The Power of Visual Discourse 21 st Century US-American Films ‘Against the Grain’ Walter W. Hölbling Looking at U.S.-produced films and documentaries since the turn of the millennium, one notices a rapidly growing number of productions that diverge from official US politics or ‗mainstream‘ attitudes yet seem to be in tune with the views of statistically significant sections and/ or ethnicities of the US population. The spectrum is remarkably broad, from Michael Moore‘s polemical ‗mockumentaries‘ to Clint Eastwood‘s, George Clooney‘s, or Gus Van Sant‘s critical ‗American‘ movies, to the films by and about ethnic ‗minorities‘ like Mexican Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Asian Indian Americans, et cetera. Also, most recently, films and documentaries about the serious problems of U.S. veterans of the latest wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to make an appearance in mainstream media. Altogether, over the last 15 years, movies and documentaries have increasingly put their fingers on critical social and political issues; ethnic minorities and women in particular have become much more visible and, most importantly, they now have their own filmmakers and scriptwriters rather than leaving the ‗power of discourse‘ to the old masters. This is partly thanks to new generations of ethnic and/ or female American filmmakers, but partly also because of new digital technologies that have become available in recent years and now make the production of films as well as their distribution on DVD and via internet easier and considerably less expensive. With the creation or special audiences and virtual communities via YouTube and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the development of a growing number of ―interpretative communities‖ that began in the 1970s has accelerated and reached a new global level. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 40 (2015) · Heft 1-2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Walter W. Hölbling 152 Positioning Before I start with my ‗discourse proper‘, let me position myself. I come from a European country with a long and, if viewed with some eclectic benevolence, almost usable past that had led its citizens for a good number of centuries to think of themselves as a blessed people living in a wonderful country of great importance at the heart of Europe - or fairly close to it. Such was our master narrative until the early 20th century; since then it has been tumbled quite a bit - the end of the Habsburg Empire, our not very glorious roles in two world wars (including our not so unwilling integration into the German ―Third Reich‖), 10 years of occupation by the victorious allies of World War II, several decades as a neutral turn-table (with an obvious Western bias) between the Cold War frontiers, the fall of the Iron Curtain and, most recently, our membership in the European Union. In response to all these upheavals, our national master narrative has been revised accordingly: We now see ourselves as a blessed people living in a wonderful small country of great importance at the heart of Europe - or fairly close to it. I am saying this not only to make readers smile but also to suggest that the strong inclination of cultures to see themselves as the center of the world, and their own point of view as the universal one, plays a decisive role for our attitudes towards other groups, especially when they belong to a society‘s minorities, are less powerful, different in customs and/ or language, located on the other side of the globe - or all of the above. Rewriting venerable master narratives is a difficult task, rarely appreciated, and one could probably claim that the larger and more powerful the country the longer it takes to change ingrained points of view. If a country as small as Austria has made only minimal adaptations to its self-image over the past 100 years, one should not be surprised that in a country as large and diverse as the U.S.A., with an inherent need for a cohesive master narrative, change often comes more slowly than expected. Yet signs have become clearly visible over the past decade and a half. My argument is that the number of films produced in the U.S. which are seriously questioning various aspects of the U.S.-American master narrative has grown to an unprecedented degree since the turn of the millennium, and that even though they often run against - or ahead of - official US politics and/ or ‗mainstream‘ attitudes they seem to be in tune with the views of statistically significant sections and/ or ethnicities of the U.S. population. From my point of view, the attempts to (re-) claim the power of discourse from the traditional (film-making) powers-that-are become especially visible among ethnic and/ or social/ cultural minorities, as well as in a number of highly critical productions that focus on what I would call ‗general grievances‘ that affect all US citizens. The attached filmography provides an inkling of the multitude of such films that have The Power of Visual Discourse 153 been produced since the turn of the millennium; in the following some are mentioned in a short survey before looking at a few more closely. General Grievances Very obvious examples for the ―general grievances‖ group are Michael Moore‘s polemical ―documentaries/ mockumentaries‖ - e.g. Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/ 11, Sicko, Capitalism: A Love Story - which have raised documentary film-making (or a contemporary version of muckraking) to new and often controversial levels. On the one hand, his films once and for all bury the old myth that documentaries are/ have to be ‗objective‘; on the other, his highly satirical and provocative techniques spark fierce discussions even among people who sympathize with his point of view. Yet Moore presents topical issues across the various fields of American daily life and points his finger at highly sensitive spots on the underbelly of the American Dream. The list of awards and nominations his work received is remarkable; somewhat surprisingly, when checking the data of his movies, only the German Wikipedia lists all those awards - the English one lists none, whatever one makes of this. Another outspoken film by TV host and comedian Bill Maher, Religulous (2008), satirically castigates all religions for meddling in politics, for which Maher, not unexpectedly, receives a rather mixed appreciation. Less straightforward but not less noteworthy are Clint Eastwood‘s films, e.g. Mystic River (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004), Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Gran Torino (2009), J. Edgar (2011), and American Sniper (2014). As President Obama put it at the 2010 award ceremony for the Arts and Humanities Award, ―Eastwood‘s films are essays in individuality, hard truths and the essence of what it means to be American.‖ Even though Eastwood‘s filmic style is a couple of galaxies removed from Michael Moore‘s, his topics also touch on a cross-section of social issues and ask questions about the use and abuse of power. Flags of Our Fathers will be discussed in more detail later on. Spike Lee‘s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006, TV Mini-Series), covers the disastrous events when 2005 hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, and particularly quarters with mostly black populations. The gross incompetence of the various government agencies, and of the powerful from the local to the federal level, is examined to show how the poor and underprivileged of New Orleans were mistreated in this grand calamity, and are often still ignored today. In his highly original production Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), director Ben Zeitlin tangentially presents these events through the eyes of a six-year old girl from the resident poor living in the swamps and bayous along the Mississippi delta. Walter W. Hölbling 154 Resistance against excesses of political power is at the center of Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), George Clooney‘s movie about the hard-won success of the CBS team of journalists against the ruthless and illegal scare and defamation tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s communist witch-hunt in the early 1950s. Not incidentally, I believe, was it produced at a time of heated public discussions of the Patriot Act of 2001, with its partly serious infringements on civil rights, and of the post-9/ 11 public hysteria about people who have a beard and wear (anything like) a turban. Some critics even see James Cameron‘s blockbuster Avatar (2009) as critique of the military-industrial complex and as support for peaceful and sustainable development; in view of all the computer animations and 3D-effects, though, and with Avatar 2 (2017) and Avatar 3 (2018) already announced, this project may easily end up as a timeless multisequel/ prequel saga of good vs. evil à la Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, were special effects push critical aspects into the background. The latest US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have sparked a plethora of films that criticize and/ or question official points of view and also, increasingly, present the blight of the most recent US war veterans after their return home. Altogether, film and TV productions about 9/ 11 and the ensuing military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan number about 300, including shorts and documentaries. Public Broadcasting Service (Frontline) and National Geographic (National Geographic Explorer) produced a series of TV documentaries; a selection is listed in the filmography. Films on this topic are, e.g., The Hurt Locker (2008, dir. Kathryn Bigelow), American Sniper (2014, dir. Clint Eastwood), and rather upsetting documentaries like Beyond Treason (2005), about the permanent poisoning of people and whole regions by the U.S. use of depleted uranium ammunition and rockets in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. The number of hits on YouTube is 1,250,000 for Iraq War, for Afghanistan 820,000, including video clips from Wikileaks; for abuse of women in the U. S. military 25,800. An early movie drama about transgender and homosexuality in the military is Soldier‟s Girl (2003, dir. Frank R. Pierson), based on real events in a Kentucky military base. The very old taboo of homosexuality in civil society is convincingly breached in Ang Lee‘s Brokeback Mountain (2005) with the love story between two cowboys, deconstructing one of the primary U.S. archetypes/ stereotypes of masculinity; two well-known U.S. authors provide the texts - Ann Proulx the original story (1998), and Larry McMurtry the script (2003). The film won three Oscars and 92 other awards and was also a commercial success in the USA and internationally, which suggests that audiences considered the topic ripe for an appropriate treatment on the silver screen. Three years later we