Heroism and Gender in War Films

By Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Filmic constructions of war heroism have a profound impact on public perceptions of conflicts. Here, contributors examine the ways motifs of gender and heroism in war films are used to justify ideological positions, shape the understanding of the military conflicts, support political agendas and institutions, and influence collective memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137360724

Book preview

HEROISM AND GENDER IN WAR FILMS

EDITED BY

KAREN A. RITZENHOFF AND JAKUB KAZECKI

HEROISM AND GENDER IN WAR FILMS

Copyright © Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN: 978–1–137–36453–1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heroism and gender in war films / edited by Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki.

  pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–1–137–36453–1 (alk. paper)

 1. War films—History and criticism. 2. Heroes in motion pictures. 3. Sex role in motion pictures. I. Ritzenhoff, Karen A. II. Kazecki, Jakub.

PN1995.9.W3H48 2014

791.4396581—dc23                                   2014005575

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: August 2014

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Michael, Jan, Dom, and Lea who have taught me about war and peace

(Karen A. Ritzenhoff)

For Iana

(Jakub Kazecki)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Anna Froula

Introduction

Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki

Part I  Historical Leaders and Celebrities: Their Role in Mythmaking in the Cinema

1 Mary Pickford’s WWI Patriotism: A Feminine Approach to Wartime Mythical Americanness

Clémentine Tholas-Disset

2 The Reluctant Hero: Negotiating War Memory with Modern-Day Myths in Passchendaele (2008)

Janis L. Goldie

3 A Hero or a Villain, a Terrorist or a Liberator? The Filmic Representations of Gavrilo Princip since the Late 1960s

Tara Karajica

Part II  Hollywood’s War Myths in the 1940s and 1950s

4 No Women! Only Brothers: Propaganda, Studio Politics, Warner Bros., and The Fighting 69th (1940)

Rochelle Sara Miller

5 The Postwar Anxiety of the American Pin-Up: William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Lesley C. Pleasant

Part III  Ideologies, Nationality, and War Memory

6 Germany’s Heroic Victims: The Cinematic Redemption of the Wehrmacht Soldier on the Eastern Front

Brian E. Crim

7 Balls and Bullets: A People’s Humor as an Aesthetic Stratagem in Golpe de Estadio (1998)

Claudia Aburto Guzmán

8 From Saviors to Rapists: G.I.s, Women, and Children in Korean War Films

Hye Seung Chung

Part IV  Men, Women, and Trauma: Heroes and Anti-Heroes

9 I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen the Way It Is: Military Heroism, Gender, and Race in Brothers (2004 and 2009)

Debra White-Stanley

10 The Gendered Geometry of War in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008)

Janet S. Robinson

11 Rebel Tributes and Tyrannical Regimes: Myth and Spectacle in The Hunger Games (2012)

Jessica R. Wells

12 Mulan (1998) and Hua Mulan (2009): National Myth and Trans-Cultural Intertextuality

Jinhua Li

Part V  Historical Reality, Authenticity of Experience, and Cinematic Representation

13 What Shall the History Books Read? Quentin Tarantino’s Basterdized Histories and Corporeal Inscriptions

Tiel Lundy

14 There’s Something about Maya: On Being/Becoming a Heroine and the War on Terror

Charles-Antoine Courcoux

Notes on Contributors

Index

Illustrations

Preface

Anna Froula

As the corpus of war writing affirms, the sexual ecstasy of battle is as long-standing and constant as war itself. In his characterization of war in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Thersites infamously describes the action around him primarily in terms of sexualized disgust, as Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery! But while the Trojan War was fought for a woman’s body, war has historically been perpetuated on women’s bodies in the form of rape and the killing of civilians. On the other hand, during war, women’s bodies perpetuate war by producing soldiers—both enemies and friendlies—and nursing wounded male bodies back to health and, preferably, back to fighting shape. The interplay between male and female bodies at war, male and female bodies as war, war as sexual perversion, and sexuality as war is complex, interweaving cultural practices of sexuality and mores, often treating and outrightly conflating bodies as sexual subjects, bodies as sexual objects, sexual violence as war, and war as destructive to sexuality.

