Editorial

Issue 48–2 inaugurates a new Framework feature. The journal will now carry a war focus. How is the U.S. actually dealing with the war? There are surprising conflicts, many made covertly apparent through media representation, which, in at least three cases, platforms some of the country's subconscious stresses. This manifests in how soldiers are represented, how crushing issues—such as torture—are approached and how practitioners in the media identify (or don't) their war politics. On the one hand, there is a plethora of daily information and many questions: Does the war have a precedent or is it unprecedented? Does it mirror Vietnam or deflect it? Is it a greed fest by a few White House Neo Cons? Is it a banner of new American imperialism? Is it an imperialistic Götterdämmerung?

But what are the real underlying questions that the public is grappling with? On the other hand, while our media, radical or conservative, is inundated with opinions, critiques, biographies, narratives, documentaries, articles, exposés, blogs and interviews, and Congress struggles with the White House for control of the war budget, many U.S. soldiers express an estrangement from their home country, despite unprecedented representation of their voices. An often quoted Army perspective is, "The United States is not at war. The U.S. Army is at war but the United States is at the mall." Despite the frantic media industry around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's truth to that. What does this mean? How is the visual media handling the subject of war, much less contributing to its arguments or to the transformation of the war itself?

There are many contradictions. One example is the issue of torture. Alex Gibney's documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side (US, 2007), investigates the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo and is one of the first theatrically released films to fully discuss these crimes. It sidesteps the broader scope of torture as a battle tactic and concentrates on official culpability, on torture's failure and on its murderous nature. Furthermore, in spring of 2007, a Department of Defense study revealed that over 40% of Marines and soldiers felt that torture was legitimate. It could be argued that this in-your-face focus represents the desire for an American public to know the truth and, in many ways, it does. But strangely, torture, of all things, plays another role in American turmoil about the war. We seem to identify not with the torturing aggressor (in this case, ourselves) but with the victim. Since the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison became public in 2004, questions of torture's efficacy, legality and morality have swamped the debate. Little has been resolved politically but there has been, in the last three years, an escalation of torture imagery in film and TV. If the media reflects an inner U.S. crisis, then torture and the frighteningly ambivalent questions that its potential use evokes has become a psychological hole for our confusion. It appears in films ranging from cartoons (The Incredibles, Brad Bird, US, 2004) to parodies (Team America: World Police, Trey Parker, US, 2004) to spy thrillers (Syriana, Stephan Gaghan, US, 2005) to horror (Saw I-III, US, 2004–6 or Hostel, Eli Roth, US, 2005). In these and other fictionalized depictions of torture, it is an American who is tortured not the torturer, suggesting that Americans transfer grim ambivalence about the war into a sense of victimization. This has heightened in the last few years. Now, popular TV shows such as 24 (US, 2001–) and Lost (US, 2004–) exploit torture as a necessary means to an end. It regularly features on 24, as a method to save Americans and, in Lost, the writers went so far as to have an Iraqi Republican Guardsman, one of the show's heroes, professionally torture a mild, petite American man. But torture revealed him to be a super-villain. That torture, of all aspects of the Iraq War, should be so culturally appropriated is another mysterious reflection of our inability to articulate this war and place it in context with past wars...