Abstract
Chapter 9 is about enlisting the female and multicultural Other in the global War on Terror, including Vin Diesel’s XXX sagas that transform his former criminality into a patriotic rogue who vanquishes international threats. The remainder of the chapter examines two female CIA agents, the first is Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, and the second is Carrie Mathison in Homeland. Their representations often engage comparisons with Bauer’s hypermasculinity, underscoring how their “difference” plays out in matters of national security. While Maya is devoid of a personal life, Mathison is plagued by mental illness, troubling links to motherhood, and issues with trust and intimacy. Both are effective agents who are often able to perform the nation, offering more progressive representations than most previous iterations, despite the customary gender-based limitations.
This isn’t the arrangement we made, Carrie … you weren’t supposed to …take matters into your own hands, break the law.
Reda Hashem
I’m sorry, Reda, I fucked up.
Carrie Mathison, Homeland
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Notes
- 1.
Jess Cagle, “The Next Action Hero,” Time, August 2, 2002.
- 2.
Pozo quoted in Cagle; Pozo is CEO of Arenas Entertainment, catering to the US Latino media marketplace.
- 3.
As quoted in Cagle.
- 4.
Jet magazine put Diesel on its cover in 2002, claiming he was the next rising African American movie star; and Ebony magazine in November 2002 asked: “is he Black or not?” Finally, Gentlemen’s Quarterly put Diesel on its August 2002 cover, dubbing him “Hollywood’s first multiracial action hero.”
- 5.
Other mixed race celebrities have been pressured to openly declare themselves black. New York Yankee Derek Jeter, who has a white mother and black father, told 60 Minutes in 2005 that he received death threats for dating women on both sides of the color line. Maria P.P. Root, who studies multiracial identities, notes that until 1989, only infants born to two white parents were officially white, according to federal directives that determine birth statistics; in contrast, an infant born to one white parent took the race of the parent whose race was non-white. After 1989, an infant’s race is recorded as the same as its birth mother. See Maria P.P. Root, ed., The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 637.
- 6.
Mercer notes that simply embracing multiculturalism as a panacea to existing hierarchies of identity does little to interrogate the inequities that endure. Some groups have responded by re-appropriating the racial ideologies once used against them. Mercer notes that a shift back to “black” from “ethnic minority” among British people of color “demonstrated a process in which the objects of racial ideology reconstituted themselves as subjects of social, cultural and political change, actively making history.” Rather than compete for their individual voices in the public sphere and be reduced to an incoherent drone, Asians, Caribbean, and African peoples pulled together to embrace their shared common experiences under British racism, explains Mercer. See Kobena Mercer, “Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, eds. Les Back and John Solomos (New York: Routledge, 2000), 510.
- 7.
In the latter film, Toretto is a gang member and former street racer helping an undercover cop—not surprisingly, an Irishman named Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker)—who wants to infiltrate and stop a renegade band of street racers terrorizing truckers on Los Angeles freeways. Diesel describes his character, another criminal turned crusader, as someone who must go rogue and operate “outside the law.” From an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (NBC Television Network), August 5, 2000.
- 8.
The film did $142 million in domestic box office and more than $135 million in overseas gross, earning back nearly four times its original production costs of $70 million. Data is compiled from imdb.com (professional version).
- 9.
XXX, DVD, directed by Rob Cohen (MGM Home Entertainment, 2003).
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Bruce Westbrook, “Review of ‘XXX,’” Houston Chronicle, August 9, 2002.
- 12.
XXX, DVD.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
June Thomas “Secret Agent Woman,” Slate, November 17, 2011. Available online.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Jeff Stein, “Covert Affairs Stretches for Spy-World Reality,” Washington Post, August 24, 2010.
- 18.
Christine Lane was an early writer of Bigelow’s films and saw in them a “feminist orbit,” using Christine Gledhill’s term, as they engage “feminist politics and encourage spectators to ask questions about gender, genre, and power.” See Christine Lane, “From ‘The Loveless to Point Break’: Kathryn Bigelow’s Trajectory in Action,” Cinema Journal, 37, no. 4 (1998), 77.
- 19.
See Harriet E. Margolis, “Blue Steel: Progressive Feminism in the ’90s?” Post Script, 13, no. 1 (1993).
