The guilt zone: Trauma, masochism and the ethics of spectatorship in Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007)

Abstract

The main question of this paper is the fraught psychological realm of the combat veteran or soldier in the Brian De Palma film Redacted. This will explore how a traumatic male subjectivity is constructed and is rendered explicitly in the staging and dramatization of the film. It will also explore how this trauma impacts on the communities inscribed in the film and the implied community of the films' spectators. This paper will therefore deal with the issue of how war is memorialized, processed and critiqued through deploying traumatized male subjectivity in cinema. I will deal with this question by referring to a now well-established critical discourse of ‘trauma cinema’, influenced especially by E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, Janet Walker, and Thomas Elsaesser, and also to Deleuze's model of masochism. I intend to argue that (as mentioned previously) masochistic male subjectivity is deployed in films in which the central male protagonist is ostensibly traumatized. I also argue that, given the recent ‘turn to ethics’ in film studies, this masochistic subjectivity has important implications for the spectatorship of catastrophe and suffering. Redacted, in particular, seems to be aware of its ethical position through its reflexivity and forced collision with genuine images of death. The value of this is to show how spectators are sited in relationship to film images of death and suffering and to point out the ethical complexities of ‘consuming trauma’. It is also of use in that the position of masochistic spectatorship offers a route out of the binding power relations which inflict inaction and passivity on consumers of contemporary visual culture.