The New American War Film
We are now in a seriously divisive cultural moment, and the first place that we've seen that in culture is in the war films.
Narrator:While the war film has carved out a prominent space within the history of cinema, the twenty first century has seen a significant shift in the characteristics that define it. Featuring in-depth analyses of contemporary films like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark 30, Eye in the Sky, American Sniper, and others, the book The New American War Film details the genre's turn away from previously foundational themes of heroic sacrifice and to national glory, instead emphasizing the procedural violence of advanced military technologies and the haptic damage inflicted on individual bodies, demonstrating not only how war films have shifted over the last two decades, but also how cultural narratives surrounding conflict, heroism, military technologies, and victimhood have broken down. This is the seventh book by author Robert Burgoyne, whose previous books include Film Nation. He is joined here in conversation with Kim Nelson.
Kim Nelson:Hi. My name is Kim Nelson. I'm a film scholar and professor at the University of Windsor in Canada. I'm also a filmmaker and I'm the author of the book Making History Move And it's my great pleasure to talk to Robert Burgoyne today about his new book, The New American War Film.
Robert Burgoyne:Hello, Kim. Thank you for doing this. My name is Robert Burgoyne. I'm a retired professor of film studies. I taught the last eight years of my career at University of St.
Robert Burgoyne:Andrews in Scotland, where I was head of the department. I am the author of the new American war film. It has really consumed most of my writing over the last ten years.
Kim Nelson:Well, it's such a pleasure to talk to you about this book. As always, I found your writing and thinking to be incisive, poetic, and elegant, and I was really taken with your analysis of film aesthetics and meaning alongside an exploration of the sociopolitical resonances of this new iteration that you found of the war film. It's really revelatory and insightful. I'd love to start off by asking you about the scene in The Hurt Locker, which you describe in chapter one. So it's when sergeant Matt Thompson, played by Guy Pearce, is killed, and it's sort of this moment between the the traditional hero that were you know, of the films of your gets sort of taken out and replaced by this different figure in sergeant William James played by Jeremy Renner.
Kim Nelson:You reference it as a pivotal and momentous scene and a moment of rupture between the twentieth century war film and the new American war film. So I'm hoping that you can describe the scene and what it means sort of reaching outside the film as a shift in the genre as a whole.
Robert Burgoyne:I think that scene, which comes at the very beginning of the film, is an extremely important introduction, not only to the film, but to the book and its themes as a whole. The character of Thompson, Sergeant Thompson played by Guy Pearce has all the trappings of the charismatic Hollywood hero sort. He's handsome. He's, witty. He gets on with his men.
Robert Burgoyne:He's got all the characteristics of the natural leader that would ordinarily be the kind of focus character in a war film. But he is killed and in a particularly violent fashion within the first fifteen minutes of the film. And there's a sense that, oh, we're in a different world now. This is not what I expected. This is not the way this is supposed to go.
Robert Burgoyne:The scene both evokes the extraordinary pathos that is characteristic of the war film. That is his death scene is tragic and hard to watch and really feels like a loss. And so there's a great deal of emotion invested in the character, even in the short ten minutes that we've known him. And the way his death is portrayed, which is spectacular. That he's in the one hundred pound, one hundred and twenty pound Kevlar body suit.
Robert Burgoyne:He's not able to run fast enough in that suit to escape the range of the bomb. So that when the IED, the bomb secreted in a pile of garbage, when that goes off, he is so inhibited in his movement by that suit. And it slows him down so much that he can't get free. So the suit, which was meant to protect, it's supposed to be high-tech, it's supposed to be the best possible armor against this kind of bomb, in fact becomes his coffin. It's a complete change and reversal from what we might have expected.
Robert Burgoyne:And it pushes viewer into a whole new kind of frame for reading the war film. That is you've got some of the codes and conventions of the classic war film are given. You've got the group of guys who hail from different backgrounds and different races. You've got this friendly banter back and forth. You've got a skilled and technical group that is in this environment, doing their job with practice and with and with skill.
Robert Burgoyne:And then it all goes wrong. It all goes south. And this is within the first fifteen minutes of the film. It induces a kind of disequilibrium. The viewer is thrown off of their genre guidelines, and now we're in a different world altogether.
Robert Burgoyne:So we've got the invocation of the conventions, the narrative tropes, the kind of standard bi play, male masculine bi play that we're familiar with from the war film, but then it changes. And it changes dramatically, and we don't know where it's going to go.
Kim Nelson:Yeah. I was really taken with your description in the book and that it has this reverberation, you know, it within the film, but then across the entire genre of the war film. It's really fascinating. So could you speak to what the traditional approaches were to the war film before the new American war film?
Robert Burgoyne:Really, this comes down to the standard tropes of the war film and the narrative conventions that are extremely stable. In fact, over two millennia, stable from the time of Homer according to Frederick Jameson. And these tropes or narrative conventions or schema are things like the rescue narrative, the heroic sacrifice, the idea of the band of brothers that finds, it's this mystic brotherhood found only on the battlefield. It's the idea of the soldier as a kind of citizen soldier trying to earn his way back home, which comes from Saving Private Ryan. These and more are the standard narrative conventions and shapes that the war film is organized with.
