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

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