Film and television, trench and couch in the war against terrorism after 9/11

The Twin Towers fell and the world changed.

And also the cinema to document the new geopolitical paradigms that emerged after 9/11, and deal with the trauma caused by the attacks.

After all, never has a terrorist attack been as cinematic as the chilling crash of the World Trade Center in Manhattan broadcast live to the world.

Twenty years later, the volume of series and films about that episode and its consequences is so vast that it functions as a collective memory and conscience in relation to 9/11 and the subsequent war against terrorism launched by the White House and its allies. . That is the thesis of the historian and film critic Antonio José Navarro (Barcelona, ​​55 years old) on

(Chair).

“If you had been on a desert island without reading newspapers or watching TV, but with access to a film library where you can see the films that have been made on this subject, you would have a perfect idea of ​​what happened.

There are even dark, harsh nuances that do not appear in the media, "says Navarro and adds, by way of example, that the problem of war veterans, one of the great concerns of the US Department of Defense, has had a greater reflection in movies and series than in the press.

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The Pentagon asks Hollywood for scripts of the crisis

That the images of September 11, 2001 forced us to rethink the relationship between reality and the film event was immediately clear. Robert Altman blamed Hollywood for giving the terrorists ideas. “Those people copied the movies. No one could have planned such an outrage unless they had seen a movie, "he said. Navarro believes that the director of

cinema ”

, but, in a telephone conversation, he acknowledges that “there is an imagination of the disaster that could in some sense have influenced the jihadists, although that has not been proven”, and recalls that the Pentagon found that the Iraqi resistance in Baghdad had copies of the

(Ridley Scott, 2001) and that he learned to make helicopters fall by shooting at the tail, as happens in the film.

'Black Hawk Down', by Ridley Scott.

"Cinema creates imaginaries on one side and another, and everyone uses them," says Navarro. This is true both for the ISIS jihadists, who have used images from Western films in their propaganda videos, and for the American Administration, which has used Hollywood to encourage recruitment for decades, so that American soldiers already in Vietnam were going to the slaughterhouse. influenced by the vision of war and heroism in films starring, for example, John Wayne. Journalist Michael Herr explained in

that in Vietnam there were soldiers who "acted" and behaved "like movie heroes" as soon as the television cameras appeared.

But if in Vietnam Hollywood's view of the conflict became critical only after its end, the questioning of the war on terror hit the screens long before. In 2001, with the country still in a state of shock, Hollywood bowed to the White House's requests. The image of the Twin Towers was erased from series and movies, becoming taboo. There were meetings of members of the Pentagon with filmmakers to imagine possible jihadist plans. The hero of the series

released at the end of 2001, was undoing terrorist plots against the clock under the maxim that the end justifies the means. And prime-time television torture scenes went from less than four a year to more than a hundred after 9/11, according to a Human Rights First study.

Scene from the film 'Sicario' by Denis Villeneuve.

"Hollywood, except in the days of the big studios, has never been monolithic," says Navarro, and after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, films and series critical of both the occupation of Iraq and the lies about the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein supposedly concealed, as with the bombings, covert operations, illegal detentions, secret prisons, torture and targeted assassinations carried out by the Americans.

The fight against terror, asymmetric and delocalized, is no longer like previous wars, so the war genre also changes, more imbricated than ever with spy movies, as in

(Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), whose The obsessive protagonist, on the hunt for Bin Laden, is so reminiscent of the heroine of

(2011-2020), perhaps the most important spy series set in the post-9/11 world. The critical gaze also forces us to update the political

, sometimes twinned with satire, as in

(Adam McKay, 2018), acid

of the former vice president of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney.

The changes even have an impact on the police genre: series like the new versions of

(2017 to date) or

(2010-2020) or films like

(Denis Villeneuve, 2015) bring to the screen the militarization that the police have experimented in the US.

Actress Claire Danes, in the series 'Homeland'.

But if one genre stands out, it is the documentary, which treads on a terrain in which reality seems to have surpassed fiction without resorting to the imagination of any scriptwriter. Navarro considers that the documentaries of the hand of the film reproach to the war of terror have experienced a “golden age” of which

(Errol Morris, 2008) are good examples, which explores the torture and humiliation that US soldiers inflicted to suspected terrorists in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib, or

(Alex Gibney, 2007), which recounts the torture and murder of a taxi driver in a secret jail in Afghanistan, and which won the Oscar. Examples of documentaries conceived, and there is for the critic the key to the rise of the genre, "as a call to action, as an invitation to think."

Navarro already explored in his previous book,

(Valdemar), the way in which Hollywood translated the trauma after the attack on the Torres into a genre film key. American society "uses the cinema as a couch" and dares to approach its present, including its political present, in a much more immediate way than European cinema. In Spain, a production in which an actor plays the acting Prime Minister is still unthinkable, as Brendan Gleeson did with Donald Trump in 2020 in the series

“North Americans, with barely two centuries and a bit of history, need to narrate themselves to understand what happens to them, and they have a very powerful tool which is the cinema.

From a certain fact, they think as a society through the cinema, and that is reflected once again with the war against terror ”.

Dilawar, star of the movie 'Taxi to the dark side'.

In Spain everything is slower: the nineties are beginning to be reviewed now in series and movies such as

or

Although something moves with productions such as

or Anti-

which address more recent problems, including, in the second case, jihadist terrorism.

Navarro is not surprised that they are

"In Spain, the policeman has always been, also in the Franco regime, the most socially committed cinema."