Leiden University Student Repository

Welten, Mick (2024)

Collective Terror in Imaginary Worlds: Cinematic representation of a post-9/11 America in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds

Master thesis | North American Studies (MA)

This thesis utilizes narrative and formal analyses of the two highest-grossing science fiction pictures from the year 2005 in order to illustrate how imaginary cinematic worlds have been infiltrated by the national trauma of 9/11 and its political and societal aftermath. With a main focus on drawing parallels between a post-9/11 American society and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds, this thesis strives to illuminate a larger and more complicated relationship between mid-2000s sci-fi and the new world these films were made in. It offers the reader insight into the themes and modes of thinking that pre-occupied Americans after not only the 9/11 attacks, but the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as well. It draws upon theories on the symbiotic relationship between national identity and cinematic representation that have often been discussed by scholars such as Siegfried Kracauer and Alison Landsberg.

film studies

cinema

sci-fi

9/11

cultural analysis

war on terror

Author

Welten, Mick

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Morgan-Owens, J. J.

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en