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Bose, M. (2025). War for Work’s Sake: US Imperial Violence, Industrial Labor, and Post-9/11 Hollywood. Media Theory, 9(1), 23–58. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i1.1163

War for Work’s Sake: U.S. Imperial Violence, Industrial Labor, and Post-9/11 Hollywood

MARIA BOSE

Providence College, USA

Abstract

This essay evaluates the ideological compact between U.S. state violence deployed across a decades-long War on Terror and that violence’s foremost cultural mediator, the post-9/11 Hollywood war film. It argues that, counter the tendency to view the Hollywood war film as mere “ideological apparatus,” a media form conscripted into the project of U.S. imperialism, what implicates state and medium is instead a more immanent strategy of mutual self-justification and institutional renewal powered by nostalgia for the Fordist-industrial mode of production and its gendered division of labor. Less neoliberal-imperial jingo than neo-protectionist, post-imperial swansong, the post-9/11 Hollywood war film diagnoses rather than refutes U.S. declension, tracing that declension, as economists Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi do, to the 1970s crises in industrial “overcapacity” and “over accumulation” that precipitated U.S. deindustrialization. The genre moreover implicates Hollywood’s own declension in that systemic diagnosis, coarticulating the institution’s struggle to adapt to increasingly fragmented production processes. The genre’s insistently retrograde protagonists embody a fantasy of reindustrialization in the shadow of global outsourcing, widespread deskilling, and imminent automation that ultimately sublimates war’s violence into the labor of artistic production, binding Hollywood’s fortunes and failures to the state while staking the state’s renewal on Hollywood’s. Doing so, they subsequently convey the cinematic medium’s structural implication in US state violence while affirming its primacy to US hegemony’s maintenance.

Keywords

Hollywood war film, Hegemony, War on Terror, Deindustrialization

Figure 1: Getting Ready to put Eldridge on YouTube. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, Summit, 2008)

Figure 2: Bomb disposal as auto repair. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, Summit, 2008)

Midway through Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), explosive ordnance technician William James (Jeremy Renner) is tasked with disarming a car bomb that’s recently been discovered outside the United Nations’ temporary headquarters in Baghdad. “The car has been parked there illegally and the suspension is sagging,” an Iraqi officer informs James, who jokingly advises the man to “peek inside [the trunk] and tell [him] what [he] sees” (Boal, 2009: 32). The remainder of the scene follows James’ exhilarated search for the bomb, as he traces and retraces wire from trunk to glovebox and rips up interior upholstery. “Got a lot of det cord. Electrical,” James muses, popping the car’s hood. Minutes pass, as James’ squad members, J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Owen Eldridge (Brian Gerahty), grow agitated by an Iraqi civilian filming them with a handheld camera, whom Eldridge fears is “getting ready to put [them] on YouTube” (Fig. 1). As more civilians gather to observe the American soldiers, Sanborn urges James to “let the engineers handle this mess” (2009: 40). “We’ve been out here a while,” Sanborn pleads. “We need to get out of here soon. We got a lot of eyes on us” (2009: 40). James, meanwhile, has angrily removed his headset, refusing any interference in the work to which he clearly thrills. “What the hell is he doing?” Sanborn demands of Eldridge. “I don’t know,” Eldridge sighs. “It looks like he’s checking the oil” (Fig. 2).

Figure 3: “We have spares, but we’ve used up our wrench.” The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, Summit, 2008)

Figure 4: Eldridge swaps videogames for squeaky brakes. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, Summit, 2008)

“Checking the oil” is one of The Hurt Locker’s refrains, looping across Bigelow’s Baghdadi frontier-wasteland-cum-burned-out-Rust-Belt, awash in shuttered factories and littered with industrial Fordism’s most potent emblem: the automobile. Throughout the film, automobiles focalize the American soldiers’ wartime experience, transmuting the high-skill, technical-managerial, and immanently violent work of bomb disposal into the low-skill, manual-industrial, and ostensibly nonviolent idiom of auto repair. Early on, James faces down an impassive Iraqi taxi driver who refuses to exit his vehicle, a riff on the classic Western trope of assertive cowboy and feral horse. Later, a flat tire and missing lug wrench prompt the squad’s encounter with a group of British military contractors (Fig. 3). Later still, the detonation of an oil tanker sets James on a madcap hunt for insurgents he’s likely invented. In between these episodes, the film sees Eldridge abandon his war-themed videogames in favor of auto work, having confessed to his combat stress therapist, Lieutenant Colonel John Cambridge, that he cannot stop replaying his previous team leader’s death in his head. “You’ve got to stop obsessing,” Cambridge counsels the young soldier. “Change the record in your head. Think about other things. Right now, what are you thinking about?” (2009: 29). Setting down his gaming controller, Eldridge picks up his rifle and repeatedly dry fires. “You want to know what I’m thinking about?” Eldridge cries, on the verge of breakdown. “Here’s Thompson dead. Here, he’s alive. He’s dead. He’s alive” (2009: 30). Days later, when two meet again, Eldridge has been remade, his exposure to James’ industrial masculinity yielding a new self-assurance. “Don’t trust the mechanics around here,” Eldridge coolly observes, emerging from the Humvee’s undercarriage. “How are you doing?” Cambridge asks. “Good,” Eldridge replies. “Just want to check the oil” (Fig. 4).

Pitting James’ manual dexterity against insurgent threats of illicit video capture and YouTube circulation, or Eldridge’s blue-collar bravado against video games’ traumatic loops and repetitions, Bigelow compounds the terms of domestic political economy with those of her medium and industry. In so doing, her film nostalgizes non-automatable industrial labor—that of the virtuosic bomb tech, James, and the film’s handheld-camera-innovating director, Bigelow—while locating terroristic violence in the ever-advancing digital delivery platforms that underwrite a global post-Fordist Hollywood mode of production. That compound nostalgia for the Fordist-industrial mode of production, and the gendered division of labor it formalized, suffuses the post-9/11 war genre of which The Hurt Locker is often taken to be an exemplar. This is seen in drone pilots overcoded as blue-collar autoworkers in Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill (2014); snipers, green berets, and Navy SEALS styled as cowboys and agrarian laborers in Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), Nicolai Fuglsig’s 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers (2018), and Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013); a twenty-first-century CIA operative who foregoes surveillance technology in favor of cultivating “human intelligence” in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008); and many other of the genre’s belated Fordist icons. The post-9/11 Hollywood war film continually diagnoses rather than refutes U.S. declension, tracing that declension, as economists Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi do, to the 1970s crises in industrial “overcapacity” and “over-accumulation” that precipitated U.S. deindustrialization (Brenner, 2006: 99; Arrighi, 2003). But the genre also implicates Hollywood’s own declension in that diagnosis, reflecting the institution’s struggle to adapt to increasingly fragmented production processes, proliferating digital distribution technologies, and rising global competition with deindustrialization’s foreclosure of a competitive and autonomous U.S. industrial sector. The Hurt Locker’s Iraqi insurgents are utterly featureless save their unauthorized recording and YouTube dissemination of video footage of American soldiers, and their wanton piracy of Hollywood DVDs. So too are the Al Qaeda targets in Body of Lies and The Kingdom (Peter Berg, 2007) profligate makers of home video, the violent vectors through which the terrorist organization transacts information. Chris Kyle, of American Sniper, and Mitch Nelson, of 12 Strong, are forever maddening to the televisions that deliver news of U.S. losses and, later, metonymize the difference between a postindustrial dispensation’s implicitly feminized, social-reproductive labors and the productively masculine—and properly cinematic—spaces of industrial warfare. The compensatory final gesture of Tom Egan, the bomber pilot turned drone technician of Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill, is to reject the postindustrial work of “waging a Wii war” by prosecuting an Iraqi rapist in a stunning act of creative vigilantism—a rebuke to video games’ rising market share and the digital attenuation of US labor processes under post-Fordism, both.