Warfare’s terrain as the site of mythical man-making also often doubles as the site of women’s actual un-making, as the long, sordid history of rape attests. According to Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis,¹ US national mythology recasts the idea of the frontier as the site of man-making that served as a training ground for war-making. Indeed, the notion of Manifest Destiny is itself sexualized: brave, white men wresting the fertile, virgin land from the savage, dark Other in order to populate it with white offspring to form a civilization to which white women contribute their domestic gifts. Yet, white women also pose a threat to the civilizing white hero in the classic Western. Will she compel him to end his violent ways and subject him to a domesticated life or will she watch him ride off into the sunset, self-exiled from domesticity as a liminal being who can only preserve civilization through violence but find no home there? From Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba to recasting the Vietnamese jungle as Indian Country to President George W. Bush’s 2001 pledge to take down Osama bin Laden dead or alive,² frontier mythology permeates American martial discourse.

In the 100 years since World War One (WWI), the war to end all wars, began, war’s technologies have become more horrifyingly effective at killing—and horribly dehumanized, as in the case of drone warfare—just as war’s geographies have become more vague. The horror in the WWI trenches contorted the portrait of military masculinity in the male combatant, maimed or shell-shocked by warfare on an industrial scale. Modernist writers such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Erich Maria Remarque exemplified how this war destroyed the capabilities of language to convey that war has also destroyed notions of nationalist heroism and glory. King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) complemented Passos and Hemingway but also suggested that the love of a French woman who has survived the war in her backyard can remasculate a veteran who lost his leg.³ In a response to Remarque, Helen Zinna Smith’s Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War painted a portrait of upper-class women serving as volunteer ambulance drivers who transported the screaming bodies of men ripped open and unmanned by war. The women, cleaning bodily filth from their ambulances, embody Julia Kristeva’s abject,⁴ the charwomen of the wounded and dead, who tread the line between masculinity and femininity as both agents of warfare and of those who tend the muck of military wounds. In the United States, the military units in which women served in Europe as nurses were disbanded after the war, meaning that the nation’s entry into WWII would necessitate the formation of new military units for women.

American women served in every military branch in the United States, but popular culture—working closely with the US Office of War Information (OWI) and its Magazine War Guide as well as with President Roosevelt’s short-lived Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP)—argued just as strenuously for all women to join the military, take a war manufacturing job, and turn their homes into efficient sites of rationing and material sacrifice as it would argue for women to return home, lest children suffer from a neglectful mother who still wants to work outside the home or men suffer from returning to a newly financially independent woman. Hollywood films, popular magazines, and newsreels strove to create just the right tone: in their new, formerly male-only positions, women were capable (but not in a way that would threaten or degrade men’s capabilities), feminine and attractive (but not in ways that interfered with their work), desperately needed (but only until men returned to reclaim their occupations), and still representative of what men were fighting for overseas (heterosexual but monogamous, sexy but not too sexual). The only film to have BMP support and interference, Mark Sandrich’s So Proudly We Hail! (1943) portrays nurses in the early days of the Pacific theater as resilient, brave, cooperative, and dedicated to the mission—so much so that Veronica Lake’s Lt. Olivia D’Arcy would become a literal blond bombshell on a suicide mission against the encroaching Japanese. Yet romance was integral to narratives about military women: Lt. Joan O’Doul (Paulette Goddard) halts the evacuation of the squad of nurses in order to retrieve a black lace nightgown—necessitating D’Arcy’s sacrifice—and Lt. Davy Davidson (Claudette Colbert) ends the film nearly comatose with worry over the unknown whereabouts of her illegally married military husband. Sandrich’s next film about military women, 1944’s Here Come the WAVES!, strikes a different note, casting Betty Hutton as twins who enlist in the WAVES and squabble over romancing Bing Crosby.

