## Towards Just War-Film Theory

An evaluation of whether, and in what instances, war can contribute to peace is, at best, an elusive undertaking. There are a divergent series of theories regarding the relationship of war to peace, although most views of wars are rooted in ethics that do not require an evaluation of this particular causal mechanism. Additionally, "peace" is a state of being that can hardly be operationalized. Nevertheless, there are some standout intellectual traditions regarding war which attempt to offer a moral framework for the evaluation of war or a given war—namely justwar theory.[^1]

While the premises of just war theory may be a point of contention within certain circles focused on the development of just war theory, they are widely enough acknowledged to serve as a point of departure for what is a tangential investigation. At the foundation of this investigation lies the question: *can, and how do, war films contribute to peace?* Throughout the 20th century, war films have been as prevalent war itself. The mediums of film and television, with all of their journalism and documentarianism, came of age in a century of ever-present global conflict and, more often than not, military conflict. It is no surprise that as societies we would seek to understand and evaluate war using the familiar mediums with which we seek to understand and evaluate life as a whole. Likewise, it is no surprise that war films, and films cast upon the backdrop of war, have been so prevalent as to shape to medium itself.[^2]

The capacity for a war film to contribute to peace is as elusive of a concept (if not more so) than analyzing the capacity of a given war itself to contribute to the basic peace of humanity. It is in this spirit, that this investigation will utilize just war theory as a hermeneutical framework through which to analyze the moral evaluation coded into war films. If just war theory can be understood as a framework for the evaluation of a given war based on its capacity to contribute to peace and therefore be considered a moral undertaking, then there may exist simultaneously a "just war film theory" which can serve as a framework to evaluate a war film and its contribution to the state of peace. This will in part be done, but underscoring the function through which moral evaluations which are coded into war film, can then be transcoded into the constitution of a public which applies that coding to historic war events or agents. As the moral evaluation of wars using just war theory can be highly convoluted and often contentious, it is evident that moral evaluation of war film will be no less labyrinthine.

The goal of this investigation is to discuss neither the morality of war, nor the morality of war film as a general phenomenon which may as well be considered by many as propagandistic and immoral as a whole, but to use just war theory as a realistic framework which can aid in the development of a theory of war film that explicates its positive or negative contribution to peace. This will be accomplished first, by explicating the mechanism with which media can constitute a public, and influence political discourse and engagement. With this groundwork laid, it is then possible to analyze film and interact with the literature on war film vis-à-vis contemporary media studies, in order to identify phenomenons within film studies and their correlation (or lack there of) with the traditional criterion of just war theory.[^3]

Through the analysis and reference to multiple films explicitly depicting war, we will see how the use of mythologizing, dehumanization, and othering in war film are examples of media apparatuses which are capable of coding the traditional moral evaluations of just war theory into media. The terminology of "apparatus" is appropriate because it connotes a mechanism utilized by media (in this case film) for the particular purpose of creating a truth which catalyzes the viewer's capacity for transcoding a coded moral evaluation into their own framework and serves to enhance the narrative or simplify interpretation of the plot devices. With this being said, the potential for exploration of media apparatuses beyond the three investigated here is limitless as well as its combination with any number of premises from just war theory. While a comprehensive framework for the moral evaluation of film cannot be achieved here, this analysis will offer a possible trajectory for the blending of media and political studies of war film by positing the potency of a "just war-film theory." The goal being, to lay the groundwork for this type of inquiry into the war film genre, and provide some poignant examples of the linkages between narrative apparatuses and their influence on the public's moral evaluation of historic wars.

## How Media Constitutes Publics

First, it is necessary to provide a brief, preliminary excursus into the way in which media (or in the case of this investigation, war films) constitute publics. If there is no discernible mechanism that exists between media portrayals of war and its effects on the public, than the end goal of this analysis is impotent. This is especially important in the context of democratic societies where it is assumed that public opinion can have a directly determining effect on the nature and actions of the state, but a purely democratically determined state is not a necessary premise for understanding this mechanism.[^4] The way which the media can constitute a public, is separate from the way in which the public can constitute a state; however, it is outside the subject of this investigation. This section will first touch upon the way in which films can constitute publics, and also offer an explanation of the coding and transcoding mechanism which occurs through the narratival depiction of historic war films.

Drawing on sources like John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas, Pat Aufderheide offers a poignant précis in her article about Iraq War film in that is worth quoting at length (the content of the article being coincidentally relevant to the subject here): [American documentaries about Iraq] also fit squarely into an expectation about democracy and public life: that it is fed by the provision of information for public knowledge and action. By public, we mean here a group of people mobilized by their common knowledge of common problems, as American philosopher John Dewey used the term in his landmark 1927 book, *The* *Public and Its Problems*. Publics, informal networks of people linked by common concerns, are formed by communication with each other about these problems, and their communication is fed by media provision. They create public spheres, to use a term given stature by the work of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Publics are not, in this sense, unitary blocs under the rubric of a nation state or society, but, rather, groups constituted informally around issues or problems.[^5]

Primarily, films constitute publics because they unify them for action around an infrastructure of information. Particularly as it concerns war, media coalesces networks around "common concerns" and in so doing, shapes publics that act and respond to the problems disseminated through the media.

