Alienation, Insecurity, and Violence in Post-2008 Hollywood War Cinema

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A War Over Uncertain Privileges: Alienation, Insecurity, and Violence in Post-2008

Hollywood War Cinema

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Paul D. Peters

August 2020

This thesis titled

A War Over Uncertain Privileges: Alienation, Insecurity, and Violence in Post-2008

Hollywood War Cinema

PAUL D. PETERS

has been approved for

the Film Division

and the College of Fine Arts by

Ofer Eliaz

Assistant Professor of Film Studies

Matthew R. Shaftel

Dean, College of Fine Arts 3

Abstract

PETERS, PAUL D., M.A., August 2020, Film Studies

A War Over Uncertain Privileges: Alienation, Insecurity, and Violence in Post-2008

Hollywood War Cinema

Director of Thesis: Ofer Eliaz

This Master’s thesis is a structural analysis of the new semantic and syntactic patterns in the Hollywood war genre after 2008 and how its nearly exclusive depiction of straight white working-class and middle-class male heroes reflects social, political, and economic anxieties among Americans who share a similar background. The war genre has found renewed critical and financial success starting with The Hurt Locker through the trends that depict a soldier protagonist as estranged from his domestic lifestyle before leaving for war, editing producing an alienating experience for audiences, and how violence could potentially confront and resolve a series of perceived anxieties among audience members.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my family, friends, and colleagues for their constant support throughout this project and my degree. I am also indebted to my committee’s and department’s wisdom, patience, and commitment to helping me throughout my research, writing, and revising. This work is a product of all of my past and present education.

Thank you to anyone who sat down to watch any of these movies with me, read my drafts, and talk about my perspectives.

Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Acknowledgments...... 4 Introduction ...... 6 Chapter 1 The Estranged Soldier Protagonist: ...... 23 How New Soldier Protagonists Defy Straight White Men’s Expected Domestic Roles .. 23 Structural Changes in the History of the War Genre ...... 26 The Biggest Transformation in the War Film? ...... 31 2008 and a Hunt for Fulfillment in the Hollywood War Film ...... 35 Confronting Transforming Levels of Opportunity and Privilege ...... 44 Chapter 2 Alienating the Movie-Going Experience: ...... 50 How Fragmented and Ambiguous Editing Instills Audience Anxiety ...... 50 I Can See You, Can You See Me? ...... 55 Fragmenting the Viewer’s Experience...... 72 Visual Identification in Hollywood War Cinema ...... 82 Chapter 3 Mutilating the Perceived Threat: ...... 85 How Melodramatic Violence Brings Pleasure to Alienated Genre Audiences ...... 85 Resolving Ambiguity by Defining an Enemy ...... 91 Eliminating Threats though Mutilating Violence ...... 102 Conclusion: ...... 117 “You Can’t Hold a Man Down Without Staying Down with Him” ...... 117 References ...... 129 Filmography ...... 134

Introduction

The Hollywood war genre undergoes a major shift in 2008 that portrays war as an extension of troubles that white masculine soldiers experienced in American domesticity.

The prior war films depict the American home as an extension of the solider’s combat experience using camera movement that stresses the soldier’s subjectivity and their inability to shake their violent experiences upon their return to America.1 By contrast, the post-2008 movies depict soldiers leaving unfulfilling domestic situations for war while cutting with increased fragmentation to perspectives that extend beyond the American’s knowledge and providing genre pleasure by stylizing mutilating violence against clearly- defined enemy forces. This depiction of the estranged soldier protagonist, anxious editing, and melodramatic ultra-violence develop as syntactic patterns in the genre from a series of contemporary issues in the nation, such as the financial crisis, receding employment opportunities, stagnant incomes, and limited raises while several Americans felt displaced by the expansion of federal programming, universal health initiatives, and the election of America’s first black president.

The creation of the Hollywood war film coincides nearly with the creation of cinema, with Edison films depicting American armed forces in the Spanish-American war in 1898.2 Contemporary combat pictures — like The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2008),

American Sniper (Eastwood, 2014), and Hacksaw Ridge (Gibson, 2016) — include many

1 In the Valley of Elah (Haggis, 2007) and Stop-Loss (Peirce, 2008) depict extended combat sequences within America when Hank (Tommy Lee Jones) pursues an AWOL soldier and Sgt. King (Ryan Phillippe) attacks a couple of car thieves. These sequences use the same formal aesthetics as combat scenes in the Middle East, such as quick editing and hand-held cameras. 2 Wetta and Curley, Celluloid Wars, 96. 7 of the same generic elements from their predecessors while their critical and financial success has brought them recognition among moviegoers across the nation. Film scholarship evolved in the nineteen-sixties with the influence of Christian Metz and his treatment of film as a language system. While much of his essay, “The Cinema:

Language or Language System,” identifies complications in interpreting film from a semiotic approach, his work laid the foundations for understanding cinema as a series of conventions that have been normalized by filmmakers and adopted by audiences.3 Metz asserts that these conventions are codes that create specific expectations within the audience.4 Genre studies, such as writings on the Hollywood war film, look at films with the understanding that they comprise a series of repeated generic norms and conventions.

While film and genre studies have come to understand cinema as a series of repeated conventions, one should also remember that cinema is not static. Christian Metz shows that, like language, the codes in cinema have the potential to evolve: filmmakers can alter their patterns, audiences can interpret conventions in a different way and studios can alter the methods by which they market a film. “At any given moment, the code could change or disappear entirely, whereas the message will simply find the means to express itself differently.”5 Genre studies thus developed to categorize what makes up a genre, how it evolves, and what purpose it might serve for audiences.

3 Metz, Film Language; a Semiotics of the Cinema, 47–48. 4 Metz develops such claims based on the structural studies of linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, which can be found in his book, Course in General Linguistics. 5 Metz, Film Language; a Semiotics of the Cinema, 47. 8

Rick Altman asserts that even the most established genres never truly remain consistent and that they evolve over time. Critics have consistently developed categories by which to classify these genre changes, such as the “classical” Western and “platonic idealism” in musicals.6 Altman argues, in “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film

Genre” and his book Film/Genre, that these classifications can be defined by identifying a genre’s repeating attributes and separating them into either film “semantics” or film

“syntax.” Similar to their use in verbal and written languages, he defines semantics as content elements and syntax as the ways in which the film arranges the content. He argues that semantic attributes — such as certain “attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets” — repeat in movies and can be classified into genres based on these characteristics while syntactic elements — such as how the film is organized with employment, story- structure, and editing — can identify the structures in which they are arranged.7

Applying this use of semantics and syntax to the war genre provides an effective method for genre theorists to both define and explain the group of films within a greater context. Jeanine Basinger exemplifies the usefulness of using semantics to define the

WWII combat film in her pivotal The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre.

Like Altman’s theories of genre semantics, she classifies the genre by selecting movies with recurring content, such as American soldiers, tanks, rifles, combat uniforms, a chain of command, and military rituals (among other generic aspects).8 This illustrates the

6 Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” 12. 7 Altman, 10. 8 Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, 16–30. 9 practical use of semantics in developing a comprehensive list of war movies, but they do little to explain how the war genre connects these elements and how they evolve.

Analyzing the syntax of a genre provides a greater understanding of the corpus of films and how they adapt. Climactic battles and violent combat are common semantic attributes of the genre. Classical war films like The Longest Day (Annakin, Marton and

Wicki, 1962) depict acts of combat with a series of wide shots and camera pans while movies like The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978) and Platoon (Stone, 1986) use close-ups, slow-motion, and bloody gore. These differences illustrate that the war genre is far from stagnant and that comparing syntactic patterns exposes these shifts. Using Altman’s methodology to categorize genre patterns as semantics and syntax allows for a direct comparison between prior and post-2008 war films, which reveals new depictions of alienated soldier protagonists, fragmenting editing, and stylized mutilating violence starting with The Hurt Locker.

While Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach is effective in defining and describing repeating attributes in the war film, a method is still needed to explain how and why these changes developed in 2008. One such method can be found in Will

Wright’s theory that the structural developments in the Western genre stem from conditions in the nation in Sixguns & Society: A Structural Study of the Western. He defines the mythic components of the Western as a fictionalized depiction of American history and attributes the formal changes in the genre to shifts in American society by 10 asserting that myth is a construct developed by a given society and thus reflects the psychological and cognitive struggles that they might encounter.9 He says:

It becomes possible to view a myth as consisting of two analytically separable

components: an abstract structure through which the human mind imposes a

necessary order and a symbolic content through which the formal structure is

applied to contingent, socially defined experience. With respect to its structure,

myth is like a language in that its elements are ordered according to formal rules

of combination by which these elements take on meaning.10

Wright says that subjects (viewers) have an unconscious desire for order and that mythmaking has the potential to fulfill this need. He asserts that the formal attributes which express a myth then develop as a response to conditions that restrict such harmony and order.11 f

Wright further categorizes Westerns based on how the cowboy hero is depicted within the narrative. One such category is defined as the “professional plot” because the cowboy acts not out of heroism and selflessness, but out of self-interest and for profit.12

Wright asserts that this different depiction of the mythic cowboy represents a desire for order and harmony in a specific aspect of American culture at the time. He argues that these formal changes developed out of the societal experience of working-class citizens

9 Altman defines this as a ritualistic approach to interpreting a genre, which relies highly on the role of the film viewer/spectator in defining a genre. 10 Wright, Six Guns and Society, 11. 11 Wright, 14. 12 He cites The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Hill, 1969) as leading examples of this pattern. 11 struggling to combat the United States becoming a “managed market economy.”13 Within this context, the American citizen (the cowboy) struggles for the success of a paying job

(that of a professional) while the genre evolved to incorporate and visualize such a conflict. Genre critics can then analyze a genre in such a fashion to attribute changes within a genre to the societal constructs of the time.

Rick Altman, however, argues that this ritualistic method is limited to only studying the audience’s relationship to a genre. He criticizes such an approach because it reduces the development of a genre only in relation to “experiences confected by audiences.”14 Altman — who identifies that genre critics have a problem of attributing much a genre's development to the work of studios and producers or just audiences — establishes a methodology that incorporates many perspectives so that film genres are not understood in isolation. He asserts that genres evolve from “competing meanings, engineered misunderstandings and a desire for domination rather than communication [... between ...] administrative and production personnel [...], producers and exhibitors [...], exhibitors and audiences [...], and critics and readers.”15 His approach ensures that critics and theorists take into account the aforementioned sources when analyzing genres.

As such, the post-2008 Hollywood war genre can be seen as a structure that has undergone changes from the contentious relationship between studios/producers, the audience, and critics/readers. Altman outlines how studios historically incorporate

13 Wright, 174. 14 Altman, Film/Genre, 172. 15 Altman, 99. 12 popular traits in efforts to ensure marketability and financial success for their films.16

Production efforts geared toward profits rely on a consumer who buys them; therefore, studios work to output products that meet viewer’s expectations while the audience’s expectations mold what the studios produce. Altman identifies one major link between the development of studio patterns and the audience here by asserting the audience must come to accept the generics for them to be repeated.17 This can be seen as a strong argument for the role a viewing society plays in Wright’s ritualistic and mythological method. Had audiences not accepted changes in the genre (based on their experiences and viewing patterns), then the trend would not have been continued by the studios.

The relationship between the audience and the newly coded soldier protagonist also has some further complications in contemporary Hollywood war cinema. Such a character has been depicted — almost exclusively — as a working-class or middle-class straight white male.18 Contrary to this nearly exclusive portrayal, the United States armed forces are an increasingly diverse population. The United States Department of Defence reports that the amount of women serving on active duty in the armed forces has increased, with women comprising 16.2% of the active-duty force at the time of the

16 Altman, 43. 17 Altman, 53. 18 I use “straight” here as the soldier’s identifying sexuality in the domestic space. John Belton, Guerric DeBona, Yvonne Tasker, and Jeanine Basinger — among many other authors on the war film — reveal the importance and dominance of homosocial bonds that, at times, take precedence over the soldier’s male/female relationships at home. I say “straight” here because it describes how the soldiers identify when they are back home and attributes them to the majority groups that I discuss further in this paper (with all the acknowledged and unacknowledged rights and privileges that accompanies this position). 13 report in 2017.19 The racial and ethnic diversity of the military has also increased over the past decade, with over 30% (specifically 31.3% in 2017) of the active-duty armed forces comprised of soldiers who identify as “racial minority (i.e., Black or African American,

Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,

Multi‐racial, or Other/Unknown).”20 Why, if the American armed forces are comprised of an increasingly diverse group of soldiers, do contemporary war films restrict such a depiction of the soldier protagonist?

Will Wright might suggest looking at the social, political, and economic changes that contribute to this unwavering and unrepresentative casting of the soldier protagonists amidst these series of other syntactic differences. This methodology reveals that the aesthetic changes in 2008 — the year in which the financial crisis occurred, America’s first black president was elected, and deindustrialization further stagnated working opportunities for American citizens — relate to the social, economic, and political experiences of the viewing audiences of the time. Contemporary sociology writing — such as the works of Arlie Russell Hochschild, Paula K. Miller, J.D. Vance, Jonathan

Michel Metzl — reveals a growing sense of estrangement perceived by a group of citizens who share similar attributes to those of the soldier protagonist; typically straight white working-class and middle-class American males.21 I intentionally cite each of these

19 United States of America Department of Defence, “2017 Demographics: Profile of the Military Community” (Department of Defense, 2017), iii, https://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/2017-demographics-report.pdf. 20 Department of Defence, iii. 21 The definition of “working-class man” here comes from John Williams’s White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, where he identifies the working-class as those with earnings 14 attributes because they emphasize that these soldier protagonists come from a majority group in the nation and have experienced (consciously aware of or not) a series of privileges not afforded to many other groups. These protagonist’s sexualities or financial classes might not always be their most defining characteristic, but growing up as a white man in America with an income he can share with a wife or girlfriend results in less attention drawn to his race, sexuality, or culture than other minority groups. The genre’s casting of the same kind of soldier protagonist draws attention to this specific group who has experienced the privileges of being of a majority group throughout the nation's history. These sociologists study how events after 2008 have directly affected Americans from this group and how they have dealt with their adjusting levels of privilege over the years.

Hochschild, in Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the

American Right, began her research hoping to understand why American politics are so radically divided. In doing so, she empathized with those on the exact opposite side of the political spectrum as herself (those who support extreme right politics) to produce a study that is connected to the kind of citizen depicted as a soldier protagonist in the post-2008

Hollywood war film.22 She argues that the push towards extreme-right politics stems

above the lowest 30% and below the top 20%. Their position just above the poverty line again stresses their position within a majority group in America. Joan Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017). 22 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land : Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016), xi. 15 from the perception that this group is estranged from the kind of American Dream that was popularized for straight white Americans after World War II.

Hochschild worked to discover an objective account that would explain how and why predominantly straight, white, Christian, working-class and middle-class males perceive themselves as alienated; this narration is referred to as the “deep story.” She contextualizes these emotions through an allegory of American citizens waiting in a long line to achieve the American dream. Many citizens (similar to the soldier protagonists) feel like they have been waiting in line for a long while; and regardless of being ahead of

“many people of color — poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees,” there is still a long line in front of them. She reports that, while waiting, raises at work seem to have halted and wages, in general, have declined. Regardless, church and family have been a great relief for these kinds of pressures, but now it seems like many groups disregard religion in favor of studying evolution, supporting LGBT rights, or downright slandering those with faith.23 These groups become discontent with their position in line when their present living conditions greatly decline from a series of industrial pollutants from companies that receive tax deductions or escape federal punitive measures.24 Many waiting in line feel that they have earned their position and long to finally achieve “the

American Dream” for which they have intensely yearned.

Those waiting in line begin to experience further discouragement when it appears that some people “cut in line.” Hochschild says that the stagnant place in line —

23 Hochschild, 136–37. 24 Hochschild, 46. 16 representative of stagnant wages and few employment opportunities — frustrates the majority group when they think that many of these line-cutters are persons of color, women, immigrants, and refugees.25 She says that this majority group feels that they have been expected to allow others to cut in line (indeed there are many who feel those in the back of the line deserve an opportunity too), and they do not see themselves as anyone who did anything to push back during the multicultural, gender, and social movements of the late sixties.26 Furthermore, the people in line feel restricted from certain jobs when businesses give job opportunities to immigrants and refugees for a cheaper wage.27 She reveals that anxiety and frustration set in when it seems like the majority group is moving backward in line and becoming further and further from attaining the American dream.28

This discontent with aid distributed to those less fortunate, combined with their sense of honor and authority in line, produces an increased resentment that has been voiced in recent years.

Finally, she addresses the perception that the nation’s first African-American president is helping others get ahead, which produces emotions of betrayal and anger.29

However, this group — a majority group in America — experiences feelings of alienation when there are no social movements that address straight, white, religious males.30 Not only was this group frustrated by perceiving they were “cut in line,” but terms like

25 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 137–39. 26 Hochschild, 213–14. 27 Hochschild, 74–75. 28 Regardless if they own a house, have a family, and even schooling experience. 29 Hochschild, 137–40. 30 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 211–14. 17

“rednecks,” “hillbillies,” and “white trash” became an increasingly popular form of slander for this group.31 The last decade has brought upon a breaking point in which this group started to express their discontent and has gained a massive following in recent years. Hochschild shared this narrative with those who she observed during her research and they responded with acclaim with how an outsider depicted their emotions of perceived alienation.32

In her essay, “But Aren’t We All Poor: How Whites’ Perceptions of Economic

Group Threat Influence Racial Politics in Michigan,” Paula K. Miller argues that “whites with more negative perceptions of their own and community financial status are more likely to have negative racial attitudes.”33 She bases her argument on Hubert M.

Blalock’s “threat hypothesis” theory, which asserts that perceived threats of “political or economic power” produce negative attitudes by whites to nonwhites.34 Miller tests this hypothesis in Michigan during the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, when “industrial decline ... led much of the state to be economically disadvantaged.”35 Data from

Michigan's 2009 State of the State Survey confirms her hypothesis and supports that white citizens “were more likely to have negative racial attitudes” when they had “more negative perceptions of their own or community financial status.” She also proved that, in

Michigan, those who are conservative or less educated can have the same kind of

31 Hochschild, 144. 32 Hochschild, 145–46. 33 Paula K. Miller, “"But Aren’t We All Poor?,” 63. 34 Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. 35 Paula K. Miller, “"But Aren’t We All Poor?,” 48. 18 negative racial attitudes.36 Miller and Hochschild’s research both reveal growing frustrations and hardships experienced by men who have traits similar to that of the soldier protagonists in the post-2008 Hollywood war film.

Jonathan M. Metzl, in Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment

Is Killing America's Heartland, expands on these whiteness studies and argues that the actions of white men struggling with changes in their privilege further threaten their way of life. He asserts that they support harmful politics simply out of a backlash to those they see outside their group of “majority” Americans. He cites white men’s attempts to cling to a sense of power and authority as a major factor in their voting to eliminate gun safety policies, cripple federally-funded health care services, and support tax cuts for the wealthy that directly contribute to rising gun suicides, decreasing health care coverage, and poor school funding that debilitates not just those different from the white Americans but also predominantly white suburbs and communities. Metzl, Miller, and Hochschild reveal that there occurred major transformations in 2008 that contribute to white male

Americans — like those of the working-class and middle-class soldier protagonists — perceiving that they are estranged from evolving privileges. These economic, political, working, and social changes occur just as the war film’s syntax undergoes three dramatic changes.

The following chapters reveal that the syntactic changes in the genre — such as depicting war as an extension of the soldier protagonist’s unfulfilled domesticity, the

36 Paula K. Miller, 44. 19 increasingly jarring use of editing, and the melodramatic use of ultra-violence in movies like The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (Bay,

2016), Lone Survivor (Berg, 2013), The Wall (Liman, 2017), Fury (Ayer, 2014), and

Hacksaw Ridge — stem from the myth of American whiteness, expressing a series of unconscious experiences of viewers who share many traits of the working-class or middle-class straight white soldier protagonists.

Chapter one contrats the new depiction of the soldier protagonist with Hollywood combat films prior to 2008 by focusing on elements of the plot, mise-en-scène, and camera framing. Movies like Home of the Brave (Winkler, 2006) and Stop-Loss (Peirce,

2008) both position war as the cataclysmic event that prevents American soldiers from easily returning to domesticity by visualizing the soldier’s overwhelming stress and not showing any conflict in America before the soldiers left for combat. The Hurt Locker and

American Sniper both reveal that the masculine white soldiers experienced discontent with their lives back home before even leaving for war. The chapter furthers Altman's and Wright’s genre theories by using their methods to attribute the generic shifts to the threat of alienation and estrangement perceived by those who share many traits of the soldier protagonist.

The second chapter explores the use of formal elements, such as editing and cinematography, as an alienating experience for the viewer. The short length of shots, increasingly unmotivated cutting, use of hand-held cameras, and use of low-quality film stock contrast prior depictions of war that use wide shots and long takes to reveal actions of war as well as other forms of media, such as the unaltering point-of-view in first- 20 person shooter video games. Movies like 13 Hours and 12 Strong convey a

“fragmenting” and “jarring” experience for viewers during combat sequences.37 This disjointed editing fragments the sense of unity and harmony that could have been accomplished with shots unwavering from the soldier’s perspectives, in wide shots of the troops, or in cameras that maintain the American’s subjectivities. These aesthetics reflect a similar kind of alienation and estrangement from the motion picture that groups like the soldier protagonist are believed to experience in American society.

The third chapter applies Altman’s argument that genre films fulfill a kind of unconscious desire that is restricted by morality and society for genre audiences. Post-

2008 Hollywood war films dealing with past wars (and not contemporary situations) exemplify the immense ultra-violence that has become a common trait of the genre.

These films depict straight white American soldier protagonists who work with their unit to eradicate the enemy in a series of bloody, dismembering, and melodramatically violent scenarios. This is especially apparent when the United States army returns to the ridge to overpower the Japanese forces in Hacksaw Ridge or when the United States soldiers sacrifice their lives to take out a marching Nazi battalion in Fury. Slow-motion running, close-ups of obliterated body parts, overpoweringly loud explosions, and the consumption of the enemy into fire exemplify this power of eliminating the stereotypically positioned “evil” army. This clearly defined line between “good versus evil” and “outsider versus insider” reflects Hochschild’s conclusions of why Donald

37 Cunningham, “Explosive Structure.” 21

Trump rose as such a popular candidate for the threatened “strangers” of her study. Like brutal violence and destruction in contemporary war cinema, these dissociated subjects overcome and overpower their perceived shortcomings by eliminating obstacles assumed to be in their way.