Robert Burgoyne:According to Fredric Jameson, this syntax or these narrative shapes haven't changed really at all since the time of Homer, since the time of the Iliad. And he makes the point that it's remarkable that the war narrative hasn't changed given the changes in weaponry, the changes in what he calls the mode of production coming from Marx, and certainly in terms of the changes in aesthetic styles and aesthetic forms, including the medium. So his idea is that the war narrative hasn't changed because it's got a built in story structure. And that story structure recurs throughout history. It's the war film.
Robert Burgoyne:It's the war narrative. It's the most fundamental narrative of all. It recurs in every culture. It recurs in every period. It's been around for two thousand plus years, but it seems not to have been responsive to all of these social changes, ideological changes, aesthetic changes, technical changes, none of it.
Robert Burgoyne:What I'm arguing is that, in fact, it has changed. And this idea of the war film providing a set of cohesive and identifiable ways of being in nation and being a national subject and understanding what nation is about, that that has dissolved. What we get in the films that I treat in this book are evocations of those old conventions. That is we recognize them, we hear them, we can sense that they're there, the old conventions. The films evoke these things and then show how they are no longer functional or that they're not able to organize the narrative.
Robert Burgoyne:They're not able to shape the drama. These things are ghost paradigms, I think I say in the book. They kind of haunt the text. They're vaguely discernible, if not plainly visible. And yet by calling these things up, these films then dramatically show how they no longer function.
Robert Burgoyne:They no longer will command the kind of overall thematic power or no longer speak to the audience in the way they once did.
Kim Nelson:In the book, you forward a compelling argument in the way I read it that the twentieth century war film had this binary track of leaning towards valor and a heroic narrative or an anti war pacifist narrative. And you isolate in the twenty first century this refracted and nihilistic view of war that leans towards pathos and pathology. So I'm wondering if you could, describe why you think the shift came about.
Robert Burgoyne:The war film is one of the great genres. It's the oldest genre of film, and it emerged in 1898 with Edison's Spanish War actualities. It was marketed more or less as a genre from the beginning. There were all kinds of product tie ins, all kind of civic events around it. It was set apart from the ordinary offerings of the film company.
Robert Burgoyne:And, Edison even renamed his film company to the War Graf Film Company. So it's been around since the beginning, really, almost from the inception of cinema. But it has served many different purposes over time. In certain periods and in certain contexts of American twentieth century history, the war film was a reinforcement of an imperialistic mission. It promoted a American virtue.
Robert Burgoyne:It was set out as a way that we could understand the collective sacrifice that it takes to forge national unity or a national subject. So it had this kind of reinforcing of the dominant culture ideology working in it. Just as important though, is the tradition of the anti war film. And the anti war film is at least equally important as the imperialistic or the pro war film, or the war film that is silent on the question of whether it's a virtuous or villainous activity to make war. But the anti war film also has a kind of fixed set of moves and a fixed theme.
Robert Burgoyne:And there's a way in which war is treated not as in any way redemptive, not as in any way reparative, not generative of any new life, the life of the nation, but rather utterly degenerate and a complete waste. A waste of life, a waste of youth. Violation really of a kind of national contract. That is if you're going to war, if you're going to sacrifice, if you're going to risk your life, there should be some recognizable regenerative value to it. And the anti war film simply eschews all that and shows how this is absolutely not the case.
Robert Burgoyne:This is war and the war film that we're watching is a story of loss. It's a story of bleakness. It has no symbolic or metaphoric value whatsoever. And so what I think is happening now is that that binary no longer holds. That is we don't have that same kind of clear cut understanding of the overall shape and orientation and value of the wars we're fighting.
Robert Burgoyne:The wars have gone on forever. They are being fought in distant climes, very far removed geographically. It doesn't seem like there's any particular stake involved. And thus, no kind of compelling narrative that you can assign to how these films are working in culture. That is what they are doing is they are showing a kind of subtle and in some cases blatant and graphic shift in the way the culture sees itself and in the way society is working today.
Robert Burgoyne:These divisions and insecurities that you get in American culture right now, I think it's a way in which the war film today speaks to that sense of unsettled history of a historical future that is certainly not something that can be assumed to be working out in a favorable way. And there's a way in which the value of the films is almost as a kind of a seismograph. That is it's showing the deep tectonic shifts that are taking place in American culture. The films that I treat question the foundational myths that the traditional war film would have supported or reinforced, but they don't offer an anti war alternative that is set out as the only, moral alternative to the wars and the conflicts that we're currently engaged in. That binary no longer holds.
Kim Nelson:And I'm wondering if you think the the shift that you're talking about, is it more influenced by political changes, like, the and the changes in war itself that happened sort of in the 09/11 era that you talk about in the introduction? Or do you feel like this shift in mainstream war films has more to do with changes in audience expectations? The influence, for example, of the anti hero becoming so popular, especially in series around the turn of the century with The Sopranos and The Wire. I mean, this influence coming from television to invite more complex flawed characters, sort of undermining the traditional hero of the twentieth century. So do you think all of these things are coming together in the film, or do you think it's there's one aspect that's more responsible for this shift to the new American war film?
