The Politics of Invulnerability:

Narrating Gap between Media “Realities”, Lived Experience and Military Technology

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Carney

Submitted to Velvet Light Trap June 2005

 

Introduction

 

During the media blitz that preceded the Second Gulf War the military ran a recruiting ad campaign featuring a lone man in military fatigues climbing an imposing mesa. It stressed the Army’s archetype of a radically independent team player that achieves greatness through hard work and discipline. The campaign’s tag line “An Army of One”, expressed similar sentiments as advertisements a decade earlier that urged would be cadets to “Be All You Can Be.” As such, the advertising campaign appealed to a rapidly militarizing segment of post September 11^th America. It worked on the same mechanisms as narratives during the first Gulf War that aimed to suture a lived viewer media reality to the lived experience of soldiering. Popular filmmakers like Jerry Bruckheimer and the Gulf War’s “embedded” journalists have cultivated these representations of the American military. This cinematographic “realism” crosses a divide where the line between reality and narrative is so perilously slim that the viewer is often unaware where one ends and the other begins. Modern weaponry has capitalized on this failing distinction by allowing soldiers to kill while looking at a video screen: creating a space for so-called “clean” violence. These soldiers have become violent spectators--the distance created by video technology has alienated them from the violence they cause. The combined forces of narrative in the media and the technological form of military weaponry maintain the suture between reality and unreality.

            In recent years scholars have asked to what extent the experience and perception of violence is subjective (Das 2000, Kleinman 2000, Whitehead 2002). The trend today is to focus on the multiplicity of violences and subjectivities. What is clear is that the position of both the subject and the object are experienced differently and must be studied separately. Allen Feldman’s work on violence in the terror-ridden Northern Ireland during his fieldwork on the Irish Republican Army included an extended analysis of aesthetics, cubism and surrealism while exploring “a political anthropology concerned with war” (Feldman 2000: 73). Feldman saw that the aesthetics of the representation of violence were part of long standing cultural/historical discourses that alternately elevate and devalue violence according to the positioned decipherment of the viewer (ibid).

Likewise, aesthetics and warfare have been linked in the works of a number of historians and anthropologists from George Mosse’s (1975) look at the monumental and symbolic history of Nazi Germany to Ohnuki-Tierney’s (2002) analysis of Kamikazes and the symbolism of cherry blossoms. Both authors suggest that the nation state is responsible in creating particular sets of symbols aimed to influence the actions of the citizenry. Ohnuki-Tierney takes Mosse’s historical approach a step further to argue that individuals own perceptions of symbols are mediated through ongoing méconnaissance where symbols have a shared use, but not necessarily a shared meaning (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 281).

In this paper I intend to follow Ohnuki-Tierney and Mosse in their analysises of how state interests use and create aesthetics to support and mold nationalist causes while simultaneously questioning the ways which nationalized aesthetics and narratives themselves mold and create state action. By looking at one particular incident in the second Gulf War, the capture, alleged rape and rescue of Jessica Lynch, I aim to question how the military and media agencies shifted wide spread concern with a rising body count to a single symbolic incident. Her story was told not only through master narratives in the national psyche on the role of soldiers, women, and the varying value of human lives, but that her story was mandated by unspoken technological agendas.

Forty years ago Marshall McLuhan stated that “The medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964: 23) to indicate the power media technologies in altering the daily practices of life. He argued that specific technological mediums alter the way we interact with the world to a greater extent than substantive “content” messages in media broadcasts. Raymond Williams (1974) critiqued McLuhan for ignoring both the context in which media arrives in society and necessary social organization that keeps technology functioning. Williams noted that McLuhan’s utopian scheme of television technology remaking a regionalized world into a “global village” where ideas and images moved freely between electronically linked tribes was wholly a-historical and a-social (Parks & Kumar 2003: 4). While Williams’ critique stands, McLuhan’s thesis need not be totally discounted. World borders have not disintegrated because of technological innovation, yet the speed of transmission and organizational efficiency of news corporations have made images of the rest of the world instantly accessible. Moreover, where Williams worried about McLuhan’s technological determinism, I suggest that it is possible to re-conceive of technology at the received level as a bundle of social processes.

In this formulation, the form of media technology, be it television, the Internet, or radio, plays a subordinate role to its position between two lived worlds. Technology allows a producer to control a liminal space that is simultaneously inhabited by the viewer and the viewed. The space created by media technology allows for limited discourse between the participants yet favors producer who is able to decide who and where individuals are represented. It is possible to refocus McLuhan’s thesis away from specific technological forms and to the space that the technological form inhabits and creates.