see the release of Gus Van Sant‘s biopic Milk (2008), starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the first gay Mayor of San Francisco, who was assassinated in 1978; the release comes at a time when the discussion about gays and The Power of Visual Discourse 155 lesbians in U.S. civil society and also the US military is heating up more and more. In 2009, President Obama posthumously awards Harvey Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom (a co-recipient is South African bishop Desmond Tutu), and in the same year Californian Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger inducts Harvey Milk into the California Hall of Fame and designates May 22 as Harvey Milk Day. Incidentally or not, the ―Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell‖ (DADT) policy the US Military Forces had been practicing as regards homosexuality in the service is officially terminated two years later, on September 20, 2011. Even though I would hesitate to construct a direct causality, one can assume in good faith that the success of these films signifies a change in public sentiment at a time when the official civil and/ or military authorities are reluctant to acknowledge, and even more reluctant to act upon, these issues. YouTube hits for ―gay movies‖ are 9,300.000, for ―lesbian movies‖ 280.000. This question of ―normalcy‖ raised by gay and lesbian grievances is combined with ethnic grievances in the movie La Mission (2010), which presents the issue of homosexuality in the context of the tough San Francisco Mission District Latino neighborhood, where an ex-convict and single male parent works his way up to respected citizen with hard effort and super-masculine attitude and then finds out that his only son is gay. The movie played at numerous film festivals, was referred to as "an honest attempt to portray the destructiveness of violence in the Latino community", and was credited by Latino media as being both authentic and genuine in relation to various aspects of American Hispanic cultures. Ethnic Grievances This takes us to the second group of films that deal with specifically ethnic grievances and claim their right to the power of discourse which, for all practical purposes, in most cases means to re-write the traditional narratives written by the dominant Eurocentric majority over the previous 400 years or so. Altogether about 150 films are about African Americans, e.g. Joseph Sargent‘s Something the Lord Made (2004), and The Great Debaters (2007), with Denzel Washington starring and directing; both are based on historical events and feature African-American achievements in the face of racism and white supremacy of the 1930s and 1950s, respectively. More recent films are Precious (2009), The Help (2011), Django Unchained (2012), The Butler (2013), 12 Years a Slave (2013), and most recently Selma (2014), all of them quite successful with critics and audiences. The recent years have also seen a number of movies about African Americans serving in the World War II U.S. military, which was then still strictly segregated. In addition to several documentaries, like the 2008 Discovering the Buffalo (dir. Adrian Washington), dealing with grateful Walter W. Hölbling 156 memories of Italian civilians of black soldiers protecting them, and Inside Buffalo (2010, dir. Fred Kudjo Kuwornu), another documentary about the all-black 92 th Infantry Division, there is Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna (2008, based on the novel of James McBride) and also the 2012 remake of the Tuskeege Airmen, called Red Tails, dir. Anthony Hemingway. The figure for African American clips on YouTube is 5,140.000. Movies about Hispanic/ Latina/ Chicana/ o also have increased significantly during the first one and a half decade of our century: Real Women Have Curves (2002) won awards, among others, at the Sundance Film Festival. It is the coming-of-age story of a first-generation Latina who decides not to follow in the dressmaker footsteps of her mother but graduate from high school and accept a scholarship from Columbia University, against the absolute refusal of her mother. Walkout (2006, HBO), based on a true story, presents the successful protests of Mexican- Americans at a public high school in East Los Angeles. Set against the background of the civil rights movement of 1968, it is a story of courage and the fight for justice and empowerment. It supposedly inspired a real walkout against restrictive immigration laws in Colorado. The Goal trilogy (2005, 2007, 2009, partly only on DVD) about Santiago Munez, a successful Chicano soccer player, is officially sponsored by FIFA, the world soccer organization, and also spawned an internet game. It tells Santiago‘s life from playing soccer in a Mexican backyard to being member of the Newcastle team and, finally, of Real Madrid; the connection between the second and third part of the trilogy, though, is a bit arbitrary and the plot rather constructed. It is an American-Dream story which, being about soccer, comes true in Europe. In a different category, El Muerto: The Dead One (2008), based on a comic book series by Javier Fernandez, combines trendy Zombie romances and Aztec mythology and has turned into a cult film on the screen and on DVD. More soberly, in Bordertown (2006), written and directed by Oscar-nominated Gregory Nava, a cast of high-profile actors like Jennifer Lopez, Antonio Banderas, and Martin Sheen dramatizes the issue of numerous female homicides