Dossier » Horror
“Suffering? You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet”
Rating the Global War on Terror in American Film
Rating films requires distinguishing what is safe from what is
threatening, but the defining characteristic of terror is its capacity to
confuse these categories, which makes the already complicated task of
screening a film for harmful elements even more complex. Here, I analyze
this vexed process in the context of the American Global War on Terror
(GWOT).
War changes movie-making, readjusting the relationships between the film industry and the state and redefining norms about what kinds of subjects are appropriate. Unlike traditional warfare, which generally leaves filmmakers with a clear sense of what is or is not tolerable, terror makes these determinations more difficult, because it confounds the very terms that we employ to make them. Censoring and rating films is about distinguishing what is “permissible” or safe from what is “dangerous,” (Wittern-Keller 2008, 279), but the defining characteristic of terror is its capacity to confuse and corrupt these categories. Terror reconfigures the world and our sensibilities about it, so that the very thing that seemed safe one day seems extraordinarily dangerous the next. The already complicated task of screening a film for threatening elements is made even more complex in a situation where everything could be terrifying. This paper analyzes the practice of rating movies about America’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) (2001-present), and the politics governing the Classification and Rating Administration’s confrontations with cinematic terror, torture, and horror.
“The System Can’t Work Unless You Understand the System”: Rating American Movies
The American system of movie rating that has been in place since the 1930s is speculative, using judgments about a film’s content to hypothesize about its social consequences. Originally, this verdict came through the granting or withholding of the Production Code Administration’s (PCA) Seal of approval, which marked a film as safe, or even socially healthful. With the adoption of the current ratings system, these evaluations became less absolute, so that films could occupy a range of positions from wholesome (acceptable for all ages) to selectively dangerous (quarantined from everyone under the age of 17).
Early efforts to regulate film, like the 1909 formation of the National Board of Censorship, were designed with the interests of the studios in mind, intended to streamline the film-distribution process and insulate them from the vicissitudes of local boards while also lending the appearance of concern for audience welfare. In response to public outcry over a series of scandals involving movie stars in the early 1920s, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (the MPPDA, which would later become the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA) hired Will Hays to handle public relations and police movies and the people that starred in them. Although his list of ‘Don’ts’ and ‘Be Carefuls’ was drafted in 1927, it was not until 1934, with the PCA mandate that all filmmakers submit their products for review before release, that his ‘Formula’ was institutionalized. Under Joseph Breen, who expanded the original concern with depictions of sexuality to take on nearly everything that might be objectionable in film (Black 2002, 100), the PCA became the arbiter of what American moviegoers would be allowed to see. Calls for regulation were often couched in rhetoric about concern for children and other impressionable viewers, particularly the working class, who now had access to this cheap and potentially inflammatory form of entertainment. In the end, however, decisions about what kinds of movies to make and how to apply the Code were less about moralizing and more about negotiating between the studios’ need for immediate profits (often reaped with more sensational themes) and the long-term respectability that would sustain their business (Vasey 1997, 29).
By 1966, industry changes combined with more general social upheaval (Valenti 2005, 50) to undermine the power of the Code, and in 1968, Jack Valenti eliminated the Code and the Seal it bestowed (Haines 2003, 32). The PCA morphed into the Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA), which provided age-based ratings in a system designed to communicate with parents (Kirsh 2006, 306). From then on, films would be rated G, M, R, or X. Over time, ‘M’ became ‘GP,’ which then became ‘PG,’ a category that split into ‘PG’ and ‘PG-13’ in 1984 (Valenti 2005, 52). Filmmakers were no longer required to submit their films for rating, but the vast majority still choose to do so, because unrated films are harder to distribute and tend to make less money. In 1990, the classification process evolved into the current system. CARA began issuing ‘rating reasons’ for ‘R’movies (Valenti 2005, 51), a practice later expanded to other categories as well, in the name of giving parents even more information; generally, the MPAA states that ‘R’ movies “may include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements, so that parents are counseled to take this rating very seriously.” At this time, CARA also changed ‘X’ to ‘NC-17.’ In theory, the demise of the Code freed filmmakers to be more adventuresome, because it implemented a shift from “filtering [films] for content” to filtering “audiences ... for films” (Franklin 2006, 252). In reality, the effects of CARA are often functionally similar to those of the Code (Wittern-Keller 2008, 277), in that they induce filmmakers to make tamer products, while many critics suggest that CARA’s process for rating movies is inconsistent, repressive, and secretive. For its part, the MPAA claims that all of its raters are parents of small children, but emphasizes that there are no ‘special qualifications’ needed for becoming a movie rater; raters simply rely on intuitions honed by a lifetime of visual consumerism.