Genre shifts, such as these, do not occur in isolation. Rick Altman urges studies in film genres to credit the role of film production/studios, filmmaking, audiences, and critics in defining the evolution of a genre. The post-2008 Hollywood war film marks a shift in formal syntactic elements and also an industrial change for the genre, for very few

American combat films were financially successful after 9/11 and before 2008. “After the invasion of Iraq there followed a long paralysis in the American cinema’s ability to successfully narrate the war: between 2003 and 2008 there were approximately 23 films that took the Iraq war as their subject, and none were successful at the box office."38 It was not until The Hurt Locker that audiences, as Altman might say, would accept the generics of the war film of the time, with the film eventually grossing almost $50 million worldwide on a budget of around $15 million.39

The Hurt Locker’s strong financial and critical success reveals that studios, audiences, and critics find relevance once again in the Hollywood war film. The widely successful (and Academy Award-nominated) American Sniper in 2014 and Hacksaw

Ridge in 2016 further reinforced these syntactic trends that depict the soldier protagonist’s combat experience as merely an extension of their alienation from domestic

38 Freda, “Screening War,” 231. 39 “The Hurt Locker (2009) - Box Office Mojo.” 22

America, fragmenting their experience through editing, and stylizing their mutilating violence. The strong reception of such aesthetic trends, which Altman says is imperative for a genre’s success, connects audiences to the war genre. Studying groups that share many of the attributes as the soldier protagonist, post-2008 Hollywood war films can be understood as a depiction of the perceived experiences of alienation and estrangement from such citizens. The growing alienation among this group is reflected in the growing depiction of the estranged soldier protagonist, the increasingly jarring use of editing by which his alienation is represented, and the melodramatic use of ultra-violence of post-

2008 Hollywood war films such as The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, 13 Hours: The

Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Lone Survivor, The Wall, Fury, and Hacksaw Ridge.

Chapter 1 The Estranged Soldier Protagonist:

How New Soldier Protagonists Defy Straight White Men’s Expected Domestic Roles

The Hollywood war genre underwent an important syntactic transformation after

2008 that no longer depicted the homefront as a site of refuge or lost morality from the theater of war but portrayed the theater of war as an extension of the soldier’s growing insecurities in the homefront. The Hurt Locker and American Sniper differ from war films prior to 2008 because they visualize the homefront as an unfulfilling space that alienated the soldier long before he encounters the violence of war, which previously served as the genre’s motivation for character changes.40

This is first apparent In The Hurt Locker when Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner) recounts his domestic life in America while drunkenly bonding with his squad. He discloses that:

I had a girlfriend and, uh, she got pregnant, so we got married, and we got

divorced... or, you know, I thought we got divorced. I mean, she's still living in

the house and she says we're still together, so I... I don't know. Wha-what does...

what does that make her? I don't know.

The movie’s financial and critical success encouraged studios to repeat elements in later war films, such as when Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) experiences similar instances of dissatisfaction with his domestic life before joining the armed forces in American Sniper.

40 I use the masculine pronoun throughout this paper not to intentionally exclude any readers who might identify as another pronoun but to re-assert that the Hollywood war genre recurrently depicts American soldiers as predominantly males. I intentionally refrain from using commonly accepted non-gender specific pronouns to call attention to the gendered character that is central to my argument on these texts. 24

The filmmakers frame him as a hero from the first shot we see of him as an adult. They lower the camera as Chris, dressed as a typical cowboy, walks toward us. It is lowered so much that, by the time Chris gets closer, the camera must tilt up to reveal his towering face. The result is a shot that looks up at a traditionally dressed strong straight white

American male from Texas. While the cinematography depicts such a character as if he is an undeniable hero, his experiences in Texas are not as legendary. He works as a hired ranch hand instead of experiencing glory and honor as a famous cowboy. The rodeo, supposedly the highlight of Chris’s life at the time, has very few spectators. The long shots of the arena reveal only a handful of fans around the gate and a minimal fan section in the bleachers, which shows that — no matter how skilled he might be — Chris is not famous or successful in following his dreams of being a rodeo cowboy. These films both exemplify the new depiction of the soldier protagonist and illustrate how the traits solidified as a pattern in the genre. While this is a common trend today, a brief historical overview of the syntax used to depict the main character reveals that this development is unique to the genre after 2008.

This chapter adopts Rick Altman’s definitions of semantics and syntactics to categorize the homefront and soldier protagonist’s changes in the Hollywood war genre.

As described in the introduction, semantics are defined as the repeating content in genre movies (such as topics, plots, key scenes, character types, objects, recognizable shots, and sounds) while syntax comprises of cinematic form that arranges and orients the semantic 25 elements (such as plot structure, character relationships, images, and editing).41 The

American homefront is an example of a semantic element, while editing, photography, and other formal cinematic techniques used to depict this space are understood as the genre’s syntax. Understanding the soldier protagonist and the American home as a combination of repeating semantics and syntax in the Hollywood war film allows us to contextualize them as repeating elements that are not static and they do evolve. Genre theorists, such as Jeanine Basinger, have defined the war genre based on the semantic and syntactic aspects while also characterizing the traits of the films at a given time.

Much like Will Wright’s structural analysis of the Western genre, this chapter also connects the war genre’s (semantic and syntactic) changes to economic, political, and labor relations in America.42 However, this chapter also incorporates Altman’s

“pragmatic” approach to evaluate genre evolution beyond merely Wright’s ritualistic approach. Altman defines this approach as the process of making meaning from semantic/syntactic structures by identifying a user’s multidimensional relationship between the signs and applications of the text (in this case, genre).43 He argues that genres cannot rely on merely a ritual, ideological, or top-down approach and reveals that

41 A comprehensive definition of these topics can be found in “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” and their application can be found in Film/Genre pages 87-90. 42 As mentioned in the introduction, Wright asserts that myths, such as the Hollywood Western movie, fulfill certain needs and desires that are left unfulfilled by society. He uses the development of the cowboy as a money-driven “professional” as a reflection of the working-class’s desires for stable incomes and professions during America’s transition to a “managed market economy.” Refer to the chapter “Groups and Techniques: The Professional Plot” from Six Guns & Society for a complete analysis of the topic. 43 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 210. 26 these discourses already overlap when analyzing similar genres, films, and changes.44 He proposes the pragmatic approach to:

Treat reading [genre developments] as a more complex process involving not only

hegemonic complicity across user groups but also a feedback system connecting

user groups. Instead of a one-way text-to-reader configuration, pragmatics thus

assumes a constant cross-fertilization process whereby the interests of one group

may appear in the actions of another.45

This means that the structural changes in the war film develop simultaneously from studio influences, material forces, marketing patterns, and diverse audiences accepting or rejecting certain patterns.

Structural Changes in the History of the War Genre

Applying these methodologies to the war genre exemplifies how changing semantic/syntactic relationships between the soldier protagonists and their homes evolve out of audience’s psychological struggles and desires, as well as multidimensional factors based on different user’s (viewers, filmmakers, businesspersons, critics, etc.) connections to the film. Many genre scholars exemplify how, in the past, movies that visualize the domestic space before the soldier leaves for war have a much different effect than films depicting the soldier after he returns from war because the genre typically codes the home space as a place of idealism and morality that the soldier often finds himself unable to

44 Altman, 27–28. 45 Altman, 211. 27 return after combat.46 The homefront’s evolving role stems from Wright’s theory that social, economic, political and working relationships contribute to film structures and

Altman’s multidimensional pragmatic approach.

War movies released early during the Second World War typically address the

American audience’s struggles and desires related to going to war, while the content of the films reinforce political interests of going to war. Jeanine Basinger, in her comprehensive The World War II Combat Film, says that movies released during this time focus only on the experiences of the soldiers at war (why they fought, if they would live or die, what they did for their families) and that there existed a need “to remember and discuss home.”47 War films of this period reinforce an image of American heroism during combat and also resolve struggling viewer’s concerns by portraying men (like sons, husbands, brothers, and close friends) as ideal Americans, like in Desperate

Journey (Walsh, 1942).48 She characterizes early WWII filmmaking practices by their support for wartime politics and also how audiences could find harmony amongst the growing violence of war.

Trends in World War II movies released later during and after the war develop from the audience’s desires to cope with mortality, death, and destruction caused by

American soldiers.

46 John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (McGraw-Hill, 1994), 170. 47 Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film : Anatomy of a Genre (Columbia University Press, 1986), 62. 48 Basinger cites movies like Bataan (Garnett, 1943) and Air Force (Hawks, 1943) that end in the soldier’s heroic deaths. 28

They no longer had to cope with the idea of going to war, but now they had to deal with the results of being at war. Merely referencing the homefront was not enough to resolve the viewer’s discontent so the war movies began to visualize the American domestic space to reinforce why the soldier did what they did. Basinger says that WWII combat film as early as Destination Tokyo (Daves, 1943) exhibit this kind of validation to fight when the Navy soldiers reflect fondly upon their experiences back home by talking about their love for their families or reminiscing about a past girlfriend. Basinger asserts that these anecdotes intend to tell us about the men who are fighting and “do not form a complete story on their own.”49 The film visualizes positive, impactful, and emotional experiences in the domestic space — instead of merely hearing soldiers talk about them

— which crystallized what Americans fought to protect. This syntax for the homefront was a popular method that extended well through the cold war and up through America’s involvement in Vietnam.

War movies released after the Vietnam War address the audience's psychological struggles to confront the fatality, violence, and highly questionable involvement of the

United States Armed Forces during the war. Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard — in their argument that mass media reinforces America’s militant mentality in The Hollywood War

Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture — assert that Vietnam War films follow a pattern that depicts “innocence, defeat, and tragedy.” This pattern illustrates that the soldier’s American innocence makes them ill-equipped to deal with the traumas of war;

49 Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, 63–68. 29 thus, they are unable to return to their prior lifestyles after returning from the chaos in

Vietnam.50 Many of these post-Vietnam films visualize the homefront before and after the soldiers go to war, which positions combat as the catastrophic factor that contributes to the soldier’s character struggles.

The homefront’s syntax in The Deer Hunter exemplifies a contrast between the

American soldiers leaving for war and those returning.51 The filmmakers frame the trio of friends — Mike (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven (John Savage)

— in a group setting with close-ups that emphasize their comradery among one another before they leave to fight in Vietnam, especially during Steven and Angela’s wedding.

This wedding party sequence shows an expansive crowd of friends and family that establish feelings of community and harmony. The following scenes in Vietnam harshly contrast this tranquility when the wide shots, once composed of smiling characters, no longer consist of a tight-knit group of family and friends but of Vietnamese soldiers enjoying American prisoners risking their lives in a game of Russian Roulette. The close- ups of the familiar characters now stress their terrified emotions. The Deer Hunter depicts

America as a place of harmony and Vietnam as a warzone of chaos and violence. Upon returning to America, the film frequently portrays the soldiers as expressionless or disgruntled, spatially separated from their friends and family (the soldiers infrequently face them), and even isolated within the frame (such as when hunting alone in the

50 Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine : U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture, Second edition. (Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 66–68. 51 Other examples include Coming Home (Ashby, 1978) and Born on the Fourth of July (Stone, 1989) 30 woods).52 The syntax here positions the experience of war as the most damaging to the

American citizen, rendering them incapable of returning to society. Basinger says that the conflict in Vietnam combat pictures typically takes place at home because "veterans come home and become crazy killers, or have difficulty readjusting because they are hurt and crippled, and also because people imagine them to have become crazy killers."53

Many scholars, such as Tania Modleski in “Do We Get to Lose This Time? Revising the

Vietnam War Film,” assert that this repeated structure stems from issues of over- masculinizing soldiers for war in a society that doesn’t need that amount of strength and aggression. The war genre reveals the “masculinizing process so necessary to the creation of warriors.54 Audiences accepted the syntax in The Deer Hunter because it confronted social and political concerns in the war with which they struggled.

Nostalgic war films of the late-nineties depict almost the entirely opposite relationship to combat because of the audience’s psychological desires to move past

America’s humiliating and polarizing participation in the Vietnam War. The fall of the

Soviet Union and a “quick and dramatic military victory in the Gulf War” brought upon a shift in the war film’s syntax that no longer depicts the soldier’s domesticity and therefore reverts the relationship of the soldier and combat to that of a heroic and patriotic act of service. Boggs and Pollard say that the return to this depiction of service

52 By no means is this the first instance of such syntax. Depicting a soldier’s return from the war, such as in All Quiet on the Western Front (Milestone, 1930) and The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946), typically reveals how they have changed from their combat work. The post-Vietnam War films support Wright’s methodology here because a trend of movies that follow this pattern emerge, instead of only a handful of films utilizing these techniques. 53 Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, 213.basin 54 Modleski, “Do We Get to Lose This Time,” 155. 31 was a “continued search for a ‘good war’ to gratify the national psyche compromised by the Vietnam syndrome.”55 Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) and Pearl Harbor

(Bay, 2001) both exemplify this shift towards American militant patriotism by returning to the trope of positioning war as a separate space from the domestic. Saving Private

Ryan harkens back to Bataan (Garnett, 1943) through the depiction of a series of soldiers who lay down their lives for one another while also having discussions about their homes as validation for why they hunt Nazi soldiers. Wright’s and Altman’s approaches to genre reveal the interconnected factors that contribute to aesthetic changes in the Hollywood war movie and how the depiction of the soldier protagonist and their homeland relates to the audience's psychological struggles and desires of the time.

The Biggest Transformation in the War Film?

Boggs and Pollard argue that there exists one defining change to the Hollywood war film after this trend of recycling WWII syntax. They assert that the 9/11 attacks brought upon “the greatest transformation in American combat films since the cataclysmic effects wrought by the events of December 7, 1941,” but fail to provide evidence of a cohesive and consistent shift of cinematic form in the genre to support this claim. They cite a return to WWII patterns as a way to connect the Pearl Harbor attack with the 9/11 attacks and promote military heroics, yet there is no one dominating pattern financially and critically supported by audiences following these attacks.56 Furthermore,

55 Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine, 93–94. 56 We Were Soldiers (Wallace, 2002) recycles the moral and harmonious homefront tropes from many classical World War II war movies while Flags of Our Fathers (Eastwood, 2006) depicts WWII veterans struggling to return to America after one of the most iconic images of the war occurred. 32

Boggs and Pollard cite more substantial changes in other genres, such as the massive popularity of “violent horror films with powerful superheroes capable of defeating supervillains.”57 More than twenty Hollywood war movies were released between the period of the 9/11 attacks and the financial crisis in 2008, but none were critically or financially successful.58 This lack of audience support demonstrates that 9/11 did not drastically transform the war genre and reveals why no dominant semantic/syntactic patterns developed in the war films.59

At best, the lack of financial and critical support for war films during this period explains why studios returned to older syntactic patterns from the WWII and Vietnam combat films. Movies like Black Hawk Down (Scott, 2001) and Jarhead (Mendes, 2005) recycle the homefront syntax from WWII combat films by positioning domesticity as a place to which the soldiers want to fight and protect so that they may return someday.60

Thomas Doherty in “The New War Movies as Moral Rearmament: Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers” and Douglas Kellner in Cinema Wars both argue that war movies released soon after 9/11 encouraged a connection with audiences because they confront the trauma of loss and violence brought upon by the attacks in New York City, like early

57 Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine, 167–69. 58 Isabelle Freda, “Screening War: American Sniper, Hurt Locker, and Drone Vision,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 10, no. 3 (2016 2016): 231. 59 There exist exceptions within Freda’s financial report. There were no combat films which achieved Blockbuster status at the box office during that time, but there were films — such as Lions for Lambs (Redford, 2007) — that featured elements of war and made a modest return among audiences. See Boggs and Pollard’s chapter, “Hollywood after 9/11,” for more details. 60 There is little talk of domesticity in Black Hawk Down and it reduces the space to a place the soldiers yearn to return; a place of safety. The talk of domesticity is a bit mixed in Jarhead, but the homeland is a place for which protagonist Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) yearns so that he can continue his relationship with his high school sweetheart. 33

WWII combat films did with Pearl Harbor.61 This is apparent through the depiction of soldiers that never leave one another behind on the battlefield. These movies emphasize unity during tragedy by focusing on the extraction plot in such a manner.62

Another trend that develops during this period is the depiction of the American home space after combat events akin to the syntax used in Vietnam War films. The return of this trend connects post-Vietnam war sentiment with feelings about the United States’ war in the Middle East. Like militarism in Vietnam, several Americans struggled with the massive post-9/11 push towards militarism. Douglas Kellner, in Cinema Wars:

Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era, asserts that Hollywood films reflect audiences confronting the now-controversial United States invasion of Iraq that

“cumulatively empowered the terrorist enemies of the US […] and alienated the US from its allies and people of the world.”63 Pollard and Boggs argue that America is in a perpetual state of over-militarism that is reinforced by media, merchandise, and economics.64 The war film’s depiction of soldiers struggling to return home are products of the United States’ over-militarism and thus portrays the domestic space as an extension of combat. Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah (Haggis, 2007), and Stop-

Loss portray the homefront as an extension of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts through

61 Douglas Kellner addresses the limited corpus of War movies during this early post-9/11 period and asserts that the war was represented in the form of critical documentaries during the 2000s. Refer to “The Cinematic Iraq War” from Cinema Wars for detailed information on these films. 62 Thomas Doherty, “The New War Movies as Moral Rearmament: ‘Black Hawk Down’ and ‘We Were Soldiers,’” in The War Film, by Robert Eberwein (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 220–21. 63 Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars : Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (Wiley- Blackwell, 2010), 244. 64 Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine, 1–4. 34 the use of war semantics within the domestic space and depiction of the homefront as unfit after combat. Kellner asserts that these films testified to disillusionment with Iraq policy and helped compensate for mainstream corporate media neglect of the consequences of war.65 While these movies take place mostly in America, they are far more connected to American involvement in the Middle East — and America’s seemingly endless military growth — than any innate domestic issues.

Home of the Brave follows the pattern established by The Best Years of Our Lives

(Wyler, 1946) and many Vietnam war movies by depicting three soldiers who struggle to return to American domesticity after traumatizing acts of violence. The film opens with an unexpected attack in the streets of Iraq that indoctrinates the viewer to the bloody affair of gunshots, the dismembering impact of explosives, and a sense of anxiety. The film regularly harkens back to this moment to emphasize the trauma from which they suffer back in America, such as during Will Marsh’s (Samuel L. Jackson) family

Thanksgiving dinner. The filmmakers superimpose layered images of wartime violence and include sounds of gunshots and yelling over an image of Marsh sitting at the head of the table. They further connect war to the domestic space — and show the struggle from getting away from combat — by bringing violence and blood to the family when Marsh rips an earring from his son’s ear. These formal elements in the film connect American domesticity to the experiences of past combat.

65 Kellner, Cinema Wars, 222. 35

This emphasis on “past combat” is important because there exist no scenes that depict American life before these soldiers left. The films code the source of domestic struggles as a product of American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Home of the

Brave exemplifies this cause-and-effect relationship through Hank Deerfield’s (Tommy

Lee Jones) search for his missing son Mike, who was killed by a soldier from his unit.

Hank frequently looks at footage recorded on Mike’s phone during his tour in Iraq, which

Patricia Pisters argues connects the past violent events to the domestic present. The film also features filmmaking practices common for combat sequences in American when

Hank, a Veteran himself, chases down suspects photographed with hand-held cameras, quick cutting, and editing that positions Hank and his assailant as opponents. This also occurs in Stop-Loss when Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) confronts a group of thugs who robbed his car. The film edits Brandon and the thugs using a shot-reverse-shot pattern that places him on opposite sides as the robbers and their clearly defined opposition. A hand-held camera records the violet and bloody confrontation, which destabilizes a coherent image akin to combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Using this syntax in the domestic setting that movies like Black Hawk Down and Home of the Brave reserve for combat operations illustrate how past warfare has thus extended to the American home space after 9/11.

2008 and a Hunt for Fulfillment in the Hollywood War Film

While writers like Boggs and Pollard argue that the major change in combat aesthetics occurs following the 9/11 attacks, there exists another major development in 36 the syntax of the war movie after 2008.66 War movies start to depict combat as an extension of the American domestic space through the syntactic visualization of the soldier protagonist’s struggles in the domestic space before leaving for war.67 Past war films depict war as the major conflict that spurs the soldier protagonist’s character growth, but The Hurt Locker and American Sniper depict the homefront with syntactic elements — such as narrative positioning of the soldier’s home space, the mise-en-scène, and the editing — that reveal the soldier protagonist already experiences conflict because he appears alienated from his home before he even leaves for war. No longer is he a kind of blank slate to be influenced by combat, but war becomes an extension of the soldier protagonist’s alienation and his search to overcome it.

The Hurt Locker follows Sergeant First Class William James’, Sergeant J.T.

Sanborn’s (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Owen Eldridge’s (Brian Geraghty)

Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in Iraq as they disarm a series of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for the US Army. James joins the unit after an IED obliterates their old team leader, Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson (Guy Pearce), and sheds all cautionary measures for the thrill of quickly disarming life-threatening situations. His actions do not settle well with Sanborn, who has a wife back in America, and Eldridge, who struggles with the intense pressure of combat. Though James has a domestic partner and a child back home, he quickly jumps at the chance to disarm an explosive whether he has on

66 Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine, 167. 67 This is the opposite effect that films like Stop-Loss, In the Valley of Elah, and Home of the Brave had because they depict the effects of war (and the formal aesthetics in war) as spilling over in the domestic space. The domestic is an extension of war in these films while post-2008 war movies depict was as the extension of problems in the domestic. 37 protective gear or his unit is ready to provide him cover. As mentioned, James already finds himself alienated by his domestic situation before leaving for war and it separates him from past war movie’s depictions of the soldier protagonist. The America that James leaves for war is not one proclaimed for democratic ideals like the America for which soldiers left to fight in World War II combat films. James does not leave a “traditionally” loving and clearly defined family, like the one Mike Vronsky and Ron Kovic (Tom

Cruise) leave behind in The Deer Hunter and Born on the Fourth of July (Stone, 1989), respectively. Finally, the America that James leaves is not one he seems motivated to protect, like in the fearful and aggressive post-9/11 films. James leaves a non-traditional home with a child and a woman he is not even sure is his wife, revealing that he feels alienated from the very domestic setting that soldiers in the World War II combat film left to protect; he is alienated from the homeland to which returning Vietnam war veterans found themselves unable to return; and, he is already alienated from the very nation that was portrayed as coming together in the reconnaissance war movies of the early 2000s.

