Post-9/11 counterterrorism in popular culture: the spectacle and reception of The Bourne Ultimatum and 24

Abstract

This article examines the representation of counterterrorism in contemporary film and television and surveys its reception among active online audiences. Contemporary counterterrorism fiction like The Bourne Ultimatum (2007; Film. Directed by Paul Greengrass) and the TV series 24 (2001–2010; Television series. Created by Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow), present viewers with conventional hero-driven narratives wrapped in a spectacle of high-tech surveillance technologies. As counterterrorism is an inherently covert exercise, the widespread popularity of these Hollywood franchises raises questions about how the public understands the capabilities and ethics of counterterrorism. These questions are addressed through an analysis of the generic and aesthetic features of the texts along with a survey of audience responses on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Keywords:

• audience
• film
• Hollywood
• IMDb
• smart cinema
• surveillance
• technology
• television
• torture

Notes

1. See the new media journal Convergence for extensive discussion on this topic.

2. Much analysis has focused on the structural and economic relationships between US military/security agencies and the entertainment industry in terms of exchanging technology and resources (see, e.g. Der Derian 2001, Power and Crampton 2005, Stahl 2009, Dodds 2010).

3. Of the 500 reviews of 24, there were 222 registered from outside the United States and 44 that did not list any region. A similar balance is found across the 769 reviews of The Bourne Ultimatum, with 319 registered outside the United States and 39 undeclared. Reviews from outside the United States are predominantly drawn from Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Norway, Israel and Turkey, with sporadic contributes from nations as diverse as Ghana, Pakistan and Chile.

4. For an overview of the eight series, see Wikipedia's 19-page special on the programme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_%28TV_series%29 [Accessed 1 August 2012].

5. A 2006 BBC News survey, for example, found that almost one-third of those surveyed in 25 countries agreed with the statement that ‘[T]errorists pose such an extreme threat that governments should be allowed to use some degree of torture, if it may gain information that saves innocent lives’; available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/6063386.stm [Accessed 1 August 2012].

6. Patricia Pisters (2010) has examined the use of multiple screen aesthetics in Iraq War films to argue that these films extend the ‘logistics of perception’, first identified by critics of the First Gulf War, to include the sprawling network of contemporary media. As such, perception and psychological effect are entangled in this technical network.

7. Fax machines are often characterized as organs of uncensored freedom; see, for example, discussion on the benefits of ‘old technology’ like the fax machine for developing world democracies in Hyden et al. (2003).

8. Many conspiracy thrillers rely on this trope of a liberal media, willing to expose corruption as an effective means of resolving the narrative. In recent times, however, there has been much consideration given to whether the media are willing to fulfil this fourth-estate role, especially when publishing provocative material may be considered unpatriotic. See Defence of the Realm (1986) for a film treatment of this issue. The resolution of The Bourne Ultimatum is also deeply misleading in an important respect: the film presents Landy as a heroic figure, but fails to register the fact in the ‘real world’ she would be prosecuted and likely publicly demonised for her actions.

9. Both sets of reviews are available from the IMDb website, 24 at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285331/ and The Bourne Ultimatum at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0440963/reviews [both accessed 1 August 2012].