Meanwhile, USSR’s Supersniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko toured the United States as part of the promotion for women serving with the Allies. After being wounded in combat, Pavlichenko and her tales of sniping of 309 Nazis toured the United States and Canada, making her the first Soviet citizen to be received by a US president. She inspired Woody Guthrie to pen a song about her remarkable gunwomanship, yet she was perplexed by American reporters critiquing the fashion of her uniform and their unseemly interest in whether US servicewomen wore silk underwear.⁵ Meanwhile, Joan Blondell, whose lip-synching of Etta Moten singing Remember My Forgotten Man in Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) decried the treatment of the homeless and hungry WWI male veteran, warned women in WWII in song that You Can’t Say No to a Soldier: You can’t say no to a soldier / a sailor or a handsome marine / Oh, you can’t say no if he asks you to dance / If he’s going to fight he’s got the right for romance. Meanwhile, as lucidly analyzed in Christina S. Jarvis’s The Male Body at War,⁶ American military men, shouldered with the burden of remasculinizing manhood in the devastating wake of the Great Depression, found their bodies policed for homosexual tendencies, responsible for reimagining a physically disabled president as masculine and virile, and themselves often reluctant to be replaced by a woman trained to free a man to fight. Even as many experts viewed veterans with ambivalence—on the one hand as heroic, and on the other, as childlike and dependent—American women would bear the postwar burden of suppressing their newfound wartime independence and self-confidence, as well as their own intellectual, economic, and sexual desires, in order to demonstrate that the veterans would be their wives’ highest priority.⁷ Women veterans of the war would fight to receive military benefits into the 1970s and face rejection from veterans’ groups due to lingering discomfort about the ways in which military women challenge notions of military masculinity and manliness. Postwar popular culture framed women’s responsibilities with rhetoric that often blamed women for any difficulties in executing their rehabilitative tasks. Articles entitled Has Your Husband Come Home to the Right Woman? and Are American Moms a Menace? appeared in popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, which flipped the recruitment rhetoric to encouraging, if not demanding, that women return to their prewar domestic roles.

In the American psyche, WWII—the Good War—remains the template with which to shape official discourse about subsequent military incursions, even when the analogy fails. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War’s shared inability to live up to the righteous martial narrative cast doubt on the United States’ military prowess globally and gave rise to the John Wayne Syndrome—the disillusionment suffered by servicemembers who thought war would be like his movies—and the Vietnam Syndrome—the reluctance in early 1980s American society to use military action as a solution to global unrest—among veterans and civilians. Most memoirs written by male veterans remark that John Wayne’s heroic and broken performance as Sgt. Stryker in Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and other films fed their military fantasies and desires to enlist in the military and kill clearly delineated and identifiable enemies. Pulling a John Wayne became a derogatory category for military actions performed by Wayne’s fans in the name of heroism that endangered the servicemember and his squad.

Yet many right-leaning US commentators called for the resurrection of John Wayne and his manliness in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001—that is, events that were cast in the mold of Pearl Harbor.⁸ Popular culture and public discourse lauded the blue-collar masculinity perceived in the first responders to Ground Zero. State officials, many who lack combat experience, thrilled to the idea of restoring American masculinity once again on the battlefield. In 2003 Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who became the face of the Iraq War, injured when her convoy made a wrong turn and encountered resistance, retroactively justified the controversial decision by Coalition forces to invade Iraq by reinvigorating the logic of the captivity narrative within US frontier mythology: white men must recover white women from the dark savage Other, lest they be raped or, worse, acquire savage attributes. Rick Bragg, her Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, stated in the memoir he coauthored with her that she had been raped, despite her claims to the contrary because, as he put it, people need to know that this is what can happen to women soldiers.⁹ The stock market soared the day she was rescued from the Iraqis who had treated her injuries and tried once to return her to US forces.

One year later, Spc. Lynndie England became the photo negative of Lynch and the poster girl and scapegoat of the torture at Abu Ghraib, inspiring the Rolling Stones to write and record Dangerous Beauty, a song about her. During the invasion of Iraq, the first military member to be injured was Eric Alva, a gay man, serving his country despite the restrictions that DADT imposed on him and many, many others until September 20, 2011, when the rule was finally lifted. And in January 2013, the US military lifted its official ban on women in combat, an act that recognizes—finally—that women are fighting and dying in the United States’ unending wars. While the changing of these rules confers honor and recognition on men and women who have chosen to serve their country via military service, it also presents us with a military that can remain all-volunteer to serve the interests of the for-profit military-industrial complex. The war on terror also ushered in an era of women in postfeminist ensemble films about the conflicts, no longer starring as gendered anomalies in films such as Courage under Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996) and G. I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997). Documentaries such as Lioness (Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, 2008) and The Invisible War (Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick, 2012) are being deployed as educational tools about women’s experiences and capabilities in combat and to fight for an end to military sexual assault, which suggests that the prevalence of women in the military does not automatically translate into the military becoming less hypermasculine.