Robert Burgoyne:Yeah. This is a charged question. I hear two questions there and I'll address both of them. But the reason I say it's a charged question is it's very difficult to point to a particular event, let's say. Even the Minnesota press wanted me badly to weigh in on the influence of nineeleven on these films.
Robert Burgoyne:And I hesitated to do it. I was a little reluctant to do it because I don't think you can assign a genre shift of the magnitude that I'm describing to a single punctual event. That is, it's always a combination of things. It's an accretion. There's an accretion of cultural changes, social changes, economic changes.
Robert Burgoyne:The building up of a series of shifts that suddenly become visible when there's a shift in the genre. That you can see that this is it's got a multiple, multivalent influence that will create a shift in genre codes or that will create a shift in art form altogether. But getting back to the two points, there's your bit about the anti hero, Kim, fits into one of the paradigms that I do a lot with in the book. And that is the idea of productive pathology. Thomas Alsasser, the great film theorist and historian who passed away a couple of years ago coined this term productive pathology.
Robert Burgoyne:And in it, he talks about the way in which characters in war films today and in other forms of narrative as well, have what we would ordinarily call a kind of neurosis or even a psychotic orientation. That is they are attracted to danger. They put themselves on the line. There's a kind of furious seeking of danger and seeking of the close intimate relationship with danger and death. They are solitary.
Robert Burgoyne:They don't work with a team. The Sergeant James in the Hurt Locker is a good example, as are many others throughout the book. They are utterly skillful and completely at ease in these tense situations. They will put their colleagues in danger. This too is something that Sergeant James and The Hurt Locker illustrates well.
Robert Burgoyne:There's no real concern for what may happen to their colleagues, to their men under their command. There's a pursuit of a kind of edge that imbues all of their acts. So when Elsa Sarr uses the term pathology in previous iterations of the war film, this would have been considered pathological behavior. It would be a soldier has now crossed the line, suicidally reckless. They are a danger to themselves and a danger to their troop.
Robert Burgoyne:But in the case of the films and the characters that I'm treating in this book, their pathology actually is what makes them productive. It makes them better soldiers. It is the key to their success. And it becomes a kind of recurring lesson in the films and in the book that this is actually a kind of adaptive mechanism. In this world of complete chaos and with no clear mandate giving meaning to their actions, their pathology, their obsessiveness, their absolute compulsion is the key to succeeding and surviving.
Robert Burgoyne:So that's one part when you say the anti hero. What I think we have is a brand new type of war hero, if you can call these characters heroes. It's something new in the history of the genre, and I would say new in the history of the art form. As I said earlier, I resisted identifying too specifically what has changed in American culture that could have led to the shift in genre. And one of course, and it all kind of does necessarily, I suppose, go back at some level to nineeleven.
Robert Burgoyne:And one of the things that nineeleven did is it caused a challenge to national identity. The stories that we had told ourselves, the narratives that had sustained us, the ways in which we identify as Americans was challenged by the events of nineeleven. This idea of the shining city on the hill being Washington, the idea that the territorial boundaries of The US are inviolate. The kind of way in which suddenly our sense of unassailable superiority, both technically, morally, etcetera, was all put to the test. And one of the things that happened, not immediately because of the immediate response to nineeleven eleven was this huge patriotic upsurge and the restaging of kind of patriotic narratives.
Robert Burgoyne:The raising of the flag on the ruins of 9 11, the ruins of the World Trade Center, the twin beams of light that were, you know, shot from the ruins into the sky, which were there for months, I believe. Somewhat later, George W. Bush on the deck of the aircraft carrier declaring mission accomplished. All these things that actually look to the iconography of earlier wars were trundled out and kind of made into a big show of patriotic fervor and unity, I suppose. But very quickly, that became a way for a divisive discourse.
Robert Burgoyne:Because the targeting of Muslims and the targeting of racial others and the targeting of immigrants that happened in the right wing media very soon after nineeleven, led to a sense of the breaking apart of the dominant fiction. The idea that there is a kind of storyline that we can all identify with. That was really accelerated. I think the tensions that were in the culture were certainly there pre nineeleven. I think there was a a real sense of a fissure going, that this is a a world that is undergoing stress and is fissuring, if I can use that word.
Robert Burgoyne:But nine eleven really accelerated it and magnified it, And it wasn't long before it became a full blown, you know, the culture wars that we're hearing about these days might be able to be traced back to that even. Then I think there's this divisiveness in the culture as a whole. And the war film in its current manifestation gives us this sense of what is going on in a genre form where the large, narratives of identity are no longer in place and no longer functional. And the third thing, finally, I think is that the fact that these wars are so distant, geographically removed from The US. And they seem to have gone on forever.
Robert Burgoyne:There's no closure. There's no sense of a redemptive script being worked through. And I think that the incident of nineeleven just magnified these elements and hastened them along. What I see happening is that the war film is in a way allegorical of a larger shift in national culture and a larger shift in the social belief and in the sense of any kind of meta narrative, narrative of nation. We are now entirely arguing of what is the meta narrative of nation.
