Screen combat: Recreating World War II in American film and media

“Screen Combat” interrogates how the cultural mythology of the Second World War as the “Good War” surfaces in the American war film by examining the change in the aesthetics of combat sequences over time. By juxtaposing 1940s documentary and fiction films with contemporary cinema and video games, this dissertation argues that the World War II combat genre is not the conservative, coherent, “classical” genre that previous studies have assumed it to be. Rather, combat films and video games are complex, polysemic texts that challenge our assumptions about Hollywood filmmaking and mainstream American media.;This dissertation contends that the combat sequences of World War II films give voice to a counter-narrative of the war, breaking away from the typical plots of noble sacrifice and dedicated heroism to show literally explosive images of devastation and annihilation. Even seemingly conventional cinematic histories of the war—movies like Destination Tokyo (1943) and Pearl Harbor (2001) and video games like Call of Duty (2003)—contain jarring and exhilarating combat sequences that undercut our usual notion of the Second World War as a morally righteous undertaking and replace it with a dangerously fascinating portrait of awesome destruction. It is in these moments of action that the contradictions of war come bubbling to the surface, convulsing and even rupturing the body of the text as it seeks to simultaneously contain and unleash the violence of battle. In combat-centered films and video games, heterogeneous messages about the experience of war converge in the body of the spectator/player, who is caught up in both the spectacle of fantasy and the visceral sensation of “being there” on the front lines. Beyond the realism of historical fidelity or visual mimesis, these texts activate a “corporeal realism” that exists at the very base of specular experience—that of bodily sensation.