Committed less to the production of bombastic nationalist imagoes than the parallel construction of cinema and state’s twenty-first-century reckonings, the post-9/11 Hollywood war film accumulates strikingly similar media allegories centered on cinema’s reassertion in the aftermath of its twenty-first-century diffusion—but media allegories overlaid with geopolitical allegories animated by nostalgia for the Fordist-industrial mode of production. Channeling that nostalgia, the genre emerges as a cathexis for Hollywood’s twenty-first-century self-understanding: a tightly reflexive site of affirmation for the unity of cinema and state in an advanced global system that threatens the integrity of both. But even as the genre affirms those integrities, it cannot help but reveal the mutually supportive violence of US imperialist warmongering, Fordist political economy, and Hollywood itself, alert to the war film’s distinct legacy of state implementation. That revelation, in turn, implicates state and mediatic violence in the genre’s more immanent project of mutual self-justification and institutional renewal, a canny sublimation of state and patriarchal violence into the labor of artistic production that arrogates political authority to the latter while redeeming the former as aesthetic craftwork.

The Hurt Locker—alongside Good Kill and Body of Lies— conveys that justification as a fantasy of reindustrialization amidst global outsourcing, widespread deskilling, and automation. They consequently celebrate a formerly independent U.S. cinema helmed by auteurs while worrying the now-ambulatory post-Fordist digital mode of production and conglomerated global Hollywood in which those auteurs’ singular creative agencies have been eroded. American Sniper deepens and polemicizes that fantasy while restaging it as the antagonism between cinema’s classical “male gaze” and claims to realist representation, and television’s implicitly feminized viewer and essentially melodramatic mode (Mulvey, 1975: 11). Elaborating domestic crises of industrial productivity and decreased international competitiveness, Eastwood’s Chris Kyle is both a medium for the resentments of a downwardly mobile industrial working class and a figure for elite, well-platformed directors like himself, pining for Fordism’s entrenchment of a social order rooted in white supremacy and the gendered division of labor as Hollywood shifts priority to more diversified business models as well as more diverse content and personnel.

“I think he’s just selling DVDs”

If YouTube’s threatening dispersals and video games’ traumatic repetitions gloss The Hurt Locker’s anxieties about cinema’s diffusion within the digital production and distribution models attendant to Hollywood’s diversification into a global entertainment conglomerate, then Bigelow’s obsession with the countdown sequence—realized by The Hurt Locker’s running display of the number of days remaining in the American bomb squad’s tour of duty, and also by the second-by-second sequences that repeatedly frame that squad’s violent labor of bomb and IED disposal—works similarly to convey her commitment to cinema’s traditional immediacy and fixed temporal production. Noting Bigelow’s reflection on film as a time-based medium, Caitlin Benson-Allott writes that The Hurt Locker “[m]anipulat[es] the [war film’s] rhythm” the better to divest the genre of its “conventional ideological closure[,] … fashioning an environment of unresolved and all-pervasive anxiety” over a politics of “taking sides” (2010: 34, 41). A.O. Scott understands the film’s reflexive solipsism similarly. Less interested in the “causes and consequences of the Iraq war” than the “moment-to-moment experiences” of its practitioners, The Hurt Locker, Scott suggests, develops a “kind of hyperbolic realism [that] distills the psychological essence and moral complications of modern warfare into a series of brilliant, agonizing set pieces” (2009). So too does Alex Vernon identify in the film’s “set-piece structure” Bigelow’s “dogged avoidance of war’s controversial political history” and“fierce allegiance … [to the] spectacular immediacy … of the moviegoing experience” (2017: 375, 373). “Indeed,” Joshua Clover elaborates,

the film treats each bomb disposal as if it were a film set. Functionaries seal the area at each end, pacing with walkie-talkies while the others provide lighting and logistics. Crew and locals ring the scene gawking or going about their business while the principals, the ones with the power to act, after great delay, play out their elaborately blocked scene (2009: 8-9).

For Clover, Bigelow’s preoccupation with film’s technicians, techniques, and technologies has the effect of reducing The Hurt Locker to an allegory for its own production process. “The film hasn’t much of an analysis,” Clover concludes and, being “largely apolitical,” is “finally about nothing but itself” (2009: 9).

Being, finally, “about itself,” The Hurt Locker neither eschews the politics of Iraq’s invasion, as Vernon and Clover would have it, nor does it “distill” that politics’ “essence” to mere abstraction, as Benson-Allott and Scott would. Bigelow’s apparent fetish for the materials of her craft is neither apolitical nor abstract. Rather, it is the site of her film’s historical account of U.S. declension in the wake of deindustrialization, and also of its existential argument on behalf of an independent U.S. cinema’s capacity to impart new dynamism to a correspondingly declining Hollywood. Formalizing cinematic time so as to insist on twenty-first-century viewers’ impotence to arrest its flow, Bigelow’s countdowns consequently affirm what Thomas Elsaesser describes as traditional cinema’s “event character,” guaranteed by the durational compact between diegesis, production, and viewership (2013: 219). Legible as what Joseph Jeon calls “industrial mise-en-scène”—scenes of work for which “labor time becomes nearly synonymous with the film’s running time”—the sequences thus merge the diegetic time of James’ bomb disposal with the time of Bigelow and her crew’s filmmaking and also with the time of theatrical exhibition, synonymizing the film’s performance with its actualization as something taking place in time (2019: 18). Such “industrial mises-en-scène” reiterate their fixed conditions of production while modeling linear and goal-directed forms of work opposed to the piratical network flows and secondary market platforms that stand to subvert cinema’s event-character.

Figure 5: Daisy-chain as distribution allegory. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, Summit, 2008)

Figure 6: Beckham hawks “Hollywood special effects.” The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, Summit, 2008)

Figure 7: The Iraqi bootlegger displays his wares. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, Summit, 2008)

The Hurt Locker’s Iraqi insurgents exist as little more than specters for that subversion, an otherwise featureless foreign audience armed with consumer electronics and inscrutably driven to watch and record the American soldiers. James’ predecessor, Thompson, is killed by an apparently motiveless butcher whom Eldridge believes to be placing a call on his cellphone. En route to dispose an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), James apprehends an Iraqi factory worker toting a single 9-volt battery and, later, watches another slink away with a bulky television just as he discovers a daisy-chain of bombs—a fitting emblem for the insurgents’ malign media distribution network (Fig. 5). The cameraman who taunts Eldridge with YouTube notoriety is, above all, an anachronism, given that Bigelow sets The Hurt Locker a full year before YouTube launched its website.

Most pointedly, James’ ill-fated friendship with an Iraqi bootlegger named Beckham dramatizes the film’s indictment of a global media regime in which Hollywood’s intellectual properties rest partly in the hands of foreign multinationals, while concentrating the media/violence duality that structures the film as a whole. James befriends the teenage Beckham when purchasing pirated DVDs, which the boy describes simply as “Hollywood special effects,” and which James subsequently decries for their “shakiness” and “lack of focus”—their status as degraded copies, reflexively inferior to The Hurt Locker’s more authentic brand of “shaky” and “out of focus” independent cinema (Fig. 6). That Beckham is himself assimilated to the status of a copy reinforces the film’s linkage of intellectual property theft and terroristic violence, a counterpoint to Bigelow’s celebration of a putatively authentic, industrial mode of production. When, in an abandoned warehouse, James later discovers another young boy’s body rigged with a body-bomb—an IED surgically implanted into the abdomen—he immediately assumes the boy is Beckham. But James receives no confirmation from Sanborn and Eldridge, who must admit that, to them, all Iraqis “look the same” (Boal, 2009: 83). The unlawful reproduction Beckham practices as bootlegger of “Hollywood special effects” is literalized by the DVD’s implantation, for which the IED is metonym. Bigelow thus posits the former’s ontological violation as the latter’s surprising cause: the brutalizing violence Beckham endures follows as an extreme yet logical consequence of his contempt for legal copyright, if also his undermining of the medium’s aesthetic integrity. Following this incident, James’ suspicions about the other Iraqi bootleggers begin to mount. Querying an American infantry guard, James warns that a certain DVD merchant “could be an insurgent. How do we know he’s not giving intel to his buddies, telling them where to drop mortars?” “I think he’s just selling DVDs,” the guard responds. “He’s a security risk,” James insists. “You should get rid of him” (Fig. 7).