Although the MPAA’s method is not as systematic as filmmakers might hope, there are some discernible trends in its application of ratings. Firstly, the MPAA approach is quantitative, as ratings depend in part on how much objectionable content (for example, the number of curse words) appears in a particular film. There is a great deal of bean-counting in the assignation of a rating, but Valenti suggested that the raters are also qualitative in their approach as they evaluate how questionable elements are “treated on-screen by the filmmaker” (Valenti 2005, 54). Ratings reasons justify and amplify the letters with adjectives, often citing ‘strong’ or ‘graphic’ violence and ‘brief’ or ‘pervasive’ sexuality, though these intensifying terms do not seem to be systematically applied. In this way, their diagnostic practice gains refinement, if not consistency. Ultimately, the MPAA approach is only as effective as its adherents. Valenti testified emphatically that, “If parents don’t care, or if they are languid in guiding their children’s movie-going, the ratings system becomes useless” (2005, 54). But while the MPAA adopts a rather laissez-faire posture in emphasizing the choices of individual parents, they nevertheless use promotional materials to regulate their decision-making.
One poster available at filmratings.com offers the reminder that “The System Can’t Work Unless You Understand the System,” which is both an admonition to parents and a capitulation of the ultimate impotence of CARA. In order to be effective, CARA requires consent from those whom they seek to govern; in this, they are much like the state. Beneath this warning is a color-coded explanation of what each rating means; G is blue, PG is green, PG-13 is yellow, R is orange, and NC-17 is red. This is a shorthand of threat, a quick way to calibrate just how concerned parents should be about a particular film.
It is also a visual echo of the Homeland Security Advisory System, which color codes the terrorist threat to help Americans determine how worried we ought to be. This system was first devised for inter-agency governmental communication about terrorist threats. Now that it has morphed into a way for Homeland Security to transmit information to civilians, some critics have suggested that it works to “calibrate the public’s anxiety” (Massumi 2005, 32), but that was not its initial purpose. Whatever its original intent, the National Threat Advisory has become one of the most distinctive symbols of the GWOT and gives CARA’s poster a powerful resonance. Although the schematics diverge on which color represents innocuousness (G movies are blue and PG are green, while the least severe terror threat, ‘Low,’ is green and ‘Guarded,’ the second-lowest, is blue), the allusion remains potent. So does the goal: in both cases, the ratings systems want users to ingest this information quickly and act accordingly, to assess the risk it implies and behave responsibly. Yet the ominous tenor of the MPAA’s poster about “The System” is undermined somewhat by the cheery imperative at the bottom: “Enjoy the movie and come back often.”
Target Practice: Rating the GWOT in Film
Rating a movie about terror requires a quantification of the unquantifiable and a negotiation of the improvised social and cultural codes about what is appropriate. The stakeholders are myriad and have emotional as well as political investments in representation. In governing depictions of 9/11, for example, Susan Faludi characterizes the ‘9/11 Families’ as the new Production Code Authority (Faludi 2007, 2), their experience empowering them to be gatekeepers over representations of that day, and in the case of United 93, they acted as ad hoc arbiters of how September 11th could be represented, while the MPAA is the body officially tasked with adjudicating all of this. In their depiction of a war that is ongoing, these films construct what Lowenstein describes as an ‘allegorical moment,’ a “shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined” (2005, 2). The job of the MPAA, then, is to brace spectators for impact. Given that, as Krueger and Laitin argue (2004), the state has been making bad calculations about terrorism with flawed studies and inaccurate models, I want to explore whether the MPAA has fared any better.
