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Framing the fight: post-9/11 warfare and the logistics of representation

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Framing the fight: post-9/11 warfare and the logistics of representation

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Content FRAMING THE FIGHT: POST-9/11 WARFARE AND THE LOGISTICS OF REPRESENTATION by Stephanie M. Yeung ______________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) August 2014 Copyright 2014 Stephanie M. Yeung ii DEDICATION For Declan, Kathy, and Mom iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a true test of endurance. To my great benefit, there were a number of people who stood in solidarity with me. I am particularly grateful for the financial support I received via the GI Bill, an Annenberg Fellowship, and the USC Provost’s Fellowship. These funds allowed me the time to research and develop the ideas contained herein. I am deeply thankful for the guidance of my chair, Dr. Kara Keeling. Her keen insight into so many bodies of theory has proved invaluable in enabling me to think through the complex issues that attend wartime representation. I will be forever grateful for her patience in allowing me to sit with ideas and arrive at my own conclusions. This has been particularly valuable to me as I attempted to analyze war media in new ways. Working with Dr. Ellen Seiter was also a genuine gift. Over the years she supported my professional and personal development in so many ways. Her investment in both my scholarly and personal life helped to reduce the feeling of isolation that writing can sometimes produce. Dr. Steve Ross was a continual source of encouragement. His persistent drive for clarity and a coherent narrative drove me to do my best to make this work available to a broad audience of scholars. Two additional faculty served on my initial dissertation committee. I am indebted to Dr. David James, whose work on Vietnam provided crucial support in helping me to think through contemporary warfare. His steadfast commitment to a critical political engagement with the world in which we live is a model for us all. Finally, Dr. Rick Jewell’s love of Hollywood’s golden age productions helped me to fully understand the iv trajectory of war film. His work on censorship was also instrumental in my reconsideration of access in relation to information during times of war. I am so thankful for my dear friend Melissa Martin’s longstanding love and guidance. The insight she and her husband Phil offered about the various stages of candidacy brought me back from the ledge on more occasions than I care to recount. Her ability to make me laugh is unrivaled, and on several occasions shared fits of hysterical laughter gave me enough energy to sit back down and keep writing. For all of this and more, I am supremely thankful. Several working groups were instrumental in the completion of this project. The Dissertation Writing Group which included Leah Aldridge, Elena Bonomo, James Crawford, Kate Fortmueller, Feng-Mei Heberer, Shawna Kidman, Brett Service and Courtney White was a crucial site of support, feedback, and encouragement. I am thankful to them all for reading really rough drafts without complaining and for helping me figure out what I was really trying to say. In addition to the writing group, Leah Aldridge, Lorien Hunter, Ayana McNair, Kwynn Perry and Garrett Thompson, were a vital source of support. Their company offered a warm space to relax and recuperate. I would especially like to thank Shawna Kidman for her friendship during my many years at USC. She is an amazing scholar, mother, and friend and I feel so fortunate to have had her in my life for all these years. I also feel fortunate to have had the friendship of Kendra Darrow since 2006, when I began the master’s program at USC. The depth and breadth of her knowledge of television is beyond anything I could ever hope to attain, and her concomitant love of music and concert-going kept me sane v throughout the doctoral experience. I also had a number of other compatriots in the program at USC whose conversation and company made the experience memorable. Many thanks to Taylor Nygaard, Julia Himberg, Patty Ahn, Emily Perez, Kelly Wolf, Eric Hoyt, Ken Provencher, Josh Moss, Ghia Godfree, Lara Bradshaw, and Mike Dillon for making it fun to spend time with colleagues. The final push toward completion was greatly aided by the opportunity to write, on an almost daily basis, with Elena Bonomo and Kwynn Perry. Although the majority of the time was spent writing silently across the table from one another, somehow simply being in their presence made the writing process less arduous. I’ll never be able to repay them for such significant acts of solidarity. Over the years I also received critical counseling and administrative assistance from Alicia White, Linda Overholt, Jade Agua, Kim Green, and Christine Acham, who work in the Critical Studies office. They do so much for all of critical studies and I have been fortunate to have benefitted from their hard work and dedication. I am particularly thankful for their willingness to work around some of the particular scheduling demands required of motherhood. I also want to thank those who impacted me most during my time in the United States Air Force. Captain Tonja Batie-Washington was an amazing mentor during my time in Officer Training School. Captain Katrina Taylor, my flight commander during F- 15E training, was a phenomenal example of leadership and how to maintain a sense of one’s own personal and communal goals outside of the uniform. Tony Breck, Matt Apriceno, and Russ Klawitter soldiered through the most intense phases of training with vi me and welcomed me into their families. Finally, I would especially like to thank Chris Walsh, who despite being in the Navy, was willing to befriend an Airman. Chris endured training with me and acted as my occasional ‘beard’ in a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ military. Most importantly, Chris is the main reason I had the confidence to leave the military and begin this academic journey. I am so thankful he lead by example. I will always be grateful for his courage and his friendship. Many of my family members have offered loving words of support and said so many prayers on my behalf that mere words don’t seem a sufficient response. Instead I’ll simply hope that all of that goodness and generosity is returned to you. In particular, I’d like to thank my sister Christina who, even though many miles separate us, has been such an amazing source of strength throughout this process. She has always been so proud and so supportive. I can’t imagine having a better big sister. All the phone calls, text messages, and pep talks have meant the world to me. I needed them all. I’d also like to thank May and Adam Greco, my wonderful in-laws. Their love, support and love of red wine have made this journey so much more fun. They attended not one, but two, USC graduations -- I promise this is the last one. I am also so very thankful to my godparents, Jerry and Darlene Branch for their love and support through the years. Just like my mom, they have both been there since day one. I can’t thank them enough for helping me get to where I am today. Finally, I’d like to thank my grandparents, Clifford and Clarice Wilson. My grandfather always said to get an education because no one can take that away from you. I hope he knows that this dissertation, and the doctorate would not have been possible without the strength of perseverance carried within that charge. I’d also like vii to thank my granny, who got me to school on time as a young girl, came to events at school if my mom’s work schedule was too busy, and was such a huge influence upon my childhood. More importantly, although often quiet, the words she has shared with me in my adult-life have been ones to live by. Over and above the support of my family and friends, I honestly don’t know where I would be without my mom. She continually gives me the strength to keep pushing through life’s many challenges. I feel truly blessed that her love is still as magical at making things better as it was when I was a child. From talking to me every evening during the most intense moments of flight school, to believing in me through each page of this dissertation, she teaches me everyday what it means to work diligently and to love deeply. I don’t think I could have ever imagined that having a child would both fill my heart and make me more productive. My son Declan’s smiling face has been all the motivation I could have ever needed. Writing the last half of this dissertation meant that he had to spend time in daycare, but at the same time it meant that those hours we were away from each other became supremely efficient. Before Declan, I never knew I could write so quickly. The happiness he has brought into my life has also been a much needed salve for the deep sadness I often felt working with war on a daily basis. It is my sincerest hope that the world we leave him will not be so rife with conflict. Finally, I’d like to offer my deepest thanks to my partner Kathy. Her ability to endure the academic process was challenged right alongside mine. I am indebted to her for standing with me the whole way through. Much like when I ran the LA Marathon, she viii always stepped in to cheer me along during the hardest miles. Our personal journey very nearly began with my time at USC, and I am so thankful that it will continue beyond. She has always believed I could finish this project, even when my confidence was low. Completing this project fulfilled a commitment I made for myself and on behalf of the life we hope to build together. I hope the knowledge produced within these pages contributes in a way that makes us both proud, and offers some small reward for all of the sacrifices we’ve made over the years. I love you so very much. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES xi ABSTRACT xii INTRODUCTION 1 Spectres of War 6 Representing War in the Wake of 9/11 13 Bricolage As Method: Governmentality, Affect, and Media Industries 15 Scholarly Protest: Critical Thought and Post-9/11 Warfare 19 Scope 25 Chapter Descriptions 28 A Note on the Author's Background 32 Introduction Notes 35 CHAPTER ONE: SIMULACRA FI(DELIS): AUTHENTICITY AND THE TRANSMEDIA AESTHETIC ECONOMY OF WAR 39 The Resurgence of Spectacle: Privileging the Visual in Traditional and Interactive Media 52 Codifying Credibility: Realism and the Authentic 57 Authentic Imagery and Aesthetic Contradiction 61 Conditioning a Transmedia Aesthetic: Videogames, Reality TV and Intimate Imagery 65 Subjective Objectivity: Embedding, Documentary, and YouTube 73 Act of Valor: An Aesthetic Precis 82 Conclusion 85 Chapter One Notes 87 CHAPTER TWO: PATHOS AND PROFIT: BRAND-BUILDING AND WARFARE 96 Affective Economics, Veterans and Selling War 101 Advanced Liberalism, Self-Reflexivity and Brand Cultures 107 Consumer Citizenship and America's Wars 113 x Social Responsibility and War 116 9/11 as Commodity 126 Selling the Services 127 Recapitulation RE: Vets 129 OEF/OIF: Only Discursive, Never Material 131 Act of Valor as Social Responsiblility 147 Conclusion 149 Chapter Two Notes 153 CHAPTER THREE: A WAR OF EXCLUSIVITY: INFORMATION, ACCESS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE 163 Information and Access after 9/11 166 Media Access and the Public Sphere 172 Retelling Reality: Fact-based Fictions and Information 176 Documentary and Media Publics 183 Selling 'Truth': The TV Industry and the Market for War Docs 186 HBO's Walled Garden: A Premium Network's Exclusive War 187 PBS, Prestige Documentary Programming and War 191 HBO & PBS: Narrow-Casting the War 200 Conclusion: Conjuncture and Consensus 203 Chapter Three Notes 206 CONCLUSION 214 Conclusion Notes 220 BIBLIOGRAPHY 221 xi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Still from Act of Valor (2012). Digital text boxes provide SEAL combat statistics, a configuration native to videogames. 83 Figure 2. Still from Act of Valor (2012). The targeting view through a gun sight is an overt example of videogame-style first-person perspective in the film. 83 Figure 3. Topps Desert Storm Trading Cards. 124 Figure 4. Miller High Life IAVA Baltimore Orioles event at Camden Yards on August 9, 2011. Photo courtesy of the IAVA Flickr Account. www.flickr.com/photos/iava/ 6028947039/. 134 Figure 5. UA/WWP Uniform worn by University of Maryland in their November 14, 2009 game against Virginia Tech. Photo courtesy of Under Armour. 137 Figure 6. Still from Spike TV’s Video Salute to the Call of Duty Endowment. Photo courtesy of Spike TV. 144 Figure 7. Alive Day Landing Page. Photo courtesy of Adam Aud. 146 Figure 8. IAVA logo transformation. Photo courtesy of the IAVA. 147 Figure 9. Staged photo of the rape/murder scene of Abeer Qasim Hamza that serves as the final frame of Redacted (2007). Photo by Taryn Simon. 183 xii ABSTRACT Intervening in the tendency to analyze recent war media on purely ideological grounds, "Framing the Fight: Post-9/11 Warfare and the Logistics of Representation," puts theories of affect and governmentality in conversation, while asserting the value of industries studies as a way of 'empirically' examining the impact of media and discourse on engagement with American post-9/11 warfare. If power is diffuse, then governmentality, or the "conduct of conduct," must be seen to function within extant socio-economic and cultural formations. Therefore, rather than interpreting texts as ideologically determinant, this project delineates how textual attributes such as aesthetics, and para-textual factors such as branded marketing campaigns interact with governmental rationalities to mobilize affect and conscribe common sense understandings of and engagement with the United States' recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, this project evinces the influence of industrial efficiencies, technological convergence and historical context on the process of rendering war imagery legitimate. In addition to detailing the development and acceptance of a discrete war aesthetic, I analyze how the pathos of war is intricately bound up with both the development and sales of commodities and parse how those commodities then help shape perceptions and engagement. This type of analysis evinces the participation of the private sector in shaping Americans’ responses and opens up a space to examine the deployment of governmental rationalities across media sectors. In turn, brand culture can be seen as a crucial formation shaping the representation and reception of war; part of a broader socio-cultural assemblage through which the goals of governmentality are achieved. While the dissertation as a whole is xiii ultimately concerned with the political ramifications of war representation, it does so in order to shed light on the both the limited accessibility of diverse media representations and our constrained ability to 'access' differing perspectives. 1 INTRODUCTION. "Now we are engaged in two image wars. And we may not think that there are two of them because they are inextricable. The first is the one seen in what is seen (and thought to be stored) in still and moving images… This is the imaged conflict… the other war, the one over the imaged war, is not exactly viewable. It is not on view because it is the war about how we view - how we see what we see as well as what we make of the images that we see and what they make of us. It is a question of the conditions of everyday engagement that make the imaged war accessible or inaccessible, available or unavailable; that determine dissemination or distribution." 1 - Jane Gaines In January of 2010 Restrepo the war documentary by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Four months later, in May, its filmic peer, Janus Metz's Armadillo made its own world premiere at the 63rd annual Cannes Film Festival. These two independent documentaries, both named after forward operating bases in Afghanistan, provide intimate and visceral accounts of two different sets of troops deployed in the country in support of NATO's post-9/11 International Security Assistance Force. One group is composed of young male soldiers from the United States Army, the other of Danish soldiers. While the U.S. troops are located in the Kunar province's Korengal Valley, and the Danish troops in the Helmand province at the opposite end of the country, their experiences mirror one another in important ways and are both recorded, curated and presented to audiences with the intention of 'bringing the war home.' While at their respective festivals each film received 2 critical praise and high honors, outside of such venues, their narratives of impact diverged quite radically. After winning the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, indicating that it was the best independent documentary of the year, Restrepo went on to limited theatrical distribution and eventually had its television debut in the United States on the National Geographic channel in November of the same year. Despite also being nominated for an Academy Award, outside of critical audiences and the documentary community, the film passed rather unremarkably through its respective distribution windows and then receded into an ever growing body of war-related media. Armadillo, however, after winning the Cannes' Critics' Week Grand Prize, elicited such a response from the Danish people that it was rushed into theaters and provoked a military inquiry. 2 Given the number of correspondences between these two films -- subject matter, aesthetic approach, and time period, amongst others -- it is interesting to think about the contextual factors which contributed to the starkly different reception and response to these films. The prevailing narrative about media that has dealt with the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has centered on the general apathy with which American audiences have greeted these texts and the anemic box office revenues that were generated as a result. The justifications proffered range from an unwillingness of audiences to engage with traumatic representations to accusations of bad filmmaking. In large part, such critiques have been formulated upon the quality and performance of the few high profile Hollywood productions about the ongoing wars. What is often overlooked, however, is the substantial amount, and performance, of content that has been produced 3 independently, made for television, and generated through and for new media technologies. Therefore, while this project is concerned with a broad range of media texts, the dissimilar fates of the two documentaries discussed above, speak to a number of questions I interrogate herein. For instance, why, when these media are supposedly failing, is there such a surfeit of production? On what terms does the production of this content make sense for companies? How do these terms affect the way war is represented? The significance of answering these questions is bound up with a key underlying assumption of the project, namely, that media are a crucial instrument in shaping the U.S. citizen’s understanding of and engagement with America’s wars. Intervening in the prevailing tendency to analyze recent war representations on purely ideological grounds, Framing the Fight: Post-9/11 Warfare and the Logistics of Representation, puts theories of affect and governmentality into conversation with one another while asserting the value of media industries studies as a way of 'empirically' examining the impact of media and discourse on engagement with American post-9/11 warfare. Put differently, the project considers how our emotional responses to warfare are mobilized, often in terms of ethics and morality, toward the achievement of government- based societal goals. The dissertation thus looks, specifically, at the operations of the media industries as a crucial lens into how these population-level goals are achieved. Such a variegated approach is necessary given the diffusion of operations of power into the processes of everyday life in globally networked societies. This form of power, known as governmentality, was defined by Michel Foucault as the "conduct of conduct," and must be seen to function within extant socio-economic and cultural formations such 4 as the media industries themselves. Therefore, rather than interpreting war media as ideologically determinant, this project delineates how textual attributes such as aesthetics, and para-textual factors such as branded marketing campaigns, as industrial products, interact with governmental rationalities to modulate affect and conscribe the American public’s common sense understandings of and engagement with the United States' recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This approach was developed in response to contemporary strategies that seek to manage affective populations and thus do not simply traffic in proscription; for as Ben Anderson has argued, in "the present conjuncture...the excess of affect is now not so much regulated as induced, not so much prohibited as solicited. Modulation replaces constraint." 3 In other words, unlike the Cold War’s McCarthyism, where the repressive milieu entailed a suppression of all forms of unsanctioned political and emotional response, after 9/11, a wide range of sentiments were sought out and then channeled into forms of expression and participation that could be easily recuperated within the market-based forms of engagement characteristic of contemporary U.S. culture. The aforementioned methodological bricolage which shaped this project, thus evinces the influence of industrial efficiencies, technological convergence and historical context on the process of rendering war imagery legitimate. In addition to detailing the development and acceptance of a discrete war aesthetic, I analyze how the pathos of war is intricately bound up with both the development and sales of commodities and parse how those commodities then foster certain perceptions and modes of engagement. This type of analysis underscores the participation of the private sector in shaping Americans’ 5 responses and opens up a space to examine the diffusion of governmental rationalities across media sectors. In turn, brand culture can be seen as a crucial formation that is shaping the representation and reception of war; part of a broader socio-cultural assemblage through which governmentality operates. While the dissertation as a whole is ultimately concerned with the political ramifications of war representation, it does so in order to shed light on both the limited accessibility of diverse media representations and our constrained ability to 'access' differing perspectives. Despite the tendency to emphasize the role of news media in the development of broader societal conceptions of these wars, this project is centrally concerned with the work performed by narrative media, both fiction and non-fiction. Particularly in the years since the build up to the wars, television news has itself shown diminishing interest in covering the conflicts leaving room for other formats to contribute to the discourse. With rare exception, the few scholarly projects that have examined narrative media have positioned this body of work within larger Leftist discourses of the perpetuation of Neoliberalism and Imperialism. While such approaches are neither irrelevant nor unproductive, such tools do not allow for a nuanced understanding of the forces shaping the production of contemporary war media. Part of the issue with these analyses is their reliance upon textual analysis as the primary lens through which war media is understood. Such an approach fails to account for the industrial practices and strategies which have allowed these texts to be produced as well as to analyze how such practices have influenced the specific ways these wars have been represented; Media Industry Studies (MIS) offer a valuable set of critical tools with which we might better understand 6 these elements of production and representation. This is due to the fact that MIS is a productive combination of Cultural Studies’ attention to relationships of power and Political Economy’s attention to institutional processes. In essence, it “acknowledg[es] that economic factors must be connected to complex practices that produce a field of images and discourses” and by examining mid-level processes and undertaking detailed case studies one can glean “how political-economic structures, industrial practices and textual meaning interact with and determine one another.” 4 As such, this approach allows for an understanding of war-themed media that expands upon earlier perspectives that foreground generic codification and wartime propaganda. 5 The employment of such a hybrid methodology is necessary given that at no other point in history has warfare been represented across so many, and such nascent, forms of media. The import and impact of war representation can thus only be grasped by accounting for its multeity and the intentional and incidental interactions of this proliferating imagery. SPECTRES OF WAR Although Framing the Fight is principally concerned with the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, their representation is thoroughly imbricated with those that have come before. Given this, it is necessary to briefly trace some of the significant evolutions that have occurred in representation during previous wars and their genealogical contributions to contemporary approaches. Of the United States' past wars World War II, in particular, contributed mightily to the development of a standard of wartime representation. The massive propaganda machine which arose upon the entrance of the 7 United States into WWII enlisted Hollywood, the press, and individual citizens in the war effort. Of these, the most influential development of the government’s efforts was the alliance between Hollywood and the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures. According to the bureau’s guidelines, “Whenever possible, films were to fall into one of six Bureau-approved categories: The Production Front, The Issues, The Enemy, The Armed Forces, Our Allies and The Home Front." 6 Within these bounds various types of films were produced: Home Front films, Service Comedies, even Musicals. Most importantly, out of this collaboration came a genre of film that would come to be known as the World War II Combat film. The combat film was the genre that, for many Americans, defined what it meant to go to war. While it is true that other films examined military life and the experience of military training, the combat film “concerns itself not only with history and battle, but the underlying issue of what it means to be an American.” 7 For as much impact as the WWII combat film had in shaping the public’s conception of war, their opinion did not come from film alone. News reels and photojournalism were a vital part of bringing the war home. As is often the case, it is more telling to see what is missing from these pictures than what was shown. Much has been written about the multiple ways the war was represented, but what was kept from public view is less often discussed. To a certain extent, the reason why WWII exists as such an ideal representation of war is due to the tight control over imagery coming out of the theaters of fighting. Concentrating on the role of censorship during WWII, George Roeder Jr. reveals that the government’s policies about which images would be shown 8 were nuanced. Rather than forbidding all access to disturbing imagery, the photos were strategically released to either rally support or temper expectation. 8 The government, for instance, released graphic photos of wounded American soldiers that had been censored earlier in the war as a way of preparing citizens for the return of veterans to society. Roeder also argues that “perhaps because the war in Korea began less than five years after the end of World War II, published pictures from the beginning of the Korean War matched the candor of those from the end of World War II and soon surpassed it.” 9 Aside from a level of frankness in photography, the representation of the Korean War had little else in common with that of the previous war. The only film to make an impression while the war was ongoing was Samuel Fuller’s Steel Helmet (1951) which was made quickly and inexpensively soon after the start of the war. 10 Those films which followed the war often ended up being ambivalent in their message, in Pork Chop Hill (1959) for example, the majority of the film is spent decrying the absurdity of war but at the end the fighting is recuperated by the willingness of the soldiers to stand by each other. In stark contrast to the clear threat and clear victory of WWII, the nation never quite got behind Korea; perhaps because the U.S. was not in imminent danger. Furthermore, its memory may not have endured in the public imagination because it ended in a stalemate. 11 Far worse than being relegated to the recesses of historical memory, the Vietnam War was omnipresent on television and in the streets after “the Tet offensive in 1968 shattered popular illusions and ignited a massive public movement against the war." 12 However, in the midst of all of this imagery, Vietnam was noticeably absent on film. 13 9 The first wave of Vietnam films, including The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), came roughly three years after the fall of Saigon, the United States’ first military ‘loss’ despite its withdrawal. Regarding Vietnam, no film was a more obvious failure than John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968). Its overt nationalism and stilted presentation made the film an anachronism, even when it was first released. Indicative of the film’s critical reception, Renata Adler of The New York Times, argued that the movie was so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything and becomes an invitation to grieve, not for our soldiers or for Vietnam (the film could not be more false or do a greater disservice to either of them) but for what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus in this country. 14 Similarly, Roger Ebert noted, Perhaps we could have believed this film in 1962 or 1963, when most of us didn't much care what was happening in Vietnam. But we cannot believe it today. Not after television has brought the reality of the war to us. Not after the Fulbright hearings and the congressional debates and the primaries. Not after 23,000 Americans have been killed. 15 The subtext of both of the above statements implies that much of the film’s incompatibility with its milieu resulted from an aesthetic shift that was taking place during the war. Michael Anderegg has argued that people’s experience of Vietnam imagery, “whether on film or videotape, was produced by a generation of filmmakers imbued with the style and technique of cinema verité and direct cinema. One-day relay of film and other forms of rapid dissemination gave much of what Americans watched on the evening news an immediacy and intensity that was new and that forever shaped America's experience of warfare.” 16 This representational transformation can be seen as 10 an essential building block in developing the intense aural and visual aesthetic that would come to dominate our many screens. If the World War II combat film was a flexible genre, the Vietnam War combat film is a genre in perpetual transition: the "Vietnam films were not merely retrospective; rather, they became and continue to be barometers of current attitudes. In the Vietnam cinema, the war is not presented so much in the realm of history or memory as it is projected beyond history and memory into the present. The Vietnam War, one feels, never really ends." 17 To pinpoint specific features of the Vietnam genre is to parse out several lines of political argumentation that, over time, developed as the films about Vietnam, and the audiences who went to see them, gained new perspectives on the conflict. In the seventies, for some, the war was a horrible mistake that revealed the true evil of combat, for others the war represented an unwillingness to do everything we could to win the war. The latter perspective would eventually manifest on film as “revisionist fantasies” during the Eighties. 18 As Gregory Lukow has argued, “Films like Rambo and Year of the Dragon [...] ‘go back’ not with melancholy but with vengeance.” 19 These revenge narratives, largely fought on behalf of soldiers missing in action, subverted the war’s problematic history by using POW rescue fantasies to turn the experience in South Asia into a victory. It is important to remember that at the same time that these multiple narratives about Vietnam were developing the American media was undergoing a period of transition. The ascendance of cable and time-shifting technologies began a process of fragmenting the national audience. Early versions of home computers and video game 11 platforms were also being developed and undergoing experimentation. The two decades after Vietnam were in many ways a particularly strange time. Marita Sturken argues that "The 1980s and 1990s in the United States were defined by a pervasive culture of fear; in a time of relatively low threat, average Americans were preoccupied with potential threats to their personal security." 20 For example, the devastation of the industrial base of inner cities, that itself was a byproduct of conservative fiscal policies of the era, produced not sympathy but rather fear, and criminalization of the, often minority, poor, who were disproportionately affected. Moreover, these fears were then exploited to generate harsher punishments and mandatory sentences that would ultimately benefit a newly privatized prison industry and is thus indicative of how the paranoid culture of that moment became an integral support to policies of neoliberal deregulation. These policies also entailed shift in the way the U.S. carried out its military engagements as those fears about safety within the nation expanded to include threats from outside its borders. Much like the example of the privatization of the prison industry, one can consider the changes that occurred to the military during this time to reflect a market, or bottom-line focused, sensibility. This is, in part, what is admonished against in the concept of the military- industrial complex. This complex, whose establishment was lamented yet deemed necessary by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address, outlines the political stakes of maintaining a massive permanent military force, the necessity for a stable arms industry, and the massive economic expenditures required to sustain both. In short, a fully-professional military, supplied by a private arms industry would not only connect the nation’s martial pursuits to all arenas of cultural life by sustaining citizens’ 12 livelihoods, it would also open the door to heightened levels of political jockeying and influence in order to gain funding. In addition to the shifting relationships of power brought on by its new connections to industry, the military was also undergoing a transformation in the way it executed tasks. Although the U.S. military carried out covert operations long before the eighties, this means of intervention increasingly became the norm, particularly in areas like Central America. The short, contract-like nature of these engagements can thus be seen to foreshadow the transition to private military contractors several decades later. By the time of the Gulf War in the early nineties, the legacy of Vietnam was firmly entrenched in the American imagination. Every aspect of the Gulf War’s representation was tightly controlled given that many people believed that it was anti-war television coverage which had turned Americans against the war in Vietnam. In 1991, at the start of the war, President George H.W. Bush placed a ban on showing the caskets of returning U.S. soldiers, this ban would remain in place for the next eighteen years. Along with the disappearance of death from the visual arena two major developments fundamentally shifted the representation and reception of war: the rise of CNN and the use of smart-weaponry. Although most Americans believed the ‘100-hour war’ was exactly that – over in an instant, in reality, skirmishes involving the Kurdish population forced the war to linger on. Though President Bush triumphantly announced during the war’s ‘formal’ conclusion, “By God we’ve kicked this Vietnam Syndrome forever” – in light of historical fact the statement rings false. 21 In the years and months to come the U.S. 13 military would continue to patrol imposed ‘No-Fly’ zones which occasionally erupted into actual conflict. In the days leading up to September 11 th 2001, aside from the pseudo-policing in Iraq and occasional small scale intervention elsewhere, the U.S. military was, in essence, idle. Alternatively, in the years since Desert Storm the American media environment exploded. Satellite television, DVRs, and advances in video gaming served to further fragment the market. Expansion of broadband technologies also allowed for the creation of social networking sites and the ability to upload personal photos and video on sites like YouTube. REPRESENTING WAR IN THE WAKE OF 9/11 Although it is indeed true that there exist numerous contiguities between the representation of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their predecessors, we must account for the contextual specificity of the post-9/11 conjuncture in order to better understand their divergences. One analogue was that Hollywood, in a replay of WWII, made the trek to Washington to offer their assistance. While they did not adjust content they pushed up several pertinent films and pushed back others with questionable narratives. However, unlike during WWII, Vietnam and the Gulf War, in addition to what came out of Hollywood, there were massive amounts of documentary production and independent film. The lowered costs of film production achieved through digital video and affordable non-linear editing systems expanded the pool of who had the resources to contribute. As a result, there has been an unprecedented amount of media 14 produced, particularly after the U.S. initiated another war in Iraq under false pretenses. Many of these new text have embraced a very visceral and immediate aesthetic. In the aforementioned discussion of the aesthetic shift brought about by televisual coverage of Vietnam, a concomitant effect seems to have been brought about by not only the embedded reporting style, but the soldier mounted cameras of the military itself. Films such as Green Zone (2010) and The Hurt Locker (2008) embrace a visual aesthetic which seemingly strives to replicate the physical experience of combat in the viewer. In addition to Hollywood’s products, new, affordable technologies and distribution methods, such as YouTube, were also integral in extending the representation of war to the soldiers themselves. Several contemporary films and television programs consciously incorporated the aesthetic of videos posted by active duty soldiers of their experiences in Iraq. Documentaries have adopted these aesthetics as well – shooting with hand held cameras while embedded with units for extended periods of time. Video games have also been, if not a critical site, a realm where the contemporary wars remained important even after the American public lost interest. Games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Iraq) and Medal of Honor [2010] (Afghanistan) situate these ongoing conflicts within their own unique narratives and allow players the opportunity to interact. One particularly fascinating example is an online ‘newsgaming’ game called Kuma\War. As Roger Stahl explains, “Kuma\War gives players a chance to re-enact dramatic military scenes just weeks after they play out on television news…Kuma\War ‘[lives] between being the news and being a game,’ CEO Keith Halpern explained. ‘We wanted to put people in the middle of situations they read about or see on TV so as to 15 better understand them.” 22 More than just a simple matter of addressing fears concerning the effects of first-person shooter games, it becomes necessary to ask what is the significance of ‘playing’ the news? Little kids often replayed WWII battles, but how is it different if one is allowed to enter a world where “the game’s designers research and painstakingly re-create each mission down to 3-D topography, important characters, hardware, and military intelligence?” 23 Accordingly, in an historical moment where advancements in the technologies of representation are generative of new forms of access to and engagement with war, asking these sorts of questions allows one to gauge the material factors that are productive of new forms of war imagery and interactivity, and thus offers a chance to better understand the predominant factors impacting the mediation of war after 9/11. BRICOLAGE AS METHOD: GOVERNMENTALITY, AFFECT, AND MEDIA INDUSTRIES This project’s investigation into the development of post-9/11 approaches to war representation, and thereby, the factors shaping the predominantly mediated perspectives of warfare held by many Americans, has received crucial theoretical support from Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. According to Foucault, governmentality is centrally concerned with the “art of government,” that is, with the establishment of “continuity” between three different forms of government: the government of the self, the home (economy), and the state (politics). 24 In short, he argues that a transformation occurs around the end of the eighteenth century that makes it so that to govern at the state 16 level, to govern an entire population, one must first govern well their own activities and the affairs of their family. Conversely, a well-run government will ensure that the individuals of the population under its aegis will be efficient at self-government and the governing of their families. 25 In this way, the minutiae of one’s daily affairs become significant to the efficient government of society. Consequently, as Foucault underscores, government then becomes interested not only in the activities of individuals, but also with their relationships to “customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking.” 26 This means is that virtually all aspects of life become relevant to the achievement of a government’s desired outcomes, or what Foucault terms “convenient ends.” 27 This theorization is invaluable to this project specifically because it accounts for the fact that power is dispersed and operates via 'regimes of practices' which take as their object 'everyday life.' As a result, what is most generative about the concept of governmentality to this dissertation is the way it outlines the workings of power. Foremost, in this mode government increasingly operates outside traditional, institutionalized areas, and is thus made beholden to the unintended interactions its plans and programs encounter in the social worlds in which they circulate. This inserts a certain level of uncertainty that enables the recovery of indeterminacy, or the potential to do otherwise, not out of a utopian desire for resistance, but because governmental programs, operating at a distance, do not always achieve their intended goals. I would add here that given the importance of global capitalism to the operation of power in a networked society, one must also account for the fact that the intentions of capital and of government are not commensurate although, indeed, at times they are coincident. This is 17 not to say that rationalities, or naturalized ways of interpretation, engagement, and seeing, are coincidences, rather, it is that governmental strategies do not exist in isolation and thus maintain an incommensurability, as for example between government and capital, that allows one to view the representational trends at hand as indicative of what Barnett et al. have termed "emergent rationalities" rather than, for instance, the direct inculcations of government or business. 28 Specifically, borrowing from game theory as well as the work of Gary Bridge, Barnett et al. argue, "the rationalities that govern strategic interactions are not the pre-existing properties of the different actors involved, but are an emergent dimension of ongoing interaction itself." 29 Consequently, by tracing the multiple factors that are influencing representations of war across media and industries, one can begin to outline how diverse interests have aligned, and indicate complimentary approaches, while still acknowledging relatively discrete origins. This expansion is important because it acknowledges the diverse interests that have participated in regularizing war representation, not for the sake of diminishing the importance of governmental influence, but instead, so that it becomes clear that solely deconstructing governmental rhetoric, representation and policy is insufficient. As the opening discussion of the apathetic reception of critical war texts indicates, what is at stake here then, is the collective disengagement of the population of the United States from its nation’s wars. The gravity of the situation is easily grasped when one considers that this dissociation is being fomented on multiple fronts: through play, through consumption, through modes of information distribution. It is thus revelatory to read the decline of critical public concern with the United States’ post-9/11 wars 18 alongside the gradual isolation of the military from civilian life, the rise of private military contractors, the use of drones, and the consumption of combat as entertainment. Such an exercise evinces the instrumentality of interactive, bracingly visceral, and highly commodifiable representations of warfare, toward the achievement of “convenient ends” in U.S. foreign policy. In short, this representational mode enables more efficient management of the American population’s responses to warfare through its production of an extremely circumscribed body of knowledge for warfare. In combination with military strategies which displace the costs of waging war onto machines, highly paid contractors, and non-combatant Others, there is less and less cause to raise one’s hackles. In addition to governmentality studies, theories of affect have also been vital to this project because of the way it allows one to think through the ways that the conflicted sentiments which often accompany the prosecution of war are mobilized. Moreover, since affect, or that element of feeling that is unrecoupable, is, as Shaviro has argued, non-subjective or transpersonal, it is also a useful way to think about the dispersal or transmission of rationalities through and between populations, which ultimately shape the conditions of possibility for engagement and for action. Finally, despite their utility, due to the theoretical nature of governmentality and affect, and the desire for the project to have a strong materialist grounding, I have attempted to incorporate the methodological insights of media industries studies as a means of ascertaining how it is that certain 'processes' or goals are manifested in relation to representation. While, as Mitchell Dean has argued, one should not attempt to deduce a particular rationality from a specific 'programme' or goal since they are 19 incommensurate, it is important to look at specific operations of media as examples of how industrial practice, and thus the goals of industry, can coincide with and perpetuate certain governmental rationalities. 30 Moreover, despite the fact that Barnett et al. argue that empirical work "easily leads to an analysis of diffusion and resistance that leaves intact the fundamental social-theoretic assumptions of [a fully-intentional, unified and strategic nature of governmental rationality that they argue attends] the analytics of governmentality," I would assert that the value of a MIS approach in this setting is precisely that it looks at an entirely different framework of rationality, the media industry itself and its unique motivations, while still being able to identify points of conjuncture with broadly construed governmental rationalities. 