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CHAPTER EIGHT

2002: THE WAR ON

TERROR BEGINS

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 19, 2002

An embarrassment on September 12, a patriotic vision five months later: Warner Bros. evidently began testing, and perhaps tweaking, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Collateral Damage back in November, discovering, to no one’s surprise, that audiences were far more responsive to the scenario than before the terror attacks. (The intra-studio paper trail would doubtless provide a crash course in emergency marketing.) Thus the movie’s release version begins as if in the fiery heart of the World Trade Center holocaust, with Arnold and his fellow smoke-eaters saving lives. “Heads up—let’s do it!” the star cries, as if anticipating the signal for passenger rebellion given on the fourth hijacked plane, Let’s roll!

One scene later, Arnold’s central-casting wife and son are vaporized before his eyes when a bomb detonates outside the Colombian consulate. Small by WTC standards, the explosion reportedly leaves nine dead and twenty-four injured, but it is more than sufficient to light the fuse of Arnold’s one-man war on the El Lobo terrorist cadre. Perhaps newly added to the film is the scene wherein the hooded guerrilla leader sends a videotape blaming “American war criminals” for provoking his group’s action. Even more key to the movie’s emotional thermostat is the Colombian leftist who openly sympathizes with the terrorists, using the US Army phrase “collateral damage” to rationalize Schwarzenegger’s dead family, thus prompting Arnold to redecorate the guy’s grungy headquarters with a baseball bat.

In publicizing the movie, Schwarzenegger has claimed that Collateral Damage showcases his vulnerable side. True, he does have to fight mano-a-mano with a girl. (As usual, a signifier of revolutionary cadres is a heavy sprinkling of grim-faced warrior-women in their combat-fatigued ranks.) But, whether sprinting through the rainforest or digitally diving down a waterfall, Our Arnold is tough enough to wipe the smirk from beneath El Lobo’s mask. The revolutionaries’ quotes are largely from the Al Qaeda fakebook: “Americans hide behind family values … they have forgotten the reality of war, not like us.” This reality is apparent when the sadistic guerrillas prove their native cruelty by exotically forcing one of their own to swallow a live coral snake.

Intermittently attempting to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive. It takes a sudden segue to fisticuffs and ear-chomping for the movie to escape from a tautological debate on moral equivalence between good vengeance and bad. (“You Americans are so naïve. You never ask, why does a peasant need a gun? You think you are the only ones to fight for your independence?” The non-sequitur riposte: “Independence to do what—kill women and children?”) Similarly, in the aftermath of Arnold’s single-handed decimation of the guerrilla camp, El Lobo asks the Fireman (as he is usually known) to explain the difference between them, prompting Arnold to ponderously elucidate, “I’m just going to kill you.”

This is the sort of burly action flick where one coincidence pummels another, narrative necessity is a drunken roundhouse, and whatever passes for logic is a factor of the last plot device left standing. It’s a small world after all, particularly in comparison to Arnold. When the star instructively yells, “You cannot fight terror with terror,” at the resident CIA sleazebag (Elias Koteas), he’s creating his own foreign policy; when he extends his protection to El Lobo’s consort (Francesca Neri), he’s acting as a nation unto himself.

Collateral damage is something that Americans have inflicted far more than they have suffered, but in this case, the phrase is synonymous with windfall profits. Just as George Bush’s questionable presidency was consecrated by the War on Terror, so Schwarzenegger’s flagging career should be revived. Perhaps the Fireman would again decide to run for governor of California. All together now: “Heads up. Let’s … do … it!”

Fifteen months later, Schwarzenegger did successfully cast himself as protagonist and beneficiary of another extraordinary crisis, namely the drive to recall California governor Gray Davis.

The beat went on. Hollywood rolled out a well-hyped succession of combat films and the public lined up to see them. More were said to be in production. Not all would come to fruition; that they were announced was sufficient to define the moment. Titled “The Art of War,” the following piece was the cover story for the Village Voice’s June 19, 2002 issue.

