Description
How is the relationship between embodied military masculinity, heroism, & vulnerability and State ideology/ontology reflected in film representations of war? Particularly, how is this relationship altered by the post-War on Terror release of films that claim to be apolitical? This paper utilizes the 2025 release of the film Warfare as an entry point to these questions relative to the logics used to give violence higher meaning for citizens of the war-making state. Engaging with Francois Debrix’s 2008 book, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics, I employ an expository film analysis of Warfare to differentiate its “forensic approach”, or dedication to “truth” as opposed to dramatization/political commentary, from what Debrix calls “tabloid culture”. I posit that in traditional representations of the War on Terror, tabloid culture would expose viewers to violent imagery as a means to then enforce dominant ideology - be this nationalism, heroic masculinity, democratic ideals, etc. Warfare, however, offers the viewer no heroism, sacrifice, or bravado to assuage the senselessness of the horrific violence that takes place. I then employ Adriana Cavarero’s theory of horror as de-ontological violence and Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine to interrogate the ontological impact of a war film that does not employ tabloid state ideology. I argue that while Warfare disrupts state-preserving justificatory logics of war, the brutal violence experienced by the viewer is instead employed in the privileging of the soldier as the primary victim of the war machine, rather than the Iraqi civilians, or Others, deeply affected by American occupation. When the ontological connection between state and soldier is severed, who becomes the victim, and to what end? If the visual representation is “too real”, what is the widespread ontological effect of making publicly visible the dissonance between representation and reality - particularly given the current state of U.S. civil-military relations?