Robert Burgoyne:What is the dominant fiction which we can all kind of identify ourselves with? This has become the absolute subject of very contentious cultural exchanges over the last several years.
Kim Nelson:Yeah. You know, war has not often been brought to the American territory. And in the book, you describe a transfer of affect so that these films shift. Although there's not a shift in wars abroad, but there is a shift in centering the anguish of westerners in wars overseas. And you you talk about the way that these films will be about the protagonists, but it's the opposing population, whether combatants or civilians, that are the ones that are truly imperiled.
Kim Nelson:So could you talk a little bit about this transfer of affect and, this shift in the role of the protagonist and the violence inflicted on an other population.
Robert Burgoyne:Right. It's a very curious development in these films that was brought to my attention by the external readers who did an absolutely wonderful job with the manuscript. And that is that the Western characters, the Western soldiers are the agents of war, the agents of violence. In many cases, in the films I treat, they are the ones targeting the figures who they then identify with. There's a way in which the victims of war, the native population, I'll use the character Alia in eye in the sky, a young girl who wanders into the kill zone of a drone strike, minutes before the strike is is to commence.
Robert Burgoyne:There's a great debate among all of the kill team that has to decide whether to send the missile or not given her presence there. And she is, of course, unaware of what is going on. She's unaware that she's being watched on three continents from the drone camera. Her every gesture is being observed. Her life and her being are subject to this calculation.
Robert Burgoyne:A lesser of all possible evils type calculation because there's a terrorist in the house that she's standing in for sitting in front of, a terrorist team that is about to go out and do a suicide bombing attack. And the military has x number of minutes before, that opportunity to take out that terrorist team will be ended. So there's a heightened dramatic exchange between the drone pilots who don't want to release the missile because they don't want the little girl who they bonded with by watching her throughout the day and the military establishment, the higher ups, and the government establishment. As the debate is going back and forth, and as the time is ticking down, and as the secondary characters in the film are working so hard to try to get Leah out of harm's way. There's a way in which the drone pilots become the intense carriers of emotion.
Robert Burgoyne:They become the mediums of pathos. All of the stress, the anxiety, the moral decision that has to be made is registered through the faces of the drone pilots. Whereas the victim on the ground, who would seemingly be the subject of pathos in a traditional war film. This would be the character who we are identifying with. This is the character who's going to be the locus of sentiment and emotion and care.
Robert Burgoyne:It's almost like that set of emotions that would ordinarily be associated with the victim of war are transferred to the agents of war, the very ones who are going to send the missile. As we watch the drone pilots suffer through this decision making process and debate among themselves and debate with the superior officers, it's like the affect that would ordinarily be associated with the victims of war, of war. In this case, a child. And that this is a motif that comes up again and again in the film side treat in this book is the child victim of war. That emotion gets transferred to the agents of war where in a way we are suffering along with the agents of war.
Robert Burgoyne:That is the soldiers who are going to release the drone, as they are sweating. Their fingers are trembling. They're looking sideways at each other. And it's a real interesting move from what I think would be the traditional setup here with the pathos being embodied in the victim as opposed to the agents. But here, it's the western agents of war who become not only the agents, but the vectors of pathos as well.
Robert Burgoyne:And that occurs time and again in these films. It occurs in the film Restrepo. It occurs in American Sniper. It's a common motif. This is something that I've not noticed before in war films of the past, and it's something that, I haven't fully worked out what the implications of this are.
Robert Burgoyne:But I said but it's a structure that really is prominent in these films. As I said, it's American Sniper. It's Verstrup, it's Eye in the Sky. Not Zero Dark 30, I wouldn't say, but to some degree also The Hurt Locker.
Kim Nelson:So yeah, that leads into another aspect of these films that you isolate, which is the role of women and children emerging as a strong hallmark of the new American war film. Do you attribute that change to changes in the reality of war, or is it completely to do with the rise of feminism and multiculturalism and liberal pluralism that women and children who were always implicated and involved in war are suddenly seen.
Robert Burgoyne:Right. And I'm gonna treat this as, again, two different aspects of a question. I'll talk about the women warriors first. In several of the films I treat, the primary agent of war is the women characters. And this is the case with Maya in Zero Dark 30 in Eye in the Sky, where it's the Helen Mirren character who's the colonel, Colonel Powell in The UK.
Robert Burgoyne:In fact, Eye in the Sky, the three principal characters in the film having to do with this question of war and its morality and its justifiability are all women. Colonel Powell, who is played by Helen Mirren, Angela Northman, whose actor, whose name I can't recall at the moment, but she's the parliamentarian in England who is resisting the call to send the missile in. She is the one character in the hierarchy who resists this plan. And the little girl, Aaliyah, the victim. The narrative revolves around these three women.
Robert Burgoyne:And the drone pilots who become the source of pathos, the vector of pathos in the film, they really are levers. They're moving the plot along, and they're doing this and that. But the three major figures for the unfolding drama are the three women, in the one case of Leah, the little girl. Maya in Zero Dark 30, the character of Marie Colvin in A Private War, who was a war correspondent. The female soldier figure has taken a prominent role in these films, but in a way that isn't remarkable.
