Sovereign Contempt

August 10, 2017 | Autor: Peter Hutchings | Categoria: Cinema, Sovereingty
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13.

SOVEREIGN CONTEMPT

Peter J. Hutchings In starting to think about the events of September 11, 2001 (I give the year lest we forget the Chilean coup of that date in 1973), two quotations hovered above my thoughts. Perhaps not surprisingly, they both derive from the eve of that very different conflict – World War II – which is constantly invoked as a reference point for the current situation. Both are almost too well-known. First, Carl Schmitt: Sovereign is he who decides the exception (1985, p. 5).

Second, Walter Benjamin: ‘Fiat ars – pereat mundus’, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art’. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order (1973, p. 244).

For as much as Benjamin’s words were called up by the compulsive repetition of those images of jets crashing into the Twin Towers, and by the pervasive sense that what we were seeing had been seen before in cinema, Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty appeared to emerge with a renewed relevance from the very dust of those collapsed towers. The paradox of border protection and other responses to the terrorist threat involves a transformation of the field of sovereignty. As the geographical extent of sovereign power shrinks – in the Australian example – the countervailing movement is towards a more intense control of the remaining territory. Contemporary sovereignty remakes law, reminding us that the mythos of English An Aesthetics of Law and Culture: Texts, Images, Screens Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 34, 269–277 Copyright © 2004 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(04)34013-5

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law – the ancient constitution – figures law as a check upon sovereign power. In the legal domain, the evasiveness of various actors (multinational corporations, non-state combatants) leads to a focus upon more fixed targets. The individual or, at least, some spectre of a subject without social ties – the very subject of the ideology of the American individualism embodied in the narrative codes of Hollywood cinema – is constituted as sovereignty’s zone of intensity. September 11 was an event which became cinema even as it was happening, was constantly referred to in relation to cinema – the references to disaster films and to Pearl Harbor (dir. Michael Bay 2001) more movie than event for most Americans – and the reactions to it are now reflected in the ideological modes so common to cinema, particularly the duel. Even, if not especially, the films which appear to question those tropes follow them closely, and reiterate their cinematic power. Parallel to this is the evocation of a legal mythos of sovereignty. The practice of cinema, delivering aesthetic gratification to a technologized sense perception, screens, filters and constructs elements of the political and legal ideologies of contemporary state sovereignty, that hard to kill kingship. The current renegotiation of the dimensions of sovereignty is part of a larger refashioning of governance and the rule of law, and cinema figures forth that process in a number of ways. At the level of content, this paper emerges from a consideration of a group of films – Enemy of the State (dir. Tony Scott, 1998), The Siege (dir. Edward Zwick, 1998), Behind Enemy Lines (dir. John Moore, 2001), Black Hawk Down (dir. Ridley Scott, 2001), Spy Game (dir. Tony Scott, 2001), Collateral Damage (dir. Andrew Davis, 2002), The Sum of All Fears (dir. Phil Alden Robinson, 2002) – that form a composite of some key issues: the tendency to expand the reach of states beyond their borders, together with a tendency toward the shrinking of national borders; and the ever more intense internal scrutiny of a state’s own citizenry in response to perceptions of foreign threats. Dividing the films along the lines suggested by these contradictory, yet mutually reinforcing, tendencies, a continuum could be posited running from the surveilling security state extremity of Enemy of the State, through the uncannily prophetic The Siege (featuring terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, Al Qaeda-like CIA-trained terrorist cells, and the brutal imposition of martial law upon a totally-surveilled citizenry), to the externalized heroics of Behind Enemy Lines (set in Bosnia) and Spy Game (CIA dirty tricks around the globe). As it turns out, none of these films were made after September 11, although they all look different because of it. Two of them were released in 2002. The cinematic spectacle of self-destruction became – momentarily – unpalatable. And then it was business as usual, as it had been for some anyway. Collateral Damage,

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starring the now-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, seemed for a time to be unreleasable before going on to do good business. Given its cynical take on the U.S. government’s involvement in terrorism, it was probably held back more for its politics than for its depiction of violence. The Sum of All Fears – shot before, but released after, 9/11 – blithely stages the nuclear bombing of a football stadium in Baltimore designed to kill the U.S. President and involving the deaths of tens of thousands of people who are personalized through a crowd montage moments before their deaths. Less than nine months after 9/11 this was considered a releasable, action entertainment film for an audience who presumably enjoy the spectacle of their own destruction as long as the good guy wins. There are a number of perversely fascinating elements in this film – which I won’t detail here – but one element does bear mention for its illustration of something discussed by Jean Baudrillard in his essay “The Spirit of Terrorism”: its presentation of homely banality as a marker of virtue or innocence: As their most cunning trick, the terrorists even used the banality of American everyday life as a mask and a double play: sleeping in suburbs, reading and studying in a family environment, before going off one day like a time bomb (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 138).

