of Sunday from his empire is bizarrely insouciant in tone. Yet it suggests a schism that mirrors the disarray confronting the neoconservative movement and the Republican right in the mid-2000s. Plainview’s vision is so totalising that constituents like Sunday become irrelevant to his empire, a subtext of imperial overstretch that befits the film’s release towards the end of the Bush years. If interpreted as allegoric for the United States’ neocolonial role in Iraq, the scene proves the unsuitability of implanting Western capitalistic mores on socially conservative populations. Sunday, who naively bought into Plainview’s individualism by becoming a radio evangelist, is penurious before his

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untimely demise. He provides a direct inversion of the happy coalition evinced in Sinclair’s novel and serves to belie the neoconservative myth that socially conservative populations would adapt easily to the forces of American privatisation. Why did No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood achieve more success with critics than Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah, two 2007 films which offered comparatively staid, sober-minded and direct engagements with the machinations of the War on Terror? One answer would be the fulcrum of allegory in coming to terms with events and epochs through an indirect viewing experience absent of didacticism and partisanship. Lions for Lambs, which hinges on a nexus of different characters involved in the War on Terror, from enlisting College dropouts to a hawkish senator, was lampooned by the left leaning The New York Times for being “more soporific than Socratic, and brimming with parental chiding, generational conflict and invocations of Vietnam” (Dargis 2007). In the Valley of Elah, which depicts a veteran’s quest to find the truth behind his son’s death in Iraq, received far better reviews. Nevertheless, its overt political agenda was commonly cited in criticism. Journalists such as Christopher Orr of The Atlantic (2007) labelled the film a “mournful dirge” and “a thuddingly one-note tone poem about how the Iraq War inevitably turns innocent boys into soulless monsters”. This stance was additionally typified by Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times (2007), who remarked, “The characters in this somber film have the glum look for individuals delivering a Very Important Message to the world”. These opinions, written by left leaning film critics, purvey the counterproductive and at worst insulting results of “on the nose” messaging in mainstream films. But there is a greater significance to political resonance than avoidance of overt or blatant political engagement. The potential interpretations to be mined from No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, which range from the exploitation of Jacksonian America to the unsustainability of Bush’s electoral coalition, offer markedly more expansive subtexts than the intimate storylines contained in Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah. These Revisionist Westerns testified that allegory could go further in signalling a crisis besieging American diplomacy, without conceding obvious left or right political affiliations. Above all, they convey how the neoconservative agenda prioritised economic control over democratisation, contravening Fukuyama’s reading of a foreign policy undone by liberal idealism. Both pictures reflect on neoliberalism’s incompatibility with a welfarist democracy, a meaning resonant with America’s nation-building failure in Iraq. The next chapter

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examines how this unwieldiness intensified at the end of Bush’s presidency through discussing how two blockbusters heighten traits of collision in a fashion both critical of the neoconservative coalition’s contradictions and synergetic with the reformulations of the Obama years.

Notes 1. Visual details regarding Chigurh (and other characters) only occur when directly relevant to the narrative in the novel. When it is established Chigurh is in police custody, McCarthy (2005, 5) mentions his “manacled hands behind him”, but specifies no other visual characteristics. 2. In the novel, Chigurh’s experience of Vietnam is implied by the veteran and hitman Carson Wells. He relates his Vietnam experience to major character Llewellyn Moss (also a Vietnam vet) and summarises Chigurh as someone with “principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that” (McCarthy 2005, 153). Although Wells could be talking about collaborating with Chigurh in the contract killing business, the conversation is suffused with the traumatic memory of Vietnam. Chigurh’s Vietnam background is less implicit in the film, where Bardem’s performance overshadows these allusions. 3. The first line of Yeats’s poem (1928 [1996], 102) states “that is no country for old men”.

References Bacevich, Andrew. 2005. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. New York: Oxford University Press. Balz, Dan. 2007. Bush’s Ambitious Second-Term Agenda Hits Reality. In Second-­ Term Blues: How George W.  Bush Has Governed, ed. John C.  Fortier and Norman J. Ornstein, 17–38. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute Press. Berman, Paul. 2003. Terror and Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. Abingdon: Routledge. Calhoun, David. 2008. There Will Be Blood Time Out London Review. Time Out, February 4. https://www.timeout.com/london/film/there-will-be-blood. Cant, John. 2008. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. Abingdon: Routledge. Coyne, Michael. 1997. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. London and New York City: IB Tauris. Dargis, Manohla. 2007. Hearts and Minds: Senator Meets Reporter, Selling a New, Improved War. The New York Times, November 9. https://www.nytimes. com/2007/11/09/movies/09lion.html.

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De Boever, Arne. 2009. The Politics of Retirement: Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men after September 11. Image [&] Narrative X, no. 2 (June). http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/l_auteur_et_son_imaginaire/ DeBoever.htm. Denby, David. 2012. Do the Movies Have a Future? New York: Simon and Schuster. Dix, Andrew. 2016. US Election 2016: Five Films Donald Trump Should Watch. The Independent, August 7. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/us-election-2016-five-films-that-donald-trump-should-watcha7177391.html. Dobbins, James, Seth G.  Jones, Benjamin Runkle, and Siddharth Mohandes. 2009. Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Santa Monica, California: The RAND Corporation. Dodge, Toby. 2010. The ideological roots of failure: the application of kinetic neo-liberalism to Iraq. International Affairs 86 (6):1269–1286. Durham, Martin. 2006. Evangelicals and the Politics of Red America. In Right On?: Political Change and Continuity in George W. Bush’s America, ed. Iwan W.  Morgan and Philip Davies, 204–218. London: Institute for the study of the Americas. Elmore, Jonathan, and Rick Elmore. 2016. Human Become Coin: Neoliberalism, Anthropology, and Human Possibilities in No Country for Old Men. Cormac McCarthy Journal 14 (2): 168–185. Faludi, Susan. 2007. The Terror Dream. New York: Metropolitan Books. French, Laurence, and Magdaleno Manzanarez. 2004. NAFTA & Neocolonialism: Comparative Criminal, Human & Social Justice. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006a. After Neoconservatism. The New York Times, February 19. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/after-neoconservatism.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=A585BE261CB1DD51AEE8B 2D9660489E7&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL. ———. 2006b. After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads. London: Profile Books. Gardner, Lloyd C. 2005. Present at the Culmination: An Empire of Righteousness? In The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach in on US Foreign Policy, ed. Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn C. Young, 1–31. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hitchens, Christopher. 2005. A War to Be Proud Of. The Weekly Standard, September 5. http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-war-to-be-proud-of/ article/7193. Ignatieff, Michael. 2003. The American Empire: The Burden. The New  York Times, January 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/theamerican-empire-the-burden.html.

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Ikenberry, G. John. 2014. “The Future of the Liberal World Order.” In Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays: 7th ed, in G. John Ikenberry and Peter L. Trubowitz, 575-581. Oxford: Oxford University Press. IMDCB: Internet Movies Cars Database. n.d. 1988 Dodge Ram Forum. http:// www.imcdb.org/vehicle_155000-Dodge-Ram-1988.html. Accessed 22 Dec 2019. Jarrett, Robert. 2009. Genre, Voice, and Ethos: McCarthy’s Perverse Thriller. In From Novel to Film: No Country for Old Men, ed. Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach, and Jim Welsh, 60–72. Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2010. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-­ Cheney Era. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. LaFeber, Walter. 2006. The Flawed Rice Doctrine of Transformational Diplomacy and American Global Policy. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 4, no. 3 (March). http://apjjf.org/-Walter-LaFeber/1870/article.html. Malewitz, Raymond. 2014. The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McCarthy, Cormac. 2005. No Country for Old Men. London: Picador. Mead, Walter. 2004. Power, Terror, Peace and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk. New York: Penguin Roundhouse. ———. 2016a. The American Perspective on Global Order. In Still a Western World? Continuity and Change in Global Order, ed. Sergio Fabbrini and Raffaele Marchetti, 59–70. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2016b. Andrew Jackson, Revenant. The American Interest, January 17. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/17/andrew-jacksonrevenant/. Medani, Khalid Mustafa. 2004. State Building in Reverse: The Neoliberal ‘Reconstruction’ of Iraq. Middle East Report 232 (Fall). http://www.merip. org/mer/mer232/state-rebuilding-reverse. Modell, Josh. 2008. Interview: Paul Thomas Anderson. AV Club, January 2. https://film.avclub.com/paul-thomas-anderson-1798213013. Morreale, Joanne. 1991. A New Beginning: A Textual Frame Analysis of the Political Campaign Film. Albany, New  York: The State University of New York Press. Mulholland, Marc. 2012. Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noonan, Peggy. 2006. A Father’s Tears. The Wall Street Journal, December 9. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116560985458844878. O’Hara, Helen. 2008. There Will be Blood Empire Magazine Review. Empire Magazine, February 8. http://www.empireonline.com/movies/will-blood/ review/.

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Orr, Christopher. 2007. The Movie Review: ‘In the Valley of Elah.’ The Atlantic, September 10. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2007/ 09/the-movie-review-in-the-valley-of-elah/69251/. Packer, George. 2005. The Assassins Gate: American in Iraq. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Phillips, Kevin. 2004. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. New York: Penguin Group. Reber, Deidre. 2016. Coming to Our Senses: Affect an Order of Things for Global Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Rodriguez-Plate, S. Brent. 2012. A Nation Birthed in Blood: Violent Cosmogonies and American Film. In From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America, ed. John D.  Carlson and Jonathan H.  Ebel, 48–61. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Saxton, Benjamin, and Thomas Cole. 2012. No Country for Old Men: a search for masculinity in later life. International Journal of Aging and Later Life 7 (2): 97–116. Sinclair, Upton. 1906 [2002]. The Jungle. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics. ———. 1927 [2008]. Oil!. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2009. Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century. In The Crisis of American Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century, ed. G. John Ikenberry, Thomas Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tony Smith, 89–117. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Dina. 2012. 2007: Movies and the Art of Living Dangerously. In American Cinema of the 2000s: Themes and Variations, ed. Timothy Corrigan, 172–193. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Sperb, Jason. 2012. Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Takacs, Stacey. 2010. The Contemporary Politics of the Western Form: Bush, Saving Jessica Lynch, and Deadwood. In Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror”, ed. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, 153–166. New York: Continuum Publishing International Group. Tatum, Stephen. 2011. Mercantile Ethics: No Country for Old Men and the Narcocorrido. In Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road, ed. Sara L.  Spurgeon, 77–93. New  York: Continuum International Publishing Group. The Economist Editorial. 2008. Lexington: Blood and Oil. January 17. http:// www.economist.com/node/10533992. The New York Times. 2008. Oil! and the History of Southern California. February 20. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/timestopics/topics_uptonsinclair_oil.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&.

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Turan, Kenneth. 2007. Somber Look at the Effects of War on Family. Los Angeles Times, September 14. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/14/entertainment/et-elah14. Welsh, Jim. 2009. Borderline Evil: The Dark Side of Byzantium in No Country for Old Men, Novel and Film. In From Novel to Film: No Country for Old Men, ed. Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach, and Jim Welsh, 73–85. Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Westwell, Guy. 2014. Parallel Lines: Post 9/11 American Cinema. New  York: Columbia University Press. Whitman, Anne M. 2016. Talking Conflict: The Loaded Language of Genocide, Political Violence, Terrorism, and Warfare. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. Woods, Kris. n.d. Mapping Contemporary Cinema: There Will be Blood, 2007. Mapping Contemporary Cinema. http://www.mcc.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/?p=1. Accessed 30 Aug 2018. Wurmser, David. 1999. Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein. Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press. Yeats, W.B. 1928 [1996]. Sailing to Byzantium. In Selected Poems and Four Plays of William Butler Yeats, M.L. Rosenthal, 102–103. New York: Scribner.

Filmography The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. 2007. Directed by Andrew Dominik. USA: Warner Bros. Behind Enemy Lines. 2001. Directed by John Moore. USA: 20th Century Fox. Deadwood. 2004–2006. Created by David Milch. USA: HBO. In the Valley of Elah. 2007. Directed by Paul Haggis. USA: Warner Independent Pictures. Lions for Lambs. 2007. Directed by Robert Redford. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. No Country for Old Men. 2007. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. USA: Miramax. Saving Jessica Lynch. 2003. Directed by Peter Markle. USA: National Broadcasting Company. There Will be Blood. 2007. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. USA: Paramount Vantage. Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros. 72:10 to Yuma. 2007. Directed by James Mangold. USA: Lionsgate. War of the Worlds. 2005. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Paramount Pictures.

CHAPTER 6

Collision: The Dark Knight and Avatar’s Eulogies to Liberal Internationalist Failure

In his introduction to The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (2009, 2), G. John Ikenberry asks whether the Bush administration’s foreign policy during the Iraq War formed “an evolved Wilsonian worldview that is widely shared across the political spectrum”, or resulted from, “a group of ideological outliers who hid behind Wilsonian ideas but were ultimately wielding a very different vision of America and the world”. This chapter discusses how two late 2000s blockbusters affirm the attenuation of liberal internationalism involved in Ikenberry’s latter hypothesis and build on the allegorical scrutiny of No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood. America’s brand of liberal internationalism is widely thought to have originated in President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a democratic settlement for the war-torn Europe of 1917. Lori Damrosch (1994, 493–494) sees this formation, defined as Wilsonianism, as founded on “the advancement of democracy through US initiatives”, alongside “the development of norms and institutions to which opposition to unilateral intervention could be mobilized”. Walter Mead (2001, 151), who views the nucleus for the Wilsonian as located in a “missionary” tradition from the nineteenth century, adopts similar categorisations. He interprets Wilsonianism in its orthodox form as the belief that, “the United States has a moral obligation and an important national interest in spreading American democratic and social values throughout the world, creating a peaceful international community that accepts the rule of law” (2001, xvii). To many © The Author(s) 2020 T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_6

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liberals, this vision was undermined in the Second Gulf War’s contravention of international law, comity within International Relations and arbitration of conflict through the League of Nations and its later progeny in the UN. Wilfried Gerhard (2014, 17) sees this development as replacing Wilsonian internationalism “with imperial attitudes”, a culture where “the United States is entitled to unfettered freedom of action, specified in the concepts of unilateralism” and “pre-emptive action”. By considering The Dark Knight (2008) as allegoric of collisions between the ideal of liberty and the realist principle of security, the first half of this chapter argues that Christopher Nolan’s film mirrors the changes to Wilsonianism created by neoconservatism and depicts a purgatory of endless war. The science fiction fantasy Avatar (2009), which is the subject of the second half, adds to this profanation the ruination of Global Meliorism and paints the necessity of an alternate “leading from behind strategy” in lieu of McDougall’s welfarist ideology. Neoconservatism’s corrosion of liberal internationalism is, despite tonal and narrative differences, central to both these pictures.

The Dereliction of Wilsonianism in The Dark Knight The first scenes of the blockbuster sequel to Batman Begins present countervailing political instincts. In a set piece revolving around a bank robbery orchestrated by villain The Joker, various clowns attack Gotham City’s central bank in piques of hyper-capitalist mania comparable to the nihilistic opening moments of There Will be Blood. This tonal affinity becomes most evident in a villain who associates himself with the clashing ideologies dominant in the post-9/11 era. This antagonist, who shoots a bank manager and money launderer for the mobs of Gotham City, is unperturbed by a rant nostalgic for criminals that used to believe in ‘honour’ and ‘respect’. A close-up shot of the manager’s assailant conveys a punk rock veneer, displaying a visage made distinctive by facial scars, clown paint and grungy, unwashed hair; yet more important is his dialogue, which proclaims, “What doesn’t kill you … makes you stranger”. The combative nature of The Joker’s introduction shows an affinity with the Islamist terrorism that precluded the post-Cold War hope of the United States fulfilling the role of a pacific commercialist power. It mirrors

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what Albanese (2012, 95) contemplates as the end of “a largely pacified international political framework” and warrants an embrace of an “ideological vision put forward by neoconservatives, which provided for the return to ‘closed systems’, ideologically and territorially defined”. At the same time, the robbery serves to, as Hassler-Forest (2012, 156) notes, mirror our “ambivalence in the face of a new form of capitalism that is as monstrous, chaotic, and unpredictable as it is inescapable”. This ambivalence was emblematic to Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, a character that infused neoliberal capitalism with dysphoric violence. The scenes beyond this opening sequence continue evoking the disjunctions of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy through the differences between billionaire superhero Bruce Wayne and District Attorney Harvey Dent. Wayne first appears in an underground base filled with military equipment and surveillance footage of Gotham City, directly associating the protagonist’s superhero identity with the circumscriptions of civil liberties inherent in legislation such as the Patriot Act. His weary state is connotative of an administration resigned to war—whilst Wayne sews a wound received in battle, butler Alfred warns him to “know your limits”, a line that seems suffused with implications of imperial overstretch. The figure of Dent, who surfaces on security footage with Wayne’s ex-­ girlfriend Rachel Dawes, contrasts this sobering mood. A close-up shot of the footage shows Dent’s square-jawed, chiselled appearance, a disposition reminiscent of the tough-minded, pragmatic liberalism of the Kennedy era. Actor Aaron Eckhart thought of Robert Kennedy (Keck 2008) when playing Dent and his performance recalls K.A. Cuordileone’s (2005, 297) description of the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, connoting a liberal identity “rational, flexible and instrumental, concerned with the achievement of results through experimentation and dispassionate analysis”. Much of this disposition is conveyed in a courtroom scene where Gotham City’s key mobster, Sal Maroni, awaits trial. Upon arrival, Dent pervades a ‘cool’ representation of American power. He flips a rare ‘lucky coin’ (which actually has two heads) before the trial begins, associating his arrival with the triumph of American liberty. Indeed, the Zimmer score that plays over this sequence is both brooding and quietly patriotic, making his persona seem connected with the health of Gotham’s body politic. In a medium shot of Dent aggressively quizzing a witness and member of Maroni’s syndicate, Nolan pans across the courtroom whilst the score grows increasingly serious in tone. Dent’s hawkish stance against crime is

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reminiscent of what Michael Coyne (2008, 27) refers to as a ‘Tough Liberalism’ phase of American film that was embodied in courtroom dramas such as Advice and Consent (1962) and The Best Man (1964), cinematic responses to “the glamour, liberal toughness and sex appeal” of “the Kennedy mystique”. The final moments of this sequence convey such dynamism. In an abrupt turn of events, the witness pulls a gun on Dent. The District Attorney then knocks out the gang member before grabbing his weapon and turning around to a stunned courtroom. Dent’s liberal patriotism continues in his admonishment of Maroni. He uses dialogue that celebrates the supremacy of American economic and democratic conventions, stipulating, “If you want to kill a public servant, I suggest you buy American”. For all the toughness of Dent’s liberalism, his offer of a politics distinct from the unilateralism of Bruce Wayne’s Batman recalls the objectivity Hillary M.  Larkin (2016, 548–550) sees in a Wilsonianism “humanitarian, egalitarian or pacific in emphasis” that was “entirely noble and disinterested”. A first meeting between Dent, Gordon and Batman on the rooftop of Gotham’s police headquarters nevertheless shows collusion between Dent’s idealism and Batman’s culture of unilateralism. The meeting begins with Dent and Gordon arguing over their failure to stop a criminal businessman from Hong Kong, named Lau, from leaving the country, with Dent accusing Gordon of omitting to prevent corrupt police officers leaking information. Gordon responds by accusing Dent’s law office of attracting undue attention to the investigation while Dent expresses anger about an officer he had “cold on a racketeering beat”. Batman, who watches Gordon and Dent’s dispute, offers an approach that contravenes the constitutional niceties required as upholders of the law. He asks the District Attorney if he can get Lau “to talk”, avoiding mention of a solution that will deliver on Dent’s promises to the Gotham public, but also break the rules of due process. The rooftop meeting between Batman, Dent and Gordon prompts a return to the question postulated by Ikenberry at the beginning of this chapter. Is there an inevitable co-existence between liberal internationalism and a unilateral foreign policy or is the latter the cause of the former’s destruction? To Tony Smith the liberal internationalism of the 1990s shared commonalities with the neoconservative interventions of the Bush years. Smith (2009, 67) speaks of an “emerging imperialist consensus on the part of American Wilsonians” that came out of the end of the Cold

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War, leading to a “bid for global supremacy on Washington’s part for the sake of freedom and peace and American national security”. The fact that liberal internationalists like Michael Ignatieff and Democrats in Congress “joined the war party led by George W. Bush” proved “progressive neoliberal members of the party supported the terms of the Bush doctrine as their own, modified only by their invocation of multilateralism” (ibid., 78). To Lock (2010, 47), the Wilsonian belief that “universal values such as those regarding democracy represent resources of the USA” evinced commonality with the beliefs of hawkish neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who “championed the promotion of the American principles of democracy, free markets and respect for liberty”. Smith’s idea that idealistic Wilsonianism and unilateralism are compatible is later given tangibility in a political discussion between Dent and Wayne (whose identity as Batman is unknown to Dent). This scene takes place in a high-end Gotham restaurant, where Wayne, adhering to his billionaire playboy persona, brings a Russian ballerina named Natasha to meet Dent and ex-girlfriend Rachel Dawes. The surrounding mise en scène is filled with Gotham’s wealthy elites, all drinking and socialising to the diegetic sound of genteel orchestral music. During the dinner, Dent undermines this elitism by propounding a populist defence of Batman’s vigilantism. His argument expresses Batman’s beneficial effect on the city and forms a hinge moment for The Dark Knight’s political dialectic. Dent claims that “Gotham city is proud of an ordinary citizen standing up for what is right”, a position that attracts ridicule from Wayne’s date Natasha, who feels that “Gotham needs heroes like you, elected officials, not men who are above the law”. The analogy that Dent uses as rebuttal fetes unilateralism as key to consolidating Gotham’s vulnerable democracy. Dent refers to the wartime suspension of Roman democracy under Caesar, praising the role of Batman as a protector for life and contravening his own public endorsement of relying upon the criminal justice system to fight terrorism. Although Rachel derides the parallel, the scene concludes poignantly for both Dent and Wayne. Dent admits his belief that Batman “wants someone to take up his mantle”, a gesture that in turn prompts Wayne to propose a fundraiser for Dent. The pursuit of unilateralism is renewed by both reactionary vigilante and orthodox liberal, creating a spirit of bipartisanship that has parallels with the events of George W. Bush’s first term. Dent’s uncritical praise of militarism synergises with the United States’ post-Cold War history of intervention. In the first chapter of The New

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American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, entitled ‘Wilsonians under arms’, Bacevich (2005, 14) posits that “at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power”. This “prevailing national security consensus” (ibid., 15) was encompassed in the veteran motifs of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, which guaranteed “an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves” (ibid., 23). Corroborating Bacevich’s observation is the liberal Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Harold Bloom, who, in an October 2003 article, celebrated the imperial potential of the American presidency. The argument Bloom (2003) makes below is directly comparable to Dent’s Caesar analogy, in both tone and substance: Lincoln, confronting the South’s rebellion, first established our imperial presidency. Since then we have become increasingly a plutocracy. Like such precursors as Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren Harding, the current possessor of the White House sincerely believes in making the rich richer, while expressing the hope that somehow all of his constituents must eventually benefit from this benign process. Our nation has long invested in this hope, with our territorial expansion (mostly at the expense of Mexico, and of the Native Americans) and also overseas extensions fueling the investment. At this time, we occupy all of Iraq, and rather less of Afghanistan. These irrealistic adventures, while expensive in money and in blood, are more venturesome than most of our past incursions, but otherwise not radically new. What is different are the provocations. Fundamentalist Islam conducts a world-wide terror onslaught, much of it financed by Saudi Arabia. Israel and the Arabs continue to fight a Hundred Years War, going back to the earliest Zionist emigrants, and we are now well along in the first decade of a religious war that could endure for another century. All this is piously denied by nearly everyone, yet all the deniers know better. The American Empire, like the Roman before it, seeks to impose a Roman peace upon the world … we have no option except imposing a Roman peace. The question I bring forward is: what is the proper training for our imperial presidents?

