The ‘War on Terror’: Post-9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary

By Derek Paget and Stephen Lacey

This book explores the ways in which television has engaged directly and indirectly with the new realities of the post-9/11 world. It offers detailed analysis of a number of key programmes and series that engage with, or are haunted by, the aftermath of the events of September 11 in the USA and what is unavoidably through problematically and contentiously referred to as the resulting ‘war on terror’.

The substantive part of the book is a series of independent chapters, each written on a different topic and considering different programmes. It includes series and single dramas representing the invasion of Iraq (The Mark of Cain, Occupation and Generation Kill), comedic representations (Gary, Tank Commander), documentary (the BBC Panorama’s coverage of 9/11), ‘what if’ docudramas (Dirty War), 9/11 in popular series (CSI:NY) and representations of Tony Blair in drama and docudrama. The book concludes with an extended reflection on contemporary docudrama and an interview with filmmaker and docudramatist Peter Kosminsky.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783162475

Derek Paget

Derek Paget is Reader in Theatre and Television in the department of film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Derek Paget and Stephen Lacey

CULTURAL RESPONSES TO 9/11

IN THE WAKE OF THE EVENTS in New York of 11 September 2001 a veritable flood of artistic responses occurred, alongside the various political (and indeed military) reactions. Type ‘cultural responses to 9/11’ into Google and first among the entries (over thirty million of these) is a Wikipedia site that comes up with reference after reference covering every conceivable category of artistic production.¹ Another Wikipedia list focuses simply on output in recorded popular music. The songs listed range from the arguably sublime – Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris’s 2006 ‘If This Is Goodbye’, to the patently ridiculous – Bo Diddley’s 2003 ‘We Ain’t Scared of You’ (aka ‘My Eagle is Pissed’).²

Perhaps it is not surprising that culture, and especially performance and media culture, has fixed its attention on 9/11, since the events themselves seemed designed, as Jean Baudrillard maintained (2002), as media spectacles, of symbolic rather than strategic value, timed to coincide with news bulletins and inviting comparisons with disaster movies. As Philip Hammond has noted, ‘[r]ight from the first moment, the 11 September attacks and the ensuing war on terror were closely associated with film and media’ (2011: 1). This sometimes meant close cooperation between Hollywood and the US government that included meetings between executives and creative personnel and government officials, notably Karl Rove, senior presidential adviser, ‘which appeared to raise the possibility that an official propaganda line would guide future production of films and TV dramas’ (Hammond, 2011: 1). What followed was much more chaotic and less organised, more a number of stages in a ‘long information war’, as Stacy Takacs has put it (2012: 1), between the United States government and al-Qaeda. It is not solely the events of 9/11 themselves that are under discussion, but the cultural impact of those events on politics and history, for which ‘war on terror’ provides a convenient, but contested, shorthand. Although we have chosen to keep the phrase in this book, and adopt it in the title, this is in full acknowledgement of its controversial and problematic status and in recognition that it has a certain historical significance, if no longer much political traction.³ As was noted by Los Angeles Times reporter Megan Stack, sent to the Middle East after 9/11, the ‘war on terror’

never really existed. It was not a real thing [. . .] it was hollow, it was essentially a unifying myth for a complicated scramble of mixed impulses and social theories and night terrors and cruelty and business interests, all overhung with the unassailable memory of falling skyscrapers. (Stack, 2010: 15)

The idea of a ‘war’ in the singular, then, was always as much metaphor as reality, more a ‘structure of feeling’, to adapt Raymond Williams’s resonant term, which shaped a range of different political and cultural responses. As Takacs has argued of the American context, media texts were united less by their ideological homogeneity than by a general sense of crisis. The legitimisation of US government policy was:

performed not at the level of ideology – where there was a good deal of variation among the programs – but at the level of affect – where the programs consistently propagated a sense of urgency and anxiety that led audiences to desire extreme action as a means of alleviating the perception of pressure. (Takacs, 2012: 26)

This war, which was never declared against any single state, was also a means of fighting more familiar battles under other banners, and it is perhaps no coincidence that some of the most convulsive struggles associated with the ‘war on terror’ occurred in the Middle East (the 2003 invasion of Iraq) and Afghanistan, neither of which were strangers to Western interference before 2001. The chain of events that were precipitated by 9/11 seep into other concerns – with national and ethnic identities, or with the conduct of war – and these run across the contributions to this collection.

