There is, if one allows oneself the luxury of too-intent contemplation, a curious and unsettling theology in the way the American flag flutters in slow, viscous motion across the screen, as though its stripes were the vestments of a high priest and its stars a constellation of minor deities presiding over the soft-lit sanctum of a multiplex. The modern cathedral, after all, no longer requires spires; it glows in the blue radiance of a Netflix interface, or in the retinal shimmer of a theater screen where the congregation slumps in comfortable chairs, their faces illuminated by an artificial aurora comparable – if one squints – only to that luminescent stained glass in Chartres, diffusing sanctity through colored panes. The congregants of this secular sanctuary watch in that reverent, pre-linguistic silence that precedes epiphany, while a new gospel – loud, pyrotechnic, morally lacquered – unfurls itself before them: the gospel of firepower, of sacrifice, of righteousness camouflaged in desert fatigues.
US military cinema, which on its surface pretends to be merely a genre among other genres, reveals itself upon closer inspection as a ritualized epistemology, a mode of revelation in the ancient sense of apokalypsis: an unveiling. From the jet-washed eroticism of Top Gun to the dolorous sniper-soteriology of American Sniper, from the doctrinal choreography of Black Hawk Down to the martyrdom-and-miracle narrative of Lone Survivor, the military film is not primarily about war, any more than an icon is about wood and pigment. It is about the mythos of war – its sanctification, its aestheticization, and its theological justification. These films are not mere entertainments but exercises in theodicy, projected in Dolby surround. They are attempts, as Leibniz attempted in his Théodicée and as Dostoevsky wrestled with in The Brothers Karamazov, to reconcile suffering with meaning, to lift atrocity into moral architecture, to drape bloodshed in the embroidered vestments of necessity.
Theodicy, that ancient and endlessly metastasizing problem, asks how evil and suffering can coexist with a meaningful cosmos. US military cinema attempts a parallel alchemy, transmuting the brute fact of war – its limbs torn open, its bones shattered, its psychic sedimentation of terror – into spectacle, into redemption. It is the audiovisual analogue of Augustine’s paradoxical felix culpa, the fortunate fall: violence becomes necessary, death becomes sanctifying, sacrifice becomes regenerative. What in the real world is a tragedy becomes, on screen, an apotheosis.
Thus we must consider military cinema not as entertainment but as theology, as ideology, as propaganda in the precise sense articulated by Jacques Ellul in his seminal Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Ellul warns that propaganda is not chiefly concerned with lying; rather, it sacralizes. Its genius lies in its ability to sanctify the myths that sustain political power. It does not persuade through argument; it baptizes. The military film, in this sense, does not deceive; it canonizes. It does not distort reality so much as subsume it within ritual, transforming conflict into liturgical narrative and soldiers into quasi-saints of the republic.
These films do not depict war; they curate myth. They do not question empire; they domesticate it, as one might domesticate a wild animal into a housepet whose growl is no longer threatening but reassuring. Baudrillard, with his perverse clairvoyance, observed that “the Gulf War did not take place” – not because bombs failed to fall or bodies failed to bleed, but because the war was consumed not as event but as simulation, a hyperreal spectacle mediated through screens and interpretations. Likewise, US military cinema does not portray war; it portrays the cinematic idea of war, a Platonic form projected in dust and flame. The soldier is not a person but an archetype – pure, loyal, unconflicted except in the ways that ennoble. The enemy is not human but a silhouette, a blur of hostility, an ink-black shape into which bullets disappear without resistance or moral residue.
This flattening is not incidental but engineered. Since at least the mid-20th century, the Pentagon has maintained a symbiotic industrial partnership with Hollywood. Access to military hardware, to aircraft carriers and helicopters, to training bases and technical consultants, is granted only on the condition that scripts undergo approval – sometimes gentle, sometimes surgical. Matthew Alford and David L. Robb have documented this arrangement with forensic meticulousness. Files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that hundreds of scripts have been reviewed, altered, sanitized, or rejected by Defense Department officials. What we are watching, therefore, is not cinema in the auteurist sense but a form of state-vetted scripture, a liturgy screened and blessed by the high priests of war.