In reiterating post-9/11 National Security discourses that likened “the fight to protect American intellectual property” to “the war against weapons of mass destruction,” Bigelow aligns The Hurt Locker, in part, with Hollywood’s “twenty-first-century crusade” against piracy’s costly “shadow politics of distribution” (Miller et al. 2005: 214, 217). Adapting George W. Bush’s “precedent of retrofitting connections to substantiate unilateral intervention,” Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell and Tina Wang observe that the Motion Picture Association was swift to translate “contemporary intellectual property threats into millenarian hyperbole” it then marshalled to “lubricate international exhibition and open up new areas of information management,” evolving IP from an “economic sign” of free trade into a “strategic weapon” of imperialist warmongering (2005: 214, 216).

As we will see, The Hurt Locker’s tight equivalencesbetween media piracy and terroristic violence culminated with an unprecedented scale of litigation pursued by its independent production company, Voltage Pictures, against some 80,000 North Americans accused of BitTorrenting the film. But against the tendency to view that litigation as evidence of Bigelow’s complicity with Hollywood’s bid to secure control over distribution, I argue that Voltage’s demands are primarily symbolic: a knowingly compensatory gesture aimed less at recovering ticket or DVD sales than revaluing an older industrial and cinematic ethic. For Voltage and Bigelow, both, copyright cathects the sanctity of independent-minded auteurism under the Hollywood aegis: an idealized model of small-business management practice, craft-oriented manual technique, and theatrical exhibition essential to stabilizing authorial attributions complexified beyond delineation by Hollywood’s diversification into a global entertainment conglomerate and thereby upholding film’s status as cinematic art. If, in this view, The Hurt Locker exemplifies the violence perpetrated against state and medium as twin consequences of U.S. deindustrialization, so too does the film stake U.S. hegemony’s restoration on Hollywood’s aesthetic rehabilitation by so-called independents like Bigelow.

The Hurt Locker thus offers a vision of independent-minded auteurism that is both exceedingly retrograde—a near-caricature of the director-as-solitary artist and craftsman, the delicate manipulator of tiny parts—and fraught with contradiction, muddled by the post-Fordist tenets it otherwise rebuffs. A gifted and intuitive technician, James’ virtuosity within an elite team working on behalf of the U.S. military presents clear material and performative links to Bigelow’s desired practice as a maverick independent filmmaker working within a tightly consolidated Hollywood. But those links also point up Bigelow’s awareness that the model of directorial control she renders nostalgic is both always-already compromised and beyond recuperation, and that its twenty-first-century precondition amounts to a complete ideological alignment with the corporate entities that grant it.

In contrast to Hollywood auteurs’ typical opposition to a hostile and repressive system that, as Jeff Menne has it, compels them to break the rules so as to express their innermost selves, James’ insubordination—his assiduous refusal of the remote-controlled robot, brash removal of bomb protection equipment, and repeated disconnection of his communication headset from Sanborn’s and Eldridge’s—ostensibly take place in the system’s better service (2019). James breaks the rules not to upend a constraining system to which he is fundamentally opposed but rather to support that system with greater efficiency. The force of James’ artistic individuality exists not along the contours of ideology but within the parameters of technique, and therefore reveals, once again, Bigelow’s subsumption of aesthetic autonomy within a craft-oriented industrial mode of production. A Fordist icon imbued with the spirit of post-Fordism, James approximates the director-as-artist because Bigelow renders his technical gifts in aesthetic terms and imparts those gifts with artistic satisfactions, enriching the stultifying, mechanical work of James’ industrial labor with postindustrial provisions of creative fulfilment and self-direction. Formal technique, personal style, and interior meaning—auteurism’s traditional rubrics—effect Bigelow’s transmutation of James’ Fordist mechanical work into post-Fordist creative labor.

Even as James’ Fordist labor is articulated along post-Fordist timescales and invested with post-Fordist ideals, his vigorous desire to perform the work of war as an Army of One also admits anxieties about post-Fordist labor modalities only subtly implied by the film’s otherwise overt vilification of an ambulatory and piratical global mode of production. Refusing the aid of robots and teammates both, James is at once committed to outperforming the machines that would replace him and markedly allergic to the contamination of his otherwise isolated, blue-collar, Fordist tasks by the affective and communicative demands common to varieties of white-collar, post-Fordist work. Upon first meeting Sanborn, James immediately offers his condolences for Thompson’s loss. “I heard [Thompson] was a good tech,” James declares matter-of-factly. “[H]e was,” Sanborn replies, “and he was a great team leader too.” “I’m not trying to fill his shoes,” James reassures. “I’m just going to do my best” (Boal, 2009: 16). For James, doing his best means going it alone. Unwilling to perform Thompson’s affective-managerial labor or provide Sanborn and Eldridge with any ethos of teamwork, the best James can muster is a unidirectional pantomime of paternal encouragement, as he cajoles Eldridge (nickname: “buddy”) to put on his “[g]ame face” or supportively hands Sanborn (nickname: “cowboy”) Capri Suns and Gatorades (2009: 21). That lack of affective-managerial competency infuriates Sanborn, who declares James a “reckless,” “redneck piece of trailer trash,” formulating in the class idiom his frustration with a correlative style of atomized blue-collar, manual-industrial work inappropriate to the team setting (2009: 31). Eldridge’s criticism is more measured. “Not very good with people, are you, sir,” the timid specialist confides to James after a night of carousing. “[B]ut you’re a natural warrior” (2009: 70).

Shadowing The Hurt Locker’s nostalgia for the Fordist mode of production, then, is Bigelow’s more granular account of its experiential elision by post-Fordism—a subtler and more precise tracking of structural transformations in work’s technical processes, organizational hierarchies, and social dynamics following U.S. deindustrialization. In the film, these transformations play out as the progressive humanization of bombs and IEDs and, consequently, of the affective, interpersonal demands their disposal makes of James. The film’s major turning point is James’ discovery of the body-bomb victim he takes to be Beckham. Prior to this, James’ disposals have unfolded as abstract mechanical challenges with no discernable human source or consequence—“solitary encounter[s],” screenwriter Mark Boal glosses, “between one man and a deadly device” (2008: 123). The daisy-chain of IEDs is only tenuously attributed to the battery-wielding Iraqi factory worker whom James makes no attempt to prosecute. So too does the car bomb discovered outside the UN building seem to appear out of thin air, a contextless object for James’ self-absorbed technical prowess.

With the body-bomb, however, the terms of James’ engagement shift, as the bomb literally assumes a human form. Its disposal consequently undermines the hygienic, isolated pleasures of Fordist mechanical work by requiring James to rummage through the savaged abdomen of a child he thinks he knows—a grotesque condensation of feminized modalities of affective and reproductive labor valorized under post-Fordism if also a crucial de-sublimation of imperialist and patriarchal violence. Boal writes that James “finds himself drawn to the dead boy’s eyes, which seem somehow to stare directly at him” (2009: 81). As human blood and emotion intrude upon technical labor formerly abstracted from both, the body-bomb summons, in Eva Illouz’s words, a typical post-Fordist intersubjectivity that forces James to “view [himself] through others’ eyes” (2007: 23). Desperate to identify the insurgents responsible for Beckham’s mutilation, James accosts an Iraqi professor and his wife in their Baghdad home, believing them guilty of the crime. The professor, startled from his nightly dishwashing, immediately realizes that James is lost in a deranging “private war,” and so attempts to placate him (Boal, 2009: 93). “[P]lease sit down,” the man politely requests. “I am Professor Kalim, this is my home. You are a guest” (2009: 89). Anticipating some inscrutable militant, James confronts, instead, an avatar for post-Fordism’s knowledge economy engaged in typically feminized domestic labor—one who, within the intimate confines of the home, levels not a mechanical challenge but rather a communicative one, couched in affects of hospitality and care. “You are CIA, no?” the professor continues. “I am very pleased to have CIA in my home. Please, sit” (2009: 89).