We see a similarly alienating narrative before Chris Kyle leaves for war in

American Sniper. We see through a flashback that Kyle was raised in Texas by a strict father who stressed family and honor while also training him to become a skilled hunter.

As an adult, Kyle does not achieve the kind of prosperity and domestic success he might have expected for himself (as previously mentioned). He works on a ranch as a hired hand, gains only meager attention as a rodeo cowboy, and fails to build a family. Kyle leaves behind a life with few accomplishments to enlist as a US Navy SEALs sniper 38 unlike the soldier protagonists in past war films who leave to protect loving households and girlfriends. In contrast to his domestic life, his fellow soldiers, superiors, and even enemy soldiers regard him as a very talented sniper. He starts a family with Tanya Kyle

(Sienna Miller) after — and only after — he attains success with his new role as a soldier but leaves them for four tours in Iraq. American Sniper depicts Kyle struggling to return to America, much like pre-2008 war movies, but the film positions this as a continued separation from domesticity because the flashback already revealed his struggles to thrive in domestic life before leaving for war.

Both films depict the straight white working-class male soldiers as estranged from domesticity through syntactic changes that derive from a shift in the psychological struggles and desires of American audiences, much like the previous overview of aesthetic changes throughout the war film. The financial and critical success of The Hurt

Locker — the first Hollywood war film after 9/11 to garnish such success — signals that audiences and critics accepted the new aesthetics depicting the struggles of a straight, white, working-class or middle-class, male soldier protagonist so studios would further incorporate them to replicate success.68

The massive 2008 financial crisis is the first factor that contributes to Americans

(with similar backgrounds as the soldier protagonist) perceiving themselves as estranged.

Annie McClanahan, in Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, attributes changing aesthetics in a variety of art forms — novels, poems,

68 Any further usage of the term “soldier protagonist” should be understood as a soldier with these attributes. 39 photojournalism, and movies — to the American suffering brought upon by the financial crisis. She asserts that many critics of the crisis defer blame from individuals directly involved with the shifting market and onto consumers not limiting their spending habits in times of economic squeeze.69 She reveals that these consumers were encouraged to spend recklessly, and possible homeowners would get riskier loans because politicians lifted many restrictions and safeguards preventing safeguards to ensure financial security.

McClanahan argues that President George W. Bush further contributed to the reckless loan practices through the emphasis he placed on the home as a right for

Americans. He worked to reduce many government restrictions to prevent risky loans so citizens could invest in houses (whether they could afford them or not) to calm national anxiety after 9/11.70 McClanahan argues that the federal attention on homeownership positions a house as the ultimate commodity for Americans because it serves as a major financial asset and represents all for which the citizen has labored (and saved).71 This caused many citizens to perceive the suburban home as the central accomplishment in domestic life and a vital component of the “American Dream.”

The financial crisis upset this goal for many Americans (many with backgrounds similar to the soldier protagonist). Huge drops in stock values, defaulting loans, bank’s failures, and poor loan insurance brought about crippling unemployment, food insecurity,

69 Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, Post 45 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2017), 26. 70 She asserts that the home invasion film genre developed from the idea that the home space is the ultimate place of safety for American citizens. For more information on the emphasis on home owning in American finance, please refer to: McClanahan, 145–55. 71 McClanahan, 99. 40 evictions, bankruptcy, loss of life-savings, and suicides; not just nationally, but also globally.72 These events rocked the American sense of what citizens perceived as

“normal” and possible as they planned for their future.

As mentioned in the introduction, the war genre’s exclusive depiction of straight, white, working-class and middle-class males crystallizes the experiences of Americans from this background. Sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild specifically studies these citizens and argues that they feel alienated from American life because they struggle to confront not having the same opportunities and privileges this group once used to. She identifies the struggles associated with achieving their idea of the “American Dream” and the changing social, political, economic, and working conditions that diminish this group’s opportunity to achieve lifestyles for which their ancestors aspired.

The rest of this chapter addresses specific examples from the soldier protagonist’s life that embody this group’s struggles to confront their changing roles and abilities in

American society, such as when Chris returns home one night after a modest rodeo and finds his girlfriend sleeping with another man. On her way out, Chris’s ex-girlfriend tells him, “you think you’re a cowboy ‘cause you rodeo. You’re not a cowboy, you’re just a lousy ranch hand… and you’re a shitty fucking lay.” Her statement reveals that Chris has achieved neither the traditional nuclear family or a productive and fulfilling job. A medium shot shows Chris sitting on a couch reflecting on his accomplishments (or lack thereof). American Sniper’s financial and critical success reveals that audiences accepted

72 McClanahan, 5. 41 this new depiction of the soldier protagonist and their connection to the film as an evolving myth. The outburst forces Chris to confront his less-than-fruitful accomplishments and crystallizes the audience's struggles and desires of the time.

Students in lower-economic white communities parallel Chris’s circumstances.

Hochschild reveals that a large number of these students feel alienated and disconnected from their education experience. She asserts that many of the students struggle with their work, become frustrated, then begin to care less about school. School for them turns into a humiliating, aggravating, and unfulfilling daily task. During her research, Hochschild interviews a man who says his factory job was far more fulfilling than any academic performance because it made him feel valuable, capable of completing tasks assigned to him, and possible to earn a living for his family.73 This factory job restored the possibility for the kind of future that he envisioned for himself.

American Sniper begins to resolve these unfulfilled desires by depicting Chris

Kyle overcoming his mediocre working-class life through his excellent marksmanship as a Navy SEAL sniper. Like the man Hochschild interviewed about the merit of his factory job, Chris achieves honor and recognition by adding up the number of men he kills. Even his Taliban adversaries recognize his skill by offering a large reward for anyone who can kill “The Legend.” The photography and blocking further reinforce Chris’s proficiency outside of the domestic space by frequently visualizing the domestic space with a shallow depth of field, as if the walls of his house or his truck restricted him from a large scale of

73 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land : Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016), 93. 42 view. The photography in Iraq contrasts this with a series of long shots with a deep depth of field that brings numerous buildings, streets, and possible targets into view for Chris in this different non-domestic setting. Furthermore, his proficiency grants him an unprecedented level of mobility that becomes apparent when he leaves his rooftop post to help marines storm apartments. This scene opens with a long shot of Chris’s setup on the roof (deep focus shots showing the cityscape) watching Marines as they go door-to-door searching for enemy soldiers. He gets frustrated when he cannot provide sniper cover to the soldiers once they enter a building, so he decides, “I’m going to go clear house with the Marines,” and leaves the rooftop to join the troops on the ground. The next shot portrays Chris walking alongside a squad of Marines in the streets of Iraq telling them that he can show them how to stay alive. The moving camera and blocking of Chris transcending rigid orders reinforce Chris’s ease of movement in the armed forces, thus conveying his fulfillment outside of the home space and in the combat space.

Sgt. James experiences a similar opportunity outside of American and during the intensity of war in The Hurt Locker by finding motivation and drive from high-pressure situations disarming bombs. Like Chris, James’s superiors praise his risky work, such as when Colonel Reed (David Morse) thanks and congratulates James on a job-well-done disarming a car bomb. James thrives at such a high level that he feels he can accomplish anything by himself in risky situations. This becomes apparent during his first mission with his new Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit when he throws out smoke to cloud his unit’s vision, ignores their communications over the radio, and single-handedly stops a (possibly threatening) oncoming vehicle. Numerous long-shots photograph James 43 alone in the frame, thus reasserting his individuality and role in achieving his own success.

Hochschild emphasizes these individual accomplishments and proficiency through times of stress in Strangers in their Own Land. She argues that many citizens like the soldier protagonists pride themselves on a sense of honor for what they went through to accomplish what they have. As mentioned in the introduction, many straight, white, male Americans perceive that there is a greater struggle to achieve what they believe is the “American Dream,” which Hochschild and McClanahan attribute to deindustrialization and decreased working benefits. These citizens are convinced that they fought to earn their jobs and they will have to continue to fight to maintain their labor opportunities; with the 2008 economic crisis strengthening this sentiment.

Hochschild contrasts this work with the opportunities of federal assistance programs that may supplement income, help find jobs, or provide relief for those who do not have jobs, food, or homes.74 This increases citizen’s (like the soldier protagonist) pride that they earned what they had without help from others.75 The acclaim and achievement James earns from disarming improvised explosive devices (IED) in The Hurt Locker fulfill genre audiences who felt like they struggled to earn what they had on their own. Both films’ financial and critical successes reveal that viewers affirm the patterns in post-2008

74 Hochschild, 92. 75 Hochschild reveals this is a fallacy because many benefit from community programs from their churches or workgroups. She also asserts that the state of Louisiana receives the most federal financial support than any other state. Hochschild, 8–9. 44 war films and that there is a strong connection between the psychological struggles of the protagonist and a group of American citizens who come from similar backgrounds.

Confronting Transforming Levels of Opportunity and Privilege

Unlike past movements in the war genre — in which semantic and syntactic patterns provide audiences with the opportunity to work through their desires and anxieties through combat heroism, advocacy, and confronting loss — post-2008 war movies restrict the soldier protagonists and audiences from fully resolving these feelings.76 Hochschild identifies a culmination of social, political, and economic factors that cause majority groups (straight, white, working-class and middle-class males) to realize that many have not, and probably will not, achieve the American lifestyle they expected to earn.77 As mentioned earlier in this chapter and the introduction, this group exhibits a lot of pride in their lives because they attribute a lot of work to being the reason they acquired what they did. They, along with support from local churches and their families, manage to “get by” regardless of the poor job opportunities, low wages, environmental pollution, and poor education systems. Hochschild argues that anything that might appear as a threat to these vital aspects of their lives produces feelings is mistrust and frustration.78 Examples include an expanding emphasis on women’s rights

76 Examples of this fulfillment include Basinger’s description of the heroic sacrifices at the end in Bataan, the massive and enduring victory over enemy troops in the Longest Day, Modleski’s argument on Ron confronting and controlling his trauma through advocacy in Born on the Fourth of July, and analysis of confronting loss in Coming Home. 77 A full synopsis of how these Americans perceive themselves as estranged can be found in the introduction to this thesis. Much of her research is summarized in the “Deep Story” chapter in Strangers in Their Own Land. 78 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 15. 45 issues that shift the dynamic of the nuclear family, opportunities for gay and lesbian individuals that also change the family unit as they understand it, scientific ideas (like evolution) that contrasts with certain church teachings, and federal programs that aid communities lacking in opportunities because it replaces the kind of labor through which they believe other Americans suffer.79 Such groups perceive these shifts in society as a threat to what they value and many are convinced that they might become a minority in the country that has historically benefitted them more than any other group.80 This perceived threat to acquiring their idea of American lifestyles reveals why many audiences accept (and support) films that depict the soldier protagonist’s efforts to escape the alienation in the domestic space as a threatening undertaking. As such, The Hurt

Locker and American Sniper crystalize this group’s belief that they can no longer achieve their ideals of fulfillment in America and expose their desperation.

The Hurt Locker crystalizes this unbelonging sentiment when James returns to the base after curfew. He announces that he belongs with the soldiers at the base by shouting

“USA friendly coming in,” but soldiers greet him by shining a bright light into his face and screaming “stop right there” and “get the fuck down.” Alienation is apparent through this scene when not even troops from the very same army as James will listen and accept him in a calm and equal manner. James informs the soldiers that “I have a weapon,” yet one of the men comes to kick him to the ground and shouts “gun” when he uncovers

James’s loaded weapon. James, at this point, acknowledges the ridiculousness of how his

79 Hochschild, 145–51. 80 Hochschild, 62. 46 own base treats him as an alien by looking directly into the camera — placed on the ground so we identify with his isolated position — and says: “like I said.” This chaotic experience — depicted with non-motivated editing, harsh spotlights, excessive shouting, and hand-held cameras — reverses the kind of thrill James experiences when on the hunt.

The next sequence reveals how long takes and silence contrast the aforementioned frenzied experiences. James returns to his room and — in one long take — takes a drink of water and a deep breath. Douglas A. Cunningham, in “Explosive Structure:

Fragmenting the New Modernist War Narrative in The Hurt Locker,” argues that the excessive use of cutting in The Hurt Locker creates a fragmenting experience for the audience.81 The slow movement, silence, dim lighting, and absence of editing reveals

James’s desire to find a bit of peace and harmony as an alienated man in his own room.

The film perpetuates this when Sandborn calls him on the radio and James does his best to ignore the call, reinforcing his desperation for tranquility. Eventually, he can no longer ignore his contentious position so he responds to Sandorn and the frenzied aesthetics returns.

The next long take further conveys James’s desperate search for harmony when he returns from the raid during which he caused Eldridge to be shot. The camera follows

James looking into the mirror as he walks — still in his combat gear — into the shower; a location that is closely associated with the private and domestic space. The hand-held camera looks up and down at James as the blood falls from his uniform. James takes deep

81 Douglas A. Cunningham, “Explosive Structure: Fragmenting the New Modernist War Narrative in The Hurt Locker,” CineAction, no. 81 (2010): 2. 47 breaths and keeps his eyes closed. He rips off his helmet and quickly sits in the corner of the shower stall. The film cuts to James cowering in the corner with his arms crossed tightly across his chest; he beats the shower walls and frenzies his hair. The sparse editing stresses James searching for tranquility alone in the shower and crystalizes a straight white man who is utterly incapable of attaining harmony in his personal spaces.

The final long take in the movie depicts James’s return to the original space that made him feel out of place. As mentioned, the film establishes that James lacked the fulfilling lifestyle he expected to achieve at home before leaving for war, which means his experience of alienation during combat is only an extension of the alienation he experienced back in America. This pattern comes full-circle in the scenes depicting

James’s return to his domestic partner and his child, to which the filmmakers transition with a simple cut and no stylistic emphasis. The film cuts from looking at the Iraq streets from the window of a driving Humvee to slowly tracking backward in the frozen food section of a supermarket in America. This lack of a stylized cut (such as the use of a fade or dissolve) emphasizes James’s inability to discern his experiences between the domestic space and at war.

The filmmakers refrain from jagged cutting when James appears in the domestic space and they use composition and character relationships to convey his unfulfilled desires. James tries to connect with his domestic partner, Connie (Evangeline Lilly), by commenting on her shopping skills (he only comes up with some soda while her cart is filled). This already positions James as inferior to her and stresses the lack of agency he experiences from traditional family life. She asks James to recover a box of cereal before 48 they return home, which proves to be another needlessly detaching task. The filmmakers cut to a long shot of James in the cereal aisle and we see him staring at the long row of increasingly indistinguishable name-brand breakfast cereals. James was able to recover and disarm an IED in Iraq with ease but now cannot find the one product to fulfill his family’s needs. After a couple of close-ups that depict James selecting a random cereal, the film cuts back to another long shot from even lower on the ground than before. We see James walking dismally away (from the long rows of products that reinforce James’s alienation from domesticity) from an angle near the ground; a height that James might feel comfortable when he had to disarm IEDs buried in the Iraq sand.82 This supermarket scene directly follows a conversation between James and Sandborn in which Sandborn tells James that he is done fighting and will return to America to start a family.

Juxtaposing these two scenes conveys that Sandborn returns home to achieve the kind of normalcy that James is unable to attain.

Post-2008 Hollywood war movies like American Sniper and The Hurt Locker depict war as an extension of the soldier protagonist’s alienation in their homeland through the use of new semantics and syntactics that crystallize a series of psychological struggles and desires from genre audiences of the time. The genre’s users financially and critically support these new patterns, which affirms a strong connection between the viewers (specifically American citizens) and the formal aesthetics of the genre. This chapter demonstrated how the soldier protagonist’s structural change stems from

82 The dinner preparation scene further reveals James’s disconnection from normalcy when he shares a story about Iraq with his wife. His wife says nothing and merely assigns him another detaching task. 49

Hochschild’s argument that American citizens (with a similar background to the soldier protagonist) increasingly struggle to achieve their idea of a traditional lifestyle and the

“American dream.” Many critics applaud her work for characterizing the emotions felt by this group and how they contribute to the 2016 presidential election; but, while these feelings affect contemporary politics and other cultures, it should still be remembered that this group does not suffer in exclusivity. Women continue to struggle for equal wages and health care opportunities, laws continue to allow for the discrimination of the

LGBT community, and cultural minority groups still face harsh inequalities in jobs, education, housing, etc. A diverse community of viewers comprise American audiences; surely the movies could not receive critical and financial success if only straight, white, working-class and middle-class males supported new cinematic trends. The post-2008

Hollywood genre not only subjects audiences to the semantic and syntactic methods that depict straight white men as alienated from society, but the wide support of these conventions reveals a growing acceptance of this perceived estrangement from viewers who do not come from a similar background as the soldier protagonist. The genre and the viewing practices thus reiterate this majority group’s perception that they feel detached from the privileges from which they once benefited.

Chapter 2 Alienating the Movie-Going Experience:

How Fragmented and Ambiguous Editing Instills Audience Anxiety

Chapter one identified narrative patterns that visualize estrangement felt by the soldier protagonists, arguing that contemporary war films express a continuity between the alienation felt by these characters at home and in war. This chapter moves from a consideration of character to the viewer, showing how editing patterns common to contemporary war films work to create an alienating experience for the viewer. In particular, the increasingly fast cutting to a variety of sometimes disconnected locations tethered to the soldier protagonists’ point of view blocks the viewer’s identification with the character as well as the viewer’s ability to make sense of the space’s threat. Paul

Virilio, who argues that military developments contribute to cinematic perception, says that visualization provides armed forces with a robust upper-hand. Seeing the American forces from other perspectives provides other potential threats with agency over the heroes and thus contributes to an anxious viewing experience. This jarring syntax in The

Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor, 13 Hours, and The Wall reflects Paul Virilio’s arguments on drone vision after the Gulf War, but its shift after 2008 produces an alienating viewing experience among all genre audiences, regardless if they share a similar socio-economic and cultural background as the soldier protagonists.

These editing patterns are not unique to Hollywood cinema, but their overwhelming inclusion in the war film produce a distinctive divide in the genre before and after The Hurt Locker in 2008. Multi-perspective ambiguous cutting and abrupt editing permeate nearly every scene in this film and displaces time and space, such as 51 when an IED explodes and kills Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson. A series of quick shots from a man detonating the bomb cuts to shots that fragment Thompson’s traumatic death. We see the bomb blow up behind Thompson in a medium shot, but the film immediately cuts to a long shot from just before the bomb goes off. We see the explosion again from a perspective lower to the ground as time slows nearly to a halt. Quick slow- motion shots cut between the explosion’s impact on bouncing rocks and agitated rust.

Three different shots show Thompson fall to the ground, emphasizing the moment in which the impact tears through his body. The editors repeat shots of the explosion from multiple angles as it turns into a fiery mushroom cloud. The camera’s location for each of these shots strongly contrasts the camera positioning in war films before 2008. Notably, in The Hurt Locker and other contemporary war films, the filmmakers increasingly place the camera in locations separate from the soldier’s perspective. During this sequence, they cut to a long shot of Thompson from far across the empty street and it becomes increasingly clear that we no longer witness the mission from Thompson’s (or even the

American’s) point of view.83 This growing divide between the camera and the straight white male American soldier’s perspective stems from social, political, financial, and working changes that Arlie Russell Hochschild and Paula K. Miller identify majority groups in America struggle to confront. These aesthetic developments become clear when

83 “Point of view” is used in this thesis to describe the way the camera orients viewers toward a certain character or object’s perspective. This does not infer that the film positions the camera in a first-person perspective where we see exactly what the character sees. Instead, the filmmakers position the camera close enough to certain characters that audiences perceive circumstances similar enough to that character. 52 contrasting the closer visual and identificatory links between character and camera in earlier Hollywood war films and war movies outside of America.

Stop-Loss, released early in 2008 but shot in 2006, exemplifies how the genre’s dominant camera placement before The Hurt Locker almost exclusively aligns viewers with the soldier protagonist and their struggles to return to domesticity. The movie follows Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and his unit during their Texas homecoming after fighting in Iraq, which depicts war as a life-changing event that leaves the soldiers ill-equipped to return home. The movie conveys this metaphorically when the

Army stop-losses King and demands he returns for another tour in Iraq (narratively preventing him from returning home), but Brandon refuses and tries to escape to Canada.

In addition to this pre-2008 depiction of war’s perpetuity, the film aligns the camera almost exclusively with Brandon’s experiences and subjects us to his point of view over everyone else's. Rarely does the film present another character’s subjectivity and, when it does, it is with other American’s from Brandon’s unit. The camera never shares a non-

Americans’ point of view throughout the film. The sequence in which Brandon confronts a gang of street thugs emphasizes the movie’s syntactic difference with post-2008 films because the camera maintains its position on Brandon’s side of the confrontation. This scene opens with Brandon looking through a hole busted into his car. When he turns his head, so does the camera. Brandon then confronts the group of thieves and the movie cuts to face them as well. The camera even follows Brandon as the other men knock him to the ground. We look up at them from the ground as they beat Brandon (us). Each of these 53 shots position the camera as expressive of Brandon’s subjectivity instead of on the side of any potential threats.

Simply realizing that the genre’s structure deviates at this time does not inherently explain what impact it has on the audience. Paul Virilio, in War and Cinema: The

Logistics of Perception and Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, develops a methodology that attributes changing perspectives in movies to military technological developments, such as the use of lofty long shots taken from airplanes after their usage for aerial photography in World War I and the helicopter shots after the United States military utilized aerial photography to confirm enemy geographical territory during the

Vietnam War.84 He stresses that “there is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also perception.” He illustrates here how military technology fundamentally shapes the perspectives we see in mass media over time.

