The War Body on Screen 9781628929232, 9781441161857

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this collection emerged in a fairly innocuous exchange between the two editors of the book over the film Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall 2002). This led to the following question being posed: What happens when the war body meets the horror body in a single apocalyptic film text? The answer to the question we set ourselves became the many pages of this collection. The answer became The War Body on Screen. We would like to thank David at Continuum for his support on this project; our friends and colleagues at Southampton Solent University and at Victoria University of Wellington; our students past and present who have enhanced our thinking and asked the difficult questions; and our contributors who found the war body in all the places and spaces that we had imagined they haunted.

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KR: For Mum, for all those conversations about war SR: For Dylan Niall, for living, and for the War Body no more

Contributors

Vian Bakir is Senior Lecturer in Communications, Culture and Media at the University of Glamorgan, UK. She is coeditor of Communication in the Age of Suspicion: Trust and the Media (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007) and is published in Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics (2006), The Qualitative Report (2006), Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management (2006), Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics (2006), and Journal of Risk Research (2005). Anita Biressi is Head of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Roehampton University, UK. She is the author of Crime, Fear, and the Law in True Crime Stories (Palgrave, 2001), coauthor of Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (Wallflower, 2005), and coeditor of The Tabloid Culture Reader (McGraw Hill, 2007). She has published in journals such as Mediactive, Screen, and Feminist Media Studies. Jennie Carlsten received her MA in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her research concerns include audience reception and spectatorship, ethnic representation, memory construction, and Irish cinema. Her work has most recently been published in the journal Cinephile and in the collection Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism (Routledge, 2007). Rinella Cere lectures in Media Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is currently writing a monograph, Museums of Cinema (Routledge, forthcoming), editing a collection on Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain (Palgrave, forthcoming), and is published in Film History (2006), The Ideology of the Internet (2006), and Crime Online (2006). Lindsay Coleman is a PhD Candidate in the Cinema Studies Department of the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has been published in Illusions, Lava magazine, The Big Picture, and Film & History.

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H. Louise Davis is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Michigan State University. Her most recent publications include book chapters in Women in Rock (ed. Patricia Rudden, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View (ed. Barbara Cook, Lexington Press, forthcoming), and Mothering and Popular Culture (ed. Elizabeth Podnieks, McGill-Queen University Press, forthcoming). Renuka Gusain is a PhD student in Early Modern Studies at Wayne State University, Detroit. She has an MA and MPhil from Delhi University, India, where she was also a lecturer for two years. Her research interests include aesthetics, beauty, phenomenology, and ethics. Sarah Hagelin is Assistant Professor of English at New Mexico State University. She has published on violence and masculinity in The Passion of the Christ, and her work on Schindler’s List will appear in a forthcoming collection on the Holocaust in a national context. Andrew Hill is Research Fellow in Visual Culture, Centre for Research in SocioCultural Change (CRESC), The Open University, UK. He has published on various aspects of the relationship between media, culture, and politics, including in the Journal for Cultural Research, Media History, and Space and Polity. Jeffrey Johnson is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Michigan State University. He is published in The Journal of Popular Culture and Popular Culture Review. He also is working on his first book, The Cultural Globalization of New Europe: Narrative Symbolism and Mythology in American Advertising in Poland, 1990–2005. Andrew McStay is Lecturer in Advertising at Thames Valley University, UK. He is published in Communication in the Age of Suspicion: Trust and the Media (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007) and Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics (2006). Heather Nunn is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Roehampton University, UK. She is the author of Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy (Lawrence & Wishart, 2002), coauthor of Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (Wallflower, 2005), and coeditor of The Tabloid Culture Reader (McGraw Hill, 2007). She has published in journals such as New Formations, Screen, and the Journal for Cultural Research. Adele Parker is Lecturer in French at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, USA. She is currently completing a project on contemporary French poetry.

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Karen Randell is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at Southampton Solent University. She is coeditor of Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies (Wallflower, 2006) and is published in Film and History: War in Film and Television (2006), Art in the Age of Terrorism (2005), and Screen (2003). Sean Redmond is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand. He is editor of Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (Wallflower, 2004), and coeditor of Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (Routledge, 2006) and Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (Sage, 2007). He has published in journals such as the Journal of Consumer Culture, Scope, and Screening the Past. Linda Robertson is Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York. She is the author of Discovery: Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Academic Disciplines (Harcourt, Brace & Collins, 1989) and The Dream of Civilized Warfare: World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Matthew Wagner is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published in Theatre InSight (1998), Text and Performance (2005), and Screening the Past (2007). Paul Williams is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Plymouth, UK. He has published in the European Journal of American Culture and Science Fiction Studies. He is presently coediting a collection exploring North American comics of the last twenty years.

Introduction Setting the Screen Karen Randell and Sean Redmond

Figure 1. World Trade Center Explosion The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd. Nietzsche (1978, 21) The War Body on Screen is principally concerned with the way the body, individual and social, is employed to make sense of terror, conflict, and warfare. In this collection war is defined in hard and soft terms to not only include the literal manifestations of state-sanctioned violence and “terrorist” insurgency, but also the discursive and metaphoric forms of war—war as an expression of power and subjugation; and war as an interior and interpersonal mechanism that writes identities and scripts differences. Similarly, the collection takes the body to be fleshed, a corporeal and phenomenological sense-based entity, and a technological and spectacular creation. The body is not only human but also 1

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cyborgian, simulated and screen-based. In this collection the screen is itself considered to be an embodied or carnal medium that moves, feels, senses, and touches as though a human body willed into action. The editors take the screen to be any vision-making technology or vision-based text. Television news, photographs, consol games, documentaries, fiction films, the art gallery, and the Internet find their way into the arguments and illustrations of the book. The War Body on Screen is centrally concerned with the contemporary manifestations of terror, conflict, and warfare, but with a particular concern for 9/11 (2001), and the War on Terror and the War on the West for which it acted as catalyst. The editors suggest that post 9/11 a global “open wound” has emerged, which bleeds itself into the articulating, discursive fabric of everyday life. This is the age of the war body on screen.

Historical Bodies Visualizing the war body is not a recent turn of events. Visual representations of the war body can be found as far back as two million years ago in Palaeolithic rock art (Otterbein 2004). For one human to kill or maim another and then in drawing or picture to represent this sovereignty over the flesh was to confirm their victory, their superiority, so that it could be translated and passed on—as a documented form of territorial empowerment, political rhetoric, and mythological folktale. In Western cultures, for example, the visual representation of the war body can be found across all the major art forms: from the 1070s Bayeux Tapestry, to the sculptures of the Crusaders, and to the stained-glass images of the martyred Saints in thirteenth-century churches across Europe. Whether we look at Ruben’s sketch of The Triumph of Henry IV (1627–31) or Vereshchagin’s haunting The Apotheosis of War (1871), which shows a pyramid of skulls, the image of the maimed and dead war body haunts the cultural imagination. With the birth of modern photography, this bringing of the dead into vision is greatly accelerated and ontologically transformed. Photographic journalism, for example, introduced a “reality” and an immediacy of representation that changed the image from one that was art-based, memorialized, and historical to one that was reality-based, democratic, personal, and everyday. The war body could be brought into the home, particularly in the form of family photographs of loved ones gone to, or lost in, battle. It is not unusual for family albums to contain photographs of soldiers from as early as the American Civil War (1861–65) or the Boer War (1880–81, 1899–1902). The photographed war body: a historical artifact, a keepsake or memento, a body-memory, a “bridge” to a loved one, a reminder of “absence,” contained and domesticated within the private sphere. The war body is imbued with political significance. Eddie Adam’s 1968 Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong soldier (fig. 2) can be considered alongside Goya’s 1814 painting of the execution of the

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Spanish insurgents by Napoleon’s Army on May 3, 1808. The two images— divided by form, history, and national context—nonetheless demonstrate a shared iconography in which the politicized body of war is meant to have political repercussions: it is meant not only to record history but also to affect historical change. Such images produce protest and resistance and become part of a political discourse in which war is denied, decried, or championed. Goya is thought to have witnessed this mass execution from a nearby hill, coming down the next morning to sketch the bodies where they lay. The authenticity of the war image is mythologized here in the artist’s history, an authenticity, nonetheless, that tries to efface the artist or photographer’s complicity in the events they capture: Goya and Adams are themselves taken over (taken in) by the war bodies they attempt so faithfully to capture.

Figure 2. Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a North Vietnamese prisoner Adam’s photograph was apparently “staged” for the press: Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan led the prisoner out onto the street, where the press were waiting, clearly intending to take the prisoner’s life and to be photographed doing so. Susan Sontag suggests that this complicity extends to the viewer: there is an “indecency” in our cospectatorship of a killing—the photograph being taken the same moment as the bullet enters the prisoner and a moment before he falls (Sontag 2003, 54). Yet Sontag cannot help but wonder at its “mystery.” We are utterly fascinated by the photographed war body: we desire it even if we are repulsed by that desire, and by the act of witnessing death and ruination. Cinema has paid witness to the war body from almost its primal moment. As early as 1897 the image of the war body was projected into cinemas all over

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Europe and America (Bottomore 1995). War films, Bottomore states, attracted “huge audiences,” and the impact of these films was “often increased by the use of music, patriotic commentary, sound effects of explosions, and the like” (32). The war body was a must-see image: a validated, legitimate, heroic, and visceral attraction. Hollywood rose to the challenge of representing the biggest war in history on screen, but its representation of the war body during World War I was subject to the conditions of genre and audience expectation (Debauche 1997; Kelly 1997). Melodramatic narratives of the early war film presented the WWI war body as a heroic entity (Hearts of the World, Griffith 1918; The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ingram 1921; The Big Parade, Vidor 1925) but only if the war bodies were of American or French soldiers. The German war body appeared as passive, dead or mutilated, or as the monstrous aggressor. At this time, European cinema also produced fictional and documentary engagements with WWI (Dibbets and Hogenkamp 1998). Abel Gance’s J’accuse (France 1919), for instance, presents returning dead French soldiers at the end of the film as a ghostly roll call staring out at the audience accusingly. In Britain the image of readied men waiting for over-the-top action in the staged scenes of The Battle of the Somme (1916) has since become iconic, replicated over and over in footage used to represent WWI in numerous documentaries (Eksteins 1995, 209): authentic bodies but not authentic action has become a leitmotif of realist filmmaking. The war body is subject to cultural, historical, and political ascription; heroic and diabolical myths are drawn from victorious images of soldiers, and from passive and alienating images of the enemy. These supericonic images move from one war to another, creating a seamless impression or signification of what the war body does when it is called into action. During World War II Hollywood produced hundreds of films, many of them with the institutional backing of the U.S. government (May 2006, 182–83). The American war body in Hollywood was unquestionably patriotic, as personified by such characters as Sergeant Stryker (John Wayne) in The Sands of Iwo Jima (Dwan 1949). In his work with Vietnam veterans Robert J. Lifton describes how the war image of John Wayne (particularly as Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima) had inspired many young men to join up for Vietnam. For these men there was an impossibility of living up to a screen image of a conquering war body: We have seen the John Wayne thing to be many things, including quiet courage, unquestioning loyalty, the idea of noble contest, and a certain kind of male mystique, . . . but its combat version, as far as the men in the rap group were concerned, meant military pride, lust for the battle, fearless exposure to danger, and prowess in killing. (Lifton 1973, 219) The image of the war body here was imbued with a notion of courageous masculinity that proved unattainable in combat conditions. The men in Lifton’s rap

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group were post-traumatically stressed; egged on to war by images of a war hero, but they returned from war disillusioned. After the Vietnam War, the increasing interest in trauma (PTSD) and its effects on the combatant created or fueled a transformation in the way the military war body was to be represented. The returning Vietnam vet was an isolated, anomic victim rather than a national hero. For instance, Michael (Robert de Niro) in The Deer Hunter (Cimino 1978) or Luke (Jon Voight) in Coming Home (Ashby 1978) are figures of distress and dislocation rather than empowered masculine figures. In Rambo: First Blood (Kotcheff 1982) John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) appears to be such a victim. After his arrest and subsequent interrogation in a backwater police station, he suffers a series of flashbacks in which he returns to the moment he was tortured in Vietnam. Nonetheless, his hard body refuses this passive signification: his war body wages war on an America gone soft on crime, an America that has failed to honor its courageous soldiers. Susan Jeffords has discussed the way in which the hard body of John Rambo presents itself as a “national emblem” during the Reagan era (2005, 146) while Douglas Kellner points to the reinvention of the Vietnam war warrior being transformed from “wounded and confused misfit to super warrior” (1995, 64). The war body then assumes its cultural position not from the war from which it emanates but from the era in which it is produced. Television has not been reticent in its depiction of the war body. During the Vietnam War–period documentaries and TV movies engaged with the war body of the combat zone and the return of the veterans. News programs such as 60 Minutes carried Vietnam stories from 1969 to 1979, the CBS series The Twentieth Century ran with Vietnam issues from as early as 1966. ABC’s Scope: The Vietnam War ran from 1967, and NBC’s Meet the Press regularly showed interviews with entrenched reporters in the field. Here the image of the war body becomes present at the home front, relentlessly beamed into living rooms via the television. Similarly, in Britain during the Falklands War, television was the media that brought “live” information about the war home. Schedules were interrupted; Department of Defense press briefings became primetime texts, and images of battle, albeit censored, created an audiovisual space for war bodies to emerge in all the intimacy of the domestic setting. Clearly the 9/11 catastrophe was a made-for-television event: it can even be argued to be the event of recent times. When the 9/11 attacks happened, French filmmakers Jules and Gedeon Naudet were already in New York, filming firefighters in action. Their film, 9/11: A Documentary, was aired on March 10, 2002, on CBS—one of the earliest full-length films about the event. On the first anniversary of 9/11, every network and cable channel seemed to carry a memorial show: from Portraits of Courage, which profiled “heroic young people” and was aired on UPN, to 60 Minutes on CBS, whose episode “An Ordinary Town” detailed the ways in which one small town had been affected by the event. Anatomy of September 11 gave a detailed account of the structural collapse of the WTC on the A&E channel. Spike Lee hosted a showcase of films created by film and

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television students from NYU Tisch School of the Arts on Showtime: Reflections from Ground Zero (schedule from www.austinchronicle.com). Television, then, is still providing the debate and visualization of the most catastrophic events of that day and its scripted consequences, but increasingly people go to the Web to interact with the horrors of war. The Internet offers one the chance of watching unmediated, uncensored, and potentially “live” bodies of war in the form of executions, bombings, assaults, suicides, and beheadings. In the Baudrillard sense, the war body on screen becomes caught in an obscene network of communication. What then of the representation of the war body during the two wars in the Gulf? Baudrillard’s assertion that “the Gulf War did not take place” presents us with an impossibility of representation: “When the Americans finally appeared behind their curtain of bombs, the Iraqis had already disappeared behind their curtain of smoke” (2006, 303). The controlled media conditions of the First Gulf War “assured that primarily positive pictures and reporting of the war would take place” (Kellner 2005, 209). The war body was censored for the West. Nevertheless, Hollywood did try to explore the war body of this conflict. Three Kings (Russell 1999) presented the American soldier as idiosyncratic, ironic, and self-interested, while more recently Jarhead (Mendes 2005) adopts a confused response to combat, presenting both parody and homage to earlier Vietnam films. Mendes’s film tries to recuperate the war body so that it becomes more than the impotent combatant that the film explores. When Baudrillard’s virtual “curtain of smoke” lifts, there are real dead Iraqi war bodies to be cleared, buried, and counted. The physical, numerical, palpably real nature of the war dead ensures that the memory-image of the war body cannot be entirely censored or effaced. In 2002 the British Medical Journal highlighted work done by two consultant psychiatrists detailing the trauma of British soldiers who cleared dead bodies after bomb attacks. An officer, who had volunteered to help clear the highway from Kuwait to Basra, commented: On leaving their Chinook helicopter, his detail of 30 men vomited due to the stench of burning corpses and tires. He will always recall a baby heat-fused to its mother’s chest in a burnt-out car. (Gabriel and Neal 2002, 340) This soldier suffered PTSD on his return to civilian life, in particular the unwanted memory of this scene returned over and over, rendering him immobile. The notion of the unwanted return of the war body is a recurring trope of war trauma testimonies. For example, after WWI British soldier William Carr recalled clearing a German trench: Dead bodies everywhere, some half propped against the trench wall, some lying on their backs, some with their faces in the mud. . . . The shock was

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beyond belief. I stared at those poor German soldiers. Never have I forgotten the look on their faces. (Carr 1985 in Bourke 1999, 4) This image of the dead war body, related through the memoirs of these surviving British soldiers, highlights the relationship between trauma and witnessing a terrible event. It is a trauma that frequently remains locked into the psyche: “Never have I forgotten. . . .” The war body then is an ever-present private image at the very least. Nonetheless, trauma can be collective: a psychic wound inflicted on the nation-state, a condition that E. Ann Kaplan (2005) attributes to Americans post 9/11. Joanna Bourke’s research has shown that where the actual dead or maimed war body is not witnessed in battle, soldiers often “construct elaborate, precise and self-conscious fantasies about the effects of their destructive weapons, especially when the impact of their actions was beyond their immediate vision” (1999, 6). Every day people witness the war body precisely because the screen, in all its permutations, presents its warrior flesh at every click, cut, or dissolve of its lens. Although warfare has become increasingly technological—and increasingly mediated for the spectator—it has done “little to reduce the awareness that dead humans are the end product” (7).

Setting the Screen The troubling vision of the bodies of the dead and the soon to be dead litter the contemporary media landscape, helping to frame and fix the way war, terror, and conflict are to be understood and experienced. In fiction and factual formats, and across a range of diverse, formal, and informal media sites, the War on Terror, and its symbiotic corollary, the War on the West, is played out in and through the body that is violent, that produces violence, that has been or soon will be marked by violence. For example, in Special Force, a first-person shooter computer game designed and marketed by the Lebanese Hezbollah, the player takes on the role of a brave and heroic Arab fighter who storms Israeli military strongholds. The game cover blurb pronounces: “Be a partner in the victory. Fight, resist, and destroy your enemy in the game of force and victory.” Special Force is unique because it is the first game to adopt the format and trajectory of Western (American) military combat scenarios, but here it reverses the usual core/periphery, us/them dynamic. In Special Force, Hezbollah is great and good, and the “I am a soldier” player of the game is given a virtuous body, which it uses to kill the unclean and the tyrannical. Special Force is organized around an embodied point of view: it gives “carnal vision” (Sobchack 2004) to the first-person shooter, who skillfully mows down scores of Israeli soldiers. The “I am” of the game is meant to vicariously feel what it is like to kill and to win. The narrative of the game, then, driven by a body-count impulse, demands a cardiovascular response from the player.

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The body playing the game is a body at war. As Mahmoud Rayya, an official from the Hezbollah bureau, triumphantly suggests: This game is resisting the Israeli occupation through the media. . . . In a way, Special Force offers a mental and personal training for those who play it, allowing them to feel that they are in the shoes of the resistance fighters. (2003; emphasis added) The war body on screen is thus encountered in the virtual worlds of gaming and the Internet; in realist genres and actuality forms; in the new “domestic” sites of amateur filmmaking; in the public spaces of the art gallery; and in the fantasy genres of horror and science fiction, where, for example, the image of the monstrous other and the supericonic cyborg have been increasingly fused with the wasted or hypermasculine body of the soldier. Dog Soldiers (Marshall 2002), a low-budget British werewolf film, conjoins the body-horror violence of the gore flick, with the riddled, realist body of the war film, suggesting in their unification like-for-like, simultaneous baseness. The war body on screen leaks, weeps, defecates, and bleeds: they are often made to do so by sadistic, militaristic bodies better trained and armed, or by bodies that understand the obscene logic of terror. Powerful binaries exist between the legitimate and legitimated bodies of war, often belonging to the Western and white soldier, hostage, innocent victim, investigative journalist—and bodies that “unfairly” bring destruction, belonging to the Eastern and off-white terrorist, extremist, or hostage taker. In a Taliban televised execution (April 2007), a young boy is filmed cutting the head off an alleged spy, Ghulam Nabi, accused of giving the American military information which led to an air strike in which a senior Taliban commander died. The boy, dressed in a traditional headscarf, hacks away at the man’s neck before he finally severs the head to the chant of “God is great.” From at least a Western perspective, the film proves the barbaric nature of the Taliban, these so-called lawless others, and in so doing gives “law” to the West to both protect its own and attack the agencies that would otherwise bring destruction on the body, both individual and social. The war body on screen is also made to disappear. These absented bodies are abducted, kidnapped, ushered away in the middle of the night; they are placed in limbo, moved like cargo in international transit, and denied sovereignty (the right to exist) in nowhere and no-time prisons. As a striking case in point, the CIA’s “secret” extraordinary rendition program involves extraditing terrorist suspects to nation-states where they become nonpeople or ghost prisoners and subject to torture. In an articulating feedback loop, one can read the entire series of Lost as a metaphoric, displaced exploration of America’s rendition policy. All the survivors (prisoners) on Lost are at some point taken against their will and tortured in a nowhere, no-time zone until they confess all. These absented bodies are also replaced by the disembodied spectacle of war. Made out of digital special effects and the light and magic of hi-tech weaponry

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exploding in the long-shot distance, the “body” of war is no longer human but technological. The modern soldier loses its organic body: encased in virtual armor and supplied with vision and mapping devices, he/she moves through the battlefield as a blip on a screen, making tactical decisions that are preprogrammed and scripted (Virilio 1994). In a comprehensive sense, the Abu Ghraib prison torture photographs are a telling example of this contemporary will to flesh. In them, Iraqi prisoners are variously stripped, covered in shit, beaten, placed in sexual poses, and attacked by dogs. In one provocative photograph, a hooded prisoner is made to stand on a tiny box, arms stretched out wide, with electrical wires running from his fingers to an electricity supply. Douglas Kellner suggests that the “hood evokes the Ku Klux Klan . . . while the pose of the Iraqi with his arms spread out evokes Christ on the cross, and the monstrous and grotesque figure as a whole reminds artsensitive viewers of Goya’s sketches of the horror of war” (2004). In another disturbing photograph, the MP Lyndee England is captured pointing her finger at a prisoner’s genitals while he is forced to masturbate. England’s body is empowered: it is (supposedly) judicious and legal, and it holds the body of the prisoner in the grip of power. England demonstrates her “conquest” through embodied humiliation of the male other who is impotent—is made to be impotent—in her eyes. The prisoner’s othered and sexualized body is meant to stand for, and confirm, the mythic status of the Oriental male as effeminate other. What is being exercised in these photographs is a representation of biopower in its purest form. As Giorgio Agamben suggests: Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized—a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without mediation. (Agamben 1996, 41) The photographs were never meant to be seen, at least not outside the contexts of the prison, or in their circulation to family and friends. Like so many other war bodies post 9/11, these bodies were to be made unseen, invisible, denied presence. As Paul Virilio has argued, “It is a war of images and sounds, rather than objects and things” (1994, 70). Nonetheless, the fact that the photographs surface bear witness to the uncanny way in which the body comes into view as a bare witness no matter what is done to deny its corporeal life. The war body cannot be easily denied its presence in an age where affect and emotion are central to the successful trade in images, and where the screen, in all its liquid forms, can be found everywhere. The MPs at the prison sent these photos to loved ones along with images of tourist sites, everyday mess/camp rituals, and comradeship poses. In so doing they placed themselves in an affecting economy of rather banal and—outside of the torture photographs—powerless life in Iraq. Their trained and militarized

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white bodies have been reduced to a docile state where their “boredom” (humiliation) flows into, onto, and through the bodies of their racialized prisoners. The violent power that circulates in the Abu Ghraib prison torture photographs is in the end a parody of itself: A parody of the war itself, pornography becoming the ultimate form of abjection of war which is unable to be simply war, to be simply about killing, and instead turns itself into a grotesque infantile reality-show, in a desperate simulacrum of power. (Baudrillard 2005, 2) Nonetheless, parody can be argued to be aggressively political and potentially recuperative. Linda Hutcheon (1988), for example, has argued that postmodern forms of aesthetic or cultural parodic activity can be productive and interrogative, opening up spaces for exploring and critiquing the dominant social order. In December 2006, Banksy, a UK-based guerrilla artist, placed a life-size figure of a Guantanamo Bay detainee within the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California. With this intervention, Banksy is not only intending to draw attention to the camps in Cuba but also to bring the absented and dehumanized war body to the ultimate in simulated play environments. The Disneyland theme park reconstructs the world in utopian colors and dreamscapes. Banksy sets or retunes the screen so that the absented war body is made present; it comes, or rather it plays back into troubling view.

Sight Lines Debating The War Body on Screen is best served by drawing upon multiple and diverging viewpoints, differing academic backgrounds and methodological approaches, so that the discussion or “story” of ruination that follows is textured and multilayered. A multidisciplinary approach is essential in order to capture and interpret the complexity of the war body on screen and its many manifestations. Contributors have utilized textual analysis, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, postcolonialism, comparative analysis, narrative theory, discourse analysis, representation, and identity politics as their theoretical footprints. Analysis of the impact of new media and information technologies on the construction and transmission of war bodies has also been addressed. The book is divided into themed parts organized around “the war body,” “the body of the soldier,” “the body of the terrorist,” and “the body of the hostage.” Part 1, “The War Body on Screen,” broadly introduces and contextualizes the ideas, issues, and political complexities that shape the rest of the collection. In this part writers address the way terror, conflict, and warfare have been increasingly filtered, measured, and communicated through the image of the corpse, terrorist, soldier, and victim. All the writers agree, albeit from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, that ideology, power, identification, and

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estrangement enter the representation of warfare in and through the carnal. Vision and the technologies of vision play a key part in this cultural centering of the war body; in many respects the screen is considered actually to be carnal too. Part 2, “The Body of the Soldier,” explores the varying ways in which the body of the soldier is presented and represented on screen: mutilated, traumatized, absent, dead, masculine, heroic, vulnerable, and visible. The writers see the body of the soldier as a site of ideological contention and corporeal instability. These debates form the central thread for discussion of recent horror and war genre films where the body is subject to damage and visceral death by both unknown forces and known enemies. The writers ask, what are the implications of these representations? What meaning can the body of the soldier convey? Part 3, “The Body of the Terrorist,” examines the centrality of the body to texts that are composed of acts of terrorism, or confer terror on the viewer or reader. Taking four different mediums/forms as their starting point—fiction film; television news coverage; hip-hop and music video; and television drama— the writers discuss the ways in which the deviant body of the enemy can be dehumanized. Issues of civil rights, sadism, ambivalence and ambiguity, and torture thread their way through these four chapters. In summation, the writers in this part present a set of often-contentious debates about images that are, perhaps, the most politically motivated of those that visualize the body at war. Part 4, “The Body of the Hostage,” looks at the ways in which the body of the hostage has been used as propaganda from both sides of the political divide: as bargaining tool for the kidnappers, and as an emotive material sign by the captives’ families to secure support and sympathy for their lost or dead loved ones—rendered present but soon to be absent by the visibility bestowed on “it” by video and Internet footage. Most significantly, this part highlights how developments in new multimedia technologies have enabled a global (real-time) positioning of the body of the hostage, arguably collapsing time and space so that the image of death is being constantly updated and relayed in domestic settings. In many ways The War Body on Screen was a difficult book to write and to edit. It brought us into intimate proximity with the power-saturated biopolitics of war, and it filled our lives with the numerous horrors that this book contains. We became witnesses to a great number of traumatic events, events that moved and affected us deeply. In some small way, we hope the collection moves and affects its reader.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Agamben, Giogio. 1996. Means without End: Notes of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Anon. 2003. “Trouble in the Holy Land: Hezbollah’s New Computer Game Players Take Target Practice on Sharon, Israeli leaders.” WorldNetDaily.com (March 3). Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. “L’esprit du terrorisme.” Translated by Donovan Hohn. Harper’s, February 13–18. ———. 2005. “War Porn.” Translated by Paul A. Taylor. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 2, no. 1, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillard/vol2_1/taylor.htm (accessed July 27, 2007). ———. 2006. “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” In Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, 303– 14. Edited by J. David Slocum. London: Routledge. Bottomore, Stephen. 1995. “The Biograph in Battle.” In Film and the First World War. Edited by Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 28–35. Bourke, Joanna. 1999. An Intimate History of Killing. London: Granta Books. Carr, William. 1985. A Time to Leave the Ploughshares: A Gunner Remembers 1917–1918, 47–48. London: Hale. Quoted in Bourke, 1999, An Intimate History of Killing. Granta Books: London, 4. DeBauche, Leslie Midkiff. 1997. Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Dibbets, K., and B. Hogenkamp. 1998. Film and the First World War. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Eksteins, Modris. 1995. “The Culture of the Great War.” In Film and the First World War. Edited by Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 201–02. Gabriel, Roger, and Leigh A. Neal. 2002. “Clinical Review, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Following Military Combat or Peace-keeping.” British Medical Journal 324 (February 9): 340–41. http:// www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7333/340 (accessed July 29, 2007). Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Jeffords, Susan. 2005. “The Reagan Hero.” In The War Film, 141–54. Edited by Robert Eberwein. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. London: Rutgers University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 1995. Media Culture. London: Routledge. ———. 2004. “Baudrillard, Globalization, Terrorism: Some Comments on the Recent Adventures of Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudrillard’s 75th Birthday.” http://www. gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/baudrillardglobalizationterror.pdf (accessed July 26, 2007). ———. 2005. Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Kelly, Andrew. 1997. Cinema and the Great War. London: Routledge. Lifton, Robert J. 1973. Home from the War: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Simon & Schuster. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1978. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All. London: Penguin. Otterbein, Keith F. 2004. How War Began. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. California: University of California Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Picador. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose. London: British Film Institute.

Filmed 9/11: A Documentary. Directed by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. France, 2002. J’accuse. Directed by Abel Gance. France, 1919. Battle of the Somme, The. UK, 1916. Big Parade, The. Directed by King Vidor. USA, 1925. Coming Home. Directed by Hal Ashby. USA, 1978. Deer Hunter, The. Directed by Michael Cimino. USA, 1978. Dog Soldiers. Directed by Neil Marshall. UK, 2002. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The. Directed by Rex Ingram. USA, 1921.

Introduction Hearts of the World. Directed by D. W. Griffith. USA, 1918. Jarhead. Directed by Sam Mendes. USA, 2005. Lost. Directed by J. J. Abrams. ABC, USA, 2004. Rambo: First Blood. Directed by Ted Kotcheff. USA, 1982. Sands of Iwo Jima, The. Directed by Allan Dwan. USA, 1949. Three Kings. Directed by David O. Russell. USA, 1999.

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Introduction to Part One Sean Redmond

Figure 1. George W. Bush taking the oath of office, January 20, 2005 A few hours after Saddam Hussein’s execution, one was able to watch the grainy, mobile-phone footage of the proceedings on YouTube. The tyrant’s body, almost detached from its neck, was rendered dead for the entire world to see. The execution footage is a part of what might be described as a relentless trade in persona images, which ensures that the “language” of modern warfare, terror, and conflict is communicated in and through the body. These war bodies are individuated—signifiers of individual acts of heroism, barbarity, and loss—and they are social or collectivized, standing in for the nation, group, or for a political and religious doctrine. Hussein’s dead body is meant to undeniably confirm that his despotic regime is over; his body justly deserves its violent death because of the acts of genocide it was implicated in; and the pain inflicted on this diabolical body can be vicariously taken up and felt by those who watch the footage, so that revenge can be pleasurably re-enacted. In this killing of the king, one may also produce the corpse of a martyr, with followers using the film to worship Him. Hussein’s body is both individuated and collectivized: the lifeless flesh of a

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The War Body on Screen

dictator, the deceased muscle of a repressive nation-state, the warrior-king born again in martyrdom. Hussein’s execution also allows one to bear witness to the ubiquity of the screen in contemporary culture and to the embodied nature of the lens. I was able to watch the Hussein hanging on my computer in my home. I could click on a play button and watch an uncensored film bring me an unmediated killing. I could bring the war body home, into the domestic space, with the gentlest of hand movements. I could fill myself up with the horrible consequences of war in a space and place supposedly so far removed from the battlefield or operational theaters where “live” bodies flounder. The playback itself—through QuickTime software on a 17-inch PC window—arguably intensified the sense that what I was watching was here-and-now and in the room with me: Unlike big-screen, live-action movies, they draw us down and into their own discrete, enclosed, and nested poetic worlds: worlds recollected and remembered; worlds more miniature, intensive, layered, and vertically deep than those constructed through the extensive, horizontal scope and horizontal vision of cinema. (Sobchack 1999) The playback video invited me into its intricate, shadowy spaces and sounds: the grainy, illicit footage, uncut and “live,” demanded or rather elicited such a singular, reverberating compulsion to watch and to feel. I could fully immerse in its real-time compression. It offered me the possibility of interactivity: I could rewind and fast-forward, I could re-edit the footage, and I could copy it and send it to others, partaking in the trade of images of the war body on screen. I could kill and kill again; and I could reanimate, give life to, Hussein the Tyrant. I could give life and death to the war body on screen. I too could be a warrior tyrant. This illicit footage, shot on a mobile phone smuggled into the execution chamber, made me feel unlawful. It made me question why I was watching the execution, and it made me assess, or engage with, the feelings and senses that emerged in the watching of it. I made sure that I watched it alone: if one of my children came into my room, I would click it off. I didn’t want them to see me watching the video much more than any desire to censor their viewing. I didn’t want them to see me be taken over by the biopolitics in play: to be caught in its iron grip. I didn’t want them to see me desiring, and finally disgusted by, the death that had to come by the close of the “execution” footage. I was trying to remove my body from the affected chain of communication in which I was circulating. There may be an irony at work here: this is a strategy employed by Western governments who create a widespread discourse where the body of war is removed from operations; war thus becomes disembodied, sterile, surgical, hitech, and digitized. However, it was just my body that I didn’t want them to see wracked with guilt and complicity. I also knew that my body could recover, recuperate: watching the footage actually liberated my body from its docile and repressed conformity. I also knew that the war body on screen can never be

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disappeared: a billion mobile phones and low-end digital cameras will see to that. YouTube will see to that. Part 1, “The War Body on Screen,” broadly introduces and contextualizes the ideas, issues, and political complexities that shape the rest of the collection. Its writers address the way terror, conflict, and warfare have been increasingly filtered, measured, and communicated through the image of the corpse, terrorist, soldier, and victim. All the writers agree, albeit from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, that ideology, power, identification, and estrangement enter the representation of warfare in and through marked flesh. Vision and the technologies of vision play a key part in this cultural centering of the war body. In his essay, “When Planes Fall Out of the Sky: The War Body on Screen,” Sean Redmond argues that the war body has the potential to be a culturally transgressive mode of being. Redmond contends that “the war body on screen is a ‘sickening’ creation that we have desired into being, so that way may feel, better understand, and be taken over by its terror. This terror of living ultimately helps ensure our docility, a docility required by the late capitalist nation-state; but it also reconnects us to our bodies in profoundly moving and potentially challenging ways.” Using the work of Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks, Redmond suggests, for example, that “through the screening of the tortured body, one violently gets to touch bodies wracked with pain, and to be subject to and the object of violent assault. Screening torture puts one in haptic connection with the sickening biopolitics of war, in a way that may release our bodies from the regime of docile obedience that they are put under.” Redmond produces a visual trajectory of the war body post 9/11, making the case for its ubiquity: “In the liquid reality of the Internet age, absented bodies return for another reason: recording devices are so culturally pervasive that even those bodies officially kept from public view emerge bloody, beaten, killed, or soon to be killed. There is no escape from the war body on screen.” In “The War Body as Screen of Terror,” Renuka Gusain makes a compelling case for the way terror is produced by, in, and through the screened body and the body-as-screen. She “visualizes the war body as a collective space of ‘happenings’—among the spectator, the spectacle and the medium; between the physiological body of the viewer and the on-screen body—all of which are mutually imbricated in the war dynamics and terror presented on and through the screen.” Gusain suggests that terror and war are no longer geographically locatable. “Even those bodies that are thousands of miles away partake in this war through various media. More than ever, now, soldiers and civilians have the necessary technology to communicate images of war to a hitherto unprecedented number of people. The experience of participating in war through these dynamics wreaks terror and violence on the body in all senses of the word, as we all become the war body. The war body is precisely so because it is war on the body as it is caught in being both the source and the victim of terror.” Gusain outlines a number of key theoretical approaches to the war body on screen but suggests

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The War Body on Screen

that in and through the complex electronic circuits of the screen, “the proliferation of this terror is inevitable. The war body count is in fact innumerable.” In Matthew Wagner’s “A King(dom) for a Stage: The War Body in and as Performance,” the war body is considered to be a performative site/sight. Wagner poses and answers the question: “To ask after the war body on screen is to ask first this phenomenological question: how does the war body emerge into a subjective consciousness? It does so as performance, and it is this performativity that I am interested in here.” Wagner’s analyses of embodied and presentational action takes a number of important conceptual turns and addresses a range of examples, from the Bush Presidency and the body-memory of Al Pacino, to Kenneth Brannagh’s bloody Henry V. Wagner’s thesis, nonetheless, is bound by a desire “to address the war body on screen as a ‘poetic image,’” an image, as Bachelard suggests, that “emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul, and being of man, apprehended in his actuality.” In relation to Warrior-President George W. Bush, for example, Wagner analyzes a publicity stunt involving boarding the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce “mission accomplished.” That publicity stunt “was not merely intended to create a war body (a warrior-king’s body, the body of a wartime leader) in Bush by placing him corporeally on a warship; it also linked him—bodily—to Lincoln himself, one of the greatest wartime leaders in American history. To borrow from Hodgdon, we had in this instance a Bush-Lincoln, displaying and reading all of his own corporeal-martial signs. What performance effects, what here it does, is this: in Bush’s body the current leader, it incorporates the flag (under which he is placed), the past historical leader, and indeed the army itself (or in this case, the navy) right down to the actual instrument of war, the ship. Bush’s body is all these, in this moment, and it is so because it is held in view as performative.” In “Baghdad ER: Subverting the Mythic Gaze upon the Wounded and the Dead,” Linda Robertson looks at the way the war body on screen is often made to disappear by the dominant discourse that demands a sanitized war. According to Robertson, “the absence of the dead and wounded from television screens in the United States during the Iraq war served a powerful political purpose by preventing the sensory reality from interrupting the powerful mythic reality used to sustain public confidence in the war.” Robertson suggests that in some ways this is what citizens want: “There is a kind of relief when those in power sanitize the images of war, because the public wants to be entertained by the novel, the exciting, the thrilling presentation of an entirely predictable mythic narrative: The myth of ‘Americans at War’ means that the good guys get the bad guys, the soldiers pass out chocolate bars to the kiddies, no civilians are killed (at least not on purpose) by Americans, all the injured soldiers can be repaired, and those who die do so with the consciousness that they have sacrificed for their country.” Nonetheless, “leaks” emerge: the wounded and the dead cannot be so easily censored from view. Through an analysis of Baghdad ER, Robertson shows how this discourse about the war in Iraq was subverted. “It both invoked pity for and invited identification with the wounded soldier and those who care for him.

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Beyond that, the documentary constructed the audience as morally entailed by the war because of a shared sense of humanity and responsibility for those who have been wounded and killed. The content and style of Baghdad ER is important as an example of how the knowledge that cannot speak its name—that war is about death and maiming and citizens have to accept responsibility for that reality—is elicited.”

Works Cited Sobchack, Vivian. 1999. “Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime.” Millennium Film Journal 34 (Fall), http://www.mfj-online.org/journal/Pages/ MFj34/VivianSobchack.html (accessed July 27, 2007).

1

When Planes Fall Out of the Sky The War Body on Screen Sean Redmond

Introduction I can’t keep my eyes off the war body, even though in the repeated seeing of it I feel nauseous: implicated in, and affected by, its painful coming into being. In this age of the War on Terror, wherever I look, wherever I am directed to look by the all-seeing “vision machines” that “illuminate” our identities (Virilio 1994, 70), the body of the soldier, terrorist, hostage, and victim come into troubling view. These war bodies are real in the ontological and phenomenological sense; they are also metaphoric, simulated, and discursive. In this chapter I will define and explore the complex ways in which these three articulating axis—war, in its militaristic and ideological sense; the screen, in all its multifaceted forms and contexts; and the body, individual and social— conjoin and synthesize, disintegrate and dislocate, in a phantasmagoric but simultaneously desperately real collision of power, desire, and control. My main contention will be that the war body on screen is a “sickening” creation that we have desired into being, so that we may feel, better understand, and be taken over by its terror. This terror of living ultimately helps ensure our docility, a docility required by the late capitalist nation-state; it also reconnect us to our bodies in profoundly moving and potentially challenging ways.

Long Live the King The war bodies’ primary existence emerges in and through its relentless realization in news, Internet, and documentary coverage. These are the bodies blown to pieces in suicide bombings and air strikes; decapitated in ambushes, area sweeps, and dawn raids; beheaded on the Internet. In the first instance, these factualized war bodies are constructed out of power-saturated binaries: the trained soldier-hero versus the irregular/hysterical villain; the honorable and 22

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brave act of self-sacrifice versus the fanatical death; the bordered and regulated whole self of the Western individual versus the hidden, leaky, and schizophrenic self of the Eastern/Oriental. This realist war body brings the corporeal and psychic terror of the war home; it globalizes war (the world, an embodied place, is at war); and it naturalizes and essentializes the support for warfare—conferring on us all the articulating sense that our bodies also are at war and therefore need to be prepared, disciplined, and monitored. In this respect Noam Chomsky argues, for example, that the Bush administration used the September 11th terrorist attacks and subsequent War on Terror campaign “to discipline its own population,” to “frighten the populace into obedience,” through the binary designation of the body as either safely with us or violently against us (2003, 26; 115). Those bodies designated as against us—as terrorist-like—became “enemy combatants” and were shipped indefinitely to Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. It seems, or rather it definitely feels, then, as if the social body of the contemporary nation-state is meant to be collectively experienced (screen-sensed, as I will go on to argue) as if it is persistently on high alert, perpetually in a state of clear and present danger. The social body is caught in a seemingly contradictory but nonetheless self-sustaining dynamic where it is simultaneously both warrior-like and vulnerable to attack, ruinous and ruined, murderous and murdered, torturer and tortured, terrifying and terrorized, disciplined and punished. George W. Bush’s September 20, 2001, landmark televised live “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People” introduces and develops this dynamic through the deployment of a series of affecting, embodied metaphors: In the normal course of events, Presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people. We have seen it in the courage of passengers, who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground—passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer. And would you please help me to welcome his wife, Lisa Beamer, here tonight. (Applause.) We have seen the state of our Union in the endurance of rescuers, working past exhaustion. We have seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers—in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. We have seen the decency of a loving and giving people who have made the grief of strangers their own. My fellow citizens, for the last nine days, the entire world has seen for itself the state of our Union—and it is strong. (Applause.) Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done. (Applause.)

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And I will carry this: It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end. (Applause.) I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people. The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them. (Applause.) (http:// www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html, accessed July 2007) Bush’s impassioned speech implicates the body in the War on Terror, in five contrasting ways. First, the speech is delivered through a warrior-like presidential body that says and shows—through a combination of sentimental and hardbodied nonverbal cues—it has been deeply affected by 9/11 but is now defiantly prepared (armed, trained, resourceful) to defend itself against all enemy forces. The president’s body is militarized, hardened, sanctified for the war to come. In a number of ways, then, it is reborn in the armored guise of his father’s Republican war body. Junior George W. becomes just like his warrior dad, Bush Sr., creating a symbiotic trajectory for his/their call to arms. Second, individual bodies are named and praised for their heroic and sacrificial acts. Such bodies not only personalize and democratize the crisis—every American man and woman has been touched by this event; a great number have already laid down their lives—but they also embody or give body to the State of the Union. The American nation comes into living being in and through these dutiful bodies. As J. David Slocum argues, “Sacrifice . . . produces and maintains social cohesion” (2001, 13). Third, this living, breathing, fleshy Union Body is capable of being wounded and, perhaps more important, of being healed. Its healing qualities are actually absolute: it can only be healed, reanimated, never finally vanquished. Fourth, absent bodies—the bodies of the victims and the bodies of the terrorists—are made present. The loved ones of the dead (mom and wife in this instance) are asked to stand in for them: their presence places the heroic victims in a familiar domestic and family context; and it gives them a voice (brought back from the dead) that supports their present-tense actions. Similarly, powerful judicial symbols that come from or off the victim’s body, such as the police shield belonging to George Howard, reanimates the body that has passed (away) so that in the live moment of the address its sacrifice can be painfully, presently communicated. The shield serves as a reminder of the damage done to the American body, and the just response—to be metered out on “other” bodies— that will now be undertaken. By contrast, the terrorists’ presence is achieved through ghostly inference: although we cannot see “it,” the shape-shifting

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terrorist is here among us, and so our dutiful bodies should be constantly on guard and ready to respond. But not only this: for the War on Terror to have real ontological power, the terrorist must have already invaded our bodies. They are within the United States, virus-like, silently waiting for the unspoken moment when they will be able to spread through the entire social network. As Baudrillard powerfully suggests: Terrorism, like a virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism, like the shadow of any system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a double agent. There is no boundary to define it; it is in the very core of this culture that finds it—and the visible schism (and hatred) that opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly linked to the internal fracture of the dominant system. (2002, 14) Finally, the transcendental body of God is called upon as omnipresent and omnipotent force to carry the body of the State of the Union into victory over its foreign and diabolical enemies. Bush takes on or takes over the body of God as he lays out his crusading moral dictum. The loud applause that accompanies the most affective rhetoric of the speech gives supercorporeal body to the proceedings: the congress and, by implication, the American people are using their bodies—made in sound—to unify the nation; to anoint (re-elect) their warrior-king. In more general terms, the war body doesn’t need to be corporeally present each time it is enunciated; it doesn’t have to be physically there to be seen and felt. In fact, the absent(ed) war body is central to the way the War on Terror has been screened. Paul Virilio has suggested that modern warfare increasingly involves the “logistics of perception” or the movement of images and information, rather than the movement of troops, tanks, and fuel. War becomes an “info war,” a techno-war, devoid or absent of human, fleshed bodies: The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call “the information bomb” associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future, and I stress this important point, it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means; it will be what I have dubbed “the integral accident” that is the continuation of politics by other means. (Virilio 2000) Nonetheless, the body—often removed from the screen through censorship, editing, metaphor, allusion, special effects, and through focusing on ordinance, weaponry, and scenes of precision strikes on buildings and communication and transport networks—is the material “thing” that refuses to be airbrushed out of

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The War Body on Screen

the image, returning, emerging as the quantifiable subject and object of destruction. The absent(ed) war body is an ontological impossibility, not least because the (war) screen is itself a carnal body, demanding a bodily experience from those who sense it (Sobchack 2004). The screen “expresses a ‘human-like’ mode of perceptual consciousness: the camera and microphones articulate a technologically inflected version of what a human body in that situation might experience” (Stadler 2002, 240). In the liquid reality of the Internet age, absented bodies return for another reason: recording devices are so culturally pervasive that even those bodies officially kept from public view emerge bloody, beaten, killed, or soon to be killed. There is no escape from the war body on screen. I began to write this essay four days after Cho Seung-hui killed thirty-two students at Virginia Tech University.1 This tragic event, relentlessly played out on a range of audiovisual screens, once again brings to the fore the central issues and discursive themes that make this age—this blood-soaked moment—the age, the moment, of the war body on screen. While high school shootings generally follow their own carefully managed media script— loner/outsider, who has been recently offended or rejected, and with a history of mental health problems, goes on the rampage in the community that defined the shooter as an outsider—Cho’s massacre also appropriated the imagery of warfare. He used the screen as if it (he) were a carnal body at war, as if it were a camera-gun; and he delivered a speech that in a number of important ways mirrors and is a “logical” response to Bush’s post-9/11 State of the Union address. The media clearly contributed to the terrorist affect. Cho punctuated the two waves of his killing spree and suicide by sending a prerecorded, multimedia presentation to the news channel, NBC. This largely consisted of photographs and videos. In them, Cho is dressed in a hunting jacket, and he repeatedly adopts the “iconic” pose of the armed vigilante, a figure possibly borrowed from films such as Night of the Living Dead (Romero 1969) and Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1974), films that themselves are haunted by America’s failure in the Vietnam War. The “outlaw” video testimony is also particular to the modern age, where so-called terrorists use it to “talk” to their followers, issue threats, and to parade hostages and victims. Cho is warrior-like and hard-bodied. His head is shaven. Hand guns and rifles are displayed and pointed at the camera (at the viewer). He is shooting us with it (figs. 1–2). The camera thus is doubly implicated: it violently takes his picture, and shoots him shooting us, confirming in its terrifying reflection the sense that the camera has “the power to destroy” (Slocum 2001, 16). In another sense these photographs and videos already have destroyed: they are full of dead bodies and of the act of killing. Cho is caught in a past/present paradox that extends beyond the usual here/now and there/then contradiction that the screen image conjures up (Barthes 1982).

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Figure 1. The camera-gun

Figure 2. Cho’s war body on screen These still and moving images were taken before his killing spree, before he killed himself, and before he killed us (as past/present surrogates for the thirtyone students whom he shot with his camera-gun). And yet, in the present/past tense of the image, the violent acts reverberate at the center of these photographs and videos, populating them with ghostly corpses. Cho is (now) dead and so, by prosthetic implication, are we. According to Paul Virilio, people “no longer believe their eyes.” Rather, “their faith in perception” has become “slave to the faith in the technical sightline,” a situation in which contemporary substitution has reduced the visual field to the “line of a sighting device” (quoted in Kellner 2004). We look at Cho and he looks at us, as if we are staring down the barrel of a loaded camera-gun. But more than this: in a phenomenological sense we become the violence of the camera-gun, drawn into its effective economy, because “we are

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part of the film, joined in hermeneutic and embodiment relations with it in inseparable symbiosis” (Stadler 2002, 241). In the accompanying videos Cho provides a telling testimony for his actions: You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off. . . . You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul, and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people. Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave? Do you know what it feels like to have your throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled on a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement? I didn’t have to do this. I could have left. I could have fled. But no, I will no longer run. It’s not for me. For my children, for my brothers and sisters that you [expletive]. I did it for them. Through this speech Cho is suggesting that his body has been attacked and violated in much the same way as Bush argued America’s social body had been on 9/11. Corporeal and psychic damage is key to both “events”: blood has been and will be spilled. Cho’s messianic claim to be the tortured body of Jesus Christ sanctifies his actions, in much the same way that Bush ordains the War on Terror. Similarly, Cho’s claim that his actions are a “just” response to perceived personal violations mirrors Bush’s “We are at war” response to the planes hitting the twin towers. For Cho, it is “America” (the American Dream) that has wounded him, frighteningly realized in terms of his use of rape and torching metaphors, two tropes associated with wanton militaristic destruction and invasion. America has terrorized Cho, and in turn he has responded as a terrorist might, with insurgent, guerilla-like tactics. The initial media response to the shootings was to try to fix Cho as an Asian male, as an “outsider” because of his ethnicity. The media, caught up in, and key circulators of, war imagery and the rhetoric of the War on Terror, had defined Cho as a possible terrorist before the “facts” of his localized (homeborn) alienation had emerged. In a sense, as previously suggested, Bush’s post-9/11 speech called on Cho to become a/this war body. By demanding his citizens to be ready, prepared, if only to keep them docile, Bush has given “birth” to the warrior machine within the State of the Union. In the Baudrillard sense, Cho is a “virus,” an “othered” volatile shadow waiting to explode into the light. A “misfit” Korean, bullied by his

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peers, sick of the consumerist ethic, Cho makes the war on terror a home-based contagion. America is at war with itself.

War of the Worlds The war body’s secondary (but by no means lesser) existence emerges in the wider image-based data banks of the mass, narrowcast, and new media, becoming the dominant or overarching metarepresentation of the age. The war body is the supercharged sign of the moment: the discourse through which questions of power, knowledge, and social well-being are articulated. The war body emerges, ghostlike, haunting the narratives of television dramas, science-fiction films; music videos, and electronic games. The war body creeps its way into glossy magazines, personal blogs, artwork, poetry and novels, shaping stories, testimonials, and aesthetic choices without seemingly being in conscious “play.” For example, Stephen Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds (2005) is full of the imagery and symbolism of the 9/11 catastrophe, including some leitmotifs of the War on Terror. Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) is a blue-collar worker from New Jersey, estranged from his family, who during the course of the film proves his worth as a father/heroic male. Not quite the mythic firefighter of 9/11, Ferrier nonetheless crawls through the rubble, the twisted metal, and the burning fires to keep his children/child alive. The film is shot through with 9/11 war imagery: burning planes fall out of the sky; military missiles slice through the air; the alien enemy, intent on harvesting all of humankind for their own survival and domination, emerge fully armored from underneath, from within the borders of New York City. Human blood, in the literal sense, soaks the screen—the entire mise-en-scène—as if the social body of America, where the film is relentlessly set, is being bled to death. The defeat of the aliens emerges in two ways, perhaps contradictory. Ferrier’s transformation into a warrior-male enables him to repel repeated attacks and to take his child “home.” Pivotally, he learns how to kill and kill “American,” in the most “intimate” or proximate of ways, when he silences (strangles) the deranged Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) because he threatens to give their position away. His heroic actions refuse to let America be overtaken, overrun, and he will protect America from wayward Americans. Ferris (Cruise) stands, then, as a symbol of America’s resilience and hypermasculine strength when it is tested most. However, the aliens are in the end vanquished not by heroic act, guile, invention, technomilitaristic cooperation (as is often the case in science-fiction cinema) but by a common airborne virus. At the end of the film, alien spaceships crash to the ground and bodies fall from their interiors, emaciated, because the air is poisonous to them. The aliens that first emerged from beneath/within America, as allied and coordinated “terrorist” cells, are beaten by a homegrown virus that is itself terrorist-like, invisible and yet everywhere. The barely hidden premise of the film, then, is that America can no longer rely on conventional

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warfare to kill the enemy (that lies within): it has to adapt and mutate; to survive, it has to become (like) the enemy. The cultural theme of invasion, of a society being taken over by a superior force, emerges in times of crisis. For example, the 1950s science-fiction invasion narratives arguably respond to, and inform, a prevailing set of fears including the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, stifling bureaucracy, rapid consumerism, and the racial others who had begun to move into white suburban neighborhoods (Redmond 2004). One can argue that post 9/11 there has been a re-emergence of the invasion scenario in both film and television. These invasion texts arguably speak to the range of fears that circulate in a catastrophic climate of insecurity brought about by the War on Terror. As Derek Kompare argues, in relation to three first-season 2005 USA television invasion series—Invasion (Shaun Cassidy, ABC), Threshold (Bragi F. Schut, CBS), and Surface (Jonas Pate, NBC)—“the core of insecurity is the idea that nowhere is absolutely safe, that nobody is absolutely trustworthy. . . . The alien menaces . . . are practically invisible. . . . The outside threat could come from within” (2005). The individual and social body is central to these invasion narratives since this body is under threat from being taken over and assimilated into the other. In Threshold, “the telltale clues about alien ‘infection’ are under the surface, as otherwise normal human beings dream about glass forests and have bursts of superhuman strength” (Kompare 2005). These invasion texts, then, ask us to be vigilant, to self-survey our bodies for signs of infection, and to survey others (our neighbors) for the same. They contribute to a particular conspiratorial surveillance culture that responds to and fuels the War on Terror. Our bodies must be ready for the danger or they will be taken over or disappear.

Lost Allison McCracken (2004) has written persuasively about the emerging cult of bodily disappearance that has begun to pervade American fiction. She argues: America is making people disappear. While the “real” casualties of this administration are rarely represented on television, rituals of death are continually replayed and the sense of loss remains, haunting these texts. . . . On the one hand, these programs serve as cautionary tales reinforcing the terror warnings: we must be fearful, we must be good consumers, we must not lose the game. If we make a mistake, we shall be erased. On the other hand, these programs also enact a revealing displacement: both domestically and internationally, America is making people disappear. In the American television series Lost (J. J. Abrams, ABC), the various textures of disappearance and loss are provocatively explored. The survivors of a plane

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crash find themselves marooned on a mysterious tropical island, with no easy means of survival or escape. Communication with the outside world is revealed to be impossible. As the series progresses, it becomes clear that rather than being stranded travelers, they are prisoners or inmates of the island and an occult group, the Others. Their predicament as “homeless” citizens, outside the jurisdiction of any nation-state and held against their will, resembles the conditions of those detained indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. They also echo the “ghost prisoners” of the Abu Ghraib prison complex. So-called ghost prisoners are not entered into the prison’s inmate tracking system: they are nonpersons, whose disappearance or burial is not to be recorded. Identities and subjectivities are called into question in Lost. Nearly all the survivors are designated as nonpersons, social types “who are normally invisible as protagonists on television (non-Americans, non-Anglos, the disabled, the overweight, an Iraqi citizen, a drug user)” (McCracken 2004). Through the flashback device we get to see the survivors’ faulty, failing lives before they arrive on the island. Marriages have failed. Fathers have attempted infanticide. Murders have been committed. Successes have been spurned. The world that disappointed them and in which they were disappointing, and yet to which they long to return, haunts and traumatizes them in the present through apparition and the reincarnation of key figures in their lives. The past won’t let them go; it won’t let them forget their own failures. At the existential level, the survivors were “lost” before they arrived on the island, and they remain lost, even if spiritually and physically renewed. In one sense, then, Lost suggests that there is no way out from this terror of living, no way out from this phantasmagoric War on Terror. America and its citizens are in some way guilty, culpable of wrongdoing, and as such there is a terrible price to pay. The trauma, collective and individual, cannot be forgotten or resolutely repressed; as it is in Lost, it must be “acted out” (Kaplan 2005, 136). The War on Terror emerges in Lost in more explicit ways. The theme of torture ripples across episodes, from season to season. In Lost, bodies are regularly brutalized, starved, stripped, drowned, drugged, kicked, assaulted, shot, chained, operated on, and placed in solitary confinement. For example, in the episode “Every Man for Himself” (2006), Sawyer is subject to a savage surgical procedure: he is cut open and a pacemaker planted in his chest to curtail his wayward behavior. Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) and Benjamin Linus (Michael Emerson) are both expert proponents of the art of torture, albeit on different “sides.” Sayid is a former torturer for both the Iraqis and the U.S. military; Ben, leader of the Others, is a neofascist personification of the brute rule of law. Torture regularly happens in the presence of others, of “loved ones” and comrades, so that the pain and shame can be vicariously experienced. In sum, the types of abuse metered out and the visual framework that they are set in, recall the U.S. military abuses at Abu Ghraib. For Jean Baudrillard, the Iraqi prisoner abuse images represent “a nonevent of an obscene banality, the degradation, atrocious but banal, not only of the

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victims, but [also] of the amateur scriptwriters of this parody of violence” (2005). Nonetheless, the bad conscience of the entire West is crystallized in these images. The whole West is contained in the burst of the sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and pornographic. (2005) One could argue that Lost exercises this “bad conscience” through suggesting that torture is a necessary will to power in a world where anyone, anywhere, at anytime could be plotting to destroy anyone. And if torture is commonplace and necessary, then one’s own body, in case it is the next in line to be tortured or is called upon to torture, needs to be hardened and readied. The prepared body will be able to resist interrogation and negation, and it will be able to brutalize the other. The body will be able to say, “I can destroy the thing that scares me by force of response” (Spivak 2004, 96). Scenes of torture are not confined to Lost. Alias (J. J. Abrams, ABC), 24 (Joel Surnow, Fox), Without a Trace (CBS), Saw (James Wan 2004), Hostel (Eli Roth 2005), and Casino Royale (Martin Campbell 2006), to name but a select few, involve violent, sadomasochistic interrogation scenes. It’s as if torture provides the hegemonic framework for believing that something is being done, at the carnal level that has individual and social bodily affect/effect. The two groups who face off against one another in Lost are seemingly indistinguishable; the Others, the diabolical force on the island, are able to “pass” as survivors, bringing havoc with them. Similarly, the survivors are able to cross over into the camp of the Others, threatening their hegemony on the island. The various narrative agents tortured in Lost do not give away their position. The conflict in Lost again suggests that terror is close to home, within the United States, is a part of us. And very little can or should be done about this. Terror is pleasurable. These texts suggest that torture makes us stronger. But screening torture also allows us to torture and be tortured in our bodies. Laura Marks suggests, “Vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes” (2000, xi). Through the screening of the tortured body, one violently gets to touch bodies wracked with pain, and to be subject to and the object of violent assault. Screening torture puts one in haptic connection with the sickening biopolitics of war, in a way that may release our bodies from the regime of docile obedience that they are put under. In relation to the Holocaust narrative, Thomas Elsaesser has persuasively argued that emotional affect may have productive consequences for the viewer: one realizes, in one’s body, that there is a duty to act, to respond. The “affect of concern . . . covers empathy and identification, but in an active, radical sense of being ‘stung into

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action’” (1996, 172–73). In feeling, or screen-sensing, the tortured body, one may be stung into action.

When Planes Fall Out of the Sky Following the collapse of the twin towers, I felt the terror of, and desire for, death within me. A few days after 9/11 I was at a UK premiership football match with my young son, Joshua, when a big plane flew directly overhead. Without thinking about it, we moved closer to one another, tightly pressing our bodies together, as if the plane was going to explode above our heads and fall right out of the sky. We had both watched the 9/11 events unfold on television. I remember us both being mesmerized, and for my part, darkly excited by the spectacular ruination before us. It felt like we were watching a rerun of an old disaster movie. As the plane flew overhead, I guess we reimagined and relived the twin towers’ destruction. Blood coursed through our veins. Our sense of fear was palpable. It was a fully embodied and yet fantastic reaction. I felt for my son’s life, he felt for mine, and on my part, the bodies of all those killed on 9/11 came into ghastly, ghostly view. This was an obliteration that, as Baudrillard provocatively indicated, I had desired, and I felt desperately implicated in the loss of life and my vicarious dreamlike “enjoyment” in it. According to Baudrillard, moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better, by seeing it more or less selfdestroying, even suiciding spectacularly. . . . That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree—this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it. (2002) Nonetheless, I believe (feel-think) my latent desire for the destruction of U.S. capitalism has more to do with the empowering freedom that the carnal gave me—can give all of us—rather than just a simulated and disenchanted docility. All of the war bodies discussed in this essay have been screened-sensed in some way: the war body produces, and is a product of, a universalized “carnal screen.” The war body on screen is shockingly embodied: it shocks my body, and the nation’s body, time and time again. Ultimately, then, the war body on screen may connect and collectivize disconnected and individualized bodies through shared affect, emotion, and the raw and immediate senses of touch, sight, and smell. The haptic nature of the screen—its skinlike, sentient qualities—may be agonizingly felt in the case of the war body, as if it is our own flesh and bone being touched, tortured, made new again. Bush’s War on Terror may have been

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an attempt to bolt down the body, to employ it for capitalist-military gains, but the terror of/in living that this discourse feeds upon may have opened up new sights/sites of experiential feeling that run counter to the docile, conformist body the regime has asked for. Since 9/11, I keep seeing planes falling out of the sky. In film and television, particularly, the image of the aircraft in flames, breaking up, hurtling toward the earth keeps cropping up. Each time I see this image—at the moment it is one of the central narrative images of Lost—I can’t help but feel my body in the world. My senses are heightened, my heart beats a little faster, and I feel my bodily weight and shape in the world like never before. I feel so very alive because I can sense (my) death so very readily. Vivian Sobchack explains: Our vision and hearing are informed and given meaning by our other modes of sensory access to the world: our capacity not only to see and to hear but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and always to proprioceptively feel our weight, dimension, gravity, and the movement in the world. (2004, 60) The war body on screen has got to this body writing this essay. My eyes are sore from the looking and the feeling. I can’t get the stench of death off my skin. Paradoxically, I have never felt so alive, so aware of my body as a carnal thing. Desiring death is the most uncomfortable thing. The experience is wildly intoxicating and yet desperately painful. So many deaths; so many bodies. I feel it all too much. I must put this essay away.

Acknowledgment To Matt Wagner, for listening to, commenting on, and for gently feeling the arguments in this essay. And to Dick Whyte and Horst Sarubin for ideas on planes falling out of the sky.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1982. Camera Lucida. London: Hill & Wang. Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. “L’esprit du terrorisme.” Translated by Donovan Hohn. Harper’s, February 13–18. ———. 2005. “War Porn.” Translated by Paul A. Taylor. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 2, no. 1, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillard/vol2_1/taylor.htm (accessed July 27, 2007). Chomsky, Noam. 2003. Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books. Elsaessser, Thomas. 1996. “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List.” In The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, 145–83. Edited by Vivian Sobchack. New York: Routledge.

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Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. London: Rutgers University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2004. “Baudrillard, Globalization, Terrorism: Some Comments on the Recent Adventures of Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudrillard’s 75th Birthday.” http:// www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/baudrillardglobalizationterror.pdf (accessed July 27, 2007). Kompare, Derek. 2005. “We Are So Screwed: Invasion TV.” Flow 3, no. 6 (November 18), http:// jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=1304 (accessed March 23, 2007). Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. New York: Duke University Press. McCracken, Allison. 2004. “Lost.” Flow 1, no. 4, http://jot.communication. utexas.edu/flow/? jot=view&id=481 (accessed July 27, 2007). Redmond, Sean. 2004. Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press. Slocum, J. David. 2001. “Introduction: Violence and American Cinema: Notes for an Investigation.” In Violence and American Cinema, 1–34. Edited by J. David Slocum. London: Routledge. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. California: University of California Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakavorty. 2004. “Terror: A Speech after 9/11.” Boundary 2 31, no. 2:81–111. Stadler, Jane. 2002. “Intersubjective, Embodied, Evaluative Perception: A Phenomenological Approach to the Ethics of Film.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 19, no. 3:237–48. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose. London: British Film Institute. ———. 2000. “The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space: Paul Virilio in Conversation with John Armitage.” Ctheory.net, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=132 (accessed July 27, 2007).

Note 1. The Virginia Tech massacre took place on Monday, April 16, 2007, at Blacksburg, Virginia.

2

The War Body as Screen of Terror Renuka Gusain

Words have no impact on you. Therefore we will talk to you in a language you understand. London suicide bomber (aljazeera.net 2005) This epigraph (above) was declared by Muhammad Siddique Khan, a suicide bomber, via a video tape released by Al Jazeera (aljazeera.net) after he set off the bombs in London on July 7, 2005. Is this simply a statement about the use of violence and terror as an alternative language? Or does the statement not, perhaps unwittingly, also reflect how the body is now being used as a new medium of terror and communication? Is it possible that such terrorists are realizing the centrality of the body as the new language or even another “new” media in the representation of war? Is there not a strong possibility that through the combination of this “corporeal” media with “technological” new media, terror is being spread in multiple ways?1 Terror and war are no longer locatable only geographically. Even those bodies that are thousands of miles away partake in war through various media. More than ever now, soldiers and civilians have the necessary technology to communicate images of war to a hitherto unprecedented number of people. The experience of participating in war through these dynamics wreaks terror and violence on the body in all senses of the word, as we all become the war body. The war body is precisely so because it is war on the body as it is caught in being both the source and the victim of terror. The term war body is taken to be any body that is caught up in the symbolic signification of terror and ruination. This essay in particular explores the impact and consequent proliferation of terror through the human body—the physiological, phenomenological, and epistemological body—in its inescapable engagement with the mediality of the screen. It also visualizes the war body as a collective space of “happenings”—among the spectator, the spectacle, and the medium; between the physiological body of the viewer and the on-screen body—all of which are mutually imbricated in the war dynamics and terror presented on and through the screen. I work through the concepts of embodied 36

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cognition in psychology and cinematic affect vis-à-vis contemporary media technology and its materiality, to come to an understanding of the phenomenological war body that we have become in our engagement with the multisensory medium of the screen. While media technologies are forever changing, our primary engagement with them remains through a screen (TV, cinema, computer, electronic billboards, video games). Even where the technology is not primarily and initially visual, there has been a notable trend to integrate visual components in them (cameras, video phones, video iPods, etc.). This essay recognizes that the impact of various kinds of screens—HDTV, cinematic screen, 17-inch flat panel monitor, and so forth—on perception and embodied responses is different.2 For the larger purpose of this essay, we traverse these differences and understand the screen to be largely a digital one. This includes primarily computer screens but can also extend to media that use digital technology to make images visible on the screen. It would not be amiss to suggest that the screen has become the most important site of our technosociocultural interaction with and through contemporary mediascape. To come to an understanding of the concept of screen at present and its physiological, phenomenological, and epistemological implications, it is useful to explore an earlier visual technology: cinema. The first section of the chapter thus examines Walter Benjamin’s theoretical formulations on cinema, which we can partially appropriate for theorizing about the contemporary screen. Then will follow a theorization of the screen as a choric space that is a medium between the body off-screen and the body on-screen. Given that the screen and body on-screen and body off-screen are proved to exist on the same irreducible plane, their demarcations break down and they become mutually molding spaces without hierarchy. The next section examines the body as the site of cognition, perception, and human memory; a space where a fluxing multisensory and cognitive functions of analysis and assimilation are happening at once. Through an examination of concepts of embodied cognition, the associative network, and ecological perception, it becomes evident that once incorporated in the cognitive network of the body, terror can become activated by any other affective or semantic stimuli. The final section tries to understand how terror is spreading exponentially through the war-ravaged body on-screen even as we continue to become the collective war body.

Walter Benjamin on Cinema The instigation behind this research is in part Miriam Hansen’s suggestion that by restructuring Walter Benjamin’s reflections on cinema, we can better understand today’s media culture; a culture that, as she rightly points out, “is the framing condition for any cultural practice.” By this restructuring we can also “guard against idealizations of either individualized or collective subjectivities

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and identities” (1999, 343). Another prompt is her conjecturing about whether electronic and digital media will allow for new forms of innervations, different possibilities of mimetic experience and reflectivity. One of Benjamin’s major concerns was that with the onslaught of modernity and technology, the human sensorium was facing an altered environment (d. 1940). In his Artwork and Baudelaire essays, he discusses how this mechanized environment led to shock and an increasing loss of experience. Benjamin (1996, 345) distinguishes between two kinds of experience: Erfahrung is something integrated as experience over time and is tradition-bound, and Erlebnis is the isolated experience of the moment, something merely lived through, and also the inability to integrate oneself with the world. Hansen (1999, 310) suggests that Benjamin laments the transformation of the former into the latter in modernity, which is synonymous with “the disintegration of aura in the experience of shock.” Benjamin explains the experience of the aura as an experience “that arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects” (338). This is suggestive of a sensual relationship between humans and their inanimate environments. Laura Marks (2000, 140) correctly reads Benjamin’s concept of aura as entailing “a relationship of contact, or a tactile relationship. . . . Aura enjoins a temporal immediacy, a co-presence, between viewer and object.” Auratic experience can thus be understood as a perceptible and tangible interface with an inanimate object. Such a concept foregrounding the palpable is remarkably relevant to topical formulations of the impact of the multimodality of the screen on the human sensorium. Furthermore, through his concept of innervations, Benjamin also anticipates contemporary cognition theories that are indispensable to understand human interaction with technology. As Hansen (1999, 313) puts it cogently, “Innervation refers, broadly, to a neurophysiological process that mediates between internal and external, psychic and motoric, human and mechanical registers.” Using Susan Buck-Morss’s reading of Benjamin’s concept of innervation as “a mimetic reception of the external world,” she (317) arrives at the conclusion that Benjamin understood it as “a two-way process, that is, not only a conversion of mental, affective energy into somatic, motoric form, but also the possibility of reconverting, and recovering, split-off psychic energy through motoric stimulation.” Hansen (329, 332) further explains that for Benjamin, the mimetic is invoked as a form of practice that transcends subject-object dichotomy and its technologically exacerbated splitting of experience and agency—a process, . . . a mode of cognition involving sensuous, somatic, and tactile forms of perceptions. . . . Mimetic innervation entails dynamics that move in opposite, yet complementary, directions: (1) a decentering and extension of the human sensorium beyond the limits of the individual body/subject into the world that stimulates and attracts perception; (2) and an introjection, ingestion, or incorporation of the object or device.

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When faced with the stimulus of the image on the screen, mimetic innervation simultaneously decenters and also splices the spectator’s senses with the screen and the image on screen. Hansen (2004, 29) sees “in [this] transference between the electrified subject on screen and the audience the space where Benjamin locates the ‘equilibrium’ that film is to establish between human beings and the apparatus.” Benjamin’s incorporation of bodily aspects (somatic and motoric) in perception and in the interface with film foreshadows theories of embodied cognition and ecological perception (discussed later) that explore the association of the physiological body with its environment.

Film as Skin In her book The Skin of the Film, Laura Marks (2000, xi–xii) uses the metaphor of film as skin “to emphasize the way film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between perceiver and object represented.” She thereby suggests that film and video may be “thought of as impressionable and conductive, like skin.” Miriam Hansen (1999, 308) actually uses the same metaphor in a different way in her analysis of Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Peter Chan HoSun 1996), when she talks of how the tattooed skin of the corpse “becomes a screen for the recovery of sensory affect.” For Hansen, the skin of the dead body becomes a screen, and for Marks, the screen can be said to become like skin. Both of these views are accurate when understanding the body on the screen, where both function as media. As Hansen has discussed at length about Benjamin and cinema, the screen is not a “one-way street.” The screen becomes a point of mediation between the war body presented on the screen and the body of the spectator off the screen. Though it can be seen as a barrier or shield between the two bodies and the dynamics of their respective situations, the screen is far more accurately comparable to a permeable surface, which mediates both ways, and is a link between these two bodies. The screen becomes thus a site for moments of flux and happenings. It does away with the idea of being a fixed and immutable object that one can view from a distance, objectively. With the subject-object dichotomy breaking down, through “mimetic innervations” that happen in the interface between the screen and the spectators, the screen becomes inclusive and participatory. According to media theorists Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen (1994, “Body Snatching” 8),3 the concern with “body image” has never been greater. To illustrate their point, they use Kiki Smith’s art, which is preoccupied with body parts not usually visible (brain, stomach, guts, etc). They attribute this concentration on the body to the idea that in the “culture of the simulacrum” the real body disappears and becomes displaced by artificial prosthesis. While such formulations do correctly identify the body image as central, their take on the human sensorium’s interaction with technology is from a perspective not particularly invested in issues of embodiment cognition and affect. In part such theories, like

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others that extol the metaphysical perpetuity of virtuality, show underpinnings of the Cartesian epistemological tradition that espouse the need for a disembodied experience or Cartesian dualism, which acknowledges the synthesis of the body and mind, wherein the body is subservient to the mind. Katherine Hayles (1999, 193) counters similar “ecstatic pronouncements” by asserting that current fascination with the body “should be taken as evidence not that the body has disappeared but that a certain kind of subjectivity has emerged.” Jan Campbell (2005, 100) also takes issue with the idea that “with the advent of postmodernism and electronic media we are now disengaged from our bodies and affectual situations within a world of referentiality and simulations.” She cogently argues that the demarcation created in situating photography with realism, cinema with modernity, and electronic media with postmodernism is too simple. Technology, in this case visual technology, is not wholly an external factor that is the sole determinant of embodied perception.