Robert Burgoyne:It's not like they have to justify their role in prosecuting the war narrative in any way, shape, or form. It's never questioned. They are never treated in a gendered manner in these films. They are professionals. It's interesting to me that in the typical male dominated war film, war narrative, it follows a kind of Bildungsroman pattern.
Robert Burgoyne:That is, it's the emergence of the young man by the hard experience that he gets in war. And if you think of Platoon or you think of Full Metal Jacket, born on the July 4, or even Saving Private Ryan, I mean, these are about this kind of emergence of the young man into experience and knowledge through the hard incidents of war. With these characters, Maya, Colonel Powell, the character of Marie Colvin, that absolutely doesn't hold. There's no Bildungsroman formula. It's not like these women characters, women soldiers are learning about themselves and learning about the world by their hard experiences and work.
Robert Burgoyne:They are professional, fully committed to their work, pathologically productive, if you will, but not part of the old scheme where the female soldier was always held to be kind of a masculinized female that is adopting all the codes and conventions and the manners of the male soldiers. In these films, this is not the case. This is like an accepted place for women to be now. It appears. And it's a big change.
Robert Burgoyne:And the fact that it's not emphasized by the films that this is a change, I think is of interest too. As far as children in the war film, it's a standard kind of trope, the child victim of war. When you see it, I mean, I'm thinking of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, for example, where the child is there's two child victims in that, Odessa steps sequence. There's, the child victim of war is, is something we've seen many, many times in the traditional war film. But it always carried a kind of antiwar conviction and antiwar meaning.
Robert Burgoyne:Even if that anti war meaning didn't extend through the rest of the film, the discreet moment of the child being victimized, the child being killed, the child being wounded is set out as a kind of indictment, an indictment of wars injustice, an indictment of wars victimizing of these characters. And this appears in our films, in the films in this book as well. That is the child victim of war. But that, the kind of emotions associated with that migrate over to the soldiers, to the agents of war who are portrayed as children in their own right. They're portrayed as youthful, inexperienced, emotional.
Robert Burgoyne:They break down in tears. They can't accept that one of their in Restrepo, that one of their colleagues has been killed. Once more, the transfer of affect that we were talking about a few minutes ago from the victims of war to the agents of war. That takes place when it comes to the child victim of war to the agents of war as well, who are portrayed again as vulnerable youth. As I say in the book, lost in a wilderness of pain.
Robert Burgoyne:In some ways, you could almost call this the granular level of war cinema. You know, certain tropes, certain conventions, certain themes that had, if not a fixed meaning, at least a fixed emotion associated with them. That has also been altered in the course of these works.
Kim Nelson:I'd also like to ask you about the shift in the portrayal of the home front. So obviously through the twentieth century, as conscription's gone away and the material sacrifices that had to be made, families had family members fighting in the World Wars. There is transcription during the Vietnam War. You know, it was such a massive social change in the World Wars where the men were gone and everything was scarce and it just completely affected people's lives. Can you talk to the way, these films, I guess, in particular American Sniper, but how any of these films deal with this incredible shift in the way things function on the home front in The United States?
Robert Burgoyne:I start the book by pointing out the ways in which American culture in the post 09/11 period, I'll just use that as a convenient marker, has become consumed with military iconography. That is the mentality of the period is militarized. We have a plethora of military insignia, military reenactments. There's a sense in which there's this cultural fetishism for the military in some ways. I mean, if you think of all the places in American life where there is a kind of martial and militarized iconography, flyovers, almost any sports event these days, live sports event, includes some sort of marching of the colors or some sort of salute of some sort.
Robert Burgoyne:You've got the popularity of military fashion on the street, the extreme popularity of things like paintball, just a range of cultural manifestations of a kind of militarization of ordinary life. Of course, the most striking aspect of this is the January 6 riot at the Capitol, where this was conceived entirely as a military kind of operation and the iconography of the flags and of, the weaponry and the camouflage and the helmets and all of that. But really, it's present at political rallies, and political events all around The US. There's this kind of sense of a culture that is more and more invested, I suppose, in the iconography of the military, the iconography of war. That really, is a change, I think.
Robert Burgoyne:There's a kind of, enthusiasm for this iconography and for this this sensibility that I think is something new. The home front, what I would argue here is that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there's a contagion that goes on. It's a contagion of violence, a contagion of this kind of warlike mentality. I think it has to do with how long the wars had lasted, how remote they are, and what the the sense of, again, of a trying to find some sort of narrative, some sort of meta narrative that one can pin one's desires to and that can motivate someone's emotional life and give that emotional life some kind of content. What has increasingly happened, it seems to me, is that the war mentality, the war experience of the last twenty five years has in effect bled into domestic culture as a whole, where we have this predominance of military thinking, war like activities, and the celebration of war in a kind of almost entirely uncritical domestic space of America, domestic politics of America, I think those things are clearly linked.
Robert Burgoyne:It's not central to the films that I'm treating in the book, but it is central to the overall point of the book. That is we are now in a seriously divisive cultural moment. And I think the first place that we see that in a kind of plain way in culture is in the way the war films, codes and conventions and narrative schemas have changed.
