Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media

By Tanine Allison

The American popular imagination has long portrayed World War II as the “good war,” fought by the “greatest generation” for the sake of freedom and democracy. Yet, combat films and other war media complicate this conventional view by indulging in explosive displays of spectacular violence. Combat sequences, Tanine Allison argues, construct a counter-narrative of World War II by reminding viewers of the war’s harsh brutality.

Destructive Sublime traces a new aesthetic history of the World War II combat genre by looking back at it through the lens of contemporary video games like Call of Duty. Allison locates some of video games’ glorification of violence, disruptive audiovisual style, and bodily sensation in even the most canonical and seemingly conservative films of the genre. In a series of case studies spanning more than seventy years—from wartime documentaries like The Battle of San Pietro to fictional reenactments like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan to combat video games like Medal of Honor—this book reveals how the genre’s aesthetic forms reflect (and influence) how American culture conceives of war, nation, and representation itself.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813597508

Book preview

Destructive Sublime

War Culture

Edited by Daniel Leonard Bernardi

Books in this new series address the myriad ways in which warfare informs diverse cultural practices, as well as the way cultural practices—from cinema to social media—inform the practice of warfare. They illuminate the insights and limitations of critical theories that describe, explain and politicize the phenomena of war culture. Traversing both national and intellectual borders, authors from a wide range of fields and disciplines collectively examine the articulation of war, its everyday practices, and its impact on individuals and societies throughout modern history.

Tanine Allison, Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media

Brenda M. Boyle and Jeehyun Lim, eds., Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives

Jonna Eagle, Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema

Aaron Michael Kerner, Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation

David Kieran and Edwin A. Martini, eds., At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett, Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War

Nan Levinson, War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built

Matt Sienkiewicz, The Other Air Force: U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media Since 9/11

Jon Simons and John Louis Lucaites, eds., In/visible War: The Culture of War in Twenty-First-Century America

Roger Stahl, Through the Crosshairs: The Weapon’s Eye in Public War Culture

Destructive Sublime

World War II in American Film and Media

Tanine Allison

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

978-0-8135-9749-2

978-0-8135-9748-5

978-0-8135-9750-8

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Tanine Allison

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

In memory of my father, who first taught me the power of the movies

For Kyle, Emer, and Dash

Contents

Introduction: A Retrospective Look at the World War II Combat Genre

Chapter 1. No Faking Here: The New Authenticity of Wartime Combat Documentaries

Chapter 2. The Good War? Style and Space in 1940s Combat Films

Chapter 3. Rationalizing War: Reconstructions of World War II during the Cold War and Vietnam

Chapter 4. Nostalgia for Combat: World War II at the End of Cinema

Chapter 5. Simulating War on an Algorithmic Playground

Conclusion: A Bad War? The World War II Combat Genre Now

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

A Retrospective Look at the World War II Combat Genre

A succession of World War II–era U.S. Army transport airplanes floats across a starry nighttime sky partially obscured by clouds. With somber music, a male voice recounts, My paratroopers and I got our orders to jump into Normandy today. White text on a black screen clarifies the date: June 5, 1944, the night before D-Day. Over a montage of images showing U.S. Airborne paratroopers preparing to jump, the voice continues, We’ll be the first ones there, the first to fight. The Screaming Eagles won’t let our boys on the beach down. In medium close-up, one paratrooper looks up at the camera, his face camouflaged with black paint and aglow with a red warning light, as the voice-over concludes, I won’t let my men down. Text on the screen alerts viewers that the events pictured are based on a true story. A different male voice begins a new narration: In the name of liberty, they fought for their country, their families, their brothers. As soldiers, they fought as a squad. As a team, they triumphed. This recitation unfolds over a series of images showing soldiers in combat in a generically French landscape from the mid-twentieth century, filled with quaint farmhouses, fields of tall grass surrounded by trees, and bombed-out villages bounded by short stone walls.

Like many trailers, this one highlights action and excitement: soldiers run across an open landscape firing their rifles into smoke; a soldier is blown backward by an explosive blast; a Jeep approaches with machine guns ablaze at the camera; an airplane on fire darts across the sky and crashes into the ground, causing an enormous yellow explosion. There are also moments of pathos and danger: a soldier cries into his radio, This is Baker company, we’re surrounded; a group of paratroopers tries to find a way to parachute out of their burning aircraft; of the dead body of a soldier lying in blood nearby, someone states, They were on the same basketball team, they dated the same broad.