NEW YORK, JUNE 19, 2002

A landscape of smoky rubble littered with American corpses: Mogadishu, the Ia Drang valley, downtown Baltimore. For seven weeks out of the past twenty-two, the nation’s No. 1 or 2 box-office attraction has been a spectacular war film. Add to these hits—Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, and The Sum of All Fears—such crypto-combat, high-body-count chart-toppers as Collateral Damage and Attack of the Clones, and 2002 has been springtime for carnage, at least at the movies.

As Black Hawk Down instructed, “Leave no man behind.” Last weekend’s Windtalkers may have been butt-kicked by Scooby-Doo, but more spectacles of organized mayhem are on the way: To End All Wars continues the World War II revival, Men in Black II envisions warfare in outer space, K-19: The Widowmaker and Below bring back the Cold War nuclear submarine drama, Gods and Generals resurrects the Civil War. Meanwhile, on television, CBS floated the since-canceled AFP: American Fighter Pilot, and the VH1 reality-based series Military Diaries will soon be joined by ABC’s Afghanistan-set Profiles from the Front Line.

Not since the flurry of Vietnam movies in the late 1980s has the combat film been so viable or so visible. And not since the gung-ho Reagan-era warnography of Rambo and Top Gun had the brass been so pleased. Vice President Dick Cheney took a breather from his undisclosed location to join Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the gala Washington premiere of Black Hawk Down, the first movie for which (thanks to Rumsfeld’s personal intervention) US troops were dispatched to a foreign country to aid in its production. We Were Soldiers and The Sum of All Fears were similarly treated as official art. Mel Gibson’s Vietnam War vehicle We Were Soldiers was previewed for George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, and sundry military VIPs at a well-publicized White House screening. (An aide summarized the president’s evaluation of the movie as “violent” but “good.”) The Sum of All Fears had its world premiere in Washington, DC, as Paramount took care to alert the media that the producers had enjoyed considerable, even unprecedented, CIA access and Pentagon support.1

All of last spring’s movies, if not the TV shows, predate September 11. Their inspiration came not from the attacks on New York and Washington or Team Bush’s war on terror but the strong showing of Saving Private Ryan (which grossed $216 million and topped the box office for a month during the Lewinsky summer of ’98, when Bill Clinton too was striving to show he was not just a lover but a fighter). Credit the entertainment industry, or at least producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writer Tom Clancy, with uncanny prescience. Bruckheimer’s Pearl Harbor grossed $200 million in the spring and summer of 2001, but what truly seemed prophetic the day after September 11 was the movie’s blend of blockbuster mega-disaster and historical war epic.

Bruckheimer’s art film Black Hawk Down was rushed into theaters in late December (and subsequently furnished on video to US military bases) to capitalize on the nation’s new bellicosity. Throughout the winter, this visceral spectacle of US soldiers pinned down under Somali fire effectively functioned as an example of virtual combat. Black Hawk Down inspired patriotic sentiment, precipitated European ridicule, and invited anti-war protest, even as it stood in for the American debacle in Afghanistan that never quite happened (and to which reporters had even less access than Operation Desert Storm).

The scenario structures the event. Bruckheimer co-produced Top Gun, the 1986 movie that military historian Lawrence H. Suid credits with rehabilitating Hollywood’s image of the US armed forces. Clancy was the nearest thing the military establishment has to a Homeric bard. The writer had been recognized by the afternoon of September 11 as a near “precog” and pundit supreme for his 1994 novel Debt of Honor’s climactic description of terrorists wiping out the entire US government by crashing their hijacked airplane into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress. The Sum of All Fears, adapted from an earlier Clancy book, opened amid international jitters that the perennial Kashmir dispute might precipitate a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan—resurrecting a cinematic mode more or less dormant since the early 1960s by bringing the Bomb home.2

