Soldiers as Filmakers

Psychological healing by means of narrative recovery of traumatic events necessarily implies their re-visitation, which can then easily lead to re-traumatization; therefore, narrative recovery might, in fact, sometimes work as a recovery of trauma. The latter may often be politically motivated, in which case the narrative usually prolongs ad infinitum exactly that which is supposed to heal: a wounded psyche in pain, a consciousness struggling to find its original self. The purpose of this analysis is threefold: first, to underscore the present importance of a comprehensive and politically non-partisan discourse about US war trauma in the wake of the Iraq War and before the scheduled winding down of the allied intervention in Afghanistan; second, to take a closer look at three cinematic representations of wartime PTSD, with focus on historical background, character dialog, visual effects, and moral message; and third, to make sense of the motivation leading screenwriters and directors to create dark, or at times even grotesque, audiovisual narratives representing war trauma (from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view), even though such films are mostly doomed to fail at the box-office.

Formations: The Graduate Center Journal of Social …, 2010

During World War I, Sigmund Freud and his followers held a special symposium in Budapest entitled" Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses." Their contributions centered on the importance of trying to understand what can cause a soldier to become traumatized in ...

Subjectivity, 2016

This article investigates how the contemporary war dispositif in cinematic representations captures and integrates bodies, gestures, space and desire. It focuses on two analytic aspects of this process, suture and interpassivity, and shows how soldiers, in cinematic space, confront trauma that results from an incompatibility between the accelerated speed of military dispositif and the slower rhythms of everyday life. It analyzes the clash between life speeds through three cinematic texts-The Hurt Locker, American Sniper and Good Killand clarifies how such disruptions motivate attempts to manage and renegotiate realities fractured by traumatic war experiences. More generally, it analyzes the ways in which war disfigures the phenomenology of bodies and the life world.

2012

Anchorage "That which doesn't kill me, can only make me stronger." 1 Nietzche's manifesto, which promises that painful experiences develop nerves of steel and a formidable character, has not stood the test of time. After decades of research, we now know that traumatic events often lead to debilitating psychiatric symptoms, relationship difficulties, disillusionment and drug abuse, all of which have the potential to become chronic in nature. 2 The American public is now quite familiar with the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), its characteristics and associated problems. From what we know now, it would have been more appropriate for Nietzche to have stated "That which doesn't kill me sometimes makes me stronger, sometimes cripples me completely, but regardless, will stay with me until the end of my days." The effects of trauma have not only been a focus of mental health professionals, they have also captured the imagination of Americans through exposure to cultural artefacts. Traumatized veterans in particular have provided fascinating material for character development in Hollywood movies. In many film representations the returning veteran is violent, unpredictable and dehumanized; a portrayal that has consequences for the way veterans are viewed by U.S. society. Unlike the majority of literature stemming from trauma studies that utilizes Freudian

The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 2012

Eugene O'Neill's engagement with psychology is an essential feature of his dramatic career. From his early plays onwards, he grapples, to a more or less degree, with psychological theories and concepts. His anti-war plays are no exception. Shell Shock depicts the psychological hell which the traumatized Jack Arnold finds himself in during and after First World War. It employs a number of psychological concepts and methods such as shell shock, trauma, repetitive compulsion, and talking cure. Since studying shell shock falls within the domain of psychology, the present paper is divided into three main sections. As the play was written in October, 1918, about two months before the end of the First World War, section one is a study of the definitions, symptoms and treatment of shell shock as it is understood during the First World War. Section two deals with O'Neill's engagement with psychology in general, shell shock and war trauma in particular. Section three is a study of Shell Shock as a testimony to the dehumanizing and monstrous nature of war. The paper is rounded off with a conclusion in which the main findings of the study are stated.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 2021

A focus on trauma’s institutional trajectory in literary and cultural theory serves to narrow the transnational and multidirectional scope of memory studies. While Sigmund Freud’s attempt in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to define trauma in order to account for World War I veterans’ symptoms might serve as a provisional departure point, the psychological afflictions that haunted American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War reinforced the explanatory value of what came to be called “posttraumatic stress disorder,” which the American Psychiatric Association added to the DSM-III (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. Multiple dramatic films released in the 1980s about Vietnam conveyed images of the American soldier’s two-fold traumatization by the violence he not only witnessed but also perpetrated along with the ambivalent treatment he received upon his return to a protest-riven nation waking up to the demoralizing realization that US military prowess...

Modernism/modernity, 2002

2004