No Jurisdiction

<p><b>A deeply personal study of post-9/11 film that exposes how genre can frame the shifting meanings of the War on Terror and its impact on American law and culture.</b></p><p><i>No Jurisdiction</i> interweaves autobiography and analysis to explore how a disabled American of French-Arab descent justifies his love for the (super)heroes who destroy brown people like himself. Framing Hollywood genre films as a key to understanding a crisis-filled world shaped by the global War on Terror Fareed Ben-Youssef shows how in response to 9/11 filmmakers and lawmakers mobilized iconic characters-the cowboy the femme fatale and the superhero-to make sense of our traumas and inspire new legal landscapes. The competing visions of power produced in this dialogue between Hollywood entertainment and mainstream politics underscore genre cinema's multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it.</p><p>Chapters devoted to the Western film noir superhero movies and global films that deploy and comment on these genres offer compelling readings of films ranging from the more apparent (<i>The Dark Knight</i> <i>Sicario and Logan</i>) to the more unexpected (<i>Sin City</i> <i>Adieu Gary</i> <i>The Broken Circle Breakdown</i> and <i>Tokyo Sonata</i>). Through narratives of states of emergency that include vaguely defined enemies obscured battlefield boundaries and blurred lines between victims and perpetrators a new post-9/11 film canon emerges. <i>No Jurisdiction</i> is a deeply personal work of film scholarship arguing that we can face our complicity and discover opportunities for resistance through our beloved genre movies.</p>