TABLE 1 - The GWOT in film
Box office figures—reliably available on Yahoo! Movies and Box Office Mojo (boxofficemojo.com)—provide a rough (and relative) estimate of a film’s cultural weight. Subsequent GWOT movies have been far less profitable and popular than Fahrenheit 9/11. The early success of Michael Moore’s documentary was clearly not predictive of a trend; regardless of artistic merit, most GWOT documentaries reach very limited audiences and make very little money, and even the most profitable narrative GWOT films garner relatively low earnings. Film critic Anthony Kaufman has speculated on why this might be (2006), and he posited a kind of combat fatigue on the part of the viewers, so that popular impatience with the war morphs into disinterest in films that depict it, so that even stylized or unique representations fail to draw large audiences.
Even without reaching blockbuster status, however, these films contribute to popular understandings of and feelings about the war, and in the aggregate, this data suggests some patterns in the MPAA’s approach to rating terror. The ratings alone do not provide much insight into CARA’s methods, but the ratings reasons illuminate some of the criteria factoring into their calculations about the affective consequences of a film. Ratings reasons, especially for war films, can be somewhat absurd in their juxtaposition of relatively innocuous plot points (“drug references”) with more substantive thematic issues (“rape”); the fact that the first reason for United 93’s ‘R’ is “language” dramatizes this. In rating such films, the MPAA has to confront the historical events that they visualize, all while counting how many times the soldiers curse.
In October 2003, Donald Rumsfeld infamously admitted that “[t]oday, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the Global War on Terror” (Op. cit., Kreuger and Laitin 2004, 26). Like the state, the MPAA has had to improvise defenses against terror, to devise its own metrics for measuring it in a campaign with much lower stakes. Like the Department of Homeland Security (low/guarded/elevated/high/severe), the MPAA relies on vague categories (G/PG/PG-13/R/NC-17), translating a mass of information into just a few words. There is no ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ in their effort, as there is in the GWOT, but there are benchmarks, and the MPAA seems to be more successful in their mission than the state has been. As Valenti testified before Congress, “The rating system isn’t perfect but, in an imperfect world, it seems each year to match the expectations of those whom it is designed to serve—parents of America” (2005, 56). The MPAA has proven itself able to determine how scary something is, and many American parents seem to agree with their assessments. And so, six years after Rumsfeld’s grim prognostication, without any evidence of improvement on that front, perhaps films about terror(ists) serve as a form of target practice in an effort to apprehend a much larger threat.
“Intense and Emotional Content”: The 9/11 Movies
The attacks of September 11, 2001 have been the subject of only two mainstream American films: United 93 and World Trade Center. Of the two, critical opinion largely favored United 93. In an exemplary assessment, Martin Amis wrote that it left spectators “in a state of near-perfect distress” (2008, 131), a testament to director Paul Greengrass’ craft and commentary on the consequences of his skill. The film itself, however, seems to refuse critical scrutiny. It makes now-familiar critiques about the ill-preparedness of the government, aviation officials, and the military. It trades on sentimental representations of the heroics of the passengers and their last moments. All of this seems unassailable, however, because the film works so hard to present itself as an accurate reenactment of what happened on that flight. Greengrass cast many of the characters as themselves, for example, and used average people rather than high-profile actors to portray passengers on the plane. The end credits remind audiences about the “meticulous research” that went into “all aspects of the production,” even as they confess that some events and characters were “necessarily composited” and “fictionalized.” But because there is no way to definitively evaluate the accuracy of the representations, United 93 has become the truth of what happened on that day.
Judith Mayne asserts that cinema is an institution in the Althusserian sense (1993, 13), a device for interpellating audiences into an ideological system, and this film is an especially potent instrument. In interviews, Greengrass repeatedly explained that he cast the movie with average people because he wanted the audience to identify with them, a mnemonic that also reminds viewers that this could have happened to any American traveler. The film almost serves as a primer, explaining to audiences what (not) to do should they ever find themselves in a similar situation. And if we are persuaded by Elaine Scarry’s paean to those passengers who did fight back, “Who Defended the Country?” (2006), in which she argues that the passengers’ populist, improvised form of resistance is the best opposition to terrorism, then United 93 is a very important film indeed.