31 Therefore, this project uses industry studies to offer insight into the ways in which capitalism's desires, as manifested through the interests of media entities, can, and do, dovetail with governmental rationalities. These conjunctures amplify and extend particular ways of knowing the world and thus impact the 'conditions of possibility.' In this regard, MIS is most useful in that is allows one to trace the specific instruments which interpellate citizen consumers via the contemporary ethos of responsibility and optimization. SCHOLARLY PROTEST: CRITICAL THOUGHT AND POST-9/11 WARFARE Much like the hypodermic model, many contemporary analyses of war media often assume a direct, ideological, correlation between media which demonstrate conservative wartime perspectives and 'real world' outcomes that are commonly 20 associated with advanced liberalism. Such modes of analysis, however, typically cannot account for the mechanisms through which such programs are taken up within a given population's common sense understandings of war. For me, affect provides a way to think through that connection, and then in combination with MIS to identify some of the industry's own rationalities that ultimately help shape war's representation and reception. As a result, against ideological readings, one of the broadest interventions made by this dissertation is to emphasize not only the potential engage with war outside of the ways encouraged by various forms of war representation, but most importantly to assert that even if certain individuals in positions of power have specific goals which would ultimately seek to impact societal perspectives on warfare, government, is itself multiple, partial, and dispersed. It is not characterized by unity and is thus not a monolith. Likewise, governmental rationalities, are characterized by a certain plurality. They overlap and conflict across the various branches and agencies of government. They are also impacted and shaped by the voiced interests of those who lobby government directly, and still more importantly, by the meeting of diverse sets of rationalities in the world of lived experience. The above intervention is necessary given that one of the prevailing ways of analyzing post-9/11 media about America's wars has been through textual analysis. Works such as that by Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, use this scholarly methodology to describe scenarios whereby media is directly responsible for inculcating militarized, neoliberal perspectives on warfare. Boggs and Pollard argue, for example, that Hollywood films have fomented a culture of militarism. Their work briefly discusses 21 several important non-filmic cultural contributors such as gun control law, changes in media ownership, and limited access to international news coverage amongst others, however, their argument depends upon a relatively simplistic correlation between film themes and cultural views. In other words, Boggs and Pollard see Hollywood films as simultaneously ideologically determinant and symptomatic of American cultural views of warfare. Moreover, their work has not kept up with the shifting importance of media forms that has occurred in recent decades. While, indeed, one can reliably assert the importance of the World War II combat film given the mass movie attendance of the era, as Jeanine Basinger has done in her canonical text, the singular import of film to cultural perspectives on warfare during the contemporary moment appears particularly specious given the prevalence of television, video games, and web-based media. 32 Douglas Kellner's work, though similarly grounded in textual analysis, is more straightforwardly an attempt to correlate the films of the 2000s with the political machinations of the Bush-Cheney administration. The project celebrates the ability of certain films to function as sites of contestation to neo-conservative perspectives and critiques others' that Kellner argues were deployed toward the achievement of neoliberal ends. Where Kellner's work is most generative is in his allusions to a societal sensibility, or mood, that the films he analyzes lay bare. While Kellner is likewise uninterested in non-filmic media, his claims are more modest, limiting the scope of his reading's implications to the world of film. The limited contextualization of Boggs and Pollard is, however, magnified because of their failure to modulate the relative importance of film in relationship to their broader societal claims. 22 In contrast to the aforementioned textual readings, another strand of relevant critical literature that has been generated in relationship to American warfare is largely theoretical in nature. The majority of this work derives its critical agency from an understanding of the U.S. as an empire or at least views its military pursuits as imperial. From this point of view a wide range of insights are offered. In the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, empire is the critical context for understanding the status of democracy and the prosecution of war. Hardt and Negri, deploying their updated understanding of empire, account for the 'networked' qualities of global power, and reconceptualize war as a structural feature of, rather than a disruption to, the rational organization of everyday life. Although this work lends keen insight into the evolving nature of warfare, Hardt and Negri's ultimate goal is to use these insights to rework contemporary understandings of the potential for democracy. 33 Given this emphasis, their work, while indeed powerful, offers limited specific insight into the unique role of representation in shaping perceptions of the transformations occurring across war-related media. The theoretical work of Rey Chow parses the fraught relationship between representation and language in the context of atomic warfare. While the specific context of her work is somewhat removed from post-9/11 warfare, it speaks volumes about the impenetrability of war representation and links this obfuscation to the degraded correspondence between language and representation, as explained by Foucault, as well as to the increasing truculence of sight, as understood in the work of Virilio. Building upon their work, and using the example of the atomic bombing of Japan, Chow posits 23 that the current moment as one in which both seeing and knowing are tantamount to processes of targeting. Moreover, extending the implications of these altered modes of perception, she argues such targeting likewise entails a particularly virulent form of self- referentiality. Self-referentiality as Chow and others conceive it, is a theme which weaves throughout this project. For Chow the term describes self-referentiality as a xenophobic way of seeing that prompts the U.S. to seek to eradicate the radical alterity of the Other. As she explains, “to be self-referential is, from the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, a straightforward practice of aggression and attack. As was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the more recent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq this self-referentiality means bombing - and eradicating - those others who are not like 'us.'" 34 For Jean Baudrillard, American self-reflexivity is marked by a projection of the U.S. onto the Other, “by…a kind of egocentric generosity or stupidity, [whereby] the Americans can only imagine and combat an enemy in their own image.” 35 This misrecognition, in the case of warfare, according to Baudrillard, allows Americans to believe that a war, between two 'equal competitors,' took place. Drawing attention to these issues of self-reflexivity, opens up a space in which to pursue a similar self-reflexivity that is taking hold at the level of the individual. In addition, linking macro-level demonstrations of self-reflexive behavior to its manifestation within populations points toward the increasingly prominent role of the 'Ethical' in contemporary practices of citizenship. Here, ethical refers not merely to standards of appropriate conduct, but rather, "to the active shaping of lives in relation to individuals' own sense of fulfillment rather than by reference to models of citizenship in 24 which obligation and prescription are the dominant registers of subject formation." 36 Much like Chow, Judith Butler's Frames of War is concerned with 'visual and discursive fields.' For Butler, rather than seeing the Other through cross-hairs, the Other's life is made vulnerable by representational frames which seek to constrain our ability to grieve the loss of life, particularly those whose racial Otherness can be seen to trigger a xenophobic response. Much like my own work, Butler is attuned to the ways in which various aspects of warfare succeed or fail in attaining visibility. Furthermore, she asserts that audio and visual representation "selectively carv[es] up experience" in ways that enable the prosecution of war. 37 By presenting war such that domestic issues are viewed as unrelated to foreign policy, and by obscuring the fact that “media representations have already become modes of military conduct,” naturalized modes of seeing are produced that devalue the lives of others and are “supported by prevalent social norms as they are articulated by both public policy, dominant media, and the strategies of war.” 38 Each of the three aforementioned scholars theoretical work has been instrumental in shaping the way this project's assessment of the importance of modes of representation to the prosecution and understanding of war. In addition to these somewhat 'disciplined' analyses, several scholars have begun to outline a path which demonstrates the relevance of a multifaceted approach. Roger Stahl’s Militainment Inc.: War, Media and Popular Culture takes as its object popular culture texts from arenas as disparate as sports, video games, toys and reality television. In doing so, Stahl lays the groundwork for understanding how certain products of popular culture dovetail with militarized perspectives. Stahl's work, while indeed generative, depends heavily upon the insights of 25 James Der Derian whose landmark text, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial- Media-Entertainment Network, insists upon the necessity to account for the participation of the entertainment industry in contemporary warfare. While Der Derian's primary interest is in elaborating how cooperation between the Military Industrial Complex and the entertainment industry have produced new modes and conceptions of warfare, his secondary interest -- the power that these cooperative relationships attribute to mimetic artifacts, proves most useful to this current project. Indeed, such insight ultimately allows one to acknowledge the instrumentality of these interconnections for commercial entities and, astoundingly, the individual subject, rather than simply highlighting their advantageousness to the military. SCOPE As Alexander Galloway has argued, "Periodization theory is a loose art at best and must take into account that, when history changes, it changes slowly and in an overlapping, multilayered way, such that one historical moment may extend well into another, or two moments may happily coexist for decades or longer." 39 Still, it is a valuable heuristic, and one which without demanding concrete starting and ending points, allows one to trace evolving societal conditions and account for moments of change. To that end, with the goal of making clear the shifts that have occurred in relationship to war representation, this project's assessment roughly covers the period from 1998 through 2013, with strong emphasis on the media produced from 2004-2012. If permitted to isolate a temporal range rather than a specific year, I would argue that the starting point 26 for the shifts with which this project is chiefly concerned is most likely somewhere between 1998 and 1999. 1998 was significant politically because it was the year that Osama bin Laden first issued the fatwa against the U.S. This act was important because its issuance was in many ways tied to resentment bred by U.S. involvement in the Middle East during the1991 conflict between Iraq and Kuwait. 1998 was also the year that Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The embassy bombings are relevant because, as John W. Dower asserts, despite also being linked with the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, "these were the first anti-American atrocities unequivocally connected to Al Qaeda." 40 1998 was also a landmark year for war representation, it was during this year that Steven Spielberg's blockbuster Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malick's critically- acclaimed The Thin Red Line were both released. However, 1999 also asserts its representational relevance through David O. Russell's Three Kings, which includes the visceral use of special effects, a characteristic which factors greatly into some of the aesthetic qualities this project examines. 1999 also saw the release of Medal of Honor, a landmark instance of the first-person shooter video game which would come to dominate the gaming industry and impact war imagery across media. Thus, as I will explore in greater detail in chapter one, the impact of aesthetic shift rendered by the media of 1998- 1999 is a critical reference point for understanding the approaches to war media which would follow. While to some extent, one must determine a point to conclude research because it is impossible, given the nature of academic production, to generate work which is 27 entirely contemporaneous with one's object if it is ongoing, I have chosen 2010 as the endpoint for the film, television and video game texts examined in this project as that year saw the 'declared' end of combat operations in Iraq with the majority of American troops returning from deployment in December. 41 For the present work I also felt it was important to concentrate on works which were largely contemporaneous with the fighting itself, this is, in part, why the bulk of the film and television research concludes in 2010. 42 The earlier works have a certain messiness about them, because their narratives are unsettled, thus their representational modes are prominently displayed and those texts have a certain aesthetic irreducibility that is apropos of the affective role they have played. Likewise, as many approach a critical distance from the events of 9/11 and the wars that ensued, a different set of considerations and interests are beginning to impact how these wars will be represented going forward. I expect this will start to be reflected aesthetically in forthcoming media. The largest exception to the 2010 end date is my consideration of CSR campaigns which, as they build upon the aesthetic developments that occurred in other media, extend as far into 2013 as my research would allow. Although this project analyzes a diverse group of war media, there are large bodies of work that, although indeed tied to the post-9/11 moment, are not examined within. The largest ouvre of media texts, and their scholarly analysis, that lie just outside the focus of the project are those that deal specifically with issues of terrorism and torture in the context of the events of September 11th. A number of scholars, such as W. J. T. Mitchell, Linda Williams and Jasbir K. Puar have dealt ably with these, and related, topics and while those issues contribute mightily to the milieu in which the media under 28 consideration here was received, their conclusions are tangential to the specific argument developed within. 43 Thus, I direct the reader to those works which take 9/11 as their object for deeper consideration of such issues. There are also bodies of theory which, although relevant, exceed the scope of this project. While some theoretical insights have offered crucial support to the arguments herein, others, which delve further into concepts such as the ontology of torture, xenophobia, empire, and war itself are too far afield of the questions of representation I have sought to address. A similar process of winnowing occurred when selecting media objects for examination. Specifically, I chose to examine media texts which were, at their core, organized around the experience of combat. I chose this criterion because of the singularly-privileged position that was afforded the combat-experience in establishing authenticity across all manner of media. As a result, common media topics that have often included warfare including politics, torture, and terrorism are mostly absent from the project. CHAPTER DESCRIPTIONS Framing the Fight interrogates contemporary assumptions about warfare and the militarization of U.S. society by parsing the processes through which certain representational modes come to cultivate common sense understandings of both. It considers the manifold audio-visual fields through which the particulars of war's prosecution are rendered and situates these representations within the broader operations of a globally networked society. Much like the networked, digital world from which this 29 representational consolidation is born, identifying the points of exchange and coincidence which have fostered the circumscription of the representational field which attends the production of war media is necessarily rhizomic. The rhizome with its horizontal interconnectedness is an apt model for the circuits of influence this project explores, in particular because it resists facile top-down ideological interpretations which often attend discussions of war media. Still, it proves challenging in that the structure of the written essay imposes a certain linearity. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose, “the ideal…would be to lay everything out…on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individual, groups, [and] social formations.” 44 Yet, this dissertation must perforce examine the various conditions in a sequence which defies the actual state of multiplicity which informs the conjuncture itself. Given such limitations, the project is organized in terms of the particular representational shifts and condensations which have manifested as a result of rhizomic interactions; thematic nodes from which the contemporary approach to depicting warfare is made tenable. Given this, the dissertation is organized thematically around three main concepts: aesthetics, branding, and access. The specific, and diverse, examples which issue from these general themes work in concert to demystify the modulation of the American population's responses to the United States' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11. Chapter one interrogates the specific frameworks which have, in recent years, come to influence how the sights and sounds of war are presented across ostensibly disparate media forms. It posits the development and promotion of a distinctive aesthetic 30 in the representation of warfare. By aesthetic I mean the specific qualities, or characteristics, of audio-visual presentation in the texts under consideration. This aesthetic shift is associated with changes in common sense understandings of warfare and socially validated citizen responses. In this way, the aesthetic can be considered a form of 'biopolitical production' since, as Hardt and Negri assert, this form of production includes "immaterial projects, including ideas, images, affects, and relationships." 45 To understand this aesthetic as 'biopolitical production' is to acknowledge its participation in the "produc[tion]...of social life." 46 Therefore, by tracing the multiple influences which have contributed to its establishment, I demonstrate that this aesthetic is not merely a vehicle for governmental ideology, but rather that, even when it coincides with such rationalities, it is at its core the result of the distinct, if interrelated, desires of a host of industries and interested parties. This line of argumentation thus prepares the way for the rest of the project which works to expand the present cultural myopia around recent war representation, a perspectival limitation that fails to acknowledge the regularization of how we see war, the legitimation of pedestrian, commodified responses to war, and ultimately demonstrates that what is often termed a 'militarized' perspective is quite often commercial or industrial in nature. Chapter two asserts the rise of branding as another contextual frame for understanding the forms responses to war have taken in the wake of 9/11. I situate the goals of various corporate social responsibility campaigns within the broader context of the management of populations as construed within governmentality studies. Here, crucially, the interaction between corporate and individual figurations of responsibility 31 not only works to produce a version of participation that is funneled through commerce, but most importantly, in order to legitimize consumption as a political response, it is generative of depictions of warfare that are precisely circumscribed. As a result, the chapter traces the history of consumption as related to U.S. warfare in order to mark the rise of a distinctly self-reflexive component within contemporary war-related consumption. By analyzing several corporate social responsibility campaigns I demonstrate how the figure of the veteran is essential to the dual forms of valorization required of war-related commodity activism. On one hand, as mentioned above, the value of the commodity as a response must be asserted, and on the other, the specific benefit for the individual consumer must be made evident. In this way, the chapter delineates how corporate rationalities can and do align with governmental rationalities characteristic of advanced liberalism. In chapter three I argue that the aesthetics and branding of war as distinct, if not entirely discrete, rationalities are significantly impacting the ways access to diverse representations is gained. The impact of these subtle restrictions of access is magnified given other contextual factors that served to promote a culture of consensus. One of the integral components of this conjuncture was the modulation of affect in tandem with restricted informational access. This confluence helped foster an environment of consensus, an occurrence foreshadowed by the circumscription of response as seen in relation to CSR as well as in the hackneyed approach to aesthetics. I first demonstrate, how the distinctive rationalities governing aesthetics and branding come together to further limit the representational field of contemporary war. Then using, two case studies, 32 it considers how aesthetics and branding further limit access to diverse representations of war when they become part of niche marketing strategies and tools for establishing the worth of walled gardens. These discussions evince the mechanisms through which industrial practices exacerbate the dearth of well-researched, contextualized imagery and information that has been characteristic of war representation after 9/11. Establishing these limits thus allows for a broader discussion of the potential for a well-functioning public sphere. A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR'S BACKGROUND It is necessary to include here some insight into my personal history. I came to this topic somewhat reluctantly as it forced me to grapple with my previous decisions and sensibilities. The events of September 11th marked the opening of my final year of undergraduate education, the time when one is in the midst of trying to determine what to do professionally. The affective milieu, for me, and I assume for others given the high rates of enlistment, was one in which the excess of that moment made traditional employment appear somehow 'less than'; seemed to lay bare the egoistic economic rationale of most careers. As I did not yet have the tools to deconstruct the swirl of discourses and power formations that I was positioned within, I felt that enlisting was a rational response. I realize now that it was indeed rational in that the desire meshed well with so many of the governmental and corporate rationalities being deployed at the time. Nevertheless, I, of my own free will and in the absence of economic duress joined the United States Air Force and while I may be conflicted about the decision-making 33 process that brought me there, I remain proud of my service. While enlisted I trained to become an F-15E Strike Eagle Weapons Systems Officer, a position commonly referred to as a Navigator. During that time I learned how to do so much of what today's war scholarship addresses, things like mastering technologies of surveillance and targeting. As such, this undertaking has not only required the dedication of ample resources toward the location and analysis of media which offered crucial support to the rationalities which fostered certain views about and relationships to warfare, but it has forced me to examine my own beliefs and modes of thought. In this way this project has been extremely personal. As a result, I think it important to acknowledge that for me, a schism yet persists between my scholarly thought work and my embodied life. I am a work in progress. While I clearly acknowledge the omni-directional violence that is unleashed by warfare, it would be hypocritical of me to pretend here that if I honestly believed my family, or my country were truly under threat, that I would not serve again. I realize given my likely audience that this admission may taint the project's reception, but I think it is better to be honest about such things. I also believe it acknowledges the affective excess that may remain even when one tries to think their way out of the vestigial fight or flight response. It is my hope that acknowledging and working in solidarity with such ugly remainders will produce further scholarly insight as I continue to work with and through these issues. Although, indeed it is necessary to acknowledge my past, the greatest paradox to come of undertaking this research has been that I feel I am even more strongly implicated in this country's wars now that I am not wearing a uniform. What this project makes clear 34 in a number of ways is that our everyday decisions, choices, and behaviors are integrally connected to and supported by our nation's military; uncovering those linkages is extremely difficult but is a challenge we must accept. I leave the reader with the words of two who have marked our mutual culpability with eloquence. "War extends throughout the spaces of the economy or leisure and, consequently, comes to rest on the participation of populations." 47 - Ben Anderson "If the voluntary soldiers choose the mask and the costume of a hideous carnival, let us not choose, on our part, the blindfold of a self-appeased conscience. We do not share the innocence, only the guilt. If the habit makes the monk, the uniform of combat no longer makes the 'soldier'…" 48 -Paul Virilio 35 INTRODUCTION NOTES 1 Jane M. Gaines, "The Production of Outrage: The Iraq War and the Radical Documentary Tradition," Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 48 No. 2 (2007), 36-7. 2 Geoffrey Macnab, "Armadillo: The Afghanistan Documentary that Shocked Denmark," The Guardian June 3, 2010 Web. <theguardian.com/f ilm/2010/jun/03/armadillo-danish- documentary-af ghanistan>. January 9, 2013. 3 Ben Anderson, "Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of 'Total War'," The Affect Theory Reader Ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), 168. 4 Timothy Havens, Amanda D. Lotz, and Serra Tinic. “Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach,” Communication, Culture & Critique 2 (2009) 238, 243. 5 One of the canonical texts in the study of war media is Jeanine Basinger’s genre analysis of the World War II combat film. Through detailed analysis of over four decades of films in some way related to WWII, she carves out a clearly defined combat genre with dates of inception and evolution, stock characters, plot point, and settings. While such work is essential to understanding audience expectations and the role of genre in determining how war narratives are constructed, it fails to offer an understanding of the place of these films in society. Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003). On the opposite end of the spectrum, recent work, such as that by Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard as well as by Douglas Kellner have attempted to remedy this lacuna by examining the intersection of politics, media and militarism. 6 Randi Hockett, “Waging Warners’ War.” Ed. Martin Kaplan and Johanna Blakely. Warner's War: Politics, Pop Culture & Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood (Los Angeles: Norman Lear Center, 2004), 19. 7 Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 31. 8 George Roeder Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 9 Ibid., 147. 10 Albert Auster and Leonard Quart, How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1988), 9. 36 11 Ibid., 11. 12 Daniel Miller, "Primetime Television's Tour of Duty," in Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television, Ed. Michael Anderegg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 166. 13 Michael Anderegg, “Introduction,” Ibid., 2. 14 Renata Adler, “Screen: 'Green Berets' as Viewed by John Wayne:War Movie Arrives at the Warner Theater,” The New York Times, June 20, 1968. 15 Roger Ebert, “The Green Berets,” RogerEbert.com, last modified June 26, 1968, accessed February 25, 2014, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-green-berets-1968. 16 Ibid., 2. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 Gregory Lukow, “Anniversaries of Defeat,” Journal: A Contemporary Art Magazine 5, no. 42 (1986): 61. 19 Lukow, “Anniversaries,” 60-61. 20 Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 42. 21 Michelle Kendrick, “The Never Again Narratives: Political Promise and the Videos of Operation Desert Storm,” Cultural Critique 28 (1994): 129. 22 Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009), 104. 23 Ibid. 24 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality Ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 89-91. 25 Foucault, “Governmentality,” 91-2. 26 Ibid., 93. 27 Ibid. 37 28 Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke and Alice Malpass, "The Elusive Subjects of Neo-Liberalism," Cultural Studies 22, no. 5 (2008): 632, doi: 10.1080/09502380802 245902. 29 Barnet et. Al, "Elusive," 632. 30 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), 32. 31 Barnett et Al, "Elusive," 632. 32 Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 1-376. 33 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). 34 Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 15. 35 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 37. 36 Barnett et Al., "Elusive," 627. 37 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2010), 26. 38 Butler, Frames, 29 and xxiv. 39 Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 27. 40 John W. Dower, Cultures of War, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 28. 41 Although I end my discussion of film, television and video games with those produced by the end of 2010, my discussion of CSR campaigns runs through the end of 2012. 42 Although fighting in Afghanistan is still ongoing, and in reality in Iraq as well, combat in Iraq was far more visible over its duration, and achieved a level of visibility never obtained by that which is occurring in Afghanistan. 43 See inter alia: W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1-240. Linda Williams, 38 "Cluster Fuck: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure," Camera Obscura 73, vol. 25, no. 1 (2010): 28-67, doi 10.1215/02705346-2009-014. Jasbir K. Puar, “OnTorture: Abu Ghraib,” Radical History Review 25 no. 93 (2005): 13 – 38. 44 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), February 17, 2012 <http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uscisd/Doc?id=10151134&ppg=30>. 45 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), xvi. 46 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xvi. 47 Ben Anderson, "Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of 'Total War'," The Affect Theory Reader Ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), 170. 48 Virilio, 51. 39 CHAPTER ONE SIMULACRA FI(DELIS): AUTHENTICITY AND THE TRANSMEDIA AESTHETIC ECONOMY OF WAR "Faced with war, we must be [...] objectors to the objectivity of its representation." - Paul Virilio 1 The representation of war in the post-9/11 moment has been marked by ever- increasing levels of interconnectedness. The corporate conglomeration which has unified the majority of media production under six massive entities, the increasing collaboration between the Department of Defense and the private sector, and the technological advances which have fundamentally altered modes of distribution and continue to erode the traditional specificities of medium, are all conditions which have allowed for the emergence of an aesthetic convergence around the representation of American military combat. These representations have frequently resisted interrogation on the grounds that what is on offer is ‘authentic.’ Yet, ‘authenticity’ rather than providing unmediated access to war is itself a construct which privileges particular perspectives and is formally codified. This chapter thus examines what qualifies as authentic in recent war representations. Looking at the particular aesthetic forms such representation takes, makes evident the influence of industrial efficiencies, technological convergence and historical context on the process of rendering war imagery legitimate. While the 40 dissertation as a whole is ultimately concerned with the political ramifications of war representation, this first chapter specifically explores the visual and aural approaches currently being used to validate representations of war. In doing so, this chapter simultaneously probes the aesthetic tropes through which the visceral presentation of warfare has become naturalized and attempts to disrupt the narrative of authenticity which often mitigates the critical interrogation of such imagery. In addition to detailing the development and acceptance of the contemporary war aesthetic, such an examination seeks to highlight the way this new style is indicative of an aesthetic economy which makes war media increasingly saleable. As the following investigation will elucidate, this process of monetization is dependent upon the complex interactions between aesthetics and affect. Consequently, such an examination also evinces the complex mechanisms through which the contemporary viscerality of war imagery iterates governmental rationalities. It is important to establish that the examination of this aesthetic does not assume the existence of a prior historical moment in which the representation of war was somehow more authentic. Rather, the issue at hand is to grapple with the contemporary tropes for establishing authenticity itself. Similarly, pursuing the ways the contemporary aesthetic is convergent not only in representational style but in its presence across media does not advocate medium specificity in the portrayal of war, but instead attempts to understand the ways that multiple forms of convergence make the contemporary war aesthetic better suited for the industrial practice of synergy, and potentially alters political responses to warfare. As Lev Manovich suggests in his discussion of “post-media 41 aesthetics,” what is required is a shift away from “the old discourse of mediums” and toward “new concepts from computer and net culture…[which] can describe how a cultural object organizes data and structures [the] user’s experience of this data.” 2 Engaging a broad spectrum of war representation while deemphasizing traditional conceptions of medium makes it possible to parse the way the post-media environment, one heavily influenced by intertextuality, recycling, and appropriation, is essential to the ways contemporary aesthetic approaches organize both the experience of and information about war. The structuration of this information is most easily seen in the ways that historical, technological, and industrial conditions have fostered the pervasive employment of hyper-mobile handheld cameras, digital multi-channel sound, digital special effects, rapid editing, and close framing. In the context of war, these aesthetic strategies reflect a commitment to, and a desire for, the experience of battle. Consequently, the utilization of these techniques embodies propinquity, that is, an unfailing attention to proximity in both time and space. While scholars such as David Bordwell have identified these aesthetic properties throughout contemporary American cinema, the consistency with which these aesthetic tropes are used to portray war marks the consolidation of a representational approach to warfare that not only seeks to simulate the chaotic experience of battle, but to define the quintessential trait of warfare itself as a particular brand of experience that is reproducible via the technologies of contemporary media. 3 It is a style which is fundamentally contradictory in nature: hyper-subjective imagery is read objectively, spectacle is branded as realism, and information becomes 42 entertainment. It is also a style which actively engages the body of the spectator, a trait which further substantiates this mode of representation's affective charge. Moreover, whereas experiences of warfare are multifarious, and heavily informed by myriad subjective factors such as one’s status as a soldier, journalist or civilian, wealthy or impoverished, male or female, aggressor or resister, the contemporary aesthetic distills warfare into a singular vicarious experience. This experience is primarily derived from the experiences of troops that have been forward-deployed to combat zones that are experiencing intense, close-contact combat. This perspective, commonly discussed in terms of “embeddedness,” appears across numerous forms of media and exploits aesthetic strategies that seek to reproduce the bodily, emotional and affective sensations of battle within the viewer or player. This particular way of representing war has proliferated across media and reinforces its own legitimacy through its omnipresence. Accordingly, this version of warfare has been authenticated to such a degree, that it has become difficult to engage with war in ways that rely upon contrary conceptions of war and its implications. The pervasiveness of these representational strategies thus makes it exceedingly difficult to get outside the interactive, apolitical frame that recent aesthetic strategies entail. Consequently, given the aesthetic nature of this shift, it is important to examine its particular characteristics before attempting to parse the particular work such an aesthetic performs. For, as Andrew Darley notes, “A rush into interpretation before the aesthetic itself has been more clearly apprehended may follow an all too easy dismissal…on grounds that it is facile, already transparent or really about something else. It almost 43 certainly is about something else, but it is also and equally about (relatively) poorly understood but clearly powerful modes of aesthetic practice.” 4 Due to the importance of representational strategies and their impact upon the ways the public understands war, this chapter not only seeks to delimit the aesthetic itself, but how such an aesthetic came to be: What industrial changes made such an approach to war representation culturally legible? What technological shifts have made new forms of imagery and image-relay possible? How is war representation indicative of broader aesthetic shifts? And finally, how does the appeal to experience and bodily interpellation in contemporary war media facilitate the modulation of wartime engagement? Answering these questions will elucidate the material factors which have produced such an distinctive representational mode while also exploring the appeal of this style to media consumers. Ultimately, these answers lend insight into the relationship between mediated representations and political engagement with war. While this chapter primarily contends with the aesthetic characteristics and industrial context which have allowed such a high degree of convergence and condensation in war imagery, such an examination, indeed, has broader implications which motivate the project itself. The significance of understanding the representational aesthetic of the ongoing wars evolves from the political nature of perspective – how something is depicted is as important as what is depicted. Given this, what is ultimately at stake, then, is the political nature of a particular aesthetic. As Jacques Rancière suggests, “politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it,” and moreover that “aesthetic acts [function] as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense 44 perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.” 5 Rancière’s position stands in opposition to Walter Benjamin’s well-known conception of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ which turns on the loss of ‘aura’ and the resultant descent into Fascism. 6 In contrast, Rancière argues, “aesthetics should not be understood as the perverse commandeering of politics by a will to art…it is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.” 7 Here Rancière's formulation calls attention to the relationship that exists between sensation, experience and subjectivity. Conceiving of the political function of aesthetics in this way allows one to access the work that contemporary representations of war are performing; to explore how particular ways of representing the war, in fact, shape what Rancière has termed the “distribution of the sensible.” 8 Conceived in this way, one is able to grasp that the aesthetics which attend war representation are part and parcel of our ability to apprehend warfare itself. In tracing the evolution of the contemporary aesthetic, and the technological and economic shifts it entails, convergence is a useful lens. Several examples of recent scholarship provide insight into the forces which are shaping convergence in ways that alter our relationship to war. The most generative texts have been those accounts which outline how the evolution of military and consumer technologies have begun to influence the representation of war across media. For example, the work of James Der Derian, updating Eisenhower’s famous admonition, posits the development of a “Military- Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-NET)” which, via the exponential increase in “mimetic power” created through such linkages can “seamlessly merge the 45 production, representation, and execution of war.” 9 He stresses that the true significance of these changes is that “it represents a convergence of the means by which we distinguish the original and the new, the real from the reproduced.” 10 Der Derian’s material account suggests that the consolidation of “computer simulation, media dissimulation, global surveillance and networked warfare,” works in concert with contemporary political projects that seek to establish “a technological and ethical superiority” for the U.S. regarding its conflicts. 11 This elevated status produces what Der Derian terms, “Virtuous War,” a situation wherein America’s engagements are perpetually framed by assertions of ‘just war’. 12 While Der Derian’s account is useful in a number of ways, its reliance upon binaristic conceptions of authenticity and privileging war representation in distinctly militarized media limits its utility. By relying upon problematic binaries such as “real” or “reproduced,” Der Derian’s framework underestimates the way the current aesthetic mode governs both the presentation of that which is ostensibly ‘real,’ that which has been completely constructed, and even attends reality-based programming which intentionally hybridizes these categories. Moreover, given that the cultural currency of the majority of contemporary war media is rooted in claims to the authentic, such distinctions only further muddle the processes which work to perpetuate the very trends he identifies. Likewise, while collaboration between the simulations industry and the military, or the military and Hollywood demonstrate the interoperability of certain forms of war representation, his emphasis on media objects which have usefulness for military education, such as simulators and other training devices, deemphasizes the participation 46 of other media such as television and popular film in the process of convergence. The inclusion of these media is essential to an account of how such a process of condensation is occurring. I would also argue that not only have virtually all branches of media become participants in this new order but, more importantly, aesthetics has been integral to the process. Whereas Der Derian’s attention to the military and its use of simulation technology substantiates a conception of America’s wars as ‘virtuous,’ Roger Stahl’s analysis of civilian uses of these technologies, not only simulators but popular first- person shooter (FPS) games, alongside the combative rhetoric of sports and reality TV, exemplifies the fact that the most prominent lens through which war is viewed, is quickly becoming that of entertainment. Moreover, he argues that “a turn toward the interactive,” suggests “the entry of a new discourse,” an active process of engagement he calls the “consumer war.” 13 Fundamental to Stahl’s analysis is the role played by “consumption and the production of pleasure.” 14 As opposed to the representational tropes of previous conflicts, he asserts that “the pleasures of the interactive war are predicated on participatory play, not simply watching the machine in motion but wiring oneself into a fantasy of a first-person, authorial kinetics of war.” 15 This line of argumentation also provides a way to think about how the body, specifically, is affected. As a result, such insights have not only been essential in shaping my own understanding of the aesthetic economy of war, but simultaneously highlight the lack of attention to the role played by aesthetics in producing the widely accepted, and acceptable, understanding of conflict which has made the notion and practice of a consumer war possible. This lacuna within 47 the analytical framework is often obscured by exhaustive textual analysis. 16 While close readings are useful for a number of reasons, media industries research is more appropriate to the task of acquiring an “empirically based understanding of media industry practices…[and] the aesthetic, cultural, economic, and social values associated [with them].” 17 Fundamental understanding the impact of industrial practices upon the current war aesthetic is an acknowledgement of the collaborations and convergences which attend the production of war media. Convergence in the media industries has been particularly relevant to this aesthetic given that the translation of the aesthetic across media is fundamental to its potency. Although there is a rich history of conglomeration that includes “film studios [...affiliating] with large parent corporations…these tended to be a diverse group of companies operating diverse business segments.” 18 However, over the past serveral decades, consolidated media and communications conglomerates own broadcast television stations, cable networks, online properties, and videogame developers as well as more traditional Hollywood film studios. This is due to a process of deregulation, signified by such legislation as the demise of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules in 1995 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed for both vertical and horizontal integration. 19 More recent legislation, such as the extreme relaxation of ownership limits under FCC Chairman Michael Powell in 2003, have continued this trend. 20 Technological advances have also been essential to convergence and the ability to represent war in new ways. The use of green screens, computer generated imagery, and 48 newer versions of high definition technologies have encouraged the representation of spectacle, war being only one kind among many. In addition, these digital elements are more easily transferred between one medium and another. Yet, despite this ability to realistically depict modern and past warfare that these new technologies afford, the verisimilitude often ends with the visuals - regularly calling attention to the form itself rather than narrating the history for which such imagery has ostensibly been put to use. Dana Polan sees this self-reflexivity even in the marketing of contemporary war films. He asks: “Is it accidental that so many big war films of recent years emphasize the cost and effort that went into their production as if to reiterate the extent to which they build up narrative worlds and also build up the world views they subtend.” 21 Although much has been said about the new possibilities afforded by convergence, as Judd Ethan Ruggill stresses, it is important to remember that “convergence is primal.” To call convergence primal is to acknowledge that “it has always been a precondition for media development, shaping innovation and evolution in terms of persistent principles in industrial, economic, political, and social ways of meaning making.” 22 Ruggill traces the lineage of convergence by pointing to early collaborations between the major media industries: the pooling of talent between the television and radio industries, the sharing of content between film and television, and later, the development of videogame consoles by TV companies as a marketing tool for television sets. 23 Each of these examples not only demonstrates the literal industrial collaborations which occurred, but evince the practices of which aesthetic condensations were a byproduct. 49 Still, what is unique about contemporary strategies of convergence is the role played by digital technology and the new forms of storytelling it engenders. 24 In his analysis of ‘convergence culture,’ Henry Jenkins posits "transmedia storytelling" as a narrative modality which plays out across varying media, "places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities." 25 While Jenkins applies this term specifically to the recreational consumption of a single piece of intellectual property, this dissertation also views such a methodology, one that requires the “chasing down [of] bits of the story across media channels [and] comparing notes” as a successful framework for productively engaging contemporary war representation. 26 Specifically, it allows the aesthetic commonalities across media portrayals of war to appear through an active process of comparison and deliberation. Another useful aspect of this framework is that, as Jenkins notes, it draws attention to the “strong economic motives behind transmedia storytelling.” 