James can no more easily sit and explain himself to Professor Kalim than he can, in the film’s concluding act, explain anything at all to his ex-wife, Connie (Evangeline Lily), and so he shamefacedly retreats from both. Throughout, The Hurt Locker codes domesticity as a site of male trauma and joylessness: James is more unnerved by Kalim’s softspoken hospitality than by any of his violent encounters with militants; more dismayed while navigating an American supermarket than by the ravages of war-torn Baghdad; more uncomfortable chopping vegetables for Connie than at the sight of maimed compatriots. Those responses are surely legible as some form of post-traumatic stress. But they are also of a piece with the film’s pervasive industrial nostalgia, a deepening of its mediation along axes of postindustrial masculine anxiety and resentment. As Nancy Fraser writes, Fordism’s “industrial gender order” maintained a strict division between male and female, productive and reproductive, waged and unwaged, extra-domestic and domestic labor (2016: 102). Institutionalized by the Fordist family wage, a state- and corporate-backed form of social welfare that enabled white male workers to maintain stay-at-home wives occupied exclusively with the care of children, patriarchy was simultaneously naturalized and “remov[ed] from political contestation” (2016: 111). But with the emergence of the dual-income household that followed Fordism’s collapse and women’s large-scale entry into the paid workforce, the family wage’s androcentric delimitations became progressively muddled. In deindustrialization’s wake, Michael Szalay suggests, domesticity, for men, becomes a reminder of the prophylactic sphere of masculine productive labor Fordism once upheld, and thus of labor’s progressive feminization under post-Fordism—an artifact, as Arlie Hochschild (1997: 255) writes, of post-Fordism’s widespread “reversal of the time norms and habits of work and home” and, Eva Illouz (2007: 23) adds, its consequent “blur[ring] of gender divisions”.

James confronts the full terror of that blurring in the last disposal he attempts before the brief, strained, visit to see his own family. The episode centers on James’ effort to remove a steel vest of IEDs bolted to an Iraqi man who approaches an American checkpoint claiming the vest was forced on him by insurgents. The man wears a simple black suit and dress shoes and is repeatedly identified as “having a family”—not simply a body-bomb whose disposal challenges James with the production of affect and social relation, but one hosted by the debased, emasculated body of post-Fordism’s exemplary subject: the precarious white-collar worker (Boal, 2009: 103). In contrast to the taxi drivers, factory workers, and civilians previously implicated in acts of insurgency, this man—identified in Boal’s script simply as “BLACK SUIT”—is visibly “gripped with despair” (2009: 102.) “He says, I don’t wish to die. I have a family,” the translator relays to James. “He says, please hurry, he has a family” (2009: 104).

Indexing domesticity’s simultaneous affront to and corroboration of industrial masculinity, BLACK SUIT’s sole description as a family man underscores the white-collar worker’s disidentification with labor that no longer requires specialized knowledge. In tandem with James’ horror at the man’s yearning for his family is thus equal horror at his exemplification of what Sianne Ngai defines as postindustrial laborers’ “despecified” relation to increasingly “abstract and homogeneous” forms of work (2012: 9-10). Against Bigelow’s metonymic fetishization of manual technique, figured forth by The Hurt Locker’s nostalgia for blue-collar Fordism, varieties of white-collar post-Fordist work appear doubly disempowering, overcoded with domestic femininity’s affects while “abstracted and homogenized” (to recall Ngai) within opaque chains of production primed to generate productive subjectivity rather than apply fixed, material skills. Keyed to post-Fordism’s erosion of the twenty-first-century auteur’s creative agency across an increasingly despecified filmmaking practice, Bigelow nevertheless routes her assertion of that creative agency through a reflexive and contradictory nostalgia for industrial Fordism that ultimately admits the auteur’s changed conditions of production. Those changes, Allen J. Scott suggests, render art and commerce increasing reciprocal, a corollary to the symbolic reciprocities of violent overseas power, domestic patriarchy, and Hollywood cinema on which The Hurt Locker turns. Ridley Scott’s Iraq thriller Body of Lies and Andrew Niccol’s Afghanistan drama Good Kill admit those reciprocities in similar ways, worrying, too, the twenty-first-century auteur’s loss of material and creative control. “I have a Ph.D., you know?” Iraqi informant, Nizar (Alon Abutbul) boasts to his American handler, CIA operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Body of Lies’ opening sequence. “And they[, Al Qaeda,] want me … They want me to blow myself up” (Monahan, 2007: 29). “Ph.D in what, chemistry?” Ferris probes. “Linguistic [sic],” Nizar responds. “I speak five languages. Five, you know? Nobody should say ‘martyr’ to me. Nobody.” “You are a rare flower,” Ferris reassures (2007: 29). Like Bigelow’s denigration of “Hollywood special effects”—a stand-in for the CGI-rich war-themed blockbusters against which Bigelow positions The Hurt Locker—Body of Lies seeks to rationalize the difference between the auteur Scott’s “rare” and delicate war-on-terror thriller, and Hollywood’s typical blow-’em-up fare. A figure for Scott, Ferris rejects his superiors’ detached, technical methods for information gathering, preferring to develop on-the-ground human intelligence using his own linguistic talents. At one point, he tries to recover Al Qaeda intelligence by rummaging through a smoldering pile of DVDs, recently destroyed by the CIA’s principal target (Fig. 8). Ferris’ final operation amounts to the production of a low-budget, independent film: an artfully staged terrorist attack that backfires, prompting Ferris’ extraction by the CIA bosses who have been tracking his activity via digital tools all along.

Figure 8: Ferris attempts to recover Al Qaeda DVDs. Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, Warner Bros., 2008)

Figure 9: Egan gazes at disused M-16s from his Pontiac Firebird. Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, IFC, 2014)

Niccol’s account of twenty-first-century auteurism in Good Kill is more reflexive still, while tracking closely with Bigelow’s industrial nostalgia. The film centers on Tom Egan (Ethan Hawke), a former F-16 fighter pilot reassigned as lead technician for an MQ-9 reaper drone. Egan, who continues to style himself as a pilot and spends his leisure time cruising Las Vegas in his classic Pontiac Firebird, likens the reassignment to “going from a Ferrari to a Ford Fiesta” (Fig. 9). His intuitive capacity to “feel turbulence in a plane that’s over seven thousand miles away” and to discern his targets’ facial expressions render Egan both eminently suited to his digital labor and acutely oppressed by remote chains of command that compromise his freedom to prosecute targets he deems most offensive. Consequently, Egan’s concluding act of defiance—barring his team from the missile control room and orchestrating, alone, the prosecution on a non-combatant Iraqi man he’s repeatedly observed entering a woman’s home and raping her—unfolds as an exaggerated display of aesthetic autonomy that de-sublimates the violence immanent to the “wii War.” Having conceived his targets’ miniature world in the manner of metteur, blocked his scenes and honed his characterizations, Egan realizes his vengeance, carefully manipulating the drone’s camera movements to frame, track, and finally execute the “good kill.”