Bloom goes on to champion former NATO commander Wesley Clark for president in the 2004 election, a man whose authoritative role in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars would make him “an authentic unifier, wise and compassionate” (ibid.). The liberal fetishisation of American military power played a crucial role in the narratives of Team America: World Police and Three Kings. A progressive celebration of militarism is tangible in Dent’s speech to such

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an extent that the perspective of Bloom feels eerily invoked. Are Dent and Bloom’s arguments betrayals of natural Wilsonianism? To the proponents of neoconservatism, the Wilsonian ideals of interdependency and democratic proliferation could only be achieved through the preponderance of American military force and the predilections of imperial power. As mentioned in Chap. 5, neoconservatism shared an ideological affinity with the neoliberal backlash against the Keynesian consensus that had orientated United States and British domestic policy since 1945. Its early realist formation under Jeanne Kirkpatrick (1979) endorsed “moderate autocrats friendly to American interests” and distinguished between “traditional and revolutionary autocracies”. The end of the Cold War largely nullified this dichotomy and replaced it with a post-1989 idealism, described by Stephen McGlinchey (2009) as one that “presupposes that liberal democracy will spread globally in the wake of the West emerging triumphant in the Cold War, rendering all opposing political orientations obsolete”. Yet despite this metamorphosis, adherents to neoconservatism before and after the Cold War could be said to champion an authoritarianism that traduced Wilsonianism’s original democratic and multilateral vision. The philosopher Leo Strauss (quoted in Fussi 2016, 59), whose writings influenced the Bush era disciples of neoconservatism, spoke of the necessity of the ‘noble lie’ in Plato’s Republic. He argued that society was not possible “without a fundamental untruth” and defended the “replacement of the earth as the common mother of all men, and therewith of the fraternity of all men, by a part of the earth, the land, the fatherland, the territory, and the fraternity of only the fellow citizens” (ibid., 59). In his 1953 book Natural Right and History, Strauss (quoted in Smith 2006, 198) produced a treatise that was similarly Jacksonian: In extreme situations there may be conflicts between what the self-preservation of society requires and the requirements of communicative or distributive justice. … There are no limits which can be defined in advance, there are no assignable limits to what might become just reprisals.

Perhaps drawing on memories of the failed liberal democracy of Weimar Germany and the Nazi regime which followed, Strauss warned that the Lockean concept of “Natural right must be mutable to be able to cope with the inventiveness of wickedness” (ibid., 199). By marrying this authoritarianism to their vaunting of regime change, the neoconservatives of the Bush administration evidenced a distinctly partisan take on

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Wilsonianism. Abram Shulsky (quoted in Packer 2005, 106), director of the Bush era Defence Department’s Office of Special Plans, viewed Strauss’s work as conveying that “deception is the norm in political life” and sought to ideologise the process of democracy promotion by using intelligence to mollify the Iraqi exiles that supported the Iraq invasion. This in turn led to the overruling of Colin Powell’s State Department and the more pragmatic vision of reconstruction outlined by the counterpart Future of Iraq Project. George Packer (2005, 108) comments on the effort to “circumvent the normal interagency process, in which the unconverted would have been among the participants and might have raised objections. … Shulsky directed the writing of Iraq, WMD, and terrorism memos according to strictly supervised talking points.” This process was subversive to Anne-Marie Slaughter, who sees the disingenuous orchestration of the Iraq War as a rejection of Wilsonianism. In her view, defenders of neoconservative foreign policy used the term as a rhetorical redoubt that “conflates the military adventurism of American conservatives with broad international efforts to build a law-based world that preserves peace, prosperity and human rights” (Slaughter 2009, 90). The scenes which close The Dark Knight’s first act draw attention to this conflation. Following through on Dent’s desire to indict Lau, Wayne heads to Hong Kong to capture the criminal businessman. Wayne uses “smugglers from Pyongyang” to help him on his journey, generating synergy with the transgressive national security policies of the Bush administration. Examples of authoritarian nations colluding with American national security agencies had been evidenced in countries such as Egypt, where terrorist suspects were interrogated by the CIA.  These practices, to Forsythe (2011, 160–161), caused “a US loss of reputation and soft power”. Fittingly, the Hong Kong set capture of Lau resembles a hyper-stylised form of extraordinary rendition. Batman uses an electromagnetic pulsing device, provided by Wayne enterprises scientist Lucius Fox, to help disorientate the launderer. The device’s disabling of the lights in Lau’s office allows the superhero to glide in, leading to a set piece where Batman engages in hand-to-hand combat with Lau’s bodyguards. Transcending the spectacle of the fighting, Batman’s breaking of international law and the scene’s moody tone seem to signify a trend of deception in American foreign policy. Batman’s use of an air recovery system/grappling hook to extract Lau, a device employed by CIA agents in the Vietnam War,

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underlines the covert nature of US power and the spirit of political transgression. If the first act of The Dark Knight encapsulates collaboration between Wilsonianism and illiberal national security strategies, the second act initiates the unravelling of this interplay. Like the narratives of No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, subtexts of insurgency and imperial overstretch emerge. These are present when the body of a ‘copycat’ vigilante, murdered by The Joker and dressed as Batman, is hung in front of the Mayor of Gotham’s office window, indicating a world plagued by anarchy. A close-up shot depicts how The Joker has mutilated the copycat’s mouth and painted his face white, a warped act of desecration which feels invocative of Meyer’s (2014) photograph of four civilian contractors who were immolated and hung by al-Qaeda during the Fallujah uprising of March 2004. These apparent parallels continue in the videotaped torture and murder of the fake vigilante by The Joker, an act similar to Chigurh’s first execution in its allegorising of an insurgency antithetical to American idealism. Screened on a TV in Wayne’s penthouse, The Joker blackmails Batman to “take off his mask and turn himself in”, a threat which recalls comparable messages by al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Musab Al Zarqawi, and his propaganda war against the presence of US troops.1 How would a Wilsonian respond to The Joker’s wave of terrorism? Revisiting the philosophy in its progressive era context, one could say that reforming Gotham city’s corrupt politics and crony capitalism might achieve results. Orthodox Wilsonians would reject using unilateralist methods (employed by Batman) to further this success. Perhaps most importantly, historically sensitive Wilsonians would avoid collectively punishing the outgoing pariah state. The signature proof of this danger was in Wilson’s original attempt to reform post-war Europe in 1918. His proposals to create a liberal international order under the League of Nations were attenuated by his collaboration with European leaders Lloyd George and Clemenceau over the Treaty of Versailles, which called for German demilitarisation and open-ended reparations.2 This ideological impurity, damaging to the goals of liberal internationalism, foreshadowed Wilsonianism’s alterations throughout the twentieth century. G. John Ikenberry (2011, 191) notes how the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were “sobered by the failure of Wilson but convinced that a new global order committed to human rights, collective security, and economic advancement was necessary to avoid the return to war”. In contrast, the Wilsonianism of Lyndon Johnson and his Secretary

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of State Dean Rusk became more militarised, championing, in Thomas W. Zeiler’s (2000, 133) words, a “neo-Wilsonian mission, a vision hinging on a refusal to retreat in the face of aggression or a losing cause”. After the failure of Vietnam, Wilsonianism was deprived of this hawkishness by the Carter administration. Mary N.  Hampton (1996, 141) describes how Carter instead focused on “the global desire for greater social justice, equity, and more opportunity for individual self-fulfilment”, along with “the purposeful downgrading of the bipolar competition” in American-­ Soviet relations. As was highlighted in Chaps. 2 and 3, Wilsonianism underwent change again in the 1990s—its tenets of international justice rationalised a series of unilateral interventions that betrayed the caution of Carter’s presidency. Moreover, Wilsonianism has not only been applied in different ways politically—the essence of the Wilsonian ideal has been subject to clashing interpretations by academics. Whereas, to McDougall (1997, 146), Wilson’s philosophy originally stood “as an ideological weapon against arbitrary power everywhere”, Frank Ninkovich’s 1999 work The Wilsonian Century interprets a worldview born out of epochal change and emergency. He outlines a crucible for a world traumatised by the experience of World War One, driven “on behalf of international organization … a response to the crisis of a civilization that, if left to the old methods of regulating foreign policy behavior, appeared destined for self-destruction” (Ninkovich 1999, 48). Ninkovich further argues against interpreting Wilson’s philosophy as belonging to a tradition of liberal idealism and cosmopolitan globalism. He instead distinguishes Wilsonianism as a “crisis internationalism” that contrasted with a “normal internationalism”, which was a “natural out-growth of the commercial and cultural internationalism of the nineteenth century” (ibid., 12). In opposition to other International Relations theorists, he sees the Wilsonianism of the 1990s as belonging to a commercially orientated internationalism. This contrasts with Ninkovich’s view of the Cold War as making his hawkish definition of Wilsonianism “become central to US foreign policy in the postwar years” (ibid., 144). Two later scenes in The Dark Knight mirror how the brand of Wilsonianism based on commercial reciprocity and international law deteriorated in the wake of 9/11. The first scene returns to Wayne’s underground base of operations and begins with a medium shot that shows Wayne and Alfred facing a multitude of widescreen TVs, all displaying various clips from The Joker laughing in his torture video. The uneasy atmosphere is compounded by an anecdote that seems analogous for the

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experience of fighting Islamist terrorism in Iraq. Alfred refers to his time as an imperial policeman in British-occupied Burma, where he tried to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. His effort was undermined by the actions of a bandit who raided the gems and disposed of them throughout the countryside, a repudiation of Western materialism that feels allegoric of the refutations of American cultural and economic imperialism by Islamist groups. The ineluctability of anarchy, and the corresponding rejection of America as a benevolent hegemon, is connoted in Alfred’s response to Wayne’s querying of why the stones were stolen in the first place. While the camera zooms in on footage of The Joker puckering his lips deliriously, Alfred observes that, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical … they can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with … some men just want to watch the world burn”. Alfred’s anecdote is associable with David Simpson’s (2006, 7) writing on the bipartisan attributions of nihilism to terrorism (also evident in Team America), which attested to the labelling of “an intransigent fundamentalism wholly foreign to our professed ethic of tolerance”. It portends a political outlook unmoored from Wilsonianism’s goals of peace and democratisation, adhering to the realism of Kagan’s (2006, 3) description of “an anarchic Hobbesian world where international rules are unreliable”. The imperial mythos of Alfred’s story moreover seems synergetic with the Vietnam War’s neocolonialism, a conflict descended from the legacy of French empire and preoccupied militarily with body counts over benevolence. Allusions to Wilsonianism’s attenuation continue in a scene revolving around two parallel interrogations. The first interrogation sees Dent threaten an employee of The Joker in a section of Gotham City known as ‘The Narrows’. Dent opens his interrogation by making the employee, a former Arkham asylum inmate called Thomas Schiff, kneel on the ground for questioning. Dent’s aggressive stance towards Schiff and the squalid backdrop of the mise en scène recalls Dick Cheney’s (quoted in PBS Frontline n.d.) call for US intelligence agencies to “work the dark side” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, thematically embodied in the neo-noir ambience of the cinematography that envelops the scene. This disposition continues in the second example when Nolan crosscuts to a nearby parallel interrogation of mob boss Maroni by Batman. As Dent is threatening Schiff, a medium shot shows Batman dangle the mob boss from a building in an effort to extract information about The Joker. After Maroni is

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dropped to the ground, he groans in agony, a portent of Schiff’s vulnerability. These parallel interrogations establish the growing duality of Dent’s political identity. When Dent’s interrogation reappears, the attorney descends further into vigilantism—a medium shot shows him pointing a gun directly at Schiff’s temple. Whilst a moody score plays, Dent decides the man’s fate in a coin toss, eliciting connection between his behaviour and Chigurh’s in No Country for Old Men. As with Chigurh, Dent’s degeneration into violence implies the effect of new diplomatic realities. To Daniel Benjamin (ibid.), member of the United States National Security Council from 1994 to 1999, the 9/11 attacks legitimised “covert, lethal operations” against “a different enemy”. Such changes have precedents in the volatile history of Wilsonianism. The Wilsonian creed was repeatedly altered by the exigencies of American militarism; Stephen Graubard (2006, 190) notes the domestic environment that vitiated Wilson’s quest to “make the world safe for democracy” in World War One, specifically the patriotic fervour and wartime curtailment of civil liberties that threatened the “kinds of peace policies he advocated”. Although Ninkovich writes of Wilsonianism as a hawkish doctrine for times of discord, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ruined the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights orientated policies, paving the way for the Reagan administration’s support of anti-communist dictatorships. This created, in Steigerwald’s (1994, 235) words, “the specious distinction that there was a difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism”. The subsequent admonishment of Dent reflects a comparable descent. After stopping Dent’s interrogation, Batman lambasts the District Attorney for putting his career at risk and reminds him of his promise to be Gotham’s standard-bearer for justice. Batman tells Dent he is “the symbol of hope I can never be … the first legitimate ray of light in Gotham in decades”. The anarchic threat to a Wilsonian world order is reinforced in the persona of Schiff, whose mental degradation recalls not just the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but also the atmosphere of psychological trauma that nullified the prospect of democracy in Iraq. George Packer (2005, 145) spoke of the looters that engulfed post-invasion Baghdad and broke into the al-Rashad psychiatric hospital, an act that “liberated about six hundred of the hospital’s one thousand chronic schizophrenics and other hard-core, burnt-out cases”.

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To some academic critics of The Dark Knight, abrasive symbolism demonstrated conservative inclinations. Although Douglas Kellner (2010, 11) praises the film’s portrayal of “the morass and abyss of the Bush-Cheney era” and the “dark, deep pessimism of people plagued by their own economic and political elites and deadly enemies who want to destroy them”, other readings of The Dark Knight have interpreted the film as a reactionary extension of the Bush administration’s Jacksonian national security policies. Prince (2009, 286) views The Dark Knight’s attractions to be its “generic elements of action and a vengeance narrative”, creating a tone of “egregious violation”. Martin Fradley (2013, 18) criticises Kellner’s reading for its detachment and cites its refusal “to condemn torture per se as a moral, ethical and political obscenity”. Surmising the politics of The Dark Knight and its predecessor in Batman Begins, Justine Toh (2010, 138) perceives the franchise as embodying the dominance of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, reproducing “the ills of the system instead of offering a real alternative for the liberation of all”. A problem with these readings is their dismissal of both the film’s fatalistic tone and their implicit desire for a kind of partisan stance in its place. Instead of viewing The Dark Knight’s exploration of a contradictory US foreign policy in the same fashion as tonally similar Westerns such as No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, their critiques dismiss its politics purely based on political nihilism. This ignores the salience of the ideological crosscurrents in Nolan’s picture, collisions palpable in the third act’s drama. Soon after a dramatic plot development which sees the triumvirate of Batman, Dent and Gordon successfully arrest The Joker, the prospect of collaboration between unilateralism and Wilsonianism collapses against the institutional corruption of Gotham’s police force and the machinations of The Joker. Upon beating the villain savagely in a cell which invokes the abuses of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Batman discovers that Dent and Rachel Dawes have been placed on opposite sides of the city by corrupt police officers, in warehouses rigged with timed explosives. In instances of nullified idealism associable with the immolated oil derrick set piece of There Will be Blood, Batman fails to save Dawes’s life and is too late to extricate Dent from the impact of the planned explosion, resulting in the District Attorney’s facial disfigurement. Nolan succeeds this startling sequence with a montage which includes a shot of Batman standing alone against the destroyed warehouse where Rachel was slaughtered,

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imagery connotative of the trauma of Ground Zero. The shot’s clear allegorical overtones are visible below (Fig. 6.1): The hegemony of Jacksonian realism over Wilsonian idealism implied in this dysphoric allusion emerges in the grief-laden discussion which takes place subsequently in Wayne’s penthouse. After finding a letter written by Rachel before her death, Alfred reads of her love for Dent and her belief that Wayne should continue in his role as Batman, revelations potentially devastating for the already distraught protagonist. By hiding the letter from Wayne, Alfred hints at a policy of deception contrary to the democratic transparency evinced in Dent’s first appearance. The return of Alfred’s Burma anecdote further maps this deception on to a foreign policy context. After Alfred tells Wayne Batman will now have to be Gotham’s hero rather than Dent, the billionaire asks how the bandit was caught in Burma. Alfred’s response, that, “we burned the forest down”, appears emblematic of the nihilistic imperialism evinced in Ben Tre and more recently on the battlefields of Fallujah. The dark nature of the line recalls the political alternations of Team America: World Police; the successive relationship in the Burmese story between co-optive power (shown in the earlier tales of bribery) and violence suggest how American soft power segues easily into its harder form.