However, it is important—for our purposes here, and all studies of the role of media in society (democratic or not)—to dismantle the imprecise technological idiom which to paint the media, its viewers, and the publics constituted merely as processing centers and networks disseminating and assimilating information and data points.[^6] This sentiment can be understood as an emanation of Laplacean, scientistic logic, rooted in the rational actor paradigm of contemporary politics and sociology, which has been further embedded by incorporating modern technological simulacrum into our anthropology of the modern, democratic citizen.[^7] The mechanism between media products (be they journalistic, documentary, fictional war films or otherwise) and the constitution of a public is far more nuanced than this.[^8]

Since the rise of the media proliferation in the 20th century as gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the modern mass society, there has been no shortage of work done regarding the relationship of media to the constitution of the public.[^9] Much of this work comes in light of those who sought to understand the totalitarian use of modern propaganda in the 20th century. Hannah Arendt, in *The Origins of Totalitarianism*, explicates in seemingly minor, but poignant stretches, the modes through which authoritarian regimes exploit the framework of mass sentiment through media.[^10] This to say, the ground is fertile for work seeking to further understanding this mechanism, but we have yet to incorporate it into our framework for the role of media in modern American democracy in a way that would *effectively* overcome this "data networks paradigm" that is suggestive of Laplacean logic.[^11]

In conclusion of this preliminary section, we will briefly dialogue with one thinkers, French philosopher Jacque Ellul, and his perspective on the relationship between media and the public. In his work *Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes*, Ellul also undercuts what I have termed here "Laplacean logic" with his analysis of the function of propaganda: [E]xcessive data do not enlighten the reader or the listener; they drown him. He cannot remember them all, or coordinate them, or understand them; if he does not want to risk losing his mind, he will merely draw a general picture from them. And the more facts supplied, the more simplistic the image.[^12] While the dissemination of information is a part of the mechanism which the media plays in the constitution of a public, it remains an incomplete analysis of its function. As subjects, we are more capable of the assimilation of the image constructed by media sources than we are capable of independent integration of discreet data which is communicated. As a result, he concludes: But in our time, the conviction of democracy and its claim to inform people collide with the fact that propaganda follows an entirely different mechanism, performs a function entirely different from that of information, and that nowadays facts do not assume reality in the people's eyes unless they are established by propaganda. Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs and indications of true believers.[^13]

Again, this is not just unique to democracy, but within the confines of contemporary discourse, it bears particular weight. At first, Ellul's use of the acquiescence to the term "propaganda" seems highly charged and cynical (particularly to our contemporary predisposition that information *can* be disseminated unfettered by subjectivities and free of coded evaluations).[^14] However, throughout Ellul's discourse, it is clear that his use of propaganda is not rooted in cynicism, but gesturing toward a realistic acceptance of the meta-analysis that is coded into, and inseparable from, media products and networks.

These basic insights are fundamentally important to this analysis of how films and fictional narratives constitute publics.[^15] This is, in part, because we have yet to develop penetrating frameworks for probing the messages bearing on the public (for example, in war films) where elements contributing to the narrative (i.e. Ellul's propagandistic "image") are coded into the tacit infrastructure of the media product, and cannot be explicated comprehensively (if at all) by relying wholly on explicit elements capable of being subjected to objective analysis.[^16] This does not address the questions of historicity, or limit evaluation of war film to explicit discourse within the film which may bear (if only in part) on the perceived morality of a given war.[^17] Instead, I have opted to treat the film as a whole, beginning (although not uncritically) with the supposition that the tacit elements are as—if not more—important to a film's constitution of a public. Therefore, the investigation will demonstrate examples of this propagandistic mechanism whereby judgements—in this case moral evaluations of war—can be coded into media products, such that the viewer transcodes them into their own judgements about reality.[^18] This study is geared specifically towards deepening our understanding of the role of these tacit elements in war film, in order to ascertain the mechanisms through which moral evaluations of war, vis-à-vis just war theory, are coded into the narrative of film and therefore transcoded into the viewer's moral evaluation of the historic war or conflict which is depicted by the film.

## Mythologizing in War Film (Coding Just Authority)

Mythology is the appropriate word because it properly gestures toward the way in which superstructural valuations of reality can be embedded not only in the lives and actions of the actors which constitute the narrative, but also its intended audience (in this case a given public). Within any narrative—including that of film—there are tacit frameworks required in which the subjects are embedded, contextualized, and through which the mythology is reified and manifested in discreet events or actors. In war film, the state's conflict and the war itself, as well as its coded moral evaluations, serve as the superstructure of the narrative.

In using just war theory as a framework through which to evaluate these coded moral evaluations, the mythology can be critiqued as either adequately representing, or misconstruing the necessary elements with which a viewer is capable of making fair moral judgements concerning whether or not the conflict was just. If a war film is understood as propagandistic (in Ellul's sense) we can critique its justness by determining how, for example, the given mythology transcodes a moral evaluation of the war by obfuscating the complex historical realities which one would require to make this moral evaluation (vis-à-vis just war theory). In part, this is accomplished by the reflexive nature of the mythological reality, where the morality of particular character's actions can be coded onto an evaluation of the state's action through war as a whole. It so doing, these narrative apparatuses code moral evaluations such as right or legitimate authority onto the historic war.[^19]

Take, for example, Steven Spielberg's World War II film *Saving Private Ryan* (1998), a watershed film in the transition from what has been termed the Vietnam Syndrome.[^20] It is a film worthy of consideration in the course of this analysis because it is a paradigmatic example of contemporary depictions of "the good war" in the recent history of film.[^21] For the purposes of this investigation, *Saving Private Ryan* serves as a preeminent example of a war film in which the narrative of a few soldiers is cast against the backdrop of a war which receives little to no explicit moral evaluation within the confines of the film.

