Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century

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Mediated Terrorism
in the 21st Century

Edited by
Elena Caoduro · Karen Randell
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
 Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century

“Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century presents provocative analyses of the

way terrorism influences our lives through its depictions in popular culture.
The chapter authors have written sophisticated examinations of varied media
approaches to terrorism, and the variety of their offerings reinforces our under-
standing of how terrorism has become a nearly ubiquitous presence in the ways
we live our lives.”
—Philip Seib, University of Southern California, USA

“The mediation of terror and violence involves narration, sensationalism and

invention. This intriguing collection explores these processes from multiple
perspectives, encompassing different national and transnational narrations of
terror that contextualise and work to dislodge the prominence of the USA
and its military/political/mediatized constructions of American vulnerability and
strength. The collection spans diverse media (film, television, cartoons, photog-
raphy, social media) and distinct modes of production, drawing out nuances of
what is at stake in narration, remembering and representation. What emerges
forcefully is not only a sense of the generic, familiar character of the mediati-
zation of terrorism and political violence, but the importance of memory and
creativity in responding both to the traumatic legacies of terror and to its insistent
mediatized presence in contemporary cultures.”
—Yvonne Tasker, Professor of Media and Communication, University of Leeds

“Across its eleven scholarly yet accessible chapters Mediated Terrorism in the 21st
Century offers fascinating engagements with a range of topics in both depth
and breadth, marking it out as a lively, dynamic and original contribution to the
field.”
—Dr Terence McSweeney, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television, School of Film
and Television Faculty of Business, Law and Digital Technologies, Solent
University Southampton, UK
 Elena Caoduro · Karen Randell ·
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Editors

Mediated Terrorism
in the 21st Century
Editors
Elena Caoduro Karen Randell
School of Arts, English and Research Institute of Media and
Languages Performance
Queen’s University Belfast University of Bedfordshire
Belfast, UK Luton, UK

Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Department of Communication
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-73510-4 ISBN 978-3-030-73511-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73511-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
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 For Athena
—Elena Caoduro

For John
—Karen Randell

For my kids. May they live in a peaceful world

—Karen A. Ritzenhoff
 Foreword: Will I Dream of Terror
Tonight?

One of my earliest night-terror dreams was when I was aged six, sick with
a mild fever. I was sleeping between my parents as warplanes began to
fly over me. Their engines purred and roared as their wings and bombs
descended. As terror dreams often do, these warplanes were near and far,
inescapably close and yet, high, high in the blazing red sky. Perspective
shifts in night-terror dreams: objects, lines of sight, time and space mutate,
merge and converge, so that all of you is caught in an impossible, somatic,
psychic dread. This terror of planes falling out of the sky has followed me
throughout my life, so much so that the mediated images of bombers
and drones found in terror texts immediately fill me with a shattering
sense of loss. To see so many planes now grounded, parked in hangers
or in massive holding parks, because of restricted air travel and the fear
of transmitting COVID-19, does nothing to lessen these fears. My night-
terror dream imagines these planes taking to the sky all at once, dropping
not bombs but disease. Terror, for me, is bio-molecular and a nightmarish
haunting.
This aviophobia is not a unique or singular perspective, of course. At
school, during the Troubles in the 1980s, children in Northern Ireland
painted and drew army helicopters into their local community or neigh-
bourhood scenes. Alongside drawings of green trees, a smiling sun and
blue skies, there would appear grey, metallic birds hovering over play-
grounds and gardens. These terror birds were real—they took up posi-
tions in these Irish communities—but they were also dreamed by news

vii
viii FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT?

bulletins, documentaries and screen fictions that attempted to capture

these conflicts.
The relationship between the social world and the world of representa-
tion is inherently entangled. Cultural mediation is not separate from “real-
ity” but a constitutive of it. As the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard
powerfully suggested, we dreamed the fall of the twin towers in count-
less Hollywood blockbuster movies that preceded 9/11.1 And since this
dreaming was actualised—we witnessed in real time planes crash into the
towers—we have filled our cultural world with new images, narratives and
heroes that re-play, re-animate these terror texts.2
Terror is not equitable but contextual: it is not an even ripple across
society but implicated in the circulation of power and control. Simi-
larly, representations of terror operate from centres of cultural power and
ensure that certain subjects, groups, religions and nations are either iden-
tified as the transmitters of terror or its recipient. The very definition of
terror is elastic precisely because it is used to other the Other, who are
signified as a constantly shifting enemy “shadow”, and to justify increased
techniques of the self that survey and monitor those who are perceived to
be a threat. The concept of terror is also fluid because of the way it encap-
sulates night terrors like mine, resting in the sour belly of the individual,
and in large-scale events and catastrophes, where millions of people will
be subject to the iron fist of terror.

Pause
Think for a moment of the overfilled migrant boat capsized on the rough
seas, its children, women and men drowning. Think of the war drone, silently
gliding above a Syrian city, its guided bombonly noticed a few seconds before
its collateral impact. Think of villagers sleeping, slowly waking to the sound
of machine gunfire. Think of these not simply as mediated scenes, dreadful
dreams, or as an academic exercise, but as the searing call of terror as it
is felt within each individual as they face its reckoning. Think then of the
power structures and processes of difference that produce the bio-political
forces of terror. In all that we do, we should always remember what the felt
consequences of terror are. As the British sociologist Stuart Hallpowerfully
reminds us:

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name
is the point of cultural studies?... At that point, I think anybody who is
 FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT? ix

into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their

pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little
we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you
don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has
let you off the hook.3

Play
Terror shifts because of political circumstances: terror once came from
outside, from the hands of an external enemy—Russia during the Cold
War, Saddam Hussein, China and the Wuhan virus. Then, terror was
let in, the enemy was within, was among us and needed to be outed,
expunged and defeated. War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg 2005) offers
us such a cleansing as Ray (Tom Cruise) not only saves and protects his
family from the diabolical enemy who had been lying dormant as sleeper
cells beneath New York City, but helps bring them down. Then, terror
was us, all of us, as the power-saturated binaries that once held us apart,
seemingly disintegrated. Terror moved from the night to the day, and
from the day to the night, a red blanket of fear and dread infecting all of
social life.
Joker (Todd Phillips 2019) powerfully captures this envelope of dread,
where menace haunts every street corner, rides on every train and bus,
shapes its anomic inhabitants and laisses-faire political and civic leaders.
Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) carries this terror within him: his otherness a
mark he seeks to hide, his loneliness forged out of a New York that is
brutal and cold. Joker brings terror to the world: he stalks his neigh-
bour, murders the bankers who sought to terrify him and unleashes a
city-wide riot that brings terror to the boil. Joker dreamed of the collapse
of New York, of America, before it happened. Taken up by Left and Right
protesters across the USA in 2020, Joker masks were worn as the cities
burned.
Joker dreamed the collapse of democracy before it happened on Capitol
Hill (January 6th, 2021). Stoked by a fascist, popularist President, the
mob entered Congress, sacking it as they did so. Members of congress
hid under tables, phoned loved ones, so terrified “they feared for their
lives”. Captured on hundreds of mobile phones, and news cameras, the
sacking was recorded live, so that the seismic shock to the foundation
of democracy played out in real time, as it did with the fall of the twin
towers, as it did in Joker.
x FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT?

This terror text had been fermenting for months: claims made by
Trump that the election had been fraudulent, and that he had “won”,
fuelled conspiracy theories and a sense of injustice by those on the Right.
As a consequence, they lived in a state of imagined terror, as did those on
the Left, fearful that democracy would be upended. Terror fuels opposi-
tion, pitches one against the other and reduces each to a “bare life”. It
empties the Agora of public discourse and fills it with hate and bile. As the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben observes, “the thought of security
bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task
and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked
by terrorism to become itself terroristic”.4
And yet such terror texts also draw attention to its machinery and
gears, obliquely reminding us that liberal democracy is only ever truly
demotic: it carries on its gilded wings power inequalities and fails to truly
empower those on the margins of society, to truly leave the Other’s imagi-
nary shadow behind. The cause of the sack on the Capitol is not “Trump”
and he is not the sole architect of terror: terror emerges because of a capi-
talist system that turns the world into markets and territories and with
it inequalities and inequities, and because of religious conviction that has
rendered faith a tool of direct and symbolic violence. To understand terror
is to understand the operations of capitalism and religion.5

Will I Dream of Terror Tonight?

Not by choice. What energises me, what mobilises my political beliefs is
a steadfast belief in humankind: in their—our—agency. For every terror
text, there is a blanket of love. Migrants rescued and given new lives.
Syrians rebuilding their community, sharing their art and culture. Villagers
uniting across ethnic and religious differences to plant crops and seed
futures. If we could—and we can—mobilise these energies across the
world, take on the forces of capitalism and religion together, I may never
again dream of planes falling out of the sky….
This wonderful collection dreams of this dread but also of the possibil-
ities that understanding terror texts offer us. Taking us across a range of
screen and media case studies, the collection shines the most perceptive
and critical light on the way war and conflict have been represented and
communicated. The chapters historicise and contemporise terror texts,
so that its long arm and wounding history manifest across the book’s
pages. Here, we bear witness to Hollywood genre cinema, Palestinian
 FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT? xi

film, conflict memes that contest Islamic Radicalism on Indonesiansocial

media, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and the terrorist acts that followed
its publication, and the way that photographs can narrativise religious
and ethnic difference. The collection’s architecture, its meeting points,
is beautifully curated, so that a revelatory journey, terrifying as it may be,
is undertaken, as we cross cultures, contexts and power relations. It is a
moving, haunting collection that nonetheless refuses to let terror have the
last word. It begins to do what Stuart Hall has asked of us, to insert our
theory into cultural life, in the hope, with the expectation of, changing
the world for the better.

January 2021 Sean Redmond

Professor of Screen and Design in the Faculty
of Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Notes
1. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and other Essays (New York: Verso,
2013).
2. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell (eds.), Reframing 9/11:
film, popular culture and the “war on terror” (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2010).
3. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” in Lawrence
Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 272.
4. Giorgio Agamben, “Heimliche Komplizen. Über Sicherheit und Terror”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No 219, (20 September, 2001), 45.
5. Noam Chomsky, “Terror and Just Response” in Milan Rai (ed.), War Plan
Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War On Iraq (New York: Verso, 2002).

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. “Heimliche Komplizen. Über Sicherheit und
Terror,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No 219, (20 September,
2001).
Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. New
York: Verso, 2013.
xii FOREWORD: WILL I DREAM OF TERROR TONIGHT?

Birkenstein, Jeff, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell (eds.). Reframing

9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror”. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.
Chomsky, Noam. “Terror and Just Response”. In Milan Rai (ed.),
War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq. New York: Verso,
2002.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies”. In
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds.),
Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992, 277–294.

Films
Joker. Directed by Todd Phillips. USA, 2019.
War of the Worlds. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA, 2005.

Sean Redmond is Professor of Screen and Design in the Faculty of Arts and
Education at Deakin University in Australia. He researches in the areas of stardom
and celebrity; genre studies and science fiction cinema in particular; film author-
ship; film sound; film and affect; Asian Cinema; and whiteness studies. Redmond
edits the journal Celebrity Studies, short-listed for the best new academic journal
2011. He has chaired the Inaugural Celebrity Studies Conference in December
2012 and was on the organisation committee for the 2014, 2016 and 2018
conferences, the last one held at the University of Sapienza in Rome.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Elena Caoduro, Karen Randell, and Karen A. Ritzenhoff
2 The Body as Weapon: Paradise Now and the Allure
of Enchanted Violence 17
Robert Burgoyne
3 Spielberg and Terrorisms: Munich and War
of the Worlds 37
Frederick Wasser
4 Spinning Terror on TV: How The Grid Taught Us
What to Fear 59
Dahlia Schweitzer
5 “God, I Miss the Cold War”: The Imagination
of Terrorism on Post 9/11 American Serial Drama 79
Ariel Avissar
6 Battling It Out with Memes: Contesting Islamic
‘Radicalism’ on Indonesian Social Media 107
Leonie Schmidt

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

7 1984 and the Anti-Sikh Pogroms: Gauri Gill’s

Photo Narrativization of the (Continuing) “Horrors
of Those Weeks” 127
Harveen Sachdeva Mann
8 The Pencil is Mightier Than the Kalashnikov: What
Cartoons Can Tell Us About Our (Mis)understanding
of Terrorist Acts in the Wake of the Charlie Hebdo
Massacre 159
Matthew Leggatt
9 Return to Entebbe: CineTerrorism as Contested
Memory 181
Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann
10 In the Fade: Motherhood, Grief and Neo-Nazi
Terrorism in Contemporary Germany 201
Elena Caoduro
11 Tales of Chaos and Order: Exploring Terrorism’s
Melodramatic Use in The Dark Knight (2008)
and Skyfall (2012) 219
Charles-Antoine Courcoux
12 Terrorism and Gender in Eye in the Sky and Zero
Dark Thirty: Women and Girls on the War Front
in Contemporary Cinema 243
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
13 Afterword: Will I Dream of Terror, Again? 269
Stacy Takacs

