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

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.