During wartime, technology serves as a proxy by which the viewer is removed and desensitized from the real life experiences of warfare. Indeed, the media pursued the narrative of the second Gulf War with all the gusto of a video game addict. News of the conflict was carefully censored and restricted by the military in the name of National Security, so that much of the news coverage began to assume the visual aesthetic of video games where embedded news reporters only shot images from behind the protection of American soldiers. The war took place not only in the Persian Gulf, but also in the competition between networks for Neilson ratings that aimed at meeting “consumer demands.” On a computer the player never needs to worry about his own life, but can kill hordes of faceless enemies with impunity. To shield the United States viewing public (and soldiers) from the real consequences of death resulting from armed conflict, the military used killing technologies that let soldiers kill the enemies remotely without risk to themselves. Flagging support for the war effort forced the military to abide by the non-lethal rules of video games to minimize the negative publicity of dead soldiers. Few American soldiers were wounded in the initial campaign because most were physically removed from the conflict. American soldiers wore multiple layers of body armor, sat in “Bradley” and “Abrams” tanks or dropped bombs from the air. Technology did not eliminate risk of combat completely but the disparity in casualties between Iraqi and American forces is a testament to its effectiveness. I suggest that the United States military is engaged in a politics of invulnerability whereby the viewing public demands American soldiers to kill efficiently while being immune to enemy retaliation. In turn, Jessica Lynch’s narrative showcased the value of efficient military technology as it completed an essential master narrative.

This paper will draw upon anthropological theories to demonstrate how the double reflexivity between master narratives and lived experience in the context television viewing fosters a state that is vulnerable to transient laws of media hegemony. The state is bound to these laws of capitalism and symbolism, as are media organizations that engender, constitute and dispute state power. Support for the war, and the experience of it by American viewers is based on the synchronistic coincidence of technology that removes the viewer from lived experience and a master narrative that restricts and modifies the psychological terms of engagement with the news media.

While it is beyond the scope of this paper to address the individual viewer experience of mass media, I urge the reader towards a growing body of reception theory literature. In this framework, Mankekar (1999) and Abu-Lughod (2002) suggest that viewers receive mass media discursively and generate their own meanings form hegemonic messages. In contrast, I approach the American mainstream viewer in terms of how producers and power elites perceive American viewers to react to media messages.

                       

Cowboy Narratives and the Ideology of Video Games

I have titled this section “Cowboy Narratives and the Ideology of Video Games” to connote a link between lived experiences and narrative structures that recontextualize and fictionalize our sense of the world. Narratives can have powerful effects on human action; they lend a structure for moral decisions.

Narratives do not depend on reality, but, as Michael Taussig suggests, they are able to create truths from fictions. “The truly crucial feature [of narratives] lies in creating an uncertain reality out of fiction, a nightmarish reality in which the unstable interplay of truth and illusion becomes a social force of horrendous and phantasmic dimensions. To an important extent all societies live by fictions taken as reality” (Taussig 2003: 49). Taussig identifies how white colonists mythologized indigenous peoples living on the boarders of strong imperialist states in South America as monsters in order to justify the increasing levels of violence used to “pacify” them. Increasing violence against natives increased instances of cannibalism by both indigenous peoples and muchacho hirelings, creating a vicious cycle of story and real life: what Taussig calls a “Culture of Terror” (ibid). It is this sort of narrative that justifies and creates human action that I will call a “Master Narrative”.

            To explain the effect of master narrative on technological formation, it is important to define it more specifically. The term that has been used in literary criticism and in journalism to denote a “master” story that determines and contextualizes other stories. “Master narrative” emerged in anthropology at the intersection between Marxist scholarship and literary criticism to describe theoretical approaches (like Marx’s class struggle, or evolution) that explains events after they have happened (see Appadurai 1996: 52, 62-65).