Index 279
 Notes on Contributors

Ariel Avissar is a Media Scholar at the Steve Tisch School of Film

and Television at Tel Aviv University, Israel. His main areas of scholarly
interest are television studies, American popular culture and videographic
criticism. His contribution to this collection is based on his Master’s
dissertation on catastrophic narratives on post-9/11 American television.
Robert Burgoyne is a Writer and Lecturer whose work centres on the
theory and representation of history in film. The author of five books and
numerous essays, his work has been translated into nine languages. He has
lectured in thirteen countries. He was formerly Chair in Film Studies at
the University of St Andrews, and Professor of English and Film Studies at
Wayne State University. He is currently working on a book-length project
on post-9/11 American war films, provisionally entitled The Body at Risk:
War Cinema in the 21st Century.
Elena Caoduro is Lecturer in Media Analysis at Queen’s University
Belfast, UK. Her research on contemporary European cinema, analogue
nostalgia and the trauma and memory of terrorism has been published in
edited collections and journals, including Networking Knowledge, Alphav-
ille Journal of Film and Screen Media and NECSUS: European Journal
of Media Studies. She is currently writing a monograph about 1970s
left-wing terrorism and contemporary Italian and German cinema, and
co-editing a volume dedicated to fashion and non-fiction media.

xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Charles-Antoine Courcoux is Senior Lecturer in the Department of

Film History and Aesthetics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Charles-Antoine’s key research interests include issues related to the repre-
sentations of masculinity and femininity, feminist, queer and film theory,
the social history of cinema, as well as questions surrounding the recep-
tion of technologies. He is the author of Des machines et des hommes.
Masculinité et technologie dans le cinéma américain contemporain [Of
Machines and Men. Masculinity and Technology in Contemporary Amer-
ican Cinema] (Georg, 2017), and he has co-edited with Gwénaëlle Le
Gras and Raphaëlle Moine L’Âge des stars: des images à l’épreuve du
vieillissement [The Age of Stars: Aging-proof Images ] (L’Âge d’homme,
2017).
Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann is a Lecturer in the Department of
Communication and Journalism and the DAAD Center for German
Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has written Images of
History in Media Memory: Cinematic Narrations of the Holocaust (2011,
in German) and is co-editor of Docudrama on European Television: A
Selective Survey (2016, with Derek Paget). He has published widely on
cinematic memories of the Holocaust and political violence. Currently, he
is a consortium member of the Horizon 2020 project “Visual History
of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age” (2019–
2022) and Co-PI of the research project “(Con)sequential Images—An
archaeology of iconic film footage from the Nazi era” (2021–2029).
Matthew Leggatt is Senior Lecturer in English and American Litera-
ture at the University of Winchester. He is author of the monograph
Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror: The Melancholic
Sublime (2017) and editor of Was it Yesterday? Nostalgia in Contemporary
Film and Television (2021). Other recent publications include the journal
articles “Deflecting Absence: 9/11 Fiction and the Memorialization of
Change” (Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 2016), “You’ve Gotta Keep
the Faith: Making Sense of Disaster in Post-9/11 Apocalyptic Cinema”
(Journal of Religion and Film, 2015) and “Another World Just Out of
Sight: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandel’s
Station Eleven” (Open Library of Humanities, 2018).
Harveen Sachdeva Mann is an Associate Professor of English at Loyola
University, Chicago. She has published and presented extensively on
topics ranging from third world feminism to postcolonial pedagogy, and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

from South Asian fiction to Bollywood films. Her two current projects
focus on the Sikh-American diaspora in a resurgent, white Christian
nationalist America and the teaching of terror(ism) in the US academy.
Karen Randell is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Research Institute
of Media and Performance at the University of Bedfordshire where she is
a Professor of Film and Culture. Randell is coeditor of six books including
The War Body on Screen and Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-
Horror to American Cinema. Her most recent book is The Cinema of
Terry Gilliam: It’s a Mad World. She has also been published in Screen and
Cinema Journal. She is currently working on a British Academy project
entitled, “Horror and Romance in the Technologizing of the body: Lon
Chaney and Elinor Glyn ‘suffering for their art’ in five films of the 1920s”
with Professor Alexis Weedon.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff is a Professor in the Department of Communica-
tion at Central Connecticut State University (USA). She is affiliated with
the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and cinema studies.
In 2019, her co-edited book (with Clémentine Tholas and Janis Goldie)
on New Perspectives on the War Film was published by Palgrave. Also, in
2019, a co-edited collection of essays on The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching
Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders came
out. In 2015, she coedited The Apocalypse in Film with Angela Krewani
(Germany); Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn
with Catriona McAvoy (UK); and Humor, Entertainment, and Popular
Culture During World War I with Clémentine Tholas-Disset (France).
Ritzenhoff is also co-editor of Heroism and Gender in War Films (2014)
with Jakub Kazecki; Border Visions: Diaspora and Identity in Film (2013)
with Jakub Kazecki and Cynthia J. Miller; and Screening the Dark Side of
Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema (2012) with Karen Randell.
Leonie Schmidt is Associate Professor in Media Studies in the Media
Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author
of Islamic Modernities in Southeast Asia: Exploring Indonesian Popular
and Visual Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Currently, she is
working on a postdoctoral project titled: “Pop Preachers and Counter-
terror culture: contesting Violent Extremism through Social Media and
Popular Culture in Indonesia”.
Dahlia Schweitzer is an Associate Professor at the Fashion Institute
of Technology. Her latest book, Haunted Homes (2021), examines the
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

haunted house as it appears in American film and television and the

ways it signifies the anxieties, traumas and terrors of suburban American
life. Her previous works include L.A. Private Eyes (2019), Going Viral:
Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (2018), Cindy Sherman’s Office
Killer: Another Kind of Monster (2014), as well as essays in publications
including Journal of Popular Film and Television, Jump Cut and Journal
of Popular Culture.
Stacy Takacs is Professor of American Studies and Screen Studies at
Oklahoma State University. She is the author of Terrorism TV: Popular
Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (U of Kansas Press, 2012), Interro-
gating Popular Culture (Routledge, 2014), and numerous essays on the
intersections of popular culture and politics. She co-edited the collection
American Militarism on the Small Screen (Routledge, 2016) and serves as
chief editor of the U of Kansas Press book series “War on Screen”. She is
currently at work on a cultural history of the American Forces Network.
Frederick Wasser is a Professor in the Department of Television, Radio
and Emerging Media at Brooklyn College CUNY and Chair of the
Department. His most recent book is a century-long history of Twen-
tieth Century Fox. He has written a book and several articles on Steven
Spielberg as well as a foundational monograph on home video and Holly-
wood. His field is American media history. He has taught at the Univer-
sity of Helsinki, Philipps Universität in Marburg, Tufts University, Central
Connecticut State University and elsewhere. He spent much of the 1980s
working in Hollywood.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Television coverage of the terrorists holding Olympic

athletes from Israel hostage in Munich (2005) is watched
by the perpetrators, members of “Black September.” One
of the terrorists is outside on the balcony as broadcast
news footage shows his movements 42
Fig. 3.2 Former Mossad agent Avner (Eric Bana) is meeting
with his superior Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) on the East
River Waterfront in Manhattan but refuses to disclose any
of his contacts from the mission 44
Fig. 3.3 As Avner (Eric Bana) returns from his final meeting
with his Mossad contact, the skyline of Manhattan
and the Twin Towers is prominently depicted,
as an ominous portent of the future escalation
of international terrorism 45
Fig. 4.1 Maren Jackson (Julianna Marguiles) on The Grid 64
Fig. 4.2 Still from the videotape Hamid Samoudi finds
while looking for his brother on The Grid 69
Fig. 4.3 Another still from the videotape Hamid Samoudi finds
while looking for his brother on The Grid 70
Fig. 5.1 Diagram of all players in the Global Blackout 90
Fig. 7.1 “We will keep fighting, our children will fight our battle.
We’ll never forget,” Gauri Gill, 1984 (Photograph/digital
image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019. Courtesy of Gauri Gill,
http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 130

xix
xx LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.2 “‘Jis tann lãgé soee jãné’…Only she whose body is hurt,
knows,” Gauri Gill, 1984 (Photograph/digital image
copyright Gauri Gill, 2019. Courtesy of Gauri Gill,
http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 135
Fig. 7.3 “Postmemory—that messy archive of trauma and its
transference.” Gauri Gill, 1984 (Photograph/digital
image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019. Courtesy of Gauri Gill,
http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 137
Fig. 7.4 Taranjeet’s living quarters, Gauri Gill, 1984
(Photograph/digital image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019.
Courtesy of Gauri Gill, http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 138
Fig. 7.5 “’84 De Shaheedan Nu Samarpit” (“Dedicated
to the Martyrs of ’84”), Gauri Gill, 1984
(Photograph/digital image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019.
Courtesy of Gauri Gill, http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 143
Fig. 7.6 The wall of truth, Gauri Gill, 1984 (Photograph/digital
image copyright Gauri Gill, 2019. Courtesy of Gauri Gill,
http://gaurigill.com/works.html) 144
Fig. 8.1 “What’s this little weapon which hurt us so much?”
Reproduced with the permission of the artist Satish
Acharya 170
Fig. 10.1 Katja (Diane Kruger) is strapped down to the ground
as she breaks the cordon line after the terrorist attack 204
Fig. 10.2 Katja waits to bleed out, following the violent death
of her family 205
Fig. 10.3 The campervan, parked by a tranquil Greek beach,
explodes with Katja and the neo- Nazi couple inside 213
Fig. 11.1 The Joker (Heath Ledger) is seen from the back in The
Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), waiting
with a clown mask in his left hand at a crossroads
in downtown Gotham 223
Fig. 11.2 James Bond (Daniel Craig) stands, similar to the Batman
character in the super hero franchise, in a dominating
position on the rooftops of the city of London in Skyfall
(directed by Sam Mendes) 234
Fig. 12.1 British Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is
working in a home office close to her kitchen to visualize
her manhunt of international Al-Shabaab terrorists in Eye
in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015). She uses old-fashioned
threads to connect the dots as well as cutting edge digital
technology 246
 LIST OF FIGURES xxi

Fig. 12.2 A surveillance drone in Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood,

2015) has only the size of a bug. Its signal can be beamed
to military headquarters and labs all over the world. It
supposedly helps to rule out ambiguities about terrorist
targets in Kenya 247
Fig. 12.3 Special CIA Operative Agent Maya (Jessica Chastain)
is tracking military intelligence by diligently working
on reviewing recordings online to find Osama Bin Laden
in Kathryn Bigelow’s Award winning war film Zero Dark
Thirty (2012) 249
Fig. 12.4 CIA Agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) identifies the dead
body of Al-Quaeda leader Osama Bin Laden by unzipping
a body bag after his capture in Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn
Bigelow, 2012) 250
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Elena Caoduro, Karen Randell, and Karen A. Ritzenhoff

On 6th January 2021 when the Capitol Building in Washington DC

was stormed by a marauding mob of Trump supporters the images that
beamed onto the screens of the world were interpreted as something out
of a movie. Twitter was inundated with tweets about the ease of the entry
to the building and many social media sites and memes asked why it had
been so problematic for Nicolas Cage’s character, in National Treasure
(2004) to get access to the National Archive; one tweeter declaring, “I am
no longer impressed that Nicolas Cage managed to steal the Declaration
of Independence.”1 Instagram, Twitter and Facebook feeds were alive
with the images within minutes and threads were filled with comments

E. Caoduro (B)
School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK
K. Randell
Honorary Research Fellow, Research Institute of Media and Performance,
University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK
K. A. Ritzenhoff
Department of Communication, Central Connecticut State University, New
Britain, CT, USA
e-mail: Ritzenhoffk@CCSU.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
E. Caoduro et al. (eds.), Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73511-1_1
2 E. CAODURO ET AL.