Embodied Cognition It would be relevant here to examine a few theories of embodied cognition, ecological perception, and associative network. Embodied cognition claims that an organism’s physical body, sensorimotor capabilities, and environment play an important role in cognition. More important, the way in which these elements interact enables particular cognitive capacities to develop and determines the precise nature of those capacities. Developmental psychologist Esther Thelen (2001, cited in Cowart 2005) further clarifies the central claim: To say that cognition is embodied means that it arises from bodily interactions with the world. From this point of view, cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matrix within which memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life are meshed. Monica Cowart suggests that if our conceptualizations and categorizations are based on the way we are embodied, then according to embodied cognition, these concepts and categories are actively constructed and not merely understood from an observer-independent environment. Thus the body is caught up in a flux of feedback loop systems where the conditions of embodiment, the factors that constitute the materiality, spatiality, and experience of the body itself, determine the way we interact with the world, and our embodied responses also partly determine our perception of the world around us. The idea that perception is an environmental process can be found in James Gibson’s (1979) ecological approach to visual perception. He suggests that what we perceive about our environment is not wholly outside of us (exteroception);

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rather, it is an awareness of the movement of our body relative to the surface or the ground. It is this movement that our vision registers, and this is what makes vision kinesthetic. The registering of this movement is what he calls proprioception. Perceiving images is a lived and total body experience, not simply an act of objective gazing from a critical distance. The body off-screen is invariably affected. The body image that we see on the screen is not an inert object to be observed. The very act of seeing it evokes what Vivian Sobchack (2004) refers to as “carnal thoughts.” This can variously be understood as an affective and embodied response to the images on the screen. With respect to kinesthetic vision in relation to the screen, Laura Marks’s (2000, xi) conceptualization of haptic visuality suggests an experience that combines the senses of sight with touch. The term haptic4 is used in psychology to indicate the tactile, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic senses. Marks defines haptic visuality to suggest the tactility of visions, as seeing the world as though one were touching it. Haptic visuality “also suggests the way vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes.” Vivian Sobchack (2004, 60) furthers this enmeshing of sensory experience by asserting that “our vision and hearing are informed and given meaning by our other modes of sensory access to the world: our capacity not only to see and to hear but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and always to proprioceptively feel our weight, dimension, gravity, and the movement in the world.” While she is talking specifically about the movie experience, this overlap and interconnectedness among the senses exists when the human sensorium is confronted with any visual technology. “Carnal thoughts” cannot be disassociated from the body, and the centrality of affect in the human body’s interaction with its environment cannot be undermined. Joseph P. Forgas (1999, 539) explains this with the associative network principle: The associative network principle suggests that the links between affect and cognition are integrally linked within an associative network of cognitive representation. In other words, affect is not an incidental, but an inseparable part of how we see and represent the world around us, the way we select, store and retrieve information, and the way we use stored knowledge structures in the performance of cognitive tasks. The model assumes that some affective nodes are biologically wired into the brain, activated by a range of situational triggers which become greatly elaborated as a result of cultural learning. Affective states can spread activation to related physiological and autonomic reactions, facial and postural expressions, verbal labels, action tendencies, and memories associated with that affect in the past. (emphasis added) Thus not only is affect integrally linked to our perception and reception of the environment; affective experiences also become stored as memory in the brain’s nodes, which are connected to other nodes and can be either affective or

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semantic. When one node is activated, the other one linked to it in the network has high chances of becoming activated too.

Embodied Responses As a receptacle the body becomes a reservoir or databank for affective and embodied responses. Human beings know much more than they are consciously aware they do. Their embodied responses are not consciously registered but become encoded into bodily memory and thus determine the body’s future movement in the world. While all bodies become carriers of imprints (or information) because all humans share embodiment, Katherine Hayles (1999, 201) cogently states that “embodied experience is dispersed on the contexts of enactment, so no one position is more essential than any other. For similar reasons, embodiment does not imply an essentialist self.” Taking her cue from The Embodied Mind,5 Hayles argues that “embodiment subversively undercuts essentialism rather than reinforces it.” The embodied spectator ceases to be the unified “self,” becoming more like a “posthuman collectivity.” Hayles (1999, 6) uses the term while discussing new models of subjectivity to show how “an ‘I’ [is] transformed into the ‘we’ of autonomous agent operating together to make a self.” Furthermore, she (196) sees embodiment as “contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment.” I extend this to see the spectator as a posthuman collectivity; the spectator’s body becomes a site for the performative enactment of a series of happenings and embodied responses that come together as heterogeneous fluxes, in specific permutations and combinations at a particular moment in time. In this respect these heterogeneous fluxes are a close approximation of what Silvan Tomkins refers to as central assemblies—the transmuting mechanisms involving consciousness and components of the nervous systems that are functionally joined to it at a given moment in time (Sedgwick 1995, 37–38). The body thus becomes a choric space, experiencing mangled moments of this flux. In this space, various psychophysiogenic interactions happen as a result of being innervated by visual media. In becoming chora (Greek: chǀra, space), the body becomes a surface where inscription and incorporation happen simultaneously. “Chora receives everything or gives place to everything. . . . Everything inscribed in it erases itself immediately, while remaining in it. . . . It is thus an impossible surface—it is not even a surface, because it has no depth” (Derrida, cited in Ulmer 1994, 65). Greg Ulmer’s move to emphasize the characteristic of memory with chora is important because by the same equation, the human body too becomes at once a site where there are invariable resonances of past experience. That which is incorporated in experience becomes imprinted on the body unconsciously. The body as chora becomes the receptor and the receptacle, at once a site of being and becoming. The very idea of chora resists essentialism, proposing instead the idea of subjective embodiment.

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As chora, the body on-screen and off-screen becomes similar to the screen. The demarcations between these three receptacles/spaces blur and overlap, overthrowing any binaries. This relationship can be expressed through the visual metaphor of the Möbius strip.6 A Möbius strip is a nonorientable surface/topology in which the inside becomes the outside, and outside becomes the inside: basically, the inside and outside merge. There is a simultaneous participation of one in the other. As the dichotomy between the on-screen and off-screen bodies breaks down and the binaries blend into a flux, the distinctions forming these polarities appear heuristic rather than absolute.7 The experience of one body becomes the experience of the other. The tactility and affect of one is similarly shared by the other body as well as the screen. Since these relationships between bodies are never static, they are constantly reconfiguring themselves in relation to the stimuli they encounter. Their ability to incorporate experiences and environments extends to rendering “external” spaces as “internal”: these “external” spaces are already a part of the body via ecological perception and associative network. This is can be exemplified by Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 143) famous description of the blind man’s cane: “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight.”8 As the body incorporates the screen, the differences and imagined distances between the body on-screen and the body off-screen become imperceptible.

The War Body War is a violation of the body—the human body and the body of another sovereign territory made of the collective bodies of the people. The wars we face now are unlike any other. Many theorists have emphasized the simulated/virtual nature of war in this postmodern age, seeing the terror and violence as symbolic, “unreal” or more real than real, and so forth. The phenomenological and biological human body is under severe onslaught in these wars—the one on the actual battlefield, the one represented by media, and the one that consumes (and produces) these media images. The reason any war fought in this age is different is partly because of the increasing access the population has to the screen. To take the ongoing war in Iraq as an example, war is no longer just within the geographical territory of Iraq or parts of the Middle East. Post 9/11, much of the terror that is generated is due to the realization and use of the human body as the greatest weapon that can be used against another body. The increased use of suicide bombers is an example of how central the body has become in this proliferation of terror. The possibility of biological warfare or sending out an infected body into the masses reflects a similar terror focused on, around, and in the body, even though this is not as visual right now.9

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What is visual right now is the distinct war body that has been ravaged mostly by methods other than biological warfare. Talking about “what the sight of violence can do to the human body,” Robert Sylwester (2005) rightly observes, “Given such manipulative potential over our affective processes, it’s important to know who determines the content of mass media.” More than ever now, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the war have the necessary technology to communicate images of the war to a hitherto unprecedented number of people. These “unofficial” photographs find their way to the screen through the Internet, uncensored. Websites like Under Mars (2005), an “online archive of soldier’s photos,” and The Memory Hole (2004) have many graphic images of ruined bodies. March for Justice (2003–) carries gruesome images in the gallery “Shock and Awe” as an antiwar message. Another website, ogrish.com, with its tagline “Can you handle your life?” gives access to videos of beheadings, killings, and wounds in the aftermath of shootouts. To better understand the uncontrollable spread and circulation of war images on the screen, one has to look at this example: a website called NowThatsFuckedUp.com, which offered soldiers an opportunity to exchange war photographs for pornography, was shut down by the Polk County (Florida) Sheriff. The website facilitated the posting of graphic images of war-ravaged bodies in exchange for access to pornographic material posted by other soldiers.10 The site was shut down for “violations of Florida laws pertaining to obscenity.” The site reads: “The Polk County Sheriff’s Office now maintains this URL to prevent further transmission of obscene material.” The reason for shutting the site down was pornography and not the existence of visceral images of bodies afflicted by war. It is as if it is acceptable practice that those images can be lawfully circulated. Debating the authenticity of such images is really of no point. It is true that some images on the Internet might be fabricated, but images of ravaged war bodies are easily accessible in journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine and others, where one can find images of bodies wounded in combat. And what about the horrible Abu Ghraib pictures that were made public and repeatedly circulated across media? And even the harshest skeptics of the authenticity of images on the Internet from “unofficial” channels have to believe the “authenticity” of obituaries with headshots, given out to soldiers in newspapers like The New York Times. Their faces are untarnished by the wound of war, but the spectator knows that these people are dead. The interactiveness of their images (you can place the cursor on various shots, and details come up, including whether the solider was killed in a “hostile” situation) heightens the experience. The increasing interactiveness of the screens and technologies around us provide visible instances of total bodily mediation. Several video games, through their content and the new technologies through which they are played, provide a space for “seeing” or better understanding this mediated and remediated war body. Although it is outside the scope of this paper to discuss the phenomenon

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of the recent rise of war video games, it would be beneficial to cast a sidelong glance at a few. The video game Call of Duty 3 for Xbox 360, published by Activision in November 2006, is in a series of games based in World War II. This particular game is set during the Normandy invasion, and the player is placed in the role of different soldiers on the side of the Allies. Among other things, the controls allow the player to replicate the gun’s vision, to correspond the eye level of both eyes—of the player off-screen and of the game’s soldier with the gun. To induce a similar sensation a soldier would experience, the screen becomes blurry to simulate the effect of having to clear up to focus on the target. The official trailer of this game ends with the caption “Get closer than ever.” That is the crux of the affect of such video games. The body is able to experience war as if it was there—it involuntary shudders and experiences adrenaline rushes as it blows up another body, and even the eyes blink frantically and try to focus (in the absence of real smoke). This experience is even more pronounced and visible when coupled with the technology of the Wii by Nintendo. The Wii comes with a motion-sensitive controller that replicates on-screen the physical actions of the player off-screen. For instance, the controller would have to be swung like a tennis racket while playing a tennis game, and it would serve as a gun in a first-person shooter game. Playing a war game on the Wii would heighten the affective onslaught on the senses. The player is physically immersed and involved in the war game—perhaps moving one’s arms at the screen with a quick movement could avoid shrapnel hit, or perhaps a shot being fired at the same screen would result in some other body being blown up. One wonders not just what affect would be produced when the insides of a body are splattered across the screen, but more important, one wonders how far technology will go to physically and visibly enable and induce full bodily mediation! One can hope that a video game where the player is a suicide bomber does not come out anytime soon. As such war games indicate, cognitive apprehension is not disembodied or dissociable from the associative network. For the most part, what we get to see are really graphic images of bodies that have been inflicted with the worst possible violence: many are grossly mutilated and blown apart, making visible the visceral parts of the body. Though the pictures we may see on the screen are twodimensional and flat, the images depicting internal visceral organs convey a dimension of depth to them. So what are the potential affects on the spectator of viewing bodily excess on the screen? Such haptic, visceral intimacy engenders a relationship between the viewer and the viewed: the viewer not only mimetically embodies the experience of the body image viewed, but there is also a dimension to this experience that goes beyond a simple mimicry of those viewed bodies. In the interface of the body with media, the violence and terror are transmitted to the body. Silvan Tomkins describes the affect of terror thus: “The primary function of terror is to amplify its activator by simulating its profile, of rapidly increasing neural firing and adding an appropriate analog, in this case of special toxicity. . . . Terror is designed to punish rather than to interrupt” (cited

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in Sedgwick 1995, 235). According to the principles of associative network, terror and fear become stored in the brain’s nodes, becoming themselves networks of concepts that link with other nodes and are stored in memory. Terror, violence, and fear thus become embedded in the network alongside every other affective, somatic, semantic node. The more of the network activated, the more likely violence and terror will occur. Thus these can begin at various places, through various cognitive processes, physiology, response patterns—all parts of the network. An example would be the stampede incident that happened in Baghdad in September 2005: rumors of suicide bombers in the people’s midst caused panic, and more than 900 were killed and almost 500 injured. Ironically the Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi claimed that “only the seven that were killed this morning were killed by terrorists,” referring to seven slain by a mortar attack before the stampede. The trigger for the stampede was the cognitive association of suicide bombers with death. Quite naturally the association of this terror with panic resulted in a widespread frenzy that tragically ended in death. The image of the terror-stricken war body, blown apart, disemboweled, or decapitated sets off chain reactions of associativeness that link terror to all other nodes directly or indirectly. The body becomes a cognitive accumulation of phenomenological bodily experiences. Media theorists Taylor and Saarinen (1994, “Body Snatching” 4) in their circuitous but insightful manner point out that in the present mediascape “image exposes one to the gaze of others, which simultaneously captivates and liberates. The captivated image becomes captivating when it liberates associative energies that generate new images.” As “associative energies” are released, the body makes new connections but also captivates or stores the old ones as knowledge, history, memory, and identity. This process is thus similar to Benjaminian Erfahrung. In the present age Erfahrung is definitely not lost; rather, it exists in a most profound manner through its engagement with the screen. It would not be amiss to say that through a combination of Erfahrung and Erlebnis, terror grows exponentially. As terror is rapidly inflicted on and afflicted by phenomenological corporeality, the epistemological and ontological body comes under continual violent attacks. This is how terror can now be thought of as outside terrorism, as it is commonly understood. It is not merely limited to geography; it is profoundly ontological and real in the truest sense of the word. Perhaps it would not be wrong to call it an embodied terrorism or bodily warfare. Rebecca Solnit (2005) could not have been more accurate when she pointed out that “for millions of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and contractors, the war will be visible in the mind, inscribed on the body, long after it is over on the ground.” To take this further, this war and any other war that happens in this age of massively proliferating mass media will be inscribed and incorporated in and on, not only the bodies who participate in it but also those who partake in it via the screen. The visualization and resultant memories of terror will long outlive actual, lived experience. Today, on March 11, 2007, the Iraq Body Count database reports up to 64,273 civilians killed by military intervention. The war

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body count is many times that number. When the screen—the electronic screen and the screen of the body—is omnipresent and capable of mediating in all senses of the word, and the body itself is a medium, then the proliferation of this terror is inevitable. The war body count is in fact innumerable. This screen is training the human sensorium in the way Benjamin imagined cinema could, seeing it as an antidote to cope with the shock of the onset of mechanized modernity. Only now with “the technologies of virtuality, with their potential for full-body mediation” (Hayles 1999, 26), the screen11 is more potent than ever and is continually constructing and restructuring the human sensorium and its capacities. It is difficult to imagine the present-day screen as an “antidote” since this very potency in tandem with attacks of terror (new and those already set into motion by associative networks) has set off a Möbiusly irreducible chain reaction. As the body is caught in being both the source and the victim of terror, the war—more than being a war on terror—becomes a war of terror on the body. The consequent and gradual degradation and destruction of the psychological, epistemological, phenomenological, and finally biological body is a reminder of the fragility of the material world and the materiality of the perishable body, without which there would exist nothing of the human race.

Works Cited Aljazeera.net. 2005. “London Suicide Bomber on Videotape.” December 7. http:// english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FC8750D0-908D-4272-953D-EA27523A47AE.htm (accessed July 27, 2005). Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2002. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire: Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940, 313–55. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Campbell, Jan. 2005. Film and Cinema Spectatorship: Melodrama and Mimesis. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Cowart, Monica. 2005. “Embodied Cognition.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Psychology, http:// www.iep.utm.edu/e/embodcog.htm#H5 (accessed July 27, 2007). Forgas, Joseph P. 1999. “Network Theories and Beyond.” In A Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, 591–612. Edited by T. Dalgleish and M. J. Power. Chichester: Wiley. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 1999. “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street.” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter): 306–43. ———. 2004. “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema; The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture 2003.” Expanded version, October 109, no. 1 (Summer): 3–45. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Iraq Body Count. 2003–. http://www.iraqbodycount.net (accessed July 27, 2007). Johnson, Karl M. 2006. “Book Reviews: Targeting Bioterrorism.” The New England Journal of Medicine 354, no. 2:213–15. Katz, Eliot. 2002. “When the Skyline Crumbles.” In Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, 23–26. Edited by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House.

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Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. March for Justice. 2003–. http://www.marchforjustice.com/shock&awe.php (accessed July 27, 2007). Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. “Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes.” Framework: The Finnish Art Review, http:// www.framework.fi/2_2004/visitor/artikkelit/marks.html (accessed July 27, 2007). McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Memory Hole, The. 2002–. http://:www.thememoryhole.org/war/wounded/gallery.htm (accessed July 27, 2007). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Nowthatsfuckedup, http://www.mistymedia.co.uk/tagnowthatsfuckedup.com Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, eds. 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1991. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———.2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Solnit, Rebecca. 2005. “War Visible.” Mother Jones (July). http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2005/07/war_visible.html (accessed July 27, 2007). Sylwester, Robert. 2001. “How Mass Media Affect Our Perceptions of Reality—Part I.” Brain Connection (December). http://www.brainconnection.com/content/172_1 (accessed July 27, 2007). Taylor, Mark C., and Esa Saarinen. 1994. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. London: Routledge. Ulmer, Gregory L. 1994. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Under Mars. 2005. http://www.undermars.com (accessed July 27, 2007).

Notes 1. A section of this chapter was presented in “The Culture Industry Today,” International Conference at Universidade Metodista de Piracicaba (UNIMEP), Brazil (August 30, 2006) under the title “Urban Aesthetic and Ethics: Production and Consumption of Visual Culture.” 2. It is not just the materiality of the screen that makes the impact different but also the way viewership occurs. Cinematic viewing—a collective viewing process where the images are projected from behind the viewers onto a screen—is certainly different from the viewing experience of an individual in front of a 17-inch high-definition screen. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1994) in Understanding Media made distinctions between hot and cool media, depending on the resolutions and viewer participation. Vivian Sobchack (1991) made distinctions between electronic imaging and film, reading the former as a space that disembodies and does not enable “potential bodily habitation.” 3. Taylor and Saarinen’s book is chunked into twenty-five chapters; each resets the page count, and there is no alternative numbering. 4. Laura U. Marks (2004) elaborates about the origins of the term in “Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes.” 5. Hayles (1999, 201) points out, “As Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch argue in The Embodied Mind, a coherent, continuous, essential self is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain embodied experience. The closer one comes to the flux of embodiment, . . . the more one is aware that the coherent self is a fiction invented out of panic and fear.”

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6. Jean Baudrillard (1994) has used the Möbius strip to depict the distortion of meaning in a postmodern society that is caused by the excess of information; it indicates the simulated social order where dichotomies disappear and a silent implosion takes place by the merging of oppositions. For further interpretations, see http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/theory/Mobius/home.html (accessed July 27, 2007). 7. “Since the body and embodiment, inscription and incorporation are in constant interaction, the distinctions forming these polarities are heuristics rather than absolute” (Hayles 1999, 193). 8. This idea of “intercorporeality” is similar in many ways to Marshall McLuhan’s perception of media as an extension of the senses: for instance, if the wheel is an extension of the foot, and the book is an extension of the eye, then the screen is an extension of the eye too (1994, 31–35). 9. A person who is willing to be a suicide bomber is just as likely to infect his own body with anthrax, smallpox, or something else and use it as a weapon. The ease of communicability of such infections (via air) to vast populace and the resulting high fatality rate make it more effective. In The New England Journal of Medicine, Karl M. Johnson (2006) concludes his book review section “Targeting Bioterrorism” by asserting, “Today, many in [the U.S.] government who have access to classified information are convinced that a biologic attack is not a matter of if, but a matter of when.” 10. What Baudrillard says about disaster movies and pornography offers an interesting insight visà-vis the war body: “The countless disaster movies . . . clearly attempt to exorcize with images, . . . but the universal attraction they exert, which is on par with pornography, shows that acting-out is never very far way” (2002, 7). 11. Another way of looking at this would be as Jean Baudrillard reflects in relation to the Twin Tower disaster: “We would pardon any violence if it were not given media exposure (‘terrorism would be nothing without the media’). But this is all illusion. There is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions” (2002, 31).

3

A King(dom) for a Stage The War Body in and as Performance Matthew Wagner

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene. Shakespeare (Henry V, prologue 1–4) [To] clarify the problem of the poetic image philosophically, we shall have to have recourse to a phenomenology of the imagination. Gaston Bachelard (1964) In the October 26, 2001, issue of The New Yorker, film critic Anthony Lane wrote a column titled “This Is Not a Movie.” In it he argued that the American way of seeing 9/11 was fundamentally informed by the country’s cinematic imaginary1; we (Americans) couldn’t help but see the attacks as a screen event, not least because of the simple fact that for the vast majority of seers, it was, actually, precisely that: a set of images unfolding on screen. Lane’s title invokes a “recourse to . . . phenomenology” akin to that called for by Bachelard in the epigraph above: What is this thing in front of me, and how do I experience it? The thrust of Lane’s brief column is an exploration of the discord between what we understand something to be and the way in which we experience and perceive it. This “is” not a movie, but that is indeed exactly how we experience it. A very similar discord informs the arguments I wish to make about the war body on screen. Like the pool of perceivers of September 11, the vast majority of people who experience the war body do so not with the immediacy of flesh, but with the schooling and the framework of a cinematic imaginary, or as I will expand the idea here, a framework of performance. As Lane suggests of 50

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9/11, “Only those close enough to breathe the foulness into their lungs could truly measure the darkening day for what it was.” For the rest, epistemological comprehension notwithstanding, the day was a movie. Similarly, the war body on screen, I suggest, while perhaps not strictly a movie, is a performance. My contention is that to address the war body on screen is to address it as a “poetic image,” an image, as Bachelard suggests, that “emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul, and being of man, apprehended in his actuality” (1964, xiv). Thus, to ask after the war body on screen is first to ask this phenomenological question: How does the war body emerge into a subjective consciousness? It does so as performance, and it is this performativity that I am interested in here. My case studies will be predominantly fictive and filmic, and my hope will be to trace through them a set of processes and phenomena of performance specific to the war body, and the implications that those processes and phenomena have upon our cultural experiences of the war body. Finally, it is a particular kind of war body that I am interested in here—the body of the warrior/king, or leader—which both resonates with and stands apart from the other categories of war body addressed in the collection (that of the soldier, the enemy, and the hostage/victim).

An Anatomy of Performance Performance, according to Ruth Holliday and John Hassard, “is . . . an explicitly embodied process” (2001, 7), and I suggest that the inverse is also true: embodiment is an explicitly performative process.2 In other words, given the inescapably visible and mediated societies we have created and now inhabit, to talk of the body (in general, and the war body in particular) is to talk of performance. But to talk of performance is to demand much greater specificity, and again, recourse to phenomenology is helpful. My use of the term here, which expands beyond screen media, is intended to convey two particular connotations—an elementary definition of “doing,” and the condition that such “doing” (regardless of medium or (non)fictive quality) is given life and credence by virtue of its being available for public scrutiny and consumption. Alice Rayner’s treatise on the phenomenology of action provides a productive starting point. She takes as her rubric the gravedigger’s definition in Hamlet of an act: “An act,” the gravedigger tells us, “hath three branches—it is to act, to do, and to perform” (V.i.9–10, 1997). Rayner, looking beyond the apparent tautology embedded here, suggests that the gravedigger’s statement opens up for us “a useful outline for multiple perspectives on an act” (1994, 11). She goes on to align certain functions and definitions with each of these three branches. “To act,” she suggests, concerns “the dimension of action that links acts and intents”; whereas “to do might be said to sever intentions and regard only the material or gestural conditions” (21). It is the third branch, however, that is the key and is the most useful for my project here:

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As the third term in the gravedigger’s anatomy, to perform is both medial, standing between act and do, and formative, at the public edge where the act opens into a sensory and social world where it is subject to immediate interpretation and judgment. It is neither part of the sedimentation of the narrative act, which traverses past and future in a portable form, nor of the present tense of the body. It serves both, however, in phenomenological terms, by breaking up the false dichotomy between the purely conceptual and the purely physical. (32) In other words, to perform (or performance) is the link between the materiality of the performing body and phenomenal perception of the viewer. To contend that the war body is experienced as performance is to locate the essence of the war body in the linkages between material corporeality, praxis, and perception. Given this context, the driving question of an investigation of the war body will involve a return to Rayner’s second branch—to do. In other words, my interest in these pages lies in what the war body “does”—what its core, essential praxis is—as it is contextualized by its inescapable performativity. To turn our attention specifically to the body of the warrior leader, for example, we might ask: What is the fundamental “doing” of George W. Bush’s landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003? His “act,” in Rayner’s lexicon, was a speech, an announcement, and we might even go so far as to say an official cessation of a war. But as all of this was performative, something else—something more, and something more essential—was “done” (a war body—a warrior-king—was “made,” as I’ll argue below). Put another way, to ask what the war body does is a question that begs an answer beyond an immediate and simple activity. The answer is not “pulls a trigger” or “receives a wound” or even “ends a war.” Rather—and herein lies the inescapability of performance—the answer concerns that medial ground between such activities and the broader perceiving public. So what, then, is the answer, what does this body of the leader “do” as a performing entity? I propose two answers: it makes itself into a war body, and it justifies itself as a war body. What it “does” is constructive, on one hand—in the literal sense of “making”—and justifying on the other hand. My focus from here, then, will be on how the body of the leader makes itself into the body of the warrior-king, what processes of justification accompany that making, and what potential consequences might be worth our attention.

Disclosure—Making the War Body Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother his up his beauty from the world,

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That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. Shakespeare (1997, Henry IV, Part I, I.ii.175–81) Perhaps the most pervasive, visible doing in terms of the performing war body is creation itself. While there is a clear deficiency in understanding the body as only constructed, we have, I think, long since passed the theoretical point of no return in terms of the symbiosis between body and construct.3 The war body, I propose, is made precisely as it comes into view; its construction, in other words, is based in the performative. Thus, as young Prince Hal indicates above, the body of the warrior-king is created out of a process of disclosure—showing and constructing are one and the same. A body will be the body of a warrior-king when it chooses to show itself as such. Hal’s introduction of a strategic timing of such showing is only an elaboration upon the basic cornerstone of the making of the king’s body: performance. On a subtler and more intricate level, however, the making of this particular kind of war body also occurs by metaperformative processes; here, the issue is one of a “making” via an identification of the body with a performer and/or performance, in the context of star or celebrity phenomena.4 Such identification traverses both historical periods and performative media and becomes written on the body in very distinct ways. From the realm of cinema, a perfect case in point is Al Pacino. In The Godfather (Coppola 1972), we first meet Michael Corleone dressed as a soldier. This opening wedding sequence is the only time we see him directly visually identified with explicit military action. And yet, despite the uniform, he is the “nonsoldier” at this moment; he is at the lavish wedding of his sister, home on the family estate in Long Island, courting a markedly civilian lady. As the film progresses, however, we see his body (though never again visually identified with that of a soldier) take on the markings of a war body. We see the scars of his particular war (from his beating at the hands of Captain McCloskey), and we especially see a certain physiological aptitude for war, most notably in the scene outside the hospital just before his beating. Here, Michael’s ad hoc henchman, Enzo the baker, can’t light a cigarette for the shaking of his hands after their brush with Solazzo’s hit men. Michael’s hands, though, are famously steady. And he notes this fact: Michael, and the audience, pause to dwell on the steadiness of his hands as he lights Enzo’s cigarette. This corporeal manifestation of the physiological aptitude for battle goes much further toward the making of a war body out of Pacino’s form than the soldier’s uniform he is dressed in at the film’s opening. What’s most interesting about these particular corporeal phenomena is the way that Michael Corleone’s war body stays with Pacino in other roles.

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I don’t mean here necessarily the kind of role identity that Sean Connery feared would mark him for life as James Bond, but rather a specific corporeal resonance that layers the performing body as it becomes increasingly recognizable. We see, for instance, a different kind of violent/warrior aptitude in Tony Montana (Scarface, De Palma 1983); we see an aging, benevolent echo of Michael Corleone (especially as we remember him in the wedding sequence) in Lt. Col. Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (Brest 1992); and in perhaps the most interesting example of this metaperformative “making,” we see the resonances of all these war bodies in Pacino’s tackling of Shakespeare’s Richard III (1997) in Looking for Richard (Pacino 1996). This film presents us with a rendering of one of the more preeminent and recognizable war bodies of all time—Richard III, remarkably apt soldier, scarred not only (or not even explicitly) by his experiences on the battlefield, but also by his inner character. By his own admission, Richard is “misshapen, deformed” and was born to “snarl and bite and play the dog” (Richard Duke of York, V.vi.77). He is a character who cannot abide “weak, piping times of peace” (I.i.24), who thrives only and wholly on battle. What is most fascinating about Pacino’s Richard is that this Richard depends as much on the recognizable features of Pacino’s body as it does on the historical/dramatic attributes of the character. Here I am not referring to the level or quality of method acting he achieves, the “becoming” of a character (or conversely, the not becoming of a character, seeing the actor instead). I mean instead the way in which Pacino, by the film’s production in the mid-1990s, has become a character himself, a star or celebrity persona, and that persona is held in Pacino’s body and explicitly deployed in the corporeal creation of Pacino’s Richard. As Barbara Hodgdon argues, the film presents us with a kind of body double, a Pacino-Richard, achieved not only by the film’s documentary structure (we follow Pacino in the making of a not-for-distribution film of Richard III), but more potently by the way in which Pacino trumpets his own star persona. Through much of the film he wears a Scent of a Woman ball cap, borrows imagery from the Godfather films, and cuts repeatedly and quickly—sometimes line for line—between Pacino-asrehearsing-actor and fully costumed, inhabited King Richard. As Hodgdon suggests, “What emerges most clearly . . . is that Pacino’s performing body—as himself in rehearsal, as Richard in performance—is the one that counts” (1998, 209). This body carries with it Michael Corleone’s steady hands and Tony Montana’s scarred face. “Richard-Pacino is here, there, and everywhere, and he loves reading his own signs,” Hodgdon asserts (211). And so, I would add, do we; or if it’s not so much a matter of an audience “loving” to read all of RichardPacino’s own signs, we do, in any case, read these performative signs loud and clear, and they are part and parcel of the making of Richard’s war body. These Pacino-centered examples traverse historical periods, and it goes without saying that Tony Montana is a different kind of figure (and maybe not classifiable as a “leader” at all) than Michael Corleone or Richard III. By moving so broadly among different character types, historical contexts, and even to some

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extent forms of media (Richard is, after all, straddling the worlds of film, theater, and literature), my purpose is not to suggest a totalizing, universal definition of the war body. Rather, it is to highlight the ways in which historicity and genre, while never erasable, become subservient to metaperformative processes of constructing the body. The argument is not that all historical eras (or character types or performative media) are the same. Rather, the argument is that from a performative perspective, the relationship between character and actor—especially the ways in which that relationship consciously draws on the ability to traverse histories and genres—is a significant part of the making of the war body. In other words, the ability to have—and display—a body that resonates with corporeal attributes of other bodies from across historical divides helps to construct the war body. In this way, Richard III is made a more potent war body because it is Pacino-Richard, playing Pacino-Michael and Pacino-Tony. Moreover, such potency increases, rather than diminishes, when the relationship between character and actor is less readily discernible. Put another way, we might argue that on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush grew a foot taller and donned a stovepipe top hat when he stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce “mission accomplished.” That publicity stunt was not merely intended to create a war body (a warrior-king’s body, the body of a wartime leader) in Bush by placing him corporeally on a warship; it also linked him—bodily—to Lincoln himself, one of the greatest wartime leaders in American history. To borrow from Hodgdon, we had in this instance a Bush-Lincoln, displaying and reading all of his own corporeal-martial signs. What performance affects here—what it does—is this: it creates in Bush’s body 1) the current leader, 2) the flag (under which he is placed), 3) the past historical leader, and 4) the army itself (or in this case, the navy), right down to the actual instrument of war, the ship. Bush’s body is all these, in this moment, and it is so because it is held in view as performative.

Jus in Bello, Jus ad Bellum, Jus et Corpus Bellum King Henry: May I with right and conscience make this claim? Bishop of Canterbury: The sin upon my head, dread sovereign. Shakespeare (Henry V, I.ii.96–97) There was, of course, another purpose to Bush’s appearance on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and that had to do with justifying the war in Iraq in similar terms that the 1991 Gulf War was justified5: the speed, precision, and relative lack of casualties appended to the war would make it more readily justifiable. Though such a position might seem overly Machiavellian (and now, in 2007, ludicrously and tragically ironic in its distance from reality), the ability to

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humanely (quickly and with minimal “collateral damage”) fight a war is a longstanding marker of jus ad bellum.6 Yet in terms of corporeality, of the body of the leader/king, there is a deeper current of justification worth exploring, and that is the current that links cause and body. To turn the metaphorical to the literal, how does the cause and the responsibility of a war rest on the head and in the hands of a leader? And more to the point, how does the very body of the leader serve to contain and display the “rightness” of the cause while simultaneously shedding the weight of responsibility? I’ll want to return to the figure of George W. Bush on this front, but to trace these particular processes, no better performative example (again, crossing media) exists than Shakespeare’s Henry V. The body of a king, more than the dualistic entity envisioned by Renaissance philosophy,7 is a pluralistic entity through which a multitude of discourses pass and vie for primacy. And in Henry’s case, the victorious discourse, the primary thread of thought, is a discourse of justification, particularly both if and how the war is justified. Both questions are presented initially as relating to the cause of the war, the justness of Henry’s claim on the French throne. But the concern with the cause very quickly and subtly shifts to a concern with Henry himself, a shift that is rather neatly encapsulated, for example, in this early exchange between the Bishops of Ely and Canterbury: Canterbury: Thus runs the bill. Ely: This would drink deep. Canterbury: ’Twould drink the cup and all. Ely: But what prevention? Canterbury: The king is full of grace and fair regard. Ely: And a true lover of the holy Church. (Henry V, I.i.19–24) The issue at hand is one of a bill set to pass in parliament that would greatly tax the church’s coffers; this scene at large has been much commented on as a display of Shakespeare’s cynicism, offering, as it does, the “real” reason for the war—a politically manipulated distraction from domestic affairs. But my interest here is in Canterbury’s answer to that crucial question “What prevention?” Why answer with a comment on the nature of the king? Following this exchange is an additional forty-five lines of dialogue between the two bishops, praising various qualities of King Henry, and especially the way in which he turned his life around, departing from his wild youth, and becoming a reasoned, scholarly, pious, and judicious leader. To answer “What prevention?” with extended description of the king means locating the question at hand squarely on the person of the king. Henry is thus dramaturgically positioned front and center, as the literal

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touchstone for all questions. The whole of act I, scene 1, actually serves as evidence that the war with the French is not justified, or at least, it is spurred on by motives that are considerably other than the justness of Henry’s claim. But what the exchange cited above accomplishes is a trivializing of cause and rightness of claim in favor of prioritizing the person of the king. In other words, the war is just—it is a good cause—if the king is good. Throughout the play, issues of justification resurface (though these two bishops, and the parliamentary bill they wish to be forestalled, never do), and every time such issues arise, the dramaturgical recourse is not to a cause or to a theoretical jus ad bellum, but rather to the figure of the king. This pattern culminates textually in Henry’s famous “upon the king” soliloquy (IV.i.212–66), wherein he pointedly rejects the notion that responsibility for soldiers’ actions (and deaths) rests with the king. In spite of his literal rhetoric, though, the performative effect is again one of equating, in an audience’s eye, the issue of justification with the body of the king. But all this might be said to reside in Henry’s character, or attributes, not necessarily in his corporeal being, and this is where we return to the central issue of the performing body. It is, in other words, the war body in performance that locates upon itself all surrounding discourses of war— including those of justification. The body, in this respect, might be said to be “consuming” the world around it, a figure that Bert O. States applies to the praxis of theater in general.8 Henry’s body, I’d argue, takes into itself and onto itself the things of war, ingests them, and redisplays them as a different kind of living image. The prime example here is the body of the dead boy in Branagh’s film Henry V (1989).9 As a bloodstreaked and muddy—but victorious—Henry makes his way from the battlefield at Agincourt, he carries with him the body of one of “boys and luggage,”10 so brutally and unjustly murdered by the French soldiers. The battlefield appears endless, and at first it seems that Henry will carry the boy forever. But Henry carries on, struggling through the mud, and finally halts at a wagon-cum-bier. He climbs this, lays the boy to rest here, kisses his head, and then stands upright, reminiscent of his position earlier in the film when delivering the St. Crispin’s Day speech. As he stands, the camera cuts to his face, leaving the body of the boy. The effect is one of the boy being subsumed by Henry; he was Henry’s burden, and upon his laying down of that burden, it has not so much disappeared as become a part of the figure now filling up the frame. Henry and the dead boy are, in a very significant way, one. This scene of the king carrying the unknown page certainly has the potential to be damning in terms of justification. On paper, we might read it as raising the question “At what cost victory?” But the phenomenon is actually quite contrary to this motif; the body of the boy is not an emblem of too high a price for what we might recall wasn’t a remarkably just war to begin with (remember the Bishops). Rather, the body of the boy serves to extend the reading of Henry as a sympathetic and “just” man, caring for his subjects, caring for youth, true to his word (given in the St. Crispin’s Day speech, that all who fight with him shall be

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his brother). As we see this caring, troubled, affected Henry, we see a king who is also still a boy, who is, in fact, the boy he has just laid down. The effect is extended by the specifically corporeal embellishments in play: the blood, the exhaustion, and as Donald Hedrick has pointed out, the mud itself. Hedrick makes a convincing argument that Branagh’s conscious and extensive use of mud in the film serves as a means of both identifying the war with the body of the king and of “whitewashing” both: Throughout the performance tradition of the play, one finds again and again a variety of means of whitewashing the war and the character of the king, but an innovation in this production is Branagh’s accomplishing whitewashing chiefly by means of mud. . . . Briefly put, the result of this movie is a new form of whitewashing: the film implies that if war has a necessary dark or muddy side, the [potentially “dark side” of the] character of King Henry is thereby exonerated; if the king has his own dark side, on the other hand, the character of the war itself is exonerated. (47) Henry is cloaked in mud and shrouded with the body of the boy, and through this mud and these two bodies, we see, finally, a king we want to follow, and thereby we see a war we believe in, a war that is “just.” We might even go so far as to say that this filmic moment creates a desire in the viewer to be not Henry, but the boy; the subject position we project ourselves into is the one who, though dead, has the benevolent, powerful (if human and therefore not perfect) protector/leader—and one not need look very hard in contemporary headlines to see the power of the rhetoric and imagery of protection. Ultimately, by presenting Henry as a protector, a savior (even if in this case, he was unable to save that particular body), this scene uses the very cost of the war (a dead body) to in fact justify the war, and this paradox is both located in and activated by the body of the king. There certainly is a “real world” corollary to the mud in Branagh’s Henry V, and the complex relationships the film and play draw between jus ad bello and the body of the king. We see it in Margaret Thatcher and Michael Dukakis appearing in tanks during their Cold-War campaigns, or (to return to this example) in George W. Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln. More than just easy political photo opportunities, these images are designed to clothe the leader’s body in the things of war (though admittedly, “cleaner” things than mud and corpses), to indelibly link—however far-fetched—the material body of the leader with the war in question, and through that linking to enact a justification of the war. The argument I’m developing has to do with the way in which the body of the king, especially when it is yoked to other bodies of war, becomes a site for justifying war; certainly, the inverse may be true as well, and in such cases, bodies that might be analogous to the boy’s body in Henry V do indeed become damnations, signifiers of a cost that is too high. This is actually the argument proposed

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by the foot soldier Williams to a disguised King Henry, predicting the protest of all the dead soldiers’ body parts: “All those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all ‘We died at such a place’” (IV.i.128–30; in Shakespeare 1997). Should the cause of the king not be good, Williams argues, the bodies have their due, and the “king shall have a heavy reckoning to make” (IV.i.128). Similarly, we might look to the way in which George. W. Bush forbade media coverage of the first American coffins returning from Iraq.11 In what might be too easy a comparison, we can see in the Pentagon’s edict to keep the bodies out of sight a fear that politically, if not literally, the corpses returning from Iraq would indeed be pointing their fingers and crying out, “We died at such a place.” Even here, however, as if by counterexample, we see the implicitly tight yoking of the body of the “king,” the bodies of war, and the discourses of justification. Jus ad bello has, in the age of imminent visibility, become inseparable from the corpus bellum.

Body and Space In this chapter I have been tracing an encounter with the war body, one that posits the war body as essentially, ontologically performative. One of the primary requisites of such a position, and the point with which I’d like to conclude, is to look beyond the corporeal to the spatial. Conventionally, we may tend to consider performance as a temporal alteration in character or identity, located in and focused on the body; yet we cannot overlook the phenomenon of extension that accompanies performance. The body performs outwardly. No ghost needs to come from the grave to tell us, now, that space is not absolute and that it is every bit the product of human activity as the precursor and container of human activity.12 As bodies move, inhabit, perceive, secrete, they form and alter space and spatial relations. There is a very valid argument that this is true to a heightened degree in the context of performance. José Gil, for instance, puts it like this: We know that the dancer evolves in a particular space, different from objective space. The dancer does not move in space; rather, the dancer secretes, creates space with his movement. This is not too different from what happens in theatre, or on other stages and in other scenes. The actor also transforms scenic space; the gymnast prolongs the space that surrounds his skin—he weaves with bars, mats, or simply with the ground he steps on relations of complicity as intimate as the ones he has with his own body. In a similar way, the zen archer and the target are one and the same. In all of these cases a new space emerges. We will call it the space of the body. (2006, 21)

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Here Gil is developing ideas that form cornerstones of the work by thinkers such as Michel de Certeau (1984), Henri LeFebvre (1991) , and Maurice MerleauPonty (1962). LeFebvre writes at length in The Production of Space about the secretion of space, and (as Gil’s translator André Lepecki notes), Merleau-Ponty proposes that “the body is not ‘in’ space but ‘of ’ space” (Gil 2006, 23n2). Presuming a space of the body—and the overt impact that performance has on that space—what must we say, or ask, about the relationship between the war body and the space it inhabits and creates? The tracing I’ve done above of the two key phenomenal actions of the war body lead to this culminating point: there is a third action, an extra “doing” in need of tracing: the war body makes the space of the war. I believe that our conventional cultural tendencies would be to conceive of things the other way around: the space of war makes (out of necessity, if we’re being generous) the body of war. But if we consider the war body as (1) performative, (2) therefore active and doing things, and (3) extensive, as in Gil’s formulation, then we must consider the possibility that the war body actually makes the war, just as the body actually (not just in theory) makes the space. I mean here much more than the simple idea that it is a body that pulls the trigger or drops the bomb or signs the command ordering 21,500 other bodies to the front lines. I mean instead to follow the fluid, symbiotic relationship between body and space proposed by Gil.13 I mean that the presence of the performing war body in a perceptual field makes a broader space of war, a war that is literal (those 21,500 soldiers will indeed pull triggers, cause other bodies to die and disappear, and in one way or another eventually unmake themselves), and a war that is globally spatial. To draw an easy parallel, this is Donald Rumsfeld announcing to cameras that “victory” in the war on terrorism can be defined as a condition rather than an end date, one in which “we can continue to live in a world with powerful weapons and with people who are willing to use those powerful weapons” (2001). Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense, as a literal embodiment of the U.S.-led war on Iraq and of the U.S. military, is here performing outwardly. He is extending his war body into space, generating a space like him. War itself becomes, from this performative extension, indistinguishable from peace: both are defined by the having and using of weapons. Umberto Eco says that the body is the final measurement of time (1999, 14); we might extrapolate further and suggest that the body is the measure of all things. If indeed the war body is as pervasive, as determinant, and as dominant as any image of our times, then a consideration of what that body does in performative terms leads us indeed to conclude that we live in an inescapable space of war. As it makes itself and justifies itself, the war body also extends itself, becoming generative of space, and that space is like the body that generates it. As Gil reminds us, “The space of the body does not come about except by the projection-secretion of interior space on exterior space. The body, as we saw, also becomes space” (2006, 26). And as we are seeing every day, the war body

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stretches its skin, projects its interior onto the exterior, and creates, transforms, becomes a new environment, a war space.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Bachelard, Gaston. 1964. The Poetics of Space. Translated by M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon. Blau, Herbert. 1982. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Burroughs, Catherine B., and Jeffrey David Ehrenreich, eds. 1993. Reading the Social Body. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Collier, Susanne. 1992. “Post-Falklands, Post-Colonial: Contextualizing Branagh as Henry V on Stage and on Film.” Essays in Theatre / Études Theatrales 10, no. 2:143–54. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. “Walking in the City.” In The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eco, Umberto. 1999. “Times.” In The Story of Time. By Kristen Lippencott, Umberto Eco, et al. London: Merrell Holberton. Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen. Fitter, Chris. 1991. “A Tale of Two Branaghs: Henry V, Ideology, and the Mekong Agincourt.” In Shakespeare Left and Right. Edited by Ivo Kamps. New York: Routledge. Garner, Stanton B., Jr. 1994. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gil, José. 2006. “Paradoxical Body.” Translated by André Lepecki. TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 4:21–35. Hedrick, Donald K. 1997. “War Is Mud: Branagh’s Dirty Harry V and the Types of Political Ambiguity.” In Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. Edited by Linda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London: Routledge. Hodgdon, Barbara. 1998. “Replicating Richard: Body Doubles, Body Politics.” Theatre Journal 50, no. 2:207–25. Holliday, Ruth, and John Hassard, eds. 2001. Contested Bodies. Routledge: London. Holmes, Su, and Sean Redmond, eds. 2006. Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture. London: Routledge. Hoskins, Andrew. 2004. Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq. London: Continuum. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Millbank, Dana. 2003. “Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins.” The Washington Post, October 21, A.23. Pick, Daniel. 1993. War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rayner, Alice. 1994. To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rumsfeld, Donald R. 2001. United States Department of Defense News Briefing. September 20. http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=1901 (accessed July 28, 2007).

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Shakespeare, William. 1997. Hamlet; Henry V; Henry IV; Richard III; Richard Duke of York. In The Norton Anthology. Edited by S. Greenblatt. New York: Norton. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, ed. 1992. Giving the Body Its Due. Albany: SUNY Press. Shepherd, Simon. 2006. Theatre, Body, and Pleasure. London: Routledge. States, Bert O. 1985. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walzer, Michael. 2000. Just and Unjust Wars. 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books. Wegenstein, Bernadette. 2006. Getting under the Skin: Body and Media Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zarrilli, Phillip B. 2004. “Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience.” Theatre Journal 56, no. 4:653–66.

Filmed Godfather, The. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA, 1972. Henry V. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. USA, 1989. Looking for Richard. Directed by Al Pacino. USA, 1996. Scarface. Directed by Brian De Palma. USA, 1983. Scent of a Woman. Directed by Martin Brest. USA, 1992.

Notes 1. I am indebted to my colleague John Downie, at Victoria University of Wellington, for the term “cinematic imaginary,” which I think succinctly captures much of Lane’s argument in terms of the ways in which our imaginations are shaped by the dramaturgies of cinema, and simultaneously shape our experience of the “real” world. 2. Bernadette Wegenstein offers a similar proposal in Getting under the Skin, claiming that “embodiment—being akin to articulation—is inherently performative” (2006, xviii). 3. Literature on the constructedness of the body is vast; for highlights and introductory material, see Butler (1990), Burroughs and Ehrenreich (1993), Sheets-Johnstone (1992), and Wegenstein (2006). But, as Phillip Auslander reminds us in a review of Burroughs and Ehrenreich, “However persuasive arguments are for seeing the body as constructed, the body seems always to exceed its construction in ways that cannot be described” (1993, 169). For work that more directly addresses the body in performance (though departs somewhat from theories of the constructedness of the body), see Shepherd (2006), Elam (1980), Garner (1994), and Zarrilli (2004). 4. For more on this phenomenon at large, see Holmes and Redmond (2006). 5. Both classical and contemporary just-war theory typically divides its inquiries into two categories: jus ad bellum, or the justness of war; and jus in bello, or justness in war. The former, which is the primary focus of this paper, addresses questions of how the waging of war is justified in the first place; the latter addresses issues of conduct while engaged in war. For a strong and wide-ranging introduction to this complex field, see Walzer (2000) and Pick (1993). 6. See again Walzer (2000, esp. 16–33) and Hoskins (2004, 77ff.). 7. See Ernst Kantorowitz’s (1957) seminal work The King’s Two Bodies, which traces the Renaissance philosophy that the monarch was (like an actor [my parenthetical, not Kantorowitz’s]) of two bodies, the individual and human body, and the body politic or body of state. A more familiar

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manifestation of this phenomenon is found in the referral to lords and kings by the land over which they rule, so that Claudius, for example, is referred to and is Denmark. 8. States argues that “the theatre is a rather predatory institution that not only holds a mirror up to nature but [also] consumes nature as well” (1985, 13). “It is, finally, a matter of gestation: theatre ingests the world of objects and signs only to bring images to life” (37). This bringing of images to life takes us back to Bachelard’s “poetic image” and the question of how they first emerge in an audience’s consciousness. And while States is referring specifically to the theater, I think it a fair extrapolation to apply this model to performance media that include the cinema. 9. This film has been read as both counter to Olivier’s 1944 patriotic call-to-arms version and as a subtler justification of the Falklands Wars under Thatcher (see esp. Collier [1992] and Fitter [1991]). For a good survey of these and other readings of the film, see also Hedrick (1997). 10. “Boys and luggage,” as cited in the text (IV.vii.1), refers to the pages and baggage carriers that accompanied an army. 11. On October 21, 2003, The Washington Post reported: “In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. ‘There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Delaware] base, to include interim stops,’ the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains” (Millbank 2003). 12. See esp. Lefebvre (1991) and de Certeau (1984). 13. To approach that fluidity from the opposite direction, see Bert O. States, who eloquently describes how, in the theater, “rooms, like all [theatrical] images. . . . must inhabit the people who inhabit them” (1985, 46).

4

Baghdad ER Subverting the Mythic Gaze upon the Wounded and the Dead Linda Robertson

Any attempt to account for the fiasco in Iraq—an opportunistic war of aggression that has cost thousands of American lives and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties—must include the American public’s capacity to view a sanitized war without either wondering about or protesting the absence of the images of the dead and wounded, both innocents and warriors, particularly during the first three and a half years of the war. The question might be answered using any one of three important analytical models. Each is commendable and none contradict the other; each postulates that the complacency of the public in the face of sanitized warfare is due to forces—political, economic, or psychological—over which the public as a whole (or the individuals who comprise the public) have little or no control. Each has one significant weakness, which is how to use the mass media to challenge the public’s complacency by using an aesthetics that invokes pity for the wounded and dead. Cultivation Theory, first formulated by George Gerbner, would explain the willingness of the American public to accept images of a sanitized war as the inevitable byproduct of a public both desensitized to violence by the mass media’s emphasis on it and rendered dependent upon authority because media reality makes the world seem far more dangerous than it is; this cultural conditioning resonated with the fearmongering after 9/11 by the Bush administration, making the public receptive to the use of violence to assure security by a strong, central authority (Gerbner and Gross 1976). Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model would explain that once those in power decided to go to war, they concocted a set of causes intended to motivate the public to accept the decision that had already been made and supplied the poisoned Kool-Aid to the media, which is controlled by corporations whose interests are served by the government; the press media in turn served the deadly brew to

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a credulous public. These same forces then controlled the images of the war to sustain popular support (Herman and Chomsky 1988). The psychologist Lawrence LeShan’s Mythic Model in The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Madness (2002) would call the vision of war preferred by the public the seductive “mythic reality” of war, which persists unless supplanted by the “sensory reality.” For a war to retain its mythic aspects, many of the facts of how war is really waged must be concealed. Any information that lessens war’s psychological satisfaction is generally rejected. . . . Mythic wars have proven to be the greatest way ever discovered to sell newspapers. Wars like Vietnam, which came to be viewed through the sensory mode of perception, are a different story. As the terrible jungle fighting went on and on in Vietnam, even those who had first seen it in mythic terms were disillusioned in the face of so much visual evidence to the contrary. (92) These approaches place most of the American public in a decidedly unequal position with the secular powers that control them. It is reminiscent of the position the eighteenth-century Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards presented to his parishioners when he admonished them that even those who imagined themselves in a state of grace were, until truly redeemed, “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” Cultivation Theory assumes that the mass media, and particularly television, create a cultural conditioning that is more powerful in constructing reality than other cultural influences on those who watch a great deal of television. The Propaganda Model assumes that the public cannot see beyond the representation of reality produced by those in power. The Mythic Reality versus Sensory Reality Model assumes that it is natural for human beings to shift into a mythic mode of perceiving reality, and the tendency is easily manipulated. A different explanation for the public’s willingness to accept the sanitized images of war comes as a condemnation written by a British officer during World War I. Richard Henry Tawney, who after the war became one of Britain’s most influential economic historians, wrote “Some Reflections of a Soldier” in 1916 while convalescing in a hospital in England from wounds received in the Battle of the Somme. Having read the propaganda versions of the catastrophe that the Battle of the Somme in fact was, Tawney wrote: I read your papers and listen to your conversation, and I see clearly that you have chosen to make to yourselves an image of war, not as it is, but of a kind, which being picturesque, flatters your appetite for novelty, for excitement, for easy admiration, without troubling you for masterful emotions. You have chosen, I say, to make an image, because you do not like, or cannot bear, the truth; because you are afraid of what may happen to your souls if you expose them to the inconsistencies and

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contradictions, the doubts and bewilderment, which lie beneath the surface of things. (1916) This self-deluding insistence upon superficiality requires, as Tawney sees it, a complicity among the public on the home front, the government that sends its young to fight, and the journalists and editors who cover the war. In the Tawney Model, it is not the case that the public are simply credulous victims manipulated by the all-powerful media or government; rather, the credulity of the public is a desperate effort to suppress what the public knows to be abhorrent about war: people die, bodies are maimed, worlds are destroyed. There is a kind of relief when those in power sanitize the images of war, because the public wants to be entertained by the novel, the exciting, the thrilling presentation of an entirely predictable mythic narrative. The myth of “Americans at War” means that the good guys get the bad guys, the soldiers pass out chocolate bars to the kiddies, no civilians are killed (at least not on purpose) by Americans, all the injured soldiers can be repaired, and those who die do so with the consciousness that they have sacrificed for their country. The absence of the dead and wounded from television screens in the United States during the Iraq War served a powerful political purpose by preventing the sensory reality from interrupting the powerful mythic reality used to sustain public confidence in the war. Presenting the sensory reality of warfare in the current electronic age means primarily the presentation of the visual reality of war, particularly, the insult to human flesh caused by the myriad of deadly weapons available in the contemporary arsenal. The documentary Baghdad ER, which first aired in the United States on May 21, 2006, subverted the discourse about the war in Iraq. It both invoked pity for and invited identification with the wounded soldier and those who care for him. Beyond that, the documentary constructed the audience as morally entailed by the war because of a shared sense of humanity and responsibility for those who have been wounded and killed. The content and style of Baghdad ER is important as an example of how to elicit the knowledge that cannot speak its name: that war is about death and maiming, and citizens have to accept responsibility for that reality. As an event, it is also important because its showing was controversial; yet, the production qualities of the documentary subverted the “antiwar” label that those in power attempted to use as a frame to discredit it. An understanding of why it was controversial also reveals an additional factor contributing to the representation of the destructiveness of warfare, and that is the debate among elites about how the war ought to be conducted and its consequences for changing the discourse about the war.

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Baghdad ER and Medical Emergency as Reality Television In May 21, 2006, the American cable Home Box Office (HBO) network aired Baghdad ER, a documentary of the lives of the medical staff at the 86th Combat Support Hospital in Iraq and the life-saving operations of the 54th Medical Company Air Ambulance Team. The documentary also records the dangerous patrol of “Route Irish,” nicknamed “IED [improvised explosive device] Alley.” The filmmakers were Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill. Alpert has won twelve Emmy awards for his previous television documentaries. The team shot during two months in 2005, working in twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. Alpert said he wanted to make the film because he “thought it might be a way to be able to show both the horror of war, which I think people really always need to know about if the country is at war, and also the heroism of the people that we’re sending over there to fight that war” (Gross). Baghdad ER has no narrator. It opens as the camera follows the member of an emergency operating team who carries a newly amputated arm from the operating table to a trash bin lined with plastic. The mind boggles as the reality sinks in: that is a real arm, severed from a real human being, and it will never be attached again. It is a simple, childlike realization, and the metacognition that it brings—“yes, it is just that simple and just that horrific”—compels a shocked release from what is essentially a general state of denial. How else could we get on with the mundanities of life while at war if we were fully conscious of that simple reality: limbs once removed are not restored. As the film unfolds, the viewer becomes aware that day after day after day, in twelve-hour shifts, American soldiers are being brought into the ER for amputations and the treatment of burns, shock, and other profound physical trauma because of the land mines laid along Route Irish. The very routine of it is a surreal normality. Baghdad ER subverts the dominant discourse cultivated by the mass media about screening the traumatized body. Since 1997, American television has aired reality series set in the emergency rooms of major hospitals, showing audiences the traumatized bodies of one victim after another and their treatment. Baghdad ER uses a similar format and implicitly raises the expectation that it will mimic reality television by its very title. But the documentary subverts this expectation through the production values it utilizes. During its first run, the original and most popular of the emergency room documentary series on American television was the TLC cable/satellite network’s Trauma: Life in the E.R. In 1997, the program was a half hour, but due to its popularity, it became a one-hour program in 1998. The original series ended in 2002. It was shown regularly as reruns on Discovery Health Channel until 2007. A similar series, Critical Hour, is still featured several times a week. In each episode of Trauma, cameras follow severely injured or ill patients as they are rolled into a Level One (equipped to handle extreme trauma) emergency room in a major American hospital. A team of between eight and ten doctors, residents, and nurses crowd around the patient, calling out information to the

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emergency physician. Viewers see graphic footage of wounds from stabbings, bullet holes, blunt instruments, or from serious accidents. In the operating room, the body is opened, probed, fixed, and stitched while blood gathers around the feet of those attending the surgery. Sometimes, a patient dies—or “is called”— before treatment can be offered or after a surgery. Trauma: Life in the E.R. maintains interest and arousal through a feverish pacing. The narrative line is fragmented. Patient A is rolled in with a head trauma. There is a brief, breathless narration of what happened while the ER team works over the patient and the attending physician gives a brief account of the patient’s status to the camera; then Patient B is rolled in, and the formula is repeated, usually introducing anywhere from three to five patients. As the program progresses, we return to check in on Patient A. Then we cut to another patient, and the pattern is repeated. Additional camera, sound, and editing effects contribute to the high-tension atmospherics: jerky images from handheld cameras; camera frames on partial images, such as a part of the patient’s body, the feet of the physicians standing in blood; crosscutting; use of slow motion; adjusting the digital camera to simulate low-light conditions, which makes objects leave light trails and distorts the image; going to black and white for emphasis; using a “gong” sound effect to signal a dramatic transition. Since only major traumas are shown, the formatting heightens the role of the doctor as one step below a god, capable of split-second decisions that snatch a patient from death. The professional detachment of the doctor differs from the detachment of the viewer. The viewer is provided with the thrills of watching the maimed made whole, but without having to do anything to save the patient. All of the patients are on the screen for too short a period of time, and little of their background or history is provided. The desensitizing effect is evident when one of the patients dies. The focus is on the doctor’s feelings of loss and regret. The question of why the death of an individual ought to be commodified for a cable network television program is never raised to the level of consciousness. It is just part of the “show.” One reason the series ended was that 5,000 patients featured on the program filed a class-action lawsuit because they felt that their privacy was invaded. They claimed either that they did not know what they were signing, that they were in no fit state to give consent, or that aspects of their private life were revealed without their consent (Kinsella v. NYT 2004; Holland 2005; Fisher 2005). An additional factor in canceling the series was that, at the urging of physicians who have objected to the invasion of the physician/patient relationship, the American Medical Association adopted guidelines requiring patients’ prior consent to cover the use of cameras for commercial purposes to record treatment of patients (Birnbaumer 2006; Thrall 2000; Schumacher 2000; Gelderman and Larkin 2002; Legay 2003). Both the lawsuits and the AMA policies indicate how highly invasive the Trauma cameras were into the sensibilities of suffering individuals.

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Trauma: Life in the E.R. thus relied upon several levels of alienation to achieve a marketable spectacle. The viewer was not engaged with the patient as an individual, or even as a fully profiled human being with a history and social relationships, but rather as a medical challenge because of the physical trauma. Patients were not asked for prior permission to be filmed, which meant that the viewer was regularly watching violations of not only the usual ethics of documentary filming, but also of physician/patient privilege. The substitute for actual engagement was artificially provided through special effects in the use of the camera, editing, and sound. Viewers were desensitized to witnessing people die. The legitimizing premise was that the program provided some educational insight and that patients had “volunteered” to have their stories told. Hence, this seemed to validate inducing in the audience a high level of arousal at the graphic presentation of invasive medical procedures and a great deal of blood. In Baghdad ER it is the medical staff and the chaplain whose personalities, reactions, and dedication are paramount to the documentary; yet the patients are not made as anonymous as they are on Trauma: Life in the E.R. When each is brought in, their reason for being in the hospital is already known: they are fighting on behalf of the United States. Among the patients is one shot by a sniper while passing out candy to Iraqi children, another shot in the chest in Fallujah, and many—too many—blown up by land mines while driving in convoy. Unlike Trauma, the emergency room is not a scene of hectic, controlled anarchy and hubbub swirling around a doctor who must make split-second decisions. The doctors and nurses are low-keyed and highly respectful of each patient. There are far fewer medical personnel for each patient—two to three for each severely wounded soldier—and they function as a team. The patients are not cocooned in neck braces and blankets when they are brought in. Most are in their battle uniforms. Nor does the documentary present only one critical casualty after another in order to hype the adrenaline of the viewer. There are soldiers with less severe wounds, who will return to battle. The doctors, nurses, and other staff, all of whom are in the military, are clearly efficient but not as detached in the medical sense as are their civilian counterparts. They are focused but engaged. When one soldier is brought in dead-onarrival (DOA), and there is some hubbub from the attending staff, the physician tells them, “Speak to your team calmly,” and then looks at the clock. “Let’s call this one,” he says. There are none of the special or intrusive techniques of camera, editing, and sound used to hype Trauma. The camera may be handheld, but the shots are steady. The editing is straightforward, and the transitions are consistently simple: fade to black and fade up from black. Instead of breathless narration, white-onblack intertitles are used to tell the viewer the location of the next scene. One doctor articulates the effects on the medical staff of the endless string of injured soldiers: After an amputation there is “a never-ending string of this shit. . . . These assholes with IEDs.” Another surgeon says, “I hate this stupid war,” but does say that he feels he is making a difference in helping to save lives

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and for that reason does not regret his assignment. A third says he “has to believe that the people of Iraq will be the better for it. Otherwise, this is madness.” The articulation of the sense that one is acting against one’s better interest on behalf of others is not an element in Trauma. The featured doctors usually say that they gain a great deal from knowing that they have “made the difference” in whether or not someone will live or die; recover or be permanently damaged. But these doctors do not say that they are in emergency medicine because they feel called upon to address the problems of a society that sends them their patients: those who are injured by bullets, knives, or industrial accidents; those who cannot pay for regular diabetes treatment and ultimately must have their feet amputated; those who come in gasping for breath because of pollutioninduced asthma. Trauma presents the patient as a set of physical injuries that must be addressed. The military approach to treating the wounded attends not only to the physical wound but also the psychological, spiritual, and emotional needs of the patient. As a nurse puts an amputated thumb in the sort of plastic bag usually reserved for freezing shelled peas, she says, “Even if you’re lucky enough not to go home with war wounds on the outside, if you’re not equipped with coping skills, you’ll definitely have them on the inside.” She speaks for both the soldiers who face battle and the medical staff who treat the wounded. There is constant interaction with the injured soldier as a person with a history, not simply as a set of symptoms. A wounded soldier—conscious, stripped, and lying on a gurney, injured within the previous hour—is awarded a purple heart by a commanding officer. Soldiers who are able to talk are given cell phones to call their loved ones even before the dried blood is cleansed from their faces and hands. Soldiers are encouraged to talk about what has happened to them. The chaplain usually takes this role and begins talking to patients as soon as they arrive. One soldier who is lucid but clearly in shock tells the chaplain that he has just seen his best friend’s face blown off while they were driving down Route Irish. The chaplain also plays a central role in easing the dying from this life. A marine is brought in from fighting in Fallujah the day after his twenty-first birthday with a wound to his pulmonary artery. He does not die immediately. The medical team struggles to keep him alive. One of his buddies visits him and says it is to assure the wounded and unconscious soldier that his friends “still have their eyes on him.” As he drifts away from life, the chaplain holds his hand and says into his ear, “Keep fighting if you can. If you can’t, it’s OK.” This marine dies. The camera does not show us the face of Lance Corporal Bob Mininger. We know him as a shape covered by an army blanket. In a later segment the chaplain is called to pray over a dead soldier who has stated no religious preference. The chaplain offers a prayer of sympathy and hope. He later says he does not count how many dead he has prayed over. In Baghdad ER the patient is treated with respect, as an individual who is remembered, loved, has a history, is in the throes of death and may be

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afraid, and deserves to die with dignity. This compassion is opposite to the way the dying are depicted in Trauma; for example, in one notably insensitive episode, a woman is brought in who is coughing up blood. She must be operated on immediately or she will die. Just before she is wheeled out of the ER, the camera gives an overhead shot of the elderly woman lying in her own blood, glassy-eyed, on the brink of death and staring into a camera lens. What must she have thought when she saw this camera loom over her? What should we think of ourselves for watching? Baghdad ER is not exempt from some of the criticism that can be laid against Trauma: Life in the E.R. Both are highly selective. Trauma presents one after another of severe trauma cases, leaving out the others. Baghdad ER does not cover the other patients treated at the hospital: wounded Iraqi civilians and wounded insurgents. Nor does it show the worst or most shocking cases; these were intentionally left out. The camera intrudes into the lives of wounded soldiers as they are being wheeled into the ER, and we witness the death of a marine.

Flag-Draped Coffins and the Controversy over Screening Baghdad ER Although the military had obviously approved the project, a rift over control of the images of dead or wounded soldiers became public at the special premiere of Baghdad ER on May 15, 2006, in the auditorium of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Notably absent invitees were Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense; Gordon England, the Deputy Secretary of Defense; Lt. General Kevin Kiley, Army Surgeon General; and Pete Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff; along with numerous other invited members of the top military. Sheila Nevins, president of HBO’s documentary unit, expressed surprise and regret: “I can’t quite figure out their reaction. I was hoping this audience would be covered in green,” a reference to the color of the U.S. Army dress uniform. Richard Plepler, HBO’s executive vice president, said he had screened a preview for senior active and retired army officers, who gave the documentary their enthusiastic support (Farhi 2006). As the day for the television premiere approached, the frame placed around the Baghdad ER before its first showing, and particularly after the military noshows at the Washington premiere, was whether the documentary would fall into the conventional binary (antiwar/pro-war) that had been imposed upon images of the fallen soldier—for the purposes of this discussion, both wounded and dead soldiers. The polarities endlessly repeated made it “antiwar” to document American casualties and, through inference, “pro-war” not to document them (Scarborough 2006; Leonard 2006; Miklaszewski 2006; Cornwell 2006) This frame had already been placed around images of the flag-draped coffins and the honor guard accompanying them on their return flights from Kuwait. The original ban on photographic images of military coffins or funeral

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ceremonies was imposed by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney when President George Bush took the nation to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, and was renewed when President Bush went to war in 2003 (Mink 2004). Just how important control over the image was to the government was clearly demonstrated in April 2004, when the Seattle Times ran a picture of twenty-two flag-draped coffins in a cargo plane hold in Kuwait, awaiting the flight home. The pictures had been taken by Tami Silicio, 50, whose hometown was near Seattle. She and her husband were working at the Kuwait airport for Maytag Corporation, which held a contract to provide transportation services to the U.S. military. As U.S. military casualties rose during the months of March and April, Silicio, who assisted in loading the cargo planes, felt overwhelmed “with grief.” She sent her photograph to a friend in Alaska via email. Her friend called the editor of the Seattle Times, who wished to publish it. In an e-mail response to the editor, who raised the possibility that Maytag Corporation might fire both Silicio and her husband, she wrote: “The picture is about them, not me: about how they served their country and paid the price for our freedom and the respect they receive on their way home.” Both Silicio and her husband were fired. Maytag acknowledged the Pentagon had raised “very specific concerns” with the corporation, and that the corporation agreed with the Pentagon’s objections (Fancher 2004). Shortly after the Silicio pictures ran on April 18, 2004, the Pentagon released the first pictures of military photographs of flag-draped coffins in response to a filing by a private citizen under the Freedom of Information Act. Subsequently, the Pentagon declared that releasing the images had been a mistake and refused to release any more. In October 2004 University of Delaware Professor Ralph Begleiter filed under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of additional photographs of flag-draped coffins. When the pictures were not released, Begleiter filed a lawsuit charging that the U.S. military had failed to comply with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Six months later, the Pentagon preempted (forestalled) a ruling by the U.S. District Court and released additional pictures (April 2005). The Pentagon reportedly stopped the practice of taking official photographs or videos of the honor guards for flag-draped coffins or funeral ceremonies, while maintaining the ban on press coverage. In other words, there will be no further official or public historical or archival record of the ceremonies for the fallen soldier (Bernton and Rivera 2004; Tyson, 2005). The absence of images is not due entirely to government censorship. The American University School of Communication polled 200 American and international journalists covering the war in Iraq and found that 17 percent of them said their news organizations had an outright policy of not publishing pictures of the dead, while 42 percent had rules that discouraged it. David Carr, writing in the New York Times, reported that these policies were influenced by “a variety of taste issues and commercial considerations—a dead body is never a good adjacency for ads—and a squeamish public aesthetic that can lead to

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germane but grisly photographs being left on the darkroom floor” (Carr 2006). These photographs are point-of-death images; for example, Carr reports that a “gritty, horrific portrait” of a U.S. Army captain who was shot and killed in Fallujah ran in a number of European papers but not in the United States. Baghdad ER achieves a preemptive strike against those who would be prepared to call any film that showed wounded or dying soldiers “antiwar.” It does not offer a narrative or an analysis; there is no “authority” to tell us how to think on what we are seeing. The documentary also forestalls the accusation that depicting the wounded or dying soldier will be insensitive because it will appropriate the fallen as a symbol for some meaning the warrior may not have stood for. One wounded national guardsmen, who has been in Iraq for one day and who is told that he will be sent home because he needs eye surgery, is very upset because he wants to stay and fight with his unit. Another soldier, also in the national guard, who is sent home because of his wounds, comments: “I volunteered to do this to pay off my bills and build my family a house.” He says that he has “lost his best friend” in the war. The documentary most clearly undermines the validation of a detached gaze upon the wounded body—the hallmark of the television reality emergency room programs. The relationship of the staff to the patient demonstrates that the appropriate response to the wounded and the dying is careful attention to them as human beings, and not as a set of symptoms or a collection of body parts. Freed from the chains of the false “pro-war/ antiwar” binary and compelled to view the wounded body as an object of compassion, the audience is also freed to become morally entailed—to feel pity for what American soldiers endure—by the harrowing images of wounded and dying men.

Baghdad ER and the Army You Wish For The connotation of pity is that it inclines the person who experiences it to want to do something to alleviate suffering; it implicitly means that one has the capacity to intervene because one is not in the same troubled or dangerous state as the one who is pitied. This potential is at the heart of the matter for understanding why Baghdad ER became the center of controversy before its airing, even though the project had the approval of the Pentagon from the outset. Most of the casualties in Baghdad ER are soldiers who were hit by IEDs while driving in convoy. At the time the documentary was aired, it was already public knowledge that the vehicles soldiers were required to drive lacked sufficient armor to protect the drivers and that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seemed indifferent to the problem. At a press conference in Kuwait on December 9, 2004, Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a soldier why “soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal” to armor their vehicles. The 2,300 soldiers in attendance cheered. Rumsfeld gave the callous answer: “As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want” (CNN 2004).

