Public Character and the Simulacrum: The Construction of the Soldier Patriot and Citizen Agency in Black Hawk Down

Abstract

This essay examines how the film Black Hawk Down functions rhetorically to reconstruct the legitimacy of political and military institutions and policy, and the possibilities for efficacious, responsible citizen agency within the post-September 11, 2001 context of increasingly unconventional warfare. Black Hawk Down reconstitutes popular perceptions of war and the appropriate response of citizens to it. It continues a pattern of contemporary war films established by Saving Private Ryan in 1998, reducing the patriotic purpose of war to surviving and protecting one's fellow soldiers. This pattern is developed through a hyperreal spectacle of war that both encourages audiences to empathize with the dominant “pro-soldier” message and discourages critical public discourse concerning justifications for and execution of military intervention policy.