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- Title
The Elusive Enemy: Zero Dark Thirty and the American Worldview.
- Authors
KENNEDY, LIAM
- Abstract
As a new paradigm and frame for US geopolitical imperatives, the war on terror poses particular challenges of representation. Like other media today, American cinema screens the war on terror - that is to say, it functions both to show and to conceal the conditions and effects of perpetual war. It dramatizes the hauntology of this war and it also mystifies and demystifies its violence. This essay focusses on the example of the film Zero Dark Thirty to consider how the film re-presents the aporia of representation that structures the production of the war on terror as a field of perceptible reality and reflects the geopolitical priorities of an American worldview. Central to this aporia is the mystification of the "elusive enemy" and the naturalization of a "long war." The hunt for Osama bin Laden has been a symbolic narrativization of this aporia and the essay comments on how Zero Dark Thirty re-presents this.
- Subjects
ZERO Dark 30 (Film); BIGELOW, Kathryn, 1951-; GEOPOLITICS in motion pictures; UNITED States social conditions; TERRORISM in motion pictures; WAR on Terrorism, 2001-2009; TWENTY-first century
- Publication
Journal of American Studies, 2017, Vol 51, Issue 3, p965
- ISSN
0021-8758
- Publication type
Film/Television Criticism
- DOI
10.1017/S0021875816001006