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In April 2006 the widespread internal criticism of Rumsfeld within the military became highly public as a total of nine retired officers, including half a dozen generals and one retired admiral, called for Rumsfeld’s resignation on the grounds of incompetence. The officers had firsthand experience of the war in Iraq, either at the planning stage or once operations began. On April 18, 2006, Bush made it clear that he would not be moved. “I am the decider,” he famously said (Cloud and Schmitt 2006; Gordon 2006a, 2006b; Sevastopulo 2006; Blumenthal 2006a). In June, online magazine reporter Sidney Blumenthal reported that George Bush Senior had been behind the push to replace Rumsfeld in an effort to salvage his son’s historical legacy in the face of the failing war in Iraq (2006b). On May 19, 2005, Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held what was called a Department of Defense Town Hall Meeting in the Pentagon, probably intended as a public relations opportunity to still the criticism within the Pentagon. A member of the audience asked about the publicity that preceded the premiere of Baghdad ER and wondered what either Rumsfeld or Pace planned to tell the American public the day after the documentary aired, “when they’re wondering, you know, what are we doing to stop IEDs?” Secretary Rumsfeld said he had not seen the film. Neither Rumsfeld nor Pace responded well to the question. Rumsfeld said that a great deal of money was being spent to develop unspecified technologies to solve the problem, and Pace said that the enemy was listening and so he could not discuss what was being done (Department of Defense Briefing 2006). Rumsfeld was able to say that he “had not seen the film,” because he and General Pace and other top brass had declined to attend the premiere in Washington four days earlier, May 15. There cannot be much doubt that Rumsfeld declined to see the film because the documentation of soldier’s bodies dismembered by IEDs would implicitly suggest that the retired top-ranking military who called for his resignation had a good point. The sudden about-face to be against the documentary seems likely to reflect not a change of heart or mind within the majority of the military, but a response by higher-ranking officers to the negative reaction of their boss, Secretary Rumsfeld, once he understood the implications of Baghdad ER. The anticipatory aversion to this implication was undoubtedly conveyed to the right-wing commentators on Fox News, who daily reflect the administration’s “talking points” in their commentary. They offered preemptive opinions that the film would undoubtedly be “antiwar.” Pentagon officials issued warnings against the scheduled screening of the film at twenty-two military bases in the United States because, they said, it could trigger post-traumatic stress syndrome (Cornwell 2006). These were smoke screens to prevent attention to the documentary’s implicit criticism of the lack of appropriate protection for American soldiers.

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Some Concluding Thoughts: The Pity of War in the Visual Age Wilfred Owen did not survive World War I, but his poetry spoke for his generation and continues to speak to us today. In a preface he planned for a book of poetry, he wrote: This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, Except war. Above All I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful. The Cultivation Theory, the Propaganda Model, and the Sensory versus Mythic Theory explain how the mass media are effectively used by those in power to construct a media reality that seems more real than any immediate, lived reality. Each supposes that if the institutions making such manipulation possible were reformed or radically altered, the public would have a clearer, more balanced, and hence more realistic understanding not only of the world, but also of their role in it. All three approaches are commendable for the confidence they place in ordinary people—once they can be freed from the chains that bind them in the cave of shadows cast by those who control and manipulate them. Tawney (1916) is much less confident of this essential potential. He recognizes in the gullibility of the public not a victimization by the propagandists and the powers they serve, but a complicity. He argues that the suppressed knowledge of the carnage of war reflects a fear in individuals of being overwhelmed by “masterful emotions” or of losing their souls if they actually confront the truth that the aims of war and the means of war constitute irreconcilable inconsistencies. What Tawney recognizes and others do not is that the moral sensibilities of compassion or pity will not automatically assert themselves in the hearts and minds of the public if the constraints on the media are removed and the public is therefore better informed, or exposed to more points of view. Owen recognized this, too: “The Poetry is in the pity.” The conveying of the pity of war requires a poetics of pity.

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Baghdad ER does not have the elegiac power of Owen’s poetry. But it uses the moving image to convey a different way of understanding the wounded body than is offered by similar screened formats, and in so doing, it sets out to elicit the pity of war. Yet Baghdad ER invokes a parochial pity, one fixed on the specific harm to American soldiers by the failure of the government to provide them suitable armament. Even when the pressures against representing the fallen or wounded soldier lessened, this narrowness of focus persisted. After the November 2006 elections in the United States, the Democrats gained control of both Houses of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld stepped aside as Secretary of Defense. The Bush administration turned its back on both the message from the public opposing the conduct of the war and the report of the Iraq Commission, which was appointed by Congress to study the war and offer ways to address the obvious quagmire. There was also considerable opposition from within the military to escalating the war. During this contentious period, CNN on Veteran’s Day aired a documentary on the emergency care in military hospitals in Baghdad. CNN Presents: Combat Hospital (November 4, 2006) was accompanied by none of the controversy that preceded the showing of Baghdad ER, probably reflecting the change in leadership at the Defense Department. During sixteen days it was filmed by CNN Bureau Chief Cal Perry and CNN Senior Photojournalist Dominic Swann at the 10th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad. Without narration or music, it presents stark images of wounded soldiers, most of whom have been injured by IEDs. Unlike Baghdad ER, this documentary shows Iraqis brought in for treatment. They are all victims of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. One little girl of three, who has been shot in the foot, is brought in after insurgents have killed her mother and father because they had assisted the American forces. As one surgeon comments, the little girl would not be in the hospital, and her parents would be alive, if the Americans were not there. The injury of the little girl takes a heavy emotional toll on the medical staff who attend to her. The images were, indeed, wrenching; they entailed the viewer in considering the cost of continuing the war, just as Baghdad ER made it difficult to avoid questioning the lack of suitable armor for convoy vehicles. That both documentaries depicted specific issues important both within the military and as a matter of public concern at the time they were made reflects both the effects of embedding reporters and also the tendency of Americans to see issues through the narrow lens of American concerns. What has yet to be shown on mainstream American television are documentaries of the cost to Iraqi lives of the devastation that the American forces have unleashed upon the civilian population. This is the ultimate pity of war, the most challenging to American eyes because it requires considering not what the conduct of the war is doing to American soldiers, but what the American military has been doing to the innocents of Iraq. These documentaries of the deepest pity of this war are available in the United States, but it may be quite some time before Americans are

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asked to see them on the screens in their living rooms. The pity of war bodies on corporate media television screens to this point in the United States is reserved for the effects on the soldiers of the war in Iraq. It is not extended to those in Iraq who were harmed by the actions of American soldiers.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Bernton, Hal, and Ray Rivera. 2004. “Air Force Adds to Controversy with Its Own Coffin Photos.” Seattle Times, April 23, A1. Birnbaumer, Diane M. 2006. “TV Filming in the ER: How do Patients and Providers Feel about It?” Journal Watch Emergency Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, http://www.jwatch.org/ specialtycare.dtl (accessed July 28, 2007). Blumenthal, Sidney. 2006a. “I’m the Decider.” Salon.com, April 19, 2006. http://www.salon.com/ opinion/blumenthal/2006/04/19/rumsfeld_bush/index.html (accessed August 1, 2006). ———. 2006b. “George Bush Sr. Asked Retired General to Replace Rumsfeld.” Salon.com, June 8, 2006. http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/06/08/haditha/print.html (accessed: July 28, 2007). Carr, David. 2006. “Show Me the Bodies.” New York Times, July 12. Cloud, David S., and Eric Schmitt. 2006. “More Retired Generals Call for Rumsfeld’s Resignation.” New York Times, April 14, 1. CNN. 2004. “Troops Put Thorny Questions to Rumsfeld.” CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2004/ WORLD/meast/12/08/rumsfeld.troops (accessed on July 28, 2007). Cornwell, Rupert. 2006. “Brassed Off: Why the Pentagon Has Turned on the Makers of Baghdad ER.” The Independent (London), May 18, 32. Department of Defense Briefing. 2006. May 19. Transcript: DOD Town Hall Meeting. Federal News Service. http://www.fnsg.com (accessed July 28, 2007). Fancher, Michael R. 2004. “Worldwide Interest in Coffin Photo Was Surprising, Gratifying.” Seattle Times, May 2, A2. Farhi, Paul. 2006. “Strategic Retreat? HBO Says Army Rallied Around Baghdad ER, But Soldiers Are Mostly MIA at Screening in Washington.” Washington Post. May 17, C 1. Fisher, Daniel. 2005. “The Real Reality TV.” Forbes.com, June 21, http://www.forbes.com/technology/2005/06/21/privacy-lawsuit-televison-cz_df_0621documentary.html (accessed July 28, 2007). Gelderman, Joel M., and Gregory L. Larkin. 2002. “Commercial Filming of Patient Care Activities in Hospitals.” Journal of the American Medical Association 288, no. 3 (July 17): 372–79. Gerbner, George, and Larry Gross. 1976. “Living with Television: The Violent Profile.” Journal of Communication. 26:2 (June). 172–74. Gordon, Michael R. 2006a. “Criticizing an Agent of Change as Failing to Adapt.” New York Times, April 21, 18. ———. 2006b. “Rumsfeld under Fire: As Policy Decisions Loom, a Code of Silence Is Broken.” New York Times, April 16, 18. Gross, Terry. Transcript. “John Alpert and William O’Neil discuss their new documentary, Baghdad ER.” Fresh Air. WHYY. May 29, 2006. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Holland, Lila. 2005. “Emergency Reality Series Sparks Lawsuit.” TV.com, June 24, http://www.tv.com/trauma-life-in-the-e.r./show/6393/story/379.htmlom_act=convert&om_ clk=headlinessh (accessed July 28, 2007). Kinsella v. NYT Television et al. 2004. Entertainment Litigation Reporter, August 20. Lagay, Faith. 2003. “Resuscitating Privacy in Emergency Settings: AMA Policy Requires Patients’ Consent before Filming.” American Medical Association Virtual Mentor Policy Forum 5, no. 2, http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/9577.html (accessed July 28, 2007). Leonard, John. 2006. “War Torn: In Baghdad ER the Point of View Is Objective, but the Conclusions Are Impossible to Escape.” New York Times Magazine, May 22. Leshan, Lawrence. 2002. The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness. New York: Helios. Miklaszewski, Jim. 2006. “News in Depth Tonight: Casualties of War.” NBC Nightly News, May 20. Transcript: NBC News Transcripts. Mink, Eric. 2004. “Editorial: We’re Obliged to Bear Witness.” St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 28. Owen, Wilfred. 1965. Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. (Rev. ed.) New York: New Directions. Scarborough, Joe. 2006. Scarborough Country, May 23. Transcript: MSNBC transcripts. Sevastopulo, Demetri. 2006. “Rumsfeld under Fire of Eighth Retired General.” Financial Times (London), April 25, USA edition, 6. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Tawney, Richard Henry. 1916. “Some Reflections of a Soldier.” The Nation 20 (October 21). Reprinted in Tawney, The Attack: And Other Papers, 21–28. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1971. Thrall, Terese Hudson, et al. 2000. “TV Cameras in the ER.” Hospitals and Health Networks, 74, no. 10 (January 1): 28. Tyson, Ann Scott. 2005. “Hundreds of Photos of Caskets Released.” Washington Post, April 29, A10.

Televised Baghdad ER. 2006. Directed by John Alpert and Matthew O’ Neill. HBO. CNN Presents: Combat Hosptial. Directed by Cal Perry. 2006. CNN Trauma: Life in the ER. 1997. TLC. Discovery Health Channel.

Introduction to Part Two Karen Randell

Figure 1. Soldiers from Battery B, 3rd Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, pause at the end of a patrol near Wynot, Iraq, September 8, 2006. This photo appears on www.army.mil (http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/ uploads/large/2006/CSA-2006-09-08-094936.jpg). At the beginning of The Green Berets (Kellogg 1968) we hear what it takes to be a Green Beret, “Fearless men. . . . Fighting Soldiers from the sky, . . . who jump at night, . . . who mean what they say,” who can operate “well” in “hand-to-hand combat.” This construction of a superhuman fighting force is an image perpetuated by the Green Berets themselves. In his history of the Corps, Stanton has documented that the members are “rugged individualists, thoroughly professional yet capable of going beyond standard operating doctrine, . . . able to survive the most hostile environment, and to take care of themselves and others, . . . to be independent thinkers, able to grasp opportunities and innovate with the materials at hand, . . . to fight the enemy with his own weapons, in his own style, on his own terrain.” (1985, 105). The war body here is signified by its mythical heroic stature. The film engages with this image of supreme fighter and attempts to connect its audiences back to the stable image of World War II, where “a group 81

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of men, led by a hero, undertake a mission that will accomplish an important military objective” (Basinger 2005, 46). This is problematic within the context of the ongoing Vietnam War however, where the image of the conquering war body was becoming more and more unstable. In 1966 a headline in the New York Herald Tribune reads, “Ex-Teacher, a War Hero, Arrested as Bank Robber.” During the article his father is interviewed and comments: Why the kid should pull a thing like this, I can’t figure out. . . . He was wounded in the war, in the back of the neck, with shrapnel, and something might have snapped. The father reads his son’s behavior in terms of the injury that he received during the war. War trauma here is indicated as the motivation for the robbery even though when arrested the veteran’s comment, “Well, I guess my financial worries are over,” is suggestive of fundamental issues around employment and benefits for veterans. The notion of the dysfunctional or “crazed” vet in films of the Vietnam era was fueled by the notion of the Vietnam vet as a “problem” to be solved. The combatant war body was a troublesome entity when not at war. Articles like Leslie H. Whitten’s “special” on “Vietnam Vets Face Problems” in the same year (1966) indicate how the returning men were considered “difficult.” The subheading asks: How is the nation coping with the special problems of the servicemen returning from Viet Nam and other veterans now pouring out of the service at the rate of 50,000 a month? Although the headline suggests that it is the veterans who experience problems, the subtext and tone of the article suggest that the presence of so many veterans is also a problem for the society that they return to: the ambivalence toward the veteran is clear. Counseling programs, education, and medical facilities are all areas covered by the article, which sets out to educate the reader as to the needs of the veterans and the facilities that are set in place to help: the veterans rights, we are told, “remain formidable.” The image of the lone Vietnam veteran became a staple of American popular cinema, and his alienation from American society was a recurring theme in the early films of the Vietnam veteran—the war body had gone bad. Films depicting unstable Vietnam veterans were screened as early as 1965, as for example in Motor Psycho (Russ Meyer) in which the veteran is depicted as a crazy, leatherclad biker. In 1968, The Edge (Robert Kramer), Angels from Hell (Bruce Kessler), and The Angry Breed (David Commons) all show the veteran to be a vengeful and emotionally unstable entity. The prepublicity for Angels from Hell, states:

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Mike (Tom Stern), a former motorcycle outlaw returns from Viet Nam somewhat of a war hero and with the wild fever of frontline battle still racing through his veins. . . . In the violent showdown Mike is shot. He dies in frustrated disillusionment in a rebellious fight against the very establishment for which he so bravely fought in Viet Nam. (Press Book 1968) Here this film makes an explicit link between fighting in Vietnam and violence in American society: the veteran’s return with “wild fever” in his veins suggests that violence has returned to America with him. The war is something that has been internalized, and the return of the war body infects the home space. This infected combatant war body becomes the leitmotif of the Vietnam veteran in film. Its manifestation as an infecting influence on the home front was also felt after World War I. After this war the civilian witnessing of the war body was evident on the streets of Europe, as Bourke points out: “mass mutilation was there for all to see” (Bourke 1996, 35). In America the consequences of the war were being felt as early as July 1917 (three months after America entered the war), when an article in the Washington Post details the help being offered to “crippled soldiers and sailors [who] will be instructed in trades and occupations that will make them self-supporting.” The war body did not just exist on the battlefield: modern interventions in medicine and surgery had ensured that it had returned to the home front with all its visceral signifiers of modern warfare. Such anxiety about the returning war body is present in all of the chapters in this part. The chapters in part 2 do not necessarily engage with the war film as you might expect to find it: the generic hybridity of the horror/war film is apparent in two of the chapters here as the war body goes “underground” in its zombie/ horror manifestation: the body of the contemporary soldier does not always play to the generic conventions (see Neale 2000; Basinger 2003). Adele Parker reads Robin Campillo’s 2004 film They Came Back (Les revenants) in terms of history, memory, and identity through an analysis of the living dead “zombies” in the film. The returnees become a locus for anxiety, a symbol, Parker argues, of the repressed history of France not only in terms of its “collaborative” Vichy past, but also in terms of its great losses of war dead. Their every move is subject to surveillance, marking the state’s “desire to contain and control this new minority” and highlighting the anxiety caused by the return of an unwanted past. Parker’s analysis weaves through a complex negotiation of trauma and national identity to locate the figures of the returnees as agents of a potential dialogue of reparation, a visible articulation of the losses of the past. In her chapter “Bleeding Bodies and Post-Cold War Politics: Saving Private Ryan and the Gender of Vulnerability,” Sarah Hagelin focuses on Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg 1998) and its representation of the damaged male body. Hagelin argues that the assumption of “stoicism and sacrifice” often associated with the representation of the soldier in Hollywood WWII films is undermined

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in Saving Private Ryan. Instead, the “visual strategies” at play in the film subject the male body to a visceral destruction, focusing “obsessively” on the vulnerability of the male body. Hagelin places her argument within the cultural context of the Iraq War and its integration of women soldiers into the front line. Does this present a new vulnerability to be addressed in popular culture or, asks Hagelin, are these issues to be hidden too? Karen Randell’s chapter “Trench Horror: Deathwatch and the Resignification of World War I” takes up Parker’s discussion of the returning “zombie” soldier in an analysis of Deathwatch (Bassett 2002) and an interrogation of body horror. Set in WWI, the film negotiates the trauma of shell shock and trench warfare through the inflection of the horror genre. This film’s hybrid genre enables an articulation of the trauma of war through the mise-en-scène of horror. Randell also interrogates the cultural specificity of trauma in Deathwatch, discussing how the film interprets absence and loss, visceral body mutilation and psychological damage. Reclaiming the war body through the horror genre offers a fantasy space for articulating the terror of war. It is a space where anything could happen to the war body because it isn’t a war film: the verisimilitude of the war genre is subjugated to the narrative tropes of the horror film. The final chapter of part 2 places us explicitly back in the post–Gulf War moment in its analysis of Jarhead (Mendes 2005). In their chapter “One Nation Invisible: Unveiling the Hidden War Body on Screen,” H. Louise Davis and Jeffrey Johnson draw attention to this war’s connection with an earlier war in its evocation of Vietnam: in this the Gulf War body becomes essentially invisible. Davis and Johnson draw on the central theme of the absent war body. The “war body,” they argue, has “no right to visibility”; it is hidden, remains anonymous, both in fiction texts and in the popular media. It “peers out of the jungle,” is “hidden in foxholes,” or is underreported and underrepresented in images of the real conflicts in our daily news. Through a comparative analysis of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) with Sam Mendes’s 2005 Gulf War film, Jarhead, they demonstrate the evolution of the recuperative figure that has, at least in the realm of twenty-first-century popular culture, been rendered redundant. The chapter draws parallels between the depictions of both military bodies and technologies in Mendes’s film and nonfiction accounts of the current war in Iraq; it tries not only to identify the new role played by the U.S. marine, but also to locate/situate the human body within modern war. Part 2, “The Body of the Soldier,” thus looks at representations of the combatant war body as it is resignified in depictions of four very different wars. All contributors place the context of their analysis within the post–Gulf War moment, suggesting that the war film is permeable in its ability to articulate the current anxieties and prevalent discourses of war.

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Works Cited Printed or Posted Basinger, Jeanine. 2003. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2005. “The World War II Combat Film.” In The War Film. Edited by Robert Eberwein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge. New York Herald Tribune. 1966. “Ex-Teacher, a War Hero, Arrested as Bank Robber.” New York Herald Tribune, December 30 (Veterans clipping file. Center for American History: University of Texas at Austin). Press Book, Angels from Hell. 1968. Produced by Kurt Neumann. BFI Archive. Stanton, Shelby L. 1985. Green Berets at War: US Army Special Forces in South East Asia 1956–1975. New York: Dell Books. Quoted in Philip Slotkin. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America, 525. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Washington Post. 1917. “Help Crippled in War.” Washington Post, July 9, 7 (Newspaper Morgue. Center for American History: University of Texas at Austin). Whitten, Leslie H. 1966. “Viet Vets Face Problems.” World Journal Tribune, USA, December 4 (Veterans clipping file. Center for American History: University of Texas at Austin).

Filmed Angels from Hell. Directed by Bruce Kessler. USA, 1968. Angry Breed, The. Directed by David Commons. USA, 1968. Edge, The. Directed by Robert Kramer. USA, 1968. Green Berets, The. Directed by Kellogg, Ray and Wayne, John. USA, 1968. Motor Psycho. Directed by Russ Meyer. USA, 1965

5

They Came Back War and Changing National Identity Adele Parker

France was continuously involved in wars from 1939 until 1962—World War II, Indochina, and finally Algeria—and the country as a whole has yet to come to terms with these events, their consequences, and long-term effects. In recent years much ink has been spilled, much of it by the French themselves, over what is referred to as “declinism,” or a feeling among the French that their collective identity is being diluted, is slipping through their fingers. They say: “To be French today is to mourn for what we no longer are” (Chantal Delsol, cited in Gentleman 2004) or “Fear, absolute fear of change, is the dominant emotion of the country” (Pascal Bruckner, cited in Gopnik 2005, 38). These sentiments are most often traced back to the end of the WWII and, more recently, to the end of the empire and the beginning of the so-called postcolonial era, since when France has been reduced to the hexagon. Now add the further dilution of collective identity occasioned by France’s absorption into the new Europe, and the encroachment of free-market practices. With all the talk of boundaries crossed and borders dissolved in this age of globalization and unification, one of the few remaining boundaries is the one between life and death, the particular demarcation between past and present that is the one between the living and the dead. In this context, a recent film by first-time director Robin Campillo (2004) entitled They Came Back (Les revenants) mirrors some of the anxieties about French military history and national identity as embodied in the “returnees”1—returned from the dead—in one French town. Those who come back are the recently deceased from the last ten years, and all of the governmental, medical, and military institutions of classification, knowledge, and control must coordinate the reintegration of 13,000 people. These living dead are not zombies hungry for human flesh, but rather are clean and preternaturally impassive, a bit pale but showing no signs of disease or decomposition, when, in a luminously shot first scene they come flowing as a body out of the cemetery gates and down the main street. We learn that they are returning worldwide, but the film focuses on one small French city,2 where in city hall the mayor and his aides discuss how to integrate the sudden influx of 86

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returnees: a Red Cross shelter is set up to accommodate them according to UN guidelines, where doctors identify and examine them while social workers find them menial jobs and provide their families with reinsertion counseling. Concern is expressed about the need to create new jobs and reinstate pensions for the many returnees who had already retired. The film cuts between scenes of efficient bureaucrats reeling off statistics and scenes following three reunions: the mayor with his wife, Martha; Isham and Véronique with their six-year-old son Sylvain; and, especially, Rachel with her fiancé, Mathieu. Campillo stated that he wanted the story to take place “in a bubble” in a provincial town3: while events can be globally pertinent, they still take place within a particular locale, like the holding of refugees in the small seaside town of Sangatte. “What interested me . . . is that, from under an appearance of formal unity, a heterogeneity surfaces, and a sort of disturbance results” (cited in Mangeot 2005).4 The returnees can stand in for, or embody, returning soldiers and war dead, immigrants and refugees, and on a larger scale, the return of the barely repressed past of Vichy collaboration, colonial wars and torture, inadequate social integration policies, and even the more-distant history of Haitian colonization and the legends of zombie slaves. A mayor’s aide in the film points out that “the situation resembles that of refugee assistance.” Other issues that specifically inspired Campillo (who was himself born in Morocco in 1962, six years after independence) include AIDS, the elderly, peacetime lives of traumatized soldiers, and increased fears of terrorism since 9/11 (Kalina 2005). In particular, he locates the seeds of his project in early images of AIDS victims and his fear of this unthinkable and yet somehow inevitable death. For him the film resonates with real elements (like Sangatte), and he drew on particular media images and documents, but it is not so much “about” those things as it is about the experience of being set apart from society. There is room for all of these meanings in the film, consciously intended or not. My particular focus will be on what I see as representations of the status of French soldiers returning from combat in Algeria and on the lasting repercussions of that particular colonial relationship and subsequent fight for independence, seen most recently in, for example, rioting by French youth of North African descent in the fall of 2005. I will look at this film’s construction of a particular contemporary moment in France, suffused by events that were elided from national discourse for forty years and that have become an increasingly important part of that discourse since 1999 (Stora 2004). Official government denial of the effects of these events has further demoralized an already traumatized nation, and I suggest that the returnees might ultimately suggest a possibility for dialogue between political and social exigencies. There is a correlation between the inability of the returned dead to grasp the future, or even the present, and the difficulty the living have in coming to grips with the past. Finally, I examine how viewing war dead as “the living of the past” can open up a contiguous space between repressed past, anxious present, and unimaginable future, thus dislodging the nation from a melancholic state and toward true mourning.

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The dead in this film bear an uncanny resemblance to their former living selves, the difference being that they display flat affect and slowed movements and responses, coupled with a strange restlessness. One doctor compares their state to a sort of “post-traumatic aphasia,” while a psycholinguist proffers the theory of “echo and memory”: the dead can imitate the speech and behavior of others, or they can draw on remembered words and gestures, but they cannot innovate or produce language on their own. Their condition could possibly be temporary, as one doctor speculates: “They seem to be in a latent period. A waking phase, in a way.” Their barely maintained semblance of normalcy is simply a matter of impersonation and recollection: the dead are truly other. “All the subjects display a lack of synchronism with reality, at least in their oral expression,” the doctor continues. Not only have the living been traumatized by the loss (and now return) of their loved ones; it also appears that the dead are playing out a “mute repetition of suffering” (Caruth 1996, 9). The dead are restless and so are medicated to keep them from wandering and to make them sleep. Heat-sensitive infrared cameras attached to balloons easily track their movements, as their body temperatures average five degrees lower than those of living bodies, and interviews with them are videotaped. This filming and recording, along with various acts of spying with night goggles and video cameras, constitutes the instantaneous and obsessive archiving that for Pierre Nora is symptomatic of the modern age: it marks the state’s desire to contain and control the new minority in its midst (Nora 1996, 9). Voices of bureaucrats and experts diagnosing and explaining the returnees’ symptoms are often heard over shots of them walking or working in cafeterias, factories, or construction, drawing us as colluding spectators into this process of state control. The last scenes of the film can be seen as referring to various episodes of modern terror, when the dead set off explosions as they move through town to return underground. Linking them to specific military episodes can illuminate many of the cinematographic elements that viewers have found most illogical. There is no explanation for the return of the dead, and this can be illuminated by the behavior of the traumatized as described by Cathy Caruth, drawing on Freud: Catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through them. . . . These repetitions are particularly striking because they seem not to be initiated by the individual’s own acts but rather appear as the possession of some people by a sort of fate, a series of painful events to which they are subjected, and which seem to be entirely outside their wish or control. (Caruth 1996, 1–2) The return of the dead is presented as inevitable; Campillo is not interested with the particular causes of this trauma, but with the consequences, the efforts to regain control of the suffering mind that drives the body to inexplicable acts. Indeed, it is the accidental, incomprehensible nature of the event, “the way

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[the event] was precisely not known in the first instance [that] returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 1996, 4). As a social group, the dead can stand in for any “maligned, ghettoized, yet worldwide minority” that becomes the object of study. What we are witnessing is the return of the repressed, of the real that always comes back to the same place; the eruption of the unknown and unsymbolized into the linear, cohesive narrative that a nation is always trying to construct for itself. The returnees are, in part, that which cannot be contained or explained by historical discourses of nationhood and identity. In the case of Algeria, this is due not only to psychological repression of traumatic events but also to deliberate and consistent official suppression of facts.

The Undeclared War The Algerian War, the longest French war of decolonization, in which over 4.5 percent of the population fought, is a site of intense repression for a number of reasons. Throughout the war, the word “war” was officially forbidden to the press; instead, the conflict was referred to by a series of carefully chosen epithets: “events,” “police operations,” “maintenance of order,” “operations to reestablish peace,” and “the Algerian drama” (Stora 1992, 13). After the war, efforts toward memorialization focused on a reinterpretation of the WWII Resistance as the cement for national identity. To call the conflict a war would have been to acknowledge Algeria as a separate nation, rather than the three French departments it had constituted since 1848. It would have been a reminder of defeat and perhaps led to questions about the legitimacy of the Fifth Republic (Evans 1997, 75). Films making reference to the “events” taking place in Algeria were censored, and the media portrayed Algeria as being at war solely with itself, with French soldiers simply lending assistance (Stora 1992, 43). The most pertinent repercussions of this were for the soldiers themselves, who did not have the rights of ex-servicemen, with all that that entails in the way of pensions, disability allocations, and social recognition, until 1974, after tireless campaigns on their part. In spite of the large postwar influx from Algeria of approximately 1 million French citizens and half a million Harkis (Algerians who fought for France),5 the French economy was growing stronger; “it was hoped that the combination of consumerism and full employment would, by rapidly reinserting the veterans into mainstream society, efface any trauma” (Evans 1997, 75). This was not to be. We can see the returnee, as veteran of the Algerian conflict, being marginalized once again upon his second return: misrecognized, misunderstood by family, unable to take up his old way of life or to speak on his own behalf. There were other factors that made it difficult for combatants of this unconventional war to feel part of a cohesive group: their experiences varied according to their own allegiances (to a French Algeria, to an independent Algeria), military status, and which phase of the war they participated in. The war itself had

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no clear temporal boundaries: the beginning was fixed, in retrospect, as November 1, 1954, but the end could have been one of three different dates in 1962, and the day chosen to memorialize veterans of the North African campaign was a topic of heated debate. The war took place in what became foreign soil after 1962, there is no battle site in France that can be visited, and for many years there was only one commemorative site: a statue to the unknown soldier of the North African campaign in the town of Arras, dedicated in 1977.6 In December 2002 President of France Jacques Chirac inaugurated a national memorial in Paris to combatants of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and in 2003 a law was passed announcing an official memorial day for those who died in combat in North Africa. Not until June 10, 1999, did the National Assembly at long last adopt a measure giving the conflict the official name of the Algerian War. Remembering was made even more difficult by the closure of national police archives in 1979, effectively preventing any research into the Algerian drama. Benjamin Stora notes that after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Indochina, the French nation had become somewhat inured to death and had no use for heroes: bodies of soldiers who died in Algeria were quietly buried by their families, and this restriction to the private sphere was to continue. “The Algerian War constitutes a past which is permanently present, continuing to victimize French conscripts” (Evans 1997, 83). On a larger scale, however, repercussions of the Algerian era are lived everywhere in France today: in immigrants’ demands for equality, problems with defining French identity, Harki demonstrations in the 1970s, conflicts with the Maghreb during the Gulf War, and so on. “No people, no society, no individual could exist and define his identity in a state of amnesia; a parallel, individual memory always finds a place of refuge when the powers that be wish to capture it, or abolish it” (Stora 1992, 318). I wish to consider this parallel memory, what it consists of, and what became of it.

The Zombie In an interview, actor Jonathan Zaccaï (Mathieu) talks about the difficulty of playing a living dead person who is not a horror figure, a character who had never existed before. He claims that when he played the scene where he meets Rachel (Géraldine Paihas) again for the first time and saw her expression, he had a much better idea of who he was: she recognized and feared him, was fascinated and horrified. This recognition coupled with fear of what has returned drives the film. Stora observes that in France talk of Algeria often includes the words “amnesia”—or a lack of recognition—and “silence”; he posits the loss of Algeria as the site of a repetition of the repressed (more than the return of the repressed), among other analogies involving illness and mental stress. Recognition of something one has already seen or experienced is thus silenced: there is an inability to speak of it or others’ inability to hear it. Stora warns:

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This “repetition” hinders real knowledge of the fragments of this shared past. Living in the illusion of repeating the same experiences prevents lessons for present-day life from being learned. French and Algerians must look their own internal history in the face, sweep away myths and chimerae, untangle rights and memories. We cannot share the future while denying the shared, conflictual past. For France, it is a question of “entering” this war, of freely taking responsibility for this inglorious page of history, of looking the colonial past in the face, without complacency. The Algerians, who won this war, will have to on the contrary “leave it,” grasp the future by not ceaselessly taking refuge in a heroic past. (1992, 320) Stora describes the refusal to admit the “amputation” of a French territory as a kind of gangrene spreading through the polis and affecting French nationalism (1992, 318). This is not to divert our focus from what the soldiers suffered. The symptoms evinced by the returnees mimic those of “emotionally estranged” conscripts after the war, whose symptoms including depression, insomnia, and nervousness were a “savage indictment of government neglect” (Evans 1997, 80), a response to the “official marginalization” (73) and “official invisibility” (76) inflicted on them. Veterans have acknowledged amnesia of their own: it was too difficult to talk to their families about it and to make themselves understood (Stora 1992; Evans 1997). This amnesia and silence are replayed in the aphasia of the returnees. Analyses of horror films have often drawn on Freudian models of interpretation, particularly repression (dovetailing with Stora’s use of the same terminology in relation to Algeria, above), the uncanny and the double (Tudor 1997, 4; Schneider 2004, 2), and the reappearance of the dead as a classic representation of the uncanny.7 An experience of the uncanny happens when either repressed infantile complexes are activated or primitive beliefs, once dismissed, begin once again to seem true. Thus when what was once known and then repressed returns, it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The uncanny can be described as everything “that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (Schelling, cited in Freud 1955, 225), or “something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and returned from it” (245). As Freud postulated, The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it. Thus he acquires no sense of conviction of the correctness of the construction that has been communicated to him. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past. (1989, 602)

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Thus, from this standpoint, to live authentically it is necessary to recuperate and reintegrate the lost past. The unconscious or repressed itself does not resist treatment—it wants to rise to consciousness or be discharged through action. This is one way of understanding the returnees’ actions at the end of the film: their setting off of bombs, causing them to be fired at, in a film where everything else that happens consists of talking, repeating, observing, being observed. We see parts of this unconscious being suppressed/re-repressed—some returnees are returned to their graves—and some others escaping, taking refuge (until the next time?). Campillo suggests conscious manipulation of uncanniness when he says, “I wanted . . . [viewers] to have the feeling of recognizing familiar things that suddenly become very odd, because they concern dead people, and that come to be seen in another light” (cited in Mangeot 2005). Reference to the uncanny, the double, and repetition compulsion is one way of explaining the presence of zombies in They Came Back, but not the only one: they can also be said to comment on the problems of returning soldiers, as mentioned, on labor, race, and on the peculiar nature of the France-Algeria relation. The zombie returnees are striking in their banality. Camerawork and lighting were intended to make them look like retired people out for a serene Sunday stroll—perhaps too serene—and to provide almost a documentary quality to the film (Lapoirie 2004). More specifically, they are lit so as to have no shadows and to look “more real, more concrete” (Campillo, cited in Mangeot 2005) than the living; the familiar is made strange and the strange is made banal, disorienting the viewer perceptually and cognitively. It is their dead eyes and lack of warmth that best identifies them and that begins to gradually stir fear among the living, and their slowness is also remarkable. “Their handicap [slowness] is also the manner in which they resist the world of the living. It is a resistance without any particular meaning, except as it defines their identity” (Mangeot 2005). Zombies are the most working-class figures of horror stories, as opposed to vampires, for example, who have come to represent the elite.8 This aspect jibes with Campillo’s previous collaborations with Laurent Cantet, notably on the films Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001), both of which treat the soullessness of work under capitalism. The returnees seem to be fit only for mindless work, if they work at all, regardless of their predeath careers. A correlation with immigrants in France is not an incapacity to work, but the fact that the unemployment rate among immigrants is twice that of the population as a whole (INSEE 2006). Zombies are automatons operating on what they have already heard, said, done; they typify a loss of identity and autonomy. It becomes clear why zombies were so feared by ex-slaves and descendants of slaves in Haiti, who saw in them the specter of a fate truly worse than death. If “for most Haitians, the predominant fear was not of being attacked by zombies, but of becoming one” (Russell 2005, 11), the same can be said here. This is not a simple fear of death, but fear of the loss of a whole, essential self. Given that the concept of the zombie originated in Haiti, the returnee as “Other” points to the question of race in a post/colonial context. Indeed, Stora

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links the return of memories of the Algerian conflict to the interest a new group has taken in the issue: children of Algerian immigrants in France, who wish to simultaneously honor their combatant fathers and claim their full rights as French citizens, interests that would appear contradictory within the traditional French framework of the conflict (2004, 506). The zombie as familiar and unfamiliar is interesting in light of how a different race or ethnicity is seen as “us” or as “Other.”9 Differences in behavior may take time to notice, but can prove to be quite alienating: witness the growing fear of the living when faced with returnee behaviors, and the acrid debate in France over whether Muslim girls should be allowed to wear the headscarf (hijab) in school. Physical differences are what draw immediate attention. Daniel Gordon discusses police raids at the time of the war, specifically related to the events of October 17, 1961,10 which focused solely on appearance: when accosted, Spaniards or Italians and even Moroccans would protest, “But I’m not Algerian!” Considering that Algerians were citizens of France all along, “it is a strange kind of racism in which, it is thought, to be foreign is to escape from it” (2000, 2). It is striking that the returnees are so white—and not just due to the pallor of death; they are white, wear light-colored clothes, and are lit by bright, monochromatic light. We might imagine that there is displacement at work: second- and third-generation North Africans are displaced onto elderly white people, covering over the fact that what is at stake is the status of ethnic Algerians and other North African citizens/immigrants.11 Isham, played by Djemel Barek, is the only character who is clearly of North African descent. Campillo said about the character: “When writing the script, I thought that Isham could be a beur [second-generation North African immigrant] . . . who has made considerable efforts toward assimilation” (Écran noir 2004). Isham tells Sylvain, “No one has forgotten you.” The child does not respond, and it is doubtful whether he understands. This statement recalls Chirac’s statement at the dedication of the war memorial in Paris: In the name of all French people, I wish to pay the nation’s respects to the soldiers who died for France in North Africa, almost a half century ago. . . . I wish to tell their wounded families that we will never forget them. (Chirac 2002) The family structure also recalls the common trope of Algeria as the “child” of mother France, so we can read the scene between Isham and Sylvain in a few ways: the living have not forgotten the dead; France has not forgotten Algeria; and ultimately those traumatized have not completely forgotten what they repressed. Richard Dyer’s article “White” makes some points about race and film that could be relevant here, in terms of what or who must be excluded to preserve a semblance of homogeneity, such as of national identity. He notes the dependence of whites on black people, materially and in terms of self-identification in relation

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to the other. We can even draw a parallel between Dyer’s comparison of white and black meetings in the film Simba, with city council meetings (“white”) and meetings of the returnees (minority): the council meetings are orderly, rational, and bureaucratic; on the other hand, the dead do not even interact with each other when they meet, but rather mumble directions to themselves in a darkened building at night. The zombies, as a minority group, challenge “white values of reason, order and boundedness” (1988, 53) with their violation of the boundaries between life and death and the suggestion that this breaches normative boundaries of national identity. Dyer’s notion of “whiteness as repression” (54), including repression of life and nature to the point of death, further complicates the zombies’ role. He shows that in George Romero’s Dead trilogy whites are the living dead; not just because all the dead are white, but also due to this association between whiteness and death, and white fear of losing control of self and others. Again there is a suggestive displacement: pale zombies stand in for African immigrants who disrupt the former neat divisions between white, colonial, continental France and the outlying colonies. This racial ambivalence ties in to the nature of the relationship between France and Algeria. Zombies, neither entirely alive nor dead, stand in for the ambivalence of French-Algerian relations. Given all of the complex and long-standing entanglements made up of Pieds-Noirs (French nationals born in pre-independence Algeria), Harkis, and immigrants who have never been completely accepted in France and are no longer accepted in Algeria, one can say that these two nations, while no longer one, are not two completely separate entities either. For France to move forward in comprehension of contemporary French identity, it must include increased understanding of Algerian identity, whether in Algeria or in France. “Our Republic must fully assume its duty of remembering. . . . One French person out of six has blood ties with Algeria, whether from before independence or since then. . . . The time has come for a new Algerian-French alliance” (Chirac 2003). The mixing of genres in the film also correlates with these mixed relations. Viewers expecting a horror film based on the presence of zombies will be disappointed. It is classified as fantasy, outside of mainstream French film production, 50 percent of which is comedy and 25 percent thrillers (Hayward 1999, 100).12 Clearly there is a suspension of disbelief demanded of viewers as there is for works of fantasy or science fiction. There are elements of mystery: why did the dead return, and how? One might even argue for romance as a main narrative thread in that Mathieu returns to reconcile with Rachel over the argument they had just before he died in an auto accident, and the mayor’s wife wishes to convince him to join her among the dead. This mix of genres echoes the mix between Algeria and France and suggests that a new kind of narrative is required to tell this story. Forging a new kind of narrative was deliberate for Campillo: he was inspired by the contradictions inherent in various media images in which a seemingly peaceful scene reveals more disturbing elements when examined more closely. He describes his film as “a cold film about grief,” in which grief is deferred, first

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passing through a stage of numbness or desensitization. As Mangeot points out when introducing his interview, there are striking contrasts between brightly lit scenes and darkness, between close-ups and extreme wide shots, and no one hypothesis can account for all the events in the film, precluding any possibility of synthesis or continuity. Ambivalence is a characteristic of horror for Wood: we watch in horror while simultaneously feeling sympathy for the monster and/ or reveling in the destruction of “the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere” (2004, 119). Here, the norm is a cohesive (white, Catholic, ethnic French) national identity, the repressive/oppressive nature of which becomes more evident. While attempts to remember or commemorate the Algerian experience are certainly allowed, they are tightly controlled and at times are met with some resistance. The divisiveness in 2002 over which date would best serve as a national day in honor of those who died in the North African campaign was one example of the strong emotions still being stirred up. In They Came Back, one expert presents the following commentary on efforts to keep the dead in line, in parallel to attempts to manage and control memories and discussion of Algeria: They tend to wander night and day. They may be looking for familiar places such as a childhood home or workplace. Therefore it’s hard to keep them in the centers. They are full of energy and apparently in excellent health. Paradoxically, this is a problem for their caregivers. Medical staff at the centers has reported some disturbing details. . . . Clinical research hasn’t yet provided answers, but has shown the relative efficacy of one product, axadrolyne: this neuron regulator acts like a chemical straitjacket on returnees, allowing them to sleep better at night and move around less during the day, thus easing the work of the police and medical staff. The product should be available to everyone, families in particular dealing with similar problems. Licensing of the drug is sped up, and details about it are provided to avoid the appearance that the dead are being forced. Soldiers watching the centers (to protect the returnees or defend against them?) have been armed with the drug in their guns, large doses of which will put returnees into “irreversible comas.” Thermal cameras attached to balloons are used not so much to analyze their agitation but to determine whether there is a “migratory phenomenon,” given that the returnees walk nine miles a day. In one of the moments of sly humor in the film, the presenter states that the “cameras respect anonymity.” This wholesale effort to keep the returnees sedated and monitored can only go so far: a guard at the center tells Doctor Gardet (Frédéric Pierrot): “They’re pretending to sleep. In fact they’re active all the time.” Gardet follows Mathieu when he leaves the center and finds that the returnees gather at night. Eventually he gets close enough to see that they are looking at maps and memorizing routes, saying their directions out loud to themselves while memorizing.

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The question asked by characters and viewers alike, Why did they return just to plan their escape? can be examined through the lens of collective memory and the issue of who has the right to shape it. When a government sends its citizens to war and then virtually denies the existence of that war, let alone of the physical and psychological sacrifices of combatants and their families, it cannot expect loyalty and compliance from those citizens and soldiers. When the dead return and are greeted with incomprehension, fear, and suspicion, they will return whence they came. One important association of ex-servicemen, the FNACA (National Federation of War Veterans of North Africa), watched closely the USA’s reception of returning Vietnam vets, and found it warm and helpful in comparison to their own. They based many of their own claims to rights on those of Vietnam vets. One important difference is that Americans fighting in Vietnam were largely either black or working-class white soldiers, but French conscripts came from every social stratum, thus spreading the effects of that war throughout the country. The FNACA’s mission is to promote peace and to educate future generations, which they do through touring exhibitions, school programs, and participation in international conferences, to ensure that their hard-won knowledge and their memories do not go to waste (Evans 1997, 78). The ending, the subject of many complaints from viewers and critics, builds on the slowly increasing sense of menace felt through the film. After the endless walking and the mysterious meetings at night, the returnees one night move through town with an apparent destination in mind, setting off explosions as they go. This constitutes the threat that some townspeople, and by extension viewers, have been waiting for. Military police turn out to shoot at the returnees with high concentrations of axadrolyne. Many of the returnees make it to a trapdoor in the ground by the factory, where they redescend into the depths of the earth through long tunnels, disappearing from our view. Those who are felled by the soldiers are carried by them back to the cemetery and laid on top of tombstones, from which they vanish.13 The repressed tries to move toward consciousness but is constantly pushed back. Resuppressing/repressing the returnees allows a return to normal, a feeling that everything is all right again, but without any real process of integration or understanding. Yet there is necessarily some ambivalence around understanding and integration of these memories: can civilians comprehend the experiences of soldiers in wartime in all their true horror? About as well, we might argue, as the living can grasp the experience of death. This enigmatic finish might be addressed by making reference to other aspects of France’s military history. Cameras attached to balloons, used to track the returnees’ movements, point all the way back to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, in which air balloons were first used for reconnaissance purposes.14 The gas used on the escaping dead recalls the chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas used against French and allied troops during World War I as well as the first use of tear gas, by the French against the Germans in 1914. The bombs going off certainly recall the local resistance in Algeria, when ordinary citizens transported and placed bombs, and the “Café Wars” in Paris during the same

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period, as well as more recent bomb attacks in the Paris metro and elsewhere in France. These explosions also wake us, the viewers, from our collective dream (or nightmare) of viewing the film. We are jolted into realizing the impossibility of the returnees staying. If the appearance of the returnees was not enough to jolt the living into history, their (second) disappearance perhaps will. Art, such as film, is a privileged route to traumatic experience precisely because it can represent what has not been fully processed or understood (Caruth 1996). Fantasy in film removes the experience even further, so that seemingly implausible events witnessed on screen can work their way into the spectator’s unconscious and take root. The zombie thus stands in for the unconscious intra- and extradiegetically (on-screen and off-screen), as the unacknowledged part of the self who holds the memories that we cannot.

War Dead In a discussion of war, memory, and traumatized soldiers, we might continue to ask: Why zombies? Why the dead? How are they related to the future of a nation? In an article entitled “Temporal Distance and Death in History,” Paul Ricoeur proposes death as a paradigm of the temporal distance that for Gadamer is the “supportive ground of process in which the present is rooted” (2002, 239). Death dramatizes the absence of the past from discourses about the past; and it differentiates between the historic past and the recent past, opening a space where living words of “survivors” and mute archives of the dead are brought together (239–40). The returnees embody the subjective experience of living past and present simultaneously, and it is precisely when this experience becomes externalized that it becomes unnatural and unsettling. “Whereas, in nature, instants die and are replaced with others, a past event, so far as it is historically known, survives in the present. Its survival coincides with its reenactment in thought” (251). In this light, the returnees are no longer natural, biological, but historical: they embody the relation of national historiography to the individual. Ricoeur writes: Like us, past persons were subjects mounting initiatives, looking back and looking forward. The epistemological ramifications of this insight are immense. The knowledge that people of the past formulated expectations, previsions, desires, fears, and projects leads to a fracturing of historical determinism through a retrospective reinsertion of contingency in history. (2002, 252) We come to a point where “the dead of the historic past will be recalled to life and named as the living of the past” (241), where today’s dead are not only absentees of history-being-written but seen also as “the living of the past at the heart of history-in-the-making” (248).

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In relation to those historic deaths, the death of those close to us mediates death in general, historic death, as well as our confrontation with our own death. We internalize doubly: in mourning our loss, internalizing the lost object, and in anticipating the mourning that will follow our own death; we are confronted with the mortality that is already impregnated in our flesh, and intimate knowledge of which is embodied in the returnees. They have known their own deaths, and their return exposes them to some of the grief surrounding those deaths, while enacting for the living an intimate connection with the past. The graveyard, and the return to it, holds significance in that “burials . . . become durable symbols of mourning,” says Ricoeur (2002, 246). In passing we might recognize the similarity between tombstones and memorial monuments: these “durable symbols” entomb memories, allowing us to forget while they ostensibly “remember” for us. In one scene, Mathieu, who has proved unable to continue his former job as an architect due to the deficits associated with being dead, has been demoted to factory work. At work, he has unexpected memories of the day of his death and the events leading up to it, and he begins to memorize these memories, repeating them aloud to himself. In Campillo’s terms, he becomes an individual once again, a particular returnee. This is an unusual scene in the film for a few reasons: it is the only one where we witness a character’s thoughts (flashbacks of the day in question appear on the screen), rather than being continually confronted with impassiveness, and it is the most dreamy, imagistic scene. This is also the one memory recovered or expressed by a returnee that seems authentic and not merely imitation: it is a new kind of memory. Mathieu rehearses these memories so that later he can present them to Rachel as a kind of living archive. There is an overlay here between the tradition of memory as repetition, passing on experience through generations, through the survivors—a tradition that has now disappeared, according to Nora (1996, 6)—and modern memory as individual and psychological. Clearly there is still a need for the old kind of memory, for communication of shared experiences. While the whole cultural process of memorization and memorialization is beyond the scope of this paper, this scene is important in that it suggests the possibility of forming memories from traumatic events, rather than simply reenacting them mechanically as zombies do. France is in a waking phase, and while it might be facile to say that once the trauma is assimilated and fully mourned, immigrant populations may be integrated as well, there is the opportunity to learn the importance of “permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Caruth 1996, 11). Full understanding, or comprehension in the sense of appropriation, is simply not always possible or even desirable: attempts to control a population, as attempts to repress memories or events, are doomed to fail. While organizations such as governments will try to legislate collective memory and identity, there are limits to their power, limits formed by the diverse experiences of individuals, families, and communities. Why memory and commemoration of some events should be “permitted” and even encouraged and others disavowed (such as WWI accepted

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and Algerian War rejected; the “rewriting” of the French role in WWII) is a topic to be considered at greater length. Suffice it to say here that zombies communicate volumes about rote replaying of horror as opposed to mindful recall in a good-faith bid to be informed by it; about the shifting categories of race, class, and ethnicity that are reconfiguring the French nation; about the denial of trauma that prevents carrying awareness of the past into the future; about national history and its impact on individual and collective identity. Ultimately, the colonial past that in part necessitated this reconfiguration has to be faced in all its heterogeneous implications. The Algerian War was a “crisis . . . that simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (Caruth 1996, 5). In reference to his film, Campillo has spoken of “mourning as a global crisis.” There is still much left to mourn from that bloodiest of centuries, the twentieth.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chirac, Jacques. 2002. “Discours de M. Jacques Chirac Président de la République à l’occasion de l’inauguration du Mémorial national de la guerre d’Algérie des combats du Maroc et de la Tunisie (Paris).” December 5, http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/francais/interventions/discours_et_declarations/ 2002/decembre/discours_de_m_jacques_chirac_president_de_la_republique_a_l_occasion_de_ l_inauguration_du_memorial_national_de_la_guerre_d_algerie_des_combats_du_mar oc_et_de_la_tunisie-paris.3039.html (accessed July 29, 2007). ———. 2003. “Discours prononcé par M. Jacques Chirac Président de la République devant le Parlement algérien (Alger).” March 3, http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/francais/interventions/ discours_et_declarations/2003/mars/discours_prononce_par_m_jacques_chirac_president_de_ la_republique_ devant_le_ parlement_algerien-alger.2185.html (accessed July 29, 2007). Dyer, R. 1988. “White.” Screen 29, no. 4:44–64. Écran noir. 2004. “Revenants, Les.” http://www.ecrannoir.fr/films/04/revenants.htm (accessed July 29, 2007). Evans, M. 1997. “Rehabilitating the Traumatized War Veteran: The Case of French Conscripts from the Algerian War, 1954–1962.” In War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, 73–85. Edited by M. Evans and K. Lunn. Oxford: Berg. Freud, Sigmund. [1920] 1989. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Freud Reader, 594–626. Edited by P. Gay. New York: Norton. ———. [1919] 1955. “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 218–52. Edited by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth. Gentleman, Amelia. 2004. “Summertime, and Living Is Not Easy for French Racked with Self-Doubt.” Guardian, August 10, http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/ 0,11882,1279873,00.html (accessed July 29, 2007). Gopnik, A. 2005. “Paris Journal: The Real Thing: Is Paris Finally Having Its Crisis?” New Yorker, August 22, 36–41. Gordon, Daniel A. 2000. “World Reactions to the 1961 Paris Pogrom.” University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History 1, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/history/documents/2._gordon_world_ reactions_to_the_1961_paris_pogrom.pdf (accessed July 29, 2007).

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Hayward, S. 1999. “Questions of National Cinema.” In National Identity, 92–106. Edited by K. Cameron. Exeter: Intellect Books. INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques [National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies]). 2006. Table: “Taux de chômage des immigrés selon le sexe et l’âge” [Immigrant Unemployment Rates by Sex and Age]. http://www.insee.fr/fr/ffc/chifcle_fiche.asp? tab_id=439 (accessed July 29, 2007). Kalina, P. 2005. “Dead People Walking.” The Age, July 28, http://www.theage.com.au/news/film/ dead-people-walking/2005/07/27/1122143901379.html (accessed July 29, 2007). Lapoirie, J. 2004. “Les revenants.” AFC Newsletter 136 (October), http://www.afcinema.com/ article.php3?id_article=381 (accessed July 29, 2007). Mangeot, P., Laurence Potte-Bonneville, and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville. 2005. “La parenthèse hantée: Entretien avec Robin Campillo.” Vacarme 30, http://www.vacarme.eu.org/ article462.html (accessed July 29, 2007). Nora, P. 1996. “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 1:1–20. Edited by P. Nora. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Foreword by L. D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2002. “Temporal Distance and Death in History.” In Gadamer’s Century, 239–55. Edited by J. Malpas, U. Arnswald, and J. Kertscher. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Russell, Jamie. 2005. Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. Surrey: Fab. Schneider, Steven Jay. 2004. “Introduction: Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film.” In Horror Films and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmares, 1–14. Edited by S. J. Schneider. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stora, Benjamin. 1992. La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2004. “1999–2003, guerre d’Algérie, les accélérations de la mémoire.” In La guerre d’Algérie: 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie, 501–14. Edited by B. Stora and M. Harbi. Paris: R. Laffont. Tudor, Andrew. 1997. “Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre.” Cultural Studies 11, no. 3:443–63. Wood, Robin. [1979] 2004. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, 107–41. Edited by B. K. Grant and C. Sharrett. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.

Filmed Les revenants. Directed by Robin Campillo. France, 2004.

Notes 1. The French word revenant is used in English to refer to “one that returns after death or a long absence” (Merriam-Webster), from the verb revenir to return or to come back. In French it also means “ghost.” 2. The film was shot in Tours, although the city is not named in the narrative. 3. One of Campillo’s many references is to the film Muriel (Alain Resnais 1963), a film in which the Algerian War is glimpsed from a small provincial town. 4. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Quotations from Campillo’s film are Englishlanguage subtitles. 5. The term Harki has been used to refer to any Algerian who fought on the side of France, from the Franco-Prussian War (1870) onward. During the Algerian War those seeking independence used the term as a synonym for “collaborator.” Between the ceasefire on March 19, 1962, and the day Algeria declared independence on July 5, 1962, tens of thousands of Harkis left behind in Algeria were massacred. The term still holds great emotional resonance for many today.

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6. This is in contrast to some 38,000 monuments to WWI in France, for example. 7. Credit for first discussing repression in relation to horror films is attributed to Robin Wood (2004), whose article “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (its earlier version was published in Film Comment 14, no. 4 [1979], as “Return of the Repressed”) argues that “in a society built on monogamy and family there will be an enormous surplus of sexual energy that will have to be repressed; and . . . what is repressed must always strive to return” (Wood 2004, 119–20). 8. “In Haiti, the zombie had encapsulated fears of enslavement and the terrifying loss of individual freedom that the slave trade had imposed on generations of displaced Africans. In 1930s America, the zombie and the stock market crash segued neatly together, expressing the powerlessness that so many felt as they suffered under an unstable economy” (Russell 2005, 23). This contrasts with images of Count Dracula in his castle and other such portrayals of vampires. 9. “French identity is obsessively comparative; there is always an Other” (Gopnik 2005, 38). 10. Police assaulted Algerians protesting peacefully in Paris against a curfew that applied only to them, and many were thrown into the Seine; it is estimated that some 200 deaths resulted. These infamous events were covered over for many years. Maurice Papon, head of Paris police at the time, was brought to trial in 1997. 11. The elderly also call up the aging Algerian generation, one factor cited in the return of memories about that time (Evans 1997, 79; Stora 2004, 507). 12. In two other French films returning war dead figure prominently: J’accuse/I Accuse (Abel Gance 1938) and Zombie Lake (Jean Rollin 1980). 13. Jamie Russell recounts the “first proper zombie narrative published in the West” as recounted to American adventurer William Seabrook by a Haitian farmer named Polynice. The story ends with the zombies, awakened from their state of life-in-death, passing through their former village on the way to the cemetery. “Collapsing onto their empty graves, the zombies fell still as death took hold of them once again” (2005, 12). 14. France launched the first balloon (1794) and the first manned balloon and developed the first air force during the French Revolution. The French used balloons very effectively for transport during the Franco-Prussian war.

6

Bleeding Bodies and Post–Cold War Politics Saving Private Ryan and the Gender of Vulnerability Sarah Hagelin

I believe that the Holocaust is ineffable. I do not believe that combat is. Steven Spielberg Saving Private Ryan, which Jeannine Basinger credits with reviving the World War II combat film as a commercially viable genre, provides celluloid evidence of Steven Spielberg’s faith that war is representable.1 Ryan shows remarkable fidelity to Basinger’s catalog of the war film’s defining characteristics, visually recreating Robert Capa’s D-Day photography and ideologically celebrating the American project in the 1940s, symbolized by Tom Hanks’s paternal Captain Miller.2 But the WWII combat films made in the 1940s and 50s are not the only context for Spielberg’s 1998 film. Vietnam war films made during the decades between Vietnam and the end of the Cold War—such as The Deer Hunter (Cimino 1978), Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979), Platoon (Stone 1986), and Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick 1986) provide audiences with an image of combat as dehumanizing and a new iconography of the American soldier as a psychological casualty of war.3 Saving Private Ryan resists this ideological context. But the Vietnam films also establish a visual context. I suggest that this visual context genders physical vulnerability female even as it focuses attention on bodily suffering in a way that Production Code–era WWII films could not. Ryan resists this gender formulation, and that resistance interests me far more than the film’s ideological conservatism. While the bleakness of Saving Private Ryan’s opening Omaha Beach sequence unsettles the iconography of earlier WWII combat films, the narrative that follows pays homage to the genre and its affection for the United States military.4 But unsettling images remain, and I argue that they stem not just from the violent beach landing’s lingering effect, but also from a narrative and visual structure focusing on male vulnerability, which Spielberg does not abandon until the final twenty minutes of the film.

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Ryan revisits the 1940s and ’50s’ war film in one sense: Spielberg returns to a nearly all-male cast after audiences were used to decades of Vietnam War films and their frequent depiction of Vietnamese women as either prostitutes or war casualties, in either case victims of American male violence. The WWII films dramatized soldiers dying and tied this suffering to a patriotic defense of women and children back home. The majority of Vietnam films produced during the 1970s and ’80s, however, take this formulation a step further, using the bodies of Vietnamese women and non-stoic men to gender physical vulnerability as female.5 I will offer two brief examples from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket to illustrate this strategy. But my primary focus in this essay is the way Spielberg uses the politics of vulnerability established by the Vietnam War films and shifts them. At the time of the film’s release, film critic Neal Gabler pointed out that Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and The Deer Hunter are each as violent and uncompromising as Ryan, arguing that Ryan’s effect depends less on its aesthetics than on what audiences are invited to invest in it: “In effect, Saving Private Ryan has become the bloody, heartfelt cultural salve to the divisions and tumult that have riven this country throughout the postwar period. The text of this film may be warfare 1944; the subtext is unity 1998.” This debate about the quantity of violence in the film matters less in my view than the affect of that violence, which I see as unique in a film of Ryan’s ideological conservatism. Turnof-the-century America’s fascination with WWII6 makes Spielberg’s return to a sense of American triumphalism predictable,7 but his use of vulnerability on screen is considerably less conventional. The antiwar Vietnam films of the 1980s depend on a traditional model of gendered vulnerability, while Saving Private Ryan takes the camera’s fascination with the destroyed body—for example, Full Metal Jacket’s focus on a dying female sniper—and trains it on men. Spielberg’s return to an older model of war film owes its success to the political context of the late 1990s. The small number of American combat deaths during the First Gulf War created an atmosphere where the public was newly fascinated by cinematic portrayals of the American soldier’s damaged body.8 Anxieties about war’s mechanization were met by large commercial projects like Spielberg’s that again tied American militarism to the stoicism and bodily sacrifice that audiences are trained to associate with the WWII generation. I argue that Saving Private Ryan divorces these concepts—stoicism and sacrifice—and makes the male body vulnerable, porous, and penetrable, focusing obsessively on this vulnerability the way few films of its genre do. The instability this creates around the gendered meanings of vulnerability threatens dominant cultural ideas about gender and war because it challenges an important assumption that even most antiwar films maintain: that society sends the strong (able-bodied men) to war in order to protect the weak or vulnerable (women, children, and nonmasculine men). This assumption allows the public to avoid the moral problem of war’s cost in broken bodies by imagining vulnerability primarily in the bodies left at home. If we admit that men are just as vulnerable as women to the gunshot wounds and bomb attacks that constitute much of

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modern warfare, we undermine this sacrificial logic. I argue that Saving Private Ryan’s visual strategies unsettle these deeply ingrained social understandings of vulnerability, offering instead a new vulnerability divorced from the female body. We might call these the new technologies of vulnerability, aided by both more sophisticated squib technologies than were available to 1940s and ’50s film directors and a more fraught affect established by 1970s and ’80s war films.9 The titular Private Ryan’s vulnerability and absence ostensibly provide Ryan’s driving narrative force. But the film’s third act uses his bland, reassuring solidity and physical wholeness to replace the destroyed bodies of the young squad of soldiers whose story has occupied most of the film’s running time, and whose bodies are, in the film’s patriotic finale, hidden from view. What many critics see as the film’s unsettling effect is, I argue, its unsettling affect, necessitating Spielberg’s retreat from that affect in the film’s sentimental final frames. This retreat is the site of the film’s greatest interest to those invested in the war body and the politics of vulnerability. In order to reassert the stoic masculinity Spielberg’s narrative demands, the broken bodies of the young soldiers whose deaths structure the narrative must be left behind, closing off the questions the film raised about male vulnerability. This formal strategy has political consequences, as audiences are encouraged to ignore the disconnect between the political causes of war and the cost in blood and broken bodies those wars demand, as well as the assumptions about vulnerability that society uses to justify those costs.

Full Metal Jacket: Gendering Vulnerability Female Full Metal Jacket—one of the more critically acclaimed and explicitly antiwar films on the Vietnam experience produced in the United States between the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the end of the Cold War in 1991—challenges traditional masculine investments in military violence. But this challenge happens narratively, not visually. I suggest that Kubrick’s filmic techniques refuse to question the equation of vulnerability with the female body. Although a full reading of Full Metal Jacket is beyond the scope of this essay, two of its most famous sequences create a cinematic precedent for Ryan’s intervention. The film’s critique of military violence actually depends upon traditional codes of male protection, and its two acts—boot camp and Vietnam—each hinge on a scene of intimate violence that genders the vulnerable body female. The least stylized moment in the boot-camp section, the squad’s disciplinary attack on Private Pyle, establishes the film’s equation of visible pain with nonmasculine vulnerability. Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio), a chubby, gentle recruit, fails to perform adequately in basic training and hoards fattening, forbidden food. Already marked as vulnerable by his physical softness and his need to be taught basic skills by the film’s protagonist, Private Joker (Matthew Modine), Pyle’s suffering at the hands

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of his frustrated fellow recruits marks the film’s first moments of realistic violence, absent the farcical tone established by R. Lee Ermey’s satirical turn as the sadistic Sergeant Hartman. When Hartman punishes the whole squad for Pyle’s overconsumption, the recruits retaliate. This scene’s use of close-ups and diagetic sound—the moaning, crying, and screaming that audiences associate with physical vulnerability—establishes two kinds of masculinity: Joker’s masculine violence and Pyle’s feminized vulnerability. Before the attack, we are treated to an eerily lit shot of Joker peering into the top bunk, where the camera reveals Pyle sleeping on his back, mouth slightly open, dressed in boxer shorts and an undershirt, which rides up to expose his belly. The recruits immobilize, gag, and beat Pyle for thirty excruciating seconds of screen time. Joker, initially reluctant to participate in this violence, eventually hits the sobbing Pyle six times, with increasing viciousness. Pyle’s physical vulnerability in this scene enlists audience sympathy with him, but it also highlights the difference between the ambivalent but masculine Joker, who talks back when Hartman assaults him, and the feminized Pyle, who suffers and cries. Vulnerability is female, and the suffering of a vulnerable figure is the leverage Kubrick uses to enlist his audience’s disgust at military cruelty.10 The film’s second half, set in Vietnam, extends the consequences of this vulnerability. At the film’s end, a hidden sniper picks off members of Joker’s squad one by one until the remaining squad members find and kill the sniper, a young Vietnamese woman. Kubrick’s representation of her drawn-out death equates physical vulnerability in its most palpable form with the female body. As the men gather around the mortally wounded woman, they argue over whether to shoot her or leave her there to die slowly. Joker, the only soldier who recognizes her soft speech (“She’s praying”), argues, “We can’t just leave her here,” while cartoonishly masculine Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin) says, “Fuck her. Let her rot.” Finally, Joker himself shoots her with a pistol, both to put her out of her misery and to silence her. “Hardcore, man,” the other men murmur, seeming to imply that Joker has killed the woman out of anger over his comrades’ deaths, and that this act of violence has finally made him part of the ambivalent community of men whose ethical sensibilities have been shattered by the military-industrial complex. But the film’s actual moral calculus is different, and far less subversive: Joker kills the woman because he cannot stand watching and hearing her suffer. Here, as elsewhere, he functions as the viewer’s stand-in; after several straight minutes of listening to her labored breathing, choked praying, and soft begging (“Shoot me”), we want to hear the shot that kills her as much as Joker wants to fire it. As he shoots, the camera focuses on his face, not the dying woman. The vulnerable body in pain, established as female, has served its purpose—to reclaim Joker from the nihilism in which the film thinks it implicates him. The audience’s uneasy reaction to the sniper’s death depends on the film’s conservative visual strategies: it is especially horrifying to watch a woman suffer, because women (like the “soft” Private Pyle) are more vulnerable than men. The

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film’s antiwar power thus depends on a strictly gendered vulnerability. But moments like these, where ambitious films bend to tradition, are not my primary concern. The new vulnerability I see in Saving Private Ryan creates a different iconography, which views male bodies as a site of vulnerability. Spielberg eventually retreats from this attempt, reasserting a stoic masculinity that inadequately resolves his film’s tensions. Yet part of the film’s emotional power for audiences rests in the difference between the film as spectacle—which undermines our assumptions about male vulnerability—and the film’s storytelling structure, which writes women back into the script of an all-male military.

Saving Private Ryan and Post–Cold War Masculinity If Full Metal Jacket and other war films of its era take their cue from the cultural aftermath of Vietnam, with its pictorial legacy of bodies both in and out of caskets,11 Saving Private Ryan responds to a very different moment in American military history. The end of the Cold War offered no cultural catharsis similar to WWII’s V-E Day, and the major American military engagement in the years leading up to Ryan’s production was 1991’s first Gulf War, which was won largely by U.S. airpower, leaving only 147 American combat deaths. John Hodgkins argues that this is Ryan’s most important political context and that Spielberg’s goal is to “vanquish once and for all those doubts and fears that had been festering since Vietnam and return the U.S. soldier to his rightful place as a heroic icon” (2002, 76). Spielberg’s intentions aside, I see in the film a fascinating remainder of Vietnam’s iconography, most present in Ryan’s focus on the destroyed body. This confusion over the war body and its meaning in popular culture is one of the impulses behind the late-’90s WWII craze, dubbed “World War II chic” by Richard Goldstein, which included Tom Brokaw’s bestseller The Greatest Generation and the construction of the WWII memorial on the National Mall, as well as Ryan and Terrence Malik’s The Thin Red Line (1998). Goldstein himself places the phenomenon directly in the context of the Senate’s “ritual caning of [President Clinton]” (1999, 43). Indeed, Saving Private Ryan’s production and theatrical release coincided with the Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to President Clinton’s impeachment, lending another valence to the film’s anxious portrayal of American masculinity. As Anthony Giardina opined in GQ: “Simultaneous to our fixation on the wanderings of the president’s penis, we were given images of 19-year-old boys having their guts splashed before our eyes. . . . Where they sacrificed, we indulged” (1999, 137). A conventional wisdom quickly developed that Americans’ renewed interest in WWII was the result of Baby Boomer self-flagellation. But the specific popularity of Saving Private Ryan earned a reputation as more than mere nostalgia, since the film’s violence was assumed to give audiences unfamiliar with “real” warfare an understanding of war’s human cost. Journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz (1998) bristled at the suggestion of the educative effects of

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on-screen violence: “There is something peculiarly deranged, in an inflated sort of ’90’s way, in the notion that this film has now come to the rescue, to educate a great unwashed public deluded—thanks to John Wayne films and similar pernicious influences—into the belief that war is glamorous.” Ryan’s official press junket celebrated this purported revision of the war film genre, which the film’s producers argue deglamorizes death, if not war itself. Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat structure the film’s narrative around three deaths, and the increasing intimacy of those deaths reveals the film’s interest in vulnerability without that vulnerability being gendered female. Saving Private Ryan also undermines the audience’s traditional understanding of male sacrifice by structuring its narrative around death on the one hand and the stories men tell themselves about women on the other. In this context, the absent Private Ryan becomes the focus of the narrative, and finding him closes off the questions the film has raised about male vulnerability. 12 In order for the symbol of the tattered American flag (which both opens and closes the film) to resonate with the “sacrifice” the film catalogs, vulnerable bodies other than Ryan’s need to be removed from the scene. And to close off these questions about vulnerability, the soldiers’ bodies, particularly the body of Private Mellish (Adam Goldberg), the one Jewish recruit, must be left behind. The film spends its final twenty minutes retraining its audience to resist the spectacle of vulnerability it had spent the previous two and a half hours establishing. The inevitability of this abandonment establishes itself early: the graveyard frame opens with a close-up of the American flag faded out, with the sun behind it. The sun washes out color and backlights the flag, making it both bright and faded. This will become a visual symbol for memory and sacrifice, the two concepts the film most wants to tie to patriotic symbols of the American nation. In one of the film’s opening shots, an aging veteran breaks down, crying in front of a grave. But as the Omaha Beach invasion will soon establish, male tears are not the marker of vulnerability in this film; blood and injuries are. Critics have called the Omaha Beach sequence “a blood and gut-spilling range of cinéma vérité that would make Sam Peckinpah blanch” (Nathan 1998, 102). Violent enough to spark an FCC debate about violence on television when Ryan was aired unedited on Veterans Day,13 it is visually gritty and disorienting and aurally unrelenting; the only sounds are bullets, water, and screams of agony. This aural focus on suffering—labored breathing, crying, screaming—is central to what I identify as male vulnerability, and it lays the groundwork for a change in the way male spectacle has traditionally worked.14 Ina Rae Hark argues that genres focused on physical conflict between men (Westerns, epics, war dramas) depend upon “episodes in which a male protagonist’s enemies make a spectacle out of him” (1993, 151). But Spielberg’s Omaha Beach sequence cuts the human enemy out of the equation and relentlessly focuses on physical injury itself making a spectacle out of men, placing the camera’s focus on the details of injury itself.