Fig. 6.1  The Dark Knight’s ‘Ground Zero’ (Shortlist 2019)

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The primacy of authoritarian Realpolitik is moreover reinforced in a scene where Wayne, in his Batman incarnation, meets scientist Lucius Fox at Wayne Enterprises Headquarters. They discuss finding The Joker through a sonar device that can spy on every single person in Gotham City. The mise en scène, which features a row of computer screens playing security footage of civilians engaged in everyday activities, symptomatises the paranoia of this debate. Although the sonar device could track down The Joker before his next attack, its impact is potentially pyrrhic, damaging civil liberties and confronting Wayne with his own ‘burning the forest’ legacy. Fox expresses this sensibility by imploring “this is too much power for one person”, promising his resignation if the device is maintained after Batman captures The Joker. To Muller, the scene’s explicit allusions to the Patriot Act and Fox’s tone of indignation critiques the Bush administration’s abuse of civil liberties in domestic and foreign policy. Muller (2011, 51) argues that “insinuations of causal connections between Gotham’s populace and the city’s perpetual troubles in the context of these historical associations afford viewers the opportunity to reflect on their own relationships to September 11 and its aftermath”. The visible prioritisation of security over liberty in the scene, however, is just as synergetic with a shift in Iraq policy that occurred in the years preceding The Dark Knight’s 2008 release. The repudiation of neoconservatism in the 2006 mid-term elections, which saw the Republican Party lose both houses of Congress, halted the Wilsonian facet of the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq. Though to Jason Stahl (2016, 196), the Bush administration’s refusal to heed the advice of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group seemed to “not bring respite from further neoconservative foreign policies”, the resultant surge in troops sent to Iraq in 2007 could be interpreted as a capitulation to the greater demands of counterinsurgency over democracy promotion. Much of this alteration in sensibility was conveyed by the former CIA intelligence analyst and Middle East expert Kenneth M. Pollack (2013, 8), who wrote on “the change in strategy and tactics” that saw increased troop numbers supervise the development of the Iraqi Security Forces. This led to the deployment “of reasonably competent and reliable formations that could be counted on to fight the militias and insurgents, keep the peace, and maintain law and order” (ibid., 5). The brokerage of a “new power sharing arrangement” (ibid., 11) between formerly warring Sunni and Shia groups further distanced the United States from the ambition of building a pro-American

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democracy in the Middle East and acknowledged that “Iraq descended into a Hobbesian state of nature” post-invasion (ibid., 3). Such futility becomes tangible in The Dark Knight’s epilogue, which takes place after Batman captures The Joker and finds out that he has manipulated Dent into murdering members of Gotham’s mob and corrupt police force. After Batman finds Dent holding Gordon and his family hostage at the site of Rachel’s death, he is forced to break his rule around not killing opponents, initiating a lengthy coda which reflects on the loss of progressive politics for Gotham. Gordon, overlooking Dent’s dead body, notes that recent tragedies will make “Harvey’s prosecutions, everything we fought for, undone”, concluding that: “The Joker took the best of us and tore him down”. Batman, in defiance, tells Gordon that he will take the blame for Dent’s murders in order to restore faith and order to the city, making Dent a martyr instead of a murderer in the minds of the Gotham public. The backdrop of the Ground Zero style site of Dawes’s death lends this proposition intensity. The setting seems implicative of the 9/11 attacks; yet Batman’s protection of Dent’s legacy testifies to a myth of progressivism used to cover America’s subsequent pursuit of preemptive war. McSweeney (2014, 122) views the endorsement of Dent and the self-tarnishing of Batman as adhering to a “maxim from The Man who Shot Liberty Valence and the commitment to ‘Print the legend’ rather than reveal the truth to the public”. In a manner that epitomises the presentation of an exploited Wilsonianism, The Dark Knight’s final montage sees the liberal legend of Dent again used to paper over an unaccountable political agenda. The montage displays a sequence of interconnected events that draw attention to Gordon and Batman’s cover-up. Within these events are eulogies for the political roles Batman and Dent have played. The first such example is wholly literal and begins in a ‘flash-forward’ segment where Gordon delivers a eulogy for Dent at his funeral. This segment is filmed in bright white to reflect the District Attorney’s politically canonised status. The feting of Dent is encapsulated by Gordon’s dialogue, which describes “a hero … not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed … nothing less than a knight, shining”. Though Gordon’s speech stands out in its deception, this moment seems to pall in significance next to the more symbolic eulogy that resolves around Batman embracing a kind of vicarious redemption for Dent’s sins. This begins in the next flash-forward segment, which depicts Gordon smashing the bat signal used to form meetings between him, Batman and

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Dent. Gordon’s action establishes the end of the triumvirate that was used to track down Lau and The Joker earlier in the picture. The overlaying of dialogue taken from the aftermath of Dent’s death further indicates this end to multilateralism and institutional collaboration. In dialogue directly corresponding with Gordon’s smashing of the bat signal, Batman grunts that the police will “hunt me … condemn me … set the dogs on me”. Despite this not being a eulogy in the literal sense, Batman’s endurance of the city’s political turmoil is memorialised. The extra-legal nature of his power, unlike the idealistic liberalism of Dent, can survive and be consolidated against the exigencies of terrorism and institutional corruption. This is symbolised by the following image, a low-angle shot that displays Alfred burning the emotional letter intended for Wayne from Rachel earlier in the picture. In a juxtaposed voiceover, Batman expresses that, “sometimes the truth isn’t good enough … sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded”. Wayne’s line, dramatically ironic when placed against the burning of a letter he may have wanted to read, emphasises the noble lie. Even a subsequent medium shot of a pensive Fox, who looks over the destruction of the sonar device that was used to track down The Joker, fails to escape this fatalism. The hegemony of authoritarianism is integral to the final eulogy of this sequence, which returns to the Ground Zero style site. As police arrive on the scene to arrest Batman, Gordon tells his son why Batman is being framed for the good of Gotham. Gordon speaks of Batman as “the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now” whilst a grandiose score plays over images of Batman fleeing the scene. A bombastic drum rhythm adds to the intensity of Gordon’s lines. He utters, “We’ll hunt him because he can take it” as the police chase the superhero. When Batman drives away from the scene, Gordon concludes the peroration for his legacy. He celebrates “a silent guardian … a watchful protector … a dark knight”. Understandably, this final sequence lent itself to partisan readings of Nolan’s picture. There are two interpretations of this concluding scene worth discussing. The first one is by the right-wing commentator Andrew Klavan, who praises The Dark Knight as a purveyor of neoconservative values. The second is from the liberal perspective of The New York Times’s Jonathan Lethem, who views this sequence as indicative of an evasiveness that covers for the Bush administration’s transgressions. To Andrew Klavan (2008), The Dark Knight formed a “paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this

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time of terror and war”, embodied in the concluding scene’s “moral complexity”. He adds that this ending seems a rebuke of a liberal mentality in which “we prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve” (ibid.). In contrast, Lethem (2008) thought The Dark Knight “echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance” and failed to serve as a helpful allegory for the United States in 2008. The reviewer describes a climax consisting of “déjà vu battles”, where “the combatants forever escape one another’s final judgment, whirl off into the void, leaving us awed standing in the rubble, uncertain of what we’ve seen, only sure we’re primed for the sequel” (ibid.). The partisan fashion of these reviews seems to mirror Kellner’s (2010, 2) view of Hollywood cinema as a “contest of representations and a contested terrain that reproduces existing social struggles and transcodes the political discourses of the era”. Yet Kellner’s methodology, along with Lethem and Klavan’s reviews, focuses on a dynamic of hyperpartisanship that fails to acknowledge the representation of foreign policy contradiction fundamental to The Dark Knight’s ending and broader narrative. As with the conclusion of No Country for Old Men, Wilsonian idealism has been enervated, with Dent’s ideology shown as less hegemonic than Batman’s national security state apparatus. Though Klavan champions Nolan’s conclusion for forming a pugnacious defence of the Bush administration during its final two years in office, this ending could be termed as more subversive in its allegorising. For all the spectre of Leo Strauss’s noble lie in the cover-up surrounding Harvey Dent’s death, Dent’s hallowed position as liberal figurehead implies the possibility that Bush administration shibboleths will be preserved in a future Democratic regime. Interpreting the lies surrounding Dent’s death as figurative of the continuation of Bush era policy enables comparisons to be drawn between the Wilsonian fig leaf we see at the end of The Dark Knight and the various betrayals of liberal idealism in the Obama years. Although Obama’s election seemed to give the imprimatur of a new Wilsonian idealism, events and re-evaluations of his foreign policy conspired to belie this image. Jack Goldsmith (quoted in Singh 2011, 288) interprets the Obama administration’s continuation of extra-judicial assassinations, state secret privileges and indefinite detention as proof that the administration had made no substantive change, arguing, “the main difference between the Obama and Bush administration’s concerns was not the substance of

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terrorism policy, but rather its packaging”. To Robert Singh (2011, 288), Obama renewed “a restrained pragmatic realism in place of a militarized Wilsonianism” that had begun late in the Bush administration’s second term. Although Paul Bonicelli (2012) opines that “the tenor and work of the (Obama) administration is best described as idealist or liberal”, other analysts of his presidency see it as constrained by events that tested orthodox Wilsonian presumptions of championing international law and democracy. Adam Quinn (2015, 20–21) comments on the “obliged reconsideration” of Wilsonianism that occurred in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, where a series of “zero sum political conflicts” led to “tacit support for manifestly authoritarian forces that have rolled back the liberalization of politics sought by the Arab revolutions”. The Obama administration was forced to fear the results of demands for democratisation in Egypt, Syria and Libya. This again repeated on a regional scale the dichotomy between liberty and security that occurred in the Iraq War. Although the Obama administration supported a British and French-led humanitarian intervention in Libya and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the brutalised status of Syria in Obama’s second term and the conflict between Russia-backed dictator Assad and the sectarian forces of ISIS suggested that Wilsonianism, whether annexed by neoconservatives or remoulded by liberals, would find no easy assimilation within the outlook of US foreign policy. James Mann (2012, 334) underlines Obama’s maintenance of a security orientated policy that had been consolidated in Bush’s second term: The drones and targeted killing didn’t stop. The United States continued to hold prisoners without trial. The policy of rendition remained in effect. Just as many of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms didn’t become permanent until the Eisenhower administration failed to do away with them, so, too, some of George W. Bush’s antiterrorism policies didn’t seem like permanent changes until they were perpetuated by Obama.

The ending of The Dark Knight indicates that orthodox Wilsonianism is impossible to recapture. The next section argues that James Cameron’s 2009 science fiction epic Avatar contrastingly celebrates the possibilities created by the breakdown of the Wilsonian-Jacksonian alliance and raises the prospect of an alternate doctrine in lieu of a disgraced Global

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Meliorism, synergising with the disjunctions and recalibrations of the early Obama years.

Avatar and the Consummate Contradiction of Foreign Occupation Avatar allegorises McDougall’s (2011, 30–31) view of the Iraq occupation as embodying “Global Meliorism with guns” and underpins the “persuasive analogy between Iraq and Vietnam”. The film opens with a portentous tracking shot that heads through the jungle of the planet Pandora, the setting where most of the allegorical critique takes place. The jungle’s mystical nature is underlined through the sound of Pandora’s indigenous humanoids, the Na’vi. Although not seen onscreen, their music plays over the scenery in ethereal fashion, implying the sacredness of this agrarian planet. For all the sublimity of these visual and aural elements, the voiceover of Avatar’s protagonist, Jake Sully, adds an ambivalent tone. Sully refers to the impact of a war wound that left him without the use of his legs and stuck in a veterans’ hospital “with a big hole blown through the middle of my life”. His account of his quadriplegia, for all its incongruity, has an intimate connection with the landscape before the viewer. Sully comments on the dreams he had of ‘flying’ during his time convalescing in the hospital, thus revealing the tracking shot to be from the perspective of his traumatised subconscious. The causative relationship between Sully’s role as a soldier and his dreaming of Pandora is soon revealed to be more than an ephemeral fantasy. After the dream ends, a close-up shot shows Sully in a cryogenic chamber on a spacecraft, juxtaposing the planet’s beauty with the clinical reality of Sully’s outer space mission. The final line of Sully’s voiceover notes that “you always have to wake up”, temporarily ignoring the implications of his dreaming for viewers. Sully’s subconscious kinship with Pandora inverts Faludi’s notion of a hawkish “terror dream” pervading post-9/11 life. This theory proposes that a “national fantasy of virtuous might and triumph” underpinned the War on Terror (Faludi 2007, 289), sanctioned by “rescue language” (ibid., 44) and rhetoric which supported the “liberation” of the women of Iraq and Afghanistan, who formed the “cumulative elements of a national fantasy” (ibid., 14). The national security dimension of this idea was rebuked in the final scene of No Country for Old Men, which saw Bell’s

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aimless dream reject the activist notions of Faludi’s theory and its vaunting of a frontier culture to protect the homeland. In its subtle repudiation of American influence, Sully’s dream refutes this theory’s neo-imperial connotations and its co-option of a Global Meliorism used to rationalise American change of the Middle East. Recalling the bathetic opening moments of Three Kings and There Will be Blood, Sully’s conflicted status underlines a cognitive dissonance in American foreign policy. Cameron makes clear the complex nexus of reasons behind Sully’s journey to Pandora in the extended edition of his picture. As in the early scenes of Three Kings, a series of flashbacks make clear how motivations for American imperialism are compelled by economic discontent and decline at home. A wide-angle shot foregrounds a wheelchair bound Sully sitting against the backdrop of an unspecified American city, signalling the anonymity of his life on earth. Sully’s existence in this industrialised wasteland, which is not unlike the LA of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), is further delineated in imagery redolent of the baneful aftermath of the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In a moment reminiscent of the treatment of Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Sully is kicked out of a bar for being drunk and disorderly. He is, despite being a quadriplegic, left to languish in a gutter, and to contemplate his limited existence on veteran benefits. The economic rationale for the Pandora mission also supersedes its tragic origins. A flashback displays Sully looking over the dead body of his scientist brother and former Avatar programme member, Tommy. His death, the result of a violent mugging, makes a vacancy available. A group of government agents are subsequently shown offering financial inducements to Sully, engendering the opportunity to change his material circumstances and pay towards an operation for his quadriplegia. As this occurs, Sully comments in voiceover that he is “just some dumb grunt going someplace he is going to regret”. The left-wing International Relations theorist William Appleman Williams noted the ameliorative effects of expansionism on a beleaguered national psyche. He wrote objectively on how the 1890s rationalisation of imperialism propounded “the firm conviction, even dogmatic belief that America’s domestic wellbeing depends on ever such sustained, ever-­ increasing overseas economic expansion” (Williams 1972, 15). Bacevich perceives the military equivalent of this palliative in the neoconservative ascension of the late 1970s and the arms build-up of the early Reagan years. American neo-imperialism served as a siren song for the sense of

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malaise left by Vietnam, a phenomenon most crystallised in the post-1989 era (Bacevich 2005, 225–226): The new American militarism materialized as a reaction to profound disorientation and collective distress. In the wake of a humiliating defeat and a closely related cultural upheaval, restoring the sinews of US military might, celebrating soldierly virtue, and contriving ways to restore the utility of force seemed in some quarters to offer an antidote. The ailments were real, but the remedy turned out to be toxic.

This toxic effect, and the ultimate failure of this medicine to stop a recurrence of the Vietnam syndrome, is very much in abundance when Sully reaches Pandora. The first port of call for arrivals is Hell’s Gate, a base of operations used by the mining corporation ‘RDA’ and their private military contractors. The base is protected by a pentagonal fence and shows signs of perennial industrialisation, a condition illustrated by the refineries and plants that comprise the structure. Less the opulence of the imperial palace that housed Paul Bremer’s CPA in Iraq, Hell’s Gate is more akin to Israel’s border wall in its lugubrious connotations of neocolonial oppression.3 These ‘qualities’ are signalled in the mise en scène of the area where Sully’s spacecraft lands, which is filled with armed private contractors, bulldozer-style vehicles, and human-controlled robots known as AMP suits (lifted from the analogously designed ‘powerloaders’ in Cameron’s 1986 science fiction blockbuster Aliens) primed for removing Na’vi settlements. The privatised nature of the military culture alienates Sully. He comments in voiceover on how, on earth, Americans celebrated the “brave marines fighting for freedom”, a culture that has no relevance to the private contractors who are “hired guns, taking the money … working for the money”. The Social Darwinism of these soldiers accentuates this unease. Before Sully exits the spacecraft in his wheelchair, he is referred to as “special K” and told, “Do not make me wait for you!” by a senior officer. After one soldier sees the wheelchair bound Sully manoeuvring across the runway of Hell’s Gate, he belittles him as “meals on wheels”. In another instance, a low-angle shot shows Sully stopping before a vehicle designed for tree demolition. The vehicle towers above him, signalling the all-powerful nature of American military technology and his own lowly stature. To Frances Pheasant-Kelly (2013, 165), these moments of emasculation relate to the “costs of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”, a pain evoked

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by Sully’s simultaneous use of “combat gear and wheelchair”, which recalled “recent images of amputees and injured combatants”. At the same time as reflecting this world weariness, Pheasant-Kelly propounded the idea that Sully mirrors Faludi’s notion of an “impotence” felt by the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. This multifaceted perspective observed the “congruencies with 9/11 and the War on Terror” (ibid., 165). It is not the spectre of terrorist insurgency that is most disconcerting in Sully’s arrival on Pandora, however, but instead the implications of neo-­ imperial violence. The contemporary and historic associations of this violence establish the attenuation of Global Meliorism to be a key motif of Cameron’s picture. The former contemporary quality is evident in the private contractors, who, like Plainview’s oilmen in There Will be Blood, allegorise the privatising zeal of Iraq’s occupation. Thomas Ricks’s (2006, 225) coverage of the Second Gulf War notes the violence of the “personal security details for CPA officials”, who “rocketed through Baghdad, forced Iraqi cars onto sidewalks, needlessly alienating the capital’s population”. This brutality was compounded by the “worried U.S. troops or third world contractors” who “shot at Iraqi civilians to make them keep their distance” (ibid., 225). Martin Barker views this trope of casualisation as an essential aspect of war films released during the 2000s. Mirroring Bacevich’s perception of a “new American militarism”, Barker (2011, 68) contends that films such as the 2008 Rambo reboot supplanted the conscription/draft culture in Vietnam for the new ethos of privatisation: After Vietnam, then, the ‘Grunt’ became a moveable feast within popular culture. In most versions, he is a soldier just desperate to survive. Fighting wars he (or she) does not believe in, invading space, alien worlds, even taking alien form, the ‘Grunt’ becomes a virtual mercenary. And this is important since, unlike Vietnam, for Iraq there has been no draft. The American army in Iraq is a volunteer army, aided by privatized military forces. It is vital to our understanding of these films to see that the image of the ‘American Soldier’ is in meltdown.

At the same time as encapsulating these changes, Avatar transplants them to a milieu associated with America’s signature foreign policy failure. The jungle backdrop of Pandora is of course reminiscent of Vietnam, as is the runway at Hell’s Gate, which bears comparison with the airbases at Pleiku and Da Nang. In having the privatised military culture of the Iraq War descend on this setting, Avatar depicts the new American militarism

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as atavistic. To invoke Malewitz’s (2014, 163) memorable phraseology towards the 1980 of No Country for Old Men, it returns to the “primal scene” of Global Meliorism’s ruination. It is worth contextualising again how McDougall’s theory of Global Meliorism emerged (a phenomenon first discussed in Chap. 3) and the permutations it experienced before it was dramatically remoulded in the Clinton era. Emerging as a corollary to the Wilsonianism and liberal internationalism of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations in the mid-­1940s, Global Meliorism sought to promote a welfarism in foreign policy that had been characteristic of the New Deal.4 To McDougall, this was first applied in the post-war reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan. Elements of the latter example, especially the attempts to reform the Zaibatsus (large business conglomerates that dominated the Japanese economy before and during the Second World War) by Commander Douglas MacArthur and his staff, extended a “new-deal idealism” into the occupation, a progressivism tangible in the bequeathing of “women’s rights, land reform, and renunciation of war” (McDougall 1997, 179). This progressive dimension is specified by John W. Dower (2005, 185), who describes the “major land reforms” and “labour laws” which were “designed to crack open the old authoritarian system”. The Global Meliorist philosophy was simultaneously prevalent in the early stages of the Cold War. McDougall notes its integrality for the Marshall Plan of 1948, which, in its $13 billion programme of economic aid, typified the belief that Global Meliorism could stem the influence of Communism. McDougall corroborates this with a quote from Sallie Pisani’s 1991 work The CIA and the Marshall Plan, which underlined the CIA’s adherence to Global Meliorism and the institution’s view of it as a practical outlook on world affairs. The intelligence service supported Global Meliorism’s proposals of economic modernisation on the basis that, “developing nations receiving adequate assistance from the West in the form of planning and technology would aspire to emulate Western ideas and be less vulnerable to Communist agendas” (Pisani, quoted in McDougall 1997, 181). The throes of Vietnam, however, resulted in competing definitions of this welfarist worldview. Patrick Lloyd Hatcher (1990, 19–21) argues that the war’s tumult emerged from the rival perceptions of administration “Whigs” and “Tories”. Whigs who opposed absolute monarchy were embodied in individuals such as the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger Hilsman, who advocated supporting political reform

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of the corrupt Diem regime and sought a “government that could really care” (ibid., 19). The aim of the Whig mentality was to instil democracy by “writing constituents, organizing trade unions, establishing legal studies, and holding elections of all sorts” (ibid., 19). Tories, in contrast, preferred “economic action” (ibid., 20). They expressed concern for issues such as “promoting dry farming techniques” and “upgrading health and sanitation practices” (ibid., 20–21). Vietnam’s Whig and Tory divides did not form splits between liberals and conservatives—they were both integral parts of an unwieldy liberal internationalism. What they shared was an inability to find a comprehensive answer to the problems confronted by US involvement. This progressive cognitive dissonance was evident in the Pentagon’s command unit the Military Advisory Command Vietnam, which “found its personnel absorbed with problems of political and economic intervention”, and issues of “civic action and pacification” (ibid., 19–21). The exigencies of anti-communism and counterinsurgency, which became more conspicuous in Johnson’s later escalation of the war, sabotaged the ideological purity of the Whig and Tory visions. McDougall indicates this incoherence when he evokes the crude efforts to instal South Vietnamese democracy. Whig ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge’s endorsement of a coup against Diem’s regime in November 1963, which led to a military triumvirate, proved “even less effective at winning public support and fighting the Viet Cong” (McDougall 1997, 188). This discrepancy between idealism and the demands of American neo-imperialism metastasised further in the Johnson years. McDougall describes how Johnson hated the “military side” of the conflict but loved the “Tory Meliorist” dimension of America’s involvement (ibid., 188). He cites his ambition for “foreign policy to be an extension of our domestic policy”, and Johnson’s desire to build “schools and hospitals and dams” (ibid., 190). Elizabeth N. Saunders (2014, 537) underlines this cognitive dissonance by examining Johnson’s “tendency to separate the military aspects of the war from Vietnamese domestic issues”. She notes his April 1965 speech to Johns Hopkins University, “in which he offered to invest $1 billion to develop the Mekong Delta region”, a “proposal that came in a separate section … not connected to the nature of the conflict or the military strategy” (ibid., 537). In Avatar, the collision between martial and Global Meliorist interests is embodied in the figure of Colonel Quaritch, the head of the military mission in Pandora. His first lines, which are delivered in a drab dining hall

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to the mission’s security forces, pervade a febrile atmosphere. He admonishes his audience of soldiers that “you are not in Kansas anymore” and reports an environment where: “Every living thing that cries, crawls, squats in the mud wants to kill you”. Like the fatalism of Alfred’s Burma anecdote in The Dark Knight, Quaritch paints a realist portrait of an America facing conditions of international anarchy. This status quo is maintained by Pandora’s “indigenous population of humanoids”, who survive attacks through “bones reinforced with naturally occurring carbon fibre”. The language here moreover grafts the imagery of Vietnam on to a War on Terror subtext. James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull (2013, 208) see Quaritch as a “generic hyper-masculine, seething marine whose idiom reflects that documented in Full Metal Jacket (1987)”, a Vietnam War film with an equally vituperative figure in Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann. At the same time, they view this reference as juxtaposed with a subversive War on Terror allegory, created by Quaritch’s argument that the troops must fight “terror with terror” (ibid., 208). The clashes between Whigs and Tories are evoked and updated in the rivalry between the scientist progenitors of the Avatar project and the corporate interests of the RDA. The causes embraced by Pandora’s head scientist Grace Augustine, who reluctantly oversees Sully’s initial use of Avatar technology, conflicts with the focus of RDA head Parker Selfridge. Whereas Augustine favours a concentrated emphasis on nation-building and rejects the “trigger happy marine” Sully, Selfridge frames her Whig concerns for “building them a school” and “teaching them English” against the neoliberalism and unilateralism that dominated the post-1989 landscape of intervention. Selfridge emphasises the importance of ‘unobtanium’, a clear reference to the non-existent WMDs used to rationalise the Iraq War’s unilateral and preemptive nature. Selfridge has greater affinity, however, with the privatising ethos of Paul Bremer’s CPA—he warns Augustine that her “hearts and minds” strategy is subservient to the goals of retrieving unobtanium for the RDA corporation, “which pays for the whole party” and subsidises her “science”. Replacing the Tory Meliorism of Vietnam for the hegemony of neoliberalism, Selfridge instructs Augustine to find “a diplomatic solution” and “get results”, using the cultivation of the Na’vi as a mere means for American control. The different facets of the Pandora occupation correspond with Mead’s categorisations of American foreign policy. Selfridge’s chairmanship of the RDA is associable with the Hamiltonian. There is an affinity between