In my sense of the term a master narrative is an unspoken story that acts upon and directs the activities of individual actors and social institutions. I do not mean it in the sense of an unfolding story that is explicitly predetermined, but rather a feeling that creates expectations of what sorts of events should be expected by the listener/viewer. For example, a classic master narrative in the popular consciousness might start with the situation of “boy meets girl”. Given this, the master narrative states that at some point in the narrative that they “fall in love”. While any number of possibilities might alternately occur after this set up, certain events are more likely than others. Hence, it is unlikely that a person listening to this opening would assume that the next step in the story is “girl asks boy to file her late tax forms”. Master narratives in this sense are created through expectations. Master narratives are highly subject to context, culture, historical precursors and a number of considerations brought out by scholars of media reception (see Ginsburg 2002, Turner 2000, Prins 2000, Clifford 1986, Abu-Lughod 2002, Kulick & Willson 2002). With this in mind I posit that in the minds of certain producers, politicians, military officials, journalists and viewers master narratives are understood and are on some level acted upon.

            The cowboy narrative is the well-known story of woman who is kidnapped by the “bad guy”, leaving the “good guy” cum-love-interest to rescue her and fight off any number of evildoers. The story is not confined to the American Wild West, but is equally found in Greek literature during the siege of Troy, the Tibetan story of Gesar Ling, European tales of Rapunzel and countless novels and films. In the same way that Hans Solo and Luke Skywalker rescue the fair Princess Leia in Star Wars (1977), Zorro (1920-1998) rescues numerous maidens from Mexican landlords in dozens of films beginning in the 1920s and extending to recent years. Given the sheer number of damsels in distress, rescuing women might be number one activity for action heroes since the dawn of literature.

            While the content of “cowboy narratives” is almost standardized, it is the perspective of the story that is of concern. The tale is told from behind the “good-guy’s” proverbial gun sight. The hero is forced into action to wage war for a just cause. His vigilante justice is enabled by the fact that he holds a gun and is determined to fight evildoers. In the same breath we also know that, because of the righteousness of the cause, the hero is unlikely to come to harm. He will always shoot straight, while his foes inexplicably miss with every one of a thousand shots. The invulnerability of the hero in these cowboy tales is as a fixture of the story as is rescuing the maiden.

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam suggest that the framing of capture narratives, news programs and popular films conceals a constellation of power relations that are accepted passively by the viewer (Shohat & Stam 2002: 129-137). Indeed, popular stories of cowboys and settlers “taming” the “wild” West, is premised on an exteriority, where the enemy lives beyond the bounds of the American legal and moral world. Western civilization, symbolized by a wagon train or remote military outpost is couched in what Tom Engelhardt calls an “imagery of encirclement”. The stories focus on the lives and trials of the besieged soldiers and colonialists in wagon trains or remote outposts who are the object of the viewer’s sympathy. From this proverbial center of civilization, the protagonists sally out against enemies who “are characterized by inexplicable customs” and irrational hostility. “In essence, the viewer is forced behind the barrel of a repeating rifle and it’s from that position, through its gun sights, that he receives a picture history of Western colonialism” (Englehardt 1973: 3 et al). Attacks on wagon trains are demonic and irrational actions by primitive people who place a low value on life. Given the native’s outsider stateless status, they also fall beyond the reach of law.

While there is a clear disparity in the weaponry of the cowboys over Indians, there is still a sense of the cowboy’s tenuous hold on survival. Depicted as besieged on all sides and vastly outnumbered, their attacks on native populations are not only seen as morally justified, but necessary for the survival of western civilization. Narratives like these give us a guns eye view of history where violence partaken by the actors is a priori necessary.

Another common theme is the rape of civilized white women by dark and savage others. Hollywood films from the last fifty years are replete with images of dark men scheming to take control of white women’s sexuality. Dark men take advantage of women through outright violent assault, kidnapping, or through animalistic charisma, while their white counterparts are left with no choice but to defend their women’s’ honor.

Stories of this kind are not confined to the boundaries of fiction, but seep into daily life. Stories of the abduction and dishonoring of women have been as common in the newspapers as they were in the national mythology. Leon Litwack demonstrates how in the South newspapers were complicit with sustained myths of black savagery and posed no opposition to the vigilante actions of lynch mobs. Newspapers justified violence on the basis of “protecting Southern Women”, and called for pictures of lynched blacks to be published (Litwack 2003: 123-127).  

            On the other side of the globe, and half a century later, both Urvasi Buttalia (1998) and Menon and Bhasin (1998) note that in the partition of India women’s bodies became the sites of male violence, and were the metaphoric battlefield over which community boundaries were fought.

While capture and rape myths can justify violence by controlling and constraining women’s sexuality, military technological innovation in the hands of an organized state allows for retribution that limits the danger to individual soldiers and the home front under an officially sanctioned aegis.

