Remediating War in Iraq

2008

This essay examines some of the contours of new documentary’s relationship to war, first characterizing historical and theoretical frameworks while considering the social and spectatorial impact of moving images that have engaged with war themes and imagery. The focus falls on new documentary and representations of the war in Iraq, asking if these cultural mediations of war might indicate shades of an ‘Iraq syndrome’ in the making. Finally, a close reading of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 considers the film in light of social and representational issues facing new documentary, marking the film’s postmodernist and surrealist tendencies. I argue that Moore’s film ends up projecting ambiguous and perhaps self-contradictory conclusions about the US’s reliance on war as a mechanism for advancing its global social, ideological, and economic agendas. At the same time, the film manages to capture elements of the heterogeneity and instability of Americans’ own national and patriotic self-p...

Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2011

This article examines some of the important changes in the films (and TV-series) about the Iraq War. Focus will be on the combat films: Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007), Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (2007), HBO’s mini-series Generation Kill (2008), Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), and Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone (2010). The films break from tradition by dismissing both the mythic heroism that pervades World War 2 films and the disillusionment of many Vietnam War films. A shared trait in the films and TV-series is a striving for authenticity and a tendency associated with this: the depiction of American soldiers as war junkies. What has become of the noble intentions, the ideas of freedom and democracy, once linked with the US military? Without judging, the films depict the new generation of American soldiers, raised in a historical vacuum, young men who see war as just another extreme sport.

Virology, 2009

This paper examines five American war films (Green Zone, The Hurt Locker, Body of Lies, Rendition, and Jarhead) with stories distinctly counter to the dominant war, government, and soldier narratives promoted by government and mass media. Each of these films, although commercial failures in the U.S., serves as an example of the very acts of defiance of pro-war propaganda and the counter thinking that is called for by the scholarly work that grounds my analysis: James Der Derian’s Virtuous War, Judith Butler’s Frames of War, and Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution (eds. Keeble, Tulloch, and Zollman). As such, the films can be viewed as a powerful interruption to the status quo useful tools for exploring the role of fiction, media, “truth,” and memory in a networked age.

Where is it written that seeing is believing? The recent war in Iraq (Iraq II) saw the first widespread use of live picture/phone satellite transmitted television coverage of ongoing battle, reported by camera crews Òimbedded Ò with military units. It was shaky, it was intermittent, the sound and image broke up, and viewers all around the globe marveled at its powerful immediacy. ÒIÕve got to go, weÕve got incoming!Ó Analysts and pundits questioned the credibility of journalists under fire. Newscasters themselves seemed genuinely astonished to witness their colleagues thousands of miles, yet not even milliseconds, away. Audiences bonded with sympathetic, personable correspondents. ÒDr. Gupta is performing surgery at the front!Ó Mass media reportage of war took huge technological and psychological leaps. Iraq II was not the first time, nor probably the last, that war and media converged to revolutionize our perception of reality. In the wake of the resultant ooohs and aaahs, and the corresponding head shaking and hand wringing, itÕs perhaps prudent to take a moment to re-examine the ways that mass media and war have always converged in making history. That which a 21^st Century audience accepts as real---the veracity of the immediately witnessedÑis different from earlier audience realities.

Democratic Communique, 2014

A s this special issue moves into production, the world remembers the centennial of the Great War, which sadly was not the war to end all wars. Instead, WWI gave birth to modern war propaganda and established a "symbiotic relationship" between the media and the military. The art and industry of representing war through various media forms was finely tuned over the course of what became a very bloody 20 th century, and the military conflicts of the present are firmly embedded in the 21 st century media environment. Since 9/11, media studies scholars have analyzed the nexus of the media industry and the military and scrutinized the media products of war which result from this unity. Many military media products invite their subjects to dispassionately watch and interactively play war; some, albeit a few, display signs of resistance to it. Today, critical studies that seek to unravel the ties that bind the media to the military require multiple perspectives, theoretical formulations and material practices. This special issue presents timely scholarship at the forefront of understanding and responding to current trends in media and militarism. The Media War At a safe distance from the actual battles of war, civilians read war stories, hear war broadcasts, watch televised war fictions and play war games. Yet this mediated field of spectacular vision and immersive narrative space is never actual war, but a partial, selective, often simulated and mostly partisan representation of it. It is something that has been constructed, scripted and produced, and over the years scholars have appreciated the disjuncture between war and its media representations and contemplated the consequences of the loss of the real. War itself refers to actual material referents: invasions, occupations, violent conflicts and coups, and the cities, deserts and jungles where people fight, bleed, kill and die. Media images, tropes, themes and myths of war often bear little resemblance to war itself. Philip Taylor contends that each time the U.S. military wages war, two kinds of war occur: an actual war and a "media war." 1 Civilians never see the actual war but instead consume or play media-engineered stories of conflict-a media war. Indeed, the products of this media warnews clips, TV shows, films, video games and digital content-represent America at war to U.S. and world publics in ways that often do not inform or foster empathy but instead rein

2009

2018

This thesis argues that the perception of realism and ‘truth’ within narrative feature films set within the Gulf War (1990-1991) and Iraq War (2003-2011) is bound up in other transmedia representations of these conflicts. I identify and define what I describe as the Gulf War Aesthetic, and argue that an understanding of the ‘real life’ of the war film genre through its telling in news reportage, documentary and combatant-originated footage serves as a gateway through which the genre of fictional feature films representing the conflicts and their aftermath is constructed. I argue that the complexity of the Iraq War, coupled with technological shifts in the acquisition and distribution of video and audio through online video-sharing platforms including YouTube, further advanced the Gulf War Aesthetic. I identify The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009) and Green Zone (Greengrass, 2010) as helpful case studies to evidence these changes, and subject both to detailed analysis. I draw an alignment...

JADT: Journal of American Drama and Theatre 20.2 (Spring 2008): 65-86., 2008

potential supporters were more numerous in urban areas, it would be logical to shape the archive in a way that would appeal to these outside reviewers. It is possible, then, that t h s organization may not be any indication as to what was actually valued by Flanagan and the FTP; instead, it may conform to the expectations (real or imagned) of these outsiders, which brings questions of the nature of the archives themselves to the forefront of this investigation.