Screening war: American Sniper, Hurt Locker, and drone vision

Abstract

Abstract This article engages the complex intermingling of imagery, ideology and history as it emerges within the sub-genre we might describe as the ‘post-9/11 Iraq War Film’. Taking as my focus Katheryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, I ask, first, why these films garnered large audiences (in contrast to the genre as a whole) and why, moreover, American Sniper became such a mega-hit. In narrowing my examination to these two films, I propose to examine the interplay of subjectivity and the cinematic screen, asking what position these films place the spectator in and how we might understand this in terms of screen history and violence in general as well as the specificity of the war and its visual frame in particular. Further issues that arise in the juxtaposition of these two films include: the issue of gender (as it applies to the representation of both Iraqi and American protagonists and to both films directors: Hurt Locker was the first film directed by a woman to garner an Academy Award); issues arising out of the long relationship between the camera and the gun historically, and today, as it has found its most deadly incarnation in the military drone, and, finally, the broader contours of official discourse as it is solidified (or not) within these films and the sub-genre as a whole.