Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction. Hollywood at Ground Zero: Confessions of a Conflicted Fan

1. "It was like a movie!": Theorizing the Eerie Symmetries of a War on Terror

2. On the Frontier between Hate and Empathy: The Post‑9/11 Border Western

3. Femmes Fatales as Torturers and Lost Detectives in a Fragile City: Post‑9/11 Noir

4. Soaring Above the Law: The Post‑9/11 Superhero

5. "9/11 Transformed the Whole Planet, Not Just America!": The War on Terror's Shadow across Global Law and Cinema

Notes
Works Cited
Index

About the Author

Fareed Ben-Youssef is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas Tech University.

Reviews

"This book examines cinematic responses to 9/11 in genre cinema of the twenty-first century. Negotiating film/media studies with cultural theory and social theory, it explores the ways films not ostensibly about the attacks channel various anxieties and fears surrounding them. The book's major strength is its confident close analysis of individual films within a cogently defined social/cultural context, but it also has the advantage of mounting a sustained argument from an individual point of view, one given added heft by being from an Arab-American's perspective." — James Morrison, Claremont McKenna College