Bruce Willis chases some all-American terrorists in Die Hard 4 - or Live Free or Die Hard as it was titled in the States.
Nick Cohen wrote an intriguing article in this week's Observer which raised a mystery that I myself have pondered many times: the Case Of Hollywood's All-American Terrorist. As Sherlock might have said: it really is a three-pipe problem.
Why is Hollywood so keen to create terrorists who are not al-Qaida, not Islamist, not Muslim? Why not name the elephant in the living room? After all, any screenwriter could easily create some "good" Muslims in the script to pre-empt accusations of xenophobia, or Islamophobia. It was after all pretty common for World War Two pictures to create depictions of decent Germans to balance the swinish Nazis.
But the puzzle goes further than this: the bad guys are not simply non-specific, or even North Korean - a pretty safe bet for screen villainy. The villains are actually Americans themselves. In Tony Scott's Déjà Vu, the terrorist is an American. In Die Hard 4.0, Bruce Willis's latest gung-ho actioner, the terrorist is American: a brilliant and in fact formerly patriotic American security expert who has gone to the bad through being mistreated by the authorities. Most notoriously of all, Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate, transposed to the first Iraq War of 1991, simply refused to accept the original premise of American soldiers being successfully manipulated by a foreign power and he made the villains - Americans.
Nick Cohen's argument, as I understand it, is an extension of his view that today's Left are a pusillanimous, chuckle-headed bunch who will tie themselves in knots rather than be accused of Islamophobia, and that Hollywood liberals may suffer from the same neurosis; they furthermore don't want to offend moviegoers in all-important foreign markets, and anyway prosperous developed democracies haven't actually suffered from terrorist violence that much and so have become detached from reality.
Well, Die Hard 4.0 was in the US called Live Free Or Die Hard, a twist on the state motto of New Hampshire. The distibutors might well have thought this bullish title was strong meat for pinko non-US audiences.
But I think The Case of the All-American Terrorist is at once more simple and more complex than Nick Cohen implies. It's more a psychological symptom of denial - a distant cousin to the denial suffered by pro-war parties in politics and the media. Making terrorists real Islamist soldiers would call to mind too painfully the facts of 9/11, it would remind cinemagoers that this terrorist attack, however grotesque and despicable, was resoundingly successful. And the reality and sheer size of that memory would instantly engulf any story that you are trying to construct. Making the villain an American is, paradoxically, a retaliatory act, a patriotic act. It is a consolatory fiction which says to the public: here are the only people who are actually capable of defeating Americans - other Americans.
Hollywood's American terrorists are not implying an actual, American-inspired conspiracy behind 9/11, and they are naturally not attacking any putative state terrorism practised by the US beyond its borders. They are not even implying that the home-front enemies are American faintness of heart, or American liberalism. It is just a unilateralist fiction of denial which, in the enclosed universe of its own devising, insists on the exclusively American significance of 9/11.
The All-American Terrorist is, I now think, a new manifestation of the Japanese Godzilla phenomenon, particularly in the 1954 Godzilla movie by Ishiro Honda. This terrifying sea monster was awakened from its millennia of sleep by America's nuclear blast in 1945; then it rampages around destroying Japanese cities in ways that explicitly recall Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Allied bombing of Tokyo. Here was a way of re-imagining the devastation - but now a Japanese monster is responsible for destroying Japan. It was a therapeutic way of confronting the carnage, but without the chagrin of recent military defeat.
The mysterious red-white-and-blue terrorist is all about the weirdest kind of movie alchemy and sleight of hand: turning defeat into victory.