in Ciudad Juarez, the sprawling Mexican industrial city across the Texas border, and also points to the negative social consequences of the NAFTA free trade agreement for the Mexican side. - A related note is sounded in Down for Life (2009), a film based on a true story depicting a single dramatic day in the life of a 15 year old Latina gang leader in South Central Los Angeles. Figures from YouTube are 926,000 for ―Chicano‖, 873.000 for ―Mexican American‖, 926.000 for ―Latino‖, and 3,460,000 for ―Spanish American‖. Asian American and Indian American films that deal with social and cultural issues also have surfaced lately, in addition - as well as in contrast - to the numerous Kung Fu varieties and martial arts productions. The documentary An Asian American Experience (2009, dir. Cory Reed Smith) is focused on five Asian American students, their diverse back- The Power of Visual Discourse 157 grounds, and the prejudices they encounter within American society as well as the Asian American community. Great American Dream (2012, dir. Roger Lim) places its protagonist in the context of racial and social tensions in college baseball, and Uploaded: The Asian American Movement (2012, dir. Kane Diep), is a documentary that explores the growing presence of Asian Americans in pop culture since the advent of new media forms such as YouTube. On the comedy side, we have the Asian American/ Indian American couple of schlemiehls, the stoner friends Harold and Kumar, who have made their way through slapstick and cultural/ racist embarrassment in so far three movies and several TV shorts: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (dir. Danny Leiner, 2004); Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (dir Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg, 2008), and A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011). A YouTube search for ―Asian Americans‖ yields 4,350,000 results. Finally, as relative newcomers on the block, Native Americans have entered the scene over the past decade, with documentaries as well as motion picture dramas and independent productions. Native Americans became a visible active part of U.S.-American cultural production only in the 1960s, with Navarre Scott Momaday‘s ice-breaking novel House Made of Dawn (1968). Films made by Native Americans with Native Americans took another 30 years to come along. In 1994, Steven R. Heape, a Cherokee Nation citizen, and Chip Richie, a second-generation filmmaker, founded Rich-Heape Films Co. with the goal to inform, educate, and encourage awareness of Native Peoples, and to preserve the history and culture of American Indians. They have since produced a number of award-winning documentaries that write Native Americans back into the history of the United States, not as the yelling chasers of the pioneers‘ wagon trains but as the people who had lived on that continent for tens of thousands of years before European settlers arrived. James Earl Jones, well-known actor and partly of Native American descent, joined the production as a narrator in several of the documentaries. Their first film was Black Indians: An American Story (2001) and garnered several awards. ―A society that wants to build the future must know its past, its real past, as it was. But what if that past had been lost, forgotten, hidden, or denied? ‖ - ―It was a black and white world in the early days of the Republic and little or no thought was given to people of mixed race, especially if they looked ‗black.‘‖ Steven Heape recalls: ―We were told ‗if you could pass for white, that's who you'd be; if not, it was usually better to be identified as black than Indian. It was this kind of thinking that later led to ‗pencil genocide‘ - changing one‘s race on a birth certificate to fit the skin color of the child.‖ Don‟t Get Sick After June. American Indian Healthcare (2010, video) can be seen as the Native American version of Michael Moore‘s Sicko, adding one more turn of the screw, so to speak, and illustrating the rather poor quality of (on paper, contractually guaranteed) health care facilities and Walter W. Hölbling 158 services for Native Americans. Our Spirits Don‟t Speak English (2008) uncovers the dark history of the U.S. government education policy and gives a voice to the traumata of countless Indian children who were forced through the U.S. boarding school system under the then popular assimilationist slogan of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlyle Indian Industrial School - ―kill the Indian, save the man‖. Native American filmmaker Georgina Lightning also deals with this issue of cultural genocide in her film drama Older Than America (2008). Trail of Tears: Cherokee Legacy (2006), winner of prestigious awards, explores one of the young American republic‘s darkest periods: Andrew Jackson‘s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced 800-mile march of the Cherokee Nation from their homelands East of the Mississippi to Oklahoma in 1838. Nearly a quarter of the 250,000 people of the Cherokee Nation died on the Trail of Tears. While the voice-over of this documentary is fairly even-handed and calm, another one by Joanelle Romero, Native American actress and filmmaker, is much more hard hitting. Quite suggestively, it is titled American Holocaust: When It‟s All Over I‟ll Still Be Indian (2011) and establishes multiple affinities between the extermination of Jews by the Nazis and that of 19 million Native Americans by White America. This