27 He underscores the fact that “media convergence makes the flow of content across platforms inevitable,” is a key part of processes such as the reuse of ‘digital assets’ which facilitate the “construction and enhancement of entertainment franchises” and allows the ability to “make additional sales.” 28 Transmedia storytelling’s attention to correspondences and commonality across texts also points to the necessity for any examination of the contemporary state of war representation to consider both fictional and documentary texts. Including various texts along the spectrum between fact and fiction will highlight documentary’s own unspoken mediations and begin to delegitimize the hierarchy which privileges official discourse. 50 Indeed, juxtaposing fictional and documentary texts will provide the opportunity to glean how stylistic tools are differentially deployed toward the achievement of realism. Furthermore, as Vivian Sobchack argues, “cinematic identification does not depend necessarily…on the ‘type’ of film objectively unfolding on the screen…Thus…a fiction can be experienced as a…documentary, a documentary as a…fiction…Existential knowledge and forms of attention structure cinematic identification with – and of – the cinematic object.” 29 As a result, when taken together, these various media form a generative macro text which makes evident the appearance of particular representational tropes which function to legitimize these texts in terms of contemporary appeals to ‘experience’ and ‘authenticity’. In beginning to engage with these trends, perhaps it is useful to open the discussion by way of a brief filmic example. The Hurt Locker (2008), for instance, is in many ways indicative of the larger aesthetic tendencies in that capturing a sense of liveness, of immediacy, was essential to the film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow. Rather than shooting on film with stationary cameras or even a Steadicam, she shot the action with four handheld digital video cameras all rolling simultaneously. This particular decision often gives the film an aesthetic that is reminiscent of live news coverage of disasters. The camera constantly shakes disorienting the viewer and in many ways draws the audience into the chaotic emotional world of war. It has much in common with what Robin Andersen termed the ‘new war film,’ which, she argues, has “defined itself by sacrificing all else to deliver a virtual experience of combat which create[s] a scene strangely lacking in any reference to war's political justification." 30 51 The fact that The Hurt Locker earned 6 Oscars and was nominated for three others points to the cultural currency this style has within the industry. This style is particularly potent given its adoption of documentary aesthetics; the ever-roving camera being the most prominent feature. As John Corner notes, “the shifting perception brought about by camera movement…is one of the most familiar of aesthetic tropes in documentary practice.” 31 This type of camera work “demotes the camera/eye from its objective status, [implying] a subjective body in its place, and [inviting] the viewer into that body," affording exposure to new intimate experiences of war. 32 Yet, while the visual element is foundational, it is essential to recognize that the contemporary aesthetic is also aural in nature. Given this, The Hurt Locker is also useful in addressing contemporary approaches to sound. While Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998), famously muted sounds to insert the viewer into the battle, the proximity of The Hurt Locker’s shooting location to the actual ongoing conflicts allowed the filmmaker to use organic sound throughout. Shot on location in Amman, Jordan which borders Iraq to the West, the movie was filmed only several hours away from combat zones. The intrusion of the sounds of combat-equipped jets overhead inserts within the film the sonic reality of the ongoing wars; the aural experience of daily life in a war zone in subtle, yet potent, ways. While the film was hailed as unique for its intensity and realism as much as for its perceived ability to be the first contemporary war film to turn a profit, The Hurt Locker is more accurately an exemplar rather than a singularity. Its privileging of visceral style over and above political content and context is demonstrative of the traits which make 52 this aesthetic both profitable and mobile. 33 In addition, the intensity of the imagery also raises questions about the role played by spectacle in the production of pleasure by these texts. Given this, the spectacle becomes a vital lens into the deployment of this particular perspective of warfare across media. THE RESURGENCE OF SPECTACLE: PRIVILEGING THE VISUAL IN TRADITIONAL AND INTERACTIVE MEDIA The aesthetics of recent media production have been marked by a return to spectacle. Andrew Darley’s analysis of ‘visual digital culture,’ for example, marks “a generalized tendency within much of late twentieth-century culture towards an increasing preoccupation with visual form and surface,” that he argues has arisen alongside new technologies. 34 As a consequence of this shift he suggests that “it is possible to discern a distinct diminution in concern with meaning-construction at the level of textual production itself,” and furthermore that “spectators are solicited and engaged…at more immediate and surface levels.” He maintains “that such engagement entails something of a shift in sensibility towards far more involvement with surface appearances, composition and artifice - towards too, increased connections with more directly sense-based aesthetic experiences.” 35 One of the most clearly discernible ways to trace the return of spectacle, and its inclination toward convergent behaviors, is through Hollywood’s transition to blockbuster filmmaking in the eighties. Yet more significant than the notion of a generalized blockbuster is the development of what Justin Wyatt terms “High Concept” 53 that followed the success of these films. He argues, “High concept can be viewed as a progression from the blockbuster. High concept shares the emphasis on pre-sold components, yet modifies the style and narrative of the blockbuster.” 36 In short, they are narratives which are nearly impossible to misunderstand and so simple that they can be codified on posters for advertising. Despite the ways high concept filmmaking codes texts as spectacles, as Guy Debord’s formulation of the spectacular society contends, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.” 37 It is a social state wherein all aspects of life are organized by the image, the commodity - where societal bonds and critical engagement atrophy from disuse. While many scholars have critiqued Debord’s formulation for its conception of spectators as fundamentally passive, his understanding of the spectacular as “a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations,” mediations which privilege the visual above all else, highlights a key component of the process by which contemporary war media is authenticated. 38 Yet, for other scholars the relationship between passivity and engagement is, precisely, why the spectacle is no longer a sufficient lens into the role of media in culture. While Debord did account for the fact that “reality rises up within the spectacle,” that the spectacle allows for an intertwining of “lived reality” and the spectacular, his theorization, developed in the sixties, fails to account for the growing body of media which is predicated upon interactivity. 39 More than the inputting of commands, scholars such as Mark Andrejevic and Stahl assert that interactivity also entails a fundamental 54 shift in the way one engages with the media object. For Andrejevic, interactivity signifies surveillance and the generation of valuable information, it promises political engagement that is ultimately conscribed by market demands. These are limitations which have potent ramifications for war. As Andrejevic suggests, the status of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as the U.S.’s first ‘net’ wars has produced citizens who through new interactive technologies are now able to take part in the informational circuits which have dominated the war itself. Such participatory behavior, he argues, fosters the melding of the citizen and the soldier. The production of the citizen-soldier, according to Stahl, is also the most the generative aspect of other interactive technologies outside the realm of information gathering. While acknowledging the continued relevance of the spectacle as a framework for analyzing how war media operates, Stahl marks the entrance of interactivity as a new form of engagement. Interactivity makes war saleable by emphasizing both the pure visual excesses of warfare and its ludic possibilities. It is in this way that interactivity perpetuates the commodity orientation of the spectacle. Turning his attention to entertainment based media such as toys, video games, simulators and blockbuster films, Stahl marks interactivity as a technique which has played an integral role in getting citizens, or more precisely consumers, to engage with the war as a leisure activity. Despite the ways in which spectacle and interactivity work together, the key distinction Stahl emphasizes is that as opposed to the “conventional account [which] considers the ways that media discourses work to exclude, distract, and ultimately deactivate the political subject,” interactivity functions such that “the interactive mode presents myriad 55 ways for the citizen to plug in to the military publicity machine, not only through new media technologies but also through rhetorics that portray war as a 'battlefield playground.” 40 Although work on interactivity by both Andrejevic and Stahl has been generally well-received, and any current work on war must take Stahl’s work in particular into account, my own position, and therefore this chapter’s treatment of interactivity is more closely aligned with the work of Andrew Darley. According to Darley’s configuration: In many respects interaction is not as new a concept as many would have us believe; it occurs in all aesthetic reception - be it perceptual, cognitive, psychical, interpretive. What is being signalled (sic) here, however, is a rather different mode of immediate engagement with technically reproduced art works. In computer games the spectator is positioned as a real-time participant within the diegetic space of the game world - given the ability to affect what happens and a certain agency and control over how the game unfolds. Although, clearly, the interactive player does not operate with anything approaching total freedom - rules and constraints are often all too apparent - nevertheless, it constitutes an intriguing and potentially important development. I have argued that 'interactivity' in computer games is very much analogous to the moving image in early cinema. In a similar manner to the moving image in the early 'cinema of attractions,' 'interactivity' itself is on display in the computer game. The vicarious kinaesthesia that comprises the major part of these (relatively) semantically shallow texts constitutes their primary attraction. They are, thereby, very much continuous with the aesthetic of surface play. 41 Still, while interactivity is perhaps not as radical a distinction as it is made to be, the particularities of new media have challenged traditional assumptions about the role and operation of realism in such varied situations. Manovich underscores these distinctions noting that as opposed to mainstream film which "aims at all cost to maintain the continuity of the illusion for the duration of the performance...new media aesthetics 56 [have] a surprising affinity to twentieth-century leftist avant-garde aesthetics." 42 Identifying correspondences between avant-garde aesthetics and new spectator positions, emphasizes that new media texts often require "the subject…to oscillate between the roles of viewer and user, shifting between perceiving and acting, between following the story and actively participating in it." 43 These alternations also shift back and forth between supporting and disrupting the narrative illusion of the text. Manovich argues that this change is indicative of a "new metarealism [that] is based on oscillation between illusion and its deconstruction, between immersing a viewer in illusion and directly addressing her. In fact, the user is put in a much stronger position of mastery than…when she is 'deconstructing'…traditional noninteractive media. The user invests in the illusion precisely because she is given control over it." 44 While conceptualizing the new metarealism in this way points to the ways interactivity is involved in shoring up new media texts, on the surface it seems to leave traditional media behind. However, a key aspect of Manovich's claim is that this "oscillation...is not an artifact of computer technology but a structural feature of modern society, present not just in interactive media but in numerous other social realms and on many different levels." 45 Thus, his framework points to a broader societal reshaping of the aesthetic conventions of realism. This reworking of realism has produced within the realm of war representation an aesthetic which via specific formal techniques attempts to codify a particular experience of battle. It is my contention that this aesthetic mode functions analogously in both traditional and new media and is not solely dependent upon the command and control functions specific to simulators and video games. There is an equivalency between the 57 specific styles of camera work, editing, sound, and narrative construction which coalesce to produce a participatory perspective in TV and film, and the interactivity afforded by inputting commands; each of these media rely upon the same aesthetic tropes to substantiate their respective illusions and most importantly authenticate the same, singular perspective of war. CODIFYING CREDIBILITY: REALISM AND THE AUTHENTIC Although realistic representation has been the predominant approach to the depiction of warfare, what constitutes such realism has evolved through time as a result of cultural shifts, technological breakthroughs, and access. Whereas the still photograph was the predominant visual form of both the Spanish and First World Wars, the news reel took on new power during World War II alongside a bevy of patriotic films hailed for their “gritty realism.” 46 With the Korean War, as H. Bruce Franklin maintains, “When the [war] began in mid-1950, there were fewer than ten million TV sets in the United States. Americans' principal visual images of the war came from newsreels shown before feature films in movie theaters and from still photos in magazines.” 47 As television’s market penetration rates climbed, the TV quickly became the primary instrument for both information and leisure. As Lynn Spigel indicates, “while in 1950 only 9 percent of all American homes had a television set, by the end of the decade that figure rose to nearly 90 percent, and the average American watched about five hours of television per day.” 48 During Vietnam, “one-day relay of film and other forms of rapid dissemination gave much of what Americans watched on the evening news an immediacy and intensity that 58 was new and that forever shaped America's experience of warfare.” 49 Moreover, in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in the Vietnam documentaries, Direct Cinema and Cinema Verité techniques were the visual language through which authenticity was codified. In the years since Vietnam, for Americans, war has essentially been a televisual artifact, that is to say, not only has television been the primary medium through which information about U.S. conflicts is received but, most importantly, standards of realism in the depiction of war have been strongly influenced by televisual conventions such as liveness and immediacy. Television’s particular forms and modalities, moreover, allow for associations between the medium and discourses of authenticity. Situated both visually and temporally, television’s technological advancements have been framed not only in a simplistic notion of seeing, but rather seeing live – seeing as the event happens. The advent of satellite and then broadband internet capabilities have made “the live remote broadcast…a stylistic necessity,” and have fostered “a new intensity of vicarious experience defined and controlled by the television medium." 50 This recent stylistic intensity is an extension of the aesthetic trends which emerged during the early nineties alongside American operations in Iraq. It was during this conflict that two major developments fundamentally shifted the representation and reception of war: the rise of CNN and the use of smart-weaponry. CNN was the first twenty-four hour news network and though it launched in 1980, the Gulf War truly put it on the map. 51 CNN correspondents, via improvements in satellite technologies were able to relay near-instantaneous information and imagery to U.S. viewers. Whereas images from the front lines took weeks during WWII and days during Vietnam to reach their 59 intended audiences, during Desert Storm the American public watched feeds which reduced transmission time so drastically as to be referred to as coming in real time. The immediate presentation of the war was made all the more spectacular given the U.S. military’s new weapon: the patriot missile. Viewers were treated to a round the clock light-show of neon streaks shooting across the sky. With these new weapons, combat in the new techno-war was suddenly clean. ‘Smart weapons’ often contained video cameras in the nose cone which aided with laser targeting of GPS guidance systems. While these cameras were able to depict the missile’s path until the moment of impact, the crucial images were absent. For all the imagery that these cameras could provide they could not reveal the havoc they wreaked nor the concomitant effects upon human bodies within their reach. This omission distanced viewers from the reality of what was happening but it did not seem to matter: “The generation raised in video arcades and on Nintendo could hardly be more satisfied…There were no bloated human bodies, as in the photographs of the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg. There was none of the agony…glimpsed on television relays from Vietnam. There was just nothing at all.” 52 As mentioned above, the aesthetic is also marked by a particular temporality which points toward the ways in which realism is currently configured; liveness, or that which is marked by the formal traits and limitations of the live broadcast and its ‘having- been-there’, becomes a guarantor of authenticity. 53 The appearance of liveness, according to Jeremy Butler, evolves from “small visual gaps… and other departures from the continuity editing system [which] occur frequently in multiple-camera editing.” 54 Given 60 the traditional standards of cinematic aesthetics, “The visual looseness…comes to signify 'liveness' when compared to the controlled imagery of single-camera productions." 55 As a result, the affordability of digital cameras and digital video (DV) has also been essential to conveying a sense of immediacy. Not only have the wars been captured by an unprecedented number of recording apparatuses, but the relatively nominal cost of storage devices has, in certain cases, allowed for shifts in the production process. As mentioned in the example above, The Hurt Locker, is able to convey a sense of ‘liveness’ in part because they used multiple cameras, traditionally a convention of television, and shot the movie on DV. For certain scholars, more than the explosive materials themselves, the new temporality which governed Desert Storm media coverage was the conceptual munition which disrupted the way people engaged with the war. Paul Virilio, termed this increased pace the "information bomb, [an] expression adapted from Einstein for the explosive effect of living in networked real time, where the immediacy of events and collapse of cause and effect valorizes speed, cybernetic reflex and crisis management over human reflection and deliberative decision-making." 56 These changes in pace and perspective are not without consequence. In the two decades since the Gulf War, the rate of technological advancement has only intensified. Indeed, as Virilio notes, "It is no longer a matter, as previously, of a tele-audition (the Second World War) or of a television (the Vietnam War), but indeed of a true tele-action, that is to say, the establishing of the interactivity of the partners in war: those actually making war, and those watching it at the same time as their counterparts." 57 Many new texts, have embraced a visceral and immediate aesthetic 61 characteristic of these changes. Moreover, this temporality manifests across a range of texts as a narrative lack, the emphasis upon the experience of battle leaves the overall text unmoored; each vignette reduced to pure presence. As Garrett Stewart observes, the “requisite authenticities of…visualization” in the “new digital milieu” are limiting in that “these narratives can only project a visual 'look,' where the graininess of the image, infrared or video, must stand in for the true grittiness of the mission." 58 AUTHENTIC IMAGERY AND AESTHETIC CONTRADICTION Each alteration in the presentation of war has challenged and modified expectations of how war should be represented. Still, a subtler yet more potent change has been the expectation of what realism itself can provide. Whether it is called authenticity, objectivity, or realism, the emphasis upon the appearance of truth is a defining component of the new aesthetic. Yet, none of these terms are easily reducible – each speaks to a certain formal practice governing the representation of the profilmic. As Jay Rosen has noted, “objectivity,” is itself “a form of persuasion” which “tries to persuade all possible users of the account that the account can be trusted because it is unadorned.” 59 Appeals to objectivity have been abetted by recent advances in high definition technology. The History Channel’s recent award-winning mini-series, WWII in HD (2009) and its 2011 follow-up, Vietnam in HD, provide a revelatory instance of the associations attributed to HD technology in the authentic presentation of warfare. Whereas HD presentation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appears logical in that it is 62 the current standard for quality presentation, it is my contention that the application of these visual standards to past conflicts evinces an underlying link that is being made between visual clarity, authenticity, and increased access in all cases, both past and contemporary. As can be seen in the marketing materials for the History Channel’s series, high definition, via its “unprecedented clarity” is posited as being capable of “chang[ing] the way the world sees this defining conflict” by “experience[ing] the war as if they were actually there.” 60 Specifically, there is a slippage occurring between sight and insight whereby better visuals are construed as not only providing new forms of knowledge but also offer the promise of interactivity. It subtly asserts that the only real way to engage with and understand warfare, is to be there. For the History Channel this desire asserts itself in the extreme attention to recreating the experience both visually and aurally. As Hank Steuver reported, History’s obsession with HD visuals leads to overblown aural enhancements as well. In addition to the celebrity voice overs, ‘Vietnam in HD’ adds sound to vivify what would likely be the silence that accompanied the original amateur footage. This means a lot of work for sound-effects artists, who make sure no jungle bird goes unchirped, no leaf goes uncrunched, no bullet unwhizzed, no shell unexploded - re-creations all. If they could find a way to shake your sofa, they’d do that too. 61 This aspect of the new aesthetic, as Roger Stahl notes, “modifie[s] the usual narrative filters to promote first-person fantasies of war.” 62 Yet while the implementation of new technologies has urged citizens to take part in the experience of war, importantly, it simultaneously suggests that interactivity is also the best way to know war. In short, these tools have aided in the development of a realist aesthetic that seeks to fully embed the citizen in missions as intense as the firefight or as mundane as the routine patrol. These 63 experiences are then legitimized through their iteration across media and become the substance of politics in that they tend to subvert years of critical investigation into this war in favor of a highly constructed first-hand experience. Likewise, it is the aesthetic’s ability to “accurately reproduce the battlefield,” that has been instrumental in marketing these media to consumers. 63 Still, the aesthetic is rife with contradiction in that as much as the new style is grounded in seeing ‘better,’ there is an opposing trend which endows degraded imagery with equivalent claims to the authentic. This illegibility is indicative of what Hito Steyerl has termed “the uncertainty principle of modern documentarism.” 64 This ‘uncertainty’ evolves from the fact that much of the imagery which came out of the earliest days of the war, and whose aesthetic has been imitated since, often provided startlingly little to see - - pixilated distortions which in their attempt to achieve immediacy, as much or more than indexicality, became unintelligible. 65 Given this, those images which purportedly have the greatest ‘indexicality’, the news report and the soldier-posted YouTube video, for example, often demonstrate their authenticity via momentary dissolution into the incoherence of digital snow. This trait can also be found in realms where such lapses can easily be avoided. In recent narrative war films, Geoff King argues, "Some of the techniques employed involve a deliberate 'handicapping' of the means of representation, a denial of the full scope of the cinematic apparatus. A technology such as the Steadicam, which permits highly fluid mobile camera movements, is replaced here by a reversion to the precise opposite: a patenting, almost, of the radically 'unsteadicam.'" 66 This practice suggests a desire for an embodied experience of war, an experience whose intensity is not 64 modulated by classical cinematic tropes. Yet, as Marita Sturken argues, the link between aesthetics and presence or authenticity is only attainable through adherence to more traditional “codes of cinematic realism - portraying the details of a patrol, the boredom, [and] the confusion of combat... [As well as the inclusion of h]eightened 'naturalised' sound [,] rapidly edited combat scenes, and on-location shooting." 67 Given this reliance upon such codes, the current representational trend can in many ways be traced back to Steven Spielberg’s 1998, blockbuster film Saving Private Ryan, which not only revived the popularity of the war genre itself, but modified contemporary conceptions of realism in the depiction of combat. To achieve this new manner of visualization, Spielberg used “individual camera operators” and “shot all handheld exteriors,” techniques traditionally associated with low- budget, documentary filmmaking. 68 They also “slowed the camera to 12 frames a second and then printed each frame twice [which produced] a staccato movement. The sound [is thus altered], too, and a hyper-reality is reached.” 69 Still, according to Janusz Kaminski, the film’s Director of Photography, they “did not want a documentary feel. [They] wanted it to feel like the viewer is in the battle, with explosions, bullets, physical hardships and immediate danger.” 70 This ethos also governed the development of Spielberg’s landmark first-person shooter (FPS) game, Medal of Honor in 1999. The game, which was created through DreamWorks Interactive and published by EA, follows a narrative similar to Saving Private Ryan and repeats the Normandy beach landing for which the film is so well-known. The level of realism which was brought into the game 65 world of World War II, can in many ways be seen as paving the way for contemporary FPS games’ approach to authentic representation. Recent games have taken what was only then an aspirational realism and transformed it into a space where war is represented with acute visual fidelity. CONDITIONING A TRANSMEDIA AESTHETIC: VIDEOGAMES, REALITY TV AND INTIMATE IMAGERY One of the most significant evolutions in bringing about a media landscape which facilitates exchange has been the transition to digital imagery, and no single medium has demonstrated its impact greater than video games. Although videogames first achieved popularity in the nineteen seventies, and their usage became relatively common in the mid-to-late eighties, the technological advances which have improved the overall quality of graphics and possibilities for action within the diegesis of games have contributed to their significant increase in market share of entertainment dollars. Whereas Nolan Bushnell, the creator of “the first coin-operated stand-alone arcade video game Computer Space (1971)” made only “$500…in profits,” today videogames are a multibillion dollar industry. 71 In fact, according to the retail research company the NPD Group, “total spending on video games and equipment [was] $18.6 billion in 2010.” 72 These astronomical amounts of revenue highlight how the advancement of consumer technologies has allowed videogames to transition from a coin-operated arcade experience to one in which the personal computer and television-displayed gaming consoles have evolved into a domestic pastime. 66 Among the newer generations of videogames, one of the most popular genres has been the war-themed shooter. While war has long been a popular topic for videogames, Castle Wolfenstein (Muse Software, 1981) being one of the earliest examples, the past decade has seen a remarkable increase in their prevalence. Fundamental to the success of these games has been the advancement of a video game aesthetic which is grounded in two dominant perspectives: first-person and third-person. 73 The first-person perspective, in particular, has been integral to more recent war games which proffer the notion of 'experience' rather than a more straightforward space for play. By anchoring the player’s perspective to that of a soldier-avatar, the digital landscape of the game world is presented as if looking through one’s own eyes – the body is largely absent. The primary referents that a body exists are the hands which hold the player’s gun. Such a perspective does not permit the player to achieve any real sense of distance from the engagements and there is no time for reflection, again reiterating the propinquity which currently attends the representation of war across media. Still, the appeal to experience is made most poignantly in terms of authenticity: these are the actual weapons, this is what the theater of war looks and sounds like, and this is what it means to know war. The games' authenticity is rooted in discourses of realism, whereby the games' mimetic capabilities become the singular determinant for judging fidelity to warfare. The prevalence of this representational trope is significant particularly in light of synergistic practices amongst media conglomerates and the aesthetic convergences they tend to foster. One example is that video games strive for cinematic modes of representation while films have begun to show signs of a video game 67 narrative structure that "suggests a certain form of narrative, based on the cycles of character-death and reset" and whose narrative organization is inspired by "the cut-and- paste sensibility of video games and the internet.'" 74 These correspondences, however, serve to highlight the fact that beyond the mere mediation of the apparatus, the presentation of warfare is filtered through prevailing representational forms: "The 'realism' these games aspire to is a mediated truth - the experience not of being at war, but being in a war film." 75 Beyond the exchanges with the cinema, video games have also become influential on the aesthetics of other media, specifically, television news. With the explosion of cable networks and the transition to narrowcasting, cable news outlets alongside broadcast news struggled to maintain audiences. As a result, there was a large push toward ‘infotainment,’ beginning in the nineties, as networks made attempts to increase viewership in order to meet the demands for increased profit margins by the conglomerates that now owned them. 76 Aside from covering lighter topics which might be construed as more ‘entertaining,’ one tactic that has been used in the attempt increase viewership has been to modify set design and on-screen graphics; modifications which bear a striking resemblance to video games. Robin Andersen marks these correspondences as signs of a “new visual rhetoric,” one she terms “the digital spectacular.” 77 Andersen argues that the digital spectacular engenders a “participatory mode” of engagement which can be traced to the world of video games in which such heightened involvement is fundamental to the experience. 78 She reiterates that this rhetoric has become integral to the entertainment value of contemporary news programs 68 and “fundamental to news representations of war.” Correspondingly, the visual rhetoric of television news becomes a key site at which we can begin to see how a uniform aesthetic has been able to develop across such diverse media platforms. 79 While the “digital spectacular” has functioned as a tool which makes real news more interesting, as video games and gaming consoles have evolved to embrace ever higher quality graphics, an essential element in their development has been the attempt to make games more interesting by becoming ‘real.’ Although improved processor capabilities have heightened the immersive potential of most games, one specific technique used to enhance the legitimacy of war games has been the insertion of clips of archival footage from previous wars into set points in the video game narrative called ‘cut scenes.’ 80 While the inclusion of such imagery “may produce in the user a phenomenological experience of what Vivian Sobchack refers to as ‘the charge of the real,’…these images are…recognized and experienced… as more ‘real’ than the rest of the game.” 81 Given this, another approach to shoring up the authenticity of video game narratives has been to blend recent news footage with fictionalized stories to lend realism to speculative future wars. In this regard, THQ’s 2011 release Homefront is exemplary. In the pre-release marketing for the game, the company released ads which blended segments of former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s press conference, during a trip to Japan in May of 2010, where she discussed the torpedoing of the South Korean warship, The Cheonsan, by North Korea, into the story’s hypothetical narrative. 82 The clips were used to set up a scenario where a unified Korea eventually occupies an isolationist United States in the year 2027 – a situation which has had odd resonances as it is predicated 69 upon the death of Kim Jong Il and the ascension of his son Kim Jong Un to power, both of which occurred virtually on the same time table proposed by the game. While the aforementioned strategies for repurposing archival and news imagery have indeed helped contemporary war games achieve verisimilitude, the development of high levels of mimesis within the actual game play is the ultimate goal and ultimately a powerful lens into what these game makers are actually selling: an experience of war. In recent years the duel for top position in the “$5 billion dollar first-person shooter game market” has been between the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises. 83 Battlefield has been published since 2002 by Electronic Arts’ (EA) subsidiary Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE) and Call of Duty, which was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, began in 2003. It is important to note that both franchises are products of the post-9/11 world, and while a number of the early editions pertained to World War II, the narratives of many recent releases have been predicated on a desire to engage with the ongoing wars. The games with modern settings, rather than incorporating news clips that might still retain some political charge, have leaned heavily upon the audio-visual traits of current media to achieve a level of authenticity which is being branded as ‘experience.’ A poignant example can be seen in the 2011 marketing campaign for Battlefield 3 (BF3) which was built around the tagline – “Is it real? Or is it Battlefield 3?” The advertisements, which intercut live action and game play clips, challenged the viewer to discern which portions were ‘real’ and which were the game as a means of assuring the authenticity of ‘experience’ offered by BF3. While previous ad campaigns, such as Medal of Honor’s (MOH) October 2010 “The Catalyst” trailer, have 70 intercut live action with scenes from the game, in the case of MOH having an actor portray the game’s protagonist, Tier 1 Operator “Dusty”, the juxtaposition forms a relationship akin to that between gameplay and cinematics – they are distinct yet lend credence to one another. In contrast, BF3’s ad campaign attempted to erase that distinction entirely. Yet, BF3 and Modern Warfare 3 (MW3), and FPS war games as a genre, are not the only site where such articulations are being made. The appeal to authenticity can be seen as part of a much broader reshaping of conventions in which there are identifiable correspondences between realism, the move toward infotainment, as discussed above, and the emergence of ‘reality’ as a dominant format in television. Much like the move toward ‘infotainment’, the development of reality TV, and the genre’s rapid dominance of television in the nineties, was borne out of industrial concerns. As Chad Raphael observes, reality television is a “fiscal strategy,” which was formulated in response to the “dilution of advertising spending,” that had also been brought about by the fragmentation of television audiences across an increasingly vast pool of channels. 84 The success of reality television was important not only for these networks’ bottom lines, but also because it laid the groundwork for the use of embedded reportage. As Stahl indicates, “The similarities between reality television and the embedded war were not coincidental. Embedding directly followed from an experiment in reality television called Profiles from the Front Line, a cooperative venture between ABC and the Pentagon publicly announced in February of 2002.” 85 This manner of presentation brought to war reportage all of the drama, the emphasis on up-close experience, and identification with the central figure that are the hallmarks of reality 71 television. Yet this translation also generates a noteworthy discrepancy: while reality television cultivates a persistent questioning of its reality status, a mode of interrogation that is embedded within its viewing pleasures, there is a distinct lack of critical skepticism when virtually identical conventions are used to represent war. Thus, while reality television’s conventions and economics make it a rational programming choice in the post-network era, the true impact of the application of its generic conventions to war representation can only be fully understood within the context of the constraints placed upon war imagery and information over the past several decades. For example, for most of the engagements after Vietnam journalists were excluded from the actual theaters of combat. In addition, because the US’s involvement in Grenada and Panama was so brief and required so few resources, there was “almost complete absence of photographic images [and] no congressional or public endorsement.” 86 This media blackout was an attempt to prevent “another Vietnam,” in terms of public outcry. However, the media protestation during these years forced the government to concede some ground and for the Gulf War they allowed a press pooling system that was nevertheless constrained in many ways. Even with the limited inclusion of journalists, the restrictions entailed an overreliance upon imagery provided by the government. While this should have raised alarms, both the media and the public acquiesced because they were offered a vantage point for war that had never before existed. Embedding, then, superseded this offering an even more intimate portrait of war, one t within the context of a media landscape marked by reality television shows like Cops (1989-), Survivor (2000-), The Real World (2002-), and Combat Missions (2002), 72 was able to meet the demands of economic concerns, liveness, and dramatic presentation. Nonetheless, the prevalence of subjective, first-person storytelling is not only resonant in a media environment dominated by reality TV, but it also bears the mark of its more highly regarded counterpart: Quality Television. While high production values and unique storytelling are the most discussed standard bearers of quality, one of the prominent narrative traits is a privileging of character development over and above plot progression. 87 This hierarchy is significant in that the characters’ personal evolutions are emphasized over the specific context of the show’s diegesis. When this occurs in war- themed programming the war is reduced to the status of a prop – a tool in the writers’ arsenal of potentially fruitful opportunities for character growth. Moreover, the war itself becomes inherently personal, its trials and tribulations abstracted from war’s wide- ranging impact. The critically acclaimed HBO mini-series Generation Kill (2008) is a generative case in that the stagnancy of the characters’ situation not only heightens the emotional valence of the narrative but also foregrounds the imagery through attention to high production values so indicative of quality television. The fact that these character- driven narratives shore up the highly subjective aesthetic presentation of this material is particularly significant given that HBO has in many ways cornered the market on representing the wars, and moreover because of the influence its ‘quality’ approach has had on TV representation more broadly. 88 Beyond the niche orientation of quality programming on premium cable, the overall political-economy of television has also enabled the growth of an audience for the topic of war. The launches of Military History and Discovery Wings (later rebranded The 73 Military Channel) in 1999 demonstrate the attention to cost-effectiveness and demographics that the subject of warfare enables. As Jane Shattuc has described, “The popularity of military history shows how much cable depends on inexpensive public- domain footage to fill its programmes (sic) as old newsreels from the world wars are resurrected.” 89 Equally important is the fact that military programming draws a predominantly male audience, an audience segment highly prized by advertisers and therefore ultimately a boon to network revenues. SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVITY: EMBEDDING, DOCUMENTARY, AND YOUTUBE While I have argued that the aesthetic of contemporary representations of war is contradictory in terms of the associations made between varying qualities of visual information and authenticity, a deeper incongruity exists in that current modes of authenticity depend upon a form of objectivity that is, in reality, hyper-subjective. The contemporary tendency to privilege a ‘boots-on-the ground’ perspective, however, can be seen as an intensification of tropes present since Vietnam. David James argues, that in their role as intermediaries, “the GI’s experience of the war, always weightier and more authoritative than [the civilian] and so circumscribing any experience [the civilian] can have, is proposed as the moment of authenticity and knowledge – of authenticity as knowledge – upon which the war can be evaluated and validated.” 90 Given this, the individuated perspective of combat, particularly when it mimics that which is experienced by the soldier, becomes equated with the authentic. Proximity and experience supplant objectivity, or more specifically, as James 74 notes, “the affirmation of and commitment to presence in the film image presupposes an aesthetic of empiricism.” 91 Still, although these tendencies can be found in earlier historical moments, the radical shift toward the prevalence of subjectivity over objectivity, of situated presence as objective truth, has become pervasive due to the successive impacts of embedded reporting, documentaries, and the rise of video hosting services, like YouTube, on war representation. It is, moreover, reflective of a subtle shift in the control of wartime imagery. As Judith Butler asserts, embedding is not merely a neutral journalistic practice, it reflects a particular politics of perspective -- it regulates “the perspective from which the action and destruction of war [can] be seen,” rather than delimiting what might be seen. 92 More than merely imitating news media the translation of this aesthetic across media is indicative of a broader confluence of factors currently governing the representation of war. One of the fundamental changes that escalated this representational approach was the shifting of the Department of Defense's (DoD) media policies. Although Operation Enduring Freedom began in Afghanistan in early October 2001, the DoD’s official embed program, the sanctioned exemplar of subjective reportage, did not begin until troops were deployed to Iraq in March of 2003. However, the military's approach to media coverage and access in Afghanistan helped set the tone for the type of media perspectives which would be encouraged, and ultimately shaped the embed program itself. In many ways, early press access in Afghanistan was reminiscent of “the 1991 Gulf War…most information about what was happening was handed out during Pentagon briefings.” 93 Yet while news reporters were being prevented from interacting with troops, 75 “the Pentagon… allow[ed] the entertainment media to gain the kind of access to troops in Afghanistan that it…repeatedly denied journalists.” 94 The entertainment teams to whom the DoD granted access and who would shape the earliest embedded imagery were those responsible for reality TV programs such as Military Diaries (VH1, 2002) and Profiles from the Front Line (ABC, 2003). While I have discussed some of the economic imperatives and aesthetic tendencies of reality television above, what is important to note here is the way these programs can be seen to function as test cases for the embed program that would ultimately be developed. Profiles proved particularly instructive since the footage for the show was obtained by “eight teams of two or three people [embedded with various units] from early summer into fall of [2002].” 95 From this experience, Vince Ogilvie, “the Pentagon's project officer for the series, said the interactions of the film crews and military personnel provided ‘a prelude to the process of embedding’ media representatives in military units for war coverage.” 96 In hindsight, the project’s logistical successes ultimately masked a compromised aesthetic. While eliminating the informational distance that existed between the Pentagon briefing rooms and the battlefield, all context for these images virtually disappeared. The so-called truth of the battle, absent from second hand briefs, could now be accessed because “the strength of…embedding is in the details, the texture and the close-ups,” yet simultaneously, “those are also its limits. Seeing that tight shot, it’s very difficult to have that broader perspective.” 97 Such intimate perspectives are also extremely personal. Although what is presented is indeed an indexical representation, it is firmly rooted in the singular 76 experience of a particular person’s experience of battle and therefore highly subjective. Such experiences were personalized even further in programs like Military Diaries in that cameras were given to sixty soldiers to record their daily experiences. 98 Their video submissions were professionally edited together using “music [as] it’s (sic) connective thread.” 