It does this on two crucial, linked occasions. The film opens with the presentation of the Chekhovian pistol in the form of an Israeli jet carrying a U.S.-made atomic bomb which is shot down during the 1973 Seven Day War. The jet is shot down after the pilot bends down to pick up a photo of his wife and child, which has fallen from its place on the plane’s instrument panel, and so doesn’t see the approaching rocket. Even pilots who might be about to nuke Egyptian and Syrian ground forces are still just folks. Later, as the pace of the editing suggests that the football stadium is about to be bombed, the audience is subjected to detailed, personalizing images of the crowd who are about to be vaporized by the same bomb, twenty nine years later. After the blast, the film concentrates its pathos upon the rescue of the president, and the worthy death of the CIA Director, played by Morgan Freeman, on the basis of the tried formula that audiences only relate to individual tragedies, in the same way that the rescue of a family dog took precedence over the deaths of millions in Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996): a film which presents one of the apog´ees of Benjamin’s aesthetic of self-destruction, and whose ideological patterns merit further consideration after 9/11.1 There isn’t the space here to treat all of these films in detail, and so I’ll discuss The Siege before going on to consider Behind Enemy Lines on the way back to a further discussion of sovereignty.

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THE SIEGE The Siege opens with news footage of the bombing of military dormitory barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (on June 25, 1996). Whatever the genesis of the screenplay may have been, the release of a film some two years after the actual event which inspired some of its story is remarkably quick by Hollywood standards (where the average development time of any project is three years). An interesting film on its initial release, it now screens like a premonition, or a blueprint. The fictional alleged perpetrator of the bombing – which was actually the work of Al Qaeda – Ahmed bin Talal is secretly kidnapped by U.S. forces, and taken to the U.S. The drama which then unfolds involves the operations of a network of terrorist cells – all trained by the CIA to destabilize Saddam Hussein – demanding bin Talal’s release through an escalating series of bombings in New York City culminating in the destruction of One Federal Plaza, the imposition of martial law in Brooklyn, and the detention of all Arab-American adult males in makeshift camps set up in sports stadiums. The film is structured around a number of triangulations, the primary triangle involving the representatives of three state agencies: the FBI (in the person of Agent Anthony Hubbard, played by Denzel Washington), the CIA (Elise Kraft, a.k.a. Sharon Bridger, played by Annette Bening), and the military (Major General William Devereaux, played by Bruce Willis). Like the recent pronouncements which now seem to be echoing this film, General Devereaux’s announcement that: This is an attack. This is a time of war. The fact that it’s inside our borders only means that it’s a new kind of war (dir. Edward Zwick, 1998, 1:08:05)

doesn’t extend its own logic to consider that what is inside the borders is also a new kind of state. If the film’s narrative triangulations produce more than one duel, it is nonetheless a standard action-image film (SAS’) organized around the duel.2 Hubbard vs. the terrorists; FBI vs. CIA; U.S. military vs. the FBI; Hubbard vs. the hubristic Devereaux; law vs. the sovereign. The complex instability of the triangle is thus resolved into an agonistic simplicity in which law, as represented by the FBI, opposes itself to the emergency measures taken by the sovereign, the U.S. president and Commander-in-Chief as represented through the military. The catalyst for this confrontation is, finally, beside the point of the real drama involving the negotiation of the nation as U.S. cinema has done since The Birth of the Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915). In a film with an African-American protagonist, Arab victims, and a white villain, the reference to Griffith’s racist urfilm is hardly incidental (and is of a piece with director Zwick’s liberal revisionism in his 1989 Civil War film Glory). Late in the film’s second act, Devereaux tortures and executes an Arab-American, and so falls under the law’s interdiction after the

