the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

spectator positions, taking undoubtedly a degree of visual pleasure from the process of
watching the visceral horrors of war films. In a sense, we adopt a punished, vicitimised, even
assaulted subject position through bearing witness to traumatic scenes of violence and
carnage, but we remain safely distanced and can disavow our implication in the cinematic
happenings the more extreme they are; i.e. it bears no relation to the perceivable reality we
encounter on a daily basis. So, contemporary war cinema’s viewing pleasures reside in the
anxieties it provokes, and these pleasures are as much reactive and status quo affirming as
transgressive. The short-term affects of contemporary war film spectatorship are fluid and
radical in terms of producing a dynamic sense of shattering and self-abandonment in the
spectator, but long-term, in Hollywood, transformation and transgression are a rarity. For
example, the visceral terrors of a film such as Saving Private Ryan can fix the spectator as
victimized, which is hardly a radical position. In negotiating the effects of trauma,
contemporary war films betray the radical political potentials of masochistic subject positions
for the compelling reactive power of causation and narrative. This is an almost hysterical
desire for fixed identities, something which is not easily obtainable in a war film.
So what do these safeties, pleasures, and emotional entanglements with contemporary war
films mean for us as spectators? We have already seen how spectatorship of contemporary
war film may be considered masochistic, and to what ideological uses this spectatorial mode
may be put. This thesis, however, builds towards an analysis of the spectatorship of
contemporary war films in the context of the emergent field of ethics and film studies. The
trajectory that my chapters describe shows a movement from the spectator being
overwhelmingly figured as masochistic, to one where the ethical considerations behind
looking on at fictional depictions of US military violence is the main concern. This is not to
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