Airport Terminals and Desert Planes: Re-Visiting the Border in The Terminal and No Countr y for Old Men

Abstract

Eighteen years after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington and in the present context of bitter conflict over the building of a wall across the US-Mexico border promoted by current President of the United States, Donald Trump, this article reads Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal and the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men through the use of border theory and Cosmopolitanism. The main aim of the article is to reveal the mechanisms by which these films promote and intervene in an ongoing debate on the nature of the nation-state and the role of national borders in the creation of national identities. The two films appear to consolidate certain social imaginaries while highlighting the extent to which, though the turn of the millennium seemed to promise a world with more mobile, hybrid identities in multicultural spaces, most social and cultural realities still tend to be trapped within nation-state borders which prove the staying power of national identities.