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Augustine’s compassion towards the Na’vi and the “universal” aspect of the Wilsonian doctrine, which propounds “recognition of equality both within and beyond the United States” (Mead 2001, 169). The Jacksonian nationalism of Quaritch of course personifies Mead’s description of a diplomacy wedded to “honour, concern for reputation, and faith in military institutions” (ibid., 244–245). Sully’s experience of the avatar technology, which allows him to control a Na’vi body, attests to the colliding interests of these schools. His debut as a Na’vi is an exercise in aesthetic and ideological purity—a POV shot from a hospital bed conveys his avatar experience as disorientating but also exhilarating, a tone amplified by a series of high-angle shots that show Sully staring in awe at his towering, elongated Na’vi form. Like the dream that opened the picture, the spectacle connotes a sublimated revolt, its pleasant aura of depersonalisation rebelling against Faludi’s notion of an atavistic, war-obsessed terror dream. This spirit becomes noticeable in a short sequence that sees Sully escape the hospital and run through a series of training grounds designed for other users of the avatar programme. Upon reaching the outside world, Sully witnesses a paradisiacal landscape of colour and natural beauty. The tracking shot that delineates Sully’s run alternates between reminders of the neo-imperial purpose of his mission (many other avatars/Na’vi duplicates are depicted playing basketball) and his own raw experience of the Na’vi body, dichotomising American neocolonialism with his own newfound sense of liberation. For all the rejection of the Hamiltonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian schools, the quiet revolt against American power here touches on a hitherto absent foreign policy school created by Mead, that of the “Jeffersonian”. Mead describes this school as antithetical to the internationalism that dictated “endlessly involving American arms, credit, honour, and prestige in attempts to spread democracy”, defined by the “enduring sense … that the United States could better serve the cause of universal democracy by setting an example rather than imposing a model” (ibid., 182). Sully’s integration with Pandora’s natural landscape rejects neocolonialism’s impositions—his encounter with the planet’s luscious landscape is redolent of the agrarian fantasy in the time of Jeffersonian America, its virginal and atavistic state possessing an ideological innocence. Mead discusses this image of the Jeffersonian in contrast with the other, more expansive foreign policy philosophies (ibid., 183):

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Liberty is indeed precious, and almost as infinitely fragile; that is the core belief of the Jeffersonian movement. In this it differs from all the other major political forces in American life. Hamiltonians believe that commercial development can secure the blessings of free government; Jeffersonians note that in one democracy after another, great commercial interests have subverted the process to its destruction, and that the ambitious rich man can be the greatest danger to a democratic system. Wilsonians believe that the force of progress and enlightenment is moving mankind toward a reign of peace and reason; Jeffersonians believe that history goes backward as well as forward, and that ambition and the lust for wealth are too deeply embedded in human nature to be easily harnessed by just and rational laws. Jacksonians, as we shall see, believe that the deep, good heart of the American people will instinctively repel any threat to their cherished democracy; Jeffersonians know too well the danger to which an unchecked, unbridled popular passion can endanger the very democracy that it wants to protect.

Sully’s experience of his Na’vi body also belies both the hard and soft power facets of the avatar programme, quietly subverting its aims of spreading American hegemony. On the one hand, the vicarious nature of the avatar programme appears a less sinister manifestation of the technology that allowed the deliverance of remote-controlled drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bianca Baggiarini (2015, 128–129) refers to this flexibility as a “techno-fetishism”, which formed “co-constitutive responses to the perceived need to unman combat’” leading to a world where “state violence is privatized and increasingly disembodied”. Yet the avatar programme’s true aim, which is to co-opt the indigenous Na’vi, emblematises a heightened version of soft power. The fact that Sully is required to manipulate the Na’vi into relinquishing unobtanium mirrors soft power’s “contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants” (Nye Jr. 1990, 166). Sully’s time on Pandora associates both hard and soft power with a dubious missionary imperialism. This is evident in his first encounter with the Omaticaya, a key Na’vi tribe who guard vast sources of unobtanium. The tribe leader’s daughter, a warrior princess called Ney’teri, rejects Sully’s universalising notions of neo-imperialism by ignoring a question asking if she went to one of Augustine’s colonial schools. He is instead derided as an irrational ‘baby’, viewed as a colonised misfit in a jungle defined by indigenous identity. This rejection of Westernisation continues when Sully is imprisoned and taken to a mass gathering of the Omaticaya tribe. Mo’at, Ney’teri’s mother and the tribe’s spiritual leader, allows Sully

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to join purely to see if his “insanity can be cured”, humorously pathologising the neocolonial project that threatens their way of life. From the beginning of its production, Cameron intended Avatar to be an explicit polemic against American imperialism. In an interview with SFGate, Cameron outlined how his picture “broadly concerned imperialism in the sense that the way human history has worked is that people with more military or technological might tend to supplant or destroy people who are weaker, usually for their resources” (quoted in Ordona 2009). Although Avatar received generally positive reviews, many critical and academic readings accuse its politics of glibness, covertly championing the American hegemony it portrayed as under threat. To Will Heaven (quoted in The Week Magazine editorial 2009) of The Telegraph, Avatar was “nauseatingly patronising” because the Na’vi “were a childish pastiche of the ethnic”, who “must rely on the principled white man”. The journalist Annalee Newitz (2009) echoed this argument through a perception of Avatar as a mere addition to Hollywood’s white guilt narratives, with the Na’vi resembling the Native Americans of paternalistic Western dramas like Dances with Wolves (1990). This contrasted uncomfortably with the Americans, who were “leaders of the natives—just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick”. A comparable cynicism was shared by academic critics of Cameron’s film. In a critique recalling Holloway’s derisory labelling of Hollywood cinema in the 2000s as an “allegory lite”, Zizek (2010) accused Avatar of a “Hollywood Marxism” through “sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle”. Reiterating the idea that Hollywood cinema implicitly sympathised with the ideology of liberal intervention, Alford (2011, 120) compared Avatar to Three Kings (a film he also thought adhered to this disposition) because the “key characters amongst the US invading force are leading figures … our heroes remain the humans, and US marines at that”. Alford considered Cameron’s allegory to be ultimately less effective than another 2009 science fiction picture which concerned the abhorrence of colonial oppression. Neil Blomkampf’s District 9 revolved around the treatment of a group of extra-terrestrials in Johannesburg. This allegory inverted the dynamics of the alien invasion film and served as a commentary on the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid. To Alford, District 9 contrasted with Avatar’s “simplistic and unnerving message”, illustrating a critique that functioned “in a more rigorous manner, notably by depicting the apartheid style system with cold and brutal

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realism” (ibid., 119–120). Thakur (2015, 143) shared this view of Avatar’s superficiality, believing Cameron’s film “folded into the axioms of Hollywood’s endorsed forms of protest”, forming “ideology at work in its most pragmatic form”. Although these views correctly observe the derivativeness of Avatar’s storyline, they disregard its insightful portrayal of foreign policy contradiction. Resembling Drolet’s (2010, 89) argument that neoconservatism is “predicated on an atavistic conservative philosophy”, that is “in fact ferociously predatory on liberal values and liberal mechanisms of governance”, the second half of Cameron’s picture sees the Global Meliorism of the Pandora mission’s scientists collide with the forces of militarism and neoliberalism. This disintegration begins when an RDA bulldozer encroaches on Sully and Ney’teri. Cameron amplifies the tension through the sudden onslaught of troops and robots onscreen, a sight that matches the ‘shock and awe’ sensibility of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The use of subversive political references makes this subtext more pernicious. An image of the Na’vi Sully standing alone against the bulldozer compares the American occupation in Iraq with nefarious examples of intrastate oppression. A high-angle shot of Sully from the tank’s perspective recalls the infamous 1989 ‘Tank Man’ photograph, which showed a lone Chinese civilian challenging the path of a tank in Tiananmen Square.5 The bulldozer’s destruction of Na’vi land also invokes the settler culture of the Israel-Palestine conflict, a parallel that entwines the RDA with neocolonial aggression. The authoritarianism implied here, and its resemblance to forms of oppression practised across the world, highlights the reactionary aspects of the Iraq War. Like the CPA and their private security details, the corporate RDA displays scant regard for Pandora’s pre-colonised state. Most interestingly, this portrayal had an impact on audiences in China and the West Bank, who respectively recognised Cameron’s portrayal of capitalist indifference and military occupation. In areas supplanted by development projects such as the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei Province, Chinese citizens identified with the Na’vi’s forced eviction from native soil. The impact of this affinity was so extreme that the Chinese government banned Avatar from cinema screens, due to the fear of violent upheaval (Jimbo 2010). A comparable influence was tangible in the West Bank, where Palestinian protestors donned blue paint and dressed as Na’vi to protest the separation barrier created by Israel (The Guardian editorial 2010).

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Do these examples mean Avatar purveys a form of liberal internationalism at the same time as presenting ideologies such as Global Meliorism to be enervated? Nye (2004, 75) would argue that the revolts of Chinese and Palestinian communities mirror the effect of pro-democracy elements of soft power during the Cold War, which undercut “a closed system, lack of an attractive popular culture, and heavy-handed foreign policies”. McDougall (1997, 146) notably sees this transnational solidarity as integral to Wilsonianism and its power “as an ideological weapon against every arbitrary power anywhere”. Yet Avatar’s rejection of a top-down nation-building also refutes these clarion calls for the emulation of American democracy. A set piece that revolves around the destruction of the home tree, the Omaticaya’s dwelling and repository for unobtanium, uses allegoric imagery that symbolises the failure of the idealist visions explored by McDougall and propounded by Nye. Akin to the early scenes in Hell’s Gate, this stance is achieved through shots and dialogue that synthesise the Vietnam War and the War on Terror. The set piece sees the Omaticaya confronted with total war. High-angle shots show helicopters and spacecraft sent to terrorise the Na’vi, who flee from aerial assaults reminiscent of the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ scene in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). These images become more provocative after Quaritch decides to destroy the home tree. He uses a series of measures against the indigenous people, including nerve gas and incendiaries. The latter consists of an onslaught of inflammatory missiles which are powerfully invocative of the use of napalm in Vietnam. At the same time, however, there are elements associable with the War on Terror—the use of tear gas recalls the chemical devastation of battles such as Fallujah, while, inversely, the Na’vi appear redolent of the traumatised civilians who witnessed the 9/11 attacks and were forced to wander through clouds of noxious dust after the Twin Towers fell. This dualistic allegorical depiction, which makes the Na’vi both third world counterparts to those ordinary Americans and victims of US imperialism, is heightened by the multifaceted meaning of the home tree. Relatable to the sites of the flaming oil derrick in There Will be Blood and the smouldered Ground Zero style warehouse in The Dark Knight, the destruction of the home tree portends the end of an idealism in foreign policy. In There Will be Blood, this was the reformist imperialism briefly promised by Plainview in his address to Little Boston; in The Dark Knight, the Wilsonianism originally envisioned by Dent became destroyed; in this case it is the Global Meliorism of the avatar scientists under threat, a

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quality symbolised in the home tree’s welfarist role for the Na’vi. A succession of shots and dialogue connects a disparate medley of political symbolisms. Sully, whose work for the RDA has been discovered by the Omaticaya, can only flee from the tree’s collapse. In a coded reference to the destruction of the Twin Towers, he warns that “Quaritch is going to blow the columns”. The home tree’s descent is delineated in a series of long shots, which lend its fall a totemic status. Its assault is, like the 9/11 attacks, an act of terrorism, designed seemingly to repudiate an entire ‘way of life’. At the same time, its immolation, and the ethno-religious identity of the Na’vi, evokes the sectarian carnage unleashed by the United States’ pursuit of regime change in Iraq. The destruction of the Samara mosque, a Shia shrine destroyed by al-Qaeda militants in February 2006, emblematised this chaotic nihilism (Worth 2006). The felling of the home tree transfers the responsibility for such crimes on to the US occupiers, depicting Quaritch’s assault as both terroristic and militaristic, a seemingly schizophrenic unity of sectarian violence and neoconservative shock and awe. The process of allegory here, for all its polemical nature, would likely provoke conflicting opinion amongst scholars of War on Terror cinema. McSweeney (2014, 27) would likely acknowledge Cameron’s avoidance of a “culture of dismemberment and mythologisation”, a phenomenon he viewed as prominent in films which dealt exclusively with recent epochal events. He argued that United 93 (2006) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) refused to answer, “troubling questions of political cause and effect”, generating an “end of innocence” that “works by disconnecting itself from the history of the twentieth century” (ibid., 27). Conversely, Westwell identified invocations of history and contemporaneous political context as part of a deeply hegemonic function. A film such as Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) merely solipsised history because its scenes of alien invasion reference “the experience of Iraq, the genocide in Rwanda and the bombing of Hiroshima”, “amplifying the significance of 9/11 and reducing history to a level playing field of traumatised victims” (Westwell 2014, 120). Although Cameron’s film is not explored in his book Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema, Westwell would likely apply these accusations of moral equivalence to Avatar, which, just like War of the Worlds, juxtaposes the “traumatic shock caused by the experience of 9/11” with “the vicarious experience of the Iraq War as victim” (ibid., 100). Yet Westwell’s position disregards allegory’s deconstructive potential. Avatar

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contravenes Westwell’s understanding of a synthetic moral equivalence in its later scenes of Na’vi rebellion, which subversively employ post-9/11 imagery to repudiate the top-down forces of American neocolonialism. Moreover, Avatar’s focus on the victims of US power differs from the comparative parochialism of a picture like War of the Worlds, which, for all its topical references to the Iraq War, is situated solely from a US perspective. The inversion of Westwell’s understanding of a “hegemonic reconciliation” within allegory, which licensed “an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy” (ibid., 94–95), is evident in a later speech by Sully to the Omaticaya. This situates the 9/11 style cassus belli of the fallen home tree within the subtext of a third world uprising. Sully’s address takes place immediately after Augustine dies from a fatal gunshot wound, a narrative development that reinforces the vitiation of the Global Meliorist doctrine. Rather than invoking her ideology of Whig Meliorism, Sully conveys that the Ground Zero-esque site where the home tree once stood should galvanise the Omaticaya to repel their American invaders. Refuting his marine background and work for the RDA, he lambasts the “sky people taking whatever they want” and declares that “this is our land”. The pugnacity of this speech is made more vivid by a bullish score and a sweeping panning shot. The use of such dialogue and techniques ironically engender association with the ‘bullhorn speech’ delivered by George W. Bush on September 13, 2001. This speech, which was delivered at the site of Ground Zero, promised that: “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” (quoted in American Rhetoric website 2017). Rather than disseminating its heartfelt patriotism, Sully’s rally reframes this response for those made impotent by American power. In a subsequent montage, he traverses across Pandora to rally neighbouring tribes and species, transcending the divisive effects of US neo-imperialism in an expression of Panglossian unity. To critics of Avatar’s politics in academia, these scenes merely sublimate the post-9/11 pursuit of preemptive war and regime change into a palatable narrative of moral equivalence. Professor of Philosophy Pierre Desjardins (2010), writing in the French Newspaper Le Monde, criticised the metaphoric nature of the fallen home tree because it “conceals a view that is remarkably caustic: that of justifying war for us peaceful Westerners”. Another academic with a background in Philosophy, Nathan Eckstrand (2014, 199), interprets the uprising encouraged by Sully as signalling a “passive wisdom and goodness” in the Na’vi, who are subservient to

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“Jake’s knowledge, ingenuity, and bravery”, and his effort to “convince them to form an effective plan of attack against the colonizing forces on Pandora”. Thus, Sully’s anti-colonial rhetoric displays signs of the very neocolonialism it rejects. Yet these plot elements can be read in a more nuanced fashion. Sully’s abandonment of the RDA’s neocolonial project and Jeffersonian deference to the interests of the Na’vi recall several policy shifts during the early Obama years. Georg Lofflmann (2015, 309) considers how Obama “re-­ appropriated” American exceptionalist beliefs in the “uniqueness of the United States” and “the belief in the superiority of American values”. Part of this re-appropriation would be the understanding “of a post-American world” (ibid., 318). In direct contrast to “Clinton’s liberal interventionism and the unilateral primacy of the Bush administration”, which embraced “the country’s unparalleled military supremacy” and “unique values”, Obama disputed the “equation of American exceptionalism and American global leadership” (ibid., 315). The Libya intervention, which saw the Obama administration’s “leading from behind” strategy delegate responsibility to the French and British governments for stopping a brutal crackdown by Gaddafi’s regime, embodied the post-American outlook and search for a new middle way, signifying a “contradictory fusion of realist restraint and liberal engagement” (ibid., 322). Maria Helena De Castro Santos (2015, 119–120) illustrates how this change offered a more pragmatic philosophy than the “merging” of “American security interests” and “liberal democratic values” during the Bush years, instead promoting the idea that “regime change should be a task for the nationals”, declining to link “democracy to security”. This aversion to the Jacksonian-Wilsonian fusion is underlined by Mead (2010), who sees the early years of the Obama presidency as consisting of contradictions between “the limited realism of the Jeffersonian worldview” and a “transformative Wilsonian agenda”. Such a combination was evident in the president’s wish “for an orderly world in which burdens are shared”, and where “the military power of the United States is a less prominent feature of the international scene” (ibid.). The attempt to achieve this new pragmatism, and the consequent disassociation from the militarised Global Meliorism of the Clinton and Bush years, is made vividly clear in the Vietnam and Iraq alluding imagery of Avatar’s final scenes. Quaritch, echoing the Westmoreland style language he employed in his introduction, speaks of “fighting terror with terror”, and “blasting a crater in their racial memories so deep they won’t come

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within a thousand clicks of this place ever again”. This dualism is reemphasised during the subsequent battle between Quaritch’s vehicles and the Nav’i, who utilise pterodactyl-like creatures known as “mountain banshees” against the RDA’s aircraft. Quaritch boasts of “shock and awe” while trying to counteract the Viet Cong vein of Guerrilla warfare practised by the Omaticaya, who use their knowledge of the jungle environment to hijack the marauding planes. The lineage between the failings of Vietnam and Iraq is most explicit at the film’s ending. After Quaritch’s army is dramatically defeated, Selfridge and his corporate employees are forced to leave Hell’s Gate in handcuffs. The scene, which takes place on the runway of Hell’s Gate, is bathed in golden, sanguine cinematography, a tone oppositional to the portent of Sully’s first arrival there. Nevertheless, despite this optimism, the conclusion of Avatar pervades a serious political message against the nation-­ building agendas of liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. Sully wryly comments that “the aliens went back to their dying world”, associating himself with the interests of the Na’vi and inverting the traditional neocolonial dynamic. The declinism in Sully’s statement is heightened by the mise en scène; the runway setting, as well as the Na’vi who escort the RDA employees and private soldiers, presents a more benign rendition of the climatic scenes in 1975 Saigon. Those scenes, which saw the mass exit of US diplomats from a collapsing South Vietnamese regime, halted the United States’ pursuit of Global Meliorism for a generation. In presenting this scene for 2009 audiences, Avatar implores pragmatism, foregrounding a new consensus after a decade exhausted by intervention. Avatar presents the defeat of the unilateral idealism and militarised Global Meliorism incipient in the Clinton years. Its political imagery highlights how the Iraq War returned the latter ideology to its Vietnam era contradictions, a fatalism further evoked by Cameron’s portrayal of rival occupying forces. Sully’s narrative arc delineates liberal interventionist decline, unveiling, much as Three Kings did a decade earlier, a reconceptualisation of American diplomacy.

Notes 1. General Eric Shinseki (quoted in Ricks 2006, 99) accounts for the propagandistic effect of Zarqawi’s blackmail, which created the view that “we were working with Zarqawi to create the maximum amount of chaos possible”.

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2. Wilson’s collaboration with European leaders and the resultant fallout of the First World War are detailed by McDougall (1997, 140–142); an early analysis of these events by Bailey (1944, 297–298) delineates how the “Fourteen Points” for a harmonious post-World War One order promised to Germany by Wilson were “violated”, as the allies “could invoke principles that operated to Germany’s disadvantage, and discard those that did not”. 3. Galbraith (quoted in Cooper 2009, 716) describes the “full scale occupation with imperial Americas cloistered in a palace of the tyrant, eating bacon and drinking beer, surrounded by Ghurkhas and blast walls”. 4. Gillon (2010, 169) discusses FDR’s New Deal as a “bold and ambitious reform agenda designed to revive the economy and the nation’s spirit”, which consequently “redefined the relationship between the federal government and its citizens”. 5. Hillenbrand (2017, 127–166) provides valuable insight into the ‘Tank Man’ photograph and its resonance.