Kim Nelson:Yeah. It's interesting because there's this valorization of the military in the culture that's coming hand in hand with this complete lack of sacrifice on behalf of most people whose family members are not fighting, who are not, you know, materially sacrificing for the war effort and things like that. It's an interesting convergence. And it seems that a lot of the divisiveness and culture that's maybe playing into this has to do with the massive changes in technology. A lot of people are talking about the wars that emerged after the invention of the printing press.
Kim Nelson:And then now with the Internet and that a lot of the division and partisanship that we're facing might be a result of this technological change that obviously had a huge impact on the weapons of war. What are you reading about what these films have to say about the insertion of digital technology and in particular drones? What impact does that have on wars as viewed through these collection of films?
Robert Burgoyne:Well, that's a big question. The war at a distance, of course, is one of the great celebrated paradigms of military thinking, over the last thirty years. And the idea of being able to fight war in a way that does not put our soldiers in danger, all done remotely, has been promulgated with great enthusiasm in the military world. War waged by robots, war waged by drones, war waged by attacking infrastructure. This is kind of like the new model of military culture.
Robert Burgoyne:Or at a distance, this idea, which has been very enthusiastically embraced has given rise to what I call an unfortunate neologism, which is post heroic war, which has such a nice peaceful kind of benign sound to it, post heroic war. But what post heroic war means is that you're not putting boots on the ground anymore. You're not sending soldiers into battle zones. You're not in a framework where heroism could actually unfold. Post heroic war means war at a distance.
Robert Burgoyne:It means that you're going to be fighting without, as you said earlier, any risk or any sacrifice, at least to the soldiers on our side. Well, the victims of war, the people who are being targeted, that's a whole another thing. War at a distance is one of the paradigms that gets into several of the parts of the book in the film Eye in the Sky, which is the drone war film. All of the the myths of war at a distance, that it is objective, that the soldiers are not affected by it, that they're releasing missiles from miles high in the sky. So there's a way in which the impact of that kind of weaponry and the impact of that kind of conflict is going to be a minimum on the soldiers.
Robert Burgoyne:Eye in the sky shows that it's not, that in fact, they're looking at their victims on a screen 18 inches away. There's real intimacy there. The intimacy between the target and the agent is pronounced. Many times, the drone pilots, for example, have been following the person they're targeting for days or even weeks. They develop a real intimacy and a real understanding and a real in the case of Eye in the Sky, there's a kind of empathy there.
Robert Burgoyne:The fact that war at a distance is supposed to spare soldiers the trauma, the emotional intensity of actual combat is absolutely not the case, and the film makes this really clear. It's devastating. And in fact, we know that there are greater incidence of PTSD now in the American military than there has ever been before by a lot. But on the other hand, you've also got a competing paradigm, which is the idea that the irreducible essential component of war is this agonistic struggle between one side and another, between one soldier and another. There's a way in which the physical and tactile engagement with the experience of war is lionized in culture today.
Robert Burgoyne:In popular culture, if you think of the celebrity that is afforded to the Navy SEALs, the celebrity that is afforded to Delta Force, the fascination with these kinds of elite commando groups. It's a refutation of the idea of war at a distance as a kind of important cultural paradigm. It may be important to the military, but I think in terms of the way the culture understands war and understands the military and understands And the And the films that I treat in this book truly emphasize the continuation of interest in that kind of physical engagement in war. There's an interesting dichotomy there. On the one hand, there's the keen enthusiasm among the military for robotic war, the revolution in military affairs, they call it.
Robert Burgoyne:But in the culture, I think the real interest has to do with this somatic, corpographic engagement in the battle space.
Kim Nelson:Yeah. And that was so interesting because reading your treatment of Eye in the Sky, my thought would be that drone warfare would be akin to video game and that it would be totally dehumanizing. And so that film really brings the audience into a different understanding of the implications and it's fascinating. You talk about the films you treat in the book. All chapters are devoted to films with actors that are scripted performance based films except for one.
Kim Nelson:So I'm wondering if you can speak to why you decided to have one chapter dedicated to four different versions of the war film in documentary and photographs.
Robert Burgoyne:Yeah. The film Kim is speaking of is Restrepo. It's the works of Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. Restrepo is the full length film. The book of photographs is called Infidel.
Robert Burgoyne:There's another photo collection, a short magazine piece, Into the Korengal by Hetherington. And then there's a video essay, which you can find on YouTube very easily called Sleeping Soldiers, also by Hetherington. And this is a documentary project, and it's the only one that I treat in this book. The rest are dramatic fiction films. But the documentary project that Hetherington and Junger, set out where they embedded themselves with US troops for over twelve months in the extraordinarily dangerous theater of war, the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.
Robert Burgoyne:It deals with a part of our war story in the contemporary period that is almost never talked about. It's never rendered. The war in Afghanistan has been massively underrepresented in American culture. So this is a series of works that actually deals centrally with that war and with the experience of the American troops in that war. One of the things that came through for me was the ways in which the soldiers as depicted there, in some ways, see themselves as avatars, probably not the right word, of fictional types.
