Martial Culture, Silver Screen: War Movies and the Construction of American Identity

Review
The eleven essays in Martial Culture, Silver Screen brilliantly decode American war films. They illustrate how Hollywood shed light on our evolving national identity, ‘tell[ing] us who we are in the present and how we got here,’ in the words of the editors. This is an insightful and necessary book for anyone looking to understand the dynamic American Experience, as reflected in and shaped by our great tradition of war pictures and their changing panoply of heroes. -- Nancy Schoenberger, author of "Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, the Forging of an American Hero"
For over a century, we Americans have looked at war films to find out who we are. These essays focus on the tension between the themes of brutality and redemptive sacrifice in American films, and offer us an important set of reflections on the cinematic mediation of war and national identity. -- Jay Winter, author of "Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century"
Americans have relived their wars at the movies for over a century. Martial Culture, Silver Screen offers a pathbreaking and insightful look not only at war films, but the way they considered the larger question of who we were as a people. It reminds us that Americans could be brave and strong in the face of danger and also cruel and unduly violent. Like the silver screen itself, this book allows us to seriously reflect upon this important point. -- John Bodnar, author of "Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film"
Martial Culture, Silver Screen analyzes war movies, one of the most popular genres in American cinema, for what they reveal about the narratives and ideologies that shape U.S. national identity. Edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and Matthew E. Stanley, this volume explores the extent to which the motion picture industry, particularly Hollywood, has played an outsized role in the construction and evolution of American self-definition.
Moving chronologically, eleven essays highlight cinematic versions of military and cultural conflicts spanning from the American Revolution to the War on Terror. Each focuses on a selection of films about a specific war or historical period, often foregrounding recent productions that remain understudied in the critical literature on cinema, history, and cultural memory. Scrutinizing cinema through the lens of nationalism and its “invention of tradition,” Martial Culture, Silver Screen considers how movies possess the power to frame ideologies, provide social coherence, betray collective neuroses and fears, construct narratives of victimhood or heroism, forge communities of remembrance, and cement tradition and convention. Hollywood war films routinely present broad, identifiable narratives―such as that of the rugged pioneer or the “good war”―through which filmmakers invent representations of the past, establishing narratives that advance discrete social and political functions in the present. As a result, cinematic versions of wartime conflicts condition and reinforce popular understandings of American national character as it relates to violence, individualism, democracy, militarism, capitalism, masculinity, race, class, and empire.
Approaching war movies as identity-forging apparatuses and tools of social power, Martial Culture, Silver Screen lays bare how cinematic versions of warfare have helped define for audiences what it means to be American.