film combat

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Cinema Journal 44, No. 3, Spring 2005 35

Cinema and the Civilizing Process: RethinkingViolence in the World War II Combat FilmJ. David Slocum

Abstract: This essay proposes an alternative critical approach to the “violence” ofthe World War II combat film. Guiding this approach is the idea of a “civilizingprocess” that attends both to specific representations in war films and to the insti-tutional role of cinema in socializing and regulating individual behavior. The theo-retical grounding here is the sociological work of Norbert Elias, whose major study,The Civilizing Process, was first published in 1939.

The World War II combat film enjoyed a revival in the late 1990s and early 2000s.Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line(both 1998) provided the initial impetus, but a steady stream of productions fol-lowed, including Hart’s War (Gregory Hoblit, 2002), Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay,2001), and Windtalkers (John Woo, 2002). Band of Brothers, the ten-hour HBOminiseries produced by Spielberg and Tom Hanks in 2001, blurred the lines be-tween film and television and literally brought the “Good War” home.

For film historian Thomas Schatz, “The WWII film has continued to developas a means both to revisit the most heroic episode in the American Century and, asthe century wore on, to provide a touchstone of sorts for America’s subsequent(and generally far less heroic) military conflicts.”1 That latter function has provedespecially important as films about other wars appeared, from Apocalypse NowRedux (Francis Coppola, 2001) and We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002),both about Vietnam, to Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001) and Black HawkDown (Ridley Scott, 2002), about Bosnia and Somalia, respectively, to Courage un-der Fire (Edward Zwick, 1996) and Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999), bothabout the first Gulf War. Whether as reaffirmation or subversion, whether directly orindirectly, the war films of the last decade still rely on what Schatz calls “Hollywood’smilitary Ur-narrative,” which includes prescribed standards of behavior and moralityas well as conventions for imaging combat, fighting, and killing.

Curiously, only sporadic attention has been devoted to the “violence” repre-sented in Hollywood’s war movies. The opening twenty-minute sequence of Sav-ing Private Ryan was celebrated for its disorienting and intense visualization ofthe storming of the beach at Normandy; and the nearly clinical imaging of theeffects of bullets entering bodies in Three Kings was a much less discussed if novel

J. David Slocum is associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New YorkUniversity, where he teaches cinema studies and art and public policy. He is the editor ofViolence and American Cinema (Routledge, 2000) and Terrorism, Media, Liberation (RutgersUniversity Press, 2005).

Bridget Beall

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36 Cinema Journal 44, No. 3, Spring 2005

rendering of the damage done by military weaponry. Likewise, the psychologicalburdens of battle and the threat of death were the subjects of multiple explora-tions of Courage under Fire. Looking at more formal innovations, scholars haveexamined the so-called forty-five-degree shutter technique Spielberg has employedto fragment the viewer’s perception of action sequences and thereby, presumably,to replicate the psychological disorientation of combat.

Overall, and in public discourse especially, when discussions of bloodlettingand brutality in war films have occurred, they have turned on questions of “real-ism” and “authenticity.” Such treatment can be illuminating, as in Jeanine Basinger’seffort to historicize the notion of “realism” in popular considerations of SavingPrivate Ryan, but such treatment also limits the thoughtful attention that can bedevoted to the violence of combat.2

This limitation is noteworthy because, during the 1990s and early 2000s, onecan observe a pronounced tendency among film critics and scholars to examineviolence in Hollywood cinema more robustly. Much of this work seeks to exploretoday’s visions of carnage as well as the more general meaning of Hollywood “filmviolence” by looking back to the 1960s and 1970s as originary moments in thehistory of the cinematography (use of multiple cameras, lenses, film speeds), edit-ing (faster cutting, montage, slow-motion inserts), and special effects (invention ofthe squib) of blood and gore. Also important were the undoing of long-standingindustry strictures (the Production Code was scrapped in 1966 and replaced bythe postproduction ratings system in 1968) and the increased willingness on thepart of producers to target specific segments of the mass market (by making filmsfor adults or “mature” audiences). These institutional changes are seen in part tohave supported a period of exceptional artistic freedom and innovation.

The shift in the style and narrative presentation of brutality and death thatmany viewers saw as radical also served as the basis for the expansion of socialscience research into the alleged effects of media violence on social behavior.3 Inaddition, the larger social and cultural backdrop (of military conflict in Vietnamand of racial and generational discord domestically, both thoroughly mediated byproliferating television images, and of the assassination of President John F.Kennedy) altered the prevailing visual experience of physical injury and death.4 Inother words, the experience of conflict during the 1960s is understood to haveinfluenced contemporary (and subsequent) Hollywood and its onscreen render-ings of violence, yet that influence is rarely explored in discussions of direct repre-sentations of military combat. Even in examinations of films about Vietnam thatsought explicitly to undo the sanctities of World War II films and pathologize mili-tary action, the horrors of war appear to be more political and moral than corpo-real or psychological.

Despite the lack of direct references, much recent critical work on movieviolence illuminates the meaning of the visual experience of combat films. Wemight pause, however, over the standards for approaching such violence. Whilesome of this critical work illuminates and lends meaning to later films, construc-tive attention to the onscreen standard-bearers of blood and guts during the 1960sand 1970s—canonically, Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and The Wild Bunch


(Sam Peckinpah, 1969—has obscured understanding of other cinematic and cul-tural forms. Earlier films, such as those made during World War II, are conse-quently relegated to the realm of the tame, quaint, or inchoate. Thus, while themost probing of recent analyses of film violence are rooted in 1960s cinema, andthose works substantively reference the Vietnam conflict and the end of WorldWar II “victory culture,” little sustained consideration has been given to the goreand carnage of onscreen military conflict itself.5

This essay proposes an alternative critical approach to the “violence” of theWorld War II combat film. Guiding this approach is the idea of a “civilizing pro-cess” that attends both to specific representations in war films and to the institu-tional role of cinema in socializing and regulating individual behavior. Thetheoretical grounding here is the sociological work of Norbert Elias, whose majorstudy, The Civilizing Process, was first published in 1939 and bears the marks ofearly-to-mid-twentieth-century state, social, and cultural formations, including thosein Germany, from which Elias fled in 1933. His descriptions of the increasinglycomplex differentiation and integration of social functions giving society coher-ence and patterning individual social relations offer constructive means for ap-proaching more recent social and political developments. Elias himself exploredthe transformation of aggression in mass society into such forms as spectating, andothers have sought to employ his ideas to illuminate developments ranging fromthe Holocaust to the status of civil society.6

The peculiarities of the United States have been subject to instructive if limitedanalysis via Elias’s writings. In the American context, the focus has been on the sig-nificance of western expansion, the racialized institutions of the South, the history ofmanners, and the twentieth-century emergence of mass society.7 In part, this dearthof critical work reflects the fact that most literature on political development in theUnited States, as Stephen Mennell writes, “is slanted rather towards nation buildingthan state formation, towards the construction of a sense of shared national identityrather than internal pacification and the forging of an effective monopolization of themeans of violence.”8 For Elias, these concerns could not be separated. Conse-quently, a goal of this essay is to explicate the cinematic representation of militarycombat during World War II by building on the insights of Elias’s well-rounded andnearly contemporary analysis of state and institutional power and the regulation ofsocial behavior, particularly violent conflict.

The Bureaucratic Imperative. The assessment here of onscreen imaginings ofbrutality in battle entails consideration of Hollywood’s studio-era institutional de-velopment as well as its mode and forms of production. While consolidation of themode of production had been taking place since just after World War I and hadbeen advanced by the exigencies of new sound technology in the late 1920s, it wasduring the 1930s that the greatest expansion of bureaucratic thinking occurred—that is, the spreading of administrative structures and the increasing sway of ratio-nal thinking undergirding society and its institutions.

The hierarchicization of the film industry during the 1930s is but one exampleof the remaking of a major social institution; the bureaucratization of the federal


government during the New Deal is another. The film industry not only mass pro-duced fantasies of energetic individualism and moral community; its own opera-tion was presented to the public and critics as epitomizing the freedoms ofexpression and choice that formed the bedrock of the American way of life. Thus,during the 1920s and early 1930s, the Motion Picture Producers and DistributorsAssociation (MPPDA) claimed to be a modern and forward-thinking national tradeassociation committed to public relations and institutional development. In fact,in his memoirs, Will Hays implies that an important link existed between the filmindustry’s building of legitimation and cultural respectability, on the one hand, andits innovative practices of self-regulation and openness to cooperating with thegovernment and various national opinion organizations, on the other.9 The filmindustry can also be seen to have contributed to the formation of the modernnational state and to the furtherance of specific (self-)constraints on individualbehavior and, especially, the exercise of aggression.