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final terrorist cell has been destroyed. Thus, for all its attempt to fashion a different kind of American tale, The Siege offers a familiar story of law’s resistance to, or curbing of, sovereignty, one familiar from deep in English legal history, right down to the French name of the villainous general Devereaux opposed by the old English Hubbard. The conceptual simplifications which finally resolve the film’s conflicts have neither vanished from reality nor been subject to sustained critique. Assumptions of an identifiable enemy, capable of being hunted down and exterminated by a combination of police, military and intelligence agencies persist, while the film’s vision of a triumphant multicultural resistance to anti-Arabic, anti-Islamic state racism seems as much a fantasy in the post 9/11 U.S. as it does in post-Tampa Australia. At the level of the legal struggle which the film allegorizes, it would appear that the re-empowered sovereign is in the ascendant. George Bush’s Executive Order on “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism” places torture and summary execution outside of the law. Like the Howard government’s border protection legislation, Bush’s executive orders and legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act, are instances of sovereign power posed as law, of that form of law which undoes legality itself: emergency law.3 In the same way that Kant disregarded the legality of emergency law – it is illegal because it legislates upon the grounds of the exception as if it were the rule – the critiques of emergency law reveal the lie of all emergency laws as law: that the “law” is specific to a particular time and circumstance, which is to say that this law is no law at all (being more like a practice of equity), yet all the more powerful for its illegality. Sovereignty is here shown to have contempt for law per se. Legality, here, is not the extension of sovereign violence – an extension sanctified by both reason and faith – but the cloak concealing the king’s dagger or smart bomb. Law, as emergency law, wields the assassin’s knife in the sovereign’s service. The further sovereignty of contempt is seen in the ambit of these emergency powers: all states, and all princes, come under this outlaw legality.

BEHIND ENEMY LINES Now we move further behind enemy lines, tracking the reductive individualism of the duel into the field of American unilateralism and exceptionalism. In a manner comparable to The Siege’s sincere attempt to explore the complexities of the new nature of terrorist conflicts, Behind Enemy Lines at least gestures toward some awareness of the contemporary nature of armed conflict. Set in Bosnia, with some basis in fact, its protagonist is a U.S. Navy aerial navigator, ready to resign out of

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frustration with the limited sphere of action offered by these new forms of conflict. As Lt. Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson) puts it early in the film: Everybody thinks they’re going to get the chance to punch some Nazi in the face at Normandy. And those days are over – they are long gone. (pause) I used to think I was going to get a chance to do it. And now I’m eating jello (dir. John Moore, 2001, 0:08:15).4

Although this is one of the dicta to be disproved by the narrative, it is quite an intelligent comment upon the film’s own fantasy, and that of all post-9/11 “Pearl Harbour” responses. There are so few opportunities to punch Nazis in the face because modern warfare lacks real enemies (and all of the energy involved in casting Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden as the new Hitlers only underlines that desire for old-fashioned enemies and conflicts). As Gary Ulmen puts it, in a comment linking the altered nature of war to the altered nature of the state and its sovereignty, War has escaped from state control, but the reason is that the state is becoming historically obsolete (2001, p. 174).

In a film set in Bosnia there are still things that look like states, yet Burnett’s observation still stands and is even more relevant in the war on terrorism, which must construct a target that looks like a state. The War on terrorism, as a counterterrorist war, with an unclear objective and a potentially ever-shifting opponent, cries out for confrontations with actual states so as to resuscitate a geopolitical order that recuperates versions of state authority and legitimacy that insurgent political violence calls into question. Today’s counterterrorism strives to shore up state power by effecting states as the exclusive provenance of legitimate violence (Trover, 2002, p. 19).

The combination of a NATO-led police action and a fragmented former state establishes the situation of sovereign impotence which the film’s plot must resolve. Not long after bemoaning the lack of opportunities for Nazi punching, our hero finds the action he’s been seeking, and gets the chance to figuratively punch out a Nazi, when he flies over a supposedly demilitarised zone, witnesses a mass grave being covered over by Serb troops, and is shot down. After seeing the murder of his pilot, he flees across hostile territory, unable to be rescued because of the intricate politics of ongoing peace negotiations. Burnett’s commanding officer Admiral Leslie Reigert (Gene Hackman) chafes under the control of a French NATO superior, until he finally intervenes and personally (and improbably) supervises the rescue of his “boy.” Shot like a Navy recruitment film – with the extensive co-operation of the U.S. Navy – by an Irish director with a background in TV advertising, Behind Enemy Lines is an extraordinary compilation of U.S. fantasies about itself and the new world order.

