Abstract
This essay dissects how media that depicts World War II through the mode of realism fail to accomplish their ontological goals. It examines three pieces of media made in the late 1990s and early 2000s: the films Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Dunkirk (2017) and the Call of Duty video game franchise (2003-). I explain how the sublimated desire to view violence by watching a Nazi die collapses under moral scrutiny, and how the desire to make their death and the preceding combat as realistic as possible works counterintuitively to mask the real horror of war. The essay goes on to argue that Dunkirk succeeds in portraying the horror of war by utilizing the negative space present in audiovisual silence. The essay will conclude with an analysis of how the lack of negative space in realistic films degrades the quality of critical analysis of depictions of the most horrific moments in history.
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