Suffering with honour: the visual brutality of realism in the combat film

A genre of films depicting the action, drama and violent bloodshed of combat has flourished since World War II. Films such as Wake Island (1942) and Bataan (1943) sought to bring a sense of the experience of war to viewers in the United States and other parts of the Western world. Likewise, re-creations of the Vietnam War in Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987) or the less critical Missing in Action (1984) presented explicit scenes of bloodshed and injustice to a still troubled American viewing public. Cinema and other visual technologies have also impacted on the way war has been fought or 'staged'. Since its industrialisation modern warfare has been closely tied to what Paul Virilio calls the mechanics and informatics of vision and perception, where the target area of war has become 'a cinema 'location', the battlefield a film set out of bounds to civilians' (Virilio, 1989: 11). [1] Between the use of visual technologies in warfare, and the continuing presence of an ever growing genre of combat films, there is a widespread desire to see and control the image of the vulnerability and suffering of bodies in war.