The war on terror enunciates the absurdity of declaring war on an abstract emotion, a war in which the theater of combat is civilization itself, crumbling under air strikes and bombing raids and penetrated by house-to-house searches in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just as the frontless theater of war blurs boundaries between civilian homes and war zones, the figure of the soldier blurs as well. Some of the captives tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison were the children of alleged insurgents, kidnapped by Coalition forces to be used as bargaining chips.¹⁰ As of February 2014, 1,100 of the dead reported in Syria’s ongoing civil war are children, and some 6,000 women have been raped, mostly during governmental raids at checkpoints and within detention facilities.¹¹ This grim picture, largely only witnessed by those suffering it, hangs conspicuously in the background of progress made by military servicemembers in arenas of gender and sexuality.

These snapshots paint with broad strokes some historical ways in which gender, sexuality, and military culture intersect. The recent changes in US military rules will give rise to new popular stories as well as new insights about the impacts that gender and sexuality make on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and success in re-assimilating servicemembers into a society prone to occasional jingoistic displays of thanking military men and women for their service but not ensuring that these same servicemembers receive benefits, including food stamps, prompt and adequate health care, and access to employment. It is my hope that this collection and books like it will encourage us not only to tell better stories about the full costs of war but also to treat all those who must suffer its costs with greater human dignity and empathy.

Notes

1. Frederick Jackson Turner introduced his Frontier Thesis on July 12, 1893, during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. See The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/development-west/timeline-terms/frederick-jackon-turners-frontier-thesis-0 , accessed February 10, 2014.

2. George W. Bush explained in 2001 press conference why Osama Bin Laden needed to be captured to achieve justice. He referred to an old poster Out West that supposedly said Wanted, Dead or Alive, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFgn4EaCGQA , accessed February 10, 2014.

3. John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers , 1921 (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2004); Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms , 1929 (New York: Scribner, 1957); Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel, 1929 (New York: Random House, 2013); Helen Zinna Smith, Not So Quiet . . . Stepdaughters of War, 1930 (New York: Feminist Press, 1993).

4. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

5. Army Girl Sniper, Time, September 28, 1942, 60.

6. Christina S. Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during WWII (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

7. Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 235.

8. Peggy Noonan, Welcome Back, Duke, Wall Street Journal , October 12, 2001, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB122451174798650085 ; Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

9. Faludi, The Terror Dream , 191.

10. Standard Operating Procedure. Directed by Errol Morris. USA, 2008.

11. Syrian Women Raped, Used as Shields and Kidnapped by Both Sides in War, The National , November 26, 2013, http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/syrian-women-raped-used-as-shields-and-kidnapped-by-both-sides-in-war .

Introduction

Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki

One of the most powerful heroes of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, Nelson Mandela, looms large over our book. When he passed away in December 2013, millions of admirers walked by his open casket to pay him homage. In his article in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch has no doubt that the South African leader was an modern incarnation of a fighter we know from epic poems of the Ancient Greek literature: In a post-heroic age, Mandela attained the stature of a classical hero—at once a righteously angry warrior and a wise and just peacemaker, an emblem of reconciliation.¹ But, unlike in a Homer epic, Mandela defies the traditional image of the superhero who needs to succumb to gods’ help to win the good fight against opponents, so he can eventually bring peace and order to the world. Instead, Mandela was engaged in armed struggle early on in his life, was incarcerated for almost 30 years by a corrupt segregationist regime, and then helped end apartheid in South Africa through peaceful means as its first black president. He is the true hero of the war against racial injustice, the trailblazer for independence and democracy.

In the 2013 film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, directed by Justin Chadwick, the South African hero does not walk alone. Gender politics play a crucial role in the film. Women are not just passive bystanders and providers in the world dominated by fighting men but active participants in the war on apartheid. In fact, the character of Winnie Madikizela (Naomie Harris) is depicted as a strong advocate of Mandela’s political ideals. Contrary to him, she continues to promote violence in the course of the film. The fact is that Mandela is surrounded by an immediate circle of trusted male friends who share in his imprisonment but has the female members of his family—not only his wife but also his daughters—screened as intelligent, radical freedom fighters.