Virilio further argues that the ways from which we see produce competitive and distancing emotions after the development of drone technology and constant news programming during the First Gulf War.85 Overwhelming coverage from different angles from numerous different perspectives on several networks contributes to a “drone-like” method of viewing; a way in which the viewers have an omniscient perspective of the world with no real relation to characters or humans performing acts of violence.86

84 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London ; New York: Verso, 1989), 19,73,80-82. 85 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers (London ; New York: Continuum, 2002), 20–25; Virilio, War and Cinema, 6. 86 Virilio, Desert Screen, 109-113,129-130. 54

Furthermore, he says that one can assert authority and power over others by instituting an omniscient and all-knowing record of images over them. The war genre and the action movie quickly adopted many of these news footage aesthetics, such as the use of hand- held cameras, and quick editing.87 Movies like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and Stop-Loss feature combat sequences that include these later attributes, but they do not yet follow the “drone-like” ways of seeing. Instead, the war films cut only to shots from the American soldier’s perspectives.88 Virilio’s argument that the camera separates itself from the US soldier’s point of view does not occur in the war genre until The Hurt

Locker. Even when this does happen, the camera’s position still connects to another person’s point of view (it is not truly omniscient like a drone). This begs the question as to why the camera does not entirely separate itself from a character’s subjectivity and these patterns developed at such a time.

87 Hollywood products of this new way of seeing can be seen in the various establishing shots from different angles in Mission: Impossible (De Palma, 1996). We see Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) pull information from a computer while hanging from the ceiling in an open room. The film cuts to a variety of angles to show his condition while also showing possible threats to his secrecy. Movies like The Last Broadcast (Weiler and Avalos, 1998) and The Bourne Identity (Liman, 2002) feature extensive uses of hand-held shaking cameras that also reflects the kind of ground footage captured during the newscasts. 88 Many sequences in Black Hawk Down cut to a variety of different angles to show the soldiers position, use handheld cameras from ground perspectives, and rapid cutting in times of chaos. The cutting to different angles exhibits much of the news footage kind of seeing but focuses mostly on the side of the American soldiers. The film tracks their position and who surrounds them, yet the perspectives from which we see this does not come from a character’ point of view in the film but a kind of drone perspective. The quick cutting also follows a classical pattern of editing because the filmmakers cut based on action occurring in combat. The bullets soaring and the American soldiers running motivate the filmmakers cutting to the next shots. For example, during the sequence in which the Delta Operators attempt their rescue mission for the crew on a crashed American helicopter, the editors lead us through a view of the conflict motivated by the American’s actions. First we see, from inside the helicopter, that the Americans are being fired upon so the next shot cuts to the enemy foot soldiers firing at them (but not from the enemy’s point of view). This editing method presents an ambiguity (who is shooting at the helicopter?) then resolves it with the next shot. The next shot shows a series of citizens, not a trained militia, fire round after round into the helicopter while the subsequent shot shows the American soldier firing back. The editing presents this soldier’s actions as a logical response to getting shot at while the following shot shows the bullets pelting through the opposing civilians. 55

Wright’s framework once again provides an effective approach for identifying how a genre’s structure changes at a particular time due to changes in social, political, cultural, and labor relations. Therefore, the aforementioned changing syntactic patterns can be understood by identifying transformations among the lives of Americans from similar social, cultural, and economic groups as the soldier protagonists. The Hollywood war genre creates an alienating viewing experience after 2008 through fragmenting editing that cuts to different perspectives outside of the straight white male’s subjectivity.

Virilio argues that media perception after the First Gulf War incorporates a highly competitive “drone-vision” way of seeing, but war movies after 2008 do not award

American soldiers with this authoritative view. They instead cut to perspectives from other non-American points of view. Movies like The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor, 13

Hours, and The Wall create an alienating viewing experience by both privileging these other perspectives and decreasing each shot’s length when the camera does depict the

American soldier’s subjectivity.

I Can See You, Can You See Me?

Cutting to different perspectives is the first alienating use of editing that separates post-2008 Hollywood war films from the genre.89 Separating the camera’s subjectivity from the straight white male soldier protagonists conveys emotions of insecurity among viewers who connect and identify with such a character.90 bell hooks, in “The

Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” argues that the ability to look produces

89 We will look at how the genre alienates the soldier protagonist’s perspectives in the next section. 90 The narrative, cinematic, and star structures already innately assumes the viewer is invested in these types of characters. 56 power over those who are not able to. She says that whoever controls the ability “to look” can assert authority over those who cannot, such as parents who reprimand their children for staring and slaveowners punishing slaves for looking them in the eyes.91 She argues that the act of looking is strongly political because it determines who allows other groups to look, whose perspectives are recorded in history, and how other groups are seen from another’s perspective; her article exemplifies how the group who has the power to look can exert their authority over other groups.92 hooks — a black woman — speaks from a group that historically did not benefit from the privilege of holding this powerful perspective. The war genre demonstrates how majority groups have maintained this advantaged position because the movies often place the camera near the American troops and viewers only see other groups from their perspective. War films after 2008, in contrast, begin to privilege non-white American perspectives and conveys that another group now has agency over the white masculine soldiers, even though the film still narratively positions the Americans as heroes. Starting with The Hurt Locker, the genre increasingly cuts to shots from these multiple perspectives to position other (ambiguous) characters — including perceived threats — with potential agency over the American heroes.

These trends appeared in a series of Hollywood war films since then and have firmly established themselves as defining patterns in the genre. 13 Hours visualizes the infamous 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound and CIA outpost in

91 bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” Black Looks: Race and Representation, no. 1992 (1992): 115–16. 92 hooks, 116–17. 57

Benghazi, Libya (which gained much publicity during the 2016 Presidential election) from the perspective of understaffed and ill-equipped private military contractors hired to protect the CIA outpost, such as newcomer Jack Silva (John Krasinski) and his commander (and friend) Tyrone "Rone" Woods (James Badge Dale).93 As Jack arrives for his new job in Benghazi, the filmmakers cut to a variety of objects and people using eyeline matches from Silva’s point of view as he walks through the airport. We see a burned-out old aircraft (who burned it down, is there a threat?), a series of civilians (will any of them hurt the white masculine hero?), and a man in sunglasses who spots Silva from the staircase. The film cuts to these first two objects as Silva turns his head to face them but not for this third cut. The first two cuts stress the objects on which he focuses and adheres to the traditional subjectivity in war movies before 2008. Suddenly, however, the film cuts behind the man following Jack. Silva does not know this position and the film stresses that there are perspectives that can act on (following, targeting, harming) him without his knowing. The man gets in the same car as Jack and he is revealed as

Rone, Jack’s new commander. While Rone turns out to be an ally, this outside perspective demonstrates hooks’s argument that certain perspectives hold power over others. We see Silva from another character’s perspective who can exert power and authority on Silva without his knowledge (at least, not until it is too late). This troubles the division between ally and enemy that was much clearer in the previous war films

93 Many republican candidates and supporters cited Clinton’s handling of Benghazi as a major flaw in her leadership throughout the 2016 campaign. Republican candidate Donald Trump frequently cited this as a major flaw. See the following news article for more information on his approach: DelReal, “Trump, in Video, Attacks Clinton Over Benghazi.” 58 because the camera maintained a position aligned with the American soldier’s point of view. Rone even explicitly tells Silva, “this place sucks, Jack. Not only is it hot as balls, but you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.”

Once the film establishes this insecure feeling, it heightens the consequences by cutting to shots from perspectives that remain anonymous and not revealed to be one of the heroes. We see Silva and Rone driving a Jeep through the city in a series of long shots. For one shot, the camera is placed in an old brick building and follows the car by panning to the right. In another shot, the filmmakers place the camera on the ground in an open street as the car drives past. Many subsequent shots follow similar distant setups that follow the American soldiers through the city. This conveys that local citizens, residents looking out from their balconies, and even potential threats can gain knowledge over the United States Soldier’s position. The truck’s location motivates the camera’s pans and tilts, which maintains our attention on the Jeep and implies that whoever’s point of view we are watching from also has an interest in watching the driving soldiers. We, however, cannot discern this onlooker’s intentions. As hooks says, the ability to watch grants authority and privilege those with the opportunity to look. The non-American perspectives from which the camera watches could potentially assert their agency over

Silva and Rone and threaten their lives.

The ambiguous shots from non-American points of view create anxious emotions when Rone and Silva drive into a claustrophobic alley halted by traffic where several other anonymous perspectives have the potential to exert some form of agency over the 59

American men.94 We see them hit the brakes not from inside the car with Jack and Rone but from a hand-held camera in a crowd of civilians to the right of the vehicle. From whose perspective do we see this and why are they watching the Americans?95 The film then cuts between camera setups from a zoom lens with the US soldiers inside the Jeep and with the crowing crowds outside the vehicle.

A shot from the Jeep’s front seat shows the high (inescapable) walls on either side of the street, and a growing number of civilians crowding the area. The next shot — photographed with a telephoto lens through the dashboard — reveals Rone’s frustration and also grants knowledge about Rone’s present emotions from a long distance away.96

Here, the camera no longer needs to be in the car to see the American characters but others from outside can gain full knowledge of their actions from yards away. If we could have such a clear image of Rone from so far away than another person — potentially armed and threatening — with this view could exert their power over Rone. The filmmakers then cut to a series of different perspectives that further emphasizes the agency others have over these two Americans. The first shot comes from a bridge high above the Jeep where we can see a civilian holding a rifle with an unobstructed line of sight at the vehicle. The next perspective comes from the ground, just behind the Jeep, where we see many civilians running away. The following shot from a radically low

94 Rone, calling into the compound, refers to them as “potential radicals.” 95 Many past war films refrain from visualizing the enemy’s point of view and would instead cut to the enemy's perceived locations from the American’s point of view, such as the images of trees, shrubbery or cliff sides in We Were Soldiers. 96 Remember Virilio stresses the importance of knowledge over a potential enemy while hooks says that the viewer has a privileged view over Rone from having the privilege to gaze over him. 60 angle looking up at an armed man on the walls to the side of the Jeep, while the subsequent one looks at Silva in the car trying to get an understanding of the situation.

We, the audience, are unable to determine — like the characters — whether the characters from these positions (with clear shots) threaten the Americans or not.97 As

Rone calls in for advice, a series of shots cut to perspectives from telephoto zoom lenses that expose amassing soldiers. Shots of a man in a turret gun juxtaposed with a woman on a balcony emphasize the sense that anyone can harm the Jeep.98 This sequence demonstrates how cutting to different subjectivities in post-2008 Hollywood war films convey ambiguity and anxiety for the viewers, especially for those who strongly identify with the straight white American soldiers.

Virilio also argues that these other perspectives contribute to insecure emotions, but attributes these to changing combat approaches after the First Gulf War. Military officials before this time could determine where a battle would occur based on where the troops amassed and where they set up their lines of defense, but post-Gulf War battles take place in “post-industrial meta-cit[ies].” He argues that Germany’s east and west division changes the way military leaders identify targets and threats because there exist

97 A shot of a dead man laying on the street then cuts to a group of armed men walking toward the camera. The image and costuming of Libyan men contrast with that of the Americans. Many of the men wear open shirts, militant vests, and turbans while the heroes of the story wear jeans and t-shirts. This image emphasizes a difference between the two groups and stresses that many of the locations the camera has been positioned might have an advantage if they attacked the straight white male Americans. No one should ever become uncomfortable because a character looks or dresses different than the dominant group onscreen, but the film (by showing them with weapons, others running away in fear, and their obstruction to traffic) positions them as a possible threat to the characters that the movies depict as heroes. 98 Ironically, Rone and Silva escape this situation by reversing this sense of anxiety onto the oncoming threats. Rone points a gun at an armed man and tells their superior that a drone positioned above can see everything going on. This exemplifies the power that comes with being able to see and act upon potential threats. 61 no tanks and soldiers on a battlefield but only “geopolitical uncertainties.” Military strategy adapted and now exists as nations building their destructive strength to deter weaker nations from fighting them.99 He further asserts that this strategy straddles a fine line because the next level up would begin a battle of nuclear warfare far too destructive for the nations to survive.100 This produces a military situation involving combat of actual soldiers and machinery that does not wipe out entire territories, such as in Operations

Desert Shield and Desert Storm. This kind of warfare, not outright combat such as in previous wars, significantly changes the images Americans saw daily on television at the time.

Virilio asserts that 24-hour news networks position different perspectives that play out during real-time within American’s living rooms.101 He cites developments in surveillance and stealth equipment, such as the F117’s ability to provide live footage while remaining undetectable, that can visualize war in new ways. These technological developments, along with this new form of warfare, stress the importance of strategic knowledge and visualization. He argues that:

Detection and deception henceforth form the foundational couplings of

air-land battle strategy [where] the low probability of the detection of the

weapons and other vectors of attack constitute an advantage of which no

one wishes to be, nor can now afford to be, deprived. [...] As all

99 Virilio, Desert Screen, 3,11-13. 100 Virilio, 19. 101 Virilio, 22. 62

characteristics of the instruments of combat are henceforth subjected to

this categorical imperative of a long-distance non-detection [...], the

central concept of this new war game becomes “first look, first shot, first

kill.”102

Virilio argues that warfare has developed into a competition for who can gain an undetectable position over others so that they do not have a chance to fight back. He asserts that surveillance drones, remote-controlled missiles, and scanning technology provides American forces with this form of advantage and have increased their reliance on them since the First Gulf War.103

As Virilio argues, military developments shape the perspectives from which we see in movies and other forms of media. We see shots from perspectives with this upper hand during the sequence from 13 Hours when the civilians from upon the bridge behind the turret gun possess this “first look, first shot, [and] first kill” position over the unknowing Americans. Had the filmmakers depicted these threats from the United States soldier’s perspectives then they would still hold a sense of control over their situation because audiences would know only the threats they perceive from their location.

Positioning the camera away from the American’s subjectivity both reveals the citizen’s militant might and that the heroes might not know of a threat’s location until it is too late.

Virilio further argues that these subjective visuals stem from combat photography during the Gulf War. He asserts that unceasing footage on news channels (such as CNN)

102 Virilio, 109–10. 103 Virilio, 126. 63 brings “passive consumers” the “subjective perception” of this “live war.” The Pentagon could now bring instantaneous points of view from the war zone from drones, aircrafts, and cameras from the ground.104 Patricia Pisters, in “Logistics of Perception 2.0: Multiple

Screen Aesthetics in Iraq War Films,” expands on this argument and asserts that war films adapted footage like this through the use of pre-recorded materials and subjective photography. She cites In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss as movies that incorporate video footage from consumer digital cameras and cell phones to connect war with the homefront.105 This reinforces the argument from the last chapter that Hollywood war films before 2008 depict the soldier’s struggles to return to the domestic space after combat instead of problems within the space before the soldier leaves for war.

Pisters, contrary to my argument, argues that The Hurt Locker also follows this trend because the filmmakers use photography to convey “cinematographic technology show[ing] not only the emotions of the people involved so that we can engage with them and their situations, but they also make clear how the combat situation is governed by rage, panic and automatic reflex.” She stresses that the cinematography connects viewers to the struggling soldier’s subjectivity during war, going so far as to say it “bear[s] striking resemblance to first-person shooter games.”106 Unfortunately, her analysis does not take into account how James finds himself alienated before leaving for war and lacks

104 Virilio, 128–30. 105 Patricia Pisters, “Logistics of Perception 2.0: Multiple Screen Aesthetics in Iraq War Films,” Film- Philosophy 14, no. 1 (April 2010): 244–46, https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2010.0008. 106 Pisters, 242–43. 64 an explanation for the variety of shots that extend beyond the American’s subjectivity.107

Pisters extends Virilio’s argument to The Hurt Locker’s aesthetics, but only in the context of war films prior to 2008. Virilio’s arguments can be expanded beyond just how recorded imagery conveys the American soldier’s point of view because the film also exemplifies that cutting to other perspectives conveys their power and authority over the

United States troops, an aspect that Pisters does not address in her article.

Again, The Hurt Locker is one of the first Hollywood war films to cut in such a fashion. During the opening scene, when Thompson approaches the explosives, the film cuts from Sanborn to a masked shot (from his scope) of civilians watching from a balcony, similar to how past Hollywood war movies visualized potential threats from the soldier’s perspective. This perspective from the scope provides us with a sense of the civilian’s location and the ability to act if necessary. A following hand-held shot from

Thompson’s perspective pans left and right from the apartment buildings to the IED on the ground. We become aware of his surroundings and target from his subjectivity. The next shot, however, shows Thompson and his American colleagues in an extreme long shot from a new point of view that marks the new shift to privileging non-white male points of view. From whose perspective are we watching Thompson now? Why are the

Americans not looking this way? Does this position have an advantage if someone here wanted to harm Thompson or the other soldiers?

107 A defining aspect of first-person shooter video games is that the camera maintains its positioning as the character’s line of sight without cutting to a series of other perspectives. 65

Before we can answer this question, the film reverts to Sanborn and Thompson’s point of view by cutting to a series of shots with the camera placed by them. We see

Sanborn chat with his colleagues and shoo away a local from this position. From here it seems like they have everything under control until the film cuts to another point of view separate from these Americans. This time, we see Thompson (alone) from a shaky camera position far off to his right. The unsteady motion conveys that a human is watching this attempted disarming because the camera is not on a tripod and must be held by someone who actually stands there. The film then cuts to a similar shot from another high angle behind Thompson. How many people are watching the Americans without them knowing about it? Are any of them a threat? Thompson is an easy target out in the open street if there was anyone who sought to harm him. Unfortunately, there does exist someone from one of these perspectives who pulls out a cell phone, triggers an explosion, and kills Thompson. Cutting to these potential threats directly contrasts with Pister’s argument that The Hurt Locker exhibits a first-person shooter aesthetic because it breaks up the moving long takes from a single perspective in video games. Instead, this exemplifies Virilio’s argument that groups engage in a constant struggle for the “first look, first shot, first kill” perspective.

2008 also marks a departure from Virilio’s post-Gulf War arguments because power comes not from omniscient “drone” perspectives but other non-American perspectives. He does not account for these other groups gaining knowledge and agency over the United States because much of Desert Storm focuses on how America gained a powerful and authoritative position. Instead, we now see other points of view exerting 66 their agency over members from a majority group, which produces a different emotional viewing experience than previous war films. Douglas A. Cunningham, in “Explosive

Structures: Fragmenting the New Modernist War Narrative in The Hurt Locker,” extends this argument that editing to different perspectives creates an uneasy and fragmenting viewing experience for audiences. He asserts that this pattern develops in the genre around 2008 and says that it is “as if the very nature of this place (Baghdad in 2004) thwarts all attempts to keep pace with the potential threats that seem to lurk behind every angle from which the camera affords a view. Eyes watch from everywhere, their invisible lines of sight fragmenting even empty air into a disjointed, distorted grid of myriad loyalties and intentions.”108 Cunningham goes on to emphasize how actions occurring hundreds of yards away from identified and unidentified locals can contribute to the difference between life and death for the American soldiers and that each perspective holds the potential of a threat that provides emotions of uneasiness and insecurity among viewers. His argument here extends Virilio’s stance that the ability to look provides “the looker” with power and authority over another group, such as in the camera setups that align the audience with other non-US points of view.

The Hurt Locker, even with these potentially threatening perspectives that contribute to an unpleasant viewing experience, gained financial success and critical acclaim upon its release. This, according to Altman, contributes to these different subjectivities quickly developing as a pattern in the genre. Many Hollywood war movies

108 Cunningham, “Explosive Structure,” 3. 67 after 2008 produce similarly uneasy emotions among audiences who cannot evaluate possible threats to the straight white male’s success. While Virilio argues that cinematic form develops alongside military technology, his model does not explain cutting to other points of view (instead of cutting to “drone-vision” ways of seeing) after 2008.

Will Wright, as he exemplifies with his analysis of the Western genre, argues that major structural changes like this stem from changes to social, labor, economic, and political relations. Hochschild’s research reveals changes experienced by groups similar to the soldier protagonists and how they experience estranging and alienating emotions during this time. In her pivotal chapter, “The Deep Story,” she creates an allegorical narrative about waiting in line on a hill for “the American dream” that encapsulates the perceived estranging emotions of these Americans. She says:

It’s scary to look back [in line]; there are so many behind you, and in principle

you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time, worked hard, and the line is

barely moving. You deserve to move forward a little faster, [...] You focus ahead,

especially on those at the very top of the hill.109

Unfortunately for those waiting, the line slows — and eventually stops — because of the economy, layoffs, poor working conditions, labor opportunities, environmental conditions, etc.110 Soon, these Americans see others “cut in line” with aid from

“affirmative action, pushed by the government, they are being given preference for [...]

109 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land : Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016), 136. 110 These, among many other, are the primary social factors that contribute to the changing structure from chapter one. 68 jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches.” Furthermore, they come to believe that many of these “line cutters” consist of mostly marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, immigrants, refugees, and women.111 Until this point, their focus was on their own goals of reaching the end of the line (“It’s scary to look back in line”), but they are forced to acknowledge other people in the line when they start seeing others pass them. This group witnesses others that used to be behind them gain agency and authority that they — a majority group in the nation — feel they are losing. They see a president that does not share their skin color or working background who seems to be helping others “cut in line,” with his election in 2008 strongly contributing to these emotions of perceived displacement.112 As they watch these others move along, they perceive their position in line starting to move backward.113 While they held such a position for years, they cannot imagine losing their spot and start to think of anyone that might rise up behind them as a possible threat. We see this group’s fear over another’s agency posing as a threat to straight white American males in war movies like

The Hurt Locker, which begins to privilege other points of view that do not come from the white US soldiers. Both these majority groups and the straight white masculine soldier protagonists find themselves in a position where they, for once, do not have the

“first sight, first shot, [or] first kill.”