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Coyne, Michael. 2008. Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen. London: Reaktion Books. Cuordileone, K.A. 2005. Manhood and American Political Culture During the Cold War: Masculinity, the Vital Centre and American Political Culture in the Cold War, 1949–1963. Abingdon: Routledge. Damrosch, Lori. 1994. Nationalism and Internationalism: The Wilsonian Legacy. New York University Journal of Law and International Politics 26 (3): 493–510. De Castros Santos, Maria Helena. 2015. Interests and Values in Obama’s Foreign Policy: Leading from Behind? Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 58 (2): 119–145. Desjardins, Pierre. 2010. Avatar: Nothing But a ‘Stupid Justification for War!’ WorldMeets.US, January 28. http://worldmeets.us/lemonde0000223. shtml#axzz3zRj7mRVW. Dower, John W. 2005. Occupation: A Warning From History. In The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on US Foreign Policy, ed. Lloyd C.  Gardner and Marilyn B.  Young, 182–197. New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company. Drolet, Jean-Francois. 2010. A Liberalism Betrayed? American Neoconservatism and the Theory of International Relations. Journal of Political Ideologies 15 (2): 89–118. Eckstrand, Nathan. 2014. Avatar and Colonialism. In Avatar and Philosophy: Learning to See, ed. George A.  Dunn, 190–200. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Faludi, Susan. 2007. The Terror Dream. New York: Metropolitan Books. Forsythe, David P. 2011. The Politics of Prisoner Abuse: The United States and Enemy Prisoners after 9/11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fradley, Martin. 2013. What Do You Believe In? Film Scholarship and the Cultural Politics of the Dark Knight Franchise. Film Quarterly 66 (3): 15–27. Fussi, Alexandra. 2016. Loyalty and Love in Plato’s Republic. In Philosopher: European Vistas, edited by Antonia Lastra and Josep Monserrat-Molas, ed. Leo Strauss, 43–66. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Gerhard, Wilfried. 2014. American Exceptionalism and the War in Iraq. ENDC Proceedings 18: 11–24. Gillon, Steven M. 2010. Democratic Party, 1932–68. In The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, Volume 1, ed. Michael Kazin, Rebecca Edwards, and Adam Rothman, 169–172. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Graubard, Stephen. 2006. The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. London: Penguin. Hampton, Mary N. 1996. The Wilsonian Impulse: US Foreign Policy, the Alliance and German Unification. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

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Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2012. Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age. Portland, Oregon: Zero Books. Hatcher, Patrick Lloyd. 1990. The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists in Vietnam. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press. Hillenbrand, Margaret. 2017. Remaking Tank Man, in China. Journal of Visual Culture 16 (2): 127–166. Ikenberry, G. John. 2009. Introduction: Woodrow Wilson, the Bush administration and the Future of Liberal Internationalism. In The Crisis Of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century, ed. G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tony Smith, 1–24. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2011. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jimbo, Mackie. 2010. Why Did China Kill ‘Avatar’? The Atlantic, January 20. h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e a t l a n t i c . c o m / b u s i n e s s / a r c h i v e / 2 0 1 0 / 0 1 / why-did-china-kill-avatar/33817/. Kagan, Robert. 2006. Dangerous Nation: US Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Vintage Books. Keck, William. 2008. Aaron Eckhart Puts on His Best Acting Face. USA Today, July 29. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/people/2008-07-28-eckhart_N.htm. Kellner, Douglas. 2010. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-­ Cheney Era. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Kirkpatrick, Jeanne J. 1979. Dictatorships & Double Standards: The Classic Essay That Shaped Reagan’s Foreign Policy. Commentary, November. https://www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/dictatorships-double-standards/. Klavan, Andrew. 2008. What Bush and Batman Have in Common. The Wall Street Journal, July 25. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121694247343482821. Larkin, Hillary M. 2016. The Victorian Aetiology of Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism. Intellectual History Book 26 (4): 537–555. Lethem, Jonathan. 2008. Art of Darkness. The New York Times, September 20. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21lethem.html. Lock, Edward. 2010. Soft Power and Strategy: Developing a Strategic Concept of Power. In Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox, 32–50. Abingdon: Routledge. Lofflmann, Georg. 2015. Leading from Behind—American Exceptionalism and President Obama’s Post-American Vision of Hegemony. Geopolitics 20 (2): 308–332. Malewitz, Raymond. 2014. The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mann, James. 2012. The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power. London: Penguin Books.

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McDougall, Walter A. 1997. Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ———. 2011. Are US Foreign Policy Traditions Relevant to the Middle East? In Culture and Civilisation: Volume 2: Beyond Positivism and Historicism, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz, 16–32. Abingdon: Routledge. McGlinchy, Stephen. 2009. Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy. E-International Relations, June 1. https://www.e-ir.info/2009/06/01/ neo-conservatism-and-american-foreign-policy/. McSweeney, Terence. 2014. The ‘War On Terror’ And American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mead, Walter Russell. 2001. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2010. The Carter Syndrome. Foreign Policy, January 4. https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/01/04/the-carter-syndrome/. Meyer, Michael. 2014. The 10th Anniversary of a Photo That Changed the Iraq War: An Image from Fallujah and Its Consequences. Columbia Journalism Review, March 30. https://archives.cjr.org/feature/one_day_in_the_war_of_ images.php?page=all. Muller, Christine. 2011. “Power, Choice, and September 11 in The Dark Knight.” In The 21st Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre, and Globalization in Film, edited by Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamanidou, 46-59. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company. Newitz, Annalee. 2009. When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’? Gizmodo, December 18. https://io9.gizmodo.com/ when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar-5422666. Ninkovich, Fraud. 1999. The Wilsonian Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 1990. Soft Power. Foreign Policy 80 (Autumn): 153–171. ———. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New  York: Public Affairs. Ordona, Michael. 2009. Eye-popping ‘Avatar’ Pioneers New Technology. SFGate, December 13. https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Eye-poppingAvatar-pioneers-new-technology-3278484.php. Packer, George. 2005. The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq. New  York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. PBS Frontline. n.d. The Dark Side. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/themes/darkside.html. Accessed 1 Aug 2019. Pheasant-Kelly, Frances. 2013. Fantasy Film Post 9/11. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pollack, Kenneth M. 2013. The Fall and Rise and Fall of Iraq. Middle East Memo 29 (July): 1–21.

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Prince, Stephen. 2009. Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Quinn, Adam. 2015. Obama’s National Security Strategy: Predicting US Policy in the Context of Changing Worldviews. London: The Royal Institute for International Affairs. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/ field/field_document/20150109ObamaNationalSecurityQuinn.pdf. Ricks, Thomas E. 2006. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. London: Penguin. Saunders, Elizabeth N. 2014. Transformative Choices: Leaders and the Origins of Intervention Strategy. In American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays, ed. G. John Ikenberry and Peter L. Trubowitz, 7th ed., 521–550. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shortlist. 2019. 15 Things You (probably) Didn’t Know About ‘The Dark Knight’. Last modified September 2. https://www.shortlist.com/news/15-thingsyou-probably-didnt-know-about-the-dark-knight. Simpson, David. 2006. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Singh, Robert S. 2011. Continuity and Change in Obama’s Foreign Policy. In The Obama Presidency: Appraisals and Prospects, ed. Bert A.  Rockman, Andrew Rudalevige, and Colin Campbell, 268–294. Washington DC: CQ Press. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2009. Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century. In The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century, ed. G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tony Smith, 89–117. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Steven B. 2006. Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Tony. 2009. Wilsonianism After Iraq: The End of Liberal Internationalism? In The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century, ed. G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Tony Smith, 53–88. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stahl, Jason. 2016. Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. Steigerwald, David. 1994. Wilsonian Idealism in America. Ithaca, New  York: Cornell University Press. Thakur, Gautum Basu. 2015. Postcolonial Theory and Avatar. London: Bloomsbury. The Guardian editorial. 2010. Avatar Protest at West Bank Barrier. 14 February. h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / w o r l d / g a l l e r y / 2 0 1 0 / f e b / 1 4 / west-bank-barrier-avatar-protest. The Week Magazine editorial. 2009. Avatar’s ‘Ugly’ Message. December 22. https://theweek.com/articles/498243/avatars-ugly-message.

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Toh, Justine. 2010. The Tools and Toys of the War on Terror: Consumer Desire, Military Fetish, and Regime Change in Batman Begins. In Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror”, ed. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, 127–140. New  York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Westwell, Guy. 2014. Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema. New  York: Columbia University Press. Williams, William Appleman. 1972. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Worth, Robert F. 2006. Blast Destroys Shrine in Iraq, Setting Off Sectarian Fury. The New York Times, February 22. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/ international/middleeast/blast-destroys-shrine-in-iraq-setting-off sectarian. html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=F1AED648C1917300DD153D48419 ECBAC&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL. Zeiler, Thomas W. 2000. Dean Rusk: Defending the American Mission Abroad. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Books. Zizek, Slavoj. 2010. Avatar: Return of the Natives. The New Statesman, March 4. h t t p s : / / w w w. n e w s t a t e s m a n . c o m / f i l m / 2 0 1 0 / 0 3 / a v a t a r- r e a l i t y love-couple-sex.

Filmography Advice and Consent. 1962. Directed by Otto Preminger. USA: Columbia Pictures. Aliens. 1986. Directed by James Cameron. USA: 20th Century Fox. Apocalypse Now. 1979. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA: United Artists. Avatar. 2009. Directed by James Cameron. USA: 20th Century Fox. Batman Begins. 2005. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. The Best Man. 1964. Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. USA: United Artists. Blade Runner. 1982. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA and Hong Kong: Warner Bros. Born on the Fourth of July. 1989. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Universal Pictures. Dances with Wolves. 1990. Directed by Kevin Costner. USA: Orion Pictures. The Dark Knight. 2008. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. District 9. 2009. Directed by Neill Blomkampf. USA, New Zealand and South Africa: Sony Pictures. Full Metal Jacket. 1987. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA and United Kingdom: Warner Bros. No Country for Old Men. 2007. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. USA: Miramax. Rambo. 2008. Directed by Sylvester Stallone. USA: Lionsgate. Team America: World Police. 2004. Directed by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. USA: Paramount Pictures.

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There Will be Blood. 2007. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. USA: Paramount Vantage. Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros. United 93. 2006. Directed by Paul Greengrass. USA, United Kingdom and France: Universal Pictures. War of the Worlds. 2005. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Paramount Pictures. Zero Dark Thirty. 2012. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. USA: Sony Pictures.

CHAPTER 7

Stasis: The Continuation of Contradiction in the Age of Malaise and Populism

The earlier chapters explored a series of motion pictures that engage with notions of contradiction in US foreign policy and consequently synergise with the kaleidoscopic understanding of American diplomacy outlined by Mead. By focusing on films spanning the 1990s and 2000s, it is clear that narrative elements and characterisations reflect incongruous relationships between International Relations principles and outlooks. The political contortions of Andrew Shepard in The American President portend the combustible interactions of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian schools; the volatile attempt to reconcile hard and soft power is integral to Gary Johnston’s narrative arc in Team America: World Police; the final revolt of Avatar befits the Obama administration’s effort to meld Jeffersonian introversion with Wilsonian altruism. The broadness of these examples, in both genre and subtext, attests to the inherent prevalence of contradiction in American foreign policy and film’s role in negotiating this theme. Memorable precedents from the New Hollywood and Classical Hollywood periods suggest that numerous American pictures of the 1990s and 2000s draw on an already existing tradition of International Relations allegory, despite differing in their subject matter. The recognition of contradiction, or cognitive dissonance, became a resplendent trope of American cinema in the post-9/11 era. Moreover, representations of contradiction build on and complement the presence of time-honoured dichotomies derived from American history and culture. The conflicting imperatives of “self-interest versus © The Author(s) 2020 T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1_7

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ideals” (Huntingdon 2014, 297) and “order versus violence” (Schlesinger, quoted in Coyne 2008, 12), respectively underlined by the references to Huntingdon and Schlesinger’s arguments in the first chapter, anchor the treatment of foreign policy in productions as diverse as political dramas, Revisionist Westerns and comic book adaptations. Specific invocations of historical contradiction supplement these illuminations of a cognitive dissonance in American life and foreign policy. Most common is the transgression of the Vietnam War, which fuels the anxieties of Colonel Ron Horn in Three Kings and vividly embeds itself in the minutiae of Avatar’s Hell’s Gate. Yet there are other possible interpretations; Daniel Plainview’s shifts between Social Darwinism and progressivism in There Will be Blood recall the contradictory imperialism of the late nineteenth century, while the authoritarian realism in The Dark Knight reflects a stance enervative of the liberal internationalism vaunted by Woodrow Wilson in 1918 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945. Most salient in each picture, however, are contemporaneous issues surrounding American foreign policy relevant to their year of release. 1996’s Independence Day mirrors the potential for centrist triangulation through military intervention in the 1990s; 2003’s Tears of the Sun engages with the alliance forged between militarists and evangelical Christians in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks; 2005’s Syriana, notably released in the first year of Bush’s second term, predicts a world where the Wilsonian goals endorsed by neoconservatives are sabotaged by Hamiltonian predilections. Different films deal with the lack of reconciliation within International Relations in distinctive ways. In pictures such as Three Kings, Team America and Avatar, resolution is achieved after lengthy periods of ideological conflict and incongruity. Gates’s rapprochement with Horn, Gary’s ‘dicks, pussies and assholes’ speech, and Sully’s championing of Pandora’s natives all foreground a new consensus associated with the national zeitgeist. By ‘new consensus’, I mean political configurations and ideological blends that put forward an image of political moderation designed as an antidote to the fears of overseas quagmire. These include the remoulded Global Meliorism of the 1990s, a modified variant of smart power and a determined application of the ‘leading from behind’ approach pioneered by Obama. Some films concerning these standpoints conclude somewhat artificially, restoring a sense of both narrative and political equilibrium to a world plagued by uncertainty.

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The endings of other productions, encompassing many released over the course of Bush’s presidency, propound disarray while invoking the failures of important ideological and political collaborations. The lost patriarchal authority of Ed Tom Bell at the end of No Country for Old Men, the collapsing state of Plainview’s empire during the final scene of There Will be Blood, and the noble lies of The Dark Knight’s climax purvey subtexts of disintegrating foreign policy coalitions and imperial overstretch. Key in these films is the unwieldiness of intervention, the dominance of political extremes and the supplanting of one facet of American foreign policy for another. Much as the Bush administration struggled to straddle Jacksonian nationalism, Hamiltonian mercantilism and Wilsonian idealism in the Iraq War, these pictures render an International Relations landscape that is mercilessly chaotic, culminating in scenes of ideological dysphoria. Withstanding these contrasts, the films examined share an affinity in their emphasis on diplomatic incongruity. The rising prevalence of allegory charted across the book perhaps highlights that this style is more effective at painting crosscurrents of policy than pictures that attempt to attain an aesthetic realism, a point conveyed by Mamoon Abassi’s dual analysis of Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009). Inverting the fantastical premise of Avatar’s Pandora setting, Abassi sees James Cameron’s blockbuster as a more nuanced portrayal of the difficulties of winning hearts and minds than the gritty verisimilitude of Bigelow’s war opus, which is set in 2004 Iraq. The cognitive dissonance and contradictions of US foreign policy, and the need for resolution, is central to Avatar, a film that stresses the damaging impact of American hard power to Abassi (quoted in Barker 2011, 160): Ironically, and contrary to official film labeling, for many Iraqis ‘Avatar’ is seen as the most accurate Iraq War movie so far, while ‘The Hurt Locker’ might appear as more alien to them. The link to Iraq in ‘Avatar’ is apparent to many from the outset of the film, but it is further entrenched with the use of terms like ‘shock and awe’ and ‘fighting terror’. However, the plot thickens. The blue humanoids in ‘Avatar’ appear more humane than their human invaders, who came from earth to steal the resources of their planet. In ‘The Hurt Locker’, where we follow an adventurous US bomb squad in Iraq, the Iraqis in the movie appear to serve just as a background that shows how heroic the film’s stars are. Almost faceless and voiceless, they are—as in the world of politics—robbed of their humanity.

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The spirit of political allegory and reflection of fragmentation has continued since the distribution of Avatar in 2009; yet these phenomena have manifested differently across two ideologically oppositional presidential administrations. On one level, a cycle of films which arrived late in Obama’s presidency reflects Bacevich’s (2016, 370) notion, put forward at the end of his 2016 book America’s War for the Greater Middle East, that the American populace remain “deep in slumber” about a United States unable to “reshape itself” and restore “effectiveness to self-­ government” in response to imperial overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan. The various pictures reflective of this context contain the refrains of circumscribed civil liberties, endless war and disjunctions between realism and idealism which escalated in Bush’s second term, normalising longstanding disconnects. Productions released after the 2016 election, however, have shown International Relations dichotomies take on an impassioned and possibly more partisan bent, capturing the extreme divides of white nationalism and cosmopolitan globalism illustrated by Trump’s electoral victory. In the final pages of this book, I examine these discrepancies and posit hypotheses for the future of diplomatic allegory.

The Normalisation of Malaise: The Late Obama Era The low-key odyssey of Boyhood (2014), a drama directed by Richard Linklater which charts the growth of a seven-year-old boy from the year 2002 until the summer of 2013, reifies a sense of numbness synergetic with Bacevich’s view of a somnambulistic American perception. Boyhood, which is set in Linklater’s home state of Texas, follows the lives of Mason Evans Jr. and divorced parents, Mason Sr. and Olivia, along with sister Samantha. The narrative consists of set pieces which range from the banal to the melodramatic, underscored respectively in discussions of the future of the Star Wars franchise and arguments between mother Olivia and her family circle. One novelty of this eclecticism is its simulated occurrence in the ‘moment’. The film was shot incrementally from 2002 to 2013, a process which allowed its child protagonist to develop onscreen and his parents to age in front of the viewer’s eyes. As Chloe Schama (2014), a reviewer for The New Republic, noted, aspects of Boyhood resemble Michael Apted’s Seven Up documentary series, which, starting in 1964, followed the lives of several individuals from childhood into late middle age. The treatment of tumultuous political events in Boyhood, presented as proximate to their occurrence as cinematically possible, also invites fascination.

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A scene in 2004 where Mason Sr. talks to his son about the upcoming presidential election features a rant against George W.  Bush delivered without the benefit of hindsight and the distance of history. In this sense, Boyhood is somewhat comparable to the tonally oppositional 25th Hour in showcasing reactions to transformative moments relatively improvisational and impromptu. It differs, however, in its tangible normalisation of political upheaval. Seismic episodes such as the Iraq War and the 2008 election are assimilated within a quotidian context, mere adjuncts to the real-world routines and dramas experienced by Mason Jr.’s family. At the same time, interpretable allegories of diplomatic failure emerge from the juxtaposition of Mason Jr.’s formative years and the subdued political mise en scene. It seems no coincidence that soon after Mason Sr.’s rant against the Iraq War and the imperial excesses of the Bush administration, Olivia marries an alcoholic academic with authoritarian tendencies. Bill’s controlling tendencies and perniciousness steadily increase over the film’s first half. He signals synergy with Texas’s red state identity when he ensures that Mason Jr. has his head shaved, a prescriptive ritual which purveys undertones of illiberal militarisation. His monitoring of his biological children’s phones further elicits memories of the anti-civil liberties Patriot Act, illuminating meaning in the personal as well as the political. The ambience of malaise reflected in the tropes of failed fatherhood renews in the years which coincide with Obama’s presidency and implies the futility of hopes for reform. Soon after a humorous sequence where Mason Jr. is told off for putting an ‘Obama 2008’ campaign poster on a Confederate sympathiser’s lawn, Olivia embarks on a relationship with Jim, a mature student and Iraq War veteran. In their first onscreen exchange, Jim talks about his involvement with the chaos resultant from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. As with Bill, disappointment follows. Linklater soon establishes that, circa the early 2010s and in the throes of the Great Recession, Jim has been forced to take a job as a security guard and, in a sign of encroaching alcoholism, drinks resentfully. Boyhood’s failed models of fatherhood, not unlike America’s political leadership, are doomed to disappoint and incapable of orchestrating unity. In a landscape of endless war and economic inequality, the surrogates of Bill and Jim provide perceivable allegories of a stasis in American diplomacy. Connotations of political shortcomings are delivered, in other respects, genially and subtly. Peripheral elements of Boyhood’s second half speak to a relinquishing of the Democratic hopes for peace and economic security

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through the amicable depiction of figures traditionally part of liberal demonology. Mason Sr. eventually remarries into a conservative family steeped in Christian piety and Mason Jr.’s meeting with them is suffused with cordiality, an ephemeral and unlikely glimpse of the transcendence of a “red state, blue state” divide once visualised in Obama’s 2004 National Democratic Convention speech in Boston (Leibovich 2016). When Mason Jr. works in a fast food restaurant at the age of seventeen, his boss is a character of affable goofiness rather than a harbinger of neoliberal exploitation and even appears at his graduation party as a gesture of goodwill. Far from the partisan disdains and hopes which infused Linklater’s allusions to the Bush and Obama campaigns, these subtle asides introduce an acceptance of political difference and imperfection, a pragmatism which occurs in tandem with the film’s delineation of the ageing process. This disposition can be understood as a peculiar inversion of the politics manifest in George Stevens’s Giant (1956), another film preoccupied with the social vagaries of a Texan family. As mentioned in the first chapter, Giant follows the social changes experienced by a multi-generational Texan dynasty over a series of decades. Whereas Stevens’s picture builds towards a grand allusion to the inequities of pre-civil rights America, implicit in the barring of patriarch Jordan Benedict’s interracial grandchildren and daughter-in-law from a diner, Boyhood concludes with a sense of quietude and contented exhaustion. Olivia remarks, before her son heads off to college, that life has moved too fast and she “thought there would be more”. Mason Jr. ends the film by contemplating that existence, rather than consisting of moments to be seized, encompasses moments which “seize us”. Far from a wakeup call against social injustice and imperial overstretch, Linklater’s mosaic of Texan life is cheerfully fatalistic, celebrating the bewilderment inherent in our interactions with popular culture, the social institutions of church and school, and political change. Films part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically those released towards the end of Obama’s first term and throughout his second, ratify similar refrains of political imperfection and cognitive dissonance.1 The 2012 blockbuster The Avengers, a production premised on an iconic superhero squad uniting to fight an alien invasion, features a climax set in Manhattan redolent of the 9/11 attacks, raising the implication that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to alleviate the trauma of their casus belli. Much as Avatar’s expansive allegory rivalled the hermetic realism of The Hurt Locker in political resonance, The Avengers’s evocation of anxieties resultant from the War on Terror offers saliences which compete