of disbelief, horror and eventually levity: as somebody on a Facebook

feed said, “where the f*** is Gerard Butler or Channing Tatum????? Tell
them that Olympus has fallen…”2 In a Facebook post on 8 January the
BBC declared that from the inside of the Capitol building it “was like a
zombie movie” as the protesters climbed through windows and stormed
through the corridors.3 Like the mediated event of the 9/11 attack on
the World Trade Centre, the attack on the Capitol building played out on
our screens and we couldn’t look away.
The reason for the storming was a complex mix of disaffection and
disappointment, anger at claims of a fraudulent election and ardent loyalty
to an outgoing President who in a most grotesque display of win-at-
all-costs toxic masculinity called on his supporters to sack the seat of
democracy in the United States. The stimulus for the anger that empow-
ered the storming of the Capitol building had been growing louder
throughout President Donald Trump’s presidency as an underbelly of
masculine discontent. The rise of the white supremacist group, the Proud
Boys, under its founder Gavin McInnes, is an indication of an eruption of
masculine insecurity that wishes to reassert its white patriarchal control.
It was a sign of an insurrection, not only of a disgruntled mob, but,
as many Senators argued in the week-long impeachment hearings in the
week of February 8, 2021, to launch a second impeachment of the former
President: this was an act of Domestic Terrorism.
The Inauguration of the 46th President of the United States of
America, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. on January 20, 2021 went without
disruption as it was broadcast live around the world. Washington DC
itself was a fortress with 25,000 National Guard members in camouflage
standing beside police, fire engines, and heavily armed troops. Once Biden
was sworn in, a global sigh of relief could be imagined as tensions had
been running high concerning the potential for violence. The idea that a
democratically elected President could have been hurt or assassinated in
front of running cameras was a haunting nightmare for all decent people,
whatever their political affiliation.
We can all imagine what this would look like: we have seen it on
our screens in fiction films and television shows before.4 The threat was
real. Two weeks earlier, Trump, his family members and his followers
had summoned the so-called base to Washington to overturn ratifica-
tion of the democratic election. The following insurgence and the sacking
of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 broadcast on live television
across the world provided disturbing images of a democracy under siege
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

by Domestic Terrorists. President Trump had encouraged his followers,

many of whom were affiliated with militia groups and neo-Nazi networks,
to march to the Capitol, a gallows and noose were mounted in front of
the symbolic building to indicate that violence was part of the attempt
to overturn the certification of the Presidential election. Although five
people died during the events of the insurgence on the Capitol Building,
large blood shed was prevented but the images that were created of angry
predominantly Caucasian men storming the building, attacking police,
and even defecating on the walls of the Capitol left a traumatic legacy of
dysfunction and violence. It was as if we were watching “The Capitol Has
Fallen”.
On 19 January, 2021 Fox5 News announced that 12 National Guards
had been removed from duty, two of whom had been identified as
having links to far-right extremist group, to prevent potential attacks
from the inside.5 The threat on the life of the new President did not
come from international terrorists but from within the United States.
“Proud Boys” were threatening to lead an armed struggle on the Amer-
ican streets, ignited in their anger by the idea that the 2020 American
Presidential Elections were rigged and “stolen.” Americans turn against
Americans. Biden called it out in his inaugural speech when he stated that
“we must confront” and “we will defeat” a rise in “political extremism,
white supremacy [and] domestic terrorism.” In this celebrated moment
where power is handed over from one President to another the biggest
concern was that American insurgents would return to the Capitol to
exert violence as they had done two weeks earlier, marking an historic
turning point in US politics.
Ever since the military invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the leadership
of President George W. Bush, the United States has been at war. This has
been the longest lasting war in American history. The so-called “war on
terror” has shifted its focus in the past ten years, the faces of victims have
changed, as has the way of image transmission. Instead of American casu-
alties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, initially hidden from view
when body bags were not to be shown on US news media before the
Obama Presidency, the international victims of war in the second decade
of the 21st century are remaining undocumented and there are seem-
ingly no more American dead bodies. Instead, we find ourselves writing
this book in the middle of a global pandemic where to date 2.13 million
have died, over 400,000 of those Americans, of COVID-19. In contrast,
2349 Americans died during the “Operation Enduring Freedom” from
4 E. CAODURO ET AL.

2001 to 2014. Since 2014 “Operation Freedom’s Sentinel” has caused

93 US fatalities. Technology such as drone warfare has facilitated a way
where no American soldiers need to die. When Syrian cities are bombed
into rubble no cameras send the images of destruction and civilian casu-
alties back to US screens. These are remote wars in remote countries who
seemingly do not affect Americans or their Allies. Syrian refugees are not
reaching American borders. President Donald Trump pulled troops out
of war zones, formerly associated with terrorism, during his Presidency,
keeping one of his campaign promises, while further de-stabilizing the
American status as a global peacekeeper.
The end of the Trump administration produced a variation on the
theme of mediated terrorism. The violence of an angry army encouraged
via Twitter, Facebook and other social media forums. The sustained rela-
tionship between terrorism and media has never been more commonplace
and thus our collection reignites the interest in this topic and validates the
necessity to reexamine these issues in light of recent developments. To
an extent we follow the path initiated by Tony Shaw in his monograph
Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film by confronting
mediated memories of terrorism beyond the United States and the UK.6
But at the same time, we do not limit our investigation to the tradi-
tional screens of film and television, as the sole litmus test to capture
current anxieties. Cartoons, still photography and social media are equally
important to show how memories travel and connect with other stories.
In recent years terrorists attacked their victims in touristic locations
(hotels, museum, beaches, resorts, archaeological sites), urban connecting
sites (stations, stadia, markets, promenades and bridges) transforming
streets and landmarks into metaphors for the stage, but also a synecdoche
for the threatened urban space. The Madrid train bombings, the frequent
suicide missions in Bagdad, Kabul, the Breivik shooting in Norway and
the attacks in touristic locations in London, Tunisia, Egypt and Bali are
now part of the cultural imaginary associated with modern terror, not
only because of the scale of the violence, but also because of the symbolic
meaning of the sheer collection of images circulating.
Mediated Terrorism investigates how the memory of terrorism can
be inscribed in media texts (fiction films, photography, comics, televi-
sion dramas and meme) in order to explore the relationship between
mediated memories and different declinations of political violence in the
new millennium. This collection is grounded in the necessity to expand
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

the topography of international terrorism in screen media, and to eval-

uate how these mediated narratives have transformed, challenged and
reworked beyond the paradigmatic 9/11 template. Given the emergence
of new terrorist subjects, among others Boko Haram and ISIS, the repe-
tition of terrorist attacks in European, Asian and South Pacific cities, this
edited collection represents the beginning of a new wave of scholarly
works which open up the discourse about new warfare in the age of global
terror and global conflicts. The local and the national remain important
paradigms, but terrorism and counter-terrorism ought to be regarded,
now more than ever, through a diachronic and international lens. This
is because the dialogue between distant contexts, both temporally and
spatially, allow us to better grasp our interconnected world. Using a
range of cities, regions and conflicts from Europe, North America, Asia
and the Middle East, this collection offers a comparative survey of the
complex and controversial encounters between the spectacle of terrorist
violence, traumatic memory and commemoration, as well as an insight
into the political and ethical issues of representation and the balancing of
forgetting and remembering.
This collection does not aim to provide a fully comprehensive view
of mediated terrorism in the new millennium but aims to shift the
focus beyond 9/11 and the USA, to capture more recent developments
and begins considering international and domestic terrorism as a prism
through which to understand our contemporary interconnected world.
While the public imaginary associated with 9/11 might reverberate in
the narrativization of other terrorist attacks, even episodes from previous
decades, different scenarios and new emerging subjects call for a renewed
investigation and contextualization. Building on the current literature
on media and terrorism, this collection includes a consideration of the
most recent technological developments which have impacted the way
we experience terrorism: online videos, social media, and drones. It also
acknowledges the new collective concerns, from bioterrorism to extreme
right-wing violence and cyber-terror. The chapters offer new interpre-
tations of figures emerging from the representation of terrorism and
counterterrorism, the male hero, the female agent, religious leader, the
victim/perpetrator, the survivor.
Our collection of essays, by a broad array of international scholars,
reflects this altered image-making process that has developed from George
W. Bush’s “war on terror.” The title of our collection Mediated Terrorism
in the 21 Century captures the idea that warfare is represented on a
6 E. CAODURO ET AL.

variety of global social media platforms, as well as television and film.

We are drawing from research outside the realm of Western-centric media
studies and have incorporated the analysis of cartoons, websites and media
feeds. We are also addressing different time periods and different terrorist
groups as well as the way, the filmmakers from the United States, Europe,
South Africa, and the Middle East are choosing to document modern
wars in popular culture.
In Chapter 1, “The Body as Weapon: Paradise Now (2005) and the
Allure of Enchanted Violence,” Robert Burgoyne argues that nowhere
is the allure of enchanted violence more thoroughly demystified than in
Paradise Now (2005), a Palestinian film that dramatizes the psychological
and political pressures that shape the main character’s decision to become
a human bomb. Depicting both the power and the dark reality of concepts
of enchanted violence, Burgoyne argues that the film explores the charged
symbolism of suicide bombing in the occupied territories, as well as the
human costs of political self-sacrifice. In Paradise Now he suggests these
themes are placed in relief—and shown to be inseparable. Both are high-
lighted in the internal struggle of the young protagonist as he weighs the
decision to sacrifice himself in an act of suicide terror. Burgoyne sensitively
argues that by placing us almost in the shoes of the main character, the
film renders the martyr as a deeply human figure, situating the act in its
historical and environmental context, while also illuminating the difficult
alternatives that the character has been presented with.
In Chapter 2, “Spielberg and Terrorisms: Munich and War of the
Worlds,” Frederick Wasser examines Steven Spielberg’s two films and
explores the notion that the director has taken on the role as the liberal
conscience of Hollywood. Spielberg, he suggests tests himself as a film-
maker with the problem of terrorism. Munich (2005) was his most direct
confrontation with the terrorist theme but it is also prominent in Minority
Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005). Wasser’s analysis triangu-
lates the three movies to identify Spielberg’s approaches. In each movie
terror threatens democratic values, and in each movie Spielberg works
with collaborators who force him out of his safe zone. In Minority Report
the tension is between Spielberg and the paranoid determinism of the
source, a short story written by Philip K. Dick; Munich written by Tony
Kushner, a playwright with a greater willingness to provoke Israeli apolo-
gists than Spielberg and H. G. Wells who gave us allegorized imperialistic
conquest as alien terrorism. Wasser explores whether Spielberg liberal
conscience is adequate to imagine a moral response to terrorism.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

In Chapter 3, “Spinning Terror on TV: How The Grid Taught Us

What To Fear” Dahlia Schweitzer discusses how Television narratives after
9/11 increasingly featured not only heroic saviors and violent redemp-
tion but also fantasies of national and subjective coherence and fantasies
of international coherence. The central focus for her discussion is The
Grid—a 2004 espionage miniseries co-produced by the BBC, Fox TV
and Carnival Films that aired on TNT in the United States and the BBC
in the UK—whose narrative followed agents who made global efforts
to stop terrorism. Representatives of various anti-terrorist agencies, NSA,
the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI, but also British agencies MI5 (the
United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence security agency) and
MI6 (the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence agency) are forced to
work together as an international counter-terrorism team to disrupt a
terrorist cell determined to attack the world’s economic foundations. The
series she argues, troublingly reinforce the suspicion that much of Amer-
ica’s threat comes from the Middle East through the defined networking
of heroes from different countries working together as a team.
In Chapter 4, “God, I Miss the Cold War: The Imagination of
Terrorism on post 9/11 American Serial Drama” Ariel Avissar exam-
ines televisual representations as a reflection of contemporary conceptions
of global terrorism and the anxieties it provokes. He illustrates that
terrorism is only one symptom of broader existential anxieties inherent in
everyday life and suggests that contemporary television, with the increas-
ingly complex and distributed nature of its narrative structures, is a
fitting medium for the representation of complex, global terrorism. Amer-
ican television, he argues, has produced an abundance of serial dramas
centered on catastrophic events. These events, whether they take the
form of terrorist attacks, technological experiments gone awry or alien
invasions, all evoke, explicitly or implicitly, the events of September 11,
2001. From real-world oriented series like Homeland and Rubicon, to
fantasy and sci-fi oriented series like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D or
Flashforward, the series invariably feature deadly and infiltrative “terror-
ist” networks, who can strike unexpectedly anytime and anyplace. The
protagonists thus find themselves plagued by helplessness and paranoia,
often expressing a sense of Cold War nostalgia, and a yearning to return
to what is seen as simpler times.
In Chapter 5, “Battling it out with Memes: Contesting Islamic ‘Radi-
calism’ on Indonesian Social Media”, Leonie Schmidt considers a recent
phenomenon which represents a creative counterpart of the online “jihadi
8 E. CAODURO ET AL.

cool” movement. She examines how cyberwarrior accounts on Facebook,

Instagram and Twitter creatively and digitally alter images to counter
the threats of interreligious violence and radicalization. In Indonesia, the
world’s most populous Muslim country, volunteers battle Islamic radi-
calism with memes, hashtags, comics and videos producing an Islamic
counter-terror culture. Schmidt argues that the social media posts portray
kyai (students of Islam in Indonesia) and ulama (Islamic scholars and
interpreters) as authentic and inspirational stars, voices of reason in trou-
bling times and antidotes to extremism. The cyberwarriors shield the
country from radicalism by circulating posts about interreligious dialogue,
critical thinking and better religious knowledge and reason. Schmidt
maintains that the counternarratives produced by the cyberwarriors are
implicated in a contradictory process with regard to religious authority.
While their postings reclaim religious authority, generating new voices of
piety, at the same time their narratives further corrode religious authority.
The creative act of cutting, pasting and mixing quotations allows for
the fragmentation of religious authority, since cyberwarriors are often
self-trained and differ from the formally trained Islamic scholars.
In Chapter 6, “1984 and the Anti-Sikh Pogroms: Gauri Gill’s Photo
Narrativization of the (Continuing) ‘Horrors of Those Weeks’”, Harveen
S. Mann analyzes the pamphlet titled 1984 by internationally renowned
photographer Gauri Gill. 1984 puts into dialogue a series of photographs
taken between 2005 and 2009 of survivors of the anti-Sikh pogrom that
occurred in New Delhi in 1984, following the assassination of Indira
Gandhi, and essays reacting to each image. In this chapter, Mann exam-
ines Gill’s artistic practice in the context of political silence, national
amnesia and denied justice for the victims and survivors. She argues that
Gill’s work becomes a counter discourse to the impossibility of making
sense of those atrocities, and ultimately the photo notebook 1984 works
as a civic discourse, at once an aesthetic, but also a profoundly political
and public act that bears continuing witness for the dead and silenced
survivors.
In Chapter 7, “The Pencil is Mightier than the Kalashnikov: What
Cartoons can tell us about our (Mis)Understanding of Terrorist Acts in
the Wake of the Charlie Hebdo’s Massacre”, Matthew Leggatt explores
how some cartoons, produced on the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist
attacks in Paris, articulate common misconceptions about acts of terror,
misconceptions which are in turn perpetuated by governments and
mainstream media. By analyzing cartoons which provide more peaceful
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

