War Films, Combat Simulators and the Absent Virtual Soldier

Abstract

If, as Chapter 3 argues, civilian and military technological use are converging to the point that they are indistinct, then Chapter 4 will take up combat that is represented as completely virtual through cinematic representations (or lack thereof) of combat simulators. The American military has long been invested in single-soldier and networked simulation technology, like SIMNET and “The Battle of 73 Easting” (to say nothing of flight and tank simulators), as a means to train its soldiers in an attempt to expose them to the speed and visceral nature of warfare. Yet these simulators are almost completely absent from the war film genre. Interestingly then, the cinematic representations of the technology, when they do show up in movies like Brainstorm, The Lawnmower Man, and Gamer, appear under the guise of civilian military-styled video games and virtual reality. Using these films and focusing on the civilian use of the technology, the chapter explores these films’ critiques of how popular combat simulators function within a culture of Total War, while also raising concerns around the virtualizing of the modern military War Machine as both dehumanizing and overcorporatized applications of military brainwashing. The movies present conflicts that further enhance the theme of enemy-ally disintegration by turning civilians against other civilians in the role of soldier in militarized combat, generating a space, via the games themselves and the cinematic representations of these virtual spaces, wherein the dense networking capabilities of the Internet becomes a normalized facilitator of military violence. The end of the chapter will then further explore the reasons why, despite its normalized placement within many contemporary State War Machines, combat and warfare simulators do not show up in war films. After first touching on the obvious differences in the mediums of film and video games, the chapter looks at the intertextual nature of movies like Jarhead, wherein soldiers watch other war movies within the film, to argue that cinema itself functions as a form of “virtual reality” training that potentially indoctrinates soldiers in much the same way a combat simulator does.