Hollywood cinema functioned as a source of mutual identification and sharedstandards of social behavior and values for a variety of viewers. Importantly forthe evaluation of the visual medium, the spectatorial pleasures cinema providedalso contributed, as we shall see, to the process of pacification. Specifically, the

Figure 1. Robert Taylor in combat in Bataan (Tay Garnett, MGM, 1943).


regulation of filmmaking practices, including public and industry attention toonscreen images of violence and criminality, derived from a process of bureau-cratization of both industry monitors and external moralists, a consolidation ofthe production and exhibition system, and a complex appeal to moviegoers seek-ing a sense of themselves as Americans.

The most conspicuous realization of the institution building occurring in Hol-lywood was the emergence of the film industry’s own self-regulatory apparatus,first in 1922, with the formation of the MPPDA, and then, twelve years later, ofthe Production Code Administration (PCA), to enforce self-imposed proscriptionson film content. Much as Jon Lewis has argued that the complex systems of regu-lation in play in the late 1960s and 1970s enabled the film industry to flourish, theinterplay of cultural and institutional processes of regulation in the 1920s and 1930senabled the film industry to consolidate its position in U.S. society and audiencesto be socialized to specific forms of filmmaking and storytelling.10 In more socio-logical terms, the industry facilitated the continuation of a longer-term project ofstate formation and institution building that shaped the expression of aggressionin both social and consumer activities in the United States.

The coming of World War II forged an active alliance between Washingtonand Hollywood.11 The Office of War Information (OWI) was the government unitcharged in June 1942 with coordinating the national propaganda effort. Its Bureauof Motion Pictures (BMP) monitored film production and advised film studiosabout the political appropriateness of productions. The BMP’s recommendations,furthermore, were heeded by the government’s Office of Censorship, which wasoriginally founded under the 1917 Espionage Act to review foreign films for im-port and domestic exhibition and Hollywood productions for international distri-bution—and had control over potentially profitable foreign exports. (Notsurprisingly, with European and Asian markets compromised by war, the film in-dustry worked assiduously with these agencies and with the Office of Inter-Ameri-can Affairs to coordinate productions suitable for Latin America.)

In its July 1942 “Manual for the Motion Picture Industry,” the BMP began byasking, “Will this picture help win the war?” Like the general principles of moraluplift and social progress limned in the Production Code itself, the BMP’soverarching political aims were often uneasily applied to individual film projects andbecame the source of convoluted and sometimes acrimonious relations among thestudios, the PCA, and BMP reviewers. Unlike the Production Code, the manualspelled out few prohibitions more specific than those against “offensive” images, andin its final major section, on the importance of the “job” being done by U.S. fightingforces, couched concerns firmly in political aims. Oriented by what Clayton R.Koppes and Gregory D. Black have described as “mild social democracy and liberalinternationalist foreign policy,”12 the efforts of the OWI and the BMP were seizedupon by some conservative members of Congress for demonstrating, in ways that thestudios and the PCA had in the past so painstakingly sought to avoid, the social andpolitical power of cinema. Institutionally, Hollywood would participate in a massivewartime public information campaign, closely coordinating production with various


government agencies, while remaining aware of the currents of public concern; suchcentrality also meant, however, that filmmakers were subject to the intense dynamicsof wartime cultural politics.

Concern with all aspects of the war effort translated into a wide array of filmproductions. Contrary to the popular memory generated in succeeding decades bymostly postwar productions, relatively few feature-length films made during the warportrayed the training of servicemen or military combat directly. Variousfilmographers have claimed that the number of productions dealing significantlywith the first subject is around thirty, while the total about armed forces in a “combatenvironment” is between twenty-five and thirty. Several films count in both catego-ries.13 (This of more than fourteen hundred features that the major studios releasedbetween 1941 and 1945.) Many other movies foregrounded conventional Hollywoodfare—light romances, comedies, musicals—while keeping the war in the back-ground. Documentaries, newsreels, shorts, and animated movies filled out theatricalprograms and often dealt directly with the war effort at home and in combat areas.

Across these varied forms, the cinema contributed to what might be called theoverall discursive experience of the war. The consolidation of existing Hollywoodstorytelling practices suited the government’s political aims of encouraging Ameri-can unity and resolve while polarizing the conflict as between the Allies and theAxis powers. As film theorist Dana Polan argues, popular filmmaking strategiestranslated into more than merely topical political propaganda; rather, from thebeginning and through whatever conflicts, stories promised “happy endings,”thereby delimiting any uncertainty surrounding the current situation. As a result,Hollywood narratives represented “the war-affirmative ideology of the Americanwar years,” ensuring unambiguous closure. A key aspect of this discursive systemwas the narrative preoccupation with “averageness,” that “everyone’s story can bea war story, everyone has something to contribute.” For Polan, this “generalizingquality” enabled wartime representations to fit within an “overall master plot” andto “transcode” any element, even the seemingly oppositional or neutral, into “adiscourse of affirmation.”14 Through narratives about the battlefront and the homefront alike, cinema thus helped to position viewers not only relative to the currentpolitical environment but more broadly into a constructed realm of reassuranceabout timeless and empowering American values and, especially, the manifest des-tiny of the United States.

Wartime Conversions. Depictions of physical threat, harm, and death figuredimportantly in this constructed narrative. Images of war-related violence increasedincrementally in feature films and other media as the war progressed.15 In part,this resulted from popular demands for more direct images of violence, indeed ofdeaths and killings, as domestic audiences concluded that more sanitized imagesfailed to reflect the experiences of their loved ones or imaginings of the horrors ofwar. At the same time, the escalation of direct representations proceeded from aneed to articulate more and more emphatically the role of cinema in modifyingstandards of behavior: the more intense the narrative conflicts or the greater theresistance to be overcome, the more dramatic the consolidation of war-affirmative


ideology could be—and the national society refigured through it. In the process,the more contemporary references to specific battle sites or forms of violencewere enveloped by and reworked, the more timeless were the tropes of Americanindividualism, community and assimilation, group resilience, and manly virtue.

The forms of violence suggested, threatened, or enacted in wartime produc-tions were extensions of some of the broader representational patterns that hademerged in popular cinema in previous years. Bodies were the focus, either activethemselves or acted upon by others, and their presentation as both capable andsusceptible, as both empowered and passive, is at the heart of the conflicts and theresolutions the narratives pose.16 The overt attention in many films to the remak-ing and conversion of individuals—perhaps most dramatically in that small pro-portion of films with “basic training” sequences—underscored the importance ofdisciplining the body and molding the individual for success in battle. These pro-ductions shed light, reflexively, on the management and regulation of aggressionin everyday social behavior. Moreover, films about the home front, especially thosefocused on the components of combat, drew attention to how violence and con-straints on aggression are internalized rather than simply imposed externally. Wemight see the predominant logic guiding these actions and constraints—ofscapegoating and sacrifice—as intricately linked not only to individual behavior orcharacterization but to (the unsteady) process of affirming shared social standardsof conduct. Such logic was hardly unique to war films. However, wartime produc-tions offer especially clear-cut depictions of the elements constituting this logic,including the relations of individuals to society, the foregrounding of violence asan act with instrumental social meaning, and affirmation of the boundaries of thesocial through articulations of difference. Recapitulated in wartime cinema, in otherwords, are a complex range of narrative articulations about the body, physical ac-tions and injuries, and social constraints on bodies and behavior.

The idea of a “civilizing process” proves especially useful here. Elias, in par-ticular, does not dwell on the opposition between putatively “civilized” and “sav-age” values but on the ongoing contest over the constraint of individuals’ aggressiveand libidinous drives.17 These “drives” are less innate desires or impulses to becontrolled by external or social coercion than potentials for aggression activatedand shaped by group conflict and insistent social learning. In other words, physicalattack or the expression of aggression or emotion may be a primary behavioralresponse to conflict, but it is hardly the biologically or psychically overdeterminedresponse familiar from essentialist and Freudian models. As a result, Elias’s think-ing does not fit easily with existing psychoanalytic studies of movie violence.18 In-stead, the pacification and socialization entailed in the civilizing process remainkeyed to the interdependence between individual and group and to the malleabil-ity of drives rather than constituting merely an incremental increase in externalauthority over historically unchanging psychic dynamics.19

As a central element of human relations, the power embodied in physical behav-ior and violence, according to Elias, was the basis of conflicts and interactions thatsharpened the identities of different groups (especially classes) and eventually gaverise to states. In the early formation of states such as England and Germany, physical


violence or its threat emerged in the name of common defense and survival, shapingsocial “figurations” as well as individual and group identities.