Shohat and Stam suggest that the camera’s point of view in cowboy westerns ultimately justifies violence against the adversary (Shohat & Stam 2002: 138-142). They further argue that the camera’s viewpoint was used in the first Gulf War to justify the violence against Iraqi soldiers and civilians (ibid). To demonstrate the suture between violence and narrative they quote the commander of the American forces, General Norman Schwartzkopf, who at one point compared Iraq to “Indian Territory” suggesting that American soldiers in Iraq were both surrounded, and obliged to kill (Shohat & Stam 2000: 134).

The melodramatic formula that cast Hussein as villain…Bush as hero, and Kuwait as the damsel in distress was a replay of countless colonial-western narratives. Basic to such narratives is the rescue of the White woman (and at times a dark one) from a dark rapist, and a happy conclusion entailing the restoration of a patriarchal-imperial world order and the punishment of the dark disobedient rapist, who must be humiliated in the name of the dishonored female (Shohat & Stam 2002: 139).

 

The true terror of the first Iraq war is not the justification behind the violence, but the impunity with which the violence was enacted in the Persian Gulf. Rough body counts of the Gulf War indicate that over 150,000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers were killed by direct military action, while that number again died from the disease and malnutrition that followed the conflict. American casualties stood below 200.

I remember news commentators praising how the military’s ability to photograph and capture the violence on film made the entire war seem like a video game. For Americans, the stakes of the first Gulf War were exceedingly slim. With few soldiers returning in body bags the American military waged a war that had both the aesthetic appeal, and safety, of playing Nintendo. Removed from the geographic space of conflict, many Americans participated in the war as voyeurs while networks outdid one another to capture the highest ratings. Cameras placed in the nose cones of so-called “smart weapons” allowed a missile’s-eye-view of perspective of violence where the moment of impact (and subsequent explosion and suffering) was replaced by static (see photo 1.1). Homes were attacked and destroyed on air without showing human consequences.

            The barrage of military images sent out to American audiences in the first Gulf War gave the same gun’s-eye-view of history that is central to the cowboy genre.

Camera lenses embedded in modern weapons represented the American soldiers’ point of view, said to be in “Indian territory”. The initial focus on an air war was designed to minimize American casualties that would result from direct person-to-person combat, and was largely successful in preventing deaths of American troops. Iraqi soldiers and civilians, on the other hand, were killed in untold numbers with the same moral justification as was used in Indian wars. The perspective of the gun and the camera intrinsically justified violence against a faceless, yet morally bankrupt, enemy. By removing American troops from harm and saturating the news media with images of sanitized destruction, the first gulf war appeared, from the American perspective, to be bloodless.

1.1 Taken from CNN with the caption “A Gulf War Missile Successfully finds its Target.”

www.cnn.com/WORLD/9802/ 14/iraq.intelligence/

            During the second Gulf War the access to the battlefront was increasingly restricted by Pentagon officials so that the majority of news coverage came from so-called “embedded journalists” who, restricted to the confines of individual military units, experienced and wrote from the soldier’s perspective. Alternative news sources like the Qatar based Al-Jazeera was portrayed as a flawed counterpoint to the American media. Al Jazeera was told to be inherently biased towards the “Arab world”, even possibly linked with the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. More than ever before, the military seized on the opportunity to limit journalist access to the front and engender uncritical reporting of the campaign. While members of the press were aware and vocally critical of the military’s controls on information, most lacked the ability to gain non-speculative direct access to the war. Veteran journalists were even expelled from Iraq by the Army when their reports of civilian deaths were less than glowing.

            In the war and the occupation that followed, soldiers were never asked to be critical about the people at whom they aimed their weapons. Civilian casualties were explained as the result of military personnel’s defensive actions. In other words, if an Iraqi moved in “the hot zone” without authorization, it was fair game to eliminate him or her as a target. On March 31^st, 2004, a year after the second Gulf War had begun, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the American command, stated that he no longer considered the distinction between “Sadaam Loyalists and Militant Islamists” to be important. He went on to say “On the operation’s side, we just call them ‘targets’. (Gettleman & Burns March 31, 2004). Suffice it to say, that from the military point of view, the enemy abandons its personhood when on the wrong side of a gun. The language of “targets” instead of “people”, “enemies”, “foes”, “evildoers or “bad guys”, precludes any question of individual motivations. The “targets” invariably are portrayed as bodies whose only reason for existence is to be shot. The military constructed a conceptual and technological environment that engendered the John Wayne ideology of “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”. In the Iraq war, military commanders and individual soldiers, were the heroes, protected by a supreme technological advantage. Targets were the people who died in front of their guns. Both American civilians and soldiers experienced the war as if they were playing a videogame. Thus, the “mediatization of violence and suffering create[d] a form of inauthentic social experience, witnessing at a distance, a kind of voyeurism in which nothing [was] acutely at stake for the viewer” (Kleinman 2000: 232), or the soldier pulling the trigger. The American public was made to believe that no were no real human consequences—few Americans troops were injured, and only “targets” were dying.