In addition to the exposed female roles in Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela’s sexual politics are given much attention in the first part of the movie. The African leader is depicted as a womanizer who has affairs, frequents bars, and eventually betrays his first wife who leaves him. In the logic of the film, which relies heavily on Mandela’s autobiography, the leader is cut off from sexuality, once in prison, and unable to rekindle his intimate relationship with Winnie, once released from prison. Although there is a brief reference in the movie that she may have been unfaithful to him, Winnie is never shown with another man. Neither is Mandela’s third marriage included in the biopic, which ends with his election to the South African presidency. In order to serve as the leader of the entire nation, Mandela removes himself from his personal life and sexuality. His true heroism emerges, once he is confined to the prison, separated from Winnie, and he later lives in more luxurious but still solitary confinement in government housing until his release. Heroism in Mandela is connected to sexual abstinence and the transfer of the hero’s energies and focus to the well-being of the nation. Once he makes the struggle his priority, he can succeed.

This narrative strategy also applies to many of the films discussed in this volume. The contributions to our collection focus on the interrelations of heroism and gender to study the changing roles of women and men in films that use warfare and violent conflict situations as the driving force and backdrop of their stories. Our selection of war as one of the two themes that inform the discussions in this book is not coincidental. The film historian John Belton (1994) observes that war film genre is potentially the ultimate form of cinema, creating conditions in which extreme expressions of love, hate, action, violence, and death can find representation.² If then, as Belton suggests, the battlefield is a world in which the laws, beliefs, behavior, and morality of civilization are suspended,³ images of war in films create an opportunity for both the filmmakers and the viewers to engage in discussions about the norms of a given society. The projector screen becomes a training ground for testing the existing assumptions about gender roles, for proposing new perspectives, for re-enforcing the ones that have been articulated from various positions of power, or for exploring extreme scenarios.

In selecting the contributions to our volume, we asked their authors to (at times, re-)frame their analysis to study the display of gender roles and focus on (gendered) heroism in films in different national and historical contexts. An observation that many of authors in the volume share is that the ways in which men and women are portrayed in the war film genre in the past 100 years are closely linked to changes in national discourses and construction of mythic heroism. Examples of this phenomenon are discussed in the chapters by Clémentine Tholas-Disset, Rochelle Sara Miller, and Lesley C. Pleasant (who follow the changes in the construction and de-construction of images of the male hero in Hollywood cinema since World War One [WWI]), as well as Janis L. Goldie, Tara Karajica, Jinhua Li, Brian E. Crim, Hye Seung Chung, and Claudia Aburto Guzmán (who follow the same phenomenon in different national traditions that defined themselves in opposition or as competition to American mainstream film industry).

Another important strand of our articles deals with contemporary depictions of war in the twenty-first century, female warriors, and the role of the female and male veterans. Debra White-Stanley, Jessica Wells, Janet Robinson, and Charles-Antoine Courcoux discuss the post-9/11 reality of American war involvement. The depiction of gendered heroism in cinema is indeed changing: women are no longer seen as a threat to the unity and mission of the homosocial group and removed or repressed from view, their absence serving consequently as a reference point in the construction of male hero on screen. Women, like the female characters in Mandela, are gaining agency in violent conflict situations, replacing and supplementing male combatants, and questioning the processes of masculinization of heroes. Women in cinema have shifted from the position of victims of war to one of perpetrators, with all of the moral complexities and social consequences of their new role.

In fact, it is the fundamental shift in the narrative function of female characters along with a visible increase in the number of captivating performances of women on screen that gave us the first impulse for creating the volume. The recent surge in lead roles by female actors and the large number of fascinating, complex parts written for women is a phenomenon that many (us included) can interpret as a sign of a greater popular interest in female characters as carriers of a film narrative and heroines of a story. And, at the same time, it can be read as a sign of a greater appreciation of the film industry for rabid, man-eating feminist, as Meryl Streep sarcastically called herself and Emma Thompson during the 2014 Golden Globes ceremony. In turn, Thompson pointed out that year’s long-awaited wave of roles for women that seem to have behaved like buses in London, where you wait for hours for the right one, and then suddenly seventeen come along at once.⁴

