Description
This paper brings together the literature on popular culture, temporality, and war termination in IR to aid our understanding of how claims of victory in war are made and shaped and ultimately how conflicts end. Building on existing work that explains how the War on Terror was temporally framed, this article shows that this was not achieved solely through political rhetoric and discourse, but also through popular culture, specifically contemporaneous cinema. Furthermore, this politico-cultural inscription of a linear temporality onto the war imbued it with a sense of inevitable victory for the United States and its allies. Analysing Edge of Tomorrow (2014) in the context of its alternative cinematic temporalities, this article poses the question of whether popular culture has the potential to undermine this dominant linear construction of time in war and the politics and political violence made possible by it. The finding is that despite the possibilities of critique in the film, this potential is unfulfilled. Not only does this indicate the challenges faced by mainstream cinema to articulate critique, but it also demonstrates the resilience of politically articulated temporalities to change and such disruption.
