Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films

250 Pages·2017·3.521 MB·English

by  Aaron Tucker (auth.)

THE MILITARIZED INTERNET IN HOLLYWOOD WAR FILMS
AARON TUCKER
Virtual Weaponry
Aaron Tucker
Virtual Weaponry
The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films
Aaron Tucker
Department of English
Ryerson University
Toronto, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-60197-7 ISBN 978-3-319-60198-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60198-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944177
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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For Julia, all of everything
A
cknowledgements
I need to begin by thanking my parents, Cam and Sherrie Tucker, for
all their incredible and constant support. Thanks as well to Dr. Christine
Daigle for her invaluable recommendations and advice at the outset of
this book and to Shaun Vigil and Glenn Ramirez at Palgrave Macmillan
for guiding this book home. I also would not have been able to com-
plete this text without the generous financial and spiritual support of the
Ryerson University English Department and my CUPE union sisters and
brothers.
Chapter 2, “The Hard Technological Body in the Exoskeletal
Soldier,” was first published in Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the
Moving Image (Issue 7) as “The Hard Technological Bodies of Elysium
and Edge of Tomorrow.” Earlier versions of these chapters were also pre-
sented at the 2015 and 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies con-
ferences, as well as the Pop Culture Association conference in 2014 and
2015, and the 2017 Film Studies Association of Canada.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Virtual Weaponry 1
2 The Hard Technological Body in the Exoskeletal Soldier 37
3 The Soldier Interfaces on the Digitally Augmented
Battlefield 69
4 War Films, Combat Simulators and the Absent Virtual
Soldier 107
5 Ender’s Wargames: Drones, Data and the Simulation
of War as Weapon and Tactic 145
6 The Civilian Soldiers of Cyberwarfare 187
Conclusion: What Might a War Film Look Like Going
Forward? 229
Films Cited 235
Index 245
ix
l i
ist of mAges
Image 1.1 Tony Stark and his Iron Man suit separate ally from enemy 2
Image 2.1 A prototype sketch for the G.E. Hardiman exoskeleton 41
Image 2.2 Ripley in her exoskeleton about to square off against
the alien queen 46
Image 2.3 Captain Mifune fires from inside his exoskeleton
in The Matrix Revolutions 47
Image 2.4 Elysium’s Max and his exoskeleton fire a gun in profile 56
Image 2.5 Edge of Tomorrow’s exosuit 60
Image 3.1 The synthetic view from within War Machine’s suit 82
Image 3.2 Tony Stark inside his Monitor-Based AR system 88
Image 3.3 Pacific Rim’s dual Jaeger pilots within their AR interface 91
Image 3.4 The audience sees as Tony Stark’s camera sees 95
Image 4.1 The flight simulator in Brainstorm 115
Image 4.2 Chimpanzee VR in The Lawnmower Man 116
Image 4.3 What Slayer’s audience watches as Kable plays 133
Image 4.4 Simon hovers behind Kable and controls him during a round
of Slayers 134
Image 5.1 How the American military digitally views the world
in WarGames 156
Image 5.2 Good Kill monitors via the point of view of a drone 163
Image 5.3 The majestic drone of Eye in the Sky 167
Image 5.4 Ender commands his simulated army 176
Image 6.1 Rat hacks the Internet in The Core 198
Image 6.2 Swordfish’s Jobson’s virus-building interface 207
Image 6.3 The many Julian Assanges of WikiLeaks 218
Image 6.4 The real Edward Snowden gets the last word 223
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Virtual Weaponry
After watching a TV news report about men terrorizing a village, indus-
trialist-playboy Tony Stark flies from his home in the United States to
that village in Afghanistan in his robotic Iron Man suit. After he is shot
out of the sky by a missile, he pulls himself up out of a crater, dodges
another giant shell, fires a tiny explosive into the tank and walks away
as it explodes spectacularly. As he is being shot at by another terrorist
soldier, he flies up into the air and pauses. The movie switches to a shot
from Stark’s perspective, looking out through the suit’s eye slits; the
audience watches as the computer system within the suit scans the land-
scape, outlining each individual with a digital red silhouette indicating
potential targets while popping up annotative information beside objects
(“Jericho missiles”), after which Stark fires his hand-mounted weapons at
his enemies. The movie then cuts to a group of men rounding up civil-
ians, and just as one is about to shoot a father in front of his screaming
son, Stark lands and punches one man so hard it launches him doz-
ens of feet backwards. As he comes upon another hoard using civilians
as shields, he powers his weapons down and stands with his arms at his
sides. While completely still, the movie again cuts to the interior point of
view of Stark within the suit, and this time the computer system separates
the people into the binary of “Hostile” (identified by a red bull’s-eye)
and “Civilian” (identified by white text); guns then rise from each of his
shoulders and he expertly snipes just the terrorists out of the group, leav-
ing the civilians unharmed (Image 1.1).
© The Author(s) 2017 1
A. Tucker, Virtual Weaponry,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60198-4_1
2 A. TUCKER
Image 1.1 Tony Stark and his Iron Man suit separate ally from enemy
This scene from Iron Man (Dir. Jon Favreau 2008) involves a number of
actions and cinematic effects that are common throughout the very popular
series of films that feature the character of Tony Stark as Iron Man. What is
that audience to make of the fact that Stark just flies to another country to
carry out vigilante justice with his own military-style technologies? What is
the audience who watches such a scene being encouraged to think about
their relationship to their digitally networked technology in such scenes?
In what ways do Stark’s violent acts on the battlefield affect those relation-
ships? With all these questions in mind, broadly, as bell hooks writes in her
introduction to Reel to Reel, “Whether we like it or not, cinema assumes a
pedagogical role in the lives of many people. It may not be the intent of a
filmmaker to teach audiences, but that does not mean that lessons are not
learned” (2). Beyond this, hooks adds, “Movies not only provide a narra-
tive for specific discourses of race, sex, and class, they provide a shared expe-
rience, a common starting point from which diverse audiences can dialogue
about these charged issues” (3). To this end, Kellner states that “contem-
porary cinema can be read as a contest of representations and a contested
terrain that reproduces existing social struggles and transcodes the political
discourses of the era” (2); as such, he continues,
films are an especially illuminating social indicator of the realities of a his-
torical era, as a tremendous amount of capital is invested in researching,
producing and marketing the product. Movie creators tap into the events,
fears, fantasies, and hopes of an era and give cinematic expression to social
experiences and realities. (10)