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with Zero Dark Thirty (2012), a Kathryn Bigelow directed geopolitical thriller concerning the build-up to Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011. As Pardy (2016, 28) comments, “The Avengers recognizes that the long running wars have made American patriotism divisive” through a finale which “harkens back to 9/11 with its New York setting”. Some critics as well noticed this fixation, albeit occurring in jingoistic fashion. Richard Brody of The New Yorker (n.d.) thought Joss Whedon’s production “carries out its cartoonish mission while addressing graver concerns—the construction of a post-9/11 revenge fantasy that takes place against the backdrop of unpopular foreign wars”. The arc of leading billionaire scientist Tony Stark, otherwise known as the superhero Iron Man, returns to these predilections in the beginning film of ‘phase two’ of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man 3 (2013). Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of the battle of New York and facing a villain primed to launch terrorist attacks on the United States, the titular superhero encounters threats that would have been relevant a decade earlier and grapples with the atmosphere of endless war cultivated in The Avengers.2 The Captain America films accumulate comparably repetitive emphases on malaises emergent in the Bush years and recurrent in Obama’s presidency.3 The first instalment depicting this traditionally patriotic superhero, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), tells the origin of Steve Rogers, a man with multiple physical ailments who transforms into the super soldier Captain America for the Second World War. This debut for the comic book hero climaxes with Rogers frozen in time and its epilogue shows him thawed for the world of 2011. In the more subversive 2014 sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rogers attempts to adjust to twenty-first-century society after missing out on seven decades of human development and history, discovering wider fissures within America’s political life as a result. Although a significant part of the film’s action portrays the threat provided by the Winter Soldier of the title, who attacks Rogers late in the first act, its explicitly politicised elements do not stem from its signature antagonist. The plot comes to hinge on the revelation that Hydra, a pernicious organisation defeated during the throes of Second World War in the first film, has agents planted within the ranks of S.H.I.E.L.D., the special law enforcement organisation which facilitates superhero collaboration in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In a scene purveyed by the overtones of

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1970s conspiracy thrillers The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975), Rogers finds a secret bunker in New Jersey which reveals that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been subverted by Hydra since the end of the Second World War. This is proved by a supercomputer housing the consciousness of Dr Armin Zola, a Nazi scientist thought to have been eliminated in The First Avenger. Zola speaks of creating a world so “chaotic, that humanity is ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security”, invoking the classic tropes of the idealism/realism dichotomy. The pernicious trade-off envisioned by Zola, coupled with Captain America’s coming to terms with his missing out on seventy years of US history, can be seen to address a discrepancy between the moral mission of the pre-1945 fight against Nazism and the comparatively murkier politics of the subsequent Cold War. Yet Captain America: The Winter Soldier arguably offers greater resonance for the bipartisan disillusionments of the Obama era in its fear for a United States corrupted by rogue agencies and vulnerable to authoritarianism. Both voices of the radical left and libertarian right seized on its conveyance of a political landscape where national security priorities override privacy and civil liberties. In respect to a moment where a Hydra mole confesses to employing surveillance and private data to execute individual threats, Josh Bell (2014) of the ACLU drew parallels between this policy and the revelations over the National Security Agency’s spying in 2013, an instance of a “secretive agency … undermining the very values that the government is meant to protect”. Bell also detected that Hydra’s “secret helicarrier program” of “Project Insight”, an operation premised on aircraft designed for widespread assassination, overlapped with Obama’s liberal adoption of drone strikes and his “legal justification for putting people on the real-world kill list” (ibid.). Conversely, Republican commentator Glenn Beck (quoted in McSweeney, 2018, 164) suggested that Captain America: The Winter Soldier formed a “pro-American story”, replete with libertarian shibboleths against “killing people with drones” and “spying”. The third film in the Captain America trilogy, Captain America: Civil War (2016), showcases further frustrations with the unsatisfactory triangulations and renewed schisms of the Obama years. Released in the final year of a presidency alternating between unilateral drone attacks and the vaunting of soft power diplomacy, this sequel, effectively an ‘Avengers 2.5’ because of its inclusion of multiple characters from across the MCU, reiterates a clash between realism and idealism. The catalyst for this friction occurs as a result of an episode of collateral damage in Lagos, Nigeria,

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brought on by a firefight between the Avengers and criminal supervillain Brock Rumlow. The Sokovia Accords, a set of resolutions passed by the UN which circumscribe the actions of the superhero team through a regulatory panel, prompt differences of opinion between Captain America and Iron Man. Whereas the former accentuates the distrust of big government implicit in The Winter Soldier by decrying the accords as a threat to “our right to choose”, the latter draws on his creation of the robotic antagonist Ultron (a plot development of 2015s The Avengers: Age of Ultron) to rationalise the UN oversight and assertions of multilateralism. Compounding matters are the divided allegiances of fellow Avengers, separations which lead to a memorable set piece at a German airport where erstwhile allies fight one another. A dark plotline encompassing the brainwashing of Rogers’s WW2 comrade Bucky Barnes, who was revealed as the Winter Soldier in the third act of the previous film, adds to the crosscurrents afflicting the MCU. Captain America: Civil War derives its inspiration from the Marvel Civil War comics of 2006–2007, a crossover storyline which provides the foundation for the feuds of Rogers and Stark. Erdemandi (2013, 214) viewed this yearlong comic book saga as synergetic with “post-9/11 debates over national security and civil liberties”. These alternate priorities are again respectively outlined in Iron Man and Captain America, who disagree over the introduction of “governmental regulations to protect civilians” and dispute whether “registering superhero identities will take away their personal freedoms” (ibid., 217). There are crucial alterations made to the work of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven by Captain America: Civil War directors Anthony and Joseph Russo. The Civil War comic books depict Stamford, Connecticut, as the site of collateral damage which dramatises the need for superhero regulation, a contrast with the 2016 blockbuster’s use of Lagos, Nigeria. Illustrations of firefighters sent to rescue New Englanders trapped under debris, juxtaposed with a funeral service for children lost to the tragedy (Millar and McNiven 2007), form invocations of the days following the 9/11 attacks. This haunting symbolism is substituted in Captain America: Civil War for an allegory more ecumenical in orientation; the fact that the Russo Brothers present the Sokovia Accords as a product of the UN rather than the US government of the comic book source material plays to contemplations of America’s reputation in the world and supersedes the anxieties of domestic national security. If, as Erdemandi (2013, 223) contends, the Civil War comic

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books contain “debate over the role of freedom and security”, the Russo Brothers’s production extends this dichotomy into the realm of International Relations, injecting irreconcilabilities of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian central to the post-Iraq era. Coupled with this capturing of disjunction are the refrains of stasis familiar to Obama’s second term and the failures to mine true Wilsonian alternatives to endless war. The tone emblematises this mood of resignation. Despite a bombing attack at a UN ceremony in Vienna which kills T’Chaka, a leader of an African kingdom central to the MCU, and a twist which establishes that a brainwashed Barnes assassinated Stark’s parents in 1991, Captain America: Civil War is subdued in its evocation of trauma compared to the source material’s allegorisation of 9/11. The film’s ending, which lacks resolution and succeeds an inconclusive fight between Rogers and Stark, differs wholly from the epilogue of the comic books, which show the surrender of Captain America to the authorities. Further, for most of the picture, it is unclear whether the audience should be siding with Roger’s unilateralism or Stark’s Wilsonianism, an ambiguity which prompted McSweeney (2018, 254) to note the “reasonably balanced argument” delineated. To McSweeney (ibid., 254), it is only late in the second half where the film sides with Rogers, a stance resultant from Stark’s “internment” and “involuntary incarceration” of his opponent’s allies. This deliberativeness is contrary to the hyperpartisanship of the political rhetoric and the superficial qualities of the cinematic milieu which has attended Trump’s presidency. Heading beyond the stasis of the preceding years of American politics, Trump’s victory in 2016 extrapolated the disintegrating relationship between the Wilsonian and Jacksonian polarities, illuminating diametrical opposition to the syntheses of both these schools evident cinematically and diplomatically twenty years earlier. Moreover, his campaign and presidency have inspired allegories galvanised by the surge of nativist populism across the Western world and fixated on the undercutting of homeostasis within Mead’s kaleidoscope, mirroring vituperative dynamics in contemporary foreign policy debate.

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Trump’s Presidency: The Continuation or End of Kaleidoscopic Diplomacy in American Cinema? The inauguration of Donald Trump, an event outlined at the beginning of this book, can be interpreted as a homogenisation of the multifaceted complexion of American statecraft cited by Mead. The president’s inaugural address in January 2017 rebuked a long-term neglect of Jacksonian shibboleths through references to an “enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry” and the “very sad depletion of our military” (Trump 2017). Several articles by Mead acknowledged these grievances as essential to understanding Trump’s repositioning of Jacksonianism as a national force, but more importantly, they implied their break with Mead’s kaleidoscopic thesis. In January 2016, Mead (2016a) viewed Donald Trump’s strong status in the Republican primaries as proof that Andrew Jackson, the populist nineteenth-century president after whom the Jacksonian school is named, was again “central in American political life”. In the wake of Trump’s surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton in November, Mead (2016b) underlined the ascension of the Jacksonian further through the hypothesis that “Mr. Trump’s strongest supporters are the twenty first-century heirs of a political tendency that coalesced in the early 1820s around Andrew Jackson”. The military historian, Andrew Bacevich, echoed this perception of the Trump phenomenon as a transformative updating of Jackson’s politics. Bacevich (2017) identified Trump’s victory as a repudiation of “the underlying consensus informing US policy since the end of the Cold War”. This repudiation was catalysed by the Hamiltonian pressures of “unfettered neoliberalism” and the Wilsonian ideal of “the US military as a global police force”, making Trump’s rise of greater impact than the “crude Andrew Jackson’s ousting of an impeccably pedigreed president” (ibid.). The nullification of a “post-Cold War consensus” meant that Jackson’s defeat of John Quincy Adams in the 1828 presidential election “was nothing compared to the vulgar Donald Trump’s defeat of an impeccably credentialed graduate of Wellesley and Yale who had served as first lady, United States senator, and secretary of state” (ibid.). The motifs of a purist Jacksonianism located in Trump’s touting of ‘America first’, have, however, been simultaneously countervailed by the president’s mercurial governing style. Despite his campaign’s rejection of a militarised Wilsonianism that had been shared by Republican neoconservatives and liberal interventionist Democrats, various incidents have

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elicited the resumption of a kaleidoscopic approach. The vituperative reaction of the ‘Alt-right’ to Trump’s bombing of Syria for human rights violations in April 2017 hinted that the Wilsonian/Jacksonian breakdown of the late Bush years was liable to return in a newer, conspiratorial form.4 Trump’s failure to achieve total withdrawal from the Middle East and Afghanistan, a distinguishing feature of his campaign especially when juxtaposed with the accusations of ‘globalism’ levelled at Hilary Clinton, established the truly perennial nature of the endless war once promised to be abolished by Obama. On the domestic front, the citing of tax cuts as the main achievement of Trump’s first two years in office foregrounded the ineluctability of a Republican Hamiltonianism largely ignored in his populist 2015–2016 campaign.5 Like the rapacity and vulgarity of Daniel Plainview, the avaricious and seemingly improbable candidate Trump, at least on an attitudinal level, has belied the benevolent America championed by neoconservative and liberal interventionist ideologies. Yet this anarchic tendency has frequently only served to renew the politics of the kaleidoscope, resurrecting old habits and refusing to exorcise longstanding demons. Hollywood allegories released during Trump’s presidency have fittingly reflected the divisions of the binary and heterogeneous qualities respectively attributable to his administration’s electioneering rhetoric and conduct in office. The Shape of Water (2017), an Oscar winning magical realist story set in early 1960s Baltimore and directed by Guillermo del Toro, overlaps with the binary position. The premise of del Toro’s film revolves around a romance between Elisa Esposito, a cleaner rendered mute as a child through an unspecified act of violence, and an amphibian man retrieved from the Amazon River by the US military. Esposito grows to sympathise with the amphibian man’s imprisonment and abuse under military personnel in her job as a cleaner in a secret laboratory in Baltimore, relating especially to his position as representative of an oppressed minority. Their courtship begins in a first act which also touches on the oppression of African Americans and outlines the inequities experienced by Esposito’s homosexual next-door neighbour Giles, who is ejected from a diner for revealing his sexuality to a male employee. Reifying the social and racial illiberalism of the pre-civil rights United States, Esposito and the amphibian man’s relationship contends with the bigotries of an America orientated around an atavistic Jacksonian agenda. This political antagonism emerges in the chief villain, Colonel Richard Strickland, who tortures the amphibian man in the secret government

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laboratory and supports the amphibian man’s vivisection in order to advance US scientific knowledge in the Space Race. It is outside these applications of violence, however, where Strickland most connects with the vulgarities of the Trumpian political persona. Displaying attitudes not far removed from the language of the ‘Hollywood Access tape’ and Trump’s mockery of a physically disabled reporter employed by The New  York Times (BBC 2015), in one scene Strickland simultaneously threatens Esposito sexually and mocks her muteness by boasting that he can “make her squawk a little”. In another aside, this time taking place in Strickland’s suburban home and soon after an altercation with the amphibian man, the colonel has sexual intercourse with his wife and instructs her to be silent, nihilistic behaviour relatable to Trump’s brand of populistic chauvinism. Although The Shape of Water was shot prior to Trump’s inauguration, its filming period took place from August 15, 2016, to November 6, 2016 (IMDB n.d.-b). This therefore intersected with the dramatic final months of the 2016 presidential race, a synergy accentuated in a 2018 article by John Richardson titled, “The Shape of Water: an allegorical critique of Trump”. Richardson (2018) views the characters of Esposito, Giles and Zelda, an African American friend and work colleague for Esposito, as emblematic of “Americans who live lives of quiet oppression in the past-­ tense America that shimmers, mythical and revered, at the heart of the Trump campaign promise”. This period, a point of nostalgia for Trump’s vision but anathema to Hillary Clinton’s, offered “comfort and reassurance to people whose lives have been disrupted by global trade, population movements and the emergence of AI in the workplace” (2018). If the Americans who lived under quiet oppression stood out as representative for the progressive supporters of Hillary Clinton, Strickland is “designed as a bridge to Trump’s present-day political toxicity”, through “boasts about his power to sexually assault women” (ibid.). Del Toro’s condemnation of the cultural Jacksonianism hegemonic in America’s early 1960s is complemented by his portrayal of superpower politics. The journey from dove to hawk signalled by scientist Robert Hoffstetler, a Russian mole hired to extract the amphibian man for vivisection by the KGB, rejects the hardnosed realism typified by Strickland’s Soviet counterparts. Coming around to a kind of humanist internationalism, Hoffstetler repeatedly refuses to kill the amphibian man and even abets his escape in collaboration with Esposito, Giles and Zelda. Hoffstetler’s torture and murder at the hands of Strickland in the third act

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only acts as an overture to the exorcism of cold American Realpolitik. The Shape of Water concludes with a showdown between Strickland and the amphibian man which results in the former’s execution and the latter’s triumph, illustrated in voiceover dialogue provided by Giles which tells the viewer that Esposito lived “happily ever in love” with the amphibian man. An alternately heterogeneous allegory can be found in Black Panther (2018), a comic book adaptation which declines to ratify easy assumptions about the Trump era’s ideological polarities. Resembling Avatar, Ryan Coogler’s Oscar nominated addition to the MCU elicits a passionate treatise on imperialism and multifarious allegorical readings which mask its shifts towards centrist resolution. The ‘Black Panther’ superhero of the title is T’Challa, the designated heir to a sub-Saharan African kingdom known as Wakanda. Unknown to the West and the international community, Wakanda harbours technology far superior to the ‘developed world’ and is disguised as a third world nation in order to safeguard its wealth from colonial marauders. Its leaders have been part of a dynastic line empowered both by a metal known as vibranium and heart-shaped herbs which enhance physical prowess and enable communion with deceased Wakandan rulers. A tradition of isolationalism has allowed the economic and cultural realities of T’Challa’s country to remain hidden from Western diplomats. Yet the policy alterations proposed at the end of the life of Wakanda’s recently deceased previous king, T’Chaka, force son and new monarch T’Challa to contemplate whether it is appropriate to renew longstanding policies of non-involvement with the United States and abstention from intervention in impoverished neighbouring African states. Vexingly, before his death in Captain America: Civil War at the hands of a bombing perpetrated by the brainwashed Bucky Barnes, T’Chaka stated to the UN that “Wakanda is proud to extend its hand in peace” through cooperation with other nations and ratification of the Sokovia accords, a Wilsonianism nullified by his demise. Black Panther, in addressing the political ambitions left unfulfilled by T’Chaka’s departure, universalises the dilemma of establishing firm boundaries between what Brands (1998) categorises as “exemplarism” (which is based on the worldview of an America leading by example) and “vindicationism” (which hinges on an America performing the role of global policeman). Brands’ dichotomy, which manifested itself fluidly in Team America: World Police, is transplanted to the setting of Wakanda through an early exchange between the newly enthroned king T’Challa

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and childhood friend W’Kabi. Moving from the exemplarist view that Wakanda should consolidate its values “at home” (ibid., 4), T’Challa references the desirability of internationalist policies encompassing “refugee programs” and “foreign aid”. This philosophical change overlaps with the vindicationist ideal of America “as a beacon to the world”, portraying diplomacy as a Manichean choice between “freedom and slavery” (ibid., 2). Coogler reflects the danger of a drift from the soft power of exemplarism to the hard power of vindicationism, however, through T’Challa’s cousin and chief antagonist, Erik Stevens, otherwise known as “Killmonger”. Killmonger is the unfortunate son of N’Jobu, the younger brother of King T’Chaka who planned to undermine Wakanda’s policy of isolationalism while an undercover agent in the United States. T’Chaka’s execution of N’Jobu for treason left a child Killmonger abandoned in South Central Los Angeles and destined to take on the role of hawkish claimant to Wakanda’s throne. As an adult, Killmonger’s experience as a black operations soldier in the regime changes wrought to Iraq and Afghanistan reinforces his endorsement of a kind of Pan-African vindicationism, crystallised in a plot to overthrow T’Challa and use Vibranium technology to “arm oppressed peoples all over the world”. Despite how Black Panther relates Brands’ dichotomy to a subtext of African American resistance and condemnation of colonialism, its motifs of black self-governance have been interpreted by several ‘Alt-right’ critics as allegoric of the need for a world governed between culturally homogenous ethnostates. This reading counteracted reviews which foregrounded Coogler’s “prismatic perspectives on black life and tradition” (Smith n.d.). John Nolte of Breitbart (2018) claimed that Black Panther was Donald Trump’s “big screen avatar”, because of “the healthy form of nationalism” in Wakanda. A YouTube user known as Black Pigeon Speaks (2017) noted that Wakanda’s leaders presided over a conservative “hereditary monarchy” and an “anti-globalist society”, which had “little interest in sharing its wealth and resources”. Yet both progressive and reactionary endorsements of Black Panther neglect how Coogler’s production arrives at an interplay of the realist and idealist schools respectively attributable to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns in 2016, restoring the politics of the kaleidoscope. Coogler’s picture climaxes with the defeat of Killmonger’s unrestrained interventionism and consequently restores a semblance of political equilibrium. This is explicit in an epilogue where T’Challa finishes his father’s interrupted speech for the UN by proclaiming “the wise build bridges

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while the foolish build barriers”, updating the address to rebuke Trump’s nativism. Unlike the liberal interventionist and neoconservative policies corrosive to America’s recent reputation, however, Wakanda’s progressivism will not be spearheaded through militarism, nor will it veer wildly between exemplarist rhetoric and vindicationist practice. By constructing an outreach centre in South Central Los Angeles as the first cautious step on the road to global engagement, T’Challa hints that Wilsonian internationalism is best applied pacifically, tempered with the prudence of the Jeffersonian. If Black Panther typifies the reconciliation possible in diplomatic allegory, Joker (2019), another comic book adaptation, attests to the collisional framing and disarray applicable to the Trump years. Like No Country for Old Men, director Todd Phillips’s origin story for Batman’s most iconic opponent is set at the dawn of the Reagan era in the early 1980s and evokes disjunctions between the Jacksonian and Hamiltonian schools. The film opens with the mugging of outcast protagonist and aspiring stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck by a gang of delinquents, focalising a Gotham City curiously redolent of pre-Giuliani New York in its anarchy.6 Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Fleck invokes the troubled men ingrained in American cinematic lore by director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro in the 1970s and 1980s, echoing Taxi Driver’s (1976) vigilante Travis Bickle and The King of Comedy’s (1983) wannabe comic Rupert Pupkin in his portrait of maladjustment. The first half is devoted to Fleck’s isolation and the foolhardiness of his attempts at launching a comedic career in imitation of his idol, TV host and funnyman Murray Hamilton.7 These efforts are hindered by a complex neurological disorder which causes Fleck to laugh at inopportune moments and marks him out as easy prey for Gotham’s criminal classes. As the narrative develops and Fleck’s aspirations repeatedly meet harsh reality, Hamilton, in the eyes of Fleck, increasingly takes on the aura of a patronising liberal indifferent to the crime wave afflicting Gotham, catalysing a Jacksonian animus “profoundly suspicious of elites” (Mead 2001, 224). In a dramatic confrontation with Hamilton which forms Joker’s climax, Fleck, dressed in clown garb and realising his identity as The Joker, speaks resignedly to a landscape of anarchic realism by describing an environment where “nobody’s civil anymore” and “everybody just yells and screams at each other”. Throughout Joker, Phillips contextualises this Hobbesian state with indications of Fleck’s alienation from neoliberal mores. Implicitly