Further illuminating Elias’s concept of drives is his critique of Freud’s view ofpsychological and sociological functions as largely ahistorical. In The CivilizingProcess, Elias argues that individuals’ basic drives, emotions, and libidinal ener-gies—in Freudian terms, the id—as well as the ego and superego are historicallyand culturally specific.20 More important, the relationships between these are like-wise determined and differentiated in individuals according to particular contexts.

We tend more readily to recognize historically specific changes in forms andinstitutions of socialization or forceful constraint, but Elias emphasized that psy-chic forms and functions, too, have a marked and related history. As JonathanFletcher succinctly writes, “Changes in the social structure at large go hand inhand with changes in the psychical make-up of people as well as vice versa.”21

Consolidation of a group’s or a state’s monopoly over violent action can thereforebe seen to take place concurrently with changing and culturally specific patternsof child training and everyday life. To appreciate Elias’s concept of drives requiresnot only recognition of psychic tensions or tendencies toward aggression and grati-fication or of structures or institutions of control and conditioning but an under-standing of the figuration of the entire social field in which both are interdependent.

Recognition of the greater mutual identification of individuals in a societyproduced a crucial shift for Elias. Rather than simply taming or restricting aggres-sion through external controls such as the threat of physical injury, for Elias “thecivilizing process” entailed the development of more stable and individuated formsof internal and self-restraint. Elias thus saw violence as not opposed to any fixednotion of “civilization.” Instead, he saw links between the patterns of individualrestraint on aggression and of social development and interdependence, in whichviolence is managed.

Unlike the more familiar Freudian model, in which adult pleasures are atodds with the individual’s infantile fantasies, Elias’s drives may be understood toemphasize a constant if unstable and shifting tension between self and other markedby a simultaneous crossing and maintenance of bodily and subjective boundaries.As Robert van Krieken puts it, Elias’s “theoretical principle was that emotions anddesires were themselves socially constituted, and there was no pre-social humannature which opposed or resisted the requirement of social relations.”22 That is,drives are not innate compulsions to aggression or libidinal release so much as theinevitable consequence of social relations and group dynamics. Consequently, con-trol of aggression and violence comes about through a process of “civilization” thatincrementally develops stable forms of self-constraint on individual drives and thesocial relations through which they operate.

A pair of familiar examples is illustrative. In Sergeant York (Howard Hawks,1941), which tells the story of Alvin York’s (Gary Cooper) journey from the moun-tains of Tennessee to the battlefields of Europe during World War I, two personalconversions are showcased. The first concerns the imposition of social standards andthe raising of the threshold of shame and propriety about adolescent manners andprankish behavior; the second involves the inculcation of social constraints on the


exercise of ostensibly more serious (i.e., potentially lethal) aggression and its deploy-ment in authorized, military situations. Both conversions turn on the management ofphysical conduct and habits. Both also reference long-standing figures in popularfilm history, from the “bad boy” of turn-of-the-century comedies in the first case tothe frontiersman, whose natural courage and physical prowess are harnessed to thecause of state formation in so many westerns, in the second. Considered together,these conversions reiterate the development through various social and institutionalprocesses of internal constraints on individual behavior.

What is striking about Sergeant York is the way it links a local and familiarcoming-of-age tale with a nearly contemporary and politically resonant narrativethat underscores the “coming of civilized values” in an individual. Consequently,the film employs the mythological structures adumbrated by Tom Doherty to dem-onstrate the influence of internalized social control on the expression of aggressivedrives and the use of physical force by both individuals and the state.23

Often, individuals came to a new form of reconciliation with social authority,as in another familiar wartime production, Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942),which features the renunciation of earlier indifference or isolation and the em-brace of ideals associated with the state and collective action.24 This was more thanmerely a matter of political suasion. The adoption of ideas was important, but

Figure 2. Adolescentmanners and prankishbehavior on the homefront. Gary Cooperand William Haade inSergeant York(Howard Hawks,Warner Bros., 1941).


their mobilization by bodies was crucial; individual commitment could be mea-sured by active, physical participation in the war effort.

The power of a wartime narrative might even be said to have turned on itsaffirmation of a certain habitus, of values and dispositions consistently demon-strated through physical action. Largely through its popular cinema, the war, Polanasserts, “will virtually write a grammar of acceptable and unacceptable actions”and “will argue that nothing an individual does is without significance for or againstwar-affirming practices of everyday life.”25 The conversions conveyed so insistentlyin narrative films thus not only spoke to the formation of group identity crucial tothe war effort but did so by marking standards of behavior that each individual wasto manage internally.

Importantly, such conversions tended to occur in response to provocation byan enemy characterized by its aggression and putative savagery. That provocationtypically entailed a physical threat or act against friends, allies, or, especially, women.In Sergeant York, not only are the threats against the fellow soldiers York has be-friended in Europe but also, as the film’s regular cross-cutting makes plain, themembers of his family, mostly women, he has left behind in the Tennessee hillsand who uphold the values of home, family, and tolerance that the army remindsYork he should fight for. The juxtaposition echoes a long-standing pattern, per-haps most recognizable in the threat of miscegenation by Indians in westerns, ofidentifying threats to women and the private space of the home as a justificationfor the public exercise of violence by men. Film narratives prominently featurethe links between the need to defend against those threats and to maintain na-tional values, often explicitly emphasizing the opposition between “civilization”and “savagery.” Indeed, allusions to, and images of the harm and injury caused by“savage” or “inhuman” enemies, are central to Hollywood’s imagination of vio-lence, which contrasts with the masculine, communal, or American values in de-fense of which “civilized” men are justified in using violent means of retribution.

In groups in conflict and in the midst of a civilizing process, the savage an-tagonist also shows the toll on individuals and groups of being unable or unwillingto manage hostile drives or dispositions toward aggressive behavior. Several recentanalysts have developed the notion of “decivilizing processes” to account for thisconflict.26 These “reversals” in the civilizing process operate both at the individuallevel of socialization—that is, of learning prevalent standards of behavior—and atthe level of longer-term structured processes of psychic and social change. ForFletcher, these processes include

[first] a shift in the balance between constraints by others and self-restraint in favour ofconstraints by others; [second] the development of a social standard of behaviour andfeeling which generates the emergence of a less even, all-round, stable and differenti-ated pattern of self-restraint; and, third . . . a contraction in the scope of mutual identi-fication between constituent groups and individuals.27

In every society, these processes coexist with civilizing influences that are movingin the opposite direction; the question, as Elias put it in a late interview, “is to whatextent one of the two directions is dominant.”28


In its wartime representations, Hollywood characterized Japan and Germanyas repressive states that were imposing restraints on individuals through centralizedsecurity apparatuses that refused to recognize varied groups as constituents of asociety with shared standards and values. The cinematic demonization of these statesand their nationals can thus be seen to have proceeded from the contrasting ap-proaches to the socialization of drives and the management of aggression in theUnited States and in states considered its enemies. The implicit explanation forNazi atrocities and justification for the conflict with Japan follow from this contrast-ing history and, in the process, distinguish the enemy, its violence, and the state.

Either as provocation or rightful retribution, actions involving bodily harmor death were among the most conspicuous of those reframed by wartime cin-ema. These actions were also among those that the government and the filmstudios monitored most closely. Yet it was not only direct images of bodies thatshaped Americans’ perceptions of war; indexical, photographic qualities com-mingled with the cinematic properties of motion and editing. Accordingly, theviolence in the climactic charge portrayed in Sergeant York relies on cross-cutting(especially between close-ups and long shots); slanted camera angles ratherthan agonizing long takes or gruesome, special effects–laden images; and rap-idly moving cameras.

The “grammar of acceptable and unacceptable actions” that marked the vi-sual experience of wartime violence was shaped, that is, through the deploymentof formal practices as well as by the production of narratives that affirmed the war.Images that demonstrated the drives of individual characters visually underscoredideological interdependence within the larger social group. In this way, the rhythmsof editing and the unfolding of narrative reinforced the process of socializing indi-viduals and configuring culturally specific standards for enacting (and constrain-ing) aggressive behavior.

Combat and Sacrifice. Wartime violence took many forms and occurred in manysettings. One telling distinction is between the overt images of brutality and car-nage exacted in combat and the physical, psychic, and emotional toll suffered onthe home front. As in World War I, the physical interactions between human com-batants in World War II frequently depended on weaponry and equipment rang-ing from submarines and bombers to guns and grenades. These elements appearedas enhancements of human bodies and their aggressive drives, as extensions ofnations or private spaces being fought for, and, more ominously, as inhuman threatsto life and limb.

