Document Type
Article
Abstract
The first mainstream cinematic engagements with 9/11, Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), are stridently apolitical. These films are conspicuously micro in scope, circumscribed with the task of dramatizing emergency and trauma. Nevertheless, a certain kind of politicised rhetoric emerges in both films. This article argues that by surreptitiously or perhaps unintentionally adopting two integral tropes of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, these two films adopt a fundamentally unilateral or singular politics that eschews any kind of exchange or international scope. Both films, therefore, ultimately remain ‘apolitical’, though clearly not in the sense that they are reverently documenting the emergency or trauma of the day, but rather, in their alignment with the rhetoric of a ‘state of exception’ that operates outside of conventional political dialogues.
Repository Citation
Keeble, Arin. "The ‘Apolitical’ Cinema of 9/11." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1–14. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss4/14