99 This program, along with Profiles, and a pre-9/11 project called AFP: American Fighter Pilot (CBS, 2002) helped to shape the overall approach to embedding and military reportage more broadly – the fact that their aesthetics were rooted in the sensual world of entertainment rather than grounded in the ethics of journalism was often overlooked. Upon the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, once the actual embedding program began, the hyper-subjective aesthetic became nearly omnipresent. From embedded reporters on Fox News Channel and CNN, to the embedded documentarians of Gunner Palace (Epperlein & Tucker, 2004) and Occupation: Dreamland (Olds & Scott, 2005) the pervasive point of view lacked any greater perspective on the war. Documentaries, in particular, formed the bulk of long form media in the early days of the war and, I would argue, created a powerful template for the media that followed. Gunner Palace, mentioned above, was one of the earliest documentaries to use the embedded perspective. Whereas many documentaries often adhere to the conventional ‘Talking Head’ format, Gunner Palace (Epperlein, 2004) is styled such that it mirrors the embedded journalistic practices that have characterized the war thus far. The documentary follows a group of soldiers who are living in a partially destroyed palace that used to belong to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday Hussein. Since they have been living there they have renamed the building ‘Gunner Palace’ and it serves as their base of 77 operations. The general thrust of this particular film, like most recent documentaries, is to examine the war from the perspective of those who are fighting it while they are in fact still engaged in battle. The film intercuts interviews with the soldiers with handheld images captured while on daily patrol and shots of the soldiers enjoying their limited amounts of downtime at Uday Hussein’s compound. What is significant about this particular portrayal is that in many ways it captures the juxtaposition of boredom and fear that often characterizes the daily experience of these soldiers while also allowing them to describe their experience in their own words. Yet, the structure of the film is distinctive because although it presents the soldiers’ responses to questions that have presumably been asked by the filmmakers, it also includes clips of the soldiers rapping and performing spoken-word poetry as a means of expressing their feelings. The inclusion of such material adds both comedic and dramatic elements to the text. These shifts in presentation are useful in that they point to the evolving nature of documentary itself. Rather than a strictly educational or observational function, documentary experimentation with alternative forms of storytelling, particularly within the era of infotainment has made evident documentary’s capacity to serve as a cost-effective tool for entertainment. As John Corner asserts, “…when a piece of work in documentary format is entirely designed in relation to its capacity to deliver entertainment, quite radical changes occur both to the forms of representation and to viewing relations." 100 The potential entertainment value and light impact on the bottom line have allowed for an extreme dispersal of documentaries and reality based programming across television and film, manufacturing an environment in which the 78 meaning and function of such actualities has become destabilized. Corner marks the effects of these transitions as creating: A mood at once both more cynical and more comic, a mood in which versions of performance cut through questions of sincerity and authenticity, [which] has started to change television's terms of secondary seeing. Within this new affective order, this emerging 'structure of feeling,' a busy dialectic of attraction and dislike, provides the mainspring of the entertainment. The very volatility of the feelings here allows for a viewing combination in which what are, for nonfictional formats quite unparalleled modes of 'getting close' become mixed with a remarkably cold, objectifying distance. 101 In such an environment the shifting status of documentary only serves to further complicate an approach to war representation which is rooted in the notion of experience. These production methods became starker through the ever-increasing emphasis on embedding, immersion, and gripping entertainment. However, rather than being seen as failing to provide context and meaning, these texts were seen as somehow unadulterated; unencumbered by partisan interpretations of the war. Whereas Gunner Palace, attempted to engage some of the broader questions about the wars through some of the tropes of reality television, specifically the notion that non-participants are recording the lives of others, Restrepo (Hetherington & Junger, 2010) a documentary film released nearly six years later, eliminates all pretense of being outside the experience. Restrepo follows a single Army platoon through their 15-month deployment in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley and while filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger argue a distinct, and intentional, refrain from ideology there remains within their embedded-style reportage a distinctive allegiance to the experience of battle. Within the first three minutes of the film, upon entering one of eastern Afghanistan’s most contested 79 regions, the convoy of Battle Company’s second platoon is struck by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Yet, rather than seeing the explosion from a distance, the attack is witnessed by the camera of the filmmakers who are themselves inside the Humvee. The camera falls over, dirt sprays the windscreen and dust fills the cabin of the personnel carrier. As the soldiers exit the vehicle and prepare to defend themselves, the camera’s sound capabilities fail. Silent, unstable images give a visceral account of their engagement. While Restrepo is very much indicative of the trend of embedded representation, in addition to its depictions of battle, its inclusion of soldiers dancing to Gunther & The Sunshine Girls’ “Touch Me” is also relevant in that it is also marks the impact that the rise of YouTube has had on war imagery. Launching in 2005 as a video hosting site, YouTube quickly became a repository for videos of all kinds. While content known as ‘war porn’ or ‘drone porn,’ a genre of video I will address momentarily, has comprised the bulk of military-themed uploads, a substantial portion of these videos has been comedic soldier postings which often feature troops dancing to popular songs. 102 One of the most popular was a remake of Lady Gaga’s hit song “Telephone” posted by soldiers in Afghanistan. 103 That soldiers find ways to relieve stress during the times between fighting is indicative of the nature of battle itself; a strategy for enduring its cyclical rhythms of boredom and bustle. However, digital technology has allowed such activities to be circulated through new avenues of popular culture. Moreover, the entertainment value of such videos also fosters the ambivalent traits Corner attributes to new forms of documentary by introducing a heightened degree of performativity that, while proffering 80 intimacy with these soldiers experiences, has the potential to foster a withering engagement with war. In stark contrast to light-hearted music videos, the majority of online war content is often termed “war porn.” These videos revel in the graphic nature of the violence depicted while proffering jingoistic recapitulations of recent engagements. “Drone porn,” a closely related genre, edits together camera footage from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator, the Global Hawk and the Reaper. Much like the mix-tape preceded the iTunes playlist, the roots of these kinds of videos have resonances with the circulation of training videos of accidents and morale boosting montages within the military in the age before digital video hosting. One of the earliest videos to circulate publicly, "Taliban Bodies" even mimics the slideshow set to death metal style which was characteristic of these videos. 104 This video, which was set to “Bodies,” a 2001 song by the alternative metal band Drowning Pool, was made in October 2001 by a blogger named Grouchy Media. It is a compilation of photos and video clips demonstrating the destructive capabilities of American materiel. This video is pertinent in that one can already see not only a conscribed perspective but the role played by music in adding entertainment value. In addition, the musical accompaniment often renders a particular, often jingoistic understanding of the imagery. As technology advanced and YouTube’s capabilities grew, these videos evolved from edited slideshows of stock images into streaming video of recent engagements. Despite overt manipulations, these highly subjective videos retain credibility not only as a result of the fact that these videos are now being posted by soldiers themselves, 81 but because the DoD itself has begun to post these videos. As Keith Thomson notes, With an aim of promoting UAVs domestically as well as ‘enlightening’ our enemies, the Defense Department recently began placing the Predator and Reaper mission clips on YouTube. Ranging from relatively detached wide shots of bombings taken by onboard cameras to startlingly graphic close-ups, the so-called ‘drone porn’ has been a smash hit, as it were, tallying over 10 million views. 105 However truthful and accurate the images may be, the underlying issue remains that these images have been extracted from their context and emphasize a highly subjective combat presence. Given the economic roots of many of the changes in representation discussed so far, the move towards subjective presentation may initially appear contradictory given that, historically, objectivity in news reportage arose, in part, from the market-based imperative to obtain the largest possible readership. Biased presentation became a liability in that these perspectives became off-putting to audiences who were not of like mind. As a result, “objectivity and its central component, detachment, offered the press a strategy for expanding its market by balancing perspectives from at least two sides of an issue.” 106 Claims of objectivity remain particularly relevant today, in spite of the niche address of the contemporary news media. In contrast to previous historical moments, strategies of the current televisual milieu shore up market position within the increasingly competitive world of television news through narrowcasting and the branding of partisan political identity. Yet, despite such contrasting political frames, warfare looks startlingly similar whether watching Fox News or CNBC, YouTube or Xbox. The fact that war is presented in such complementary ways across media bolsters the claims this aesthetic is making upon authenticity; for in order to “presum[e] an 82 objective reality to be reported in the first place, that norm would seem to preclude dramatic variations in how the same event is covered.” 107 In a bit of circular logic, then, this wide-ranging consistency lends credibility to the status of this particular aesthetic of warfare as ‘authentic.’ Moreover it shows how this aesthetic aids in the production of an abstraction of war. This aesthetic, recognizable in the shaky hand held YouTube video or the garbled report of a sandy, uniformed journalist, hints at the “subjectivity of perspective” which organizes its view of the world. 108 It is also, precisely, the situated nature of such a perspective that shapes and constrains the role such imagery can play in the cultural transformation of broader opinions of the role of the US, and its military, in global geopolitics. ACT OF VALOR: AN AESTHETIC PRECIS One recent product of the aesthetic convergence this chapter details is the 2012 film Act of Valor. The film, directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, is proffered as the first-ever honest portrayal of Navy SEALs. The film’s truth claim is guaranteed by the fact that rather than casting actors to play the soldiers, the film uses real, active duty SEALs in these roles. In addition, according to the filmmakers, “everything in the film has happened in the past ten years.” 109 Developing the story from real occurrences and using real Navy SEALs not only makes claims to the authentic by grounding itself historically, but it activates the conventions of both documentary and reality texts by dramatizing the lives of these soldiers. Waugh, noting that both he and McCoy were coming from the documentary space, said of their advice to the SEALs: “We didn't ask 83 them to act; we encouraged them to be themselves.” 110 In addition, the increasing use of reenactment and alternative modes of narrative construction in documentary further blur Valor’s claims. Figure 1. Still from Act of Valor (2012). Digital text boxes provide SEAL combat statistics, a configuration native to videogames. Figure 2. Still from Act of Valor (2012). The targeting view through a gun sight is an overt example of videogame-style first-person perspective in the film. Valor is also a key text in that it demonstrates the ways in which videogame 84 aesthetics and their immersive potential are being translated into film. Most overtly, each SEAL is introduced via the use of a digital text box which appears in the top corner of the screen and lists their name and awards in much the same way that stats are provided for video game characters. In addition, the camerawork itself is reminiscent of videogame approaches to visual framing. While, as previously mentioned, first-person perspective is fundamental to shooter games, first-person point of view scarcely occurs in film. Even in the majority of contemporary war texts, while the camera is placed in the battle, and inserts the viewer into the conflict, the camera only rarely coincides with the body of the protagonist. Yet, Valor appropriates the first-person perspective throughout. When the SEAL team rescues a CIA agent who is being held captive, the camera becomes the SEAL’s eyes: the viewer’s perspective is down the barrel of a gun. While this perspective occurs repeatedly throughout the film, the scene which does the most to affirm the participatory illusion is during the film’s final gun battle where “Chief” is nearly killed as he prevents terrorists from entering the United States. 111 As Chief is repeatedly wounded the camera becomes unsteady; as he begins to lose consciousness, the camera slips into momentary darkness. While some of the film’s more astounding scenes are based on real occurrences, they also seem to reflect the “death and reset” narratives discussed earlier. Examples include: a soldier who was shot twenty-seven times, had his thumb blown off and still won the gun fight, as well as a soldier who was down after being shot in the head and awoke fifteen minutes later, and finally a soldier who gets hit in the chest with a dud rocket propelled grenade at close range and survives. 112 Each of these fantastic 85 occurrences, while based on real-world events, participates in affirming invincibility. While the team’s First Lieutenant is killed during the course of battle, his death is the exception to the rule. The film is also relevant in its buried ties to the events of September 11 th , 2001. The film, for example, does not discuss 9/11, yet pays tribute to SEALs who have died since then. Additionally, Valor is in many ways not a traditional war film. Rather than centering upon a specific campaign in a discrete theater of war, the film’s engagements are indicative of Military Operations Other than War (MOOTW), a newer tactic in military strategies that have gained currency as a result of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) implemented under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The engagements this film depicts in all likelihood are representative of what war is beginning to look like. The film is also indicative of the ways the new aesthetic makes contemporary war media readily available for industrial cross-promotion, a topic that will be explored in greater detail in chapter two. CONCLUSION While the foregoing analyses of the representation of war across media provide useful insight into the mechanisms that are drawing these distinct media realms closer in terms of shaping the public face of war: media consolidation, collaboration between the public and private sectors, and the evolution of new media technologies amongst others, the most significant development is the codification of a distinct representational style for these wars across media. This style, which, above all else, privileges propinquity and 86 audio-visual verisimilitude, has been distilled into an identifiable aesthetic and appears with startling consistency across diverse media. While understanding the circuits of influence between media forms and between media and culture is frustratingly complex, and moreover, that the particularities of each medium structure and constrain how we engage with those texts in unique ways, what these correspondences reveal is that the aesthetics of war are not innate. Current media representations of war are not merely beholden to war itself but are fully subject to the political economies of the media industries. 87 CHAPTER ONE NOTES 1 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. (Continuum, 2002) 31. 2 Lev Manovich, “Post-media Aesthetics,” Info-Aesthetics: Information and Form, accessed February 10, 2012, http://www.manovich.net/IA/. (Emphasis in Original) 3 David Bordwell has termed these changes “Intensified Continuity” in “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly 55 no.3 (2002): 16-28. Matthias Stork, has argued elsewhere that this style has evolved further into what he terms “Chaos Cinema,” an aesthetic style which “trade[s] visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence.” Matthias Stork, “Video Essay: Chaos Cinema: The Decline and Fall of Action Filmmaking,” Indiewire.com, last modified August 22, 2011, accessed April 5, 2012 http://blogs. indiewire.com/pressplay/video_essay_matthias _stork_calls_out_the_chaos_cinema#. 4 Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (New York: Routledge, 2000), 6-7. 5 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006), 13, 9. 6 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 5 th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 731-51. 7 Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 13. 8 The distribution of the sensible, for Rancière marks “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” In other words, aesthetics should be understood as governing potential visibility and response. Ibid., 12- 19. 9 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media- Entertainment Network, 2 nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), xxxvi. 10 Der Derian, Virtuous War, xxxvi. 11 Ibid., xx. 12 Ibid., xx. 88 13 Roger Stahl. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), 16, 42. 14 Stahl, Militainment, 42. 15 Ibid. 16 Several recent texts have used close readings as a means of deciphering the political intent of post-9/11 texts. While I take no issue with the fact that these scholars identify within these, often allegorical, texts a replication of the neoliberal/neoconservative politics of their historical moment, the staunch Leftist perspective from which these arguments are made seemingly disqualifies the polysemy of media texts. Moreover, I believe these overly politicized arguments fail to account for the processes which embed the ideologies under examination. As a result the only interpretive frame becomes a government initiated militarism rather than an examination of the policies and representations through which martial perspectives gain currency. For examples see: Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). 17 Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 3. 18 Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980- 89 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xiii. 19 William M. Kunz, Culture Conglomerates: Consolidation in the Motion Picture and Television Industries (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007). 20 Stephen Labaton, "Deregulating the Media: The Overview; Regulators Ease Rules Governing Media Ownership," The New York Times, June 3, 2003. 21 Dana Polan, “Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malick’s War Movie,” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 267. 22 Judd Ethan Ruggill, “Convergence: Always Already, Already,” Cinema Journal 48 no.3 (2009): 110. (Emphasis in Original) 23 Ruggill, "Convergence," 107-8. 89 24 Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 102-6. 25 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 21. 26 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 21. 27 Ibid., 106. 28 Ibid. 29 Vivian Sobchack, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience.” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 246. 30 Roger Stahl, Militainment, 41. 31 John Corner, “Television, Documentary and the Category of the Aesthetic,” Screen 44 no. 1 (2003): 97, doi:10.1093/screen/44.1.92. 32 Stahl, Militainment, 43. 33 Thus far, profitability has been achieved more successfully in television and videogames than in film. 34 Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 2. 35 Ibid., 4. 36 Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 81. Rather than serving as an indictment of the film industry for attempting to maximize profits, Wyatt posits the term as a way to distinguish between Hollywood’s various products as well as to emphasize the importance of economic imperatives in the evolution of such strategies. As Wyatt notes: “This differentiation occurs in two major ways: through an emphasis on style within films, and through an integration with marketing and merchandising.”(7) The central traits of this approach are the use of “the high concept ‘look’, stars, music, character and genre.” (24) 37 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), Section 4. 38 Debord, Spectacle, 18. 39 Ibid., 8. 90 40 Stahl, Militainment, 15-6. 41 Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 194. 42 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 207. 43 Manovich, Language, 207. 44 Ibid., 209. 45 Ibid. 46 Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 255. 47 H. Bruce Franklin, “From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of America’s Wars,” in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War ed. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 43. 48 Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 33. 49 Michael Anderegg, “Introduction,” in Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television ed. Michael Anderegg (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1991), 2. 50 Victor J. Caldarola, “Time and the Television War,” in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War ed. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994), 100. 51 “All-News Cable Network Makes Debut,” The Los Angeles Times June 2, 1980: OC2. 52 Franklin, "Realism," 42. 53 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (New York City: Hill and Wang, 1982), 76. 54 Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (New York: Routledge, 2007), 224. 55 Butler, Television, 224. 56 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (New York: Continuum, 2002), xii. 91 57 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen, 41. 58 Garrett Stewart, “Digital Fatigue: Imaging War in Recent American Film,” Film Quarterly no. 4 (2009): 47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2009.62.4.45. 59 Jay Rosen, “Objectivity as a Form of Persuasion: A Few Notes for Marcus Brauchli,” Press Think: Ghost of Democracy in the Machine (blog), July 7, 2010, http://pressthink. org/2010/07/objectivity-as-a-form-of-persuasion-a-few-notes-for-marcus-brauchli/. 60 “About the Series,” The History Channel, accessed January 16, 2012, http://www.history.com/shows/ wwii-in-hd/articles/about-wwii-in-hd. 61 Hank Steuver, “Experiencing War Through the Soldier’s Eyes,” The Washington Post November 8, 2011: Style: C 01. Lexis Nexis July 26, 2013. 62 Stahl, Militainment, 3. 63 Ibid., 18. 64 Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” APM 15 (2011), accessed December 29, 2011, www.aprior. org/texts/apm15_steyerl_docu.pdf. 65 Ibid. 66 Geoff King, “Seriously Spectacular: ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Art’ in the War Epic,” in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, ed. J. David Slocum (New York: Routledge, 2006), 290. 67 Marita Sturken, The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 99, as quoted in, Dana Polan, “Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malick’s War Movie,” in Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Alexander Horwath et. al (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2004), accessed October 4, 2010, http://site.ebrary. com/lib/uscisd/Doc?id=10065764&ppg=268. 68 Steven Jay Rubin, Combat Films: American Realism 1945-2010 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2011), 241-2. 69 Steven Jay Rubin, Combat Films, 242-3. 70 Ibid., 242. 92 71 Mark J. P. Wolf, “Inventing Space: Toward a Taxonomy of On- and Off-Screen Space in Video Games,” Film Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1997): 14, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy. usc.edu/stable/1213527. 72 Bill Rigby, “Annual Video Game Sales Fall, Better 2011 In View,” Reuters, last modified January 13, 2011, accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/ article/2011/01/14/us-microsoft-xbox-idUSTRE70D 00120110114. 73 Will Brooker, “Camera-Eye, CG-Eye: Videogames and the ‘Cinematic’,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 3 (2009): 122-8, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.usc.edu/stable/20484483. 74 Brooker, "Camera-Eye," 124. 75 Ibid., 126. 76 Michael Curtin and Jane Shattuc, The American Television Industry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 148. 77 Robin Andersen, A Century of Media, A Century of War (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 244. 78 Andersen, Century of Media, 244. 79 Ibid. 80 Jaimie Baron, “Digital Historicism: Archival Footage, Digital Interface, and Historiographic Effects in Call of Duty: World at War,” Eludamos 4.2 (2010): 303-314, http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/ article/view/vol4no2-12/197. 81 Vivian Sobchack, “The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 269, as quoted in Baron, "Digital Historicism," 303. 82 One reputable report of these incidents can be found here: Tania Branigan and Justin McCurry, “Hillary Clinton condemns North Korean torpedo attack,” The Guardian, last modified 21 May 2010, accessed January, 19 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2010/may/21/south-korea-prudent-response-sinking. 83 Mike Snider, “‘Battlefield throws down gauntlet before ‘Warfare’ lands,” USA Today, last modified October 24, 2011, accessed January 20, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/ tech/gaming/story/2011-10-23/battlefield-3-cover/50884732/1. 93 84 Chad Raphael, “The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 121. 85 Stahl, Militainment, 83. 86 H. Bruce Franklin, “Realism to Virtual Reality," 40. 87 This in itself has odd resonances with the emphasis on individual lives in reality programming. 88 HBO has had more programs related to the current wars than any other premium network. It has, indeed produced more than most other channels across the spectrum, with the exception of basic cable channels which focus on the military and PBS who produced a number of documentaries about the wars. Programs include: Generation Kill, Band of Brothers, House of Saddam, Alive Day Memories, etc. 89 Curtin and Shattuc, American Television Industry, 123. 90 David E. James, “Presence of Discourse/Discourse of Presence: Representing Vietnam,” Wide Angle 7, no. 4 (1985): 42. 91 James, "Presence of Discourse," 44. 92 Judith Butler, “Photography, War, Outrage,” PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005): 822, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy .usc.edu/stable/25486216. 93 Terry Ganey, “Some Want Reporters Alongside U.S. Troops in an Iraq Campaign,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in LexisNexis Academic, December 22, 2002, accessed May 23, 2012, Newswatch sec.: B1. 94 Douglas Quenqua, “Press is Shut Out of War, Reality TV is in,” PR Week, in LexisNexis Academic, March 2, 2002, accessed May 23, 2012, News In Brief sec.: 3. 95 Judith S. Gillies, “Putting a Face on Those Who Serve,” The Washington Post, in LexisNexis Academic, March 9, 2003, accessed May 21, 2012, TV Week sec.: Y7. 96 Gillies, "Putting a Face," Y7. It is also important to note that Victoria Clarke, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Relations under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worked actively on both the Profiles project and setting up the embed program. 94 97 David Bauder, “Study Suggests Embedded Reporters Give Television Viewers an Intriguing Slice of War,” The Associated Press, in LexisNexis Academic, April 2, 2003, accessed May 23, 2012, Entertainment News sec. 98 Lisa de Moraes, “’Reality’ TV is Marching to the Military’s Tune,” The Washington Post, in LexisNexis Academic,March 19, 2002, accessed May 23, 2012, Style sec.: C7. 99 Noel Holston, “War’s Home Movies Set to CDs,” Newsday New York City, last modified May 27, 2002, accessed May 23, 2012, in Actual Reality Pictures, http://www.arp.tv/pressarchive/selectedreviews /15_nynd_md_052702.pdf. 100 John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 263. 101 Corner, Critical Ideas, 266. 102 Keith Thomson, “Drone Porn: The Newest YouTube Hit,” The Huffington Post, last modified December 30, 2009, accessed May 28, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ keith-thomson/drone-porn-the-newest-you_b_407083.html. 103 Malibumelcher, “Telephone Remake,” YouTube, last modified April 23, 2010, accessed May 28, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haHXgFU7qNI. 104 "Taliban Bodies," Grouchy Media (blog), October, 2001, accessed November 22, 2009, http://music-videos.grouchymedia.com/2001/10/taliban-bodies.html. 105 Thomson, "Drone Porn." 106 Sean Aday, Steven Livingston, and Maeve Hebert, “Embedding the Truth: A Cross- Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and Television Coverage of the Iraq War,” Press/Politics 10, no. 1 (2005):5. 107 Aday et al., “Embedding the Truth," 4. 108 Jeffrey Chown. “Documentary and the Iraq War: A New Genre for New Realities.” in Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History, ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 466. 109 Mike McCoy, “Question & Answer Session” (Act of Valor Screening, Aero Theater, Santa Monica, CA, February 19, 2012). 110 Scott Waugh, “Question & Answer Session” (Act of Valor Screening, Aero Thweater, Santa Monica, CA, February 19, 2012). 95 111 The quotes here, and lack of actor citation, result from the fact that the actors were played by active duty SEALs and therefore their identification information was omitted. 112 Mike McCoy, “Question & Answer Session” (Act of Valor Screening, Aero Theater, Santa Monica, CA, February 19, 2012). 96 CHAPTER TWO. PATHOS AND PROFIT: BRAND-BUILDING AND WARFARE "...the actions through which the elaboration of ethical selves is increasingly being pursued are those very humdrum, daily activities like shopping or disposing of household rubbish." - Clive Barnett, et al. 1 In 2007, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (CBTL), “the oldest and largest privately- held specialty coffee and tea retailer in the United States,” began its Support at Home program. 2 This program markets a specialty blend of its coffee in distinctive packaging bearing the Support at Home logo. According to CBTL, the “special blend…honor[s] our military families, troops, and wounded warriors who have returned from deployment overseas” via the donation of one dollar to Operation Homefront with each purchase. 3 When one considers that the bag of coffee retails for $9.95 USD, CBTL’s patriotic endeavor not only boosts its credibility as a socially responsible corporation but allows it to retain almost ninety percent of the revenue the program generates. Another vital element of the program is that since the purchased coffee can be donated “to the families of […] service members and wounded soldiers as a ‘Thank You’ for their service,” customers can use the “custom ‘message of support’ sticker [that] has been placed on the back of every Support at Home coffee bag [to] include a personalized message to the troops and their families.” 4 CBTL is not unique in its efforts to link its corporate interests with contemporary 97 practices of consumer citizenship; however, it is revelatory in that it functions as a link between older versions of cause marketing and current modes which have been fundamentally shaped by recent socio-cultural transformations such as the development of “brand cultures” and neoliberal individualism. 5 Whereas during previous historical moments American consumerism was directly linked with the war effort, it is my contention that the value generated by contemporary incarnations is primarily bestowed upon the consumer and the corporation. Moreover, for the production of these assets to occur, the field of representation must be constrained in relationship to war. The opening discussion of CBTL is therefore a useful point of entry for considering the aforementioned issues given that the company's efforts retain some of the old line formulation of commodity activism in that it produces something for the troops. Still, that which is produced, coffee, bears little connection to the war itself. 6 As a result, one is led to ask: What is the end goal of sending coffee? How does this action correlate with a specific desired outcome? And, most importantly: Who are the real beneficiaries of such a program? Asking these kinds of questions is particularly useful in light of contemporary manifestations of war-themed media production. Unlike war bonds and coffee, contemporary war media generally lack direct ties to US war efforts or the morale and welfare of US troops, yet these properties often prove immensely valuable to building the brand identity of the media outlets with which they are associated. While one might question the link between a coffee company and media, what is at stake in both cases is the effect of corporate rationalities on the status of war representation. I use such a stark contrast because while consumers are often attentive to companies who act 98 opportunistically in the marketing of their products, the public outrage generated by General Motors' “Keep America Rolling” campaign in the wake of 9/11 for example, the ability to discern similar behaviors within the media realm is obfuscated by the abstract ways that value is generated for media entities through the branding of politics. 7 Consequently, this chapter examines the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns, and their media marketing packages, on war representation through the lens of pathos and profit. Pathos, is a useful way of thinking about the affective appeals made to consumer citizens in that it marks both the evocation of sympathy, sadness or pity and the transient nature of such sentiment. 8 Put differently, I analyze how the pathos of war, as one of marketing's most frequently used emotional registers, is intricately bound up with both the development and sales of commodities as well as examining how those commodities, in turn, help shape perceptions of, and engagement with, the United States' post-9/11 wars. In doing so, part of the underlying issue I am attempting to remedy is the persistence of a reductive discourse of militarization that tends to accompany analyses of war-related media and imagery. Specifically, I believe that framing representational strategies as part of an ideological program solely generated by the military/government, misses the participation of the private sector in shaping Americans’ responses to 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If power is more diffuse, then "governmentality" or the "conduct of conduct" must be seen to function within extant socio-economic and cultural formations. In this case brand culture, can be seen as a crucial formation that is shaping the representation and reception of war; part of a broader socio-cultural assemblage through which 99 governmentality is achieved. 9 Grappling with branding thus requires tracing the unique ways the American population has been affectively mobilized. One critical modality within recent processes of governmentality has been what Barnett, et al. have described as the "responsiblization of the consumer." They characterize this strategy as follows: Policy interventions are increasingly re-defined in terms of a shared logic of 'responsibility', in which the greater freedom ascribed to individuals as consumers in markets for goods and services needs to be balanced by efforts to instill in them greater concern to look out for their own good...and for various collective goods as well... It is less often acknowledged that this 'responsibilization' of the social field is not only the work of states, governments and policy-makers. Key actors here include capital (in the form of corporate social responsibility initiatives, for example), but also...a whole range of non-state actors such as charities, NGOs, and campaign groups. There is no single logic unfolding here, but rather a set of overlapping programmes and interests. 10 Consumers are thus, from multiple directions, impelled to demonstrate that they are both conscientious and astute. In relation to war, this logic has increasingly meant that consumption has become a privileged cite of engagement. These processes are further intensified due to the discrete affective valences of both marketing and the post-9/11 milieu. For these reasons, and in order to understand how acts of consumption participate in the mobilization of affect into hackneyed emotional registers which largely benefit contemporary American approaches to global conflict, we must parse the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility, consumer citizenship, and branding. While these three areas may at first seem to be quite distinct objects of study, in this chapter I am attempting to narrate how the histories of each have come together under extensive 100 processes of governmentality to configure both representation and response in the post- 9/11 era. Throughout this analysis I also argue that the veteran has come to function as the primary affective object used in patriotic appeals. By ‘primary affective object,’ I am attempting to highlight the crucial role the figure of the veteran has played in mobilizing public sentiment about post-9/11 warfare. Despite the early usage of blue-collar American figures such as the fireman and the police officer immediately after 9/11, beginning around 2004, and with increasing frequency thereafter, as documentaries and television programming began to emphasize the perspective of the soldier experience, the veteran gained new visibility. Soliciting help on the veteran's behalf, then, within the framework of 'responsibilization,' extends the call to be 'concerned for the collective good' by identifying a concrete need. At the same time, this centering of the vet is also indicative of how injunctions in the realm of consumption often operate synergistically with governmental rationalities concerning war; when one consumes the vet, accordance is assumed. Thus the veteran in this capacity, as I will discuss later, not only became a tool for the displacement of the politics of war, but as such was transformed into an economically potent tabula rasa on which the patriotism of corporations could be projected. Furthermore, using the veteran as the primary affective object, various brands have participated in the development of a palatable, and commodifiable, perspective of war. Doing so has enabled companies to advance desirable traits of their corporate brand identity and consumers to unburden themselves of some of the affective excess of war. For the aforementioned reasons this chapter asserts the need to trace several 101 contributing trends occurring throughout contemporary American culture. Despite the multiplicity inherent to this situation, most recent war-related media thus far been examined solely from an ideological perspective. These accounts describe the worldview each piece of content espouses and make claims as to whether the text is jingoistic or nationalistic and functions as a clear example of how the media is militarizing Americans. However, such readings not only disregard interpretive agency within the viewer but they elide the fact that media consumption in the current image-dominant brand culture has much in common with more traditional forms of consumption; both manage consumer desires for individuality and savviness. Given this, one must grapple with the operations that make the figure of the veteran a central component of the mobilization of affect. Via several case studies later in the chapter I explore these processes in detail, however, the logic of the conclusions of such an examination require that one recognizes the intensified linkages between commerce and affect in general. AFFECTIVE ECONOMICS, VETERANS AND SELLING WAR One of the most important ways we can begin to parse how CSR, consumer citizenship, and branding have come together in the post-9/11 era to exert a powerful influence upon the representation of war is by grappling with how each area relies upon the mobilization of affect. Although scholarly work on affect can be traced back hundreds of years to the works of Aristotle and Spinoza, its contemporary currency is derived from what Patricia Ticineto Clough marked as the "affective turn," which occurred during the 1990s and attempted to redress the "limitations of post-structuralism and deconstruction" 102 around issues pertaining to emotion and the body. 11 Accordingly, those "thinkers inside the 'second' tradition of affect" offer valuable insight into the linkages between media and sensation, sensation and action, and by extension media and action. Consequently, affect is particularly useful in that it provides a vocabulary to discuss the experience and transmission of sensation amongst populations, for as Brian Massumi notes in his canonical article, affect is pre-subjective and pre-personal. 12 Correlating the importance of affect's autonomous nature to sensibilities beyond the individual, Eric Shouse notes that “The power of affect lies in the fact that it is unformed and unstructured (abstract). It is affect’s ‘abstractivity’ that makes it transmittable in ways that feelings and emotions are not, and it is because affect is transmittable that it is potentially such a powerful social force.” 13 Thus, if affect can be said to move through and connect populations, it also, simultaneously, evinces an inherent instrumentality to processes of mobilization. The post-9/11 moment, for this very reason, constitutes a unique background against which the mechanisms of consumerism were not only able to harness “the surfeit of affect” brought on by the events of that day, but within the context of a brand culture that galvanizes the relationship between identity and consumption, provided a unique opportunity for both producers and consumers to strengthen the association between patriotism and purchasing. 14 More broadly, the mobilization and channeling of affect through circuits of consumption has been termed “Affective Economics.” While the term “affective economy” is generally known from Henry Jenkins' influential text Convergence Culture, here I am referencing Mark Andrejevic’s expansion of its 103 processes. He asserts: "In an affective economy, a circulating, undifferentiated kind of emotion…comes to serve as an exploitable resource, a part of the 'infrastructure'." 15 In other words, affect becomes a material component of commerce; as exploitable as any other raw material. The contemporary instrumentality of affect both within and outside the economic realm has much to do with the increased commodification of patriotism and the mobilization of support for war that patriotic consumption has enabled. As Jennifer Scanlon asserts, the consumerist response to 9/11 was also political in that it “framed a discourse of patriotism in which solidarity demanded conformity of values rather than vigorous discussion of issues. Media conformity as well as consumer commitment to defining patriotism through goods rather than actions ensured that decorative statements effectively replaced community debate." 16 Given this, various easily accessible products such as flags and bumper stickers “served as props for the performance of patriotism.” 17 Moreover, despite the often meager price point of patriotic goods, “the link between consumer spending and patriotic sentiment was not restricted to the working or middle classes. People of all classes embraced the visual in their displays of patriotism.” 18 In other words, not only was patriotism to be consumed, it also needed to be conspicuous. At the same time, it is necessary to remember that these purchases also performed a palliative function for the consumer. For as much as the attacks of 9/11 destroyed, they also produced an affective excess that exceeded patriotic sentiment. Although, as described above, affect is at its core undifferentiated and abstract, the political and public discourses in circulation during that historical moment helped to channel this excess into 104 readily accessible emotions such as fear, jingoism and sadness. These simplified emotions, divorced of the complex questions around American geopolitical behavior, global disparity, and the asymmetrical impact of globalization that an attack of U.S. commercial and martial icons exposed, were thus more easily assuaged through acts of consumption which allowed consumers to simultaneously perform public mourning and shore up an economy that had been positioned as the central American virtue. These purchases offered comfort through consumption. As Marita Sturken observes, in the days and months directly following September 11 th , 2001, “kitsch culture offered simple and consumable emotional registers. [Moreover,] it didn't matter that a post-9/11 souvenir might be kitschy in offering prescribed sentiment because emotions were so present and easily tapped into." 19 Sturken’s analysis of the function of the purchasing of snow globes and teddy bears at ground zero are part of a process whereby “the American public is encouraged to experience itself as the subject of history through consumerism, media images, [and] souvenirs…a form of tourism that has as its goal a cathartic ‘experience’ of history.” 20 It is here that we begin to see how such acts of consumption center the consumer and his needs rather than impacting the events to which they are symbolically tied. Still, while it is important to acknowledge that these purchases were able to access the affective environment, we must simultaneously consider that kitsch is often “politically disabling…since [it] foreclose[s] on particular kinds of political action." 21 Specifically, as Sturken asserts, Much of the culture of comfort functions as a form of depoliticization and as a means to confront loss, grief, and fear through processes that disavow 105 politics…Thus an American public can acquiesce to its government's aggressive political and military policies, such as the war in Iraq, when that public is constantly reassured by the comfort offered by the consumption of patriotic objects, comfort commodities and security consumerism. 22 It is through these mechanisms that the commodification of affect has been such an effective tool in the mobilization of the American public’s support for and perception of the U.S.’s post-9/11 engagements. In time, the potency of 9/11 receded somewhat in the face of two wars and a new affective object was needed to marshal the remaining affective surplus of 9/11 as well as to render accessible that which was being produced by the US’s two problematic engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq. This process of rendering is the defining trait of affective economics, specifically, it addresses the articulation of affect to processes of monetization. 23 Therefore, as Andrejevic argues, "affective economics… is directly related to marketing.” 24 Given that marketing thus lends insight into the mobilization of affect, what is to be gleaned from the array of war-related consumer products, and their respective advertising campaigns, being offered to the American public? Foremost, it is at this juncture that we begin to see the rising significance of the image of the veteran. The veteran becomes the central figure around which the majority of product marketing campaigns are built. This in itself is notable given the persistence of the specter of Vietnam and the beleaguered history of its servicemen. The altered contemporary status of the veteran is thus, in a sense, linked to the assertion that the United States has rid itself of the stigma of Vietnam. In addition, much of this transformation occurred during 106 Operation Desert Storm/Shield in the early Nineties when many Americans, harboring guilt over the treatment Vietnam Veterans received, vowed that their support for the troops would not waver. This attitude was further reinforced by a post-9/11 political climate which Roger Stahl argues is marked by a distinctive discourse he fittingly calls, “Support the Troops” rhetoric, mentioned above. 25 As Stahl notes, “In one sense, this phrase is an entirely virtuous request, extolling the mindfulness and gratitude for those volunteer servicemen and women who have been ordered into harm’s way. The virtue of the phrase, of course, is part of what allows for its strategic use to suppress dissent, which it does by equating support for official policy with support for the soldiers.” 