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alone its later manifestation suggested by the ‘War on Terror’. Stone’s early life and career were dominated by the effects of Vietnam. Much later with Nixon (1995), Stone was still piecing together his personal and cinematic treatise on what the country and the conflict meant to himself and his fellow Americans –and his work has returned to that territory and its wider Cold War ramifications time and again. However, there has been a shift too. His post-9/11 films, Alexander (2004), World Trade Center (2006), W. (2008) and Savages (2012) also had plenty to say about
brought to a close by the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 (2005: 95–107). The cold war that was defined by the nuclear stand-off between the US and USSR after world war two began to unwind with the USSR’s debilitating war in Afghanistan in which the US-funded Mujahideen insurgents exposed the weakness of the Soviet military outside their spectacular Kremlin displays. The war crippled an already weak Soviet economy, forcing President Gorbachev to withdraw his troops in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. Ironically, a civil
Introduction On 11 September 2001, two hijacked aircraft were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the US Department of Defence’s Pentagon building while a fourth, seemingly aiming for the Capitol in Washington, crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Self-evidently, as commentators such as Noam Chomsky have argued, this was a massive symbolic attack on the Western world – most specifically the military-industrial complex of American corporate capitalism.1 But while the sheer ambition of Al-Qaeda’s assault was entirely without precedent, the
), and just some unknown capacity to spot the trends and desires of wider society which then can be communicated through a story or historical period, were no longer as much of a vital confluence as they once were in Stone’s filmmaking. Alexander (2004) and World Trade Center (2006) seemed perfectly in line with tastes and predilections for the return of the ‘sword-and-sandals’ historical epic and, after 2005, a harder-edged, more resonant assessment of the nation five years on from 9/11. These were productions that followed in the wake of successes such as Ridley
within Hollywood did have an impact on Stone in the 2000s. In World Trade Center and W., the perspectives on 9/11 and the Bush administration were remarked on for their lack of polemical bite. More visceral and acerbic critiques including War on Terror and Jawbreaker were developed, but ultimately faltered for want of available funding. This was certainly evidence of what Stone and many other observers saw as the prevailing neo-conservative cultural narrative about the necessity and justification of the ‘War on Terror’. However, the mothballed scripts also provided
certain times on television. For the last five to seven years everyone has been under pressure to make PG-13 rather than R. World Trade Center was a PG-13, which was a very violent movie about a grim subject. It was however a family-oriented movie with good perceived values. The violence was modified so that the viewer does not see overly crushed limbs. There were heroic true stories, and so the film got a PG-13 despite the violence. This move to PG-13 is driven by commercial pressures. Studios will not make the movie if it has certain threatening elements in it
the events seared so indefinitely into collective memory was due to a number of factors, among them that the day’s horrors unfolded sufficiently gradually for the world’s news media to capture them on camera. Some viewers will have inadvertently witnessed live the second plane strike the south tower of the World Trade Center. The footage, alongside that of the towers’ subsequent collapse, would be the most replayed and watched news footage in history. This looped footage had dramatic and lasting impacts, not least in triggering clinically significant psychological
attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 changed the emphasis, resulting in greater state intervention in the area of homeland security and military actions abroad, but the war–business correlation remained. Ex-CEOs George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were eager to deploy the business-inspired ‘revolution in military affairs’ to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with mixed consequences. Such a conjunction of war and business involving traditionally very different forms of expenditure is a highly precarious strategy, and runs counter to the classical nineteenth
4 Love Introduction I liked Heaven and Earth and Alexander for their tenderness. I dedicated both to my mother for that reason.1 With the exception of U Turn, all of my films have an aura of optimism about them. In World Trade Center it is feelings of family that help pull the people out of the hole. In W. Laura Bush is a binding force. In Wall Street love is also important. U Turn demonstrates the problem of isolation.2 In the opening scenes of Salvador (1986), Richard Boyle (James Woods) is arrested for multiple traffic offences and then bailed by his friend
United States social life. It is doubly appropriate, moreover, that since the bombing of the World Trade Center, the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ and instigation of an effective suspension of many long-prized civil and political rights in the United States, the cinematic hillbilly should return to cinema screens as a timely reminder to that nation that the wider world does not necessarily acquiesce to the United States’s self-proclaimed mission to save it from itself. Hillbilly horror, in the conceptual vocabulary of Trauma Theory, can thus be seen as part of a ‘process