War Films, Combat Simulators and the Absent Virtual Soldier

Abstract

If, as Chapter 3 argues, civilian and military technological use are converging to the point that they are indistinct, then Chapter 4 will take up combat that is represented as completely virtual through cinematic representations (or lack thereof) of combat simulators. The American military has long been invested in single-soldier and networked simulation technology, like SIMNET and “The Battle of 73 Easting” (to say nothing of flight and tank simulators), as a means to train its soldiers in an attempt to expose them to the speed and visceral nature of warfare. Yet these simulators are almost completely absent from the war film genre. Interestingly then, the cinematic representations of the technology, when they do show up in movies like Brainstorm, The Lawnmower Man, and Gamer, appear under the guise of civilian military-styled video games and virtual reality. Using these films and focusing on the civilian use of the technology, the chapter explores these films’ critiques of how popular combat simulators function within a culture of Total War, while also raising concerns around the virtualizing of the modern military War Machine as both dehumanizing and overcorporatized applications of military brainwashing. The movies present conflicts that further enhance the theme of enemy-ally disintegration by turning civilians against other civilians in the role of soldier in militarized combat, generating a space, via the games themselves and the cinematic representations of these virtual spaces, wherein the dense networking capabilities of the Internet becomes a normalized facilitator of military violence. The end of the chapter will then further explore the reasons why, despite its normalized placement within many contemporary State War Machines, combat and warfare simulators do not show up in war films. After first touching on the obvious differences in the mediums of film and video games, the chapter looks at the intertextual nature of movies like Jarhead, wherein soldiers watch other war movies within the film, to argue that cinema itself functions as a form of “virtual reality” training that potentially indoctrinates soldiers in much the same way a combat simulator does.

Introduction: A Brief Military History of Combat Simulators

Howard Rheingold’s 1991 text Virtual Reality begins with a firsthand account:

I was standing in a carpeted room, gripping a handle, but I was also staring into microscopic space and directly manoeuvring two molecules with my hands. Perhaps someone in an earlier century experienced something similar looking through Leeuwenhoek’s microscope or Galileo’s telescope. It felt like a microscope for the mind, not just the eye. (14)

The quote is just one example of Rheingold’s rhapsodic commentary wherein he breathlessly outlines examples of Virtual Reality (VR), skipping from North Carolina’s ARM project, to NASA, to Kyoto and the South of France, in an attempt to establish the technology as one of the key “outposts of a new scientific frontier” (17). However, there are a number of troubling flattenings within his discussion of VR that is indicative of other theorists and technological historians of the time, making it a useful place to begin this chapter’s exploration of the military use of VR and its representations in war movies.

The first such problematic fusing that Rheingold undertakes is the melding of “cyberspace” with VR. Like many other early Internet scholars, Rheingold points to Gibson’s definition of “cyberspace” from Neuromancer and the oft-cited passage of Gibson’s characters inhabiting a digital world that is a “consensual hallucination … a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (51). At the end of the paragraph, he introduces the term “virtual reality” (VR) , arriving at it via Jaron Lanier, and, from there on, uses “virtual reality” and “cyberspace” synonymously. Michael Heim’s text The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993), rooted in Platonic notions of physical reality that is deeply critical of virtual space and selves, similarly uses the terms interchangeably. The Plague of Fantasies by Slavoj Žižek (1997), in particular the chapter “Cyberspace, or, The Unbearable Closure of Being,” mixes virtual reality and cyberspace (a space that encompasses web browsing, chat rooms and Multi-User Dungeons [MUDS]) without parsing between what each of those virtual spaces entails. Part of this flattening might be explained away by the infancy and fast-exploding population of the technology. ¹ However, for this chapter in particular, it is very important to differentiate between “cyberspace,” virtual worlds, and virtual reality.