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The eerie underwater sequences focus the viewer’s attention on this specifically visual spectacle; they provide a respite from the stomach-turning sounds of the above-water battle, but only to increase the suffocating horror of the experience, as men drown, weighed down by their gear. Film critic Gary Kamiya (1998) has called this sequence “so corrosive, so subversive of all logic, all morality, all stories, that it devours the story that follows”; but this misses the ways the film channels the “corrosive” effects of this kind of spectacle. It does not subvert logic and morality so much as it hijacks them, creating its own logic and its own morality in ways that undermine the way we expect to read vulnerability. In New York Magazine, David Denby describes this effect as “cruel magnificence,” calling it “one of the greatest, most appalling things ever done in movies. Not just the violence, but the strangeness of it, is overwhelming” (1998, 44). In my view, this is the filmic effect that most separates the Omaha Beach sequence from the narrative that follows. The structuring deaths later in the film retain the graphic violence but abandon the strangeness that the disorientation of the beach landing causes. Those later deaths, after Spielberg has established audience identification with the soldiers, involve male vulnerability without hallucination; cruelty without magnificence. The beach landing’s hallucinatory effect depends on a camera that rarely differentiates between the men, just as the German machine gun (behind which the camera is frequently positioned) does not. The camera relentlessly searches out spectacles of the body’s vulnerability. Bodies leak and spill; a still-living man’s guts lie piled next to his body as he screams “Mama.” An injured soldier that squad medic Wade (Giovanni Ribisi) tries feverishly to save is hit in the head by a bullet from a German machine gun. This is a war film cliché, a dark joke, but it also sets up the actual activity that the film’s plot documents. Spielberg’s camera does not linger on men fighting, or saving, but on soldiers watching each other die, rehearsing again and again the vulnerability of their own bodies. Yet the narrative’s insistence that, as the film’s advertising campaign announced, “The mission is a man” creates a backward sacrifice structure: the lives of many are sacrificed to save the life of one. The film’s ending elides this structure, replacing it with the traditional one-for-many sacrifice structure, with a final image of the elderly Ryan and his children and grandchildren all standing before a single grave. After the Omaha Beach sequence, a far-more traditional narrative begins, as Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squad search for Private Ryan, ordered home to his mother in Iowa after his brothers are killed in action. The death scenes of Private Carpazo, Private Mellish, and medic Wade structure the narrative, a familiar formulation from WWII combat films, which works to raise the stakes of the squad’s eventual rescue of the missing Ryan. More important for my purposes, the increasingly visceral horror of each death progressively undermines the stoic, duty-bound masculinity represented by Captain Miller. The first of these structuring deaths, Carpazo’s, happens in a bombed-out French village where the squad finds a frightened, trapped family. This introduction of women and children, particularly the family’s terrified little girl, appears to give

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audiences an image of vulnerability the way they expect to see it: young, helpless, and female. But the squad’s interaction with the family makes it clear that protecting them is not the justification for the mission. Carpazo (Vin Diesel) wants to help the refugees, who ask the Americans to take the children to safety with the Allied troops. The scene’s dialogue—Carpazo insists that taking the child he’s holding down the road to safety is the “decent” thing to do, while Miller snaps, “We’re not here to do the decent thing; we’re here to follow fuckin’ orders”—is less important than the visual image of tall, broad-shouldered Carpazo cradling a small girl. This image is inverted when it turns out that the truly vulnerable body is not the child’s, but the man’s. Carpazo falls, leveled by a hidden German sniper, followed by a long, difficult-to-watch sequence where the squad, including medic Wade, cannot reach the dying Carpazo because the sniper is still hidden. Spielberg’s camera hides the scene where Wade finally reaches Carpazo’s body, focusing on the girl hysterically hitting her father. The French father’s inability to protect his family from war mirrors the squad’s inability to reach Carpazo’s body in time to help him. The child is active—hitting, yelling—while Carpazo lies, unable to move, still vulnerable to the sniper’s bullets (fig. 1.). The camera registers the moment of his physical suffering but not what Wade’s medical training might do to help him.

Figure 1. Carpazo dies. Carpazo’s emotional vulnerability to the plight of a family in a war zone where the domestic space has been destroyed leads to his body being made vulnerable. Only Miller’s military restraint (“That’s why we can’t take kids”) protects the body from its own vulnerability. Carpazo is the first character to be sacrificed in the search for Ryan, and after the spectacle of his death, the squad openly questions the efficacy of the mission. Walking away from Carpazo’s corpse, the

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tough-talking Brooklyn-Irish Private Reiben (Ed Burns) mutters “Fuck Ryan.” This begins to establish the film’s substitution of Ryan for the American civilian population in general and the film’s audience in particular. The film asks whether the protection of people who don’t understand the sacrifice is worth the cost of these agonizing deaths. By substituting a single soldier for this faceless collective, Spielberg has it both ways, voicing the cynical point toward which the film barrels for most of its running time (It’s not worth it) while endorsing the film’s eleventh-hour embrace of Ryan. Saving Private Ryan’s single ideological subversion of the traditional war film is the way it shows male vulnerability in the absence of women or feminized men to keep that vulnerability coded female. But the conservative narrative needs a release valve for the consequences of this subversion, so the film becomes increasingly interested in stories the men tell about women. These stories attempt to rewrite men’s vulnerability back into a narrative of male control, withholding, and exploitation. Spielberg thus primes his audience for Wade’s death with a scene where the men swap stories as they camp in an abandoned church. Wade tells a story about his mother as a young medical intern, coming home late at night, and his own childish impulse to feign sleep rather than talk with her. In the story, he has control and is able to wound other, more vulnerable people, despite the film’s attempt to use his guilt over the memory to attract audience sympathy.15 Captain Miller, a different type of man than the young soldiers, will not tell the story of his family or his home. He withholds it, just as Wade withheld his company from his overworked mother. The squad has a running bet as to Miller’s home-front profession, and his reluctance to share this information is both a plot device and an indication that he exists outside the storytelling structure that unites the younger men, an insistence that his type of manhood sees but does not tell. As a sign of the film’s ultimate rejection of the male body as a site of vulnerability, in the ending graveyard frame the now-elderly Ryan withholds Miller’s story from Ryan’s family. Ryan models Miller’s style of manhood, not Wade’s. The sight of Wade’s body being riddled with bullets the next day is similarly withheld. Spielberg’s camera shows only the aftermath, as the men rip open his shirt to expose his bleeding chest. Blood seeps out of multiple bullet wounds; they cannot wipe it off fast enough, and the camera focuses obsessively on Wade’s face and bloody torso, intercut with close-ups of the panicked men surrounding him. In several tight medium shots, the men press their hands into his chest and stomach to try to staunch the bleeding (fig. 2.)

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Figure 2. They try to save Wade. They lack his medical knowledge of how to deal with multiple gunshot wounds, and the sickening image created by shots of their hands ineffectively covering his body makes the site of the physically vulnerable male body also a site of male emotional and professional failure. After requesting an overdose of morphine, Wade cries, “I don’t wanna die. Mama? Mama? I wanna go home. I wanna go home. Mama! Mama! Mama—Ma—Mama,” an aural return to the dying soldiers on Omaha Beach. Critics often argue that the scene that follows this one—where squad members capture a German soldier, beat him, and want to execute him—is structurally important because of the moral questions it raises about killing unarmed prisoners. I view the scene where Wade dies as more crucial to the visual structure of a film that is more interested in establishing vulnerability than it is in establishing moral choice. When to kill is actually less important in this film than how to die, and how the spectacle of male vulnerability affects the ethics of war. After Wade’s death, Spielberg desperately needs the reintroduction of a female presence to contain the film’s anxieties about male vulnerability. The stories that follow, one about Miller’s wife, the other about Ryan’s mother, reassert the narrative that has been in tension with the camera’s focus on vulnerable men. These narratives are the film’s clumsy attempt to paper a traditional dichotomy of female vulnerability and male stoicism onto the scenes that precede and follow them.16 The ability to tell a story, and to replace the sight of the dead body with a reminder of the absent domestic space, thus begins to emerge as the film’s answer to the problem of vulnerability. Reiben, angry that Miller and the soft, bookish Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) stopped him from killing the German soldier who shot Wade, threatens mutiny. This confrontation, and its threat of violence within the squad, finally prompts the story of Miller’s life at home. He is an English teacher—a teacher of stories—and his story, the film suggests, is the only antidote to the violence that threatens to erupt.

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Miller: So I guess I’ve changed some. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed so much, my wife is even going to recognize me whenever it is I get back to her. And how I’ll ever be able to—to tell her about days like today. Ah, Ryan—I don’t know anything about Ryan; I don’t care. The man means nothing to me. He’s just a name. But if, . . . you know, if going to Ramelle and finding him so he can go home, if that earns me the right to get back to my wife, well then, . . . then that’s my mission. (To Reiben) You want to leave? You want to go off and fight the war? All right. All right, I won’t stop you. I’ll even put in the paperwork. I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel. After Miller gives this speech, the camera shows him backlit, dragging a body to its shallow grave. This body is probably Wade’s, though the light does not allow us certainty. Now, Wade is just a body, waiting to be dragged off-screen. The supposedly redemptive effect of Miller’s speech is only convincing once the body is absent. The spectacle of war must be framed in terms of a waiting woman, not the body of a man who just died calling for his mother. The speech itself not only writes choice back into the soldier’s contract (a choice that didn’t exist for soldiers in WWII any more than it did for soldiers in Vietnam); it also obscures the film’s actual moral calculus. Every man he buries, not every man he kills, makes Miller feel far away from home. Dying, not killing, prompts the horror of vulnerability that stories about women must try to obscure. Fittingly, then, soon after losing Wade the men find Ryan, another son waiting to talk to his mother. Private Ryan (Matt Damon), grief-stricken over the news of his dead brothers, balks at abandoning his squad, which has been ordered to protect a bridge against heavy odds. Ryan’s reaction to the news of the squad’s sacrifice, and his refusal to “abandon [his] post,” signals the film’s intention to switch its focus to Ryan, toward the narrative concerns of storytelling, and away from anxieties about male vulnerability. When Ryan resists Miller’s offer of male protection, Reiben angrily interrupts: Reiben: Ryan (to Miller): Miller: Ryan (walking over to Reiben and the squad): Mellish: Ryan: Mellish:

Hey, asshole! Two of our guys already died trying to find you, alright? Sir? That’s right.

What were their names? Irwin Wade and Adrian Carpazo. Wade and . . . Carpazo.

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Ryan’s desire to know the names of the men who died to find him is a marker of his understanding of, and respect for, their sacrifice. Ryan names the spectacles of vulnerability the audience has witnessed (“Wade,” “Carpazo”), connecting the audience and Ryan in shared recognition of this specific sacrifice and the knowledge of vulnerability it entails. It serves as proof, both for the squad and for the audience, that Ryan is worth the sacrifice made for him, and it begins Spielberg’s attempt to include his audience in the film’s salvific project. The film documents this exchange of bodies, not the military maneuverings that make holding the bridge important, which becomes more apparent when Ryan insists that he doesn’t deserve special treatment: Ryan:

Miller: Ryan:

It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense, sir. Why? Why do I deserve to go? Why not any of these guys? They all fought just as hard as me. Is that what they’re supposed to tell your mother when they send her another folded American flag? Tell her that when you found me, I was here, and I was with the only brothers that I have left, and that there’s no way I was gonna desert them. I think she’ll understand that. There’s no way I’m leaving this bridge.

Here, Ryan appears to voice the film’s subversion of vulnerability: the other vulnerable men, not his waiting mother, deserve his protection. Ryan chooses “brothers” over mother, but the dialogue’s focus on what story they should “tell” if he dies brings the narrative back to the question Miller posed over Wade’s dead body: “how I’ll ever be able to—to tell her about days like today.” The “her” switches from Miller’s wife to Ryan’s mother, but both attempt to replace the dead body with a story about women. Ryan’s own story about home mirrors the third act’s attempt to replace physical vulnerability with stories about women and the stoic masculinity they require of men. Ryan confesses to Miller that he cannot remember his brothers’ faces. Miller tells him to think of something specific, like Miller’s own memory of “my wife pruning the rosebushes in a pair of my old work gloves.” Ryan then tells a misogynistic story about himself, his brothers, and their cruelty toward an “ugly” girl named Alice Jardine. Gary Kamiya, echoing many critics in otherwise glowing reviews of the film, calls Ryan’s speech “one of the movie’s few moments of artificiality.” But critics like Kamiya, who dislike this story but admire the film, are missing something about the film’s structure and the way these mininarratives work in Spielberg’s larger ideological project. The stories serve the compensatory function of distracting attention from vulnerable male bodies with stories about women being made vulnerable by men.

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What critics and audiences have seen as Saving Private Ryan’s unsettling effect is actually the consequence of its violent shift away from its revision of vulnerability. It encourages audiences to read the male body as a site of vulnerability, then reverses this logic through the increasingly visible importance of the stories men tell about war and about women. But in addition to replacing the visual emphasis on male vulnerability with a narrative focus on female vulnerability, Spielberg must also resolve the problem of sacrifice Ryan’s plot has established as a central concern. Having cataloged the relentlessly painful displays that are the cost of saving Private Ryan, the film must find a way to leave those bodies behind. It must shift the audience’s focus from Carpazo’s, Wade’s, and Mellish’s deaths toward Miller’s death and the scores of people on the home front that his sacrifice purportedly “saved.” To do this, the film makes its lone statement about WWII’s political context, the piece of the moral puzzle that Spielberg had, up until this point, largely ignored. Private Mellish’s death in Ramelle registers a political critique that Spielberg seems eager to disavow. For the final battle, Mellish places himself on the second floor of a bombed-out house, relying on skittish Corporal Upham to bring him ammunition. At the climactic moment, Upham, unable to muster physical courage, cowers on the stairs with the now-useless ammo as Mellish struggles hand-to-hand with a German soldier. Earlier in the film, Carpazo had taken a Hitler Youth knife from a dead German soldier and offered it to Mellish. Mellish renames the knife a “Shabbas challah cutter,” and the object comes to represent Mellish’s Jewishness in the ritualistic context of Shabbat. Mellish’s struggle with the German soldier represents a turn away from the film’s storytelling structure and a return to the violence and ritualism of the film’s first half. And in this context, knife and its dual meanings again become important symbols. After a series of disorienting, violent close-ups, Mellish pulls out the Hitler Youth/ Shabbat challah knife, over which the two struggle at excruciating length. In a close two-shot, framed as nearly an embrace, the German soldier slides the knife into Mellish slowly, whispering “Shhh . . . ,” his voice nearly a caress (fig. 3).

Figure 3. Mellish is killed by the German soldier.

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The spectacle of this scene, with its intimate, penetrative violence, becomes ideologically horrifying as well when we realize that Mellish is killed with the Hitler Youth knife, now robbed of its potentially redemptive meaning, while Christian, liberally educated Upham cowers on the stairs outside, too afraid to intervene. Upham sinks on the stairs, crying, and the exiting German soldier brushes past him, deciding (together with the film) that he is not worth killing. Putting aside the ideological irony of a Nazi soldier passing the film’s own moral judgment on Upham, this is a shocking moment in an otherwise ideologically predictable film. In a movie about “saving”—and when you can’t save, witnessing; and when you can’t witness, mourning—the Jewish soldier is killed where nobody tries to stop it, nobody witnesses it, and the soldiers who would have mourned it are already dead: a politically powerful indictment of America’s inaction during the first five years of the Holocaust. But, given the celebration of American victory in WWII that is Saving Private Ryan’s crowd-pleasing goal, this political critique must be swept aside, much like the anxieties about male vulnerability the first two acts raised. Literally and figuratively, Mellish’s body must be left out of sight. The film’s closing graveyard frame tries to provide the audience with an emotional release from this tension. But the attempt lacks moral and emotional weight, since Reiben—along with Upham, the only member of the original squad to survive—is the witness whose mourning ought to matter, not Ryan’s. But to insist on ideological closure (and to shut off the potentially subversive critique it opened with Mellish’s death), the film has to name Ryan the final witness. With his dying breath, Captain Miller tells Ryan, “Earn this. . . . Earn it.” Miller’s sacrifice has bought James Ryan’s manhood, purchased over the body of a dead father figure whose body is never allowed to seem vulnerable the way the younger men’s had (fig. 4). In these final scenes, Ryan trains its audience to resist the spectacle of vulnerability it had earlier established. The dying Miller speaks stoically to Ryan as the male body figuratively closes back up while he speaks.

Figure 4. Miller’s dying moments

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The Normandy frame finishes the transition from backward sacrifice-structure to the sacrifice-structure the war film narrative traditionally demands: one for many. This compels the presence of Ryan’s family at Miller’s gravesite in Normandy. Miller is the sacrifice; Ryan and the generations of his family who otherwise would not have been born are the beneficiaries. Ryan:

Mrs. Ryan: Ryan: Mrs. Ryan: Ryan: Mrs. Ryan:

My family is with me today. They wanted to come with me. To be honest with you, I—I wasn’t sure how I’d feel coming back here. Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I’ve tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me. James. [reading the name on the cross] Captain John H. Miller. Tell me I’ve led a good life. What? Tell me I’m a good man. You are.

Despite the much-criticized sentimental tone of this closing frame, Saving Private Ryan is not about the certainty of having “earned it,” for either the WWII generation it ventriloquizes or the baby-boom generation whose members wrote, directed, and starred in it.17 It is about the tenuous position of the “new” man— one who can tell stories about rose bushes as well as vulnerable male bodies—as a husband, father, and son, and about the costs of physical sacrifice for a nuclear family that, the movie implies, can never really understand. Spielberg insists upon a traditional sacrifice structure at odds with his film’s most viscerally powerful images. Thus he must back away from the dynamic that offers the Mellish/ Upham interaction as a metaphor for America, instead offering the Miller/Ryan dynamic—the good father and the grateful son. Saving Private Ryan is at the same time ambivalent and certain: ambivalent about what the spectacle of vulnerability asks of men, but certain about the inability of women to reassure them of its value. What the film itself wants to offer, though, is a respite from the question of male physical vulnerability through a collective absolution for the stories we tell ourselves about war. Viewers may balk at the aesthetics of Ryan’s appearance in the graveyard rather than Reiben’s, but ideologically the film requires Ryan’s presence and Reiben’s absence. Ryan, the character who, like the audience, was not part of the squad but understands and honors its sacrifice, is celebrated in the film’s closing frames, Spielberg’s final exercise in wish fulfillment. The audience is thus included in the film’s salvific embrace, and the narrative encourages us to believe that it is a tragic but unavoidable circumstance of war that Mellish’s body is left behind. The image

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of Ryan’s grateful family standing in near-mute awe of his status as veteran states the film’s overt thesis: on the battlefields of Europe, a specifically American form of masculinity was born, and the appropriate response to it is gratitude. But there remains an uncomfortable sense, which the sea of white crosses cannot quite erase, that something else happened in Europe during those years, a spectacle of male vulnerability harder to repress than the tears that threaten to overcome Private Ryan.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Auster, Albert. 2002. “Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 30, no. 2:98–104. Basinger, Jeannine. 2003. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Carson, Tom. 1999. “And the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Rabid Nationalism Goes to . . . : A Reconsideration of Saving Private Ryan.” Esquire, March, 70–74. Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. 2005. “Restaging the War: The Deer Hunter and the Primal Scene of Violence.” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2:89–106. CRS [Congressional Research Service] Report for Congress. 2004. “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf (accessed July 29, 2007). Denby, David. 1998. “Heroic Proportions.” New York Magazine, July 27, 44–45. Dunne, John Gregory. 1998. “Virtual Patriotism: Feeling Good about War.” New Yorker, November 16, 98–102. Eberwein, Robert. 2001. “‘As a Mother Cuddles a Child’: Sexuality and Masculinity in World War II Combat Films.” In Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture, 149–66. Edited by Peter Lehman. New York: Routledge. Gabler, Neal. 1998. “Private Ryan Satisfies Our Longing for Unity.” Los Angeles Times, August 9. Gates, Philippa. 2005. “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: The Real and the Moral in the Contemporary Hollywood Combat Film.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 4:297–310. Giardina, Anthony. 1999. “Are We Not Men? Nineties Preoccupations with Manhood Are Fueling Our Obsession with World War II.” GQ, May, 137–44. Goldstein, Richard. 1999. “World War II Chic.” Village Voice, January 19, 43–47. Haggith, Toby. 2002. “D-Day Filming—For Real: A comparison of ‘Truth’ and ‘Reality’ in Saving Private Ryan and Combat Film by the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit.” Film History 14:332–53. Hammond, Michael. 2004. “Saving Private Ryan’s ‘Special Affect.’” In Action and Adventure Cinema, 153–66. Edited by Yvonne Tasker. New York: Routledge. Hark, Ina Rae. 1993. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge. Hertzberg, Henrik. 1998. “Theatre of War: The Risks Steven Spielberg Takes in His Film about the Invasion of Normandy Are Moral as Well as Commercial.” New Yorker, July 27, 30–33. Hodgkins, John. 2002. “In the Wake of Desert Storm: A Consideration of Modern World War II Films.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 30, no. 2:74–85. Jeffords, Susan. 1989. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kamiya, Gary. 1998. “Total War.” Salon, July 24, http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/reviews/ 1998/07/cov_24review.html (accessed July 29, 2007).

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Magid, Ron. 1987. “Full Metal Jacket: Cynic’s Choice.” American Cinematographer, September, 74–84. Modleski, Tania. 2001. “The Context of Violence in Popular Culture.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 27, 47 (53), B15. Morgenstern, Joe. 1998. “Battle Rages Ahead but Plot Drags Behind in Saving Private Ryan.” Wall Street Journal, July 24, W3. Nathan, Ian. 1998. “Apocalypse Then.” Empire, October 12, 100–114. O’Connell, Aaron B. 2005. “Saving Private Lynch: A Hyperreal Hero in an Age of Postmodern Warfare.” War, Literature, and the Arts 17, nos. 1–2:33–52. Rabinowitz, Dorothy. 1998. “Summer of War: It’s D-Day at the Movies.” Wall Street Journal, July 31. Rothstein, Edward. 1998. “Rescuing the War Hero from 1990’s Skepticism.” New York Times, August 3. See, Fred. 2004. “Steven Spielberg and the Holiness of War.” Arizona Quarterly 60, no. 3:109–41. Wallenstein, Andrew. 2004. “Many Reinforce War Film: ABC Affils Grapple with ‘Great Debate.’” Hollywood Reporter, November 12, 1 and 95. Wood, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press.

Filmed Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA, 1979. Deer Hunter, The. Directed by Michael Cimino. USA, 1978. Full Metal Jacket. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA, 1986. Platoon. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA, 1986. Saving Private Ryan. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA 1986.

Notes 1. See the preface to Basinger’s seminal study, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (2003). 2. The Saving Private Ryan press kit announces this intention: “Early on, we [Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski] both knew that we did not want this to look like a Technicolor extravaganza about World War II, but more like newsreel footage from the 1940s, which is very desaturated and low-tech,” Spielberg said. The press kit goes on to detail Kaminski’s use of 90-degree and 45-degree shutters (instead of the standard 180-degree) to cause “a certain staccato in the actors’ movements and a certain crispness in the explosions, which makes them more realistic” (8). Also see Toby Haggith (2002). 3. On the political and theoretical contexts of Vietnam representation during the 1970s and ’80s, see Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (1989). Jeffords, building on work that John Ellis, Teresa de Lauretis, and others have done on audience identification in film, describes the suffering male body in Vietnam films as a form of “fetishistic display.” See also Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986). 4. See Henrik Herzberg (1998), Tom Carson (1999), and Richard Goldstein (1999), each of whom implicitly makes some variation of this argument. They claim that Spielberg abandons Hollywood war film conventions in favor of the iconography of war photography in the Omaha Beach sequence, then returns to the narrative conventions of the war film. On this return to convention, John Gregory Dunne argues that “once off Omaha Beach, Spielberg’s film, however brilliantly shot and edited, becomes as stereotypical and sentimentally askew as a Ford oater, with the all-purpose Hollywood squad: the Jew, the Italian, the smartmouth from Brooklyn, the hillbilly Christer, and the intellectual who can’t cut the mustard” (1998, 100).

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5. See Robert Eberwein (2001) for the ways WWII combat films negotiated this focus on the male body while preserving midcentury ideals of masculinity. 6. See Neal Gabler (1998), Anthony Giardina (1999), and Richard Goldstein (1999). 7. See Albert Auster, who argues that the film, coming after “the low-key American victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, was a perfect anodyne for the somewhat equivocal victory of those triumphs” (2002, 99). 8. According to Congressional Research Service statistics, 147 American service personnel died in combat during the First Gulf War (CRS 2004, 12). 9. See Philippa Gates, “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: The Real and the Moral in the Contemporary Hollywood Combat Film” (2005). Gates traces three phases of Vietnam war films for their attitudes toward realism and the figure of the American soldier. 10. See Ron Magid on the way director of photography Douglas Milsome lights and shoots this scene to create both a sense of “pain and horror” as well as a “combination of naturalism and stylization” (1987, 79). 11. See Sylvia Shin Huey Chong (2005) on the connection between war photography and film violence in The Deer Hunter. See also Edward Rothstein (1998) on the ways Vietnam and its cultural legacy provide the context for WWII films like Patton (1970) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). 12. See Aaron B. O’Connell (2005) on the importance of the captivity narrative tradition to films like Saving Private Ryan. The trope of the missing child is especially relevant to the vulnerability system I explore in Spielberg’s film. See O’Connell (2005, 38) for the ways that this discourse influenced the narrative of PFC Jessica Lynch’s rescue from Iraq in 2003. 13. See Andrew Wallenstein (2004) on this 2004 election-year debate. Much press attention also focused on the boot camp the actors attended, run by Dale Dye, and the “real” suffering they endured to ensure their portrayals were as accurate as possible: article after article praised them as “gallant men who endured sheer hell for the sake of absolute realism” (Nathan 1998, 101). Tania Modleski critiques this impulse, which she calls “the alibi of the real,” saying of Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993): “Realism becomes a perfect alibi for indulging in morally dubious pleasures, assuring us that we’re not just having a little sadistic fun but participating in the solemn act of bearing witness” (2001, B15). 14. Michael Hammond argues that the film’s audio is crucial to its “underlying obbligato of melancholy”: “This undertone exists not only in the musical score but [also] in the tone of anguished voices and viscerally felt noises, which heightens the consequence of weaponry and makes poignant [the] fear, suffering, and loss” (2004, 153). 15. This scene’s setting in an abandoned church is appropriate to what Fred See identifies as Spielberg’s impulse to “reinstall domestic holiness” into the fractured worlds his films present (2004, 115). But here, while the stories about home are intended to attach violent death to the sphere of domestic holiness, the narratives themselves are punctuated by a sense of cruelty and loss at odds with the salvific tone they create. 16. As Tania Modleski puts it, “It’s all in the context—in the way the film allows us to understand what we’re seeing, in the questions it poses about the place of violence in our culture and about the viewer’s own investment in the erotics of violence” (2001, B15). It is here, during Wade’s death scene, that Spielberg most needs a different context for this violence than the male vulnerability established by the beach landing and Carpazo’s death scene. 17. Goldstein reads this scene differently, seeing Upham as a “stand-in for the Boomer’s selfcontempt” (1999, 47).

7

“Welcome to Hell, Private Shakespeare” Trench Horror, Deathwatch, and the Resignification of World War I Karen Randell

This film is such a shell-shock dream. Press Pack for Deathwatch This opening heading to the Press Pack of Deathwatch alerts us to the idea that this film engages with the terms of war trauma. Further on in the pack the producers inform the reviewer of the work of W. H. R. Rivers during World War I at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland: Rivers developed his own version of Freud’s psychotherapy to extinguish the traumas of war (Showalter 1987). Thus there is an expectation that the audience will be familiar with the terms of trauma established during WWI. This chapter stems from a desire to find suitable ways in which to debate the cultural specificities of war trauma in my teaching of “Visualizing War”: For instance, how do medical interventions inflect the ways in which the war body is represented? What readings do certain cultural conditions produce? This chapter engages with the historical conditions of war trauma in its interrogation of Deathwatch (Bassett 2002) and the narrative potentials of the structures apparent in the ways in which, starting with the premise of trauma, the war body is imagined.1 Set in WWI the film negotiates shell shock and trench warfare through the inflection of the horror genre. Like Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002) this film’s hybridity enables an articulation of the trauma of war through the mise-en-scène of horror. Mark Kermode has described its hybrid war/horror genre as marrying the “poetic melancholy of Siegfried Sassoon with the undead cavortings [sic] of George Romero” (2003, 40)—an insightful reading that evokes the representations of two very different wars: WWI and the Vietnam War (Higashi 2000: Randell 2005). It is a reading that asks us to contemplate not only its hybridity but also the cultural conditions in which those earlier representations were 120

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produced. It also presents us with the question: What happens to the signification of the (traumatized) war body (WWI) when it meets/becomes the horror body (Vietnam War)? Since Deathwatch was conceived and produced after the First Gulf War (and in the shadow of 9/11), there is a further context for consideration. This film offers a resignification of the combatant war body—a visceral incarnation—after an absence of the Gulf War combatant on screen. As has been argued, the exchanging of a physical war for a technological war, such as played out in this Persian Gulf conflict (1990–91), effectively removed the war body from vision. Commenting on this in 1991, a reporter stated, “There are no dead Iraqi soldiers”; their absence was censored by the “lack of access” of the press to the war zone (Young and Jesser 1997, 182). As Baudrillard states, “Since the Gulf War was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed.” Instead, “the war goes to ground. It hides in the sand, it hides in the sky, . . . it awaits its hour, . . . which will never come (2006, 303–4). How then do we represent war when the war (body) is invisible? Courage under Fire (Zwick 1996) and Three Kings (Russell 1999) offer an engagement with the Gulf War but refuse the battlefront. Courage under Fire uses the flashback approach to enter the battle zone during a protracted courtroom narrative that investigates the death of Capt. Karen Walden (Meg Ryan) and whether she should be posthumously awarded a medal for heroism (see Tasker 2005). Although this narrative structure enticingly engages with issues of trauma and memory, it renders the battlefield practically absent from the text. Similarly the action takes place in Three Kings after the war has ended; although there are moments of visceral engagement with the wounded body—the bullet point-ofview entering the body, for instance—the battle zone of war is missing. Later, Sam Mendes’s Gulf War film Jarhead (2005) does engage with the war as it happens but uses tropes of the Vietnam War film to tell its story (see Davis and Johnson, chap. 8, below). The Gulf War film, it seems, does not yet have its own battle iconography. To all intents and purposes, the Gulf War film does “not take place” either (Baudrillard 2006, 303). The media representation of the Gulf War was a “painless, bloodless [and] sanitized success” in its refusal to engage with the consequences of long-range technological warfare on the enemy (Jesser & Young 1997, 188). Reclaiming the contemporary war body through a resignification of another bloody war is one way in which the body can be reinserted into the contemporary landscape and discussion of war: the absence of combat and corporality on television and cinema screens during and after the First Gulf War creates a space for an alternative representation of the gruesome fascinations of war. Reclaiming the war body through the horror genre offers a fantasy space for articulation, a “safer” space, where anything can happen to the war body because it is not a war film: the verisimilitude of the war genre is subjugated to the narrative tropes of the fantasy horror film. Deathwatch interprets absence and loss, visceral body mutilation and psychological damage, through an engagement with an earlier war that has

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a clear iconography and discourse around both the futility of war and the horror of its consequences. Brian Bond has argued that WWI has generally been discussed as a literary one in terms of its representation rather than a historical event: it is a history made up of individual stories (2002). This has led to a mythologizing of the war combatant, as Samuel Hynes has discussed: a mythology starting during the 1920s, when antiwar literature and art became the dominant form of representation (1990, 455). In particular, Trudi Tate has argued that “two sights are figured repeatedly in the soldiers’ narratives of the Great War: corpses and bodies in pieces” (1998, 64). Such somatic images of war litter the mise-en-scène of Deathwatch. As Y Company stumbles through the fog and discovers the German trench, McNess (Dean Lennox Kelly) steps into the stomach of a German corpse; he is seemingly unaffected and moves on to the trench. The camera, however, closes in and lingers on the mud-soaked (rather than blood-soaked) carcass as the other men pass by. Its abject presence provides a traumatic trigger for the horror story to begin; from this point the conventions of the WWI war film fall away. However, importantly, this type of body horror belongs to a generic store of iconic motifs for war. In Deathwatch the constant image of the corpse— decomposing, dismembered, inappropriately visible, and anonymous— provides the backdrop for the horror that will ensue. As Trudi Tate’s summary of World War I literature details: the image of the corpse is a recurring theme. In Undertones of War (Blunden 1928) and Under Fire (Barbusse 1916) corpses are constantly “trodden under foot” (1988, 66). By the twenty-first century this shocking image has become shorthand for the failure and futility of war.

Charlie Shakespeare: A Case of Shell Shock? The war body is played out in Deathwatch through the signification of trauma. The terror that emerges through the visceral incarnation of the mud-soaked returning dead and the barbed-wire evil (it has no bodily incarnation) springing up from the ground provides a horror smokescreen for what is really going on: war trauma. War trauma is culturally specific; shell shock is the term for trauma suffered during WWI, a diagnosis that presented itself through the negotiations of studies of hysteria and the development of psychoanalysis. In the Gulf War period, Gulf War syndrome presented itself as a strand of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a diagnosis that developed out of symptoms suffered by soldiers during and after the Vietnam War. What follows is an engagement with these specific traumas and the ways in which their differing structures are represented in Deathwatch. The film’s engagement with depictions of war trauma—neurotic symptoms—ensures that the horror awaiting the soldiers is understood within the context of war, rather than the “slasher movie” that the film becomes: the horror body here is always subservient to the wartraumatized body.

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Deathwatch opens with Y Company preparing to go over the top. This scene depicts the company as already subject to war trauma. The men exhibit signs of neuroses that the audience is encouraged to identify; it immediately places the central theme of the film—trauma—in the frame. It is night; the men are clustered together, shoulder to shoulder: the camera scans across the tops of their heads. Flares light the sky, and the soldiers’ faces look up (to the camera) to watch them. The first face to be raised is that of Charlie Shakespeare (Jamie Bell), a young, soft, and mud-spattered face, whose mouth is in a tight grimace and eyes stare unblinking. As the camera wanders among the men, it is clear that there are different ways of preparing for battle: Starinski (Kris Marshall) shakily lights a cigarette. Captain Jennings (Laurence Fox) downs alcohol from a flask. Bradford (Hugh O’Conor) stares catatonically into the distance, his body unflinching. Doc (Matthew Rhys) closes his eyes as if he knows what he will expect to see once over the parapet. Quinn (Andy Serkis) raises his arm to the sky, his face screwed up and showing hatred, screaming “Come on!” to the sky. Tate (Hugo Speer) poignantly kisses a photograph. This scene shows many ways to prepare and many reactions to war, and they are all understood to be signs of neurosis. Charlie Shakespeare has a rite-of-passage journey through the film. He is the youngest member of the company—he admits to being sixteen after the company enters the German trench—and so, not even yet a man, he is totally inexperienced as a soldier. As the company is preparing to climb the parapet, he stalls; tears stream down Shakespeare’s face as he cries, “I can’t do it; I can’t do it.” A commanding officer rushes to Shakespeare, brandishing a pistol that he holds to Shakespeare’s head: “Do your duty!” He is in danger of being shot for cowardice, a common misunderstanding of shell shock, until Tate helps him up the wall and over, saying, “Welcome to Hell” (for a discussion of mistaken cowardice, see Marr 1919). The trench is diabolical: men fall back wounded or dead. There is bombardment on all sides, and mud up to the knees. What looms over the top is unimaginable. Shakespeare is young, confused, and terrified but is he shell-shocked? It is useful to consider the conditions of the diagnosis of shell shock here to understand the representations that are present in this film. Deathwatch is a WWI film, engaging with a historical trauma but, I argue, finding its referentiality in the post–Gulf War era. Shell shock was a condition specific to its moment of psychiatric practice—the dawning of psychoanalysis and Freud’s work—and to its moment of a new modern warfare. We need to consider how it might become the referent for a technological, invisible war ninety years later. I suggest that it provides a moment of visceral contemplation of the war body that is not apparent elsewhere on screen in relation to the Gulf War. The iconography of shell shock here works as an interpolation between the audience and the trauma: it is at the same time misleading and illuminating. The visceral imagery of the horror hybridity serves as an abject reminder of the somatic realities of war: as a visual overcompensation for the invisible sterility of war that Young and Jesser suggest (1997).

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In 1915, the British doctor Charles S. Myers confessed that shell shock was a “singularly ill-chosen term” for the condition of war neurosis evident during the WWI (Showalter 1987, 167). Its initial naming had been made in an article in the British medical journal The Lancet, in which Myers had described his treatment of men suffering paralysis, blindness, or violent tremors but who did not appear to have any physical injury (167). He had witnessed such emotional breakdown of many men at the front after they had been under heavy bombardment and within close proximity of exploding shells and chemical attack and assumed that there was a physical connection between the symptoms and the traumatic event (Babington 1997, 44). However, it was Freud’s intervention into this area within the medical arena that produced the psychiatric diagnosis known as war neuroses. Here modern science advanced a code of practice to “explain” the behavior of men unable to fight in the war because of physical and emotional debilitating symptoms. Such symptoms, commonly referred to as shell shock, included paralysis, mutism, uncontrollable shaking, nervous tics, nightmares, insomnia, spasms of the face, neck or limbs, walking with halting gaits, catatonic states, temporary blindness and deafness, stutters and other speech disorders (Leed 1979, 167). In April 1918 Sigmund Freud presented his findings on war neuroses to the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Budapest. Here he made the connection between the peacetime patients who had exhibited “severe disturbances in their mental life” after such incidents as train crashes, with men who exhibited similar “functional disturbances” during the WWI (1955, 207). He brought to the congress’s attention that “medical opinion had long found difficulty in explaining how such severe disturbances could occur without any gross injury to the organ (212). However, because of the case studies made possible by the large numbers of men presenting with similar symptoms during the war, he concluded that “the great majority of physicians no longer believe that the socalled “war-neurotics” are ill as a result of tangible organic injuries to the nervous system” (212). To clarify this point, he explained that, although the men were diagnosed after they had been in contact with “the explosion of a shell nearby” or “were buried by a fall of earth,” it was indisputable that the “war neurotics [which] manifested themselves for the most part as motor disturbances, . . . tremors, or paralysis” had a mental origin, rather than a physical one, when the “same symptoms appeared behind the front as well, far from the horrors of war” (212). Importantly Freud argues here that the symptoms of war neurosis had an internal as well as an external structure to them. His 1918 lecture states: In traumatic and war neuroses the human ego is defending itself from a danger, which threatens it from without, or which is embodied in a shape assumed by the ego itself. In the transference neuroses of peace the enemy from which the ego is defending itself is actually the libido, whose demands seem to it to be menacing. In both cases the ego is afraid of being

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damaged—in the latter case by the libido and in the former by external violence. . . . What is feared is nevertheless an internal enemy. (1955, 210) The formation of the diagnosis made in the cases that Freud and Breuer studied before the war took its impetus from the notion that the ego was under threat due to unresolved desires created during the pre-oedipal formation of the libido, desires and fears repressed without language to articulate them. Although these desires are repressed, they can make their presence known through symptoms played out on the body, such as those mentioned above, or through unwanted revisitations in dreams. The danger to the ego often requires the patient to “fly into illness” to protect themselves in a flight-or-fight scenario (Freud 1995, 34). So what of Charlie Shakespeare’s early behavior in the trench? Is this symptomatic of his flight into illness to escape danger? Remember that the link to shell shock was explicit: the senior officer wanted to shoot him because he was exhibiting signs of cowardice—a common interpretation of shell shock. However, once in the trench Shakespeare’s behavior denies those early tears and immobility as manifestations of shell shock. Indeed, compared to the rest of his company— which I will discuss in the next section—he is decisive and clear-headed. He prevents a prisoner of war from being killed, asserting, “It’s not right, It’s not right,” then later saves him from torture. Shakespeare repeatedly suggests to the rest of the company that they should evacuate the trench, which appears to be “evil.” He saves himself from the monstrous barbed horror by remaining quiet and still, and he shoots two fellow soldiers to prevent them from suffering an agonizingly slow death. Shakespeare does not conform to any model of young recruit in war film, nor does he continue to exhibit symptoms of war trauma. Indeed, one could argue that he exhibited a commonsense reaction to being asked to run to (almost) certain death. As his journey through the German trench continues, Shakespeare becomes increasingly brave and assertive. In fact, he starts to take on the resourceful attributes of the horror film survivor, in particular, those traits of Carol Clover’s “final girl” (1999). Not wanting to have it all in this argument that the final girl could actually be a boy, I suggest that Shakespeare’s soft body and face, unformed sexuality, and youth compromises his gender construction in just the same way that Clover suggests that the male attributes—such as resourcefulness, androgynous dress, and name—compromise the surviving girl in her discussion of the “slasher movie.” Shakespeare is the only character to actually have a first name at all— Charlie—which suggests that we should read some significance into the fact that this can also be a girl’s name in the twenty-first century.2 This is only important because this trope of the horror/slasher movie is clearly being utilized here in the battle against good and evil: the soldier versus the unknown force in the trench. Resorting to the tropes of the war genre—hero saves the day, known enemy is tracked and killed, camaraderie in the company (Basinger 2005, 39)—cannot express the anxiety of war that Deathwatch contains. It is around the war body of Shakespeare that the hybridity of this film sits.

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The mise-en-scène of the film plays into the “slasher movie” iconography as much as it plays with images of WWI. There are crossovers in the visual representations. There is often poor visibility, with no idea where the enemy/monster/ evil will come from, and it is often raining (a signifier of a dysfunctional environment). The first incidents of death occur at night and in the rain. The unknown enemy literally disappears back into the trench once it has killed; the trench bleeds (although in a Hitchcockian twist the audience is privy to this before the characters are), shifts its shape, moans, and screams. It is as if those who have died in the trench now inhabit the mud. This mud is pathological. It rises up and engulfs men, sucking them down into it—actively, decisively. There is a monster living within. The film has been described as a “creepy, authentically nasty little horror film” (Pierce 2002), and so it is: its tropes of horror stand in for the unknowable horrors of war. The boundary between life and death is collapsed in the trench, where the men live among the decaying bodies of the German soldiers who failed to hold it before them. Death becomes life, and life becomes death. Barbara Creed suggests that “the horror film attempts to bring about a confrontation with the abject . . . in order finally to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human. . . . [However] abjection by its very nature is ambiguous; it both repels and attracts” (1993, 14). In this way, then, the horror genre exposes rather than contains anxiety. Within the context of post Gulf War, the excesses of the film exhibit abjection not realized by images of the war itself. Robin Wood suggests that the horror film is able to bring resolution to these repressed fears and anxieties by playing out the “collective nightmares” of the audience and “working through” the issues (1978, 26). Such fantasy scenarios can “represent attempts to resolve those tensions in more radical ways than our consciousness can countenance” (26). Deathwatch is a horror film within a WWI context that plays through issues pertinent to its 2002 post–Gulf War, post-9/11 production conditions; presenting the horror through the tropes of the “slasher movie” enables a reading of a visible war body: horrific and destabilized. In the horror film, Clover suggests, females are “horribly punished” if they exercise the “investigating look” normally reserved for the heroic male (1999, 238). In the “slasher movie” the final girl’s gender construction is compromised entirely because she does take on this power, “reaches for the knife,” and “addresses the killer on his own terms” (239). Deathwatch reverses the power of the gaze that is inherent in the horror genre and punishes everyone (all male) but Shakespeare. The men are continually called to investigate strange sounds: horrible shrieks, sounds of bombardment, the calling of colleagues, only to find themselves mutilated by the evil presence in the trench, which leaves them wrapped in barbed wire, dying a horrifyingly slow death. Charlie Shakespeare does not investigate: He stays on guard or hides in holes in the trench walls. He is resourceful and conscious of the evil around him. He tries to make sense out of the confusion and does not join it. In the final scene he refuses the ultimate resting place of his company, an intrauterine cavern where the men will forever

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play cards and eat in a soft yellow glowing light—a fantasy scene of perpetual homo-social harmony but also, in Freudian terms, an unheimlich place of rest. In this cavern, this “other” place, the dead men are resurrected and contained within the womblike glow. Shakespeare refuses this passive end; he leaves back through a long tunnel and enters into the light, born again to life. In a flight-orfight scenario, Charlie Shakespeare is able to fight. The iconography of WWI, the shell-shocked label, which would render him a victim, is replaced by the “final girl” active agency of the “slasher movie,” which ensures that he will survive.

Quinn: PTSD Visits World War I The “alternative” weapons used in the “slasher movie” (domestic knives, drills, saws) are recalled here too by the use of barbed wire. The barbed wire has a life of its own: it twists itself around the victims, crushing and piercing, gouging at the flesh; it is an evil presence. Early in the film Quinn—one of the older members of the company, a professional career soldier—picks up a club that has barbed wire twisted around it. He uses it during the course of the film to kill one of his comrades and to torture the German prisoner. This weapon links Quinn to the evil of the trench; he becomes the monster within the company but also the monster lurks within Quinn. Three incidents involving Quinn are marked out in the film by what we can describe as their atrocity signification. His behavior is against army regulations: he kills and tortures prisoners, kills one of his comrades, and “frags” his commanding officer. These incidents mark Quinn out as unstable and “crazy”; they are removed from the iconography of WWI films. Instead, his character construction is linked to the unstable Vietnam combatant and veteran. It is useful to consider where these representations stem from and how Quinn’s actions here forward the narrative through this resignification. During his research into the effects of jungle warfare on the U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam, Robert Jay Lifton identified what he considered to be an “atrocity-producing situation” within the construction of guerrilla warfare (1973). For Lifton, the conditions of the Vietnam War produced reactions in men that had not been apparent in earlier wars: this research was, in the first instance, founded on discussions with men who had witnessed and taken part in the My Lai massacre. The men felt disaffected from their government and the general population of the United States (where the war was increasingly unpopular) and alienated by the territory in which they were situated. The term “atrocity” was not only linked to mass murder, as in the My Lai case, but also to incidents of torture, fragging (killing one’s officer), scalping, and rape. This application of trauma seems to be more appropriate to the actions of Quinn than the symptoms of shell shock, and it blurs the cultural specificity of trauma. Quinn’s first incident marks him out as someone who has been made literally “crazy” by war. Once Y Company moves into the German trench, Quinn abuses

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the German prisoners. He shoots the first two immediately, even though they are asking to surrender, and knocks the third to the ground, repeatedly kicking him. While doing this, he rants loudly and exhibits again the crazed facial expression. The other men look on with shocked expressions but do little to stop him: only Shakespeare tells him that he should stop. Quinn becomes visibly excited by his actions. As the man remains moaning in the mud, Quinn leers into the camera—to be sure that the audience does not miss the brightness of madness expressed in his eyes. The second incident involves the prisoner again when Quinn crucifies him with barbed wire and tortures him by beating him with the barbed-wire-covered club. A long shot shows the crucified prisoner screaming for help as Quinn moves around at the foot of the makeshift cross. The highangle camera remains in position as Captain Jennings tries to stop him. As Jennings moves nearer, the camera moves with him until the audience is looking Quinn in the face. Without a moment of hesitation, Quinn stabs him with his hunting knife. As Jennings dies, Quinn leans forward and hisses into his ear, “What I hate most about the war is not the mud or the cold or the wet or even the Hun: it’s the officers.” The camera movement here implicates the audience as the victim: we are close to the pathological war body, and he is hissing in our ear. This violent exchange is conducted through pouring rain and slipping mud: Jennings cannot keep dignity as he runs across the clearing to stop Quinn; his impotence is signified by his inability to stand in the moving ground. The killing of officers was reported in both WWI and the Vietnam War, but its representation in film has mostly occurred in the Vietnam War films (for instance, in Platoon): it is a trope of atrocity. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the predominant reference point for trauma discourse after the Vietnam War. Its symptoms are clearly represented in films made during the 1980s such as Cutter’s Way (Passer 1981), Rambo: First Blood (Kotcheff 1982), Platoon (Stone 1986), Casualties of War (de Palma 1987), and Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick 1987). In the late 1960s and during the 1970s symptoms of a condition named post-Vietnam syndrome (PVS) were discussed in the popular press and represented in films that dealt with Vietnam veterans. Most often these symptoms were displayed as antisocial and violent, as for instance in Veteran biker films like Angels from Hell (Kessler 1968). Quinn is not just a traumatized soldier: he is also a hyperreal traumatized soldier representing not the reality of the shell-shock victim of WWI but celluloid representations in Vietnam War films. The point of reference for his behavior is that of Rambo and Alex Cutter and Barnes rather than earlier versions of the genre. So although Deathwatch constructs a verisimilitude around the representation of the wet, muddy trenches of WWI (and the reviews all agree on this even if they are unconvinced about the horror/war mix), the dominant iconography and reference point for the most violent soldier in this film is the Vietnam War. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (vol. 3, 1980), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is defined:

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The development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or witnessing an event that involves death, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a family member or close associate. . . . The person’s response to the event must involve intense fear, helplessness, or horror. The characteristic symptoms resulting from the exposure to the extreme trauma include persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event, persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and numbing of general responsiveness. (463–64) The condition has a linear structure of cause and effect. There is an element of being “done to” in the identification of PTSD: that those who experience a traumatic event will be subject to, victims of, the event itself. In this way then, Quinn becomes absolved of responsibility for his pathological tendencies: he too is a victim of war. It can be argued that the diagnosis of PTSD in 1980 allowed a discourse around the atrocities of the Vietnam War (such as My Lai) to be recuperated, resulting in a flow of Vietnam veteran and combat films. The atrocities of war can be shown when an explanation for them can be articulated. Writing in 1984, John A. McKinnon, MD, states that the “muddy stagnant pond [of memory] may be eruptively disturbed by the surfacing leviathan: the delayed stress response system”(127). Like the shorthand of WWI iconography for the futility of war, the prevalent iconography of the Vietnam War is the traumatized veteran. Quinn plays into this representation and incorporates the horrors of war into his pathology. This violent pathology ensures that Quinn dies the most horrible death of them all. He appears to be punished for his behavior. After Jennings has died, Sergeant Tate runs out to try to stop Quinn from continuing to torture the prisoner. Quinn attacks him with the knife. As Tate tragically pleads his life, saying, “I have children,” Quinn raises his arm and hits him in the face with the barbed club, killing him outright. In this murder Quinn is victorious; he raises his arms to the sky, grinning and shouting, “This war, it’s all murder—and do you know what? I love it!” At this point the ground begins to move, and a large snakelike coil of barbed wire moves along the ground; it winds itself around the legs of Quinn, who starts to scream. The camera moves up Quinn’s body, following the tracks of the wire until blood appears in spots around his neck and on his cheeks. There is a moment of silence from Quinn as he (and the audience) anticipates what happens next. The barbed wire shoots out of his neck and face, wrapping itself around his head. Here the war body literally becomes the horror body, pierced and bloody, reminiscent of Pinhead (in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser 1987): an out-of-control body incapable of empathy and outside the conditions and behavior of war. This is the most visceral of the deaths from the barbed

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wire—earlier the audience has only seen mummified barbed-wrapped bodies— the results of the barbed evil’s work. This active moment of killing has been saved for the most pathological of characters: is this just the expected denouement of the horror genre? Or a punishment for war trauma: a comment on the excesses of war? The visceral fascinations of war are played out in this horror/war film through an evocation of war trauma and the generic structures of the “slasher movie.” The technological absenting of the war body in the Gulf is negotiated here through an engagement with tropes from earlier wars, whose safe temporal distance allows for a fuller investigation of the image of war. We can look to the medical journals to find the visceral realities of the experiences of war in the Gulf and to understand the toll that such imagery of the war body takes. Roger Gabriel and Leigh A. Neal’s interviews with troops returning from the Gulf have illustrated that the symptoms of war trauma discussed by Myers, Freud, Lifton, and McKinnon are still prevalent. One soldier describes the consequences of witnessing the horrors of the war body, the burned-out corpses of the Iraqi dead, images that he found to be “awful. . . . I have been knackered ever since. . . . My life has been shit for the past 10 years” (2002, 340). Since returning home from the Gulf, he has been subject to bursts of anger and rage. There are real war bodies evident in the memories of the Gulf War; there are still lived consequences and experiences for the troops that fought there. We may inhabit a media world in which the consequences of war can become invisible, but memory will always deny this absenting of the war body. At the end of the film, the German soldier Friedrich releases Charlie Shakespeare from the trench, and he walks into the grey fog and disappears: the war body made invisible again. There is a pause as we contemplate the fog and what we have just seen, before the camera once again focuses on the German corpse and the booted foot of a British soldier as he steps into it. An edit takes us to the face of Friedrich in close-up. He raises his face and smiles leeringly at the camera. A company of men is seen behind him, about to enter the trench. The narrative has started again: the monster is not dead; war continues. In his review of Deathwatch, Mark Kermode observes that the “ending fails to make sense of the preceding bloodbath” (2003, 40), but I suggest that this ending opens a space for a discussion of the structures of trauma, structures that elude the very nature of closure and resolution. The ending creates a time-loop paradox: the end takes us back to the beginning, and we are left wondering whether this is a new troop of soldiers about to live experiences similar to those that we have witnessed, or whether we are literally back at the beginning and Y Company is reentering the nightmare, never to be released from the trauma of war.3 Although this suggests a depressing neverending moment of war, it also, in its neurotic attachment, places order on the world, its repetition becoming something familiar and thus moving toward a potential assimilation of trauma. For Freud, one must always return to the original site of trauma to be able to reach full abreaction of the neurotic symptoms: the repeat narrative presents such a return. The horror film

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here offers its audience a safe fantasy space in which to consider the return to these imagined bodies of war. My reading of the film, then, suggests that the structures of trauma as understood by discourses prevalent in our contemporary Western society have produced a narrative that engages with the impossibility of representing war. The statement in the Press Pack that Deathwatch is a “shell-shock dream” is played out in this recurring narrative of the entire film. Its circular structure away from and neurotic return to the trampling of the German corpse suggests two things about representing war: First, the dead and decomposing war body is a locus of trauma (whether visible or not), whose visceral abjectness presents an impossibility of assimilation. Second, war will only be recovered from traumatic memory by its continued reinterpreting and reinvention of the image of the war body.

Acknowledgments To Amy, Phil, and Jessica Bristow; Carina Buckley; Claire Hines; Jackie Furby; Rachel and Sarah Furnish and Livvie Furnish Griffiths; Helen, Mike, and Ben Tomkies; and especially Jason Lucas. Thank you: you all know why.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Babington, Antony. 1997. Shell Shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis. London: Leo Cooper. Basinger, Elaine. 2005. “The World War II Combat Film: Definition.” In The War Film, 30–52. Edited by Robert Eberwein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Barbusse, Henri. [1916] 1988. Under Fire. Translated by W. Fitzwater Wray. London: Dent. Baudrillard, Jean. 2006. “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” In Hollywood and the War: A Film Reader, 303–14. Edited by J. David Slocum. Abingdon: Routledge. Blunden, Edmund. 1928. Undertones of War. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Bond, Brian. 2002. The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourke, Joanna. 1996. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and The Great War. London: Reaktion Books. Clover, Carol. 1999. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in The Slasher Film.” In Feminist Film Theory. Edited by Sue Thornham. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 229–33. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 1980. Vol. 3. Washington: American Psychiatric Association. Freud, Sigmund. [1918] 1955. “Introduction to the Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 22. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth.

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———. [1896] 1995. “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” In The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. London: Vintage. Gabriel, Roger, and Leigh A. Neal. 2002. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Following Military Combat or Peace Keeping.” British Medical Journal 324, February 9, http://www.bmj.com/cgi/ content/full/324/7333/340 (accessed July 29, 2007). Higashi, Sumiko. 2000. “Night of the Living Dead: A Horror Film about the Horrors of the Vietnam era.” In From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, 175–88. Edited by L. Dittmar and G. Michaud. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hynes, Samuel. 1990. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Bodley Head. Kermode, Mark. 2003. Review of Deathwatch, directed by Michael J. Bassett. Sight and Sound, NS, 13, no. 1 (January): 40. Leed, Eric. 1979. No-Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lifton, Robert J. 1973. Home from the War: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Simon & Schuster. Marr, Hamilton Clelland. 1919. Psychoses of the War, Including Neurasthenia and Shell Shock. London: Henry Frowde / Hodder & Stoughton. Pierce, Nev. 2002. Review of Deathwatch, directed by Michael J. Bassett. http://www.bbc.c.uk/films/ 2002/11/20/deathwatch_2002_review.shtml (accessed July 29, 2007). Press Pack, Deathwatch. At http://www.michaelbassett.com/pages/press_%2opack.html (accessed on April 28, 2007). McKinnon, John A., MD. 1984. “Brief Psychotherapy of the Vietnam Combat Neuroses.” In Psychotherapy of the Combat Veteran. Edited by H. J. Schwartz. New York: SP Medical & Scientific Books. Randell, Karen. 2005. “Lost Bodies/Lost Souls: MIA narratives in Night of the Living Dead.” In 2004– 2005 Film and History. CD-ROM Annual. Showalter, Elaine. 1987. “Male Hysteria: W. H. R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock.” In The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830–1980. London: Virago; New York: Penguin Books. Tasker, Yvonne. 2005. “Soldier’s Stories: Women and Military Masculinities in Courage under Fire.” In The War Film, 172–89. Edited by Robert Eberwein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Tate, Trudi. 1998. Modernism, History and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wood, Robin. 1978. “Return of the Repressed.” Film Comment 14 (July–August): 26. Young, Allen. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, Peter, and Peter Jesser. 1997. The Media and the Military: From the Crimea to Desert Strike. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Filmed Angels from Hell. Directed by Bruce Kessler. USA, 1968. Casualties of War. Directed by Brian de Palma. USA, 1987. Courage under Fire. Directed by Edward Zwick. USA, 1996. Cutter’s Way. Directed by Ivan Passer. USA, 1981. Deathwatch. Directed by Michael J. Bassett. UK, 2002. Full Metal Jacket. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA, 1987. Hellraiser. Directed by Clive Barker, USA 1997. Jarhead. Directed by Sam Mendes. USA, 2005. Platoon. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA, 1986. Rambo: First Blood. Directed by Ted Kotcheff. USA, 1982. Three Kings. Directed by David O. Russell. USA, 1999.

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Notes 1. The synopsis: It is 1917. A division of British soldiers on the Western Front, Y Company, go over the top. Pvt. Charlie Shakespeare (Jamie Bell) is too terrified to move, is commanded to do his “duty” whilst being threatened with a pistol to his head by the company commander and then dragged over the top by Sergeant Tate (Hugo Speer) who tells him, “welcome to hell, Shakespeare.” Once over the men encounter a bloody battle and are consumed by what they believe to be Gas: it turns out to be the fog. One of the men, Chevasse (Ruaidhri Conroy) is injured and carried on a stretcher. As the Company wanders through a thick gas/fog in no-man’s land they literally stumble into a German trench, stepping into a German corpse on the way. Here they shoot the two remaining German soldiers and take one prisoner, Friedrich (Torben Liebrecht) he tells them—through a conversation in French with Shakespeare—that the trench is “evil” and that they should leave. Captain Jennings (Laurence Fox) orders the men to secure the trench and await orders: over the next two days supernatural forces appear to be at work as the men start to hallucinate, kill each other or are killed horribly by the trench itself. Eventually only Shakespeare and Friedrich are left. Shakespeare enters a bunker and finds his dead comrades eating and chatting; he meets the eye of his doppelganger and tells him, “I’m not dead,” he leaves the bunker and comes face to face with the barrel of a gun pointed by Friedrich who says, “I saved you; only you tried to save me.” Shakespeare turns and climbs out of the bunker asking, “What’s out there?” Fade to gray. A company of men come out of the fog. One of the Company steps into the carcass of a German soldier. The camera closes in on the face of Friedrich who half-smiles . . . the scenario has started again. 2. Michael J. Bassett has stated that he wanted Charlie to have a name that stood out so that the audience would not lose sight of him. The other characters in the film are named after actual combatants who died in World War I (Press Book). 3. This rebeginning is also suggestive of the computer game narrative where each level not achieved takes us back to the beginning to try again—a contemporary twist on the notion of the repetitive, neurotic, nature of trauma.

8

One Nation Invisible Unveiling the Hidden War Body on Screen H. Louise Davis and Jeffrey Johnson

Since the end of the Vietnam War, various screenwriters and filmmakers have tried to represent the conflict in more and more realistic ways. Considering the excess of visual images and footage of the Vietnam conflict produced by journalists and consumed by television viewers worldwide, even before the end of the war, this move toward reproducing the “authentic” Vietnam experience through the filmic medium appears somewhat redundant. However, as many scholars have demonstrated, visual reconstructions of the Vietnam experience produced during the mid 1980s, in both aim and format, differ considerably from fictional and nonfictional accounts produced in the previous decades (see Berg 1986; Kinney 1991; Williams 1991). One of the most significant recuperative tendencies of Hollywood Vietnam War films from the 1980s is to depict the body at war, the American soldier, as an epitome of masculine power and strength. Whether at the height of his success as a warrior, or as a casualty of war, the body at war is one with whom audience members, particularly those raised on a diet of Westerns and World War II movies, can easily idealize. In this chapter we look at Vietnam War texts from the 1980s in order to discern how an already-established “fantasy” genre constructs a hypermasculine technological body-at-war as a recuperative figure. Through a comparative analysis of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) along with Sam Mendes’s 2005 Gulf War film, Jarhead, we demonstrate the evolution of the recuperative figure that has, at least in the realm of twenty-first-century popular culture, been rendered redundant. In drawing parallels between the depictions of both military bodies and technologies in Mendes’s film and nonfiction accounts of the current war in Iraq (2003–), we attempt not only to identify the new role played by the U.S. marine, but also to locate/situate the human body within modern war. To recuperate is to remember and to control memory, to produce reminiscences, to possess power. By consuming the experiences of the hypermasculine technobody active in the war zone, American audiences share his memories, see 134

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the conflict from his perspective, and begin to develop a new body of knowledge relating to Vietnam based on these borrowed memories. Thus, in the mid-1980s films, the Vietnamese landscape, “a landscape for American projections” (Doherty 1988, 28) functions as a site where memories are produced, where truth is constructed to legitimize the function of power (Hamilton 1986, 50). The “authentic” Vietnam experience is thus a production, an illusion produced both to contribute to already-existing American knowledge systems and to construct new truths. In her discussion of Full Metal Jacket, Willoquet-Maricondi argues that the “infertile unity” between man and machine is part of a process of masculinization, a “process [that] has run its course. The logic of this masculinization is a suicidal logic. The truly ‘made’ man is a dead marine” (Willoquet-Maricondi 1994, 15). Astute as her statement may be in relation to mid-1980s Vietnam War films, Willoquet-Maricondi could not have anticipated how fitting this notion would to more-modern representations of more-recent conflict. Indeed, the process of masculinization has run its course, not as a result of an infertile union, but because the next generation of military machines has dispensed with the body altogether. The hypermasculine technobody’s progeny has the strength, power, and visual capabilities of the marines in Vietnam with none of the human vulnerability. New bodiless military technologies have literally “killed off” the active combatant role of the marine. And as a result, the marine is of little cultural value unless dead. In “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” Jean Baudrillard argues that the redundancy or implied death of the soldier’s role is a direct result of the televization or virtualization of war: We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real. War has not escaped virtualization, which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a facelifted war, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge. . . . Even the military has lost the privilege of use value, the privilege of real war. . . . The military personnel do not know what to make of their real function, their function of death and destruction. (1995, 28) The media’s perpetuation of the idea that humans are no longer involved in war, that bodies are neither damaged nor destroyed within combat, is a highly sophisticated recuperative strategy that allows for producers of images of war to deny the failure of war and to elide the loss of actual bodies. The simulated, televisual war is a fantasy that fulfills the viewer’s fetishistic desire to see the destruction of a faceless enemy without having to reveal the horrors of war, the actual conditions of life in the war zone, or the fact that human deaths are a daily occurrence.

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The notion of a simulated war is taken up by Sam Mendes’s film Jarhead, which continues many of the generic conventions established in war films since the end of the conflict in Vietnam. But as a result of its parodic approach and play with intertextual reference, Jarhead is a war text that further extends and fixes generic definition. The film openly borrows from earlier texts that deal with soldiers at war, yet in its engagement with the complexities of visualizing the Gulf War, it is also specific to its own historical context. While referencing and alluding to films set in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s—in particular Apocalypse Now (1979), The Deer Hunter (1978), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Platoon (1986), and even Cocktail (1988)—Mendes’s film is clearly contextualized within the 1990s. In the same way that mid-1980s films were recuperative texts trying to fulfill the “desperate desire to win the lost war, to conquer and possess it” (Berg 1986, 95), Jarhead can be described as a revisionist text that, while presenting a very clear antiwar sentiment, deflects attention away from U.S. failures in the Gulf War by focusing on the redundancy of the individual soldier. The film’s focus upon an individual at war and his buddies, a trope typical to the genre, results in the elision of the actual events or causes of war. As with Vietnam combat films, Jarhead is also “successful in erasing the difference between individuals as a locus for suffering and death in war and the larger ideological context of the society that sent them to war” (Kinney 1991, 159). This proves to be a useful erasure for America, a nation whose rationale for its recent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq is under question both within and outside the United Sates. Despite the similarities between Jarhead and its predecessors, despite the film’s allusions to and borrowing from Vietnam texts, Jarhead also illuminates the ways in which both war and depictions of war have shifted since the mid-1980s. Set in Iraq during the first Gulf War, Jarhead chronicles a new era of warfare and demonstrates how the traditional role of the soldier has been usurped by military technologies. As the film clearly demonstrates, the modern world insulates the body at war from its purpose and from the pleasures that war can afford to the victors. An examination of the ways in which Jarhead steals from, parodies, and reinscribes established war-film conventions provide insight into developments of the war-film genre and the current technological nature of warfare. Jarhead opens with a now-familiar image of the recruit embarking upon his grueling transition from a Jody to a marine. On board a bus bound for base camp, in a scene reminiscent of Brian Flanagan’s (Tom Cruise) return to civilian life in Cocktail (both films also feature Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” Anthony Swofford describes how his transition into a jarhead begins with the deconstruction and reconstruction of everyday language: So now my hands were dick skinners. A flashlight was a moonbeam. A pen was an ink stick. My mouth was a cum receptacle [sic]. A bed was a rack. A wall was a bulkhead. A shirt was a blouse. A tie was still a tie, and a belt was still a belt. But many other things would never be the same.

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Here Swofford indicates how, through language, the Marine Corp permanently alters his perceptions of the world. Parts of the body, clothing, and everyday items that he once referred to and conceived of as mundane objects—now they take on new meanings. Thus, when he is placed in unfamiliar contexts, such as the company barracks or a war zone, he acquires the language that not only enables him to describe his surroundings, but also to psychically protect himself from the abject horrors he encounters. The development of a new language serves a further purpose in that it distinguishes between the military man and the civilian, the man experienced in warfare and the man excluded from such experiences. In his discussion of Full Metal Jacket (the Vietnam film that Jarhead alludes to the most), Thomas Doherty explains the “incantatory function” of what he describes as “Vietnam vernacular,” describing it as “an exotic sub-cultural dialect, the knowledgeable use of which grants admission to the Brotherhood of Vietnam warriors. . . . Its purpose is not only to identify the kindred spirit but [also] to brand the nonconversant as alien”(Doherty 1988, 26). In the same way, Swofford’s newly acquired vernacular marks him as part of the brotherhood, as a marine. It also allows him to claim his place among those heroic marines, actual and fictional, that have come before him. Swofford’s new language is masculine, a set of words that consistently refers to the male organ and its potential to violate. The replacement of words such as pen, flashlight, and wall may at first appear arbitrary; however, the phallic imagery produced by such words indicates the new hyperphallicized nature of Swofford’s new vocabulary. These evocations are reinforced by the more obviously sexualized substitutions, where Swofford’s hands become synonymous with his dick (masturbation being a recommended solution for boredom in the field), and his mouth becomes an orifice that does not expel (unless commanded) but is penetrable. Swofford’s new language also indicates his place in a new world order, in a symbolic order specific to the military. The marine recruit is reduced to the level of a child. He returns to what Jacques Lacan deems the “Imaginary phase,” only to reemerge, after basic training, into a symbolic order where the corps is his parents and the feminine his enemy: To be part of the body [the Corps] one must shape oneself in its image. One body must not be disgusting or alluringly “other.” The Corps is both mother and father, functioning according to group dynamics that fall distinctively within the Imaginary order as Lacan describes it, with the consequent aggression directed toward the body itself insofar as it is the threateningly powerful maternal body; this aggression is directed only secondarily against the enemy. (White 1991, 208) The overemphasis on the marine’s genitalia and orifices serves to infantilize or emasculate the marine, forcing him to acknowledge his place and his role within the military machine (without the collaboration of all members, the

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machine cannot function adequately). His drill sergeant–parent provides constant reminders of his vulnerable position, of his penetrability, so as to force him to develop a heightened awareness of his own corporeality, to learn how to become impenetrable, to reproduce himself as a technological advanced hypermasculine machine. Susan White argues that to become the epitome of hypermasculinity, the marine must repress the feminine by first conquering its “powerful maternal threat,” and then by directing aggression toward the enemy. In contrast to White, Susan Jeffords argues that the marine does not completely reject all that is feminine; instead, he appropriates the reproductive capacity of females. For Jeffords, the male marine who has been to Vietnam is situated in a privileged position; because he has been “isolated from American culture and saved from its deterioration and feminization,” he has the ability to “revitalize a U.S. society that has lost or corrupted its own”(Jeffords 1990, 205). However, the marine can only function as savior by appropriating reproduction, first by identifying the feminine with reproduction and subsequently rejecting and replacing it with the masculine; second, by abstracting and technologizing reproduction as a prelude to its appropriation by the masculine. (Jeffords 1990, 205) This rejection and subsequent appropriation of the feminine becomes most obvious when Swofford and his fellow recruits first learn how to relate to their rifle. In a scene lifted from Full Metal Jacket, the recruits feminize their rifles only in order to incorporate the feminine into their own bodies. Swofford and his partner Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) first learn about the ways in which a marine treats his rifle when their drill Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx) commands the men to repeat after him: This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine. Without my rifle, I am nothing. Without me, my rifle is nothing. (Jarhead, 2005) During his training, Swofford describes himself as “hooked” to his rifle; it has become a corporeal extension and affects his body image. In both Swofford’s mind and the viewer’s mind, the marine’s rifle can no longer be perceived as separate from the marine. He has become partially mechanized and experiences a sense of powerfulness and pleasure as a result of his new, hypermasculinized, technological self. To become one with the rifle is the training marine’s primary goal as, once he has become part of a killing machine, he can successfully function as part of the larger military machine. For Swofford and his buddies in Iraq, the war is a distant concept, fought by a more-advanced macho machine than themselves (bombs and planes) miles away from their location. Their inability to fight, as a result of the distance between them and the action, leaves them with an inordinate amount of leisure time. In Jarhead the infertility of the union between man and his weapon, of the

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interchangeability of his rifle and his penis, is most evident at moments of inactivity, at times when the soldiers find new ways to use their guns. As there is often “no pussy for a thousand miles” (Fowler’s comment in Jarhead), the soldier has no “productive” use for his penis. He can masturbate, but his semen becomes wasted fluid. Similarly, the nonfighting soldier’s rifle is rendered unproductive, his bullets have nothing to penetrate, and his rifle becomes a symbol of futility. He has already produced himself and, in the inert moments of the Gulf War, he has nothing more to produce, nothing to look at, nothing to capture literally or even on film. At such moments cleaning one’s rifle and masturbating are on a par for the leisured marine. Both are indicative of the marine’s physical prowess, and both are encouraged, when appropriate, by the military machine. In Jarhead, the body of the marine is constantly regulated when even the marine’s intake and expulsion of liquids is carefully monitored: You will hydrate. You will train. You will adjust to this desert, and you’ll hydrate some more. And you will be ready. The punishment for failing to be regulated or controlled is to come face-to-face, literally, with “shit.” Of all the abject bodily wastes, shit is perhaps the most controllable and the most disposable, and yet it is still reminiscent of that bodily waste “which reaches its extreme in the horror of the corpse” (Grosz 1994, 193). To force the soldier to handle shit, especially when he has been trained to avoid pollutant fluids in the field, is to remind him exactly how close he is to the abject, and how easy it would be for him to cross the fragile boundary from a technologically advanced body at war to a penetrated, seeping corpse. Any embracing of the abject filth reminds him of the threat of the maternal that he has, thus far, expelled (White 1991, 209) and that his technobody is merely a production of his own making. In Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Jarhead, it is the soldier’s abuse of his own body, through the consumption of alcohol, that leads his officers to reprimand him and put him on latrine duty. Here the soldier is forced to recognize that the body at war does not belong to the soldier but to the one whose image he molded himself into, the Corps. In becoming part of an invincible military machine, and by controlling “shit,” the body at war is almost always able to evade incorporation of pollutant fluids, control (for the good of the company) his own bodily waste, and maintain his hypermasculine identity. Yet, not all bodies at war survive. Indeed, in every contemporary classic war film discussed, soldiers fall victim to the bullet, and their bodies, no longer at war, seep and expel blood as though it were shit. However, the bodies at war that fail to fully protect themselves in the field are quickly contained on both a literal and a symbolic level. The filth and horror of the actual body or corpse is ritualistically contained within a body bag and/or the flag-covered coffin (as well as within the frame of the screen). Once contained, most abject bodies at war are also raised to the status of hero. Through a process of heroization, the abject condition is thus swept aside. The corporeality of the corpse, now covered over

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by the flag, is diminished into little more than the symbol of nation and freedom that covers it. In contrast, the body at war in Iraq today, a figure rarely depicted on active duty (in American television, footage of large battles are rarely seen), is at the moment of death reduced to nothing more than a biographical account of his civilian life. The U.S. news networks present “behind the scenes” reports of the personal lives of soldiers, rather than bodies in actual combat. The public image of the soldier serving in Iraq is today contained within montage pieces of an injured soldier’s family, a dead war reporter’s heroic life, or a Marine’s desire to do what is “right.” While bombing footage dehumanizes war, these personal reports emphasize the goodness and valor of the people involved in it. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent conflict in Afghanistan, media outlets in the United States seemed to make a concerted effort to present the American military as heroic and inspirational. This trend continued as the United States entered into a military conflict with Iraq in 2003. Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2003 was “the American soldier”; numerous sporting events, concerts, and television presentations were dedicated to the troops; and networks began airing montages that detailed the lives of soldiers, many of them having fallen in battle. Thus CBS Evening News presented a daily piece about the life of a soldier who had died in combat. Fox News created a wall of pictures of servicemen and servicewomen that credited these soldiers as America’s brightest. Even local television stations like WPMT Fox 43 in central Pennsylvania broadcasted stories about the lives of local soldiers. These news segments not only promoted American patriotism and the heroic warrior cult; they also humanized the soldiers. They removed the bodies from the context of war and compensated for the dehumanized look of war footage by creating a war figure with whom the audience could identify. The service personnel featured were no longer seen as soldiers, but as ordinary American people. The soldiers were shown, not just as generic bodies of war, but also as sons and daughters of a nation that loved them. In essence, biographies replace bodies at war. And yet the biographical accounts have a function similar to the fictional representations of bodies in the sense that biographies also deflect attention away from “larger ideological context of the society that sent them to war” (Kinney 1991, 159). The images of dead soldiers while they were alive, as presented on television, satisfy the morbid fascination of American news junkies without shocking them or implicating the government or military powers that put the marine in that position in the first place. In the mind of the viewer, the dead soldier remains alive and healthy. As with the depiction of the soldiers in Jarhead, most of the wartime action that American viewers see either focuses upon minor street skirmishes or upon the humanless war machines. This is seen as a typical CNN report follows a group of marines in Fallujah, Iraq, who are looking for snipers. The marines are seen walking down the street, talking to local citizens and giving candy to children. The scene is described as peaceful until a sniper fires on the marines and they are forced to detain citizens in order to find him (“CNN Fallujah” 2005). This, cou-

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pled with the unknown nature of the Iraq conflict, gives the impression that American soldiers are merely patrolling streets and are more akin to traffic cops than warriors. Even funerals and incoming coffins of dead soldiers are rarely seen on American television. In fiction films, however, it is the U.S. soldiers who perform the cleansing rituals that render the abject corpse unthreatening (they retrieve, transport, and bag the bodies); but in the actual world it is the media that performs the ritualistic cleansing of the abject bodily fluids, expulsions, and corpses by refusing to represent them. In wiping clean all war images, the media is able to psychically protect the responsible and responsive viewer who acts as a body at war. Without hiding the bodies, the media is unable to continue to justify the wars depicted. Though it may be true that some outlets try to balance their coverage, even antiwar speech tends to conform to the idea of personal soldier. Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan started a campaign against the Bush administration and the Iraq War after her son was killed in Iraq in April 2004. News reports show video of Sheehan protesting the war from many venues across the United States, and to many she has become the leader of the antiwar movement. Sheehan’s antiwar activities sprang from the idea that the personal life and belief of the soldier was as important as his role in the military. Sheehan focused on the rights of soldiers that are fighting in Iraq and the idea that an illegal war has placed them in danger. In a television advertisement addressed to the president, Sheehan declared, “You lied to us, and because of your lies my son died” (Byrne, 2005). Sheehan shares the media’s belief that the personal life of the American soldier is paramount and his job is secondary. In doing so, Sheehan continues to cover over the realities of war, the conditions that led to her son’s death. In trying to personalize him, she may elicit viewer sympathies, but she does little to challenge either the war itself or the ways in which the war is represented. That said, however, where the media presents the personal soldier in order to veil the horrors of war, Sheehan’s personalization of the body at war is an attempt to deny the military’s right to control and possess the U.S. soldier’s body. In effect, Sheehan is reasserting her role as her son’s mother and denying the military the right to own him. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, reporters who are captured, injured, or killed are becoming the focus of news stories. ABC News reported that by August 30, 2005, sixty-seven journalists had been killed in Iraq (2005). Although one could argue that news reporters, in theory, should be unseen conduits of information, it is understandable that their misfortunes would be reported. What is unusual is the way in which captured or injured reporters are often portrayed as news soldiers. While working journalists are generally thought to be impartial, captured or sacrificed newspersons are frequently portrayed as individual bodies at war, fighting to obtain the truth. One of the most famous or prominent examples of a news reporter transformed into body at war is the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped by terrorists on January 23, 2002. When Pearl’s kidnappers demands of U.S. policy change were not met, he was later found beheaded in Pakistan.

