Towards Just War-Film Theory: A Critical Analysis of Propagandistic Elements in US War Film

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

footnotes

  1. 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." ↩

  2. 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. ↩

  3. 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." ↩

  4. 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. ↩

  5. 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." ↩