Big-screen versus small-screen terror

I'm currently reading a book to review called Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. It's pretty good—a decent balance of exposition and analysis, and makes some very useful observations about the often serendipitous relationship between Hollywood and 9/11. One observation it makes, which sort of struck me, is that since the attacks nine years ago, there has been very little in the way of terror-based plots emerging from Hollywood. Certainly when compared to the fairly constant presence of terrorists as ubiquitous bad guys through the 80s and 90s, the absence is rather striking. The author quotes an article written in The Atlantic in 2008 by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, who claims "Even in films that aren't taking thinly veiled jabs at the Bush administration, terrorist baddies turn out to be Eurotrash arms dealers (2006's Casino Royale), disgruntled hackers (2007's Live Free or Die Hard), a sinister air marshal (2005's Flightplan), or the handsome white guy sitting next to you in the airport lounge (2005's Red Eye). Anyone and anybody, in other words, except the sort of people who actually attacked the United States on 9/11." I think Douthat's claim here is inane,¹ for reasons I will get to in a moment, but at least has the merit of being correct in the broad strokes: namely, that there have been very few films since 9/11 that have depicted Islamist extremists in any capacity. Those that have I can more or less count on one hand: The Kingdom, United 93, Munich and Syriana are really the only ones that leap to mind (though I suppose you could include You Don't Mess With the Zohan if you wanted to stretch the designation to the breaking point, and Iron Man features bad guys in Afghanistan whom we are meant to understand as either Al-Qaeda or Taliban types).

To clarify what I mean here: there are a host of films that feature terrorism as a narrative element, or which are obviously about 9/11 in displaced form (think of Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds), but these are not about radical Islamism per se; I also leave off the list films about the Iraq war such as The Hurt Locker, Stop-Loss or In the Valley of Elah. I find Douthat's claim insipid because, of the films he cites, only Live Free or Die Hard can reasonably be called a film about terrorism, and even there the antagonist's principal motivation is to demonstrate to his former employer, Homeland Security, how vulnerable the U.S. is to electronic assault. The other three are, respectively, an overwrought spy film, a really rather incoherent psychological thriller, and a more nuanced and taut psychological thriller. Given that the latter two involve airplanes, I can see the impulse to classify them as Douthat does, but that stretches the definition of "terrorism" to an extent that renders is more or less meaningless.

I would counter Douthat's claim, which attempts to posit this lack of "the sort of people who actually attacked the United States on 9/11" in films as Hollywood being all wimpily PC, with the observation that there have been very few films about terrorism in general since 9/11.² It's not that Hollywood is reluctant to depict Islamists (Allah knows they were the among the most frequent go-to villains in action films in the 80s and 90s), but that it has become leery of the very subject of terrorism. This is, in and of itself, unsurprising. For all it gets vilified as a bastion of liberalism, Hollywood is actually very conservative—not politically, perhaps, but it is very cautious where the financial bottom line is concerned. Whether or not big-budget, genre movies—and this, really, is what we're principally talking about, not small-scale, independent or self-consciously "quality" films—could sustain audiences if they actively reminded them of the war or terror is an interesting question, but not one that major studios are likely to test at the risk of their profit margins.

All of this, besides offering me an excuse to take a few thwacks at Ross Douthat, is by way of pointing out that while films have been reluctant to depict terrorism since 9/11, Islamist or otherwise, the same cannot be said for television. Indeed, the small screen has been very nearly glutted with narratives of Samuel Huntington's so-called "clash of civilizations," and pretty much every American actor who can pass for "Eastern" has been getting work on 24. Even Kal Penn of Harold and Kumar and House fame has taken a turn as terrorist (albeit a reluctant one). Kal Penn, I ask you! Also that season, Canada's own Sean Majumder played a terrorist as well, casting that is perhaps even more amusing than Penn's.

While 24 is the primary example of TerrorTV^TM, it is by no means the only one: besides such short-lived shows as E-Ring, Threat Matrix, and The Grid, N.C.I.S. has frequent recourse to plotlines involving Islamists; season three of The West Wing began with a special post-9/11 episode ("Isaac and Ishmael") in which the characters mused over the nature of the war on terror while in a lockdown, and the second half of the season hinged to a large extent on a plot in which the president must decide whether to assassinate a foreign dignitary who is discovered to be the leader of an Al-Qaeda type group; Showtime produced a two-season series titled Sleeper Cell, about an African-American Muslim working for the FBI who infiltrates, well, a sleeper cell; and the various Law & Order franchises have all featured episodes about terrorism, Islamism, or the new American security state.

I raise this question here because I am curious as to why this is the case—I get why film shies away, but what is it about terrorism, Islamist or otherwise, that television finds so amenable? Is it the small-screen format? Where film is leery of recreating the kind of spectacle of 9/11, is television unconcerned because it can't do large-scale visuals in the same way? Are terrorism plots (in the various senses of the word) better suited to episodic format or procedural dramas? Or is there another reason?

I throw this out to general discussion—I am interested to get feedback. Also, I am sure I am missing terrorism-based films in my short list. If you want to point out anything I have overlooked, that would be super.

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¹I suppose I should be kinder to Ross Douthat, given that he is one of a rapidly shrinking cohort of conservative writers and thinkers who actually value intellect and erudition, and overall the article of his I'm quoting offers an interesting reading of post-9/11 film as a self-conscious retread of 1970s Hollywood. His discussions are almost invariably marred however by such tendentious claims as the one he makes in the quoted passage. He pretty much always manages to seriously irritate me whenever I read his columns, less by his politics than the presumptions about leftist and liberal thought that underwrite his arguments. (One way or another, I am deeply amused that Microsoft Word's spellcheck suggests that the word I'm meaning to type when I write "Douthat" is actually "douched.")

²Douthat, incidentally, does not do much to help his argument when he dismisses one of the few post-9/11 films to specifically depict Islamist terrorism—Syriana—as a film that "eschews nuance entirely, tracing all the ills of Mesopotamia to a malign nexus of Texas oilmen, neocons, and a trigger-happy CIA." Omitted from this list, interestingly, are such middle-Eastern regimes as Saudi Arabia, whose systemic maltreatment of migrant workers provides the primary site and source of religious extremism in the film.