Consider how the film bookends with the overtly patriotic screen-filling shot of an American flag, with the rays of the sun shining through Spielberg's emblematic, war-desaturated, color-grading and the affective accompaniment of the John Williams.[^22] The entire film, from start to finish is saturated with Americana and pulls primarily from American influences while following the story of American soldiers.[^23] There is no significant reference to other allied forces who contributed to the success of the war, the Normandy invasion or V-E Day.[^24] This patriotism undergirding the American-centric depiction of conflict in *Saving Private Ryan* codes into the film a moral evaluation about just authority and can rightly be criticized as a form of "American triumphalism."[^25]

The only depiction of American authority in the film, are those of the commanding officers who opt to send Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) on the benevolent, self-sacrificial mission to save Private James Ryan (Matt Damon). While Miller's soldiers, as well as Miller himself, question their mission's legitimacy, these are elements of rising action that climax inevitably in the narrative's conclusion that the mission was just because of Private Ryan's salvation and following as a "good man," alongside the willingness of the soldiers to die performing their duty. In spite of the questioning of commands, these depictions of the American military authority, and the soldiers willingness to honorably perform their duty despite doubts, are prime examples of the reflexivity of the mythological function in war film: because the authorities (such as the Chief of Staff George Marshall) are portrayed as benevolent authority figures, this "just authority" is thusly coded onto the moral evaluation of World War II as a historical reality present in the film.[^26]

The obfuscation of the role of other global forces, as well as the explicit patriotic bookends and exclusivity of the role of the United States in the depiction of the war, offer another lens through which to critique to coding of just authority onto World War II in *Saving Private Ryan*. In this case, it does not necessary present the viewer with a just authority which may otherwise be absent (as expressed in the previous point). Instead, it augment's the viewers perception of where just authority for war would be derived.[^27] In the case of World War II, assuming the imperial regimes in Europe were legitimate malefactors from the standpoint of just war theory, the impetus for just cause in war was historically sourced from a variety of global authorities including the British Empire, the Soviet Union, etc. The obscuring of these authorities, along with the depiction of the United States as a just authority, not only augments the historical premises from which just authority may be derived in a moral evaluation of World War II, but singularly accentuates the priority of US authority as a sufficient source of legitimacy for the depicted military engagement.[^28] As Childress says, "[the criterion of just authority] determines who is primarily responsible for judging whether the other criteria are met." This obfuscation of just authority is also present in criticisms of other World War II films such as Christopher Nolan's *Dunkirk* (2017), in which criticizers argues that colonial forces are obscured for the sake of lionizing the role of the West in the victory against Axis forces.[^29]

Whether or not the United States is considered a just authority within the evaluation of World War II through just war theory is immaterial to this analysis, but this is precisely the point. The coding of a moral evaluation of just authority into the narrative of the World War II film predetermines the transcoded historical evaluation for the viewer, particularly the uncritical one. Within the framework proposed by this analysis, we can also point toward a more precise tool for understanding the mechanism which makes patriotism or nationalism in general subversive in the context of war film: that is, it utilizes the mythological apparatus and exploits on viewers nationalistic affectivity to code a just authority moral evaluation onto the film.

Mythologizing in war film functions by positioning particular actors as stand-ins which actualize the moral evaluation of a state agent in war, as well as through depictions of the state which bear a totalizing valuation on its actions and the actions of its actors.[^30] In the case of *Saving Private Ryan*, both of these facets are accomplished through the benevolent depiction of military commanders as benevolent authorities, and the patriotism portrayed through the lens of the filmmaker's cinematography. Although a variety of different just war principles could be viewed through an interpretation of these narrative apparatuses, this analysis has singled out the way the apparatuses code into the movie the presence of a just authority, and therefore a moral evaluation of the war. As Childress notes that the just war premise of legitimate authority is the first grounds from which the other principles fall in step, it is appropriate that *Saving Private Ryan—*a paradigmatic modern war cinema in the positive portrayal of war—can be explicated through the framework proposed by this analysis.[^31]

## Dehumanization in War Film (Coding Just Intention)

Dehumanization is the process of divorcing the human element from a person in an attempt to simplify and absolutize a moral evaluation about actions taken by, or actions taken toward given persons as a justified means to an end. This is most predominant within (although hardly limited to) war films robbing civilians or masses of the screen-time or investigation which would warrant a humanizing or personalizing consideration of their role in the narrative. Instead, through dehumanization, people becomes a means to an end, and subvert thorough consideration of traditional just war premises like just intention (i.e. *jus ad bellum*, which Childress sees as interconnected with proportionality and reasonable chance of success).[^32]

The use of aerial bombardment was a major contention in public discourse leading up to the American involvement in World War II.[^33] The first film to depict aerial bombardment in war was the 1942 film *Mrs. Miniver*, which was a romantic drama set in an English town against the backdrop of the London air raids. As public opinion grew in support of retaliation against reported Japanese war crimes (mistreatment of prisoners of war, etc.) films such as *Air Force* (1943), *Bombadier* (1943), and *Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo* (1944) allude to or depict an aerial bombardment of Tokyo in response to Japanese aggression. All three of these films follow from the total war logic of the sermon in the final scene of *Mrs. Miniver*, where the vicar concludes "[...] this is not only a war of soldiers in uniform. It is the war of the people, of all the people. And it must be fought not only on the battlefield but in the cities and in the villages, in the factories and on the farms [...]"[^34] Although these films do not depict the killing of civilian populations explicitly, as Daniel Marcus writes: *Bombadier* and *Thirty Seconds over Tokyo* raise the specter of civilian victims as an unavoidable accompaniment to the destruction of military facilities, in keeping with government assertions that the morality of bombing cities rested on its lack of intention to kill civilians, even if the vagaries of ‘precision’ bombing resulted in non-military deaths. In all three films (including *Air Force*), the heroism and accuracy of the pilots is lauded as the triumph of American success. The occasional depictions of Japanese (soldiers, workers or otherwise) running frantically while their military bases are being bombed gesture toward the development of dehumanizing portrayals of aerial bombing targets in war film. As Marcus shows, the director William Wyler's arc of films and documentaries about aerial bombardment end with *The* *Memphis Belle* (1943) and *Thunderbolt* (1947).[^35]