Awash in patriarchal resentment and riddled with ideological contradiction, Egan’s display of sheer cultural exceptionalism cancels Good Kill’s entire moral discourse about drone warfare, replacing that discourse with an overdetermined defense of Fordist hegemony that echoes The Hurt Locker’s leeriness of post-Fordism’s increasingly feminized modalities of work as well as its anxiety about blue-collar American workers’ deskilling and redundancy in the advent of automation. Egan’s compassion for his targets leads him to experience the violent labor of remote killing as a kind of care work—a feminized form of emotional labor that jointly manifests his resistance to the post-9/11 dehumanization of non-white lives, and the twenty-first-century devaluation of non-automatable manual-industrial labor. “It’s so beautifully clear when we watch [our targets],” Egan tearfully confesses to his wife. “It couldn’t be clearer if I was there. You could see everything: the looks on their faces, everything” (Niccol, n.d.). Unable to distinguish here from there, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from sites of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, Egan’s intimacy with those images equally betrays the reversal of workplace and home and the blurring of gendered spheres Hochschild and Illouz attribute to deindustrialization’s foreclosure of the division of labor under Fordism. Egan’s compulsion to purge the Iraqi rapist from his victim’s home takes shape in response to that foreclosure, restoring the Fordist ideal of separate spheres caricatured by Good Kill’s account of patriarchal Islamic culture.[i] In this sense, while Good Kill’s condemnation of an unmodern Islamic patriarchy seems to provide a moral foil to the film’s modern, Western assertion of women’s rights, what it reveals instead is an ideological alignment between Islamic and Fordist patriarchal institutions. Like James’ procedural insubordinations—minor acts of defiance that ultimately corroborate the imperial state’s military agenda—Egan’s killing of the Iraqi rapist upholds U.S. neo-conservativism abroad and conservative domestic politics at home. Reiterating The Hurt Locker’s account of the mutually supportive violence of imperialist warmongering and Fordist political economy, Niccol, like Bigelow,acknowledges his directorial practice as less resistance to studio control than a highly pragmatic bid for what Menne conceives as “small-unit autonomy” within the system, acknowledging, in turn, that artistic ideals and commercial imperatives are immanently linked (2019: 30).

Tellingly, The Hurt Locker’s notorious legal afterlife renders those conciliations to the marriage of auteurism and commerciality hyperbolic, reinforcing the entailment of terroristic violence and intellectual property theft advanced by post-9/11 National Security discourse and by the Motion Picture Association. The centerpiece of that notoriety is the protracted reverse-class-action lawsuit brought by The Hurt Locker’s independent production company, Voltage Pictures, against some 80,000 North Americans accused of pirating the film. But this fact neglects the resulting distribution woes all but anticipated by the film’s preoccupation with the diffusion of twenty-first century cinema. After premiering at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2008, The Hurt Locker was purchased by American distributor Summit Entertainment and granted a limited U.S. release. As the film outperformed bigger-budget competitors, Summit agreed to increase its exposure, but soon encountered challenges when a shortage of film prints forced theater owners to delay screenings. By the time the film was released on DVD in January 2010, it had been illegally downloaded over ten million times, amid widespread speculation that a digital version had been leaked the previous year. Voltage pursued legal action against suspected copyright violators for the following two years, eventually halting its U.S. cases due to the costs of forensic software analysis needed to tag IP addresses to individuals. At the time of writing, the company continues its campaign against 55,000 Canadian John Does.

Nicolas Chartier, the former janitor who founded Voltage in 2005 and launched it in 2008 with The Hurt Locker, describes his anti-piracy crusade in the familiar language of independent studio and franchise behemoth. “Without such [legal] action,” Chartier reasoned in a 2010 interview, “the only movies that are going to be able to get made are Transformers 7 and Sex and the City 14” (Hazelton, 2010). As a result, he continued, “culture is going to diminish. You’re going to have fewer quality movies because these are the risky ones” (Tran, 2015). In Chartier’s view, piracy diminishes culture because it compels the film industry toward heavily franchised blockbusters rather than riskier, quality films. But through the restoration of legal viewing practices and grounded by social recommitment to “going to the theatre,” economic and cultural imperatives might happily rebalance (Gardner, 2015). Concerns over independent filmmaking’s commercial viability thus return to the essential cultural value of theatrical viewing, as violating a film’s copyright entails undermining the technical and aesthetic integrity immanent to the theatrical mode. By viewing The Hurt Locker illegally—and, importantly, on laptops and phones—Chartier’s targets are as guilty of violating the film’s trademark as they are of compromising its aesthetic effects: graininess, yes, but not the Bigelovian kind. Chartier’s legal claims thus align with Bigelow’s aesthetic and medium-existential ones, as the possessory discourse of copyright ownership bleeds into the aesthetic and attributive claims of auteurism, and the defense of culture converges cinema’s production with its distribution and reception. Bigelow and Chartier maintain that there is a legally valid way to distribute and consume The Hurt Locker, but there is also a singularly valid cultural one, and consuming the film in that way preserves film’s status as cinematic art in tandem with the legitimacy of America’s imperial power writ large. In The Hurt Locker’s war of survival, mass weapons cannot destroy Americans so long as piratical and automated post-Fordist labor systems don’t replace them—which they won’t, so long as an independent Hollywood upholds cinema’s hegemony as state power’s symbolic guarantor and goad.

The Iraq War will not be televised

Unlike The Hurt Locker, which famously holds the title for lowest-grossing film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, American Sniper is perhaps best known for disproving the Iraq war drama’s box-office toxicity. Released in 2014 alongside the second installment of The Hunger Games, Clint Eastwood’s biopic of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle was the highest-grossing film of that year, surpassing Saving Private Ryan (1998) to become the highest-grossing war film of all time. Critics and reviewers have generally attributed American Sniper’s overwhelming commercial success to Eastwood’s endorsement of what A.O. Scott describes as the George W. Bush administration’s “Manichean approach to foreign policy” (2014). Positive accounts of the film seized on the “breathtaking assurance” and “clear-sight[edness]” with which Eastwood invested the Middle Eastern wars with American cultural and political ideals, while negative ones underscored Eastwood’s studied elision of those wars’ precipitating factors (Kenny, 2014; Travers, 2014). Such accounts denounced American Sniper as a “typically Hollywoodian one-note fairy tale” (Taibbi, 2015) propelled by a well-nigh messianic Kyle, whose “savage” Iraqi nemeses include the fictional Butcher—an Al Qaeda enforcer whose weapons of choice include a power drill and a meat cleaver—and the quasi-fictionalized Mustafa—a Syrian sharpshooter and Olympic medalist hired by Al Qaeda to dispatch American soldiers (Hall, 2014: 61).

The film opens with a long-distance establishing shot trained on a convoy of marines advancing through a bombed-out Iraqi neighborhood. Moving to an overhead shot of Kyle (Bradley Cooper), the camera travels from the tip of Kyle’s rifle to his eye before shifting to the crosshair view from the rifle scope as the sniper tracks an Iraqi man on a cellphone. Kyle suspects the man is “reporting troop movement” to Al Qaeda (2014: 2). His teammate, Goat (Kyle Gallner), jokes that it’s just as likely the man is “calling his old lady” (2014: 2). Moments later, an Iraqi woman and young boy appear—the “old lady” conjured by Goat’s imagination, accompanied by the family his joke implies. The first-person point of view shot from the rifle tracks the woman as she pulls a grenade from her robe and hands it to the boy, instructing him to run toward the convoy. Goat lays bare Kyle’s dilemma: “[t]hey fry you if you’re wrong,” the marine taunts. “Send your ass to Leavenworth” (2014: 3). Luckily for Kyle, Eastwood resolves that dilemma with an abrupt cut to the sniper’s early life in Texas, where an adolescent Kyle has just killed his first white-tailed buck. “Helluva shot, son,” Kyle’s father commends. “You’re gonna make a fine hunter someday” (2014: 4). Approaching the wounded deer, Kyle’s father proclaims that “[e]verything dies to give life.” “Can it see me?” a worried Kyle responds. “It’s a deer, son,” his father reassures, before prompting Kyle to slit the deer’s throat and process the kill (2014: 4).