Robert Burgoyne:That is they are playing roles that they have imbued from war films of the past. So there's a kind of by play there between the two. But the other part of that, I found a way finally to put the different parts of Hetherington's work into a context where I think it can be seen not as an imperialistic pro soldier, pro war narrative, which some people have accused Restrepo and Infidel and others of their works as being pro war, siding with the soldiers, identifying with the soldiers, being completely uncritical. I wanted to show that by looking at certain evocations of what I call genre memory, there's another way of reading these moments. There's another way of reading the scene where the the children are wounded and injured, and we're getting big close ups of the children's faces, bloodied faces.
Robert Burgoyne:There's a way in which a certain set of genre memories are evoked in the documentary work, and these genre memories are, of course, coming from the fictional side of the equation. But we are able to read certain moments, certain camera moves, certain emphases, certain dramatic editorial choices as a kind of critique, as a kind of distance from the military project. Though Hetherington is a celebrated photographer, and he passed away. He was killed in Libya, soon after Restrepo was made, as a matter of fact. I wanted in a way to to fully engage with his work beyond what had already been done critically.
Kim Nelson:One thing that I think is such a strength of your writing throughout this book and also in your, essay about They Shall Not Grow Old is you will refer to other writings on the films that I find tend to be more binary, sort of writing these films off, or, you know, just so many, responses to war films are very partisan and you'll always acknowledge critiques or that you weighed into it and really take a much more complex view. And it's such a strength of the book throughout. I'm also wondering, since these films were made, there's really been a shift. There was an ending to the war in Afghanistan that wasn't in place in when these films were made. And also since these films were made, there's been a lot of recanting quite recently from people who were on the record in supporting George W.
Kim Nelson:Bush's adventures into Iraq and the Iraq war. And they've said they were wrong, which is, you know, not something people often do. How do these films look now in light of the sort of disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the handover to the Taliban and this really large scale mea culpa that the Iraq war was not an intelligent response to nineeleven?
Robert Burgoyne:I would say for the most part, they are much more gritty and hands on and deal primarily with the grunts, with the soldiers on the ground, with the actual process of making war. The very large geopolitical questions that are now being asked about the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are not explicitly articulated in these works. They're they're granular. They're dealing with the experience of the soldier there on the ground individually, their own psychic experience, their own emotional, their own physical experience. In the case of the the withdrawal from Afghanistan, it really has left us in suspension.
Robert Burgoyne:There's a way in which this is not the triumphal ending that war and war films have always celebrated. There's no sense of redemption. There's no sense of regenerating the culture or regenerating the society through war, which is, again, one of the the standard modes. One of the things that I think is is interesting in these films, and it's one of the things that separates these films and the new war film from the traditional war film. The traditional war film is teleologically organized.
Robert Burgoyne:It's a very straightforward linear narrative typically. You know, with the, rising and falling structure, the various dramatic arcs ending in a resolution, ending in a in a clear cut endpoint. If you think of Saving Private Ryan, for example, in the way that that film ends, It wraps up, and now this is something that is behind us, and we are fully looking back on an event that had a kind of a a relatively fixed endpoint. That's not the case with the films that I treat in this book. They are recursive.
Robert Burgoyne:That is you go back and start over again. At the end of the film, there's no sense of resolution. There's no sense of teleological closure. There's only a sense that it's going to continue. And in the case of The Hurt Locker, it's staged that way.
Robert Burgoyne:Now he's not in Iraq. He's in Afghanistan. But he's starting off, with his, you know, bomb disposal suit on, and he's walking down a street in Afghanistan about to begin again. And so there's a way in which the closure that you expect from war, that it is finite in its duration and finite in its geographic extent. I don't think that that's operating anymore.
Robert Burgoyne:And the films, in a sense, tell us that this isn't over yet. When we see the characteristics of drone warfare and eye in the sky where there is no fixed boundaries to the battle space, where there's no sense that taking out this one target is now going to end this conflict. This is a continuing story.
Kim Nelson:And finally, so the historical film always makes strong statements about the present. In your book, the historical film, you really eloquently describe this as the present being stamped on every frame. So historical films are always inserting a point of view in the way that they interpret the past. And this seems especially trenchant for the war film. I was wondering what role you think the war film plays in shaping the public consciousness and also in inciting creating a public dialogue?
Robert Burgoyne:This is an important question. Let me address the idea of the public dialogue first. Historical films always are regarded with suspicion because there is a sense that it's a drama on the one hand. Certain aspects of historical films are fiction. Not the events necessarily, but there's fictional characters, there's fictional situations, the dialogue is scripted, blah blah.
Robert Burgoyne:There's a way in which people are absolutely convinced that this is going to give people the wrong picture, that history is much more complicated. There needs to be a debate going on that you can't really get in a film per se. A historian would say there's no footnotes in a historical film. How can this be trusted? How can we actually take this as some sort of insightful treatment of the past?
