American War Film

Generational Memory and Affect in Letters From Iwo Jima

by Robert Burgoyne

In Country: mapping the Iraq war in recent Hollywood combat movies

by Guy Westwell

Published in Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television Since 9/11 (Abramis Academic, 2011).

This chapter aims to begin the process of establishing how the recent cycle of US war movies showing wars in Iraq and... more This chapter aims to begin the process of establishing how the recent cycle of US war movies showing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might be located in relation to the development of the US war movie genre more generally, and especially in relation to the genre’s most recent cycles, including the Vietnam war cycle, and the pre-9/11 ‘greatest generation’ cycle. A brief description of the core myths of the war movie genre will provide a context for a series of more specific observations about The Hurt Locker (2008), the most successful of the recent Iraq war movies. I am particularly interested in the question of whether the contemporary war film conforms to the war movie genre’s general tendency, ideologically speaking, to make an argument for war.