Aesthetic qualities of the images connect this trailer to recent contributions to the World War II combat genre: desaturated colors dominated by browns and greens, tracking shots moving around soldiers in combat, slow motion to show the experience of firing at the enemy, a shot that shakes in response to an explosion. The musical soundtrack, too, reminds one of John Williams’s melancholic, brassy score for Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and the martial drumming familiar from many battle scenes. Not only does the on-screen text provide information like the date and the historical source of the story, but it also pulls out and emphasizes particular words in the voice-over narration: Country, Families, Brothers. The trailer gives the overall impression that combat is an honorable activity, motivated by the necessity of protecting liberty and one’s fellow soldiers. Despite the dangers, waging war is a matter of duty and service to one’s country and one’s family. As the voice-over, on-screen text, and selected imagery make clear, triumph can be achieved through teamwork and, occasionally, sacrifice.

Reading my description above, you might assume that the trailer in question was made to promote a film or television series set in World War II, or perhaps a History Channel documentary that uses reenactments. If you were watching the trailer, one clue would suggest otherwise: all the characters and settings are computer generated. In fact, the trailer advertises a video game, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox/Ubisoft, 2005).¹ The thematic concerns and aesthetic characteristics of the trailer suggest that the digital medium of video games simply adopts genre conventions of legacy media like film and television while giving them a technological upgrade. The video implies that the game continues in the venerable tradition of the World War II combat film. It includes all the elements that, as media scholar Debra Ramsay has argued, comprise the conventional American media portrayal of World War II: the citizen-soldier, the spectacular visual construction of the war, and the justification of the war as necessary.² Even the game’s title is intentionally reminiscent of the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), which dramatized the wartime exploits of the same airborne company that is depicted in the game.

Playing the game itself, though, suggests something else. Most of the gameplay involves moving through a simulated version of World War II–era Normandy and enacting brutal violence on German soldiers. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is a first-person shooter, meaning the player looks at the gameworld through the eyes of a participant in the action. The gameplay is focused on killing; a gun remains visible at the bottom of the screen and a targeting reticule stays centered on-screen throughout the interactive portions of the game. Missions involve achieving particular objectives: usually a combination of destroy this (bridge, tank, weapon), capture this (farmhouse, town, weapon), or defend this (town, bridge, hill). But instead of providing meaningful historical narratives, these objectives primarily serve to motivate movement through a series of game challenges with different weapons, vehicles, landscapes, and arrangements of enemies that must be killed. The majority of the gameplay is spent moving, aiming, and firing, as well as directing squad members to do the same. The narrative qualities emphasized in the trailer—the selfless squad leader, the emotional connections among brothers in arms, the virtues they are fighting for—are, ironically, minimized within the game to intermediary cut-scenes or bits of voice-over between the missions. In many ways, World War II becomes merely an aesthetically and historically interesting backdrop to the standard first-person shooter mechanics of gameplay.

It is tempting, therefore, to see World War II shooter games as watered-down versions or bastardizations of the cinematic combat genre. This line of reasoning would allow scholars and historians of the World War II combat genre to set video games aside as an aberration, leaving untouched the core values of the cinematic genre as they have been understood in previous scholarship. However, another possibility—which I take up in this book—is to suggest that video games can expose parts of the genre that have previously been ignored. While it is often taken for granted that the study of older media can inform our understanding of newer media, I propose that the reverse is also true: the analysis of emerging media can open up novel ways of understanding the aesthetic forms of the past. By looking at the World War II combat genre retrospectively, through the lens of first-person shooter video games like Brothers in Arms, we can see the seventy-plus-year-old genre afresh. In applying this retrospective methodology, new questions arise: Do the celebration and reward of violence form part of previous representations? How might attending to combat change how we conceive of the genre, its aims, its aesthetic forms, its functions, and its meanings?

Figure 1. A digital landscape in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (Gearbox/Ubisoft, 2005).