All of these examples depict the targets of aerial raids with the prototypical "eye-in-thesky" shot, scanning down over the two-dimensional, scrolling targets. As opposed to the rest of the film, where all of the protagonists are shot with ground shots, their faces shown, receiving close-up frame time, the two-dimensional portrayal of the targets of aerial bombardment are a precise example of the dehumanization of the enemy (whether civilian forces are implicated or not). These films serve as good examples of this study, because of Wyler's regular reference to the total war logic that gestures toward the legitimacy of aerial bombardment. Nevertheless, the narrative apparatus of regularly dehumanizing the targets—notably, there are real, whole people in the buildings scrolling across the two-dimensional landscape—is cast against the language of total war. This effectively codes into the film a moral evaluation of just intention by dehumanizing human targets such that the film is capable of depicting the unalienated proper motives assigned to the protagonists—and their government's—mission. The more that a target is dehumanized, the less chance there is for actions taken against them to be perceived with vicious motives, disproportionate use of force, inflicting unnecessary suffering, etc.[^36]

Note that, particularly in Wyler's films, these are film portrayals (in the case of *The Memphis Belle,* a documentary), about the real historic use of aerial bombardment during World War II. With the same mechanism, these moral evaluations of military actions portrayed in the film, constitute a public which transcodes this coded moral evaluation on to the real historic military actions taken by the Allied forces in the war.

## Othering in War Film (Coding Just Cause)

Othering is distinct from dehumanization in the sense that other creates an ontological antagonist out of another human being.[^37] While dehumanization creates an object which does not receive the same moral benefit of the doubt as a person, othering creates a person onto which actions can be justified because they are directed toward threats to the self's perceived hegemony although they are human.[^38] Both dehumanization and othering are co-implicative and are often cased together in similar depictions. However, they are distinct apparatuses in the portrayal of persons, particularly in war film, which both serve to code a moral evaluation into the film in distinct ways. As a result, they deserve to be analyzed separately.

This distinction is important and worth further emphasis: dehumanization creates an object toward which use or exploitation is justified (as in the case of the depiction of casualities in aerial bombardment as means to an end of war); othering, on the other hand, depicts a person or agent toward which even normally questionable action may be justified uncritically on the grounds that they are are threat to peaceful human existence.[^39] This is the way in which othering augments a moral evaluation of just cause, because just cause requires in part, the perception of the other as unjust and necessity of war as a last resort. Through othering, both of these principles of just war become easily coded by the depiction of the enemy as adulterated moral agents which justifies military action as necessary for elimination.

In light of its controversial reception and massive box office success, it is worthwhile, for the final subject of this analysis to take a closer look at Clint Eastwood's *American Sniper* (2014). The primary reason for this, is because it represents a more contemporary example of war cinema, in a time where conversations about the jingoism of war films has come under fire, and filmmakers are expected to respond to the public's aversion to patriotic portrayals of war as propagandistic. This enables us, in the course of this analysis, to apply the framework posited here to a subject with a more convoluted approach to the coding of a moral evaluation of war. Although the film has been widely receive as "jingoist propaganda" the creative team has largely sought to reassure the public that the film is an a-political study of the struggle of an individual soldier.[^40] Despite the intended a-political nature of the film, a deeper understanding of apparatus of othering that exists throughout the film, enables us to critique the film on its own, regardless of the intentions of the creative team and reveal the mechanism with which a moral evaluation of war is coded into the narrative.

The moment when our protagonist Chris Kyle chooses to join the military is emblematic. Sitting in his living room with his younger brother, news of the bombing of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania breaks on the TV. In response, Kyle mutters only to the viewers ears, an unambiguous statement of pure othering: "Look what *they* did to *us*." From the viewers standpoint, both they and us are obscure—it is not even clear in the context of the film that Kyle knows anything about the people who constitute "they" as the reporter even mentions that they are unsure who committed the bombing. Additionally is also not clear that Kyle includes any of the Tanzanians, or anyone else in his consideration of "us."[^41]

Certainly, it is possible that the filmmakers intended to include the mechanism of othering as it exists in the story of the common soldier. However, throughout the rest of the film, Kyle is lionized for his honorable and self-sacrificial commitment to the protection of his brothers in arms (as well as his literal brother). As Lennart Soberon has aptly interpreted *American Sniper* through the lens of the classic western genre, the othering of Iraqi militants is reinforced throughout the remainder of the film as a depiction of a war between civilization and savagery.[^42] Enemies are at times called savages, and Kyle at one points reports back to his wife, "I've never seen evil like this before." Additionally, the enemy sniper Mustafa is clearly set up as the anti-Kyle— the antagonist other. The othering may be a depiction of reality, but it is clear in the context of this film, that it still functions as an apparatus through which just cause is coded onto a moral evaluation of the war, and the actions of our protagonist.

Soberon's analysis of *American Sniper* and the way in which its depiction of the war in Iraq is coded with moral evaluations of the war contours precisely with the purpose of this investigation and is worth quoting at length: In its evocation of frontier mythology the film delivers to audiences a powerful frame of reference through which contemporary geopolitics are to be read, at the same time promoting an aggressive foreign policy and a militaristic disregard for human life. Such attitudes are further enforced by American Sniper’s representation of the enemy as a savage entity that can only be eliminated through acts of regenerative violence. [...] *Such sentiments thereby facilitate the justification of war as a viable, and indeed necessary, means of political action.*[^43]

To deepen Soberon's conclusion, it is one function of othering in media through which the moral evaluation of just cause is coded into the narrative—American military are the innocents worth protecting, threatening Iraqis (or Syrians) are unjust agents. Additionally, othering and the portrayal of enemies as savages, codes onto the narrative the reprobation of barbarism, incapable of being reasoned with and requiring the use of violence as a last resort to restore justice. While the creative team behind *American Sniper* is able to, in part, circumvent the wholesale othering of the enemy through the portrayal of Kyle as a honorable soldier who wrestles with the moral justification of his own actions, it utilizes the apparatus of othering to code a moral evaluation into the actions of Kyle as just, thereby transcoding the same moral evaluation onto the American agents in the historical war for the viewer.

