No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema

Description

No Jurisdiction interweaves autobiography and analysis to explore how a disabled American of French-Arab descent justifies his love for the (super)heroes who destroy brown people like himself. Framing Hollywood genre films as a key to understanding a crisis-filled world shaped by the global War on Terror, Fareed Ben-Youssef shows how, in response to 9/11, filmmakers and lawmakers mobilized iconic characters—the cowboy, the femme fatale, and the superhero—to make sense of our traumas and inspire new legal landscapes. The competing visions of power produced in this dialogue between Hollywood entertainment and mainstream politics underscore genre cinema's multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it. Chapters devoted to the Western, film noir, superhero movies, and global films that deploy and comment on these genres offer compelling readings of films ranging from the more apparent (The Dark Knight, Sicario, and Logan) to the more unexpected (Sin City, Adieu Gary, The Broken Circle Breakdown, and Tokyo Sonata). Through narratives of states of emergency that include vaguely defined enemies, obscured battlefield boundaries, and blurred lines between victims and perpetrators, a new post-9/11 film canon emerges. No Jurisdiction is a deeply personal work of film scholarship, arguing that we can face our complicity and discover opportunities for resistance through our beloved genre movies. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Hollywood at Ground Zero: Confessions of a Conflicted Fan A 9/11 Film Study without Films About 9/11? Passing through X-Ray Machines and into the Security Theater “Don’t think!”: Looking at the Collapsing Towers “Like watching a Hollywood blockbuster”: A Memorial Calls Out to the Movies “The World Trade Center in the Popular Imagination”: Finding Superman at the 9/11 Memorial Museum Like a Hollywood Superhero Blockbuster? Finding Spider-Man in World Trade Center “Welcome to a world without rules”: World Leaders as Movie Stars The Hedonist’s Eye: Eating a Sandwich and Glimpsing the Nation’s Enemy as a Mirage 1 “It was like a movie!”: Theorizing the Eerie Symmetries of a War on Terror The Joker’s Lesson: A Time of Law and Genre Cinema without Jurisdiction The Undercover Cop’s Lesson: The Power in Playing the Victim Logan’s Lessons: Learning Cruelty, Compassion, and History from (Super)Heroes Responding to a Challenge to Complicate Histories of 9/11 2 On the Frontier between Hate and Empathy: The Post-9/11 Border Western “I am not a cowboy”: Finding My Selves in the Western When Texas Stands in for Iraq: Introducing the Border Western and Its Ever-Shifting Boundaries Drones over the Frontier: Sicario and the Panopticon Border The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: Realizing the Impossible Subject’s Humanity The Noir Border in The Counselor: Where Economics Trumps Humanity Conclusion: Finding (and Exploiting) the Divine Violence in Genre 3 Femmes Fatales as Torturers and Lost Detectives in a Fragile City: Post-9/11 Noir “I hate this place!”: Seeing a Noir City as a Dark Mirror “Somebody’s lying!”: Introducing Post-9/11 Noir and Our Paranoid Politics Sin City and the Militant Femme Fatale Jessica Lynch Comes to Sin City: The Damsel in Distress as Female Rambo Lynndie England Comes to Sin City: The Femme Fatale as Revolutionary Perpetrator and Useful Fall Girl Zodiac and the Allegorical Representation of Bureaucratic Failure in the War on Terror Conclusion 4 Soaring Above the Law: The Post-9/11 Superhero The Damsel’s Troubled Gaze: Loving the Superhero in Times of Mass Violence Introducing the Conflicted Post-9/11 Superhero and Christopher Nolan’s Batman “The Power of Fear” and Psychological Torture in Batman Begins “It’s not about money, it’s about sending a message!”: The Transformation of a Clown into a Terrorist “Beautiful, isn’t it?”: The Allure and Trap of State Surveillance in The Dark Knight Seeing Spectacular State Violence Anew: The Shadow of Hurricane Katrina in The Dark Knight Rises Conclusion 5 “9/11 Transformed the Whole Planet, Not Just America!”: The War on Terror’s Shadow across Global Law and Cinema Blood on the Red Carpet The Necessity for a Global Vision on Post-9/11 Hollywood Genre Film Alba Sotorra’s Game Over: Tracking the Shadow of the War on Terror Nassim Amaouche’s Adieu Gary: Adopting a Destructive Gaze on the Self Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown: Inspiration and Disillusionment with Contested Genre Forms Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata: Seeing America’s Wars as a Noir Nightmare Genre as the “Claire de Lune” in Post-9/11 Public Discourse Notes Works Cited Index