Using Mark Bell’s definition as a framework, a virtual world is one in which a user extends his/herself, via an avatar, into an synchronous and persistent network of other users, which is then facilitated by networked computers (3). Bell’s broad definition extends to spaces like email conversations or social media sites (a Facebook profile for example), and/or modern websites that would include embedding of images, videos, comments, etc. Chapter 6 examines civilian virtual worlds-as-battlefields in its examination of cinematic representations of the hacker in war films like Blackhat and Sneakers , ultimately arguing that the inclusion of these virtual worlds in the discussed movies blends the genre of the war film with the political thriller; as discussed later, it is because these virtual spaces are most closely associated with the civilian realm that their inclusion within war films most often takes place far from the fields of combat, on the home front, and is instead often demonstrative of the civilian realm being invaded and/or surveilled by military and governmental infrastructures (their own or nations like Russian, China, etc.) in a paranoiac war waging.

In terms of war films that are closer on the spectrum to combat or action-adventure films, there is a distinct lack of these “personal” digital virtual spaces. Some of this can be explained by the genre’s tendency to recreate historical battles: it makes little sense for period movies like Unbroken (Dir. Angelina Jolie 2014) or Fury (Dir. David Ayer 2014) to include the Internet, as it hadn’t been invented by WWII. However, in 2017, the relative absence of these virtual worlds is strange considering how common they are in actual American military practice: in a Time article, Wendle explains that

BlackBerrys have made an appearance in the combat zone. … Of the roughly 30 soldiers in the platoon, five of them have the devices (the soldiers pay the monthly charges themselves). … With all of the communications options out there—from Skype to Google Talk to AIM—it has become easier and easier to stay in constant touch. (para. 8)

In terms of war film conventions, one would suspect such communication might appear in movies as a cousin of the “letter back home” or “mail call” that is a key part of the genre; Basinger states that genre conventions and items common in combat films, like “boots, mail call, stopping to enjoy nature and adopting a little child … might be seen as the man in combat’s attempt to link himself to sanity, to order, and the remembered life from before he went into combat” (15). Emails, texts and engagement with social media while deployed could be a similarly utilized trope to provide an essential pipeline between the battlefield and the “sanity” of “back home” that would establish the soldier’s connection to the home front and help to humanize the soldier and justify their actions by providing a sense of their motivations (defending their family, nation, the American “way of life”). Yet, in Zero Dark Thirty (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow 2012), while there are often computers in the background of office scenes and computers are used to play videos, the closest the film comes to showcasing a personal virtual world is an instant chat, complete with emojis, between Maya (Jessica Chastain) and Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) just before the Camp Chapman attack. For the most part, in popular and Oscar-nominated films about modern American military conflicts, like The Hurt Locker (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow 2008), American Sniper (Dir. Clint Eastwood 2014) and Lone Survivor (Dir. Peter Berg 2013), there is little presence of the Internet and no extended use of these virtual worlds. There are scattered examples across other war films. LaRocca points to Brian De Palma’s 2007 Redacted, wherein the audience sees “footage from a surveillance video, a helmet camera, a night/infrared camera, a handheld digital video camera, a laptop video camera and iChat, a cell phone camera, a news report camera, and a YouTube video, among other screens and displays” (47). In Rendition (Dir. Gavin Hood 2007), the main character, Salazar (Izzy Diaz), talks via a Skype-like technology with his father back home; yet the scene remains an outlier in the genre in how it showcases how a networked military communicates, via virtual worlds, with civilians. Within Stop-Loss (Dir. Kimberly Pierce 2008), there is a brief scene in which Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) shows one of his fellow soldiers pictures of his fiancée Michelle (Abbie Cornish) on a digital camera, saying he was sent them yesterday, but he does not view them in or upload them to a virtual world like Facebook. The film also makes use of YouTube-style videos, made by Isaac “Eyeball” Butler (Rob Brown), that cut together footage of the soldiers outside of combat with stock footage of military fighting; the films vary from the showcase of comradery that opens the film, to a combat-positive video backed by heavy metal, to memorial videos like the one for Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon Levitt). These documents themselves are melded into the movie as part of the filmic text and characters are never shown watching them (say on YouTube, on a phone or in a web browser); in this way they provide much the same effect as the inclusion of Tony Stark’s “test videos” (discussed in Chapter 3), in that the synthetic images of the videos blend with the synthetic images within the machinic phylum of the movie itself, and this assemblage of assemblages then joins the State War Machine as the larger Total War Machine. ² Returning to this chapter’s focus of virtual worlds and virtual reality, the videos in Stop-Loss are un-networked and oddly disconnected from their technological origins, pseudo-private and semi-documentary, and do not gesture to the types of homemade Internet videos beginning to become popularly shared online at the time.

