The tension between us was palpable. She was sitting across from me, peering over my shoulder as I stretched out on the couch watching the war movie The Three Kings -- a film about U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf War.
I was enjoying myself, even though the part that she had stepped in on was only the beginning of the carnage.
After a long conspicuous silence, she spoke in a stern sort of motherly type of voice.
“How can you watch that?”
The question, especially the tone of her voice, broke through like ice water on a blistering day.
“What?” I shouted back as a barrage of bullets and bloodied bodies flew across the screen.
She repeated her question seemingly more perturbed than before.
“How can you watch that?”
I knew exactly what “that” referred to.
Screen violence.
“It’s research,” I said defensively.
“What?” she said.
“Really. I am researching how film and media depict acts of violence,” I said.
“There is a scene here in this movie where a bullet entering a soldier’s body dissolves into a computer generated graphic to animate the impact of metal on flesh,” I continued.
“You should go to bed,” she said ending the conversation.
For me, this interaction reveals a great deal about how violence, even imaginary violence, can impact emotions. Even more so, the interaction pointed out how differently people perceive representations of pain and suffering.
Since childhood, boys have been conditioned to watch media violence without reflecting on the deeper, more symbolic, meanings of belligerence and aggression. For most of us, making sense out of all those people dying on screen was accomplished with casual aplomb. Films depicting acts of violence were never real and no direct connection to reality. As children we could act out these scene of shooting, stabbing, fighting, and dying with precision and abandoned. We set model airplanes on fire and ripped the arms and legs off G.I. Joes without regard, alarm or any sense of grief. We mimicked the violence we saw around us not in the real world, but in our heads.
Coming to terms with visual violence in our culture is no easy task. Hundreds of studies have been conducted over the past 50 years examining the impact of visual violence on teenagers. Yet, there remains a call for even more science investigating how visually mediated media affects human behavior.
The active trope of war movies is, on the surface, easy to explicate – action, violence against self and others, and more violence. Narratives are generally developed around a few central characters that find their lives substantively changed during the course of the film due to the violence they have been subjected to.
What do war movies tell us about culture and society?
What role do images of violence play in directing and shaping the realities of young male audiences?
In some ways, war movies seem to be the male equivalents of so-called “chick flicks.” However, instead of hugs and kisses the audience gets thugs and gore. War movies are typically short on the warm and fuzzy feelings found in romantic comedies.
Testosterone flicks derive signification from rationalizing pain and suffering as entertainment. As David Morgan (2002) writes in his essay, “Pain: The unrelieved condition of modernity,” some of the most fundamental human experiences shaping our “moral and practical orientation to the world” are pain, deprivation and suffering.
Both fictionalized (Hollywood) and factual (MSM news) visual stimuli depicting the pain and suffering of others contributes to how we morally define ourselves in a culture saturated with pictures of violence. Through our capacity for intellectualizing and rationalizing images of violence in the media we risk disentwining ourselves further from reality. At the same time, censoring such images from reaching public consciousness is equally as problematic.
Attached to the underlying themes shown in war movies are subtler more socially complex issues. For example, in the film Jarhead (2005), the narrative is not merely about preparing for war or being at war, but more importantly about defining masculinity and being a “man” at war. The problem here is, however, “at war”, with whom?
The failure of films such as Jarhead is that they may ultimately be perceived as parodies of other war movies. In other words, these films are abstractions that may destroy or disrupt our ability to produce deeper meanings. They present in society as fiction without wrestling earnestly with the consequences of substantive themes such as self-identity and violence.
The moral imagination of depicting modern warfare in Iraq is softened by a string of previously represented visual analogies in films such as Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986) or even Rambo: First Blood (1982)?
In the rarefying environment of popular cinema, Jarhead’s violence is codified by imagery already familiar to audiences. In the film, young Marines on the eve of battle gleefully watch the helicopter assault scene from Apocalypse Now, while grunting out Wagner’s classic. Later, one member of the squad receives a videotape of the film The Deer Hunter. Excitedly, he gathers his comrades to watch the film, which quickly turns into a pornographic home movie featuring the squad member’s wife having sex with her neighbor as payback for the Marine’s past sexual transgressions.
It’s like an anonymous post found on a review page for Jarhead suggests:
“Every War Movie is Different. Every War Movie is the Same.”
What we can understand from such comments highlights a pervasive cultural pathology in our appetite or perhaps tolerance for visual violence.
The visual tropes and analogies employed in contemporary war movies conjure up a way of viewing conflict, internal and external, are inescapably familiar to American audiences. In fact, the recall and repetition of visual cues in contemporary war movies dealing with U.S. intervention in the Middle East rely heavily on imagery already familiar to the viewer.
This is what makes Jarhead an especially interesting film. There is no escaping the “bitter veteran” tropes referencing films such as Coming Home (1978) or Born on the Fourth of July (1989) or the “mentally unhinged soldier” in Full Metal Jacket. In Jarhead, there’s even a scene when two Marine snipers come back to camp to the raucous strains of “The Doors” used throughout Apocalypse Now, only to complain that the music is so “Vietnam” and that they have their own music.
The visual cues of pain and suffering are not placed in films by accident, although they may appear gratuitous. Editors, producers, and directors set the agenda for how far they are willing to go in representing death.
As Valentin Groebner (2004) observes in his book Defaced, “Clearly, when we speak of violence, we are always speaking of imaginations: the images of mutilated and disfigured bodies in the media function as visual stimuli, as effectively orchestrated exoticism” (p. 28).
The violence in Jarhead is made formless and faceless by scenes of charred Iraqis caught in air assaults. There is a clear and disturbing resonance in the blackened line of scorched vehicles and smoldering human remains camp next to. To reflect on the reality of this scene critically now does not speak to the ambivalence I felt when I first encountered the film.
In many ways, as a culture we are habituated to visual violence to the point where it is accepted as normal. When we remove the faces of our victims or enemies, like in the Jarhead scene, we have stripped people of power. For as James Elkins (1996) in The Object Stares Back reminds us, the face can be defined as a center of power. When the face and body is no long recognizable, it loses the power of identity and is no longer a threat to us. This is precisely the way to read Jarhead, yet so many of us dismiss the underlying political messages depicted in such moments.