The soldier’s (or sailor’s or airman’s) body itself was also a war machine—trained, regimented, dressed, targeted, and deployed for maximum physical effectagainst the enemy. As war correspondent Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith) muses inThe Story of G.I. Joe (William Wellman, 1945), “The greatest fighting machine ofall [is] the infantry soldier.” In retrospect, the suggestion of men as machines ormachine-like brings to mind broader issues of modernization and bureaucratiza-tion, more particularly, the standardization of codes and the management of be-haviors involving harm and hurt.


As in so many other wartime productions, the representations of violence inBataan (Tay Garnett, 1943) emerge more through context and repetition thanthrough explicit images. Bataan features an American melting-pot platoon defend-ing the Philippine jungle against the Japanese. One by one, the U.S. soldiers die—aPole, a Filipino, a Mexican, and finally an African American. Wesley Eeps (KennethSpencer) is the last of the minority soldiers to be killed. Eeps charges and bayonets aJapanese soldier, only to have another appear and slash at his neck with a sword.Although there is little blood, a freeze frame captures the look of horror on Eeps’sface at the instant of death; it is a horrific scene of violence in battle.

Eeps’s death occurs during a nearly ten-minute-long battle between Ameri-can and Japanese soldiers. Sixty years later, the variety of deadly acts in the se-quence still gives pause. From a distance, the U.S. soldiers kill the Japanese withmachine guns and by throwing grenades; and from closer range, by shooting themwith rifles and pistols, stabbing them with bayonets, attacking them with fists andrifle butts, and strangling them. Americans are likewise killed or wounded by guns,swords, and knives. These multiple instruments represent a combination of con-temporary and seemingly “barbaric” or “primitive” weapons and tactics.

In Bataan, the performance of martial activities—of killing or being killed, ofusing weapons and bodies against the enemy—relies on varied cinematic tech-niques. Most of the action, in choreographed long shot, plan américain, or mediumshot, shows individual soldiers (from toe to head, from knee or midthigh up, or waistup) moving through battle, engaging the enemy with weapons, or in bodily combat.A few longer shots show the initial approach of the camouflaged (i.e.,deindividuated) Japanese or of shooting from a treetop machine-gun nest that anAmerican grenade eventually destroys. Interspersed are close-ups of intense physi-cal reactions—Eeps’s frozen look of death and an all-American private struggling inhand-to-hand combat with a Japanese soldier. Whatever the distance, the predomi-nant camera placement is straight on and frontal, and the camera is unmoving,clearly establishing a stable space and background for individual and group actions.The editing is also conventional if often rapid, matching the action; the cutting be-tween combat scenes emphasizes the intensity of battle while preserving the recog-nizable relationship between various spaces and the continuous flow of time.29

The visual economy of combat extended the protocols of social interaction andcorporeal action longstanding in popular cinema; the sanctity of bodies (Americanbodies, at least) remained the touchstone of engagement with others and of theirviolation by an inhuman enemy. This contrasted with the depiction of the enemy.Even more than the Germans, the Japanese were consistently dehumanized in com-bat films, often by virtue of their seemingly unconstrained aggression.30 In Bataan,the Asian enemy crawls, advances camouflaged with shrubbery, and shrieks whenattacking or being attacked (otherwise, the Japanese do not communicate and arenot individuated). The privileging of American bodies, in contrast, underscored thechallenge to U.S. standards of behavior implicit in enemy attacks.31

Because the combat platoon symbolized the United States and its shared val-ues, an attack became an assault on the integrity of the broader social body. Con-sequently, unlike actual battle, in which detached body parts were a common sight


and even, following explosions, feared as dangerous projectiles, wartime films nevershowed body parts.32 Even blood, as Stephen Prince observes, was shown onlyrarely, not as evidence of the traumatic invasion of the body by bullets, knives, orshrapnel but to suggest incidental and superficial wounds.33 Other physical reali-ties were similarly left unrepresented; celluloid soldiers never soiled themselves,nor were they defaced or blown unrecognizably apart.

The PCA’s prohibition against the depiction of dead bodies generally appliedto both the Americans and the Japanese. Only rarely did films made between 1941and 1944 dwell on men who were dying. One exception is Air Force (HowardHawks, 1943), in which a Japanese fighter pilot—who previously machine-gunnedan American soldier parachuting down to earth—is shown burning in the fusillageof his downed plane.

The Story of G.I. Joe (William Wellman, 1945), made near the end of the war,shows an increasing interest on the part of filmmakers to address the reality of deathand the stilling of bodies in battle. The opening scene shows the death of an anony-mous U.S. soldier after an aerial attack. Through a panning shot of the reactions byhis comrades, Wellman shows the body only briefly on the ground, as an ambulancearrives, and then an increasingly distant long shot. By contrast, the closing of the filmdwells on the death of a central character, Major Walker (Robert Mitchum), whose

Figure 3. Highlighting (with little blood) the enemy’s aggression as provocationfor American retribution, George Murphy and Robert Taylor kneel by a fallen LeeBowman in Bataan (Tay Garnett, MGM, 1941).


body is carried over a mule’s back before being laid out next to other corpses and, infull view, acknowledged by his former troops. Despite—or, rather, throughout—theevolution of wartime cinema, the physical body persisted as the basis for the visualestablishment and enactment of agency, integrity, and interaction.

In the finale of Bataan, only the heroic sergeant, Bill Dane (Robert Taylor),remains of the original thirteen soldiers. Dane takes pains to bury and respectfullymark the plots of his fallen comrades—a commonplace in World War II combatfilms. This contrasts with the later imperative, during and after the war in Viet-nam, to “leave no man behind.” Standing alone, shot in plan américain, firing hismachine gun directly into the camera, Dane faces the onslaught of Japanese sol-diers. The final image of Bataan shows the hero, blurred, still firing his gun at theoncoming Japanese. This is noteworthy not only because the hero’s death is de-nied but also because the instant before his death remains frozen for the viewer.The threat of death becomes the promise of the meaning of that death. Laughing,the sergeant says, “We’ll always be here.” As prelude to the closing image, thesewords suggest that the sergeant stands in for the small cavalry group and, moregenerally, for all Americans whose standards and values have been reshaped byand for the war. What occurs in the narrative, observes Basinger, is a “shifting froma single individual, or a pair of competing individuals, over to a unified group as ahero that marks the war years.”34 By extension, the group in the film heroicallyrepresents the larger group at home, whose way of life—social relations and stan-dards for conduct—is being fought for.

The cumulative effect of the battle and its physical costs is nothing less than theaffirmation of the wartime social fabric. The frozen image of Robert Taylor at theend of Bataan is testimony to the standards of the nation for which he is now theviewer’s visual surrogate. Putting a finer point on it, historian Richard Slotkin arguesthat the scene recapitulates the American trope of the “last stand,” in which theheroic soldier defends civilization “against the rising tide of color and the totalitar-ian ideologies.” The scene thereby evokes the Alamo and, especially, Custer at LittleBig Horn.35 Taylor’s implied death thus becomes a sacrifice in the name of nationalvalues and community. As a mode of action that produces and maintains social co-hesion, sacrifice is persistently privileged in American cultural productions as an actin which “the social is defined by what is given up in order to produce it.”36

Motion pictures also highlighted the enemy’s aggression as provocation forAmerican retribution. Some of the most heinous examples appeared in noncom-bat films. In Behind the Rising Sun (Edward Dmytryk, 1943), the bayonetting of ababy and the rape of women in occupied China are hinted at (following the screamof a woman offscreen, a sign reads “All women will welcome all Japanese sol-diers”), and the torture of Americans in Tokyo, by inserting a fountain pen undertheir fingernails, and the crucifixion of another American are shown. Consequently,the concluding aerial bombardment of Tokyo by the United States appears mor-ally justified. Yet such brutishness is an assault not only on American individualismor political freedom or moral values but also on the shared standard to constrainaggression and curtail bodily violation. Such actions inscribed any subsequentAmerican deaths as patently sacrificial—that is, as serving an underlying modality


or logic through which physical harm and hurt occur, the enemy is demonized,and the values of U.S. society and its standards for social conduct and aggressivebehavior are affirmed.37

Combat films likewise drew on this logic of retribution. In Gung Ho! (RayEnright, 1943), footage of the wreckage left after the attack on Pearl Harbor (“mutetestimony to the power of Japan”) is sufficient shorthand for the enemy infamybeing countered by GIs. The battles for the beaches of Makin Island were unusualin their depiction of hand-to-hand combat and use by U.S. Marines of knives tokill Japanese soldiers. Again, though, such combat occurs not because of Ameri-cans’ primal need to release aggression but because of a social imperative to over-come the competition and threat of the Japanese, to discover common kinship(even amid the diversity of ethnic types) by confirming nonwhite otherness, and toaffirm social and political hierarchies (distinguishing central from marginal indi-viduals and groups).