This absence of virtual worlds, which this chapter will further tease out by exploring the similar lack of VR within war films, reflects the distrust in “invisible networks” that integrate into the “human” soldier. When they do show up in the political thriller/war films discussed in Chapter 6, they function as an invisible and irradiating presence that make the human/biological user vulnerable through its always-on connections that enable surveillance, hacking and cyberwarfare. Within war films that involve combat and action-adventure that are to be discussed in this chapter, a soldier assemblage that lacks these virtual Bodies without Organs , despite their real inclusion in “actual”/“real” warfare, speaks to how human-centric the combat soldier at the middle of the war film remains. There is a tolerance for versions of these virtual networks when they are made visible through their manifestation in physical hardware (as explored in Chapters 1, 2) so long as they are mastered as tools; the lack of “invisible” (public?) virtual worlds into the cinematic combat soldier perhaps speaks to the need to resist diluting the humanistic qualities of the private individual mind that upholds rationality and duty, characteristics that are very necessary for the war film to remain rhetorically effective. Given the porous and symbiotic relationship between war films and “real events” (as explored in the introduction of this text), this absence is made even more striking when noting that very little VR is represented in war films, either.

To return to this chapter’s focus, the main marker of a VR is that it is an automatism specifically constructed to replicate some aspect of “the real world.” Aukstakalnis and Blattner define it as “an artificial environment created using information technology tools (both hardware and software) and presented to the user in such a way that it appears and feels like any real environment” (1992; as quoted in Lele 18); Rob Shields also adds that the user is then granted “a sense of phenomenological presence or immersion into the environment” (The Virtual 54). This makes VR, and its goals and effects, very different than a virtual world: a virtual world, like Facebook or an email system, makes no aims to replicate the world in any way; instead, its goals are built around a dense virtual hyper-connection and any immersion that takes place within the space is done in an abstracted, non-representational space. VR is closer to an interface into a virtual world, a very specific subset within the larger umbrella of virtual worlds: recalling Chapter 3’s discussion of “perceptual realism,” the immersion into this space is usually made through hardware that is designed to provide as much multisensory feedback as possible, again in replication of “the real,” and has typically included equipment such as full head-mounted goggles and display in combination with various forced-feedback and haptic devices, such as vibrating controls, and movable and inflatable seats and suits. As such, this chapter’s discussion of VR is different than Chapter 5’s discussion of predictive “data-driven” conflicts, such as wargames , drone strikes and full-scale situational simulators , which involve little of the physical body an immersed VR demands. This chapter is also separate from Chapter 3’s discussion of “enhanced” soldiers (mechs and/or suits) and Augmented Reality (AR), despite overlaps in filmic portrayals of VR and AR hardware and visualizations of data, as the Jaegers and Iron Man suits do not replicate the “real” world in the parallel manner that VR does. With this in mind, this chapter will explore specifically how small-scale combat or training VR, including flight and tank/vehicle simulators, are portrayed in movies.

Looping back to Rheingold’s text, the second conflation he makes when discussing virtual reality is similar to Norbert Wiener’s blending of civilian and military cybernetics that is explored further in Chapter 2: Rheingold also nonchalantly slips the US Air Force’s use of VR for training simulators in between other examples of VR (16) and puts “MIT and the Defense Department” (46) side by side, without pausing to acknowledge either’s military history (16). Much like Wiener, this melding of civilian-military is indicative of the acceptance of the Total War Machine , one in which the military culture’s ubiquitous penetration is normalized; the weaponized versions of these technologies, these astounding “microscopes for the mind” that are the “outposts of a new scientific frontier,” go uncommented upon. Returning to “Necropolitics,” Mbembé describes how “colonies are similar to the frontiers” and as such are viewed as being

inhabited by ‘savages.’ The colonies [or frontiers] are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies. They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects (citizens) who respect each other as enemies (24).