responses to violence as well as those that instead take a retaliatory

perspective, Leggatt reflects on the dynamic reactions to the Hebdo
killings, and how the general public and mass media make sense of
such attacks. He argues that cartoons, because of their content and their
method of distribution through viral circulation on social media, seem
to suggest that terrorism can be fought and defeated through the power
of images. But this hegemonic display of images, he notes, is what ignites
terrorist violence in the first place and creates an environment that encour-
ages further disillusionment. Leggatt concludes that the public reaction,
as spoken through the mass demonstration and through the emergence
of cartoons, can reveal more about the West’s response to terrorism as a
whole than it does about Charlie Hebdo as a singular incident.
In Chapter 8, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann describes in “Return to
Entebbe: CineTerrorism as Contested Memory” one of the key terrorist
events in Israel’s history: in the night of July 4th 1976, an Israeli
special military commando rescued more than 100 hostages from the
old terminal building at Entebbe in Uganda. A week before, a terrorist
commando consisting of two members from the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and two members of the German left
militant group Revolutionäre Zellen (Revolutionary Cells) had hijacked
a French plane and forced it to Uganda. A few days later they separated
from the hostages the Israeli and some non-Israeli Jewish passengers and
kept them to free Palestinian and militant left prisoners held in Israeli,
Swiss, German and Kenyan prisons.
After the successful Israeli rescue mission, Entebbe turned into a
synonym for combatting global terrorism of the 1970s, a mythic place
where innocent victims, cruel terrorists and brave soldiers encounter each
other. However, it also became the symbol for a recurring traumatic past
and persisting Holocaust memories that blended into the actual expe-
rience of terrorist violence. The limited space of the airport building
offered an excellent opportunity to visualize the traumatic situation of
the entrapped hostages, and to intersect its narrowness with the political
decision making process and the rescue preparations.
In 2018, more than forty years after the actual events, Brazilian film
director José Padilha adopted the terrorist attack into another film, this
time proposing that it would equally interrelate the different perspectives
entangled in this memory. However, as it is the case in most historical
dramas, 7 Days in Entebbe was not a pure reconstruction of the historic
events but offered a post-9/11 reading of 1970s terrorism by blending
10 E. CAODURO ET AL.

the historical situation with current conflicts in the Middle East, espe-
cially in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Padilha’s film establishes
a cinematic space that intersects different times and places, experiences
and memories that demonstrate the entangled character of terrorism as
a contested memory. By focusing on Holocaust memory frames and
the representation of the German terrorists in 7 Days in Entebbe and
comparing it to earlier films, as well as by analyzing the interrelation of
different spaces in these films, the chapter reviews Entebbe as a specific
cinematic place and significant case of CineTerrorism, a cinematic imag-
ination of terrorist violence and its repercussions with the past and the
present.
In Chapter 9, “In the Fade: Motherhood, Grief and Neo-Nazi
Terrorism in contemporary Germany,” Elena Caoduro examines the
representation of far-right terrorism in German cinema and specifically
analyses Fatih Akin’s film, In the Fade (2017), focusing on the blurring
of the conventions of the action film and melodrama. The film repre-
sents a reflection and reaction to the discovery of a network of far-right
terrorists, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), and the presence
of Akin’s name in the list of possible targets. Differently from contempo-
rary films about terrorism which take the perspective of the perpetrators,
investigating their motivations, or those fighting terrorism, Akin shifts
the attention to the victims and survivors of terrorist violence proposing
a visceral portrayal of grief and revenge. Caoduro explores Diane Kruger’s
performance as Katja, a bereaved widow and mother whose family is assas-
sinated in a xenophobic bomb attack. Following the tripartite subdivision
of the film in chapters, In the Fade articulates how the environment of
survival (the domestic space, the institutional space of the courthouse,
and the landscape of Greece) produces a social space where motherhood,
grief and violence are intertwined. Caoduro concludes that this consid-
eration of spatial politics adds a productive perspective to the study of
representation of traumatized survivors, since power and gender relations
are often negotiated through space and embedded through setting.
In Chapter 10, “Tales of Revenge and Chaos: Exploring Terror-
ism’s Melodramatic Use in The Dark Knight (2008) and Skyfall
(2012)”, Charles-Antoine Courcoux describes how an enigmatic inter-
national terrorist creates a wave of chaos in a city whose complexity
and multiple ramifications make control difficult. The criminal master-
mind gets captured, but only for the hero to realize “too late” that
getting caught was part of the terrorist’s plan from the very beginning.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Indeed, after having foiled once again the hero and the authorities, the
villain peruses his criminal endeavor, pushing thus the hero into his last
entrenchments, until the latter finally finds the resources to neutralize
him. Courcoux argues that this scenario, which stages the confrontation
between an all-powerful terrorist figure and a disqualified masculine hero
within a highly mediated urban space emblematic of the world’s great
capitals, has structured the narrative stakes of two of the most critically-
acclaimed and commercially successful films in recent memory, namely
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) and Skyfall (Sam Mendes,
2012). Yet, despite this and these two films’ ostensible usage of 9/11
iconography, none of them ever deals with or verbalizes the issue of
modern terrorism and its political implications. Starting from this obser-
vation, Courcoux’s chapter investigates the nature of the discursive use
these films make of the figure of the mastermind terrorist and the urban
space in which he thrives (Gotham City, London). Primarily centered on
issues of gender, age and sexuality, this comparative analysis shows that,
despite their anchoring in different genres (the superhero film and the
spy thriller), these two productions display a relatively common usage of
terrorism (that is “queer” and technologically determined) in order to
justify the actions of two types of masculine heroes who, in the end, are
supposedly more adapted to the challenges of their/our globalized time.
In Chapter 11, “Terrorism and Gender in Eye in the Sky and Zero
Dark Thirty: Women and Girls on the War Front in Contemporary
Cinema,” Karen A. Ritzenhoff analyzes the ways in which new technolo-
gies have entered the war film narrative. Terrorist attacks are commonly
staged at crowded sites to provoke ample global media coverage that
depicts amok among civilian populations: the recent bombings in Euro-
pean metropolitan areas targeted concert venues, subway stations, airports
and shopping malls in Brussels, Paris and Munich. Ritzenhoff discusses
two recent war films from the United States and Britain that depict
women as leading decision makers in the fight against international
terrorism. Several Hollywood and mainstream war films since 9/11 depict
the fight against terrorists as a necessary and unavoidable task, even
if it involves civilians. The question of modern warfare and “collateral
damage” is heightened when children are involved. Eye in the Sky (2015),
by the South African director Gavin Hood, focuses on a central dilemma
concerning whether a little girl in Kenya should be sacrificed to prevent
a terrorist suicide attack in a civilian mall that would kill even more
12 E. CAODURO ET AL.

people in Nairobi. The commanders from different countries decide—

while monitoring the evolving situation from screens in their control
rooms—whether media coverage about a child killed by an American
drone would be a more damaging PR exercise than reports about yet
another terrorist attack killing many civilians in a remote location. In
the end, the Kenyan girl dies in the arms of her parents at a hospital.
The targeted suicide bombers are being shredded by two drone assaults,
launched from an American air base, from “the eye in the sky:” only body
parts of them remain in the rubble. One female computer specialist at one
of the agencies (all situated in different locations) confirms the identity of
a dead terrorist by scanning an ear lobe.
The second example of a war film with a prominent female lead is
Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The movie has been contro-
versial, among other concerns, because it depicts suspected terrorists
being tortured by the US military at so-called “Black Sites.” CIA Agent
Maya (Jessica Chastain) uses her abilities to gather intelligence to hunt
and eventually capture the Al-Quaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Ritzen-
hoff argues that new technologies seamlessly used in this global war
theatre add to the allure of the warzone action movie. In addition, she
explains that these technologies render the hyper-masculinity of earlier
war films redundant and that women can now assume a central role of
masterminding counter terrorist attacks through the use of cyber-warfare.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank our contributors for their steadfast

commitment during the most unusual year any of us will have experienced: we
became a community, a support group of sorts, working through the difficulties
and coming up with the goods. We would also like to thank Sean Redmond
and Stacy Takacs for believing in the book before it was ready and agreeing to
write our Foreword and Afterword: you inspired us with your work and we are
honored to have your contributions.
We would like to thank our editor at Palgrave MacMillan, Camille Davies, her
editorial assistant Jack Heeney and the project coordinator Supraja Ganesh for
their patience and guidance.
Elena Caoduro—This volume would not have been possible without the
Research Institute for Media, Arts and Performance (RIMAP) at the University
of Bedfordshire, which supported research and conference trips and facilitated
initial discussion between the editors. A heartfelt thank you to Gianandrea Poesio,
Alexis Weedon, Jane Carr and Luke Hockley for their encouragement, generous
guidance and useful advice. I am thankful to my co-editors, Katti and Karen, the
best partners in this adventure who kept me sane throughout the whole process.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

Finally, and especially, my thanks go to my mother, my brother and my husband

for their endless patience, uplifting humor and astonishing support. My greatest
dept of gratitude is for my daughter, Athena Giulia, who made the writing more
difficult, but taught me that there is so much more to life!
Katti—Karen A. Ritzenhoff would like to thank Sabrina Cofer who has done
magic with the index. A recent graduate from Central Connecticut State Univer-
sity, she is an astute media scholar and writer in the making. I am thankful to
Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann who delivered his work on the crisis in Entebbe just
in the nick of time. His family is in flux while he and his wife are going to
shift households from Israel to Berlin, Germany. Robert Burgoyne sent me his
brilliant scholarly works-in-progress about the two films I discuss in my chapter
for this volume. It is wonderful to learn from the leaders in the field as we add
our voices to war and media studies. I am so grateful for the incredible inter-
national team of scholars we have assembled for this collection. Many of our
authors have been patient with us as we re-envisioned this volume and added
more voices. We had to move the deadline for submission of the manuscript
to Palgrave twice…and some of our authors have changed universities, gotten
promoted and have moved on in their academic careers. We are thankful for
so much dedication to the project during house moves, retirement, University
moves, and home-schooling. We all kept being committed to lead this project
to fruition despite all the challenges of working with each other in a global
pandemic.
I would like to thank my immediate family: my husband Michael, my three
kids Jan-Philipp, Dominik and Lea-Karoline, my mother Birgit in Germany, and
my brother Burkhart in Copenhagen. My trusted girlfriend Chez Liley helped
me, as always, to see the bigger picture. During the COVID pandemic these
extended members of my American family kept me sane: Amy Dumschott,
Bonnie Baldwin, Elizabeth Eden, Susan Yancy with our “Cup of Conversa-
tion” tribe, my allies at the University, our relentlessly supportive group of
“women warriors” in academia, and the “Badass Female Filmmakers” (BFFs)
in Connecticut: Jennifer Boyd, Karyl Evans, Ágnes Mócsy, Heather Elliott-
Famularo, Suzanne Colton and Tracy Heather Strain. A shout-out also to my
biggest gift during the pandemic, my painting teacher Elizabeth Seewald Hill.
My friend and colleague Renée White and I will continue on our editing journey.
Another shout-out to Clémentine Tholas who is a fellow war film genre scholar,
always in our minds and by our side.
The brilliant and lovely Karen Randell and Elena Caoduro are also family.
Karen and I have been a team for almost twenty years: managing conferences
together, leading discussions, writing, editing, traveling and dreaming together.
She and Elena help me believe in the value of research and academic scholarship,
paired with international solidarity. As we expand our reach to include colleagues
14 E. CAODURO ET AL.

and friends across borders, we seem to contribute to the ideal that world peace is
not beyond our reach despite the threats of international and domestic terrorism.
Karen Randell—I would like to thank my ever-constant support team for
always being in my corner. My family; Victoria Jane, Wills Brant, Alex Brant,
Parker Lucas, Rick Randell, Lou Randell, Kev Randell, and Jane Chapman.
Thank you to my besties and chosen family, Kim Furnish, Jill Langford, Alexis
Weedon, Wendy Leeks and Amanda Oliver. Thank you to the Tap on Tour:
Mark Margaretten, Keith Jebb and Lesley McKenna, still crazy after all these
years! Thank you to Chris Holmlund for our virtual chats and sanity checks, you
were there when I needed you most. Amy Chaps, thanks for the bants. Big love
and thanks to my Rockies: we know that singing will solve anything; thank you,
JoJo, Lesley, Jayne, Jan, Samantha, and Wendy for “standing by me” even if it
was mostly virtual. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to one woman in particular;
thank you, Rachel Challen. I would not have made it through 2020 without your
constant support, loud laughter, lattes in the churchyard and unyielding belief in
me. Te iubesc.
And I have dedicated this book to John, who I thank for watching the films
endlessly with me and for delivering coffee and tea, making the best food, and
the best cakes, while I worked on this volume. You make everything we do
together so joyful, thank you. I know that you would have preferred for me to
work about Jason Bourne…maybe next time.
Finally, we three have nurtured each other through this process, it has been
quite a year, and what our process has revealed is that kindness and unconditional
support go much further than panic and stress about deadlines and font size
and referencing style. The book is testament to the drive of Karen (Katti), the
dedication to the cause of Elena and the feel the fear and do it anyway resolve
of Karen. It has been an honor.