film is not available commercially but accessible on YouTube, where entries for Native Americans number over 2,060.000. An until then unprecedented collaboration between Native and non-Native filmmakers is the five-episodes TV documentary We Shall Remain (2009, dir. Ric Burns), part of the American Experience series that presents Native American history from King Philip‘s War in colonial times up to the resurgence of Native culture through the American Indian Movement. One of the few Native American filmmakers who produce feature films rather than documentaries is Chris Eyre, dir. of Smoke Signals (1998), which is based on short stories in Sherman Alexie‘s 1991 collection Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. This is the first American move made exclusively by and with Native Americans. Eyre also directed the awardwinning Skins (2002), based upon the novel of Adrian C. Louis that dramatizes the Native American protagonists‘ struggle for balance between the world inside and outside the reservation. - Alexie himself produced his own films, The Business of Fancydancing (2002) and 49? (2003). Exemplary readings Among the ethnic movies, The Business of Fancydancing deserves more detailed attention. Sherman Alexie, author of fiction and poetry, and also a filmmaker, sticks out as a highly individualistic person who focuses on (and sometimes also personifies) major problems of Native Americans in his writings as well as in his films. Readers who happen to know Thomas King‘s short story ―A Seat in the Garden‖ can appreciate how Native The Power of Visual Discourse 159 American humor can be put to service for deconstructing the clichés and stereotypes which first U.S.-American literature and then Hollywood have perpetuated over the centuries. Alexie, too, has a hilarious, and sometimes outrageous, sense of humor which also includes the ability of making fun of himself and his fellow Indians. The Business of Fancydancing is based on Alexie‘s 1991 poetry collection of the same name. The character that holds the film together is Seymour Polatkin, a gay half-breed American Indian poet living in Seattle, who receives accolades from non-Indians but meets with a lack of approval from those he grew up with back on the reservation. After many years, Seymour returns to the reservation for the funeral of his friend Mouse, a marvelously gifted violinist who died of alcohol and drug abuse, and Seymour's internal conflict becomes external when his childhood friends and relatives on the reservation question his motivation for writing Indian-themed poems and selling them to the mainstream public. In the end, his visit only deepens the rift between him and his former friends. The film has a loose chronological plot frequently interrupted by flashbacks and poetry readings and by what can be called a polyphonic, democratic structure, in the sense that during his visit on the reservation Seymour is only one of many voices, and actually one of the quietest, which underlines the fact that he has become a stranger to most of the people he grew up with. This is a very personal film, yet at the same time quite sophisticated and artistic. Elements of self-reflective meta-narrative suggest an attempt to present an artist whose cultural as well as sexual identity places him in an in-between space the contrasting tensions of which can only be held in a delicate balance by keeping in perpetual motion, for which Fancydancing serves as a multi-referential symbol. Two examples: Shortly after learning about the death of Mouse, Seymour gives one more public reading before setting out for the reservation, and suddenly Mouse is in the audience, and he and his violin fill the end of that sequence. Towards the end of the film, during the grieving ceremony over Mouse on the reservation, Seymour is unable to articulate his grief, only cries out inwardly, and leaves; the visuals suggest his torn personality, while the soundtrack plays a Kaddish for Mouse intoned by a Jewish-Indian friend of their youth. The interview at the beginning of that sequence illustrates the huge gap between the world of Seattle and that of the reservation. Among the ―general grievances‖ group I would like to focus on films about war issues, simply because being involved in wars abroad, since the end of World War II, seems to have become a rather ‗normal‘ experience for U.S. citizens; and because the problems of an estimated 5 million veterans and their families from more recent wars (Vietnam, the Gulf War of 1991, Afghanistan, Iraq) affect a significant section of U.S. society and have lately also found their way onto the silver screen. Walter W. Hölbling 160 I would like to start out with Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (2006), about the battle of Iwo Jima from the point of view of the U.S. soldiers. This battle was one of the bloodiest in the World War II Pacific theater of war; altogether 29,000 people died, 5,500 of them Americans. The movie opens with a sequence in which a corpsman on a battlefield is exasperated to the point of tears as calls for help seem to come from all directions at once. It turns out that the sequence is the nightmare of a war veteran who dies soon thereafter of a heart attack and leaves his son to discover his father‘s experience during the war. These first expository sequences introduce major themes of the film and also illustrate its quite complex and interlinked structure. The fact that we see the ‚real‘ battle of Iwo Jima only after having been introduced to the personal nightmares which it spawned as well as to the media‘s staged simulacra, signifies major ideas that are further developed in the rest of the film. Altogether, one could call it a quite ‗postmodern‘ production, in the sense that it mixes traditional genres biopic, documentary, and feature film, mostly presents highly subjective versions of reality and has no chronological storyline. The past co-exists with the present at any moment; it features multiple narrator figures; the temporary and spatial distribution of characters/ speakers achieve a certain degree of Bakthinian polyphony. It also interlaces different time/ space levels - the battle itself, which is still on-going during the war bond promotion tour in Feb.