26 Therefore, while on the surface, the use of the veteran as the primary affective object of patriotic consumption seems to indicate a direct engagement with the war and its repercussions, in truth the vet as facilitator of corporate social responsibility is a marketing tactic that has much in common with the kitsch products Sturken marks as so politically limiting. Thus, what begins to occur when the veteran is at the center of these campaigns is that the larger issues of the wars, such as the grand stakes of waging war or the high rates of bodily and psychic trauma it produces, for which veterans are meant to serve as proxy, evanesce. While veterans and veteran causes have become pervasive, paradoxically the wars in which they have served, along with their provocations and aftermath, elude examination. That the more problematic resonances of the veteran are smoothed over, however, should not come as a surprise when one considers that the primary arena in which this imagery circulates is commerce. To render the veteran a productive figure, companies must present the plight of service members in a manner that makes the act of 107 consumption a legitimate response to the challenges they face. First, this requires creating a narrative devoid of the controversial nature of warfare in general and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq specifically. Second, companies must portray their product as ameliorating either the effects of combat or aiding the transition back into civilian life. Finally, and this is most potent aspect of the marketing appeal, the combination of the product and the veteran must not only portray the company as socially responsible but it must also mark the purchaser as patriotic, while simultaneously speaking to their unique identity as a savvy consumer. Thus, the substantial amount of filtering which must occur to make the figure of the veteran useful for the sale of commodities, in combination with the prevalence of veteran causes in the contemporary CSR environment, are a powerful influence upon the way war is represented. This particular manner of mobilizing the vet would, however, be completely ineffective were it not for the recent emphasis of responsibility as a discrete logic within advanced liberalism ADVANCED LIBERALISM, SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND BRAND CULTURES The first few pages of this chapter have referenced the recent cultural and historical moment as advanced liberalism. Due to the ambiguity of the various terms of political economy and the situations they are meant to describe, any usage of such terminology requires further explication. This is particularly true when trying to negotiate the particular beginning and endpoints of gross societal transitions. Therefore, although, as I discussed in the introduction, periodization is a difficult endeavor, it is necessary to attempt to characterize the specific political economy that attends the transformations at 108 hand. In recent years, scholars have posited the changes occurring within US society as indicative of "late capitalism," "the control society," and "the network society." 27 While these terms can be useful ways of thinking through certain questions of power and political economy, their application can, at times, become dogmatic. For this reason, this project characterizes society with a broader descriptor, that of advanced liberalism. While the term originated in the work of Nikolas Rose, Mitchell Dean's adaptation has been of great import to the project's analysis. Dean describes his process of expansion in the following way: While adapting the term 'advanced liberalism' from the pioneering work of Nikolas Rose, I sought to ensure that the term did not become a kind of 'ideal type' readily applicable to a host of situations or reducible to the principles of an ideology. There were a number of strategies by which I sought to emphasize this. First, I distinguished between neo-liberalism, which I viewed as a range of programmatic rationalities of government, and advanced liberalism as an assemblage of rationalities, technologies, and agencies found in certain countries and regions. This would allow us to make clear that regimes of government were not manifestations of political principles or philosophies. 28 Importantly, these adaptations also "pluraliz[e] neo-liberalism and advanced liberalism, [...and] suggest that neo-liberalism exist[s] within a field of contemporary rationalities but [does] not exhaust them." 29 Although, following Dean, I acknowledge the limiting aspects of the wholesale application of the neoliberal framework, its ability to trace the rising prominence of the individual as an integral component of recent political economic changes remains significant. In his influential text A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey outlines 109 the ascendance of a political-economic perspective during the eighties which engendered a pervasive privileging of free-market logic in the administration of societal functions. Although, the recent global economic crisis of 2008 has challenged the legitimacy of such policies, the attendant shifts produced within the cultural realm remain cogent. As Harvey asserts, “The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic licence (sic), promoted by…powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture.” 30 Under these circumstances, the emphasis of “individual freedoms” within “neoliberal rhetoric” ultimately divorces political positions of their potency. 31 Regarding the case at hand, as Harvey asserts, in such a cultural milieu, “eventually narcissistic consumerism [will be split] from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice” because “Neoliberal concern for the individual trumps any social democratic concern for equality, democracy, and social solidarities.” 32 As a result, the logic behind recent moves toward self-reflexive forms of social responsibility becomes evident. This emphasis on individualism can thus be readily seen in the rise of branded social campaigns. As Naomi Klein observes, “we…go to such great lengths to reshape social and environmental injustices just so they can be brought home to us shoppers. In a way, these campaigns help us to care about issues not because of their inherent injustice or importance but because we have the accessories to go with them.” 33 These changes in activism point to what Sarah Banet-Weiser marks as the “transformation of culture to brand culture.” According to Banet-Weiser, in her monograph Authentic™, “cultural spaces that are often thought of by individuals as “authentic”— politics, [for example]— 110 …are increasingly formed as branded spaces, structured by brand logic and rationality, and understood and expressed through the language of branding.” 34 Amidst such a cultural landscape the function of war-related consumer products within the brand strategies of the companies which produce them begins to shift. As Banet-Weiser notes, “This transformation, then, of culture to brand culture, signals a broader shift, from “authentic” culture to the branding of authenticity. Contemporary brand cultures are so thoroughly imbricated with culture at large that they become indistinguishable from it.” 35 For the majority of Americans then, not only is there no war outside of representation, but, via the logic of branding, these representations must perform the double function of speaking truthfully about the war while also speaking to one's status as a unique individual. Consequently, the notion of brand cultures, and its production of branded authenticity also allows one to begin to parse the self-reflexive aspects of consumption. The implications for expressing one’s identity are succinctly addressed by Scott Lash and John Urry’s notion of “Reflexive Accumulation.” As André Jansson explains, reflexive accumulation, Lash and Urry’s modification of ‘flexible accumulation,’ was meant to address the fact that: The notion of flexibility does not capture 'the extent to which production has become increasingly grounded in discursive knowledge', and 'the extent to which symbolic processes, including an important aesthetic component, have permeated both consumption and production' (pp. 60-1)…Accordingly, compared to 'flexible accumulation', the term 'reflexive accumulation' is also better suited to capture the increasing significance of the media - the means for circulating discursive knowledge. 36 Moreover: 111 The fact that non-material goods play a more important role in the economy, and that material commodities have a greater non-material component, is also reflected at the level of everyday experience. Due to the development of mass media, people today are to a great extent encountering semiotic representations of commodities, rather than the commodities themselves. In the course of everyday life, various kinds of media texts provide consumers with images of goods and services that might be acquired and incorporated as meaningful components of their expressive style. Consumers often have a quite extensive knowledge of the meanings of things before they actually acquire them. 37 Thus, given the discursive function of commodities throughout society, we should understand the circulation of war-related CSR products as a salient manifestation of broader cultural tendencies toward the use of goods for the expression of distinctive qualities of both consumers and producers. CSR-based consumption under these conditions is therefore quite ‘self-reflexive.’ Another way of discussing this tendency, briefly mentioned in the introduction, is what Barnett et al. have described as an appeal to "ethics." They assert: This sense that one can only understand the relationship between individuals and wider systems of norms and regulation by taking account of 'what matters to them' is crucial to understanding the dynamics of ethical consumerism as a sub-sector of contemporary consumption practices. It is the only way to understand the 'responsibilization' of individuals as consumers, empowered with choice through various marketized practices of public and private provision of the means of social reproduction. If consumerism is indeed an important contemporary political rationality, then it works not through the promotion of unfettered hedonism and self-interest, but by making problematic the exercise of consumer choice in terms of various, ever proliferating responsibilities and ethical imperatives. 38 Here, then, a fundamental trait of the self-reflexivity of CSR is made evident. Since such commodity activism is positioned as ethical, within market-based discourses of responsibility, the self-interest which motivates this consumption is obfuscated. It is also 112 important to emphasize that these appeals operate through the banal activities of everyday life. In this way, one can see "how [...] macro-level processes are connected to micro- level processes of subject formation," a linkage that makes CSR a potent mechanism of governmentality. 39 Each of these tendencies are also directly connected to brand-building in that, as Banet-Weiser notes, “there are a number of entangled discourses and practices involved in the complex process of branding: it entails the making and selling of immaterial things – feelings and affects, personalities and values – rather than actual goods.” 40 Therefore, an essential point of consideration when examining contemporary war media pertains to the role such texts play in shaping conceptions of the self. In much the same way that status brands confer prestige upon their owner, the real worth of war-related advertising and CSR products must be understood in terms of the social value they reflect upon the individual consumer or brand. It is also important to remember that these traits indicate a radical shift, for during earlier historical moments, such as the 1950s-70s there existed a consumer movement that “was largely understood as the conduit between social justice, equity, and community building.” 41 However, as Banet-Weiser has argued, changes over the past several decades have altered the overall goals and desires associated with this type of consumption. She notes, “Critically, what distinguishes the contemporary consumer movement is that its emphasis has shifted from larger, communal political goals to consumers themselves ‘as the chief beneficiaries of political activism.’” 42 Lawrence Glickman describes this transformation straightforwardly noting that 113 "Since the turn of the twenty-first century […] commentators and activists have emphasized radiation […] from the outside world to the individual. In doing so, they have shifted the question from the ethics of consumption (how do my actions impinge on other people, ecosystems, and nations?) to the personal affects of consumption (how does what I buy change me?)." 43 Thus, again, it is the turn to the individual, and to the privileging of personal and corporate identity, which ultimately lays bare the processes by which brand culture and CSR have been able to influence representations of war. CONSUMER CITIZENSHIP AND AMERICA’S WARS To obtain a better understanding of contemporary processes, we must also parse the historical relationship between consumer citizenship and America’s wars. Most often patriotic consumption is discussed in terms of consumer citizenship, however, such a broad term obscures the actual practices through which consumers and corporations engage with warfare in the marketplace. Consumer citizenship, as it developed in the 1930s, often entailed the pursuit of consumer rights and equal access, however, in terms of war, citizens’ consumptive practices were meant to be a patriotic expression of duty. This duty often demanded restraint on the part of consumers. As Lizbeth Cohen describes, during World War II, the contributions of citizen consumers, through “their recycling of metals made ammunition plentiful, their limited consumption of sugar and shoes fed and dressed the army, [and] their adherence to tight restrictions on automobile tires and gasoline kept American tanks advancing across Europe.” 44 In addition, the relationship between government and business was far more contentious at that time. Due 114 to previous achievements gained in consumer rights battles, “the story of federal management of the consumer economy during World War II was one of growing government intervention in the private transactions between customers and retailers.” 45 One clear example is that the Consumer Office of the National Defense Advisory commission “was charged with identifying and protecting the needs of civilian consumers as the nation mobilized its defenses.” 46 The goal was to guard consumers from deficiencies in product quality and price gauging as the nation geared up for war. The one area, however, where citizens were encouraged to spend was fundraising for the war effort – a massively successful campaign to which I will return momentarily. The altered role of consumption that has occurred during times of war since WWII, then, lies at the heart of this chapter’s concern about the relationship between CSR, branding and wartime representation. Moreover, since the government no longer sponsors campaigns such as the bond drives of WWII, and only rarely explicitly portrays consumption as an act of citizenship, it is necessary to examine how specific practices within the umbrella term of consumer citizenship have evolved and come to encompass patriotic consumption as it currently exists. 47 Consumer citizenship, as it has risen up around American military campaigns, is heavily influenced by the social and cultural changes effected by political economic shifts. For instance, the ethos of World War II era Fordist mass production pertained not only to the manufacture of consumer goods, but was also reflected in the ways advertisers addressed consumers in the marketing of those goods. Thus, the philosophy behind both production and sales regarded American society as, if not unified in actuality, one which desired to be so. 115 One of the earliest, if nascent, examples of consumer citizenship can be seen in the marketing campaign by the U.S. Treasury for its war bonds during WWII, mentioned above, “which sold an incredible $185.7 billion in bonds during the war years.” 48 Much like the marketing plans for contemporary cause marketing ventures, each of the eight bond drives “had a sales quota, special theme, catchphrase, and logo… [which] targeted…the home front's current mood.” 49 However, one of the subtle, yet extremely relevant, differences pertains to the way consumers were hailed. Rather than emphasizing the importance of the individual consumer, the American public was hailed as a unified and responsible citizenry. As James Kimble has asserted, “The Treasury's Liberty Bond drives target[ed] 'patriotic rather than commercial motives.' Those who purchased their bond quota wore ‘badges and medals as a sign of their patriotism.’” 50 These signs affirmed their belonging in a community of likeminded patriots. While the notion that the purchase of war bonds was considered an act of patriotism might appear a banal conclusion at first glance, one must consider how such a simple act of consumer citizenship has evolved in the intervening years since WWII. Consumer citizenship has transformed in the wake of post-Fordist and Neoliberal political economies to such an extent that today the majority of consumptive acts that are tied to the US’s recent military efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq are self-reflexive; they say more about the individual or the brand than the cause to which they are attached. Whereas “the bond program … ‘provide[d] an activity in which all 135 million Americans could…serve their country and achieve that sense of personal participation in the war’,” today's fragmented landscape of patriotic consumption purports to offer a 116 multitude of opportunities while constraining the kinds of engagement consumers can have, and largely divorces its commodities from the actual wars and their consequences. SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND WAR Although the bond drives provide a glimpse into some of the earliest incarnations of war-related consumer citizenship, we must also consider how developing processes of corporate social responsibility shaped these activities. In the wake of the market crash and corporate excesses of the 1920s, in the early 1930s a debate began amongst several prominent academics that discussed to whom companies were responsible: shareholders exclusively or the larger community. 51 Framed in terms of ‘social responsibility’ rather than the more contemporary appellation ‘corporate social responsibility’, the central idea under negotiation concerned whether or not, “in addition to the economic responsibilities [companies] owed shareholders, managers had social responsibilities to society because the modern large firm is ‘permitted and encouraged by the law primarily because it is of service to the community rather than because it is a source of profit to its owners.’” 52 These two positions were fairly consistent throughout the next two decades and corporate thinking about the suitability of one practice or the other was largely stagnant. However, even though the academic discussion was at a stalemate and corporate discourse was ambivalent, particularly concerning whether or not companies had a larger responsibility to society, in practice they affirmed this responsibility, or at least the advantageousness of such corporate philanthropy, through their contributions to World War II efforts. 117 These attitudes can be seen in the advertising used by companies that manufactured consumer products where numerous campaigns were built around associating individual brands with their fulfillment of patriotic wartime duties. Despite the fact that the entrance of the United States into the global conflict almost immediately brought about product shortages, ad spending was often employed to show a company’s dedication to the war effort while simultaneously maintaining its brand awareness. As described in Advertising Age, “Unlike during World War I, when companies cut back on advertising, World War II saw an increase in spending, from $2.1 billion in 1941 to $2.8 billion in 1945. Ad agencies focused on maintaining demand until the war was over and merchandise was available to consumers again.” 53 The core elements of this strategy, although to a far lesser extent, were continued once the United States became involved in Korea in 1950. Reynolds Aluminum, for example, released an advertisement that positioned its product as one used “…To Protect the Supplies that Protect Us!” Above and below this banner, were images of medical supplies on the front and boxes of Reynolds Wrap with aircraft wings zooming in to save the day. These images were also accompanied by copy that described the many ways Reynolds aluminum foil was supporting the war effort. Although there were far fewer ad campaigns which emphasized contributions to the war efforts, those that included patriotism as a theme continued to demonstrate the usefulness of their products to the national cause and the future prosperity of America. The decreased prominence of war- based social responsibility at this moment seems to be tied to the state of public opinion regarding the war. As Andrew Sidman and Helmut Norpoth observe, “The climbing toll 118 of U.S. casualties, [which spiked early in Korea] turned the public back home against [the war very] quickly.” 54 Furthermore, coming so close on the heels of WWII, most advertising seemed more concerned with harnessing the economic boom and adapting to Television than with associating themselves with a conflict that soon became controversial. The tumult of the Sixties would bring about radical changes in both public and corporate views of social responsibility. Specifically, the developing social movements surrounding civil rights, gender and sexual equality, the environment, consumer rights and war generated pointed public interest in the role played by corporations, and corporate interest in how best to manage such intense scrutiny. As Philip Cochran notes, the coalescence of these various movements “permanently chang[ed] the business environment in America and the world by ushering in an era of activist groups and NGOs that are concerned about businesses and business practices.” 55 This created a situation where, as N. Craig Smith argues, “consumers [began to function as the] drivers of corporate social responsibility.” 56 The most overt public responses to actions viewed as corporate malfeasance were protests and boycotts. The latter, in particular, would strengthen the relationship between responsible business practices and consumer purchasing decisions. Although, as mentioned previously, there were a host of other social movements occurring during the Sixties, the war in Vietnam engendered some of the most prominent instances of commodity activism. Commodity Activism functioned as the consumer analogue to corporate practices of social responsibility. One key example is the protest of Dow 119 Chemical for its production of the controversial incendiary weapon, napalm. Since Dow was also the producer of household goods, consumers boycotted other products such as Saran Wrap, Handi-Wrap and Dow Oven Cleaner. 57 As a result, although the boycott “didn’t end the Vietnam War…Dow did discontinue napalm production…and the boycott tainted the firm’s reputation for years.” 58 While these changes may indeed have occurred, C. A. Harwell Wells, argues that such changes were not necessarily indicative of a true shift in corporate mentality. He notes: …corporate social programs did not necessarily contradict policies of profit maximization and, by extension, shareholder primacy. Some corporations that opened factories in the "ghetto," for instance, were careful to characterize the move as the product of business judgments, not altruism. Other highly publicized social programs were little more than charitable contributions-already allowed to all corporations-while still others were in fact funded by government grants, and so did not cut into profits. Even the most ambitious social investments could be justified as directed to a firm's long-run profits. In short, the majority of corporations that adopted ‘socially responsible’ policies did not thereby acknowledge new legal duties to non-shareholder constituents. 59 This continued privileging of profits and shareholder interests, despite some surface changes, manifested a series of corporate scandals during the mid-to-late Seventies and consumer rights activists such as Ralph Nader continued to strive for greater amounts of federal regulation to combat actions which were perceived as abuses of power. 60 However, at the same time, led by the arguments of Milton Friedman, a counter-narrative was being developed that essentially equated the use of corporate funds for external programs as shareholder theft. 61 During the 1980s the influence of Reaganite economics produced a substantial 120 shift in American fiscal policies. These changes, particularly a substantial withdrawal of government funding from the social realm, in many ways directly correlated with the diminishment of programs which catered to community concerns. Despite the prevailing governmental and corporate attitude that shareholders ought to be the primary concern, community needs persisted and as a result there remained a gap that could potentially be filled by responsible corporations if somehow these needs could be matched with the profit motivations of the shareholder. As Naomi Klein asserts, the new “policies... [of] deregulation and privatization […] dramatically lowered […] corporate taxes […] a move that eroded the tax base [, …] gradually starved out the public sector,” and simultaneously inaugurated “new public-private sector arrangements” beneficial to corporate branding strategies. 62 Alongside these changes, “the academic debate over corporate social responsibility dwindled and splintered. Isolated articles still appeared, some evincing a good deal of intellectual sophistication, but there was no clear debate over the larger responsibilities of corporations.” 63 In combination with the new, neoliberal, market orientation of the period, it is no coincidence then that the early Eighties is when we begin to see the rise of Social Entrepreneurship, or approaches which attempt to use the efficiency and principles of the business world to gain difficult resources for vital, yet underfunded programs. While social entrepreneurship centers the needs of the larger community, during this same period we also see the rise of its more commercially oriented counterpart: cause marketing. Inaugurated in 1983, the first instance of cause marketing occurred “when 121 American Express launched a much acclaimed campaign to help restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island [by]…promising to contribute [a donation based on one percent of card transactions and one dollar for new accounts created in] the last quarter of 1983.” 64 Although the campaign raised an astounding “$1.7 million for the restoration effort,” the real value generated was the “fantastic publicity…and the 28% increase in use of the American Express cards that followed.” 65 To this day, cause marketing is one of the most relevant forms of consumption that has become intricately linked with notions of a responsible citizenry. As Inger Stole outlines, cause marketing is "defined as 'a business strategy that integrates a social issue or cause into brand equity and organizational identity to gain significant bottom line impacts' (Cone/Roper, 1999, p. 18).” To achieve this, “cause marketing aims at linking corporate identities with nonprofits, good causes, and significant social issues through cooperative marketing and fundraising programs (File & Prince, 1998)." 66 Cause marketing mobilizes consumers to, at least in part, base their purchasing decisions on the desire to ameliorate troubling social problems. In this we can see how contemporary appeals to responsibility fit easily within a mode of consumption that has long positioned itself as capable of societal beneficence. However, despite surface appearances, cause marketing has several disturbing characteristics. First, the primary goal of the corporate/nonprofit partnership is to benefit both the corporate image and bottom line. During earlier phases of corporate philanthropy, companies realized that they had much to gain from a bit of well-placed charity; this has been termed “Strategic Philanthropy.” 67 As Phillips explains, “strategic 122 philanthropy allowed businesses to focus their charity dollars on social issues and causes that directly affected their business-success and simultaneously allowed them to use the tax deductible donations to expand markets and build public goodwill (Phillips, 2000, p. 7)." 68 The second issue is that not all social issues and associated nonprofits are well- suited to the needs of corporate image-making. While in many circumstances causes which lack popularity or prove politically controversial remain untouched by corporate philanthropic strategies, others gain access via specific representational approaches which seek to maximize palatability and prestige. It is this manipulation of the societal issue enacted through cause marketing that has played a fundamental role in shaping the representation of, and discourse on, America’s post-9/11 wars. A similar approach to cause marketing can be seen with the rise of affinity credit cards in the mid-Eighties. These cards, much like the American Express campaign, agree to contribute a defined amount to particular causes, however, the cause is determined by the consumer who chooses a card that has ties to an organization with whom she or he has a strong affiliation. 69 It is with the affinity card, that we begin to see war enter back into the realm of social responsibility. One of the earliest linkages of cause marketing to war-related issues can be seen with the issuance of Dollar Dry Dock Savings Bank’s Visa affinity card program for the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) in 1987. The advertised benefit of the card is that it “provides donations to the VVA every time the card is used…[and contributes]$4 of the annual fee [which begins after the first year].” 70 As Patricia Winters reported, “The program is the latest twist in "affinity marketing" by charitable, social and business groups that offer Visa and Master Cards to members…[as] 123 John Mullday, Dollar Dry Dock's senior VP [of] consumer lending division, argued,...‘This is one step above affinity cards,… most affinity cards represent membership in a particular group. But our affinity is America.’” 71 While in relationship to war, more direct appeals to patriotic consumption would dominate in the immediate years following, this form becomes prevalent in relationship to post-9/11 warfare. Although, the linkages between warfare and corporate social responsibility were somewhat limited in the Eighties, the involvement of the US in the Gulf War during the Nineties created new associations that would foreshadow patriotic CSR campaigns after 9/11. It is also this moment that begins to resemble earlier instances of consumer citizenship in that direct appeals to consumption are again foregrounded. The commodities produced in relation to the Desert Shield/Desert Storm conflict, more so than those of any of the US military’s previous engagements, can be seen as laying the groundwork for the kinds of commodity based cause marketing that has come to dominate the public pathways for wartime engagement since 9/11. One of the clearest examples can be found in the success of the trading card series that examined the conflict in the Gulf. The Topps Company, Inc. is most commonly known as the manufacturer of various collectible sports trading cards. Although the company, at the time already facing stiff competition from other card makers, had ventured into the realm of “entertainment phenomena [such] as Dick Tracy and Batman” basing their new series releases on popular trends, they also included historical sets such as “the Civil War and the American Revolution.” 72 However, in February 1991, the company further expanded their offerings 124 and issued their first card set to cover an ongoing war. 73 While their timely release functioned as an overt attempt to capitalize upon the popularity of the ongoing war, the company’s spokesman, Tim Boyle, argued that “the series [was] neither frivolous nor opportunistic,” and moreover that the “cards [did] not glamorize war.” 74 The series proved to be extremely popular, so much so that many of Topps competitors quickly followed suit releasing similar card sets. As Jeffrey Gordon attests, “As a result of such unprecedented demand, five other rivals rushed to participate in the market for military cards. America’s Major Players, Operation Yellow Ribbon, Pacific Trading Cards and Pro-Set all supplied products.” 75 Figure 3. Topps Desert Storm Trading Cards. 125 Yet it is not the success, nor the copying which marks the relevance of these cards to contemporary CSR campaigns. Rather it is that, as Gordon notes, “in the face of obvious economic profit, [these companies] were careful to appeal to and perhaps appease consumers’ patriotic values.” 76 In order to mitigate the appearance of war profiteering the companies issued the following statements: “‘100% of Pro Set, Inc. profits from these cards benefits families of Desert Storm veterans.’ (Pro Set, Inc. 1991) ‘Portions of Troops trading card sales will be donated to: U.S.O. (Troops 1991)’ and ‘Part of the proceeds from the sale of these cards is donated to Operation Yellow Ribbon (AMA Group 1991)’”. Yet trading cards were not an isolated case, as Tad Tuleja observed, “Novelty companies produced yellow ribbon bumper stickers, decals, buttons, pins, gimme hats, tee shirts and coffee mugs…on the home front, the six-week war was a small-business bonanza.” 77 The ability for Americans to engage with the war through these commercial products can in a certain sense be linked to the transition to just in time production and “a commercial structure [that] evolved [during the Eighties and Nineties such that it was] poised to take the temperature of popular consciousness and reduce it to products that are very overtly sign systems.” 78 As Kenon Breazeale asserts: …certain modes of production and habits of consumption were cranked up and ready to go when George Bush decided to [prepare] the country, not just militarily, but emotionally and psychologically, for war during the second half of 1990. The material culture of [Operation Desert Storm] is a phenomenon that began during the fall of 1990, peaked during the late winter and spring of 1991 and started to diminish after the 1991 Christmas sales season. 79 In addition to the new availability of au courant products, the ability to even have the raw 126 materials required for their production is the result of large weapons stockpiles built up during the Cold War. Unlike World War II, the need for consumptive sacrifice on the home front was non-existent. As a result, consumerism could continue unabated. 9/11 AS COMMODITY Grappling with the effects of consumption upon the representation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq also requires that one take into consideration the historical and affective context of the events of September 11 th , 2001. Dana Heller’s work outlines the ways 9/11 condensed preexisting associations between consumption and nationalism. She argues, "the post-9/11 political economy,” is indicative of the fact that “complex cultural relations of commodification and commemoration, marketing and militarism, commercial patronage and patriotism…took shape long before American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower…[but] were brought to the fore and reinvested with nationalist solemnity in that tragedy's wake." 80 This intensification of the association between consumerism and patriotism meant that “‘9/11’ itself…attained the cultural function of a trademark, one that symbolize[d] a new kind of national identification - or national branding awareness, to adopt the jargon of advertising.” 81 In the wake of 9/11 however, not only did the boundaries between profit and charity become permeable, but so too did the lines between wartime engagement and consumer citizenship. As David Barstow and Diana B. Henriques argue, “Companies, interested in doing good and capitalizing on patriotic fervor, scrambled to form marketing alliances with charities and then rushed merchandise into stores.” 82 Yet, the associations 127 between consumption and patriotism were not being newly formed, but rather, reinvigorated. As Marita Sturken notes, "Before 9/11, the brand of the nation was already constructed as an affirmative social space in which to construct individual identities. This enabled the connections between comfort and nationalism that proliferated in the first few post-9/11 years, with the attendant consequence that dissent or public debate became marked as the antithesis of comfort and thus 'anti-American." 83 Therefore, while the branding of the nation had already begun prior to 9/11, the commercial availability and success of 9/11 themed commodities set the stage for CSR campaigns to be able to harness patriotic fervor in service of corporate, and ostensibly, community goals. The fact that these products saturated the marketplace with trite perspectives of war was glossed over. SELLING THE SERVICES In addition to the events of 9/11, in recent years brand culture has also affected the military and its promotional strategies. While much work has been produced that analyzes the increased attention to branding that has been seen in recent recruitment efforts by the U.S. military, confining our examination to the ways these branding efforts impact recruitment overlooks the ways in which the military has itself become a brand and that this brand proves beneficial to corporations without any direct connection to the defense department. 84 Although, there have historically been Air Force coffee mugs and Marine Corps T-Shirts, in 2004 a major change occurred in the way U.S. military branches participate in branding themselves. This change involved the U.S. Code (10 128 USC § 2260), which pertains to the “Licensing of Intellectual Property [and] retention of fees” for the new Department of Defense (DoD) Branding and Trademark Licensing Program. 85 Under this new directive, branches of the military are now able to license their own service marks and insignia and use the profits to support Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) activities. 86 As a result, there now exists a direct incentive for the services to participate in commercially branding themselves. As Christian Davenport reports: With a more formal procedure in place, an increasing number of companies have signed up to do business with the Defense Department in recent years…In fiscal [year] 2007, private retailers sold an estimated $5 million in Army branded products. [In 2011], officials expect[ed] to sell $50 million worth, already generating more than $1.2 million in fees and royalties for the Army. 87 Part of the allure of licensing military themed products is that they portray the values that companies believe are attractive to consumers. As Jasen Wright, “director of brand management for the Beanstalk Group, a licensing agency that works for the Army, [notes,]…Consumers have a strong affinity and a great pride for what the U.S. Army stands for…Retailers – Wal-Mart, Target – know it is very attractive to consumers, and they want to make sure they have it on the shelf.” 88 This perspective relies upon the fact that the military is often posited as “the last repository of civic idealism and sacrifice for the sake of the common good” and, additionally seems indicative of the fact that “we have outsourced and confined to the military a concentrated expression of the civic ideals and patriotism that [were once thought to] be shared by all American citizens.’” 89 In a broader sense the increased corporate desirability of the military brand is tied to the rise in merchandised products across the board which has occurred in light of the fact that 129 “sales of licensed merchandise as a whole [have fared] better than general retail sales.” 90 Moreover, with the increasing importance of market segmentation, these products not only tap into societally dispersed affect which can be channeled into patriotic consumption, but directly target the demographic of military members, veterans and their loved ones as a well-defined consumer group. RECAPITULATION RE: VETS The aforementioned sections cover not only a vast historical period but a diverse selection of business practices and conflicts. Still, it is my hope that outlining each area’s development serves to show how war imagery and discourse, even if it is not commonly thought of in relationship to social responsibility and branding, has been materially impacted by their respective strategies and processes as they have evolved through time. These effects have become particularly significant during the post-9/11 period given the pervasiveness of ‘brand culture’ in contemporary American society; we begin to see concomitant changes in the kinds of representations that get circulated. While these changes have affected all manner of imagery, in terms of warfare, the affective resonances of the veteran have functioned such that they simultaneously make the vet, and warfare by extension, both consumable and proscribed. The veteran, for example, has itself been reduced to a particular archetype. If we consider the host of ways one can serve in the military, in addition to the varied experiences and myriad ways service members cope with the stresses of conflict, the simplistic construction of the veteran often displayed in consumer campaigns points to a 130 certain reductiveness. Take, for example, the centrality of veteran hiring drives to a significant number of CSR campaigns (Hire A Vet, C.O.D.E., Walmart). While it is indeed true that the rate of unemployment, specifically for young vets (ages 18-24), was nearly double that of the civilian population, at “20.6 percent in 2010”, we must consider both the palatability and customer value proposition of the issue of joblessness in comparison to bodily trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and suicide. 91 These other issues belong to a more problematic image of the veteran, one commonly associated with Vietnam, which is annulled in contemporary campaigns. Moreover, the contemporary emphasis on the veteran, much like the ‘Support the Troops’ rhetoric discussed above, enables the elision of not only the political aspects of warfare, but, in a certain sense, of war itself. As seen with the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP), the customer value proposition is firmly rooted in this rhetoric; they posit their organization as worthy of support because: “When you support Wounded Warrior Project ® , you’re supporting an organization whose broad appeal reaches across demographic, geographic, and political boundaries. We’re an apolitical organization by design. For us, it’s not about the war; it’s about the warrior.” 92 War, and all of its complexity, is sequestered as a causal factor in the existence of the veteran population and thereby their existence becomes contingent. Much like a natural disaster or an incurable disease, then, appeals to affect can be made without triggering the underlying associations between decisions about warfare, consequences of conflict at home and abroad, and the complex associations between business and American military campaigns. 131 At the same time, the depoliticized positioning of these efforts also posits American consumerism as apolitical. This is noteworthy particularly given that it was virtually the only mandate the American people received after 9/11 as a way to contribute to the war effort. Moreover, portraying consumption in this manner masks the fact that "the dominant role played by the United States in global capitalism is mediated by protectionist policies and concepts that portray consumerism as an isolated rather than a global activity. A belief in the global marketplace…is accompanied by a set of narratives about the U.S. consumer as an innocent bystander to the destructive aspects of that marketplace." 93 Simply put, acts of consumption are positioned as being capable of ameliorating the effects of war, when in fact they often rely upon commercial pathways guaranteed by the US’s martial presence across the globe. OEF/OIF: ONLY DISCURSIVE, NEVER MATERIAL While thus far I have attempted to delineate how changing trends in the areas of corporate social responsibility, branding and consumer citizenship have individually evolved over a number of decades in relationship to American warfare, these fragmented approaches have solidified into an integrated process with distinct impacts upon the form and function of war imagery and discourse in the media. Several recent military-themed consumer campaigns exemplify the influence that the confluence of these interests is having upon individuals, corporations, and wartime representation more broadly. Given this, one of the key impacts that can be gleaned within contemporary solicitations for CSR-based engagement with America’s post-9/11 wars is that a 132 preponderance of these campaigns rely upon very limited constructions of both war and veterans. Let us take, for example, the discourse used to describe war. Many ads position the call to action along the lines of: “Now that the fighting is done,” or “Now that these vets are coming home.” In each scenario the war itself is present in name only. There is no discussion of what occurred or why these vets need assistance. In addition, the visual imagery which often accompanies such appeals is extremely sanitized. Young veterans are portrayed as full of vitality, emboldened and enlightened by their experiences, and fully capable of rejoining the civilian population. 94 In reality, “U.S. military veterans who have been deployed overseas for prolonged periods [often] struggle to [reintegrate and] find work because of the traumas of war.” 95 The result of such filtering is that war-related causes, and veterans in particular, become safe objects around which corporations can build branded campaigns. A prime example of how of CSR shapes media representations of war can be seen in MillerCoors Brewing Company’s “Give a Veteran a Piece of the High Life Campaign.” As the program website states, “For every High Life cap or tab you collect, Miller High Life, with the help of IAVA and Operation Homefront, will donate 10¢ toward High Life Experiences for returning vets. Up to $800,000 will go toward paying soldiers’ way into sports events, concerts, outdoor adventures and more.” 96 While both IAVA and Operation Homefront address serious issues facing the veteran community such as joblessness, food assistance and health care needs the emphasis upon the experience of the “High Life” shifts the focus away from the daily struggles veterans encounter and towards a more palatable consumer citizenship. In order for such a shift to 133 function, the representation of the veteran must be sanitized. Take for example the publicly available photos the IAVA posted on its Flickr page from the Miller High Life Baltimore Orioles event at Camden Yards on August 9, 2011. 97 Figure 4. Miller High Life IAVA Baltimore Orioles event at Camden Yards on August 9, 2011. Photo courtesy of the IAVA Flickr Account. www.flickr.com/photos/iava/602 8947039/. 134 One of the most prominent images is the photo of a young, smiling veteran in a High Life emblazoned T-shirt raising a glass of Miller High Life beer in a jovial toast. Such an easily digestible image of veterans fits well with a commodity activism that requires nothing more from consumers than continuing to purchase their preferred lager or try a different brand for a good cause, a latent benefit for MillerCoors. In addition, Miller High Life, as the solo sponsor of veteran experiences, is not the only way that the brand has exploited veteran causes. In 2012, alongside the release of Relativity Media’s Act of Valor (Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh), Miller High Life created an integrated campaign that included placement in the film, premiere sponsorship and programs to share experiences among veterans. They also were provided with tickets to many of the screenings, which they then used as part of their promotions, some with partners such as Operation Homefront, which provides assistance for veterans and their families. 98 Moreover, as Brendan Noonan, Miller’s brand manager for High Life, attests: "While [the] collaboration with Act of Valor began with the filmmakers, we were able to expand the relationship with Relativity to deliver on our promise to help members of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and Operation Homefront to enjoy a little piece of the high life – providing veterans access to exclusive screening experiences.” 