## Final Remarks

The point of departure for this investigation was the question *can, and how do, war films* *contribute to peace?* By the end of this analysis it should be evident the complexity of this question with regard to convoluted mechanisms with which war films constitute a public and promulgate moral evaluations through narrative apparatuses. Moreover, it should be fully apparent, that even by attempting to discern a framework through which one could produce a just war film (one that contributes to peace), we have, in part, begged the question: can a film that adequately addresses these concerns exist? Let alone entertain or achieve commercial success? Like wars evaluated by just war theory, pure and spotless historical examples are few and far between (if they exist at all). One would not be cynical to expect the same thing from "just war film theory." This points us toward two significant closing remarks.

First, in the same way that just war theory has offered us a framework for understanding the contributions that war may make to peace, the assumption that the existence of war is inevitable is still, in effect, precisely that—an assumption. Thus, the same concern that haunts the existence of war remains a specter in the case against the genre of war film—namely, that the burden of proof should still fall upon the necessity of its existence at all. There may be just wars, the same as there may be just war films, but since the war film is not possible with out the war, we must remind ourselves, that war's absence is unequivocally more desirable than its presence. In the case of utter death and destruction, burden of proof falls on those who would assert otherwise. The dubiousness of this assertion is not lost on us, but it does aid in properly orienting ourselves toward the prospect of peace, rather than reifying the inevitability of war through cynical realism.

Second, the seeming intractability of the application of "just war film theory" should lend itself as much to a critique of a given media product, as it does a critique of an industry which is incapable of contributing to peaceful depictions of war which do not exploit viewers by constituting a public uncritical of the engagement in military conflict. If the industry is by and large incapable of producing media products which do not contribute positively to peace in this way, than all the parts should be implicated in its criticism. This includes the both the producers, and the consumers. We as the viewers, remain culpable so long as the audience of these films and products are constituted by a public which is willing to engage uncritically in the consumption of media which disseminates overly simplistic and infantilizing moral evaluations of the most destructive reality of human existence. Neither war nor war films, are justifiable solely on economic grounds—this is exploitation of the public. The primary goal of this analysis is not to contribute to some abstruse academic theory for the moral criticism of a media genre, but rather, to propose an accessible framework which would enable the public to take a critical approach to the war film genre. It is certainly not wrong to be entertained, but it is to be entertained at the expense of others. So long as war films constitute publics that are prone to uncritical evaluations of war itself, the world remains unguarded against exploitation, be it economic, political, or otherwise.

[^1]: Cf. James F Childress, “Just-War Theories: The Bases, Interrelations, Priorities, and Functions of Their Criteria,” *Theological Studies* 39, no. 3 (1978), 427: Childress appropriately identifies the popular modes of moral consideration vis-à-vis just war: "One is to start from basic ethical principles and to ask what criteria of just wars can be derived from them. The other is to start from the just-war criteria that we have inherited and to criticize them in terms of consistency, coherence, and fidelity to fundamental ethical principles and values. Within either approach we move back and forth between our practices, including our ordinary judgments, and ethical principles and theories; Catholic Church, “Safeguarding Peace: Avoiding War,” in *The* *Catechism of the Catholic Church* (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2012)., 2309: "The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. *The gravity of* *such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy*" (*emphasis own*); National Conference of Bishops, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” (1984); Childress, (1978); "The traditional criterion of just war theory" are not only debated, but have a long history of development and change across cultures and thinkers. Since comprehensive consideration of this theory and its history is outside the scope of this investigation, the analysis will defer to the theory as articulated in the catechism of the Catholic Church (which is primarily limited to the four principles commonly considered as just cause, last resort, probability of success and proportionality) and the US Conference of Bishops encyclical, in tandem with the prescient overview and analysis found in Childress. The goal of this analysis is not critique just war theory, but to use it in its most basic form as articulated in these highly regarded sources as an exploratory framework with which to build a framework for the criticism of media elements within war film.

[^2]: What constitutes a "war film" is obviously a debatable subject within genre studies but it is immaterial to the subject of this analysis in the sense that any film, so long as it makes any reference to, or depicts anything related to war could be potentially understood through the lens of this framework as offering a coded moral evaluation of a historic war vis-à-vis just war theory; cf. Tim Blackmore, “Eyeless in America, the Sequel: Hollywood and Indiewood’s Iraq War on Film,” *Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society* 32, no. 4 (2012a), 322: Additionally, as Blackmore shows, moral evaluations of war (or coded political statements that may bear on a public in general) are hardly limited war films. More often than not, filmmakers can be more nuanced in their criticism of a given reality because they opt for narratives which rely heavily on fictionalization and distance themselves from the real historical events they may be evaluation.

[^3]: Cf. Church, “Safeguarding Peace: Avoiding War.”;

[^4]: Cf. David Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,” *Review of International Studies* 29, no. S1 (2003), 57: "If we assume that the state has no ontological status apart from the many and varied practices that bring it into being, then the state is an artifact of a continual process of reproduction that performatively constitutes its identity. The inscription of boundaries, the articulation of coherence and the identification of threats to its sense of self can be located in and driven by the official discourses of government. But they can equally be located in and driven by the cultural discourses of the community, and represented in sites as ‘unofficial’ as art, film and literature."

[^5]: Patricia Aufderheide, “Your Country, My Country: How Films About the Iraq War Construct Publics,” *Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media* 48, no. 2 (2007), 56; cf. Blackmore, (2012a), 296.

[^6]: It is not lost on me that in criticizing these technological idioms for understanding the function of media in the life of the citizen, I have still opted to rely on the image of "coding" and "transcoding" as a metaphor to describe the mechanism here. I do not intend this mechanism to be understood as the transmission of discreet sets of data, but rather, as an imprinting force, rather than a data creation force, which is assimilated into emergent frameworks be it a narrative or a person's political framework; cf. Lennart Soberon, ““The Old Wild West in the New Middle East”: American Sniper (2014) and the Global Frontiers of the Western Genre,” *European* *journal of American studies* 12, no. 2 (2017), 2; Soberon also uses the language of "transcoding;" Blackmore, (2012a), 328; Blackmore uses the metaphor of "DNA."