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During the time in which Pearl was held hostage, news coverage portrayed his family-man status: television news outlets ran repeated footage of both his wife and his boss pleading with his captors to spare his life. It was also made clear that Pearl was in Pakistan to find information about the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. In doing so he was shown not only as a journalist doing a job, but also as a soldier in the war against terror. Even the group that kidnapped him claimed that he was not merely a reporter, but rather also a U.S./Israeli spy. In fact, videotape showing his death and beheading carried the title “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl” (BBC News 2002). In death Pearl becomes a new type of soldier for a new era: the informant. He did not carry a gun or have a rank, but according to the news broadcasts, he was a protector of the American way of life; his weapon was his ability to record and reconstruct the events of war. Not surprisingly, in light of the bodiless nature of war, figures such as Pearl have been elevated to hero status. Pearl himself has become so popular among the press and the American public that a number of books have been written about his life, and at least two films are currently under development (Moerk 2005). In such a way Pearl’s role has shifted, from journalist to soldier to dead war hero. Pearl can be both soldier and hero because he is allowed the privilege of sight. As a mobile and active figure on the ground, amid the fighting, Pearl has both the capacity to control the camera’s gaze and to look around; for this reason he appears as a threat or spy to the enemy. As both Jarhead and actual war footage demonstrate, what the soldier at war sees is an augmentation, an optical illusion. The marine need not use his eyes. Instead, a technologically advanced viewing apparatus has replaced his limited human organs. He becomes a spectator whose experience of war is made virtual by an artificial eye, a technological production. He is rarely put in a position close enough to see his enemy other than through a telescopic lens or upon a screen. In Jarhead Mendes illustrates the virtual nature of war, and the consequent role of soldier as viewer, most effectively in the scene in which Swofford and Troy are about to take their one and only “shot” at the enemy. Despite the fact that their request to fire has been granted, the pair is denied the opportunity to shoot the Iraqi generals in their line of fire. The colonel calls in the air strike, telling Swofford and Troy to watch: “It’ll blow your fucking minds.” As ordered, Swofford sits back and watches the spectacular strike through the window of the bunker. The view of the strike presented to the film’s audience is a direct reversal of that which Swofford sees. As he looks out, we look toward him and see the spectacle presented as a reflection on the outside of the window. Behind the image, redundant and despondent, the marines become faintly visible, almost reminiscent of the shadowy alien-like enemy depicted in earlier war films. Here Mendes demonstrates not only the helplessness of the soldier, who watches the action from a safe distance, but also, in showing how Swofford’s view is only a simple reflective reversal of the audience’s view, he reconfirms the interchangeability of the soldier-viewer and the viewer at home. 1

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Swofford’s view of the enemy is one that is distant and mediated by visual technologies; for this reason he, like many media audiences, conceives of the war he is fighting in filmic terms. Mendes emphasizes this early in the film. Just before Swofford’s company receive their orders, they are shown watching footage of Vietnamese villages taken from Apocalypse Now. Swofford’s response to the villagers (who may or may not be the enemy) is, like that of his fellow marines, aggressive and violent. Swofford views the Vietnamese as enemies, even though the war in which they fought U.S. marines ended over twenty-five years before the screening of Apocalypse Now in Jarhead. Throughout the film Mendes selfconsciously explores the ways in which film and media, the illusion of realism, have taught Swofford and his company to experience and read their situation, their own bodies, and the bodies of their enemies. The simulated war is again emphasized in nonfiction through the use of constant repetition and the weapon’s-eye view. While journalists from the Vietnam era were commonly allowed to select their own stories, latter-day reporters have had to contend with new military policies that limit a journalist’s access to information. As visual technologies expand, visual information has become more restricted; networks have often been forced to share footage, which regularly creates a seemingly endless sampling of the same video images. Strikingly, these images often do not contain physical representations of a human fighting force, of bodies, but rather frequently focus on technologically advanced weaponry and the destruction that it causes. And as images of bombing campaigns and precision missile attacks are presented for easy viewing, the typical citizen becomes a virtual combatant. Footage of technological attacks invites citizens to be the face, or eyes, of the “precision” nonhuman assault. In a sense, while watching the battle on television, the viewer is transformed into the modern-day, semi-redundant hypermasculine technobody. In the Iraq War era, the hypermasculine technobody’s role is, as we have described, to observe. Such bodies are, however, still absolutely necessary because, in a virtual war, the war does not exist unless someone witnesses it. Networks display raw footage, not to inform their audiences, but for entertainment values. Doing this assumes that the viewer, like Swofford and his company, does not locate actual bodies within the bombsights or see the enemy as anything more than a “spectacular display.” The eye of the camera, which is not designed to mimic the human eye, dehumanizes the action. Through the technological lens, the school, homes, and workplaces of Iraqi civilians fail to register as “real” places. Baudrillard effectively explains why this dehumanized, defamiliarizing footage appeals to audiences, or at least does not offend: We have neither the need nor taste for real drama or real war. What we require is a multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence, for we have a hallucinogenic pleasure in all things, . . . pleasure in our indifference and our irresponsibility and thus in our true liberty. (Baudrillard 1995, 75)

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The video footage of the opening “shock-and-awe” attack of the Iraqi War, screened early in the conflict, serves as a prime example of seemingly simulated or “fake” and “hallucinatory” violence that is both insignificant and exhilarating. Images are intercut from several cameras to record multiple missiles lighting up the night as they whiz through the air, before finding their targets and creating loud booms and electric-hued firebombs. As the bombs explode, the transition from dark into bright is much too awkward and jarring, which causes the video to seem unnatural or fabricated. The destruction appears as it would in a video game, as opposed to an actual event. This unreality allows war to become a game, and although the viewer is like a body at war, the person fears no bodily injury or no future repercussions for one’s actions. In such a way war becomes a game or a sporting event in which the viewer, as soldier, can experience emotional and spiritual victory and loss but not physical harm. Due to the dehumanization and unfamiliarity of such footage, it is necessary for newscasters to create narratives and deliver commentaries to remind the viewer that, although invisible to the naked eye, the war body exists at the target sight. Because the raw footage is unfamiliar and the power of the bomb is unknown, newscasters typically stress the severity and seriousness of bomb attacks through the spoken word, but their words cannot override the sensations and excitement produced by the images presented. In a somewhat disturbing but now typical manner, certain American newscasters have cheerled the destruction of Baghdad by describing the types of weapons being used and then pausing to listen to the explosions being produced by such weapons. For instance, during the Fox News live coverage of an early U.S. attack on Baghdad on the March 21, 2003, reporters inform the viewers about the details of the attack while all watch the repeated bombardment of an Iraqi city. Within such media narrative of war, the war bodies (in this case Iraqi civilians) are reduced to inanimate objects. Iraqi civilians’ deaths are referred to as “collateral damage” and the point is made that every effort has been made to keep this statistic low (“Fox News Iraq War” 2003). The problem here arises from the fact that, in feigning objectivity and in refusing to replicate the view of the human eye, such virtual footage diminishes the effect of warfare on real lives. As much as we may like to claim that the First Gulf War did not happen, and similarly that the War on Terror is not happening, that is not the case for the war bodies who suffer very real consequences of war. For the viewer-soldier, accomplished and in control, but not responsible, the war body or victim of the bombs that figure in actual footage do not exist: they are not worthy of being looked at and no longer necessary as an opposition by which to establish the strength and masculinity of the hypermasculine technobody at war. In presenting modern warfare as bodiless, while indicating how physically and psychically destructive war still is for all the bodies involved (whether visible or not), Jarhead exposes the fallacies and contradictions of war in the modern era.

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Works Cited Printed or Posted Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. BBC News. 2002. “Pearl Family Anger at Broadcast.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ americas/1988828.stm (accessed July 30, 2007). Beck, A. 1992. “The Christian Allegorical Structure of Platoon.” Literature/Film Quarterly 20, no. 3:213–22. Berg, R. 1986. “Losing Vietnam: Covering the War in an Age of Technology.” Cultural Critique 3 (Spring): 92–125. Byrne, John. 2005. “Video: Mother of Fallen Soldier Asks Questions of President Bush.” The Raw Story, http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Video_Mother_of_fallen_soldier_asks_questions_ of_Presiden_0812.html (accessed July 30, 2007). Doherty, T. 1988. “Full Metal Genre: Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam Combat Movie.” Film Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Winter): 24–30. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gruben, P. 2005. “Practical Joker: The Invention of a Protagonist in Full Metal Jacket.” Literature/ Film Quarterly 33, no. 4:270–79. Hamilton, R. 1986. “Shooting from the Hip: Representations of the Photojournalist of the Vietnam Era.” Oxford Art Journal 9, no. 1:49–55. Harris, Tom. 2006. “How Smart Bombs Work.” http://science.howstuffworks.com/smartbomb.htm (accessed July 30, 2007). Jeffords, S. 1990. “Reproducing Fathers: Gender and the Vietnam War in U.S. Culture.” In From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, 203–16. Edited by L. Dittman and G. Michaud. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kinney, J. L. 1991. “Gardens of Stone, Platoon, and Hamburger Hill: Ritual and Remembrance.” In Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, 153–65. Edited by M. Anderegg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moeller, Susan. 1999. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death. New York: Routledge. Moerk, Christian. 2005. “The Race to Put Pearl on Screen.” New York Times, http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/movies/MoviesFeatures/31moer.html?ex=1280462400&en=7c d7e1fa73c9b48e&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (accessed July 30, 2007). USA Today. “TV Reporter 67th Journalist Killed in Iraq.”www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/ 2005-08-31-journalist-killed_x.htm (accessed July 30 2006). White, S. 1991. “Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression of the Feminine in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.” In Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, 204–30. Edited by M. Anderegg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Williams, T. 1991. “Narrative Patterns and Mythic Trajectories in Mid-1980s Vietnam Movies.” In Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, 114–39. Edited by M. Anderegg. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Willoquet-Maricondi, P. 1994. “Full Metal Jacketing, or Masculinity in the Making.” Cinema Journal 33, no. 2:5–21.

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Filmed “CNN Fallujah.” December 2005. Atlanta: CNN (television). “Fox News Iraq War.” March 21, 2003. New York: Fox News (television). Full Metal Jacket. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA, 1987. Jarhead. Directed by Sam Mendes. USA, 2005. Platoon. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA, 1986.

Notes 1. In the early ’80s, CBS producer Malcolm Browne covered the conflict in Lebanon. When discussing the ways in which conflicts are represented visually, Browne stated: ”You’ve got a TV audience that’s used to war movies. Real explosions have to look almost as good. There’s a boredom factor” (Moeller 1999, 19).

Introduction to Part Three Sean Redmond

Figure 1. Osama bin Laden (http://itscool.com/images/OsamaBinLaden_ blackwhite.jpg) According to dominant Western political discourse, the body of the terrorist is an elusive thing. It trains in secret; goes undercover; impossibly hides itself; shape-shifts its identity; and secretly moves or operates among law-abiding citizens. The body of the terrorist is monstrous, fanatical, driven by fear and loathing, and it is inculcated by some obscene political or religious doctrine or cause. It knows no reason: the body of the terrorist doesn’t have a mind of its own. The body of the terrorist will give up its body to advance their political cause: it wills its own suicide, and in suiciding it will take innocent bodies with it. The body of the terrorist is cowardly: it never engages in a fair or a legitimate fight—it self-detonates at will. The terrorist enemy is never a freedom-fighter; their cause is never a just or justifiable one. The body of the terrorist is never, in the end, singular: it is a part of a supramass of uncontrollable bodies that have as their potential the destruction of the social and political order. As Chris Gutierrez suggests, in relation to the War on Terror:

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Less like a hierarchical and organized army, and more like a discontinuous swarm, the enemy here is a clandestine and unidentifiable one. This ambiguity allows these shadowy members to move silently through society and to infiltrate their desired targets of destruction, simultaneously though; this ambiguity allows the discourse of the War on Terror to constitute the enemy through whatever means seem fit. (2007) The 9/11 airplane hijackers, for example, were represented to be the prototypical terrorists. They had lived and trained in the United States, a sleeper cell of the Al Qaeda network. They had passed as American in the sense that they could go about their business without interference. They were already among U.S. residents. They were under the command of arch villain Osama bin Laden, and as such were deemed to be a group of brainwashed fanatics intent on wounding a “peaceful” nation-state. They hijacked commercial airplanes, full of ordinary Americans (men, women, children) and foreign internationals (Arabs included, the terrorists’ “own kind”)—everyday people who would become the slaughter of the innocent. They were not given a chance at survival: the 9/11 hijackers only had ruination in mind. One can contrast this with the heroic deeds of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93. After a series of phone calls informed them that similarly hijacked planes had been crashed into the Twin Towers, the passengers tried to seize control of the plane from the hijackers. The narrative of their actions becomes one of self-sacrifice, bravery, and duty, in contrast to the hijackers, who were destructive forces of evil. The passengers became the epitome of America, of the social body of America, ready to collectively respond to that which affects its living being. One of the key heroes of the crisis, Tom Beamer, was recorded issuing the battle cry, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” This call to arms would later become the war cry for those combatants fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq. The body of the terrorist is given clear definition: it is often placed in a powersaturated binary with other “fair” and free bodies, so that right and wrong, “us” and “them,” can be clearly established. This is most clearly seen in news reporting where linguistic use can set the parameters of the representation. In Elizabeth W. Dunn, Moriah Moore, Brian A. Nosek’s (2005) four-part case study of news reporting in America, they found that “subtle linguistic differences . . . [were] sufficient to influence whether people interpret violent acts as patriotism or terrorism.” For example, in their first study, a content analysis of newspaper articles describing violence in Iraq, they discovered the following: Words implying destruction and devious intent were typically used in reference to violent actions associated with Iraq and opponents of the United States, while more benign words were used in reference to the United States and its allies. These observed differences in word usage

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establish schemas that guide perception of violence as terrorism or patriotism, thereby affecting people’s attitudes toward, . . . and memory for, . . . violent events (83). The U.S. State Department draws its working definition of terrorism from Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f (d). The code states that terrorism is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience” (p. 8). In this definition noncombatants include off-duty and/or unarmed military personnel and armed combatants who are attacked at a time and place where war has not been declared. According to this definition, then, the American government can never be the perpetrator of terrorism, but American soldiers and citizens can be the victims of terrorism. American citizens can be accorded terrorist-like qualities and allegiances. The racialized and sexualized body, for example, is often aligned with the “othered” body of the hijacker, suicide bomber, and shooter. In fact, war and conflict scenarios may very well work to reposition (make safe) those identities that threaten the status quo or the heterosexist, patriarchal norm. In a diabolical alignment, the terrorist is often Asian, black, or queer; by transference, the American Asian, black, or queer may very well be terrorist-like in their ontological being. As Chris Gutierrez suggests (cf. chap. 1 above), the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib prison work not just on the terrorist figure, but also . . . on the population at large; dividing people through sexual practices as either friend or enemy to our very civilization. . . . Biopower emerges in a moment of double articulation here, honing its power on an individual body and using this singular body to discipline the larger public body. That is, it uses the terrorist figure to discipline the entirety of the population. (2007) All the essays in part 3, “The Body of the Terrorist,” explore these competing and highly volatile notions of the terrorist body. From a range of perspectives, approaches, and media contexts, each of the authors tries to see through the terrorist body so that its complex, uneven, and explosive mode of being is carefully attended to. The essays in this part, then, try to unpack the biopolitics of the body of the terrorist as it manifests in the age of the War on Terror. In her essay, “Constructing the Terrorist Subject: Michael Collins and The Terrorist as Models of Agonistic Pluralism,” Jennie Carlsten suggests that in the main the filmic representation of the terrorist is inherently paradoxical. Narrative film constructs the terrorist as incarnate evil, hell-bent on destroying legitimate modes of cultural and political life. In the narrative film, the terrorist is decontextualized and delegitimized, the story arc unable or unwilling to deal with histories or memories that would undermine the good/evil dichotomy in place. “Underlying films about terror is a tendency towards denial, delegitimization, and disavowal.” Nonetheless, “in doing so, it risks acting terroristically

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itself, perpetuating a narrative cycle of violence and counterviolence as it denies the agency of individual subjects.” Carlsten argues that there are a small number of films that run counter to this terror rhetoric. In this essay Carlsten examines Michael Collins (1996) and The Terrorist (1999), arguing that they “engage in self-conscious examination of their own construction and reveal the limitations of the terror rhetoric.” In their essay “When the Script Runs Out, . . . What happens to the Polarized War Body?” Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay analyze a number of 24/7 news broadcasts during the so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom in March–May 2003. Bakir and McStay argue that “24/7 news polarized the War Body so that the enemy body at war (the Iraqi military) was erased while the friendly military body (largely composed of American and British troops) was privileged.” They go on to argue that “this was a scripted outcome—the scriptedness highlighted by a brief moment when the script ran out.” Taking a Derridean approach to the news text, they examine the interplay between “liveness” and the “scriptedness” of the war, identifying a televisual moment that, “through its very existence, highlights the operation of the binaries of power.” This “undecidable” was the shooting in the reeds scenario, an unscripted sequence that occurred three days into the war. This scenario centers on the Iraqi military’s search for downed pilots along the banks of River Tigris in Baghdad. Bakir and McStay suggest that the reporters on scene have no “script” to respond to, “leaving USA, the audience, with the feeling that we are bearing witness to the unknown,” to the immediately real. In Paul William’s essay, “Bodies on the Margins? African America and the War on Terror,” the black (male) body is considered to be “disposable” in the War on Terror. Post-9/11 terror rhetoric constructs the “African American as marginal to the United States,” and the disposability of the black (male) body “is a vector of its historical association with the ‘chaos’ of Islamist terrorism that the Bush administration defines itself against.” Williams goes on to examine successful black bodies, such as Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, and Colin Powell, arguing that their “presence in the White House conceals the marginality of African America by stressing the opportunities available to black Americans.” Nonetheless, Williams argues that hip-hop culture works out these collisions and contexts, directly addressing the question of marginalization that black Americans face. Using the rapper Mr. Lif as his central case study, Williams argues that he “shares the sense that the energy and solidarity of military combat might be harnessed to answer back to the conductors of the War on Terror.” For example, in the song/video “Heavy Artillery,” Mr. Lif’s “war of words is symbolically enacted through an urban rampage in which America’s armed forces, the physical manifestation of Bush’s militarizing United States, are easily swept aside by the giant Lif’s weapons.” In “Damn You For Making Me Do This: Abu Ghraib, 24, Torture, and Television Sadomasochism,” Lindsay Coleman examines the cultural and psychic meaning of torture as it is manifested and develops in the American

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television series 24. According to Coleman, “Torture is a genuine narrative motif” in the series; “it never represents the extremity of a dramatic arc or ethical dilemma. It is not a cliffhanger. . . . The audience is never in any doubt as to Bauer’s willingness to use such means.” Such violent action seems endemic to the series, to the American psyche—a post-9/11 state of being that nonetheless is itself traumatized. For Coleman, the male narrative agent of 24, Jack Bauer, is “the priest of the streets,” a twenty-first-century reincarnation of Dirty Harry, “concerned or obsessed with the pursuit of truth.” Bauer will do anything to get at this truth, but in so doing he engages in a masochistic drive, which problematizes his actions. For Coleman, then, 24 explores power relations and the complexities of patriotism and duty. It is a text that fetishizes and undermines the biopower at the heart of the practice of torture.

Works Cited Dunn, Elizabeth W., Moriah Moore, and Brian A. Nosek. 2005. “The War of the Words: How Linguistic Differences in Reporting Shape Perceptions of Terrorism.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 5, no. 1:67–86. Gutierrez, Chris. 2007. “Terrorizing Bodies.” Reconstruction 7, no. 1, http:// reconstruction.eserver.org./071/gutierrez.shtml (accessed July 30, 2007).

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Constructing the Terrorist Subject Michael Collins and The Terrorist as Models of Agonistic Pluralism Jennie Carlsten

Like the rhetoric around terrorism itself, the representation of the terrorist on film is inherently paradoxical. The terror rhetoric, seeking to explain and deflect images and acts of terrorism through binary oppositions of good/evil and self/ other, relies on twin strategies of decontextualization and delegitimization. In doing so, it risks acting terroristically itself, perpetuating a narrative cycle of violence and counterviolence as it denies the agency of individual subjects and silences discourses of memory and countermemory. While the terror rhetoric is by no means new, it has gained significance and primacy in the U.S.-led, post-9/11 discourse. Films that depict terrorism or the figure of the terrorist engage with this rhetoric and, most frequently, encourage the viewer to understand their narratives through an essentialist and paradoxical framework. Some earlier films, however, resist the model offered by the terror rhetoric; films like Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996), and Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist (1999) engage in self-conscious examination of their own construction and reveal the self-perpetuating and problematic nature of representation. These two films not only reflect the limitations of the terror rhetoric; they also model strategies of representation alternative to those employed in Hollywood terror films such as True Lies (James Cameron 1994) or The Devil’s Own (Pakula 1997). Considering the methods by which the conventional model of the terror film operates, and the challenges posed to these methods by other models, it becomes clear that departures and variations from the generic standard may function to permit engaged spectators to read the films differently. This paper is concerned foremost with the shared qualities of the terror films, and much less with the meanings generated by the texts as objects of their individual national cinemas, or as exemplars of auteurist critique. Yet the various conditions of reception cannot be given due consideration within the scope of this discussion. Rather, the assumed audience is the same audience to which the U.S. terror rhetoric is most frequently directed: if not simply an American audience, certainly a 154

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Western, democratic audience intimately familiar with the cinematic language and conventions of Hollywood cinema. Within narrative cinema, acts of terrorism are routinely dehistoricized; formal and generic conventions situate and organize events in the absence of political context. Underlying films about terror is a tendency toward denial, delegitimization, and disavowal. To differing degrees, each of the films discussed here presents the terrorist as denuded, without context or meaningful motivation. Historical contexts are ignored or are simplified to become merely setting and not cause. Actual political agents are absented; significantly different groups may be conflated, or individuals may appear as composites of true historical figures. The emphasis is placed on “personal” stories, a problematic distinction in itself. Emotional appeal is placed before intellectual or ideological reckoning, since the spectacle of terrorist violence is the end, rather than the means, of the dialogue. At the same time, by presenting issues and images otherwise absent from our film-viewing experiences, these films become political even in their attempts to circumvent politics. Hollywood versions of the terrorist story most strongly rely on strategies of depoliticization. The individual terrorist is presented as a body, lacking in social context. Specific political goals and groups are avoided in favor of fictionalized organizations with vague ideological objectives. Groups may be confused with one another, or the film may attribute terrorist actions to a fictional and more extreme splinter group, distancing the acts from any real political players. Consider, for example, the Arab terrorist group in True Lies, the “Crimson Jihad”— a conflated fictional entity whose precise geographical home is unclear. The legitimacy of causes is undermined by providing individual motivations to the archvillains, who are shown to carry out their deeds not for the purported ideological cause, but for their own selfish purposes of advancement, financial gain, or vendetta. Frankie (The Devil’s Own) acts not only outside the law, but also outside the laws of his terrorist sect, as a renegade. Believers are framed as misinformed or hypocritical; in the rare case in which the terrorist is permitted to speak his piece, the counterargument is quickly articulated (as in the arguments between Frankie and the law-abiding Irish-American Tom). Most often, though, the terrorist is simply silenced. A literal example of this is provided in True Lies: the terrorist leader has arranged to videotape a statement, calling upon the American government to pull its troops from the Persian Gulf. He begins his statement with a list of American offenses, including the killing of civilians and children. As the terrorist speaks to the camera, the image begins to disintegrate before our eyes. The battery in the video camera has died, and the rest of the statement is lost. The terrorist must not be permitted to speak, even in this mediated fashion. Indeed, the attempt at speech results in a moment of comedy for the audience, encouraging us not only to dismiss the terrorist claims, but also to mock the attempt itself. Disavowal is found not only in Hollywood terror films, but also in nearly all narrative fiction films depicting acts and agents of terrorism. In The Terrorist,

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we see disavowal not only in Malli’s ultimate decision to choose life over her underarticulated cause, but also in the framing of her choice. While the film is based on real events (in part, the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) and conflict, the viewer is not encouraged to read the film with specificity; for example, we are not provided with explanatory titles or exposition through dialogue. A viewer with some familiarity of regional politics would undoubtedly be aware of the background issues, but even for such a viewer, few handholds are provided. Focusing on Malli’s individual substance and interior developments, the film is barely concerned with establishing the social forces at work. Geography is similarly vague; the mise-en-scène is used to suggest alterations in Malli’s circumstances and mind-set, rather than to evoke specific locales. The little information we are given about the terrorist cell is in the form of propagandistic speech, clearly coded as suspect. The group is unidentified and the face of the “Beloved Leader” is pointedly excluded from the frame. In contrast to The Terrorist and to the vast majority of terror films, Michael Collins seems much more forthcoming. The film opens with titles that inform the viewer of the historical context, and historical specificity prevails throughout the film; at one point, newsreel footage is used, literally fading into the fictional diegesis. Despite the considerable criticism of the film’s historical inaccuracies,1 Michael Collins is notable for its unusual attention to context. Jordan positions the film as historical document by including the actual text of speeches and referencing events that figure in popular memory. Here, characters are not composites; while the members of the outlaw Irish Cabinet are perhaps underdeveloped and one-dimensional, they do correspond to actual individuals. Locations are named—the General Post Office of the opening scene has strong symbolic and historic resonance for any viewers familiar with Irish history; Dublin’s buildings and Cork’s scenery are specific and readily recognized citations. Jordan also stops short of effacing or disavowing the ideology behind Collins’s violence. Instead of distancing the film from politics by avoiding the issue, Michael Collins engages with the issues. It is true that by historicizing those issues the film also effectively distances them from current events. The film implicitly, but never explicitly, engages with present-day terrorism. This means that its representation of the terrorist is still, in its way, decontextualized. Nevertheless, the film’s engagement with context and memory makes it unusual and presents an important challenge to the silencing effects of the terror rhetoric. What motivates the tendency toward decontextualization? The simplest explanation is that filmmakers and film producers intentionally obfuscate terrorism’s political dimension, either through fear of glorifying an unpopular cause or through conservative or reactionary impetus. Another explanation is that these films are not primarily concerned with terrorism in the first place, that it is simply one possible plot element that provides the catalyst for other narrative concerns (Kirkland 2003, 77; McLoone 2000) In other words, the “real” story of True Lies is the story of the Taskers’ troubled marriage and how it is reaffirmed; or the “real” story of Michael Collins is the story of treachery and betrayal between

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friends. Others argue that the absence of material context is simply due to the nature of the genre, and that it is unreasonable to criticize individual films: Daniel Mandel, for instance, writes that “action and spectacle . . . override all other considerations, such as character development or social commentary. . . . It is untenable to expect this genre to undergo a qualitative revolution” (Mandel 2001, 28). Yet another possibility lies with Baudrillard’s conception of terrorism as hyperreal, transcending real politics and context, and “substituting the signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard 1994, 2); or with Adorno’s claim that terror is unrepresentable (2000, 84). For some critics, terrorism is treated as something forever unknowable; representing terrorism is about “representing the unrepresentable” (Rowe 1989, 212; Berendse and Williams 2002). These approaches, though they offer much to the discussion of representation, contribute to the dilemma they describe, academicizing the violence of terrorism, and divorcing it from its visceral reality. To claim, as Baudrillard does, that violence is banal ignores the still-relevant truth that for its victims, terror is not hyperreal, but real: “It is precisely the personal, even intimate, contact between the victim and the perpetrator that shapes the aesthetic, narrative, and ultimately ideological impact of violence” (Gomel 2003, xv). Some will defend the tactics of dehistoricization and decontextualization. Elana Gomel, writing on the representation of killers in literature, claims that “lingering on the political dimension of ideological violence can obscure its true motivation” (xi). That “true motivation” is the individual terrorist’s search for identity and transcendence through a violent act. Gomel’s argument that ideology cannot account for individual participation or pleasure in violence prioritizes psychological drives over any social or material forces and obscures distinctions between terrorists and other violent subjects. At the core of such an argument is an essential debate about who the terrorist subject is, in reality as well as within the text. Is the terrorist inherently any different from any other agent with the purpose of causing injury?2 This is a familiar debate outside the arena of film studies; on the one hand, there is the characterization of the terrorist as psychopathic murderer; on the other, the cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” I have argued that these films distance themselves from the violence of terrorism; another way of creating distance is by portraying the person of the terrorist as racially, sexually, and psychologically deviant, an unreliable point for viewer identification. If the true motivation—if indeed we can assume that there is a locatable thing that we can term “true” motivation—is transcendence through violence, it becomes not only possible but also imperative that the viewer identify the terrorist as something inexplicable and foreign. The very body of the terrorist must, too, be read as foreign. The terrorist is always Other. In the most interesting and progressive films, this “deviancy” is an entry point, used to allegorically explore the idea of Otherness in all its permutations (so, for example, the terrorist subject of The Crying Game [1992], another Neil Jordan film,

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becomes the unstable center of transgressive gender, national, and racial ideas). In the most conservative works, though, the terrorist Other exists to be condemned or exploited (or exploited and then condemned). Michael Collins and The Terrorist adhere to the model of the terror film in many ways, but in their treatment of the Other, they possess significant variations that allow for more complex understandings of these supposed deviancies. Deviancy is located in the body of the terrorist. The first markers of deviancy are race and ethnicity. John Hill (1989) and Martin McLoone have written convincingly of the “myth of atavism” that pervades visual representations of the Irish: the notion that the Irish are, by their very nature, violent and irrational people. By trafficking in the image of “the simian Irish—a range of hulking, apelike monsters” (McLoone 2000, 60), a number of British and American films have attempted to explain the violence of Irish terrorism as an inherent evolutionary reality.3 The Irish terrorist in contemporary films may look like Brad Pitt and may not be a physical monster, but the brutish and irrational nature is there beneath the surface: his Irishness explains his actions. Michael Collins may deplore his talent for “bloody mayhem,” but he also admits that it comes naturally to him. As Hill, Rockett, and Gibbons point out, this approach denies the political dimension and so absolves the British government of any responsibility for the origin of the terrorist. In a similar vein, Hollywood’s depiction of Arab terrorists may serve to absolve the West of any culpability for events like September 11. The fact that a character is Muslim and Arab is presumed to be enough explanation for their acts of violence. The unattractive Khaled in True Lies is the quintessential Arab terrorist in Hollywood: uncombed hair, yellow teeth, and a tendency to shoot anyone who annoys him, without regard for consequences or any moral code. Having established the terrorist as an irrational Other, physiologically marked as a deviant, there is no need to look for alternative and perhaps disturbingly complex explanations. To reinforce the sense of deviance, the Hollywood terrorist is presented in contrast to the racially, psychologically, and sexually “normal” alternative (e.g., Arnold Schwarzenegger or Harrison Ford).4 In an unconvincing defense of Hollywood portrayals, Mandel argues: “Stereotyping is common in Hollywood but tends to be factually based. There is nothing reprehensible in this. Verisimilitude is the all-important consideration and by that standard Hollywood can be vindicated” (2001, 28). Quite aside from the questionable notion that films like True Lies are concerned primarily with verisimilitude, Mandel’s claim is disingenuous. These films rely not on stereotypes alone (the drunken Irishman or the fanatical Arab), but on entire sign systems that obscure ideology and advance the simple notion of the dangerous Other. A second marker of deviancy is the sexual character of the terrorist. The terrorist is most often represented as sexually deviant: homosexual, asexual, or hypersexual. At the same time, the body of the terrorist is not often sexualized. We rarely—as in Westerns, war, or action films—are presented with the male body as fetish object. Generally, the terrorist is coded as an object to despise and

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deride. The physical beauty of the terrorist (especially of the rare female terrorist) may be used to arouse viewer sympathy or suspicion (what lies beneath the façade?), but not for sexual arousal. The body of the terrorist is fully clothed, significantly in the “uniform” of the terrorist: balaclava, gun belt, and keffiyah or Aran sweater. The camera doesn’t linger on the body, but on the weapons. The body is not a site for pleasurable exhibition, although it is frequently the site of trauma. This is true in The Terrorist and Michael Collins as well. Malli’s body is not exhibited in The Terrorist, even though the plot turns on her pregnancy; rather, the film relies heavily on close-ups that emphasize Malli’s face as a site of expressive emotion. The destruction and creation of flesh, the crux upon which the film turns, is not a focus here. In Michael Collins, the body, when it is emphasized, is simply meat: the imagery of bodies hanging on hooks is repeated throughout the film. Here, the flesh is reduced to its most grotesque. It is not the spectacle of the sexualized body, the martyred flesh of the hero/victim/soldier, or even the physical conduit for expression of the spirit, as in The Terrorist, but simply pieces of meat as one might see in a butcher’s shop. The viewer is distanced—even uncomfortably so—from the sense of the body as something familiar and knowable, or as a place of stable reference and identification. The terrorist body in these latter films still signifies Otherness; the body may be reduced to flesh or transcend the flesh, but in both cases, the body remains a maker of inherent deviancy. Finally, the terrorist subject is represented as psychologically deviant. The terrorist is, above all, destructive—of life, art, culture, and the family. For example, consider the rather obvious gesture of the Arab terrorist in True Lies destroying centuries-old statues. Whether configured as the reluctant gunman or the sociopathic murderer, the terrorist inevitably destroys until he is destroyed himself, canceling out his narrative weight. While again following the familiar generic patterns, Michael Collins and The Terrorist are interesting in that both show something we rarely see, the transition of the individual terrorist/Destroyer to a Creator. Collins becomes a statesman, creating the modern Irish nation; Malli’s pregnancy transforms her into the archetypal Creator, the mother. In this way, the figure of the terrorist retains narrative weight and refuses to be disavowed. The conventional terror film, then, first strips the terrorist’s actions of their context. Next, it strips the terrorist subject of legitimacy. These strategies— decontextualization and delegitimization—pose a problem of interpretation. The viewer is deprived of material context and the corresponding causality. Protagonists are unreliable and irrational and motivations unclear. The inevitable result of removing the political context from representations of terrorism is a lack of coherence. Compounding this incoherence, the films discussed here all share a disjointed sense of narrative: transitions between scenes are abrupt and unsettling. The Devil’s Own uses captioning to partially account for shifts in space and time, while True Lies moves from one spectacular act to another. The shifts

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of Michael Collins rely on the viewer to decode sudden relocations and ellipses, and The Terrorist uses the disjunction to create a dreamlike logic. How then is the viewer to make sense of the narrative? Richard Kirkland argues that the viewer’s tendency is to compensate for the lack of coherence (Kirkland 2003). By recourse to generic models, the viewer imposes causality and order on events and creates satisfactory explanations for the violence. The syntax and iconography of melodrama, Westerns, and gangster films provide familiar touchstones for confused viewers; for example, violence is most often explained as vendetta or justifiable revenge for an act perpetrated against the terrorist’s own family. In this way, the viewer’s accepted knowledge about terrorists (they are different, perverted, unstable) meshes with the viewer’s knowledge of genre convention to provide the coherence and meaning that is otherwise impossible for the text to contain. Michael Collins and The Terrorist resist this rhetoric by making the invisible visible: highlighting the construction of the genre, gesturing at unseen violence, and giving agency to the terrorist subject. Michael Collins engages with genre in a way that highlights the process of representation and challenges the construction of The Terrorist. The use of a film noir aesthetic and references to gangster films is exaggerated and self-conscious. The overdetermined nature of these signifiers is brought to the foreground by costuming, body movements and gestures, and speech patterns. Characters within the film comment on (“You look like a gangster,” Harry tells Mick; Broy is “pretty eager for a G-man”; etc.) and play with their constructed roles. In fact, the construction of Collins is portrayed as his greatest asset; Jordan suggests that the leader’s power lies in his mythic status and ability to role-play. Meanwhile, The Terrorist plays against Western viewers’ genre expectations of both the action film and the woman’s melodrama.5 Not only does the character of Malli differ from the typical depiction of the terrorist—she is female and a mother!—but she also is an almost entirely passive figure. The stilted dialogue of the terrorists comes across as theatrical, an impression confirmed by the scenes in which they costume and rehearse Malli’s role. The slow pacing contradicts our expectations of an action film, as does the lack of climax. Instead, the film offers an extended buildup to violence with little actual violence occurring. The costumed, performing bodies have been used simultaneously to situate the viewer within a particular and familiar narrative framework, and to draw the viewer’s attention to the construction of that framework; to remind the viewer of the expectation of violence and then deny any catharsis through violent spectacle. Both The Terrorist and Michael Collins make use of off-screen or downplayed violence, either through composition that shows the initiation but not the completion of the act, or through narrative ellipses that force the viewer to infer acts of violence. At the start of The Terrorist, for example, a traitor to the terrorist cell is shot. Rather than showing the victim or even the perpetrator, Sivan shows a few drops of blood hitting the face of the witness. The effect is to simultaneously remind the viewer of one’s role as witness, and to move the completed act out of sight and satisfaction.

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Leo Charney describes “the enduring appeal of those singular moments when a building explodes, a car crashes, someone shoots or stabs or punches someone else” (2001, 48) as akin to the “cinema of attractions”: moments that disrupt the narrative and contribute to an escalating sense of decontextualized spectacle. The decision not to engage in the pleasures of kinetic spectacle allows the narrative context to dominate. As well, this technique can be read as a recognition that the truly horrific nature of terrorist violence cannot be adequately expressed. Most important, this technique forces the viewer to recognize that violence is occurring even when it is not seen. This in turn may lead to the recognition that there is an entire unseen level of violence in the “real” (nonfilmic) world. In this way, the invisibility of terrorist bloodshed can produce new definitions of the term “terrorism,” expanding it to include the violence of states and ideologies. Films about terrorism, even the most generic and spectacle-driven Hollywood depictions, do something almost no other fiction films do: they depict or imply state violence. In terms of Hollywood terror films, this means that they contribute in equal proportion to the spectacle. In the counterrhetoric films, we see a more extreme shift. The narrative of Michael Collins is structured so that the balance of violence is evenly distributed between the state and the resistance. The opening scene of the Easter Rising, for instance, is countered by the scene of the leaders’ executions. The song that becomes attached to Collins through his repeated performance, “Skibbereen,” is a rebel song that details the British brutality in Ireland. The Terrorist uses reference to state violence to explain Malli’s affiliation with the terrorist cell; we learn in flashback that soldiers killed her parents. Even in The Devil’s Own and True Lies, agents of the state are adversaries as much as heroes, and in equal proportion they contribute to the spectacular violence. This in turn raises the issue of justification. Kirkland outlines three stages in the dominant discourse of terrorism. First, we are presented with an emotional response. Next, we are moved to an emotional response. Finally, we reflect upon the act and form an ethical response. This third stage allows individual viewers to consider issues of context and legitimacy, and ask themselves if violence is indeed an “appropriate” or instrumental response. In this way, cinema’s representation of terrorism poses a challenge to conceptions of terrorism as an irrational or “evil” force. Both Michael Collins and The Terrorist give a voice to the terrorist body. By this, I do not mean that the films attempt to justify the violence of terrorism, but that they allow the subject agency. Both of these films can also be viewed as works of postcolonial national cinemas and of societies with highly contested perceptions of national identity. Postcolonial theory reminds us that identity is both constructed and performed (an idea embodied by Malli’s “terrorist coach,” who literally tells Malli who she is), and that narrative is a strategy of domination to supersede a subject position. Taking control of the narrative shifts the subject position to a place of agency and asserts identity. Significantly, the act of terrorism itself relies on taking narrative agency; the terrorist seeks to gain control

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by writing the story of events, inscribing it on a body through violence. The terrorist retells the story of past events to provide ideological context and the story of the future, thus forcing others to act in delimited ways. In this sense, accusations that films like Michael Collins support terrorism are actually not entirely unfounded: the film itself practices a form of “terrorism” (or, conversely, “freedom fighting”). Part of controlling the identity narrative is the process of naming, and an emphasis is placed on names and naming in both films. In particular, speaking one’s name is configured as an assertion of the self as subject. Malli is repeatedly asked for, and offers, her name; this calls attention to her singular refusal to give her name to her lover—“I’ll tell you later,” she says, knowing there will be no later. She gives her body but not her name. Malli’s refusal to equate her terroristSelf with her woman-Self can certainly be read as an assertion (rather than a negation) of her own identity: she is more than the name given to her by others. The power associated with the naming of the body is a key point in Michael Collins. To the British Intelligence, “Michael Collins” is a name, but a name without a body, and therefore impossible to defeat. By attaching the name to a body, they believe that they will take control over the flesh itself; naming is the first step toward confining and injuring the body. Conversely, naming oneself is an act of assertion that invests one with power. Ned Broy, the IRA spy working in Dublin Castle, is ultimately undone by his assertion of his own identity, but it is also this act that shows his growing sense of self and transforms his character into a hero. The first time his superior gets his name wrong (calling him “Boy,” with all of that word’s implications of slavery and colonialism), Broy lets it pass. On the next occasion, Broy defiantly corrects Smith, not once, but twice. This act of rebellion is enough to arouse suspicion, and Broy is killed—or more properly put, his body is martyred. Self is also identified and asserted through the image of the body, and terrorism relies on the control and reproduction of the image. The notion of ownership over the image is central to these films. Not only are visual media—such as newsreel footage, television broadcasts, videotaping, and still photographs—used to mediate the images of violence and alert us to the significance of representation (e.g., the newsreel of de Valera’s funeral at the conclusion of Michael Collins or the extreme black-and-white close-up of Frankie’s photographed face that leads us into The Devil’s Own), but the possession of the image is an important narrative element as well. This is closely related to the dissemination of knowledge, a commodity that empowers the terrorist. When Ned Broy steals the photograph of Michael Collins from Castle files, he is restoring the balance of power to the resistance. In their attempts to give voice to the terrorist subject, Michael Collins and The Terrorist are engaging in what has been termed “agonistic pluralism.” The prevailing rhetoric of terror/counterterror is built around the ritual demonization of an evil antagonist. Using the language and symbols of pathology, sacrifice, and redemption to explain violence, the discourse reverts to essentialist notions

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of good and evil that positions the Other as the enemy. Robert Ivie, in his examination of the Bush administration’s counterterrorist rhetoric, points out that this construction traps participants in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and reinforces a narrative of vengeance (2003). Baudrillard’s “The Spirit of Terrorism” accuses us all, as viewers of the media event that was 9/11, of complicity, of secretly desiring the destruction of the hegemonic superpower, because we want to restore a narrative that has been lost (2001, 134). Imperfectly and incompletely, filmic representations of the terrorist—by breaking down binary oppositions, avoiding the discourse of the Evil Other, and calling attention to the processes of image-making and subject construction—may provide the engaged spectator with an alternative response to a rhetoric that “makes us complicit with terrorism” (Ivie 2003, 182). The terrorist body becomes a site of ambiguity, memory, pluralism, and resistance.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Adorno, Theodor W. and Brian O’Connor. 2000. The Adorno Reader. London: Blackwell. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2001. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Telos 121:134–42. Berendse, G., and M. Williams, eds. 2002. Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts. Bielefeld, Germany: Aisthesis. Charney, L. 2001. “The Violence of a Perfect Moment.” In Violence and American Cinema, 47–62. Edited by J. D. Slocum. New York: Routledge. Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. 1997. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gomel, E. 2003. Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Hill, J., K. Rockett, and G. Gibbons. 1989. Cinema and Ireland. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ignatiev, N. 1995. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge. Ivie, R. L. 2003. “Evil Enemy v. Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 25:181–200. Kirkland, R. 2003. “The Spectacle of Terrorism in Northern Irish Culture.” Critical Survey 15, no. 1:77–90. Mandel, D. 2001. “Muslims on the Silver Screen.” Middle East Quarterly 8, no. 2:19–30. McIlroy, B. 2001. Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Richmond: Steveston. McLoone, M. 2000. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute. McSwiney, S. 1997. “Trying to Take the Gun out of Irish Politics: An Interview with Neil Jordan.” Cineaste 32, no. 4:14–24. Newey, G. 1996. “Both Gangster and Gandhi.” Times Literary Supplement, November 15, 20. Rowe, J. C. 1989. “‘Bringing It All Back Home’: American Recyclings of the Vietnam War.” In The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, 197–218. Edited by N. Armstrong and L. Tennenhouse. London: Routledge. Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Shaheen, J. G. 2000. “Hollywood’s Muslim Arabs.” Muslim World, Spring, 22–41.

Filmed Crying Game, The. Directed by Neil Jordan. UK, 1992. Devil’s Own, The. Directed by Alan J. Pakula. USA, 1997. Michael Collins. Directed by Neil Jordan. UK, 1996. True Lies. Directed by James Cameron. USA, 1994. Terrorist, The. Directed by Santosh Sivan. India, 1999.

Notes 1. For a discussion of these inaccuracies, see, e.g., McSwiney (1997), Newey (1996), or McIlroy (2001). 2. Consider Elaine Scarry’s alignment of torture and war as “occurrences whose activity is ‘injuring’” both the human body and civilization itself (1985, 63); terrorism surely is another of these occurrences, but is the terrorist a torturer, a soldier, or some other entity altogether? 3. Much has been written about the perception of the Irish as “nonwhite” (see, e.g., L. Perry Curtis’s Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature [1997], or Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White [1995]), and notions of “whiteness” permeate the terror film. 4. The Terrorist is interesting in this regard: the question of ethnicity is elided, and the faces of Malli’s enemies are largely unseen. Yet the idea of difference, of a physical ideal that the terrorist does not reflect, is brought to the forefront when Malli judges herself against the wall of photographs in her new bedroom. These images of actresses represent the idealized feminine body, which Malli cannot possess, whether as soldier or mother. 5. Again, considerations of the national cinema traditions offer further perspectives that inform any analysis of audience reception; further areas for examination include the role of theater and masquerade in Indian and Tamil cinemas, or the Irish cinema’s fascination with the gangster genre.

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When the Script Runs Out, . . . What Happens to the Polarized War Body? Deconstructing Western 24/7 News Coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom 2003– Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay

The danger with news, especially television broadcast news, is that it is regarded as wholly real, devoid of manipulation, and transparent. Although a critical media audience understands that immediacy, liveness, and authoritatively stated presentations are manipulable and edited, constant vigilance and attention to content and framing is required in the theater of news reportage to avoid succumbing to the reality effect of actualité—particularly when it is live. Taking a Derridean deconstructive stance, we explore the constructed polarization of the war body during the initial part of Operation Iraqi Freedom 2003 (March 19–May 2, 2003) in a range of 24/7 news broadcasts, taking into account a continuum of presentational formats ranging from the preplanned event to the unplanned and live event. This is an instructive war to examine from the perspectives of immediacy and liveness as developments in technology allowed it to provide the world’s first real-time video from the battlefield (Becker 2003; Hiebert 2003). We chose 24/7 news broadcasts for analysis because of the very qualities mentioned above: their championing of the live, unmediated event. By 2003, the 24/7 news channels had proliferated, and since going live to the sites of unfolding news is one of their defining characteristics, this generated an enormous news hole, hungry for live content (Thussu 2003). Noting Derrida’s (1997) deconstructive reading of the political terms “enemy” and “friend,” we declare our relationship to these terms. Writing as Westerners located in the UK, when we use the term “enemy” body, we are referring to the Iraqi military, yet fully cognizant of the fact that unwilling conscripts compose much of this body. When we use the term “friendly military” body, we refer to the American–UK alliance—the carefully termed “Coalition of the Willing” (Hiebert 2003), but with full awareness that the governments whom these military bodies serve have pursued foreign policies with outcomes 165

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ultimately unfriendly to the interests of ordinary Iraqis (such as the Pentagon’s deliberate destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including power sources and water and sewage plants, and withholding $5.4 billion worth of humanitarian supplies approved by Washington D.C.’s Security Council [Pilger 2004]).

Binary Oppositions within News Construction A growing body of literature exists that deconstructs news constructions of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and it is not our intention to rehearse these arguments. We already know that, especially in wartime, national news is generally biased toward its own troops and government and thus sets up binary oppositions of moral self and immoral Other (Kellner 1992; Knightley 2000; Lakof 2003; Falah et al. 2006), with “biased news reporting, asymmetrical reliance on sources and neglected areas of coverage” (Nord and Strömbäck 2006, 86). Thus, even in this highly asymmetrical war in which the Iraqi military had no chance against the U.S. war machine (Kellner 2003), in both new and familiar ways Anglo-American news was biased toward the West, setting up a binary opposition of Friend and Foe. Journalists “embedded” with military units, and by virtue of their embeddedness, they portrayed in close-up what it was like to be a soldier with the friendly military, so enabling identification with their mission, a gradual cooption, and a focus on the action rather than on the war’s motives, context, and justifications (Beck and Downing 2003; Brown 2003; Hiebert 2003; Cardiff School of Journalism 2004; Kellner 2003; Knightley 2004; Miller 2003; Tumber and Palmer 2004). In contrast, few journalists covered the enemy. News networks were officially instructed by the Pentagon and Downing Street to remove their journalists from Baghdad (Knightley 2004), and the death of a senior ITN correspondent traveling independently of coalition forces led to the immediate withdrawal of unilateral (nonembedded) journalists from South Iraq (Cardiff School of Journalism 2004; Gopsill 2004), resulting in 903 journalists embedded with U.S. and UK forces, six times the number of journalists in Baghdad (Miller 2003; Knightley 2004). Furthermore, in 2003, the world’s broadcasters were structurally dependent on news footage supplied mainly by just two Western news agencies—Associated Press Television News (APTN) and Reuters Television (Thussu 2003)—again indicating the limitations in perspectives that were ever likely to be visually captured. For example, Kellner (2003) observes that the 24/7 cable networks of Fox, NBC, and CNN tended to provide highly sanitized views of the war, rarely showing Iraqi casualties. This was compounded by an absence of Iraqi, Arab, or Islamic commentators (Nuri 2003; Robertson 2004). Western journalists covered official perspectives (such as government spokespersons, governmentvetted military experts, and military achievements and developments; BoydBarrett 2004) and covered them uncritically (Knightley 2004; Mooney 2004; Robertson 2004; Tumber and Palmer 2004).1 This helped to create a climate in

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which the war seemed normal (Robertson 2004) and in which coverage was prowar: for instance, Lewis and Brookes (2004) demonstrate the pro-war orientation of the BBC, ITN, and Sky. All sections of society, including the media, were urged to support our troops, leading to self-censorship (Boyd-Barrett 2004); and key political and military protagonists tried to influence news reporting through careful construction of media-friendly messages designed to garner support and legitimacy, domestically and internationally (Hiebert 2003; Lule 2003; Miller 2003; Rampton and Stauber 2003; Butt et al. 2004; Gershkoff and Kushner 2005; Falah et al. 2006) while deliberately diverting attention from war events that could erode public support for the war—such as the number of Iraqi casualties (Hutnyk 2004). Thus, for reasons to do with production constraints, access to what are deemed as key and credible sources, censorship and self-censorship, it is well-established that the Western war reporting was biased. Given the structural bias of Western wartime news reporting, together with the 24/7 news structural privileging of the visual and the live event, how did 24/7 news report the war body in Operation Iraqi Freedom? We argue that 24/7 news polarized the war body so that the enemy body at war (the Iraqi military) was erased while the friendly military body (largely composed of American and British troops) was privileged. We further argue that this was a scripted outcome—the scriptedness highlighted by a brief moment when the script ran out. We shall demonstrate this through a specifically Derridean critique of the polarized construction of the war body in 24/7 news. In contrast to postmodern concerns with simulational functions of media, in an interview on the specificity and textuality of the televisual medium, Derrida warns against the danger of collapsing real world events into simulations: The requisite deconstruction of this artifactuality should not be used as an alibi. It should not give way to an inflation [une surenchère] of the simulacrum and neutralize every threat in what might be called the delusion of the delusion, the denial of the event. (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 5–6) Here we utilize Derridean concepts of trace (1976) and teletechnologies (including the notion of liveness and embodiment; Derrida and Stiegler 2002). Derrida’s complex use of the word “trace” (the French word carries strong implications of “track, footprint, imprint”), refers to the part played by the radically Other within the structure of difference that is the sign (Spivak 1976). As Derrida argues, following Freud, the “trace” signifies an anterior, if shadowy, significatory presence: there is no “thing” there in the unconscious but simply the possibility for a particular path to be energized (Spivak 1976). However, how does this potential for the slippage of meaning within signs marry with the highly structured text of 24/7 news representations of the war body? Derrida argues that the first question we must ask of the new “teletechnologies” is what new forms of intelligibility they make possible (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 105). As Derrida

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observes with regard to any technology, we must both mark their constraints and also respect their specificity as they produce our experience (38). As observed above, one element of the specificity of 24/7 news is its extensive use of live broadcast footage, and its potential impact, so that we are “overcome by a total image, impossible to analyze or break into parts” (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 59). We may even know how it works, but “we don’t see how it works” (117), and it is what is presented before us that influences what we think about (the agenda-setting thesis: Dearing and Rogers 1996) or what we immediately recall as significant (the availability heuristic: Webster and Hillson 2005). The live broadcast may work in this way because of its relationship to embodiment. In discussing a television broadcast of an interview with himself, Derrida says: “We are caught by the ‘living image of the living,’ by what appears to be most live: the timbre of our voices, our appearance, our gaze, the movement of our hands” (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 38). This idea of the captivating immediacy of the embodied live sequence is not new: Virilio (2002) also wrote about this extensively when analyzing the 1991 Gulf War. Virilio (2002) also describes that in the immediacy of perception enabled by live transmissions, our eyes become indistinguishable from the camera’s optics, and critical consciousness, along with the body, goes missing: thus subjective viewpoints are exchanged for a global optic. Der Derian (2001), following Virilio, similarly argues that military, cinematic, and technoscientific logistics of perception have melded into each other. He argues that since we can no longer tell what representations are real, visual, or virtual, everything arguably disappears into a telematic/interactive aesthetic. Other commentators have picked up on the importance of the apparently live feed: “By making the live and the exclusive into primary news values, accuracy and understanding will be lost” (MacGregor 1997, 200). In analyzing 24/7 news broadcasts of Operation Iraqi Freedom, we offer our interpretations of critical moments of this media discourse that shed insights into the constructed polarization of the war body, and that also draw attention to a key moment of instability. These critical discourse moments are the eve of war (March 19, 2003); the “shooting in the reeds,” several days into the war (March 23); and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue (April 9). Our identification of these events as key critical telematic moments is based on reflection upon events garnered from near-continuous watching and recording of the war as it unfolded on television. We recorded half-hour-long segments of news on a rolling basis from each 24/7 news channel available to us (Sky News 24, BBC News 24, ITV News Channel, CNBC News, Fox News, Euronews, and CNN), and later analyzed the archived footage. Although this method of recording cannot hope to be representative, it factually describes what we saw, as highly interested onlookers. It generated a recorded data base of sixty hours of 24/7 broadcast news, distributed fairly evenly across seven 24/7 news channels from March 18 to May 30, 2003, representing the immediate preparation for war, up to Bush’s declaration of the official end of war (May 2) and the immediate aftermath, including the lifting of sanctions on Iraq (May 22). In terms both of sampling through regular channel hopping, and identification of the critical

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discourse moments, two 24/7 news channels ended up being analyzed here— BBC News 24 and ITV News Channel. Deconstructive theory makes it clear that no binary opposition is stable (Caton 2004). We argue that the presence/absence binary of the friendly/enemy military body is made possible through the scriptedness of the war, and where the war became momentarily unscripted, this binary broke down. The scriptedness of the war was evidenced in all of the above stated critical discourse moments except for one—a moment that we have identified as the “undecidable” (Derrida 1982)—in this case a televisual moment that, through its very existence, highlights the operation of the binaries of power. This undecidable was the shooting-in-the-reeds scenario—an unscripted sequence that occurred three days into the war, in the middle of the day.

Establishing the Script On the eve of war, May 19, 2003, BBC News 24 (12:03–06 a.m.) broadcasted a report scripted from the viewpoint of “our boys,” foregrounding the technology and might of our war body. Absent were any representations depicting the enemy military body or war machine. To a backdrop of visuals of our tanks moving through the desert toward the Iraqi border and troops rehearsing the donning of protective gear, including gas masks, embedded reporter, Ben Brown, reporting from Kuwait, described how these, our advance troops, were preparing “to find out if Iraq has fired chemical weapons, or biological, at the advancing Allied forces. They use sophisticated vehicles with state-of-the-art detection equipment.” Although the hard, technologically superior, friendly military body is foregrounded, it is also humanized as time and again throughout this piece, Brown describes how the troops are feeling: “There is enormous tension here, and a fear of the unknown.” Frontline troops are directly asked how they feel. The reporters describe difficult conditions and “blinding sandstorms” and tell us: “Moving around in conditions like these is hard enough. Imagine what it would be like to fight when it’s like this.” The 101st Airborne Division is filmed, and in an extreme close-up of one such young white American soldier, we overhear him saying on the mobile telephone: “I love you—I told you I’m not going to die, so don’t worry.” With the ambient background sound booming out the opening, stirring rock music of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” the report switches to a hangar full of cheering, clapping troops, and Brown tells us “the Commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet gets a rapturous reception from hundreds of his sailors out at sea.” This Commander, Vice Adm. Timothy Keating, psyches up his troops with this sound bite: “Make no mistake, when the President says go [dramatic pause] look out—it’s Hammer Time.” After this emotional build-up, the report concludes by describing and showing “some of the hammers”—“vast 2,000- pound bombs” and “RAF Tornadoes armed with the very latest Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles.”

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The dramatic finale of this segment shows the RAF Tornadoes noisily taking off in flight. Like the 1991 Gulf War, this war was initially an air war, and the technology of the projected aerial bombardment is a highly visible aspect of this report on the eve of war. Coming on the eve of war, this report frames the overarching narrative. Since this is not a live broadcast, and the news media had much forewarning that this war was about to happen, the news media, the government, and the military had time to compose the script. As an audience, we are told who the heroes will be, and we are asked to identify with them and the risks they face. Notably absent is reference to the Iraqi soldiers, but the friendly military are present, visually, emotionally, and technologically. The use of embedded journalists, and the knowledge that there was a large news hole to fill for 24/7 news, encouraged the construction of news segments exploring the minutiae of war: the preparations, the protective gear, the soldiers’ feelings. Indeed, as other media analysts have noted, embedded journalists were the greatest public relations coup of the war in that they were almost completely controlled by the military. Embeds agreed to give up most of their autonomy in exchange for access to the fighting on military terms and military protection from physical harm (Miller 2004). Thus, this nonlive, preprepared piece was highly scripted, and as such it was constructed to privilege the friendly military body while erasing the enemy military body. What happens, however if we move to live broadcasts—the defining feature of 24/7 news? Below we analyze two live events, the first preprepared and the second unexpected.

Scripting the Fall The live toppling of a new Saddam Hussein statue in Firdus Square, Baghdad, on April 9 was a media event for which the networks already had their own crews in place (Hiebert 2003). This points to the stagedness and scriptedness of this televisual moment, apparently engineered to symbolize the moment when war was won (Knightley 2004). Indeed, despite the fact that President Bush did not declare the official end of war until May 2, 2003, and despite Iraq’s gradual collapse into ongoing civil war, the vast majority of the media took this cue to withdraw their correspondents, so effectively ending the media war (Cardiff School of Journalism 2004). We recorded a 16-minute-long live segment from BBC News 24 on April 9, 2003 (3:33–49 p.m.), at the start of which the presenter asks: “Is this the end of the war?” Throughout the segment, the symbolism of this moment is referred to nine times, twice by the group captain, Al Lockwood in the studio: “The sight of the statue coming down will be a sign really that the regime is finished.” The remaining seven mentions are from the BBC’s correspondent in Baghdad, Rageh Omar, such as this example:

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The crowds are cheering, jumping up and down; the chain is around the neck of the statue. . . . It’s about to come down; it’s the most symbolic moment, the image of the day, as Saddam Hussein and his twenty-fiveyear rule is about to come crashing down; it’s teetering on the edge. Given their desire for this event to symbolize the end of war, it is obvious here how carefully the military were thinking about what image to project as they slowly pulled down the large statue (approximately four times a man’s height and on a podium of equal height). This statue of Saddam is only one of hundreds throughout Baghdad (Knightley 2004) and was arguably chosen for toppling because it was conveniently located opposite the Palestine Hotel, where most members of the international media were still staying. Although the Square was cordoned off by U.S. tanks and marines, the cameras show a small crowd (no more than 200) of celebrating Iraqis, who had been allowed through. They occupied only a small fraction of the overall Square, yet the live broadcast frames the toppling of the statue with a long shot so that the square’s emptiness cannot be seen (Information Clearing House 2003). Knightley (2004) and Information Clearing House (2003) cite an IndyMedia source who suggests that these Iraqis were members of the Free Iraqi Forces, headed by Iraqi National Congress founder, Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon’s favorite to head the new Iraqi government (Information Clearing House 2003; Kellner 2004; Knightley 2004). In the fifteen-minute lead-in to the toppling, we see much deliberation about what flag to adorn the statue with. Initially, two U.S. marines climb on top of their armored personnel carrier, reach the statue’s neck, put a noose around Saddam’s head, and totally cover his head with the Stars and Stripes flag, like a hood (this hooding lasts two minutes, from 3:34–36 p.m.). The ensuing BBC commentary talks about the appropriateness of the symbol, consulting in the studio with Dr. Ghassan Atiyyah, former United Nations and Arab League Diplomat, and then with correspondent Rageh Omar. (We hear this in audio only, since the visuals remain on the live toppling of the statue throughout this segment.) By 3:37 p.m. the Stars and Stripes is taken off Saddam, and a period of debate seems to ensue among the soldiers. By 3:38 an Iraqi standing on top of the armored personnel carrier brandishes the old Iraqi flag above his head for a minute. By 3:40 the Iraqi flag is passed up to the soldier on top of the armored personnel carrier; after securing the noose around Saddam’s head, he more respectfully attaches the Iraqi flag to the neck of Saddam, like a neckerchief, and then climbs down to the tank’s main body (3:41). After a brief close-up of the statue adorned with Iraq’s flag, by 3:43 a soldier climbs up to the statue’s head and removes the flag—presumably because once the statue was toppled, it would give out the wrong signal, that of destroying Iraq rather than Saddam Hussein’s regime. The scriptedness of this scene comes though its setting (the square accessible by the international media); its visual framing (the long shot hiding the emptiness of the square); the correspondent’s prior knowledge that the statue was

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about to be toppled; and the continued repetition from the correspondent about the symbolic value of the statue’s toppling. The scene perhaps is trying to repeat the successful formula of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, when crowds toppled statues of Lenin. However, in this case a significant difference is that the crowds were small and were unable to pull down the statue without the aid of the U.S. military. Like the nonlive segment referred to earlier, the presence of the friendly military body is very much evidenced; the enemy military body is totally absent, and much is made of the effacing of their leader’s statue. The script is still in place since this is a prearranged media event. Unfortunately for the symbolism of the moment, its preparations have all been captured live on TV, allowing its scriptedness to become apparent to the casual viewer. There are many minutes to fill while the U.S. marines choose the appropriate symbol with which to adorn the statue (first the U.S. flag, then the Iraqi flag, then no flag at all); and while the marines ensure that the chains to the statue are attached securely. The toppling of the statue is followed by the crowd rushing up to hit it with whatever is at hand; the toppling itself only takes about thirty seconds, but in the preceding fifteen minutes the BBC’s correspondent, Rageh Omar, is forced to continually repeat what this moment will symbolize, preempting the event itself and almost willing it to happen. Indeed, in the fifteen-minute preamble to the moment of toppling, Omar refers to the imminent destruction of the statue twelve times, detailing that there are “Iraqis weeping in anticipation to see this statue topple down,” and repeating that Iraqis are “just desperate for this to happen. . . . They want to see this statue come crashing down.” Perhaps more desperate than the Iraqis, however, were the media and the governments of the U.S. and the UK. As Derrida (1994, 29–30) notes, “actuality” is created by media rhythm and the necessity of running to their meter. Thus, although this scene is live, it is very much scripted. Here, the only uncertainty the liveness adds to the script is the precise timing of the event, but a seasoned and skilled commentator is able to fill in the temporal gap with speculations, framed as describing the mood of the scene. Because it is scripted, the binary opposition of the presence of the friendly military body and the absence of the enemy military body is maintained. What happens, however, when an unplanned, unscripted event is captured live on 24/7 news?

Unscripted Presence/Absence The shooting-in-the-reeds scenario on ITV News Channel on March 23, 2003 (11:57 a.m.–12:02 p.m.) does not appear to have been widely reported. However, it is our argument that this is a significant moment in its undecidability. It centers on the Iraqi military’s search for downed pilots after witnesses said they had seen parachutes fall alongside the west bank of the River Tigris in Baghdad (TCM archives 2003). The full five-minute sequence is as follows.

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The visuals depict the banks of the River Tigris, under a large (al-Tahrir) bridge. Over the past half hour something has attracted a crowd of Iraqi spectators and television cameras along the bridge and the top of the steeply sloping riverbank, looking down at the reeds in the river. The first minute of reportage (11:57–58) cuts immediately to a midshot of an Iraqi solder looking at the river. Another Iraqi soldier in front of him has his pistol raised, pointing at the river. The camera pans quickly twice from left to right, and then continues in its pan right to take in the wider scene. To the ambient sound of traffic, and Iraqi onlookers talking to the soldier with the pointed pistol, this wild panning shows us the gun pointing to the man-high reeds in the river, a group of soldiers gathered by the reeds, and the crowds gathering on top of the steep riverbank some ten meters (33 ft.) distant. The presenters’ voice-over during this visual sequence anchors the idea that something is going on: Presenter 2: Presenter 1: Presenter 2:

I must interrupt you. Look at this—soldiers on the banks of the river with their weapons drawn. [Pause] Yes it looks like they’ve found something — they’re covering something there. There are the crowds that you’ve mentioned have been gathering to watch this, er, drama unfold.

In the second minute of reportage (11:58–59), the presenters continue to voice their uncertainty as to what is happening, while trying to make sense of it for the audience: Presenter 1:

[Pause] Yes, I think they’re looking—they’re trying to track something in the reeds there. I think the way that the gun’s drawn—the guns are drawn—I think they are certainly looking for someone, and if you look up at the bridge there, there are people pointing down there, so I suspect they’ll move into the reeds and shortly they’ll do a sweep through the reeds.

To this voice-over, the camera pans shakily across the gathering crowd, sometimes pointing at the dusty, muddy floor by the cameraperson’s feet, other times capturing close-ups of the surrounding people’s midriffs. We see a succession of shots of several Arab men searching through man-high reeds under the bridge: Presenter 2:

Well, we’ll stay with this picture as this drama unfolds right in the center of Baghdad, on the banks of the River Tigris. More armed [pause] police, I would imagine.

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Yes, I see a dialogue going on between the people up on the bridge and on the bank and those down much closer to the scene, trying to direct them to something they can see in the reeds just, er, in front of us here [long pause].

With the above voice-over, the camera again pans around from side to side, showing blurry shots of the crowd by the reeds, a young armed soldier running toward the reeds, and the crowds lining the steep side of the riverbank. The ambient sound is of Iraqis urgently speaking to each other. For the first time, the continuously scrolling news bar on the bottom of the screen presents news that may be of relevance to this scene: IRAQ SAYS IT HAS SHOT DOWN 5 PLANES AND 2 HELICOPTERS BELONGING TO U.S.-LED FORCES IN IRAQ. U.S. OFFICIAL DENIES IRAQI CLAIMS IT HAS SHOT DOWN 5 PLANES AND 2 HELICOPTERS. In the third minute of reportage (11:59 a.m.–12:00 noon), the action starts to happen. The camera pans quickly round to the left again to show that more people have gathered by the reeds under the bridge. A soldier armed with a rifle held over his shoulder starts walking purposefully toward the reeds. He is joined by another. The ambient sound is of distant car horns honking and people shouting in Arabic. The news bar tells us: U.S. OFFICIAL:

Presenter 1: Presenter 2: Presenter 1:

WE HAVE NO REPORTS OF MISSING AIRCRAFT OR PILOTS. [Both presenters then jump in at the same time.] And in fact there’s something going on. They’re shooting. Yes, yes.

From the rest of this minute onward, the presenters do not commentate. Since the camera remains on the crowd immediately next to the reeds under the bridge, this obscures the shooting, but we see huge plumes of water shooting upward while hearing the ambient sound of a series of loud gunshots in steady succession, and a shout from the soldier with the rifle. A young Arab boy on the riverbank runs toward and past the camera, away from the shooting. The camera shakily zooms in on the reeds, gun smoke emanating from them, and pans round to the soldier armed with a rifle, who turns around to one of the group and shouts something urgently at him. As the camera moves to frame the two soldiers pointing their guns at the reeds several feet away, we hear the clear sound of the rifles being cocked, followed by more shouting from an Arabic cameraman

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(momentarily in view as he walks in front of the reeds), and then a loud series of gunshots in steady succession. Meanwhile, the news bar informs us: MOD: UK MILITARY:

CENTRAL COMMAND IN QATAR SAYS RAF AIRCRAFT MISSING. INITIAL EVIDENCE SUGGESTS MISSING RAF AIRCRAFT SHOT DOWN BY U.S. PATRIOT MISSILE.

As the soldier fires another round into the reeds, other camerapeople press closer to the edge of the riverbank, obscuring the view of the soldier. We then switch to a wide shot of Baghdad’s skyline as the news bar and then a presenter inform us: UK MILITARY:

Presenter 1:

MISSING AIRCRAFT MAY HAVE BEEN SHOT DOWN BY A US MISSILE NEAR KUWAITI BORDER. We’ve lost those pictures of the river there, but clearly—er—personnel have been—And I think we can get those pictures back again.

In the penultimate minute (12:00 noon–12:01 p.m.) of this sequence, we are returned to the scene from a new vantage point, as the cameraperson has gone onto the overlooking bridge: Presenter 2: Presenter 1:

Yes, they’ve got a camera up on the bridge now so we can see what they were seeing. This is—these are crowds watching. We saw— they’ve found people down there and they’re making absolutely sure there’s no danger to them.

With the above commentary, the camera moves through the crowd on the bridge to capture an unobscured view from the bridge, looking down at the reeds and the soldier on the riverbank shooting into them with his rifle, surrounded by other camerapeople. In the middle distance are the reeds. In the near distance are onlookers on a raised platform, several of them camerapeople, one with a tripod, looking down at the shooting in the reeds. The news bar tells us: UK MILITARY:

MISSING AIRCRAFT IS A TORNADO. U.S. SAYS PATRIOT MISSILE MAY HAVE ENGAGED BRITISH AIRCRAFT NEAR KUWAIT BORDER.

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As the camera zooms in on the reeds and the photographers, the presenters confirm the scene: Presenter 1:

Presenter 2:

Presenter 1: Presenter 2: Presenter 1:

The cameras are right there. They’re firing into those reeds. If there is anyone in there—well [pause]. I don’t think anybody will be emerging after two or three magazines of Kalashnikovs. Although of course they may just be firing nearby if they see someone or—to try to force them to surrender. What’s interesting is that they appear to be, um, firing out into the water as though, er . . . Yes. Perhaps there is—somebody spotted something underneath the water [pause].