 

Narrating Jessica Lynch

How complicit was the military in fostering these narrative and technological formations? How was warfare simultaneously waged on the two fronts of the battlefield and the mass media? In the Second Gulf War certain events were magnified by both media agencies and the military to encourage the American public to read the war as a narrative divorced from human consequences. The experience of PFC Jessica Lynch, an army supply clerk captured by armed Iraqis, was transformed into a capture narrative that further demonized the “targets”, and legitimized the entire military occupation.

            Lynch’s story can be read in the archives of just about every American newspaper and only a few key points need be summarized here. On March 23, 2003, the 507^th Maintenance Company, a poorly armed supply convoy, took a wrong turn into the “hot zone” of downtown Nasiriyah, Iraq. The company was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons and suffered heavy casualties. In the conflict two women, Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa, were captured and taken to a nearby hospital. Piestewa died from a head wound in the hospital within a half hour, and Lynch’s whereabouts were unknown. In the firefight Lynch suffered a broken hip, fractured spine, elbow, broken leg and other injuries. On April 1^st, Lynch was rescued by an elite team of special forces from all four arms of the military, and green “night-vision” images of the rescue were distributed on the news media. In the eleven days that Lynch was in captivity, little was known about her, or the other soldiers’, condition. They were listed as MIA.

            By that time some American soldiers had already died in the conflict, and several others were known to have been captured, Jessica Lynch was the only name on everyone’s mind. Newspapers questioned the suitability of women in the military, candlelight vigils were held, churches prayed, and photos of Lynch were ubiquitous in the media. News agencies had kicked into high gear, and every nuance of her story was examined and lain in the public view. There was speculation as to what was happening to her, including dozens references to the almost constant rapes that she “must” be undergoing at the hands of the enemy.

            In almost every instance, barbaric Iraqis were contrasted to Lynch’s almost virginal purity. In the American press, stories that were critical of the war effort were sidelined to speculation about Lynch, and for some time support for the war ran high. Minutes after she was rescued the military’s press office sent news agencies video images of soldiers loading her onto waiting helicopters (see page 20). Initial reports of how the rescue was accomplished varied, but most of them mentioned firefights between American soldiers and Iraqi militants.

            Within a few months of the rescue, Jessica Lynch signed a million dollar book deal with Alfred Knopf press, the elite subsidiary of Random House Books and a TV movie, Saving Private Lynch, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer was in the works. For a while it seemed that the media and the military marched in lock step: one marched for ratings, the other for support for the war. In her defense, Lynch said repeated that the military “used her”, but she was unable to affect the larger social processes.

            Her biography by Rick Bragg, I’m A Soldier, Too, contained sensationalized accounts of her rape:

The records show that she was a victim of anal sexual assault. The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones to splinters until she was almost dead. (Bragg 2003: 96).

 

In an interview after the book release, she stated that she had no recollection of the events, yet believed the military records. However, doctors at the Iraqi hospital that received her contradicted her when they stated that she arrived at the hospital fully clothed in her military fatigues. According to the Iraqi doctors she showed no signs of sexual assault and that her injuries were consistent with an auto accident. They point out that when she was admitted to the hospital that, given the degree of her injuries, that it was extremely unlikely that her “broken body” would have been able to survive a rape at all.

            While many papers included a story that cited the doctor’s objection to Lynch’s rape claim, they did so in different ways. The Herald Sun quoted her doctor saying “‘If she had been raped there is no way she could have survived it. She was fighting for her life - her body was broken. What sort of an animal would even think of that?’” (Herald Sun 2003). The AP, however, included no line that suggested her rape was impossible. They truncated the quote to read, “"She was injured at about 7 in the morning," he said. "What kind of animal would do it to a person suffering from multiple injuries?"(AP 2003: November 7). The syntactical differences are important. Rather than stating that she could not have been raped, the AP let the reader speculate on exactly how depraved the Iraqis must have been to rape someone so early in the morning.