From westerns and melodramas to war films and courtroom dramas, this modeof organizing experience and cultural forms has proved central to popular narra-tives, especially those from the 1920s through the 1950s.38 War films, however, bestillustrate how the link between the individual and the social are dependent for theirdefinition on violent conflict; World War II, as previously noted, foregrounds the

Figure 4. The originalstudio caption for thisphoto read: “Japs arenoted for theirterrifying fear of coldsteel, such as bayo-nets and knivescoming at them.Here, Walter Sande,as a Marine Gunner,demonstrates howMarine Raidersrepeatedly liquidatedJaps on the MakinIsland raid by U.S.Marines in WalterWanger’s ‘Gung Ho!’at Universal.”


historically specific convergence of bureaucratic, modernizing imperatives and con-solidating myths of nation.

Especially in its concluding scene, Bataan effects these links through two re-lated processes. The first is the evocation and perpetuation of a specifically Americannational ideology, with its attendant racism. This is accomplished first through thefilm’s narrative of individual action and sacrifice. Second, the imaging of the standserves as one of a series of gestures and actions ritualized in the war film that tran-scends narrative or historical particulars and that demonstrates the emergence of acode of conduct or standards for behavior linked to the internalization of constraintsby individuals. Taylor’s relentless firing of his machine gun is a solemn performancein the service of the nation. It is one of a variety of patterned visual images of Ameri-can military activities on the ground. Others include the removal of a pin (often withthe soldier’s teeth) and the throwing of a hand grenade; the advance, sometimes arousing charge or attack, of soldiers with bayoneted rifles, typically shown in longmedium shot; the soldiers crawling in tight medium shot; the grouping or regroupingof soldiers immediately before or after an attack, their anxieties displaced by check-ing their weapons, ammunition, and equipment; and, as already described, the longmedium shot of hand-to-hand combat. Cinematic portrayals of physical injury anddeath were consistently managed, preserving the long-standing integrity of bodies byrelying on the stilling or stoppage of movement rather than the fetishizing of corpo-real penetration, dismemberment, or blood spillage. These images thus rationalizedthe soldiers’ movement and behavior according to prevailing standards of social con-trol that these movements and behavior, in turn, helped to maintain.

Hollywood Cinema as Civilizing Institution. The evolution of drives and thenotion of civilization operating around and through these drives may be eluci-dated by tracking changes in habitus, those socially learned dispositions towardemotional expression and behavior shared by members of a group.39 Elias believedthat manners and standards for behavior and feelings become more stable, differ-entiated, and subject to internal rather than external controls. In The CivilizingProcess, Elias examines the formation of table manners in the late Middle Ages,for instance, as well as subsequent changes in such social and bodily behaviors asblowing one’s nose and spitting. For Elias, changes in habitus and the physicalexpression of individual drives were connected with rivalries and shifts in poweramong various social groups that led to the forming of states. Ultimately, his objec-tive was to track how the unplanned dynamics of social competition, intergrouptension, and state formation transform external constraints over behavior, particu-larly aggressive behavior, into internal compulsions. While individual drives to-ward physical gratification, libidinous release, or the expression of aggression maybe inflected by culturally or historically specific interactions, it is the sweepingprocess of socialization and internalization that more pointedly explains changesin personality, social formation, and the place of violence.

Rather than demonstrating the abandonment of specific values of toleranceor compassion, combat films display a historically and culturally specific pattern ofconduct and the dispositions, or habitus, underlying it. From Elias’s perspective,


even in war individuals can no longer give free rein to their pleasure, spurred on by thesight of the enemy, but must fight, no matter how they feel, according to the commandsof invisible or only indirectly visible leaders, against a frequently invisible or only indi-rectly visible enemy. And immense social upheaval and urgency, heightened by care-fully concerted propaganda, are needed to awaken and legitimize in large masses ofpeople the socially outlawed drives, the joy in killing and destruction that have beenrepressed from everyday civilized life.40

These words from The Civilizing Process betray their being written in Europe inthe late 1930s and underscore the particular conditions of modern life and themodern state in which Elias constructed his historical argument. Yet the broadersuggestion nevertheless remains compelling, namely that the socialization processand the transactions that shaped aggressive action were complex products of theinterplay between individual personalities and shifting social standards. Modernwar altered the balance authorizing the enactment of aggressive drives—that is,the drive-economy—prevalent in social relations in Europe and in the United States.In the cinema, these shifts were captured most conspicuously in images of basictraining and combat; however, the reconfiguration of drives and social interdepen-dencies is similarly evident in wartime films about the home front and in otherproductions with war in the background.

Hollywood filmmaking during the wartime 1940s represented interactions andrelationships through critical reference to a “civilizing process” predicated on thedifferentiation and proliferation of social functions. Rooted in the individual, physi-cal behaviors and social interactions that had emerged in popular cinema, thoserelationships were enacted through forms of civility that reconciled individual andgroup interests onscreen. Even more, as became especially conspicuous duringwartime, the associations binding Americans together in combat units and home-towns alike were juxtaposed with images of physical harm and death or the threatof harm and death. The contrast was crucial and inscribed images of violence asantithetical to civilization. Thus, wartime films also affirmed the state’s monopolyover violence by removing or at least displacing direct bodily violation from thecivilized realm of personal and communal associations. “Civilization” in these termscould be understood according to the operation of certain social processes, andviolent action became a key measure of those operations: the deployment of vio-lence became an almost necessary activity for the modern state even as it wasapparently depersonalized for individuals interacting within civil society.41

Even as they foregrounded individuals in combat or on the home front, war-time films depicted or evoked the broader public and social issues at stake as indi-vidual “battles” were waged over participation in the war that typically were resolvedwith affirmative conversions. These narratives drew connections between physicalaction and psychic or emotional states, thereby increasing the cultural and psycho-logical freight borne by specific acts of bodily harm or hurt.

As the war ended, the connections persisted and representations of postwarAmerica and its constitutive social relations rearticulated Hollywood concerns evi-dent during wartime: the emphasis on control and rational motivation of the bodyand its behavior, the regulation of interpersonal interactions and associations that


constitute the social realm, and the expansion and differentiation of state and cor-porate bureaucracies. The army itself was the consummate bureaucracy for regi-menting bodily behavior and inculcating standards for interpersonal interactions.A society at war is also defined by the active repudiation of threats to communityand individual rights. One of the key difficulties citizens, particularly men, con-front after the war is what happens when the direct institutional influence of thearmy and the defining threat of hostile nations has receded.

A similar set of questions can be posed about the cinema as a social institu-tion. How did Hollywood contribute to the regulation of U.S. society and its sto-ries of conversion, participation, and integration? One response, of course, turnson the patterns of individual behavior and social association to which viewers werehabitually exposed. Filmgoing itself became for many a recurrent social ritual;many Americans during the war were concerned with the institutions, ceremo-nies, values, and beliefs of civic and everyday life that gave coherence and mean-ing to their individual and collective experiences.42 To use Doherty’s words, it ishere that “the sense of the moviehouse as a communal space with discrete conven-tions of deportment and manners”43 suggests a bridge between representations ofconstraints upon physical action and the management of behavior in everyday life.More generally, the cinematic affirmation of social values contributed to the largerand ongoing process of nation-building and state consolidation. As Lewis wouldlater note, such participation in the symbolic construction of the nation secured acentral role for Hollywood cinema as a national cultural industry and institution.44

Another concern, however, is the particular individuals, groups, social rela-tions, and economic and institutional issues largely or entirely absent from popularcinema. To cite an obvious example, race on the home front was ignored duringand immediately after the war at the same time as events outside theaters, mostnotably the Zoot Suit riots, involving Latino youths in Los Angeles, and “hate strikes”by white workers against blacks in Detroit (both 1943), called attention to bitterrace-based differences in status. The regulation of onscreen behavior and socialrelations had been furthered by the singular imperative of the war effort despitethe revelation of exclusions and instability.45

The war years represented the apotheosis of a way of seeing bodily violencethat had coalesced in the late 1920s. Besides visiting injury or death upon individu-als embodying coherent, motivated, and often multidimensional identities, violenceinvolved the violation of “social” bodies whose interactions and relations under-scored standards of conduct associated with the American nation. At the same time,increasingly bureaucratic institutions, including the urban, military, political, legal,and economic, extended coercion and discipline over those bodies.46

Over time, Hollywood exercised its own visual and narrative forms of bodilyconstraint. Not only did the cinema imagine corporal punishment against gangstersand enemy soldiers, it persistently imaged norms for a range of physical activitiesand everyday interactions (including the removal of some activities, such as sexualbehavior, to secret realms). The result included both the overt depiction of corporaldiscipline, punishment, and control by the nation-state or other external institu-tional forces and the envisioning of individual behavior bounded by internalized


standards of acceptable and civil action. Perhaps most conspicuously, as observed atthe end of The Story of G.I. Joe, many films developed varied if patterned visual andnarrative practices for envisioning the transformative individual experiences of painand death. These cinematic bodily conflicts, social differentiations, and, finally, in-dividual actions and restraints were important cultural contributions to the civiliz-ing process and state formation during the war.