The chapters that follow this Introduction are concerned with a relatively narrow area of artistic activity on the small screen, focusing as they do on a selection of TV dramas, docudramas and, to a much lesser extent, documentaries. The dramas discussed embrace different genres, including comedy and critical realism, but much of this book is concerned with docudrama, which we argue is particularly important, given the congruence of news/documentary approaches to current events and the docudramatic realisations that often follow them, and characteristically incorporate news footage (in the case of 9/11 docudramas, the filmed collapse of the Twin Towers provides authentication and adds emotional impact). Documentary and docudrama build on the still powerful aura of factual authenticity that is inherent in the concept ‘documentary’. Both forms, too, share in drama’s ancient claim to authenticity of an altogether different kind. Docudrama utilises documentary material with the primary aim of seeking empathetic involvement from audiences who then experience events vicariously. Academic writing for a generation has eschewed the notion of the ‘universal’, yet film-makers – even documentary ones – and their audiences continue to find reasons to believe in the idea that a level of emotional involvement and identification can enable an augmented artistic experience lived through character and situation. Especially in the aftermath of disasters, the wish to be, however briefly and protectedly, in someone else’s shoes stems from the ancient faith in the catharsis claimed in drama. In psychoanalytic terms, accessing healing through such an identificatory therapeutic process enables an abreaction. ‘Abreaction’, the relief of anxiety through expression leading to release of otherwise repressed emotion, applies equally at the level both of the individual and the society within which the individual lives. In the material covered in the essays that follow, contributors review such abreaction via the represented realities of selected documentary and docudrama. It is wise to approach any depiction of reality with due caution, of course. Representations cannot escape context, and are inevitably hedged around by the kinds of cultural and political factors that the chapter writers are concerned to explore. The ‘second-order experience’ held up for scrutiny, however, can be – and often is – experienced by audiences as sufficient approximations to first-order, direct, experience. The appetite for the understanding-through-identification that is the essence (another critically banned term still in popular usage) of theatre and drama is undiminished, however suspect. Catharsis rules in the popular Imaginary, where willing suspension of disbelief still produces belief.

Identification with individuals who, literally and metaphorically, turn keys that unlock definitive experience is a process that mutates over time and continually seeks and acquires new modes of expression. The post-9/11 conjuncture seems determined at least in part by the concept of the ‘bipolar’. The word itself only entered language very recently as a coinage of the rationalist nineteenth century. ‘Bipolar’ exists alongside the flood of usages associated with the (then) new area of human experiment and study, psychology. But it was the late twentieth century that gave bipolarity cultural currency, through defining and labelling aspects of manic depression and bracketing them off from the more socially dangerous concept of ‘schizophrenia’.⁴ The classically alienated, but fully functional, modern condition of bipolarity depends upon something crucial to a cultural understanding of 9/11 and its presentation in art – the simultaneous presence of two conflicting, and conflicted, poles with equal pulls on the human psyche.

An example in support of this argument is the American television series Homeland (Fox/Showtime, 2011–present).⁵ Here, central protagonist CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is bipolar. Her management of her condition is a running theme in the series. It means that even she is not always able to trust her judgement, even though the series shows her consistently to have brilliant intuitions and instinctive understandings of the workings of the terrorist mind. One of Homeland’s directors, Michael Cuesta, makes the point succinctly, claiming that Carrie’s bipolar disorder is nothing less than ‘a metaphor for the US . . . The scars of 9/11 are starting to heal but now everyone is confused, we’re all unsure’ (Mulkerris, 2012: 36). Academics Gary R. and Katherine C. Edgerton make the same point in rather more precise language:

In Homeland’s fictional calculus, Mathison’s bipolar disorder emerges as an apt synecdoche for the current state of the post-9/11 American psyche, oscillating between aggressive offensive actions and fear-filled defensive manoeuvres at home. (2012: 89)

The other central protagonist in Homeland is US Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis). Series 1 sees Brody return to his homeland as a war hero who has survived brutal captivity in the Middle East. He may or may not have been turned against his country by his captors. Brody’s gathering paranoia stems from the fact that he, too, lives a double life. Brody belongs to two tribes – the American one of his upbringing and training, the Muslim one of his personal Calvary in the Middle East. The fragile mental states of the two main characters not only constitute the twin madnesses that define their actions as characters within a drama, they are also benchmarks for the condition of the USA itself and an expression of the madness of the West/East conflict that promises to define the twenty-first century. (However, this schema operates most fully in series 1; series 2 and 3 shift the focus towards a single enemy, Iran, and led the narrative to Brody’s eventual demise.)