From the start, American Sniper formalizes the merger of weapon, eye, and camera lens sketched by Paul Virilio in War and Cinema (Figs. 10 and 11). Tracing the shared provenance of military and cinematic technologies, Virilio argues that “nothing now distinguishes the functions of the weapon and the eye; the projectile’s image and image’s projectile” (1989: 104). Begotten of military contests for optical power and consolidated by moving images’ continuous developmental imbrication with the imperial state—as recently expounded across a range of historical contexts by such critics as Jonathan Beller, Lee Grieveson, Priya Jaikumar, and Joseph Jeon—cinema’s representational forms are, for Virilio, inherently violent. “[T]he cinematic camera,” Roger Stahl elaborates, is better understood as a “camera-weapon assemblage” (2019: 101).

Figure 10: “The function of the eye being the function of a weapon.” American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2014)

Figure 11: Keeping the woman and child in his sights. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2014)

American Sniper luxuriates in the fusion of camera and weapon scope. But it commits to that fusion, first and foremost, as an artifact of cinematic technique capable of generating the intense voyeuristic pleasure that defines classical cinema’s ‘male gaze’ and underwrites its distinctive realism (Mulvey, 1975: 11). Overcoding classical motifs of visual dominance, objectification, and sadistic possession with religious themes of sight and oversight, Eastwood invests cinema’s modal dominance with a complex Fordist symbology rooted in the revalidation of industrial economy’s presiding social norms. In the scene immediately following the deer hunt, Kyle listens intently as his Protestant pastor recites the familiar “through the glass, darkly” passage from Corinthians 13:12. “We don’t see with his eyes,” the pastor explains, “so we don’t know the glory of his plan. … But on the day we rise, we will see with clarity and understand the mystery of his ways” (Hall, 2014: 5). That clarity of vision is Kyle’s, his sight enhanced by the rifle’s telescope. But it is simultaneously the viewing audience’s, compelled to assume Kyle’s sight and experience his military conquests in what Virilio calls acts of “perceptual ‘faith,’” realized through the “soul of the gun barrel” (1989: 3, 104). As Kyle sees through God’s eyes, the audience sees through Kyle’s “weaponized gaze,” bearing the burden—but also thrilling to the absolute scopic power—of a contained yet transporting moral and masculine vision Eastwood motivates toward the highest sense of cinematic realism (Stahl, 2009: 100).

The cut that resolves Kyle’s dilemma about the Iraqi woman and boy thus formalizes Eastwood’s commitment to Virilio’s camera/gun equivalence while moralizing that equivalence with a pastoral trope. Transmuted from human political actors into impassive animals available to Kyle’s oversight and judgment, the woman, Kyle later admits, appeared before him a kind of “evil” and “hate like [he’d] never seen … before” (2014: 36). That “evil” surely manifests Eastwood’s Western-inspired strategies of Manichean cultural mythologization. But it also conveys his nostalgia for the subtler moralistic components of Fordist hegemony underpinned by the political style of Protestant American patriarchy for which Kyle is an overdetermined ambassador. American Sniper routinely muddles the difference between acts of Islamic terrorism and acts of feminist liberation perpetrated by wives and mothers who threaten to collapse Fordism’s separate spheres—either by escaping the homes to which they’ve been consigned or by dragging men into them under newly flexible post-Fordist family structures.

That threat emerges in the film’s opening minutes when Goat, eliding the difference between the Iraqi man’s terrorist plotting and marital chitchat, forecasts American Sniper’s sustained anxiety about the dismantlement of Fordism’s gendered division of labor. Framed by domesticity’s encroachment upon an extra-domestic space of violent action—the suspected terrorist’s compulsion to speak with his “old lady”—the “evil” Iraqi wife and mother willing to sacrifice herself and her child to serve a radical Islam bespeaks a militant feminism that, refusing to be consigned to the domestic sphere, pursues instead a revolutionary career outside of it. As the man remains housebound on the phone, the woman and child undertake their jihadist mission on his behalf. In contrast to the Fordist families fetishized across the genre—The Hurt Locker, Good Kill, The Kingdom, Body of Lies, Lone Survivor, and 12 Strong all feature white soldiers whose heroic adventures afford them the luxury of stay-at-home wives occupied exclusively with the care of children—American Sniper’s Iraqi families are, from the start, coded as that form’s flexible, post-Fordist antitheses, dangerously unhinged from Fordism’s gendered norms of parenthood and love.

For Wolfgang Streeck, the breakdown of the Fordist family wage was 1970s U.S. political economy’s defining event, radically altering the gender composition of the domestic workforce by integrating women’s labor and thereby inaugurating newly flexible labor arrangements (2011). A response to women’s bids for economic independence, the overhaul of the family wage replaced the traditional Fordist family with “a flexible family in much the same way as Fordist employment was replaced by flexible employment” (2011: 72). Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello add that the years following Fordism’s institutional dismantlement “chimed with a depreciation of the family as a factor of temporal and geographical inflexibility” the better to “justify adaptability in work relations and mobility in emotional life” (2007: 190).

As Robert Brenner explains, Fordism’s dismantlement followed from decades-long declines in the competitiveness and profitability of America’s domestic manufacturing sector, as higher rates of return via outsourcing and foreign direct investment steadily eroded the nation’s industrial base, gutting domestic wages and facilitating the importation of cheap foreign goods. “In 1980,” Dylan Riley writes, “manufacturing still provided 22 per cent of [US] employment, and around 30 percent in most counties east of the Mississippi…By 2015, manufacturing employment had collapsed to 10 per cent” (2017: 30). Like Brenner, Riley attributes the current crisis in U.S. hegemony to the domestic industrial sector’s collapse and private capital’s reallocation to the financial sector. Like Streeck, as well as Boltanski and Chiapello, he consequently identifies the social impact of deindustrialization in terms of growing insecurity across increasingly fragile institutions of work and home. Those insecurities were compounded by the rise of “racist and patriarchal resentments” amongst industrial Fordism’s previously protected workers—workers who, like Kyle, evince an unmistakable nostalgia for the conservative politics of white supremacy, domestic patriarchy, militant nationalism, and Protestant fundamentalism (Brenner, 2007: 47) As Melinda Cooper notes, that complex jointly upheld white, working-class, and married masculinity as ‘a point of access to full social protection’ (2017:12).

Like The Hurt Locker, American Sniper traffics in highly schematic if also acutely diagnostic figures for U.S. hegemony’s decline. Kyle’s fictionalized nemeses are near-caricatures of intensifying international competition in high-skill manufacturing, such as the Olympian sharpshooter and rival sniper Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), with whom Kyle undertakes an utterly narcissistic contest of technical superiority. Others gesture to overcapacity in international markets for industrial and agricultural products, such as the cartoonishly evil “Butcher” (Mido Hamada), who tortures his victims with a power drill before carving their bodies with a meat cleaver and storing them in a walk-in freezer. The film is also relentless in its effort to bind those schematic accounts of America’s postindustrial decline to corollary depreciations in Fordist institutions of American domesticity that Eastwood, like Bigelow, understands to have bolstered postwar U.S. hegemony. Midway through American Sniper, Kyle is shocked to learn that his teammate, Biggles (Jake McDorman), has purchased a diamond engagement ring from an Iraqi merchant. “Dude, you bought it from savages[?]” Kyle gapes. “How do you know it’s not a blood diamond?” Objecting that he could not afford to buy the ring from an American vendor, Biggles responds that he’s going to tell his fiancée, Kelly, that he “got it from [the American manufacturer] Zales” (Hall, 2014: 81). The young SEAL is duly punished for his duplicity. Shot by Mustafa, Biggles loses his vision and, rallying to the cause of America First, resolves to buy Kelly another ring from Zales. He dies of his injuries before he can do so. The SEALs of Peter Berg’s military docudrama Lone Survivor fare no better, their brutal suffering at the hands of Taliban warlords set against the suburban lifestyles that suffering makes possible. “Really vivid reds,” the youngest SEAL murmurs, staring at the knub of what used to be his left hand while clutching housepaint swatches in his right (Berg, 2013: 71).