War as a Way of Seeing. Hollywood’s deployment of violence in combat filmsshould be examined not only for their images and narratives onscreen but also forhow their visual and spectatorial dynamics contributed to the advancement of cin-ema as a social institution. Following the surrenders by the Germans and the Japa-nese, images of GIs in combat and eventually returning home quickly becamefamiliar and persistent. Pride of the Marines (Delbert Daves, 1945) told both thesestories by recounting actual events in the life of Al Schmid (John Garfield), a marinewho was blinded by a grenade blast at Guadalcanal after killing two hundred Japa-nese soldiers and who subsequently faced difficulties adjusting to civilian life. Blind-ness in the film is a physical condition directly conveying the physical effects ofcombat, but it is also linked to the returning soldier’s halting psychological under-standing of community and its constitutive associations and constraints. Perhaps

Figure 5. James Cagneyin Blood on the Sun(Frank Lloyd, UnitedArtists, 1945), featuredon a war bond poster.


most obviously, Al’s lack of sight prevents him from moving physically and emotion-ally between different spaces and social relations. However, as Polan has noted, it isnot merely readjustment to civilian life or his disability that proves difficult for Al;instead, as the film makes clear, he must cope with the “ideological violence” thataccrues with the adjustment to any given set of social prescriptions.47

In one memorable line linking constraints at home and on the battlefield, andbetween genders, Al equates the feeling of a woman wearing a girdle to “sitting ina tight foxhole.” The juxtaposition of spaces of combat and domesticity in Pride ofthe Marines suggests that neither space is simply neutral or natural and that indi-viduals are socialized to behave according to the standards of behavior operativein each. Along these lines, Polan views the film as asserting that male and female,reunited on the postwar home front, can “be part of a single discourse, a singleideological space, as long as aberration, violence, a truly disturbing difference, aredealt with, resolved,” in the narrative.48

The reconciliation of male and female through the overcoming of violenceand the inculcation of shared standards of behavior was surely important duringand at the end of the war. Yet it is also possible to approach Al’s aggression not asan aberration but as a drive to be regulated and refigured by the different socialand spatial dynamics of the Philippines and Philadelphia. That John Garfield, oneof Hollywood’s consummate outsiders, played Al only reinforces this image of anindividual confronting a group or society made coherent by shared social dynam-ics. The two conversions in the film—from civilian to war hero and, still moretriumphantly, back to well-integrated postwar civilian—can accordingly be read asrelated processes in which Al comes to terms with the distinctive social and psy-chic dispositions shared by most members of the respective social groups. Again,aggression here is not an aberration to be resolved or an innate drive to be cur-tailed; rather, the socialization of individual drives imagined in the film narrativetakes place because dispositions toward or away from different forms of violentbehavior are themselves socially produced and learned.49

A parallel and interwoven process occurred for film audiences. Wartime mov-ies did not simply impose behavioral standards, resolve cultural contradictions, ortame elemental drives. They contributed to a readjustment of social habitus, ofdispositions toward interpersonal behavior, the expression of feelings, and the en-actment of aggressive drives. Central to the operation of Hollywood cinema dur-ing the wartime 1940s was its coupling of both individual and local standards offeeling and behavior and standards for the nation and still larger groups such asthe “free” or “democratic” world.

Cinema as a mass entertainment afforded individuals pleasure not only throughthe direct enactment of aggression but also through the enjoyment of experienc-ing representations of violence that were highly regulated and contained. Pleasureat the representation of acts of brutality marked an ongoing transformation of so-cial standards for, and constraints on, viewers’ aggression while also affirming indi-viduals’ participation in the community or society for which these standards ofbehavior obtained. Sight, as illustrated in Pride of the Marines, was consequently


reinforced as a guiding mediator of socialization and the pleasure related to thesocial management of aggression.50

Put differently, film viewers themselves took part in the conversion and civi-lizing processes enacted in popular narratives. The experience of movies by view-ers’ “lived bodies” reflexively reinforced that contemporary behavior, whatever itsinternal motivation, existed cinematically, that is, in part to be looked at. The plea-sure they derived from “spectating” was the result of a transformed drive-economyin which imaginary identification with representations of belligerence or aggres-sion became socially permitted.

Elias remarked on “this transformation of what manifested itself originally asan active, often aggressive expression of pleasure, into the passive, more orderedpleasure of spectating (i.e., a mere pleasure of the eye).”51 Considering the con-ceptual refinements offered by later theorists, this use of the term “passive,” theinvocation of the concept of identification, and the overall sensitivity to the opera-tions of representational media are dated and simplistic. Still compelling, how-ever, is the overriding point about the ordering, differentiation, and individuationof aggressive drives in a process of internalization that regulates and effectivelydiminishes outward aggressive behavior in society. That regulatory process is im-portantly marked by the transformation of emotional and aggressive drives througha gradual process shaped and arguably typified by the spectating experience ofmotion pictures. In particular, and in contrast to the transition to a culture of con-trol theorized by Foucault, the emphasis for Elias remained on social relations andthe shifting balance between individual drives and the demands of social life ratherthan between power and resistance or between institutions and individuals.52

Such remarks tread on a discussion of the relationship between the body andcinematic representation that is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to sayhere that, as in the analysis of specific images or narratives, film viewing must beunderstood as creating a persistent if diffused and unstable tension between self,in which constitutive elements such as the pleasures of sexual or aggressive re-lease are internalized through identification, and other, that outside the self.Following Vivian Sobchack’s trenchant work on “the cinesthetic subject,” the dif-fusion and instability of these terms and their opposition point to an appreciationof “the sensible-sentient lived body’s” experience of events and bodies onscreen,off screen, and of the screen itself. Indeed, much as Elias deployed the notion offiguration to emphasize the irreducibly defining relationships between individualand society, Sobchack develops the idea of cinesthesia to subvert the fixed andmutually exclusive sites of onscreen and off screen in the lived, bodily experienceof a movie. She writes: “The film experience—on both sides of the screen—mobilizes, confuses, reflectively differentiates, and yet experientially unites livedbodies and language, and foregrounds the reciprocity and reversibility of sen-sible matter and sensual meaning.”53 The more modest claim in this essay is thatthe phenomenology of cinema can usefully inform the notion of drive-economy,and of the broader viewing process, underpinning the representational sociologyof cinematic violence being sketched here.


For all the actions and interpersonal relations depicted onscreen, it was thesurface of bodies, individual and social alike, and their public character that re-mained paramount in war pictures. Interiors were rarely penetrated visually; in-stead, they were often apprehensible only through the outward symptoms theyevoked. This preoccupation with exteriors reinforced the unitary nature of indi-viduals and the behaviors that marked the values of association and the processesof socialization that constituted national society. Paradoxically, for many moviego-ers, this emphasis on the external also facilitated the process of internalizing manycompulsions about social behavior, including the deployment of violence, privileg-ing outward action rather than plumbing the depths of interior or psychologicalmotivations. Constraints on the body can accordingly be understood as internal-ized forms of engagement with—and, in many instances, compliance to—domi-nant social standards. During World War II, Hollywood cinema proved especiallyadept at connecting the inscription of culturally specific codes for violent acts in-volving individual bodies onscreen with the sensate, often shocking experience ofthese violent acts by theater viewers.

Cinema and Civilization. While Hollywood combat films made during WorldWar II cast in sharp relief the connections between cinematic portrayals of bodilyviolation and broader social regulations about violence, films made during otherhistorical moments and noncombat films might also be examined in light of theseconcerns. This article began with a discussion of the affinities between the wartimeconsolidation of certain government and film industry structures, the regulating ofnarrative norms with respect to individual and social bodies, the bureaucratic andmoral regulation of film production, and the circumscription of such social and po-litical tensions as that between local and national life. These affinities brought abouta convergence in the mode of film production, stylistic and narrative practices, andthe culture of consumption. This confluence of events also contributed, especiallyduring World War II, to the regulation and internalizing of standards of behaviorranging from the sexual and familial to the criminal and military. Similarconvergences can arguably be observed at other historical times.