111 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 137-138,140-143. 112 Hochschild, 139–40. 113 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 137. 69

These Americans, who no longer feel they have the power and authority they once had, develop fears and frustrations perceiving that anyone could be a threat to their wellbeing and their ways of life. Along with this comes the desperation to identify what specifically caused their position. It takes Hochschild years of research, large amounts of statistical analysis, and hours of interviews to specify many factors that contribute to these American’s perceived alienation. While this group is eager to discover what causes their unrest, Hochschild asserts that this group quickly attributes much of the unrest among those who become easily identifiable from their differences within culture, race, religion, and lifestyles.114 Hochschild stresses that other groups are not the problem but a series of dominant societal and national events serve as such reasoning (all of which are not listed but encapsulated in her “Deep Story” chapter), which stresses the ridiculousness of this group’s belief that other — often marginalized — Americans directly contributed to their current situation of strain.115

The inability to fully attribute one’s shortcomings onto specific cause-and-effect situations contributes to an ambiguous and even helpless position, similar to the positions

114 Hochschild, 137–39. 115 Even Hochschild cannot fully list every condition that “explains” this group of American’s present frustrations. Instead, she uses an allegorical “deep story” to capture their emotions and feelings in particular circumstances. She outlines a series of experiences that contribute such feelings of alienation, but she even admits that the scope of the issue is beyond a simple cause-and-effect understanding. This comes through during her “The Fires of History” chapter when she likens much of the straight white male’s struggles in contemporary society to the uncomfortable struggles following the American Civil War. In this chapter, she emphasizes that the feelings of discontent stem from a structural and societal problem instead of specific events, such as the insecurity to allow other people similar freedoms they have grown accustomed to. Simply put, the historical figures confronted a variety of once-marginalized groups experiencing many of the same privileges they did and found it hard to confront because they know they deserved better but that it might also detract from their levels of privilege. Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 212–16. 70 in which Thompson, James, and Silva find themselves in The Hurt Locker and 13

Hours.116 Cutting to each perspective outside of the soldier protagonists’ does not instantly depict a threat, but instead the possibility of a threat. Lone Survivor and The

Wall further illustrate that cutting to these outside perspectives that can (and do) act on the straight white Americans conveys a sense of anxiety for the genre audience because they witness other characters gain “first sight, first shot, and first kill” status over the fleshed-out American characters with which many identify.

Lone Survivor follows a United States Navy SEALs unit’s failed mission to eliminate a dangerous Taliban leader in Afghanistan. During their assignment, marksmen

Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) and his unit stumble upon a small shepherd family who they fear might expose their hidden location. After deliberating about whether to slaughter or release the young boys and their grandfather, the soldiers run into the mountains only to be pursued by Taliban soldiers. Unable to establish communication or find effective cover, they make a stand on the hill but suffer severe casualties. Luttrell escapes the skirmish (just barely) and a local Pashtun villager, Mohammad Gulab (Ali

Suliman), takes him back to his village. Luttrell limps through the open street guided by

Gulab and his friends, but the filmmakers cut to a series of other people watching

Marcus’s limp through the town. A wide shot of Luttrell reveals his anxious looks around the street as he scans for potential threats. One older man might seem trustworthy enough, but the next shot shows a younger stronger man standing up with curiosity. We

116 Cutting to the perspectives on the bridge above the Jeep and behind the turret show visualize positions that have agency, but we do not yet know if they want to attack the American men. We see that there is a possibility of a threat but cannot confirm what they can or will do. 71 see men pass looking at Luttrell with curiosity while the filmmakers cut to images of women in burkas who we cannot even see their facial responses to the American protagonist. This sense of anxiety comes to a climax when Gulab lets Luttrell recover in his house and another local man comes to argue with the decision. The filmmakers cut between a close-up of Luttreell’s head and a close-up of the yelling neighbor using a zoom lens that pushes the intense performances of each actor closer to us. We know, based on the local man’s yelling that he can pose a potential threat, but we are unsure of what he will do. Continuously cutting to this mysterious threat establishes an anxiety- inducing and alienating experience for the viewer that crystalizes another group’s potential agency and authority over white masculine Americans.

The Wall also cuts to a non-American’s point of view, but this time the film already establishes that this point of view is a major threat to the straight white American men’s livelihood. The film follows Sergeant Allen Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) responding to a sniper who takes out his friend and colleague Staff Sergeant Shane

Matthews (John Cena) after investigating a pipeline in the desert. Matthew’s body lies motionless and pelted with bullets for most of the film while Isaac, who has also been shot, struggles to maintain consciousness until he can get a hold of a rescue team. The film never visualizes the enemy sniper but stresses his danger through his radio communication with Isaac.

Most of the setups position the camera on the same side of the wall as Isaac, going so far as to only reveal other parts of the setting to us through his scope instead of moving the camera to them. The editing contrasts this subjectivity by cutting to camera 72 setup far away from — and looking down onto — the wall. The corners of the frame are masked out and we see the crosshairs in the center of the shot to provide the illusion we are looking down the enemy’s scope at the Americans. Isaac struggles to fight off the threat but, even by the end of the film, cannot visualize the man firing at him. Spatially, this perspective remains almost entirely unknown to Isaac until the very end of the film, but we as the viewers can see the power and agency this sniper has from his privileges position over Isaac, which creates an anxious viewing experience for the audiences who identify with the wounded straight white men at the other end of his rifle.

These films illustrate a change to Virilio’s argument on drone vision in 2008 by positioning the camera in ways of seeing that are not from the American’s perspectives.

This change conveys feelings of anxiety and alienation because the American characters

— with which many genre audiences identify — now do not hold the same historic advantages and often perceive themselves in threatening situations without being able to identify an attacker. No longer do the soldier protagonists have the “first sight, first shot, first kill,” but the films visualize that other groups have this position over the straight white masculine characters because of changing relations within the nation at the time.

Fragmenting the Viewer’s Experience

Cutting to these other perspectives marks only the first defined shift in the war genre’s syntax. While these non-US points of view produce anxious feelings for audiences not knowing if they see from a potential threat’s perspective, what emotions do they experience when the film aligns their vision with the soldier protagonists’?

Beginning with The Hurt Locker, war movies like 13 Hours and Lone Survivor visualize 73 the American soldier’s point of view as a fragmenting experience through the use of abrupt cuts and handheld shots from a variety of different angles, such as in the bonding sequence when James discusses his domestic situation while drinking with his unit.117

James, Sanborn, and Eldridge sit around and try to decompress from a long day of work, yet the camera does not share this casual situation. It abruptly cuts between the three different men and rapidly zooms in and out to reframe the trio. These are not jump cuts because the cuts maintain the character’s time, but the cuts displace the viewer because the film changes camera setups almost every second or two throughout the sequence.

Each time the film cuts, it cuts to a camera setup mere inches away from its original positioning, which does not provide a drastic new angle on the group and simply emphasizes the spatial difference within this cut. Even the zooms do not bring clearer information into sight. Instead, the extreme close-ups zoom very close into the character's heads and cut out most of their bodies. Often, the cinematographer does not rack the focus when the camera zooms and the image blurs out most of the characters. While this scene’s semantics depict the characters trying to relax and nourish bonds between one another, the syntax depicting their subjectivity is splintering and distracting. Their actions could very well have been photographed in a wide shot, yet the filmmakers use editing, pans, and zoom lenses to restrict the viewers from seeing the whole image of bonding men trying to fit in.

117 This is the same scene analyzed in the previous chapter. 74

This fragmenting editing effectively conveys the traumatic experiences of disarming IEDs and solidifies as a pattern that appears in many later war films. In Lone

Survivor, for example, a crucial scene takes place during a battle on the hillside and the subsequent fall. The editors cut to tight shots of the soldiers as they talk amongst one another from shaky, handheld telephoto lenses. As the unit retreats from their pursuers, the camera rapidly cuts and often struggles to keep the soldiers within the frame. Like the

IED explosions from The Hurt Locker, the filmmakers intercut shots at varying speeds

(such as the slow-motion shot of the soldiers jumping off of a cliff face) with medium close-up shots of different soldiers falling. Quick shots at varying shot scales (some close-up shots emphasize a soldier falling onto a boulder while other long shots depict the soldier whipped through a forest) cut among different troops at inconsistent times, which restricts a cohesive understanding of the time and emphasizes a continuous state of chaos.

The later sequence exemplifies a similarly anxious syntax when Taliban leader

Ahmad Shah (Yousuf Azami) confronts Luttrell. Shah threatens the village for the

American’s location and eventually pulls the battered and bruised Luttrell out for execution. Telephoto lenses and handheld cameras capture the abuse as medium close- ups from a distance away. The editors cut the scene of Shah throwing Luttrell to the ground from different angles and distances. We first see him at a level just above the characters, then at a level lower to the ground. They frequently cut to shots opposite from one another (breaking the 180-degree line) and cut to claustrophobic images of the men’s legs to emphasize a disorienting experience. Not only does this disorienting experience 75 reflect Lettrell’s abuse, but the repeating aesthetic provides an alienating experience for war genre audiences after 2008.

The feelings of alienation here stem from the editing not being motivated by the characters or their actions. During the fall from the mountain, the filmmakers cut to a variety of shots of different soldiers from different angles. Unlike the examples from

Stop-Loss, the filmmakers do not cut from one soldier falling from a cliff, to the next rock into which they hit, to the next bullet they avoid, to the next ditch they fall into. The editing captures different angles and different soldiers falling as they each hit the hillside.

We can put together that they are falling together, but the different cuts are not motivated by the timing or cause-and-effect events like in previous war films.

Cunningham argues that this abrupt cutting to different handheld cameras from a wide variety of perspectives produces a “rupturing [of] body, mind, and consciousness.”

He asserts that the editing fractures the viewing experience — reminiscent of explosive fracturing from bombs — that stems from Bigelow’s excessive use of handheld cameras and rapid cutting. He asserts that “even the bodies of our protagonists are initially splintered by the camera into component parts, a strategy that denies spatial and situational orientation to the spectator.” Cunningham argues that, by quickly cutting between around fifteen angles in the opening sequence, “Bigelow has already succeeded in fragmenting spectatorial experience through her formal presentation of an unstable and unsettling opening sequence that prefigures The Hurt Locker's overall disruption.” She frequently refocuses the lenses, uses handheld cameras, and cuts to different angles of the same event from a wide variety of distances. Cunningham asserts that this has a major 76 impact on the viewing experience and reflects the protagonist’s conflicted experiences.118

Pisters has a similar argument about the logistics of perception in the movie. Though the editing contradicts her comparison to first-person shooters, she asserts that the aesthetics convey “berserker rage” and “reenact [...] the intensity of combat which gives insights into the paradoxical psychological effects of desubjectified precognitive reflexes and feelings of subjective traumative guilt after combat.”119 Both authors emphasize that jarring aesthetics stress the chaotic and splintering combat events when the camera aligns with the American soldier’s subjectivity. Yet, neither Cunningham or Pisters address that these jarring syntactics exist before and after the soldier leaves for combat, thus extending domesticity’s alienation to every aspect of James’s life.120 They occur when he disarms an explosive, when he relaxes with his unit, and even when he buys DVDs from

Beckham (the last two do not semantically deal with combat). The Hurt Locker introduces a trend (repeated in many subsequent war movies) of straight white male soldier’s entire subjectivity being shown as insecure and disorientating, not just during combat.

13 Hours features fragmenting editing during not only the fast-paced combat sequences (like Lone Survivor) but in the hired soldier’s daily and mundane events at the

118 Douglas A. Cunningham, “Explosive Structure: Fragmenting the New Modernist War Narrative in The Hurt Locker,” CineAction, no. 81 (2010): 3. 119 Pisters, “Logistics of Perception 2.0,” 224. 120 These fragmenting aesthetics are by no means new or innovative to movies with combat. The Bourne Identity is an example outside the genre that utilizes handheld cameras, varying shot scales, angles, and rapid editing to create a disorienting experience for the audience. Naturally, filmmakers would implement similar techniques when filming combat in war, yet this pattern extends beyond simply fighting and chaos. This syntactic trend stands out in the war film because of how it appears consistently as an alienating aesthetic independent of the content. Cunningham asserts that this pattern extends throughout nearly all of The Hurt Locker, but this occurs in other war films during simple and mundane events. 77 compound. While this structure might seem out of the norm in the film’s context, it reflects the patterns developing in the war genre after 2008. Several scenes cut between moving camera shots, back and forth between characters, and objects in a room. One particular instance of alienating editing occurs before any of the attacks commence when

Tyrone S. "Rone" Woods (James Dale) — the unit’s commander — briefs the team on protecting Americans during a meeting with an oil company exec in the city. The scene opens with a brief shot of a ceiling fan precariously spinning. While Rone instructs the men, the film cuts between shots of Silva preparing his weapon, objects in the room, and other men in the unit.121 We get a glimpse of a soldier listening, a man strapping a knife to his ankle, a man’s shrouded bicep, a fan, and bottles on the table. We get closer to

Silva each time the film returns to a shot of him, but the angle becomes increasingly slanted and the extreme close-ups make the image disorienting. The filmmakers use a telephoto lens to record this sequence so out-of-focus objects in front of the camera frequently obstruct a clear image of the men in the unit. The jarring editing also emphasizes the alienating photography by cutting to different angles, or a seemingly spontaneous object around the room, at an average of every 1.4 seconds. The images of objects (at different angles for such a short period) restrict us from focusing on the commander, his charts, and photographs of potential threats in the area. War movies before 2008 lack this kind of fragmenting editing throughout mundane daily experiences,

121 From the shaking ceiling fan, the film cuts quickly to Silva as he prepares his gun and sits down. After a quick shot of a cartridge loaded with bullet’s and a man’s sunglasses on the table then the shots become increasingly slanted. 78 such as a briefing in an office space. They, instead, reserve abrupt and jarring aesthetics for instances of combat and violence.

While many might argue that this trend simply exists in the film because Michael

Bay often directs his films with such a fast-paced approach, 13 Hours is not the only war movie after 2008 to exhibit these jarring events outside of combat, and thus an auteurist reading does not give us a full picture of the film.122 Lone Survivor — also during the unit’s briefing — features similarly splintering and disorienting syntactics. The sequence opens by quickly cutting to medium shots of certain soldiers in the room (no wide shot to establish their spatial relationships to one another) then cuts to an extreme close-up of the projected slide. We cannot see all the words on the screen while the camera uneasily pans back and forth to show only a fraction of a target and a map. One of the men points a laser to this picture and the camera quickly zooms even closer into the picture, blurring the image and exposing the screen’s pixels. Shots lasting less than a second cut to specific words on the screen (such as “taraq”) and restricts our ability to read the whole presentation or see the targeted men. This sequence exemplifies disorienting syntax from the soldier’s subjectivity occurring not just during the fighting but also during daily events and routine meetings at the base.

The abrupt editing creates a jarring viewing experience while just watching the straight white male soldier’s day-to-day activities. As mentioned in the first chapter, for techniques to develop into patterns in a genre, they must develop favor among audiences,

122 Many of Bay’s movies feature quick cutting in domesticity, such as in Transformers (Bay, 2007) whenever Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is in his parent’s house. 79 fans, and critics that encourage further uses of a similar technique. In the case of this aforementioned fragmented editing, these patterns resounded with audiences enough that they became successful installments at the box office.123 This once again draws our attention to the conditions that existed during the time of these films' releases to understand why audiences would support such a trend. Again, Wright’s methodology of identifying changes among social, political, economic, and working relations during times of structural changes reveals the uneasiness among Americans like the soldier protagonists in (and after) 2008.

The acceptance of fragmenting editing patterns within mundane workspaces and domesticity also stems from this group’s discontent when the 2008 financial crash worsened many of their working conditions and changed the possible futures they might have been able to achieve. While this group figuratively “witnessing people cut in line” contributes to the genre’s increasing visualization from other subjectivities, the uneasiness from their own perspective reflects their discomfort with their own “position in line.”124 Many working-class Americans in recent years have been pushed to new extremes because the quality of labor has decreased and the poor financial system from the economic crash in 2008 decreased job opportunities for laborers.125 Many businesses offset their revenue shortcomings during this time by cutting raises, lowering wages, and laying off employees. Out of desperation, this group often supports incentives to bring

123 While 13 Hours earned approximately $20 million at the box office, Lone Survivor went on to make over $100 million. And this is in addition to the aforementioned critical and financial successes of The Hurt Locker and American Sniper. 124 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 85–89. 125 Hochschild, 15-16,46-48,68. 80 major corporations into their communities in attempts to stimulate job growth.

Unfortunately, this did not overwhelmingly succeed as many businesses hired low-paid immigrants, polluted the towns (such as oil companies in southern Louisiana), and benefited from local tax cuts.126

A brief flashback from 13 Hours crystalizes this group’s growing anxiety over being laid off, poor wages, limited job opportunities, and the changing role of the straight white man in American domesticity in and after 2008. The film depicts Silva’s wife pleading for him to stay home and continue his real estate job, but Silva eventually leaves to put his life in danger in the hope of making a sizable income for his family. The editing in this fleeting sequence bears strong similarities to the soldiers from chapter one who experienced alienation and discontent with their domestic space before leaving for war. Beyond just the narrative, the abrupt cuts restrict the viewer’s connection and contentment with the American domestic space with Silva. The filmmakers abruptly cut from a wide shot of a suburban backyard, to Silva’s daughter, to Silva, then to his wife, then to a two-shot of Silva and his wife all within less than ten seconds. Furthermore, the shots of Silva and his wife cut between different distances and even different times that all contribute to a fragmenting experience for audiences. This pattern, like the changing structure of the narrative covered in the first chapter, stems from the alienated experiences of the soldiers within the American domestic space. The narrative provides a further connection to American life when we find out that Silva used to work in real

126 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 85–89. 81 estate, which was an industry that played a large role — and was deeply impacted by — the 2008 financial crisis.127 The war genre’s editing now does not separate the struggles of the home space from the combat zone. This scene is not important because of this inflated mythical patriarchal image, but because it visualizes how these groups put themselves into extreme conditions to try and maintain their ways of living after 2008.

The editing, unlike the narrative structure, does not simply reflect or visualize domestic problems in a genre film but instead establishes a viewing experience of alienation for all audiences (not just the predominantly straight white males who perceive themselves as estranged).

Alena Oliete uncovers a similar aesthetic during many sequences in Wall Street:

Money Never Stops (Stone, 2010). She explores the influence of the financial crisis on the film by contrasting it with the original eighties Wall Street (Stone, 1987) in “Images of

Love and Money in Hollywood Cinema: Changing Patterns in the Last Decades.” She argues that the original film depicts the family saving the main character from illegal greed while the sequel (after the financial crisis) presents “unsteady [...] family relationships” alongside greed becoming a legal and encouraged practice. This post-2008 financial-focused film shares some of the syntactic patterns exhibited in Hollywood war films of the time, such as the scene when Jake (Shia LaBeouf) convinces foreign investors to invest in a fusion project. The camera restricts showing the entire conference room in a wide shot — like in Lone Survivor and 13 Hours — and uses long lenses to

127 Silva himself, while chatting with Rone, admits that the real estate market was “pretty bad.” Rone asks how bad and Silva responds, “I’m here, aren’t I?” 82 record the characters from a distance (also showing out-of-focus characters and objects obstructing the foreground). The camera quickly cuts to characters talking in the conference room while also abruptly cutting between computer-generated mock-ups of the proposed generator. The camera moves and sways, as if from a hand-held perspective, and anxiously pans between the boss and other characters seated around the table. Oliete asserts that “the editing and mise-en-scène highlights the distancing effect again.” She describes this aesthetic as alienating and stresses its inclusion after the 2008 crash as a nostalgic desire for “past times in which family reconciliation and couples living happily- ever-after was possible.”128 These post-financial crisis editing patterns develop in the war genre after 2008 when the camera aligns the audience with the straight white male soldier’s subjectivity. Cutting to other perspectives riddles the viewing experience with anxiety because it implies that another person (or group) has agency over the American heroes. Yet, aligning the camera with the American hero’s perspective creates a more fragmenting experience than a pleasurable one.

Visual Identification in Hollywood War Cinema

It is important to acknowledge that each of these films use alienating syntax to depict almost exclusively straight white male working-class and middle-class

Americans.129 While chapter one reveals that the war genre’s structure changed to visualize insecurities that the central characters experience onscreen, this chapter revealed that the syntax creates a fragmenting and alienating experience for the viewers.

128 Elena Oliete, “Images of Love and Money in Hollywood Cinema: Changing Patterns in the Last Decades,” International Journal of the Image 2, no. 2 (July 2012): 120–21. 129 Though Wall Street and its sequel focus less on the working- and middle-class ones. 83

We no longer just watch a depiction of a group of Americans who perceive themselves as alienated, but the genre now exposes all viewers — regardless of their background — to the use of ambiguous editing, perspectives outside of the Americans’, and the fragmenting cutting from the United States soldier’s perspectives. Virilio’s argument about the drive to maintain dominance becomes even more anxiety-inducing when we see others with agency over the Americans. Watching this becomes even more jarring because even scenes from the soldier protagonist’s perspective are riddled with abrupt cuts to disjointed shots to many camera setups and zooming lenses.

Though not everyone comes from the same background as the soldier protagonists that the genre positions as the hero! Laura Mulvey, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema,” illustrates that — through the camera positioning, editing, and narrative drive

— the classical Hollywood film’s subjectivity is from a straight male’s perspective, yet not all audiences share this trait. Mulvey says “by means of identification with him, through participation and power, the spectator can indirectly possess [the woman object] too.”130 The war film, through a similar process of establishing the straight white masculine soldier’s subjectivity, creates a means of identification for spectators along with their emotions of alienation and insecurities.

Providing a universal viewing experience that conveys perceptions from this majority group normalizes their experiences of discontent to various genders, cultures, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc. Not only does their perspective remain the dominant

130 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (October 1, 1975): 12–14, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6. 84 mode of representation, but it subjects all audiences to their perceived estrangement. The next chapter argues that this group responds in harmful ways to the situation in which they find themselves. Audiences now have experienced alienating aesthetics that validate this groups resorting to fighting. Violence in the war film has the potential to convey emotions of genre pleasure because — and only because — the war genre creates an alienating experience for all genre audiences regardless of their background. Just as these violent push-backs harm everyone involved, so are the aesthetics that normalize the validity of this already dominant and privileged group of Americans.

Chapter 3 Mutilating the Perceived Threat:

How Melodramatic Violence Brings Pleasure to Alienated Genre Audiences

Chapters one and two argue that the post-2008 Hollywood war film’s structure crystallizes many viewer’s perceived feelings of alienation and estrangement, yet such jarring aesthetics do little to help audiences deal with the anxious emotions that they confront. This chapter argues that the character’s and viewer’s alienation from the previous chapters is resolved through scenes of melodramatic violence that the film stylizes to stress a threat’s dismemberment and mutilation. Rick Altman argues that genre films provide feelings of pleasure for audiences when fictional characters overcome

“moral crossroads.”131 Post-2008 Hollywood war movies, such as Fury and Hacksaw

Ridge, grant audiences these “generic pleasures” through a new depiction of violence that stylizes mutilation and reduces narrative conflicts to melodramatic emplotments of good and evil. These new syntactic trends visualize mostly straight white masculine American soldiers butchering anything that they might perceive as a threat, which creates an environment that justifies the character’s actions at their moral crossroads and provides pleasure and resolution for alienated viewers.