            While smaller newspapers and networks highlighted a sub-narrative where the government manipulated the Lynch story, the overall story was that elite military personnel rescued the damsel, Lynch, from the clutches of rapist-monsters. Somehow it was a little easier to stomach American imposed violence all over Iraq after Lynch was rescued. Military transgressions involving mounting numbers of civilian casualties were absolved in the creation of military heroes and the defilement of the blonde haired, starry-eyed PFC Jessica Lynch. The military sutured her personal trauma to justify violence all over Iraq.      

           While it is clear that the military used the story of Lynch to its own advantage, the question remains of how complicit the military was in the story, and how much on the media’s own need to generate ratings and heroes. While much information of the rescue operation was never released, John Kampfner of the BBC suggests a unique link between Hollywood and the Military. One year before the Pentagon hired Jerry Bruckheimer to produce a TV show On the Front Lines, that would be the public face for the military action in Afghanistan. According to the BBC, it was clear that Lynch’s rescue was influenced by Bruckheimer’s cinematographic aesthetic (Kampfner 2003). Bruckheimer is known for his reputation for sensationalism, and his glorification of the military in the film Black Hawk Down that narrates the rescue of marines in Somalia. Though there is no verifiable connection between Bruckheimer and the first reporting of Lynch’s rescue they existed symbiotically, Bruckheimer’s next film was titled Saving Private Lynch.

            The aesthetic similarities between the Lynch rescue and Bruckheimer films is best demonstrated visually. In the following pages I show how “real” photos from military operations are synthesized in film and on video games. Photos 1.2 and 1.3 show the technical similarity between the rescue of Jessica Lynch boarding a waiting Blackhawk helicopter and a picture from a video game James Bond 007: Nightfire where the same “night vision” gaze as in the Lynch photo serves as a gun sight. The next image is a publicity-still from the movie Blackhawk Down that dramatized the army’s botched rescue mission in Somalia that ultimately resulted with the withdrawal of United States military personnel. 1.5 is an image from the movie based video game Blackhawk Down: Delta Force, where players take on the role of soldiers in the movie and fight their way back to the safety of the army barracks. The last two images are possibly the most disturbing. As part of the Army’s recruitment campaign “GoArmy”, military software developers designed a “true to life” game for prospective soldiers to get acquainted with basic training and special operations missions. The game’s so-called “realism” includes special operations mission that play on the aesthetics of Blackhawk Down, and use familiar game interfaces that place the soldier behind a gun. In 1.6 the player aims his gun at a bearded man who is kneeling on the ground. These images point to a trend in both the media and military to blur the distinctions between real life and life experienced through a video lens. By training soldiers to fight enemies via computer, soldiers and game players are vulnerable to disassociating entertainment from murder.

When images from the rescue reached America, they were strikingly familiar to what one might expect from an action movie. Though there were no shots from the actual mission, the news was flooded with grainy green images from a soldier’s night vision goggles as she was loaded onto waiting helicopters. The camera was attached to the soldiers’ helmet. The images looked like they could have been utilitarian, the type of things we expect from intelligence agencies, yet, once Lynch was safe, no longer served a tactical purpose to the military. Intelligence officers did not need to see the layout of the hospital or rescue after the operation was complete. The rescue was videotaped for the sole purpose of releasing bits and pieces of it to the American media and make American civilians feel as if they were actively participating in Lynch’s rescue through a mimesis of cinematography and live action.

Newspapers reported that viewers who had been following the story in the media experienced a cathartic release when Lynch was finally rescued. Their release was experienced through the lens of military personnel so that, for a brief moment, viewers were encouraged to feel as if they were soldiers able to rescue damsels in distress and empowered to kill intervening enemies.

 

1.2 (left) video of Jessica Lynch’s rescue by American special forces as she boards a waiting helicopter. According to the BBC, the media presentation of Lynch’s rescue was influenced by cooperation between the Pentagon and Jerry Bruckheimer’s Profiles from the Front Lines. 1.3 (right) image from video game James Bond 007: Nightfire.

 

1.4 (left) publicity still: Blackhawk Down (2002) produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

1.5 (right) computer game: Blackhawk Down: Delta Force

1.6, 1.7 (above) images from video game America’s Army released by the United States Army as part of the GOArmy recruitment campaign. It claims to provide a “Realistic depiction of the values, units, equipment and career opportunities that make the Army the world’s premier land force” (www.goarmy.com & www.americasarmy.com ).