A week before The Sum of All Fears opened to become the nation’s top-grossing movie, a New York Times Magazine cover story warned of the inevitable nuclear terrorism that was bound to befall American cities. “Not if but when” is how Bill Keller’s remarkably fatalistic “Nuclear Nightmares” began, going on to term the deployment of a high-radiation dirty bomb as “almost childishly simple.” The Sum of All Fears obligingly visualized the possibility of such a radiological dispersion device detonated by foreign terrorists at Baltimore’s Camden Yards, where virtually the entire US government is attending the Super Bowl. It’s the ultimate advertisement for Homeland Security. The president’s men are hustled out faster than you can say “anthrax.” A frenzied attempt at poignant montage presents the American people as goofball cheerleaders, their faces painted in support of their team, idiotically oblivious to their imminent incineration.

In the early 1960s, imagining nuclear war was called thinking about the unthinkable. What’s startling in The Sum of All Fears is that the nuke actually happens—rolling shock waves flinging cars into the air and swatting planes to the ground, a big black mushroom cloud rising over what once was Baltimore as the movie’s surviving protagonists race around the white-light radioactive inferno. As The Sum of All Fears captured its second weekend, US Customs officials called a news conference to demonstrate their bomb detection capability. Meanwhile, the Chris Rock vehicle Bad Company offered a similarly radioactive terrorist scenario played for laughs and on cable TV, Turner Classic Movies topically offered historical perspective with a triple bill of Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and The China Syndrome.

The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence may have officially backed off its announced intention to plant disinformation in the foreign press, but it would seem that Washington takes its cues from Hollywood—as well as vice versa. Attorney General John Ashcroft timed for the Monday morning that followed The Sum of All Fears’ second triumphant weekend his proud announcement that the currently beleaguered FBI and CIA had successfully collaborated on the arrest of one Abdullah al-Muhajir, born Jose Padilla in Brooklyn. Already detained for a month since deplaning in Chicago, Padilla was being held as a military prisoner and suspected of abetting an Al Qaeda plot to produce the very scenario The Sum of All Fears so vividly illustrated—the drama of a nuclear device detonated in an East Coast American city.3

Indeed, the attorney general received another timely cue the following month with the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Having been announced on the eve of the millennium, as the Y2K panic was reaching its peak, Spielberg’s science-fiction policier went into production in the spring of 2001 and wrapped that July. Premiering in June 2002, the director’s first post-9/11 release was a tale of precognitive police work that, as many reviewers pointed out, uncannily anticipated Ashcroft’s notions of preventative detention. “The guilty are arrested before the law is broken,” TV spots warned, strategically placed during national and local news programs during the week of Padilla’s arrest.

NEW YORK, JULY 2, 2002

Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report posits a futuristic police force that arrests criminals before they have a chance to commit their crimes. The unexpectedly topical premise, taken from a 1956 story by sci-fi master Philip K. Dick, posits a future in which mutant “precogs” dream of murders before they occur, thus allowing the police to arrest killers in advance of their crimes. Spielberg himself has expressed cautious support for the extra-legality of the current Bush war on terror: “I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9-11 from ever happening again. But the question is where do you draw the line?”4

Adding to the early twenty-first-century feel, Minority Report opens with a zappy, gore-filled “pre-visualization.” Chief inspector John Anderton (Tom Cruise) conducts the flow of images, hilariously accompanied by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony,” rewinding and recombining the evidence as though fashioning a movie on some telepathic editing console. The three pre-cogs floating unconscious in their high-security amniotic pool are not the only ones troubled by nightmares. The solitary Anderton is a secret dope fiend, haunted by the disappearance of his young son six years before. It is because of the boy’s abduction that the cop has become the poster child for the Washington, DC, pre-crime unit founded by the lordly, Ashcroft-like Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow). But is preemptive punishment a good thing? Inevitably, Anderton discovers that the pre-cogs have determined that he is destined to commit murder, killing someone he doesn’t yet know.