This use of violence is perhaps the most apparent during the second assault on the

Maeda Escarpment ("Hacksaw Ridge") in Hacksaw Ridge. Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who serves as a medical officer during World War II, and his unit are assigned to take control of this ridge during the Battle of Okinawa; yet, the Japanese

131 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 146–50. 86 armed forces overpower them on their first attempt. Desmond’s unit suffers many casualties and retreats from the ridge, but he stays up all night retrieving wounded (still- living) soldiers from the corpse-ridden battleground to get them medical attention. His commanders plan a second attack in the morning and ask Doss to accompany them as a source of hope and inspiration for the oncoming violent struggle.

The filmmakers use slow-motion photography as soon as the soldiers hit the top of the ridge and throughout much of the following battle. They emphasize unity and strength by composing shots filled with angry American soldiers ready to cut down the enemy. The slow-motion persists as we see the first Japanese soldier fall backward from a fiery explosion, which stresses the strength of the straight white American forces. This dominance continues in a subsequent shot when an American shoves his knife through a

Japanese man’s chest. The Japanese man swings his arms in desperation but stands no chance against the overpowering American force. We see, in the next shot, a burning

Japanese soldier flying through the air over the dead bodies of his fallen comrades. This shot stresses the death and destruction caused by war but also reduces the Japanese men to weightless rag dolls that Americans can easily demolish. The filmmakers string each of these shots together based on artillery and bodily impacts from perspectives completely separate from characters in the film, such as a soldier pulling a trigger, an explosion detonating, a man getting stabbed, or a soldier falling.132 This editing is motivated not by the character’s experiences, but by the violence of the battlefield.

132 This follows the editing patterns identified in chapter 2 in which the filmmakers cut to a series of different perspectives from outside of the American soldier’s point of view. 87

These aesthetics strongly contrast Hollywood war movies before 2008, such as the differences between Hacksaw Ridge and Saving Private Ryan. The widely popular and highly praised opening D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan exemplifies how war movies prior to 2008 connect shots based on heroic character’s perspectives and stress the mutilation of enemies much less.133 Instead, many war movies of the era depict combat from the perspective of what Albert Auster defines as a “collective memory.” He asserts that “It is [a] collective memory that Spielberg relies on in the film’s first twenty- five Goyaesque minutes of war horrors rather than the actual mind and experience of the aged veteran we see in the cemetery.”134 In Saving Private Ryan, the camera follows

American soldier after American soldier through the chaotic violence of war. The shaky camera does not cut every time an impact occurs but instead cuts to follow soldiers charging off the boats, through the water, and throughout the crater-ridden beach. The cuts occur when a soldier dies and the film moves onto the next American’s perspective.

We rarely see enemies with much clarity; and, when we do, the movie does not position the camera from their point of view. Rather, the film photographs these enemy troops head-on with the camera positioned by the American troops as we all face the opposing

133 I selected this scene because its mass popularity both makes its aesthetics quickly recognizable and because it also stands a s one of the leading instances of combat in war films. Critics Roger Ebert, Stephen Hunter, and Janet Maslin praise the use of violence and cinematics in this opening sequence and say that it provides an emotional experience like no other in the Hollywood war genre. Roger Ebert, “Saving Private Ryan Movie Review (1998) | Roger Ebert,” Roger Ebert.com, July 24, 1998, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/saving-private-ryan-1998; Stephen Hunter, “‘Saving Private Ryan’ (R),” The Washington Post, accessed February 12, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/style/movies/reviews/savingprivateryanhunter.htm; Janet Maslin, “FILM REVIEW; Panoramic and Personal Visions of War’s Anguish - The New York Times,” The New York Times, accessed February 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/24/movies/film-review-panoramic-and-personal-visions-of-war-s- anguish.html. 134 Auster, “Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism,” 101. 88 armed forces. J. David Slocum, in “Cinema and the Civilizing Process: Rethinking

Violence in the World War II Combat Film,” says that Spielberg used a forty-five-degree shutter technique to replicate the chaos and intensity of combat as if it were from a soldier’s perspective.135 He and his crew also grant us few visuals of the opposing forces during this sequence and grant even fewer shots from their perspective because the film ties our way of seeing to the oncoming American soldiers. Auster says that this is a common pattern among the triumphant American war films of the late nineties and early two-thousands.136

The use of slow-motion in Saving Private Ryan also contrasts the use of slow- motion in post-2008 war films because this technique in Saving Private Ryan connects the viewing experience specifically to the character’s point of view. The camera scuffles up to Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) while the fighting speed and chaos slow down. The film cuts to an image of a petrified American soldier huddling for cover, a soldier burst into flames, and a dismembered young man looking for his severed arm. The filmmakers cut back to Miller with an eyeline match to emphasize his role in witnessing these atrocities. The viewing experience has slowed down for the viewers because it is tied to

Miller’s slowed perspective as he takes in the chaos around him. This contrasts the use of

135 J. David Slocum, “Cinema and the Civilizing Process: Rethinking Violence in the World War II Combat Film,” Cinema Journal, no. 3 (2005): 36. 136 This trend can also be seen in We Were Soldiers during the battle in the Ia Drang Valley when the filmmakers cut between shots of the different American soldiers fighting for their survival. Pearl Harbor is another instance of a film that does not emphasize the mutilation of the enemy but instead frequently photographs combat from the American’s perspective. Jarhead, while there is little combat throughout the film, also emphasizes on the American soldier’s perspectives instead of emphasizing the destruction of the enemy (too much disappointment of the protagonist). 89 slow-motion in Hacksaw Ridge because the slowed-down slaughter of Japanese forces does not come from any of the character’s points of view.

Scenes that depict American troops inflicting harm on enemy troops use these disconnecting camera setups. The filmmakers often compose the violence horizontally in movies like Fury, which arranges the forces coming at each other from the left and right sides of the frame instead of from shallow space to deep space. Had they placed the camera next to the soldier, the enemy soldiers would appear to charge at the screen

(instead of left or right in the frame) while it would also exhibit the first-person video game patterns that Pisters argues in the last chapter; which the film does not do. The shot of the US soldier stabbing a Japanese man follows this new trend because the filmmakers place the camera not in line with the soldier’s line of sight but further back and to the soldier’s side. This long shot exemplifies how the war genre photographs combat violence from omniscient perspectives disconnected from the characters in the movie.

Why, then, do Hollywood war movies after 2008 exhibit the syntactic patterns that emphasize mutilating violence against an enemy from perspectives disconnected from characters when the prior war movies do not stress killing in such a way?

These trends can be understood by using Altman’s argument that genres evolve to provide “genre pleasures” from moral crossroads. In Film/Genre, he asserts that audiences desire excitement from instances when characters must act outside of accepted morality to resolve conflicts and bring into motion well-recognized tropes in the genre.

He exemplifies this in the case of the gangster film, arguing that the genre’s viewers — through the character’s actions — partake in illegal criminal activity while “remain[ing 90 in] a culture that condemns crime.” He continues, saying “since illegality is required for our pleasure, we actually seek it out.”137 The war genre’s audiences follow this trend and expect large-scale combat from the war movies they see. The movies they pay to see then provides them with genre pleasures by fulfilling these expectations, even if the characters might have to act immorally to ensure that this event occurs. The amount of pleasure that this expectation-fulfillment can also resolve much of the anxious and alienating emotions that viewers have experienced from the rest of the film. Audiences seek out opportunities that they can overcome (with violence) the problems they might face in a culture that typically outlaws mutilating whatever one might perceive as a threat. This explains why, despite a sense of anxiety from fragmented aesthetics, the Hollywood war film develops as both a financial and critical success after 2008.

The first two chapters in this thesis argue that developments in the war genre stem from audiences visually confronting perceived psychological conflicts, concluding that ambiguous and abrupt editing creates an extremely anxious and fracturing experience for audiences. In contrast, this depiction of outright violence (usually during climactic battle scenes) that reduces characters to melodramatic and easily identifiable representations of

“good versus evil” minimizes the anxious emotions from the aesthetics analyzed in the last chapter. Altman’s arguments on “genre pleasure” further resolve these instances of alienation because viewers can now live out violent fantasies of butchering threats through the new semantics and syntactics of melodramatic enemies, silhouette lighting,

137 Altman, Film/Genre, 146. 91 oppositional editing, slow-motion photography, dismembering violence, and impact editing in contemporary Hollywood war films.

Resolving Ambiguity by Defining an Enemy

One component of violence in the genre that remains particularly stagnant after

2008 is the melodramatic stripping away of complexity between “good” and “bad” characters. The films overtly portray the American forces as universal heroes (even though some individuals might have their own flaws) while they position enemy troops as nothing more than a threat to the straight white masculine American “heroes.” Laura

Mulvey’s approach — outlined in the last chapter — asserts that movies predispose audiences to a certain point of view through the narrative objectives, camera placement, and shot-reverse-shot editing. The war film orients audiences to innately support the

American soldiers through a similar use of these aspects: the narrative focuses on the US soldier’s motives and goals while the cameras (at least in the past) typically follow the

Americans through their daily lives until they step onto the battlefield. The exclusive attention to this single nation’s armed forces inherently positions the audience as sympathetic to the protagonist’s plight. This simplistic universality, while ridiculous in life outside of the movies, contributes to emotions of pleasure because it resolves much of the anxious and fragmented viewing experience described in the previous chapter.

The war film — through these practices — also orients us against anyone who might pose a threat to the main character’s point of view onscreen. These potential threats can cause anxiety for viewers when they remain ambiguous (as argued in the last chapter), but clearly defining them can provide reassuring emotions to audiences because 92 the hero characters can now overtake whatever threatens them. Several of these films feature climactic battle sequences that fully identify the threats that editing patterns previously restricted. Agnieszka Sołtysik Monnet, in “American War Adventure and the

Generic Pleasures of Military Violence,” argues this melodramatic simplicity persists throughout combat sequences in American Sniper. Monnet argues that the film reduces

“all Iraqis, men, women, and children [to simply] cruel, greedy, or neutrally violent

[characteristics].”138 Therefore, any instance of brute force against such a group would then please the audiences because they witnessed a “hero” eliminate these negative characteristics.139 By stripping away narrative complexity for enemy soldiers, depicting them as simplistically ruthless, cutting with oppositional editing, and concealing humanity through silhouette lighting, Fury and Hacksaw Ridge also resolve much of the alienating experiences with which the war films confront their audiences because audiences can witness the violent destruction of something they perceive as a cause to their alienating experience.140

138 Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, “American War Adventure and the Generic Pleasures of Military Violence: Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper,” Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 6 (December 12, 2018): 1379. 139 Monnet asserts that “combat is portrayed as a challenging ordeal, but, as in the classical paradigm, an effective mean[s] to test one’s mettle and become a man. [...] No activity elicits as much admiration and male approval as the successful deployment of violence.” Monnet, 1391. 140 13 Hours is one of the best examples because the anxious and ambiguous editing through much of the film diminishes during the climactic battle scene that clearly defines who is bad and who is good. The film restricts incoming soldiers to dark shadows that the American soldiers know they need to shoot down rather than the possibility some are just innocent civilians. Other instances in which combat reverts the ambiguous and alienating aesthetics to melodramatic conflicts include the final battle in 12 Strong (Fuglsig, 2018), sniping sequences against Mustafa in American Sniper, almost the entirety of Act of Valor (McCoy and Waugh, 2012), and most action sequences in Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston, 2011). 93

Fury’s narrative, while critical in its evaluation of how war necessitates that men must become killers, still positions German soldiers as nothing more than antagonists for our heroes. The film follows a young soldier, Private First Class Norman Ellison (Logan

Lerman), joining an M4 Sherman tank veteran crew — affectionately nicknamed “Fury”

— tasked to defend American soldiers and break through the final Nazi forces in 1945

Germany. The film very clearly depicts Nazis as evil forces that the American heroes need to conquer, doing away with any ambiguity both at the level of plot and of form.

The narrative even punishes characters who do not kill their opponents on-sight. Norman

Ellison has many opportunities to shoot and kill Nazi soldiers but he hesitates and allows for a young Nazi foot soldier to destroy the platoon leader’s tank with a Panzerfaust.141

Norman’s hesitation might be seen as an act of generosity or mercy outside of this genre, but his momentary lapse directly contributes to American destruction. The narrative, through instances like this, depicts the enemy as nothing more than a destructive threat that Americans need to eliminate for their lives to ever be safe from threats.

Much of the villain's two-dimensional nature in movies like Fury stems from the historical context of WWII.142 Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard write about how returning to events during the Second World War brought pleasure to audiences during the resurgence of the World War II combat film in the 1990s (after the fall of the Soviet Union and

141 A Panzerfaust is a German anti-tank weapon that fires an explosive from an easy-to-transport tube. 142 While the World War II combat film returns to popularity throughout history, the execution of World War II films after 2008 are fundamentally connected to the issues already discussed in this paper. The characters in Fury and the protagonist from Hacksaw Ridge are alienated from their experiences before they enter combat. They continue to experience alienation throughout the film, but this tension resolves through acts of violence. 94

America’s military intervention in Operation Desert Storm). They argue that America’s victory and military vigor convey emotions of pride and solidarity in contemporary

WWII narratives because “the motif of a triumphant good war could be used to affirm

U.S. exceptionalism.”143 Albert Auster, in “Saving Private Ryan and American

Triumphalism,” also argues that World War II brings with it a sense of American exceptionalism and national pride. He says, “World War II has become the indispensable symbol of American patriotic virtue and triumph. It can be brought forward to exalt

American arms and the American spirit whenever contemporary events require it.”144

Filmmakers should easily be able to encourage viewers to root for any character that cuts down Nazis because of today’s overwhelming acceptance that America asserted itself as a hero during this time.145 Their decision to return to events, during which many

Americans believe that they triumphed, provides a setting for violence that can bring contemporary audiences harmony and resolution because of this historical justification.

In addition to defining heroics from historical context, Hacksaw Ridge orients

Japanese soldiers as simplistic enemies to viewers through three narrative methods. The first, which becomes known to us early in the movie, is through the hero’s support of the war. Desmond — even though he vows to remain a pacifist — still wants to contribute to

America’s efforts against the Axis powers. The narrative thus positions audiences against the Japanese army before the filmmakers depict any combat through this overwhelming

143 Boggs and Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine, 93–95. 144 Auster, “Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism,” 104. 145 I initially wrote that widespread audiences would experience pleasure by cutting down the Nazi regime, but recent developments reveal increasing support for this kind of authoritarian power. I instead chose to focus on how the general acceptance of America’s action during this period can provide genre pleasure. 95 sense of support for the American forces. The second method occurs through physical acts of combat. Much like in Fury, the American forces fall prey to the Japanese soldiers if they do not shoot at (and kill) the opposing army. While writers Robert Schenkkan and

Andrew Knight argue that Doss becomes a more sympathetic character when Doss aids a

Japanese soldier in a cave, it does little to increase the audience’s connection with the melodramatically evil Japanese army because of the continuous threat they pose to the

US soldiers. Despite Doss’s generosity, the very next scene depicts him testing the vitals of a man killed by these Japanese troops, which makes Doss seem only more generous for aiding a group of men who can contribute to so much destruction against the

Americans. Positioning an entire group as a threat to our hero’s happiness and harmony thus restricts them to nothing more than a melodramatic villain. The final instance exists as the violence emphasized against the American heroes. Hacksaw Ridge, like Fury, conveys an urgency to destroy a clearly defined enemy when the American soldiers first reach the ridge. Our first introduction to graphic violence comes in the form of

Americans approaching the Japanese army. The filmmakers cut to shots of butchered US troops on the ground lying in large pools of their own dark red blood. The genre has depicted casualties of war since the very early years, but Hacksaw Ridge shows casualties not as crumpled heaps on the battlefield, but as torn apart by the weapons that penetrated their bodies or the decay that permeates their resting place. We see decapitated heads or limp body parts covered in both blood and maggots scattered throughout craters and other dead soldiers. Some bodies are torn in two; not cleanly torn apart but with their innards thrown across the ridge leading up to their motionless body. This imagery both conveys 96 that Japanese soldiers are a threatening presence and crystallizes imagery of straight white men as defeated.

As the soldiers push on, one tattered body jumps up and screams in terror. The filmmakers then show a bullet pass through the man’s skull; scattering his face, blood, and dirt all over a fresh American soldier’s face. Rapid camera pans visualize soldiers becoming casualties of war; albeit not simply falling limp — like in classical World War

II combat films — but with their blood splattering across the battlefield. Loud explosions tear through the men’s flesh. The enemy weapons do not simply exterminate life from these American men, but brutally tear apart their bodies. Stepping on a land mine sends a man’s legs in an entirely different direction than his torso (and the rest of his organs). The filmmakers edit most of this sequence together with a series of rapid cuts that show the massive violence upon the American soldiers. Each cut gives us only enough time to understand where the camera is placed so that we are not quite spatially disoriented but it instead cuts based on impact. A shot of a few men pelted by machine-gun fire cuts to men stepping on a landmine, then a cut to a man shot through the head, then a cut to soldiers taking cover behind a log pelted by bullets, and then a cut to soldiers avoiding an oncoming explosion. Each shot contains some instances of a munitions impact and lacks any connection between the different characters or different locations to which the filmmakers cut. Furthermore, a lack of passing time before and after each impact in these quick shots further heightens this excessive and gory violence. These series of cuts exemplify how impact (not character’s experiences) motivate editing in post-2008 war films. 97

This simplistic depiction of enemy forces plays a necessary role in how audiences experience Altman’s genre pleasures. Altman argues that genres rely on preconceived expectations that heroes will overcome challenges through patterns of the genre. This might manifest itself as Fred and Ginger defying cultural norms to dance with each other in a musical, or James Cagney fighting off the police in a large-scale shootout in a gangster movie.146 Altman himself says that heroes in the war film “thrives on foreigners” and the Hollywood ones released after 2008 reduce such characters to nothing more than an object that American heroes can butcher to overcome.147

The German and Japanese killing of American forces in Fury and Hacksaw Ridge establish the axis powers as an oppositional and antagonistic force to our American heroes. Altman asserts that stars also play a role in the audience's expectation and pleasure in the film. Many post-2008 Hollywood war films feature popular and box- office successful movie stars for the American protagonists, such as Jeremy Renner,

Bradley Cooper, Chris Hemsworth, John Cena, Andrew Garfield, and Brad Pitt (each with massive fan-bases who support them). Like musical fans who pay to see Fred and

Ginger dance together, so would fans pay to see their favorite (straight white male) actors succeed.148 Jenine Basinger argues that WWII combat films typically typecast the

American soldiers in their films. These are, but not limited to, an older and wiser leader, a young man (often from New York), comedic relief, and often an ethnic minority

146 Altman, Film/Genre, 146–48. 147 Altman, 149. 148 Altman, 146. 98

(typically an American Indian or a man of Hispanic background).149 Fury follows a similar pattern by casting Brad Pitt as the charismatic leader, well-known Shia LaBeouf as a religious man, and Michael Peña as the loyal American ethnic minority (Peña appears in many war movies of this era). Seeing these iconic faces in the heat of battle provides audiences with a group of soldiers to inherently support because of their popularity and recognizability outside of the movie. Casting serves as just one more way that war films maintain a melodramatic depiction of enemy forces that provides pleasure for audiences destroying “the other.”

Audience appeal for clearly defined enemy forces can be explained by Sociologist

Paula K. Miller, who proves that groups are eager to attribute their struggles to a singular group, regardless of the ridiculousness that such an entity could explain all the problems that one faces. Miller, who specializes in whiteness studies, researches groups with similar backgrounds and economic conditions as the soldier protagonist in post-2008

Hollywood war cinema. Her study looks at less-educated whites from Detroit, Michigan in the wake of the economic downturn in 2009. Workers in this geographic area — once identified as an industrial powerhouse with plentiful opportunities for working-class employment — suffered from frequent layoffs and below poverty-level income since deindustrialization starting in the nineteen-sixties and worsening after the financial crash.150 She tests the applicability of Evans and Giles’s power threat hypothesis, which argues that white’s perception of black and other ethnic minorities correlates with their

149 Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, 50–51. 150 Paula K. Miller, “"But Aren’t We All Poor?,” 48–49. 99 perception of economic or political agency. This means that whites would exhibit a more negative attitude towards blacks and ethnic minorities in times of economic downturn because they attribute the presence of this “other” group as increased competition for labor opportunities. “This increased competition is argued to increase white hostility toward racial and ethnic minorities, and the desire for social and ideological control of these minorities.”151 The lesser job opportunities available after the 2008 financial crash create a belief among whites that they need to overpower other groups to maintain their lifestyles. Miller analyzes results from the 2009 State of the State Survey (SOSS) to prove that:

Less educated, more conservative whites who have negative perceptions

of their individual and communal economic conditions are more likely to

blame blacks for their own inability to achieve economic success, thereby

downplaying the structural factors that contribute to blacks’ lack of

opportunity in the United States.152

Her findings support the notion that Americans like the soldier protagonists quickly attribute shortcomings in their quality of life to a singular easily-identifiable group.153

Therefore, this sentiment after 2008 contributes to the Hollywood war film’s syntax

151 Paula K. Miller, 44–45. 152 Paula K. Miller, 59. 153 There is much of Miller’s study that extends beyond this text. Her evidence further concludes that “1. Whites with higher educational backgrounds will be less likely to exhibit negative racial attitudes than those with lower educational backgrounds. 2. Whites who identify as Republican will be more likely to exhibit negative racial attitudes than whites who identify as Democrat. 3. Whites with more negative perceptions of their own and community financial status are more likely to have negative racial attitudes.” Paula K. Miller, 59–62. 100 depicting other groups as a threat that one needs to overpower. Viewers from a similar background as the soldier protagonists can then receive genre pleasures by watching straight white American men exert harsh violence against other groups.

This group’s reduction to a simplistic villain status extends beyond just the plot, such as how Fury depicts many German soldiers in silhouette during the final confrontation. The darkness of night mixed with the artillery fire and house fire reduce the complexity and humanity of an opposing soldier’s physical characteristics to nothing more than an outline that can kill; essentially a target.154 Like the subjects in Miller’s study, these films strip away any defining human characteristics from “other” groups and visualize opponent soldiers as nothing more than a threat to the American soldier’s wellbeing. Fury’s reduction of Nazi forces to nothing more than a one-dimensional silhouette provides further resolution to the anxiety and ambiguity outlined in the last chapter because there is no need to question the silhouette soldier’s integrity as he runs at the camera with a gun. Audiences no longer have to evaluate the potentially youthful age, morality, and innocence of the approaching opponent and can instead relish the violence that eliminates this threat.

