Popular Culture Review Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2009 | Page 65

Return of the Patriarchs: Authority, Gender, and Reason in Post-9/11 American Cinema In 1957, in his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes recommended mapping the multiple terrains in which various myths and ideologies were spoken (149). This paper follows in those footsteps by examining a pattern of discourse in American films after the events of September 11, 2001. An analysis of three recent films (and a comparison to a film from an X\