This book asserts that many of the elements of video games that appear to depart from the cinematic genre can actually be found there as well. Shifting the focus from analysis of plot, dialogue, and character to consideration of the distinct aesthetics of combat sequences—those portions of films most similar to action-oriented video games—exposes similarities between the two media, challenging some of our assumptions about the genre as a whole. After all, World War II combat films also contain sequences that spectacularize violence and celebrate destruction. Like video games, they engage viewers by evoking strong sensations, and they acknowledge killing as an inherent part of war. In addition, the films sometimes use the apparent moral clarity provided by World War II in order to justify or excuse the visualization of elements that are less clearly moral, that might in other circumstances be perceived as prurient, sensationalistic, or exploitative. The overwhelming focus on fighting in video games serves as a reminder that battle scenes are a crucial part of the cinematic combat genre, yet the aesthetics of combat have often been overlooked in favor of a narratological and ideological analysis of the genre.

By privileging the visual construction of battle over narrative, this book traces a new aesthetic history of the World War II combat genre, revealing elements of the films and other media texts that challenge our typical assumptions about them. By examining archival sources relating to the production and reception of particular texts and performing close readings of the combat sequences within them, I argue that the genre’s messages about war are more ambiguous and contradictory than previously imagined. Instead of an ever-increasing mythologization of the good war, the genre presents a (sometimes literal) battleground for conflicting views and feelings about World War II as well as more recent conflicts that have occupied the American military. Through my retrospective methodology, the genre can be viewed less as a propaganda machine, or an ongoing chronicle of the greatest generation of Americans, and more as an internally divided body of work reflecting uncertainty and confusion about America’s involvement in fighting overseas, both during the Second World War and in more recent conflicts.

In the remainder of this introduction, I examine the good war myth of World War II and the ways that the World War II combat genre contributed to that legend and made it into a formula. I then argue that combat sequences frequently complicate that formula by representing war as irrational, violent, and chaotic. They do so by engaging in the destructive sublime, a term inspired by Edmund Burke (by way of J. David Slocum) that describes the perverse pleasure taken in witnessing devastation. The destructive sublime often takes the form of an alternative or secondary discourse in a media text, running parallel to the conventional narrative. By connecting the destructive sublime to Jordan Crandall’s conception of armed vision, I show how visual media’s use of perspective can align the view of spectators with that of combatants or weapons themselves. I then introduce the primary visual perspectives (embedded and remote) and imagemaking modes (record and reenactment) that I trace throughout the World War II combat genre in the chapters ahead. Finally, in an outline of the book chapters to follow, I demonstrate how these aesthetic forms combine to mediate conflicting representations of war as rational, controllable, and knowable on the one hand, and illogical, uncontainable, and inexplicable on the other. Moreover, both of these potentially contradictory accounts of war may be present in a single film.

World War II as the Good War

The Second World War has remained a popular setting for Hollywood over the last seventy-five years, providing high-stakes drama as background to stories of romance, adventure, and tragedy as varied as The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, 1987), The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996), and even Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011). The explicitly fighting-focused World War II combat genre also continues to this day, attracting acclaimed filmmakers like Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both from 2006), Spike Lee (Miracle at St. Anna, 2008), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds, 2009), George Lucas (executive producer of Red Tails, 2012), and Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, 2017). American popular culture has taught us what to expect of these stories: citizen-soldiers fighting for freedom, individuals putting aside selfish desires to work for the common good, men finding the best of themselves in the worst of circumstances. Throw in some thrilling aerial dogfights and a little John Wayne, and you have the stereotypical presentation of World War II, burned into the American cultural imagination by television reruns, pop culture parodies, and robust genre conventions. In contrast, this same cultural imaginary projects the Vietnam War as a bad war; films about this conflict typically question the meaning of war, expose the brutality of military life, and show Americans as corruptible (or just corrupt). But World War II had both a justification (the evil Nazis and imperialistic Japanese) and a happy ending. Stories of the Second World War celebrate everyday heroes fighting the good fight. In this mind-set, recent revisions of the genre—Saving Private Ryan’s brutal Omaha Beach sequence, Spike Lee’s assertion of military racism, Quentin Tarantino’s rewriting of history—are all the more surprising because war films are purported to be conventional and staid. World War II films are often assumed to be conservative both politically and formally—to be, indeed, generic. This book argues that the genre is far more complex than it is often purported to be.