So why would CARA opt to restrict its lessons to citizens over the age of 17? One
explanation would be that they are meting out terror, rating in deference to the cognitive and emotional faculties of younger viewers. But a magical thing happens when an American youth turns 18: s/he becomes eligible for military service. The credits of United 93 indicate that the filmmakers “gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Department of Defense.” That the Pentagon would have willingly contributed to a film that showcases their own ineptitude is surprising, especially considering that they are generally very selective about cinematic collaborations, preferring favorable representations of the military. As David Robb points out, the DoD is savvy about managing its affiliations with the film industry, and its chosen partnerships are always self-interested. The Army, for example, is explicit that any assistance they lend to a film should be offered with an eye toward recruitment (2004, 26). It stands to reason that the DoD would have similar criteria, and might hope that the patriotic fervor cultivated by the film would translate into action, into enlistment. If the first, most emotionally wracking experience of viewing United 93 corresponds with that crucial time when a citizen has to decide if she wants to become a soldier, too, so much the better.
Compared to the grimly inspiring United 93, Oliver Stone’s retelling of the story of two Port Authority Police officers trapped beneath the collapsed World Trade Center was received far less favorably. Although it garnered more than twice as much revenue as United 93, most critics commented on the film’s failure to live up to their expectations. In Stone’s depiction, the attacks are “as apolitical as a mine collapse,” (Kauffman, “Stone” 2006, 21), and CARA’s assessment seems to concur, as the rating reason says nothing about terror(ism). Stone’s movie is a story about waiting, by the Port Authority Police Department officers immobilized under a collapsed tower and by the families desperate for word about their status. It is a film about having nothing to do but hope for the best. There is very little action, and citizenship here is reduced to depending on someone else to do something; in the case of the PAPD officers, that someone is a retired Marine who conscripts himself back into service to search for survivors at Ground Zero. This is a narrative about individual initiative, certainly, but that agency is dampened by the overwhelming feeling of helplessness on the part of everyone else. The story suggests that survival is a matter of luck, rather than action, a moral that is hard to translate into any kind of patriotic purpose.
Both films have essentially predictable endings; in United 93, we know that the passengers are going to die even as they cling poignantly to the hope that they will not, while the tagline for World Trade Center is a spoiler, describing the film as “a true story of courage and survival.” Presumably, the difference in their endings is a major factor in the difference between the tepid PG-13 and the decisive R ratings. (Parenthetically, it is worth noting that the IMDB page for United 93 indicates that there is an “appeal planned” for the rating, but I was unable to find any sources to corroborate that). Yet it is unclear how that the image of a trapped officer shooting himself in the head with his service weapon because he knows he is going to die (as in World Trade Center) is less disturbing than a hijacker stabbing a flight attendant (as in United 93). The MPAA detects ‘terror’ in United 93, but this is more an affective valence and extra-cinematic feature than a component of the film itself, which cuts to black before the doomed plane crashes to the ground. Surely, the passengers are mortally frightened, but are they more afraid than the men pinned below 30 feet of debris? The real terror of United 93 is in its provocation of the audience, prompted again and again to ask themselves how they would have reacted in the same situation (Kauffman, “Drama,” 2006) when there was a choice to make and the fate of the nation-state might have been at stake, as opposed to a situation where the protagonists are noble but helpless and waiting for a hero to come and save them.
Torture and ‘Thematic Material’ in the GWOT Movies
While United 93 and World Trade Center forced the CARA raters to quantify terror and evaluate visions of American citizenship. Torture, alternately, provokes a different sort of dilemma: as a potentially ‘disturbing’ element of a film, CARA must address it, but its ratings reasons belie a reluctance to do so. Although torture is referenced in In the Valley of Elah, is strongly alluded to in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, and actually occurs in A Mighty Heart, the only film whose rating reason mentions it is Rendition. Elah and Harold and Kumar allude to but do not explicitly image torture, and CARA responds with similar discretion. Elah chronicles a father’s efforts to find his son, who disappeared upon returning from duty in Iraq; his investigations uncover that he has been brutally murdered by traumatized fellow soldiers, who also disclose that his son was a ringleader in their torture of Iraqi prisoners. The film suggests that with his murder, a kind of justice has been achieved, and further condemns torture as the father repudiates both his son and the country that he fought to defend, outcomes which arguably relieve CARA of some of their burdens to address the issue of torture directly. Alternately, Harold and Kumar seems designed to rankle CARA, and the rating reason is an exasperated litany of its crudeness absented of any political resonance. Amnesty International critiqued Harold and Kumar for what it identified as its comic, trivializing depiction of the detention facility, but CARA found this less objectionable than the drug use and all the rest. In the rating, torture is elided into other thematic elements (like sexual content) rather than cited directly.