99 As can be seen here, the veteran becomes the tool through which brands are able to not only target specific demographic groups, but create multiple lucrative partnerships and do so in the name of patriotic duty. The second major impact that has occurred is that while non-profits have 135 beneficial goals for vets, their corporate partnerships tend to foreground individual brands. Let us take for example the partnership between Under Armour (UA) and the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP). The Under Armour brand, since 1996 a rising corporate star in the production of sports apparel, is in many ways distinct from industry- dominant behemoths like Nike, Addidas and Reebok. This is due to its comparatively modest size and because it began as a direct supplier for college athletic programs rather than selling products directly to consumers. As UA has expanded, they have positioned their brand as one which “make[s] all athletes better through passion, design and the relentless pursuit of innovation.” While this in itself, is an admirable goal, it is unclear how veteran efforts directly relate to the brand’s broader goals. Still, it is part of the company’s four-pronged approach which they mark as the “UA Story.” Two of the four elements of this story are CSR campaigns: UA Freedom WWP and UA Green. As their website notes: “UA Green is our challenge to make Under Armour® Performance Products with a lighter environmental impact,” a corporate goal found across industries given the vocal responses consumers have had to environmental damage by irresponsible businesses. The strategic role of UA Freedom WWP, however, is far more complex. 100 Let us begin with the company’s introduction to the program found on their website. The program is pitched as follows: “Do you Believe In Heroes®? We do. That’s why Under Armour® is teaming up with the Wounded Warrior Project™ to raise awareness of our nation’s many heroes, such as our military personnel and public safety officials – men and women who risk their lives every day to ensure our safety.” 101 The first item of note is that this single sentence introduction to the program relies upon three 136 legally protected trademarks, a glaring indicator of the financial stakes involved in these programs. The second major item is that a key aspect of Under Armour’s program is its creation of the UA Freedom NCAA Games. While this part of the program continues the recent extreme integration of sports and militarism, such as the presence of military flyovers at the start of college football games, it is one of the areas in which we begin to see how the brand’s priorities begin to trump that of the cause. 102 The hallmark of the Freedom games is the specially designed UA uniforms worn by players during each of the contests. The participating teams all belong to the limited pool of university contracts UA holds. In much the same way that Nike is able to advertise new elements of product design with each new uniform it creates for the well-followed Oregon Ducks, UA whose market position in the realm of college sports is much less secure, can not only showcase its design capabilities but generate positive brand association with a good cause through its sponsorship of the UA Freedom NCAA games. This brand outreach not only applies Figure 5. UA/WWP Uniform worn by University of Maryland in their November 14, 2009 game against Virginia Tech. 137 to teams, but to everyday consumers as well since after each competition the game’s limited edition uniforms are auctioned. While it is true that 100% of the proceeds from these auctions are donated to WWP, the purchase of the uniform generates an opportunity for consumers to become familiar with the UA brand in new ways. 103 It is this benefit to the brand which permeates the other main area of UA’s commitment to WWP: specially marked, co-branded WWP/UA apparel. On its website, UA has a designated product page where consumers can “Shop The Wounded Warrior Project.” It is here where we see the previously mentioned branding benefit for UA begin to combine with a similar process of branding that is conveyed upon the consumer. For example, the tagline for the “Men’s UA WWP Freedom Flag T-Shirt,” which retails for $27.99, argues that via this purchase one can, “Give support[,] get performance[, and]show pride in country & our soldiers.” Similarly, the “Men’s WWP 11” Shorts” are “Cool & light shorts that give to those who gave so much.” These product statements clearly articulate the benefit for the consumer produced by making these purchases. Finally, we must look at the broader context of the program’s use of the “Believe in Heroes” social responsibility program designed by Acosta Sales & Marketing. Acosta, which positions itself as a leader in the “execut[ion of] integrated, multi-point engagement sales and marketing support for both national consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and retail partners,” designed this program such that it would engage numerous CPGs and retailers in a cause marketing campaign that would benefit the WWP. 104 An overwhelming success, Acosta released figures which demonstrate exactly 138 the kinds of monetary benefits that can be generated through the veteran campaigns I am concerned with. As Acosta’s case study reveals, although the program was able to generate $3.5 million dollars for WWP, exceeding its goal by $1.5 million, the more potent result was that $80.7 million was generated across a range of participating consumer products; indicating that a meager 4.3% of total sales was contributed to the WWP. According to the WWP, Believe in Heroes ® is a Wounded Warrior Project ® initiative that calls on Americans to recognize the enormous sacrifices made by our newest generation of veterans and to honor the service of these individuals over a two-month campaign leading up to Veterans Day. The Believe in Heroes campaign will provide the American public with an opportunity to show their support and appreciation of our veterans in their communities, and across the nation. 105 However, this form participation is very much a blunt instrument. Aside from providing a small amount of money to veteran support organizations, this type of consumptive behavior conveys nothing about the consumer’s attitudes towards war. Moreover, it channels affect into safely contained outlets for participation. In addition, it lays bare the superficial ways positive perceptions are generated for companies who engage in CSR. By simply attaching veteran causes to their product marketing, companies are able to tap into consumer preferences for purchasing brands that are attached to social causes. As Ramin Eviaz, Chief Marketing officer for Acosta notes, “Cause-related marketing is one of the most effective ways for a company to differentiate itself in today’s cluttered jumble of marketing messages and hype overload. More than 80% of Americans have a more positive opinion of a company that is doing something to make the world better, and 76% 139 say they would be likely to switch brands or retailers for a good cause when price and quality are equal.” 106 Yet, the minimal commitment required on the part of the consumer is exactly what makes programs like Believe in Heroes ® so easy to pitch. As the Acosta case study notes, the program’s structure “allowed all Americans to show their support and appreciation for veterans in a simple, everyday way – grocery shopping.” 107 The real innovation of this ‘simple, everyday’ manner of engagement was the sheer number of companies – Acosta cites 52 brands and 68 retailers – it allowed to participate in a single campaign. Moreover, it begins to show one of the more problematic aspects of these campaigns, that of a cyclical or self-referential orientation. While one can see a bit of this in the way that the various brands refer back to the ‘Believe in Heroes’ brand rather than the specific plight of the veterans the WWP serves, or in the previously discussed participation of Miller High Life in multiple interrelated campaigns, this tendency is laid bare when we look the synergy created by several overlapping branded veteran campaigns. Rather than directing to consumers to engage with war or veteran efforts a vast number of corporate campaigns direct consumers to consume another product. One quintessential example is Spike TV’s ‘Hire a Veteran’ initiative. In November 2011, Spike TV began “creat[ing] a series of original public service announcements for its multiple platforms that…call[ed] to attention businesses that have hired or created positions for veterans.” According to Spike TV, in doing so, “the network [functions] as a media partner for nonprofit organizations committed to hiring veterans, offering them opportunities for publicity and recognition, while incentivizing other companies to make 140 their own commitments.” 108 The reality of this program, however, is that the most overt benefit of the program is the opportunity it provides for branding and outreach to Spike’s desirable adult male audience. Moreover, the majority of recipients of Spike’s free advertisements are major corporations rather than non-profits. In addition, while the PSAs do highlight each company’s veteran efforts, ultimately the viewer is left with an impression of benevolence on the part of the individual brand, and Spike for donating the airtime, over and above any engagement with the issues veterans are facing. Such issues are important because they speak to the material conditions and consequences of war. One case that is indicative of the types of businesses and programs that Spike honors with valuable airtime is PepsiCo. PepsiCo is not a nonprofit and the potential savings free advertising offers, again demonstrates how the value generated in these programs often returns to the corporation rather than the cause. Furthermore, the campaign fails to address any other veteran issue aside from career placement that results from the experience of war; combat is a void from which these soldiers return in need of a job. Additionally, while behind the scenes companies may in fact be hiring vets, these announcements posit such hiring as acts of disinterested patriotism. Yet as Jerald Novak, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at PepsiCo notes, “Veterans define diversity, accountability – as well as the drive for results. These are exactly the types of individuals that we want to hire within this organization.” He adds, “Every role that we have is a potential role for a veteran – not just in the name of service, but because they help us win as a business.” 109 Thus, PepsiCo and other companies receive free advertising for enacting “patriotic” policies which are already in the company’s best interest. 141 The self-reflexivity of CSR is even more pronounced regarding the Call of Duty Endowment (C.O.D.E). C.O.D.E is a non-profit veteran organization begun by Activision in 2009 which, according to its mission statement, seeks to “create a national campaign that will assist those organizations that provide our former service members with job placement, training and educational services in their post military careers.” 110 Call of Duty, as discussed in the previous chapter, is a multi-billion dollar video game franchise and one of the top war-themed first person shooter games on the market. The game’s success is largely built upon its ability to reproduce the theatre of war and its offering of an immersive experience. Furthermore, the pleasure of play and its requisite ‘in-the- moment’ temporality leaves little room for the type of critical engagement with war, in terms of its costs for veterans, the endowment purports to encourage. Therefore, if we examine the advertising material released upon the program’s inauguration, the latent benefit for the company becomes self-evident. The promotional video opens in the middle of a ‘close-contact’ urban engagement and the perspective used mimics the immersive, visceral style of the franchise and employs the recent trend of using live-action sequences to market new game releases. The speed of action then slows when a mortar shell wounds a soldier. The camera then cuts to another soldier who directly addresses the viewer saying: “We’re doing your fighting over here. We hope you’ll fight for us when we get home.” After this brief statement, the fighting resumes briefly before fading to black and the C.O.D.E. logo appears. A final message appears after the logo which reads “Helping Veterans Find Careers.” Despite the noble goals of the endowment, its marketing reinforces the sybaritic aspects of war and the gaming 142 media it produces by extension. Moreover, as mentioned above, this endeavor also privileges career placement as the direst need facing veterans – an odd disjuncture given that the video highlights combat injury. Aside from the internal incongruity of the C.O.D.E. mission and marketing, C.O.D.E. also offers yet another instance of the circularity of CSR in its participation in Spike’s Hire A Vet Campaign, mentioned above. Not only was C.O.D.E., as an organization which focuses on jobs for veterans, the beneficiary of free advertising on Spike TV, a network whose core demographic neatly matches with that of the game franchise, but as a charitable fund the organization draws attention away from the problematic resonances war gaming connotes. The instability between self-promotion and social responsibility is further exacerbated in this instance. This is due to the fact that the public service announcement used on Spike opens with a clip from the game and then 143 Figure 6. Still from Spike TV’s Video Salute to the Call of Duty Endowment. Photo courtesy of Spike TV. uses animated characters, which resemble game avatars, to both differentiate between the gaming experience and that of real veterans, as well as to make an appeal to support veterans’ transition back to civilian life based on that distinction. The avatar states: “When our mission ends, you put the game down until you’re ready to play again. With real people who serve, this is not an option. They’ve sacrificed everything to protect our freedoms. Now they’re coming home and looking for their next mission: a job. Go to HireAVet.spike.com for more information. It’s our duty to help those who have helped us.” 111 The entire appeal is still firmly linked the world of the game. The PSA concludes 144 with a voiceover that says: “Spike proudly salutes Activision’s Call of Duty Endowment for putting our veterans back to work.” 112 Once again, we not only see war used as an unproblematic reference, but the wartime mission is made an equivalent with the routine performance of a job. Finally, the framing of outcomes the U.S.’s post-9/11 conflicts in the simple rhetoric of ‘helping us,’ masks the myriad consequences of these engagements for American soldiers and those living in the theatres of each war. Additionally, much like the earlier discussion of how licensed military goods are able to target military members and families as a defined market segment, C.O.D.E.’s outreach also allows Activision to gain increased access to the valuable demographic of military members. One overt example is Activision’s 2010 donation of $180,000 worth of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II to the U.S. Navy. 113 According to Matthew Waburns, “The games [were to] be distributed to over 300 ships and submarines, as well as Navy Morale, Welfare and Recreation facilities around the world.” 114 Still, despite C.O.D.E.’s emphasis on veteran hiring, it was the endowment, not Activision, which distributed the games to the Navy – in doing so the donation was perceived as coming from a non-profit rather than a corporation with sales goals. Still, it is important to emphasize that this chapter's critique is not rooted in some impossible notion of altruism. Rather, it is to assert that the pervasiveness of CSR, and the pre-packaging of causes it demands, is fundamentally altering representations of war and thus impacting the conditions of potential response given that the experience of war is, for the majority of Americans, entirely mediated. Similarly, it is important to consider the impact of this imagery given that these games are also being played by soldiers while deployed. 145 In certain cases, a contrast can be seen when these military charities are not so heavily filtered through major brands. For example, the Wounded Warrior Project’s independent advertisements are difficult to view; they often show the image of a severely Figure 7. Alive Day Landing Page. Photo courtesy of Adam Aud. disfigured veteran and the date of his ‘Alive Day,’ that is, the anniversary of the day when he barely escaped death. However, it is important to keep in mind that such organizations, as Banet-Weiser argues, are not somehow more authentic. They do not exist outside of brand culture. For although the ‘Alive Day’ ads confront bodily trauma head-on, the term itself, coined by “Wounded Warrior Project Peer Support Program Director, Jim Mayer,” is a pending legal trademark, indicating the WWP’s attention to and maintenance of their unique brand. 115 In addition, filed in August of 2012, the 146 trademarked term not only appears in one of their most prevalent ad campaigns, but was the concept was the central organizing theme of the 2007 HBO documentary project, Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq (Jon Alpert and Ellen Goosenberg Kent). Even the highly regarded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) is heavily branded and uses their brand identity as part of their outreach to veterans. The centrality of branding to the organization is most clearly demonstrated by the major rebranding effort the IAVA underwent in 2011. As their website describes, “The new brand was designed pro bono by world-renowned branding agency Landor Associates, which has worked with major companies such as Blackberry, Citi, FedEx and MillerCoors.” 116 One of the key features of the rebrand was an updated logo. Changing from a traditional font that incorporated a set of three stars, reminiscent of the iconic USO logo, the new imagery’s aesthetic appears to be inspired from modular construction. Figure 8. IAVA logo transformation. Photo courtesy of the IAVA. With its deconstructed approach to letter type, the lack of readability requires that one be ‘in the know’ to decode the logo. In addition, as demonstrated in the two videos the IAVA posted on its YouTube channel during May of 2011, there is also an edginess and adaptability to the logo’s base design which allows young veterans, its target demographic, to create unique tags, much like graffiti, that denote both belonging to a core group of veterans while still marking their unique identity. 117 The videos show 147 various veterans using the new IAVA stencil to create personalized logos and tag them at will. 118 These actions are set to alternative musician Beck’s 2007 song “Timebomb.” The soundtrack selection also contributes to the new edgier quality of the brand, and much like the IAVA’s new approach, the tune “sounds a note of alarm beneath a playful surface.” 119 The intent of this ambivalence is to allow young veterans to express themselves through the IAVA brand. Thus, even when CSR branding partnerships are decentered, we can still see the overarching influence of brand culture on the representation of war and its effects. While physical trauma, PTSD, and other transition difficulties are the reason these veterans need the services of organizations like the IAVA, in the battle to gain both membership and funding the surface appeal must take on a very different face. ACT OF VALOR AS SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY I would again like to return to the example of Act of Valor. In addition to its exemplary employment of current aesthetic strategies in the depiction of war, the tactics used to sell the film combine many of the issues discussed above through the logic of prestige and the practice of CSR. For Relativity, the studio which produced the film, green-lighting the film can be seen as a prestige move. Although much more overt in its spectacular orientation than an HBO production, as Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO of Relativity Media, has remarked, “I think a lot of people want to see something to love in America…We're in a very odd place right now both domestically and internationally. I think this is a real message of reminding everybody of a lot of what we stand for, a lot of 148 our principles and values.” 120 His remarks, specifically the discussion of the film’s relationship to values, are indicative of the social worth of the production and consumption of this text. In addition to prestige, CSR was also an integral part of the Valor’s marketing campaign. The consumer marketing firm Eventful organized a ‘Demand it!’ coordinated publicity campaign. These campaigns are contests whereby, via social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, fans compete to generate the most viral interest for the media property on offer, in order bring the special media event which is built around the relevant media content to their home town. In this particular instance, fans vied for the chance to play BF3 in a theater before it was released; as an added bonus the winning city would also receive access to a special preview screening of Act of Valor where they were given the opportunity to: “Watch the best, then become the best.” 121 In addition, Alex Ben Block’s coverage of Valor’s campaign identified the following efforts: They solicited people to create their own videos thanking the SEALs, some of which were cut into TV spots for the film. Marketers created a program for theaters, and at screenings they handed out pre-addressed postcards that allowed people to thank the SEALs as well. The cards also had web links to sites about the SEALs. Relativity worked closely with a number of military organizations and charities, especially the Navy SEAL Foundation and the Navy SEAL Family Foundation, both of which are non-governmental groups. There was a program with Movietickets.com by which ticket buyers were prompted to make a donation to the Navy SEAL Foundation. Miller High Life created an integrated campaign that included placement in the film, premiere sponsorship and programs to share experiences among veterans. They also were provided with tickets to many of the screenings, which they then used as part of their promotions, some with partners such as Operation Homefront, which provides assistance for veterans and their families. 122 149 As evidenced by the litany of efforts, Valor is, again, exemplary in its ability to capture the cultural and industrial influences that are shaping war representation. Much like HBO, connecting the film to the services through special screenings and military service organizations positions the project as an act of public service. Valor’s connection to Miller only further highlights the interrelation of war-related CSR campaigns. Whereas these coordinated campaigns work symbiotically to generate value for the corporate brand, the underlying situations which have brought about the need for veteran aid and the shoring up of troop morale remain unaddressed. As Banet-Weiser suggests, “Branding is a cultural outlook, a way of understanding and shaping the world that surrounds us. It is also generative; branding is productive in the sense that it produces aspects and relations of social and cultural life.” 123 Brand culture has been particularly generative in shaping a representation of war in which political participation can be executed in the form of consumption. In order for such practices to have meaning, the narrative of the wars has had to be clipped; divorced from its antecedent causes and disentangled from the complex web of political and consumptive practices which spread culpability for these wars across the American citizenry. CONCLUSION The popularity of CSR campaigns among corporations has been steadily building to such an extent that, as Carol Holding remarks, “American companies in nearly every sector say they embrace corporate social responsibility [...] not only because it's the right 150 thing to do, but also because it strengthens their brands.” 124 The key point to emphasize is that the benefit generated for the company holds the privileged position. Although some degree of social, environmental or political benefit is often produced in the process, ultimately, it is not the true goal. As a result, one must consider how causes must be represented such that the company’s involvement does not unintentionally bring about negative associations. When war enters into the realm of CSR, varying discourses such as patriotism and citizenship are activated. This in itself is not necessarily a problem, however, within the contemporary historical moment, the particular connotations of these terms have shifted. Specifically, the rhetoric and representational tropes of the post-9/11 moment create a space in which only affirmative behaviors and attitudes towards the US’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gain legitimacy. Moreover, as Sarah Banet-Weiser has argued, the current “competitive context for commodity activism, like the context for brands themselves, means that some forms of activism have heightened visibility while others are rendered invisible. That is, if activism is retooled as a kind of product that either prospers or fails through capitalism’s circuits of exchange, then some kinds of activism are more 'brandable' than others.” 125 The examples I have explored above are only a few of the virtually innumerable instances of war-related CSR and the influence of brand culture in general. From JC Penny’s donation of civilian apparel to vets, to Marvel Comics’ donation of online comics subscriptions, and Stephen Colbert’s provision of a “‘slice of the American dream’” by giving a special veteran Colbert Report audience “Miller High Life, hot dogs, 151 and his specially branded Ben & Jerry’s ice cream,” the incestuous relationship between brands, CSR and wartime engagement is ubiquitous. 126 Moreover, the pervasiveness of these strategies have some culpability for the fact that consumers’ and citizens’ have only a cursory understanding of and trivial engagement with the United States’ post-9/11 conflicts. As the aforementioned case studies demonstrate, the contemporary configuration of CSR and war is complex and pervasive. One can get out of bed in the morning, throw on a pair of Under Armor WWP shorts, head to The Coffee Bean for a cup of coffee and while there write a thoughtful message on a bag of coffee to send to the troops. After completing this morning ritual, one could play poker with friends using specially marked WWP playing cards while drinking Miller High Life beer, a portion of whose proceeds will go to the IAVA and Operation Homefront. In this way, the quotidian events of a person's everyday life come to represent the ideal mode of civic wartime engagement within the overlapping frameworks of corporate social responsibility, brand culture and the governmental rationalities of advanced liberalism. At base, however, these behaviors are self-reflexive and require representations of war be whitewashed. To conclude, one final example of the power CSR has come to exert upon corporate image-making in relationship to war warrants discussion. In 2004, Marine Corps Sergeant Howard C. Wright sent an email to his friends rebuking Starbucks for its failure to support the Marine Corps and by extension the war effort. While this claim was untrue, due in large part to the unchecked transmissibility of the contemporary digital era, the rumor has persisted for almost a decade. As a result although Starbucks released 152 a statement in January of 2005 attempting to correct the false information, the company once again felt the need to comment on the issue in May of 2012. The statement read: At Starbucks, we respect the efforts of the men and women who serve their country in the military – including our fellow partners who serve during this time of war. In fact, Starbucks has partnered with the American Red Cross and the United Service Organizations (USO) to provide coffee to relief efforts during times of conflict, donating more than 141,000 lbs of coffee and over one million 3-packs of Starbucks VIA®. Additionally, troops all over the world are enjoying Starbucks VIA™ Ready Brew in care packages they receive not only from Starbucks, but from their family and friends as well. In 2011, Starbucks provided over 220,000 3-packs of Starbucks VIA® to the USO for their care package program…We have worked hard to put this rumor to rest, so that it no longer distracts from the many outstanding demonstrations our partners have made – on their own and together – to support the troops. 127 The statement is noteworthy in that, for a memo, it offers an extensively detailed listing of Starbucks’ contributions in an effort to affirm their ongoing support. This level of detail seems logical given that in a competitive market such as coffee sales, the appearance of failing to support the troops not only has the potential to damage customer perceptions of the Starbucks brand, but it simultaneously eliminates the opportunity for the consumer to use the Starbucks brand to construct a patriotic conception of self through the consumption of its products. Thus, the power of war-related CSR, and the pressure to participate which attends its campaigns must be seen as part of the environment of consensus which has largely prevailed since 9/11 – a topic I will explore further in the next chapter. 153 CHAPTER TWO NOTES 1 Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke and Alice Malpass, "The Elusive Subjects of Neo-Liberalism," Cultural Studies 22, no. 5 (2008): 642, doi: 10.1080/09502380802 245902. 2 "Caring Cup: Blending Commitment & Community." International Coffee & Tea, LLC. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, accessed July 27, 2012, http://www.coffeebean.com/ Caring-Cup.html. 3 While Operation Homefront is a well-regarded charity that serves military families in need, CBTL itself is not concretely tied to these efforts. In addition, the program runs for a very short time-frame, functioning as a de facto cap on the funds the company must donate. For 2012, the program ran from June 25 th – August 5 th . 4 "Caring Cup: Blending Commitment & Community" 5 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2012). 6 CBTL is not the only company in this vein, Brawny Paper Towels (a Georgia Pacific company) is another example. They have partnered with the Wounded Warrior Project with an initial donation of $250K and up to an additional $250K based on the social media responses to the company such as ‘liking’ them on Facebook. Yvonne P. Mazzulo, “Brawny paper towels launches partnership with Wounded Warrior Project,” The Examiner, accessed July 27, 2012, http://www.examiner.com/article/brawny-paper- towels-launches-partnership-with-wounded-warrior-project. 7 General Motors, along with Chrysler and Ford offered zero percent financing and other incentives under the rubric of patriotism. When critiqued the companies argued that they were merely responding to President Bush's call for the American people to 'return to normal' life. Catherine Valenti, “Patriotic Ads Stir Some Controversy,” ABC.com, last modified October 19, 2001, accessed July 27, 2012, http://abc news.go.com/Business/ story?id=87628&page=3#.UBNRGqCVoh4>. 8 "pathos, n.," Oxford University Press Online, modified December 2013, accessed January 24, 2014, http://www.oed.com.libproxy.usc. edu/view/Entry/138808? redirectedFrom=pathos. 9 Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 208-26. 154 10 Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke and Alice Malpass, "The Elusive Subjects of Neo-Liberalism," Cultural Studies 22, no. 5 (2008): 626, doi: 10.1080/09502380802245 902. 11 Patricia T. Clough, "The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies," Theory, Culture & Society 25 no. 1 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008) 1, doi: 10.1177/02632 76407085156. I should note here that while affect is a core element of the linguistic analysis in Julia Kristeva's much earlier and important text of 1980, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), it is rooted in psychoanalysis and thus departs from the critical tools which inform this project. Later works which have evolved from the 1995 articles by Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, pay greater attention to the body and are thus better suited to the visceral interpellation at the heart of this project. Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique 31 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1995), 83-109. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins," Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham: Duke UP, 1995), 1-28. 12 Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique 31 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1995), 88. 13 Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” Media-Culture Journal 8, no. 6 (2005), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. 14 Mark Andrejevic, “The Work that Affective Economics Does,” Cultural Studies 25, no.4-5 (2011): 616, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.600551. 15 Andrejevic, "Affective Economics," 608. 16 Jennifer Scanlon, "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore": U.S. Consumers, Wal-Mart, and the Commodification of Patriotism," The Selling of 9/11, ed. Dana Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 181. 17 Scanlon, "Flag Decal," 179. 18 Ibid., 180-1. 19 Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007), 52. 20 Sturken, "Tourists," 9. 21 Ibid., 92. 155 22 Ibid., 6. 23 Andrejevic, "Affective Economics," 610. 24 Ibid., 609. 25 Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), 29. 26 Stahl, Militainment, 29. 27 See inter alia: Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," October 59 (1992): 3-7, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162- 2870%28199224%2959%3C3%3APOTSOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 28 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2010), 10. 29 Dean, Governmentality, 11. 30 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 47. 31 Harvey, Neoliberalism, 41. 32 Ibid., 41 and 176. 33 Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2009), 428. 34 Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 4. 35 Banet-Weiser, Authentic™, 4. 36 André Jansson, “The Mediatization of Consumption: Towards an Analytical Framework of Image Culture,”Journal of Consumer Culture 2, no. 1 (2002): 14, doi: 10.1177/146954050200200101. 37 Jansson, "Mediatization," 14. 156 38 Barnett, et al., "Elusive," 640. 39 Barnett, et al., "Elusive," 625. 40 Banet-Weiser, Authentic™, 9. 41 Banet-Weiser, Authentic™, 137. For further information about the consumer movement during the 1950s-70s, see inter alia Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2012), and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). 42 Banet-Weiser, Authentic™, 137. 43 Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 308. 44 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 62. 45 Cohen, Consumers' Republic, 64. 46 Ibid., 65. 47 Although direct appeals to consumption have been far less frequent than during earlier historical moments, in the weeks after 9/11, President Bush posited shopping as an assertion of the persistence of American values. This stance was adopted by numerous companies, the auto industry in particular, as a meaningful response. Another clear example came directly from President George H. W. Bush during a press conference held on December 20, 2006. President Bush said: “As we work with Congress in the coming year to chart a new course in Iraq and strengthen our military to meet the challenges of the 21st century, we must also work together to achieve important goals for the American people here at home. This work begins with keeping our economy growing. As we approach the end of 2006, the American economy continues to post strong gains. The most recent jobs report shows that our economy created 132,000 more jobs in November alone, and we've now added more than 7 million new jobs since August of 2003. The unemployment rate has remained low, at 4.5 percent. A recent report on retail sales shows a strong beginning to the holiday shopping season across the country -- and I encourage you all to go shopping more.” (George H. W. Bush, "Press Conference by The President," December 20, 2006, transcript, Indian Treaty Room, Washington D.C., http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2006/12/20061220-1.html. 157 48 James J. Kimble, Mobilizing the Home Front: War Bonds and Domestic Propaganda (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), x. 49 Kimble, Mobilizing, 7. 50 Ibid., 4. 51 The two key articles which formed this debate were: A.A. Berle, Jr., “Corporate Powers as Powers in Trust,” 44 HARV. L. REV. 1049 (1931) and E. Merrick Dodd, Jr., “For Whom Are Corporate Managers Trustees?,” 45 HARV. L. REV. 1145 (1932). 52 Philip L. Cochran, “The Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility,” Business Horizons 50, (2007): 449. 53 “1940s War, Cold War and Consumerism,” Advertising Age March 28, 2005 LexisNexis 28 Jan 2013. 54 Andrew H. Sidman and Helmut Norpoth, “Fighting to Win: Wartime Morale in the American Public,” Electoral Studies 31, no. 12 (2012): 331. 55 Cochran, "Evolution," 449. 56 N. Craig Smith, “Consumers as Drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility,” in The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility, ed. Andrew Crane, Abagail McWilliams, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 281. 57 Women Strike For Peace “Napalm” Poster (1966), accessed January 29, 2013, http://www.georgetown bookshop.com/display2.asp?id=1079. 58 Smith, "Consumers," 284. 59 C. A. Harwell Wells, “The Cycles of Corporate Social Responsibility: An Historical Perspective for the Twenty-first Century,” University of Kansas Law Review 51 (2002): 112-3. 60 Wells, "Cycles," 120. 61 Ibid., 124. 62 Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2010), 30 and 31. 63 Wells, "Cycles," 125. 158 64 Inger L. Stole, "Philanthropy as Public Relations: A Critical Perspective on Cause Marketing," International Journal of Communication 2, (2008): 26. 65 Stole, "Philanthropy," 26. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 25. 68 Ibid. 69 Steve Worthington and Suzanne Horne, "Affinity Credit Cards: Card Issuer Strategies and Affinity Group Aspirations," The International Journal of Bank Marketing 10, no. 7 (1992): 3. 70 Patricia Winters, “Bank Taps Patriotism, Backs Vets with Visa,” Advertising Age, 17 Aug 1987: 22 Lexis Nexis Academic January 28, 2013. 71 Winters, "Bank Taps Patriotism," 22. 72 Rick Hampson, “Hardware Heroes in New Gulf War Trading Cards,” Associated Press. Hudson Valley Morning News, February 11, 1991: A4. 73 Hampson, "Hardware Heroes," A4. 74 Ibid. 75 Jeffrey J. Gordon, “A Geographer Looks at Desert Storm Trading Cards,” Journal of American Culture 17, no. 1 (1994): 39. 76 Gordon, "Trading Cards," 39. 77 Tad Tuleja, “Closing the Circle: Yellow Ribbons and the Redemption of the Past,” Journal of American Culture 17, no. 1 (1994): 23. 78 Kenon Breazeale, “Bringing the War Back Home: Consuming Operation Desert Storm,” Journal of American Culture 17, no. 1 (1994): 31. 79 Breazeale, "Bringing the War," 31. 80 Dana Heller, The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2. 159 81 Heller, Selling of 9/11, 3. 82 David Barstow and Diana B. Henriques, “9/11 Tie-Ins Blur Lines of Charity and Profit,” The New York Times, February 2, 2002, Metro: A1. 83 Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 65. 84 For an insightful analysis see: Samuel Dwinell, "Rock Enroll: Music and Militarization Since 9/11," The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror, ed. Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 13-30. 85 “The U.S. Code [is] the official document that contains the codified general and permanent laws of the United States, since 1942.” Marc Leepson, “Capturing The Flag: It’s not only still there, it’s everywhere. At the polls and by the pool, the Stars and Stripes sells,” The Washington Post, July 6, 2008: B01. 86 DoD Financial Management Regulation, Volume 12, Chapter 31 (2011): 4, accessed June 4, 2012, http://comptroller.defense.gov/fmr/12/12_31.pdf. 87 Christian Davenport, “It’s Not Just a Service: Military is a Brand Too,” The Washington Post, September 12, 2011. Factiva. 18 July 2012. 88 Davenport, "Not Just a Service." 89 Michael J. Sandel as quoted in Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to be Us (New York: Picador, 2011), 291. 90 Kate Fitzgerald, “Ad Age Special Report: In the $150 Billion Kids’ Marketing Universe, the Licensing Field has Changed from a ‘Here-Today, Gone-Tomorrow’ Lunch Bucket and T-Shirt Add-On to a Strategic Weapon in the Arsenal of Attention Grabbers,” Advertising Age February 12, 1996. LexisNexis July 9, 2012. 91 “The Real Story Behind Veteran Unemployment Rates: Perception vs. Reality," G. I. Jobs.com, n.d. Web. March 12, 2013. <http://www.gijobs. com/the-real-story-behind- veteran-unemployment-rates.aspx>. 92 The Wounded Warrior Project, "Why Your Donation Matters," The Wounded Warrior Project, <http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/why-your-donation-matters.aspx>. Accessed February 15, 2013. 93 Sturken, 17-8. 160 94 Even some of the media which attempts to handle veteran reintegration seriously are subject to similar forms of simplification. The IAVA’s “Alone” PSA, for example attempts to acknowledge the isolation felt by veterans when they return from combat, however, this situation is remedied by the simple hand shake and acknowledgement of another service member reaching out rather than by any societal recognition or solidarity. 95 Lucia Mutikani, “War Trauma Hurting Veterans' Job Prospects, Study Finds,” Huffington Post: Business (Reuters) Web. February 25, 2013. <http://www.huffington post.com/2013/02/25/veterans-jobs_n_2759862.html>. 96 “Give A Veteran a Piece of the High Life,” Miller High Life Web. Accessed 06 July 2012. <http://www.millerhighlife.com/high-life-experiences/index.aspx>. 97 www.flickr.com/photos/iava/6028947039/ 98 Alex Ben Block, “Selling 'Act of Valor': How a Targeted Marketing Campaign Led to a Big Opening Weekend,” The Hollywood Reporter. 29 Feb 2012. Web. 6 July 2012. <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/act-valor-navy-seals-relativity-marketing- campaign-295834>. 99 Block, “Selling ‘Act of Valor’” 100 "UA Green." Under Armour®. Web. February 25, 2013. 101 "UA Freedom WWP." Under Armour®.” Web. February 25, 2013. 102 For a detailed examination of the relationship between sports and militarization see: Roger Stahl, “Sports and the Militarized Body Politic,” in Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), 49-72. 103 “Uniforms Unveiled for Wounded Warrior Project Game on Oct. 1,” Gamecocks Online, September 21, 2011. Web. Accessed February 27, 2013. <http://www.game cocksonline.com/ sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/092111aaa.html/feed/>. 104 “The Case for Cause Marketing: When Thinking Beyond the Brand Resonates with Shoppers,” Acosta, Web. February 25, 2013, <www.acosta.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx? LinkIdentifier...>. 105 “Believe In Heroes,” Wounded Warrior Project, Web. February 25, 2013. <http:// www.woundedwarriorproject.org/believe-in-heroes.aspx>. 106 “The Case for Cause Marketing, Acosta, February 25, 2013. 161 107 “The Case for Cause Marketing, Acosta, February 25, 2013. 108 “Hire A Veteran Salutes Companies that Put America’s Heroes to Work,” Spike Web. November 11, 2011. < <http://www.spike.com/articles/rynjs9/hire-a-vet-hire-a-veteran- salutes-companies-that-put-americas-heroes-to-work>. 109 “Spike TV salutes PepsiCo's Commitment to Veteran Hiring,” PepsiCo Channel. Accessed July 6, 2012. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R-ucQI106I>. 110 "About Us," Call of Duty Endowment, Web. March 4, 2013. <http://www.callofduty endowment.org/about-us/about-code/>. 111 “Hire a Vet: Spike Salutes Activision's Call Of Duty Endowment,” Spike.com Web. December 12, 2011. <http://www.spike.com/video-clips/l8zov7/hire-a-vet-spike-salutes- activisions-call-of-duty-endowment>. Video. 112 “Hire a Vet: Spike Salutes Activision's Call Of Duty Endowment,” Spike.com 113 Matthew Waburns, “US NAVY Gets $180,000 of Modern Warfare 2 Games,” Gamerscenter.net Web. March 30, 2010 <http://www.gamerscenter.net/news/251/us- navy-gets-180000-of-modern-warfare-2-games/>. Las accessed March 11, 2013. 114 Waburns, “US NAVY,” March 11, 2013. 115 Adam Aud, “Alive Day Landing Page,” 2011 Web. March 14, 2013. <http://www. adamaud.com/WWP-Alive-Day-Landing-Page>. 116 "IAVA's 2011 Brand Launch - Why." IAVA. N.p., n.d. Web. Last Accessed March 14, 2013. <http://iava.org/iavas-2011-brand-launch-why>. 117 “IAVA's New Look,” IAVAVids Channel, May 24, 2011, Web. YouTube. Last Accessed November 25, 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2locpg6X38>. And “The Making of IAVA’s New Look,” IAVAVids Channel, May 5, 2011 Web. YouTube. November 25, 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZbzo4kMIZE>. 118 Tagging, with squadron/unit stickers instead of spray paint, is also a common element of military service. When a service member visits a new base/unit stickers are often tagged as a sign of one’s having been there. 119 Nate Chinen, “That Ticking Sound? It’s Beck’s New Single,” The New York Times September 2, 2007 Web. Last Accessed March 14, 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/ 2007/09/02/arts/music/02play.html?ex=1346385600&en=cf8f9ea1eddfca08&ei=5088&p artner=rssnyt&emc=rss>. 162 120 Alex Ben Block, “Selling Act of Valor: How a Targeted Marketing Campaign Led to a Big Opening Weekend,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 29, 2012 Web. July 6, 2012. <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/act-valor-navy-seals-relativity- marketing-campaign-295834>. 121 Act of Valor Website, 8 Mar. 2012 <http://actofvalor.com/bf3/>. 122 Block, “Selling Act of Valor” 123 Banet-Weiser, Authentic™, 9. 124 Carol Holding, “CSR’s Impact on Brands Grows,” Policy Innovations August 23, 2007 Web. Last Accessed August 6, 2012. <http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/ commentary/data/csr_brand_impact>. 125 Banet-Weiser , Authentic™, 18. 126 "JCPenney and IAVA Honor Over 6,000 Returning Vets with New Apparel," last modified October 10, 2011, accessed February 11, 2013, <http://www.jcpenney.net/ Media/Media-Room/Press-Releases/Corporate-Social-Responsibility/jcpenney-and- IAVA-Honor-Over-6,000-Returning-Vets-.aspx>. "Marvel and IAVA Provide Free Comics for Veterans," last modified January 24, 2012, accessed February 11, 2013, marvel.com/news/story/17937/marvel_iava_provide_free_comics_for_veterans. "IAVA Storms the Colbert Report," Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, last modified September 10, 2010, accessed February 11, 2013, iava.org/success-story/iava-storms- colbert-report. 127 “Starbucks Newsroom: Starbucks Support of the Troops/Military [Updated May 2012],” Starbucks Web. February 19, 2013. <http://news.starbucks.com/about+ starbucks/myths+facts/militarydonations.htm>. 163 CHAPTER THREE A WAR OF EXCLUSIVITY: INFORMATION, ACCESS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” - Donald Rumsfeld 1 "...the classical construct of the public sphere - a place for the open discussion of ideas among equals to create and sustain civil society - has become a fantasy, a chimera[...] Rather, this period of empire and war, combined with the current conditions of massive media mergers produces blindness. This political economy of blindness renders [...] war [...] opaque, unclear, remote, phantasmatic." - Patricia R. Zimmermann 2 The preceding chapters have outlined a number of trends occurring within recent representations of the United States' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This last chapter carries their conclusions forward by looking at how aesthetic considerations and brand culture function synergistically to further constrain access to war. As the epigraph from Patricia Zimmermann asserts, the concept of access does not only apply to physical or virtual access to diversely presented war representations. As well, we must consider the battle that occurs around which representations and what information can be made available. While governmental rules of confidentiality most certainly suppress and conceal information, the aesthetic considerations of brand culture likewise inform decisions that affect access. As opposed to a criterion of information security, here, brand identity and market research about viewers combine to form a narrative about what sorts of content have value for a given audience, and for the brand providing that content. In 164 this way, representations come to bear the brand hallmarks of their producers and distributors. The privileged position of brand aesthetics is all the more troublesome if we consider its potential to impact the form and function of America’s public sphere(s). 