The popular American understanding of World War II is paradoxical when we consider Hayden White’s argument that ‘holocaustal’ events—and he includes the two world wars alongside genocides like the Shoah—function like psychological trauma for the groups that experience them: This means that they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind, but neither can they be adequately remembered; which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning.³ These painful events, White claims, do not lend themselves to conventional histories. Yet for the last seventy-five years, American culture has sought to establish a clear and unambiguous account of World War II, modifying a traumatic event into the nation’s greatest glory. No matter how psychologically overwhelming, how violent and destructive, how varied in terrain and technology, World War II has since been molded into a triumphalist teleology, sanded of its rough edges and imbued with a sense of moral righteousness. The war was good because we won, and we won because we were good.

In The Best War Ever: America and World War II, Michael C. C. Adams claims that over time, the war years have come to seem a golden age, an idyllic period when everything was simpler and a can-do generation of Americans solved the world’s problems. In this mythic time of the Good War, everyone was united: there were no racial or gender tensions, no class conflicts.⁴ James Bradley, coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers and son of one of the Iwo Jima flag-raisers, characterized this can-do generation as loyal and dedicated, honorable and brave. His book concludes with the lines, They were boys of common virtue. Called to duty. Brothers and sons. Friends and neighbors. And fathers. It’s as simple as that.⁵ In his series of books on World War II veterans, Tom Brokaw also locates the virtue of the war explicitly in those who fought it, claiming that they were part of the greatest generation any society has ever produced.⁶ To achieve this unique status, their task was nothing less than to save the world, and they succeeded by winning the war.⁷

As White attests, the war was not always endowed with such clarity of meaning. Even a narrative of national victory requires frequent repetition in order to overcome the trauma at its origins. It has taken a wholesale rewriting of the war to turn one of the most destructive and deadly enterprises in human history into the good war.⁸ Paul Fussell’s groundbreaking work Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War devotes itself to undermining the myths that have accumulated about the war. He writes, For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty.⁹ For Fussell, who fought as an infantryman in the war, World War II was indescribably cruel and insane: It was a savage, insensate affair, barely conceivable to the well-conducted imagination (the main reason there’s so little good writing about it) and hardly approachable without some currently unfashionable theory of human mass insanity and inbuilt, inherited corruption.¹⁰ Similarly, Edward W. Wood Jr., another veteran of the war and author of Worshipping the Myths of World War II, writes that World War II was about one thing and one thing only: killing.¹¹

Through the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, popular American film participated in the project of transforming the Second World War from a global cataclysm into evidence of virtue, particularly American virtue. This effort began during the war with fictional films recreating battles ripped from the headlines: Wake Island (John Farrow, 1941), Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943), Guadalcanal Diary (Lewis Seiler, 1943), Objective, Burma! (Raoul Walsh, 1945). By borrowing from previous war films and genres like the Western, these films established a clear set of genre conventions that created particular, positive associations with America’s participation in the war. Jeanine Basinger’s formative book The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre elucidates these conventions while also tracing their origins and their development over time. Some of the most important of these conventions are the ethnically mixed group of soldiers that overcomes internal conflicts to become a cohesive fighting unit, the reluctant hero who is forced to become the leader of the group, the important military objective that the group must achieve, and the combat with the enemy that determines the fates of the characters.¹²

These cinematic conventions highlight the cultural meanings that have attached themselves to World War II over time. The focus on the group dramatizes the necessity of unity, and the group members’ ability to overcome petty feuds among them demonstrates their ability to put aside selfish concerns for the good of the collective. The soldiers’ acceptance of duty underscores the need for sacrifice. Their discussions of home serve as reminders of the freedoms they fight to protect, while the enemy is demonized as tyrannical, deceptive, and unrelentingly evil. Over time, these genre conventions became a formula for affirming the Second World War’s status as the good war, particularly as other conflicts, like Vietnam or the second war in Iraq, appeared in contrast to be bad wars. This formula has been pervasive, even influencing films with science fiction combat like Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977), Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), and Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997), or more recent films like Battle Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011) and Battleship (Peter Berg, 2012).¹³

This book does not question the existence of this formula or its power to inspire pathos and pride. In this way, it builds on Basinger’s work by taking the existence of a robust genre visualizing World War II combat as a given. World War II is not just a common setting for films dealing with war, but rather, in Thomas Schatz’s words, Hollywood’s military Ur-narrative.¹⁴ We saw the elements of this paradigmatic narrative in the trailer for the video game Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. However, articulating a set formula runs the risk of making it dogmatic or monolithic. This book uncovers the cracks in this formula, where the pieces don’t seem to fit or the narrative doesn’t quite congeal. Inspired by the action focus of military video games, I argue that the combat sequence is the place where contradictions arise and new narratives emerge, upending genre conventions and potentially counteracting the honorable messages expressed by the characters, dialogue, and plot.