Robert Burgoyne:But one of the things I've always said about the historical film is it doesn't unfold in a vacuum. It actually starts a dialogue because the historians who are looking at a historical film about a certain period or certain figures are going to weigh in in places that are culturally prominent. Oftentimes, there's a lively Internet debate that takes place about the the strengths or the weaknesses of a particular film and a particular take on history. There are experts who are called in to go over the accuracy of the film in terms of the way the events are portrayed, but also in the way the artifacts of the past are used and the way the costumes look and, the way the lighting looks. And so, really, it puts history into the public sphere.
Robert Burgoyne:The historical film stimulates this kind of important conversation among different aspects of society about the past. And in some cases, like the Free State of Jones, a film that we both talked about at some length, these are events that nobody knows about. And so there's a way in which something from the past that is obscure or has been forgotten or has been ignored now gets talked about and debated, and there are follow ups to it. There's documentaries about the making of the film itself. There's breakout sessions.
Robert Burgoyne:And sometimes even panels given at, conferences that are devoted to a particular historical film. And you get lots of interaction that way. In terms of the general subject question about how the historical film itself and how that works in culture and how it promotes a kind of social exchange should reassure anybody who is worried, it's usually historians, and what it does is it stimulates this larger cultural conversation.
Kim Nelson:And, I'm hoping that you can give, listeners a taste of the book and if you'll read a a passage from it.
Robert Burgoyne:I would love to. Kim and I have talked about this a little bit, which passage to read. And what I've decided to go with is a bit from the last chapter of the book, which is on American Sniper. This was not only the last chapter in terms of it being chapter six, but was the the last chapter that I wrote. And it was only after I had already finished what I thought was the manuscript that I realized there's something missing.
Robert Burgoyne:There's an elephant in the room that I haven't dealt with. Why? I think I was afraid to. I was chicken. It's a big film, and it's very controversial.
Robert Burgoyne:And, American Sniper has a kind of a vexed reputation, among certain parts of our group. So when I decided to write on American Sniper, I figured I'm just gonna take it on, and I'm gonna do what I can with it. What I discovered is surprising. What the film said to me was something quite different than the way it's been read in critical dialogue and in culture overall. I've written on Clint Eastwood before.
Robert Burgoyne:I've written essays on flags of our fathers and on letters from Iwo Jima. And, I see this fitting into a kind of larger pattern in his work. But let me now just read the first two pages or so. This is called American pastoral American sniper. Two scenes, one at the beginning of the film and one near the end create a chilling formal rhyme that underlines the larger patterns of violence threaded through American sniper.
Robert Burgoyne:In the opening sequence, petty officer Chris Kyle played by Bradley Cooper, the sniper of the film's title, is seen at the start of his first assignment in Iraq, watching over a city road as a convoy of marines is about to drive through. A burqa clad woman and a young boy walk slowly out of a doorway. Kyle is on alert. There is something about her way of walking that seems odd. As he watches them through his sniper scope, the woman reaches inside her robe and takes out a large grenade.
Robert Burgoyne:She hands it to the boy who begins running toward the convoy in order to get close enough to fling the weapon. As he lifts the grenade for the throw, the film cuts away from the action to a series of flashback scenes of Kyle's boiler, his first hunting experience, his violent rescue of his brother who was being beaten by a bully, the lesson his father imparts at the dinner table concerning the wolves, the sheep, and the sheepdog who protects the sheep. We then return to the scene in Iraq as Kyle pulls the trigger. As we watch through the scope, the young boy collapses, a bullet wound in the middle of his chest. The woman, perhaps his mother, then rushes to him, picks up the grenade, and tries to hurl it at the convoy herself.
Robert Burgoyne:Kyle shoots her as well, causing the grenade to fall short. His first two shots as a sniper in Iraq have thus been directed at a young boy and his mother. Actions that may have saved 10 marines, he is told, but they clearly exact a psychic toll. Fast forward to the last sequence of the film. The setting is Kyle's suburban home, a sunlit interior in the middle of the day.
Robert Burgoyne:The scene begins with the camera focusing in close-up on a large revolver pointed into the living room as Kyle walks silently through the house. Framed at waist height, we also see the rodeo belt he had won in a contest earlier in the film. The camera takes in Kyle's young daughter who smiles and giggles at him and then his young son also smiling and playing a video game. Kyle finds his wife in the kitchen, stops in the doorway, cocks the revolver, and speaks. She turns to him laughing.
Robert Burgoyne:The nightmare quality of this scene in which a pistol cocked and seemingly aimed at a loving family seems to be a normal form of behavior, eliciting smiles and laughter rather than terror, captures the complex and devastating critique of violence and American culture that Clint Eastwood sets forth in this film. The violence of war haunts the American dreamscape, the film suggests, as it draws a series of parallels between the war in Iraq and the culture of violence that has penetrated US domestic life. And I will stop there.
Kim Nelson:Bob, I wanna thank you and congratulate you on the new American war film. It's a penetrating engagement with the aesthetics and ethics of these films. And, you know, in your hands, you open a pressing and important dialogue about culture and politics. It's all wrapped up in the book and, it's it's wonderful.
Robert Burgoyne:Thank you, Kim. Thanks.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book The New American War Film is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.