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

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.

footnotes

  1. 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. ↩

  2. 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. ↩

  3. 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. ↩

  4. 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. ↩

  5. 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. ↩

  6. 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. ↩

  7. 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." ↩

  8. 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’." ↩

  9. 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).. ↩

  10. 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. ↩