Parables for the paranoid: affect and the war gothic

Abstract

This paper discusses a series of horror war films set during the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with the help of the concept of affect as outlined by Eve Sedgwick and Brian Massumi. The films studied in this paper combine the zombie genre with the military invasion story so that monstrous affect is always produced against what is referred to as a super-political landscape. In analysing these films, the paper abandons the a priori expectation that the use of affect will produce a set of sane (non-paranoid), fostering and liberating possibilities. The general argument of the paper is instead that these films simultaneously induce interpretative paranoia and present the spectator with the possibility that the foundation for this paranoia is inherently unstable. Thus, the paper ultimately explores the usefulness of affect on material that appears to lend itself to the traditional deconstructive endeavour and discerns points of commonality between deconstruction and affect studies.