The Function of the Combat Sequence

A fundamental argument of this book is that combat sequences in films, television series, and video games construct (and destruct) meaning in a different way than scenes without combat. Battle and fighting scenes exist in tension with narrative—sometimes reinforcing the emotional course of the story, sometimes contradicting messages in the plot, and sometimes opening up varied sensations that can be read in multiple ways. Like the song-and-dance number in the musical, the chase or fight scene in an action movie, or the special-effects sequence in a science fiction film, the war film’s combat sequence invites a different spectatorial relationship than the rest of the film.¹⁵ Just as a musical number might motivate toe-tapping mimicry and science fiction a feeling of contemplative wonder, scenes of combat provoke powerful, visceral sensations—fear, disgust, joy, exhilaration—that engage the spectator’s body on a corporeal level. As many film scholars have argued, these sequences in genre cinema, despite their spectacle and thrills, still provide narrative and character information; therefore, it would be an error to state baldly that they halt the flow of narration or oppose narrative altogether. However, these generically permitted scenes provide alternative pleasures, appeals, and forms of address to the more strictly construed narrative sequences.

In a 1988 essay on the combat sequence, Claudia Springer reads these scenes as examples of spectacle and cinematic excess. She writes that combat sequences depart from the requirements of narrative to indulge in visual display; the spectator is encouraged to experience the pleasure of looking when it is unconstrained by narrative logic, to experience spectacle.¹⁶ In characterizing these sequences as excess, Springer draws upon Kristin Thompson’s definition of cinematic excess as those aspects of the work which are not contained by its unifying forces, such as narrative motivation.¹⁷ Springer also makes use of Richard Dyer’s theory that entertainment’s non-narrative elements give the spectator feelings of plenitude and exhilaration that temporarily overshadow tensions present in the narrative.¹⁸ By drawing on these two theorists, Springer makes two arguments worth reiterating here: Combat sequences can disrupt and unsettle narrative meanings. At the same time, they provide their own gratifications in the form of heightened stimuli and intense emotion.

While combat scenes may not arrest narrative development altogether, they often depart from the rest of the film by espousing noticeably different aesthetic strategies that sometimes challenge the consistency and coherence of the film as a whole. Furthermore, these opposing styles endorse divergent values. If dialogue scenes privilege transparency, communication, clarity, and unity, combat sequences employ spectacle, movement, experimentation, and disunity. One common, intentionally disorienting technique is the juxtaposition of close and distant views of battle. For instance, in December 7th (Gregg Toland/John Ford, 1943), a documentary discussed in more detail in chapter 1, the re-creation of the Pearl Harbor attack cuts between relatively close shots of sailors moving below the decks of the USS Arizona to an extreme long shot of the battleship’s destruction in a massive explosion, envisioned using miniature models. This alternation between close-up and removed perspectives places the viewer in the midst of the danger alongside the fighting men and then, in quick succession, at a safe distance away, able to contemplate the devastation from afar. This editing strategy gives the spectator more information and a more comprehensive view of what is happening. But the rapid cutting between these two positions also creates a sensory dislocation that works to disorient at least as much as to explain.

As I will elucidate later in the introduction, the aesthetics of combat in the World War II film can be characterized by just this tension between the two different viewpoints on the action—one up close and the other from afar; I label these perspectives embedded and remote. Some war films (and other media, like video games) highlight the former perspective and others the latter, though many combine the two, resulting in a discordant shift back and forth. In this way, the combat sequence generates movement, sensation, and bewilderment in a process akin to an action film. This production of sensation contributes to the reputation action films have for being thrill rides or roller-coasters. But what are the ramifications of causing such corporeal disorientation in the war film? Combat sequences are like roller-coasters without seatbelts; the perceived stakes are life and death. Springer notes, The combat sequence is uniquely capable of positioning the spectator in the delicate balance between life and death, for it combines vicarious death with guaranteed survival. One can feel the proximity of death while knowing that, regardless of how many bodies on screen are wounded or killed, one will survive to watch the rest of the film and leave the movie theatre.¹⁹ Although the viewer’s remove from the battle depicted on screen is taken for granted, combat scenes still often overwhelm the senses and trigger sensations of panic, fear, vulnerability—and also exhilaration and invincibility.