Notes
1. Brian Marks, “Nicolas Cage’s 2004 Movie National Treasure Goes Viral on
Twitter…After Users Compare the Film to the Capitol Hill Insurrection.”
Daily Mail Online, 8 January 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshow
biz/article-9126493/Nicolas-Cages-National-Treasure-goes-viral-users-
compare-Capitol-Hill-insurrection.html.
2. With thanks to Sumaira Wilson and Tim Highsted.
3. BBC News, “The Storming of the Capitol.” Facebook, 8 January 2021,
https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/399443771120066.
4. For instance, In the Line of Fire (1993); Vantage Point (2008); White
House Down (2013); Olympus has Fallen (2013); Designated Survivor
(2016–19).
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

5. Lindsay Watts, “12 National Guard Members Removed from DC Mission.”

Fox 5 DC, 19 January 2021, https://www.fox5dc.com/news/12-national-
guard-members-removed-from-dc-mission.
6. Tony Shaw, Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

Works Cited
BBC News. “The Storming of the Capitol.” Facebook, 8 January 2021, https://
www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/399443771120066.
Marks, Brian. “Nicolas Cage’s 2004 Movie National Treasure Goes Viral on
Twitter…After Users Compare the Film to the Capitol Hill Insurrection.”
Daily Mail Online, 8 January 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshow
biz/article-9126493/Nicolas-Cages-National-Treasure-goes-viral-users-com
pare-Capitol-Hill-insurrection.html.
Shaw, Tony. Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film. London:
Bloomsbury, 2014.
Watts, Lindsay. “12 National Guard Members Removed from DC Mission.” Fox
5 DC, 19 January 2021, https://www.fox5dc.com/news/12-national-guard-
members-removed-from-dc-mission.

Films and Television

The Dark Knight. Directed by Christopher Nolan, USA, UK, 2008.
Designated Survivor. Created by David Guggenheim. Produced by Richard Klein,
Ann Kindberg and Tommy Burns. Aired 2016–19 on ABC and Netflix.
Eye in the Sky. Directed by Gavin Hood. UK, 2015.
Flashforward. Created by Brannon Braga and David Goyer. Produced by HBO
Entertainment and ABC Studios. Aired 2009–2010 on ABC.
Homeland. Developed by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Produced by Fox
21 Television Studios. Aired 2011–2020 on Showtime.
In the Fade (Auf dem Nichts ). Directed by Fatih Akin. Germany, 2017.
In the Line of Fire. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. USA, 1993.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Created by Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, and
Maurissa Tancharoen. Produced by ABC studios, Marvel Television, and
Mutant Enemy Productions. Aired 2013–2020 on ABC.
Minority Report. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA, 2002.
Munich. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA, Canada, France, 2005.
National Treasure. Directed by Jon Turteltaub. USA, 2004.
Olympus has Fallen. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. USA, 2013.
Paradise Now. Directed by Hany Abu-Hassad. Palestine, France, Germany, 2005.
16 E. CAODURO ET AL.

Rubicon. Created by Jason Horwitch. Produced by HBTV, Warner Horizon

Television. Aired 2010 on AMC.
Skyfall. Directed by Sam Mendes. UK, USA, Turkey, 2012.
The Grid. Created by Tracey Alexander and Ken Friedman. Produced by
Tracey Alexander, Joshua Brand, Patrick Sheane Duncan, Brian Eastman, Ken
Friedman, and Gareth Neame. Aired July 19, 20, and 21, 2004 on TNT.
Vantage Point. Directed by Pete Travis. USA, 2008.
War of the Worlds. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA, 2005.
White House Down. Directed by Roland Emmerich. USA, 2013.
Zero Dark Thirty. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. USA, 2012.
7 Days in September. Directed by José Padilha. UK, USA, 2018.
 CHAPTER 2

The Body as Weapon: Paradise Now

and the Allure of Enchanted Violence

Robert Burgoyne

Nowhere is the allure of enchanted violence more thoroughly demys-

tified than in Paradise Now, a 2005 Palestinian film by director Hany
Abu-Hassad, winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language
Film. As the literary scholar Sarah Cole has argued, violence, especially
embodied violence, is often represented as either enchanted or disen-
chanted, as the “germinating core of rich symbolic structures,” or the
“emblem of grotesque loss;” as a symbol of historical transformation and
renewal, or as a sign of utter degeneration and waste: “[t]o enchant, in
this sense, is to imbue the violent experience with symbolic and cultural
potency; to disenchant is to refuse that structure, to insist on the bare,
forked existence of the violated being, bereft of symbol”.1 Paradise Now
renders the transformation of a shy young man, Said (Kais Nashif), living
in the shadow of a complicated family history into a ritualized sacrificial
subject and imagined agent of national redemption. Closely following the
last three days of his life in the West Bank, the film details the psycholog-
ical and political pressures that shape his decision to become a human

R. Burgoyne (B)
University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2021
E. Caoduro et al. (eds.), Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73511-1_2
18 R. BURGOYNE

bomb, addressing both the ceremonial conversion of the character into a

martyr—the enchantment of violence into a medium of renewal—as well
as the existential drama of doubt and ambivalence that shadow Said’s final
days.
Paradise Now offers a nuanced treatment of what is perhaps the most
extreme manifestation of the shifting character of war in the present:
the use of the body as a weapon. In recent years, suicide as a tactic
of war has become an emblematic and terrifying weapon of contempo-
rary geopolitical conflict. At a point when technology had begun to seem
ubiquitous and overwhelming, the power of bodies in war has suddenly
returned in the form of an agency whose traumatizing impact reverberates
throughout the contemporary world.
Understood by classic theorists such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Carl
von Clausewitz as the most important weapon of war, the body of the
committed partisan has freakishly metamorphosed into the figure of the
human bomb in some sectors, a figure who is celebrated—like the parti-
sans of the past—in areas of the society in which he or she lived and
demonized in the cultures under attack. Depicting both the allure and
the dark reality of concepts of enchanted violence, the film explores the
charged symbolism of suicide bombing in the occupied territories, as well
as the human costs of political self-sacrifice, dramatizing the power of
embodied violence to elicit a sense of magical social transformation and
depicting, with close attention to ordinary life, the frightening reality
of suicide bombing and its underlying social narrative of abjection and
despair. The complex symbolic messages that cluster around the body
of the main character in Paradise Now combine aspects of martyrdom,
suicide, and terrorism in a way that speaks specifically to the geo-politics
of the contemporary period. The political theorists Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri describe the suicide terrorist as the “dark opposite, the
gory doppelgänger of the safe, bodiless soldier,” and emphasize the
contradiction the suicide bomber poses to the strategy of the West, with
its increasing moves to bodiless war: “Just when the body seems to have
disappeared from the battlefield, it comes back in all its gruesome, tragic
reality.”2
In Paradise Now, Said’s decision to become a human bomb is condi-
tioned by a complex overlay of political, religious, and personal moti-
vations, ranging from the promise of transformative agency through
martyrdom to personal revenge and self-purification. Although the
cultural potency of self-sacrifice is addressed in the film, it is the shaping
 2 THE BODY AS WEAPON: PARADISE NOW … 19

influence of generational memory and the daily experience of humilia-

tion that drive the main character to act, and that create the pressures
that make self-sacrifice appear to be the only way of changing the rules
of the game. Clothed in a suicide vest, the protagonist of Paradise Now
is mapped into a symbolic system in which martyrdom, suicide, and the
active destruction of others are braided together in a way that exposes
both the symbolic power of embodied violence and the grotesque waste
of suicide terror.

Transit into a War Zone

The film begins with an incident of everyday, understated violence at an
Israeli checkpoint. Opening with shots of a young woman, Suha (Lubna
Azabal), crossing into Nablus, the camera pauses with her as she weighs
the decision to cross into the occupied territories. The film renders her
entry into the West Bank explicitly as a transit into a war zone. Required
to pass through a roadside checkpoint, Suha, who will become a major
figure in the film, is immediately confronted by a checkpoint guard who
asserts control of her possessions, intimidating and dominating her with
his gaze and manner. Silent and malevolent, the Israeli soldier makes a
point of handing over and then withdrawing her passport, as if to under-
line the absolute control he has over her person. As she turns to walk into
Nablus, we see that another soldier a few yards away has had an automatic
weapon trained on her throughout. Without voice over, explanatory titles,
or embedded media to provide context, the film opens on a world defined
by tension and intimidation.
Establishing in its first scene what the critical geographer Derek
Gregory calls the “everyday exercise of the power to humiliate,” Paradise
Now conveys a granular experience of life under occupation, concen-
trating on the way the ordinary textures of life are distorted by the
psychological pressure of Israeli domination.3 One well-known commen-
tator, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benveniste, says
that the function of the checkpoints is to “send a message of force
and authority, to inspire fear, and to symbolize the downtrodden nature
and inferiority of those under the occupation.” As Gregory reports,
Benveniste calls these the “checkpoints of arrogance,” and suggests that
the occupation affects Israelis as well: “some conscientious objectors
[within the Israeli military] came to see that humiliation saturates both
20 R. BURGOYNE

sides of the barrier. For the checkpoint also degrades those who are
enrolled in its operations: ‘You become a machine of the checkpoints.’”4
As the narrative of the film begins, Said and his friend Kahled (Ali
Suliman) appear to lead ordinary lives of semi-skilled labor at a car
repair shop, a life defined by quotidian regularity. Work, glasses of tea,
family dinners unfold as usual, except for the occasional provocation like
the reminder by an irascible customer that Said’s father was executed
some years earlier for collaborating with the Israelis, an insult that Said
accepts with seeming impassivity, while Khaled leaps to his defense. The
monotony of daily life, the sense of a world that is without prospects or
potential for positive change, comes through in small, dissonant details,
and in particular in the flattened affect of Said, who seems to have stifled
his emotional life under a blanket of low-level resentment. The Pales-
tine of the film is portrayed as a nation that has been forcibly removed
from history, stripped of a sense of its place in the movement of nations,
intentionally cut off and moved back in time. The brute confusion of
war is here reduced to the low buzz of the occupied territory, with all the
tension that this condition implies. Rather than the spectacle of confronta-
tion in a contested space, a trope that has been a defining feature in war
films for a century, Paradise Now focuses on the inner feedback loop,
the daily experience of guilt and shame and the way it forecloses both a
positive connection to the historical past and to the possibility of a future.
The film’s close dramatization of the psychology of political self-
sacrifice, illustrated through the character of Said, attempts to shed light
on the elusive, seemingly opaque subject of the emotional life and psycho-
logical motivations of the suicide bomber. At the beginning of the film,
the act of suicide resistance is accorded a heightened, dramatic meaning,
set forth as the amplified voice of Palestinian suffering: as theorist Gayatri
Spivak says, “Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when
no other means will get through.”5 As the narrative progresses, however,
the film peels away the ceremonial trappings to underscore the isolation
of the human bomber, suggesting that the act of human bombing now
carries very little in the way of community sanction. Suha, the daughter
of a famous Palestinian revolutionary and martyr who has lived most of
her life outside Palestine, at one point argues heatedly with Khaled against
the practice of human bombing, opposing it on both practical and moral
grounds. In many ways, Suha serves as the film’s focalizer, and its moral
compass, the prism through whom the audience reads the film. Sympa-
thetic, worldly, responsive to Said, Suha draws the main character out, and
 2 THE BODY AS WEAPON: PARADISE NOW … 21

directly challenges some of his positions. For all her insight and sophistica-
tion, however, Suha is an outsider; she has spent the majority of her years
in comfortable settings in Morocco and France. Her emotional response
to Said is marked by a kind of optimism and determination that is in
marked contrast to the Palestinian characters we see.
Abu-Karem (Ashraf Barham), the leader of the Palestinian terrorist
group that recruits Said and his friend Khaled, serves as the counterweight
to Suha, quietly and effectively playing on the frustration and emotional
vulnerability of the two young men, seeming to offer an antidote to
the sense of impotence that defines life in the Palestinian territories.
His gravitas, his “legendary” status in the community, brings an almost
mythic sense of martyrdom into view, recalling its traditional meaning and
purpose as a means of bearing witness to a cause, of giving testimony. The
quietly charismatic terrorist leader emphasizes the honor their deaths will
bring, and the value of their sacrifice for the Palestinian cause. In his quiet
demeanor and sense of old school revolutionary purpose, Abu-Karem
embodies the potent appeal of violence as a mode of organic renewal,
or perhaps more precisely, of sacrifice as a mode of political speech.

