FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
HIJACKING CATASTROPHE: 9/11, FEAR AND THE SELLING OF AMERICAN EMPIRE
Directors Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp’s Hijacking Catastrophe opens with a
montage of the Bush Administration insisting on the
existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Viewers are likely to wonder if
Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) will have scooped Jhally and Earp entirely, but this
documentary does offer
something new. As a critique of the administration, it
contributes little that urban, media-savvy Lefties, the likely audience,
don’t already presume to know. Yet the film’s reason for being does turn
up, unlike those much-cited WMDs. With the help of a foreboding
score, Hijacking Catastrophe offers a portrait of the
group controlling the White House and the Republican agenda.
The film ascribes to Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative zealots a motive for
welcoming the attacks of September 11th. In memos across their various government
posts going back
to the first Bush administration, these neo-cons lamented the end of the Cold
War and the absence
of another Pearl Harbor - short of which they’d not be able to justify their
exercise of power for the sake of power. What the film does then - through
interviews with government officials and media pundits (which build
mini-profiles of Donald Rumsfield, John Ashcroft and the rest) - is document in detail
the worst fears of the paranoid. It builds a strong case through broad strokes what
many would prefer unconfirmed - that the government is run by the type of
“rogue element” that was blamed for the Iran-Contra scandal. Only now the fringe
element
has crept out into the mainstream, largely through a systematic
manipulation of a very horrid and tragic event. Will swing voters flock to
this film like they have to Fahrenheit 9/11? I doubt it (few Americans have
an appreciation for the deadpan delivery of alarming news). The
portraits that emerge of this administration would make George Orwell cower at his
typewriter, wishing that real life wasn’t such a plagiarist. Joel Whitney, screenwriter/poet, teaches at Fordham University
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