After the war ended, for example, tensions intrinsic to the array of wartimeregulations and standards erupted in genres ranging from film noir to the domes-tic melodrama and complicate the prevailing visions of violence and the represen-tation of social relations. Many of those tensions had surfaced and been negotiatedduring the war years as well; their later representation did not merely mark a simpletransition from wartime equilibrium to postwar transgression. However, the psy-chological anxieties and social parameters for interpersonal violence imaged incombat films appeared conspicuously incongruous when inscribed in domesticspaces and supposedly peacetime narratives.

When a fresh cycle of World War II combat films commenced in 1949, therecent military experience became a vehicle for examining contemporary habitusand a wide range of concerns with institutional bureaucracy, social authority, andthe relations between individual and group conflict.54 These films accompaniedthe arrival of institutional changes (the 1948 Paramount decision ordering studios


to sell off theaters), new political formations (the arrival of the atomic age and thestart of the Cold War), a reorientation of interpersonal and state relations (areprivileging of domestic spaces and experience, links between the family and thestate), and a reimagining of individual behavior (increased attention to internalmotivations and psychological activity). Thus, at least into the early 1960s, Holly-wood persisted in a civilizing process that turned on the shifting individual andsocial controls of aggressive drives, on the shaping of shared standards for publicbehavior and social relations, and, relatedly, on viewers’ lived, bodily experiencesof cinema and especially of onscreen violence.

Increasingly evident in films made after the war, and eventually foregrounded inthe 1960s, were basic questions about the nature of violence itself. Films fromCrossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) to The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) to In ColdBlood (Richard Brooks, 1967) addressed the relationship to, and possible reconcilia-tion of, acts of brutality with political ideals and social values of freedom, stability,and peace. Other films, such as Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), Rebel with-out a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), and Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967), ques-tioned whether violence and violation were aberrations to be policed and repressedor somehow constitutive of modern human behavior and social relations.

The idea of civilization, “American civilization,” constructed in films and else-where—especially in contrast to nature and “primitive” or “savage” others—broughtgreater scrutiny to the violence associated with core national values and pivotalhistorical experiences. Westward expansion and manifest destiny were two obvi-ous topics for treatment, although modern urban life and familial interactions werealso examined under this light. Hollywood’s intimation or imaging of such actsposed an extended question about the status of cinema’s probing of the potentialof violent actions and media images to liberate or effect fundamental social changeor to perpetuate existing social relations. The ideas outlined here regarding civili-zation as a process, its basis in the interdependence of aggressive drives and thesocial field, and the role of cinema as a mediator of socialization thus provide analternative model for approaching multiple examples of violence in films.

This new model, like the 1939 study by Elias that serves as its foundation, isthoroughly grounded in history. The “civilizing process,” particularly in its rel-evance to cinema, does not have timeless or universal utility. The modern condi-tions required for the consolidation and expansion of cinema as a technology and acultural institution, much less the social relations that were transformed in theirdepictions onscreen as well as outside theaters, urge caution in trying to make thisnew approach applicable to more than specific sites and historical periods.

By the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood and U.S. society had undergone greatchanges that altered the approaches to cinematic and social violence and that brokeimportantly with approaches of preceding decades. (Indeed, in one such formula-tion, which depicts the more “permissive” society as racked by greater criminalviolence, these decades can be productively approached as an instance of“decivilizing processes.”55) Theorists have argued that during the 1950s and 1960sthe connections between acts of violence and such cultural or ideological bases as“sacrificial mythologies, patriarchal rule, subordination, and the bloodletting of


the other” became uncoupled.56 Even the very capacity of the body to serve as asite of negotiation of social meaning or for the inscription of cultural meaning hasbeen challenged, thereby compelling the reconceptualization of any visual or cor-poral economy about violence that might be advanced. Steven Shaviro, for one,has explored how postmodern culture has “decisively altered” both our bodies andthe mechanism of cinema itself precisely by evacuating traditional meanings, iden-tities, and ideological framing, leaving the body, especially, “not an object of repre-sentation” but “an anchoring point for the articulation of passions and desires, asite of continual political struggle.”57

Future theories may well reconcile some of these recent formulations withcurrent ideas about the body and society. Indeed, such theories may account forindividual, social, and cinematic relations at other historical moments and culturalsites. The objective of this article has been to outline an alternative model forunderstanding film violence that expands critical discussion beyond familiar de-bates over the putative “authenticity” of Hollywood’s images of brutality and theiralleged “effects” on behavior. As close attention to World War II combat filmssuggests, this model integrates concerns ranging from specific images, styles, andnarratives to the institutional role of cinema in society, and from the visual economyof bodies to the socialization of aggressive or emotional behavior. Particularly im-portant for the analysis of film violence are the links between the viewer’s con-trolled experience of events, bodies, and social relations onscreen and wider-rangingprocesses of state and institutional formation affecting the expression of aggres-sive drives. Rather than serving as a fixed and timeless signifier of social conflict ormoral turpitude, violence thus becomes a historically specific and culturally con-tingent indicator of changes in individual standards of behavior, spectatorial dy-namics, state and institutional development, and the regulation of social relationsin cinema and the society at large.

NotesEarlier versions of the ideas in this article were presented at Doshisha University, the Univer-sity of Cape Town, the Universitat Ramon Llull, and St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. I amgrateful to Jonathan Veitch, Vivian Bickford-Smith, Lesley Marx, Richard Mendelsohn, JordiBusquet, Rob Fisher, and the audiences they respectively gathered for their critical com-ments and encouragement. My thanks also to the two anonymous Cinema Journal readers fortheir astute and helpful suggestions and to Photofest for supplying the photos.

1. Thomas Schatz, “Old War/New War: Band of Brothers and the Revival of the WWIIWar Film,” Film & History 32, no. 1 (2002): 75.

2. Jeanine Basinger, “Translating War: The Combat Film Genre and Saving Private Ryan,”Perspectives 37, no. 9 (October 1998); www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1998/9810/9810FIL.CFM.

3. A summary of early research on the effects of media violence is contained in StevenChaffee and John Hochheimer, “The Beginnings of Political Communication Researchin the United States: Origins of the ‘Limited Effects’ Model,” in Everett M. Rogersand Francis Balle, eds., The Media Revolution in America and Western Europe(Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1985), 267–96. For illustrative studies that focus on film spe-cifically, see R. S. Albert, “The Role of Mass Media and the Effect of Aggressive Film


Content upon Children’s Aggressive Responses and Identification Choices,” GeneticPsychology Monographs 55 (1957): 221–83; Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and SheilaA. Ross, “Imitation of Film-Mediated Aggressive Models,” Journal of Abnormal andSocial Psychology 66, no. 1 (1963): 3–11; Leonard Berkowitz and Edna Rawlings, “Ef-fects of Film Violence on Inhibitions against Subsequent Aggression,” Journal of Ab-normal and Social Psychology 66, no. 5 (1963): 405–12; Leonard Berkowitz and RussellG. Green, “Film Violence and the Cue Properties of Available Targets,” Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology 3, no. 5 (1966): 525–30; Seymour Feshback, “Real-ity and Fantasy in Filmed Violence,” in J. P. Murray, E. Rubenstein, and G. A. Comstock,eds., Television and Social Behavior, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Print-ing Office, 1972), 318–45; and J. P. Leyens, L. Camino, R. D. Parke, and LeonardBerkowitz, “Effects of Movie Violence on Aggression in a Field Setting as a Functionof Group Dominance and Cohesion,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32,no. 2 (1975): 346–60.

4. Among recent studies addressing these concerns are Stephen Prince, Savage Cinema:Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press,1999); Stephen Prince, ed., Screening Violence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-versity Press, 2000); Steven Schneider, New Hollywood Violence (Manchester: Uni-versity of Manchester Press, 2004); and Christopher Sharrett, ed., Mythologies ofViolence in Postmodern Media (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).

5. A recent, important exception is Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designingand Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick, N.J.:Rutgers University Press, 2003). However, Prince’s study focuses on the debatesamong industry self-regulators over depicting violence and on the style (or visual“poetics”) of violence during the earlier period, including World War II; Prince doesnot draw broader connections to the social and historical contexts in which theseimages appeared.

6. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, rev. ed., trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford:Blackwell, 1994); Elias, What Is Sociology? (London: Hutchinson, 1970); Elias, “OnTransformations of Aggressiveness,” Theory and Society 5, no. 2 (1978): 227–53; andElias, “Violence and Civilization: On the State Monopoly of Physical Violence and ItsInfringement,” in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Per-spectives (London: Verso, 1988), 177–98.