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U.S. exceptionalism is individualized, and Hollywood narrative codes make this appear completely natural. Burnett and Reigert are the exceptionalist individuals prompting and resolving the action: they decide on the exception which takes them outside the bounds of military law. Structurally, the film’s engagement of an audience with its rogue hero solicits an identification with, and desire for, Reigert’s eventual intervention. The father rescues his reflectively errant child. The film repeats the narrowness of their concerns by displaying no interest in the consequences of the forbidden rescue action – except to relate the value of the flight surveillance evidence of the massacre in the arrest and conviction of the Serb leader Miroslav Lokar (Olek Krupa). The narrative validation of a rescue action that was supposed to have the effect of disrupting a peace process is that it found a Nazi to punch (quite literally in the early cut of the film which featured an ending in which Interpol officers were given the chance to punch the Serbian war criminal Lokar in the face with a gunbutt). The number and identity of the massacred dead – the pretext for the action – are also elided, banished to a minor element of a gruesomely evocative d´ecoupage. Their ethnic and religious identity – the dead are Moslems – can only be deduced from the film: it is nowhere stated. This is the film which started my thoughts about the contempt of the sovereign. Hollywood’s agonistic, action-image codes position the individual protagonist as a sovereign figure, deciding, seizing upon, responding to the exception. Sovereign contempt is, thus, deeply encoded in much of Hollywood cinema, which makes the cinematic references to September 11 all the more disturbing since those attitudes are so deeply embedded in cinema and so dangerous in reality. Sovereign contempt is now the basis of U.S. foreign policy, as expressed in the new doctrine of preemption, which involves: defending the United States, the American people, and our interests at home and abroad by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders. While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country . . . (U.S. Government, 2002, p. 6; emphasis added).

CODA Baudrillard’s response to the aftermath of September 11 argues that: the concept of freedom, a new and recent concept, is already being erased from customs and consciousness, and . . . liberal globalization is taking the exact opposite form: that of totalitarian globalization, absolute control, and the terror of safety. Deregulation ends up with as many constraints as those of a fundamentalist society (2001, p. 142).

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Is the postmodernity of 9/11 that of a premodernity with modern characteristics? While the state dissipates – at the direction of those who govern it, for the benefit of unimpeded capital flows (running through conduits constructed by collective efforts and investments) – and the social resembles something of the anarchy of pre-state tribalism (identity politics, niche marketing), sovereign power appears to be consolidating itself as either a consequence of this situation, a symptomatic response to the crisis affecting its own authority, or as its own last gasp. Time is out of joint (as it is in all transitional, revolutionary periods). The structural contradictions affecting the contemporary world are not new, merely exaggerated and transformed. The corollary of this touches on law. Law presents itself as a limitation upon sovereign power even as, and because, it codifies that power’s forceful expression and manifestation. The eclipse of the state and of sovereignty might entail the eclipse of law, however this same era features the increasing recourse to law as one of the remaining master codes (morality having been relativised out of existence) facilitating the interests of the predominant economic interest. Another way of putting this would be to argue that law’s pre-eminence screens the dissolution of sovereignty rather than representing the final triumph of law over the king. That is if the new kind of king – a camera eye – doesn’t render law’s victory over that form of kingship rather moot.

NOTES 1. For a pre-9/11 elaboration of these issues, see Rogin (1998). 2. SAS’ is Gilles Deleuze’s algorithm for the action-image, a film structured around a situation (S), an action (A) in response to that situation, and a transformed situation (S’). See Deleuze (1986, pp. 141–159). 3. See Schmitt, “Emergency law was no law at all for Kant” (1985, p. 14). 4. For all of its graphic, anti-war brutality, the TV mini-series Band of Brothers (2001) is – by comparison – a compelling nostalgia trip, recreating a simpler – but never innocent – America, and a world in which conventional warfare was still possible.

REFERENCES Baudrillard, J. (2001). The spirit of terrorism. K. Ackermann (Trans.). Telos, 121, 134–142. Benjamin, W. ([1936] 1973). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In: H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 219–253) H. Zohn (Trans.). Glasgow: Collins. Deleuze, G., 1986. Cinema 1: The movement-image. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam (Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rogin, M. (1998). Independence Day, or how I learned to stop worrying and love and Enola gay. London: BFI Publishing.

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Schmitt, C. (c. 1985). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. G. Schwab (Trans.). Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press. Trover, L. (2002). The calling of counterterrorism. Theory & Event, 5.4 Access date: 6 November 2002. Ulmen, G. (2002). The military significance of September 11. Telos, 121, 174–184. United States Government (2002). The national security strategy of the United States of America. Access date: 28 January 2004.

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