-March 1945; several synchronous moments after the war; Bradley Jr.‘s research and book after the death of his father; and three different major plots: battle, promotion tour of the three/ twosome, veterans/ next generation. It blurs traditional distinctions between historical facts, personal and collective memories, dreams, fiction, and simulacra and has strong metafictional elements, reflecting on the production and the impact of its own medium and other (visual) media, and how this affects the actual events. The fact that we learn about all the war events only through selected memories - filtered through the minds of the three protagonists, mostly John Bradley‘s - underlines the film‘s focus on reality as a subjective creation and places it firmly in postmodern aesthetics, according to which there are as many realities as there are texts. Every veteran has her or his own war story, and no longer is there a single authoritative master narrator whose text is officially valid for all. The central icon of the film - the photograph of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi - shares these qualities and becomes contested terrain in several respects. We learn that the picture that grips the nation is not of the original event but of the second of its kind, with different people involved. With a fine sense of irony the film - itself the medium of simulacra par excellence - touches on the issue of authenticity, here made even more complex because, in a sense, both flag-raisings are authentic: the second one was not staged for the press either, as the soldiers were simply following orders to take down one and put up another flag, and they The Power of Visual Discourse 161 neither knew that the high brass was on their way to the top, nor that they were being photographed. To complicate the issue further, neither of the two flag-raisings signified anything like pending victory, yet this was the message that the media sent to Americans at home and to the world at large; in reality, the fighting went on for another 35 days, and thousands more would die until the battle was won. Not even to mention the fact that none of the soldiers who happened to be in the photograph has contributed anything more ‗heroic‘ to that particular event than finding a piece of Japanese water pipe, fix the American flag on it, and put it up. As we learn later in the film, each of them has his moments of personal heroism during the battle - but those are never made public. Eastwood here very deliberately picks up on the fact that gripping images brought to a mass audience by the media become free-floating signifiers whose impact and (ab)use are beyond control and become subjected to the specific historical conditions. Not coincidentally, in James Bradley Jr.‘s initial interview with the photographer of the flag-raising about the power of one single image, there is also a reference to one of the icons of the Vietnam War - the South Vietnam officer shooting a supposed Viet Cong point blank - that helped turn the mood of Americans (as well as that of the world) against U.S. support of the South Vietnamese regime. The fact that this - generically speaking rather ‗unheroic‘ - picture of the Iwo Jima flag-raising galvanizes U.S. big business as well as average Americans back home into a major bond-buying spree, makes the Public Relations campaign an outstanding success, and thus actually contributes to the American victory in World War II - this certainly is the ironic center of the movie. Eastwood‘s companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, presents the events from the Japanese point of view; even the language is Japanese, with English subtitles - a very rare if not unique attempt by a U.S. filmmaker to understand ―the other side. Though it tells a more conventional story of bravery and loyal patriotism, in both movies the fighting men are deceived by their high command resp. left without the promised support. These two films about World War II - the archetypal ‗good war‘ from the U.S. perspective - were released at a time when the two contemporary wars started by the G.W. Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq were not going well at all. Both movies deconstruct the ways politics and the military cooperate to produce glorifying stories for the public, and are quite remarkable as critical political statements. Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, about a bomb removal squad in Iraq, is an example for the ambiguities of heroism in more recent American wars. The film won six Oscars (2009) and is based on the experience of a three-man high-tech team that defuses Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq. The screen opens with a quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges: ―The rush of battle is a potent and Walter W. Hölbling 162 often lethal addiction, for war is a drug; ‖ all the words fade out except for the last four. Fairly at the beginning, the defuser of the team is killed in an explosion, in a sequence that earned appreciation for its filmic slowmotion technique; his replacement turns out be not only a technical expert but also a ―cowboy,‖ i.e., a person who loves to take extreme risks, endangering also the rest of his team in several daring actions. After his tour of duty is over, he comes back to his girlfriend and toddler son, but soon signs up for another 365 day rotation. The final shot very obviously suggests that he has become addicted to the drug of war. Nothing could be further from the minds of Heather Courtney‘s smalltown youth in her documentary Where Soldiers Come From (2011), which won a News and Documentary Emmy for ―Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story, Long Form,‖ 2012). The film tells the story of Dominic and several of his friends who, growing up in Courtney‘s Michigan home town on the Upper Peninsula at the shores of Lake Superior, join the National Guard, and then find themselves assigned to a bombclearing unit in Afghanistan, living through very similar experiences as the characters in The Hurt Locker. Instead of dramatic action, however, there is just the tense and possibly deadly daily routine. After their tour of duty, they try to re-integrate into civil life and find it rather difficult, having to acknowledge the effects of the new silent signature wound of the Afghan and also the Iraq war, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). At the end of the movie, only Dominic, with the help of an art teacher, is able to rediscover his artistic self and expresses his troubles in the form of a narrative mural on the back wall of the college. His friends still seem too suspended in limbo, not (yet? ) able to cope with the change the war experience and TBI have wreaked in their lives. Another documentary about war veterans is Poster Girl, about female Sergeant Robynn Murray, who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and has severe problems readjusting to civil life after leaving the army. She finally finds a veterans‘ self-help group called The Combat Paper Project, where traumatized veterans produce paper out of their cutup uniforms and other army paraphernalia and use the sheets for artistic creations. The haptic quality of this process, together with the psychological effects of turning terribly negative experiences and memories into a positive artistic creation help Robynn and other veterans - like Dominic in Courtney‘s film to regain self-esteem and self-determination, and to re-integrate ino civilian life. According to conservative estimates, at least 1,3 million US veterans from the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars are currently suffering from PTSD, TBI, and physical injuries, and the resulting problems affect altogether about 5-6 million citizens. Such films have apparently helped to raise the general awareness level for these issues: President Obama, in one of his last campaign speeches in 2012, even included TBI in his list of urgent issues to be addressed. The Power of Visual Discourse 163 Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper (2014) has created a heated international public debate since its release in U.S. in January 2015, partly also because it was an amazing box office success, and partly because in real life Christopher Scott Kyle, the Navy SEAL sniper on whose 2012 bestselling memoirs about his Iraq experience the movie is based, was killed together with a companion at a shooting range by another Iraq War veteran supposedly suffering from PTSD. Eastwood manages to divide his audience, presenting the cruelties of warfare in an often upsetting mixture of scenes that show cold-blooded killing, emotional quandary, and the struggles to re-adjust to civilian life while suffering from PTSD. Again, we see soldiers in situations that only allow them to choose between bad or morally questionable options. Only very recently have the problems of female soldiers who suffered sexual harassment, assault, and rape made it onto the screen. Lioness (2008, dirs. Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers) and The Invisible War (2012, dir. Kirby Dick) are two documentaries that give voices to women in the military who were also traumatized by the war but often even more shocked and wounded by harassment and sexual aggression. To conclude this tour de force: What these films have in common, in spite of all their different styles, techniques, and topics, is their attempt to (re)claim agency and the power of discourse to critically present pressing social and political grievances in a way that clearly goes beyond mainstream entertainment and aims at making their audiences - as well as official authorities - aware of the necessity to face these issues rather than sweep them under the carpet. The multitude and variety of these films, as well as their easy availability on DVDs or YouTube, can also be understood as signals from the ongoing development of an increasingly multicultural and transnational U.S. society, local and regional backlashes notwithstanding. For ethnic as well as social groups, these film productions are an effective way to inscribe themselves into the collective