Rendition was, apparently, a more complicated case. After a suicide bombing in North Africa, an Egyptian-American chemical engineer is apprehended at the airport; transported to a secret detention center in Egypt, he is tortured by Egyptian officials in interrogations overseen by a reluctant young CIA agent. The battered suspect ultimately makes a false confession, and when the disillusioned agent figures this out, he arranges his escape back to America. Although the tagline for the movie—“What if someone you love just disappeared?”—reduces the crime of extraordinary rendition to personal tragedy, there is no avoiding the graphic content of the film. And, indeed, this is an R-rated movie, on account of its “torture/violence.”
It is noteworthy, though, that there is also torture in A Mighty Heart, the Angelina Jolie film that chronicles the abduction of journalist Daniel Pearl and the grief of his wife Mariane. Suspects in his disappearance are stripped and strung up by the wrists during interrogation, but there is no mention of that in the rating reason. Moreover, even as the film emphasizes its own ideological rightness (the credits inform us, for example, that the production was carbon-neutral) and the long-suffering goodness of Mariane, the interrogation tactics are depicted rather sympathetically, as necessitated by the urgency of the investigation. Furthermore, a postscript provides the following resolution to the case: “It is alleged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the man who killed Daniel. He is currently in US custody in Guantanamo.” Having just spent nearly two hours suffering along with the survivors of KSM’s (alleged) victim, how are audiences (who are sensitive enough to be concerned about climate change) supposed to feel about this? Unsurprisingly, in these films, ‘torture’ only counts as ‘torture’ for rating purposes when it happens to an innocent person, like a chemical engineer mistaken for an accomplice. The only official victim in these movies is an American man, but even he is only half so, which might explain the elision of ‘torture/violence’ in the rating reason, in which the latter term depoliticizes the former. Perhaps only the American half was tortured, while the ‘Arab’ half was subject to the far more common (and far less objectionable) ‘violence.’
You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet: Terror, Torture, and Saw III
Films about terror are a recent descendent of a much older genre: the horror film. Horror films provide audiences with “recreational terror” (Pinedo, 1997), a pleasurable simulation of horror in a controlled environment. Wars occasionally result in a decrease in the production of horror films, as in the 1940s (Worland 2007, 128), the GWOT has not prompted any discernible change in this regard. 2006, the fifth year of the GWOT, featured the release of only two major films about it: United 93 and World Trade Center, and both were out-earned (by 2.5 times and $10,000,000 respectively) by another experience of cinematic terror: Saw III. I understand Saw III as the third, climactic scene of a 2006 triptych of American terror, and the MPAA’s reason for Saw III’s ‘R’ rating suggests a subtle but substantive connection between the three films.
Part of a growing subgenre of horror films often called ‘torture porn,’ along with films like Hostel (2005), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and Captivity (2007), the Saw series chronicles the exploits of the ‘Jigsaw Killer.’ Jigsaw tortures his victims in order to teach them life lessons through the “therapy of animal terror” (Osmond 2004), requiring them to purchase their freedom and survival with agonizing but non-lethal forms of suffering. More gruesome than frightening, the Saw movies are an adaptation of the so-called ‘splatter film.’ This subgenre of horror movies, exemplified by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, provided a “spectacle of endless death” that was cheap to produce and popular with audiences (Magistrale 2005, 166).
Essentially, the challenge of making horror movies is to make them grisly enough to capture audience attention and money, without making them so terrifying that viewers stop watching or leave the theater altogether (Pinedo 1997, 40). One concession to this dilemma has been to make horror films that are “increasingly open-ended” (Modleski 2002, 271), which also has the practical advantage of enabling sequels. Still, this strategy has its financial risks, because inevitably “a certain weariness sets in” upon the release of yet another installment (Newman 2007, para. 3). While the remarkably low earnings of Saw VI seem to confirm this trend, Saw II was a clear exception to it, out-earning the first of the series by nearly $33,000,000, or 58%. Saw III, with its upped ante of gruesomeness (and perhaps also its coincidence with other filmic depictions of terror earlier in 2006) continued to defy this pattern, and became the second most profitable of the series to date. Although all Saw movies have essentially the same plot, many reviews suggested that Saw III had raised the bar for gruesomeness; one critic wrote “[s]awing off your ankle to spite your thigh is now officially kid stuff.” (Gleiberman 2006, para. 1). Indeed, Saw III promised a whole new adventure with the tagline “Suffering? You haven’t seen anything yet.”