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This Introduction is being written more than a decade after the events of 9/11, and therefore out of a different time and in a different context (the UK). It had its origins in a conversation between the editors about docudrama constructions of the ‘war on terror’ and in a lively one-day conference in 2009 at the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Glamorgan, which demonstrated that other people shared our interest in the complex and varied ways in which TV drama and docudrama had negotiated post-9/11 realities. The book discusses programmes that have had a presence on UK TV screens, often – though not exclusively – originating in the UK as well. Many, however, will also be of interest to US audiences.

Inevitably, the analysis of individual programmes has also had an impact on the way that the forms of television can be thought about, and this has brought docudrama as a practice into the frame once more. We have included, therefore, a wide-ranging and extended essay on this subject by Derek Paget, which is positioned as a second introduction. Paget reviews some of the key terms used to define and debate docudrama – in particular the distinctions between ‘record’ and ‘report’, and the importance of the notion of bearing witness for both programme-maker and viewer – and explores them in relation to the precise moment of the 9/11 attacks. Noting how important the documentary record, especially the much-circulated film of the collapse of the Twin Towers taken by the Naudet brothers, has been to dramas and docudramas since, Paget prises open the arguments, questioning the idea that docudrama ‘blurs boundaries’, as a familiar metaphor would have it, but rather creates a range of possible negotiations of ‘the real’. He also places representations of 9/11 in the context of the phenomenon of docudramas that reflected millennial anxiety about potential catastrophes as the twentieth century passed into the twenty-first – Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon (BBC, 2001), which posits a smallpox epidemic, for example. He concludes by arguing that 9/11 has become a cultural ‘meme’, extending the terminology of biologist Richard Dawkin to the cultural sphere, inhabiting a range of diverse docudramas.

The first three chapters in the substantive part of this book are concerned, unsurprisingly, with programmes about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Hugely unpopular in the UK (and in Europe as a whole), both at the time and since, the invasion came to define the second and third administrations of the UK Labour prime minister Tony Blair (something television has not been slow to comment on, as Stella Bruzzi notes in these pages). It also marked a crucial moment in the relationship between the UK and its American allies, wedding the former ever more firmly to the foreign policy objectives of the latter and committing British troops to fighting a war against the demonic figure of Saddam Hussein, an effective substitute for the stateless terrorists of al-Qaeda. The first chapter, by Stephen Lacey, considers several UK programmes that engage directly with the Iraq War. Initially, this is via an analysis of a docudrama, Ten Days to War (BBC, 2008), which dramatises the events leading up to the decision to invade from a number of perspectives. The main examples considered are fictional (though based on research) and concern the conduct of the War seen from the point of view of the British army: the three-part Occupation (Kudos/BBC, 2009) and single film The Mark of Cain (Red Productions/Film 4/Channel 4, 2007). The chapter is concerned not so much with the distinctions between docudrama and social realism as with questions of narrative viewpoint. Taking the concept of the ‘embedded journalist’ as a model for considering the choices facing a dramatist presented with the complexity of representing a modern war, Lacey teases out the implications of ‘embedding’ a drama within a small group of characters, through which wider historical forces can be glimpsed. The chapter argues that both TV films, while avoiding a discussion of the causes of the Iraq War, take the viewer inside the institutional culture of the army (The Mark of Cain) and reveal the consequences (sometimes unintended) of the so-called ‘peace process’ that followed the invasion (Occupation).

The contribution by Stephen N. Lipkin that follows also focuses in part on the conduct of soldiers during the war in Iraq, this time from a US perspective. HBO’s critically acclaimed Generation Kill (2008), based on first-hand accounts of the early days of the 2003 invasion, is paired here with another seminal post-9/11 drama, one that deals with terrorism as a direct threat to the presidency itself, 24 (20th Century Fox Television, 2001–10). Both, Lipkin argues, can be discussed in relation to melodrama, and it is this that anchors them as post-9/11 programmes. Melodrama deals with crises of authority, and reveals the need for moral absolutes in a desacralised world. The crisis in question is often within the family, and focuses on the father figure; both 24 and Generation Kill represent the family, in different ways. In the case of 24, especially in the early series discussed here, the family stands in for the body politic and the threat becomes literal: both the wife and daughter of the protagonist, Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland), are kidnapped – the former is murdered – and the ‘family’ of the state institutions for which Bauer works cannot be trusted. In Generation Kill, the army unit that is the narrative centre of the series is recast as a surrogate family, with military superiors, representing symbolic father figures, shown to be dangerously inept. Both programmes, therefore, inhabit the metaphysical and moral world of America post-9/11, dramatising existential threats from both beyond and within its borders.