Combat sequences incite strong, corporeal feelings, but how these responses are interpreted and connected to other experiences of the film may vary widely. As Springer attests, because combat sequences inscribe so many conflicting, even contradictory, tendencies, they open themselves up to multiple readings.²⁰ Scenes of battle can thus be characterized by an ambiguity of meaning, as well as an autonomy from the rest of the film. A combat sequence may be perceived as aesthetically, and even politically, radical, while the explicit narrative overtly rejects such judgment. Because of the polysemic nature of combat sequences, war media are imbued with an indeterminacy that can lead to contradictory interpretations. For instance, a film I discuss in chapter 3, Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970), received praise from both prowar and antiwar contingents at the height of the Vietnam War, one side seeing unabashed heroism in the portrait of the famous World War II general and the other seeing parody. More recently, American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014), a dramatization of the life of U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, an Iraq War veteran credited with the highest number of confirmed kills in history, was greeted with many, often incompatible readings among critics in the popular press. While part of the uncertainty in these representations stems from the idiosyncratic and controversial behaviors of these two public figures, a contributing factor is the inability of scenes of combat to pin down meaning. In fact, part of the pleasure of the combat genre is the way that battle sequences affect viewers on a visceral level, tapping into wells of feeling and waves of excitation that do not conform to political platforms or strict ideologies.

If combat sequences sometimes work against narrative, they also have the potential to create their own alternative stories that embrace different values. Instead of the dialogue, plot points, and narrative motivation present in other scenes, combat sequences make meaning out of aesthetic innovation, sensory play, and perspectival juxtaposition. By representing World War II through the lens of death and disaster, scenes of combat depart from the typical good war narrative of moral clarity and justified force and replace it with a dangerously fascinating portrait of awesome destruction. Thus it is the ambiguity of the combat sequence’s meaning that allows it to enact a new story of World War II, highlighting the war’s sensational violence and aestheticized brutality. This view of the Second World War as typified by cruelty and killing, which aligns with the assessments of veteran authors like Paul Fussell and Edward W. Wood Jr., has rarely found unimpeded expression within mainstream American culture—except, as I argue in chapter 5, in video games. However, I contend that some of this counternarrative of the war is embedded, if heretofore unrecognized, in even the most conventional and seemingly conservative texts within Hollywood cinema and mainstream media—movies like Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943), The Longest Day (Ken Annakin et al., 1962), and Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001), and video games like Call of Duty (Infinity Ward/Activision, 2003). Submerged in the explosive and exhilarating aesthetics of combat sequences, this alternative story of the war speaks the language of spectacle; it revels in images of violence and obliteration; it inundates the spectator with kinetic action and sensory stimuli. I label this sensual language of violence the destructive sublime.

The Destructive Sublime

J. David Slocum was the first to apply the term destructive sublime to the American war film in his introduction to the anthology Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. He describes it as an intense and even perverse fascination with sensation and death that he locates among some film spectators as well as some characters within a film’s story, such as bloodthirsty enemies or even those Americans who are drawn inexplicably to war like the title character of Patton.²¹ Slocum suggests that the seductively enjoyable sensations of watching the terrible beauty of combat from a safe distance (as in one’s theater seat) can counteract the attempt of films and other media to make sense of war and inscribe it within a rational, and moral, narrative.²² It is this tension—between the sensual and sensible appeals of combat sequences—that I want to explore here, first by looking more closely at Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, which Slocum references, and later, throughout the book, in relation to particular texts.

Edmund Burke published his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757, more than three decades before Immanuel Kant published his better-known Analytic of the Sublime as part of the Critique of Judgment. For both Burke and Kant, the sublime refers to something of immense size, scale, or power that overwhelms human reason and produces feelings of awe, astonishment, or majesty. Burke, however, locates the root of the sublime in terror and pain, as long as one is slightly distanced from it and not experiencing it directly: We have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.²³ Although he argues that this delight is not based in cruelty, but rather in sympathy, he also suggests that the sublime is founded simply on a yearning for forceful sensation. For Burke, pain and fear are far stronger sensations than pleasure.

Burke characterizes the experience of the sublime as one of astonishment, that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. He continues that the astonished mind "is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by