Archive for June 2011

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[ecrea] New book: A "Toxic Genre": the Iraq War Films

Fri Jun 10 10:23:48 GMT 2011




I hope colleagues will forgive me for circulating information about my new book, out from Pluto Press this week. /A 'Toxic Genre': the Iraq War Films/ explores in depth a cycle of 23 films which came out between 2004-9 all of which address through fiction the issues for America of its war in Iraq. (There is actually a 24^th , but I missed it until too late ...) The films are linked by a number of things, but most curiously by the fact that all of them were judged to be 'failures', and endless talk about that 'failure' accompanied them before, during and after their releases.

My book asks a number of questions about these films. Why do many of them insistently fictionalise real events, but then also attach many reminders of their 'reality'? How do they combine a YouTube aesthetic of 'amateur/authentic' filmmaking with a repertoire of 'Indiewood' cinematic devices? What sense do we give to /Variety/ calling the films a 'toxic genre' (the book's title), written about Kathryn Bigelow's plans for her film about American soldiers in Iraq, /The Hurt Locker/? How /do /the films depict the 'American soldier' in the context of Iraq? The book explores the history of the idea of the American soldier, from the Doughboys of WWI, through the deliberate manufacture of the image of the 'GI' during and after WWII (a feat involving not only the military and filmmakers, but sociologists as well), to a crisis which emerged at the start of the new millennium and which afflicts these films.

The heart of this crisis comes in their deployment of one troubling category: post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD -- a 'scientific' invention of the psychiatric establishment in 1980 -- comes in these films to provide the 'excuse' for soldiers' behaviour in Iraq: and nowhere more than in the one film that broke the mould of 'failure': /The Hurt Locker/. My closing chapter explores the politics of this film, but also the politics of its battle with /Avatar/ and/ /its winning 6 Oscars in 2010. If nothing else, I hope my book could point you to films about Iraq that you may have missed, and which represent the most striking of the responses. /Redacted /for its singular construction using thirteen different kinds of filming -- and for which its director Brian de Palma was widely accused of treason. /Badland/ for its deployment for political purposes of those Indiewood devices. And /GI Jesús/ for its elaboration of a striking new soldier-image, the resisting Latino soldier.

Martin Barker



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