the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

Clearly, what a war is has changed dramatically since the days of the Hollywood war film’s
formative narrative and structural template, World War II. As Paul Virilio states, ‘since
Vietnam and throughout the seventies, the mediation of battle has grown ever more
pronounced.’ 9 The numerous technological advances in using digital, computer, and satellite
technology in the arena of battle has led to combat becoming increasingly abstract and virtual
for those who fight it. In addition to this, the depiction and reporting of war in film, television,
news media, and other such channels of mass visual culture, has been transformed by similar
technological advances. George Gerbner, discussing this issue in the light of the Persian Gulf
War, has asserted that ‘Desert Storm was the first major global media crisis orchestration that
made instant history.’ 10 Obviously, an important component of this was the way in which the
war was managed by the military and covered by the media. Significant events were staged
for the television news cameras including video footage from bombing raids and cruise
missiles being displayed at press conferences. In addition, numerous frontline reports were
televised in front of a backdrop of the Baghdad night sky lit up with mortars exploding and
tracer fire. 11 In this sense, Gerbner demonstrates that the visual culture of global news
networks, combined with a strict control of war-time media by governments, has produced a
new form of public interaction with the media, and vernacular visual culture. News reports
and media images are used in order to manufacture an interpretation of historical events in
more or less real time, a distinctly new phenomenon that has only emerged post-Gulf war.
Therefore, the Persian Gulf War marks a watershed in representation of warfare and
9 Paul Virilio, ‘A Travelling Shot Over Eighty Years’, Hollywood and War, 52
10 George Gerbner, “Persian Gulf War, The Movie,” The Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian
Gulf – A Global Persepctive, ed. Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner, and Herbert I. Schiller (Oxford: Westview
Press, 1992), 247
11 For a fascinating account of media organisations’ moral culpability in perpetuating this dispassionate portrayal
of warfare and the effect this has on media spectatorship see Susan L. Carruthers, The Media At War
(Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000), 197-243
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