Along with the above commentary and the ambient sound of another loud round of gunfire, the camera pans right to focus on the two soldiers shooting into the reeds, surrounded by twelve camerapeople and other onlookers, capturing the ripples made by the gunshots in the water. This switches to an overhead shot from the bridge, looking directly down at the reeds, the firing soldiers, the surrounding crowd, and five distinct plumes of water and ripples from the gunfire. Soldier one pulls soldier two’s arm. At this point, the live pictures run out, and we switch to the standard wide shot of Baghdad’s skyline by day. In the final minute of this sequence (12:01–02 p.m.), we remain with the wide shot of Baghdad’s skyline, and we hear the presenters trying to assemble their script of what happened: Presenter 1:

Well we’re again . . . losing the picture from [long pause] the riverbank, so we’re—we’re forced to bring you a wide shot of Baghdad [long pause] where this incident is [pause] continuing to unfold. [Long pause.] And just to bring you up to date as we look at a wide shot of Baghdad, there is an incident unfolding on the banks of the Tigris—the River Tigris—flowing through the center of the city. Personnel have clearly been spotted hiding in the rushes, or indeed in the water. Um—a crowd began gathering about half an hour or so ago. It’s slowly built up—quickly built up. Soon there were hundreds of people pointing down from the bridge, gesticulating. Then the security forces arrived. They are clearly taking no chances. They are

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Presenter 1:

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firing—they’ve been firing into the reeds, they’ve been firing into the river. Er—obviously some people have been spotted there. We don’t know who they are [pause]. Well, I suspect they may be—er—clearing those, er, onlookers and er—the camera crews down there and also the other soldiers which may be obstructing the fields of fire, may be getting in the way, and perhaps—er—will be in danger if— er— the line of fire, ricocheting bullets, takes them from the banks. We saw—we saw the lands—the rounds throwing up huge spouts of water there and obviously landing very close to those, er, people—some of them may not realize how much danger they’re in—certainly from ricochets. Right now, for a moment we’re going to move away from Baghdad. When the situa—situation there becomes clearer, of course, we’ll bring it to you. We’re going to go down south of the country to our reporter Juliet Bremner, who is on a videophone link from Basra. What is the latest? We can see huge palls of smoke behind you, Julia.

Throughout this dialogue, the news bar brings much news of different parts of the war, but only one reference to something that might anchor this scene: REUTERS:

U.S. SAYS NO PLANES SHOT DOWN AND NO PRISONERS TAKEN BY IRAQIS.

The report from Juliet Bremner that follows is also live. The camera depicts a midshot of this embedded reporter, framed by a desertscape, a thick plume of black smoke in the far distance, which we are told is emanating from a hit Iraqi tank. On the presenter’s request, the camera pans round to show three Allied tanks; we are told that they are coordinating the friendly military’s action 800 meters away on the front line. The reporter says that she is embedded with Y Company of the 1st Fusiliers Battle Group and describes their artillery, achievements, and objectives: a reassertion of the scripted binary. Although we never see who the Iraqi soldiers are firing on in the shootingin-the-reeds sequence, and although the commentary is speculative, we argue that this sequence is meaningful in its potential to raise the critical consciousness of the audience. Its meaningfulness lies in its ability to highlight the binary structures of scripted power in other 24/7 news segments.

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This short segment was a moving and powerful moment for us. It takes the presenters a full five minutes before they can assemble their script, and then it is slow and stumbling, and they freely admit their ignorance as to who the Iraqi soldiers are firing on: “We don’t know who they are.” We argue that the emotional power of this sequence lies in the appearance of the script running out, leaving us, the audience, with the feeling that we are bearing witness to the unknown, that in the next few minutes anything can happen, and that this encroachment of the reality effect is in marked contrast to the scriptedness of other news broadcasts of the War. For the first time, “liveness” and “embodiment” merge with unpredictability into an intense moment, that truly highlights the potential of 24/7 news. It was at this moment, when the script ran out, that we saw the Iraqi security forces going about their military work. For the first time, it was the friendly military body that was under erasure, impersonally referred to as “personnel,” invisible, an implied presence, a trace, hiding in the watery reeds, perhaps never to resurface. Here the visual absence of the friendly military body and the implications that it might consist of vulnerable pilots are in marked contrast to the scripted segment on the eve of war, where the military, and especially the pilots, were projected as technologically present, fused with their weaponized machines to form “hammers.” It is also in marked contrast to the scripted live segment immediately following the shooting in the reeds, where the reporter is able to project the might and invulnerability of the friendly military body.

Conclusion The scriptedness of war goes hand in hand with the privileging of the friendly military body and erasure of the enemy body in Western 24/7 news. Our analysis of the nonlive sequence and the preplanned live sequences shows that this was the dominant mode of discourse. During a rare moment of unscriptedness—the unplanned live event of the shooting in the reeds—the binary opposition is inverted. We see the enemy military going about their work, shooting at undefined and highly vulnerable “personnel,” which we assume to be friendly military, judging from the news bar reports and the presenters. The camera cuts to the skyline of Baghdad at what is perhaps the crucial moment of revelation. Indeed, it is likely that this second cut to the Baghdad skyline was to ensure that the ITV News Channel did not contravene the Broadcasting Standards Commission’s (1998) Codes of Guidance, which apply to all UK terrestrial channels and stipulate that the dead should not be shown unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. Furthermore, there was pressure on news networks not to depict the friendly military body when vulnerable, as evidenced in the political furor created by Al Jazeera’s transmission of footage of several captured, bruised, frightened U.S. soldiers on the same day as the shooting in the reeds (Tyler 2003; Badi 2004). Such self-censorship from the broadcasters, however, results in us never seeing the friendly military body in a moment of weakness or defeat.

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The normal script of preplanned events in the 2003 Iraq War had conditioned us to expect the cameras to show the friendly military body, albeit in carefully humanized (such as at the eve of war) or technologized presences, Hence, the very absence of a script for the shooting-in-the-reeds scene may serve to instill critical consciousness in the viewer, or at least in some fashion destabilize the script and meter of (hyper)mediated war. Potentially with the unplanned, unscripted, live sequence, the live image also inadvertently encourages us to ask critical questions: Why haven’t we seen the friendly military body (the pilot) here? Why have we seen so much of the friendly body at other times? In momentarily upsetting the standard binary opposition of Western 24/7 news representations of the present friendly military body versus the absent enemy military body, it may encourage the audience to realize that a construction is always at work, no matter how live and therefore real it appears. These schizo-moments of undecidability further raise awareness of the fragility of the leaky body that may lie under the reeds. In contrast to the scripted, technologized hard bodies, the reality effect of the horrors of war for the Western audience is allowed to slip through the edit. As Virilio (2004, 26) also highlights, it is the break, or untimely accident, in narrative and continuity that creates the event. The quietude of these minutes—the absence of commentary—detracts from the rhythm of the script and the pace at which the war is preferably reported. Although regulatory power steps in so as not to reveal the outcome of the grounded pilots, the stammering of the presenters highlights the palpable moment whereby the territory regains its primacy over Borges’s map (Baudrillard 1994).

Works Cited Badi, F. 2004. “Al Jazeera’s War.” In Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, 243–50. Edited by D. Miller. London: Pluto. Baudrillard, Jean. [1981] 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beck, S., and M. Downing, eds. 2003. The Battle for Iraq: BBC News Correspondents on the War against Saddam and a New World Agenda. London: BBC Worldwide. Becker, D. 2003. “New Tech Changes the Face of War Reporting.” CNET News.com, March 21, http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,39020351,2132275,00.htm (accessed July 30, 2007). Boyd-Barrett, O. 2004. “Judith Miller, The New York Times, and the Propaganda Model.” Journalism Studies 5, no. 4:435–49. Brown, B. 2003. “Basra—The Second City Falls.” In The Battle for Iraq: BBC News Correspondents on the War against Saddam and a New World Agenda, 29–32. Edited by S. Beck and M. Downing. London: BBC Worldwide. Butt, D. G., A. Lukin, and C. M. I. M. Matthiessen. 2004. “Grammar—the First Covert Operation of War.” Discourse and Society 15, nos. 2–3:267–90. Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. 2004. Too Close for Comfort? The Role of Embedded Reporting during the 2003 Iraq War: Summary Report. Cardiff: Cardiff University. http://www.warandmedia.org/documents/comfort_summary.doc (accessed July 30, 2007).

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Caton, L. F. 2004. “Review Essay: The Impossible Humanism for Today’s Cosmopolitan: Jacques Derrida’s Recent Books on Mourning, Forgiveness, and Secrets.” Critical Sociology 30, no. 3:799–815. Dearing, J. W., and E. M. Rogers. 1996. Agenda-Setting. London: Sage. Der Derian, J. 2001. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. Boulder, CO: Westview. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1982. “Différence.” In Margins of Philosophy, 1–28. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. “The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Radical Philosophy 68:28–41. ———. [1994] 1997. Politics of Friendship. Translated by G. Collins. London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques, and B. Stiegler. 2002. Echographies of Television. Translated by J. Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity. Falah, G.-W., C. Flint, and V. Mamadouhz. 2006. “Just War and Extraterritoriality: The Popular Geopolitics of the United States’ War on Iraq as Reflected in Newspapers of the Arab World.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 1:142– 64. Gershkoff, A., and S. Kushner. 2005. “Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric.” Articles 3, no. 3 (September): 525–37. http:// journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS3_03%2FS1537592705050334a. pdf&code=ce162fd3e336d7743f42f347c677729f (accessed July 30, 2007). Gopsill, T. 2004. “Target the Media.” In Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, 251–61. Edited by D. Miller. London: Pluto. Hiebert, R. E. 2003. “Public Relations and Propaganda in Framing the Iraq War: A Preliminary Review.” Public Relations Review 29, no. 2:243–55. Hutnyk, J. 2004. “Photogenic Poverty: Souvenirs and Infantilism.” Journal of Visual Culture 3, no. 1:77–94. Information Clearing House. 2003. “The Photographs Tell the Story.” http:// www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm (accessed July 30, 2007). Kellner, D. 1992. The Persian Gulf TV War. Boulder, CO: Westview. ———. 2003. From 9/11 to Terror War. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Knightley, P. 2000. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. London: Prion Books. ———. 2004. “History or Bunkum?” In Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, 100–107. Edited by D. Miller. London: Pluto. Lakoff, G. 2003. Metaphor and War, Again. http://www.alternet.org/story/15414/ (accessed July 30, 2007). Lewis, J. 2003. “Biased Broadcasting Corporation.” Guardian Unlimited, July 4, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,991007,00.html (accessed July 30, 2007). Lewis, J., and R. Brookes. 2004. “Reporting the War on British Television.” In Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, 132–43. Edited by D. Miller. London: Pluto. Lule, J. 2004. “War and Its Metaphors: News Language and the Prelude to War in Iraq, 2003.” Journalism Studies 5, no. 2:179–90. MacGregor, B. 1997. Live, Direct, and Biased: Making Television News in the Satellite Age. London: Arnold. Miller, D. 2003. “Eliminating Truth: The Development of War Propaganda.” Scoop: Independent News, March 28, http://www.spinwatch.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id= 91 (accessed July 30, 2007). Mooney, C. 2004. “Did Our Leading Newspapers Set Too Low a Bar for a Preemptive Attack?” Columbia Journalism Review 2 (March/April), http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2004/2/mooneywar.asp (accessed July 30, 2007).

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Nord, L. W., and J. Strömbäck. 2006. “Reporting More, Informing Less: A Comparison of the Swedish Media Coverage of September 11 and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Journalism 7, no. 1:85–110. Nuri, A. 2003. “April to November: An Iraqi Journey.” OpenDemocracy, November 20, http:// www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-iraqivoices/article_1589.jsp (accessed July 30, 2007). Petley, J. 2004. “Let the Atrocious Images Haunt Us.” In Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, 165–75. Edited by D. Miller. London: Pluto. Pilger, J. 2004. “The Unthinkable Is Becoming Normal.” In Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, 34–40. Edited by D. Miller. London: Pluto. Rampton, S., and J. Stauber. 2003. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq. London: Robinson. Robertson, J. W. 2004. “People’s Watchdogs or Government Poodles? Scotland’s National Broadsheets and the Second Iraq War.” European Journal of Communication 19, no. 4:457–82. Spivak, G. C. 1976. “Translator’s Preface.” In J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, ix–lxxxvii. Translated by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. TCM Archives. 2003. “Huge Search for Possible Downed Pilot.” archivesbreakingnews.ie, Thomas Crosbie Media—Thomas Crosbie Holdings, Ireland, March 23, http://archives.tcm.ie/breakingnews/2003/03/23/story92777.asp (accessed July 30, 2007). Thussu, D. K. 2003. “Live TV and Bloodless Deaths: War, Infotainment and 24/7 News.” In War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7, 117–32. Edited by D. K. Thussu and D. Freedman. London: Sage. Tumber, H., and J. Palmer. 2004. Media at War: The Iraq Crisis. London: Sage. Tyler, P. E. 2003. “Iraq Broadcasts Images of U. S. Prisoners—U.S. Assails Ruses.” New York Times, March 23. http://nucnews.net/nucnews/2003nn/0303nn/030324nn.htm#453 (accessed July 30, 2007). Virilio, P. 2002. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. London: Continuum. ———. 2004. City of Panic. New York: Berg. Webster, R. M., and D. Hillson. 2005. Understanding and Managing Risk Attitude. Aldershot: Gower.

Note 1. It is important to note, however, that aspects of the UK national press were highly critical of the 2003 Iraq War, such as Channel 4 News, Guardian, Independent, and Mirror (Lewis 2003; Petley 2004).

11

Bodies on the Margins? African America and the War on Terror Paul Williams

This essay explores how representations in the popular media of the United States—particularly film and hip-hop music—have located African Americans in relation to the Bush Administration’s War on Terror since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. I argue that African America is positioned as peripheral to the United States being defended in this twenty-first-century conflict. Further, that peripheral status is acted out in cultural texts in two connected representations of the black (male) body, both of which revolve around the idea that these bodies are “disposable” in the War on Terror. One representational trend is that African Americans are not entitled to have their rights and lives protected by the state; they are errant domestic elements whose bodies are ignored in moments of catastrophe (such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005), or left to destroy each other in the pathological environment of African-American urban communities. Given President Bush’s binary understanding of the War on Terror—“You are with USA, or you are with the terrorists” (Bush 2001)—perhaps it is unsurprising that black communities have perceived themselves as uneasily incorporated within the America that the president professes to defend. In twenty-first-century American cultural texts, Islamist terrorist “organizations” are often understood as the biggest threat to the United States; historically, some of the most widely circulated representations of American Muslims have been African Americans. The reproduction of Muhammad Ali’s image in advertising suggests that he represents an acceptable face of black Islam—as an incarnation of athleticism and sporting distinction (Burkeman 2006). Few multinational companies reach for the Nation of Islam in their marketing strategies, and in the wake of 9/11 and the faceless weapon of anthrax in the mail, the Washington sniper gave human form to the danger confronting the United States (Borger 2002). This history of AfricanAmerican Muslims pressurizes contemporary representations of the black body, figured as an internal threat within an America at war with Islamist

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terrorism, no longer entitled to the protection the state extends to bodies that are not black. My argument centers on the personae and issues in African America that seem most prominent in the United States media, and that ask questions of African-American male bodies and masculine aspects of African-American culture. This is not to suggest that either of these are stable categories, nor that they stand in for African-American femaleness or femininity. My argument about black marginality emphasizes the political implications of positionality, not biological questions of essence. My debt to Toril Moi’s reshaping of the French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva’s ideas is evident; in Sexual/Textual Politics (2002), Moi extends Kristeva’s notion of marginality into the politics of representation: Kristeva’s emphasis on marginality allows us to view this repression of the feminine [in phallocentric societies] in terms of positionality rather than of essences. What is perceived as marginal at any given time depends on the position one occupies. A brief example will illustrate this shift from essence to position: if patriarchy sees women as occupying a marginal position within the symbolic order, then it can construe them as the limit or borderline of that order. From a phallocentric point of view, women will then come to represent the necessary frontier between man and chaos; but because of their very marginality they will also always seem to recede into and merge with the chaos of the outside. . . . Neither position corresponds to any essential truth of woman. (Moi 2002, 165–66; cf. Kristeva 1977, 297) This critical framework informs my contention that media discourses construct African America as marginal to the United States. In 2002, Condoleezza Rice— presumably unintentionally—expressed the War on Terror using similar terms: “Since September 11th all the world’s great powers see themselves as falling on the same side of a profound divide between the forces of chaos and order” (Felix 2005, 220–21). The disposability of the black (male) body is a vector of its historical association with the “chaos” of Islamist terrorism that the Bush administration defines itself against. There are two sides to this disposability; as Moi suggests in relation to phallocentrism’s positioning of women, marginalized bodies collude with the external enemy and stand for the shield protecting the dominant patriarchal system. With reference to the troops fighting the War on Terror in Iraq, this essay shows that the black body is also disposed of as it is deployed as America’s defensive perimeter; bell hooks has critiqued the United States’s need for “black male bodies . . . to fight [imperialist] wars” (2004, 51). In stressing this aspect of African America’s peripheral status, I differ from Moi, for whom the internal marginality of the feminine has made women “an inherent part of the inside” (2002, 166). In the media representations discussed here, the presence of nonwhite combat troops in the U.S. armed forces may be a necessary bulwark protecting the United States, but that presence is not inherent: it is

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expedient because nonwhite bodies are more conveniently sacrificed. As Moi’s words prefigure, my aim is not to find an essential truth about the position of African America during the War on Terror, but to draw out key tendencies in media representations: the political dimensions of this work operate in the interrogation of such tendencies in the service of an antiracist agenda. If, as I argue, African Americans are positioned as peripheral to America during the War on Terror, how does one explain the constant visibility of Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, and Colin Powell, and their seeming centrality to the Bush Administration? Examining the (self-)representation of Powell and Rice in life-writing texts, I suggest that their presence in the White House conceals the marginality of African America by stressing the opportunities available to black Americans. The back cover of Antonia Felix’s Condi: The Condoleeza Rice Story (2005) impresses upon browsers Dr. Rice’s importance in the Bush Administration: “On 26 January 2005 Condoleezza Rice became the 66th Secretary of State of the USA (only the second woman to fill the role), a testament to George W. Bush’s faith in her abilities, and to her own astonishing determination.” If will to succeed is the only criterion for an African American to gain high office in the White House, perhaps the limits placed on black achievement by American racism are inconsequential. In the words of Colin Powell in A Soldier’s Way: An Autobiography (1995), “Only . . . in America” could “a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means” become “National Security Advisor to the President of the United States” (1995, viii). One might suggest that the public personae of Rice and Powell circulating in the media work against the need for America to address the racist economic and social structures that marginalize African Americans. Yet their personal success in the Bush administration does not challenge the reproduction of America’s racist structures of power, as George Lipsitz observes: “White supremacy is an equal opportunity employer; nonwhite people can become active agents of white supremacy as well as passive participants in its hierarchies and rewards. One way of becoming an insider is by participating in the exclusion of other outsiders” (1998, viii). Powell and Rice’s proximity to a Republican administration that has seemed indifferent to the situation of African America has produced hostility in some of America’s black communities (hooks 2004, 24; Stothard 2006). By referring to the racism that they have overcome to achieve personal success, Felix’s biography of Rice and Powell’s autobiography neutralize criticism that they have betrayed their “race” in accepting the patronage of President Bush, or that they accept continuing black marginality as the cost of securing their own status. While attending Reserve Officers Training Corps training in North Carolina, Powell achieved second in the Best Cadet category. A white supply officer asked: “You want to know why you didn’t get best cadet in the camp? . . . You think these Southern ROTC instructors are going to go back to their colleges and say the best kid here was a Negro?” (1995, 34). Rice’s middle-class family shielded her from the racist violence in America during the struggle for civil rights; they

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“simply ignored . . . the larger culture that said ‘You’re second class, you’re black, you don’t count, you have no power’” (Felix 2005, 37; Stothard 2006). However, addressing the press upon becoming National Security Advisor, Rice projected her origins as a way of highlighting the racism she and the United States have overcome: “I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. I did not go to integrated schools until I was in tenth grade and we moved to Denver, Colorado. . . . [President George W. Bush recognizes] how important it is that we continue the last thirty-plus years of progress toward one America; that he will have an administration that is inclusive” (Felix 2005, 20). In Rice’s words “Birmingham, Alabama” assumes the status of key battlefield in the civil rights struggle, where the fighting was most dangerous and strategically important (Stothard 2006, 19), and her proximity to this battlefield establishes her credentials in Bush’s inclusive America. A further attempt at projecting the “authenticity” of Rice and Powell’s rise to power is the tropes their personal narratives share with a tradition of AfricanAmerican autobiography. Connie Rice says family life for her second cousin Condoleezza “was a regimen: Read a book a day. Religion, religion, religion” (Felix 2005, 32). Powell exhorts teenage New Yorkers: “You can be anything you want to be. But wanting to be isn’t enough. . . . You’ve got to study for it, work for it, fight for it with all your heart and soul” (Powell with Persico 1995, 533). As in the African-American autobiographical tradition (for example, Washington 1929; Douglass 1845), Powell and Rice’s successes are built on hard work and education. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has observed that “the primal scene of instruction in the slave narratives is the mastery of “letters” (literally, the English alphabet) and its literal and metaphorical relation to a freedom of the body and of the mind” (1987, xxxii). In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845, 2076), Douglass equated his own freedom with the acquisition of knowledge. For Rice, America’s promise of opportunity rests upon the provision of schooling to the racially marginalized: “The multiethnic part of [American society] does not work without another important value: belief in upward mobility. The core of that has always been the ability to level the playing field through education” (Felix 2005, 23). Stretching back to the black autobiographical tradition, the narration of Powell and Rice’s lives emphasize education, faith, and hard work in achieving personal success. Rice and Powell’s achievements suggest that, far from being marginal, black Americans enjoy opportunities available to all American citizens. Like generations before them, they have struggled against racism, but it is no longer an insurmountable impediment to blacks. Considering their narratives, is it erroneous to suggest that African America is marginalized? The need to embed Powell and Rice’s seamless routes to the White House in the autobiographical tradition is problematic. This need reveals the work that the life-writers have to do to legitimize Rice and Powell’s successes, implicitly acknowledging the skepticism with which their roles in the Bush Administrations are perceived.

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Rice and Powell’s centrality as individuals barely obscures the continuing presence of racism that ensures that African Americans are socially and economically marginalized. Exploring the representation of African America in a post-9/11 context, that marginalization is a recurrent factor in the currents of media discourse. It is manifested in two tendencies, both centered on the disposability of the African-American body: sacrificed overseas in the defense of America, and abandoned to perish domestically in environmental catastrophes, criminal violence—or forcibly “disappeared” by the state for voicing dissident opinions.

African America as Defensive Perimeter America don’t give a fuck about you. Mr. Lif (2006) A key trope in the cultural imagination of black marginality is the expendability of black bodies in the War on Terror. In relation to the deployment of African Americans in Iraq, media discourses suggest that their lives are less valued by the Bush administration and are therefore disposable. For hooks, America socializes black men to “remain permanent members of an underclass, groomed to be without choice and therefore ready to kill for the state in wars whenever needed” (2004, 34). Colin Powell also documents the history of African Americans in America’s military units, voicing the ambivalences involved: “Why should we fight for a country that, for so long, did not fight for us, that in fact denied us our fundamental rights?” (1995, 61). Powell recalls America’s forces in the Gulf War attracting discussion in the U.S. press. “Blacks, who represented approximately 11 percent of the U.S. population over age sixteen, represented 26 percent of U.S. troops in the Gulf. Obviously, casualties would hit them proportionately harder than whites” (500). Powell recognizes the economic and social forces making the army attractive to blacks, but is disturbingly vague about redressing this situation: “There was only one way to reduce the proportion of blacks in the military: let the rest of American society open its doors to AfricanAmericans and give them the opportunities they now enjoyed in the armed forces” (1995, 501). Michael Moore’s documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) is explicitly critical of how the poorest Americans are fighting in Iraq because their desperate economic position makes it the only employment outlet available to them. In the film, reports on the falling number of American servicemen foreshadow the army’s campaign to find new recruits. Moore informs us that the military would search “all across America; in the places that had been destroyed by the economy, . . . where one of the only jobs available is to join the army, . . . like my hometown of Flint, Michigan.” This voice-over takes place as the camera surveys rows of abandoned houses. Interviewing young African-American men at a

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Training Technology Center, Moore is told: “I was watching TV one day, and they show . . . some of the buildings and areas being hit by bombs [and] I got to thinking, there’s parts of Flint that look like that, and we ain’t been in a war!” This section of Fahrenheit 9/11 seeks to establish “how poor—and particularly black—youths are targeted by U.S. military recruiters to enlist and fight in U.S. wars like Iraq” (Weber 2006, 123). Most of these African-American men have relatives in the military; they comment, “There’s . . . an Army or a Navy . . . or a Marine recruiter up there every week in the [Training Technology Center] lunchroom.” Fahrenheit 9/11 follows two Marines targeting young people to join the Marine Corps at the less-affluent Courtland Mall in Flint, and while the recruiters approach teenagers of all races, blacks form the majority of potential enlistees. One of Moore’s black interviewees reflects on their seemingly impossible situation: “One would love to have that chance to experience college life, . . . stuff young people can do, without having the risk of dying in the process.” Fahrenheit 9/11 tries to demonstrate implicitly that blacks are disproportionately represented in the military, constituting 22 percent of its active servicemen in 2005 (Maxfield 2005). This does not necessarily mean that nonwhites are press-ganged into the armed forces because of race; rather, the poorest citizens populate America’s military, and the racist structures in American society that reproduce economic impoverishment ensure that the poorest Americans are most likely to be nonwhite (Lipsitz 1998). By failing to address the vulnerability of nonwhite Americans to the incessant reproduction of poverty, Lipsitz shows the racism present in legislation that is not overtly racist. Moore’s film invites audiences to see African Americans bearing an unequal burden of military service because they are also America’s poorest citizens. Mr. Lif, an African-American rapper from Boston, has constantly attacked the Bush administration in albums such as Emergency Rations (2002), Black Dialogue (2005; with The Perceptionists), and Mo’ Mega (2006). The Perceptionists’ track “Memorial Day” (2005) perceives the U.S. presence in Iraq to rest on the financial self-advancement of the Bush administration. Using the voice of an American serviceman to pose the question “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?” “Memorial Day” asserts that the need to neutralize the security risk that Iraq’s WMD constituted was a hoax justifying the invasion: “We’ve been lookin’ for months and we ain’t found nothin’/ Please, Mr. President, tell us somethin’/ We knew from the beginning that your ass was bluffin’!” The Bush administration appears to have betrayed the military personnel in Iraq, committing them to an unwinnable war fought with unethical tactics: I feel like I’m being tricked even worse than the civilians. Nobody ever told me that we would be killing children. Feelin’ like the ones that sent me here are the psychotics. But if I say that out loud, I’m unpatriotic. But would Donald Rumsfeld back me up with the chrome? Would Tom Ridge fight, or would he stay secure back home? And would Condoleezza Rice cover grenades in a foxhole?

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The satirical unreality of this episode invites listeners to see how Iraqis are also considered “expendable,” and that the tactical and strategic situation for American soldiers is “suicide,” abandoned in an unfinished war “for someone else’s personal beef.” It is not entirely clear whether “Memorial Day” understands the troops in Iraq as black; they definitely appear to be the very poorest Americans who hoped military service would lead to “a college education” or “a steady occupation.” By referring to his dead comrades as “fallen brothers,” Mr. Lif likely is tapping into the idea that by sending the most destitute Americans to fight, America also sends a disproportionate number of nonwhite citizens, since he uses “brothers” elsewhere in his work to refer specifically to AfricanAmerican men. The militarization of black America has not, historically, always signified disposability and futile combat against the odds. Early in the twentieth century the black Jamaican Marcus Garvey turned to the spectacle of military uniform and marching bands as part of his vision of racial uplift for African Americans. He formed the African Legions for this purpose, described by Ben F. Rogers as “Garvey’s private army” (1955, 159). The African Legions were a paramilitary group under the United Negro Improvement Association, the “largest mass movement among black people that [the USA] has ever seen,” which Garvey founded in 1914 (Clarke 1974, 18). In August 1920, at the First International Convention of the UNIA, the African Legions marched in units through the streets of Harlem in their red-and-blue uniforms, waving the UNIA flag, and singing their anthem “Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers” (Clarke 1974, 18). Whether this symbolic commerce between militarization and racial pride could be useful in terms of antiracism and political opposition to the Bush administration is a stubborn question. The theorist Paul Gilroy observes “a profound kinship between the UNIA and the fascist political movements of the period in which it grew” (2001, 232). Militarization appears to be one of the means by which Garvey tried to “purify and standardize” his race: the “martial technologies of racial becoming—drill, uniforms, medals, titles, massed display—[are] set to work to generate those qualities that are not immediately present” (Gilroy 2001, 233). Militarization appears to be not the sign of collective strength, but the means to manufacture it. Further, Garvey’s drive to standardize his race and engineer its uplift was underpinned by the repression of dissent through force: The Garvey movement was based not only on personal attraction and appealing ideas; it was also based in a most insidious way on force. Negroes who criticized him were threatened and often viciously attacked. Street fights became numerous between his friends and enemies. Those who complained . . . were told to be quiet or else. At meetings, the officers of the African Legion came prepared for trouble with riding crops or swords and made sure none got in without proper tickets of admission. (Rogers 1955, 162)

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Garvey’s project was marked by this contradiction between an avowed striving for peace and order, and the violence threatening to spill over from the paramilitary activity of the African Legions. Indeed, the motto of the UNIA—“No Law but Strength. No Justice but Power” (Rogers 1955, 159)—resounds, not with the ethical quest for racial parity in the United States, but with brute struggle for survival in which only the strongest race will survive. The motto chimes with the violence and machismo running alongside the presence of the African Legions; through the twin attributes of “brutalism and masculinism,” Gilroy recognizes Garvey’s movement’s kinship with fascism (2001, 234). In this instance, adopting militarization as a challenge to black marginalization is apparently compromised by its methodological trade with the forces of white racism. Arguably, military organization, violence, and masculinism also characterized the Black Panther Party, formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Searle and based in Oakland, California. The BPP members styled themselves in black berets, black leather jackets, and visibly displayed their guns: The “Panthers instituted armed patrols. . . . Whenever police harassed ghetto residents, Panthers would arrive on the scene bearing rifles and shotguns” (Allen 1970, 69–70). The BPP intervened in these potential arrests to inform black citizens of their rights: “Several armed stand-offs with police in late 1966 and early 1967 bolstered the BPP’s reputation in Oakland’s black community” (Wendt 2006, 159). The BPP’s advocacy of “armed resistance” was not new to black American freedom movements, but their rejection of nonviolence did not follow the purely selfdefensive pattern seen previously in “Southern protective groups” (Wendt 2006, 146). Bobby Searle stated that the BPP were “waging the revolutionary struggle [against] the camp of the capitalist power structure” (quoted in Allen 1970, 74). The BPP stretched the concept of “self-defense” to include “revolutionary violence,” a verbal move that stressed a powerful, independent, and self-reliant black masculinity that symbolically defied the United States’s “racist authorities” (Wendt 2006, 146) and their expectation of African-American passivity and subservience. This psychological warfare was the underlying rationale behind the BPP’s armed patrols, and deterring police brutality and protecting black communities were secondary motivations, albeit significant ones. Wendt argues that the highly visible nature of their armed protests was aimed at recruiting new members to the BPP and educating the black masses “to prepare them for the ensuing revolutionary struggle against the racist system of capitalism” (2006, 159). The BPP sought notoriety by justifying violence in the name of black revolution: “They [the police] come down with guns and force. We must organize ourselves and put a shotgun in every black man’s home” (Bobby Searle, quoted in Allen 1970, 71). This provocative stance reciprocated physical government repression and provoked criticism often centered on the BPP’s fetishism of guns, and the gendered terms in which black pride was expressed. In specifying the assertion of black masculinity, “the organization’s self-defense stance seems to have functioned primarily as a way to assert black manhood” (Wendt 2006, 161–62). With

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apologies for the lack of sophistication in this interpretation, the guns the male Panthers toted signified the macho virility they put on show, in defiance of white stereotypes in which the figure of the African-American male was emasculated. Neither the militarization nor the machismo of the BPP was monolithic, though. The BPP newspaper was keen to correct the perception that the BPP was a paramilitary group: “Some party members . . . don’t understand that the Black Panther Party is an armed body for carrying out the political task of revolution. We should not confine ourselves merely to fighting” (quoted in Allen 1970, 228). Officially, the BPP rated the need for full employment, education, and housing above the rhetoric of self-defense, and provided black communities across the country with legal aid, medical care, and food. Male and female Panthers challenged the sexist tendencies running through the BPP (Wendt 2006, 162–63). Wendt points out that the BPP eventually tried to dampen its provocative stance, because of the risk of losing the political message (2006, 163). Audiences would search in vain to find a political message in the music video “Mesmerize” (2003), in which the rapper Ja Rule, of the record label Murder Inc., resurrects the Black Panthers’ uniform appearance and their revolutionary rhetoric. The Panthers’ iconography is emptied of the program for radical change it once signified, and is turned into a fashion style that Rule uses to illustrate his rugged masculinity at a time when his personal credibility was under scrutiny in the hiphop sphere. Playing upon the final scenes of the film Grease (1978), “Mesmerize” starts with Rule as a member of a BPP-style group about to embark on revolutionary upheaval: “The Revolution is upon us. Power to the people!” Rule arrives as the group raise their clenched fists in the air, and he attracts mockery from his peers for abandoning his black-leather attire for a “preppy” outfit in an attempt to prove his wholesomeness to Ashanti, a popular R & B singer in her own right, and his female coperformer in the video (“She want me to leave the street life alone”). Ashanti, meanwhile, is waiting to meet Ja at the carnival, dressed in a black catsuit, worn to illustrate her adoption of a new, rebellious “street” identity, in order to please her revolutionary boyfriend. “Mesmerize” outlines a conventional seduction narrative between Rule and Ashanti as they enjoy the pursuits of the fairground, and its lyrics suggest the physical reconciliation of these lovers across the divide of gender roles. At the end of the song, a black van pulls up in front of the two singers, and the revolutionaries jump out and hail Ja Rule: “Yo Rule, whassup? Ridin’ or not?” Seemingly, a decisive moment has arrived. Rule must choose between his “street” life as a revolutionary and his love for Ashanti. But before he can decide, the choice is made for him by Ashanti, as his partner reveals her authentic “street” credentials: “You’re ridin’, I’m ridin’.” The video then cuts to Ja Rule rapping as he leads a march of African Americans, all wearing the requisite black leather and carrying banners, including “Remember Tupac,” “Jam Master Jay RIP,” “X,” and “KING.” Ashanti walks close behind Rule, her own Panthers-inspired outfit completed by a black beret.

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In this particular instance of contemporary hip-hop culture, it appears that the style of the Black Panthers is deployed, not to complete their political mission of racial equality, but to enhance Ja Rule’s credentials as a authentic voice of urban black experience; one of the banners reads “Music from the Streets.” During this period, Rule’s originality as a rapper, and the veracity of his personal account of black criminal lifestyles, was questioned by other prominent hip-hop performers, first DMX, and then 50 Cent (Birchmeier 2006). “Mesmerize” should be seen as Rule’s retort. The style of 1960s black militancy is an authenticity he can wear while stating his total commitment to a cause: his record label. Rule raps “INC. is religious, MURDER is for life. . . . That’s the pros and the cons, you’re never quite free, just give me room so I can breathe. . . . Love is my destiny, my black people!” These last words coincide with the end of the music video, and the Black Power salute given by the marchers on screen. The oppression of a white capitalist system that the BPP fought against has slid into the oppression Rule is made to feel, as a black performer under verbal assault from industry peers. Rule invokes the BPP’s rhetoric of freedom, grasping for “room so I can breathe,” and like the Panthers, his rap insists that he is “dangerous” and unpredictable, defining his masculine pride through proficiency in violence. The legitimacy of the black freedom movements of the 1960s is echoed sartorially to legitimize Rule’s defense of himself, but in 2003, this is detached from the antiracist politics of overturning black marginalization; Rule presses it into the service of preserving the Ja Rule brand identity as a credible black aggressor, able to compete with other male African-American hip-hop performers. Even in examples of the hip-hop genre that avoid the glamorization of urban violence, black service in the military can be an example of strength and defiance. At the conclusion of “Memorial Day,” the voice of a serviceman in Iraq asserts, “You can’t take my pride—’cause I’m a fuckin’ soldier!” (The Perceptionists 2005). An earlier song by Mr. Lif shares the sense that the energy and solidarity of military combat might be harnessed to answer back to the conductors of the War on Terror. In “Heavy Artillery” (2002c) Mr. Lif imagines emerging from dormancy at the “bottom of the sea,” and growing “megalarge,” he rampages through the city: “The god Lif has returned to terrorize.” This warrior body is no longer expendable, but enormous and impossible to destroy. Lif’s willingness to identify the purposes of his project as “terrorism” is gleefully provocative in a post-9/11 climate where the very word “terror” carries anxious semantic freight and alerts suspicions about treasonous intent. The presence of air marshals on commercial flights leads Lif to suspect that black Americans will be unfairly discriminated against as potential terrorists: “Niggas are fair game up in the airplane.” Yet the cavalcade of dismemberment and destruction in “Heavy Artillery” mirrors the Bush administration’s own alleged marginalization of African-American bodies; it prefigures the “shock-and-awe” tactics used against Iraq in 2003: Rally back your troops, retreat Abort mission cause you know you can’t compete. . . .

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I grow megalarge, Increase in size so no one survives. . . . Blood splatters all over my specs, Body parts are found in tape decks, So visual you can’t watch the scene. Given this proximity, claims made for the oppositional stance adopted in “Heavy Artillery” against the Bush administration must be followed cautiously. Nonetheless, while they may be violent, the individual acts of mayhem wrought by the giant Lif in “Heavy Artillery” are directed against an orderly unit of “armed forces” in the song. A lyric such as “Mr. Lif Has Broken Out the Heavy Artillery” seems like military hyperbole, but that reading is undercut by the realization that the “heavy artillery” being deployed are Lif’s rhetorical skills: “metaphor, simile. . . . Lyrics are ammo.” Toward the end of “Heavy Artillery,” the “cargo” that Lif drops out of the airplane are “rhymes . . . going far beyond your belief.” These rhymes will “build back your mental [sic] piece by piece / Giving brandnew life to the mentally deceased,” and the model by which this takes place is “osmosis: underwater diffusion”—explicitly fluid, and unlike the homogenization and rigidity that Gilroy observed in the UNIA, or the uniformity that Ja Rule cloaked his revolutionaries with. Nonetheless, this liquidity coexists with martial sentiments: Lif imagines himself as a warrior fighting against America’s slide toward a rabid and unthinking national security state. In “Heavy Artillery,” Lif’s war of words is symbolically enacted through an urban rampage in which America’s armed forces, the physical manifestation of Bush’s militarizing the United States, are easily swept aside by the giant Lif’s weapons. These uncertainties over Lif’s critique of the War on Terror and military uniformity are signaled by the last words of the song. Directly addressing the listener, one is exhorted to pull on the accoutrements of war and prepare for the combat to come: You ready? I’m always prepared for warfare Bring a bulletproof vest and get ready. Whether this future violence is rhetorical or physical is unspecified, but the carapace of the bulletproof vest recalls the marshalling of black military bodies discussed above and foreshadows the concerns of the next section.

African America as Internal Enemy I will no longer pledge allegiance to a government That makes no effort to relieve my sufferin’! The Perceptionists (2005)

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The marginality of African America has a second representational trend in the hip-hop culture typified by the rapper 50 Cent. The star of the film vehicle Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005) (also the title of his 2003 album), 50 Cent is (arguably) the most popular and recognizable hip-hop artist today. He sells the idea that life is cheap and death unavoidable for participants in “gangsta culture.” Wearing a bulletproof vest as a fashion item, 50 Cent’s second major album was entitled The Massacre (2005). This aspect of the hip-hop genre can also be observed in companies such as Murder, Inc., Records and Death Row Records, although Snoop Dogg, a rapper formerly signed to Death Row, has questioned the veracity of the media’s projection of “the ghetto” (Quinn 2005, 66). But bell hooks has critiqued the glamorization of black-on-black male homicide for reinforcing notions of white supremacy and “the racist/sexist assumption that the black male is valueless, and therefore when you take a black man’s life, you are just taking nothing from nothing” (2004, 137; Quinn 2005, 111). Get Rich or Die Tryin’ claims that money is everything, and without it, you may as well be dead: all ethical choices are suspended in the pursuit of wealth. In this film the character played by 50 Cent becomes a drug dealer in order to purchase an escalating series of consumer goods: a new pair of trainers, a Mercedes. His journey through the film, with musical success replacing selling drugs, may not constitute a rejection of the violence and acquisitiveness of a life distributing narcotics; for hooks, with its emphasis on “hedonistic materialist consumerism” (2004, 29), hip-hop does not offer resistance to white economic and social privilege: Not only is hip-hop packaged for mainstream consumption; many of its primary themes—the embrace of capitalism, the support of patriarchal violence, the conservative approach to gender roles, the call to liberal individualism—all reflect the ruling values of imperialist whitesupremacist capitalist patriarchy, albeit in black face. (hooks 2004, 151; cf. Boyd 1997, 327) The acquisitive worlds of African-American life verbalized and visualized by 50 Cent’s music and marketing machine repeat the marginalization of the black body. Hip-hop’s depiction of a deadly competition to acquire and flaunt consumer goods could be argued to have affinities with the Bush administration’s unwillingness to curtail rampant market capitalism, and its indifference to the black lives consumed in America’s ghettoes. Several members of the hip-hop community have protested the Bush administration’s unwillingness to see black life as worth defending. Another popular and prominent hip-hop artist, Kanye West, spoke publicly against Bush’s slowness to help the black victims of Hurricane Katrina. West voiced his views on a television special for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund: I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, “They’re looting.” You see a white family, it says, “They’re looking for

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food.” And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black. . . . America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off, as slow as possible. I mean, the Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way—and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us! . . . George Bush doesn’t care about black people! (de Moraes 2005; Kaufman 2005) Broadcast live to the American East Coast, West’s comments support the allegations of racism surrounding the federal response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina: that the poorest citizens of New Orleans, a largely black demographic group, were left behind in the evacuation and labeled as looters by the media for trying to survive (anon. 2005a with online video). We might align West’s attack with Gilroy’s comments that racism intervenes to acknowledge certain bodies as “rights-bearing,” and others as “rights-less” (2004, 89), and that in the face of natural disaster a combination of economic impoverishment and racist devaluation of life left the poor black community of New Orleans shorn of material support from the White House. West’s language—that the American soldiers “at war right now” in Iraq are “fighting another way”—implies that a “war” is also taking place in the wake of Katrina. Donald Rumsfeld also linked the two spaces when he asserted, “We have the forces, the capability, and the intention to fully prosecute the global war on terror while responding to this unprecedented humanitarian crisis here at home” (Burns 2005). When the survivors of Katrina attempt to find food, West alleges they are met with deadly force (anon. 2005b). The Bush administration wages war in Iraq to preserve the order of the West Asian region, and domestically it instructs servicemen to shoot “looters” as part of maintaining the peace in post-Katrina New Orleans. In both cases, occupants of postinvasion Iraq and post-Katrina New Orleans are positioned in spaces where an existing civil order has been extraordinarily suspended, and American forces attempt to intervene in the “chaos.” West’s juxtaposition of Iraq and New Orleans, and the “rights-less-ness” of African Americans, introduces an understanding of these locations as spaces of “wild justice,” where the inhabitants are reduced to an “infrahuman condition” that enables them to “be killed with impunity or disposed of without conscience” (Gilroy 2004, 52–53). However, while West connects the Bush administration’s failure to act to preserve the life of black bodies to the commitment of troops in the Iraq War, his critique is more impassioned than incisive, stimulating rather than supporting theoretical inquiry. A more systematic critique is available from Mr. Lif, who has consistently argued that President Bush excludes blacks from the United States, seeing them as “enemies within” in the War on Terror. In the 2002 album Emergency Rations, Lif imagines a conspiracy in which black dissidents have been “disappeared” by the CIA. “Intro (Missing Person’s File)” (2002a) announces: “Right here in our own country, where we supposed to have freedom of speech, if you

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stand up and say something that goes against popular belief, you . . . end up missing because they gonna take some sort of action to take your ass out.” Emergency Rations is offered as a testament beyond the grave from a Mr. Lif who has paid the price for “speakin’ up for his people.” Lif stresses the violent crime of black urban life: The ghetto’s designed to leave you spiritless, Living from day to day, dodging AK spray, Niggas doing anything for pay. (“Because They Made It That Way” [2002b]) Yet Mr. Lif opposes the meaninglessness of consumer acquisition: “Moving the focus of your perception away from nice cars with fuel injection.” Describing the ghetto as “designed” implies that it is purpose-built: a cage in which black men murder one another for material survival (Baldwin 1964, 26–27). Lif observes that commodity fetishism contributes to black-on-black homicides: “One nigga snipes his brotha who he claimed he never likes / And snatches his Adidas and Nikes.” In “Brothaz” (2006), Lif raps that the Bush administration is tolerating a “holocaust” in black urban communities because it is “costless.” “America don’t give a fuck about” African Americans, only about “profit,” so the murderous competition for consumer goods escalates into genocide: “In the ghettoes, brothers and sistas, it’s self-slaughter.” Lif asks ironically, “How could colonized minds lead to such uncivilized times?” Perhaps the tenet “get rich or die tryin’” has its roots in the white devaluation of black life during plantation slavery, when the black body was a commodity, and (Lif ironically suggests) the slaves’ minds were “colonized.” Like West, Lif sees the response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation as typical: The Bush administration’s worth nothin’, just fuck em! . . . Oh, you ain’t know them flood waters was comin’? You ain’t smell that African blood runnin’? Oh, to y’all, niggaz is worthless or somethin’? As natural disaster strikes one of America’s former slave ports, Lif asks whether the Bush administration ignored the danger that Katrina posed because its potential victims were the descendants of African slaves, whose lives, then as now, are thought to be “worthless.” Whether in ghettoes or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Lif’s music reiterates his belief that America considers black men “disposable,” supplementing the argument developed through this essay: the expendability of the black body is overdetermined by America’s history of slavery as well as by the cultural memory of black Islam.

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Conclusion The personal narratives projected by Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell suggest that America under the Bush Administration is a progressive nation, where African Americans have achieved unprecedented positions of institutional power. Rice and Powell experienced racism but accepted no external limit to their ambitions. Their example suggests that African Americans are full participants in the political life of the nation. The majority of representations of African America in media discourses, however, position black Americans at the margins of the United States. Whether facing outward, fighting in the frontline in the War on Terror, or situated inside America’s outer limits, as the perpetrators of lawless violence—that peripheral status can be read across film and popular music texts. Perhaps the most familiar voices, such as 50 Cent, reproduce the expendability of the black male body that its status on the margins invokes. Not that popularity and recognition are barriers to critics of black marginality: commentators like Kanye West and Michael Moore have vocalized the intimate overlapping of racism, impoverishment, and the worthlessness of black life that the Bush administration seems to assume. Mr. Lif’s attack on America’s political leaders may be reciprocated: a sticker used to advertise Emergency Rations has President George W. Bush declaring, “I am offended by this record.” But can the representation of the black soldier, which since 9/11 has often been a figuration of black marginality and thus disposability, be reaccentuated as an example of defiant black pride and resistance to racism? Several examples from African-American history point to the use of black militarization as part of antiracist activism, yet the symbolic successes of these attempts are unclear. Often, whether in Marcus Garvey’s African Legions or twenty-first-century hip-hop culture, black militarization reuses the violence and terms of racial purity that characterize white supremacist extremism. In the music video for Ja Rule’s “Mesmerize”, the political substance of the Black Panther Party is drained away, and the apparel of black militancy and selfdetermination is signified to buttress an aggressive masculine identity. AfricanAmerican marginalization goes unspoken as the revolution’s fashion show takes center stage. For Lif, the perceived worthlessness of black life, and the hunger for consumer commodities, drives the violence that bell hooks deplores in hip-hop: “[In] the ghetto where some brothers is taught to bust shots / To get a lot of what is had by the haves (not the have-nots)” (Mr. Lif 2006). The descendants of slaves remain valued for the economic worth of their bodies; combined with African America’s historical association with the “chaos” of Islamist terrorism, those bodies are marginalized and seen as in, but not of, the United States (Gilroy 1996, 29). This marginalization takes place in spaces incorporated uncertainly under America’s aegis—in Iraq, in America’s ghettoes, and in post-Katrina New Orleans—where media discourses have understood the Bush administration’s estimation of the black body as peripheral, “rights-less”—and expendable.

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Acknowledgments My love and gratitude to my partner, Antoinette Buisman, for the anecdotal evidence and CDs she brought back from the United States, and everything else.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Allen, Robert L. 1970. A Guide to Black Power in America. London: Victor Gollancz. Anon. 2005a. “New Orleans Faces Double ‘Nightmare.’” CNN.com, August 31, http://www.cnn.com/ 2005/WEATHER/08/31/katrina (accessed July 31, 2007). Anon. 2005b. “Troops Told ‘Shoot to Kill’ in New Orleans.” ABC News Online, September 2, http:// www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200509/s1451906.htm (accessed July 31, 2007). Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1993. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baldwin, James. [1963] 1964. The Fire Next Time. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Birchmeier, Jason. 2006. “Ja Rule: Full Biography.” From All Music Guide. Repost, MTV.com, http:// www.mtv.com/music/artist/ja_rule/bio.jhtml (accessed July 31, 2007). Borger, Julian. 2002. “Captured in Their Sniper’s Nest: Gulf Veteran and the Teenager. ” Guardian Unlimited, April 25, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,819054,00.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Boyd, Todd. 1997. “Check Yo Self before You Wreck Yo Self: The Death of Politics in Rap Music and Popular Culture.” In That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 325–40. Edited by M. Forman and M. A. Neal. New York: Routledge. 2004. Burkeman, Oliver. 2006. “Ali, the Greatest, Sells His Name and Image for $50m.” Guardian Unlimited, April 13, http://sport.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1752712,00.html#article_continue (accessed July 31, 2007). Burns, Robert. 2005. “New Search-and-Rescue Effort Planned by Paratroopers.” WWLTV.com, September 6, http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/wwl090605paratroopers.300b2cff.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Bush, George W. 2001. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.” The White House, September 20, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Clarke, John Henrik. 1974. “Marcus Garvey: The Harlem Years.” Transition 46:14–19. De Moraes, Lisa. 2005. “Kanye West’s Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC.” washingtonpost.com, September 3, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/ AR2005090300165.html (accessed July 31, 2007). 83. Douglass, Frederick. 1845. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. B: 2032–97. Edited by Nina Baym. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2003. Felix, Antonia. 2005. Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story. London: Politico’s. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1987. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, Paul. [1993] 1996. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. ———. [2000] 2001. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA.: Belknap / Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? New York: Routledge. Hooks, bell. 2004. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge.

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Kaplin, Robert D. 2005. Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground. New York: Random House. Kaufman, Gil. 2005. “Jay-Z, Diddy, Others Reach Out To Disaster Victims; Kanye West Attacks Bush during Telethon.” MTV.com, September 2, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1508783/ 20050902/story.jhtml (accessed July 31, 2007). Kristeva, Julia. 1977. “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident.” In The Kristeva Reader, 292–300. Edited by Toril Moi. Translated by Seán Hand. Oxford: Blackwell. 1986. Lipsitz, George. 1998. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Maxfield, Betty D. 2005. Army Profile FY05. Washington, DC: Office of Army Demographics, September 30, http://www.armyg1.army.mil/hr/demographics/FY05%20Army%20Profile.pdf (accessed July 31, 2007). Moi, Toril. 2002. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Powell, Colin L., with Joseph E. Persico. 1995. A Soldier’s Way: An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson. Quinn, Eithne. 2005. Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap. New York: Columbia University Press. Rogers, Ben F. 1955. “William E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan-Africa.” Journal of Negro History 40, no. 2:154–65. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Stothard, Peter. 2006. “What Condi Did First.” The Times (London), April 1, 18–23. http:// women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/celebrity/article699653.ece (accessed July 31, 2007). Washington, Booker T. [1900] 1929. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Weber, Cynthia. 2006. “Fahrenheit 9/11: The Temperature Where Morality Burns.” Journal of American Studies 40, no. 1:113–31. Wendt, Simon. 2006. “The Roots of Black Power? Armed Resistance and the Radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, 145–65. Edited by Peniel E. Joseph. New York: Routledge.

Filmed Fahrenheit 9/11. Directed by Michael Moore. USA, 2004. Grease. Directed by Randal Kleiser. USA, 1978. Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Directed by Jim Sheridan. USA, 2005. “Mesmerize”. Directed by Irv Gotti. USA, 2003.

Recorded 50 Cent. 2005. The Massacre. New York: Shady / Aftermath / Interscope, LC06406. Mr. Lif. 2002a. “Intro (Missing Person’s File).” Emergency Rations. New York: Definitive Jux, DJX30, Track 1. ———. 2002b. “Because They Made It That Way.” Emergency Rations. New York: Definitive Jux, DJX30, CD Rom Bonus Track. ———. 2002c. “Heavy Artillery.” Emergency Rations. New York: Definitive Jux, DJX30, Track 3. ———. 2006. “Brothaz.” Mo’ Mega. New York: Definitive Jux, DJX129CD, Track 3. The Perceptionists. 2005. “Memorial Day.” Black Dialogue. New York: Definitive Jux, DJX103CD, Track 4.

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“Damn You for Making Me Do This” Abu Ghraib, 24, Torture, and Television Sadomasochism Lindsay Coleman

In the recent film Syriana (Gaghan 2005), star George Clooney, portraying CIA agent Bob Barnes, is subjected to a nasty scene of torture at the film’s midpoint. Hoping to penetrate Prince Nasir’s (Alexander Siddig) inner circle, he meets with a Beirut contact Mussawi (Mark Strong), who turns out to be a double agent. Barnes, the loyal company man, the spy and manipulator of third-world politics, experiences the inversion of his agency’s coercive tactics. The scene is at once explicit and opaque. Barnes does not know the true identity and political loyalty of his assailant. He struggles to discover the truth of the man’s doctrine. Barnes is rewarded as the man screams, “This is a war! You’re a PO-fucking-W.” Effectively in the moment of greatest agony, as his torture reaches its apex, he also experiences one of the film’s more truthful, telling moments. Indeed, following this hidden scene of exacted punishment, Barnes emerges to a world changed. The blinkers have fallen off, and he proceeds in a state of what Time’s Richard Corliss terms “agnostic heroism” (2005, 1). He proceeds in the film as a vigilante, a composite antagonist/protagonist who makes repeated attempts to reconnect with humanity as rebellion against his formerly CIA-mandated abstract, cerebral methodology, a raison d’être of doublespeak and coded politicking. Hidden from view in this scene of death and rebirth, he emerges with a new body, a new identity, an increased awareness of the entropy of modern geopolitics, and the attendant necessity to affirm his vulnerable emotional identity. This broad explication of the individual and torture runs concurrent to the similarly themed film V for Vendetta (McTiegue 2006), in which a bodily scarred subversive V (Hugo Weaving) compulsively connects to the political and emotional vulnerability of a young woman Evie (Nathalie Portman). In this respect Syriana and Vendetta provide a template comparable to the similarly themed 24 (Surnow 2001–). Torture is the modus operandi of personal discovery, rediscovery, and physical reformation, exacted by an alternating, shadowy figure whom we can only identify as a primal antagonist, be it the scenario’s theoretical villain or presumptive hero. The 24 protagonist/antagonist Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), like Barnes (in Syriana) and V, is victim as much as victimizer, 199

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transformer of lives, and loci of Christlike suffering and rejuvenation. He similarly is always literally awaking from spiritual or physical torment to discover changes in the composition of the regime to which he initially aligned himself. Thus the corrosion or reinvigoration of both state and individual are entirely interrelated in these post-9/11 scenarios. Yet Bauer goes further. His pain and the pain he metes out clarify identity and selfhood at their most basic and, ironically, pure level, and by extension they also clarify the entrenched political and religious struggle in the post-9/11, sleeper-cell universe. The extreme cruelty of this scenario, on both the big and small screen, has ironically allowed it to accrue the value and cultural saliency of cliché, which in turn joins the community of clichés that assemble in 24’s narrative. David Lavery observes the applicability of this babble of clichés, recognized by Umberto Eco, as responsible for the essential narrative energy of the series (2006, 5). Yet torture, as a cliché, can only make sense and alternately confound as narrative entertainment within the context of the Second Gulf War, in its events of social anarchy and torture. The alternations found in change of command, the shadowy notion of acceptable interrogation, and the primal social backlash found in the events of the American torture of prisoners of war (POWs) at the Abu Ghraib prison—these appear to track closely with the narrative twists of 24. Thus the mold is set for a twenty-first-century investigation of the body and social life subsumed by a war of hidden meanings and painful affirmations of genuine selfhood, political or emotional. While I am writing this chapter, the fifth season of 24 has come to an end in the United States. Not only has the season received considerable critical praise and Emmy wins for Best Drama and Best Actor in a Drama, but star/producer Sutherland has also committed to a further three seasons and an eventual feature film (Morris 2006, 1). It would be safe to guess that the scope of influence that this intense and demanding series will have on the television landscape of this decade will be significant. It has now achieved both popular acceptance, transcending its cultlike beginnings, and also won substantial acclaim and a vital place in contemporary cultural criticism. Yet season five has been significant in its departure from previous 24 motifs and narrative strategies, instead focusing more on the character of the personalities involved. Along with the loving-buttroubled marriage of the Logans, a study in domestic minutiae, there is the romantic tension of the traditional triangle of Bauer, Audrey Raines (Kim Raver), and Diane (Connie Britton). Either relationship might appear in any successful prime-time sitcom. So too would the more conventional workplace tensions of vying superiors, exemplified by Bill Buchanan (James Morrison) and Lynn McGill (Sean Astin), tensions we might find in a dry work comedy like The Office (Gervais 2001–5). Similarly, although there have been the usual executions, assassinations, and explosions, Jack Bauer, the hitherto protofascist company man of the fictional Counterterrorism Unit (CTU), seems to have discovered his soul, and with it the rudimentary beginnings of a personal life. This manifests itself not only in romantic options, but also in an indentured sensitivity to the complexities of

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such a position. Jack is now more lover than fighter. Where he had berated Audrey, he now courts her as his more amorous associate Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) might have done. Romance has replaced utilitarian sex of the variety Bauer used with Ramon Salazar’s wife in season three. Although he may embrace violence, he increasingly shuns the coercive power of torture. So too, the wooden and noble President Palmer (Denis Haysbert) and his cartoonish marriage to Sherri Palmer has been replaced by the flawed, insecure President Logan (Gregory Itzin) and the pathos of his marriage to a mentally unstable First Lady (Jean Smart). Evidently 24’s producers have, in the interests of their show’s maturation toward mainstream success, embraced the notion of Bauer as a more conventional hero, and with it a more conventionally dramatic narrative. Gone is the almost amoral thrill machine, ceaselessly unstable, replaced by a dramatic arc of redemption and reconciliation, replete with the aspirational emotions of love, forgiveness, and loyalty. This chapter will focus on the previous four seasons. In these early episodes the format of the series with regard to conflict and torture remained fairly consistent. A crisis of national security would occur within the first hour. The establishment of this conflict between a criminal or terrorist group and the key members of CTU would coincide with a confrontation in Bauer’s personal life. In the first season it was the registering of marital tension between Bauer and his wife, Teri Bauer (Leslie Hope), precipitated by an office affair Bauer had conducted. In the second it was the emotional rejection of Bauer by his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert). The third season’s opening exposed the private torments of drug addiction Bauer had experienced in order to gain access to his quarry. This in turn had jeopardized his professional standing within CTU and again his relationship with his daughter. After these parallel tensions were established, Bauer would be summarily dispatched to locate and interrogate the various sources who might aid in his investigation. Due to its real-time format, the narrative formula used to achieve this arc entails Bauer gaining some new form of human intelligence or, alternately, his losing said intelligence through a subject’s murder or suicide. Geographically isolated from his CTU coworkers, he would then relay to them, and in turn receive, crucial plot details. Bauer would then relocate by whatever means of transport available to the next potential rendezvous of a source. Bauer is effectively a supersleuth, tracking clues to their final destination. However, as Bauer travels from one location to another, he engages in lengthy cell-phone calls to family, friends, and coworkers. These calls typically act as emotional catalysts, whether through the inflammatory quality of plot details or the alternately soothing or exacerbating tone of their delivery. They in fact closely balance the dual facets of Bauer’s life, the public and the private. And in turn they complement one another. Bauer may be wearying of his duties to CTU, but a quick call from an imperiled Kim will immediately refocus his energy into finding the errant nuclear device/virus/assassin. Regardless of the crisis, Bauer’s emotional state is typically transformed by the time he reaches his destination, from whatever it may have been when he left his previous thwarted venue. Bauer

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may be professionally preparing, through psychological means or otherwise, to extract the information he needs in the time allotted him by external factors from either CTU or from those within his personal life. He may also arrive in a state of existential angst, suffering spiritual death or otherwise. Or he may have a sadistic urge to physically torment a suspect. Regardless, most of his interrogations begin badly and end worse. Failing verbal coercion, Bauer, usually within minutes, resorts to physical torture. Typically this involves the utilization of techniques that shatter bone and puncture flesh. It also involves psychological torment, the deprivation of dignity, and the creation of nightmarish simulacrum. The subject of this abuse may sometimes die, reveal their innocence, or eventually provide Bauer with the information he is seeking. What is startling about the series is how consistent this pattern becomes. Torture is a genuine narrative motif. As an extreme form of narrative escalation, what remains significant is that torture rarely occurs in the final moments of the episode. It is not utilized as a cliffhanger. It never represents the extremity of a dramatic arc or ethical dilemma. The audience is never in any doubt as to Bauer’s willingness to use such means. Thus it occurs almost casually, located typically on either side of an episode’s midpoint. An example would be the psychological intimidation and beating of Ted Cofell (Currie Graham) between 10:17 and 10:20 in the “10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.” episode of season one. Another would be the electrocution of Paul Raines (James Frain) around 5:40 in the “5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.” episode. Indeed, when perusing the episode guides of each season on the Fox website, it becomes clear that, in a series of minute-by-minute action and plot beats, a torture beat is simply another activity designed to engage the audience. As such, it might be judged a cliché according to David Lavery’s descriptions of the use of clichés as equals in a 24 community. In his essay “24: Jumping the Shark Every Minute,” he utilizes Umberto Eco’s writing on the value of clichés: Umberto Eco was thinking of the great, transcendent films when he observed: “Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we dimly sense that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.” The equally transcendent 24 is such a reunion. (2006, 5) In this aspect every individual bizarre plot beat of an episode, be it office romance or pesky Chloe tech talk, constitutes clichés so ludicrous, according to Lavery, that they threaten to destabilize the series’ integrity. Yet through their number and variety, they succeed in doing the opposite. Since a narrative extremity such as torture may occur frequently and casually, it is only one of the potentially ludicrous voices in a chorus of kooky ideas. Torture is a cliché through both its frequency and its proximity to the endless scenes of office backstabbing and coy PG romance, clichés so engrained in the television landscape that they infect all around it. Torture, a member of the cliché chorus, is reduced to another energizing Eco-esque beat.

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This is certainly significant when the previous structure of engagement, relocation, and engagement is considered. The structure is such that an engagement must provoke a relocation, which will spill over into the next episode. Bo Kampmann Walther writes of this process: Vectorization signifies, in 24, that vector quantities are equally—or perhaps more—important than speed itself. While speed (like 50 km/hr) is a scalar, and the same goes for distance, velocity (say, 50 km/hr South) is a vector. Vectorization therefore implies both the magnitude and the direction of an object, i.e., driving Jack’s car swiftly from point A to point B. Vectorization transforms the open, territorial space into the closed, structured, and networked space. The vectorization of speed through territorialization is therefore a matter of controlling the borders of a (region of) space by structuring the possibilities of movements within this (region of) space. (2004, 28, emphasis original) I utterly concur with his assessment that this unique sense of speed and movement is essential to the narrative construction of each episode. Yet I also believe that torture is the essential catalyst that brings these spaces into existence, in terms of the conceptual introduction of space to be traversed as Jack’s enemy, or the path to his enemy, and similarly of spaces both subterranean and of nature as the potential bounds of these activities. In short, physics and geography are enslaved as concepts for issuing pain. Vectorization thus involves the initial anticipation of the violence that awaits Bauer at his next location, but second and most important, the anticipation of the key plot detail he will discover as a result of that violence. In the narrative, this results in a sublimation of all contrary emotional impulses that might thwart Bauer. While Bauer’s peers and family inevitably judge his actions, and the man himself, as monstrous, the drive of the narrative diffuses this new vein of emotional strain in Bauer’s life. Like the audience, he wishes to quash this distraction and cuts the others off. Through the strategic placement of these remonstrations either immediately before, or during, the extraction of information, the audience is encouraged to perceive these humanist impulses as counterproductive to their reception of a thrilling plot revelation. Bauer’s narrative perspective remains prevalent. He wishes to reconnect with family and friends, despite their objections to his character and actions, and keeps his stalwart purpose to prevent terrorism: these features drive the narrative strands that lead from one instance of torture to the next. The ethical anxieties surrounding these choices are effectively neutralized by the pounding thriller logic of the series. Indeed, the use of torture may be seen as aesthetically motivated by the producers in the interests of compounding tension. The drive of the narrative necessitates that in order to pass to the next challenge or clue, they must pass through this experience with Bauer. Thus the tension of revulsion is coupled with that of excitement as they near the discovery of a new clue. They must identify with his desire to extract

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information so that the genre logic of the 24 thrill machine may reactivate itself. Effectively, the producers force a tacit consent in the audience to torture. In his essay “Torture: From Algiers to Abu Ghraib,” Neil MacMaster observes a propaganda effort originating even from American liberals such as the Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, then dispersed by the media, to desensitize and “habituate” the public to the use of torture within government-sponsored initiatives: [In season two of 24] President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is present when a specialist interrogator applies his crafts. As the President turns away from the screaming victim, he notes calmly, “Everyone breaks eventually.” Hardly surprising, then, that a CNN poll found that 45 percent of Americans were prepared to condone the use of torture against terrorist suspects. (2004, 4) To enjoy the twists of 24 is to pass through the lions’ den of physical and psychological abasement with Jack Bauer as your guide, and to do so at the behest of establishment figures such as Dershowitz and the show’s producers, such as Surnow. Implicit within this structure is the concept of the ritual. Bauer’s skill at extracting information may be considered a quest for truth of a kind. It is a truth that quantifies human experience yet is free of any social or individual influence. It is vital, not political. An assailant’s affiliation, and those of his superiors, is beside the point when the lived facts of their existence are taken into account. Bauer is really an egalitarian, the ultimate antipolitician. In this respect the use of torture in 24 is quite different from, for example, its use in Lost (Abrams 2004–). Sayid (Naveen Andrews) is inducted as a torturer by the U.S. army during the First Gulf War. He first uses it to attain vital information for the Americans from an individual responsible for political reprisals against members of his own community. He then uses it in season two to establish the true identity of “Henry Gale” and whether he is, in fact, one of the dreaded Others. In Lost, clearly, affiliation explicitly matters. The April 30, 2005, Dr. Who (Davies 2005–) episode, “Dalek,” features a scene of torture that far more closely resembles the use of the same in 24. In an effort to discover a captured specimen of Dalek’s species and its relation to other Daleks—he is actually the last—an ignorant and cruel collector tortures the sci-fi megavillain in the interests of gaining essential knowledge. The torture in season one of Spooks (Wolstencroft 2002) represents an extreme distortion of this 24 paradigm. The death of Helen Flynn (Lisa Faulkner) is the result of torture endured to the point of death. As such it represents the final exposure, and conscious extinguishment, of an individual’s essence. Helen’s dying screams are the final expression of her lungs, nerves, and mind. Yet 24’s Bauer, in contrast to these men, wishes to sustain an individual’s essence. However, this did not strike critics and viewers as initially the case. Surrounded by the self-serving political ambiguity of his superiors and the perceived vagaries of civilian rights, Bauer is a blunt instrument in the service of abstract yet practically vital absolutes. Almeida’s motives always seem heroic, yet George

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Mason (Xander Berkeley) will align practically with Bauer at moments politically opportune, just as he will betray said alliance when the situation is politically inopportune. Though Mason shows a modicum of loyalty to his colleagues and country, as demonstrated by his heroic self-sacrifice in detonating the nuclear device in season two, his division superior Ryan Chappelle (Paul Schulze) proves even more fickle. Yet Bauer’s consistency in action at first makes him appear the idealization of doctrine in action. While qualified politically, his absolutism seems to superficially classify him as an archconservative. James Poniewozik of Time states: “In the eyes of [Bush] administration critics—and some of its supporters—Bauer was an ennobled embodiment of the by-anymeans-necessary school of war” (2006, 1). However, Bauer shares affinity with neither politicians nor the people they serve. In this sense he is not an acolyte of an office or an individual. His loyalty to Palmer is established before the senator achieves the office of president. Thus his latter dedication to the office is based around personal affection and admiration. He abandons this loyalty with ease in season three when he accepts the utter illegality of his rescue of Ramon Salazar (Joaquim de Almeida). Bauer is also not strictly simpatico with the American people. He is concerned for their welfare in the abstract, but his personal demeanor would be qualified as prickly in the best of occasions. His treatment of his waitress captive in season one similarly affirms his coldly utilitarian attitude toward civilians, as does his service station holdup in season four. Bauer’s calling appears higher than either social defense or political triumphalism. We would best describe his modus operandi as utility personified. Indeed, Poniewozik identifies 24 as a plot driven by “success” (2006, 1). To achieve this, Bauer effects a doctrine of ritualized action that can be traced to the “ice-bloodeddo-what-you-gotta-doism [of] Dirty Harry, Not Donald Rumsfeld.” Bauer is the priest of the streets. This figure may in turn be traced to the prototypical action man of American fiction post World War II. He is the private eye Mike Hammer, the creation of Mickey Spillane. “Hammer, [Max Allen] Collins argues, was ‘perhaps the first widely popular antihero: a good guy who used the methods of the bad guy in pursuit of frontier justice, a vigilante who spared the courts the trouble of a trial by executing the villain himself’” (Corliss 2006, 3). Indeed, in his recent tribute to Spillane, Richard Corliss continues to define his writing as “posthumanist,” unconcerned with an agenda that might conform to some pattern of human needs or sympathy. He goes on: “Hammer’s intelligence is physical; he impresses people by hurting them or threatening to” (4). Indeed, Hammer is the personification of doctrine through action, the precision of his blows drawing a precise physical effect. Yet buried beneath this detachment is both “delusion” (5) and misanthropy. He “hates hard.” In this respect Bauer shares more directly with Hammer than Dirty Harry. If this claim is to be taken seriously, then Bauer represents an inverted millennial reincarnation of another archconservative that Pauline Kael recognized as fascist, the titular character Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (Thompson 2000, 1). This character, in the defense of civilians, repeatedly breaks his own code as a

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policeman in order to guarantee the destruction of enemies of the civic peace. Likewise, characters within the 24 series repeatedly recognize Bauer’s righteousness as that of a vigilante. In each successive season he abandons the chain of command at the point when his aims and those of his superiors diverge. As recently as “12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.” in season five, Bauer departs from CTU and becomes an entirely independent entity, eager to exploit his now indeterminable status—he officially died at the end of the previous season—within the intelligence community, to aid in the apprehension of the treacherous Logan staffer Walt Cummings (John Allen Nelson). Yet this is an anarchic streak, coupled with a fatalistic logic that drives these actions rather than an abiding Reaganite passion for America. In this respect he is unlike Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, whose care for the missing girl-victim of Scorpio is presented as the visceral justification for his torture of said serial killer. Callahan vilifies his superiors, yet he is their reluctant agent against social corrosion, just as he is more explicitly the traditional savior of the victimized public. Bauer is an endlessly unstable quantity, a man who will, as Palmer sadly discovers in season five, effect political—and sometimes personal—death in any politician he is exposed to. So too does his wife discover that Bauer would rather avenge the imaginary death of Kim against the Drazens than protect her from the very real threat of Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke). The multiplicity of tasks he must fulfill season to season, even episode to episode, suggest a polymath without particular passion or focus. He cannot love his family as he wishes to. Nor can he love the American people, as exemplified by the waitress he encounters in season one. If there is one aspect of his life, abstract or otherwise, to which Jack demonstrates utter affinity in his actions, it is the pursuit of truth—the truth of events, the truth of locations, identities, heartfelt affinities, and emotions. In short the vital, lived realities of his quarries, translated into statistically determined probabilities of life and death, affect the survival of a civilization or its demise. This is routinely presented in the flow of information reaching out from CTU to Bauer’s cell phone or computer. Bauer is a physicist attempting to sustain his society’s gravity and coherence. In his struggles against the clock and the unwilling flesh of his victims, it is the truth of plans, identities, and hidden locations that he most wishes to draw out. Effectively, Bauer is a priest of the streets who, in a religious fervor, conducts his own inquisition, testing the souls of his victims, quantifying the impact of their lives on the world to which he is theoretically alive. In this respect his seeming execution of the child of an apprehended Arab terrorist Syed Ali (Francesco Quinn) in “7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.” of season two seems entirely justified. In the scene he is the aggressor against not only the suspect but also his family, in a distant Middle-Eastern territory. Through the geographical extension of his jurisdiction, Bauer extends an imperialist arm into the living room of a civilian family. And yet he claims aggrieved status: “Damn you for making me do this!” he cries to the suspect, expressing dismay at the cruelty the man will accept in his path to truth. The high priest of CTU suffers with his victims. In this respect the agents of torture, clearly, cannot apply their

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methods without some masochistic tinge. This self-flagellating contemporary trend in the depiction of torture may be detected in the Saw films (Wan 2004; Bousman 2005), which like 24 deal with explicit torture as an important narrative element. Just as Bauer seeks to draw the truth of his victims’ actions from them, so does the serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) seek, through punishment, to educate his victims in their hypocrisies and misdeeds. He too is a quantifier of lives: the richness of statistics he brings to bear on his victims is surpassed only by the abstract poetic aptness of the fates he devises for them in the instruments of their death. Both suffer for their art. Jigsaw’s dedication is such that in the first film he applies blood to himself and plays dead in the same toxic room he has imprisoned his victims. Implicit within his announcement that he is succumbing to cancer in Saw II is the notion that his dedication has taken a physical and psychological toll. And with his progressively sadistic tortures, so does his physical state deteriorate. The torturer’s body suffers the delayed effect of torture itself within this poetic paradigm. Yet while Jigsaw’s death is physical, Bauer’s is primarily spiritual. Is Bauer’s depression at the beginning of season two the result of the grief he feels at his wife’s death, or the remorse he feels at the bloodbath he has perpetrated? Has his search for truth cost too much in supplication of flesh? Does he perhaps resemble a haunted inquisitor? If Bauer’s psyche traffics in abstraction, then the weight of numbers and the theoretical comprehension of his affront to the humanity of his victims and his family must trouble the polymath. Bauer is the ever-reluctant agent, and his virtuoso character suggests that he is gradually growing aware of the monstrous aspect of his character. The relentless sadism he must exhibit frustrates potential psychological compartmentalization; as his day progresses, his diligence can swing into bloodlust. The efficacy of his sadism effectively shortcircuits Bauer’s avenging angel/polymath profile. The ideal chasm between vengeance and utility is breached by the day’s end, as exemplified by his highly questionable electrocution of Raines (James Frain). The equal parts anarchist and mathematician war one with the other, the bloodlust looming larger than the statistics. This is clearly exhibited by his ruthless execution of the Drazens (Dennis Hopper and Zeljko Ivanek) in the 23rd hour of season one, where Bauer’s assault verges on the suicidal, motivated by the seeming death of his family. Implicit within this act of vengeance is a self-rebuke at his previous compartmentalization. Just as Bauer feels guilt in neglecting his wife and daughter, so too does he perceive himself as their secret executioner: his diffidence and the momentary neglect of his statistical findings allows their deaths. Jack’s simultaneous double appears in the abusive cop (Donnie Wahlberg) of Saw 2, whose son is submitted to potential torture to compensate for the man’s failings as a father. In 24 the dying Jigsaw and his antagonist, torturer and tortured, are found in the same figure of Bauer. The priest of the street thus confronts not only his mission in these motley suspects, but also his anthropomorphized demons. To extract truth for Bauer is not only a calling, but also a searing struggle against his desire to succumb to nihilism. Jack’s own death is in the face of every victim.

