Smart Post-9/11 Narratives – From Defining Ur-Narratives Forrest Gump and Fight Club to Three Kings and United 93

Abstract

Mythic expressions of national solidarity in war cinema remain highly controversial, especially from a representational and ideological perspective. Most frequently, Left-leaning critics decode such films by how they naturalize the dominant ideology and forgo critical structural analysis. This process is both exacerbated and at times subverted, depending on how you interpret the final result, by the ironic playfulness of the so-called smart aesthetic. To help tease out some of these attributes as they apply to 9/11 war cinema, this chapter will focus on a number of extremely influential postmodern/smart films beginning with Fight Club (1999) and Forrest Gump (1994), which helped to codify the enigmatic aesthetic form, before carrying out a close reading of Three Kings (1999) and United 93 (2006), which exemplify varying new aesthetics for the war film. Again the study will draw on the proliferation of material on DVD add-ons, which serves to create a direct dialogue between the director and the other creatives and the film audience, alongside other research avenues, to help tease out how these contemporary (war) narratives speak to and for new-generational audiences and can even be read as progressive in various ways.