the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

Downing and Saxton have pointed out that ‘ethics designates a way of responding to the
encounter between self and others, while suspending the meaning of the subject-object
relation, with its implicit dynamic of dominance and subordination’. 118 So ethical
spectatorship depends on much more than emotional engagement, it is an embodied response
that articulates a reflexive desire to expose the power dynamics that structure our relationship
to film. It is also about revealing the previously sublimated connections between the other and
the self in order to turn away from representational domination, control and hierarchical
modes of structuring spectatorial response and pleasure. In this respect, many critics studying
film and ethics find the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas useful. Sarah Cooper, in
discussing Levinas’s idea of ethics, states that it is, ‘a primordial relation, obligation and
responsibility to others on the part of the self’. 119 So the conception of ethics deployed here,
which requires communication and encounter with the other, is one in which the other is
strictly identified as the defining factor in one’s culpability and responsibility as a citizen
possessing social agency. It is our connection to others and how we acknowledge these
connections that determine our ethical responsibility for these others. Cooper goes on to
delineate that ‘the way in which the encounter with alterity is figured in his thinking is
primarily through his notion of the visage (face)’ and so therefore it is in ‘the face-to-face
encounter between self and other’ that Levinas’s ethics ‘challenge the sovereignty of the self,
which is constituted by being thrown into question by alterity’. 120 For Levinas, the relationship
between self and other is key, and it is specifically within the encounter with the other that
one can become thrown into a state of ontological crisis. In other words, the absolutism of the
self is replaced by recognition of the other. This manoeuvre exposes the interplays of
subordination, submission, dominance and control that inform social relations. Accordingly,
118 Ibid.
119 Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (London: Legenda, 2006), 5
120 Ibid.
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