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Bauer’s zeal is persistently seen as a prime example of vigilantism. By defying presidential orders, he effectively rebels against the most powerful social institution in the land. James Poniewozik observes: “Bauer is still willing to break the rules to get the job done, but . . . [in the fifth season] that means defying a fictional White House that resembles the most demonized portrayals of the Bush administration” (2006, 1) In pursuing his own doctrine, Bauer defies the institution that defines him as an American. We can recognize this most clearly in the later episodes of season four, as the newly anointed President Logan frustrates Bauer’s attempts to extract truth with his “shrinking from sacrifice, unable to accept that war was a dirty business and unwilling to give his soldiers the tools (i.e., authorization of torture) they needed” (1). Hence, by entering the taboo paradigm of torture, Bauer effects his social death. It is a social death that, within the context of Bauer’s extreme patriotism, may be classified as ascendant anti-Americanism. Indeed, when discussing Pvt. Lynde England and the photos taken of her, Claudia Wallis observes how she perverts American larkishness: “[In the pictures Lynde can be seen] standing casually in the demented scene as if posing in a college dorm. [England] is the girl next door, a Jessica Lynch gone wrong” (2004, 1). Like the new world into which Barnes emerges in Syriana, England discovered herself the inversion of an ideal. Whether a CIA warrior or a reservist with too much time on her hands, the anathema of torture in American society renders sorority prankishness obscene. Bauer’s frontier zeal, Barnes’s imperialistic manipulation, and England’s jocularity—these all-American traits are rendered sick parodies of themselves. Effectively the presence of torture provokes a flux in the identity of its participants. Not only are the victims robbed of their humanity, but so are their torturers robbed of their national, blood identity. The space in which torture occurs is effectively a space of no set constants. It is a realm in which the question of essentialized nature is endlessly questioned. If it is un-American, how can it exist? How can those of American lineage, nevertheless stripped of that status, physically participate within it? In this respect Kim Newman’s observations of the connections between the recent film Hostel (Roth 2006) and the controversies surrounding the detention centers at Guantanamo Bay dovetail nicely. Just as torture chairs contribute an iconic image to the film, so too do they reference the apparatus used to force-feed hunger strikers who have been imprisoned at the base. Significantly, these chairs are manufactured in the American heartland “by small-town Iowan sheriff Tom Hogan, who came up with the design fifteen years ago to deal with troublesome arrestees; he has since marketed them to jails, psychiatric hospitals, and the U.S. military” (Newman 2006, 28). These instruments of torture are American made yet designed to reduce its subjects to their most empty state, that of apolitical, mindless consumers. These are all institutions that prize themselves on the sublimation of identity. Its members are numbers, itemized lists of human experience, and exemplars of the truth Bauer extracts from his victims. Indeed, Guantanamo is of particular use in the jailing of its non-POWs in that its connection to the American infrastructure and state is tenuous. It is a place where

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Americans may do un-American things. When in Guantanamo, a soldier is not an American. He is an instrument of American interest, much like the combatants who appear to murder Syed Ali’s children, or indeed the chairs themselves. They are all utility-personified and posthuman. Within the vacuum of torture, the only rationality to be found is in numbers, quantities, and the directions in which they are trafficked. Within this realm the precise balance of power is remarkably tenuous. The torturer may become the tortured just as the tortured may assume the dominant role in the relationship. This realm simply necessitates that one party or another direct the aforementioned flow of abstraction. The recent depiction of torture, in both 24 and various films, is notable for its potential for reversals when someone brings the question of nationhood into the equation. One may, ironically, present it as an unquantifiable slippage that may precipitate sudden destabilization. Nationhood does fight to maintain purview as a quality, rather than a set summation. The hero’s (Jay Hernandez) pleas in German to his similarly German tormentor (Petr Janis) in Hostel disturb the man to the point that the young American gains the upper hand. So too do Syed Ali’s Arab nationalist pride and his American acolyte’s pride threaten to ruin Jack’s hopes to locate the nuclear bomb. Nationhood thus betrays the body. It numbs the pain in the tortured subject, or as in Hostel, prompts clumsiness in the authoritative tormentor to the point that they inflict injuries against themselves. So too in Abu Ghraib does Lynde England’s anti–Jessica Lynch aspect viciously inflict body blows to America’s self-image. “She is rejecting her native blood” is a simple response; yet this larkish young woman stills beams at us from the photos and from the parodies on series such as Arrested Development (Hurwitz 2003–6). The implacable hoods of the Abu Ghraib prisoners inflict greater psychic torment cumulatively on Western society than they experienced that night. This question of cumulative reprisal is certainly apt when considering Bauer’s own extended torture in the final hours of season two. In this sequence the shadowy figure that constitutes the torturer is no longer Bauer. Instead, it is a consortium of various antagonists following instruction by phone from a masterantagonist, coincidentally also played by Tobin Bell. Effectively the 24 villains experience the same structured engagement-disengagement-reengagement structure as Bauer in their attempts to thwart his efforts. They too maintain contact with their institution by telephone, and just as professional frustration and emotional wrangling are communicated to Bauer through this method, so too are they to his enemies. The pattern is effectively set for dual narrative strands, two narratives preoccupied with the same plot details simultaneously. Just as he seeks the bomb, they seek to deploy it. As he thwarts these plans, they seek to reconfigure them. When these strands become entwined in the same space as, naturally, Bauer wishes them to be, a doubly unstable torture scenario begins to play out. Bauer discovers himself in a parody of his methodology. The ghosts of those he has tortured return to animate the instincts of his tormentors. In an extended sequence he endures torments that defy utility, to the point that his heart is repeatedly stopped and started time and again. He effectively penetrates

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the abyss he had previously flirted with, time and again. Not only has the polymath-anarchist chasm been breached, but Bauer repeatedly also experiences the literal transcendence of his life and body. He continues on his ceaseless quest, this time into the realm of the dead. Effectively, Bauer’s flesh pays the price, consecutively and with corporeal finality, for each of his murders. Once again the scene has a ritual quality. Just as Bauer, like Hammer, knows how to communicate with human tissue, teasing out its essential truth, so too do his tormentors draw Bauer to his irrevocable attraction to the abyss. Time and again, they usurp and reusurp from Bauer his position of power in their attempts to draw the truth of his investigations from him. Yet, as mentioned, the scene is doubly unstable. Just as he may slip into the passive mode of the tortured, grinding the thriller narrative to a halt, so too may Bauer reacquire his narrative power. The entwinement of the narratives precipitates the sudden and surprising dominance of the conventional enemy’s story line within the physical setting of the factory space they cohabit, as manufactured by the aforementioned instability. However, the fact that this confrontation occurs before the conventional thriller showdown is problematic to the larger thrillmachine narrative of the series. Given Bauer’s intractable nature, he effectively becomes a narrative obstacle in this unstable setting. The (aforementioned) engagement structure asserts that the enemy is the one who withholds information and thus slows the resolution of the narrative; then in his repeated deaths Bauer is robbing the series of a hero and becoming an enemy in the new narrative he occupies. Also, given the exhibited response—torture—of the heroic CTU to nonrespondents, Bauer may now be classified as what the series would define as an enemy. Thus the enemy is to be defined as the one who is receiving torment in the 24 paradigm, the antagonist who stifles the narrative. Jack has intruded on the narrative of his own antagonists. Within their realm, he is the obstacle. In an effort to save the larger narrative from a complete transformation in focus and a reversal in sympathies, Bauer must reassert his CTU narrative. Ironically, with each resurrection, like a messiah ceaselessly reanimated, Bauer grows in strength: eventually he reestablishes his position as tormentor. In this respect he slips from the position of narrative antagonist back to antagonist/protagonist. In resurrecting himself, he thus reclaims his heroic status by realigning the narrative focus. By exterminating those within this narrative, Bauer also refocuses the narrative upon himself and asserts again the conventional 24 notion of the conventional enemy. The instability of the torture scenario has allowed for a reversal in sympathies, yet the new narrative direction is quickly stifled. At this point it becomes clear that torture is an act redolent in essential discovery. Even from the CTU narrative perspective, Bauer experiences painful physical identification with what it is like to be a 24 enemy in this protofascist America. He even achieves the death that is their fate when they cease to be of narrative use. Bauer’s body becomes a catalog of the various punishments he himself has meted out. He is sliced, burned, electrocuted, and injected. Similarly, in each act as tormentor he flirts with his own nihilism, seeing through the subject of his extractions to his own character, with a literal Greek chorus of

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family and friends chiming in on his phone. Indeed, he finds a greater intimacy with his quarry than he ever does with his alleged loved ones. His confrontation with the Drazens is a family reunion of sociopaths, just as his rescue of Ramon Salazar and reunion with his brother is the dysfunctional meeting of fratricidal siblings. Irrespective of the MacGuffin that drives his quest, Jack knows that he will confront the uncomfortable realization in his strivings and truth-takings that he is closer to his quarry in nature and simultaneously more vindictive against them than he cares to imagine as a father and friend. Bauer’s alienation and diffidence as an operative in seasons two and three springs from the knowledge that he will have to indulge in practices and experience torments that reveal himself to be enemy as much as hero. In this respect Lynde England, and by extension America itself, must confront the nature of her actions. Torture is un-American, even anti-American. It is the experience of the televised beheadings of Al-Zarqawi’s American captives. It is the position America felt itself in after 9/11, that of the tormented nation. The enemy was any who blocked and thwarted the American narrative. And in this narrative the American soldier was the most comfortably selfless. In his essay on The Passion of the Christ (Gibson 2004) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore 2004), Robert Gehl observes: Just like Bush, or anyone else in public life or the culture industry of the U.S., Moore’s sympathy has to lie with the martyred soldiers. (2004, 43) Yet the televised pictures of Lynde England show torture in her heart with her all-American thumbs-up gestures, shockingly intimate with her naked victims. Abu Ghraib effectively illustrated the anti-American and the all-American in a single image. Yet unlike the reversals of 24, which reassure, England and her beaming face cannot be erased. Nevertheless, the narrative of England troubles beyond this image. Found to be pregnant by one of the instigators of the Abu Ghraib scandal, her term grew apace with the condemnation for actions. Rarely are pregnant young women the focus of hatred in contemporary Western society, and yet England again confounded viewers. The diminutive, beaming young woman was now replaced by a heavier, healthy mother approaching her due date. The associations of romance, young love, and young motherhood again flew in the face of what a torturer would be. Again the American ideal was subverted. Yet in this case, in my view, it might be judged as a poetic physical remnant of the personal and national self-discovery inherent within the torture scenario. The tone of intimacy, conspiracy, and fraternity inherent to the Abu Ghraib perpetrators finds fitting expression to the world in England’s pregnancy. As mentioned in the introduction (above), Barnes of Syriana carries the mental scars of his torture through the duration of the film. But director Stephen Gaghan also focuses on his mangled fingers— the result of fingernail extractions—in several later scenes. The CIA dealmaker loses his ability to shake hands. Like the wounds in Christ’s side, the stigmata of self-discovery remain in poetically apt physical signs. The

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world has changed for the reborn torture participant. Rebirth manifests the marks of aggressive physical reeducation. This fits closely with Gehl’s observations of the unlikely parallels between Gibson’s film and Moore’s film: Still, in Moore’s language the Soldier is a Jesus-figure: a poor and humble person who has faith in his country, hears the undeniable call of the recruiter and cannot refuse his destiny. (2004) England and Barnes are the complicated result of this cultural instillment, their Golgotha a place of storms and revelation to an entire race, as depicted in Gibson’s Passion. Bauer’s rebirth is the most painful. It is actually not a single rebirth but many, each resurrection alloying his spirit while further weakening his body. If Barnes pays in broken, mangled fingers and England in the physical challenges of pregnancy, then Bauer pays with his entire body: heart, lungs, flesh, and muscle. It is a rebirth so painful that it nearly kills him. Effectively its essence is as exposed as that of Helen Flynn; yet, true to Lavery’s observations of ludicrous cliché, he is able to experience this revelation time and again. What does this imply about his new, more enlightened existence? As he struggles to reach his quarry, he also sets about educating his daughter, by the ever-present mobile, in the intricacies of the hero/enemy dichotomy. In her torture scenario, she must take the upper hand. She must not allow her pursuer to usurp her narrative with his own warped father-on-a-rampage story line. She must not allow herself to become the enemy of another’s tale; she must uphold the dominance of her own narrative preeminence. Pursued by an abusive and unhinged adult, her father jolts his daughter out of adolescence through a lesson in the rules of the jungle. He instructs her to shoot her attacker in the heart time and again, making her present quarry enter the realm of death so many times that, unlike Bauer, he will not return. Does this lesson take? Certainly. In the following season she has joined her father in CTU and is herself experiencing a burgeoning awareness of the polymath-anarchist chasm her father struggles with. Bauer is a messiah resurrected, communicating a new gospel of street justice to his only child. What is most striking about all of these new texts is their subterranean aspect. The dimly lit CTU, Abu Ghraib’s harsh walls, the blank corridors of the CIA— all are spaces outside the public realm. As illustrated, these spaces and their associated realms, be they lonely streets or some distant cell in a land far from the narrative’s center, are chambers of transformation. Like perverse catacombs, they are venues of renunciations of faith and womblike parturition. The bunker of Lost is the space where Sayid rediscovers the sadist within him, which he has struggled to bury through his love for a lost woman. Likewise, in confronting his age-old enemy the Dalek and tacitly contributing to its torture, the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) is pronounced a fine Dalek in his own right by the creature. Deprived of the light of social grace, caught in the mechanical grasp of relentless utility, individuals enter to draw truth-in-action through suffering. Indeed, torture is rapidly, in both 24 and other series—Spooks excepted—a

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narrative event from which characters can walk away. Both torturer and tortured achieve both startling and subtle new degrees of self-awareness. They then in turn carry this with them throughout the remainder of the narrative, with the conflict, character, and narrative drive now sharpened to a fine point for all the players. While Sayid pummels Gale, John Locke observes that the survivors of Lost may in fact be the true Others. It’s all relative. So too does the Doctor’s expression inform the audience that, given the episode plot point of touch resulting in energy and character transferal, his previous encounters with the Daleks may have altered the Timelord’s fundamental nature. As I have observed, in the final analysis both torturer and tortured are antagonists. While torture is, and doubtless always shall be, intrinsically shocking, the modern audience has been conditioned to absorb it. While Jack is kidnapped to China at the end of season five, we have faith that, despite certain deprivation and suffering, Jack will return in Season Six only wiser as to himself and the human condition. So too with the essential, infuriating mysteries of Lost: we are willing to see our heroes continue to suffer in the third season. If the religious mystery that permeates the island can be discovered through traditional Gibson-esque suffering, and wisdom or death are its final results, the audience wills the television producers on. The troubling image of the pregnant torturer in England, the woman who was romantically involved with the Abu Ghraib lead tormentor, presents a similar mystery as to the essential nature of America. Ironically then, through television and further revelations of improper conduct, the viewing public seeks, perversely, to learn more of its own nature through their prolonged voyeuristic engagement with both fictional and real-life proxies. Ironically, Moore’s faith in the Soldier, be it real-life, or Jack Bauer, drives the investigation onward, regardless of its casualties. Humble and patriotic, showing themselves at their best or worst, these characters must be reintegrated into America’s—and its allies’—self-concept, and to do so will require only more torture, on-screen and off-screen.

Works Cited Printed or Posted Corliss, Richard. 2005. “A Thriller That Thinks.” Time, November 28, http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1132826,00.html (accessed July 31, 2007). ———. 2006. “The Prince of Pulp.” Time, July 22, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/ 0,8599,1217987,00.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Gehl, Robert. 2004. “Why Aren’t We Seeing This Now? Public(cized) Torture in The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11.” Nebula 1, no. 2:37–47. http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/Gehl.pdf (accessed July 31, 2007). Lavery, David. 2006. “24: Jumping the Shark Every Minute.” Flow, September 9, 1–6. http:// davidlavery.net/Essays/24_Jumping_the%20Shark.pdf (accessed July 31, 2007). MacMaster, Neil. 2004. “Torture: From Algiers to Abu Ghraib.” Race and Class 46, no. 2:4.

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Morris, Clint. 2006. “Sutherland Talks 24 Feature.” Moviehole, January 9, http:// www.moviehole.net/news/20060109_sutherland_talks_24_feature_fi.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Newman, Kim. 2006. “Torture Garden.” Sight and Sound 16, no. 6 (June): 28–31. Poniewozik, James. 2006. “Tuned in: Et tu Jack: 24 Turns against the President.” Time, February 14, http://time-blog.com/tuned_in/2006/02/et_tu_jack_24_turns_against_th.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Thompson, Rick. 2000. “Dirty Harry.” Senses of Cinema, May 17, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/cteq/00/6/dirty.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Wallis, Claudia. 2004. “Why Did They Do It.” Time, May 17, http://www.time.com/time/archive/ preview/0,10987,994178,00.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Walther, Bo Kampmann. 2005. “A Hard Day’s Work: Reflections on the Interfacing of Transmediation and Speed in 24.” In Interface://Culture—The World Wide Web as Political Resource and Aesthetic Form. Edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur / Nordicom. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:qM2W1-68zaAJ:www.sdu.dk/hum/ bkw/24.pdf+24+torture (accessed July 31, 2007).

Filmed Dirty Harry. Directed by Don Siegel. USA, 1971. Fahrenheit 9/11. Directed by Michael Moore. USA, 2004. Hostel. Directed by Eli Roth. USA, 2006. Passion of the Christ, The. Directed by Mel Gibson. USA, 2004. Saw. Directed by James Wan. USA, 2004. Saw II. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. USA, 2005. Syriana. Directed by Stephen Gaghan. USA, 2005. V for Vendetta. Directed by James McTiegue. USA/UK/Germany, 2006.

Televised Arrested Development. Directed by Mitchell Hurwitz. FOX, USA, 2003–6. Dr. Who. Directed by Russell T. Davies. BBC, UK, 2005–. Lost. Directed by J. J. Abrams. ABC, USA, 2004–. Office, The. Directed by Ricky Gervais. BBC, UK, 2001–5. U.S. version, NBC, 2005–. Spooks. Directed by David Wolstencroft. BBC, UK, 2002–. 24. Directed by Joel Surnow. FOX, USA, 2001–.

Introduction to Part Four Karen Randell

Figure 1. Torture of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison (http:// urbansemiotic.com/tag/policy) On April 12, 2007, a group of journalists gathered in Trafalgar Square, London, to mark the anniversary of, and to protest at, the kidnapping of the BBC correspondent Alan Johnson on March 12, 2007. Giant pictures of Johnson hung in the square as a reminder of the loss but also as a means of ownership of Johnson, as a means to care about one man whose life few really knew about on March 11, 2007. Photographs, as Susan Sontag reminds us, “objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed” (2003, 72). The face of Alan Johnson has now become the face of the hostage in Britain: symbolic of loss and symbolic of our powerlessness to do anything. Johnson, whose job it was to bring the BBC “day after day reports of the Palestinian Predicament in the Gaza Strip” (BBC 2007a) was abducted in the street on his was way home from work in Gaza City. In early May a tape was released by his alleged kidnapers, a group called Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) showing not Johnson but his BBC pass, presumably his only ID on the day, but also a symbol of the British institution, of a history of imperialist power. 217

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Johnson was literally absent. His AWOL status prompted marches, petitions, special BBC Radio programs—one in particular “From Our Own Correspondent” renamed “To Our Own Correspondent” aired on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service on May 17, in the hopes that Johnson could access it and know that he was being cared for in his family’s and colleagues’ thoughts. Vigils were held to commemorate his forty-fifth birthday on May 17, and over 100,000 people worldwide signed a BBC-organized petition urging that he be freed. With ironic timing, Johnson was kidnapped a few weeks before his stint in Gaza was finished; he began as correspondent there in April 2004. Like a Vietnam soldier, Johnson was just short on his tour. He was missing for 114 days and then released on July 4, to worldwide rejoicing, ending what his father called “a living nightmare.” Johnson said that his ordeal was like “being buried alive” but that it was “fantastic” to be free (BBC 2007b). Our mental image of the AWOL soldier during the Vietnam War, missing in service, has created a precedent for the ways in which we deal with the terrifying impotence of absence. It is useful to consider that precedent for us to understand our reactions now: to understand our need for information, the countless websites, news broadcasts, poster-size pictures in the West End, London. In 1968 anxiety was high in the United States with regard to the men listed as missing in Vietnam. The campaign for the return of Prisoners of War (POWs) and recognition of the men missing in action (MIA) had gained impetus: Defense and State Department officials are not even certain how many prisoners are being held by North Vietnam. About 800 fliers have been shot down since the war began. . . . Estimates of those who might still be alive range from 300 to 600. . . . Letters have been received from fewer than a hundred prisoners; Hanoi broadcasts over the years have either named or carried voices of others, permitting tentative identification of about 200 altogether. Visitors to North Vietnam have seen or interviewed some of these prisoners, but apparently the same group is made available for each public display. (Grose 1968) By about 1967 in the United States, wives and mothers of missing men established the “National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.” This group continually campaigned for information about the men and worked actively with the Department of Defense. The campaign included interviews with newspapers and television and the public posting of lists of names and photographs of those missing, to keep their plight in the focus of the political forum. At campaign rallies the cry was always, “Remember the MIAs.” This was an inclusive protest group: whether officially documented as MIAs or as POWs, both sets of men were “Missing.” Newspaper reports such as the one below demonstrate the way in which this issue was considered, in 1968, to be one of solidarity within America (Davis 2000, 533) It was considered to be an issue that both those on the political right and those on the political left agreed:

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The United States appeal to members of the United Nations to put pressure on North Vietnamese to lift its secrecy on American Prisoners of War represents one aspect of Vietnam policy on which virtually all Americans are united. . . . Hanoi persists in flouting civilized practice and procedures by continuing to ignore the humanitarian obligations it assumed when it signed the Geneva conventions on war prisoners in 1957. (New York Times 1968) Families of the missing men campaigned to keep their identities in high profile and continually lobbied the government for information and action. In 1969 the “Go Public” Campaign by the United States Government was initiated to raise their profile yet higher, in the international political arena, to encourage the North Vietnamese to release the men held as prisoners. Vernon E. Davis has suggested that this campaign was developed as much to alleviate the anxieties of the families of the missing or held men as it was to put pressure on Hanoi to release the men held (2000, 533). This is a pertinent issue too. Articles appeared on the BBC website charting Alan Johnson’s life and successes; they read like obituaries, even though that is not the intention. What is the intention? How does it help Johnson for us to know, for instance, that he received an MA from Dundee University? Web visitors are invited to look at the “time line of disappearance” or to “use your blog to support Alan Johnson.” Keeping this activity going kept Johnson alive in the hearts and imaginations of his family and indeed the nation. It enabled an active participation in something that is utterly beyond our control—the actions of insurgents, the acts of terrorism. In the first chapter of part 4, “The Body of the Hostage,” Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi’s chapter, “The Kidnapped Body and Precarious Life: Reflections on the Kenneth Bigley Case,” takes as its focus the media coverage surrounding Kenneth Bigley’s kidnapping (in October 2004); it explores the representation of the vulnerable and terrorized body. This chapter reflects on the intense media coverage surrounding Kenneth Bigley’s kidnapping in Iraq in October 2004 in order to raise questions about the representation of the vulnerable body and the ways in which it can accrue collective meaning and emotional investment in the information age. It will consider how the media treatment of the kidnapped body has helped to articulate and shape the contradictory, lived experience of global and local vulnerability—a vulnerability that is an unavoidable dimension of political and social life. The Bigley case is also a point of entry into a broader exploration of the mediated experience of the kidnapped/hostage body as one of the ways in which the media, politicians, and the public talk through the precariousness of life, vulnerability, and risk in the contemporary age. They argue that the kidnapped body, its hidden location, and increasing media presence foreground questions of (dis)locatedness and the geopolitical distribution of bodily vulnerability, all within the globalized context of “the war against terror.”

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This media climate stimulates audiences to make a significant collective emotional investment. Nunn and Biressi argue that the resulting “referential instability” is central to the political and emotional currency that the mediated image holds over its various audiences. Drawing on critical work on the imprisoned body and the “body in pain,” this chapter considers how the kidnapped body opens up crucial contemporary questions about the constitution of the publicly endorsed “grievable body” (Scarry 1985; Butler 2004). The body, they argue, may never have seemed as vulnerable as it does in our global age. Rinella Cere places her discussion of the kidnapped body within an examination of gender politics. Her chapter “The Body of the Woman Hostage: Spectacular Bodies and Berlusconi’s Media” engages in a detailed study of newspaper and TV coverage. Cere argues that the representation of Italian women captured in Iraq in September 2004 underlines a gender bias in the Italian popular media, where the body of the woman is consistently placed as spectacle. Her argument considers the spectacularization of the female body in the case of two young women hostages (Simona Pari and Simona Torretta), the gender/agebiased reporting in connection with two older women hostages (Giuliana Sgrena and Florence Aubenas), and the “impossibility of spectacle” when the woman’s body is damaged, different, or “other.” The third theme discusses ways in which women hostages are divided and separated from their non-Western counterpart through the “symbol of the veil” and consequently reappropriated into the ideology of the “just war.” The body of the hostage normally seen and represented in pain and psychologically crushed was never part of the story of the two Italian women hostages, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta; theirs were sanitized and beautiful bodies, hardly consonant with their status of hostage. The spectacle, Cere argues, is privileged over the political, pushing the narrative of kidnap to the margins of the story. Andrew Hill’s chapter, “Hostage Videos in the War on Terror,” thinks through the morbid fascination of audiences with death and torture through an analysis of the audience reaction to the Iraq hostage videos and the images taken during the torture of the Abu Ghraib prisoners. It focuses on the type of fears generated among the public by the hostage videos, fears that are juxtaposed with the what at first glance may appear to be contradictory desires to view this footage, including that showing the execution of certain hostages. Hill seeks to locate these videos in dialogue with the images of U.S. service personnel torturing and humiliating detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, which came to light in the spring of 2004. In addressing these themes, Hill takes Lacan’s work—in particular its concerns with questions of seeing and questions of ontology—as a central point of reference, above all in regard to the insights it offers into the terms in which suffering, death, and “the Truth” are perceived at a visual level. Drawing on Kristeva’s discussion of Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, this chapter engages with a theme identified by all the authors in this part:

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that the demand to view these images can be situated in terms of the desire to witness death in a Western culture, in which “real” deaths are rarely seen.

Works Cited BBC News 24. 2007a. “Fears for BBC Gaza Correspondent.” March 12, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/middle_east/6442663.stm (accessed July 31, 2007). BBC News 24. 2007b. “BBC’s Alan Johnson Is Released.” July 4, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ middle_east/6267928.stm (accessed July 31, 2007). Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: the Power of Mourning and Violence. London. Verso. Davis, Vernon E. 2000. The Long Road Home: U.S. Prisoner of War Policy and Planning in Southeast Asia. Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense. Grose, Peter. 1968. “U.S. May Ask Hanoi Price for Freeing War Captives.” June 20 (Prisoners of War clipping file. Center for American History. University of Texas at Austin). Scary, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. New York Times. 1968. “A United Appeal on Vietnam.” New York Times, November 15 (Prisoners of War clipping file. Center for American History. University of Texas at Austin). Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books.

13

The Kidnapped Body and Precarious Life Reflections on the Kenneth Bigley Case Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi

This chapter reflects on the intense media coverage surrounding Kenneth Bigley’s kidnapping in Iraq in October 2004. We raise questions about the representation of the vulnerable body and the ways in which it can accrue collective meaning and emotional investment in the information age. We will consider how the media treatment of the kidnapped body has helped articulate and shape the contradictory, lived experience of global and local vulnerability—a vulnerability that is an unavoidable dimension of political and social life. The Bigley case is also a point of entry into a broader exploration of the mediated experience of the kidnapped/hostage body as one of the ways in which the media, politicians, and the public talk through the precariousness of life, vulnerability, and risk in the contemporary age. We argue that the kidnapped body, its hidden location, and increasing media presence foreground questions of (dis)locatedness and the geopolitical distribution of bodily vulnerability within the globalized context of “the war against terror.” This media climate stimulates audiences to make a significant collective emotional investment. On September 16, 2004, gunmen seized Briton Kenneth Bigley, together with two colleagues, during a dawn raid in central Baghdad. Bigley’s colleagues Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley died within a day of each other on September 20 and 21. Images of the beheading of Armstrong were posted on an Islamic website, and those of Hensley soon followed. The British expatriate civil engineer outlived them by several weeks: his death was confirmed on October 8. During his time in captivity, he was to appear on three videos; Al Jazeera broadcast the first two, in which he pleaded with the British government to meet the kidnappers’ demands and save his life. The final tape showing his beheading was sent to Abu Dhabi television, which declined to use it. It was made available on the web and via still photography. The case was at the center of British national media attention for two months; its centrality was secured by the circulation of images in the national and international news media and by the media visibility 222

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of the Bigley family. Kenneth Bigley’s recorded pleas arguably had as much impact on the public imagination as the frequently reproduced still images showing him in such degrading circumstances. For example, the second broadcast on September 29 showed him chained, trussed, and in a cage, reminiscent of those used at Guantanamo Bay. Here he pleaded, “I’m begging you Mr. Blair. I’m begging you to speak, to push.” The final tape, circulated on the Internet on October 10, lasted about four minutes. It showed Bigley crouching on the floor and surrounded by his captors. He addressed Tony Blair directly in a short speech that we only partly reproduce here: Here I am again, Mr. Blair and your Government, very, very close to the end of my life. You don’t appear to have done anything to help me. . . . I am a simple man who just wants to live a simple life with his family. These people, their patience is wearing very, very thin. . . . Please, please give them what they require. (Whitaker, 2004; 4) After one of the kidnappers speaks to camera, Kenneth Bigley is held down and decapitated with a knife. His head is held aloft in celebration and then placed on his corpse. The broadcasts could not prompt a mass-mediated dialogue of any meaningfulness between the captors and their political enemies. But they did, inadvertently perhaps and certainly painfully, prompt some dialogue between the Blair administration and the Bigley family—members of which, as we shall see later, became nascent political actors despite being nonelites within the frameworks of political journalism and political action. The media coverage of these events in Britain was phenomenal in its intensity.1 And within an international context, Kenneth Bigley’s predicament involved a wide range of elite political actors such as Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Yassar Arafat, Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern, and Muammar Gaddafi. Bigley’s capture and, more important, his forced public statements demanded public responses from some of these high-profile persons, if not always public intervention. The Bigley family also became prominent in the media, trying to use what leverage it had to appeal to anyone who potentially had influence over the hostage-takers, rejecting Foreign Office advice to avoid the television cameras. Much of the Bigleys’ campaign was coordinated by Kenneth’s younger brother, Paul, from his home in Amsterdam. He organized appeals on Arabic satellite channels that the kidnappers were said to watch. At the family’s prompting, 150,000 leaflets with a personal appeal from the family were distributed in the areas where Bigley might be held, aimed not at convincing the militants to let him go, but at undercutting any support they might have in the community (Whitaker 2004). A familial link to Ireland (Bigley’s mother was born in Ireland) produced an Irish passport from the government in absentia, and some thought it might be enough to deflect the kidnappers into releasing their captive, as Ireland had not been part of the 2003 invasion. Paul Bigley appealed via Irish

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newspapers for the Dublin government to get involved, and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Aherne made a strong appeal to the kidnappers via Al Jazeera for Bigley’s release. In addition, various members of the family both pleaded and challenged the government directly to do something to resolve the situation. Brother Philip expressed his frustration and powerlessness by moving from referring to Blair in the third person toward direct address. Philip Bigley declared, “We are not politicians. He is the political head of our country. It is the Prime Minister who has the power to save Kenneth’s life. Prime Minister, we as a family are begging you, please help us” (Whitaker 2004, 4–5). In a well-publicized telephone exchange between Kenneth Bigley’s Eighty six-year-old mother and Blair, Elizabeth begged the prime minister to help her son, claiming his ordinariness as a working family man. Paul Bigley was the most vocal in confronting the Blair government, not only over its handling of the kidnapping but ultimately also over its original decision to go to war in Iraq. On September 26 he received a standing ovation and wide media coverage for his speech by videophone to a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference. In early October he used the media to call on the public to join the Stop the War march in London later in the month: “For Kenneth’s sake and for the sake of everyone in Iraq, I ask you to make your feelings known to our Government, to protest and to join the demonstration in London. The more people raise their voices, the safer we will be” (Press Association News, October 17, 2004). On October 8, 2004, following news of his brother’s execution, Paul Bigley addressed a Stop the War Coalition meeting in Liverpool by telephone link, being joined by Rose Gentle, mother of Gordon Gentle, a teenage soldier killed on duty in Iraq earlier that year; and Azmat Begg, father of the Guantanamo Bay prisoner Moazzam Begg. These figures, joined together, highlighted how the “war against terror” seemed to know no boundaries, damaging British teenage soldiers, “unlawful combatants,” and innocent bystanders alike.2 Paul situated his personal grief within the broader context of political protest, begging for the war to be stopped before other lives were lost, and stating that the war was illegal and that Blair had “blood on his hands.” National and regional newspapers—such as the Liverpool Daily Echo, the Mirror, and Independent—echoed Paul Bigley’s charge by including the voices of ordinary Liverpudlians expressing their anger and resentment at Blair and Jack Straw for their ineffective strategies. These inclusions are illustrative of the scope within British media debate for the participation of nonelite voices and the fissures that they reveal in the sociopolitical realm in which, as hegemonic representations would contend, “we” are all bonded in the “war against terror” and in a “necessary” alliance through the conflict in Iraq itself. We argue that first and foremost, the English language media coverage of the kidnapping was notable for its inclusion of ordinary people as temporary political actors and as people with an investment in the events taking place in the Middle East (Cottle 2000, 31). The events acted as a sharp reminder to British nationals

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of their increased vulnerability as global citizens who may travel or work abroad. Mr. Bigley’s relatives and friends and the broader community from which he originated gained access to media platforms, their opinions were aired, and their concerns apparently taken seriously by political elites. Invited to speak at press conferences, at party political events, and for international news, the Bigley family momentarily became a participant in a political arena as well as the object of media spectacle. Their often highly vocal media contributions (amplified by local and national presses) countered government rhetoric. Paul Bigley, at least, worked hard to suggest that his brother’s predicament should be regarded as emblematic of the failure of both political rhetoric and government policy. Although some commentators may regard the media spotlight on the Bigley family as voyeuristic and excessive, others have suggested that in fact, the family members were consummate media managers, who effectively ensured that the case remained in the headlines and that the Blair government was forced to enter into dialogue with its members, not only about the case itself but also about the broader issue of the failure to secure a national consensus about British involvement in Iraq. Newsmakers have observed that laypeople are quick to grasp the power and importance of the media in shaping a campaign or an argument. Guy Kerr, the chief operating officer for British Channel 4 news, for example, commented on the incredible success that the family had in raising its media profile and keeping the story alive via what were often “very subtle” interventions. The family ensured that journalists felt at liberty to report the moment at a press conference when Elizabeth Bigley collapsed and had to be helped away (via Vass 2004). This moment of high drama was one of many that included family members such as Kenneth Bigley’s mother and his wife appealing directly to political elites, kidnappers, and other people of influence. The judicious use of press conferences, the release of home video footage of Bigley in happier days, and other kinds of media management all helped to give the news story longevity. This coverage occurred in the context of a new media landscape, in Brian McNair’s words (2005, 151) “an environment of communicative turbulence— a cultural chaos brought into being by the proliferation of media channels and the volume of information of all kinds which flows up, down and through them.” And central to this “cultural chaos” is the globalization of the media and the development of new technologies and multimedia platforms. Although it can be said that globalization is as old as capitalism itself, in recent years many media critics agree that globalization has intensified and that this intensification has led to the unraveling of long-held certainties and relationships of trust between citizens and the power elites of the nation-state. One byproduct of this diminution in trust is a skeptical reception toward the truth claims of media “experts.” The authority invested in the journalist as informant and representative of the citizen has been under attack for some time as journalists experience the effects of broader public disenchantment with “truth” providers. In this context the opinions of the Bigley family as “lay experts” were received with interest and were circulated widely.

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The Bigley family’s media prominence is also characteristic of the shift in the location of the political arena and in political communications to one in which the media have become the main political theater, staging political dialogues and “brokering” events (Seaton 1998, 1). Observers often assume that this new space is detrimental to democratic politics and rational debate because of its affiliation with political spectacle and a culture of exhibitionism, emotional incontinence, human interest stories, and tabloid news values. So too some have argued that this present state of political journalism has exacerbated political disenfranchisement by moving away from informative reportage and toward politics as entertainment and diversion (Sparks 1988, 211). In this context yet from another perspective, one could also argue, however, that the human-interest story has also provided a platform for ordinary citizens to speak their mind, allowing laypeople to enter into mediated political discourse. The Bigley story is a classic human-interest story, as John Taylor has observed: Human interest favours the random forces of luck, fate and chance worked out on the bodies of isolated discrete individuals in a naturalised taken-for-granted world. This given world is understood to be stable in its deeper structures but prone to local, surface turbulence and fragmentation. (1998, 89) The just-outlined factors sustained the public’s fascination with the case and allowed the Bigley family a continuing voice. As Simon Cottle (2000) has argued, the media can offer a key opportunity for the ordinary person to enter the world of public political discourse. In Cottle’s own work about laypeople in the news, he suggests that lay campaigners’ appeals can gain credence by their mustering of lived experience, familial relationships, everyday concerns, and emotions (31), and the media can provide an important arena where a form of “social rationality” can challenge “scientific rationality” (31–32), or in this case political rationality. Here Cottle draws on Ulrich Beck’s (1992) definition of laypeople in the media as “the voices of the side effects,” where news coverage concentrates on the voice of ordinary “victims” of governmental or scientific failure, symbolizing the “human face” and consequences of manufactured risk. Regarding the expertise of lay people, Beck appositely observes, “On their side of the fence, ‘side effects’ have voices, faces, ears and tears. . . . Therefore people themselves become small, private alternative experts in risks of modernization” (Beck 1992, in Cottle 2000, 30). One could argue that the Bigley family became increasingly vocal and skilled in articulating the risks of global citizenship in the context of the War against Terror and lending them a human aspect that would resonate emotionally with localized Western audiences.

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The Power of the Image Central to the impact and continuous heavy coverage of the events in Baghdad were the video images produced by the kidnappers and distributed and circulated by the mass media. As reported above, Mr. Bigley’s predicament (and others like it) was transmitted around the world and claimed audience attention not only through written and spoken reportage, but also through the circulation of video footage and stark photographic stills produced by the kidnappers, which arguably took on iconographic status. In these images Kenneth Bigley was bound and surrounded by his captors, or chained and trussed in a cage (reminiscent of images of those held at Guantanamo Bay), forced to address the camera and plea for help, and finally killed on camera. Central here is the referential instability of the images of the kidnapped body. The kidnapped body can be used for propaganda, its vulnerability and imminent death transposed into portraits of the victim marshaled for political rhetoric about the inhumanity of the enemy (both by kidnappers and government officials) and the impossibility of compromised intervention. The knowing symbolism used by the kidnappers here certainly seems to validate political theorist John Gray’s (2003) analysis of radical Islam today as exhibiting a complicated and intimate inversion of political values and strategies of dominant Western political formations in violent acts tailored for mass-mediated transmission (also Slocum 2005, 3–4). The Bigley case was dissected in the British media as one that offered insights into how individual trauma can be deployed for propaganda purposes and also as a prompt in expanding the ongoing public political dialogue on the War against Terror. This footage (video images of the kidnapped body) was regarded variously as a vehicle of propaganda and evidence, defiance and insult. Its circulation was also arguably the medium and trigger for a mutation in the complex formation of political communication that included in its network kidnappers, hostages, their relatives, and their wider community, journalists and politicians. Furthermore, these images raised broader debates by journalists and editors on the ethical professional dilemmas of circulating occurrences of violence categorized as terrorism. Since the 1970s media representations of alleged terrorism have faced charges of complicity as they frame and constitute the popular imagination of violence in the press, on screen, and in broader fictionalized forms (McAlister 2005, 151). In 1984, the Second International Conference on terrorism held at Washington served as the primary source for a widely debated forum in Harper’s magazine that brought together some of the most prominent journalists to consider the responsibility of the news media in reporting alleged terrorist events. Harper’s contended that in recent years the development of the “terrorist theater” had become a staged performance of violence, with the perpetrator as “the master of ceremonies at a media spectacle” (McAlister 2005, 151): such notions of the perilous but inevitably close-knit relationship between mainstream media, violence, and representation have in subsequent years been intimately tied to public discourses on hostage stories. Although a range of public

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figures—the terrorism “risk” expert, the policy maker, the politician, and the psychological profiler—are mustered to comment on hostage events, the role of family, friends, and colleagues of those kidnapped is frequently to provide an emotional touchstone and point of identification. Senior media professionals recalled that they had to grapple with the powerful emotional and visual nature of the videos, in particular in the context of a twenty-four-hour global news culture. The images were presumably released as part of the “terrorist” arsenal of media propaganda and as a “weapon of war,” which journalist should be wary of further circulating. But at the same time newsmakers could justify their circulation as being both newsworthy and in the public interest. After all, family members and the populist press claimed the Bigley kidnapping as somehow emblematic of the failure of British foreign policy, and that Kenneth Bigley was a body that did not elect to die for his country or for a political cause; this became the trajectory of much (but not all) of the media coverage in the UK.3 The meanings accrued to the Bigley case were variable but gradually stabilized as he became a figure of national importance; his graphically depicted distress and literal imprisonment symbolized the growing realization that all citizens post 9/11 are subject to risk, being made vulnerable to global forces outside the control or influence of power elites. As Edward Pilkington, home editor of the Guardian newspaper, commented that discussions among his editorial team concluded, “It’s one person’s story set against a situation where people in Iraq are dying every day. But most editors accepted that it was such an extraordinary emotional tale and has become so politically important [that] as a result there is no holding back” (Sunday Herald 2004, 36). The images of Bigley were doubly loaded as “captured” images: first, he was literally captured, an “ordinary” civilian caught up in a politically motivated conflict, imprisoned, and used as a pawn in a political stratagem. Second, his captured image on screen came to convey, throughout his captivity and finally in a horribly visceral way via his death, the extreme reality of suffering and imminent risk in an area rift by conflict—an area in which the military prohibition of violent images on the part of the U.S. and British states had arguably circumscribed public knowledge of the conflict and its human implications. Kenneth Bigley’s sudden, and from his perspective unplanned, media appearances in degrading conditions were in more than one sense publicly embarrassing; they bound together the public political statement or challenge formulated by the kidnappers and the filmic exposure of an individual humiliation, which is an essentially private and intensely personal experience. This literal exposure of Bigley in all of his vulnerability as both an ordinary person and as a citizen of a state engaged in the War against Terror inspired ethical questions not only about aiding terrorist propaganda but also about the diminution of human dignity entailed in showing these images without Kenneth Bigley’s own consent.4 The images also constituted a disturbing inversion of the (Western) world order as the kidnappers’ video releases dictated the pace of events and their coverage. If, as Judith Butler (2004b, 148) argues, the “shock-and-awe” strategies of

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the United States, for example, were one way to “exploit and instrumentalize the visual aesthetics as a part of the war strategy,” then the kidnappers’ mobilization of these images of Bigley’s incarceration and death could be viewed as the equally disturbing underside of that state strategy. They were, as the best of journalistic images of the effects of war can be, a “disruption of the hegemonic field of representation” (150). For these traumatic events (at the same time, media events) arguably returned not only the Iraqi conflict to the center of the electoral agenda but also to the origins of the conflict. In Britain the media visibility of Mr. Bigley and his Al-Tauhid and Jihad kidnappers ensured the return of certain “home truths” to domestic table talk: many in Britain had not condoned the war, and they continued to be concerned about its lack of resolution. The bedrock of this attitude was arguably founded on the precariousness and vulnerability of the ordinary citizen; Kenneth Bigley’s face staring from the screen and newspaper page was emblematic of what it is to be human and therefore vulnerable in the context of the risks of military intervention. These images seemed to “capture” both the precariousness of life post 9/11 and the immanence of “risk” for the global citizen. The cage in which Kenneth Bigley was displayed was central to his visual objectification and to the emotional resonance of the images as they were reproduced in newspaper and TV stills. Television screen clips showing a closeup of Bigley crouching in the wire box set up against a brick wall appeared online and in the press: it was this scene in particular that Tony Blair declared to be sickening. Elaine Scarry (1985) observes that the room or cage in which the prisoner is held is loaded with meaning. The cage is a symbolic as well as literal contraction of the prisoner’s world and a graphic expression of one’s situation, as Scarry states: In normal contexts, the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is . . . an enlargement of the body. . . . It keeps warm and safe the individual it houses. . . . But while the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturization of the world, of civilisation. (39–40) This is because it is only when the body is comfortable that the individual can engage with the external world. The cage then exemplified the decline into “barbarism” of those who opposed the Iraqi regime change, a word deployed by Western journalists and politicians alike. But the dreadful staging of Kenneth Bigley in his jumpsuit was also purposeful in its evocation of those Afghan prisoners of uncertain status held in serried cages at Guantanamo Bay. And the cage with its confining chicken-wire walls came to symbolize and condense in one image the whole sorry saga from 9/11 (2001) to that moment—acting as a visual rejoinder to the endless officially sanctioned images of containment at the Guantanamo camp already in circulation.

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In their different ways all of the videos carried a visual and emotionally visceral impact, but it was the final one that will be remembered most by those who saw it. The final film was reminiscent of early cinema’s “spectacle film,” a shocking scene of execution that does not require narrativization to make it comprehensible or to give it impact (Black 2002, 131). At the same time it was typical of what Joel Black calls the “graphic imperative” of the information age. As Black says, “Now that cameras have been banned from execution chambers and many courtrooms, the broadcast media . . . have become the last—also the most graphic—domain in which both fictional and actual violence can be displayed as public spectacle” (30). In the first instance, the fact that these films were unedited underscored their immediacy and lent them a news media realtime look in keeping with the new aesthetics of rolling news, grainy, authentic, poor production values married to high news values. The videos’ codes and conventions signified breaking news. And yet, the reiterability of the footage (subsequently edited or taken for stills, inserted into broadcast or Internet news reports) arguably transformed actuality into commodified news, whose affective status is difficult to assess.5 Sara Knox comments on the filming of U.S. statesanctioned executions and the problematic of rendering the real-time event: It is hard to imagine a television network broadcasting an unedited version of the execution. Quickly the “real time” that marks the documentary integrity of the piece fragments and decays into the episodic highlights so dear to tabloid television. Only a live broadcast might retain the dread of “real time.” . . . But it might also, simultaneously, change the nature of the document from “news” into rank media spectacle. . . . The uncertain affective power of any documentary medium stands as a testament not to the complete relativity of meaning, but [also] to its vicissitudes in culture. (1998, 194) The affective status of this final film is, like any film footage, ultimately “uncertain,” but it would be safe to say that it is, as indeed it must be, rooted in its taboo-breaking properties and in its confirmation of the precariousness of modern life. In her book Pictures at an Execution, Wendy Lesser (1993) recalls the mixed emotional reactions generated in the wake of the filmed state execution of murderer Robert Alton Harris, who was killed in 1992, becoming the first person to be put to death in California for twenty-five years. Newspapers reported widespread emotional distress among the state’s citizens. Lesser adds: The terrible irony of the death penalty [is], we take personally something that is not actually happening to us, so that even the suffering—the one thing left to the condemned man, the one thing we have not deprived him of—becomes our own rather than, or a much as, his. (249)

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Lesser also makes a larger point, and this certainly pertains to the Bigley case, that the affective impact of filmed executions must be understood in the broader context of media coverage. The war body on screen frequently reaches us and touches our imagination via its secondary circulation, not only through photographs but also via written descriptions of the filmed event. She recalls of the Harris execution: These “images” of the execution afflicted us even though we didn’t actually see it—a problem the newspapers self-righteously blamed on television. . . . [But] even TV could only give us in abbreviated form what the newspapers gave us at length. . . . The images that plagued and frightened us were made entirely of words. (249–50) It thus is difficult to assess the emotional impact of these images and their circulation, which appeared in so many variants across the lifetime of the story. On a commonsense level, newsmakers were certain that these images were emotionally powerful, and this can be supported by academic research undertaken soon after the event. For example, Aarti Iyer and Julian Oldmeadow’s (2006) case-study evaluation of emotional responses of fear, sympathy, and anger when viewing photographs of the Bigley kidnapping demonstrated how pictures of Kenneth Bigley in a state of physical and emotional distress increased feelings of fearfulness, but not anger (or indeed sympathy, which was present in both the group who viewed the photographs and the control group). The researchers began their case study by observing that the British press focused heavily on Bigley as victim, with little graphic emphasis given to the kidnappers. After certain participants in the study saw five photographs of Bigley in captivity as reproduced in the Daily Mail of September 30, 2004, they “reported reliably stronger feelings of fear . . . compared to those who did not” see them (642). Fearfulness coalesced around Bigley’s status as a victim, with little control over his situation. This increased fearfulness arguably had political implications since it could indirectly increase support for negotiating and/or submitting to the captors’ demands. The researchers concluded, “One reading of this research, then, is that those who asked the media not to publish the photographs of Mr. Bigley may have been correct in their misgivings. On a larger scale, the effects of the images that we have identified may be in the interests of the kidnappers by promoting support for negotiations” (645).6 Many newsmakers conceded that the Bigley case became a news event chiefly because of its emotional punch was enhanced by its conveyance through visual media. It could be argued that the Independent, the Guardian, the Mirror, and the Liverpool Echo were especially emotionally charged: other newspapers leveled accusations that this was due to a partisan attitude to Britain’s part in the war in Iraq (Vass 2004). Papers were confident enough to make political points via the emotionally loaded contrast of two images of people involved in the news. For example, the Independent’s piece called “Parallel Worlds” (Cornwell 2004)

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juxtaposed pictures of the interim prime minister Iyad Allawi and Mrs. Bigley (Kenneth’s mother) in order to highlight the differences between the official line on the governance of Iraq and the human cost of the situation on the ground. The article’s subheading ran: “In Washington, the Iraqi PM is applauded by Congress and feted by George Bush. In Liverpool, Kenneth Bigley’s mother is rushed to hospital after pleading for son’s life.” Beck’s description (discussed above) of the impact of risk on ordinary people dovetails nicely with the Independent’s article, which suggests that side by side with official knowledge and political rhetoric sits certain laypeople damaged by policy. The executive editor of the Independent John Mullin stated, “Our tack has been to make it very personal and very much about Bigley” (via Vass 2004). The deputy editor of the Press and Journal cited the reasons for the story’s prominence as sympathy for Bigley “and also the visual images of him with his captors and the frank appeals he made to Tony Blair” (Vass 2004). Hence, overall the story gained momentum as “an extraordinary emotional tale” that was also “politically important” (according to the Guardian’s home editor) and that seemed to justify intense coverage despite a backdrop in which people were dying in Iraq daily. The representation of Bigley in this way raises powerful political-ethical issues about the geopolitical status of the body, its role as possessed or dispossessed by a culture, and the public recognition and validation of its corporeal vulnerability. Regular media coverage of military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and the suspension of the rights of democratic citizenship for those interned in Guantanamo Bay has revealed that numerous subjects have been reduced to an “inhuman” status, to what theorist Giorgio Agamben has astutely named “bare life” (Agamben 1998; Butler 2004a, 67). This is the life of those deprived of their ontological status as a subject awarded the rights of modern democratic citizenship. The state of emergency invoked by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, for example, during the post-9/11 conflict in Iraq provided the biopolitical condition for reducing those accused of terrorism to a liminal human status. Examples of this status were uncovered in the newspaper coverage of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib prison and extended with Internet coverage of military trials of U.S. and British troops who stood accused of perpetrating abuse. The public debate over the human rights scandal was initiated on January 13, 2004, when Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The following day the army commenced a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photos and stories of horrific scenes of torture and dehumanization inside the prison. These images of naked, hooded, and cowering prisoners in scenes, often staged for the camera, of physical and sexual humiliation and abuse are now familiar to news consumers. The website Salon.com controversially published an archive of 279 photos and 19 videos of Abu Ghraib abuse first gathered by the CID and obtained from a leaked U.S. Army investigation report into the abuse.7

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Mourning Kenneth Bigley As recounted above, the Bigley story unfolded in an arena where news consumers were increasingly faced with graphic, highly unpalatable images and written accounts of abuse administered by all participants in the conflict. It was not only the kidnap video images of Kenneth Bigley that raised the emotional ante, but also the broader accounts of what he was like as a person. In describing the public expression of emotion on October 9 in Liverpool following the announcement of his death, the journalist Colin Wills observed: There was something about Kenneth Bigley that Liverpool warmed to. The pictures of him that filled the newspapers and beamed out from every TV set was of a chirpy man in an open-necked shirt with an obvious appetite for the fun in life, always smiling, always looking for the next joke. (2004) These pictures supported the family’s promotion of Kenneth as an ordinary family man, whose lifestyle and values would be accessible to the majority of those hearing his story. The degree to which certain constituencies seemed to identify with the Bigley family’s situation became starkly apparent in the wake of his death. On Saturday, October 11, at Liverpool town hall, the Union Flag hung at half-mast, and queues formed to sign books of condolences. The city held a two-minute silence from noon as a mark of respect, with many gathering in the town-hall square, which featured a sculpture of a despairing figure in chains—a figure that news pictures reproduced and many commentators linked to the now iconic image of Kenneth Bigley. At midday the city’s bells tolled sixty-two times, once to mark each year of his life. More than one Liverpudlian linked their sadness at his demise to other collective traumas experienced by the city’s people, such as the Hillsborough football stadium disaster and the murder of James Bulger. News reports situated this local mourning within the broader context of a national event and reprinted dozens of statements of condolence from royalty, politicians, and religious leaders. The Liverpool Echo’s leader of October 9 declared: “The murder of Ken Bigley by unprincipled men of violence has sickened not just this city but [also] the world. . . . No-one will ever forget the heart-rending images of Mr. Bigley, his family and, particularly, his eighty-six-year-old mother, as they pleaded for mercy.” On October 10 the Sunday Mirror declared a nation in mourning. These expressions of collective emotion are not unprecedented, and subsequent criticisms aimed at Liverpudlians’ disproportionate “wallowing” in emotions and being “hooked on grief” explicitly looked back to not only disasters such as Hillsborough but also to the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in 1997—an event that seemed to mark a sea change in not only the conventions of the public exhibition of emotion in Britain, but also in the political mood of the nation (Nunn 1999).8 These criticisms, voiced by Conservative politician and

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Spectator news magazine editor Boris Jonson (2004), triggered a lively public debate about whether modern citizens were slipping into inappropriate sentimentalism and emotional incontinence. Ultimately Jonson was forced to back down and apologize, even undertaking a penitential tour of Liverpool on October 20, with a huge media entourage in tow. Jonson’s criticisms may have been valid or not, but what they failed to engage with was the mechanics of what Nick Couldry (1999, 77, 83) refers to, in the case of Diana, as a “collective confrontation with death,” and the way in which such events can open up spaces where stories of death can be shared and where new, if temporary, locations “for experiencing the social” can be established. The implication of Jonson’s critique was that the behavior of the Liverpudlian mourners was somewhat embarrassing and self-indulgent, generated by a sense of affiliation with someone they only “knew” through the media. In this sense observers had raised the question of whether citizens had gone beyond the “culturally permissible” in their expression of emotion (Harding and Pribram 2002). Contrary to Jonson, we can say that it was the very fact of the representation of Kenneth Bigley’s death in the media and on screen in particular, its circulation and repetition, that required a collective response even from those who did not know the man. In her discussion of the public display of death in contemporary culture, as played out in psychoanalysis, in modern museums, and on television, Ariella Azoulay suggests that the displayed images of death constantly refer to a lost or an absent image. . . . Within the television set, the missing image is the image of death itself, of the very presence of death, which would somehow transcend the flux of its representations constantly projected on the screen. No matter how differently these three sites are organized, they share a similar motivation, to help the apparition of the lost image. But in fact they all produce the conditions for an unfinished work of mourning. (2001, 4) Cultural respondents to the affective space of public politics in Britain and the U.S. post 9/11 point to the experience of dispossession wrought for many citizens for whom a prior sense of privilege and security had been part of their existence as late-modern national citizens of Western democracy. In contrast to adversarial and militaristic state responses to the vulnerability wrought in that moment, other responses include a forging of political community brought to the fore by identifying with others through a sense of loss, grief, and rage (Butler 2004c, 21–22, 28–29). Although such emotions can be used to reassert a military agenda and/or to reassert reinforced national boundaries, they can also be appropriated for other forms of protest. As Andrea Brady argues in her analysis of “grief work in a war economy,” Grief is never an unmediated feeling. But neither is it just a plodding through conventions, a rhetorical performance…. Grief can be

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subversive. Ritual mourning confirms the bonds within a community; it can also vent dissent and fears of exclusion or change. (2002, 11) The rituals of mourning anticipated by the media coverage of Kenneth Bigley while he was still alive in captivity, and underscored after his death, were arguably taken up by the Liverpudlian community and made their own.9 Bigley was denied dignity and ultimately his life by his kidnappers in what could be construed as a knowing violent media spectacle; yet one of the unforeseen results was a protest on the part of the Bigley family, the broader Liverpudlian community, and indeed large sections of the national media against both the kidnappers and the state’s potential appropriation of Bigley’s plight in the name of the supposedly collective War against Terror. In the information age, the mediation of Kenneth Bigley’s incarceration and death reveals the difficulty of separating the power of the media image from the ways in which it can potentially accrue collective meaning and emotional investment. If, as Boris Jonson argues, albeit rather crudely, grief and other emotions are overarticulated in the media and the current “therapy” culture, then perhaps, viewed positively, this enables readers and viewers to draw upon the discourse of emotion as “a symbolic vehicle” to express, albeit fleetingly, their collective ties and to voice their criticism of those in power (Brady 2002, 10). Media coverage of the kidnapping suggests that these events bound citizens together in sympathy and ultimately in grief. As reviewed, academic research has suggested that fearfulness may also have played a part in the public’s fascination with the case. Mr. Bigley’s demise certainly led to a great expression of public mourning, and this emotional investment must have been predicated in part on the extensive and hugely sympathetic media coverage. In discussing the contemporary post-9/11 spectrum of precarious lives, philosopher Judith Butler observes: “The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (2004c, 20). We can argue that in the mass media and in the context of the ongoing War against Terror, some bodies and some subjects count as more grievable than others, and that this calibration of value is partly rooted in the ways in which images of war bodies are depicted, circulated, and consumed. It therefore seems that in the final analysis the mass media reiteration of images of the kidnapped (Western) body opens up the question of what constitutes the publicly endorsed “grievable” life.

Works Cited Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith. 2004. “Anger, Shame and Indifference.” Guardian Unlimited, September 24, www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1311794,00.html (accessed July 31, 2007). Agamben, Giorgio. [1995] 1998. Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Azoulay, Ariella. 2001. Death’s Showcase: The Power of the Image in Contemporary Democracy. Translated by R. Danieli. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Black, Joel. 2002. The Reality Effect, Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative. New York: Routledge. Boltanski, Luc. [French, 1993] 1999. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Translated by G. Burchell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brady, Andrea. 2002. “Grief Work in a War Economy.” Radical Philosophy 114 (July/August): 7–12. http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/print.asp?editorial_id=10602 (accessed July 31, 2007). Butler, Judith. 2004a. “Indefinite Detention.” In Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 50–100. London: Verso. ———. 2004b. “Precarious Life.” In Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 128–52. London: Verso. ———. 2004c. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” In Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 19–49. London: Verso. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Cornwell, R. 2004. “Parallel Worlds.” The Independent, September 24. Cottle, Simon. 2000. “TV News, Lay Voices and the Visualisation of Environmental Risk.” In Environmental Risks and the Media, 29–44. Edited by S. Allan, B. Adam, and C. Carter. London: Routledge. Couldry, Nick. 1999. “Remembering Diana: The Geography of Celebrity and the Politics of Lack.” New Formations: Diana and Democracy 36:77–91. ———. 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. New York: Routledge. Der Derian, James. 2005. “9/11, Before, After, and the In Between.” In Terrorism, Media, Liberation, 321–36. Edited by J. D. Slocum. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Guardian Unlimited. 2005. “Jail for Showing Beheading on Mobile Phone.” September 29, http:// forums.realpolice.net/showpost.php?p=478851&postcount=1 (accessed July 31, 2007). Gray, John. 2003. Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. New York: New Press. Harding, J., and E. D. Pribram. 2002. “The Power of Feeling: Locating Emotions in Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 4:407–26. Iyer, A., and J. Oldmeadow. 2006. “Picture This: Emotional and Political Responses to Photographs of the Kenneth Bigley Kidnapping.” European Journal of Social Psychology 36:635–47. Jonson, B. 2004. “Bigley’s Fate.” The Spectator, October 16, http://www.spectator.co.uk/archive/theweek/12691/bigleys-fate.thtml (accessed July 31, 2007). Knox, Sara. 1998. Crime, Law, and Symbolic Order: The Rhetoric of Transparency. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lesser, Wendy. 1993. Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McAlister, Melani. 2005. “Iran, Islam, and the Terrorist Threat, 1979–1989.” In Terrorism, Media, Liberation, 137–70. Edited by J. D. Slocum. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. McNair, Brian. 2005. Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture. London: Hodder Arnold. Nunn, Heather. 1999. “Violence and the Sacred, the Iron Lady, the Princess and the People’s PM.” New Formations: Diana and Democracy 36:92–110. O’Byrne, Darren. 2004. “The Discourse of Human Rights and the Neo-Conservative Discourse of War.” In Mediactive: Ideas, Knowledge, Culture, issue 3 (October), Media War, 13–22. Pantti, M., and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. 2006. “On the Political Possibilities of Therapy News: Media Responsibility and the Limits of Objectivity in Disaster Coverage.” Paper presented at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change Conference on “Media Change and Social Theory,” Oxford, September 6–8. Estudios em Comunicação 1 (April 2007): 3–25. http:// www.labcom.ubi.pt/ec/_docs/artigos/pantti-jorgensen-political-possibilities.pdf (accessed July 31, 2007). Press Association News. “Anti-war March Today Expects 50,000 Turnout.” October 17, http:// cnduk.org/pages/cnews/041410.html (accessed October 23, 2007).

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Sambrook, Richard. 2006. “Regulations, Responsibility, and the Case against Censorship.” Index on Censorship 35:166–72. Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Slocum, J. D. 2005. “Introduction: The Recurrent Return to Algiers.” In Terrorism, Media, Liberation, 1–36. Edited by J. D. Slocum. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Seaton, Jean. 1998. “Introduction.” In Politics and the Media: Harlots and Prerogatives at the Turn of the Millennium. London: Blackwell. Smith, Joan. 2004. “Britain Was Fooled over Ken Bigley.” The Independent on Sunday, October 10, 27. http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/joan_smith/article27738.ece (accessed July 31, 2007). Sparks, C. 1988. “The Popular Press and Political Democracy.” Media, Culture and Society 10:209–23. Taylor, John. 1998. Body Horror, Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and the War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vass, Stephen. 2004. “Is the Media a Weapon of War?” The Sunday Herald, October 3, 8. http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20041003/ai_n12591729 (accessed July 31, 2007). Whitaker, Raymond. 2004. “Special Report: The Death of Ken Bigley.” The Independent on Sunday, October 10. Wills, Colin. 2004. “Escape Revealed as Nation Mourns: City’s Moving Tribute Was Fit for a King.” The Sunday Mirror, October 10, 6–7. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_20041010/ ai_n12910978 (accessed July 31, 2007).

Notes 1. For this work we surveyed 502 English-language news items available in the UK dating from the kidnapping until May 2006. This included 381 newspaper reports, 55 press releases, 26 news transcripts, 5 magazines/journals, 2 web-based publications, and 44 aggregate news sources. 2. In a small but resonant way, it also highlighted how, in Darren O’Byrne’s (2003, 21) words, “global uncertainty has also breathed new life into what we might call the ‘global lifeworld,’ the antithesis of the global system, which is articulated through the activities of campaigning organisations and global citizens.” 3. Although we do not have the space to consider it here, the films made of Bigley by the Iraq militia were also read as emblematic of the failure of British and American foreign policy failure in quite different quarters and in quite different ways. A Guardian journalist interviewing people in a Baghdad café during the Bigley events gives this account of a young man who pulled out a Nokia mobile phone from his pocket: “He switched on the screen-saver clip, and a grainy scene appeared of men wearing black standing around a man in an orange jumpsuit. One of the men lifts a big sword, and the scene cuts to the man in the jumpsuit lying dead in a pool of blood. The men around him are screaming, ‘Allahu Akbar [God is great].’ ‘Every time I watch this, I feel sick,’ said the man. ‘But this is the only way to liberate my country’” (Abdul-Ahad 2004). 4. Its screening attracted few formal complaints from the viewing public. A complaint lodged against TV New Zealand by a viewer who regarded this footage (alongside the other videos) as an invasion of Bigley’s privacy and a pandering to the criminal intents of the kidnappers seems to be exceptional. See http://www.bsa.govt.nz/decisions/2004/2004-179.htm (accessed July 31, 2007). On the other hand, media professionals actively debated these issues (Sambrook 2006). The era of digital imaging thus ushers in new questions about the rights of the imprisoned, tortured, and/or slaughtered body as it is represented in the media and as cultural artifact (Boltanski 1999, xv). 5. The property of reiterating shocking images in news media is arguably central to how trauma is mediated and therefore experienced at a collective level. James Der Derian’s (2005, 325) reflection on the coverage of 9/11 (2001), for example, argues that it was the networking of images whether

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through terrorist, Internet, or prime-time media and their continuous reenactment that came to exemplify and indeed crystallize a national trauma. 6. More than one media commentator argued that Bigley’s exploitation as a hostage was prolonged because of the British media’s somewhat naïve in-depth coverage. Writing in the Independent on Sunday, Joan Smith (2004) suggested, for example, that Bigley’s American companions died more quickly because the U.S. media no longer afford kidnappings a high degree of publicity. 7. See the archives at http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/ (accessed July 31, 2007). Public debate also continued about the status of the image as accurate reference following one infamous example when the British tabloid Daily Mirror published photos on May 1, 2004, that appeared to show British troops from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment torturing an Iraqi detainee. In one picture a soldier was depicted urinating on a hooded man; in another a hooded man was being hit with a rifle in the groin. The pictures were subsequently revealed to be fakes, and the Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan was subsequently fired. 8. For a contemporary analysis of the mediated articulation of grief and the centrality of ordinary people in the media coverage of disasters, see Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen (2006). 9. These significantly were mediated rituals of mourning (see Couldry 2003).

14

The Body of the Woman Hostage Spectacular Bodies and Berlusconi’s Media Rinella Cere

Introduction During the present war in Iraq, an unprecedented number of people have been taken hostage, many of whom are women. This chapter will look at the ways in which the “body” of the woman hostage has been represented in television news and print media. The main examples used will center on two sets of women, taken hostage in 2004 and 2005 respectively. In particular, it will consider three themes. The first will look at the case of two young Italian women hostages (Simona Pari and Simona Torretta) in relation to the “spectacularization” of women’s bodies in Western media, focusing in particular on the Italian media context. The second will look at the gender/age-biased reporting in connection with two older women hostages (Giuliana Sgrena and Florence Aubenas) and the “impossibility of spectacle” when the woman’s body is damaged, different, or “other.” The third theme will discuss the ways in which women hostages are divided and separated from their non-Western counterpart through the “symbol of the veil” and consequently reappropriated into the ideology of the “just war.”

“Spectacular Bodies” and Berlusconi’s Media The body of the hostage normally seen and represented in pain and psychologically crushed was never part of the story of the two Italian women hostages, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta; theirs were sanitized and beautiful bodies, hardly consonant with their status of hostage. This is not surprising in a country that made the “spectacle of the female body” the centerpiece of its commercial television development during the 1970s and ’80s (Blain and Cere 1995; Gundle 1990). In this period Italian television underwent an epochal transformation from “national-popular” television to American-style TV. This change, was spurred by the newly deregulated environment (Law of April 14, 1975, n. 103) 239

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and the subsequent proliferation of commercial channels, followed by a copycat programming from RAI, the public service broadcast, in the battle for the audience ratings (Cere 2000: Gundle 1996). Silvio Berlusconi was the media mogul at the heart of these commercial developments, who subsequently entered into politics, ostensibly to further and protect his media business empire. Mazzoleni has argued in relation to the first time Berlusconi was elected prime minister in 1994: “His figure as domestic symbol of this Weltanschauung changes when he enters into politics. The Berlusconi political leader can be seen as the natural consequence of the type of society he helped to establish” (1995, 310). He was also prime minister at the time of the events described in this chapter.1 The coupling of commercial interests with women’s body as spectacle is not an exclusively televisual or national phenomenon. In this case study, for example, the international press followed suit in a very similar way in the reporting of these two young women hostages, even if perhaps avoiding some of the excesses of the Italian television news media. This in turn shows the shared characteristics of this “society-media-spectacle” that envelops social life in its entirety, encompassing many negative practices such as the personalization of political processes, the mediaization of society, alienation and reification of the public, and ultimately becomes part of a “total commodity”: “The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life” (Debord, thesis 42).2

The “Young” Body Hostage Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, two women working for the Italian voluntary organization Un ponte per (A Bridge To) operating in Iraq, were taken hostages on September 7, 2004, alongside two other fellow Iraqis, Mahnaz Bassam and Ra’ad Ali Aziz, working for the same organization. Even before their release, what characterized the efforts for their liberation was the high profile, image-driven campaign; thousands of posters with their faces all over Italy, their faces and bodies daily in the press, as well as a diverse range of their photographs, clearly some released by their NGO (nongovernmental organization) and/or their families and some extrapolated from a television program shot in April 2004 for RAI, the Italian public service broadcast. Simona Pari and Simona Torretta were taken hostage by an unknown group that most media commentators reputed was simply interested in the potential ransom it could extol out of the Italian government; others even suggested that it was “an inside job” to discredit the resistance movement in Iraq (Klein and Scahill 2004). The captors never circulated any statement, as others had done, about the hostages being taken on the grounds that Italian troops had been sent to Iraq by the Berlusconi government in “a show of solidarity” with Bush and Blair’s global War on Terror. Mary Kaldor has also suggested: “Hostage-taking is a typical expression of this blurring of the political and economic. Much of it

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is undertaken for profit” (Kaldor 2004). It was widely speculated that a ransom of one million dollars was paid for the release of these two women, although it was never officially confirmed by the Berlusconi Government. Until the day of their release just under a month later, on September 28, 2004, the Italian and international news media concentrated on these two Italian women hostages in ways that confirmed the gendered nature of reporting about women in Western media, a subject that has received increased research attention in recent years by feminist media scholars (Macdonald 1995). In this context I want to concentrate on ways in which these young women’s “bodies” were transformed from “normal everyday bodies” into “celebrity bodies” in television and print news media. This “spectacle” of their bodies was dominant in the reporting of the events, often overshadowing all other issues. In some sense these women were captured twice: physically and “mediatically.” The image-driven coverage did not abate for many weeks after their release, though gradual abatement is normally the case with news events; if anything, it intensified over the following weeks. From the minute they stepped down from their plane in Rome’s Ciampino Airport, the women’s appearance became as large a part of the reports as their ordeal and voluntary work. Article after article and program after program described the way they looked, the clothes they wore, their hair and the color of their eyes. Time Europe included them in their “European Heroes” series and carried a full picture of the two Italian women on their front cover (Time Europe, October 11, 2004).3 This hypervisibility was also counter to the lack of images of them when held captive. The two women never appeared in a dramatic highly staged video looking distraught and pleading for help in the way that other hostages have been, both men and women. On the contrary, in one of their many accounts to the media, they even praised their captors for giving them their favorite foods. Of course, there were other cases of “kind” hostage-takers, as described by Jo Wilding when captured in Fallujah (Wilding 2004). The women themselves, and especially Simona Torretta, expressed clear ideas about the war, declared it illegal and the Italian forces an occupying force, and felt strongly about the ransom of $1 million that had been paid for their release. On the other hand the press and news broadcasts’ representation attempted in many different ways to “tone down” their position and ideas; some of the conservative press in Britain went as far as to suggest that they were naïve and even ungrateful, presumably because of their opposition to the war (Johnston 2004). In the intensive round of photo calls and interviews, both national and international, their political ideas became less strident, or at least they were reported as such. Thus Simona Pari is quoted as saying: “We weren’t Italian or Western. . . . We were Simona and Simona” (Time Europe, October 11, 2004). At the same time their appearance received much more attention than their thoughts on either the Iraq war or their experience as hostages. Within a month of their release, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta had been transformed from voluntary workers with a relatively critical stance toward the war into “glamorous” young

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women appearing slightly confused. As a result, what the two women thought about the war, their experience as hostages, or their role as NGO workers has been ignored in most news media output. Journalists and editors for the Italian press and news broadcasts could not make up their minds whether to refer to them as women or girls: they eventually opted for the latter, using “ragazze [girls]” in spite of the fact that both Simona Pari and Simona Torretta were twenty-nine at the time. Their representation was a mixture of infantilization and glamorization.

