UC Berkeley

This dissertation addresses depictions of the first phase of the ongoing “War on Terror” (2001-2013). By focusing on the three narrative figures around which such media representations center—the journalist, the soldier, and the veteran—I examine the genres and modes that shape how the United States population tells itself stories about war and compare the reach and impact of different media forms, analyzing, for example, the disparity between YouTube videos with millions of hits and feature-film box office flops. “War on Terror” narratives raise critical ethical and moral issues around the mechanization of warfare, the global reach of American culture, and the impossibility of perpetual war, most clearly within individual media narratives that are too easily obscured by the framework of the larger media landscape. By re-sorting the films, television shows, and online videos that directly depict the “War on Terror” and grouping them by their central narrative figures, the narrative conventions repeated across media forms are more easily identified. For the journalist, I look to documentary modes to better understand the blurring of fact and fiction and the loss of appeal to journalistic objectivity. For the soldier, I dissect ideas about technologically enhanced contemporary vision in warfare, considering the telescopic views of very close and very far. And finally, for the veteran, I look to the melodramatic mode to understand the inversion of contemporary (failed) reintegration narratives. The project culminates in the uncomfortable conclusion that the United States does not yet know how to handle its traumatized and injured veterans, nor the reminder of the unpopular and amoebic war they represent. On the whole, my project critically examines the American public’s simultaneous fascination with and dissociation from the war, and our inability to deal with its legacy today. Ultimately, this project proposes that, while the narrative conventions bestow unifying legibility to the fragmented representations and a continuity in storytelling that affirms the United States as democratizing “good guys,” those narrative conventions ultimately serve to mask the fracturing and loss of a unifying mythology of American national identity. While these divisions grow more apparent daily, the divides seen today trace much further back, and are seen clearly in this project of analyzing media representations of the first phase of the “War on Terror.”