Reinhold Niebuhr, that grim diagnostician of political theology, argued that the morality of nations differs categorically from that of individuals. Nations, compelled by their structural position, must act with power rather than innocence; they must do what individuals would consider sin in order to secure survival. Yet US military cinema blurs this Niebuhrian distinction, cloaking geopolitical ambition in the intimate fibers of personal grief. The soldier’s trauma becomes the nation’s absolution; the fallen comrade becomes a sacrificial lamb whose death purifies the collective conscience. Slavoj Žižek notes that ideology functions precisely at this juncture, where suffering is aestheticized and empathy weaponized – where the image of a broken soldier becomes a moral narcotic, sedating critical faculties while intensifying patriotic devotion.
The structure begins to resemble, alarmingly, a Gnostic cosmology. In Gnostic myth, the demiurge constructs a false world, a glittering cage of illusion meant to imprison souls in ignorance. Military cinema, too, assembles a cosmos – patriotic, morally coherent, emotionally intoxicating – to obscure the subterranean machinery of extraction, intervention, and dominance. It is not that the films lie outright, but that they furnish an ontology in which geopolitical violence is transfigured into an almost mystical necessity.
Walter Benjamin, in his incisive and often misquoted essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” asserts that the aestheticization of politics is the signature of fascism. American military cinema, however, goes further: it aestheticizes not only politics but pain. It choreographs mourning. It packages grief into a consumable product. The folded flag handed to the widow becomes a sacramental object; the slow salute of the officer becomes a benediction. The funeral procession becomes a marketing motif, a commercially viable catechesis in national suffering.
Where is the enemy in these narratives? He appears seldom and is humanized even less. The camera lingers on the American soldier’s anguish, his trembling hands, his letters home, his stoic tears. It grants the enemy no such intimacy. Edward Said’s diagnosis of Orientalism looms here like a poltergeist of interpretation: the Other is reduced to function, to menace, to target. The insurgent is a shape, a noise, a thermal signature washed in infrared. His humanity is not denied explicitly; it is simply rendered irrelevant.
One is reminded of James Cone, whose Black liberation theology insists that any theology which ignores the suffering of the oppressed is not Christian theology but idolatry. In an analogous sense, any cinema that glorifies violence without attending to the voices silenced beneath its boot is not truth but fetish, an act of worship directed not toward justice but toward the golden calf of empire. It adores power under the guise of piety. It kneels before spectacle rather than reality.
What is to be done with such a cinema, luminous and seductive yet morally anesthetizing? One option would be rejection – iconoclasm in its crudest form, smashing the screen as one smashes an idol. But a more rigorous path, one aligned with Simone Weil’s notion of attention as the purest form of prayer, would require something subtler: watching with apophatic vision, attending not only to what the film reveals but to what it suppresses, conceals, or excises. It is an act of hermeneutic vigilance, a determination to perceive the negative space – the missing faces, the unheard laments, the unshown consequences.
Attention, in Weil’s sense, becomes a political and theological discipline. To ask simple questions – Who bleeds? Who speaks? Who is granted interiority? Who is pixelated into abstraction? – is to perform a kind of cinematic exegesis, a refusal to accept the film’s liturgy at face value. It is to reclaim imagination from those who would conscript it into patriotic service.
Propaganda, after all, is not merely deceit. It is beauty conscripted into servitude. It is aesthetics turned against themselves. It is poetry weaponized. And the antidote, paradoxically, is not ugliness but a deeper, more truthful beauty – a beauty that refuses sanctification when sanctification is unwarranted, a beauty sharp enough to pierce illusion, a beauty capacious enough to contain grief without converting it into spectacle.
The screen glows. The flag flutters. The orchestral score swells. In the theater, a thousand eyes glisten with borrowed sorrow. Somewhere, unnoticed, a door closes – softly, like a confession withheld. Somewhere else, perhaps in a quieter room where the glow of the screen has not yet converted attention into obedience, a mind begins to open. It begins, tentatively at first and then with accelerating clarity, to see through the liturgy, to the machinery beyond. And in that fissure – small, luminous, and hard-won – lies the beginning of resistance, of reclamation, of a theology not dictated by the screen but awakened in spite of it.
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