Welcome to the suck: Film and media phantasms of the Gulf War.

摘要

This book-length study is about the very nature of a forgotten conflict, the Persian Gulf War, and how it drastically reconfigured and returned America back to its earlier forms of intervention, namely in the form of Colonialism, Inc. Certainly, the trauma and national memory of a Post-9/11 world means that the US is again involved in an ideological struggle between "good" and simply all things "Arab." But the Gulf War should instead remind us that the war for globalization and new consumer markets does not end with boxed knick knacks from China and the fall of the Berlin Wall. While both World War I and World War II, as well as the Korean conflict and Vietnam, seem altogether divested of corporate interests, the Persian Gulf War would be America's first outright consumer war. The US would invade a non-democracy (Iraq) to save another non-democracy (Kuwait), and by doing so, prevent another non-democracy (Saudi Arabia) from being invaded in the future. All this was done---so we were told---with the intention of keeping world stability, the status quo, or as one Iraqi in Three King laments, the invasion was done to maintain stability for the sake of "filling up your pickup truck." The Gulf War would symbolically turn back the imperial clocks to a set course with steak knives, back to the conquest and corporate land-grabbing for "foreign" resources. The interest in gaining a superior corporate presence in these markets would govern much of the colonial history of Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Grenada, Panama and places like Puerto Rico. And in the following four chapters, I will make the argument that much of the media---both new and old---concerning the Gulf War worked as a kind of confused and abstract refraction. Much of the artistic and journalistic responses of the Gulf War are confused, contradictory and unable to hoist themselves onto the pyre of a dominant meta-narrative. What was this war about? What was the US fighting and waging this conflict for? Was this a war of necessity or of simple consumer need? In the space that follows, I will trace my argument through Gorbachev's visionary conceptions of a New World Order and how the term becomes co-opted and cannibalized by George H.W. Bush for the state purpose of justifying a war for Colonialism, Inc. The later chapters will discuss how these justifications, policies and assertions were conflicted and confused, and how much of what was written or shot of the war remains just as confused, arbitrary and fragmented. Save for my discussions of Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness and David O. Russell's Three Kings, the media message about the war is immobile and decidedly mute concerning its bereft and moral blankness.