[^7]: Pierre-Simon Laplace, *Essai Philosophique Sur Les Probabilités* (1814).; "An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes." Laplace, the 18th-19th century French thinker, posited a deterministic structure to reality in which a given intellect which could comprehend all of the processes at work in the universe, as well as each discreet data point, could explain not only the past but predict the future.

[^8]: Cf. Campbell, (2003), 60; As Campbell shows, the government, in fact, recognizes this reality itself: "Concerned with ‘information operations’ to influence foreign audiences, it was envisaged after September 11th that the OSI would coordinate everything from factual news releases to foreign advertising campaigns (billboards in Pakistan with images of the World Trade Centre under attack was one suggestion) to covert disinformation programmes designed to plant pro-American *stories* in the international media, sometimes using private firms to achieve the strategy" (*emphasis own*). Note the emphasis on the difference in public relations operations between the dissemination of information, and the construction of "stories."

[^9]: Campbell, (2003), 62; It cannot be underestimated how the publics frame of reference has been augmented because of the proliferation of media sources and societies relationship with it in the 21st century: "This seamless merging of production, representation and execution comes about because ‘the new wars are fought in the same manner as they are represented, by military simulations and public dissimulations, by real-time surveillance and TV live-feeds. Virtuality collapses distance, between here and there, near and far, fact and fiction;'" cf. Kevin M. Coe, “Words of War: Presidential Rationales for Military Action From World War Ii to Iraq,” diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008). provides a detailed explanation of the new ways in which government involvement in war messaging has shifted as the nature of "media economics" has changed in recent decades.

[^10]: Hannah Arendt, *The Origins of Totalitarianism: Introduction By Samantha Power* (Schocken, 2004).; see specifically "A Classless Society," p. 407-449, and "The Totalitarian Movement" p. 450-506.

[^11]: Anthony Lewis, “Democracy and a Free Press: Are They Incompatible?,” *Bulletin of the* *American Academy of Arts and Sciences* 50, no. 5 (1997), 50f: Lewis is a Pulitzer prize winning reporter and legal journalist who describes the generation and content of this idiom within the confines of the press: "It was only in this century that the idea of reporting the news objectively came to dominate the thinking of the press—or at least that of the serious press. And by midcentury it did dominate. [...] But objectivity turned out to be a flawed ethic. [...] Isolated facts were not enough. A thoughtful report needed context. So newspapers began publishing more interpretive stories, trying to show the larger meaning of events—and such stories have become a standard part of every major newspaper's reporting." This was written in 1997, but the sentiment still echoes through a variety of modern journalistic responses to the nihilistic currents in public discourse about reporting; cf. Linda A Klein, “A Free Press is Necessary for a Strong Democracy: Protecting the First Amendment Protects Our Liberty,” *American Bar Association* May (2017): "The transparency that journalism brings to events makes government work better, decreases the risk of corruption and ultimately makes our nation safer. Lawyers often use information uncovered by journalists to prosecute wrongdoing, to hold officials accountable, and to rectify injustices;" Wallace, Chris, “The Media is Giving Up Its Place in Our Democracy.” *The* *Washington Post (Online)*, 2017.: "We are not players in the game. We are umpires, or observers, trying to be objective witnesses to what is going on. That doesn't mean we're stenographers. If the president—or anyone we're covering—says something untrue or does something questionable, we can and should report it." Despite the fact that Wallace seems to be attempting to legitimize the function of the media that President Donald Trump has pointed toward with his discourse, he still falls back on the same Laplacean logic and this "ethic of objectivity" as Lewis alludes to it.

[^12]: Jacques Ellul, *Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes* (1973)., 187; cf. Coe, “Words of War: Presidential Rationales for Military Action From World War Ii to Iraq.”, 50-62: Coe's overview of research into how the development of media forms along this line corroborates with Ellul's basic hypothesis about the nature of the myth and what is digestible by viewers and publics.

[^13]: Ellul, *Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes*., 235; cf. Tim Blackmore, “Eyeless in America: Hollywood and Indiewood’s Iraq War on Film,” *Bulletin of Science,Technology &* *Society* 32, no. 4 (2012b), 294-297: In a penetrating study, Blackmore begins with Ellul's suggestion that democracies require "integration propaganda" to function, and surveys' fifty contemporary films on Iraq to understand how they function in this framework.

[^14]: Nevertheless, the government has involved itself in the propagation of media reflective of the preferred narrative on wars that would be, for all intents and purposes, defined precisely as "propaganda." This include films used in this analysis going back to WWII and the PCA (Production Code Administration) such as *Bombadier* and *Thirty Second Over Tokyo* which were produced by government studios up to and including the direction explicitly given to media by George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the OSI (Office for Strategic Influence) following the attacks of 9/11. For a comprehensive analysis of film making in the time surrounding WWII and the PCA see Joanne McGurk, “The Page and the Screen: The Subversive Message of World War Ii-Era Hollywood Films Adapted From Contemporary Novels By and About Women,” *Journal of* *Popular Film and Television* 42, no. 1 (2014); for the Bush administration and the OSI see Charles Musser, “Film Truth in the Age of George W. Bush,” *Framework: The Journal of* *Cinema and Media* 48, no. 2 (2007); cf. Campbell, (2003), 59ff; Coe, “Words of War: Presidential Rationales for Military Action From World War Ii to Iraq.”, 49-50; Ted Gournelos, “Othering the Self: Dissonant Visual Culture and Quotidian Trauma in United States Suburbia,” *Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies* 9, no. 4 (2009), 510-511; Blackmore, (2012b), 296.

