The War on Terror and American Popular Culture - September 11 and Beyond

This book edited by Andrew Schoop and Matthew B. Hill is a collection of scholarly essays about the relationship between 9/11 and American popular culture. There is an essay entitled: "Interrogating the Manipulation of Fear: V for Vendetta, Batman Begins, Good Night, and Good Luck, and America's "War on Terror." by Andrew Schoop. Here is how Batman Begins reflects American culture: "...Al Ghul may signify everything from Bin Laden to the Bush administration, he might reflect our own conflicted subject position and out difficulty in determining justice and who or what to trust, but in the end, he is the enemy and must be destroyed. More disturbingly, the film also suggests that the largest dangers we face are that we remain unable to note such "evil" when it is working within our own culture, or that we remain distracted by petty "criminals" to such a degree that we ignore the more threatening ones. But how can we know when even the Caped Crusader can't and can only respond once the threat is unleashed? In this way especially, the film rejects the rather tenuous and anguished position of post-September 11 American culture." (p.280)

Citation - Schopp, Andrew, and Matthew Hill. The War on Terror and American Popular Culture - September 11 and Beyond. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. 280. Print.