In his coda to The ‘War on Terror’ and American Film: 9/11 Frames a Second, Terence McSweeney laments ‘the absence of American films that explicitly portrayed the war on terror on the screen from critical perspectives, a counter-narrative as opposed to the master narrative’ (2014: 204). The ideologies embedded in mainstream American film often privilege stories of America's national victimhood in the wake of 9/11, but victimhood is a status that is sanctioned only under certain conditions. Indeed, many post-9/11 mainstream narratives legitimise the uniformity of America's cultural sufferings, so that differences on the level of national perspective, such as the differences generated by minority races and ethnicities, are altogether eliminated. After 9/11, the majority of the American independent film industry also raised little challenge to this hegemony, despite existing apart from the dominant ideology generated through Hollywood's centralised body of investors. In turn, this master narrative of 9/11 remained codified. However, a few American independent films do position themselves as critical counter-perspectives to this mono-narrative, and they are authored and directed by minorities who chronicle the abuses and caricatures placed upon the whole community of Arab Americans.

Against America's larger post-9/11 monomyth that includes films such as Paul Greengrass’ United (2006), Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006) and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2008), which highlight an American will to recover and a single-minded impression of Muslim extremism, Joseph Castelo's The War Within (2005) and Hesham Issawi's American East (2008) operate as dynamic counternarratives. The War Within was co-written by Castelo, Tom Glynn and the Pakistani American Ayad Akhtar, who is the lead actor and a playwright who has since written the Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced (2013), among other plays exploring contemporary American Muslim identity. American East was co-written by Issawi and lead actor Sayed Badreya, and both Issawi and Badreya are Egyptian American. These two early post-9/11 films pivot on the real and imagined threat of Muslim terror in America, but, crucially, criticise American governmental and media systems. Furthermore, they erect multiple subjectivities and narratives for the Arab American beyond the master narrative's narrow conscript of the radical terrorist, which also dominates the television series 24 and Iraq War films, including Clint Eastwood's American Sniper (2014).