Rheingold’s use of “frontiers,” when folded into the militarization that he casually mentions, perpetuates Mbembé’s fears and furthers the dehumanizing gap between the possessors of VR technology (and their self-construction as nations/entities, the American army in this case, that are civilized) and the non-distinct opposing force, primitive “savages” without the technology. While this asymmetrical warfare and its ramifications are discussed further in Chapter 6, here the superiority attached to the spectacular and weaponized version of VR justifies its conquering use of the American State War Machine’s enemies’ sovereignty under the problematic values of humanism taken up in the introduction to this text. ³

It should come as no surprise then that the American military has had a long history with VR, often as training equipment or for the reliving of specific military events, because, as Ajey Lele points out, it “becomes extremely difficult to demonstrate to military personal the real-life mental and physical challenges of military life,” especially when considering soldiers with little to no military experience (20). As such, the American military is deeply invested in VR: as Mead writes, “the research firm Frost and Sullivan predicts the DoD [Department of Defense] spending on modelling and simulation will reach $24.1 billion by 2015” (7). VR then allows the ability to participate in various aspects of warfare without having to be exposed to the potentially fatal effects of combat. The goal is to put personnel in as “real” a simulator as possible to best train them for what they are about to encounter. Kara Platoni, in her article “The Pentagon Goes to the Arcade,” adds that “to be effective, a flight simulator must react exactly as it would in the real world, giving the illusion of instant response. It must allow the user to suspend disbelief, to get caught up in the emotion of flying” (para. 5). O’Dell Hightower, a veteran trainer for the United States Army, is even more emphatic: “Since these simulators are used to train soldiers for war, they must be as accurate as possible” (11). Similar to the haptic synthetic images and perceptually real cultural interfaces explored in Chapter 3’s focus on AR, it important then that the military VR simulation is not just constructed in order to learn how to use a piece of hardware (a fighter jet, tank or gun), but also must replicate the experience, the noise, movement, messiness and violence of actual combat.

This idealized version of military simulation is not future tech: in his prescient 1993 article, Bruce Sterling described VR as a “strategic asset” in which

simulator technology has [already] reached a point in which satellite photographs can be transformed automatically into 3-D virtual landscapes. These landscapes can be stored in databases, then used as highly accurate training grounds for tanks, aircraft, helicopters, SEALS, Delta Force commandos. (para. 102)

Such technology has been a “strategic asset” since the 1950s: Giles Taylor’s “A Military Use for Widescreen Cinema” outlines the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer as “a World War II virtual reality film technology employed by the US and British militaries to simulate the direct experiences of anti-aircraft gunning combat” (17). Later examples of military VR include SIMNET, one part of the army’s “distributed simulation” network that was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s ⁴ ; this discussion should also include more contemporary systems like “AIRNET (Air Network), COFT (Conduct of Fire Trainer), I-COFT (Individual Conduct of Fire Trainer), U-COFT (Unit Conduct of Fire Trainer), and the CMS (Combat Mission Simulator)” (Hightower 13), as well as Flatworld and other simulators “which are used to teach everything from battlefield operations to cultural interaction to language skills to weapon handling” (Mead 3). “Traditional” combat military simulations are still very much in use, but have now been further buttressed by “intelligence” simulators like ELECT BiLAT, which “presents an ambitious training agenda for altering procedures for conducting complex bilateral negotiations with Iraqi power brokers” (2008; Brady 99–100). All this culminates in the dream scenario in which the American military has at its disposal “an army of high-tech masters who may never have fired a real shot in real anger, but have nevertheless rampaged across entire virtual continents, crushing all resistance with fluid teamwork and utterly focused, karate-like strikes” (Sterling para. 57). In 2017, VR is used in the Navy, Army and Air Force as training equipment, with commercial products, like the Oculus Rift and Xbox 360 controllers, providing familiar (civilian) and lower-cost interfaces for modern military VR usage (Parkin para. 11).