As parables of white working-class insecurity, such scenes route the Iraq war’s explicit violence through idioms of declining white working-class opportunity and undermined patriarchal authority. Kyle’s initial goad to military service is a televised newscast of the 1998 Al Qaeda bombings of US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, an otherwise abstract call to arms Eastwood implicates in an overblown attack on Kyle’s masculinity (Fig. 12). Moments before the report airs, Kyle discovers his high-school sweetheart, Sarah, in his bed with an unnamed “cowboy” (Hall, 2014: 8). Seizing her opportunity to end the relationship, Sarah berates Kyle for “think[ing he’s] a cowboy” while in reality being nothing more than “a lousy ranch-hand and a shitty fuckin’ lay” (2014: 9). She quickly gathers her belongings and leaves with the other man. As Kyle turns to the bombing footage, his “hand,” Hall’s shooting script reads, “slowly curls into a fist.” “Look what they did to us,” Kyle fumes, Kelly’s violation merged with Al Qaeda’s (2014: 10). Offered as pretext to Kyle’s visceral nationalism, Sarah’s betrayal both echoes the Iraqi wife and mother’s shocking militancy with which American Sniper opens and anticipates the ultimatum leveled by Kyle’s wife Taya (Sienna Miller) who, on the eve of his fourth volunteer deployment to Iraq, warns her husband that she and their children “might not be here when [he] get[s] back” (2014: 92). Native instances of a foreign “evil,” Sarah and Taya do not betray their kinship duties by indoctrinating their children into jihadism or by leaving their homes to commit deadly acts of terror. But they do, out of apparent boredom and frustration, betray Kyle’s traditionally Fordist vision of female subordination and the gendered spheres that delineate that vision, either by seeking social mobility outside of the home or by embracing more flexible post-Fordist conceptions of men’s involvement in the labor taking place within it.

Figure 12: “Look at what they did to us.” American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2014)

Central to Eastwood’s systemic critique of U.S. hegemony’s postindustrial erosion, then, is the relentless implication of neo-conservative U.S. imperialism’s twenty-first-century revival, and nostalgia for the mid-twentieth-century social conservatism of the Fordist family. That implication structures the film as a whole. Cued by the contrapuntal mechanics of Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper alternates between action sequences of Kyle’s military operations in Nasiriyah, Fallujah, Ramadi, and Sadr City over the course of his four tours in Iraq, and melodramatic ones concerned with the stateside returns that bracket and relieve those tours, during which the major events of Kyle’s domestic life unfold: his marriage to Taya Studebaker, the birth of the couple’s two children, and Kyle’s reintegration into civilian life. That insistent and repetitive relay—between what J.D. Schnepf describes as the “necropolitical work of killing the state’s racialized enemies abroad” and the “biopolitical work of social reproduction” at home, or what Perry Anderson enlarges to the “external postures of the American state” and the “internal fortunes of the American economy”—also stages a highly self-reflexive media allegory that conspicuously agonizes two competing modes of visual address: cinema and television (2020: 3; 2013: 12). Eastwood mediates Kyle’s military adventures in Iraq by way of the telescopic first-person point of view from the sniper’s reticulated lens while framing the contrastingly banal domestic stopovers that interrupt those adventures by way of grainy, washed-out television broadcasts that can only inadequately convey them.

Figure 13: The 9/11 attacks interrupt Kyle and Taya’s lovemaking. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2014)

Figure 14: Nelson and his family have just moved into a new home. 12 Strong (Nicolai Fuglsig, Warner Bros., 2018)

Where Kyle’s military adventures consequently index cinema’s classical realism and celebrate the omnipotence of its implicitly male spectator, his domestic interludes take shape in relation to television’s reception as a weak, irrealist conduit for public spectacle, restricted to the feminized context of the home. Just as Kyle maddens to the television that delivers news of U.S. losses in Tanzania and Kenya, his anger toward Al Qaeda primed by Sarah’s affront to his masculinity, so too does Kyle’s viewing of CNN’s coverage of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center immediately follow his engagement to Taya (Fig 13). Nicolai Fuglsig’s 12 Strong stages a nearly identical scene (Fig. 14). Stunned before the television coverage of the 2001 attacks, army captain Mitch Nelson (Chris Hemsworth) immediately volunteers to lead a team of U.S. “horse soldiers” on a series of cavalry charges across Afghanistan, leaving behind a wife who, in another version of The Hurt Locker’s Connie James, reassures her husband that she doesn’t “care how long [he’s] gone, as long as [he] come[s] back.” Binding the necropolitical work of military production to the biopolitical work of social reproduction, such framings elide the former’s historical realities with the latter’s outsized emotional intensities. But they also stage that elision in relation to what Lynne Joyrich describes as television’s essentially “melodramatic mode,” reflexively denying television’s claims to realism more generally (1996: 50). Marking television’s distinction from cinema’s high visual intensity and classically distant male spectator, Eastwood and Fuglsig gesture, instead, to television’s construction of a helpless and effeminate viewer, constrained by the medium’s low-intensity visual formats and “powerless to attain any distance from its sentimental fantasies” (1996: 61).

Against television’s melodramatic mediations, then, Kyle’s military campaigns afford the recovery of a virile, high-intensity cinematic vision. In war, a hypermasculine Kyle aggressively frames men, women, and children as the objects of his visual pleasure and sadistic possession—objects “to-be-looked at,” in Laura Mulvey’s classic formulation (1975: 11). Weakening the oppositions that maintain the power of his gaze, Kyle’s viewing of wartime newscasts and private sniper footage on his home’s small analog television invokes a sense of “chaotic intimacy” and “overpresence” that leaves him, in Joyrich’s words, “too close” to the objects on the screen (1996: 39). On leave following the birth of their first child, Kyle “stares at the TV, livid, lit by Christmas lights,” while the infant wails (Fig. 15). Noticing Taya in the doorway, Kyle rushes to conceal the grainy footage of the rival sniper, Mustafa, with which he’s absorbed. “Don’t bother turning it off,” Taya chides. “I already watched it. I had to make sure you didn’t have an Iraqi girlfriend sending sexy videos.” Kyle’s eyes drift back to the television. “Mustafa. They sell these in the street” (Hall, 2014: 61). Like the slippage between Kelly’s adultery and Al Qaeda’s attack on the US embassies—“look what they did to us”—Kyle’s response implicates Mustafa as his “Iraqi girlfriend.” Still, the emotional betrayal Taya intuits is less sexual than systemic, a chafing at Kyle’s seeming addiction to his work, and that work’s intrusion into the sanctified space of home. “I’m making memories by myself. I have no one to share them with,” Taya laments. “Even when you’re here you’re not here. I see you, feel you, but you’re not here…You’re my husband, and the father of my children—but they’re the ones that pull you back” (2014: 80). That “pull” describes Kyle’s compulsion to perform a work Eastwood overinvests with identitarian and sacred meaning, more fulfilling to Kyle, by far, than his role as husband and father. But it also registers the “chaotic intimacy” and overinvestment inherent to Kyle’s relation to the television on which he obsessively replays video of Mustafa’s kills and watches CNN war reports. A metonym for Kyle’s uncomfortable proximity to domestic sites of care and housework previously sequestered from male involvement, the television conditions an intimate yet powerless spectatorship by which Kyle can observe but not access Mustafa, who is paradoxically brought “too close” to Kyle’s subjective position for direct action. Late in the film, Kyle sits in a listless daze after having returned from the fourth and final tour in which he finally kills Mustafa—a bullet to the eye, mirroring Biggles’ death at the sharpshooter’s hand—with a superhuman, two-mile shot. At first, it appears Kyle is watching a televised war film, the familiar soundtrack of bullets and cries echoing his wartime experience. But as the camera pans outward, we perceive an image of Kyle’s face, framed and reflected by the television’s blank screen (Fig. 16). Reduced to television’s quintessentially “‘unmanly’ viewer, passive and helpless before the onslaught of TV,” Kyle is literally flattened into an image on the television’s gray, amorphous surface, his subjectivity absorbed by the dull, small-format screen (Joyrich, 1994: 28). Brought “too close” to his own image, Kyle is stripped of the classical cinematic distance that formerly enabled his mastery of self and other.