Finally, the editing in recent World War II combat films also reverts the enemy to a simplistic opponent by using oppositional cutting. As mentioned in the previous chapter, many war films that portray contemporary events in the Middle East restrict audiences from comprehending who and where threats might lie. Editing in instances of

154 This technique also reflects Norman’s (now “The Machine”) ability to slaughter oncoming forces without a second thought. No longer does he see the humanity or life that he takes away with his firing but sees them only as an oncoming enemy. 101 outright combat, however, clearly defines the position and whereabouts of enemy forces by cutting from a scouting American soldier to that of an enemy soldier. The next shot typically returns to the American soldier shooting down the enemy that the editing just clearly defined. This appears throughout a variety of combat sequences in Fury and

Hacksaw Ridge.

Fury follows this pattern during the sequence in which the tanks cross an open field to provide cover for foot soldiers. We see long shots of tanks passing through the field with many soldiers regrouping behind the armored vehicles. After this, we see another long shot that reveals the open field ahead of the Americans with machine-gun fire targeting them from beyond. The film cuts to Norman in the tank looking for the enemy soldiers, then back to the Nazi artillerymen. This shot-reverse-shot firmly establishes a clearly defined enemy because it juxtaposes the two forces as fighting against one another. This pattern returns in excess during the final confrontation. Early in the fight, the filmmakers cut from shots of the American soldiers inside the tank looking through their scopes to the oncoming swarm of Nazi soldiers. Repeatedly cutting back- and-forth between the Americans, the oncoming Nazis, the Americans firing, and then back to the Nazis trying to regroup establishes a firm opposition between the two groups.

Furthermore, we as viewers have followed these American stars through the trials of war for the past one-hundred minutes so we innately support the recognizable straight white men inside the tank.155

155 The filmmakers also cut between a shot of clearly defined oncoming troops and Norman shouting “fucking Nazi!” This further reinforces the melodramatically good versus evil conflict in the film. 102

Editing one group as a clear source of opposition reinforces Miller’s argument on attributing shortcomings to a single group of marginalized individuals. It also resolves the ambiguity that many of these films convey outside of outright combat sequences. These patterns put in place how mutilating violence can provide pleasure for genre audiences, but they do not fully explain how the specific extreme violence’s semantic and syntactic changes develop.

Eliminating Threats though Mutilating Violence

Now that major combat scenes continue to clearly define enemies, the soldiers can destroy anything that might seek to oppose them through new syntactic uses of violence.156 These patterns now disconnect viewers from the American soldier’s perspective when they sever and mutilate an enemy, which produces a series of pleasurable and fulfilling emotions. The war genre uses the expected climactic battle for audiences to witness masculine white soldiers butchering threats through semantics and syntactics depicting melodramatic enemies, silhouette lighting, oppositional editing, slow-motion photography, dismembering violence, and impact editing in contemporary

Hollywood war films. These aesthetic developments combine to accentuate the moment that this majority group eradicates another group’s agency.

The scene previously cited from Hacksaw Ridge exemplifies these mutilating aesthetics. Continuing where we left off, we see the burning carcass of a Japanese soldier falling on top of more of his fallen comrades (also catching them on fire in the process).

156 These patterns continue even after 2008, when many other syntactic changes develop. The genre’s static depiction of enemy forces plays a large role in the mutilating violence’s effects on viewers. 103

A man vigorously shoves a knife into a Japanese soldier’s chest; and, in the next shot, the boots of an American soldier kick down an opposing soldier and restrict his ability to get up. Blood erupts from his mouth, but not simply dripping from it; it propels from his body like a scarlet-colored mini-explosion. In a later sequence — after Doss risks his life to knock an oncoming grenade from blowing apart his comrades — Americans fire rounds upon rounds into a group of Japanese soldiers pretending to surrender.157 Their blood splashes onto one another, onto the ground, and even at the camera. One man’s bullet hole spews blood as he falls to the ground. Throughout this sequence, we see a myriad of Japanese troop’s limbs and body parts blown across the battlefield. The filmmakers stress this violence by positioning the camera not by the US soldiers but often in a location that privileges the viewer to witness the Japanese man’s bloody dismemberment. This provides viewers with an optimum angle to witness the very moment when a white male deprives another man of their agency.

These semantic aspects are all brought together with a syntax that stresses impacts, omniscient perspectives, and slow-motion. The editors cut the film based on impacts, such as when the Americans empty rounds into the half-naked Japanese men.

American (or Japanese) soldier’s subjectivity no longer motivates the editing and the filmmakers instead cut to brief shots from all-around the battlefield. This emphasizes the slaughter, provides a detailed view of the killing, and separates viewers from the characters firing the weapons (or dying). The filmmakers cut rapidly; almost as rapidly as

157 This again contributes to their melodramatically villainous characteristics. The Americans do not cut down the potential threat (the surrendering Japanese) and they immediately take advantage of the moment by throwing grenades to decimate the American’s lives. 104 the machine-guns propel their bullets. Throughout this sequence, the explosions, bullets, or artillery impact motivate each of the cuts, instead of the editing in movies like Saving

Private Ryan where the American soldier’s actions motivate each cut. Furthermore, the entirety of this sequence has been photographed in slow-motion. This stresses each of the movements, the impacts, and explosions that riddle a battlefield. A bullet quickly tears through the body; but, in slow-motion, the viewers have more time to witness the blood pour from the body, see how long it takes for the body to fall, and notice the lack of life as the soldier falls in a crumpled heap. Explosions send men flying across the battlefield, but not in a quick abrupt way. Instead, the Japanese soldiers soar across the screen away from the impact that sent them soaring. We can see the moment they lose the ability to walk or lift anything as their arms and legs tear away from their body. Each of these semantic and syntactic patterns, combined with the clearly defined enemy soldiers during major combat sequences, provide an empowering experience by stressing imagery that mutilates and obliterates anything that the audience might perceive as a threat.

Altman’s genre pleasure model effectively described how these aesthetics produce emotions of pleasure. He asserts that there are two foundations for these repeated emotions: audiences expecting (and seeking out) certain trends when they purchase a ticket, and studios conditioning audiences by introducing new tropes for them to then expect. He likens this to a Pavlovian approach by saying that “a film’s repeated invitations to generic processing train those who accept them both to enjoy new generic 105 pleasures and to disdain the cultural positions presented as alternatives.”158 We live in a society that outlaws citizens killing one another (especially with the kind of excess violence in the movies), but clearly defining the villains provides an environment that justifies heinous acts against other humans. Soldiers in the war film have no choice but to obliterate the enemy when they come to their moral crossroads because hesitation could cost them their lives. Audiences will pay for the characters to resolve their conflicts through violence because they witness other Americans — who often look similar to themselves — with the ability and the agency to act out against whatever might get in their way.159 As such, a series of semantic and syntactic patterns developed after 2008 to adjust for what brings pleasure to the paying audiences.

Why, then, do such trends develop in 2008? Arlie Russel Hochschild argues that the appeal for fighting back against a clearly defined opponent has greatly increased throughout America, especially among majority groups who come from a similar background as the soldier protagonist. She cites Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as a pinnacle example of this trend in her chapter “Strangers No Longer,” when she shares her experiences — and the rallyist’s excitement — during a Trump rally at

Lakefront Airport in New Orleans. She describes how feelings of overwhelming unity stem from visual similarities in the crowd’s clothing (many of the crowd wear red, white, and blue colors or t-shirts with one-hundred-dollar bills on them), their background

158 Altman, 151. 159 By no means do I assert that the war genre’s audience comprises exclusively of straight white male Americans, but it is a genre that appeals to this demographic. Altman himself asserts that certain genres appeal to different potential viewers and he cites the war film as an example of a masculine genre. Altman, Film/Genre, 148. 106

(“nearly everyone is white; apart from the protesters, the only blacks I see are security guards or vendors”), and their gear (“two or three thousand fans in Trump hats, or wearing Trump shirts, holding and waiving ‘TRUMP; MAKE AMERICA GREAT

AGAIN,’ or ‘SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP’”).160 These visual appearances thus create solidarity among the crowd in the hanger and can be seen as the possibility for them to resolve the perceived estrangement caused by their struggle to confront changing privileges. The war film conveys similar unifying emotions by visualizing large groups of militant American males standing out among non-white

“enemies,” silhouetted aggressors, or edited opposition.

This chapter’s major takeaway centers around how the idea of violent retaliation instills harmony over this crowd of supporters. Hochschild argues that Trump’s way to instill an emotionally uplifting experience is:

To revile and expel members out of groups. [...] The act of casting out the

‘bad one’ helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the ‘good ones,” the

majority, no longer strangers in their own land.161

She lists instances in which the support for the presidential candidate increased after he verbally threatened violent retaliatory actions against protestors, the EPA, Muslims, advocates for “political correctness,” and Mexicans.162 “Such scapegoating reinforces the

160 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 222. 161 Hochschild, 226. 162 “In other speeches Trump said, in reference to a protester, ‘I’d like to punch him in the face’ (February 23, 2016). ‘In the good old days they’s have ripped him out of that seat so fast’ (February 27, 2016). ‘Knock the crap out of him, would you? Seriously… I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise’ (February 1, 2016). [...] In his speeches, Trump has spoken of ‘something within Islam which hates Christians,’ and of his intention to ban all Muslims from entering the country. He has spoken of 107 joyous unity of the gathering. The act of casting out the ‘bad one’ helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the ‘good ones,’ the majority.”163 The war film provides a similar affective and uplifting experience for those who perceive themselves as alienated through the new ways of visualizing combat and the melodramatic positioning of ultra-violence.

By no means do I assert that the war genre’s popularity or aesthetics contributed to the 2016 election results, but the war film does crystallize this desired response from primarily straight white men who find themselves increasingly alienated from their privileges after 2008. Thus, as Hochschild proves that violence serves as fundamentally important to the feelings of harmony and unity, so does this chapter argue that it is a core attribute that brings resolution in the Hollywood war genre. Each of these new mutilating trends thus provides audiences with an overwhelming positive, empowering, and unifying experience that they do not experience within the changing potential for their lifestyles.

First, the dominating imagery provides yearning audiences with the pleasure of overtaking their competition and even robbing them of their competency and abilities.

The wealth of blood splatter visually conveys to soldiers and the viewers that the enemy experiences a wealth of pain and suffering, such as in the final battle in Hacksaw Ridge.

The battle rages on well after Doss has been taken for medical care. A Japanese man, covered in blood and dirt, falls into the frame of a close-up from the ground. Classical war films, such as The Longest Day or Sergeant York depict dead soldiers as motionless

expelling all undocumented people of Mexican origin. [...] In nearly every rally, Trump points out a protestor, sometimes demonizing them and calling for their expulsion.” Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 224–28. 163 Hochschild, 226. 108 heaps on the ground. They draw little emphasis on the specifics of blood and grime on an enemy soldier; but, in Hacksaw Ridge, the audience sees the American strength’s excessive and destructive results. Troops do not simply fall to the ground. Instead, we see their bodies blown apart, such as the cowering Japanese man covered in their comrade’s blood as they surrender to the US army. The climactic battle in Fury features blood splatter that conveys a similar effect. War Daddy unloads bullets into an unsuspecting

Nazi’s chest when he opens Fury’s top hatch. The Nazi does not simply fall, but the composition shows his innards blasted out by one of the heroes we have followed for the past hour and forty-two minutes. Excessive blood is not unique to war films after 2008, but the emphasis of blood on the enemy soldier has renewed emphasis. Prior films — like

Home of the Brave and In the Valley of Elah — stress the American soldier’s blood and the suffering they experience over the later movies’ thrill from bringing down an enemy soldier in post-2008 war movies.

The imagery of burning enemy soldiers develops as another source for further relieving feelings. This occurs in Fury when the troops come up against a Sherman tank.

Boyd "Bible" Swan aims at his foe and scores a direct hit on the German tank. The tank explodes into a fiery explosion, but the film cuts for a brief second of the tank’s commander screaming in pain as the rising fire consumes his body. Hacksaw Ridge conveys a similar effect of disabling one’s threat by burning them with a flamethrower.

One American soldier rises out of a crater to burn a series of Japanese troops who quickly catch fire and become engulfed in agonizing flames. The use of fire in these films provides an additional level of pain that the American soldiers force their enemies to 109 experience. Fury’s editors could have simply maintained a long shot to show the destroyed tank but they instead chose to emphasize the Nazi’s agony. Hochschild’s

Trump rally analysis reveals that the (perceived) struggling Americans respond with overwhelmingly positivity when something provides them with the illusion they can come together to overpower somebody/something. Cutting to the Nazi’s excruciating pain emphasizes the impact that once can excersise over a potential threat. Instead of merely conveying to the audiences that Bible (Shia LaBeouf) eliminated the tank, the film provides an additional layer of pleasure through another group’s discomfort.

Miller also provides reasoning for why viewers can experience such pleasure from the emphasis on this other group’s pain. She asserts that less-educated whites perceive other groups as a threat to their own well-being and thus develop negative perceptions of them. These genre pleasures allow them to witness groups’ — of which they have negative opinions towards — suffering without actually enacting that violence themselves. The emphasis of their pain thus secures the dominance and superiority of a group that feels they need to compete with others for their own prosperity (or to maintain the prosperity from which this group historically benefitted).

This manifests in the dismemberment and mutilation syntactic patterns after 2008.

Again, the straight white male American heroes do not simply kill enemy soldiers but butcher them by emptying rounds of bullets into their bodies and use explosives to blow them into several pieces. During Fury’s final battle, Bible fires an artillery blast into a group of Nazi soldiers aiming at the tank. Upon impact, the top of their heads (and helmets) remain in the frame, but the rest of their body parts can be seen scattered well 110 beyond the contents of the frame. The enemy forces appear to be reduced to rag dolls as they fly around the battlefield from impact after impact. Japanese soldiers in Hacksaw

Ridge experience a similar level of destruction when explosions and grenades rip their bodies apart. We can see their bodies lying on the ground often missing a limb or with their bodies butchered beyond repair. As an explosion goes off, we can see the moment that an enemy soldier loses his ability to walk or lift something when his legs or his arms sever and are thrown across the battlefield. This bodily obliteration visually and physically restricts the enemy from a kind of agency experienced by the mobile and agile soldier protagonists. No longer do the American soldiers and viewers have to worry that this enemy might pose a threat to them thanks to the might of other straight white masculine Americans (and sometimes Michael Michael Peña). Applying this to Miller’s study, these syntactic patterns show straight white males dominating potential threats and stripping them of any agency or ability that might make them compete for resources or labor opportunities. The bloodshed, burning, and severing of limbs turn potential threats into easily-dominated groups that cannot recover the kind of abilities that made them threats to the viewers initially.

Each of these dominating images rely on the genre’s new camera placement patterns that distances the viewer from the US soldier’s subjectivity during their killing moments. We now see the enemy’s slaughter from camera setups that are distant from the

American’s point of view, but still emphasize the moment that the enemy loses his life.

The editing further stresses this moment while also no longer motivated by the American soldier’s experiences by cutting to impacts across the battlefield, such as gunfire, 111 exploding grenades, bullets hitting something, or men using their rifles as a melee weapon. Each cut no longer jumps from a soldier’s perspective to another’s, but instead to different locations where mutilation might occur.

The cinematography further distances us from the soldier protagonist’s perspective and contributes to a pleasurable viewing experience because audiences do not feel they have to take accountability or guilt for slaughtering other groups. As mentioned in the last chapter, Hollywood movies after the gulf war often depicted events from an omniscient subjectivity that separated the camera’s perception to only what the character might know but instead now like “drone” or “surveillance” coverage.164 Mark J. Lacy, in

"War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety," asserts that this contributes to a viewing experience that disconnects audiences from accountability for the hideously violent and butchering violence on screen, what he defines as “moral proximity.” Lacy explores this proximity in war films released after 9/11 and the differences in subjectivity quickly become clear.

He asserts that Black Hawk Down puts viewers in perspectives that make it seem like they are next to the soldiers and like they are one of the unit. He compares this feeling to that of Saving Private Ryan, as if we were on those beaches with the soldiers. “Scott operates within a hegemonic moral geography that decides who are to be subjects of the moral community. We do not get to see the deaths of the Somalis with any moral proximity; nor do we get any insight into what it means to live in Mogadishu.”165 He says

164 Refer to the last chapter or Paul Virilio’s book on the logistics of warfare perception. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London ; New York: Verso, 1989). 165 Mark J. Lacy, “War, Cinema, and Moral Anxiety,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 28, no. 5 (2003): 620. 112 here that Scott consciously emphasizes the American soldiers’ perspectives instead of the

Somalis and, by doing so, we the viewers do not see the heinous killings of citizens of the village so we are freed from moral accountability that might make us question such actions.

The war film after 2008 accomplishes this distanced morality on the opposite principle. The filmmakers often do not tie subjectivity to exclusive characters. Like

Virilio’s argument on drone vision, the filmmakers position the cameras in many locations that do not give us the perspective of a killer during kill shots in combat. In

Fury, the tank serves as a physical boundary that restricts us from taking accountability for relishing in the death of enemy soldiers. Lacy argues that technology can also bring about large moral proximity from atrocities, such as in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) when Coppola depicts a small village’s destruction as a show of splendor from helicopters. The film cuts to images of the helicopters, not young American men, launching fiery explosives into the inhabited village and shows that technology can separate the viewers from accountability for destruction.166 The camera puts us in the tank with the soldiers in Fury, but the camera must be taken outside of the tank (and away from the killers) to show the killing we witness. We do not see the previously mentioned shot of Germans obliterated by an artillery shell from the American’s perspective. The camera here pulls us away from what the US soldiers see and enunciates the threat’s extermination. War Daddy, Bible, and The Machine are down the street and away from

166 Mark J. Lacy, 626–27. 113 where the camera is placed, away from where viewers can enjoy seeing their opponents ripped apart. Hacksaw Ridge also exhibits this pattern through the placement of the camera parallel to much of the fighting. A lot of combat occurs horizontally across the screen (with American soldiers charging to the right and Japanese forces coming from the left). The camera pans past Americans stabbing Japanese men, explosions mutilating bodies, and burning soldiers instead of showing the subjectivity of a certain side.167

While these films provide a more objective perspective than the one Lacy argues, they provide a certain level of moral ambiguity for the audiences that allows them to still enjoy the pleasure of seeing, not taking part in, the potential threat’s slaughter.

While the camera’s perspective throughout these films maintains an ambiguous

— and often omniscient — subjectivity that allows for audiences not to question the morality of mutilation, the use of slow-motion photography provides extenuating viewing time that stresses the destructive semantics. Slow-motion appears frequently in the genre after 2008 and draws out the resolution from causing the enemy threats to suffer. Mel

Gibson and the filmmakers for Hacksaw Ridge use it excessively during the final fight for the ridge at the end of the film. Approximately seventy-three shots are presented in slow- motion from the first American who makes his way on top of the cliff to the final shot of the Japanese leader committing an honorable suicide, each of which draws out time and gives the viewer a longer chance to witness the events onscreen. Suddenly quick actions

167 This is not without its exceptions, however. There are at least three shots specifically from an American soldier’s perspective from behind the sight of a machine-gun. These instances, however, revert to Lacy’s moral proximity from earlier films. The gun is not close enough to see the blood-drenched enemy’s body pelted with bullets. The camera does not maintain this perspective when Americans shove their bayonets into their opponent’s chests. 114

— such as multiple American soldiers shoving their bayonets into an enemy’s chests — take up entire seconds that stress the butchering against potential threats. The explosion blowing through the Japanese cave would have been a quick burst of flame, but the slow- motion provides ample time for audiences to witness the flames consuming dozens of opponent soldiers, to see how their bodies just disappear into flames, and how the fireball reduces their body into nothingness. slow-motion — as well as impact editing and omniscient subjectivity — emphasize the semantics that provides audiences with the feeling of overcoming their threats. They stress the demolition and destruction of any person who might pose a challenge to these viewer’s lifestyles.

Yet, Brian E. Crim and Elizabeth Flux both expose a complication in the genre’s ability to fully convey resolution and harmony through violence in the Hollywood war genre after 2008. Crim, in “I Got No Problem Killing My Kin,” argues that Fury is an extension of — and more critical look at — the WWII combat film. He says that “Fury portrays fragile and threatening masculinity that is perhaps unique to a film about the

Second World War” and points to many examples in which the film expands on the stereotyped masculine characters of past combat films.168 He argues that the real conflict of the film stems from the conflict of masculinity and a man’s ability to adjust his morality during wartime. This initial conflict, exhibited by Norman in the film, forces our attention on how straight white American males respond when they feel alienated or ill- equipped to adjust. Flux, in “Horror and Gore, Honour and Glory: Hacksaw Ridge and

168 He compares many of the figures to masculine characters of the time, he explores Wardaddy’s German ancestry, and that the movie takes place not during a famous battle but at the end of the war. Brian E. Crim, “‘I Got No Problem Killing My Kin,’” 4. 115 the War Film,” argues that Hacksaw Ridge separates itself from other war films by its focus on a hero who refuses to fight. She argues, “The success of a film like Hacksaw

Ridge lies in its ability to evoke emotion while remaining relatively impartial on the topic of war itself. All the audience is offered are nods to bigger issues; every point immediately has a counterpoint. War leads to large-scale loss of life, but Doss cancels this out by saving enemy soldiers.”169 She reveals here that Hacksaw Ridge also centers around a conflict stemming from the protagonist and how he responds when unaccepted by his surroundings. While these authors argue that the initial conflicts come from the characters themselves, the climax of the films deal with violent assaults against an opposing army and not particularly a soldier struggling with his personal issues. Neither of these films — like many post-2008 Hollywood war movies — position “the enemy” as the inciting incident or conflict that needs to be resolved. In classical Hollywood narratives, the climax of the film is positioned to resolve the conflicts that were initially presented in the film. These war films depict war and violence as the climactic moments of the narrative, yet many of these films do not position the enemies that they slaughter and overpower as the actual conflict from which they struggle.