Within this book, it is important to note the Internet-enabled nature of these simulators as well. Platoni describes how

Lockheed and other defense contractors have been able to get a piece of the next evolutionary stage in military training [by] putting networked simulators inside real tanks and planes so that troops can train on their downtime. This ‘train as you fight’ technology has been wholeheartedly embraced by all branches of the military. (para. 33)

Moving beyond stand-alone combat simulators , networked simulators like the DARPA-created SIMNET are “a real-time distributed networking project for combat simulation” (Mead 19–20). The ability to have these virtual worlds digitally networked together allows the soldiers to participate in denser and more “realistic” simulated combat with other users instead of just AI players.

VR is an essential component of a virtually mediated and Network-Centric Warfare that involves, as established in the introduction to this book, a series of “acts of war without war” (Virilio Pure War 32). As argued in the introduction of this text, the underlying mental and physical attitudes of Network-Centric Warfare is shaped and maintained largely by the increasing use of and hardware/software/infrastructure enhancements to computing and Internet usage. Within a contemporary virtuous military environment where the lines around occupied or at-war lands are ambiguous at best, where the notion of friendly and enemy are also equally indistinct, military VR systems do not simply act as simulators in which soldiers, pilots, drivers, commanders, etc. can learn how to operate various pieces of hardware and/or experience war before being thrust into “real combat.” These digitizing systems are one step in a decades-long evolution toward the integration of digital automatisms into the Total War Machine and generate a military mindset centered on a distant “cleaner” data-driven warfare, which fits more precisely into binary elements (ally/enemy) and outcomes (defeat/victory). ⁵

But, despite its long history and continued use, military VR rarely shows up in war films. In movies like Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man , two films on the edges of the genre, VR is present only after civilians have created and tested the technology and the military has intruded to repurpose it. The menace of the lurking military presence stealing VR to create “killing machines” speaks first to the movies’ suspicions around VR itself: Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man both align themselves with Žižek’s thinking when he explains, “In so far as the VR apparatus is potentially able to generate experience of the ‘true’ reality, VR undermines the difference between ‘true’ reality and semblance” (170). Within the two movies, it is not just that VR provides increasingly detailed and sensual copies of the world, but that the user runs the risk of looking at the “real” world as a virtual world, with consciousness as an interface (169). Importantly, as illustrated by Images 4.1 and 4.2 of this chapter, VR does not typically overlay data and numbers on top of its world and instead aims for a “realistic,” immersive world. Different than the synthetic images that blend the “real” word with data to create a perceptual realism , the problem with VR, according to Žižek, is that is “not spectral enough” (200), that its hyper-reality makes it so that the simulation and “the real” are incredibly difficult to differentiate. Whereas AR relies on the image-instrument as its interface, a more obvious surfacing, then layering, of data over the real world, VR immerses and replicates, and, for Žižek, potentially replaces the real world. The debate at the end of Chapter 3 around Transcendence’s Will Caster’s postbiological digital-human interfacing (or lack thereof) is in contrast to VR separation from the “real world”; whereas Caster and the users of the Na’vi avatars still engage as a physical body in the real world, mediated by the layers of invisible data but never so completely obscured that they cannot see and interact with the “real world,” the VR user’s physical body, while in a haptic interface, is separated from the “real world.” To return to the notion of Mbembé’s use of “frontiers,” a militarized VR’s eradication of the virtual other by ways of making it as “real” as possible treats the enemy outside the simulation as the same inhuman enemy as a digital being, one that can be conquered and manipulated without “real-world” consequences. The terror of military VR tech, the movies posit, is that the State War Machine will brainwash its soldiers so that when personnel are engaging with “real” warfare they would imagine it as another virtual environment, and that those personnel will engage in virtuous war waging without moral consciousness, with no regard for the real human lives and destruction they are causing.

Image 4.1

The flight simulator in Brainstorm

Image 4.2

Chimpanzee VR in The Lawnmower Man

From a critical posthuman perspective, the militarized use of the technology has negatively dominated the frontiers of the virtual; by completely blurring the real and unreal, such usage of the technology encourages the conquering and destruction the avatar self, and the different and powerful extensions and expressions a civilian user/audience member might undertake through the use of such a technology; this focus on the replication of the “real” within the virtual space again values the biological components of the user, forcing the digital versions of that user, and the machine species within that environment, to mirror those “human” components or be cast aside as a corrupting element of that environment.

