SciFi Cinema as one of Spatial Localizations of Military Images in American Mass Culture

War is one of the most popular topics in modern mass culture. The author analyzes the features of the perception of war in modern science fiction cinema. The purpose of this article is to analyze the representation of war in American science fiction as a form of historical memory in mass culture. The author uses inventionism methods to analyze the images of war in the film production of mass culture as “invented traditions” of the consumer society. The range of perception of war and military experience in popular culture is analyzed. Modern global film industry and national film industries regularly address military themes in the world or national contexts, producing films that actualize military experience of nations and states. The film industry segments that specialize in the production of science fiction and fantasy films also do not ignore the military theme. It is supposed that popular culture offers a variety of images of war, including militarism, violence, military collective trauma, and military political psychosis. The author believes that military theme in popular culture arose as a result of reflection on real military conflicts, and the creators of the pop-cultural project could reject the war or idealize it. The author believes that military science fiction in modern American mass culture actualizes the values of pacifism or militarism as reflections of the left or right preferences of the creators of such cultural product for the consumer society. Science fiction films actualize various forms of war, including global military clashes, civil conflicts, aggression, intervention and genocide. Popular culture is becoming the main sphere of existence of the memory of war because military conflicts of science fiction series can be perceived in the consumer society as more real than the historical wars of the past. Military images of mass culture are supposed to actualize various forms of war memory, including memory as trauma, memory as marginalization, and memory as nostalgia which idealize war.

Writing Back

Shyamal Kumar Pramanik is an author on social and political values and an engaging writer of Dalit literature and movement. His works glitter with pain, angst and social good will. For him, writing is a commitment, social and political. Dalit literature is born out of ideological warfare. Pramanik is a socially committed artist with many works under his belt. All his works lead us to a better society based on justice, equality and fraternity.His collection of Dalit poetry titled Aguner Bornomala was first published in 2000 in Bengali. In 2019, it was published in English as Fiery Garland of Letters translated by Kalyan Basu (Gangchil, Kolkata). This collection of poems is rich with military images to change the society for good. These are mainly protest poems, protest against the age-old stereotypes in the Bengali caste pyramid.This interview was conducted via emails in the month of December 2019. We sat with the author a couple of times in a café in south Kolkata where we discussed his works and activism for the upliftment of the Dalits in Bengal.

Aiming at Doves

Politicians (and journalists covering them) assume that association with the military has political consequences. We propose and experimentally test conditions under which military images have such effects. We presented subjects with images of the US president before varying backgrounds—including soldiers, students, children, and “ordinary” people. Only the image of soldiers has any significant effect, shifting participant preferences toward spending money on defense over education. The image does this by increasing respondent sense of threats to national security, despite the military’s depiction out of combat and in the background. The soldiers image does little to shift opinion about the president. However, the image has the largest hawkish effect on both the president’s copartisans and the strongest supporters. Given the routine use by many democracies of tactics unlikely to produce images of one’s fellow citizens in combat, the power of more sanitized images to cue hawkish policy preferences requires increased attention.

Subjective Scaling of Digital Imagery

Hard-copy digital imagery was studied with respect to subjective image quality. Trained Air Force photo-interpreters judged the interpretability of 250 military images. The images varied in noise, blur, and scene content. Other analyses performed on the data showed that at least 62 categories should be used to scale interpretability, the correlation between information extraction performance and scale values for digital imagery is high, and multidimensional scaling can be used with questionable utility in studying image quality.