His trademark paranoia aside, Dick’s original story was mainly an exercise in the proliferation of bifurcating possibilities, closer in some respects to imagining a Borges conundrum than an Orwell police state. Spielberg’s movie, however, is less concerned with forking paths of predestination than in the process of exorcizing the past. The concept of the minority report that gives Dick’s story its twist is here something of a red herring—although the screenplay does introduce such other Dickian notions as compensatory drug use and pervasive advertising.

Anticipating the proliferation of online merchandizing, Spielberg imagines an all-too-credible world in which (as with TV ratings) consumers are defined by what they watch. Eyes, in Minority Report, are literally windows on the soul, and the soul is that which yearns for brand-name fulfillment. Every electronic billboard is a consumer surveillance mechanism programmed to recognize a potential customer and deliver a customized personal message. This is most wickedly visualized as Anderton drags a shaking and quaking, madly prognosticating precog Agatha (Samantha Morton) through a shopping mall with the cops in hot pursuit.5

Minority Report is a movie of haunting images and mindless thrills. Whatever its intent, it visualizes (as well as demonstrates) a future where the unconscious has been thoroughly colonized. All human desires are grist for capitalist gratification, just as any criminal thoughts are grounds for state punishment. Although the filmmaker may have wanted to trade legal freedoms for security from terror, his recurring images of thought police drifting down from the sky or crashing through the ceiling into someone’s life have a terrorizing resonance beyond the tortuous permutations of the plot. Similarly, the mechanical spiders that serve as police bloodhounds are spectacularly invasive—a key concept for the movies.6

There’s also a rueful edge to the tawdry image emporium—part sleazy disco, part psychedelic Radio Shack—where citizens seek solace and Anderton tries to “download” Agatha’s visions. And most fascinating is the bitter knowledge of its final mystery: If you can only create the right movie, you can get away with murder.7

Anticipating the commercial totality inherent in social networking, Minority Report can be seen as a prescient expression of the new social-real. At the time, it was clear that we had entered the Age of Bush. In late July, New York Times political commentator Maureen Dowd began a column, datelined “Los Angeles,” with the hilarious news that “Hollywood agents now advise budding screenwriters how to pitch scripts by using a political analogy.”

“You’re in the Oval Office,” they bark. “You’re briefing President Bush. He’s got no attention span. He doesn’t care about details. Sell him the movie.” If you can tell the story vividly and simply enough to appeal to the curiosity-challenged chief executive who likes his memos on one page, the agents figure, you might be able to win over busy, bottom-line-oriented studio executives.8

The WTC cast its non-existent shadow over the year’s holiday releases. Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated Gangs of New York was for most a terrible disappointment although, like other movies that opened at the close of 2002, it could not be seen apart from the events of 9/11. Scorsese’s concluding image was a stunning matte shot of smoky Lower Manhattan as viewed from a Brooklyn graveyard, followed by the inevitable time-lapse dissolve to the skyline as of September 10, 2001.

Scorsese’s fellow New Yorker Spike Lee specifically set his in-your-face paean to ethnic vaudeville and urban lowlife, 25th Hour, in post-9/11 Manhattan. Although the Event has no bearing on the narrative, Lee’s movie opens with aerial shots of the city that include the memorializing twin columns of light beamed up from the Trade Center site and ends with Bruce Springsteen’s 9/11 anthem, “The Rising”; another scene is shot in a high rise apartment above Ground Zero, which is distractingly visible through the window.9

25th Hour opened in New York on the same day as The Two Towers, which might have offered Lee an alternate title. Not only notable for featuring the first convincing human-digital cyborg performance (Andy Serkis, radically modified, as the pitiful Gollum), The Two Towers was a key component in what would prove Hollywood’s top-grossing year of the ’00s. Four out of the five worldwide top-grossing movies released in 2002 were sequels: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones; and Men in Black II. The fifth was Spider-Man, which would go on to spin off sequels in 2004 and 2007. All were essentially animated movies created from photographic material.