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jettisoning the kinship between Jacksonian populism and Hamiltonian finance forged under Reagan, the downtrodden Fleck’s first descent into criminal vigilantism sees him shoot three drunk yuppies employed by Wayne Enterprises on Gotham’s subway. The shootings of the men, which are initially driven by self-defence as the Wayne Enterprises employees physically attack Fleck, inspire a revolt amongst much of Gotham’s citizenry. Public demonstrations against Gotham’s moneyed classes glorify a crime which poses a reimagining of the atavistic Jacksonianism conveyed by the New York subway shootings carried out by Bernard Goetz in 1984, celebrating a violence which punches up as well as down.8 To CNN’s Jeff Yang (2019), Joker “is the story of the ‘forgotten man’” who “has been crushed underfoot by the elite” as well as “climbed over by upstart nonwhite and immigrant masses”, a mixture of antipathy which offers “an insidious validation of the white-male resentment that helped bring Donald Trump to power”. Yet the incarnation of billionaire Thomas Wayne in Phillips’s film compromises this populism through its suggestion of a repetition of the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian collisions promised catharsis by Trump’s campaign. Bruce Wayne’s father, far from the gentle patriarch of noblesse obliges sentiment played by Linus Roache in Batman Begins, is this time a vulgar ideologue who enters an election race for Gotham mayor soon after learning of the subway shootings. Decoupling the configurations of Trumpism as much as Reaganism, Wayne’s pursuit of political power, which is justified with the moral observation that “Gotham has lost its way”, shows intentions of consolidating the hegemony of his corporate class. In rhetoric which prioritises deference to the rich in lieu of protectionism for Jacksonian America, Wayne foregrounds the preeminence of “those of us who’ve made something of our lives” and laments the contemptibility of individuals “envious of those more fortunate than themselves”. In a further reversal of Trump’s reputation as the ‘blue-collar billionaire’ tribune of the Jacksonian proletariat, Thomas Wayne exposes the false solidarity at the heart of the strong man persona when he rejects requests for help from Fleck, who, at one stage in Joker, believes himself to be the magnate’s son. This disconnect becomes moreover tangible when a red herring in the form of a letter provided by Fleck’s mentally ill mother, Penny, alleges that her troubled son is Wayne’s illegitimate child and sparks a set of transformative revelations in the third act. Upon accosting Wayne at a public campaign event, Fleck is told by the plutocrat that his

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mother is mentally ill and in fact not his biological parent. Shortly after being punched in the face by Wayne for an incongruous laughing fit, Fleck researches records on his mother in Arkham Asylum and discovers that he is indeed an adoptee, burdened with a history of childhood abuse which gave him brain damage. Fleck’s subsequent full embrace of the Joker identity and unleashing of political upheaval hinges on the Trumpian Thomas Wayne’s facilitation of antagonisms between the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian, creating a broader allegory for the truly kaleidoscopic nature of post-2016 America. The somewhat cacophonous critical reception of Joker has attested to this polychromatic picture. Critics such as The New Yorker’s Richard Brody (2019), interpreting the shootings in Gotham’s subway as hewing closely to the racist overtones of Goetz’s shooting of four African American youths in 1984, argued that Phillips “whitewashes Goetz’s attack, eliminating any racial motive and turning it into an act of self-defense gone out of control”. Fleck’s mugging by a gang of teenagers at the start of the film, meanwhile, foregrounds “an attack on an isolated and vulnerable white person by a group of young people of color” (ibid.). Joanna Robinson (2019) of Vanity Fair viewed Joker as synergetic with the anxieties of “the incel”, catering to an “ongoing cultural reckoning with toxic masculinity and the violence perpetrated by angry, young white men”. Phoenix’s representation, “a downtrodden, mentally ill man”, made his Joker the “perfect clown prince to haunt the Trump era” (ibid.). Other critics gauged an allegory left wing in purpose and instead implied that Joker focalises the injustices wrought by the Hamiltonian more than it rationalises the cause of the atavistic Jacksonian. Micah Uetricht of The Guardian (2019) contended that a plot development involving Fleck losing access to a social worker and counsellor because of government austerity showed how these characters’ interests were “intertwined against the wealthy billionaire class and their political lackeys who are slashing public services”. Kyle Smith (2019) of the conservative National Review summarised Phillips’s production as “positively Jacobinic” because of its setting in 1981, the same year “Reagan was shot … by a warped loner much like Fleck”. Christina Newland (2019), another writer for The Guardian, disputed readings of Joker as “a reactionary call for incel vigilantism” by instead emphasising “the severe cuts to mental health services affecting Arthur’s stability”. Fittingly, the conclusion of Joker encompasses the deaths of both the limousine liberal Hamilton and the brash billionaire Thomas Wayne (the former is directly

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killed by Fleck, the latter by an individual inspired by Fleck’s violence), illuminating a narrative which culminates in the fragmentation evident in There Will be Blood and The Dark Knight. Will the spirit of contradiction remain a feature of American cinema beyond Trump’s presidency? The mid-term elections of 2018, which marked the best Democratic performance since the fallout from Nixon’s pardon in 1974, seemed to herald a liberal apogee in the eyes of many commentators. No less a figure than David Frum (2018), the former Canadian-American speechwriter for George W. Bush, acknowledged the Democratic advance “in suburbs and among better-educated voters”, corroborated “in won seats such as the Seventh Congressional District of Texas, a seat won by George H.W. Bush in 1966”. The purging of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey from Hollywood memory, meanwhile, served to outline a new foundation for a revivified progressivism. Liberal opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2018 built on the goals of the ‘Me Too’ movement and underlined its comprehensive ambition. Upon release from the strictures of the Coronavirus pandemic which followed Trump’s impeachment trial and acquittal, filmmakers will likely pontificate about the more lethal consequences of Hamiltonian globalisation and cite recent market shocks as the death knell for neoliberalism’s existence. Nevertheless, fissures will inevitably resurface within liberal America. The rival presidential campaigns launched in 2019 by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who are respectively centrist and socially democratic, hint at a friction which could outlast the euphoria of a Republican defeat in 2020. Conversely, if Trump transcends the collective trauma and economic devastation resultant from the Covid-19 outbreak by winning reelection, the Democratic Party could be compelled to embrace the kind of homeostasis emblematic of the centrist Clinton era. Neither, however, will Trump and the Republican Party be immune from similar alterations. A Trump victory in 2020 could further escalate the schismatic dynamics observable in his first term and which were corrosive in George W. Bush’s second, nullifying aspirations of Jacksonian supremacy. The vagaries of the fragmented kaleidoscope are, in short, liable to deny partisan apotheosis. As I look forward to what American filmmakers can proffer in response to this ceaseless landscape, the dramatic changes, but also recurring tensions of the last four years tell me that contradiction is here to stay.

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Notes 1. Thorough analyses of the simultaneously individual and interlocking purposes of films part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (commonly abbreviated as ‘MCU’) are provided by McSweeney. The Film Studies scholar describes how cycles of films are divided into phases and “culminate in something more than a sequel. … A cinematic ‘mega event’” (McSweeney 2018, 18). The excitement around this ‘mega event’, embodied in the numerous superheroes taken from various stand-alone films and placed together in The Avengers instalments, is further juxtaposed with allegorical resonance. McSweeney speaks of the MCU’s “cultural function” (ibid., 20) and its addressing of “particular crises of national identity which emerged in the wake of the trauma of 9/11” (ibid., 27). 2. The successive allegorical shifts of pictures containing Iron Man are synergetic with the broader patterns outlined in the second half of this book. Iron Man, released in 2008, purveys the Wilsonian-Jacksonian breakdown located in The Dark Knight and Avatar through billionaire protagonist Tony Stark’s decision to abandon weapons manufacturing and collusion with the militarised regime change championed by neoconservative ideologues. By employing the Iron Man suit to combat insurgency in lieu of American troops, Stark encapsulates the liberal opinion that the United States should cease ‘boots on the ground interventions’ following the second Gulf War. A scene where Stark stops a terrorist takeover of an Afghan village with minimal collateral damage also foreshadows the Obama administration’s view that judicious use of military power, coupled with respect for cultural difference, could reform the damage inflicted on America’s international reputation by Bush. This contrasts with the productions analysed in this chapter. My evaluation of affinities between MCU films released under Obama and Bacevich’s 2016 critique shows that later instalments involving Iron Man stress the difficulty of overcoming what Mann (2012, 334) summarises as the “permanent changes” wrought by the War on Terror. 3. Although not affiliated with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Dark Knight Rises is another comic book film which focalises motifs of malaise and stasis. This is perceivable in its allegorisation of the divides engendered by The Great Recession and the continuation of Bush’s national security policies. Released in the same summer as The Avengers, this sequel to The Dark Knight (2008) and Batman Begins (2005) delineates a class-based revolt against Gotham’s elites through villain Bane’s attack on the city’s Stock Exchange and war on billionaire Bruce Wayne. It moreover features what McSweeney (2014, 124) defines as “ongoing attempts to vividly dra-

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matise the fears of the post-9/11 era”, namely through public reveals of the illiberal cover-ups hatched at the end of The Dark Knight and a climax encompassing a return of the WMD threat foregrounded in Batman Begins. 4. In the wake of the airstrikes launched by Trump in April 2017, The Atlantic journalist Rosie Gray (2017) noted the dissent of individuals such as the “alt-right leader” Richard Spencer and “pro-Trump blogger” Mike Cernovich. 5. In an article published soon after the Republican loss of the House of Representatives in the 2018 mid-term elections, Jonathan Chait (2019) sardonically defined the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as “the crown jewel of the Trump presidency”. It was also “the singular legislative achievement that even Trump-skeptical Republicans can point to”. 6. McNamara and O’Neill (2012, 263) discuss how the New York mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani (which lasted from the beginning of 1994 until the end of 2001) relied on “the packaging of a narrative of urban change”. This sought to ameliorate the memory of “the fiscal crisis that had rendered the city bankrupt in the 1970s” and “the deterioration in relations between the police and some ethnic groups” (ibid., 263); Joker was shot predominantly in New  York City. Specifically, shooting locations included The Bronx, Harlem and Manhattan (IMDB, n.d.-a). 7. The casting of De Niro as this figure ironically references The King of Comedy, where De Niro essentially played the role occupied by Phoenix as Fleck in Joker. 8. Bernard H. Goetz was a thirty-seven-year-old electrical engineer who fired five rounds at four African American teenagers on the New York subway on December 22, 1984. According to Michael Schwirtz (2013) of The New York Times, one of the adolescents, Darrell Cabey, “was paralyzed and sustained brain damage”. Goetz told the police that he “had been mugged in the past” and “feared being robbed again” by the young men, “who asked him for the time and a cigarette” (ibid.).

References Bacevich, Andrew. 2016. America’s War For The Greater Middle East. New York: Random House. ———. 2017. Trump Is Not the Problem. The Nation, August 8. https://www. thenation.com/article/trump-is-not-the-problem/. Barker, Martin. 2011. ‘A Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films. London: Pluto Press. BBC. 2015. Donald Trump Under Fire for Mocking Disabled Reporter. November 26. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34930042.

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Bell, Josh. 2014. What Captain America Has to Say About the NSA. Common Dreams, April 19. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/04/19/ what-captain-america-has-say-about-nsa. Black Pigeon Speaks. 2017. Black Panther: A Hero the #AltRight Deserves? YouTube. Last modified June 18. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=POZCF9t9FUI. Brands, H.W. 1998. What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brody, Richard. 2019. “Joker” Is A Viewing Experience Of Rare, Numbing Emptiness. The New  Yorker, October 3. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/joker-is-a-viewing-experience-of-rare-numbingemptiness. ———. n.d. The Avengers: Not Unlike An F-16 Stunt Run. The New  Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-avengers-notunlike-an-f-16-stunt-run. Accessed 4 Sep 2019. Chait, Jonathan. 2019. Trump’s One Legislative ‘Win’ Is Actually a Failure. Intelligencer, January 20. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/ trumps-one-legislative-win-is-actually-a-failure.html. Coyne, Michael. 2008. Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen. London: Reaktion Books. Erdemandi, Max. 2013. Marvel’s Civil War: An Allegory of September 11 in the American Civil War Framework. Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History 2: 213–223. Frum, David. 2018. There Is No Progressive Majority in America. The Atlantic, November 14. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/ what-midterms-showed-about-progressive-candidates/575899/. Gray, Rosie. 2017. Trump’s Disillusioned Supporters. The Atlantic, April 7. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/tr umpsdisillusioned-supporters/522336/. Huntingdon, Samuel. 2014. American Ideals Versus American Institutions. In American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays, ed. G.  John Ikenberry and Peter L. Trubowitz, 7th ed., 297–322. Oxford: Oxford University Press. IMDB. n.d.-a. Joker (2019): Filming & Production. https://www.imdb.com/ title/tt7286456/locations?ref_=tt_dt_dt. Accessed 27 Nov 2019. ———. n.d.-b. The Shape of Water (2017): Filming & Production. https://www. imdb.com/title/tt5580390/locations?ref_=tt_dt_dt. Accessed 13 Nov 2019. Leibovich, Mark. 2016. The Speech That Made Obama. The New  York Times Magazine, July 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/magazine/thespeech-that-made-obama.html. Mann, James. 2012. The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power. London: Penguin Books.

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McNamara, Kim, and Donald McNeill. 2012. The City Personified: The Geopolitical Narratives of Rudy Giuliani. Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 9 (3): 259–278. McSweeney, Terence. 2014. The ‘War On Terror’ And American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2018. Avengers Assemble!: Critical Perspectives On The Marvel Cinematic Universe. New York: Columbia University Press. Mead, Walter. 2001. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2016a. Andrew Jackson, Revenant. The American Interest, January 17. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/17/andrew-jacksonrevenant/. ———. 2016b. Donald Trump’s Jacksonian Revolt. Hudson Institute, November 13. https://www.hudson.org/research/13010-donald-trump-s-jacksonianrevolt. Millar, Mark, and Steven McNiven. 2007. Civil War. Tunbridge Wells: Panini Publishing. Newland, Christina. 2019. ‘Incel’ Violence Is Horrific, But Joker Is Complex, and Doesn’t Take Sides. The Guardian, September 2. https://www.theguardian. c o m / f i l m / 2 0 1 9 / s e p / 0 2 / i n c e l - v i o l e n c e - j o k e r- r i g h t w i n g - f i l m joaquin-phoenix. Nolte, John. 2018. Nolte: Pro-Trump ‘Black Panther’ Breaks Box Office Records Without Breaking New Ground. Breitbart, 20 February, https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2018/02/20/pro-trump-black-panther-breaksbox-office-records-without-breaking-new-ground/. Pardy, Brett. 2016. Selling Marvel’s Superheroes Through Militarization. Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology 8 (2): 23–35. Richardson, John. 2018. The Shape of Water: An allegorical critique of Trump. The Conversation, March 18, https://theconversation.com/the-shape-ofwater-an-allegorical-critique-of-trump-93272. Robinson, Joanna. 2019. This Is the Joker the Trump Era Deserves—But Not the One We Need Right Now. Vanity Fair, October 4. https://www.vanityfair. com/hollywood/2019/10/joker-joaquin-phoenix-trump-era. Schama, Chloe. 2014. Boyhood Is a Stunning Experiment in Filming Time. The New Republic, July 9. https://newrepublic.com/article/118615/ richard-linklaters-boyhood-stunning-experiment. Schwirtz, Michael. 2013. Bernard Goetz, Man in ’84 Subway Shooting, Faces Marijuana Charges. The New York Times, November 2. https://www.nytimes. com/2013/11/03/nyregion/bernard-goetz-man-in-84-subway-shootingfaces-marijuana-charges.html. Smith, Kyle. 2019. The Politics of Joker. National Review, October 5. https:// www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-politics-of-joker/.

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Smith, Jamil. n.d. The Revolutionary Power of Black Panther. Time Magazine. https://time.com/black-panther/. Accessed 21 Nov 2019. Uetricht, Micah. 2019. Joker Isn’t an Ode to the Far Right  – It’s a Warning Against Austerity. The Guardian, October 11. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2019/oct/10/joker-far-right-warning-austerity. Yang, Jeff. 2019. Joker - - a Political Parable for Our Times. CNN, October 6. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/06/opinions/joker-political-parabledonald-trump-presidency-yang/index.html.

Filmography The American President. 1995. Directed by Rob Reiner. USA: Sony Pictures. Avatar. 2009. Directed by James Cameron. USA: 20th Century Fox. The Avengers. 2012. Directed by Joss Whedon. USA: Walt Disney Studios. Batman Begins. 2005. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. Black Panther. 2018. Directed by Ryan Coogler. USA: Walt Disney Studios. Boyhood. 2014. Directed by Richard Linklater. USA: IFC Films. Captain America: Civil War. 2016. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. USA: Walt Disney Studios. Captain America: The First Avenger. 2011. Directed by Joe Johnston. USA: Paramount Pictures. Captain America: The Winter Soldier. 2014. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. USA: Walt Disney Studios. The Dark Knight. 2008. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Bros. The Dark Knight Rises. 2012. Directed by Christopher Nolan: Warner Bros. Giant. 1956. Directed by George Stevens. USA: Warner Bros. The Hurt Locker. 2009. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. USA: Summit Entertainment. Independence Day. 1996. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA: 20th Century Fox. Iron Man 3. 2013. Directed by Shane Black. USA: Walt Disney Studios. Joker. 2019. Directed by Todd Phillips. USA: Warner Bros. No Country for Old Men. 2007. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. USA: Miramax. Seven Up. 1964. Directed by Paul Almond. UK: ITV – Independent Television. The Shape of Water. 2018. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Syriana. 2005. Directed by Stephen Gaghan. USA: Warner Bros. Team America: World Police. 2004. Directed by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. USA: Paramount Pictures. Tears of the Sun. 2003. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. USA: Sony Pictures. There Will be Blood. 2007. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. USA: Paramount Vantage.

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Three Days of the Condor. 1975. Directed by Sydney Pollack. USA: Paramount Pictures. Three Kings. 1999. Directed by David O. Russell. USA: Warner Bros. 25th Hour. 2002. Directed by Spike Lee. USA: Buena Vista Pictures. Zero Dark Thirty. 2012. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. USA: Sony Pictures Releasing.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 1930 Hayes Code, 7 1960s counterculture, countercultural elements of films, 35 1980 presidential election, 55, 61n8 1992 presidential election, 39, 41, 42, 55 1994 mid-term elections, 40, 41, 60n3 2000 presidential election, 88, 116, 170 2004 presidential election, 192 2006 mid-term elections, 201 2008 financial crisis, see The Great Recession 2008 presidential election, 28, 233 2016 presidential election, 1 2017 Inauguration of Donald Trump, 239 2017 Women’s March, 2 2018 mid-term elections, 249n5

A Abu Ghraib, 136, 198, 199 Adams, John Quincy, 59n2, 60n5, 239 Advice and Consent (1962 film), 190 Air Force One (1997 film), 27, 36, 56, 57 Albright, Madeleine, 40, 42 Alford, Matthew, 79, 80, 84, 87, 98, 120, 122, 215 Aliens (1986 film), 208 Allegory, allegorical films and the allegorical process, v, vi, 1–28, 35, 36, 82, 96, 99, 108, 114, 115, 135, 142, 150, 153–155, 157, 160, 167–171, 173, 179, 180, 204, 212, 215, 218, 219, 229, 231–234, 237, 238, 240, 242, 244, 246 Al-Qaeda, 44, 110, 112, 136, 162, 195, 218 Altman, Robert, 68, 123 The ‘Alt-right,’ 240

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 T. J. Cobb, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42678-1

255

256 

INDEX

Ambrosius, Lloyd E., 8 American exceptionalism, 45, 47, 118, 120, 220 The American President (1995 film), 20, 27, 35–48, 50, 51, 56, 229 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 28, 150, 153, 165, 166, 168, 170–172, 174, 178, 179 Apocalypse Now (1979 film), 217 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007 film), 150 Avatar (2009 film), 19, 28, 187–221, 229–232, 234, 242, 248n2 The Avengers (2012 film), 2, 234, 235, 248n1, 248n3 The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015 film), 237 Axis of evil speech, 88 B Bacevich, Andrew, 3, 22, 28, 44, 66, 85, 118, 120, 127, 137, 155, 170, 178, 192, 207–209, 232, 239, 248n2 Bardem, Javier, 151, 181n2 Barker, Martin, 209, 231 Bataan (1943 film), 9, 10, 94 Batman Begins (2005 film), 27, 108, 133–142, 143n8, 188, 199, 245, 248–249n3 Baudrillard, Jean, 72, 74, 123 Baxter, Monique James, 6 Beck, Glenn, 236 Behind Enemy Lines (2001 film), 18, 24, 25, 27, 29n1, 66, 83–95, 98, 100n9 Berman, Paul, 162, 173, 176 The Best Man (1964 film), 190 Biden, Joe, 247 Bigelow, Kathryn, 231, 235

Bin Laden, Osama, 110, 112, 117, 118, 135, 235 The Birth of a Nation (1915 film), 8, 9 Black Hawk Down (2001 film), 18, 24, 27, 66, 83–94, 96, 98, 100n8, 122 Black Panther (2018 film), 4, 28, 242–244 Blade Runner (1982 film), 207 Blair, Tony, 58, 139 Blomkampf, Neil, 215 Bloom, Harold, 192, 193 Born on the Fourth of July (1989 film), 5, 207 Boyhood (2014 film), 28, 232–234 Brands, H.W., 126, 136, 242, 243 Bremer, Paul, 149, 150, 172, 176, 208, 212 Brinkley, Douglas, 56 Brokeback Mountain (2005 film), 26 Bush, George H.W., 19, 21, 46, 66, 67, 78, 84, 99n2, 100n3, 169, 247 George H.W. Bush years, 4 George H.W. Bush’s administration, 39, 40, 69, 83 Bush, George W., 15, 18, 23, 27, 28, 67, 69, 72, 84, 88, 89, 97, 99, 108, 113, 116–119, 124, 125, 127, 136, 140, 142n1, 142–143n2, 149, 150, 154, 157, 159, 170, 178, 180, 181, 191, 203, 205, 219, 230–234, 247, 248n2, 248n3 Bush’s administration, 15, 25, 27, 40, 67–69, 72, 84, 88, 93, 94, 96, 97, 111, 112, 117, 119, 124, 126, 127, 129, 139, 143n2, 149, 153–156, 160, 165, 169–174, 176, 179, 187, 193, 194, 199, 201, 203–205, 220, 231, 233