[^15]: Cf. Neil Postman, *Amusing Ourselves to Death* (Penguin Group, 1985)., 107f: Here, Postman builds on the basic insight that Ellul is making, but develops how much more insidious these inevitable effects can be when packaged within a medium of entertainment or amusement like television: "[...] [T]elevision is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. [...] It means misleading information— misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing."

[^16]: Campbell, (2003). Relevant to both the theory and its turn toward depictions of war, Campbell presciently reaches a tangential conclusion with regard to the photography as a media product as expressed here. See especially pp. 71-73: "As W. J. T. Mitchell argues, ‘whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naïve mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”; it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality’."

[^17]: Cf. Pierre Sorlin, *The Film in History: Restaging the Past* (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1980)., 19f: "Historians who try to list the historical inaccuracies in [a film] would be ignoring the fact that their job should not involve bestowing marks for accuracy, but describing how men living at a certain time understand their own history. A historical film can be puzzling for a scholar: everything that he considers history is ignored. But at the same time it is important to examine the difference between history as it is written by the specialist and history as it is received by the non-specialist;" also see Robert Stow, “The Return of the Epic Film,” in *The* *Return of the Epic Film: Genre, Aesthetics and History in the 21st Century*, ed. Andrew B. R. Elliot Edinburgh University Press, 2014)..

[^18]: Cf. Bruce Bennett, “Cinematic Perspectives on the War on Terror: The Road to Guantanamo (2006) and Activist Cinema,” *New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film* 6, no. 2 (2008), 113-116: As Bennet shows in recent filmmaking about the Iraq war, this process of coding is even more apparent considering the blurring of line that occurs in the age of documentary media that "based on" or "inspired by" a true story: "The film [*The Road to Guantanamo*] is structured around a double perspective in its visible blending of documentary actuality with dramatized reenactment and one of the consequences of the film’s assemblage from this ‘material’ is that its hybrid composition and unstable textual status remains subtly visible. [...] Film theorist Bill Nichols suggests that films that mix documentary footage with filmed reconstructions in the interests of spectatorial engagement, or in order to compensate for the absence of useable or extant material, inevitably ‘trade documentary authenticity for fictional identification’ (Nichols 1991: 250). This practice involves film-makers in ethical and political compromises, he argues, and also risks undermining the ‘credibility’ of a film since the result of such a collocation of actuality and staged sequences is that: 'the special indexical bond between image and historical referent is ruptured. In a re-enactment, the bond is still between the image and something that occurred in front of the camera but what occurred occurred for the camera (Nichols 1991: 21);'" cf. Blackmore, (2012a), 322-323.

[^19]: Cf. Childress, (1978), 435.

[^20]: John Hodgkins, “In the Wake of Desert Storm: A Consideration of Modern World War Ii Films,” *Journal of Popular Film and Television* (2002), 77; cf. Albert Auster, “Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism,” *Journal of Popular Film and Television* 30, no. 2 (2002), 100; Kelly Wilz, “Rehumanization Through Reflective Oscillation in Jarhead,” *Rhetoric &* *Public Affairs* 13, no. 4 (2010), 586.

[^21]: Cf. Wilz, (2010), 584-586: "Whereas earlier antiwar films disarticulated nobility and national purpose, in the case of Saving Private Ryan, director Steven Spielberg redirected the focus of American traumatic memory to the ethically usable pasts of World War II or 'the good war.' In each case, soldiers enacted moral justice by remoralizing and resacrilizing the gun through 'clean kills' and a clear conscience. These films portrayed 'the good fight' by focusing not only on wars that the public deemed 'just,' but also on the heroic aspects of the main characters. Notably, these films fared well at the box office, indicating a desire among cinemagoers to see soldiers and war portrayed in a positive way. In addition, each of these films let audiences off the hook from having to make moral judgments about war. *These films promoted the notion that whether or not* *these wars were just, the soldiers still fought for the right reasons"* (*emphasis own*); cf. Robert Brent Toplin, “Hollywood’s D-Day From the Perspective of the 1960s and the 1990s: The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan,” *Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film* *and Television Studies* 36, no. 2 (2006), 27; Auster, (2002), 100; Here, Auster connects 1990's mythologizing of the Great Depression/WWII generation to the appeal of *Saving Private Ryan*.

[^22]: Auster, (2002), 101: "With a few broad strokes Spielberg touches the collective memory, evoking feelings both elegiac and patriotic."

[^23]: Cf. Auster, (2002), 101-102

[^24]: Auster, (2002), 102: "The only positive references to allies in the film are indirect, such as the Edith Piaf record that the GIs listen to curiously during a moment of battlefield repose and the starring of Kathleen Byron as the aged Private Ryan’s wife (in no small part due to Spielberg’s admiration for and as a bit of homage to Michael Power, her long-time companion and director of a number of celebrated British World War II films in which she appeared) (von Gunden)."

[^25]: Cf. Auster, (2002), 104: "They combine to make Saving Private Ryan a serious inspiration and reference point for books and films, such as Pearl Harbor and Thirteen Days, that continue to proclaim American triumphalism into the twenty-first century."

[^26]: Hodgkins, (2002), 77: "Not once does Spielberg mention the geopolitical causes of the war or make any attempt to explain or investigate the chain of events that led to such bloody ends; in Spielberg’s vision, U.S. troops are on a holy crusade that will end only when the evil despot, Adolf Hitler, has been unseated."

[^27]: cf. Klaus Dodds and Sean Carter, *International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power* (Columbia University Press, 2014)., 98: Here, the authors make a convincing tangential argument for the mythologizing effect of the juxtaposition between the home and front in Saving Private Ryan. Between the opening scenes of the elder Private Ryan's family, the scenes of the pastoral French countryside, and Mrs. Ryan's home being threatening approached by the letters of her sons deaths, the authors argue that this "imaginary homeland," where safety and security are invaded by war, reify even the most distant threats as proximal and necessary of, for example, military intervention abroad.

