ABSTRACT
This chapter is organized into three sections. The first section examines how a specific grammatical structure of morality popularly attributed to a 1940s United States by Hollywood is enacted in the film Pearl Harbor. Section two, Attack on America, compares and contrasts a 1940s moral grammar of war against a state with a twenty-first-century moral grammar of a war against a terrorist network. The last by asking, "What desires are expressed in a US rhetoric about September 11 that twins it with Pearl Harbor?" Or, to employ a Freudian turn of phrase, it asks, "What does America want?" The chapter suggests that whatever America may want by twinning Attack on America with Pearl Harbor is foiled because the events are inflected differently, owing to their differing moral structures that rely on distinct interpretations of gender and sexuality.
