“A VARIATION OF VENGEANCE”

Abstract

This chapter examines contrasting reflections on “war on terror,” primarily exploring the action-thriller, The Kingdom (2008), about the FBI investigation into fictional coordinated terror attacks on an American oil workers compound in Saudi Arabia. With foreign and outpost space structured much like a “frontier western,” American masculine identity and sovereignty are numerously undermined in the course of the investigation. The film can only counter this through a jarring final act shift from “forensic procedural” to over-the-top action-war “revenge fantasy.” The bloody annihilation of the Orientalized “terror-Other” mastermind nominally “(re)Americanizes” foreign land and reinstitutes professional agency and militarized masculinity. In comparison with John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), Munich (2005) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the chapter concludes The Kingdom instead confirms the disquieting irresolution of violent revenge, extending terror through blowback and failing to reinvigorate a “protective” paternal masculinity undercut in being the same as America’s “dark mirror,” the Arab terrorist.