Traditionally, war heroes in American blockbuster films are often depicted as testosterone-filled superheroes.⁵ The genre of war film has a long history of representing the hypermasculine warrior who conforms to archaic gender roles to win wars against enemies of various complexion and brutality. However, the goal of our edited volume is not so much to continue an impressive list of books about the war film genre, following War and Cinema by Paul Virilio (1989), The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre by Jeanine Basinger (1986), The War Film edited by Robert Eberwein (2005), or War and Film by James Chapman (2008) to name just a few examples. The intention of the collection is to focus specifically on questions surrounding heroism in conjunction with depictions of gender in Hollywood and independent cinema.

One of the many questions our contributors raise is how the images of women in war are shifting due to cultural forces in current societies, and real-life changes in the American military service. When the Iraq war was continued by the George W. Bush administration with the invasion of Baghdad in 2003, women were not officially allowed in combat. The first group of female soldiers who were deployed in Iraq, the Lioness team, was supposed to help with gathering intelligence, conducting body searches of female suspects, and comforting Iraqi women and children during raids and home invasions. As the documentary Lioness by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers (2008) skillfully describes, the women soldiers did have to face combat. Although not openly acknowledged by the official writing of history, the Lioness team was in the front lines of the brutal war against terror. Other documentaries about the role of women in combat and the US military have followed since then: among them is the critical Poster Girl (Sara Nesson, 2012) and the most disturbing film about female soldiers, The Invisible War (Kirby Dick, 2012). It describes another war front for women in the military, the epidemic occurrence of rape by fellow soldiers. All of these productions from the decade document the very real new challenges that not only alter the gender relationships within the US Army, but also portray how society approaches the experiences of women in military service and its implications, until recently reserved for male veterans, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Similar to the documentary features, Hollywood addresses the gender issues in the military, bringing them—in a conventional and more digestible form—to the mass audiences: these are blockbuster films that depict women in combat roles. Most well-known among them are two different productions that cast Demi Moore as a heroine. G.I. Jane by Ridley Scott was released in 1997 and portrays Moore as Lt. Jordan O’Neil, the first female Navy Seal, and A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992) shows Moore in the role of Lt. JoAnne Galloway, a US Navy investigator and lawyer. In both movies, she is fighting a male establishment in the army that subjects her to abuse and humiliation. She is able to withstand the pressures and walk away triumphantly, applauded for her skill and perseverance. Hollywood films like these were, however, more an exception than a rule so far. Productions with mass public appeal follow the portrayal of women in war similar to the way the War Memorial in Washington depicts them: as nurses, traditional motherly caretakers, not as combat veterans. One of the famous more recent adaptations of this theme is the Hollywood blockbuster Pearl Harbor by Steven Spielberg (2001). Films such as Spielberg’s various historical epics (and office box successes) have reduced the significance of women to a bare minimum: in Schindler’s List (1993), women only appear as romantic interests, in Saving Private Ryan (1998) about WWII, women have only anecdotal significance. In Lincoln (2012), the president’s wife is an empathetic bystander but hardly has any real influence on the outcome of the Civil War. In the interest of what John Belton calls Oedipal romance⁶ typical of the war film genre, male bonding and camaraderie override the romantic interests of the soldiers in wartime.

The next frontier in American popular culture is the female superheroine. Significantly, the domain of the female warriors is placed here in the very recent past or in the realm of a dystopic future: while past wars were fought by strong men, the future—at least seen through the camera lens—belongs to women. Two of our contributions address the role of Kathryn Bigelow’s war genre films: The Hurt Locker (2008) as well as Zero Dark Thirty (2012), both preoccupied with real conflicts in which the United States was involved in the last decade. Another war scenario is the battlefield of Panem in The Hunger Games by Gary Ross (2012), where children fight other children and adolescents in a war-like scenario that is artificially controlled by a game master and his technicians in white lab coats. War is meant to be a spectacle, produced to help control a larger population and squish their ideas of revolution. Contrary to the traditional war film, the ideals of the good guys are no longer to secure democracy or independence and liberty, but to fight for the entertainment of the masses as a spectacle.

