ABSTRACT
The vigilante films Collateral Damage and In the Bedroom highlight just how difficult it is in the post-9/11 United States to tell a straightforwardly positive story about who we really are. This chapter traces how, in reconsidering the relationship between justice and security, each film articulates a moral grammar of war that, quite strikingly, is based on a reactivated feminine. For in both films, it is the feminine that is the keystone of a sustainable, positive expression of who we might become. Reactivating the feminine might seem to be an unlikely course to chart for post-9/11 films about the future of American justice, given the dangers that the feminine embodied in the contemporary families of Collateral Damage and In the Bedroom. The film opens to ominous sounds of cymbals, reminiscent of both the thunder of an approaching storm and the quickening of the human heart.