[^28]: Cf. Auster, (2002), 104; This understanding the mythologizing apparatus and its relation to the coded moral evaluation of just authority resonates with Auster's telling remarks: "Saving Private Ryan was a perfect anodyne to the somewhat equivocal glory of the low-key American victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War. Saving Private Ryan, except for the shattering realism of its opening sequences, is a brilliant, mythic blend of the religious aura of America’s martyred sixteenth president, Hollywood’s classic World War II films, the ahistorical refusal to acknowledge the major role that the Allies played in the downfall of fascism, the celebration of the American intellectual tradition, and the glorification of American GIs as the world’s greatest fighting men."

[^29]: Tharoor, Ishaan, “‘Dunkirk’ and the West’s Myopia About World War Ii.” *Washington Post*, 2017.: "'The focus on Britain 'standing alone' sometimes risks diminishing how the war brought pain in many places, right across the globe,' wrote Yasmin Khan, the author of 'The Raj at War: A People's History of India's Second World War.' 'The war, especially when viewed from the East, was about two empires locking horns rather than a nation taking on fascism. Above all, the narrative of a plucky island nation beating back the Germans omits the imperial dimension of the war. Many people living in the colonies were caught up in a vicious conflict beyond their control.'"

[^30]: Cf. Soberon, (2017), 15: This mythological framework is not uncommon in the lionization of war actors, one example of many is *American Sniper*: "American Sniper enforces a mythology in which violence is celebrated and soldiers are seen as heroes."

[^31]: Childress, (1978), 435; cf. Hodgkins, (2002), 78; Auster, (2002), 101: "Some critics contend that Spielberg’s depiction of war as bloody abattoir was influenced by decades of anti-war films inspired by the Vietnam War. But it is more realistic to see the scenes as anti-death than as antiwar." While both Hodgkins and Auster are critical of the American triumphalism evident in Spielberg's gruesome narrative, neither consider *Saving Private Ryan* as pro-war. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that a film is not required to be pro-war, nor anti-war, for its moral evaluations to constitute a public which ascribes a positive moral evaluation to a historical conflict—whether or not this historical evaluation can be cast as proor antiwar in general (and with regard to the public's capacity for evaluation of future conflicts) is outside the scope of this analysis.

[^32]: Childress, (1978), 438.

[^33]: Daniel Marcus, “William Wyler’s World War Ii Films and the Bombing of Civilian Populations,” *Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television* 29, no. 1 (2009), 81f.

[^34]: Qtd. in Marcus, (2009), 83.

[^35]: Cf. Marcus, (2009), 84-87; In 1990 *The Memphis Belle* was remade by Michael Caton-Jones, although it is clear in the film that they took extra precautions to adjust the story in a way that emphasized the characters aversion to harming civilian populations in their bombing runs.

[^36]: Cf. Childress, (1978), 438.

[^37]: Cf. Mehmet Atif Ergun, “Modernity: A Myth That Manufactures Consent,” *Humanities* 3, no. 4 (2014), 611-613 (at 613): "[...] [T]he 'other' and its markers are intertwining discursive tools to produce and maintain hegemonic boundaries. The more their otherness (and the One’s oneness) is naturalized, the more the boundaries themselves are naturalized and the more hierarchy transforms into a subtle, elusive hegemony. In other words, the notion of difference is transformed from potentially a dynamic human force into one that drives control and outputs destruction." Earlier, Ergun pulls from a variety of sources building to this concept of othering within the context of gender and race and how it is related to violence, but also explicates work done by Judith Butler to show how that this same process is inherent in the modern nation-state; cf. Gournelos, (2009), 511-513: Here, Gournelos further develops a framework for understanding how othering can happen from the inside out, when there is no longer a framework or myth which can account for internal inconsistencies within the group's tendency for hegemony; Eunju Hwang, “Stateless Within the States: American Homeland Security After 9/11 and Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend,” *European journal of American studies* 10, no. 2 (2015), builds on Butler's notion of "the stateless within the state" by interpreting *I Am Legend* (2007) in light of the politics of the war on terrorism.

[^38]: Cf. Dodds and Carter, *International Politics and Film: Space, Vision, Power*., 65-83; in the chapter "Distant Others,' Dodds and Carter with some reference to media connect the nature of physical proximity to the creation of the other and its influence on historic international relations; cf. Yarin Eski, “The War on Meaninglessness: A Counter-Terrorist Self Through an Absent Terrorist Other,” *Ethnography* 17, no. 4 (2016): In the context of the "war on terrorism" Eski shows how this othering process (as well as the distance referred to by Dodds and Carter) materializes in the lives and work of port security officers.

[^39]: Cf.Usame Tunagur, “Business as Usual: Exploring the Other From Arabia to Appalachia,” *Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present; Hollywood* 6, no. 2 (2007): Although not in these words, this is Tunagur's basic distinction between the otherness in *The Sheik* (1921) and the dehumanization in *Songcatcher* (2001) ;Alsultany, Evelyn, “Muslims Are Facing a Civil Rights Crisis in America, and it’s the Media’s Fault.” *Washington Post*, 2015.: We see this in our everyday lives still—in Alsultany's more recent article in the Washington Post lamenting the treatment of Arab-American's in media—even though we may have progressed beyond "one-dimensional depictions" (read dehumanizing) of Arab or Muslim characters, there still exists a lingering antagonism cultural consideration;

[^40]: Cf. Soberon, (2017); 1. The assertion that a war film is a-political in nature misses the point which we seek to expose through this analysis: films (especially war films) necessary constitute publics around the portrayal of historical events. The absence of any explicit "political" commentary in the film is immaterial the way in which the film as a media product uses particular apparatuses to code moral evaluations of a given war which are then transcoded into the public's moral evaluation of the historic occurrence.

[^41]: Cf. Soberon, (2017), 10.

[^42]: Soberon, (2017), 1, 4.

[^43]: Soberon, (2017), 14-15; (*emphasis own*).