- 20.
According to Jay Carr, “Why is Hollywood Bashing Women?” The Boston Globe, March 25, 1990.
- 21.
Johanna Steinmetz, “The Director’s Chair: Five Women Talk About Their Changing World,” Chicago Tribune, November 4, 1990, 20.
- 22.
The incident is historically accurate and resulted in nine dead, including seven agency personnel. See Richard A. Oppel, Jr., Mark Mazzetti, and Souad Mekhennetjan, The New York Times, January 4, 2010.
- 23.
Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Columbia Pictures, 2012), Amazon Prime.
- 24.
Daniel Joyce and Gabrielle Simm, “Zero Dark Thirty: International Law, Film, and Representation,” London Review of International Law, 3, no. 2 (September 2015).
- 25.
Adrian Chen, “Newly Declassified Memo Shows CIA Shaped Zero Dark Thirty Narrative,” Gawker, May 6, 2013. Available online.
- 26.
Paul Kendall, “Zero Dark Thirty: Fact vs Fiction,” The Daily Telegraph, January 23, 2015. Available online at telegraph.co.uk.
- 27.
“Introduction by Kathryn Bigelow,” in Zero Dark Thirty: The Shooting Script, ed. Mark Boal (New York: Newmarket Press, 2014).
- 28.
113th Congress, “Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” S. Report 113–288, December 9, 2014. Available online at https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf.
- 29.
See Jean Maria Arrigo, “A Utilitarian Argument Against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists,” Science and Engineering Ethics, 10 (2004), 543.
- 30.
Naomi Wolff, “A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty’s Apology for Torture,” The Guardian, January 4, 2013. Kate Stanton, “Kathryn Bigelow Denounces Torture, Defends ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Torture Scenes in Essay,” upi.com, January 16, 2013.
- 31.
Press release available online at feinstein.senate.gov, December 19, 2012.
- 32.
Marouf A. Hasian, Jr., “Military Orientalism at the Cineplex: A Postcolonial Reading of Zero Dark Thirty,” Critical Studies in Communication, 31, no. 5 (2014).
- 33.
“American Night: The OBL Thriller Has Landed,” The Economist, January 5, 2013.
- 34.
Hasian, 472.
- 35.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
- 36.
Manohla Dargis, “By Any Means Necessary,” The New York Times, December 17, 2012.
- 37.
Irene Shih, “Existential Heroines: Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland,” Harvard Kennedy School Review, 2013, 99.
- 38.
Hanna Rosin, “The Auteur of Unease,” The New Republic, February 11, 2013, 8.
- 39.
The CIA defines its “primary mission is to collect, evaluate, and disseminate foreign intelligence to assist the president and senior US government policymakers in making decisions relating to the national security. The CIA does not make policy; it is an independent source of foreign intelligence information for those who do.” See https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/faqs/?tab=list-10.
- 40.
Homeland’s co-creators, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, both involved with 24 as writer-producers, assert that the switch from 24’s Fox Network to Showtime (as pay cable) was significant, offering greater freedom with respect to language, dramatic complexity, and not having stories be “broken up by commercials every 10 minutes.” It enabled them to indulge in multiple facets of Carrie’s motivations. In Hamed Aleaziz, “Interrogating the Creators of Homeland,” Mother Jones, November 4, 2011. Further, Carrie is vastly different from Maya in terms of platforms, as Zero Dark Thirty only had 157 minutes to tell her story compared to twelve one-hour episodes spanning seven seasons to chart Mathison’s evolution.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Shih, 99.
- 43.
Ibid., 101.
- 44.
Todd VanDerWerff, “Homeland’s Carrie Mathison is the Most Influential TV Character of the 2010s,” Vox Media, November 11, 2015. Available online at vox.com.
- 45.
Nolan Feeney, “Homeland: The Case Against Calling Carrie a Bipolar ‘Superhero,’” The Atlantic, October 7, 2013. Available online.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
VanDerWerff, Vox, November 11, 2015.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Joanna Robinson, “The C.I.A. is Delighted that Homeland’s Carrie Mathison will No Longer Work There,” Vanity Fair, April 5, 2015.
- 51.