 INDEX 

Bush years or Bush era, 133, 135, 168, 179, 190, 193, 194, 204, 220, 235, 240 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969 film), 6, 7 C Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (1988 book), 17 Cameron, James, 205 Capra, Frank, 5 Captain America: Civil War (2016 film), 28, 236–238, 242 Captain America: The First Avenger (2011 film), 235 Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014 film), 235, 236 ‘Captivity narrative,’ 96 Carter, Jimmy, 37, 196 Carter administration, 196, 198 Casablanca (1942 film), 20–22 Chapman, Charlie, 26 Chapman, James, 212 Cheney, Dick, 127, 170, 172, 197 Chigurh, Anton, 151, 152, 155, 157–166, 181n1, 181n2, 189, 195, 198 Chile coup in 1973, 114 Christensen, Terry, 25, 117 Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (2010 book), 16 Classical Hollywood era and studio system, 6 Clinton, Bill, 15, 21–23, 26, 36–42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 55–59, 60n5, 60n7, 65, 68, 75, 77, 80, 84, 85, 89, 92, 114 Clinton years or Clinton era, v, 4, 15, 19, 36, 54, 59n1, 66, 82, 210, 220, 221, 247

257

Clinton’s administration, 22, 26, 27, 35, 38, 39, 42, 43, 60n4, 69, 80, 81, 129 Clinton, Hillary, 1, 48, 55, 239–241, 243 Clintonian approach to foreign or domestic policy/Clintonian qualities in films, 94 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), 149, 150, 172 The Coen Brothers, 21, 28, 150, 151, 153, 159, 160, 164, 165, 178 The Cold War, 7, 11, 16, 50, 69, 85, 122, 190–193, 196, 210, 217, 236, 239 Collateral Damage (2001 film), 122 Combs, James, 26 ‘Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,’ 141 Constructivism/constructivist foreign policy, 23, 130 Continental realism, 3 Contract with America, see 1994 mid-term elections Coogler, Ryan, 242, 243 Cook, David, 13 Corliss, Richard (film critic), 21, 22 Coronavirus pandemic, 247 Coyne, Michael, 7, 19, 20, 25, 153, 190, 230 Cull, Nicholas J., 212 Curtiz, Michael, 21 D Dances with Wolves (1990 film), 215 The Dark Knight (2008 film), 19, 23, 28, 138, 143n6, 143n7, 187–221, 230, 231, 247, 248n2, 248–249n3 Davis, Angela, 2, 75 De Niro, Robert, 244, 249n7 Del Toro, Guillermo, 240, 241

258 

INDEX

Democratic enlargement, 56 Die Hard (1988 film), 5 Dinner at Eight (1933 film), 5 The Dirty Dozen (1967 film), 10 District 9 (2009 film), 215 Dole, Bob, 55 Dukakis, Michael, 46 E Eisenhower, Dwight, 14, 37, 205 Emmerich, Roland, 49, 50, 53–55 Empire lite, 91, 174 The end of history, 23, 149 Enron scandal, 112 E.T. (1982 film), 17 Exemplarist foreign policy, 126 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011 film), 16, 18 F Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004 film), 25, 27, 108–120, 130 Faludi, Susan, 154, 164, 206, 207, 209, 213 Falwell, Jerry, 111, 170 The First Gulf War, 19, 50, 66–68, 70, 72, 77, 79, 83, 99n1, 99n2, 99n3 The First World War, 3, 8, 196, 198, 222n2 Forman, Milos, 5 Forrest Gump (1994 film), 26 Frum, David, 247 ‘The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture’ (2005 article by Gearóid Ó Tuathail), 29n1, 88 Fukuyama, Francis, 23, 28, 88, 149, 156, 158, 173, 174, 180

Full Metal Jacket (1987 film), 212 Fuqua, Antoine, 24, 66, 94–96, 98, 100n10 G Gaghan, Stephen, 25, 139, 141 Gardner, Lloyd C., 129, 178 Giant (1956 film), 6, 234 Giglio, Ernst, 25, 26 Gingrich, Newt, 41, 60n3 Giuliani, Rudy, 249n6 Globalisation, 15, 19, 24, 36, 53–55, 70, 72, 73, 76, 80, 82, 83, 98, 158, 161, 247 Globalism, 55, 196, 232, 240 Global Meliorism, 11, 14, 27, 65–99, 129, 175, 188, 205–207, 209, 210, 216, 217, 220, 221, 230 Goetz, Bernard, 245, 246, 249n8 Gore, Al, 88, 116 The Great Recession, 4, 149, 233, 248n3 The Great Society, 12, 36–38, 176 Griffith, D.W., 7, 8 Guantanamo Bay, 136, 199 Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (1992 book), v, 9, 94, 96 H Haas, Peter J., 25, 117 Haiti intervention, 40 Hamilton, Alexander, 3 Hamiltonian school of foreign policy (Hamiltonian, Hamiltonianism), 213 Hard power, 67, 82, 92, 108, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 122, 124, 128, 129, 133, 136, 137, 140, 142, 231, 243

 INDEX 

Harvey, David, 110, 111, 157 Hatcher, Patrick Lloyd, 210 Hegemonic reconciliation, 18, 24, 219 Helms, Jesse, 47 Hill, George Roy, 6 Hilsman, Roger, 210 Hitchens, Christopher, 44, 60n4, 119, 120, 130, 174 Holloway, David, 17, 18, 215 Hollywood VS. America: Popular Culture And The War On Traditional Values (1993 book), 4 Hollywood’s Cold War (2009 book), 7 Huntingdon, Samuel, 20, 21, 230 The Hurt Locker (2009 film), 231, 234 Hussein, Saddam, 67, 69, 72, 73, 80, 97, 98, 99n2, 138, 233 Hutton, Brian, 71 I Idealism, idealist positions and figures in U.S. foreign policy, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 19, 22, 23, 26–28, 35–61, 66–75, 79, 81, 82, 85, 89–91, 94, 116, 137, 141, 142, 143n6, 149–151, 155, 158–160, 165–167, 171, 176, 180, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 199, 200, 203–205, 210, 211, 215, 217, 221, 231, 232, 236, 243 Ignatieff, Michael, 91, 128, 173, 174, 191 Ikenberry, G. John, 108, 135, 166, 187, 190, 195 Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film (2006 book), 24 Impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, 58 Impeachment trial of Donald Trump, 247 Imperial overstretch, 15, 95, 108, 150, 179, 189, 195, 231, 232, 234

259

Independence Day (1996 film), 23, 27, 35, 48–56, 60n6, 69, 70, 81, 94, 123, 230 Independence Day: Resurgence (2016 film), 55 Internationalism, internationalist foreign policies, 96, 190, 195, 196, 210, 211, 213, 217 International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (2013 book), 23, 24, 52 In the Valley of Elah (2007 film), 150, 180 Iran coup in 1953, 141 Iraq Liberation Act, 80, 100n5 Iraq War/Second Gulf War/ Operation Iraqi Freedom, 25, 66, 79, 97, 100n10, 107, 108, 119–121, 125, 127, 137, 141, 150, 156, 174, 177, 180, 187, 188, 194, 205, 209, 212, 216, 218, 219, 221, 231, 233, 248n2 Iron Man films, 235, 248n2 ISIS, 205 Isolationalism, isolationist foreign policies, 42 Israel-Palestine conflict, 216 It’s a Wonderful Life (1946 film), 5 J Jackson, Andrew, 3, 36, 47, 60n5, 239 Jacksonian school of foreign policy (Jacksonian, Jacksonianism), 51, 213 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 37 Jeffersonian school of foreign policy (Jeffersonian, Jeffersonianism), 213 Johansson, Scarlett, 2

260 

INDEX

Johnson, Lyndon (LBJ), 7, 11, 14, 21, 27, 36, 37, 65, 81, 84, 176, 195, 211 administration, 11, 27 Joker (2019 film), 28, 244–246, 249n6, 249n7 The Joker (character), 138, 143n9, 188, 195–197, 199, 201–203, 244, 246 Judd, Ashley, 2 K Kagan, Robert, 121, 191, 197 Kaleidoscope of U.S. foreign policy, 3, 13, 131 Kavanaugh, Brett, 247 Kellner, Douglas, 16–18, 99n3, 153, 155, 169, 199, 204 Kelly’s Heroes, 71, 75, 76 Kennedy, John F., 11, 14, 27, 81 administration, 11, 14, 27, 81 Kerry, John, 120, 192 Khatib, Lina, 69 King, Geoff, 7 Kingdom of Heaven (2005 film), 16 A King in New York, 26 The King of Comedy, 244, 249n7 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne J., 193 Klavan, Andrew, 203, 204 Kolko, Gabriel, 111 Kosovo War (Kosovo), 22, 58, 70, 76, 80, 85, 192 Krauthammer, Charles, 40, 76 L LaFeber, Walter, 176 ‘Leading from behind’ approach to foreign policy, 230 The League of Nations, 188, 195 The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), 16 Lee, Spike, 5, 108, 109

Lethem, Jonathan, 203, 204 Levinson, Barry, 57, 58 Lewis, Daniel Day, 165 ‘Liberal imperialism,’ 91, 92, 173 Lincoln, Abraham, 13, 37, 39, 126, 171, 192 Linklater, Richard, 28, 232–234 Lions for Lambs (2007 film), 150, 180 Lipsitz, George, 70 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 211 Lowenstein, Adam, 26 M MacArthur, Douglas, 210 Major Dundee (1965 film), 11–13, 21 Malcolm X (1992 film), 5 Malewitz, Raymond, 152, 155, 210 The Manchurian Candidate (2004 film), 17 Manifest Destiny, 6, 115, 150, 153, 165, 166 The Marshall Plan, 210 Marvel Cinematic Universe, 234, 235, 248n1, 248n3 M*A*S*H* (1970 film), 19, 69, 71 The Matrix (1999 film), 123 McCarthy, Cormac, 150–152, 155, 158, 159, 164, 181n1, 181n2 McDougall, Walter, 11, 28, 40, 65, 74, 77, 129, 188, 196, 206, 210, 211, 217, 222n2 McGovern, George, 47 McSweeney, Terence, 16, 18, 26, 133, 135, 202, 218, 236, 238, 248n1, 248n3 McVeigh, Timothy, 47 Mead, Walter Russell, v, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 15, 25, 28, 29n1, 37, 47, 50–52, 54, 61n8, 69, 71, 82, 88, 96, 99, 111, 117, 131, 136, 142, 155, 156, 174, 187, 212, 213, 220, 229, 238, 239, 244 Medved, Michael, 4, 5

 INDEX 

‘Mexico Westerns,’ 11 Milk (2008 film), 26 Milosevic, Slobodan, 58, 85 The Military Advisory Command Vietnam, 211 Minority Report (2002 film), 24 Monica Lewinsky scandal, v38, 44, 57 The Monroe Doctrine, 40, 59–60n2 Moore, John, 60n2, 84–89 Moore, Michael, 2, 25, 116–120 Mulholland, Marc, 76, 171 Multilateralism/multilateral foreign policies, 35, 52, 55, 69, 89, 90, 203, 237 ‘Multipolar governance dilemma,’ 139 N National Security Spying Scandal of 2013, 236 National Security Strategy of 2002, 23, 127 Neocolonialism, 168, 178, 197, 213, 219, 220 Neoconservatism/neoconservative foreign policies, 28, 84, 93, 96, 108, 111, 126, 129, 131, 133, 141, 150, 155, 156, 159, 160, 165, 171, 173, 174, 176, 188, 193, 194, 199, 201, 216 Neoidealism, 52, 53 Neo-imperialism, 77, 168, 207, 211, 214 Neo-isolationalism, 93 Neoliberalism/neoliberal economic policies, 19, 21, 28, 39, 65, 81, 82, 110, 111, 119, 133, 137, 142, 149, 151–166, 171, 179, 181, 199, 212, 216, 247 The new American militarism, 3, 66, 170, 208, 209 The New Deal, 41, 210

261

New Hollywood era and/or studio system, 6, 15 ‘New World Order,’ 50, 54, 66, 69, 78, 84, 85 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 3, 158 9/11, vi, 16, 18, 24, 25, 83, 84, 92, 93, 99, 108–114, 116, 117, 121–123, 132, 135, 142n1, 154, 156, 160–162, 177, 196–198, 202, 209, 217–219, 230, 234, 235, 237, 238, 248n1 Ninkovich, Frank, 196, 198 Ninotchka (1939 film), 7 Nixon, Richard, 37, 247 Nixon administration, 114 silent majority, 13 No Country for Old Men (2007 film), 3, 17, 21, 23, 24, 28, 143n3, 149–181, 187, 189, 195, 198, 199, 204, 206, 210, 231, 244 Nolan, Christopher, 16, 133, 134, 137, 188, 189, 197, 199, 203, 204 Noonan, Peggy, 154 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 39 Nye Jr., Joseph, vi, 5, 7, 27, 77, 107–111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 122, 126, 127, 130, 134, 136, 138–141, 214, 217 O Obama, Barack, 28, 204, 205, 220, 230, 232–236, 238, 240, 248n2 Obama’s administration, 15, 204, 205, 220, 229, 248n2 Obama years/Obama era, 19, 28, 181, 204, 206, 220, 232–238 Office of Special Plans, 97, 127, 194 Oklahoma City Bombing, 47, 48 Operation Infinite Reach, 44, 45

262 

INDEX

P Packer, George, 97, 127, 176, 194, 198 The Parallax View (1974 film), 118, 236 Parker, Trey, 108, 120, 125, 132 Patriot Act, 118, 189, 201, 233 Peckinpah, Sam, 11, 13, 14, 76 Pheasant-Kelly, Frances, 16, 18, 208, 209 Phillips, Kevin, 142n2, 176 Phillips, Todd, 244–246 Phoenix, Joaquin, 244, 246, 249n7 Plainview, Daniel, 150, 165–180, 209, 217, 230, 231, 240 Platoon (1986 film), 10 Platoon films, 9–11, 94, 96 The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (1997 edition), 35, 37 Populism, 1, 7, 60n4, 68, 69, 71, 87, 153, 155, 169, 229–247 Post-9/11 era/years/cinema/ militarism, 4, 16, 17, 36, 88, 89, 131, 138, 156, 188, 229, 249n3 Preemptive presidential leadership/ politics of preemption, 27, 38, 42 ‘The Princeton Project on National Security,’ 108 ‘Project for a New American Century’ (PNAC), 80 R Raskin, Richard, 21, 22 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 21, 44, 48, 58, 61n8, 151, 155, 156, 245, 246 Reagan years/Reagan era, 17, 38, 39, 117, 141, 155, 164, 173, 207, 244 Reagan’s administration, 41, 79, 135, 138, 152, 198

Reagan Democrat, 55, 155, 156 Reaganite approach to domestic or foreign policy/Reaganism’s presence and Reaganite qualities in films, 42, 60n4, 164, 166 Realism, realist positions and figures in U.S. foreign policy, 3, 4, 6, 10, 14, 19, 22, 23, 28, 40, 42, 49, 52, 69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 82–84, 89, 90, 96, 97, 107, 115, 149, 150, 158, 166, 200, 205, 230–232, 234, 236, 241, 244 Realpolitik (foreign policy stance), 19, 22, 23, 25, 40, 74, 79, 80, 95, 135, 140, 142, 201, 242 Red Dawn (1984 film), 7 Reiner, Rob, 36–38, 41, 45 Revisionist Westerns, 3, 7, 10, 15, 17, 21, 28, 74, 100n7, 142, 150, 153, 155, 180, 230 The Revolution in Military Affairs, 137, 140 Ricks, Thomas, 209, 221n1 Robbins, Tim, 129, 130 Robertson, Pat, 111, 170 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (often shortened to FDR), 3, 22, 37, 39, 41, 47, 65, 176, 195, 205, 210, 230 Rove, Karl, 84, 122 Rumsfeld, Donald, 80 Rusk, Dean, 196 Russell, David O., 174 Ryan, Michael, 17 S ‘Safety valve’ theory of the frontier, 115 Salvador (1986 film), 17 Sanders, Bernie, 247 Saving Private Ryan (1998 film), 10

 INDEX 

Schlesinger Jr., Arthur (often abbreviated as Schlesinger), 19, 20, 81, 230 Scorsese, Martin, 244 Scott, Ian, 19, 20, 25, 45, 83, 90–94, 126 Scott, Ridley, 16, 89, 100n8, 207 The Second World War/World War II, 9, 16, 21, 51, 85, 140, 166, 210, 235, 236 Semmerling, Tim John, 68, 81 The Shape of Water (2017 film), 240–242 Shaw, Tony, 7 Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film (2005 book), 26 Shulsky, Abram, 194 Simpson, David, 125, 197 Sinclair, Upton, 150, 167, 168, 171, 178, 180 Skowronek, Stephen, 27, 35, 37–39, 41, 43, 47 Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 23, 28, 108, 135, 174, 194 Slotkin, Richard, v, 9–11, 13–15, 89, 93, 94, 96 Smart power, 27, 108, 126, 130, 132, 135, 139, 230 Smith, Tony, 141, 190, 191, 193 Social Darwinism, 110, 133, 155, 165, 166, 174, 208, 230 Soft power, vi, 4, 5, 18, 25–28, 77, 92, 107–142, 175, 194, 200, 214, 217, 229, 236, 243 Somalia intervention, 122 Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and US response, 198 Spacey, Kevin, 247 The Spanish-American War, 58, 70

263

Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (2001 book), 3, 54 Spiderman (2002 film), 123 Spielberg, Steven, 17, 177, 218 Star Wars (1977 film), 44, 129, 232 Stevens, George, 6, 234 Stone, Matt, 108, 120, 125, 132 Stone, Oliver, 5, 16 Strauss, Leo, 193, 194, 204 Syriana (2005 film), 25, 27, 108, 133–142, 230 T Taxi Driver (1976 film), 244 Team America: World Police (2004 film, commonly abbreviated as Team America), 4, 26, 27, 108, 120, 192, 200, 229, 242 Tears of the Sun (2003 film), 24, 27, 66, 94–99, 100n10, 230 There Will be Blood (2007 film), 19, 23, 25, 26, 28, 100n7, 143n6, 149–181, 187, 188, 195, 199, 207, 209, 217, 230, 231, 247 Three Kings (1999 film), 4, 19, 25, 27, 59, 65–86, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 99n1, 100n6, 111, 120, 129, 158, 168, 192, 207, 215, 221, 230 3:10 to Yuma (2007 film), 150, 153 Tiananmen Square Protests in 1989, 216 Toh, Justine, 137, 138, 199 Top Gun (1986 film), 5 Triangulation (political strategy), 14, 50 Truman, Harry/Truman administration, 65, 95, 195, 210

264 

INDEX

Trump, Donald J., v, 1, 2, 28, 55, 57, 60n5, 232, 238–247, 249n4, 249n5 Trump years or Trump era, 242, 244, 246 Trump’s administration, 240 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 115, 166 12 Angry Men (1957 film), 5, 20 2016: Obama’s America (2012 film), 25 U Unilateralism/unilateral foreign policies, 27, 35, 49, 52, 57, 69, 70, 83, 85, 87, 174, 188, 190, 191, 199, 212, 238 United 93 (2006 film), 218 Ur-Fascism, 123 US War in Afghanistan (often abbreviated as Afghanistan), 127, 128, 157, 174, 208, 234 V Valenti, Jack, 84, 99, 108, 122 Vietnam War (often abbreviated as Vietnam), 7, 9–14, 21, 22, 48, 49, 51, 57, 59, 61n8, 65, 67–71, 76, 84, 85, 122, 126, 150, 151, 155, 159, 163, 176, 180, 181n2, 194, 196, 197, 206–212, 217, 220, 221, 230 Vindicationist foreign policy, 139, 243, 244 W Wag the Dog (1997 film), 27, 36, 57–59 Wall Street (1987 film), 42 War of the Worlds (2005 film), 17, 177, 218, 219

The War on Terror, vi, 16, 17, 24, 27, 28, 84, 88, 93, 96, 99, 100n11, 107–142, 150, 153, 157, 162, 165, 173, 180, 206, 209, 212, 217, 218, 234, 248n2 Warren, Elizabeth (Senator), 2 Webber, Julia, 49, 50, 52 Weber, Cynthia, 23, 24, 52, 53, 89, 93 Weinstein, Harvey, 247 Westwell, Guy, 17, 18, 24, 109, 111, 112, 120, 142, 177, 218, 219 The Wild Bunch (1969 film), 11, 13, 14, 21, 74, 76 Williams, William Appleman, 70, 140, 207 Willis, Bruce, 98 Wilson, Woodrow, 3, 8, 9, 37, 195, 222n2, 230 Wilsonian school of foreign policy (Wilsonian, Wilsonianism), vi, 3, 7, 11, 12, 15, 24, 28, 35, 36, 42, 48–59, 66, 67, 71, 75, 79, 82, 84–87, 89, 91, 94–97, 99n2, 108, 114, 124, 126, 128, 140–142, 150, 159, 165, 171, 173, 176, 178, 187–206, 210, 213, 214, 217, 229–231, 238–240, 242, 244 Wilsonian school of foreign policy (Wilsonian, Wilsonianism), 213 World Trade Center (2006 film), 16 Wurmser, David, 127, 172 Y Yugoslav Wars/Bosnian conflict, 42, 83 Z Zarqawi, Musab Al, 195, 221n1 Zero Dark Thirty (2012 film), 218, 234 Zizek, Slavoj, 123, 215