The Semiotics of “Political Self-Sacrifice”

International Relations scholar K. M. Fierke has explored at length the
connotations of the various terms applied to the human bomb in Pales-
tine, each of which emphasize one or another aspect of the act, and each
of which conveys a distinct political message.6 Martyrdom, for example,
is a word that embeds the act in a community, and that implies a social
mandate. As Fierke writes, “In the Palestinian context, ‘martyrdom’ was,
at one and the same time, the ‘fastest way to immortalize themselves in
Allah’s heaven and the surest way to achieve a balance of terror with
Israel’s overwhelming military machine.’ It is the social significance of
the act, the promise to address a social injustice … that provide[s] the
social legitimacy for choosing to end one’s life.”7 The term “martyrdom,”
however, is not straightforward. Fierke points out that Sunni Muslims
and Shia Muslims have very different understandings of the word, “while
the concept of ‘martyrdom’ exists in both the Sunni and Shia traditions
of Islam, it has a different meaning in each. In the Sunni tradition,
martyrdom is closely linked to jihad and a conception of self-sacrifice
as the noblest act of witness to the sovereignty of God. For Shiites,
22 R. BURGOYNE

martyrdom is more closely linked to rituals of suffering, mourning and

redemption.”8
The word “suicide,” on the other hand, and even more, “terror
suicide,” are terms that emphasize the solitary and destructive nature
of the act and carry a strong psychopathological taint. Suicide implies a
withdrawal from community, a removal from the social world—a destruc-
tive act. For Fierke, the term “political self-sacrifice” is the most accurate
verbal rendering of the act, one that is free of the evaluative connotations
of either suicide or martyrdom:

To sacrifice is a verb, which points to an agent, an act and outcome. The

word suggests a relationship between the individual that is sacrificed and a
community that is the beneficiary of that sacrifice … one cannot meaning-
fully sacrifice the self for the self’s own sake but only for others. The term
only has meaning in a social world.9

“Political self-sacrifice,” however, brackets the violence of the act of terror

suicide, and also mutes the damage to the native community caused
by the suffering that will ensue. Another writer, Nouri Gana, offers the
term “suicide resistance”, a description that attempts to split the differ-
ence between the community sanction implied by martyrdom and the
withdrawal from community signified by the word suicide.10 “Suicide
resistance,” however, which appears to capture certain nuances of suicide
bombing without appearing to endorse it, nonetheless ignores the semi-
otic power of the act, its fundamental importance as a signifying, symbolic
action. The complexity of the political and social conditions explored in
Paradise Now, and the range of meanings the act of self-sacrifice conveys
are illuminated in the differences among these contested terms.
Although the extensive literature on the symbolism of martyrdom,
sacrifice, and the human bomb in contemporary Palestine cannot be
summarized here, the scholarly works on the subject describe a complex
sociological phenomenon in which religious, political, and military ideas
and purposes are combined in an act of spectacular violence. What
emerges as central in these readings is that the act is deeply embedded in
society. As political philosopher Ivan Strenski writes, “While these deaths
seem to be calculated, utilitarian acts of individuals … they are motivated
by a vengeance marked by a strong desire for ‘spectacular revenge.’ They
are thus exemplary signs that are intended for certain audiences … Their
success seems necessarily to rely upon the kind of communal recognition
 2 THE BODY AS WEAPON: PARADISE NOW … 23

and subsequent ritual celebration of the operations by the community

from which the bomber comes.”11 Further, the suicide bomber enacts
a kind of symbolic performance of nation. Laden with explosives, the
human bomber will be blown to pieces, thus reproducing the image of a
land that has been divided by the settlements into fragments, each with
a different status. As sociologist Fahrad Khosrohkavar writes, “Although
his body will be shattered into thousands of pieces, his martyrdom will
make it intact as is the idealized Palestine in his mind.”12 Film scholar
Raya Morag discusses the shattered body of the human bomber being
resurrected and reincarnated, restored to animate existence in the martyr
videos and funerary celebrations that follow.13 Violent death, in this
context, is seen as an organic part of national becoming, a generative
act that summons a sense of national coherence—with the body itself
understood as the vehicle of transformation.

The Symbolic Systems of the Martyr Ritual

Several of these ideas emerge in the videotaping of the martyr speeches
by the two main characters of Paradise Now, Said and Khaled, and in
the ritual that surrounds the preparation for martyrdom. Combining the
disparate iconographies of political resistance and religious sacrifice, the
martyr ritual in Paradise Now centers on the body, editing it into different
symbolic systems, transforming it into a figural expression of the history
and imagined community of Palestine. The symbolic power of violence is
emphasized here. As Fierke writes,

The ritual surrounding the act, from videotapes recording a last will and
testament, to headbands and banners, are symbols of the empowered indi-
vidual making a free choice to self-sacrifice for the cause … these rituals
turn the act ‘into performative traditions and redemptive actions through
which the faithful express their devotion.’14

Combining the discourses of passive, religious martyrdom, where pain

acts as a kind of spiritual therapy and symbolic capital, with the mili-
tant poses of violent agency, the martyr ritual in Paradise Now conveys a
complex range of messages. Set in an abandoned tile factory, the spatial
features of the setting, the pillars, bays and archways, reinforce the atmo-
sphere of an ancient rite. With an automatic rifle propped against his hip,
wrapped in a Palestinian headscarf, Khaled begins by reading a carefully
24 R. BURGOYNE

scripted history of injustices committed by the Israeli state. As the camera

slowly tracks in on Khaled’s face, he speaks in formal Arabic, and his
words ring with conviction. Looking to Said for approval, he finishes with
a dramatic flourish, and invokes God’s blessing. He asks the cameraman
and his assembled audience if his performance was satisfactory. Yes, he is
told, but he will have to do it again, for some reason the camera did not
record.
Although one writer has characterized this scene as a parody of the
ritualized martyr speech, its chilling seriousness comes through strongly,
despite the break in form caused by the camera that failed to work.15
Khaled and Said are both portrayed wielding rifles, dressed in fatigues,
and wearing ammo belts and headbands, as the camera, framing them in
a frontal, centered shot, slowly tracks into close-up. The visual grammar
of the scene is significant. In striking contrast with the concealment and
“passing” that is critical to the success of the human bomber, who must
blend in with the social scene he or she is targeting and pass anonymously
within the target society, the visibility of the performance is emphasized.
Although the human bomber will be clothed in innocuous garb during
the mission, and his or her weapon will be hidden from view, the martyr
video celebrates and even exaggerates the visibility of the threat.
The almost atavistic image of the resistance fighter depicted here
transforms the anonymous, clandestine act of human bombing into its
opposite, grafting the image of the revolutionary hero onto the impas-
sive face of the martyr. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s description
of modern terror is instructive: terrorist suicide, he writes, is personal,
carried out in broad daylight:

everything resides in the defiance and the duel, in a dual, personal rela-
tionship with the adverse power. Since it is the one that humiliates, it is
the one that must be humiliated—and not simply exterminated. It must
be made to lose face […] The other must be targeted and hurt in the full
light of the adversarial struggle.16

The charged combination of religious and political imagery brings the

complex claims of suicide terror into clear view. On the one hand, the
visual rhetoric and symbolic language of the martyr ritual recalls the
history of Christian martyrs, who were often depicted in frescos, paint-
ings and narratives in ways that emphasized the utter annihilation of the
body. The concentrated focus on physical torment in these representations
 2 THE BODY AS WEAPON: PARADISE NOW … 25

was designed to produce an intensely affective, embodied response in a

community of witnesses.17 As historian Christos D. Merantzas writes, the
martyr’s fortitude in the face of appalling pain, depicted in the impassive
facial expressions they wore and as described by contemporary writers,
produced a somatic response in the viewers of icons and other represen-
tations, a “collectively constituted vital energy, contained in the martyr’s
objectified body … capable of activating practices which aimed at reli-
gious, but also at political ends.”18 In a striking parallel to practices in
Palestine, the collective memorial ceremonies celebrating the martyr’s
holy death “rendered [the martyr] physically present.”19 Moreover, in
some settings, the detailed depiction of the agonies of Christian martyrs
was utilized as a weapon of political resistance, fulfilling the goals of
preserving the tradition of martyrdom as well as recruiting fresh “faith
fighters,” dedicated to weakening “the enemy of the Orthodox faith.”20

“The Voice of Dynamite” and Enchanted Violence

The ritual in Paradise Now, however, also evokes a rich iconography
of militant resistance. Terrorist violence in the 19th century, exempli-
fied in the anarchist movement, provides a ready comparison. Although
the actual damage caused by anarchist acts was minimal, the extraordi-
nary impact of their pronouncements and deeds on public perception
can be compared to the power of terrorist violence in the viral media
of today. Terror by explosion in particular, aroused an intensive response.
Described in manifestos and newspapers as “propaganda by deed,” the
bomb was understood as the most meaningful form of speech, “the voice
of dynamite,” as it was called. Sarah Cole writes: “Propaganda by deed
became canonized as allowable violence […] its effective transposition
into terrorist ideology makes it one of the critical links between this late
Victorian chapter in history and the long era of terrorism that has not yet
ended.”21
In contemporary culture, the idea that violence can be understood as
a form of language, as action encoded into spectacular meaning, is perva-
sive, a dominant characteristic of contemporary political and media life.
The old-fashioned term “propaganda by deed,” although perhaps archaic
sounding to contemporary ears, in fact conveys a nuanced understanding
of the economy of the violent act, emphasizing the speech act over the
deed itself. Political scientist Kevin McDonald describes the role of images
Another random document with
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hollow.”
And again, “Have you read Dickens? Oh, it’s charming. Bravo
Dickens! it (David Copperfield again) has some of his very prettiest
touches—those inimitable Dickens’ touches which make such a
great man of him.”
In truth there was in this tall fellow of six-feet-four a strain of
2
melancholy not seldom observable in giants. Add to this that touch
of inherited Anglo-Indian melancholy of which I spoke a fortnight
ago; add the tragedy of his marriage; and I think we need not seek
amid any literary disappointments for the well of the song of “Vanity,
vanity, all is vanity” which, springing evident in the title of his first
great novel, runs an undercurrent through all that he wrote.

2
He was remarkable for height and bulk: a
lumbering, unathletic figure with a slouch. One
day being at a fair with his friend “Big Higgins”
(Jacob Omnium) they approached a booth and
Higgins felt in his pockets for small change. “Oh!”
said Thackeray, “they’ll pass us in free, as two of
the profession.”

It was not for nothing that he translated Uhland’s

The King on the Tower

The cold grey hills they bind me around,

The darksome valleys lie sleeping below,
But the winds as they pass o’er all this ground,
Bring me never a sound of woe!
 Oh! for all I have suffered and striven,
Care has embittered my cup and my feast;
But here is the night and the dark blue heaven,
And my soul shall be at rest.

O golden legends writ in the skies!

I turn towards you with longing soul,
And list to the awful harmonies
Of the Spheres as on they roll.

My hair is grey and my sight nigh gone;

My sword it rusteth upon the wall;
Right have I spoken, and right have I done:
When shall I rest me once for all?

O blessed rest! O royal night!

Wherefore seemeth the time so long
Till I see yon stars in their fullest light,
And list to their loudest song?

VI
This leads us naturally to the second “key-secret” which Mr.
Merivale found in Thackeray—his Religion. That is all very well, but
what do we understand by it? That Thackeray was very simply
devout no reader of his novels will question for a moment. Philip, for
instance, flings himself quite naturally on his knees in prayer: and, I
am sure, quite as naturally did Thackeray in any moment of trouble,
as he might be seen religiously walking with his daughters to public
worship. But again, what is prayer? or what was it to Thackeray?—
forgive me that I raise this question, since religion has been claimed
as one of his two “key-secrets.” What is prayer, then? Is it that which,
in Jeremy Taylor, “can obtain everything,” can “put a holy constraint
upon God, and detain an angel till he leave a blessing ... arrest the
sun in the midst of his course and send the swift-wing’d winds upon
our errand; and all those strange things, and secret decrees, and
unrevealed translations which are above the clouds and far beyond
the region of the stars, shall combine in ministry and advantages for
the praying man”? Is it with Thackeray so forcible a power as that?
Or is it just the humble yet direct petition of the Athenians,
commended by Marcus Aurelius—“Rain, rain, dear Zeus, on the
ploughed fields of the Athenians”—in truth, says the Emperor, for his
part, “we ought not to pray at all, or to pray in this simple and noble
fashion.”
There is a considerable difference, you see: and for my part I
have, searching Thackeray’s works, no doubt that Thackeray’s
prayer was ever direct, devout, unabashed and as simple, as
anything in Tom Brown’s School Days transferred to a big grown
man. You may at most put him down as a guest at the inn of
Emmaus. But he lived through the time of Newman, Manning,
Martineau; and all I can say is that if Religion involve any conflict at
all of the soul, in his novels I detect nothing of the sort: nothing even
resembling those spiritual tortures which, afflicting men so various
and differing (if you will) in degree as Newman, Clough, and yet later
Richard Jefferies, were a real and dreadful burden of the soul to our
fathers and grandfathers. Thackeray lived up to the very thick of the
conflict: it touched him not. He was devout just as—shall we say?—
we elders have known certain Anglo-Indian Captains who went
through the Mutiny and during it saw things upon which, coming
home, they locked their lips, gallant gentlemen!
So Thackeray walked and knelt, as it seems to me in the very
simplest of Creeds. Its summary is no more—and no less—than old
Colonel Newcome’s dying Adsum! Says a reviewer in the North
British:

We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in

December, when he was walking with two friends along the
Dean road to the west of Edinburgh—one of the noblest outlets
to any city. It was a lovely evening, such a sunset as one never
forgets; a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going
 down behind the highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine
bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip
of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip colour, lucid, and as if it
were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object
standing out as if etched upon the sky. The north-west of
Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this
pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry
below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross: there it
was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three
gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a
tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in
the word “Calvary”! The friends walked on in silence, and then
turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and
serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things,—of death,
of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God,
and in his Saviour.