The Message is Mediated

 

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan suggested that technological advances in media technologies mold the way that people perceive the world. He argued that anthropological approaches that examined content messages, but ignored the technological intervention that restructured people’s lives, could never understand how individuals relate to the world at large. Thus, for McLuhan, what television, radio and books said was not nearly as important as the format that packaged the message. When McLuhan, said the“Medium was the Message” he meant that the input of technology fundamentally altered the ways in which people interacted with their environment. Later he was critiqued by writers like Raymond Williams (1974) who argued that technology itself does not alter people—it is just one way that people use technology to create new ways of knowing the world around them. Thus there was nothing inherent in technology that changed the world—technology was neutral; its meaning was accidental (Williams 1974: 29).

            By returning to McLuhan’s formulation that the medium is the message, I am not seeking to reinstate technological determinism, but rather to reexamine the position of media technology between the viewer and the viewed. Experience of the world is not altered only because of the introduction of technology, but by the fact that technology mediates lived experience. The position of the camera operator, camera, news studio, production editors, transmission dissemination infrastructure, television set and viewer creates a package of experience that is represented, even embodied, by the viewer. Thus, when we speak of technology altering the way we view the world, we must bundle it with all of the social processes that create a mimetic social experience. The medium is the message precisely because it is positioned in a space between local and remote lived experience.

            The way individuals experience the world does not rely on media images alone—we are bundles of previous experiences, impressions, and inherit a number of class, ethnic, historical and cultural markers which inflect the way in which we see the world (see Scott 1986). Ohnuki-Tierney contends that no symbol can ever be reduced to its Meaning-with-a-capital-M, for groups of people, but that individuals continually experience dissonance in symbols through mécconnessance (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 281). What is shared, particularly with viewers of hegemonic mass-messages, are the machinations of intervening agencies between the event experienced by the viewed and the viewer. While we can say little about how individuals interpret symbology and messages, we can be certain that at the moment of dissemination that one particular set of images, sounds and creative production efforts is transmitted to viewing audiences. We know from the action of networks in relation to auditing agencies like the Neilson system, that media agencies will do their best to modify their transmissions to fit what they believe their viewers want to read. Given the amount of resources involved in media production, we can also assume that transmitted messages are transmitted for a particular reason, and are aimed at engendering particular kinds of consumer and ideological responses.

            Thus in the case of Jessica Lynch there are several different types of mediating influences that create the images presented viewers. Two, sometimes contentious agencies, the military and media, vie for different viewer responses. The military, and thereby the state, wants public support for the war effort. The military releases certain types of messages at press conferences, it controls the movements of journalists and doctors information through propaganda, so that it can accomplish its goals without civil insurrection back home. The media, in turn, aims to make money, and compete against rival media agencies. While the media by no means operates as a single unit and different agencies routinely report different events and engender multiple meanings, certain types of messages get wider dissemination than others.

            In the first and second Gulf wars, the United States military did what it could to control the messages of the media. They restricted access to the front, embedded journalists in specific battalions to create an omni-present soldier’s eye view of conflict, and minimized images of Iraqi suffering and the consequences of lethal arms on so-called “targets”. To quote Napoleon, “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets”(cited in McLuhan 1964: 22). The military used its power over journalists to mediate between lived experiences of journalistic subjects and the viewer back in America. Media agencies, reacting to the impositions of the military, tried to create a message that would reach the largest audience out of the material they had available. In this way, the ideological objectives on the military coincided with the market driven objectives of media agencies.

            In the case if Jessica Lynch we saw a very conscious effort by the military to create a pro-military message in the media that minimized the focus on the less palatable aspects of the war. The focus was instead focus on the story of a vulnerable young girl caught in a conflict beyond her control.

          

 

 

Master Narratives and Technology          

            Having examined the construction of master narratives and the ways in which technology mediates and alters real life events to fit the agendas of intervening agencies, I would like to briefly consider the relationship between master narratives, media and military technology. I have suggested master narratives are based on the sorts of actions that seem likely. Thus, as a mentioned earlier, when a woman is captured by the “bad-guy”, the master narrative dictates that the “good guy” will come to her rescue. In a few stories the hero may die attempting the feat, but more often than not he is successful. The story implies that once the woman/damsel is captured, the hero’s violent response is inherently justified. The enemies he kills are faceless targets who willingly give their lives to the hero’s cause. The stories do not dwell on the grotesqueness of the hero’s actions, only the justness of his mission.