American imaginary and to gain the visibility necessary in our hyper-visual age to present their specific needs and views as distinct ―interpretative communities‖ while at the same time affirming their place within a generous and tolerant America - the kind of American that U.S. President Barack Obama envisioned in his victory speech of 2012, invoking the values of Benjamin Franklin and the founding fathers - and tweaking them a little to fit a truly multi-ethnic and multicultural society of our time. Selected Filmography There is little to none academic scholarship on the films mentioned or discussed, so there is no traditional list of works cited. For first information on all films please check the International Movie Database at http: / / www.imdb.com/ or put in a search on the Internet. Walter W. Hölbling 164 A Mighty Heart (2007, dir. Michael Winterbottom) A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011, dir. Todd Strauss-Schulson) American Holocaust: When It‟s All Over I‟ll Still Be Indian (2011, dir. Joanella Romero, only on YouTube) American Sniper (2014, dir. Clint Eastwood) An Asian American Experience (2009, dir. Cory Reed Smith) August: Osage County (2013, dir. John Wells) Avatar (2009, dir. James Cameron) Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012, dir. Ben Zeitlin) Beyond Treason. Depleted Uranium US-WMD Iraq War Veterans Dying (2005, dir. Doug Rokke; only on YouTube) Black Indians: An American Story (2001, Chip Richie) Blazing Saddles (1974, dir. Mel Brooks) Bordertown (2006, dir. Gregory Nava) Bowling for Columbine (2002, dir. Michael Moore) Brokeback Mountain (2005, dir. Ang Lee) Buying the War (TV episode, Apr. 25 2007) Capitalism: A Love Story (2009, dir. Michael Moore) Charlie Wilson‟s War (2007, dir. Mike Nichols) CitizenFour (2014, dir. Laura Poitras) Discovering the Buffalo (2008, dir. Adrian Washington) Django Unchained (2012, dir. Quentin Tarantino) Don‟t Get Sick After June. American Indian Healthcare (2010, dir. Chip Richie) Down for Life (2011, dir. Alan Jacobs) El Muerto: The Dead One (2008, dir. Brian Cox) Fahrenheit 9/ 11 (2004, dir. Michael Moore) Flags of Our Fathers (2006, dir. Clint Eastwood) Generation Kill (2008, TV mini-series) Goal, Goal 2, Goal 3 (2005, 2007, 2009, partly only on DVD, different directors) Good Night, and Good Luck (2005, dir. George Clooney) Grace is Gone (2007, dir. James C. Strouse) Gran Torino (2009, dir. Clint Eastwood) Great American Dream (2012, dir. Roger Lim) Green Zone (2010, dir. Paul Greengrass) Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008, dirs. Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg) Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004, dir. Danny Leiner) Home of the Brave (2006, dir. Irwin WInkler) In the Valley of Elah (2007, dir. Paul Haggis) Inside Buffalo (2010, dir. Fred Kudjo Kuwornu) Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006, dir. Robert Greenwald) J. Edgar (2011, dir Clint Eastwood) La Mission (2010, dir. Peter Bratt) Last Vegas (2013, dir. Jon Turteltaub) Letters from Iwo Jima (2006, dir. Clint Eastwood) Lioness (2008, dirs. Meg McLagan & Daria Sommers) Lions for Lambs (2007, dir. Robert Redford) Milk (2008, dir. Gus Van Sant) Million Dollar Baby (2004, dir. Clint Eastwood) Miracle at St. Anna (2008, dir. Spike Lee), My Country, My Country (2006, dir. Laura Poitras) The Power of Visual Discourse 165 Mystic River (2003, dir. Clint Eastwood) No End in Sight (2006, dir. Charles Ferguson) Off to War (2005, TV series) Older Than America (2008, dir. Georgina Lightening) Our Spirits Don‟t Speak English: Indian Boarding School (2008, dirs. Chip Richie et al., video) Poster Girl (2010, dir. Sara Nesson) Precious (2009, dir. Lee Daniels) Real Women Have Curves (2002, dir. Patricia Cardoso Red Tails (2012, dir. Anthony Hemingway; remake of Tuskegee Airmen, 1995) Redacted (2007, dir. Brian de Palma) Religulous (2008, dir. Bill Maher) Rendition (2007, dir. Gavin Hood) Selma (2014, dir. Ava DuVernay) Restrepo (2010, dirs. Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger) Sicko (2007, dir. Michael Moore) Smoke Signals (1998, dir. Chris Eyre) Soldier‟s Girl (2003, dir. Frank R. Pierson) Soldier‟s Pay (2004, dirs. Tricia Regan et al.)) Something the Lord Made (2004, dir. Joseph Sargent) Standard Operating Procedure (2008, dir. Errol Morris) Stop-Loss (2008, dir. Kimberly Peirce) The Business of Fancydancing (2002, dir. Sherman Alexie) The Butler (2013, dir. Lee Daniels) The Great Debaters (2007, dir. Denzel Washington) The Ground Truth (2006, dir. Patricia Foulkrod) The Help (2011, dir. Tate Taylor) The Hurt Locker (2008, dir. Kathryn Bigelow) The Invisible War (2012, dir. Kirby Dick) The Kingdom (2007, dir. Peter Berg) The Messenger (2009, dir. Oren Moverman) The Oath (2010, dir. Laura Poitras) The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004, 3-part TVminiseries, dir. Robert Greenwald) Trail of Tears Cherokee Legacy (2006, dir. Chip Richie, video) Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (2004, dir. Robert Greenwald) Walkout (2006, HBO, dir. Edward James Olmos) We Shall Remain (2009, dir. Ric Burns, TV documentary) When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006, TV Mini-Series, Spike Lee) Where Soldiers Come From (2011, dir. Heather Courtney) Why We Fight (2005, dir. Eugene Jarecki) WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception (2004, dir. Danny Schechter) Walter W. Hölbling Department of American Studies University of Graz