VII
I shall attempt in another lecture, Gentlemen, to examine some
of Thackeray’s limitations as a novelist; and passing on, to explore
the curious, most haunting felicity of his prose. You will have already
gathered that I am trying to do what all Professors must and no critic
should; which is to discuss an author with whom he has a broken
sympathy. The lilt, the cadence, of Thackeray’s prose are to me a
rapture, almost. The meanness of his concern with life and his
cruelty in handling mean things—as in A Shabby Genteel Story—
evoke something like physical nausea. His Paris Sketch Book seems
to me about the last word in bumptiousness: his lectures on Swift
and on Sterne might, bating reverence for him even in misdeed, be
flipped as flies are flipped off a clean page of paper. They needed
(as Venables most justly advised) a piano for accompaniment—or a
pianola. On the other hand—to omit the great novels—his
Roundabout Papers almost touch Horatian perfection.
 As for his snobbery—well, I promised you that coming to it, I
should waste little of your time. Perhaps I should have called it his
“alleged” snobbery, guardedly (as a cautious non-committal journalist
once wrote of “an alleged School-Treat”), since my own ears have
heard it denied of him. But they have heard with incredulity, since I
suppose of this distressing little disease two things to be certain: the
first that it is unmistakable, the second that it is incurable. The
patient may know—perhaps may feel as acutely as his listeners—
that he has it—but in his next sentence it must out: he cannot help
himself. Still, it is a human frailty—not ranking in any just
condemnation with cruelty (say) or treachery; not worthy to be
exalted as a Deadly sin, belonging rather to the peccadilloes about
which—if one may misapply Dante’s phrase—we do not reason, but
give a look and pass on. Moreover, if you followed the argument of
my previous lecture, Thackeray’s was a venial form of the malady
because not deliberately acquired, not (as an American said of side-
whiskers) “the man’s own fault,” but in his blood, inherited of his
Anglo-Indian stock. He never—transferred to Chiswick, the
Charterhouse, Cambridge, the Temple, Kensington, Pall Mall—
eradicated that family sense of belonging to a governing few set
amid an alien race, with a high sense of the duty attached to
privilege, but without succour of knowing all sorts and conditions of
men and understanding them as neighbours; or let me put it, without
just that sense which quite stupid men at home acquire in a Rural
Council, or the hunting-field, or a cricket-match on the village green.
I wish we could end with that, and just put it (with W. E. Henley)
that Thackeray was ever too conscious of a footman behind his
chair. Superficially and in estimating him as a man, that were enough
for us. But artistically the trouble goes deeper. There is no reason
why an artist should or should not take the squalidest of scenes,
provided that the story he sets in it is of serious import. May we
agree that of all atmospheres the atmosphere of a cheap boarding-
house is perhaps the least inviting—the smell of linoleum and
cookery in the well-staircase, the shabby gentility refurbishing itself
in the small bedrooms, the pretence, the ceremony at dinner, the
rissoles, the talk about the Prince of Wales, the president landlady
with “Saturday” written on her brow? Well, Balzac took this sort of
thing and made masterpieces of it; and Balzac made masterpieces
of it just because he understood that it, also, belonged to human
comedy and tragedy, and that there, as well as anywhere else, you
may find essentially the wreckage of a King Lear, the dreams of a
Napoleon. Thackeray takes a boarding-house merely to savage it, to
empty one poor chest-of-drawers after another and hang their
pitiable contents on a public wash-line, to hold the dirty saucepans
under our noses, to expose the poor servingmaid’s heart along with
her hands, its foolish inarticulate yearnings along with her finger-
nails—and all for what? That is the point—for what? To tell us that
her dreams of a fairy prince oscillated between a flash lodger with a
reversible tie and a seedy artist who dropped his “h’s”? We might
have guessed that much, surely, without elaborate literary
assistance. But suppose the thing worth while, why is the man so
cruel about it? His favourite Horace, to be sure, was cruel to his
discarded loves. But here is no revulsion of lost love. Here is nothing
but gratuitous mocking at a poor girl—
a fifth-rate dabbler in the British gravy—
and nothing else, or nothing we could not have smelt inside the front
door. And he finds this worth continuing and expanding into a long
novel of Philip!
As a rule, Gentlemen, I hold it idle for a lecturer to talk about an
author with whom he has to confess an imperfect sympathy. There
are so many others, worth admiring, whom he may help you to
admire! But as many of us come to Milton against the grain,
conquered by his divine music, so the spell of Thackeray’s prose
takes me, often in the moment of angriest revolt and binds me back
his slave. I shall try, next time, to speak of its great magic.
 THACKERAY (III)

I
I FEAR, Gentlemen, that you will have to take my earlier remarks to-
day with some sympathy for your lecturer’s time of life, even though
you refuse that respect for greying hairs which I shall never claim of
you. If you hereafter remember at all, you will remember that never
from this desk was preached anything but confidence in you, never a
word to bind you with any old or middle-aged rules of wisdom. “Earth
loves her young,” says Meredith:

Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads

The ways they walk, by what they speak oppressed

—which is well and hopeful and in the way of nature. But since
Professors do not come by nature you have to forgive them a certain
maturity, a date, a crust in the bottle, and handle them gently if you
would know the vintage.
I shall ask you, then, to discount what follows in apparent
depreciation of Thackeray: to remind yourselves that we are all too
prone to destroy the age just preceding our own; with something of
that primitive instinct which (they say), translated into legislation
amid the South Seas, commands a grandfather to scale a tree and
hold on, if he can, while his prehensile young sway the trunk and jerk
it. I do not myself believe in these rude communal tests, that they
ever were, or indeed that, even in our time, natural science has
arrived, for instance, at any fixable limit for a Professor’s incapacity
—and tenacity.
 I am simply stating a plain historical fact when I say that the men
who were young and practised writing in the later days of Queen
Victoria—and as devotedly as any of you can be practising it to-day
—found their most peculiar, most dearly cherished, anathema in the
“preachiness” of the mid-Victorian novelists—of which “preachiness”
Thackeray had been perhaps the most eminent practitioner and
exemplar. He confesses it, indeed, in one of the Roundabout Papers.
Says he:

Perhaps of all the novel-spinners now extant, the present

speaker is the most addicted to preaching. Does he not stop
perpetually in his story and begin to preach to you? When he
ought to be engaged with business, is he not for ever taking the
Muse by the sleeve, and plaguing her with one of his cynical
sermons? I cry peccavi loudly and heartily. I tell you I would like
to be able to write a story which should show no egotism
whatever, in which there should be no reflections, no cynicism,
no vulgarity (and so forth) but an incident in every other page, a
villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.

II
That last sentence quite misses the point—or at least seemed to
miss it quite hopelessly to those who were young in the ’nineties:
whose favourite models were French or Russian—Balzac, Stendhal,
Mérimée, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgueniev, the Tolstoy of
Sevastopol and War and Peace.
It is a long while ago: but passions of faith we had; the first
commanding us (poor fellows!) to agonise in search of the right or
most expressive word; the second to keep ourselves out of any
given story making the persons exhibit their characters of
themselves and by the actions, the actions again explain themselves
by what the persons had said or done previously. In other words
these young men attempted to apply to the novel Aristotle’s dictum
concerning the Epic, of which they conceived the novel to be (as
Fielding had maintained) the artistic successor. (And here let me
advise all you who have read the Poetics to study Fielding’s
reasoned application of that treatise in his prefaces to the several
Books of Tom Jones):

“Admirable on all counts,” says Aristotle, “Homer has the

special merit of being the only poet who understands the part he
should take himself. In his own person he should intrude as little
as possible. It is not in that way he imitates life. Other writers
force themselves into the business throughout and imitate but
little and rarely. Homer, after a few words of preface, at once
brings in a man or a woman as it may be, never characterless
but each distinctively characteristic.”

To put it in another way—and to employ for once a couple of

terms which as a rule these discourses banish, a story should be as
purely objective as possible, the author’s meaning infused indeed
(as it must be in any story worth the telling) but his own person, with
his own commentary, as rigidly excluded as from a stage-play—say,
as from King Lear or Tartuffe. Madame Bovary and Boule de Suif
were the exemplars (to name but two); any chat by the author
himself ranked as an offence against art.

III
Now, just accepting this as a historical fact, without question for
the moment of its Tightness or wrongness, you will easily see how
impatient it made that generation with many things to which their
fathers had been prone. Let me mention two or three.
(1) To begin with, it made them abhor those detailed descriptions
of hero, heroine and others—those page-long introductions to which
the great Sir Walter was prone: the philosophical reason for this
being that no art should attempt that which can be far better done by
another. “Her hair, of a raven gloss, concealed its luxuriance within
the confines of a simple ribbon. Loosened, it fell below her waist.
The upper part of her face, with its purely-arched eyebrows,
suggested a Cleopatra. A lover of the antique might have cavilled,
perchance, at the slight uptilt of the nose, which indeed, etc.: or
again at the pout of the pretty, provocative mouth reminiscent”—well,
of some picture of Greuze rather than of some statue or other with
which the reader was presumably acquainted. “But as she burst
upon Harold’s vision in a gown of some simple soft white clinging
material—” and so on. It seemed that a drawing could do that sort of
thing better and, for the reader, in one-twentieth part of the time.
(2) Secondly, our theory cut out long descriptions of “natural
scenery.” Hardy’s preliminary Chapter of Egdon Heath would, of
course, be judged for what it was—a deliberate and magnificent
setting of slow, perdurable nature as background to the transitory life
of man, the stern breast that has suckled so many fretful children
and seen them pass. And again, as in The Woodlanders all the sap
of English woodland—all its spirits of Dryad and Hamadryad—all its
aeolian murmurs in the upper boughs—might be evoked to dignify a
most simple country story. But the sort of romanticism that used to
enjoy itself in the Alps, amid thunderstorms, the solitary communings
of the tortured breast with the grander aspects of peak and ravine, of
the atrabilious or merely bilious, with the avalanche—all this [shall I
call it the Obermann nonsense?] was wiped out even as the terrors
of that gentleman who making an early ascent of the tall but
inconsiderable slope of Glaramara, sat down and demanded to be
“let blood.” In short, lengthy descriptions of scenery passed out of
vogue along with lengthy descriptions of feminine charms.
(3) Thirdly—and to be very brief about this—the names of
invented characters came to be real, or at least plausible names.
Such names as those with which Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, spoilt
the verisimilitude of their novels—“Lord Frederick Verisopht,” “Mr.
Quiverful” or the list of Becky’s guests in Vanity Fair—“the Duchess
Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire,
Marchese Allessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsugar
and Chevalier Tosti”—all in the slang of that day “quite the cheese.”
You may say what you like against the old realistic novel, but
anyhow it earned a living in its day if only by cutting out this
detestable boil inherited from Ben Jonson, with his type names of
Brain-worm, Well-bred, La Foule, Sir Epicure Mammon, and so on....
(4) But above all this passion of one’s youth for purely objective
treatment of narrative fell as a denunciatory curse upon Thackeray’s
incurable habit of preaching. And here, if we were right (which I shall
not here contend), we blithely damned ourselves to the permanent
unpopularity we are beginning to enjoy. Take warning: for if there be
one vice this nation has in its bones it is a fondness for preaching.
An inscrutable addiction, an unholy habit! I observe even in railway
trains that nine of our nation will swallow a column of propaganda,
unashamed in its cookery, for one that will relish a clean news-
report. And yet, Gentlemen, the mind that can separate clean news
from propaganda and suggestion is the only mind we should seek to
send forth from this city of ours, as the only mind that shall save our
state.
This awful propensity to preaching!—and but yesterday an
attempt to force upon all Professors no less than forty preachments
a year—a gluttony of misemployment in a land of unemployed!
Let me illustrate. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story, Treasure
Island, over which a number of those young men of whom I have
been talking waxed enthusiastic, just because it told a plain tale
neatly as (they held) a tale should be told. But Treasure Island cut
(as they say) very little ice with the General Public. What fetched the
General Public and made Stevenson popular was Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, and that because the General Public read into it a religious
lesson which the author had never intended. Thereafter he, having
ever in him a strain, as W. E. Henley noted, a
something of the Shorter Catechist,
gave way to preachment—to the composition of collects and
Christmas sermons and (as apparently any of us can do—it is a
career open to all the talents) thereby attracted audiences. But
where had gone the economy of description, the directness of
narrative, the sudden incisiveness of a speaking voice? Take this, for
example, of the Hispaniola’s working her way in to anchorage:

All the way in, Long John stood by the steersman and
conned the ship. He knew the passage like the palm of his hand;
and though the man in the chains got everywhere more water
than was down in the chart, John never hesitated once.
“There’s a strong scour with the ebb,” he said, “and this here
passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a
spade.”
We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about
a third of a mile from either shore, the mainland on one side, and
Skeleton Island on the other. The bottom was clean sand. The
plunge of our anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying
over the woods; but in less than a minute they were down again,
and all was once more silent.
The place was entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the
trees coming right down to a high-water mark, the shores mostly
flat, and the hill-tops standing round at a distance in a sort of
amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather, two
swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and the
foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous
brightness. From the ship we could see nothing of the house or
stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had
not been for the chart on the companion, we might have been
the first that had ever anchored there since the island arose out
of the seas.
There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of
the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and
against the rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over
the anchorage—a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree-
trunks. I observed the doctor sniffing and sniffing like some one
tasting a bad egg.
“I don’t know about treasure,” he said, “but I’ll stake my wig
there’s fever here.”
 You will remark, first, how the mere description moves with the
story, following the crew in and just noting the landscape as they saw
it after the long sea-passage: quite in the fashion of Homer who (as
Lessing observed) does not in the Iliad weary with any long
description of the finished shield of Achilles but coaxes us up to the
forge of Hephaestus, so that like the children at the open door of
Longfellow’s village smithy we see the work shaping under the
workman’s hammer, and—forgive the trite old verse—

love to see the flaming forge

And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor:

quite in the fashion of the Odyssey, too, where the Wanderers, and
we with them, make landfall

on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

and beach the black ship and disembark and wonder at cliff, glade
and waterfall, we wondering (that is) through their eyes.
You will remark, secondly, in the casual passage I quoted, how
the very few words spoken—those by John Silver, the villain, those
by the Doctor who is the true punctum indifferens, the normal sane
man of the story as truly as is Horatio in Hamlet—bite in, as by sharp
acid, the impression of the story—the meaning of it, at that moment,
to the mutineer and to the simply honest man.
Am I comparing small things with great? Why, Gentlemen, of
course I am, and purposely; to convince you, if I can, that in small as
in great—the same laws rule true narrative art.
 IV
So we come back to Thackeray, and to preaching. Preaching, or
lecturing, would seem to be an endemic itch of our nation, first (I am
sure) to be cured through attack on the public propensity for listening
to lectures and sermons. You will never cure the lecturer. In my own
part of the world the propensity to preach is notoriously virulent. As
the song puts it, into the mouth of an enthusiastic emigrant—

And I will be the preacher,

And preach, three times a day,
To every living creature
In North Americay.

For a moment let us go back to Thackeray’s humbugging protest that

he wished he were able to write a story with “an incident in every
other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.”
I say (with what reverence it leaves me to command) that this is
pure, if unconscious, humbug, and a clouding of truth. For what is an
“incident”? A murder—say that of Duncan in the castle of Inverness;
a ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, stalking; a horseman in the
night, clattering; a ghostly tapping, a detective holding a lantern over
a reopened grave—all these are incidents and rather obviously so.
But so also, if properly used, may be the tearing-up of a letter, the
stiffened drop of a woman’s hands, a sigh, a turning-away.
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”—just that, and
if you can use that, what more tragic? Thackeray himself—albeit he
could borrow hardily enough from Dumas, as when Colonel Esmond
breaks his sword—in that very book achieves his topmost height, his
most unchallengeable stroke as an artist, by just telling how a
brilliant girl steps down a staircase, and ending on two words, half-
whispered in French, at the foot of it—as we shall see, by and by.
 V
No: I dare to say that this gift of loose, informal, preaching was
Thackeray’s bane as a novelist. The ease with which it came to him,
and the public’s readiness to accept it, just tempted him to slouch
along. Esmond and the first half of Vanity Fair excepted, he never
seems (to me at least) to have planned out a novel. He could not sit
at home, in his desolated house, and concentrate himself upon a
close-knit artistic design: but wrote, as I have said, in hotels or “upon
Club paper,” usually behind-time and (as the saying is) with the
printer’s devil at his elbow: and so this great melancholy man could,
out of his melancholy and his genius, curiously matched with it, of
vivacious talk summon up ream upon ream at call. Heaven forbid
this should suggest that when he came to facts—more especially
when he dealt with his beloved eighteenth century—he was
careless. On the contrary, he knew it familiarly as a hand knows its
glove. I suppose no later writer (with the possible exception of Austin
Dobson) has understood the earlier half of that century better. For
certain, again, no writer has, comparably with Thackeray, revivified it.
Scholars are always on the pad, with dark lanterns, to catch out
writers of imagination: but I observe that these Proctors,
encountering Thackeray, carefully edge to the other side of the
street. I cannot find that anything in Barry Lyndon, Esmond, The
Virginians, the opening of Denis Duval, has ever been seriously
challenged by the pedants: and considering Thackeray’s fame and
the minute jealousy of pedants, that is a fairly fine record. In the
famous chapters on Brussels and Waterloo in Vanity Fair, so far as I
discover, every record confirms, not one contradicts, his story.
Again, as it seems to me, this feebleness in construction—this
letting the story go at hazard and filling out with chat or preaching—
this lazy range of invention in plot—matches with limits in the range
of his characters. Here again he is always impeccable when dealing
with an Anglo-Indian retired, whether it be Jos. Sedley or Colonel
Newcome—high or low; or with a Foker or a Costigan or anyone he
has encountered in his own Bohemian life, or in a Pall Mall Club or in
an Irish regiment or in any dingy lodging-house, at home or abroad.
Any inhabitant of these haunts, haunts of his actual experience, he
can exhibit and experiment upon with infinite variety. Within that
range, you can say, he almost never went wrong. He could there
convert all particulars to a Universal. No shadow of doubt can rest on
the literal and actual truth of an anecdote he puts into De Finibus,
one of his best Roundabout Papers.

“I was smoking,” says he, “in a tavern parlour one night, and
this Costigan came into the room alive, the very man; the most
remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, of
the rude drawings in which I had depicted him. He had the same
little coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same
twinkle in that eye. ‘Sir,’ said I, knowing him to be an old friend
whom I had met in unknown regions—‘Sir,’ I said, ‘may I offer
you a glass of brandy-and-water?’ ‘Bedad ye may,’ says he, ‘and
I’ll sing ye a song tu.’ Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue.
Of course he had been in the army. In ten minutes he pulled out
an army agent’s account, whereon his name was written. A few
months later we read of him in a police court. How had I come to
know him, to divine him? Nothing shall convince me that I have
not seen that man in the world of spirits....”

They used (he adds) to call the good Sir Walter the “Wizard of
the North.” What if some writer should appear who can write so
enchantingly that he shall be able to call into actual life the people
whom he invents?... Well, I think Thackeray could do that: but only, I
think, in the small district limited by the Haymarket on the east and
Kensington Gardens on the west. He could call spirits from the vasty
deep of the Cider Cellars, evoke them from the shadowy recesses of
the Reform or the Athenaeum Club. But, like Prospero, he had to
draw a ring around him before his best incantations worked. The
cautious Trollope remarks that his Sir Pitt Crawley “has always been
to me a stretch of audacity which I have been unable to understand.
But it has been accepted.” Yes, to be sure, it has been accepted,
and old Sir Pitt is wickedly alive and breathing just because (on
Thackeray’s own confession) he was drawn from the life. But as a
rule, if you take his dukes and duchesses you will find him on ticklish
ground, even so far northward as Mayfair, apt (shall we say?) to
buttonhole the butler. Always saving Esmond and a part of The
Virginians, I ask you to compare anything in Thackeray with the
opening of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and you will detect at once
which author is dealing with what he supposes and which with what
is known to him, so familiar that he cannot mistake his people even
as he enters a room.

VI
But now we come to the man’s style; by which I mean, of course,
his propriety and grace of writing. It is, as we have seen, a “flowing”
style: it has that amplitude which Longinus commended and our
Burke practised, as an attribute of the sublime. For defect, as a
narrative style, it tells in three or more pages what might as well be
told in three sentences and often better. Without insisting that the
writers of the ’nineties (of whom I spoke but now) ever managed to
justify their painful search for the briefest, most telling phrase, I
submit that it is unlikeliest to be found by a man writing against time,
for monthly numbers. That (if you will) being granted, we have to ask
ourselves why Thackeray’s prose is so beautiful that it moves one so
frequently to envy, and not seldom to a pure delight, transcending all
envy. For certain the secret lies nowhere in his grammar, in which
anyone can find flaws by the score. Half the time his sentences run
as if (to borrow a simile of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s concerning
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream) the man were kicking
up a bedroom slipper and catching it again on his toe. The secret
lies, if you will follow his sentences and surrender yourselves to their
run and lull and lapse, in a curious haunting music, as of a stream; a
music of which scarce any other writer of English prose has quite the
natural, effortless, command. You have no need to search in his best
pages, or to hunt for his purple patches. It has a knack of making
music even while you are judging his matter to be poor stuff; music—
and frequent music—in his most casual light-running sentences. I
protest, Gentlemen, I am not one of your pereant qui ante nos nostra
dixerunt fellows: I grudge no man saying a thing of mine before me,
even when I know it must be valuable because the anticipator is Mr.
George Saintsbury; and so far am I from wishing him to perish that
one of my sustaining hopes of life is that of congratulating him on his
hundredth birthday. (Do not be afraid: in any event, it shall not be
from this desk.) But I protest also that in his History of English Prose
Rhythm he surprised a secret which was mine, and shy as love—the
conviction that for mastery—unconscious, native mastery, it may be
—of “that other rhythm of prose”—no English writer excels
Thackeray, and a very few indeed approach him. So you guess that I
have to deal at once with a sense of gratitude and a grudge that my
secret can now stand expressed and confirmed by so high an
authority: and my grudge I shall work off by quoting him.

“When I say,” he affirms, “that I hardly know any master of

English prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and
that I certainly do not know any one with so various and
pervasive a command, I may seem to provoke the answer, ‘Oh!
you are, if not a maniac, at any rate a maniaque.’ Nevertheless, I
say it; and will maintain it. The most remarkable thing about
Thackeray is his mastery of that mixed style, ‘shot with rhythm.’
Even in his earliest and most grotesque extravaganzas you will
rarely find a discordant sentence—the very vulgarisms and
misspellings come like solecisms from a pair of pretty lips and
are uttered in a musical voice. As there never was a much
hastier writer, it is clear that the man thought in rhythm—that the
words, as they flowed from his pen, brought the harmony with
them. Even his blank verse and his couplets in prose, never, I
think, in any one instance unintentional, but deliberately used for
burlesque purposes, have a diabolical quality and, as the wine
merchants say, ‘breed’ about them, which some very
respectable ‘poets’ have never achieved.”

He quotes a short beautiful passage from Vanity Fair—

 She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling
on her shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light. By
way of helping on the preparations for the departure [for
Waterloo where let me remind you he, her husband, was to fall
and lie, with a bullet through his heart], and showing that she too
could be useful at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken
up a sash of George’s, from the drawers whereon it lay and
followed him to and fro, with the sash in her hand, looking on
mutely as the packing proceeded. She came out and stood
leaning at the wall, holding this sash against her bosom, from
which the heavy net of crimson dropped like a large stain of
blood.

He proceeds:

Take another and shorter—not, I hope, impudently short

“Becky was always good to him, always amused, never angry.”
Anybody can do that? Perhaps; but please find something
like it for me before 1845, and out of Thackeray, if you will kindly
do so. In him it is everywhere.

But, for the cadence of it—since all true prose demands prolonged
cadences—let me try to read you a passage or two from the
exquisite sixth and seventh chapters of Esmond. Harry Esmond is
home from his campaigning, has been to service in the old cathedral,
and meets his dear mistress outside as the service is done and over.
Mark, I say, the cadences of that scene of reconciliation—

She gave him her hand, her little fair hand: there was only
her marriage ring on it. The quarrel was all over. The year of
grief and estrangement was passed. They never had been
separated. His mistress had never been out of his mind all that
time. No, not once. No, not in the prison; nor in the camp; nor on
shore before the enemy; nor at sea under the stars of solemn
midnight; nor as he watched the glorious rising of the dawn: not
even at the table, where he sat carousing with friends, or at the
theatre yonder, where he tried to fancy that other eyes were
brighter than hers. Brighter eyes there might be, and faces more
beautiful, but none so dear—no voice so sweet as that of his
beloved mistress, who had been sister, mother, goddess to him
during his youth—goddess now no more, for he knew of her
weaknesses; and by thought, by suffering, and that experience it
brings, was older now than she; but more fondly cherished as
woman perhaps than ever she had been adored as divinity.
What is it? Where lies it? the secret which makes one little hand
the dearest of all? Who ever can unriddle that mystery? Here
she was, her son by his side, his dear boy. Here she was,
weeping and happy. She took his hand in both hers; he felt her
tears. It was a rapture of reconciliation.
They walked as though they had never been parted, slowly,
with the grey twilight closing round them.
“And now we are drawing near to home,” she continued, “I
knew you would come, Harry, if—if it was but to forgive me for
having spoken unjustly to you after that horrid—horrid
misfortune. I was half frantic with grief then when I saw you. And
I know now—they have told me. That wretch, whose name I can
never mention, even has said it: how you tried to avert the
quarrel, and would have taken it on yourself, my poor child: but it
was God’s will that I should be punished, and that my dear lord
should fall.”
“He gave me his blessing on his death-bed,” Esmond said.
“Thank God for that legacy!”
“Amen, amen! dear Henry,” said the lady, pressing his arm. “I
knew it. Mr. Atterbury, of St. Bride’s, who was called to him, told
me so. And I thanked God, too, and in my prayers ever since
remembered it.”
“You had spared me many a bitter night, had you told me
sooner,” Mr. Esmond said.