Figure 1. Photograph of Simona Pari and Simona Torretta at the time of their release. Rome, September 28, 2004 (Dylan Martinez, Reuters). These two “young” women had been caught in the “media machine,” whose “contradictory leaky nature” rarely applies to women (Brunt 2004, 131); in this specific case they were no longer allowed autonomy and independence of mind as well as adulthood: their youthful bodies and looks served to mask eternal patriarchal modes of address. On the other hand it is worth emphasizing that these women’s opposition to the war was real, and implicitly so was their criticism of the then Berlusconi government’s foreign policy: “Saddam was a brutal dictator—we didn’t want him in power—but now that he is gone, it’s time for the occupiers to leave” (interview with Simona Torretta, Time Europe, October 11, 2004). This was clearly the reason why the right-wing press, national and international, was quick to accuse them of ungratefulness. Many months after the spectacle- and celebrity-led frenzy, these women returned to “normal” and fully recovered their “status” in the news media. Nonetheless, it is worth considering the ways in which these women’s appearance became much more central

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than the things they had to say, a process that has been well accounted for, as in a study of women politicians in the media (Ross and Byerly 2004). What becomes evident from this study and others is that “archaic” notions of femininity are surviving against the odds: “Newspapers print numerous photos of young women, . . . especially when they are attractive and smiling.” These “add freshness and appeal to the pages, and readers appreciate them” (P. Holland 2004, 44). The news event surrounding these two women hostages provided the media, which is hungry for such images, the perfect opportunity to fulfill both the values of newsworthiness as well as those of instant news-made celebrity; this phenomenon was visible in all the European newspapers examined.4

The “Old” Body Hostage The representation and treatment of Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, before and after their release, contrasted greatly with that of other older women taken hostage. One of the reasons may be attributed to the fact that many of them were in the hands of quite different insurgent groups. Here I will consider the cases of Florence Aubenas and Giuliana Sgrena, journalists respectively for the leftwing newspapers Il Manifesto in Italy and Libération in France. Florence Aubenas was kidnapped on January 5, 2005, along with her driver-translator, Husain Hanun al-Saadi, in Baghdad by an unknown group and held in captivity for 157 days. Similarly Giuliana Sgrena was kidnapped a month later on February 4, 2005, by another unknown group and released a month later. In the case of these two women hostages, the news media did not go into hypervisibility mode; image-driven campaigns did not play as large a part, as they had done for the two Simonas, in their reporting about their capture and after their release. Florence Aubenas, however, like the two Simonas before her, was nominated “European Hero” by Time Europe a year later (October 2, 2005), but in the article that followed there was no mention of her clothing, her looks, or the color of her eyes. Although she was photographed for the article, it was clear that her appearance had not undergone a major transformation for the photo shoot, and her picture was not used for the front cover. The article itself concentrated on the issues that she put forward as being central to this war and the resulting hostage crisis, though somewhat superficially. Aubenas’s body could never be beautified and trivialized quite in the same way for three reasons: One, Aubenas was not seen as naïve and young. Two, she worked for a left-wing newspaper as a journalist, a newspaper that on the whole is not given to tabloid-style journalism. Three and perhaps most important, her body and face had been seen in the video sent by her captors in a frightened and disheveled state on Sky Italia news channel, pleading with her country for help in her liberation. This was never the case with the two Simonas: no video of their captivity was sent to TV stations, and they never appeared either in distress or injured.

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Figure 2. Video still of Florence Aubenas (aljazeera.net, March 2, 2005) Equally, Giuliana Sgrena’s body was also the body of the hostage in all its horror: injured, fear-stricken, and dehumanized. Sgrena was not in the hand of captors seeking ransom; rather, she was in the hands of captors seeking political gain for their pivotal role in the insurgence movement. The video was similar to many others sent to Arab television networks and other satellite TV stations and obtained by Associated Press Television News: masked men surrounding the hostage clearly showed a woman in distress and pleading: “Nobody should come to Iraq at this time. Not even journalists. Nobody” (BBC News Europe, March 5, 2005).

Figures 3 and 4. Two video stills of Giuliana Sgrena (BBC News Europe, March 5 and 7, 2005). This is not to say that other and “more-positive” images of Giuliana Sgrena and Florence Aubenas were also circulated other then the ones taken by their captors (above), or the video of Sgrena lying injured during the rescue operation, when American troops shot at the Italian car.5 But these photographs of their prehostage and posthostage selves could not be used in the same way as the images of the two Simonas. It is as if the “body of the hostage” in the images released by the captors could never be used fully for propaganda purposes,

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although attempts were certainly made to do just that through the news rhetoric of pitting democracy against terrorist values. The circulation of images of hostages, mainly in the form of videos, has become a large part of the Iraq war. The people that take the films and circulate them either on the Internet or on TV channels are in no doubt about the fact that “images transfix,” especially if the atrocity is extreme, but at the same time they appear to be aware of Sontag’s warning that “repeated exposure . . . [makes the images] become less real” (Sontag 1978, 20). Their purpose is not tied to the image a priori; it is rather to grab whatever media attention is available for their cause. For that they practice, in a kind of reverse ethical mandate, “an ecology of images” of their hostages, but in that “ecology” it is nonetheless necessary for the horror to be exposed to the audience. In the media of war images in all their bloodied contours, whether the “saturation” sedates people’s moral indignation is still not proved. In this particular case one could argue that the large ongoing protest against the war in Iraq throughout the world is a proof to the contrary: that the abundance of images is fuelling the protest rather than stifling it. Indeed, as Sontag has argued, “Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan” (2003, 76). War hostages’ images are becoming familiar, but their “spectacle” cannot clearly be used as a political commodity, precisely because their “emotional charge” is bursting out and beyond their media frame. In the context of this argument, we should not be surprised that in reporting about women hostages, the distorted values that have been at the center of our contemporary cultural practices have seeped through the media discourses; even in the murky world of hostage-taking and a brutal, illegal war, the Western media manage to wedge in their distorted values about women.

The Body of the “Other” Woman One final element I want to discuss here about the “body hostage” that emerged, as dominant in the media discussion of the two younger women hostages, was how the body was covered. The two Simonas, unlike other women hostages, appeared at the time of their liberation dressed in Muslim dress, which had clearly been given to them during their captivity. The national and international news media made much about the symbolic moment when they took the niqƗb off at the moment of their liberation.6 Throughout the weeks of intense media coverage, particular insistence was placed on this “passage” from “Islamic look” back to Western. This representation served to reinforce the difference between Western and Muslim women as well as reiterating Western fixation with the veil that has a long history, going back to colonial domination (Lewis 1996; El Guindi 1999).

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Pitting Western dress against Islamic dress, the article for Time Europe (October 11, 2004) thus described Simona Pari in these terms: “Pari, wearing jeans and a leather jacket, adjusts the yellow silk veil over her hair. . . . Torretta looks 100% Western with an oversized black tote bag on her shoulder.” The stress on their Western appearance performs a double function here: first, to distance them from Muslim women and “the key symbol” (the veil) of their oppression, as prevalent in Western media discourse (Macdonald 2003); and second, to “liberate” their bodies. The restoration of their “Western femininity” is also very much in the vein of what Holland called the “reassertion of the female body as spectacle” (P. Holland 1998, 24). Although these concepts are used by Holland in a discussion of the sexualization in the British popular press, they are also applicable here as restorers of sexuality. The veil has paradoxically performed two functions in Western ideology: first, absence of sexuality; and second, hypersexuality, as in the exotic and desirable veiled Eastern woman. The English term is itself problematic, not only because the one term is used to describe an array of different types of head and body cover, but also because in its colonial history it exalted the “exotic” nature of “Eastern” womanhood at the same time as attempting to conquer it: “The veil is one of those tropes through which Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient and access to the interiority of the other are fantasmatically achieved” (Ye÷eno÷lu 2003, 543). In a similar way the abandoning of the “veil” by the two Simonas, like the body it is supposed to cover, performs the act of redelivering the body to visibility and, one may add, to availability. In the reporting about these two women, liberation from their captors and liberation from the veil came to signify the now-familiar equation between the veil and Muslim women’s sexual repression, within the wider critique first proposed by Said about Orientalism: “Insofar as Islam has always been seen as belonging to the Orient, its particular faith within the general structure of Orientalism has been to be looked at first of all as if it were one monolithic thing, and then with a very special hostility and fear” (1991, 4). In a similar vein Myra Macdonald suggested: “The single item of clothing identified as the ‘veil’ obscures diversity in body-covering practices. . . . ‘The Veil’ becomes an all-encompassing symbol of repression, and in its dominant association with Islam (with equivalent Jewish, Christian, or Hindu practices written out of the script) reinforces the monocular representation of that religion” (Macdonald 2005, 8). The “visible” in its material bodily manifestation as opposed to the “invisible” in its cerebral thought-based expression has commonly been associated with the feminine throughout Western history of thought (Spelman 1999). On this media-event-led occasion, we have further evidence of the “mind-body/malefemale” dualism that drives Western dominant values. This process in turn also reinforces the “link between femininity and a low public status” (P. Holland 1998, 21). Although great strides have been made in the public arena between

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men and women, occasions like this remind us of the way in which women’s bodies are still public property. The younger women’s different dress stages and the hypervisual coverage of the event therefore serve as an important ideological function: first, to reiterate patriarchal and capitalist values; and second, to reassert the “moral superiority” of the West over other cultures, clearly here defined against Muslim cultural practices generally. On the other hand it is worth reasserting that resistance to the above arguments is also available in the media, though to a lesser extent. Situations and people involved can constrain the media as much as the media can constrain situations and people: the emphasis on the body and femininity can receive quite different treatment when the woman concerned is perceived as strong, intelligent, different, or “other.” A case in point is described by Holland about the very different visual and discursive treatment “Three Young Women from Palestine” received at the hand of the press: “[If] Rachel fitted the established image of women peace protesters and Jessica that of the Hollywood heroine, Hiba was the subject of long lasting orientalism in Western reporting of Islam, which refuses to understand the history and context of actions” (P. Holland 2004, 51).7 The problem remains when youth and femininity can be hijacked, as in the case of Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, to fulfill the microagenda of audience and reader figures as well as the macroagenda of new imperial powers (Hardt and Negri 2000).

Conclusion There is a long tradition of spectacularizing women’s bodies in the media in general, and the Italian media have rivaled many around the world, especially since the rise of commercial media and the “Berlusconi phenomenon” mentioned above. Many commentators have also often wondered about why serious Italian political and cultural weeklies have to carry on their front covers regular images of young naked women, much in the manner of the British tabloids’ page 3, although often using the style of “fashion photography.” In Italy, at least, this has been the result of both the debunking of the (Catholic) sanctity of the body as well as the rise of the feminist movement and the “reclaiming of our bodies.” Yet as elsewhere, this has coincided with the commodification of social relations and the rise of consumer society, so that what was undoubtedly a liberation has slowly become recuperated and has re-entered mainstream society in a “sexualized form”. The news as spectacle is a more recent phenomenon, which nonetheless is part of the ideological continuum of the sexualization of political culture. Patricia Holland in her article “The Politics of the Smile” argues that the sexualization of the popular press was never meant for women: “Although women were invited to enjoy themselves, to follow their desires and to drop their inhibitions, the divided address, accompanied by many a nudge and a

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wink, made it clear that this women’s pleasure is above all pleasure for men” (1998, 24). The news events discussed here are a clear case of spectacularization of news, a process that is especially dubious during the present war in Iraq, where news related to the torture of women (as well as men) in prison by the occupying forces, along with countless examples of innocent killings of civilians and numerous people taken hostage (both Western and Iraqis), does not warrant any such treatment. That news journalism can continue its gender- and race-biased reporting in the case of women taken hostage indicates what little importance is given to the context. There are enormous implications about this concentration on body and appearance in events generated by war, especially since this “beautifying” process is against a background of an “ugly and age-old war” (Ravera 2004).

Works Cited Baranski, Z. G., and R. Lumley, eds. 1990. Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy. London: Macmillan. BBC News. 2004. “FBI Quiz Execution Video Hoaxer.” August 8, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ middle_east/3545822.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). BBC News Europe. 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4321173.stm (accessed September 26, 2006). Blain, N., and R. Cere. 1995. “Dangerous Television: The TV a Luci Rosse Phenomenon.” Media, Culture and Society 17, no. 3 (July): 483–98. Brunt, Rosalind. 2004. “Broadcasting and Government Panic in the Iraq Crisis.” In Mediactive, issue 3 (October), MediaWar Cere, Rinella. 2000. European and National Identities in Britain and Italy: Maastricht on Television. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. Debord, G. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Cf. http:// library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4 (accessed August 5, 2007). El Guindi, F. 1999. Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance. Oxford: Berg. Gundle, S. 1990. “From Neorealism to Luci Rosse: Cinema, Politics, Society, 1945–85.” In Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy. Edited by Z. G. Baranski and R. Lumley. London: Macmillan. ———. 1996. “RAI and Fininvest in the Year of Berlusconi.” In Italian Politics in the Year of the Tycoon. Edited by R. Katz and P. Ignazi. Oxford: Westview. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirst, Paul. 2001. War and Power in the Twenty-First Century: The State, Military Conflict and the International System. Oxford: Polity. Holland, Patricia. 1998. “The Politics of the Smile: ‘Soft News’ and the Sexualisation of the Popular Press.” In News, Gender, and Power. Edited by C. Carter, G. Branston, and S. Allen. London: Routledge. ———. 2004. “Three Young Women from Palestine.” In Mediactive: Ideas, Knowledge, Culture, issue 3 (October), MediaWar. Il Corriere della Sera. 2004. “Libere: Le due Simona tornano a casa.” 2004. September 28. Johnston, B. 2004. “Italians Fall Out of Love with ‘Two Simonas.’” Daily Telegraph, October 2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/02/wsim02.xml&sSheet=/ news/2004/10/02/ixworld.html (accessed August 5, 2007). Kaldor, Mary. 2004. “How to Free Hostages: War, Negotiation, or Law-Enforcement?” Open Democracy, October 29, http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-hostage/article_2127.jsp (accessed August 5, 2007).

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Klein, Naomi, and Jeremy Scahill. 2004. “Who Seized Simona Torretta?” Guardian Unlimited, September 16, http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1305523,00.html (accessed August 5, 2007. La Republica. 2004. “Liberate le voluntaire italiane: ‘Grazie mille, e arriverderci.’” September 28. Lewis, R. 1996. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation. London: Routledge. Macdonald, Myra. 1995. Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. London: Arnold. ———. 2003. Exploring Media Discourse. London: Arnold. ———. 2005. “Muslim Women and the Veil: Problems of Image and Voice in Media Representations.” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 1. Mazzoleni, G. 1995. “Towards a ‘Videocracy’? Italian Political Communication at a Turning Point.” European Journal of Communication 10, no. 3. Ravera, L. 2004. “Hanno liberato la pace.” L’Unità, September 28. Ross, Karen, and Carolyn M. Byerly, eds. 2004. Women and Media: International Perspectives. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Said, E. [1978] 1991. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Reprint, London: Penguin. Sontag, S. 1978. On Photography. London: Allen Lane. ———. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton. Spelman, E. V. 1999. “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views.” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Edited by J. Price and M. Shildrick. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Time Europe. 2004. October 11, http://jcgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/europe/0,9263, 901041011, 00.html (Accessed august 5, 2007). Time Europe. 2005. No. 15 Wilding, Jo. 2004. “The Second Trip to Fallujah and the Courteous Kidnappers.” Open Democracy, April 2004, http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-iraqconflict/article_1860.jsp (accessed August 5, 2007). Ye÷eno÷lu, Meyda. 2003. “Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism.” In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Edited by R. Lewis and S. Mills. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Notes 1. His center-right coalition was defeated in April 2006 by a center-left coalition led by Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission, who now is the current prime minister of Italy (2007). 2. I have used an online text of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle since I feel that it is a better translation of the original text than the printed version, mentioned in “Works Cited” (http:// library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4 (accessed August 5, 2007). 3. The cover: http://jcgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/europe/0,9263,901041011,00.html (accessed August 5, 2007). Compared to the two Italian women, the other two Iraqi workers of both sexes that had been taken hostage alongside them received hardly any coverage in the media. There was equally no mention of their heroism, thus reconfirming that some lives are worth more than others in Western news values. 4. I have looked at national newspapers from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States for October 29, 2004. 5. The operation to liberate Giuliana Sgrena ended in tragedy: American troops shot at the car taking her to safety. Sgrena was injured in the process, and Nicola Calipari, the security agent who had gone to Iraq to aid in her liberation, was killed. 6. “Liberate le volontarie italiane: ‘Grazie mille, e arrivederci,’” La Repubblica, September 28, 2004; “Libere: Le due Simona tornano a casa,” Il Corriere della Sera, September 28, 2004.

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7. Rachel Corrie was a peace activist from the United States who was run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer. Jessica Lynch is from Palestine, West Virginia, a soldier with the U.S. Army in Iraq; she was captured and eventually released. Hiba Daraghmeh was a Palestinian woman who committed suicide by blowing herself up in an Israeli shopping area.

15

Hostage Videos in the War on Terror Andrew Hill

For audiences across the globe, video footage of hostages seized by an array of groups ranged against the United States and its allies has established itself as a prominent feature of the War on Terror. The majority of these videos—and the ones this chapter will focus upon—have emanated from Iraq 1 and can be identified with a specific time period: from spring 2004 to the end of 2005, with the decline in their appearance coinciding with Ayman al-Zawahiri (bin Laden’s “right-hand man” and “number two” in Al Qaeda) expressing his fears that these videos might alienate moderate Muslims.2 At first sight the aim of the videos might appear relatively straightforward, with the hostage-takers presenting a series of demands for the release of the hostages, focused on the freeing of prisoners held in Iraq and the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. At times certain of these demands have been met. In July 2004 the Philippine government agreed to withdraw its troops from Iraq in return for the release of Angelo de la Cruz. Furthermore, the financial gains to be made from seizing hostages have also become apparent, with the French, German, Italian, and Canadian governments all rumored to have struck deals with hostage-takers for the release of their nationals.3 The concern of this chapter, however, is with another aspect of these videos: the place they occupy in the visual landscape of the War on Terror, above all with regard to the terms in which publics in the West4 have perceived and comprehended this conflict. The chapter takes as its focus the type of fears generated among these publics by these videos, fears that are juxtaposed with what at first glance may appear to be a contradictory desire to view this footage, including that showing the execution of certain hostages. At the same time this chapter seeks to locate these videos in dialogue with the images of U.S. service personnel torturing and humiliating detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, which came to light in the spring of 2004. In addressing these themes, the chapter takes Lacan’s work—in particular its concerns with questions of seeing and questions of ontology—as a central point of reference, above all the insights he offers into how we perceive suffering, death, and “the Truth” at a visual level.

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In Their Gaze . . . Western publics have rarely encountered representations of the Enemy’s gaze while a conflict is taking place.5 (Afterward may be a different matter: witness the fetish in the UK and United States for footage shot by the Nazis, for instance.) Instead, deliberate efforts have been made to foreclose the awareness of the Enemy’s gaze, in acknowledgment both of the fears its recognition might generate—fears elaborated below—and its value as an instrument of propaganda. In the Vietnam War—the first conflict in which media coverage can be said to have played a “critical” role—certain images, such as Mai Nam’s 1966 photograph of a U.S. F-105 pilot ejecting after his plane had been hit, did achieve a profile in the West. Yet Western publics were confronted with comparatively few images of the conflict as seen from a North Vietnamese standpoint. Images that became infamous in showing the U.S. military and its South Vietnamese allies in an unsympathetic light—such as Ron Haeberle’s photographs of the 1968 My Lai massacre, or Eddie Adams’s photo from the same year of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan about to shoot a Viet Cong prisoner in the head—were typically the work of Western photographers or Vietnamese from the south of the country. Western publics have had the greatest chance of encountering the Enemy’s gaze when the media depict the Enemy as victim. (As the latter two examples from Vietnam suggest, publics in the West are most likely to encounter representations of the Enemy in general as victims.) In the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq War(2003–), images of these conflicts as seen from an Iraqi perspective were, for audiences in the West, largely restricted to brief excerpts of Saddam Hussein’s speeches (taken from Iraqi television), with the exception being footage of Iraqis lying wounded and dying in hospitals and medical centers, of which repeated excerpts were shown. Two principal explanations for the broadcasting of the latter material can be pointed to: its confirmation of the Enemy as victim (as subservient and defeated by the West), and a rhetoric of humanitarianism that regards footage of this nature as raising awareness of the “horrors of war”—with the discordancy between these two explanations invoking Slavoj Žižek’s doubts about “humanitarianism” as a goal of Western foreign policy since its rise to prominence in the post–Cold War era (2005). The widespread absence of encounters with the Enemy’s gaze in conflicts between the West and its Eastern Other—which litter the post–World War II period and of which the War on Terror presents the latest instance—mirrors the ethnohistorical dynamics of photography in general. From photography’s emergence in the nineteenth century, the foreign, the exotic, the “oriental” Other, has assumed the position of photographed for the western photographer, with any attempt to reverse this relationship hardly recording with western publics. It is in the light of this general absence of encounters with the Enemy’s gaze that the impact these hostages videos have registered with western publics needs, in the first instance, to be located. This is evinced in the media attention accorded

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to these videos, and to the numbers who have sought to view them via the Internet (issues that will be returned to in a moment). These videos present the comparatively novel experience of a conflict seen from the Enemy’s standpoint, but they do something more than this: at the same time they situate the Enemy as aggressor. In the context of the uncertain ontological status of the Enemy in the War on Terror—the indeterminacies surrounding who precisely constitutes the “Enemy,” where “they” are located, and what “their” activities are—these videos establish not only that these Enemy bodies do indeed exist, but also that they possess a gaze, that they can see, that what they see confirms (graphically, in the case of those videos that show a hostage being executed) their ability to capture and kill their opponents. Yet how—via what discrete processes—can the appearance of these videos be configured as presenting a threat to publics who might regard themselves as far removed from events in Iraq? Putting aside the practicalities or logistics of seeing for a moment, in establishing the presence and “reality” of the Enemy’s gaze, these videos serve—dramatically and graphically—to establish the awareness that the spectator could fall under this gaze, where previously the absence of encounters with the Enemy’s gaze had served to limit the awareness of this as a possibility. Situated in these terms, we can conceive the spectator as experiencing a shock akin to what Sartre (1957, 259–60) identifies with the figure of the voyeur at the moment they realize that they themselves might be being watched—the realization that Miran Božoviþ delineates in a discussion of visual perception and Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954): “What I have been doing to other people they can do to me—as a voyeur I myself can be seen” (1997, 170). In the context of the Enemy having “infiltrated” and “existing within” Western societies: as evident in the September 11 attacks and the subsequent attacks on Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005), these fears can be understood as taking on a practical, logistical reality. These events serve to foreground an awareness that this gaze could indeed be trained upon the spectators, “Right here, where they are,” and so the suffering they witness hostages experiencing might indeed be inflicted upon themselves. (The nature of the identificatory ties between the spectator and the hostages will be explored in further detail below.)

. . . The Destruction of the Body The narrative focus of these videos is upon the hostages’ bodies and, in the sequence of videos that culminate in the hostage’s execution, the destruction of their bodies (fig. 1). As with the presence of the Enemy’s gaze, the making visible of these bodies is emphasized in contrast to the relative invisibility of the wounded, the dying, and the dead body in coverage of conflicts by the Western media, in which the body as it inhabits these states, and in particular the Western body, is typically absent (Taylor 1998, 157–92).

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Figure 1. Video: capture of U.S. hostage Eugene Armstrong, executed by the Tawid and Jihad group in September 2004. As Elaine Scarry documents in her majesterial The Body in Pain, the body is typically elided in writing on the theory and practice of war, though it constitutes the ultimate target and last line of violent conflict, comprising the point toward which the antagonists’ actions are finally directed, against which each side seeks to defend itself (1985, 63–81).6 I want now to turn to Lacan’s ontological schema to illuminate the relationship between questions of seeing and the physicality of the body (and later, death) in these videos. The dimension of the body I want to pay particular attention to is its raw physicality, its status as flesh, muscle and bone, tissue and interior: the dimension of the body that can be located at the level of the Lacanian Real, the raw aspect of experience that exists beyond representation in symbolic terms. I want to place a particular emphasis upon the physicality or materiality of the Real, what might be designated the “hard Real”: a feature that although not directly elaborated upon by Lacan, is not precluded from the conception of the Real that he develops. Indeed, one aspect of Lacan’s definition of the Real is “that which is always in its place” (1966, 25), and “that which always comes back to the same place” (1994, 49), for which the material, physical world and most intimately for the individual subject, the body, provides a primary point of reference. The videos that have attracted the greatest notoriety among Western audiences have culminated in the hostage’s execution, most infamously by decapitation: in the context of the War on Terror, the first to appear showed the execution of Daniel Pearl in Karachi in February 2002; the first to emanate from Iraq depicted the execution of Nick Berg in May 2004. I want to locate these videos in terms of Philip Brophy’s analysis of “Slasher” films and realist horror from the early 1980s, and his argument that these films play not so much upon the audiences’ fear of death, as anxieties around “the destruction of the Body” (1986, 8), although the two cannot be simply separated. To understand this emphasis in regard to the hostage videos, it is necessary to remind oneself

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of death’s invisibility: of how a process that occurs at the level of the Real can be represented in visual terms, that, as Vivian Sobchak has asserted, “death confounds all codes. . . . We do not see death on the screen” (1984, 287)—a problematic that Scarry argues also occurs in the representation of physical pain (1985, 3–11). The emphasis placed on the spectacular destruction of the body that occurs in these videos can be understood as stemming from the desire to overcome or work around the problem of depicting death (and pain) at a visual level. These videos try to do so in terms that will prove profoundly shocking to the spectators, through recourse to an act of violence of the type frequently employed in fictive cinema with the precise intention, Sobchak argues, of making death visible (1984, 287–89). Conceived in these terms, these videos can be understood as attempting to displace death and pain from the Real, where it cannot be seen or represented, to the Imaginary, where it might be.7 Indeed, such is the brutality of what is shown in these videos that the viewer might feel taken as “close” to the hard Real of the body and its destruction as is possible via the Imaginary—as close to a traumatic encounter with the Real, which Lacan designates as “the tuché” (1994, 53), lying at the heart of the intense shock experienced by viewers of these videos (explored in further detail below). In 1931 Walter Benjamin noted that the camera allows us to observe the world in a way and with a level of detail that is not normally otherwise possible (1985, 243–44). As Susan Sontag has asserted, this includes being able to witness acts of suffering with an intimacy that would not otherwise be possible (2002, 168–69), rendering these acts more terrible at a visual level than they would otherwise appear to a spectator who might never encounter them firsthand. We can understand the videos as working with an acute awareness of these capacities of the camera, exploiting them to maximize the impact they register with the spectator. The techniques employed to achieve such an impact are multiple— perhaps the most notable being the focus upon the face of the hostage, in showing hostages pleading for their release and then during their execution. The attention accorded to the face is particularly disturbing in the context of Sontag’s claim that, “with our [Western] dead, there has always been a powerful interdiction against showing the naked face” (2003, 63). The face provides the principal physical features that identify an individual: showing the face of a dead person personalizes the death in a way that renders it more traumatic, with the predominance of the close-up in these videos leading, in the words of Jacques Aumont, “the spectator to extreme psychic proximity or intimacy” (1997, 103), and in so doing providing a vision of the hostages’ suffering that is otherwise likely to remain—at least in terms of graphic verisimilitude—beyond the bounds of the spectator’s imaginative capacities.

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In Dialogue: Abu Ghraib and Exhibitionism The emphasis placed upon the destruction of the body in these videos bears close similarity to the images and footage of U.S. service personnel torturing and humiliating Iraqis detained at Abu Ghraib prison, which appeared across the world’s media in May 2004. The Abu Ghraib images covered acts carried out the preceding autumn, placing their production before the first of the videos to feature Western hostages, which did not appear until April 2004. My concern is not so much with the chronology of the relationship between these videos and images, but rather to suggest how they can be conceptualized in similar terms, and the type of dialogue they establish at this level. With regard to the War on Terror, certain of the hostage videos appear to reference the holding of detainees by the United States at Guantanamo Bay: the hostages seized by Abu Musab alZarqawi’s Tawid and Jihad group were dressed in orange jumpsuits, mimicking those worn by detainees at Camp X-Ray. More specifically, in the context of the occupation of Iraq, the videos repeatedly demanded that prisoners at Abu Ghraib (and at other prisons in Iraq) be released before the hostages would be released. How then can the nature of the Abu Ghraib images be explained and conceptualized? I want to put forward a similar explanation for these images as I outlined for the hostage videos: this baroque body of images of torture and brutalization reflects above all the desire to create a spectacle of humiliation, degradation, and pain. The videos try to depict psychological-emotional conditions that cannot be identified at a visual level with any certainty.8 As with death (and as Scarry has asserted, as with physical pain), the ability with any certainty to see an individual’s experience of these and other “interior” emotional states is highly problematic: How do we see shame or love in another? How can we, with any degree of certainty, be sure when we see these states? As with the hostage videos and their attempt to make death visible, the multiple spectacles of torture and humiliation depicted in these images can be understood as deriving from a desire to make clear at a scopic level—at the Imaginary—that this humiliation and degradation has indeed taken place, and to leave whoever sees these images in no doubt that this had been achieved. Just as the issue of seeing death lies at the heart of the hostage videos, so it figures in the Abu Ghraib images as well, despite it being obscured by the focus upon these images as presenting scenes of torture and abuse. The dead body of Manadel al-Jamadi, a CIA detainee who, while being interrogated on November 4, 2003, died from “blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration,”9 does feature among the Abu Ghraib images. The possibility of other, unacknowledged killings and dead bodies appearing among these images needs also to be raised, particularly in light of the deaths of detainees at other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan.10 In turn, the uncertainties around seeing death in these images emphasizes the doubts around what precisely it is that we see occurring in this collection of photographs: What among the depictions of these strange, grotesque acts is actually taking place (while serving to

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undermine the faith in the Imaginary as providing privileged access to “the Truth”—an issue to which I will return)? We can make a comparison between both the hostage videos and images from Abu Ghraib with the act of exhibitionism as conceived in psychoanalytic terms. At the kernel of the various psychoanalytic accounts of this act lies the individual’s aggressive attempt to assert their power (and specifically their sexual power) in defiance of a sense of powerlessness (Lucas 1990). The same desire and sense of inadequacy can be detected in the hostage videos and Abu Ghraib images. Both emanate from groups who inhabit positions of relative powerlessness. For the hostage-takers, this can above all be seen to stem from their being faced with the might of the U.S. military. For the low-ranking U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib, this entailed being caught up in an occupation that has gone horribly wrong, with these images appearing against the backdrop of the rise of the insurgency in Iraq.11 (And in regard to the psychoanalytic conception of exhibitionism, it should be remembered that images of a sexual nature form a leitmotif of this latter material.) Indeed, the hostage videos and Abu Ghraib images can be situated as establishing a dialogue over who can show—who can put on display—the enemy in a more degraded state. All this indicates that it is not enough for these acts to have taken place: there also exists the need to photograph and disseminate a record of them. This is a development that Sontag (2004), in a discussion of the Abu Ghraib images, locates in terms of an ethical myopia on the part of those U.S. military personnel who took these photographs, borne in part out of the overriding desire to photograph and record every aspect of one’s life, regardless of the ethical context. Her assessment is confirmed, she argues, by the frequency with which these personnel appear in the photos, grinning while carrying out these acts.

The Passive Spectator, Figures of Identification If a type of powerlessness can be identified with both the hostage-takers and the military personnel at Abu Ghraib, the position the hostages assume in the hostage videos is pervaded by a far starker sense of powerlessness, both in terms of their being captured and held. They exist at the mercy of their captors, who decide if and when they will be released and if and when they will die. This powerlessness is mirrored in Western audiences’ experience of watching these videos, generating the awareness that there is little or nothing they can do to intervene and aid these hostages in their plight. The viewers are confronted here not so much with a recognition of the pacifying effect of images that Lacan discusses (1994, 101, 109), an aspect of his work that has been largely overlooked, and that Scarry focuses upon in a discussion of U.S. audiences and the 1991 Gulf War (1993); rather, the spectators are faced with their inability to intervene in or do anything about the scenes they witness.

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This sense of impotence is underpinned and reinforced by another dynamic as well. Since the September 11 attacks, Western publics have repeatedly been reminded of their position on the “front line” of this conflict, via further attacks (as in the Madrid and London bombings), but also through warnings from governments, security services, and the police. In March 2004, for example, the head of the UK Metropolitan Police called an attack upon London “inevitable.”12 Despite this permanent sense of threat, publics in the West have had a limited repertoire of figures with which to identify in their position on the “front line” of this conflict, figures who might aid them in making sense of their own position in the War on Terror. The casualties of the Madrid and London bombings and the September 11 attacks might at first glance seem to present one such type of figure; yet the experience of these groups is orientated toward an event that has already occurred. In contrast, the hostages in these videos present figures who (with the exception of videos showing their execution) await their fate; such waiting accords with the experience of Western publics as they await whatever it is that might happen to them in this conflict. The hostage videos thus provide, in dramatically condensed form, a version of Western publics’ own experience of awaiting the “next attack.” The tie between Western audiences and the hostages that appear in these videos can be configured as confirming, reinforcing, and binding the spectator to an awareness of their own seeming helplessness and powerlessness in the War on Terror. As individuals typically held captive, facing their fate, and dying alone, the hostage presents a figure of identification that can be positioned as contributing to the sense that the threat confronting publics in the War on Terror is one that has, above all, to be faced at an individual level—this accords with Ulrich Beck’s (1997) analysis of the individuated conception of risk more generally that circulates in contemporary Western societies. One outcome of the process Beck outlines is the eroding of the notion of politics as emanating from and directed toward collective concerns. As Tariq Ali argues in Rough Music (2005)—his response to the July 2005 London attacks—the failure of the UK government to pay heed to the scale of opposition against the invasion and occupation of Iraq can be situated as symptomatic of the crisis condition democracy has reached in the United Kingdom. This sense of the futility of expecting the UK or U.S. government to alter its attitude to the occupation of Iraq (and the broader conduct of the War on Terror) can be seen to have percolated down to the hostages themselves. Thus Roy Hallums, a U.S. citizen seized in Iraq in January 2005, stated in one video recording, “I’m not asking for any help from President Bush because I know of his selfishness and unconcern to those who’ve been pushed into this hell-hole.” 13

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Seeing Death: The Dead Christ, The Disasters of War These videos, particularly those showing the execution of hostages, appear to have achieved significant audiences amongst Western publics, who have accessed them via numerous Internet sites. One explanation offered for the demand to view this footage is the desire to understand what is “really” happening in Iraq, reflecting a long-running belief in the capacity of the visual to take one closer to the reality of war and conflict than the written word. Alex Gardner declared in 1866 in his Photographic Sketchbook of the War (the American Civil War was one of the first conflicts to be photographed): “Verbal representations” of places and events “may or may not have the merit of accuracy; but photographic presentations of them will be accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith” (via Huppauf 1995, 97). This is a sentiment echoed by Douglas Hagmann, the director of the Northeast Intelligence Network,14 whose website has provided access to the hostage videos: The American people need to know the tactics of our enemy. . . . All too frequently, we hear the mainstream news talk about a hostage being “beheaded” by “militants,” “insurgents” or other innocuous sounding descriptive terms. . . . These are acts of pure evil and savagery that must not be minimised by such references in the press. (Walker 2004) These attitudes are echoed by a viewer of this footage quoted in a report on videos showing hostages executed on the BBC News website: “Sure, they say on the news that twelve were killed here, five were killed there, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words” (Walker 2004).15 These assertions reveal a profound distrust in language—the Symbolic—to be able to come close to representing death, with the scopic, the visual, the Imaginary venerated as presenting better access to “the Truth.” In terms of Lacan’s ontological schema, this elevating of the Imaginary to provide privileged access to “the Truth” is undermined by its very negation of the Symbolic and the Real (1999, 90–100).16 In different (but related) terms, the problems with this faith in the Imaginary are exposed by an act such as that of Benjamin Vanderford, a U.S. citizen, who produced a fake execution video that found its way onto Islamic militant websites, where it was taken as showing an actual execution.17 I argue that beyond these claims about the desire to “better understand” lies another desire: that of witnessing death and the process of dying in a society in which these acts, though represented in countless fictional instances, (a symptom itself of the desire to witness them), are hidden away and rarely seen. Julia Kristeva’s discussion in Black Sun of Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (fig. 2) raises a series of related concerns about this desire to see death. As Kristeva acknowledges, although death obsesses us and we hold a deep desire to witness it, seeing death remains highly problematic: “Death is not visible in Freud’s unconscious. It is imprinted there, however, . . . by spacings,

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blanks, discontinuities, or destruction of representation” (1989, 138). As she argues, the power of Holbein’s painting lies in presenting such an uncompromising vision of the dead Christ that it appears to bring us close to seeing death. Kristeva’s analysis is part of a study of depression, and the discussion she elaborates around Holbein’s work casts light on the identificatory ties between the hostage and Western publics and the position of the latter in the War on Terror. Kristeva quotes a character’s comment from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot on seeing Holbein’s painting: The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs in one fell blow. (1989, 9) As I argued above, this profound sense of hopelessness can be extended to include the spectator’s own position in the War on Terror when faced with these hostage videos, with the sense of how little one can do to protect oneself, how powerless one is amid this conflict. This hopelessness stands as a leitmotif of public discourse on the conflict.

Figure 2. Hans Holbein the Elder, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521, distemper on paper on limewood panel, Kunstmuseum, Basel; photo: Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Martin Bühler. Situated in these terms, we can understand the hostage videos as allowing the spectator to witness a version of their own deaths, something that is at the same time horrific and which one does not want to see, and yet one is obsessed with seeing. This is an ambiguity that runs throughout viewers’ comments on the videos as recorded on the BBC News website’s report on the videos. It can be traced in the following statement from one such viewer (whose recourse to a moral argument to rationalize this desire is, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, not unusual): I regularly watch the execution videos on the Internet. I don’t enjoy them. I watch them to get a glimpse of reality. I try to imagine myself in his position, to imagine his fear, so I can understand that killing is wrong. (Walker, 2004)

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Holbein’s The Dead Christ, despite showing a body that has been subject to profound suffering, still however presents us with a body that is venerated. As such it stands in sharp contrast to the hostages’ bodies, which do not possess this sanctity of status. In fact, the hostages’ bodies resonate much more closely with another canonical depiction of the suffering of the human body in Western art: Goya’s later sketches and drawings, produced against the backdrop of Spain’s experience of the Napoleonic Wars. Etching number 37 of The Disasters of War series, titled “This is worse” (ca. 1812–1815), portrays a mutilated figure based (as Victor Stoichita and Anna Marie Coderch suggest in their study of Goya’s later works) upon The Belvedere Torso, but with its anus pierced on the branch of a tree. Goya can thus be said to offer us a vision of the classical body subject to what Stoichita and Coderch term “a rhetoric of degradation and denigration” (1999, 95). This is the version of the body encountered in the hostage videos, a version that confronts the spectator with a vision of the body—so far removed from the template of the classical body—in this ruptured and brutalized state. In his Sketchbook Journal Goya offers another image titled “We cannot look at this” (fig. 3), which depicts the figure of an old man bound and hanging upside down from an instrument of

Figure 3. Francisco Goya, “We cannot look at this,” Drawing C101 in Sketchbook Journal, 1814–1824, India ink wash on paper, Museo del Prado, Madrid. torture. As Stoichita and Coderch suggest in commenting on this sketch, “the unbearable nature of the image is heightened by the fact that the torture victim . . . is still imploring the heavens. But . . . [he] finds no salvation” (1999, 90). This is an assessment that accords closely with the position inhabited by the hostages who were executed, as we now know. Yet it can also be extended to include Western publics more generally, to invoke the absence of “salvation” they experience in their position on the front line of the War on Terror. They are uncertain of when and where the next attack might take place; they seemingly are little able to alter the vulnerability of their position in this conflict.

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Philoctetes: The Sufferer as Burden, the Corpse In The Body in Pain, Scarry makes a number of references to Philoctetes. In Sophocles’ play Philoctetes’ response to his physical suffering and the unease this created among his fellow Greeks as they lay siege to Troy—whose camp “was never free of his frantic wailing” (1964, 163)—saw him banished to a deserted island.18 I close this chapter by raising the question of how the suffering depicted in these videos can be configured as placing the hostages in a similar position to Philoctetes. For Western governments, and particularly those that have collaborated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, these videos serve as an unwelcome reminder of the suffering brought about by their actions, not only to the people of Iraq but also to their own nationals. These videos have served as a catalyst to the doubts expressed by a significant proportion of Western publics about the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and the broader conduct of the War on Terror). As I have already suggested, the videos place a burden upon Western audiences, making them vividly aware of the vulnerability of their position in the War on Terror—a burden that can be read in the comments of two different viewers of these videos: Viewer 1: I watched one of these videos out of curiosity. You hear time and time again on the news that someone has been beheaded. I couldn’t believe that people can be so brutal so curiosity got the better of me, I wish it hadn’t! I was close to being sick and the images are still clear in my head today, time and time again I think about what the poor man went through and how the family have to deal with knowing a loved one died in such a horrific way, it does get me upset. Viewer 2: I had no intention of seeing this inhumane act of murder. I did watch it firstly out of curiosity, and secondly because it was easily available. On this note—I didn’t think I would actually see the graphic detail that I did. I advise people not to watch this. It is very distressing and I wish I hadn’t now. (Walker 2004) Configuring the hostages as constituting a burden to publics in the West offers an alternative means of comprehending the typical refusal of broadcasters, particularly in the United States and the UK, to show the hostage videos in any level of detail (let alone the hostages’ execution). The standard explanation given for this refusal is that the footage is “too distressing,” a statement that can be translated (particularly in light of the pressure placed upon broadcasters in these countries to support their government’s actions) in terms of the burden the viewer would feel from viewing this footage as being likely to intensify doubts about the invasion of Iraq—and again by extension the wider War on Terror. The question of the seen and the unseen returns us to the physicality of the body and its status at the level of the hard Real. Reaching from the War on Terror

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(a conflict of the present) back to Western culture’s “first” conflict (the siege of Troy) might at first glance seem to be a great distance, but the target of each is the same: the destruction of the body. Philoctetes, Holbein, Goya’s work, and the hostage videos and images from Abu Ghraib appear at first glance to present us with very different depictions of suffering, the body in pain, tortured, being killed, and in death. Yet each invokes a constant referent that stands beyond the bounds of representation at the Imaginary or the Symbolic: the hard Real of the body, and in its dead form, the corpse. Returning again to Lacan’s conception of the Real as “that which is always in its place” (1966, 25) and “which always comes back to the same place” (1994, 49), the hard Real of the body-corpse serves as a reminder that across time and space, across history and locale, the act of war results in the brutalization of bodies and the production of corpses. The corpse presents the final object of this chapter, the final material presence of combat, which cares not for how it is represented and depicted, but constitutes the incontrovertible, detritus of war.

Works Cited Ali, T. 2005. Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror. London: Verso. Asser, Martin. 2006. “Abduction: Scourge of Iraqi Unrest.” BBC News, March 30. Aumont, Jacques. 1997. The Image. London: British Film Institute. BBC News. 2006. “Iraq Hostage Believes Ransom Paid.” March 31. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ midle_east/4864650.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). BBC News. 2004. “London Terror Attack ‘Inevitable.’” March 16. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ uk_news/politics/3515312.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). Beck, U. 1997. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Benjamin, Mark, and Michael Scherer. 2006. “The Pentagon’s Ghost Investigation.” Salon.com. May 17, http://salon.com/news/feature/2006/05/17/ghost_detainees/ (accessed August 5, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. 1985. “A Small History of Photography.” In One-Way Street and Other Writings, 240–57. Translated by E. Jephcott and K. Shorter. London: Verso. Božoviþ, Miran. 1997. “The Man behind His Own Retina.” In Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), 161–77. Edited by S. Žižek. London: Verso. Brophy, Philip. 1986. “Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.” Screen 27, no. 1:2–13. Corea, Gordon. 2005. “Iraq’s Danger for Foreigners.” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ uk_news/4479038.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). Follman, Mark and Clark-Flory, Tracy. “Prosecutions and Convictions—The Abu Ghraib Files.” Salaon.com. http://www.salon.com/news/abu-ghraib/2006/03/14/prosecutions_convictions/ index.html (accessed August 5, 2007). Huppauf, B. 1995. “Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War and Destruction.” In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, 94–124. Edited by L. Devereaux and R. Hillman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Écrits. Paris: Seuil. ———. [French, 1973] 1994. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Reading Seminar 11. London: Penguin.

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———. [French, 1972–73] 1999. On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Seminar of Jacques Lacan 20. New York: Norton. Lucas, C. 1990. “Exhibitionism.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 7, no. 1:15–24. McCarthy, Rory. 2005. “Video Plea by US Man Kidnapped in Iraq.” Gaurdian Unlimited. January 26, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1398693, 00.html (accessed August 5, 1007). Salon.com. “The Abu Ghraib Files.” 2006. http:www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/ introduction/ (accessed August 5, 2007). Sartre, Jean-Paul. [French, 1943] 1957. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by H. E. Barnes. London: Methuen. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993. “Watching and Authorizing the Gulf War.” In Media Spectacles, 57–73. Edited by M. Garber, J. Matlock, and R. Walkowitz. Routledge: London. Sobchak, Vivian. 1984. “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 4:283–300. Sontag, Susan. 2002. On Photography. London: Penguin. ———. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2004. “What Have We Done?” The Guardian, G2 section, May 24, 2–4. Guardian Unlimited, http://www.serendipity.li/iraqwar/susan_sontag_what_have_we_done.htm (accessed August 1, 2007). Sophocles. [ca. 409 BCE] 1964. Philoctetes. In Electra and Other Plays, 163–212. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Steiner, G. 1969. “The Retreat from the Word.” In Language and Silence, 31–56. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stoichita, V., and A. M. Coderch. 1999. Goya: The Last Carnival. London: Reaktion. Spierenburg, Pieter. 1984. The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, John. 1998. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: New York University Press. Walker, Duncan. “Who Watches Murder Videos?” BBC News, October 12, 2004, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3733996.stm (accessed August 1, 2007). Walsh, Joan. 2006. “The Abu Ghraib Files: Introduction.” Salon.com, http:www.salon.com/news/ abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction (accessed August 7, 2007). Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. ———. 2005. “Against Human Rights?” New Left Review 34:115–31.

Notes 1. While the vast majority of these videos have emanated from Iraq, since the invasion of the country in the spring of 2003, videos of hostages seized in Pakistan (in the case of the execution of the U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi in February 2002), Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Gaza have also appeared. (The reference to Gaza is specifically to the non-Israeli hostages whose kidnappers have cited the withdrawal of the United States and its allies from the Middle East as a precondition for the hostages’ release.) Since the invasion of Iraq to the time of writing (December 2006), over 280 foreign nationals have been seized there (along with thousands of Iraqis), of which about 50 have been killed, 140 were released or managed to escape, and the whereabouts of the remaining 90 unknown. See “Abduction: Scourge of Iraqi Unrest,” Martin Asser, BBC News, March 30, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4838018.stm (accessed August 5, 2007).

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2. Gordon Corera, “Iraq’s Danger for Foreigners,” November 28, 2005, BBC News, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4479038.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). I hesitate to identify Zawahiri’s declaration as primarily responsible for the decline of these videos since other factors, such as the reduction in foreign workers in Iraq—in part due to the numbers kidnapped—are likely to have also contributed to this. 3. “Iraq Hostage Believes Ransom paid,” BBC News, March 31, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ middle_east/4864650.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). 4. This category (“publics in the West”) is necessarily somewhat schematic given the cosmopolitanism of Western societies and the differing standpoints of different ethnoreligious groups on the War on Terror. While bearing this caveat in mind, the term maintains analytical salience in designating the majority of those that constitute these publics. 5. A major exception is during periods of occupation in World War II, where an awareness of the Enemy’s gaze constituted a defining experience of being occupied. 6. It might be contended that the material world, including buildings and productive facilities, constitutes as significant a target, such as the World Trade Center. This is to ignore the fact that the material world is the product of human labor and relies upon this (bodily) labor to sustain it. 7. Žižek identifies a similar process—the displacement of a “passion for the Real” in favor of the creation of “theatrical spectacle”—as a key feature of the politics of the twentieth century (2002, 9). The desire to make death visible can also be identified in the case of the regimes that have sought to demonstrate their power through public executions, as surveyed by Peter Spierenburg in his study of early modern Europe (1984, 43–80). 8. The current affairs magazine site Salon.com has presented a comprehensive archive of these images and footage, supported by a series of essays titled “The Abu Ghraib Files,” http:// www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/ (accessed August 5, 2007). 9. Mark Benjamin and Michael Scherer, “The Pentagon’s Ghost Investigation,” Salon.com, May 17, 2006, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/05/17/ghost_detainees/ (accessed August 5, 2007). 10. Mark Follman and Tracy Clark-Flory, “Prosecutions and Convictions—The Abu Ghraib Files,” Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/prosecutions_convictions/ index.html (accessed August 5, 2007). 11. Joan Walsh, “The Abu Ghraib Files: Introduction,” Salon.com, http: www.salon.com/news/ abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction (accessed August 7, 2007). 12. “London Terror Attack ‘Inevitable,’” BBC News, March 16, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ uk_news/politics/3515312.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 (2004) includes a sequence on how, since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. public has repeatedly been reminded of its vulnerability to attack. 13. Rory McCarthy, “Video Plea by US man Kidnapped in Iraq,” Guardian Unlimited, January 26, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763, 1398693,00.html (accessed August 5, 2007). Yet, the context in which this statement was uttered must be borne in mind. 14. The Northeast Intelligence Network is an independent body whose website is subtitled Terrorism News, Information & Analysis, http://www.homlandsecurityus.com. 15. The report included a request for comments by those who had viewed the execution videos, which were later added to the report. 16. In these comments we can also trace George Steiner’s (1969) argument about the ongoing devaluation of the Symbolic as a means of representing the world. 17. “FBI Quiz Execution Video Hoaxer,” August 8, 2004, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ middle_east/3545822.stm (accessed August 5, 2007). 18. In Sophocles’ play, the version of Philoctetes’ story that Scarry cites, Philoctetes’ suffering is caused by his being bitten in the foot by a snake in the temple of Chryse.

Afterword Joanna Bourke

Ameen Sa’eed Al-Sheikh was arrested on 7 October 2003 and taken to the now infamous Baghdad Correctional Facility (Abu Ghraib). “Do you believe in anything?” an American interrogator asked. “I believe in Allah,” Al-Sheikh replied, and the interrogator responded: “But I believe in torture and I will torture you” (Danner 2005, 219). This was not xenophobia or misogyny, not even misanthropy, but the attempted destruction of an individual; rendering that being “nonhuman” through infliction of pain and through systematic, senseless exposure of the body. The threshold of humanity has become the torture chamber. We might wonder whether Abu Ghraib offers an unexpected twist to Jean Baudrillard’s infamous quip about the first Gulf War: the war never happened; the torturers never left Abu Ghraib. There is terror inscribed on the body at war. From the trench horror of the film Deathwatch (2002), to the televised sadomasochism of 24, to rap lyrics exposing the disposability of Black Americans in combat zones at home and abroad, our screens are saturated with visions of mutilated, agonized, and contorted flesh. In the current War on Terror, there is no glory, no hypnotic beating of drums, no braying horses, no clashing of sword against sword. Instead, combat has become mechanical slaughter, a silent scream. Bodies are both invisible and omnipresent. Even the machine is corporeal: guns are “arms” and radar is “eyes.” “Disappeared” bodies are spoken about relentlessly—the bodies ushered away in the dead of night in flights of rendition, the stateless refugees, the hidden hostages holed up somewhere in Gaza City or Baghdad. In the contemporary crisis, this emphasis on the body is not (as some critics may wish to insist) a deviation from tough considerations of indomitable state power and seemingly unassailable military muscle. In the current global conflict, where discrepancies of power between protagonists are so disproportionate as to render systems of law (national or international) hollow, and where individuals from forty different nations can languish in the liminal space of Guantanamo Bay, politics operates on one level—the corporeal. The war body becomes the site of articulation of knowledge and power. Passionately, and with occasional outbursts of anger, this volume has provided us with a series of detailed expositions on the visuality of war and terrorism since 9/11. Ideologically, too, there is a clear focus. All the authors lament our membership in the “Coalition of the Willing.” They remind us of the dangers of 266

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any abstract notion of corporeality. In the hands of the oppressors, the war body becomes undifferentiated flesh—stripped of individuality, even humanity. However, terror is always local. To universalise it is to remove the specifics of an individual’s history; it is to leave the infliction of suffering to the realm of moral edification. The authors also insist that terror exists within time (history) and place (geography). Unlike most contemporary war films in which the psychological states and private motivations of the chief characters trump any political context, this book doesn’t shy away from mentioning our repressed past—our colonial wars, the ways our politics engendered the refugees or returnees, and our long historical role in creating the crises in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Gender takes its rightful place: the authors are sensitive to the hyper-masculinity of armed conflict. When women appear, they are hostages, accorded attention to the extent to which they adhere to a rigorously feminine script. But the male body on screen is not a powerful one. For many heterosexual men, it is a hard detail to accept, particularly in wartime when the military encourages the notion of the invulnerable male body, the “warrior” as “cold steel.” However, in war, the male body is violable, penetrable. The tortured body transcends “straight” gendered inscriptions. Nevertheless, where might the cultural telling of “War Bodies on Screens” go? It is important to draw attention to the use of words such as “our” and “we”— used both in this afterword and throughout the volume. For all the talk of globalization, the analyses in this book are predominantly drawn from the Anglo-American world. Although many of the philosophers discussed are European (when will Western thinkers start exploring the works of distinguished Islamic philosophers?), the war-screens are all explored through an Anglo-American lens. Such a focus profoundly affects our vision of the screen body. After all, I write this afterword in Greece where images of men, women, and children wounded or killed by the “Coalition of the Willing” are ubiquitous, not censored, as they are in the United States and Britain. In a variety of ways, many of the authors of chapters in this book have been transfixed by a kind of secularised messianic vision, in which the Rapture has already been actualized with the instantaneous pulverization of those in the Twin Towers and the disappearance of those in Guantanamo Bay and other sites of torture. It is dangerous to assume that, like prayer (another “talking cure”), these narratives might enable some form of purification from our irrepressible violent urges. There is always the risk that, in the end, torture becomes about “us.” Finally, although we are told that the feelings (or “screen-sensing,” as one author nicely put it) may encourage us to be “stung into action,” we are never given a hint how. Indeed, the emphasis on feelings may in itself be seen as dodging politics, even the bio-politics that some authors speak elegantly about. Is there a way out of the apocalyptic gloom permeating contemporary thought? As the legal philosopher Costas Douzinas rhetorically asks: can we find a language for

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that rebelliousness and dignity that belongs to each “unique, singular person who has place and time, gender and history, needs and desires”(2002, 465)?

Works Cited Danna, Mark. 2005. Torture and Truth: America, Abu Graib and the War on Terror. London: Granta Douzinas, Costas. 2002. “The end(s) of human rights” in Melbourne University Law Review, 26.2.

Index

Aubenas, Florence, 243–245 aura, experience of, 38 Azoulay, Ariella, 234

absent bodies, 24–26 Abu Ghraib prison, 151, 232, 256–257 Activision, 45 Adams, Eddie, 252 Adams, Gerry, 223 “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People” (speech), 23–24 African American Muslims, 182–183 African Americans, 182–197 Aherne, Bertie, 224 Al Qaeda, 150 al-Dulaimi, Saadoun, 46 Algerian War, 89–90 Ali, Tariq, 258 Alias (television series), 32 alien invasion in mass media, 29–30 Alpert, John, 67 American Medical Association, 68 Andrews, Naveen, 31–32 Angels from Hell (film), 82–83, 128 Angry Breed, The (film), 82–83 Anthony Swofford (fictional character), 136–138 antiwar movement, 141 Apocalypse Now (film), 102–103, 136 Arafat, Yassar, 223 Armstrong, Eugene, 222–235 Ashanti (singer), 190 Associated Press Television News (APTN), 166 associative network, 41–42, 43, 46 atavism, myth of, 158 Attiyah, Ghassan, 171

Bachelard, Gaston, 50–51 Baghdad ER (documentary), 66–77 Baldwin, Adam, 105 Battle of the Somme, 65–66 Baudrillard, Jean, 25, 31–33, 121, 135, 143–144 BBC News/Radio, 170, 218, 259 Beamer, Todd, 23 Beck, Ulrich, 226, 258 Bell, Tobin, 207 Belvedere Torso, The (statue), 261 Benjamin, Walter, 37–39, 255 Berkeley, Xander, 205 Berlusconi, Silvio, 239–240 Bigle, Paul, 223–224 Bigley, Kenneth, 222–235 Bin Laden, Osama, 149 Black Dialogue (album), 187 black Islam, 182 Black, Joel, 230 Black Panther Party (BPP), 189–190 Black Sun, 259 Blair, Tony, 223 blind man’s cane, description of, 43 body image, 39–40 Bond, Brian, 122 Bozovic, Miran, 254 Brady, Andrea, 234–235 Bremner, Juliet, 177 Brokaw, Tom, 106 Brophy, Philip, 254–255 Brothaz (song), 195 269

270 Brown, Ben, 169 Buck-Morss, Susan, 38 Burns, Ed, 110 Bush, George W., 23–24, 52 Butler, Judith, 228–229 cable news, 166–168 Call of Duty 3 (video game), 45 Campbell, Jan, 40 Campillo, Robin, 86–87, 94–95 carnal screen, 33 carnal thoughts, 41 Cartesian dualism, 40 Caruth, Cathy, 88 Casino Royale (film), 32 Casualties of War (film), 128 categorizations, 40 CBS Evening News, 140 central assemblies, 42 Chalabi, Ahmed, 171 Charlie Shakespeare (fictional character), 122–127 Chirac, Jacques, 90 Cho, Seung-hui, 26–29 Chomsky, Noam, 23, 64 chora, 42–43 cinema, 37–39 Clarke, Sarah, 206 Clooney, George, 199 CNN Presents: Combat Hospital (documentary), 76–77 Coderch, Anna Marie, 261 collateral damage, 56, 144 conceptualizations, 40 Corliss, Richard, 199, 205 Couldry, Nick, 234 Courage Under Fire (film), 121 Cowart, Monica, 40 Creed, Barbara, 126 Critical Hour (television series), 67 Cruise, Tom, 29 Crying Game, The (film), 157 Cultivation Theory, 64–65, 75 Cutter’s Way (film), 128

Index

Damon, Matt, 112–113 Darby, Joseph, 232 Davis, Vernon E., 218 death, collective confrontation of, 234 Death Row Records, 193 declinism, 86 deconstructive theory, 169 Deer Hunter, The (film), 102–103, 136 Denby, David, 108 Dershowitz, Alan, 204 Devil’s Own, The (film), 155 Diesel, Vin, 109 disappearance of bodies, 30–33 Disasters of War, The (drawings), 261 Dog Soldier (film), 120 Doherty, Thomas, 137 Dr. Who (television series), 204 Dukakis, Michael, 58 echo and memory, theory of, 88 Eco, Umberto, 60 ecological perception, 43 Edge, The (film), 82–83 Edwards, Jonathan, 65 Elsaesser, Thomas, 32 embedded journalists, 169–170 embodied recognition, 40–42 embodied responses, 42–43 Emergency Rations (album), 187, 195 Emerson, Michael, 31–32 England, Lynde, 208, 211 Erfahrung, 38, 46 Erlebnis, 38, 46 Ethiopia, Thou Land of Our Fathers (anthem), 188 ethnicity, 28 “Every Man for Himself” (Lost episode), 31–32 executions in mass media, 230–231

Index

factualized war bodies, 22–23 Fahrenheit 9/11 (film), 186–187, 211 Faulkner, Lisa, 204 Felix, Antonia, 184 50 Cent (rap musician), 193 film, as skin, 38–39 flag-draped coffins, 71–72 Forgas, Joseph P., 41 Fox, Laurence, 123 Fox News, 144 Foxx, Jamie, 138 Frain, James, 207 Free Iraqi Forces, 171 Freud, Sigmund, 124–125 Full Metal Jacket (film), 104–106, 137–138 funeral ceremonies, media coverage of, 72 Gabler, Neil, 103 Gaddafi, Muammar, 223 Gardner, Alex, 259 Garvey, Marcus, 188 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 185 gaze of enemy, 252–253 Gehl, Robert, 211 Gerbner, George, 64 Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (film), 193 ghost prisoners, 31 Giardina, Anthony, 106 Gibson, James, 40–41 Gil, José, 59–60 Gilroy, Peter, 188 Go Public campaign, 218 God, transcendental body of, 25 Godfather (film), 53–54 Goldberg, Adam, 107 Gordon, Daniel, 93 Gornel, Elana, 157 Goya, Francisco, 261 gravedigger, definition in Hamlet, 51–52 Gray, John, 227 Grease (film), 190

271 Green Beret, The (film), 81–82 grief and war, 234–235 Guantanamo Bay detention centers, 208–209 Guardian (newspaper), 228, 231–232 Gulf War films, 121 Gulf War syndrome, 122–127 Gutierrez, Chris, 149–150 Haeberle, Ron, 252 Hagmann, Douglas, 259 Hallum, Roy, 258 Hamlet, 51 Hanks, Tom, 108 Hansen, Miriam, 37–39 haptic visuality, 41 Harper’s (magazine), 227 Harris, Robert Alton, 230–231 Hassard, John, 51 Hayles, Katherine, 40, 42 Haysbert, Denis, 201 Heavy Artillery (song), 191–192 Henry V, 56 Henry V (film), 55–59 Hensley, Jack, 222–235 Hernandez, Jay, 209 Hill, John, 158 hip-hop culture, 190–195 Hodgdon, Barbara, 54 Hodgkin, John, 106 Holliday, Ruth, 51 Home Box Office (HBO), 67 hostage videos, 227–232 Abu Ghraib prison, 256–257 and art, 259–263 and destruction of war body, 253–255 from enemy’s gaze, 252–253 executions in, 253–255 exhibitionism in, 256–257 passive spectators of, 257–258 power of, 251–263 as reminder of sufferings, 262–263

272

Index

and understanding of death, 259–261 in war on terror, 251–263 of women, 243–245 hostages, 217–263 death of, 233–234 execution of, 223, 253–255 identification with, 257–258 kidnapping of, 222–235 reporters as, 217–219 video images of, 223, 227–232, 251–263 women as, 239–247 Hostel (film), 32, 208–209 Howard, George, 24 Human Resources (film), 92 Hurricane Katrina, 193–194 Hussein, Saddam, execution of, 17–18 Hynes, Samuel, 122

Jarhead (film), 134–144 Jeffords, Susan, 138 Johnson, Alan, 217–219 Jonson, Boris, 234 journalists, 141–142 judicial symbols, 24 jus ad bellum, 55–59

improvised explosive devices (IEDs), 73–74 Independent (newspaper), 231–232 information bomb, 25 innervation, 38–39 Internet, 44 Invasion (television series), 30 Iraq Body Count, 46 Iraq war in mass media, 42–43 documentaries, 67–77 news constructions, 166–169 news reports, 140–141 photographs, 44 theories, 64–66 video footage, 143–144 Islamist terrorists, 182 ITV News Channel, 172 Itzin, Gregory, 201 Ivie, Robert, 163

Lacan, Jacques, 137 Lancet, The, 124 Lane, Anthony, 50–51 LeFebvre, Henri, 60 LeShan, Lawrence, 65 Lesser, Wendy, 230–231 Libération (newspaper), 243–245 Liverpool Echo (newspaper), 231, 233 living dead in film, 87–89 London bombing, 258 Looking for Richard (film), 54 Lost (television series), 30–31

Ja Rule (rap musician), 190–191 Jaish al-Islam, 217 Janis, Petr, 209

Kaldor, Mary, 240–241 Kamiya, Gary, 108 Katrina (hurricane), 193–194 Keating, Timothy, 169 Kelly, Dean Lennox, 122 Kermode, Mark, 120 Khan, Muhammed Siddique, 36 kidnapped body, 222–235 Kirkland, Richard, 160 Knox, Sara, 230 Kristeva, Julia, 183, 259–260 Kubrick, Stanley, 104–106

Macdonald, Myra, 246 MacMaster, Neil, 204 Madrid bombing, 258 March for Justice (website), 44 Marks, Laura, 32, 38, 39 Massacre, The (album), 193 Maytag Corp., 72 McLoone, Martin, 158 media culture, 37–38

Index

273

medical emergency, as reality television, 67–71 Memorial Day (song), 187, 191 Memory Hole, The (website), 44 Mendes, Sam, 136 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 43, 60 Mesmerize (song), 190–191 Michael Collins (film), 156–162 Michael Corleone (fictional character), 53–55 Mike Hammer (fictional character), 205 mimetic innervation, 38–39 Mirror (newspaper), 231 missing in acton (MIA), 218 Mo’ Mega (album), 187 Möbius strip, 43 modern warfare, 25 Modine, Matthew, 104 Moore, Michael, 186–187 Motor Psycho (film), 82–83 mourning, 233–235 Mr. Lif (rap musician), 187, 191–192 Muslim women, 245–246 Myers, Charles S., 124 Mythic Model, 65, 75 mythic reality, of war, 65, 75

news reports, 150–151 binary oppositions in, 166–169 dehumanization of, 143–144 Derridean concepts of trace in, 167–168 live transmissions of, 168 ordinary citizens in, 225–226 scriptedness of, 169–172 specificity of, 168 teletechnologies in, 167–168 Newton, Huey, 189 Night of the Living Dead (film), 26–29 Nintendo, 45 Nora, Pierre, 88 Northeast Intelligence Network (web site), 259 NowThatsFuckedUp.com (website), 44

National Federation of War Veterans of North Africa (FNACA), 96 national identity and war, 86–99 National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, 218 Nelson, John Allen, 206 New England Journal of Medicine, The, 44 New York Herald Tribune, 82 New York Magazine, 108 New York Times, The, 44 New Yorker (magazine), 232 Newman, Kim, 208

Pace, Peter, 74 Pacino, Al, 53–55 Pari, Simona, 240–243 Passion of the Christ, The (film), 211 past/present paradox, 26 Pear, Daniel, 141–142 perception, 40–41 performance, 50–61 Philoctetes (play), 262 photographs of war, 44, 72–73 Pilkington, Edward, 228 Platoon (film), 102–103, 128, 134 poetic image, 51 Poniewozik, Janie, 208 Portman, Natalie, 199

O’Conor, Hugh, 123 ogrish.com (website), 44 Omar, Rageh, 172 O’Neill, Matthew, 67 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 166–178. See also Iraq war in mass media outlaw video testimonies, 26 Owen, Wilfred, 75

274 posthuman collectivity, 42 post-traumatic aphasia, 88 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 122, 127–131 post-Vietnam syndrome, 128 Powell, Colin, 183–186 prisoner abuse, in television, 31–32 prisoners of war (POWs), 218 Private Ryan (fictional character), 112–113 Propaganda Model, 64–65, 75 Quinn, Francesco, 206 Rabinowitz, Dorothy, 106–107 RAI (television station), 240 Rambo: First Blood (film), 128 Rayner, Alice, 51–52 realist war bodies, 23 reality television, medical emergency as, 67–71 Rear Window (film), 253 reporters, 141–142. See also Iraq war in mass media embedded, 166–169 as hostages, 217–219 scripted news by, 170–172 unscripted presence/absence of, 172–178 Reuters Television, 166 Rhys, Matthew, 123 Ribisi, Giovanni, 108 Rice, Condoleezza, 183–186 Richard III (film), 54 Ricoeur, Paul, 97–98 Robbins, Tim, 29 Route Irish, 67 Rumsfeld, Donald, 60, 73–74, 194 Ryan, Meg, 121 Saarinen, Esa, 39, 46 sadomasochism in television, 199–213 Salon.com (website), 232

Index

Sarsgaard, Peter, 138 Saving Private Ryan (film), 102–117 Saw (film), 32 Saw 2 (film), 207 Scarry, Elaine, 229, 255, 262 Schulze, Paul, 205 science fiction films, 29–30 screen, 36–47 cinema, 37–39 embodied recognition, 39–40 embodied responses, 42–43 film as skin metaphor, 39–40 war bodies on, 22–34 war body as, 37–47 Searle, Bobby, 189 Sensory Model, 75 sensory reality, of war, 65, 75 September 11, 2001 attacks, 33–34 Serkis, Andy, 123 Sgrena, Giuliana, 243–245 Sheehan, Cindy, 141 shell shock in films, 122 shield, as judicial symbol, 24 shock-and-awe strategy, 228–229 Siddig, Alexander, 199 Siegel, Don, 205 Silicio, Tami, 72 Simba (film), 94 Sketchbook Journal, 261 Skibbereen (song), 163 skin, film as, 39–40 Smart, Jean, 201 Smith, Kiki, 39 Snoop Dogg (rap musician), 193 Sobchack, Vivian, 41 soldier, body of, 81–144. and gender of vulnerability, 102–117 and horror of trench warfare, 120–131 invisibility of, 134–144 and national identity, 86–99 war veterans, 81–83 Solnit, Rebecca, 46

Index

“Some Reflections of a Soldier” (essay), 65 Sontag, Susan, 217, 255 space of body, 59–61 Speer, Tate, 123 Spielberg, Stephen, 29 Spillane, Mickey, 205 Spooks (television series), 204 stampede, 46 Stoichita, Victor, 261 Stora, Benjamin, 90–91 Straw, Jack, 223 Strong, Mark, 199 suicide bombers, 36 Sunday Mirror (newspaper), 233 Surface (television series), 30 Sutherland, Kiefer, 199–200 Sylwester, Robert, 44 Syriana (film), 199 Tate, Trudi, 122 Tawney, Richard Henry, 65–66 Taxi Driver (film), 26–29 Taylor, Mark, 39, 46 “Temporal Distance and Death History” (essay), 97 terrorism, 25 definition of, 151 in films, 154–163 function of, 45–46 and marginality of African Americans, 182–196 video images of, 227–232 Terrorist, The (film), 156–162 terrorists, 166–169 cells, 150 definition of, 149–151 delegitimization of, 159–160 depiction in television series, 199–213 deviancy of, 158–159 in narrative fiction films, 154–163 news coverage of, 165–179

275 Thatcher, Margaret, 58 Thelen, Esther, 40 They Came Back (film), 87–99 Thin Red Line, The (film), 106 “This Is Not a Movie” (essay), 50 Three Kings (film), 121 Threshold (television series), 30 Time Out (film), 92 Tomkins, Silvan, 45 Tony Montana (fictional character), 53–55 Torretta, Simona, 240–243 “Torture: From Algiers to Abu Ghraib” (essay), 204 torture in mass media, 31–33, 151, 208–210 Trafalgar Square, 217 Trauma: Life in the ER (television series), 67–71 trench warfare, 120–131 True Lies (film), 155–156, 158 24 (television series), 199–213 concept of ritual in, 204 early episodes of, 201 narratives in, 202 vectorization in, 203–204 Ulmer, Greg, 42 Under Mars (website), 44 United Airlines Flight 93, 150 United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 188–189 USS Abraham Lincoln (ship), 52, 55 V for Vendetta (film), 199 Vanderford, Benjamin, 259 veil, as symbol of Eastern women, 246 video games, 45 videos, 26–29, 251–263 Vietnam veterans in mass media, 82–83, 218

276

Vietnam War films, 103–106, 128, 134–135, 218 Virginia Tech University massacre, 26–29 Virilio, Paul, 25 virtualization of war, 135 visual perception, 40–41 vulnerability, gender of, 102–107 Wahlberg, Donnie, 207 Walther, Bo Kampmann, 203 war footage, 72–73, 143–144 War of the Worlds (film), 29–30 war on terror, 24–25 and African Americans, 182–197 body of terrorist in, 149–150 hostage videos in, 251–263 war trauma, 82, 120–131 warrior-male in movies, 26

Index

Weaving, Hugo, 199 West, Kanye, 193–194 Whitten, Leslie H., 82 Wii (gaming system), 45 Willis, Collin, 233 Willouet-Maricondi, P., 135 Without a Trace (television series), 32 woman hostage, 239–247. See also hostages; Wood, Robin, 126 World Service, 218 World War I in films, 120–131 World War II in films, 102–117 Xbox 360 (gaming console), 45 YouTube (website), 17 zombies in films, 90–97