            These sorts of heroes do not exist in real life. In a world where moral choices tend to exist in shades of gray, not black and white, human actions are rarely pure, and violent actions seldom unquestionably justified. In real life, consequences of violence are grim, and psychologically debilitating to both the victim and the perpetrator. Christopher Browining notes, that even in the most black and white of circumstances, the holocaust, there were shades of grey. Seemingly inhuman SS officers engaged in a massacre of 1,800 Jews in Jozefow, shot over their victims’ heads when they realized their own culpability in the atrocity. Others sickened at the sight and asked to be reassigned (Browning 2004: 103). Though Nazis can scarcely be called heroes, the violence they perpetrated conflicted with individual soldier’s sense of right and wrong and ultimately left many of them psychologically debilitated. The same was seen in World War I when soldiers in the trenches deliberately shot over the heads of their enemy to avoid taking a life. Lt. Col. David Grossman, an ex-soldier and professor of psychology at West Point suggests, “The real trauma of war is not about being killed, but about killing” (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2004: 15). Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois add to Grossman’s analysis that killing has to be learned, and they point out that modern military methods of desensitizing humans to killing one another is central to the mission of any boot-camp (ibid).

            Killing can be learned, yet there are other ways to desensitize soldiers to human suffering than boot camp. People can be overexposed to violence so it appears as little more than business as usual, and only the most egregious cases seem remarkable (Das & Kleinman 2002: 15). Or they can be so removed from the processes of violence that they don’t realize the results of the destructive power they wield. I am particularly interested in this last process. With advanced remote weaponry, bombs, and other weapons that kill from a distance, individuals kill without a thought. Humans kill and viewers can watch video images of hundreds of people dying without identifying with the plight of the victims. For this reason, George Bush Senior was able to call the first Gulf War “clean”. Almost no American troops died in the conflict, while the untold numbers of Iraqis vanished—almost as if they never existed at all. Military technology has become so efficient at killing that the killer does not need to know if he has killed. Media and military technology have made it possible for modern warfare to exist in an almost consequenceless vacuum for everyone but the victims.

            Anesthetized violence is commonplace in the mainstream news media. The rare instances when graphic images of suffering do appear in the news are critiqued by writers in op-eds, and American censors call the images of death grotesque. When a channel ventures to show images of real life graphic violence (like people jumping from the windows of the world trade center on September 11^th, or the bodies of American soldiers dragged through the streets in Somalia or Iraq) they lose viewers.

            With only “clean violence” shown on T.V. we find that we have come full circle to the sorts of violence found in master narratives. In narratives, on television and behind gun sights, heroes can kill and not shed blood. Soldiers kill “targets”, not people. The media engenders an environment for master narratives to flourish. Some military recruits are so accustomed to the blending of reality and unreality that the military is able to introduce them to armed conflict through video games that recreate “realistic” scenarios where questions of morality are never raised. Soldiers are trained from the outset to identify enemies as targets and learn to operate powerful weapons without thought to the consequences. Where Taussig saw a “culture of terror” where violence tends to justify further violence, today the military and the media have created a culture of displacement where soldiers act violently and yet do not connect human suffering with pressing keys on a computer.

            When Jessica Lynch was captured media agencies, military authorities and viewers all knew the story before it unfolded in real time. Dark skinned bad guys captured a beautiful white woman. She was raped, and one day she would be rescued by a team of elite special-forces. Though no one was reported to have been killed during the rescue mission, her capture somehow justified killings all across Iraq. Though there is evidence that she was not raped (i.e. she would have died because of her existing wounds) her, possibly doctored, military records say that she was. In the end even the “real life” images of her rescue were mediated through the efforts of Hollywood producers so that her capture narrative would fulfill every facet of our expectations.

            Viewers knew what was supposed to have happened and were included as voyeurs in the dramatic rescue. In doing so they ignore the rest of the conflict and became complicit in the violence perpetrated by the joint efforts of the military and media.

            In this case, as well as in countless others, we see the confluence of military technology, media practices and master narratives. The master narratives are the source of moral messages that implicitly justify certain types of “necessary” violent actions, while the media smoothes out, aestheticizes, and edits lived experiences into the box of narrativity. All the while, the world of violent action is subsumed into a fantasy enabled by the technological advancements of an age.

 

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