3 One prominent inflection point can be seen in the trajectories traveled by post-9/11 war documentaries. While it is true that documentaries have always had difficulty gaining exposure, in recent years, the terms upon which a given text can be seen hinge primarily upon considerations of brand management. Therefore, familiarizing oneself with the impact of branding and aesthetics upon documentaries is important to a broader understanding of information access and the health of the public sphere. This is because documentary programming on television has frequently introduced the American public to new and, as is often the case, under-examined information about the United States’ post-9/11 wars. The ability for documentaries to function in this way is derived from factors both intrinsic and extrinsic to documentary form. Although documentaries derive much of their power from the imagery itself, their relevance to the public sphere issues from the compromised state of American news media. These media often fail to contribute contextualized, comprehensive information about warfare; a form of presentation that arguably retains the potential to support enlightened national dialogue. Therefore, by tracing the histories of a number of war documentaries, the synergistic impacts of branding and aesthetics, as well as the stakes for public discourse, are made clear. Accordingly, this chapter expands the notion of access. By doing so, one can 165 consider issues of accessibility beyond the actual logistics of production and distribution. This is a necessary intervention given that there are other factors which significantly impact whether or not a text is made or can be viewed, and whether the perspectives of warfare espoused by a given piece of content can be comprehended. Since industrial practices have not been the only impediment to the free flow of in-depth mediated examinations of war, and in order to grasp the potency of what may initially appear to be subtle influences on presentation and distribution, the politico-historical context of this time period is exceedingly important. Consequently, in addition to performing an examination of the impact of branded aesthetics, this chapter analyzes the multiple sites from which the dispersion of mediated information, in the form of critical documentaries about the United States' post-9/11 wars, was stymied; for it is within this milieu that the potential for these texts to support a vibrant public sphere is further subverted. Therefore, it is the currently unrealized capacity of non-fiction war media to abet the invigoration of the public sphere with which this investigation is ultimately concerned. That is to say, in the contemporary moment, that which is not available to be seen, and known, is not solely a product of governmental purview. Importantly, it is the domain of an ever shrinking pool of media providers whose stake in the distribution of these texts is closely linked to the hyper- management of their corporate branded identities. As the case studies of war documentaries will demonstrate, these interests limit the potential of these media to foster societal discourse. 166 INFORMATION AND ACCESS AFTER 9/11 In order to understand precisely why the information conveyed in critical war documentaries is so valuable, it is essential to first look at the state of information in the United States. In the wake of the events of September 11th, 2001 and the signing into law of the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, the environment in which information and discourse could be circulated was deeply impacted. As mentioned in the first chapter, a 'support the troops rhetoric' was prevalent and served to suppress not only dissident opinion, but any information which was not easily categorized as affirming official discourse. Still, even before the consensual rhetoric and repression of information that characterized the post-9/11 moment had taken full effect, U.S. news had its limitations. The professionalization of journalism and the consolidation of the media industries, characteristic of American processes of news gathering, were also integral components that contributed to the degraded state of information. The stakes of these problems for democracy are all the more grave in the context of war. Robert McChesney argues the development of professionalized journalistic practice was coeval with the US’s emergence of military might in the years leading up to the second World War. He states: “The limitations of the version of professional journalism that solidified its hold on newsrooms in the United States by the 1940s – reliance on official sources, fear of context, and the unstated ‘dig here, not there’ mandate – work in combination to make professional journalism a lapdog more than a watchdog as the drums of war beat louder.” 4 Another aspect to consider is the specific political economy of the news media as 167 an industry. As Philip Taylor has argued, "News organizations, with all their commercial pressures, make decisions about what stories, especially foreign stories, they need to cover. They spend a great deal of time and money on market research about their audiences...In other words, information competition is the sole motivation that prompts the news media to do the job we used to think it was paid to do." 5 Adding to the problem are waves of newspaper closures in recent years. What is particularly distressing about these closures, reorganizations and the shuttering of foreign news bureaus is that the reasoning being offered is that the companies are in financial trouble. Eric Klinenberg, in his seminal study of US media industries, counters these notions arguing that the real reason for these changes is the desire for increased profit margins. 6 In these instances it is easy to grasp why Jürgen Habermas feared the commercialization of the public sphere. 7 Toby Miller has made similar claims based on network tendencies toward the privileging of ratings, and "ensuring returns to [network shareholders]." 8 In terms of their approaches to representing the wars, he argues that these behaviors fostered an environment in which coverage of the war amounted to little more than “techno-fetishism and flag-waving.” 9 These limitations of TV journalism are pressing because as Taylor has noted, "Television news may have become since the 1960s the most preferred and trusted medium of news provision for audiences in developed countries, but that does not mean it is the most reliable or accurate source. It is very much a flawed first rough draft of history." 10 That TV news has obvious limitations is all the more relevant given that, for example, "Seventy percent of the U.S. public obtained 'information' about the 2003 invasion of Iraq from television." 11 As a result, the combination of the political and 168 economic considerations of journalism with a decades-long process of deregulation in the media industries has resulted in a dearth of in-depth, contextualized information. Thus the restriction of information was not simply a de facto occurrence due to official and public aversions toward critique in the post-9/11 moment. In fact, there were a number of material factors which served to circumscribe knowledge production and dissemination about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In light of this, we must consider how extant information policies strengthened the inclination toward consent. One prominent instance was the ban on showing coffins. Although the policy was established in 1991, during the first Gulf War, its continuance was one overt example of how the costs of warfare were often hidden from view. 12 Ultimately, when the ban was lifted in 2009, the press fervently covered the arrival of military remains in Dover, Delaware. However, given the specific political economy of the news industry, and thus the cost of covering additional stories, many news agencies quickly tired of the topic. As Byron York reported, a mere five months after the ban was eliminated, the only outlet to cover the arrivals has been the Associated Press, "which supplies photos to 1,500 U.S. newspapers and 4,000 Web sites, [and] has had a photographer at every arrival for which permission was granted." 13 Leaving journalism, and its resources, aside as a mode of access to information, another direct route to gaining governmental information is via the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request process. The Freedom of Information Act, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson on July 4th, 1966, is "a law that gives...access [to] information from the federal government. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their 169 government." 14 Despite the law's intention, the FOIA process is notoriously slow and often fails to provide information in a timely matter, if at all. It should be noted that according to the government FOIA website, the department with the greatest backlog of requests for information is the Department of Homeland Security. 15 The extent of these delays can be so substantial as to undermine the process's intent. Commenting on this, Matthew Wald asks in a recent New York Times article, "Is A FOIA Delayed, A FOIA Denied?" 16 This because it is not uncommon for requests to be delayed for a number of years, long after the usefulness of the information has passed. In some extreme instances there exist requests which "are approaching 20 years old." 17 Although these types of delays existed before 2001, the "Bush administration...tightened up on releases after the Sept. 11 attacks" further exacerbating an already inefficient system. 18 This tightening, largely tied to the broader restriction of information which accompanied the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, was one of a series of FOIA amendments that were enacted between "1986 to 2001, ...that provided agencies with the ability to withhold information from the public." 19 Whether evidenced via the tightening of the access to FOIA documents or through the public witch-hunt of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his role in releasing classified military documents, the post-9/11 moment became an environment where access to information related to the United States’ wars was made contentious. Beyond the persecution of its founder, the WikiLeaks incident is also useful in that it, too, demonstrates how access is increasingly constrained via non-governmental actors. As Yochai Benkler discovers in his analysis of WikiLeaks’ “denial of payment” attacks, it was the private sector’s kowtowing to governmental critiques that had the 170 greatest impact upon WikiLeaks’ ability to continue providing access to restricted information. In the wake of critical comments about the legality of the documents release, many companies discontinued their services with WikiLeaks. Thus, the ‘prosecution’ of WikiLeaks by companies such as Amazon, Visa, and MasterCard, who withheld the donations that fund the company’s operations, is a watershed moment that marks the transition to extra-legal forms of censorship. As Benkler describes, "By publicly stating or implying that WikiLeaks had acted unlawfully, the attackers pressured firms skittish about their public image to cut off their services to WikiLeaks." 20 He continues noting that, these statements "triggered vigilante actions by corporations that, unfettered by the laws constraining public sector responses, likely saw themselves as acting in the national interest as they degraded the site's capabilities." 21 While the magnitude of such a shift cannot be underestimated, what remains unaddressed here is the role played by brand culture in shaping these companies’ responses. Given the assertions of Jennifer Scanlon and Marita Sturken, regarding the branding of the nation, what was at stake was not pure concern for national interest. Rather, as Benkler alludes in his reference to “public image,” their responses were indicative of the careful management of the nationalist, or patriotic, component of their brand identities. In this way, attention to brand management can be seen to underlie the reasoning behind service denials in the absence of coercion. Although, as outlined above, one can see the problems associated with the limitation of information, there simultaneously exists the paradoxical problem of too much information. The implications of the surfeit of governmental and non-governmental 171 forms of information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has received scant attention. As is characteristic of information in the digital age more broadly, an unimaginable amount of data has been produced about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; a byproduct of recent proclivities toward embedding, blogging, live reportage, and the posting of user- generated video. Therefore, the massive amount audio visual information about post-9/11 warfare that comes in the form of first-person reportage, soldier videos and vlogs, as well as government generated media, has the potential to overwhelm the public. One interesting example is the Army’s decision to start tweeting information from combat zones in 2009. As Reuters reported: The Twitter feed is a part of a broader social-networking strategy being employed by the army, which has seen US forces given their own Facebook page and a channel on YouTube to post videos about their work. The army says the decision to use the latest internet craze was meant to ‘engage non-traditional audiences directly with news, videos, pictures and other information from Operation Enduring Freedom’ and to ‘preempt extremist propaganda.’ 22 The problem with this sort of supplemental information is that governmental Tweets, alongside astro-turf, or fake grass-roots phenomena, as George Monbiot has argued, “drown out [the perspectives of] real people on the internet.” 23 One clear example of military ‘astro-turf’ phenomena is the maintenance of the MNF-IRAQ (Multinational Force Iraq) Channel on YouTube. The channel is meant to mimic the aesthetics of soldier-posted videos found on the video hosting site, while simultaneously serving as a corrective to the disruption of official discourse that they often effect. 24 Moreover, given well-documented hoaxes and the difficulty in discerning credible sources, sifting through available media which can lend insight into the state of U.S. 172 warfare becomes daunting. Consequently, modes of access and distribution, searchability and metadata, as well as issues of fact-checking and errata dissemination gain importance. Therefore, in an environment of media saturation, as the rising popularity of curation technologies such as RSS feeds attests, viewers can increasingly be seen to rely upon trusted sources to filter and prioritize their access to information. In this milieu, since established brands have to potential to perform this function for its audiences, the factors which determine decisions about which texts to produce and distribute become significant. MEDIA ACCESS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE As indicated in the brief survey above, the conditions governing access to information after 9/11, were also generative of specific outcomes that restricted the circulation of informative non-fiction media. These limiting effects are significant in that they foreclosed the potential of certain texts to facilitate critical engagement with warfare amongst America’s publics. As the case studies that follow demonstrate, war documentaries are a prime example. However, while this line of argumentation is built upon the assumed utility of the information within documentaries to public discourse, a qualification must be made: that being, although such texts indeed offer scarce perspectives of post-9/11 war, any overdetermination of their value is to be avoided. Thus, while TV documentaries are not the only potential source of in-depth information, they are featured prominently here in that they are useful in drawing out the connections between brand culture, aesthetics and their latent influence upon public discourse. Given 173 the significant role of these media, and in order to parse the connections between media, discourse, participation, and democracy, one must per force address how it is that individual responses come together with others to form local and national dialogue. The key theoretical construct through which these associations are thought in relation to each other is the public sphere. The concept of the public sphere originated in the work of Jürgen Habermas. For Habermas the eighteenth century's culture of letter writing allowed for a new revelation of one’s subjectivity. 25 From the world of the home a shared subjectivity moved into the public with the creation of the novel and other literary forms. These new genres of writing allowed “privatized individuals [to come] together to form a public [while] also reflect[ing] critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted." 26 The Habermasian public sphere was a world which prized writing and conversation above all other forms of expression. Although Habermas’ version of the public sphere never truly existed, as Colin Sparks reminds us, "[...]its normative value remains considerable. The formal requirements for the constitution of a public sphere are, it can be argued, the essential conditions for the conduct of a democratic polity." 27 One of the earliest, and best known, critiques of the Habermasian public sphere came from Nancy Fraser: “… [who disputed] four assumptions of Habermas […]: that it is possible 'to bracket status differentials and to deliberate as if [people are] social equals'; that a single public sphere is preferable to multiple spheres; that private interests must be excluded from the public sphere; and that the public sphere must be clearly separated from the state." 28 Each of Fraser's critiques 174 significantly weakens Habermas's concept since the only way for a true public sphere to exist was for everyone to have access. Applying the concept of the public sphere to the case of contemporary non-fiction war media requires significant translation since Habermas's formulation was firmly tied to a particular socio-cultural and historical moment and specific forms of media. Given this, issues pertaining to the specificity of a different nation-state, different technologies, a different historical moment, and different economic formations all stand to radically destabilize how and if a public sphere might be said to exist in contemporary American society and be rooted in documentary practice. One aspect that must be reconsidered pertains to the dominance of visual media in America. One of Habermas’s critiques of the erosion of the public sphere in the nineteenth century was predicated on the turn to visual forms as a supplement to the written word. Although he praised periodicals whose use of illustration was intended to make the information therein more widely available, he also sees this development as setting in motion a trend where, “by means of variegated type and layout and ample illustration reading is made easy at the same time that its field of spontaneity in general is restricted by serving up the material as a ready-made convenience, patterned and predigested." 29 Habermas’s critique reveals "…the strong emphasis on literacy in public sphere theory… [it also] exibit[s] a strong logocentrism…'that cultural bias, convinced of the superiority of writing or propositional language, that devalues sensory, affective, and kinetic forms of communication precisely because they often baffle verbal resolution." 30 Yet, if the intent is to recuperate the productive aspects of the public sphere in light of 175 contemporary society, it seems a more generous view of visual culture is required. Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, in their work on iconic photographs, directly challenge the notion that the potential for rational thought does not inhere in the image. As evidence they highlight the fact that “U.S. public culture was what it was during the second half of the twentieth century because visual images, as much or more than conversation, were the definitive supplement to print journalism and the most significant means for virtual embodiment of public identity.” 31 The changes wrought by television in the 1950s were only the smallest hint of the transformation that would ensue with the development of cable, satellite, computers, digitization and mobile technologies. Each of these advances further solidified the tie between information and image; a relationship that is made manifest in documentary’s form and function. In addition to the effects technological changes have had on the relationship between imagery and information, the Internet, as arguably the most significant technological development of the past several decades makes it necessary to account for the central role of computers in facilitating access to various media. As it is increasingly common that the way the public engages with, and responds to, media is through the Internet, it is necessary to account for how notions of the public sphere figure in relationship to the online world. Political Although the foregoing postulations of the public sphere highlight its existence as both essential and improbable, they make valuable contributions to considerations of a public sphere in the contemporary moment. Their insights evince the significance of TV documentaries in the post-9/11 informational environment. Despite its commercial 176 orientation, American television, yet possesses some attributes of the public service broadcaster. As evidenced by former broadcasting guidelines such as the Fairness Doctrine, and ubiquitous appeals to fair and balanced presentation, U.S. television takes its role as a provider of information quite seriously. Likewise, as a condition of its medium specificity, TV is always already navigating the permeable boundaries between public and private. Moreover, television’s political economy, as manifested in its preference for certain, more easily monetized, audiences reiterates the inequalities that characterize the disparate publics of the public sphere. For, as Peter Dahlgren has argued, “whatever arguments we care to make about the responsibility that television has to society, [...] television’s output, the topics and modes of representation, are shaped to no small extent by the impact of circumstances and relations beyond its own organizational settings; it operates in a configuration of sociocultural forces.” 32 In this way, war documentaries on television are demonstrative of larger transitions taking place with regard to information dispersion and the media. RETELLING REALITY: FACT-BASED FICTIONS AND INFORMATION While this chapter is primarily concerned with the issues of informational accessibility as it relates to TV documentaries about the war, the restriction of information after 9/11 has created a knowledge void that recent fiction films have also attempted to fill. These texts warrant brief examination, for although these films have been adapted from actual occurrences, they are copies of copies, and to the extent that the reality of lived experience resists representation even by those who have experienced it 177 directly, these derivative texts begin to take on the function of simulacra. HBO's critically-acclaimed Generation Kill (2008), for example, began as a series of articles in Rolling Stone, then turned into a book, and was then adapted for television by David Simon and Ed Burns. 33 While one must always interrogate the artistic license that is taken in such translations, this is particularly true of recent texts given the lack of information against which such renderings can be read. Although, documentaries have been far more prevalent, and more critical, several films recreated recent occurrences in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and attempted to make similar truth claims. Consequently, the line between fiction and fact in war media has become increasingly blurred. While military consultants indeed help to increase the believability of films, television and video games, in recent months controversial military input into two different productions seem to indicate that new information is being released first through fictional formats. For instance, seven SEALs were punished for their collaboration on 2012's Medal of Honor: Warfighter and the Senate Intelligence committee investigated the interactions between the CIA and the production team of Zero Dark Thirty. These two situations mark a distinct transformation in the modes of access and circulation that pertain to the acquisition of information regarding American warfare. This is because, as Peter Maass argues, "we're getting the myth of history before getting the actual history." 34 Accordingly, in addition to Generation Kill, the discussion that follows examines three films that exemplify the significance of the unique informational context, as it relates to the fictionalization of real events, during the post-9/11 moment. 178 The first film in this case study is the NBC Movie of the Week (MOW) docudrama Saving Jessica Lynch which aired on Sunday, November 9 th 2003. The tele- film reenacts the ambushing of a supply convoy during the early moments of the Iraq conflict which results in the death and abduction of several soldiers. Although the incident had been spun by both the Bush administration and the news media, NBC continued through many rewrites betting on the narrative as a core element of their sweeps schedule. 35 What is most interesting about Saving Jessica Lynch is that in many ways it ended up being the most honest media portrayal of the events. While journalists jumped on board with official administrative reports, issuing corrections along the way, the film, somewhat anti-climactically portrays a wounded soldier who is eventually returned home. However, as both Susan Faludi and Melanie McAllister note, the film is also important for the way in which it revives America’s long-standing fascination with captivity narratives. 36 This narrative goes back to confrontations with Native American populations where settlers were repeatedly incapable of defending the homeland. As Faludi notes: “A defining aspect of this cultural re-engineering was the upending of a gender history that had proved deeply humiliating to men. Time and again, leaders and militias had failed to protect and redeem women and their children.” 37 Although ostensibly a success for the network, the film highlights the failure of the discourse of the war in Iraq writ large. Saving Jessica Lynch serves as a heroic tale, rescuing the damsel in distress - it succeeds in the American imaginary where tales of a protracted war cannot. Brian De Palma’s 2007 film Redacted also lends insight into the fraught milieu that characterized the circulation of information about the United States' ongoing wars. 179 The genesis of the project was the specific desire of Marc Cuban’s HDNet Films to produce a film in high definition video rather than a desire to produce a film about warfare. For HDNet the film also functioned as a test run for its new Video On Demand (VOD) service which made the film available two days before its theatrical release. When HD Net approached De Palma, he tentatively committed providing he could find subject matter that would be best explored using the medium. Spurred by the reported war crimes by US soldiers, De Palma discovered in his research that these incidents had been examined most thoroughly in “soldier's homemade war videos, […] their web sites, and their 'YouTube' postings. [The story] was all there, and all in video." 38 Redacted tells the story of a group of soldiers fighting in Iraq through the lenses of the varying forms of current media coverage. The film uses classic cinematography, video diaries shot with handheld cameras, news reportage, and web pages amongst other formats. It is a fictionalized account of events that happened in the war, a story of soldiers breaking Geneva Conventions and brutally killing non-combatants. DePalma’s work, often praised for the way stories are visualized, produces in Redacted a deliberative distance within the framework of embeddedness which characterizes most other contemporary media depictions of the wars. Although the film was made for a modest $5 Million, it made less than $70,000 domestically with its worldwide take failing to break $800,000. Despite the fact that it was only released in 15 theaters and performed so poorly, the film provoked quite a response. Using reportage about the rape and murder of a 14 year-old Iraqi girl named Abeer Qasim Hamza, by U.S. soldiers outside Mahmudiya on March 12, 2006, the film mobilizes fictional strategies to access and recover the 180 reality of the event. This stands in stark contrast to the approach of many other media texts that supplant truth in storytelling with an aesthetic that strives solely for visual veracity. The fact that the film was fictionalized spoke to the political environment in which it was released. As Jacques Ranciere has described, the post-9/11 moment in the US was characterized by “consensus.” For example, Donald Rumsfeld, in the days immediately following the attack told Americans to watch what they said, and Michael Moore had attempts made on his life after the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). Given this, fiction might be seen as providing a unique space for straightforward commentary. As DePalma has said: "'Everything in the movie [was] based on things that happened, but one of the difficulties in making the film was navigating through the legal issues. We were forced to fictionalize things that were actually real. Even with the montage [of photos showing actual Iraqi civilians killed during the war], we weren't allowed the dignity of showing the faces of the people. The great irony of Redacted was it was also redacted.'" 39 The censoring of the final minutes of the film, which consists of a ninety-second montage of dead Iraqi civilians, condenses the uneasy, yet generative coexistence of fact and fiction in Redacted. Over the course of production the decision to include photographs was a perpetual point of contention between HDNet Films, the now defunct production banner of Magnolia pictures, and DePalma. During the final 24-hours before the film opened at the 2007 New York Film Festival, the producers decided to redact the film’s concluding montage by blotting out the faces of the victims. Citing fear of litigation, since there was no way to obtain releases for the photos, the production 181 company claimed including the photos unaltered was too great a risk. The one photo which remained as DePalma had intended is the film’s final image. Figure 9. Staged photo of the rape/murder scene of Abeer Qasim Hamza that serves as the final frame of Redacted (2007). Photo by Taryn Simon. Not willing to sacrifice exposing viewers to the horrifying reality of what these soldiers had done, of what war can sometimes entail, DePalma hired a photographer to stage the photo of Farah’s (Zahra Zubaidi) dead body. It is the only "…photograph that remains in full view. Staged and shot by New York photographer Taryn Simon, the film's final picture shows, in grisly detail, the image of a young corpse that's meant to be the murdered girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza. 'It's staged, but it's a real death,' maintains De Palma." 40 As the final frame of the film, this staged shot demonstrates the unstable relationship of documentation to fact. Whereas the prevailing style, particularly in documentary is ostensibly showing the truth, this act of staging opens up a view of 182 combat from outside the realm of the soldier. In this way, it perhaps provides a more comprehensive picture of the potential consequences of war for those who are not American soldiers. During chapter one's discussion of aesthetics, I detailed the concrete linkages between reality television and the formulation of the embedded, visceral portrayal of warfare. As the example of Profiles from the Frontline demonstrated, a key factor in the impact a show like Profiles could have was borne out of the extensive access that the show's crews had to the soldiers and the conflict. This level of access was theirs alone, as journalists, before the start of the embed program, were limited to official daily briefs. Much like Profiles, the issue of privileged media access recurred again, with far greater journalistic attention, around the production of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's film Zero Dark Thirty (2012). In December of 2012, while the film was still in limited release, Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain, and Carl Levin wrote "a letter to Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman and chief executive Michael Lynton criticizing 'Zero Dark Thirty' for its depiction of torture." 41 Thus, the press attention largely emphasized whether or not the film's foregrounding of torture made the case that it was essential to Osama Bin Laden's capture and death. The Senators' were concerned that the film incorrectly linked the success of the mission with torture tactics that had been deemed both ineffective and illegal, rather than that the film was overly reliant on official narratives in the retelling of this story. Yet another controversy surrounded the accidental release of classified information when Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta "specifically recognized the unit that conducted the raid [that resulted in the death of Osama Bin 183 Laden] and identified the ground commander by name" in the presence of [Zero Dark Thirty’s] writer, Mark Boal." 42 While these incidents aver the close relationship between Hollywood and Washington D.C., very few seemed concerned that the film, for many, would function as the definitive truth of the events. Thus due to the limited informational environment into which the film was released, the film has potential to supplant other valid renderings of these events. This is ultimately a loss for the public sphere given that Bigelow's rendering shows no concern for the larger historical context and depicts this operation as a free-floating occurrence that valorizes the efforts of many in the absence of any concern for war's Others. DOCUMENTARY AND MEDIA PUBLICS In addressing the real value of access to documentaries in the maintenance of public discourse, this section's inquiry takes seriously Patricia Aufderheide's assertion of documentary film's potential to create a discrete 'public' within the broader public sphere. A 'public,' as Aufderheide conceives it, is an ad hoc grouping. She describes publics as "informal networks of people linked by common concerns, [that] are formed by communication with each other about these problems, and their communication is fed by media provision…Publics are not, in this sense, unitary blocs under the rubric of a nation state or society, but, rather, groups constituted informally around issues or problems." 43 Thus, as Aufderheide has argued, "these documentaries are not only movies about the Iraq War, they are also part of a process of constituting a public around the issues of the war." 44 However, rather than solely performing content and aesthetic analysis of the 184 following documentary works, one of the primary goals of this analysis is to understand how the particularities of the media marketplace shape their trajectories. Doing so will lend insight into the role industrial factors play in modulating the potential of these texts to foster public discourse. Before delving into issues of industry, let us first unpack some of the formal elements of documentary which make it a useful source of information. Discourses of Documentary Power Any discussion of the power of documentary must begin with the etiology of the filmic form itself. Photography, the motionless cinematic precursor, has been hailed for many reasons; its evidentiary capabilities and its indexical relationship to the real being the most relevant to the current discussion. One need not search far to uncover the relationship between the photographic image and evidence. From its usage in the court system to providing the substantiating content in news reportage, the photograph’s ability to prove, as Barthes states, “that has been,” is well established. 45 With regard to the war documentaries at hand, “[their] evidentiary status [takes...] the form of…the ‘pathos of fact’: this happened; people died…; others are suffering.” 46 The often immense objectives of these documentary films, allude to the belief that there is a quality inherent to the photographic image that allows them to convey their message with a certain degree of intensity. Moreover, it suggests that the photograph’s indexical relationship to the real is the quintessential photographic trait upon which the documentary form depends. Stella Bruzzi's work on documentary upends some of the more traditional assumptions of the value of documentary truth. Bruzzi's main intervention is to critique 185 the insistence of scholars like Erik Barnouw and Bill Nichols upon privileging an indexical relationship to reality. She asserts that the inability of documentaries to reproduce reality without selection, bias, and the intrusion of the camera, for example, does not constitute 'failure'. Bruzzi's most significant contribution is her assertion that documentary is precisely the confluence of the camera and documentarist with the subject and situation. She thus posits documentary as a 'performative act' because in doing so one acknowledges construction and artificiality while simultaneously appreciating the type of truth produced by the act of encounter. 47 The realisation (sic), however, that the authentic document might be deficient or lacking should not precipitate a representational crisis as it too often does...documentaries are predicated upon a negotiation between the polarities of objectivity and subjectivity, offering a dialectical analysis of events and images that accepts that no non-fictional record can contain the whole truth whilst also accepting that to re-use or recontextualise (sic) such material is not to irrevocably suppress or distort the innate value and meaning it possesses. 48 While Bruzzi, articulates the power of understanding that all media is biased, the performative elements of many documentaries, often made visible through aesthetic rendering are also the realm in which we can begin to see the circumscription of meaning. Taking a different tack, Jane Gaines argues: “The documentary film…has a special power over the world of which it is a copy because it derives its power from that same world” and further that this power causes viewers “[to] want to do something because of the [existence of such] conditions in the world of the audience.” 49 This behavior results from the fact that, like Linda Williams’ “body genres,” the images in a documentary which aims for social change are consumed corporeally. 50 This bodily response, according to Gaines, is a product of “political mimesis.” Gaines states, 186 “Political mimesis begins with the body. Actualized, it is about a relationship between bodies in two locations – on the screen and in the audience – and it is the starting point for the consideration of what the one body makes the other do.” 51 Regarding efforts to motivate, to mobilize an audience, indeed, what is important is what “one body makes the other do.” More completely elaborated, Gaines proposes “[documentary's] aesthetic of similarity establishes a continuity between the world of the screen and the world of the audience, where the ideal viewer is poised to intervene in the world that so closely resembles the one represented on screen.” 52 If this is so, then there is legitimate reason to believe that war documentaries can be a vital complement to a functioning public sphere. Beyond its value to the public sphere, in recent years, the industry has begun to see the potential of documentary production in a new light. This can be attributed to the prevalence of reality programming, the targeting of niche audiences in the post-network era, as well as more cost-effective modes of production achieved through digital technologies. SELLING 'TRUTH': THE TV INDUSTRY AND THE MARKET FOR WAR DOCS While theories of 'agenda-setting' have come in and out of academic fashion, it is a useful framework for considering how particular media access points (TV, internet, etc.) impact which media can be accessed and by whom. Despite the existence of an organization like SnagFilms that attempts to make independent and documentary films available to a broader audience for free, most independent and documentary works have very few opportunities to gain access to a broader audience outside of several main 187 distributors. In addition to SnagFilms, the main access points for documentaries about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are HBO (including HBOGo) and PBS (including PBS.org). Netflix also constitutes a significant opportunity to engage with these texts, however, outside the specific promotional machines of HBO and PBS, they become buried in the mass of other content available on Netflix's service. Moreover, despite the availability of a significant number of war documentaries through Netflix's streaming service, some of the less well-known works (ones, that often failed to achieve broadcast on any cable or public channel) are available only through Netflix's DVD service, the subscription to which costs significantly more than the streaming membership. Thus, the 'gate-keeping' behaviors of the original services (class orientation, presentational mode) are reiterated across distribution channels. Despite the issues with subscription levels, Netflix is most notable for its aggregation of so many of these war documentaries (HBO, PBS, NatGeo, The History Channel) into a single location. However, mechanisms of encounter within the Netflix interface are not without their own issues. Specifically, unless a subscriber has a history of interest in documentary in general, the likelihood of the service's algorithm suggesting one of these films to a member is somewhat unlikely. Here, the issue of push versus pull technology can be seen to further impact the potential visibility of this content. HBO'S WALLED GARDEN: A PREMIUM NETWORK'S EXCLUSIVE WAR Despite the fact that HBO is often thought of as the home of quality drama and blockbuster films, after 9/11 the premium cable network also became an important site to 188 access to war documentaries. While many networks have ventured into the documentary realm in recent years, HBO’s brand strategy dictates that the documentaries it airs will offer something unique to its paying subscribers. As Abraham notes, “HBO…favors emotional stories and big characters [and] while there are always exceptions, HBO doesn't generally showcase nature or art documentaries or adhere to the one-hour television format because there are other channels tackling these topics and styles; HBO likes to produce documentaries unlikely to be seen anywhere else.” 53 It is for this reason that war has constituted such a significant portion of HBO’s documentary production. These texts have been particularly alluring to a network like HBO because of the association that is often made between documentary and quality or prestige programming. As Nancy Abraham, Senior Vice President of Documentary Programming at HBO, has argued, “while a feature documentary showing on HBO might not have the ratings of True Blood, it will serve other purposes; HBO's documentaries often garner awards and critical acclaim, which provides brand enhancement for the cable channel.” 54 This perspective is not just attributable to HBO, but is rather a fairly common sentiment among premium cable networks whose successes are based upon subscriptions rather than the performance of any single piece of content. As David Nevins, President of Entertainment for Showtime Networks, Inc. has attested, awards “are particularly important because you are trying to create a sense of value that’s worth subscribing to on a monthly basis.” 55 In addition he notes that a, “best-series win is a breakthrough moment that says cutting-edge stuff is being done here.” As a result, HBO Documentary Films, headed for over thirty years by Sheila 189 Nevins, has been a key element in establishing the HBO brand. By 2010, under Nevins “tenure HBO’s documentaries had won 21 Academy Awards, 47 Emmys and 31 Peabody Awards.” 56 HBO’s particular treatment of provocative and controversial topics like, sex, addiction and poverty in ways that reflect a cultured sensibility upon its subscribers has allowed the network to use politically charged topics in the service of gaining prestige. Consequently, a key strand of the network’s documentary output that has contributed mightily to the network’s reputation as “a trusted and prestigious outlet for [documentary] material,” particularly in recent years, has been due to its war related productions. 57 Although the earliest war documentary for the network was their 1987 Emmy Award-winning Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, the particular historical and industrial context in which such works are received and evaluated has changed drastically in the intervening years. Given this, and this project’s interest in the historical moment of the late nineties to the present, I am particularly concerned with the role war documentaries have played in building the HBO brand during that period. HBO’s documentary productions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began roughly five years after the start of combat operations with their 2006 documentary Baghdad ER (Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill). They also aired the Oscar nominated documentary Iraq in Fragments (James Longely, 2006) during the same year. The network’s war related programming remained fairly steady from this point onward. 2007 saw the release of Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, while Baghdad High, Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone, The Recruiter, and Section 190 60: Arlington National Cemetery were released in 2008. In 2010, there was another spate of war documentaries with The Battle for Marjah, Wartorn: 1861-2010, My Trip to Al- Qaeda, and Killing in the Name. Although these productions are only a fraction of the documentary unit’s projects, some forty-five in 2010 alone, these projects play a crucial role in garnering prestige for the network. 58 Recently, the cable network has continued this trend with Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 (2013), which via the experiences of responders, examine the suicide epidemic occurring among veterans. HBO’s documentary offerings, as can be seen from the list above, are quite substantial. This is due to its sizeable budget for non-fiction programming, one which easily exceeds that of PBS, the other home of prestige documentary on television. As Elizabeth Jensen has reported, "On average HBO pays in the 'mid to high hundreds of thousands per hour, equal to the highest end of PBS,' said one executive who has worked in both worlds. The difference? HBO pays immediately, while public television can take five years." 59 Thus the pay subscription model provides the channel with the ability to recruit top talent and portray gritty programming. As Susan Murray suggests, “HBO's premium-channel payment structure allows the network to escape the…censorship that plague[s] broadcast and some basic cable stations. This, coupled with an audience that wishes to see itself as more capable, responsible, and mature than the average television viewer, creates an ideal setting for the presentation of 'tasteful' but possibly lurid nonfiction programming.” 60 One quintessential example of how the perception of their content as gritty is paramount to their programming decisions can be seen in HBO’s acquisition of first 191 television run rights to Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007), a film about the use of torture tactics in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although the rights were originally purchased by Discovery Communications after the film’s successful showing at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, Discovery balked at airing the film and the TV window became available for purchase - HBO then secured the rights. As Sheila Nevins describes, “When we see something we want and it’s available, we go after it. It’s raw, it’s truthful, it’s sad, and it’s important for people to see. It has all the things we like in documentaries.” 61 As Nevins asserts, it is important that people have the opportunity to see these documentaries and while the economic imperatives of HBO trump its responsibilities to the public, it is worth considering the missed opportunities for engagement that occur because these documentaries, which constitute a substantial portion of the war coverage on television, are unavailable to many because of a payment wall. PBS, PRESTIGE DOCUMENTARY PROGRAMMING AND WAR In addition to HBO, PBS and its consortium of local public broadcasters, provide the most readily available point of access to post-9/11 war documentaries. Almost immediately after 9/11 PBS began airing documentaries which interrogated the wars that ensued, functioning as a crucial source of information in a media environment which relied far too heavily upon governmental information. 62 A noteworthy example is their rebroadcast of the 1999 Frontline episode "Hunting Bin Laden" two days after the attacks. The information in the documentary was considered so vital that PBS received requests for copies of the program from both the White House and the Queen of 192 England. 63 Thus, while the potential value of PBS’ war documentaries can be readily gleaned from the preceding example PBS, like HBO, has its own barriers to access. In order to understand how such impediments arose, and the role of PBS in the distribution of war documentaries, it is necessary to delay a moment upon the history of the network. Documentary Programming on PBS The service's main documentary programs are Frontline, P.O.V. and Independent Lens. Wide Angle (2002-09), produced by New York's WNET public television station, was also another element of PBS's documentary programming, however, the program has not produced any new material for broadcast since 2009, and has since spun off an online arm with webisodes called Focal Point. It's focus is international in nature and meant to make up for the lack of international coverage in the US news media. 