Accordingly, there are three relevant threads that are pursued in our book: The US discourse on the war on terror is portrayed as being linked to prominent female heroines in such films and TV productions as Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and the TV series Homeland (created by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa in 2011). In both of these examples, female agents are tracking down supposed enemies of the government, most prominently Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. To fight the enemy, the female protagonists do not need strength but mastery of technology and shrewdness. In the case of Maya (Jessica Chastain) in Bigelow’s movie, she also rescinds her personal life and sacrifices herself for the good of fighting the enemy. Maya defies authority, she is resilient, goal oriented, focused, and not distracted in her ten-year mission by any romantic interests or obligations as part of a family. Similar to the mythic figure of Mandela, she rises to the challenge of pursing the interests of the nation by committing herself to a cause that is all consuming. Yet, she is a different type of hero: she stays behind the scenes and is not credited for her accomplishments.

Secondly, female teenage heroines are emerging in American popular culture, leading the box office charts with the filmic adaptation of The Hunger Games and the sequel, Catching Fire, by Francis Lawrence (2013). Its teenage female heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) kills for the purpose of saving not only herself but also her sister, family, district, and eventually starts a revolution and becomes the figurehead of a widespread uprising against the dictatorial regime. Her defiance to authority and resentment toward playing traditional gender roles keep the narrative evolving. The film is in itself a hybrid between the war genre and the action or adventure tropes, thereby crossing the thematic boundaries between fantasy and combat genres. Heroism and gender are intertwined and used to produce high-adrenaline action content. The Hunger Games movies have tapped into a lucrative niche in storytelling and have used the gendered perspective of its female protagonist to its commercial advantage. The film’s story is re-packaged as a platform for video games and a different commodity appeal (such as [pink] bows and arrows but also clothing), related to the action heroine and emergent superwoman. The war in the dystopic world of The Hunger Games is linked to combat, but no superpowers are needed other than strength, fighting skills, and chutzpah. The war in this context is fought with the media and surveillance. One of the reasons why this aspect of the original book trilogy by Suzanne Collins is emphasized may be linked to the increasing government interference with the private sphere of its citizens. In 2013, the scandals of telephone interception of American allies as well as the leaking of government files by Edward Snowden showed that the war on terror has indeed trickled down to target the average citizens whose media use is being monitored by government agencies in light of a potential terrorist threat to homeland security. In this way, the adventure action films of The Hunger Games and similar movies that are scheduled for 2014 such as Divergent reflect a new form of war film genre, appealing to different age groups. The idea is that average people (such as Katniss Everdeen) can become heroes. This is a myth that also reverberates with many war films where common people turn into heroes through the challenges of combat. The gendered nature of the war film itself thereby allows for shifting boundaries and hybridizations of the genre.

Thirdly, the changes in the contemporary depictions of heroes draw the attention of filmmakers to questions about their media representation: among others, to the self-perceived role of mass media, film, and television in influencing images of heroes and passing the experiences of combat and extreme situations to the audiences. Many authors in our volume portray this side of hero construction and discuss the self-reflective and metacritical aspect of war films (Tiel Lundy, Claudia Aburto Guzmán, Charles-Antoine Courcoux). It is our intention to spark the reader’s engagement with different historical and genre adaptations that address this conflict between spectacle, entertainment, and political advocacy.

We hope that our cover image, depicting the statue Stone Thrower by sculptor Matthias Alfen that expresses the multilayered identity of war heroes and anti-heroes, fittingly illustrates the multitude of perspectives in our collection. Alfen’s figures are almost always larger than life, looming large above the viewer’s head. In his visual language, he expresses the paradox between movement and stillness, good and bad, even between gender roles. Some of his figures are gender neutral on one side as in our warrior image on the cover, and male or female on the opposite side. His sculptures capture the sentiment of not only torture but also braveness and action. Inspired by other sculptors’ work and modern art, Alfen paves his own unique path to describe the experience of agony and elation in postmodern society after 9/11.

This volume would not have been possible to complete without support, both moral and intellectual, from our friends, family, and colleagues. We are grateful to Karen Randell for her constant encouragement and keeping us on track. We are also very thankful to Robyn Curtis from Palgrave, who has been a guiding light and source of ideas throughout this process, and to her editorial assistant, Erica Buchman. We enjoyed working with both of you. We really appreciate the assistance of our