7. See Stephen Mennell, “The American Civilizing Process,” in Thomas Salumets, ed.,Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies (Montreal: McGill-Queens UniversityPress, 2001); Jonathan Fletcher, Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Workof Norbert Elias (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), esp. 76–78; and John Kasson, Rude-ness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hilland Wang, 1990).

8. Mennell, “The American Civilizing Process,” 236.9. Will H. Hays, The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955),

559–68. Also relevant here, though less frequently considered, is the “other” codegoverning Hollywood in the early 1930s: the National Recovery Administration codeof fair competition for the film industry, which was drafted in 1933 to insure stableeconomic relations among producers, tradesmen, distributors, and exhibitors; seeGiuliana Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997),117–26.

10. Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved theModern Film Industry (New York: NYU Press, 2000).


11. See Clayton R. Koppes, “Regulating the Screen: The Office of War Information andthe Production Code Administration,” in Thomas Schatz, ed., History of the AmericanCinema, vol. 6, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1997), 262–81.

12. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Prof-its, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987), 69.

13. This is the total offered by both Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film:Anatomy of a Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 281–93, and MichaelS. Shull and David Edward Wilt, Hollywood War Films, 1937–1945: An ExhaustiveFilmography of American Feature-Length Motion Pictures relating to World War II(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996), 162.

14. Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 69, 75.

15. For a fascinating treatment of the former notion, see George H. Roeder Jr., The Cen-sored War: American Visual Experience during World War Two (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1993).

16. I allude here to a sociology of the body derived not only from Foucault’s theorizing ofbodily discipline but Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body active inperception and social life. Illustrative works include Chris Shilling, The Body and So-cial Theory (London: Sage, 1993), and Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and BryanTurner, eds., The Body, Social Process, and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991).

17. Elias, The Civilizing Process, esp. vol. 1, pt. 2, “Civilization as a Specific Transforma-tion of Human Behaviour,” 45–181.

18. Psychoanalytic studies of movie violence are, to be sure, numerous and varied. Manyfocus on the violence grounded in sexual difference that is manifested in film narrativesand the viewing process. Arguably the most prominent strand, developed by feministfilm theorists, tracks narrative cinema’s repetitive restaging of the Oedipal drama, whichleads to a triumphal identification of masculine hero with paternal authority but leavesfemale viewers having to choose between sadistic identification with the male protago-nist or masochistic recognition of their subordination to patriarchal authority. For herseminal and much anthologized essay, which initially appeared in the British journalScreen in 1975, see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in PatriciaErens, ed., Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1990), 28–40. Incisive writings on the complexity of spectatorial identification with thegendered characters and narrative violence in the horror film include Barbara Creed,“Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the Horror Film,” in Steven Cohan and Ina RaeHark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (NewYork: Routledge, 1993), 118–33; Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine:An Imaginary Abjection,” in Barry Keith Grant, ed., The Dread of Difference (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1996, 35–65; and Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, andChainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1992). An original critique of Mulvey and of other Freudian writings that proceeds fromGilles Deleuze’s reexamination of ideas of masochism in the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing is developed in Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm ofPleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1988), esp. 177–93. A more recent collection focusing on the horror genreis Steven Jay Schneider, ed., Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmares(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a further sampling of psychoanalytic


approaches, see the special issue “Film and Violence” of Psychoanalytic Review 84, no. 5(October 1997).

19. See Elias, “On Transformations of Aggressiveness.”20. Elias, The Civilizing Process, esp. 409–11.21. Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, 22.22. Robert van Krieken, Norbert Elias (London: Routledge, 1998), 129.23. Wartime conversion occurred on many levels. Perhaps most obvious was the

protagonist’s acceptance of a given set of political values or mythological beliefs. Ser-geant York also overtly paralleled political and religious conversions. See ThomasDoherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1993), 100–103. Apropos of this, Elias wrote that“religion, the belief in the punishing or rewarding omnipotence of God, never has initself a ‘civilizing’ or affect-subduing effect. On the contrary, religion is always exactlyas ‘civilized’ as the society or class which upholds it.” In other words, the coupling ofreligion and politics in the formation and inculcation of standards for behavior andcontrol of aggressive drives does not alter the status of the “civilizing process” asgrounded in changes in social relations. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 169.

24. See Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 139–75.

25. Polan, Power and Paranoia, 75–76.26. See Stephen Mennell, “The Other Side of the Coin: Decivilizing Processes,” in Salumets,

Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies, 32–49, and Fletcher, Violence and Civi-lization, esp. 148–84.

27. Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, 83.28. Norbert Elias, “Wir sind die späten Barbaren,” Der Spiegel, May 23, 1988, 183, quoted

in Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, 83.29. As Prince specifically comments, the complex montage and multiple camerawork that

would become characteristic of depictions of violence in the 1960s is absent here. SeePrince, Classical Film Violence, 159–62.

30. This onscreen dehumanization was but one aspect of a more broadly racialized dis-course on the war in the Pacific. See John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race andPower in the Pacific (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

31. See Mark A. Schneider, “Sacredness, Status, and Bodily Violation,” Body & Society 2,no. 4 (1996): 75–92.

32. For accounts of the presence and danger of detached body parts in actual battles, seePaul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1989), 270–72.

33. Prince, Classical Film Violence, esp. 155–64.34. Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, 37.35. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century

America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 319.36. Susan Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social

Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 23.37. Sacrificial violence arguably operated on the home front as well as the battlefront. See

Mark H. Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World WarII,” Journal of American History 77 (March 1991): 1296–1318.

38. Anthropologist and literary theorist René Girard offers the most far-reaching explora-tion of sacrifice as a social form. Girard claims the social function of sacrifice begins


with the desiring of a single object by two individuals, self and other, who, in recogniz-ing their shared desire, become doubles to each other. The more the self compre-hends this doubling, or mimetic process, the more the object loses significance andthe rivalry with the other intensifies; the rivalry tends toward violent conflict and theindividual differences of self and other disappear. Finally, both look elsewhere for re-dress: to a marginal member of the community, a scapegoat, who absorbs the violenceof the rivalry and is expelled, thereby restoring the community of self and other. Basictexts include Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, andAnthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Girard, Violence andthe Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977;1972); and Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, RenéGirard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, commentaryby Renato Rosaldo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987). For an over-view of Girard on the cinema, see Andrew J. McKenna, “The Law’s Delay: Cinemaand Sacrifice,” Legal Studies Forum 15, no. 3 (1991): 199–215.

39. Although associated more today with Pierre Bourdieu, Elias employed at least twouses of the term habitus (the social and the individual) in The Civilizing Process. For alater discussion, including considerations of “national” and “traditional” habitus, seeNorbert Elias, The Society of Individuals, ed. Michael Schroter, trans. Edmund Jephcott(1987; reprint, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

40. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 170.41. My thinking through these issues has been influenced by John Keane’s writings. See

especially Keane, Reflections on Violence (New York: Verso, 1996).42. See, for instance, the essays in William Fielding Ogburn, ed., American Society in

Wartime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), esp. W. Lloyd Warner, “TheAmerican Town,” 40–62.

43. Doherty, Projections of War, 84.44. Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core, esp. 1–10.45. See, for instance, Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, “Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural

Solutions to the ‘Negro Problem’ during World War II,” Journal of American History89, no. 3 (December 2002); available at www.historycoop.org/journals/jah/89.3/sklaroff.html.

46. For their elucidation of this tripartite representation of the body as embodiment ofindividual identity, “social body,” and “body politic,” I am indebted to Margaret Lockand Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Mindful Body,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1,no. 1 (1987): 6–41.

47. Polan, Power and Paranoia, 94.48. Ibid., 96.49. Jonathan Fletcher notes: “In The Civilizing Process Elias uses the term ‘lust for attack’

(Angriffslust), or in a more vernacular usage this might be rendered ‘blood-lust.’ Theterm ‘aggression’ does not appear in the original German version. It seems to havebecome fashionable with the rise of behavioristic psychology, antedating Elias’s dis-cussion.” See Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, 187n17.

50. See Elias, “On Transformations of Aggressiveness.”51. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 170.52. For more on this contrast, see Robert van Krieken, “The Organisation of the Soul:

Elias and Foucault on Discipline and the Self,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 31(1990): 353–71.


53. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodi-ment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 84.

54. Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying andLove the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 51–100.

55. See Mennell, “The Other Side of the Coin.”56. Christopher Sharrett, “Afterword: Sacrificial Violence and Postmodern Ideology,” in

Sharrett, ed., Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Detroit: Wayne StateUniversity Press, 1999), 422.

57. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1993), 267.

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