Whitney Kassel, “Carrie Mathison is a Misogynist,” Available at foreignpolicy.com, December 2, 2014.
- 52.
Toby Miller, “James Bond’s Penis,” in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, ed. Christoph Lindner (Manchester University Press, 2009).
- 53.
Amy B. Zegart, “‘Spytainment’: The Real Influence of Fake Spies,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 23, no. 4 (2010), 600.
- 54.
Ibid., 601–605.
- 55.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 255–260.
- 56.
Gary Susman, “The Meteoric Rise of the TV Anti-Heroine.” Available at moviefone.com, June 19, 2015.
- 57.
Sara Stewart, “The Mother of All Bad Guys: Homeland Returns.” Available at indiewire.com, October 9, 2014.
- 58.
Homeland, Season 3, episode 12, “The Star,” directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, aired on December 15, 2013, Showtime.
- 59.
Homeland, Season 4, episode 2, “Trylon and Perisphere,” directed by Keith Gordon, aired on October 5, 2014, Showtime.
- 60.
Mike Hogan, “Why Season 5 of Homeland Might be the Show’s Best Yet,” Vanity Fair, December 20, 2015.
- 61.
Homeland, Season 4, episode 1, “The Drone Queen,” directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, aired on October 5, 2014, Showtime.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Sophie Gilbert, “A Whole New Homeland,” The Atlantic, October 5, 2015. Available online.
- 65.
Shih 100.
- 66.
Laila Al-Arian, “TV’s Most Islamophobic Show,” Salon, December 16, 2012.
- 67.
Aleaziz, Mother Jones.
- 68.
In February of 2005, the Fox Network consulted with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to air a special public service announcement, read by Sutherland, in which the network (and Sutherland) reiterated their belief that not all Muslims are terrorists. Asawin Subsaeng, “Torture-Heavy 24 Was Actually a Pretty Darn Liberal TV Show,” Mother Jones, May 2, 2014.
- 69.
PRI’s The World, March 24, 2017, “How a Muslim Lawyer and Critic of Showtime’s Homeland Became a Consultant for the Show.”
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Melena Ryzik, “Can Television be Fair to Muslims?” The New York Times, November 30, 2016.
- 72.
Gilbert, The Atlantic.
- 73.
Homeland, Season 6, episode 4, “A Flash of Light,” directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, aired on February 12, 2017, Showtime.
- 74.
Cynthia Littleton, “‘Homeland’ Season 6 Comes Home to Eye of Political Storm,” Variety, January 14, 2017.
- 75.
Gilbert, The Atlantic.
- 76.
Carol Glines, “Homeland Takes a Left Turn? New Season Focuses on Muslim Civil Rights, Female President-Elect’s CIA Battles,” foxnews.com, January 20, 2017.
- 77.
Todd VanDerWerff, “The Series Veers Toward Quiet Intimacy—and Suggests Nobody’s Hands are Clean,” Vox Media, December 22, 2015. Available online.
- 78.
Todd VanDerWerff, “Homeland Season 6 Pits the Intelligence Community Against the President-Elect. How Unrealistic!” Vox Media, January 13, 2017. Available online.
- 79.
Homeland, Season 4, episode 1, “The Drone Queen,” directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, aired on October 5, 2014, Showtime.
- 80.
Homeland, Season 5, episode 4, “All About Allison,” directed by John David Coles, aired on November 22, 2015. Showtime.
- 81.
Homeland, Season 6, episode 3, “The Covenant,” directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, aired on January 29, 2017. Showtime.
- 82.
Debra Birnbaum, “‘Homeland’ Boss on Season 7’s Trump Inspiration, Alex Jones and RIP Peter Quinn,” Variety, February 5, 2018.
- 83.
Ibid.
- 84.
Ibid.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Max Greenwood, “‘Homeland’ to Drop Trump Allegories in Next Season,” The Hill, April 19, 2018.
- 87.
Joseph Massad, “‘Homeland,’ Obama’s Show,” October 25, 2012. Available online at Aljazeera.com.
- 88.
Birnbaum, Variety.
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Yaquinto, M. (2019). Recruiting the Other as Globocop. In: Policing the World on Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24805-5_9
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