“SHIELDING US FROM WHAT WE ARE NOT YET READY TO SEE”

Abstract

This chapter examines direct representations of being caught inside terror. Concentrating on Oliver Stone’s 9/11disaster-melodrama World Trade Center (2006), it demonstrates how the eclipse of professional capacity and mobility, focused on Port Authority officers entrapped at “Ground Zero”, profoundly destabilizes male identity. A sub-generic mid-film shift from “disaster epic” to “mine accident” movie seeks to contain (this) terror, making space for the trapped officers’ symbolic restoration to the home as husband-fathers. This recuperation is undercut by subsequent, idealized returns to uniformed “protective” roles by rescuers, which remasculinizes American manhood (and national identity). The chapter finally argues that these already ambivalent recoveries are irretrievably overwhelmed by numerous gaping absences that conclude the film, including of the frighteningly unspecified “terror-Other” attackers. The chapter also examines the imagined experience onboard United Flight 93 in United 93 (2006) and the ambivalent association of male characters with the Twin Towers in 25th Hour (2002).