64 While Independent Lens has had several documentaries which address war-related issues, such as Afghanistan Unveiled (Brault, 2004) which details the effects of Taliban rule and the US military's presence on women in Afghanistan and The Invisible War (Dick, 2013) which exposes the prevalence of sex-based crimes against female soldiers, Frontline and P.O.V. are the documentary series that have directed the most attention to the specifics of the prosecution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 65 POV's programming, like Independent Lens, is independently produced, however, the emphasis of the series is on documentary storytelling with a unique point of view. P.O.V. was created in order to provide a destination for "programs [that]... did not fit the aesthetic or journalistic standards of [Frontline]." 66 As a result, the program is positioned 193 as "op-ed television" by PBS due to its 'unique' perspectives, which supposedly stand in stark contrast to Frontline's journalistic integrity. 67 This series' engagement with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began with the 2004 broadcast of Esteban Uyarra's War Feels Like War, which offers frontline information on the war in Iraq yet, importantly, from outside the embedding system. The film, as Caryn James reported, "was originally made for British and Danish television [...and] strengthens the sense that alternative sources are a powerful way to expose the darkest side of war." 68 The series has included a handful of other similarly insightful films including 2006's highly regarded My Country, My Country by Laura Poitras, an examination of the impact of the war on daily life in Iraq, and 2011's Armadillo by Janus Metz, another Danish production which, despite its employment of the all-too-familiar embedded perspective, is revelatory due to its uniquely Danish perspective on warfare -- one whose attitude toward military engagement is overtly conflicted. 69 Frontline (PBS, 1983-) is the oldest and most formulaic of the four shows. While it varies in number of programs per season, most episodes runs just over 50 minutes in contrast to POV and Independent Lens whose programs vary in length. The overtly detached approach, which characterizes Frontline, not only appeals to journalistic objectivity, but can be seen as derivative of upper-class modes of appreciation such as those encouraged within museums. As Bullert notes, the program "emulate[s... ] investigative, hard-news documentary style...[and] tend[s] to use a male, third-person narrator...or to tell the story from the first-person perspective of an on-camera male reporter." 70 This narrator is, moreover, primarily white and well-educated. It is here that a 194 clear line can be drawn between presentational styles of Frontline and P.O.V. and a point at which the particular audience address of these programs is made evident. These appeals, however, are not derived purely from economic considerations, in many ways they are indicative of discourses of betterment and propriety that accompanied the establishment of the United States’ first, and only, public service broadcaster. PBS's Roots The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was created by Congress in 1967 via the Public Broadcasting Act, and the establishment of PBS, along with NPR, followed close behind. Despite the act's acknowledgement of a societal need for independent, non- commercial broadcasting the financial structuring of the public system left it in a precarious budgetary position from the very beginning. 71 As Robert McChesney has noted, "The initial plan to have the [CPB] funded by a tax on receivers, similar to the BBC method, was dropped, thus preventing public broadcasting from receiving the stable source of income necessary for planning as well as editorial autonomy." 72 As it stands, the system is funded via an ever-shifting amalgam of governmental funds, corporate sponsorships, grants from philanthropic organizations and audience donations. 73 Despite the fact that only a very small portion of the CPB's budget is comprised of federal funds, public broadcasting has been perpetually targeted as a prime instance of governmental excess. Many recent public attacks on the CPB have been rooted in arguments that public broadcasting is anti-competitive for commercial broadcasters in the wake of the digital era's channel diversity. This is in addition to the recycling of older 195 arguments that there exists a distinctly liberal bias to the information that is being presented. The latter argument has been particularly relevant regarding PBS's often critical coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While critique itself need not automatically be deemed liberal, one aspect of the PBS programming model, that is a direct effect of its funding situation, is its tendency to cater to an educated, upper middle class audience; even in the so-called nonprofit arena, television remains a 'dual product market place,' that is, while audiences are being sold programming and products, the audience is itself being sold to advertisers. 74 The Impact of Prestige Given the unique class address produced as a byproduct of PBS's funding situation, it is useful to parse the potential impact shaping programming for this particular demographic might have upon war representation. Frontline, as noted above, is the channel's signature documentary program which, as PBS itself notes, "[casts] a national spotlight on complex and compelling issues, ...illuminates them, [and] serves as a catalyst for change, extending a documentary's impact far beyond its initial broadcast." 75 However, in the case of war documentary, the demographic chasm between the PBS Frontline audience and the majority of Americans couldn't be greater. 76 PBS notes that the Frontline audience is "affluent and well-educated," considered "social capitalists," and in the "35-49" age group. 77 The aforementioned data lends insight into the audience-limiting effects of the network's unspoken upper-class orientation. As a result, what was meant for many 196 becomes the domain of the few; a fact which is readily gleaned from audience measurements. For example, during the Nineties, "the average rating for PBS hovered around 2, which mean[t] that the typical PBS program [wa]s watched by approximately 2 percent of television viewers. [This is in stark contrast to] ABC, CBS, and NBC [which] drew about 30 percent of viewers; Fox attracted 11.5 percent; basic cable 16 percent; and pay cable 3.2 percent." 78 As bleak as those numbers were, they have only declined further in the wake of channel proliferation and cable-cutting behaviors. Many of the Frontline episodes under consideration only achieved between a .8 and a 1.0 rating with its core demographic of viewers aged 40-64. 79 The fact that scarcely one percent of viewers aged 40-64, its primary viewership, saw these programs speaks volumes about the constrained dispersion of this information amongst those younger viewers most prized by commercial broadcasters. Importantly, for audiences without cable, and thus access to news outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, local news becomes the only potential source of war information to be found on television. However, data on local news consumption exacerbates the situation. As reported in a recent Pew Research Study, "The number of Americans who say they regularly watch local television news dropped...from 54% in 2006 to 48% in 2012." 80 Although this drop was relatively small, the study also discovered that viewership among young audiences "plunged by one-third compared with those who watched regularly in 2006." 81 In addition, it is important to note that "on average 40% of...newscast[s]—[are] devoted to sports, traffic and weather combined." 82 Moreover, "In 2012, the percentage of stories more than a minute long shrunk to 20% 197 while those less than half a minute grew to 50%." 83 Thus, the combination of the aforementioned factors diminish the potential for local news to serve as a viable source of in-depth contextualized war information. Laurie Ouellette's monograph Viewers Like You? categorizes PBS's attempts at supporting democratic exchange through current affairs programming as citizen training by arguing that their content contributes to mechanisms of 'governmentality,' in that they are attempts "[...] to shape, guide, and reform the conduct of others - and [...] the way that we regulate ourselves according to such norms - in order to accommodate certain 'principles and goals' that often intersect with democratic ideals." 84 This critique speaks to the way a program like Frontline presents information about the war and how its approach fits in within larger societal requirements for participation. In this light, Frontline's coverage of the wars becomes a double-edged sword: while it freely provides thoughtful analysis of the US's military's engagements it does so in such a manner as to require specific cultural knowledge in order to use that information fully. The class orientation of the program also governs the type of imagery that can be shown. As Jacqueline Sharkey reported, "Lester Crystal, executive producer for 'The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,' [said], 'For taste purposes, you don't show people in agony on the air. You don't show a lot of dead bodies.'" 85 Moreover, what remains unspoken here is that those 'tastes' belong to a class of Americans whose day-to-day lives are rarely impacted by their country's wars. While it is indeed true that there is already a glut of imagery about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the appeal to taste here precludes a necessary opportunity to grapple with the full scope of consequences associated with 198 such traumatic imagery. PBS's New Brand Strategy PBS, despite its status as a public entity, has undergone a number of brand-based changes in recent years that have affected the public's access to these documentary series. One of the most prominent changes occurred in May of 2011 and affected the scheduling of P.O.V. and Independent Lens. 86 As reported by Anthony Kaufman, the shift from their established airing on Tuesday evenings to Thursday, one of television's most competitive times had a significant impact on viewership; "Independent Lens suffered a ratings plunge of 42%." 87 The move's effect was deleterious due to the fact that it "effectively moved these two award-winning series off the main schedule" since "Thursday [is] a local programming night, ... a 'no-fly zone' for PBS programs. Asking stations to drop programming among the most popular with their members [seemed] unreasonable." 88 Moreover, the decision split up a PBS's longstanding Tuesday night documentary programming block that had become "part of the shows' identities: Independent Lens and P.O.V. have followed the popular Frontline for as long as they've existed (10 years and 24 years respectively)." 89 PBS also shifted its branding strategies to such an extent that William Hoynes has declared it the "New PBS." 90 While in the previous chapter I discussed the specific effects corporate branding has had upon product-based partnerships with military charities, Hoynes details how PBS's increased attention to branding has shifted its service's goals. He notes specifically: 199 As PBS seeks to 'do good while doing well'—to combine public service with entrepreneurship—the PBS brand becomes a symbol of both service and value. With an aggressive branding strategy in place, the very idea of public service is becoming commodified. At the new PBS, public service is increasingly something to be packaged and sold to consumers who are brand loyal to PBS. This branding strategy targets an audience of consumers—educated, interested, high income— and it sells 'content,' various program-related products, and an image to these consumers. And, increasingly, PBS trades this image to major commercial media for new revenue streams, in the form of corporate sponsorships and strategic partnerships. 91 These changes are important because they are indicative of the increased influence corporations now have on PBS. One example is that while PBS claims to be commercial- free, its policies on sponsorships have evolved so much that sponsor acknowledgements now resemble traditional advertisements. 92 Moreover, the rising importance of demographics, which can be used to garner corporate dollars is reflected in PBS's 2009 decision to upgrade their contract with the Nielsen Company. The New York Times reported that although "for decades, PBS was content to receive monthly reports about its audience, ...those estimates [are] no longer satisfying marketers, who want shorter time frames for sponsorships and more information on viewership." 93 In addition, and "perhaps most important for PBS, the new ratings will be included in the Nielsen systems that advertisers use to assess their media spending." 94 One area where the changes at PBS have facilitated greater dispersion of documentary material, is in their increased attention to online access. Recognizing that many younger viewers viewing habits are firmly rooted in time-shift technologies, providing free access to programs like Frontline online not only allows non-traditional audiences to access these alternative sources of information, but it allows these same 200 programs to benefit from word of mouth. This is particularly useful given the large number of programs that have been produced about these wars. For example, the series' war-related content is so substantial that there are two different topic sub-headings under the Frontline website's "Programs by Topic" drop-down menu: "Iraq/War on Terror" and "Afghanistan/Pakistan" to help users sort through dozens of programs which examine various aspects of the two wars. When these programs were aired, they provided a fairly steady diet of well-researched, contextualized background information and contemporary analysis not found elsewhere on television, at least for free. Accordingly, assessing the factors impacting access to them remains important. PBS & HBO: NARROW-CASTING THE WAR The competing goals of the two most prominent documentary outlets, HBO and PBS, affect which documentaries get broadcast and who sees them. As Ron Becker has argued, "in the increasingly competitive era of [...] narrowcasting [...] network executives [...began] aggressively targeting [...] the slumpy demographic (socially liberal, urban- minded professionals) [...due to] mounting pressure to improve the demographic profiles of their audience base in order to impress advertisers eager to reach their core consumer niche." 95 While Becker’s work specifically addressed the value of LGBT storylines to this niche audience, this group of viewers, as the discussion of HBO above makes clear, thinks of itself as mature, responsible, and therefore engaged with its nations political affairs. Still, the importance of this demographic to a wide range of channels is primarily based upon their ability to draw advertisers while simultaneously building a given 201 network's brand image, not their potential to actively engage in public dialogue. Therefore, to understand this niche's power, is to acknowledge the fragmentation of audiences and radical changes in consumptive practices that occurred across the televisual landscape in the wake of cable and digitization. Once audience size was no longer the standard bearer of success, the qualities of the audience itself gained importance. Although neither HBO nor PBS are ad-supported, class-based assessments are relevant to both; for HBO the slumpy demographic is essential to asserting the quality allure of its original programming and key to attracting viewers capable of affording the monthly subscription fees. For PBS, although a public network that purports to address a broad range of American society, the same unfortunately holds true. This is due in large part to the fact that, as Glenda Balas asserts, "commercial broadcasting’s assumptions about the monetary value of audiences, particularly in attracting corporate support, have taken root in the public broadcasting sensibility and continued an unabated growth since the early 1980s." 96 Consequently, what must be considered, however much one champions the explosion of television offerings now available, is how narrow-casting's increased competition distributes a very small pool of critically informative war programming across a vast number of channels, each with differing barriers to access. One prime instance of how competition affects access can be seen with the case of Restrepo (2010). The critically-acclaimed documentary by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger was, and remains, one of the few feature-length documentary projects to explore the war in Afghanistan. The film which was bid on by both HBO and The 202 National Geographic Channel (NatGeo), had its first airing on NatGeo despite being highly sought after by HBO Documentary head Sheila Nevins. On one hand the showing of the documentary on NatGeo rather than HBO increased the potential number of households who had access to the channel since as of 2010, NatGeo was "distributed to 70 million of the 115 million U.S. TV homes." 97 HBO by contrast only has a potential reach of 28.7 million as of first quarter 2013. 98 Still, despite the greater potential reach of NatGeo, the most watched program in the history of the channel only reached 3.4 million viewers, whereas HBO's is significantly higher. 99 As this example makes clear, the market for documentaries is extremely competitive. This situation will only intensify as Netflix has recently begun successfully vying for major documentaries. 100 Shayne Pepper's work, on television's public service AIDS-related productions, also highlights the unique function of both PBS and HBO in contributing to and shaping national dialogue. As Aufderheide expands: Our mass media, designed as a one-to-many distribution system, act as a “pseudo public sphere” (Chanan, 2000), where public discussion may be mimicked or modeled, but most viewers cannot usually join in. Social documentaries engage this pseudo public sphere on its own terms, and also attempt to reach through, around and beyond it, to participate in and encourage a true public sphere. As a form featuring both story and conversation in service of public knowledge and action (Nichols, 2001), they both challenge the reality status quo and address themselves to publics. 101 Regarding the AIDS epidemic, both channels aired a number of programs which offered honest, much needed information about the nature of the disease, its transmission, and the reality of those whose lives had been affected. 102 Much the same can be said of HBO and PBS regarding their content on U.S. military engagements after 9/11. While alongside the protraction of the battles in-depth coverage of the wars receded on mainstream outlets, 203 each channel began running documentary programming which probed both the justification and costs of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pepper's work argues that due to the effect of a neoliberal context on both the media industry and the government, a cable network like HBO ought to be considered "as one example of what might count as public service television in the post-network era." 103 Given the increasingly commercial orientation of PBS, his position has some legitimacy. Still, it is the industrial constraints, which Pepper himself acknowledges, and their impact on access that this chapter's case studies mark as politically limiting in terms of helping to foster an active public sphere. CONCLUSION This chapter has examined yet another prominent area where the terms of engagement with America's post-9/11 wars have been set. This last major area of analysis parsed the tandem issues of information and accessibility while exploring how both affect the circulation of media texts that cover events that have occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the state of public information after 9/11, the repercussions from the USA PATRIOT Act and the degraded state of the news media foremost, the truth claims made by documentary films during this period were uniquely capable of impacting public discourse. Still, fictionalized texts often became the point of first contact for various 'truths' about these conflicts. Thus, while the primary emphasis of the chapter has been upon documentaries, both fiction and non-fiction texts lend valuable insight into the media context within which these documentaries were circulated. 204 Similar to the ways aesthetics and branding have impacted representation, the potency of documentary work has been diminished by a number of factors such as the decline of public funding and problems of limited distribution, despite the promises of the digital age. It is my assertion that these constraints, upon the documentary environment and within the documentaries themselves, have attenuated the potential reach of these works, while also restricting the rhetorical strategies employed and subject matter they cover. These limitations shape broader conceptions of American warfare. Thus, as the aforementioned examination of the public sphere and the state of representation and informational access makes clear, the current environment available for the development of productive group intervention and response to war seems quite inhospitable. Still, more than ever, media about the ongoing war, presented from multiple perspectives and in varying form, present the opportunity for engagement even if partial and dispersed. Moreover, because of the degraded state of news and information, the media under discussion can offer a critical intervention in the remediation of America’s conception of itself and its wars. While this project has asserted the influence of corporate strategies upon the media ecology of war representation, information and access are two areas where governmental rationalities have implicitly impacted war imagery. These challenges make it exceedingly difficult to imagine a functioning public sphere. It seems as if what is required of a contemporary public sphere is that it helps register the reality of warfare given that, as Sontag notes, "War has been the norm and peace the exception." 104 In her analysis of coverage of the war in Afghanistan in the New York Times she noted: "An 205 ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry. And the pity and disgust that pictures like [Tyler] Hicks's [photos of wounded Taliban soldiers ] inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties whose deaths are not being shown." 105 In this way, the circulation of these documentaries gains greater urgency given that the dispersion and longevity of these texts, alongside photographs and news reports, will constitute, in part, the future media archive from which public memories about these wars will be sustained. 206 CHAPTER THREE NOTES 1 Donald Rumsfeld, “Press Conference,”Nato Headquarters, Brussels, Germany, June 6, 2002. http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2002/s020606g.htm 2 Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Public Domains: Engaging Iraq Through Experimental Digitalities," Framework 48 no. 2 (2007): 67, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41552491. 3 As Peter Dahlgren has noted: “[...] we can note that to speak of the public sphere has become all the more inaccurate; we have instead a landscape of many – often overlapping – public spheres. The plural form is often linguistically awkward, so we tend to use the singular; nevertheless, we should keep in mind its multifarious character.” Peter Dahlgren, “Television, Public Spheres, and Civic Cultures,” in A Companion To Television ed. Janet Wasko (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 412. 4 Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 101. 5 Philip M. Taylor, "Television: The First Flawed Rough Drafts of History," Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age Ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 255-6. 6 Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 7 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 169. 8 Toby Miller, "Bank Tellers and Flag Wavers," Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting Ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 297. 9 Miller, "Bank Tellers," 297. 10 Taylor, "Television,” 247-8. Italics in original. 11 Miller, "Bank Tellers,” 288. 12 Byron York, "Without Bush Media Lose Interest in War Caskets," The Washington Examiner.com Last updated September 29, 2009. Accessed October 12, 2009. 13 Byron York, "Without Bush” 207 14 www.foia.gov Accessed 8 Oct 2013. 15 www.foia.gov Accessed 8 Oct 2013. 16 Matthew L. Wald, "Slow Responses Cloud A Window Into Washington," The New York Times January, 28 2012: A17 Web. 8 Oct. 2013. 17 Wald, “Slow Responses,” A17. 18 Wald, “Slow Responses,” A17. 19 "All of these restrictions were revoked in January 2009 by President Barack Obama in an effort to encourage transparency in government records. "http://library.ahima.org/ xpedio/groups/public/documents/ahima/bok1_048641.hcsp?dDocName=bok1_048641. 8 Oct 2013. 20 Yochai Benkler, “WikiLeaks and the PROTECT-IP Act: A New Public-Private Threat to the Internet Commons,” Daedalus 140, no. 4 (2011): 155. 21 Benkler, “WikiLeaks,” 157. 22 Reuters, “Army Begins Tweeting From Frontlines,PCPro.co.uk last updated June 2, 2009, accessed May 21, 2012, http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/254362/army-begins- tweeting-from-frontlines. 23 George Monbiot, “The Need to Protect the Internet from ‘Astroturfing’ Grows Ever More Urgent,” The Guardian “George Monbiot’s Blog” last updated February 23, 2011, accessed May 21, 2012, http://www. guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/ 2011/feb/23/need-to-protect-internet-from-astroturfing 24 Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, “US Soldiers Imaging the Iraq War on YouTube,” Popular Communication 7, no. 1 (2009): 17-27. 25 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 48. 26 Habermas, Public Sphere, 50-1. 27 Colin Sparks, “The Global, the Local and the Public Sphere,” Ed. Robert Allen and Annette Hill. The Television Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 140. 28 Richard Butsch, “How are Media Public Spheres?” Ed. Richard Butsch, Media and Public Spheres (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), 4-5. 208 29 Habermas, Public Sphere, 169. 30 Robert Hariman and John Luis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 39. 31 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption, 42. 32 Peter Dahlgren, “Television, Public Spheres, and Civic Cultures,” 414. 33 Troy Patterson, "Generation Kill, Reviewed," Slate.com, last updated July 11, 2008. Accessed January 30, 2014. <http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2008/07/ band_of_lunkheads.html>. 34 Peter Maass, "Don't Trust 'Zero Dark Thirty'," The Atlantic.com, last updated December 12, 2013. Accessed 29 January, 2013. <http://www.theatlantic.com/ entertainment/archive/2012/12/dont-trust-zero-dark-thirty/266253/>. 35 While the increased popularity of MOW docudramas began in the mid-80s and peaked in the mid-90s as a way for broadcast networks to retain audiences in the face of the fragmentation brought on by cable, by the late 90s such ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ fare had reached a saturation point and declined as a percentage of the program offerings of the three original broadcast networks. What has remained of these films has become a more targeted attempt to reach a core younger female audience for these types of programs, making Jessica Lynch’s story an ideal choice for NBC. Saving Jessica Lynch went head to head with CBS’s The Elizabeth Smart Story, and while Lynch was narrowly beaten by the abduction tale, it still pulled in 14.9 million viewers for a 5.4 share and a 13 rating, giving NBC its “best telepic score in more than three years.” Rick Kissell, “Television: Spotlight: Made-Fors Run Up the Score on Nets.” Variety 393.1 (Nov 17, 2003-Nov 23, 2003): 28. NBC was also tactical in its broadcasting strategy, “showing the first 40 minutes without a commercial break” as a means of retaining the audience. Doing this also allowed the network to “get premium rates compared with the typical made-for-TV movie,” once the ads started running. Steve McClellan, “The Private Goes Public, Broadcasting & Cable 133.42 (Oct 20, 2003): 1,8. 36 Susan Faludi, “America's Guardian Myths.”New York Times September 7, 2007: A29. 37 Faludi, “Guardian Myths,” A29. 38 Magnolia Pictures Press Notes. p.3. Clipping File. Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles. March 24, 2011. 39 Ali Jaafar, "Biz beating war drums along Lido," Daily Variety September 4, 2007: 3. 209 40 Anthony Kaufman, “Brian De Palma Explains Himself,” The Village Voice October 3, 2007: 78. 41 Ann Hornaday, "Oscar Under the Influence of Washington, " The Washington Post, February 23, 2013, Suburban Edition: A1. Lexis Nexis Academic. 30 January 2014. 42 Cheryl K. Chumley, "Leon Panetta Named as Source of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Scriptwriter’s information," The Washington Times, last updated December 11, 2013. Accessed 30 January 2014. <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/11/leon- panetta-named-source-hollywood-scriptwriters-/>. 43 Patricia Aufderheide, "Your Country, My Country: How Films About the Iraq War Construct Publics," Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 48, no. 2 (2007): 56, doi: 10.1353/frm.2007.0010. 44 Aufderheide, "Your Country," 57. 45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida Trans. Richard Howard. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 76. 46 Jane M. Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” Ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1999), 92. 47 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary (New York: Routledge, 2006). 48 Bruzzi, New Documentary, 46. 49 Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 90-95. Though Gaines does qualify her comment, [“It is, of course, also a question of how far from the protected middle-class screening room this struggle will take place.” (Gaines 97.)] I find the notion of a singular “world,” fundamentally problematic. 50 Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2.-Reprinted in: Film Genre Reader, Ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1995). 51 Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 90. 52 Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 92. 53 Amanda Lin Costa, “Feature Docs and Brand Building: History Makers Conference Highlights the Prestige of the Genre,” International Documentary Association n.d. Web. 210 11 July 2012. <http://www.documentary.org/magazine/feature-docs-and-brand-building- history-makers-conference-highlights-prestige-genre>. 54 Costa, “Feature Docs” 55 Bill Carter, “With ‘Homeland,’ Showtime Makes Gains on HBO,” The New York Times January 30, 2012: B1. 56 Elizabeth Jensen, “The Force Behind HBO’s Documentaries,” The New York Times June 11, 2010. Web. 29 May 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/arts/television/ 13nevins.html?_r=1&pagewanted =all>. 57 Susan Murray, “America Undercover,” The Essential HBO Reader, Ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 263. 58 Elizabeth Jensen, “The Force Behind HBO’s Documentaries” 59 Elizabeth Jensen, "The Force Behind HBO's Documentaries" 60 Murray, “America Undercover,” 264. 61 Michael Schneider, “HBO hails ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’,” Variety February 21, 2008. Web. 2 Jan 2013. <http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117981254/?refcatid=4154 &printer...>. 62 PBS broadcast Frontline episode "Hunting Bin Laden" (1999). 63 Pat Mitchell, "Real World Or 'Reality' Shows?," The Washington Post October 16, 2001: A23. 64 "About" PBS May 7, 2008 <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/about-the- series/introduction/31/>. August 29, 2013. 65 http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/afghanistanunveiled/ (8/28/13) and http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/invisible-war/ (8/28/13) 66 B. J. Bullert, Public Television: Politics and the Battle Over Documentary Film (New Brunswick: Ruters UP, 1997), 31. 67 Bullert, Public Television, 31. 211 68 Caryn James, "The War's Dark Side: Filling In The Blanks," The New York Times May 21, 2004. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/movies/critic-s-notebook-the-war- s-dark-side-filling-in-the-blanks.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm> September 3, 2013. 69 Other relevant POV programs include: Soldiers of Conscience (Catherine Ryan & Gary Weimberg, 2008); The Oath (Laura Poitras, 2010); Where Soldiers Come From (Heather Courtney, 2011). 70 B.J. Bullert, Public Television, 27. 71 Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 240. 72 McChesney, Political Economy, 240. 73 McChesney, Political Economy, 240. 74 Katherine Sender, “Dualcasting: Bravo’s Gay Programming and the Quest for Women Audiences,” Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting Ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 394-416. 75 "Frontline's Impact," PBS.org (2003) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/twenty/ etc/impact. html. Last Accessed 9/10/13 4:15 p.m. 76 PBS notes, in their analysis of the Frontline audience, that the show's demographic is even more rarified than that of its other programs. 77 "The Frontline Audience," PBS.org (2003) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/ twenty/etc/ audience.html Last accessed 9/10/13 4:20 pm. 78 Public Broadcasting Service, '1990 Public Television National Image Survey,' PBS Station Independence Program, unpublished report, September 1990. As cited in Ouellette. 79 Beth Walsh and Craig Reed, "Research Roundup: PTPA November, 2010," TRAC Media Services, Web. <www.tracmedia.com/PublicShared/PTPA/Nov2008/Prime_ Time.ppt>. Accessed 16 Sep 2013. 80 Mark Jurkowitz and Katerina Eva Matsa, "Despite Some Warning Signs, Local TV Stations Are Hot Commodities," Journalism.org, Web. August 5, 2013. <http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/despite_some_warning_sings_lo cal_tv_stations_are_hot_commodities>. Last accessed September 16, 2013. pdf 3. 212 81 Jurkowitz and Matsa. “Warnings,” 3. 82 Jurkowitz and Matsa, “Warnings,” 4. 83 Jurkowitz and Matsa, “Warnings,” 4-5. 84 Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), 107. 85 Jacqueline E. Sharkey, "The Television War," American Journalism Review May, 2003. <http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=2988>. Last Accessed September 4, 2013. 86 Anthony Kaufman, "The PBS Debacle: Why a New Time Slot Spells Disaster for Indie Docs," Indiewire.com March 19, 2012, <http://www.indiewire.com/article/pbs-shifts-the- schedule-and-shafts...> Accessed 26 July 2013 9:12 am. 87 Kaufman, “Debacle” 88 Kartemquin Films' "Open Letter" as cited in Kaufman, “Debacle.” 89 Kaufman, “Debacle” 90 William Hoynes, "Branding Public Service: The “New PBS” and the Privatization of Public Television," Television & New Media 4, No. 2 (2003): 117. 91 Hoynes, “Branding Public Service,” 124. 92 Heather McIntosh, “PBS Sings The Blues: A High-Profile Documentary Series, Commercial Media Practices, and Modern Public Broadcasting”(Doctoral Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2009), ProQuest (AAT 3524620). 93 "PBS Finally Signs Up For Nielsen Ratings," The New York Times December 20, 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/business/media/21pbs.html?_r=0>. Last accessed August 26, 2013. 94 Brian Stelter, "PBS Finally Signs Up For Nielsen Ratings" The New York Times December 21, 2009: B6. 95 Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2006), 81. 96 Glenda R. Balas, "From Underserved to Broadly Served: The Class Interests of Public Broadcasting," Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, No. 4 (2007): 367. 213 97 Peter Hamilton, "What Does National Geographic Pay for Programs?," Documentary Television.com April 7, 2010. Web. <http://www.documentarytelevision.com/sweet- spots/what-does-national-geographic-channel-pay-for-programs/>. Last accessed September 12, 2013. 98 Andrew Wallenstein, "Netflix Surpasses HBO in U.S. Subscribers," Variety April 22, 2013 Web. <http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/netflix-surpasses-hbo-in-u-s- subscribers-1200406437/>. Accessed 12 Sep 2013. 99 Lisa De Moraes, "National Geographic's 'Killing Kennedy' to Premiere November 10: Video," Deadline.com September 12, 2013 <http://www.deadline.com/2013/09/natgeo- killing-kennedy-rob-lowe-premiere-november/>. Last accessed September 13, 2013. 100 Netflix successfully purchased the rights to Jehane Noujaim's The Square (2013), a property that has received significant attention due to its previous awards at Sundance and the New York Film Festival. Significantly, it has also garnered Netflix its first Academy Award Nomination. PRNewswire, "Netflix Makes First Major Acquisition for Its Original Documentary Initiative With 'The Square',” PRNewswire 4 Nov 2013. https://secure.onlineprocessing.biz/mr5/netflix.us.en/index.php?s=24309&item=136955. Accessed 22 Jan 2014. 101 Patricia Aufderheide, "In the Battle for Reality: Social Documentaries in the U.S.," Center for Social Media, American University, December, 2003: 13. 102 Shayne David Pepper, “Public Service Entertainment: Post-Network Television, HBO, and the AIDS Epidemic,” (Doctoral Dissertation, North Carolina State University, 2011) ProQuest (AAT 3479605). 103 Pepper, “Public Service Entertainment,” 1. 104 Susan Sontag, “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death,” The New Yorker December 9, 2002: 74. 105 Sontag, “Looking at War,” 14. 214 CONCLUSION At the outset of this project, and for the majority of its production, I anticipated that there would be a moment when the characteristics of representation I describe herein would no longer hold true. While, as noted within, the films about Vietnam took several years to gain critical insight into that war's problematic resonances. I assumed no less for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for despite the sheer amount of media produced, they have predominantly been marked by embedded, interactive perspectives that lack the critical element of reflection. Unfortunately, now, more than twelve years after the first strikes in Afghanistan and over three years after the official end of combat operations in Iraq, the field of representation pertinent to war media continues to be defined by the multiple forms of modulation and constraint outlined in the previous chapters. Under a different executive administration, and at some remove from the affective milieu which so defined the American context when these wars began, it is confounding that such limiting approaches to aesthetics, branding and accessibility have persisted and perhaps even intensified. The realism deployed in the majority of the texts this project considers, while visually reproducing combat in an extremely intimate and accurate manner, also performs a fictionalizing of the theater of war. It engenders “a close-up view of operations... [a] view that is…narrow, producing what has been called a ‘soda-straw effect’.” 1 While, like its predecessors this style foregrounds the soldier’s perspective, its construction of the 215 narrative around the experience of particular engagements and deployments enacts an eclipse of the political realm. By structuring narratives in the ambivalence of combat experience, these media omit all reference to the larger historical and political context of these wars. To commence the story at this point, in this way, is to construct a particular fiction of the meaning, broader experience and ramifications of warfare. If the story begins and ends with troop experiences while deployed, there is an automatic exclusion of the politics which have brought about the situation as well as an elision of the consequences for those against whom the US has fought. As a result, “rather than advocating an active role in the politics of war, this [aesthetic] suits the citizen-spectator with an ethic of depoliticized and distant veneration.” 2 The employment of this aesthetic by fictional and documentary texts alike ultimately serves to destabilize the association of this representational trope with ‘documentation’: aesthetically, The Hurt Locker (2008) appears to be able to make the same sort of truth claim as Occupation: Dreamland (2005). In addition, it points to the ease with which these representational tropes can be put toward conflicting political ends, rendering the notion that this aesthetic is fundamentally neutral, a moot point. Early in the project I argued that the deployment of a distinctive aesthetic was indicative of a developing transmedia approach in the depiction of warfare. What was a nascent process in earlier texts has been perfected in recent media. No case exemplifies this more efficiently than the recently released film, Lone Survivor (2013). Based on the harrowing events of a failed mission in Afghanistan, the film portrays a team of SEALs that loses communications contact with their home unit during mission that is 216 compromised. When their presence is revealed to local Taliban fighters, the men are quickly outnumbered. Only one soldier survives. Lone Survivor, began as a memoir based on the experiences of SEAL Team 10 during 2005's Operation Red Wing in Afghanistan and became a New York Times #1 best-selling book by Marcus Luttrell when it was published in 2007. It was then made into the film Lone Survivor, which was released in December 2013. The film was accompanied by a documentary short entitled Will of the Warrior which was, unsurprisingly, given the network’s exploitation of non-fiction war programming, broadcast on HBO. The book's release also spawned The Lone Survivor foundation a veteran charity which, during the fall of 2013 --almost exactly two months before the film's release -- partnered with Under Armour to produce special event uniforms for the Texas Tech Red Raiders and functioned as a benefit for the foundation. Under Armour's participation did not begin and end with the foundation. UA also helped to finance the film through its paid product placements. One overt, and untoward, placement occurs near the film's conclusion, during Luttrell's helicopter rescue. While being worked on by medical personnel the camera slowly pans over Luttrell's undressed body, ostensibly to emphasize just how much his battered body had to endure. However, as the camera passes over his groin we see the proud UA emblem wrapped around his waist. Not only is the brand front and center, but given the star history of Mark Wahlberg, at least in his days as Marky-Mark, this particular way of highlighting the brand, as opposed to showing the logo on a shirt, recalls his early Nineties pants-dropping antics and later contract as a Calvin Klein underwear model. This is not the only time the 217 band of his undergarments is a focal point for the camera and is thus a potent reminder of the importance of branding to the representational strategies of war media as well as to the eventual distribution of such content. The film is also oddly reminiscent of Dalton Trumbo's 1962 film Lonely are the Brave, which starred Kirk Douglas and Gena Rowlands. More than just the fact that both movies were filmed on location in the mountains of New Mexico, the manhunt which pursues Douglas and the army of Taliban soldiers that are after Wahlberg links the two films via generic convention; it is man against the wilderness, and the Taliban fighters, discouragingly, are reductively portrayed as the 'beasts in the jungle.' Berg himself has become somewhat influential in terms of the representations of post-9/11 warfare given his production of The Kingdom (2007), his critically successful television show Friday Night Lights (2006-11), which featured a prominent storyline around a main character whose father was an Army National guard member who was perpetually deployed, has readjusting to civilian life and is ultimately killed in battle. In addition to Lone Survivor, he also produced the companion HBO documentary Will of the Warrior (HBO, 2013). In this way Lone Survivor also speaks to the contemporary media environment, that of the blockbuster franchise, and the conditions under which films that do not fit this mold can be made. Lone Survivor, despite its many flaws, does attempt to bring attention to the fighting that has occurred in Afghanistan. Given the privileging of the Iraq conflict in media, on some level this, in itself is important. Yet, the only reason Berg was allowed to make the film was by committing to a double production deal where 218 he agreed to direct Universal's 2012 film Battleship, the second film in its Mattel franchise deal. More than just an examination of the industrial practices which impact aesthetics, branding and access as they relate to war media, this project's conclusions evince the role each plays in mobilizing affect. Thus the affective economies that attend the representation of war are instrumentalized within disparate rationalities, both governmental and corporate. The functionality of these texts also modulates affect such that forms of engagement are readily taken up within discourses of consumption. However, the pluripotent potential of affect remains. The affective economies in play, though grounded in complex appeals to responsibility, and ultimately discourses of the self, are often commoditized through kitsch emotional registers which cannot possibly contain the affective excess of warfare. Accordingly, while the preceding work has offered much insight into war media after 9/11, there are a number of areas which would further expand our understanding of the complex role these texts play in shaping citizen engagement. For example, notwithstanding recent coverage of sexual abuse within the military, in general the presence and contributions of women fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are rarely seen within mainstream filmic and televisual representations. The same can be said about other soldiers of traditionally subordinate class, race and sexuality despite their rising presence in the ranks of the military. Moreover, this marginalized representation is occurring alongside an unprecedented separation of the military from civilian society in American culture. As Mark Thompson reported: 219 The world’s lone superpower has created–and grown accustomed to–a permanent military caste, increasingly disconnected from U.S. society, waging decade-long wars in its name, no longer representative of or drawn from the citizenry as a whole. Think of the U.S. military as the Other 1%–some 2.4 million troops have fought in and around Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, exactly 1% of the 240 million Americans over 18. 3 By examining the relationship of the civilian population to its military in terms of how that very same military is representationally configured rather than solely through military force shaping, such as the end of the draft or the more recent revolution in military affairs (RMA), additional research could expand how we think about the segregation of military issues from mainstream society and the consequences of that separation. This would create a space to better understand how the transition to private contractors, drones, and a military that is only 1% of the U.S. population, is not only tied to programs such as RMA, but integrally linked to how citizens conceive of the military and its service members. Thus the process which began in this project, to parse the construction of the figure of the soldier across media, must be continued as it is essential to understanding the widening gap between soldier and civilian as well as American attitudes toward the U.S. military and its wars. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq draw to a close, it is vital to continue to work on grasping the conditions that have, and continue to, affect engagement. Framing the Fight surveys the media ecologies of war representation. In doing so it evinces the fusion of theaters of war with the processes of everyday life. Thus, while the foregoing examination demonstrates the harrowing consequences of media illiteracy, most importantly our mutual culpability, as civilians and soldiers, is made clear. 220 CONCLUSION NOTES 1 Christopher Paul and James J. 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Creator Yeung, Stephanie Michelle (author)

Core Title Framing the fight: post-9/11 warfare and the logistics of representation

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/16/2014

Defense Date 03/13/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 9/11,aesthetics,affect,Afghanistan,branding,convergence,corporate social responsibility,governmentality,Iraq,OAI-PMH Harvest,War

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Language English

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Advisor Keeling, Kara (committee chair), Ross, Steven J. (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member)

Creator Email shoover02@gmail.com,stephaniehoover@hotmail.com

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