The Iraq War, as well as the conflict in Afghanistan, is also the subject of a programme discussed by Bruce Bennett, Gary: Tank Commander (BBC, 2009–12). Unlike other representations of these wars, Gary: Tank Commander is unashamedly comic, reflecting on both the military campaigns themselves and the inter-group dynamics of the soldiers who wage them from the viewpoint of its hapless protagonist, Gary. Bennett’s analysis of the programme celebrates a distinctive and incisive series that demonstrates the potential of comedy as a form for scrutinising war and its aftermath. It also uses the programme to open up questions about documentary and docudrama forms as well. Noting that Gary: Tank Commander uses strategies that are borrowed from docusoaps or ‘reality’ shows (especially the use of filmed interviews with Gary himself, apparently outside the narrative diegesis) Bennett explores the way that the programme challenges the ‘discourses of sobriety’ that normally characterise documentary form and opens up a complex critical position from which to view masculinity and war.

The next two chapters, by Hugh Ortega Breton and Janet McCabe, draw on the vocabulary and interpretative structures of psychiatry and psychoanalysis to address representations of the events of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, recognising, as have others, that ‘terror’ has psychological as well as political and military dimensions. Ortega Breton outlines a ‘paranoid style’, not new in itself but new in this context, that characterises many post-9/11 dramas and which links verisimilitude to the reproduction of social and psychological phantasies. The paranoid style, which can be found across genres, trades in an often unspoken fear and in narratives of victims, persecutors and protectors; in this, it relates closely to melodrama, in the terms in which Lipkin defines it. Ortega Breton exemplifies his argument through a close analysis of Dirty War (BBC/HBO, 2004), a ‘what if?’ docudrama that explores the possible consequences of a terrorist explosion of a nuclear device. Though undoubtedly gripping, such docudramas use their basis in verisimilitude and documentary process, Ortega Breton argues, to make such phantasies credible. Another psychiatric concept, trauma, is used by Janet McCabe to open up CSI: NY (CBS, 2004–13), a popular version of the CSI franchise, in which the forensic team is located in New York. Although rarely the explicit topic of the programme, the events of 9/11 shadow its narrative, especially in the first series. Trauma, the revisiting of the events of the past in the present, is both an individual malaise and a cultural condition, McCabe notes, which come together in the person of the series’ main protagonist, Detective Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise), whose wife was killed in the attack on the Twin Towers. Through a close analysis of key moments, McCabe explores how trauma induced by the events of 9/11 becomes a recurrent presence in the series’ narratives, half-hidden behind the trauma of each individual story, and a mechanism that drives each story towards its resolution.

Steve Blandford returns us to the context of the UK and to questions focused by the ‘war on terror’, yet having broader relevance, through an analysis of Peter Kosminsky’s two-part drama Britz (Channel 4, 2007). Britz represents the parallel stories of a brother and sister from a British Muslim family, one of whom (the brother, Sohail, played by Riz Ahmed) becomes an MI5 officer and the other (Nasima, played by Manjinder Virk) a (successful) suicide bomber. Blandford frames his argument in relation to the terrorist attacks on London on 7 July 2005 – known as ‘7/7’, in direct reference to 9/11 – in which fifty-two people were killed in a concerted attack on the city’s public transport system. The attacks occurred just one day after the announcement that Britain’s bid to host the Olympic Games in 2012 had been successful, and a reflection on the success of the Games provides a second, linked historical context. Blandford argues that for many in the UK the ‘war on terror’ was inextricably connected to pre-existing anxieties about identity in multicultural Britain. Noting that much of the controversy that greeted Britz sprung from difficulty in resolving the tension between a presumed documentary intention (which Kosminsky denies, both in this volume and elsewhere) and its status as a thriller, Blandford argues persuasively that the drama is both complex and challenging, less concerned with the psychology of terrorism than with the putting on and casting off of cultural, political and moral identities.