Figure 15: The overinvested spectator. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2014)

Figure 16: Television as site of sensory mismatch and deprivation. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2014)

Tellingly, the scene’s sensory mismatch retrieves and deepens an opposition between image and sound that recurs throughout American Sniper, as Taya’s phone calls provide Kyle with a domestic soundtrack utterly disconnected from his wartime activities. Affirming the domestic institutions for which Kyle risks his life, Taya’s calls also confound the transporting, masculine pleasures of war kept separate from domesticity’s restricted world of mundane tasks and objects. Bemused by his wife’s offers to “talk dirty” while he scopes suspected terrorists, Kyle responds that he’s “got [his] gun in one hand and the phone in the other.” “Well, you’ll just have to decide what’s more important,” Taya coyly replies (2014: 39). As Taya watches the war unfold on television, Kyle watches the war unfold through the lens of his rifle scope, seamless and unmediated (Fig. 17). But on one occasion, Taya, like the traumatized Kyle, is left sightless, her call having interrupted a showdown between her husband and Mustafa. Forced to seek cover, Kyle exposes Taya to the violent sounds but not the images of war, an aural assault that leaves her distraught. That sensory disconnect prefigures Kyle’s aural hallucination before the blank television. In doing so, it reinforces Eastwood’s account of television’s melodramatic irrealism while further denigrating television as an object of visual deprivation, a mere prop embedded in cinema’s larger, realist frames. Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty offers a similar account. “See this box?” a CIA interrogator threatens a black site detainee, pointing to a wooden isolation cube the exact size and shape of a 1970s television set. “I’m going to put you in it” (Boal, 2011: 16). Like Bigelow’s use of pirated DVDs and illicit YouTube content in The Hurt Locker, the televisions of Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper emerge as porous, unreflective, and compromised modes of visual address devoid of cinema’s sensuous detail and narrative dynamism—objects of strategic denigration against which to assert cinema’s aesthetic and experiential superiority.

Figure 17: Taya watches the war unfold. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros., 2014)

For Bigelow, I’ve suggested, that strategic denigration elaborates a set of challenges unique to her films’ production, distribution, and exhibition. Anxious about cinema’s diffusion within increasingly digitized production and distribution models,the unprecedented scale of anti-piracy litigation actioned by The Hurt Locker’s production company, Voltage Pictures, binds the film’s production narrative to its internal themes, agitating on behalf of Hollywood’s recommitment to small-scale auteurist “quality” and the taking of financial “risk” (to recall the film’s producer, Nicholas Chartier).

For Eastwood, rehabilitating U.S. hegemony requires a similar recommitment to native, small-scale industrial modes and models—not just to the protectionist ethos of America First, but more broadly to the Fordist social protections that upheld a working-class individualism, white supremacy, patriarchal authority, and Protestant fundamentalism. But if American Sniper’s Chris Kyle embodies those ideologies, he does so not on behalf of an outsider’s apparent rejection of Hollywood’s predominant values of efficiency and profit but rather in support of Eastwood’s revanchist vision of the white, male Hollywood insider whose auteurist prerogatives are fully compatible with those values. The remarkable production narrative that condenses that compatibility is Eastwood’s decision to use a plastic, animatronic doll in place of the real infant meant to portray Kyle’s daughter. In the now-infamous scene, Kyle and Taya pass the doll between them as they somberly discuss Kyle’s decision to volunteer for a third tour in Iraq. “Cooper and Miller deliver the performance of their careers during an argument over what’s supposed to be their infant daughter,” Brandy McDonnel reproved, “but instead end up cradling a jarringly fake plastic baby and trying to pretend it’s the real thing” (2015). Miller speculated that Eastwood “didn’t want a real baby because they’re not predictable, and you’d save time [with a doll]” (Lewis, 2015). In response to journalist Mark Harris’ quip that the “plastic baby in American Sniper [was] going to be rationalized by Eastwood auteur cultists until the end of days,” screenwriter Jason Hall maintained the doll’s use as little more than an instance of Eastwood’s notoriously efficient directing. “Hate to ruin the fun,” Hall revealed, “but real baby #1 showed up with a fever. Real baby #2 was a no show” (Gallupo, 2015).

As an instance of directorial economy, Eastwood’s use of the doll is plausible. “I always improvise” and “I can work quite fast,” Eastwood stated in a 2012 interview (Goodridge, 2012: 173-4). “[But] I don’t make films just to be working … it has to be something that I have a certain feeling for” (2012: 174). For Eastwood, workmanlike efficiency and the ability to meet Warner Bros.’ deadlines “on time and without a lot of fanfare” comport with personal feeling and an idiosyncratic directing style. “My relationship with Warner Bros. helps me,” Eastwood admitted in the same interview. “As long as somebody finances, you can make a film and … hopefully it’s a success” (2012: 175).

The plastic baby, then, evokes Eastwood’s ideological alignment with Warner Bros.’ business imperatives even as it hyperbolizes his bid to retain creative control within the Warner system. “I’m willing to stand before my creator and answer for every shot I took,” Kyle insists when asked to justify his 150+ kills (Hall, 2014: 112). So too is Eastwood willing to stand before Warner Bros. and answer for his use of the plastic prop most critics wager cost American Sniper the Oscar for Best Picture. “[I] couldn’t believe that we were working with a plastic baby,” Cooper confessed. “The suspension of disbelief is massive” (Lewis, 2015). Marking his authority to suspend belief, Eastwood declares the auteur’s privilege to determine what’s real and what isn’t, a counterpart to Kyle’s messianic self-regard. But because that declaration so obviously rhymes with American Sniper’s nostalgia for the social privileges reserved exclusively for white, working-class men under industrial Fordism, it also amplifies American Sniper’s ideological stakes. Domesticity, already mediated by television’s melodramatic and feminizing modes, is here reinforced as a site of irrealism and artifice—a stagey, plastic milieu where men with props are forced to play roles they secretly loathe. That irrealism, I’ve argued, throws into relief Eastwood’s assertion of classical cinema’s durability and the medium’s singular adequateness to war’s realist conveyance, agitating on behalf of so-called independent studio auteurs like himself, beholden yet also committed to Hollywood’s industry values and thus ideally positioned to put those values on display. More forcefully than Bigelow, Niccol, Scott, Fuglsig or any of his genre peers, Eastwood enshrines cinema as an essentially violent medium calibrated to the ideologization of US empire’s violent dominion, understanding cinema’s imbrication with U.S. power—as state sovereignty’s privileged mediator and vital incarnation—but moreover cued to Hollywood as an exceptional line of access to political representation for the powerful insiders who superintend it.

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Notes

[i] This, moreover, has the effect of restoring Egan’s ownership rights to his own wife, who’s earlier threatened to return to her job as a stripper and who ends the film by taking Egan’s children and leaving their Nevada home.

Maria Bose is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Providence College in Rhode Island, where she teaches and writes about the political economy of late twentieth and twenty-first century culture. With Jason Willwerscheid, she’s now at work on a handful of books: “Capital Wasteland: Fallout and the Transaction of Gaming IP,” on the Fallout franchise’s transmediation; “The PlayStation 4: Cinematicity and Sony’s Cross Media Gambit,” on Sony’s post-recession corporate media evolution; and “States of Play: Deglobalization and its Mediaforms,” on AAA RPGs and the mediation of deglobalizing transition. She recently served on the advisory board of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).

Email: mbose@providence.edu

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 26/8/2024
Date of original decision: 8/10/2024
Revised article submitted: 7/5/2025
Article accepted: 7/5/2025