Hollywood scenes that typically depict the protagonist resolving their inciting conflicts have now been replaced with expansive violence. Positioning major combat at this pinnacle moment in the film’s narrative demonstrates Hochschild’s argument that

Americans quickly resort to violence against others to resolve their struggles with

169 Flux, “Horror and Gore, Honour and Glory,” 35. 116 contemporary society. The depiction of violence in post-2008 Hollywood war films conveys empowering emotions among groups who perceive themselves as alienated and that violent climaxes do not internally resolve issues the soldiers experience. These semantic and syntactic patterns provide genre pleasure in a way that begins to resolve the fragmenting and estranging aesthetics in the movies but cannot resolve the anxious feelings perceived by many from similar backgrounds as the soldier protagonist. This really should come as no surprise because violence is hardly a perfect solution for any instance of conflict. The violent aesthetics are appealing here because they provide rushes of excitement through acts that extend beyond morality — like the affective emotions described by Hochschild during Donald Trump rallies — but do not resolve struggles of the characters or the changing privileges with which many Americans find themselves struggling. The final section of this thesis identifies emotions that the war film leaves unresolved and how they reflect the lives of viewers like the soldier protagonist.

117

Conclusion:

“You Can’t Hold a Man Down Without Staying Down with Him”170

I have argued that the Hollywood war genre undergoes semantic and syntactic changes that coincide with the 2008 financial crisis and a group of American’s struggle to respond to changing privileges among social, cultural, political, financial, and labor relations.

These changes visualize the soldier protagonist struggling with domesticity before leaving for war, abruptly cut to and from different perspectives with increased rapidity, and stylize mutilating violence against clearly defined threats. Genre audiences

(regardless of their cultural or economic backgrounds) and critics cemented these traits as patterns by financially and critically supporting these trends, which further encourages filmmakers and studios to repeat many of these attributes. Extending Wright’s and

Altman’s theories to the war film, Americans — who share many traits with the soldier protagonist — experience changes in their privileges after the 2008 financial crisis worsened many of their living conditions and expected roles in society. While these viewers can experience pleasure and excitement from watching straight white men like them mutilate anything that might threaten them, these emotions are limited to the movie theater and they do not resolve the layoffs, decreasing wages, stagnant raises, limited labor opportunities, worsening environmental conditions, and changing role of men in the domestic space.

170 Originally a quote from Booker T. Washington George Seldes, The Great Quotations, A Caesar-Stuart Book (L. Stuart, 1960), 641. 118

The soldier protagonist’s responses to their domestic alienation crystalize the

American majority group’s perceived and seemingly inescapable anxieties. Sergeant

James — in The Hurt Locker — harmfully positions himself in dangerous high-anxiety situations as his attempt to resolve his non-traditional domestic life. Among this desperation, he puts Specialist Owen Eldridge in a position where Iraqi soldiers shoot and wound him after James commands the unit to pursue suspected enemies in dark alleys.

James’s hunt for revenge in The Hurt Locker exemplifies how these situations are harmful to him. He finds the dead body of a young boy he believes to be a child he befriended from the base, which — because the film has already positioned James as estranged from the traditional nuclear family — emphasizes a growing young boy James can mentor; a stand-in son he believes was just taken from him. James, as a result, goes on a quest — characterized by all the ‘adrenaline-pumping’ tropes that James seeks — to find those responsible for the child’s slaughter; his search for fulfillment among his opportunities to achieve normalcy. James ends up finding a healthy Beckham at the base the following day, revealing that his frustrating feelings were merely self-inflicted.

The final scene of James walking away in the bomb suit reveals that he has fully devolved into a state of isolation because of his inability to achieve past expectations of normalcy. His continual search for high-pressure situations distances him further and further from his unit and his family until he is entirely alienated in this last scene.

Throughout the film, the bomb suit captures James’s experiences of isolation through the 119 use of cinematography and sound.171 These scenes restrict the soundtrack to diegetic sounds that only James would be able to hear inside of his isolated helmet, such as his breathing or his colleagues calling from the radios. In this last scene, all senses become drowned out by loud rock music while a long shot visualizes James as the only figure — alone — in the Iraq street. The extreme long-shot reflects how spatially far he is from us, but also how distant he is from achieving American traditionalism. His distance from the camera and his lack of frontality visually rejects a resolution for the character. This final shot is the culmination of James’s failed struggle to achieve past ideals of normalcy because it positions him as completely isolated in the only place he was able to find success.

Chris Kyle also harmfully responds to his displacement by isolating himself in his work and further separates himself from domesticity in American Sniper. His obsession over his duty as a sniper eventually compromises his and his unit’s safety when he pulls off a shot that alerts nearby Iraq soldiers to their presence, almost killing them all.

Furthermore, the film depicts Chris as even further alienated from American domesticity when he is separated from the engaging combat space. The film narratively disconnects him from his wife and his children while the photography harshly contrasts his home from his success in combat. The photography depicts many of Chris Kyle’s kills and accomplishments with a long depth of field that visualizes the landscapes Chris can see as

171 Alex Vernon, in “Spectator-Citizen-Soldier: History, Genre, and Gender in The Hurt Locker,” argues the alienating effects of this bomb suit by saying that James in “the armored suit [... is] now almost fully symbolically encased himself in [it] so he can live in personal isolation." Alex Vernon, “Spectator-Citizen-Soldier,” 384. 120 an expert marksman (we can see expansive buildings, entire streets from Chris’s rooftop position, and enemies before infantrymen can identify them). This expansive space visualizes the possibility for Chris to achieve fulfillment because nothing obstructs his view. Telephoto lenses provide the illusion that we are looking down the scope of Chris’s sniper rifle with him, as if we can also assert authority over others who walk into his sights. This is most evident during the climactic face-off between himself and rival sniper

Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) when a distance identified as over 1,900 yards away becomes a space that Chris can now control with his rifle.

Chris’s struggle for normalcy in the domestic space appears even worse when he cannot achieve the levels of success that he earned by being an expert marksman for the

Navy SEALs. Director Clint Eastwood is no stranger to depicting a soldier’s struggle after returning to the domestic space — such as in Flags of Our Fathers (Eastwood,

2006) — but Chris’s depiction in American Sniper differs from these past films because

Eastwood portrays him as conflicted before he joined the armed forces. The scene in which Chris sits inside his house alone during a large cookout is coded like Eastwood’s past films of a soldier struggling to return home, but portraying Chris’s struggles stemming from his life in America has a different effect than Flags of Our Fathers, in which the conflict spawns because of the soldier’s combat experience. He sits in a chair facing us as we hear loud sounds of battlefield violence (gunshots, explosions, yelling).

The camera tracks around Chris to reveal these sounds do not come from a television program (the TV is off) and show war stays with him. This coding of this scene, in isolation, emphasizes soldiers who return from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as 121 struggling to return to the domestic space, but the film conveys that Chris struggled with his domestic situation before he even left for war. He returns to this alienating space and is unable to pursue his fulfilling work of eliminating enemies from a distance. This film shows that returning to the domestic space after war is unfulfilling because it was not a place the soldier protagonist could attain their conceived idea of normalcy or success before he left for war.

The use of shallow depths of field within the home setting also asserts estranging feelings that contrast violent fulfillment through the expansive photography in Iraq. This is illustrated during the scene when Chris recognizes his expendability in the domestic space and says, one night in bed, that his wife will be able to find another man if he were to die in combat. The dialogue conveys that Chris no longer sees himself as necessary in the nuclear family unit (to his wife’s dismay). Taya (Sienna Miller), his wife, snaps back and says that his family needs him, or they may not be there when he gets back. The dialogue conveys desires to reinstall the straight white man as imperative to the American family, but the whole sequence unravels in shallow depths of focus and visually restricts these desires. The framing positions the bed restrictedly behind Chris while the framing positions Tonya in a medium shot emphasizes the walls behind her when she demands

Chris to stay with the family. The bed and walls inhibit a sense of shallow space and lack visual flexibility that further pins down Chris to confront the perceived collapsing future that Americans like him expected for themselves.

Chris’s return to domestic spaces typically visualizes him with much less mobility than in combat. When he first returns, he is shown mostly staying in the house, restricted 122 to the bedroom and in the kitchen (where he does not even leave his chair to get romantic with his wife). Much of the blocking restricts him to sitting positions: alongside his wife at the Ultrasound, in his truck, in front of the television, etc. One major exception to this is when his wife accuses him of not helping around the house while he watches footage of Mustafa hunting down American soldiers. This jerky movement in the small living room — instead of a large Iraq city — conveys his displacement in American domesticity and yearning for fulfillment that he can achieve only from outside traditional family spaces.

Finally, the end of American Sniper ultimately restricts Chris from resolving his struggles. He begins to better acquaint himself with his home life by working with severely wounded veterans at the VA hospital. This narrative resolution can be seen as a temporary resolution to Kyle’s past alienation but ends up becoming just as threatening as his past efforts. He is ultimately restricted from his home when he takes a veteran to the shooting range and the veteran shoots Chris; this forever eliminates any chance for

Chris to achieve his preconceptions of normalcy in domestic life. These events are reduced to text on the screen and are not even visualized. This absence of the masculine straight, white, working-class and middle-class man in the nuclear family can be seen as an alternative to the traditionalism that groups similar to the soldier protagonists expected to achieve. Restricting the soldier protagonists from achieving this lifestyle conveys how

Americans, like these characters, feel anxious and alienated from their expected roles and opportunities in society. They feel anxious about the possibility of a future where there exists no dominant patriarchal role for the white man in domestic life. 123

Fury also depicts the white man’s eradication from their responses to conflict.

The last chapter asserts that the climactic battle provides a source of pleasure for genre audiences because it allows for them to witness the American heroes slaughtering any possible threats to their livelihoods, but their very response to these threats ends up killing almost the entire unit. Wardaddy allows each man the opportunity to leave, but each of his soldiers volunteer to stay and do their best to eliminate the oncoming Nazi’s.

We see Wardaddy heroically stand out of the tank’s hatch and kill all opposing enemy forces. First with his machine gun, but then with his pistol when he runs out of ammunition. The camera positions this white masculine soldier towering above the

Nazi’s climbing the tank and stresses his violent response to finding harmony and resolution through war. Eventually, the Nazi’s shoot him in the soldier and beat him down with a blunt object. The film then shows each man who eagerly volunteered to stay and slaughter Nazis killed by oncoming ammunition, leaving Norman as the unit’s lone survivor. This scene exemplifies just how this dominant group of Americans respond to their perceived estrangement in ways that are harmful to their own existence. Just like the viewers who are unable to fully resolve their alienated emotions, so do Hollywood war movies after 2008 frequently restrict the white masculine soldiers from achieving success or resolve from the violence of war, like the viewers who cannot cut down the threats they perceive. This scene provides a displaced majority group with the opportunity to mutilate threats to them; but, at what cost? They slaughter a group they identify at a problem but they also eliminate any chance to preserve their own security. 124

The Hollywood war film develops a series of structural changes because of financial, political, social, and labor relations in 2008, but these aesthetics continue after the nation recovered from much of the financial crisis in around 2012. Jonathan M.

Metzl, in Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's

Heartland, argues that — even though many of these conditions had improved — the white working-class and middle-class American’s response to these problems proved to be even more harmful to them (and the nation as a whole). The genre depicts the

American soldiers responding to their perceived alienation with violence, harmful situations, and even sacrifice. Metzl similarly asserts that this group responds to their changing levels of privilege by supporting anti-gun legislature, decreasing health care opportunities, and providing tax cuts at the cost of crippling public schools, infrastructure, and community programming. He found during his field research and interviews that “middle- and lower-income white Americans across various locales, [...] support [...] a set of political positions that directly harmed their own health and wellbeing or the health and well-being of their own families.”172 He argues that these decisions are based on this group's desire to maintain their hierarchical position above marginalized and minority groups across the nation stemming from their changing levels of privilege after the 2008 financial crash. Metzl argues that — when elections come around — this group supports “backlash governance,” or the support for a policy or candidate simply out of spite that in turn provides them with emotions of unity and

172 Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness : How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, First edition. (Basic Books, 2019), 3. 125 victory (similar to Hochschild’s chapter about Donald Trump rallies).173 He says that many of these citizen’s struggles stem from deep-rooted histories of racism and authority over other non-dominant groups, such as the white man’s privilege of gun ownership, quality health care, and education over that of African American slaves, foreign migrant laborers, and marginalized groups. Metzl reveals that the mass distribution of guns in

Missouri produces more white suicides by firearm and white male’s mass-shootings than had the state not reduced gun control laws in 2007, blocking the Affordable Care Act

(ACA) in states like Tennessee restrict many white Americans from the kind of care that they need to live healthy lifestyles, and that a series of tax cuts contribute to severely lacking infrastructure and poorer academic performance among public schools (and not just schools in inner-cities or financially struggling areas).174 He argues that each of these harmful results would not worsen if white men did not confront their changing privileges in such a destructive method.

We see a similar (less-political) pattern of white men harmfully responding to their struggles in the war film after 2008. American Sniper crystalizes how white

173 Metzl, 4,7-8. 174 He asserts that whites were the only Americans originally granted the right to own, and ability to afford, a firearm (14). This continued desire to hold this ability contributes to a series of firearm-assisted suicides that Metzl asserts could have been prevented by potential items that are not so quick to operate and easy to obtain (43). Furthermore, he interviews a series of Americans that have been blocked from affordable health care and continue to struggle with critical health conditions that prevent them to work and butcher their finances, yet they continue to support blocking ACA opportunities (125). Finally, Metzl provides descriptive language to illustrate how tax cuts to wealthy business owners and politicians prevent effective and routine repairs on roads, bridges, traffic lights, etc (202). Not only does infrastructure suffer, but so do the school systems. He cites decreasing test scores in once-prosperous elementary school communities after a series of massive tax cuts in Kansas and identifies how these schools could have maintained effectiveness through continued state funding (213). Metzl, Dying of Whiteness. 126

Americans suffer from gun violence at the hand of white shooters while The Hurt Locker and Fury crystalize how Americans respond to their conditions with backlash and violence that ends up putting them in harm's way. Even high-concept titles of the films further connect the films to this group’s support of harmful policies. 13 Hours: The

Secret Soldiers of Benghazi depicts the catastrophic events of the attacks in Benghazi,

Libya. Republicans during the 2016 Presidential election frequently cited Hilary

Clinton’s handling of this situation as a prime example of why they believed her to be unfit as America’s next president. Michael Bay released the film this very year with the title and premise of the film being a visualization of the chaotic events that were popularized during the election. Jonathan Lighter asserts that fans want to find out an alternative — and incriminating — depiction of what happened, but would be disappointed that the film only chronicles events on the ground with little damning evidence supporting the media’s emphasis on the event.175 This demonstrates how this group shapes their political opinions on opportunities to find unity through opposition.

Even the title of The Wall, which was released the following year, instills imagery from the election. One of President Donald Trump’s frequent promises during rallies and speeches was that he would build “a wall” between the United States and Mexico.176 13

Hours does not convey a hidden truth that Democrats directly caused the Benghazi

175 "Action fans want to know the truth, which they don’t think they’ve gotten from no less than eight government investigations, in part because conspiracy theories and political obfuscation, shot through cyberspace at the speed of light, have been warning them not to believe anything coming from the Executive Branch or Capitol Hill." Lighter, “Thirteen Hours Review,” 4. 176 Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 223. 127 catastrophe and The Wall visualizes that a “wall” is hardly enough to save the straight white man struggling on the other side. Similarly, there is no resolution for the dead

American soldiers in Fury or the isolation into which James recedes at the end of The

Hurt Locker.

The Hollywood war film’s structural changes in 2008 stem from Americans — who come from a similar background as the soldier protagonist — struggling to confront changing levels of privilege. The soldier protagonist now experiences alienation in

American domesticity before even leaving for war because of decreasing labor opportunities, wages, raises, and living conditions after the 2008 financial crisis. The editing provides fragmenting and anxious emotions for all genre audiences by privileging non-American perspectives while also making the American subjectivity a disorienting experience. The genre provides a series of pleasures that can resolve these anxieties by stylizing the straight white working-class and middle-class soldiers cutting down any potential threats, which encourages viewers and reviewers to financially and critically support these new trends. The genre maintains these patterns even when the effects of the financial crisis begin to improve because these white Americans support politics that harm their (and their families’) wellbeing out of spite for policies that might help other groups. Out of this harmful response, the war genre’s structure continues to remove these straight white men from American domesticity. The mass support for these trends echoes the support for stripping away federal assistance programs, safeguarding policies, and 128 environmental protection acts.177 How many more soldiers need to detach themselves or even sacrifice their lives for their perceived alienation? How many more people need to die at the hand of a firearm because they provide an illusion of power to this majority group? The war genre follows Wright’s and Altman’s theories on trends evolving into patterns while also demonstrating Mulvey’s and hooks’ argument that movies subject all audiences to a majority group’s perspective. The genre’s semantic and syntactic shifts depicting the soldier protagonist’s alienation before war, anxiously fragmented editing, and stylized violence as a means to eliminate perceived threats becomes normalized based on this genre’s recent financial and critical popularity and subordinates the majority group’s alienation onto all genre audiences.

177 These are key areas addressed by both Hochschild and Metzl. 129

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134

Filmography

Annakin, Ken, Andrew Marton, Gerd Oswald, Bernhard Wicki, and Darryl F. Zanuck.

The Longest Day. Action, Drama, History, War. Darryl F. Zanuck Productions,

Twentieth Century Fox, 1962.

Ashby, Hal. Coming Home. Drama, Romance, War. Jerome Hellman Productions, Jayne

Productions Inc., 1978.

Avalos, Stefan, and Lance Weiler. The Last Broadcast. Horror, Mystery. FFM

Productions, 1998.

Ayer, David. Fury. Action, Drama, War. Columbia Pictures, QED International, LStar

Capital, 2014.

Bay, Michael. 13 Hours. Action, Drama, History, Thriller, War. Paramount Pictures, 3

Arts Entertainment, Bay Films, 2016.

———. Pearl Harbor. Action, Drama, History, Romance, War. Touchstone Pictures,

Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2001.

———. Transformers. Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi. DreamWorks, Paramount Pictures,

Hasbro, 2007.

Berg, Peter. Lone Survivor. Action, Biography, Drama, War. Film 44,

Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films (EFO Films), Spikings Entertainment, 2014.

Bigelow, Kathryn. The Hurt Locker. Drama, Thriller, War. Voltage Pictures, Grosvenor

Park Media, Film Capital Europe Funds (FCEF ), 2008.

Cimino, Michael. The Deer Hunter. Drama, War. EMI Films, Universal Pictures, 1979.

Coppola, Francis Ford. Apocalypse Now. Drama, Mystery, War. Zoetrope, Zoetrope 135

Studios, 1979.

Daves, Delmer. Destination Tokyo. Adventure, History, War. Warner Bros., 1943.

Dwan, Allan. Sands of Iwo Jima. Action, Drama, Romance, War. Republic Pictures (I),

1950.

Eastwood, Clint. American Sniper. Action, Biography, Drama, War. Warner Bros.,

Village Roadshow Pictures, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, 2015.

———. Flags of Our Fathers. Action, Adventure, Drama, History, War. DreamWorks,

Warner Bros., Amblin Entertainment, 2006.

Fuglsig, Nicolai. 12 Strong. Action, Drama, History, War. Alcon Entertainment, Black

Label Media, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, 2018.

Garnett, Tay. Bataan. Drama, War. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1944.

Gibson, Mel. Hacksaw Ridge. Biography, Drama, History, War. Summit Entertainment,

Demarest Films, Pandemonium, 2016.

Haggis, Paul. In the Valley of Elah. Crime, Drama, Mystery. Warner Independent

Pictures (WIP), NALA Films, Summit Entertainment, 2007.

Hawks, Howard. Air Force. Action, Drama, History, War. Warner Bros., 1943.

Hill, George Roy. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Biography, Crime, Drama,

Western. Campanile Productions, George Roy Hill-Paul Monash Production,

Newman-Foreman Company, 1969.

Johnston, Joe. Captain America: The First Avenger. Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi.

Paramount Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Studios, 2011.

Liman, Doug. The Bourne Identity. Action, Mystery, Thriller. Universal Pictures, The 136

Kennedy/Marshall Company, Hypnotic, 2002.

———. The Wall. Action, Drama, Thriller, War. Amazon Studios, Big Indie Pictures,

Picrow, 2017.

McCoy, Mike, and Scott Waugh. Act of Valor. Action, Adventure, Drama, Thriller, War.

Relativity Media, Bandito Brothers, 2012.

Mendes, Sam. Jarhead. Action, Biography, Drama, War. Universal Pictures, Red Wagon

Entertainment, Neal Street Productions, 2005.

Milestone, Lewis. All Quiet on the Western Front. Drama, War. Universal Pictures, 1930.

Palma, Brian De. Mission: Impossible. Action, Adventure, Thriller. Paramount Pictures,

Cruise/Wagner Productions, 1996.

Peckinpah, Sam. The Wild Bunch. Action, Adventure, Western. Warner Bros./Seven Arts,

1969.

Peirce, Kimberly. Stop-Loss. Drama, War. Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions,

MTV Films, 2008.

Redford, Robert. Lions for Lambs. Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, War. Metro-

Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), United Artists, Wildwood Enterprises, 2007.

Scott, Ridley. Black Hawk Down. Drama, History, War. Revolution Studios, Jerry

Bruckheimer Films, Scott Free Productions, 2002.

Spielberg, Steven. Saving Private Ryan. Drama, War. DreamWorks, Paramount Pictures,

Amblin Entertainment, 1998.

Stone, Oliver. Born on the Fourth of July. Biography, Drama, War. Ixtlan, 1990.

———. Platoon. Drama, War. Hemdale, Cinema ’84, Cinema 86, 1987. 137

———. Wall Street. Crime, Drama. Twentieth Century Fox, American Entertainment

Partners L.P., Amercent Films, 1987.

———. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Drama. Twentieth Century Fox, Edward R.

Pressman Film, Dune Entertainment, 2010.

Wallace, Randall. We Were Soldiers. Action, Drama, History, War. Icon Entertainment

International, Motion Picture Production GmbH & Co. Erste KG, StudioCanal,

2002.

Walsh, Raoul. Desperate Journey. Action, Adventure, Drama, War. Warner Bros., 1942.

Winkler, Irwin. Home of the Brave. Action, Drama, War. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

(MGM), Millennium Films, Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films (EFO Films), 2007.

Wyler, William. The Best Years of Our Lives. Drama, Romance, War. The Samuel

Goldwyn Company, 1947.

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