عنوان

Discourses of Legitimation: Representation, Recognition, and Truth in Post-9/11 American War Films

Number

TL49320

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Discourses of Legitimation: Representation, Recognition, and Truth in Post-9/11 American War Films

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Grace A. Foster

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Benson-Allott, Caetlin

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Georgetown University

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2017

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

89

Text of Note

Committee members: Ortiz, Ricardo

Text of Note

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-72208-6

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

M.A.

Discipline of degree

English

Body granting the degree

Georgetown University

Text preceding or following the note

2017

Text of Note

This thesis examines the role recent feature war films have played in the American cultural consciousness about the War on Terror by interrogating how they formally affirm or challenge dominant narratives about those events. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the relationship between the government, the news media, and the public was complex and unstable. Over fifteen years later, that complexity and instability has only intensified with the proliferation of blogs, podcasts, click bait, and fake news. Chapter One focuses on Zero Dark Thirty (2012) which insisted on its own inclusion in the intricate web of reporting about the events it represents: director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter/producer Mark Boal call it a "reported film," and the film's formal techniques mimic this claim. This chapter uses film studies, journalism studies, comparative media studies, and cultural studies to examine Zero Dark Thirty in this context. Chapter Two examines the formal moves that two feature films about drones-Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014) and Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2016)-make to affirm and challenge dominant narratives about drone warfare, respectively. Though these two films are ideologically opposed, they use the same symbolic economy of helpless female bodies to comment on the moral and bodily stakes of drone warfare. They also use the same formal techniques to different effects, the first emphasizing the depersonalization of drone warfare, and the second emphasizing the intimacy of drone warfare. Together, these chapters interrogate the ways in which contemporary war films have framed the War on Terror and the ways in which those frames-cinema and the armed drone-shape viewers' perception of the Muslim subject.

American studies; Film studies

Subject Term

Social sciences;Communication and the arts;Bigelow, Kathryn;Drone warfare;Recognition;Reported film;Representation;War on terror

Aaron, Eliana M.

Benson-Allott, Caetlin

Subdivision

English

Georgetown University

Call Number

1895066008; 10272346

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y