TABLE 2 - The Saw Franchise
Saw III tells the story of a gravely ill Jigsaw and his apprentice Amanda (a self-mutilator and former junkie who is desperately devoted to her mentor, whose trap once saved her from herself) as they ensnare an unhappily-married female brain surgeon and a grieving father whose son was killed by a drunk driver, later revealed to be husband and wife. As the man confronts the various people responsible for his son’s death and the lenient sentencing of the motorist who killed him, the woman must keep Jigsaw alive, for if he dies, an explosive collar around her neck will detonate. This approximation of a suicide-bomb scenario is the closest that Saw III comes to referencing real-world terrors directly, but given the cinematic context of the year of its release, even this convoluted allusion is enough to achieve a real-world resonance. It is significant that Saw III was released in the same year as United 93 and World Trade Center, and is the only one—despite aesthetic and narrative similarities among all Saw films—whose rating reason links terror and torture.
However, torture in the Saw series takes a form quite unlike that of the GWOT. Here, the torture is excessive and theatrical; it is more like that of the Inquisition, or the horror staged in the Grand Guignol, to which many reviewers compare the films. In Saw, victims bleed and lose body parts. We see their limbs amputated, watch as their joints are dislocated, and we hear them scream and plead for their lives. Gradually, Saw redefines torture as only these exaggerated behaviors; watching Saw, unlike watching news reports about the GWOT, there is no doubt that what we are seeing qualifies as torture.
In the process, anything short of what Jigsaw and his proxies do (like only pretending to electrocute a hooded prisoner) becomes dubitable—unsavory, sure, but not necessarily ‘torture.’ This revision is deeply problematic because the Saw movies, in their vivid, unequivocal depiction of suffering and harm, serve in many ways as the definitive example in American popular culture of what torture looks like. Moreover, by linking terror and torture in that order, CARA implies that one automatically follows from the other, a notion that had the potential to be uniquely resonant on the heels of the only two films to depict American terror directly. Saw III offered a horrifying denouement to that sequence, while CARA’s brief gloss on it quietly suggests that torture is a logical reaction to the terror that came before.
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Filmography
A Mighty Heart. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2007.
Battle for Haditha. Directed by Nick Broomfield. Belfast: Channel 4 Films, 2007.
Charlie Wilson’s War. Directed by Mike Nichols. Hollywood, CA: Universal Pictures, 2007.
Fahrenheit 9/11. Directed by Michael Moore. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2004.
Grace is Gone. Directed by James C. Strouse. New York, NY: Plum Pictures, 2007.
Gunner Palace. Directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlin. n.p.: Nomados, 2005.
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg.
New York, NY: New Line Cinema, 2008.
In the Valley of Elah. Directed by Paul Haggis. Blackfriars Bridge Films: n.p., 2007.
Lions for Lambs. Directed by Robert Redford. Hollywood, CA: Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 2007.
The Hurt Locker. Directed by Katherine Bigelow. Seattle, WA: First Light Productions, 2008.
The Kingdom. Directed by Peter Berg. Hollywood: Universal, 2007.
This Film is Not Yet Rated. Directed by Kirby Dick. New York, NY; IFC, 2006.
United 93. Directed by Paul Greengrass. Hollywood, CA: Universal, 2006.
Redacted. Directed by Brian de Palma. New York, NY: HDNet Films, 2007.
Rendition. Directed by Gavin Hood. New York, NY: New Line Cinema, 2007.
Saw. Directed by James Wan. n.p.: Evolution Entertainment, 2004.
Saw II. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2005.
Saw III. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2006.
Saw IV. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2007.
Saw V. Directed by David Hackl. Los Angeles, CA: Twisted Pictures, 2008.
Saw VI. Directed by Kevin Greutert. Beverly Hills, CA: A Bigger Boat, 2009.
Stop-Loss. Directed by Kimberly Peirce. Hollywood, CA; Paramount, 2008.
W. Directed by Oliver Stone. Santa Monica, CA: Emperor Motion Pictures, 2008.
World Trade Center. Directed by Oliver Stone. Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2006.
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