The way that the ‘war on terror’, and especially the invasion of Iraq, affected domestic UK politics is also the subject of Stella Bruzzi’s analysis of representations of Tony Blair, the UK prime minister for most of the noughties and a key ally of America, on UK television. Her chapter explores a range of programmes, but focuses primarily on The Special Relationship (HBO/BBC, 2010) and The Trial of Tony Blair (Channel 4, 2007). The former is a docudrama that explores the relationship between Tony Blair (played, unsurprisingly, by Michael Sheen) and former US president Bill Clinton (Dennis Quaid), and is the concluding episode in an informal trilogy of docudramas by Peter Morgan that represent Tony Blair; it takes place at the time of the decision to intervene in the Balkans in defence of Kosovo in the early noughties. The latter is a ‘what if?’ satirical take on the noisy, but to date unsuccessful, attempt to bring the ex-prime minister to trial for war crimes proceeding from his support for the US-led invasion. Tony Blair (this time played by Robert Lindsay) is, in Bruzzi’s account, both an iconic figure in the ‘war on terror’ and a point of access to wider debates about the contours of interpretation of UK involvement in Iraq and the war against terrorism generally. The chapter also returns to some of the difficulties faced by docudrama, especially when cast in a comic mode and placed against other forms of representation (and Bruzzi contextualises her analysis with discussion of other versions of Tony Blair on big and small screens and the Internet). Performance is important to Bruzzi’s argument, the performances of actors on the screen and of the historical actors on which they are based. Bruzzi draws attention to the ways in which actors’ performances are often in excess of the documentary record, providing interpretation as well explication.

The final chapter of academic analysis by David McQueen concerns documentary, Panorama (BBC, 1953–present), and returns us to the moment of the events of 9/11 themselves. Although the inclusion of a single example of documentary in a collection concerned with drama and docudrama might seem odd, the chapter’s focus on how Panorama, the BBC’s flagship current affairs strand, covered the terrorist attacks on the USA is both important in its own right – and McQueen brings to bear new information based on interviews with the programme’s key personnel – and reflects interestingly on the concerns highlighted in other contributions in relation to fictional representations. McQueen focuses on how Panorama chose to cover the events at the time, and is critical of the programme’s lack of a coordinated response. Although some of his interviewees are reluctant to go on the record, a picture emerges of a production team that was disoriented by the attacks and uncertain in its responses. McQueen argues, sympathetically and persuasively, that Panorama, with its reputation for in-depth analysis, was expected to provide a reasoned context for the al-Qaeda attacks, but did not always do so, appearing to capitulate too readily to the emerging militaristic vocabulary of the ‘war on terror’ – so useful to the tropes of melodrama in some fictions explored in earlier chapters.

Peter Kosminsky is one of the best-known and highly regarded film-makers working in British television, especially – though not exclusively, as this volume attests – in the field of docudrama. This book concludes with the edited transcript of an interview with Kosminsky conducted in April 2012 by Derek Paget. In the interview, Kosminsky reflects on his feelings about, and responses to, the events of 9/11 and on their impact on his subsequent work. Like many British film-makers in this position, this has often meant exploring the ways in which existing concerns were reshaped in the post-9/11 context (as Blandford demonstrates in his analysis of Britz and cultural identity), and Kosminsky is eloquent about the decisions that lay behind the mini-series, and what he learnt from the exhaustive research process that informed it. The interview is extremely informative about the research, casting and writing processes of some of his most critically acclaimed dramas and docudramas, notably The Government Inspector and Britz – both directly concerned with the ‘war on terror’ – and also The Promise (Channel 4, 2011), Kosminsky’s lauded but controversial four-part drama about the formation of the state of Israel and its legacy. There is a lot in this interview that echoes debates, arguments and controversies that surface in the discussion of texts in the earlier chapters, and Kosminsky offers a characteristically generous and intelligent perspective on them.

NOTES

1See https://www.google.co.uk/#q=cultural+responses+to+9%2F11, accessed 24 October 2013.

2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_about_the_September_11_attacks, accessed 24 October 2013. The Knopfler/Harris song, from the album ‘All the Roadrunning’, was directly inspired by Ian McEwan’s article ‘Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers’, The Guardian, ‘G2’,15 September 2001, 1. Article and song referenced the last phone call made from the World Trade Center by a wife to her husband in San Francisco.

3In recognition of both the contested nature of the term, and its historically specific and ideologically loaded status, we have chosen to place ‘war on terror’ within apostrophes throughout this book.

4See, amongst other possible sources, The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (ed. Lesley Brown), Vol. 1, p. 231.

5Homeland was, of course, developed from an Israeli series, Hatufim (Israel’s Channel 2, 2012) – the brainchild of its writer, producer and director, Gideon Raff. See its official website, http://www.sho.com/sho/homeland/home, accessed 24 October 2013.

REFERENCES

Baudrillard, J. (2002). ‘L’Esprit du Terrorisme’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 2, 403–16.

Edgerton, G. R. and Edgerton, K. C. (2012). ‘Pathologising Post 9/11 America in Homeland: Private Paranoia, Public Psychosis’, Critical Studies in Television, 7, 1, 89–92.

Hammond, P. (2011). ‘Introduction: Screening the War on Terror’, in P. Hammond, Screens of Terror: Representations of War and