Now that a number of commercial versions have been released, ⁶ VR has the potential to occupy a similar space in the Total War Machine as the cultural interfaces of war films: the users’ potential detailed and deep immersion into a virtual space makes it a potently spectacular medium to generate, promote and disseminate documents molding attitudes around warfare on a mass scale. Yet in Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man , the periphery military presence in both movies most effectively illustrates the problematic slippery nature between civilian-military positions within the Total War Machine . By not showing soldiers engaging in VR and then in battle, war films have lost the opportunity to make any critique of the technology explicitly; now being released on a mass scale, the problematic “frontiers” that the technology is at the forefront of have gone largely unexamined in movies. As this chapter closes by examining video games, the closest version of a VR-like automatism that is found semi-regularly in the genre of war films, it is obvious that even the clearest critical example, Gamer, ultimately falls prey to the problematic spectacle of the combat film’s nature, upholding the human-centric values of the “real” humanist soldier, and dismissing the technological species and components as virtual delivery systems for the corruption, greed and pollution of the human population.

The Rare Military Simulator in Popular Film

In American war films, soldiers do not interact with virtual reality; rather, they are depicted experiencing the “learning” and “training” that virtual reality might present via combat scenes. Top Gun (Dir. Tony Scott 1986), as an example about fighter pilots in a prestigious flight school, should ostensibly be a movie in which there is the type of environment where such simulators would be used; instead, the movie simply shows pilots learning by actually flying. Other examples of VR in film often center around its “law enforcement capacities,” like Virtuosity (Dir. Brett Leonard 1995) and to some extent The Cell (Dir. Tarsem Singh 2000) and Surrogates (Dir. Jonathan Mostow 2009), wherein police officers use VR technologies to catch/fight criminals. Similarly, there are films with commercial applications of VR, like The Thirteenth Floor (Dir. Josef Rusnak 1999) and Total Recall (Dir. Paul Verhoeven 1990), that places the user within a specific 3D experience (1937 Los Angeles, a vacation to Mars); Disclosure (Dir. Barry Levinson 1994) portrays a VR-like interface that allows users to wander around a 3D environment to access various records and files. ⁷ Yet there is a dearth of films that reflect the military’s usage of VR in its State War Machine.

Perhaps the best example is the direct-to-video Ghost Machine (Dir. Chris Hartwill 2009) in which there is a secret military installation, underwritten by the United States, at a former black site where suspects of the 9/11 attack were tortured and interrogated. The VR system is interesting in that it is created by a technician setting up a network of sensors around a real environment (in this case an abandoned prison) and from this, a digitized 3D environment in replication of that prison is created and is then able to be entered into; once the space is digitized, a user dons a full head-mounted VR kit and engages in a virtual version of that environment, which the technician populates with realistic guns and various enemy combatants. The film provides common visualizations that signal to the viewer the participation in a virtual reality, such as screen noise, different colored screen filters, and first-person POV. ⁸ The military application of the technology, especially in the combat scenes where the user’s physical bodies are copied exactly and then augmented by an endless supply of weapons, portray how being within a system can be used to create “mindless killers.” The movie’s themes struggle with the limits of the technology and the users’ immersion; technician Tom (Sean Faris) comments on Jess’ (Rachel Taylor) hesitance to kill: he says “There were times you knew it was a simulation,” implying that any break in the VR facade crumbles the usefulness of the whole system, recalling Hightower’s commentary about VR’s necessary realism from this chapter’s introduction. The movie unravels when a murderous ghost is found to be populating the virtual environment and it takes its revenge on the users for being tortured to death by American and British military members. While this paranormal element doesn’t disqualify it from this text’s discussions (as science fiction and fantasy portrayals of military technology are often as revealing as “realistic” ones), the more telling fact that there wasn’t even an American theatrical release for the film keeps it from being seriously considered in this chapter.

However, Ghost Machine does follow one trend that is worth following up on: both military personnel and civilians use the VR technology side by side, with seemingly equal skill and comfort. Vic (Luke Ford) and Jess, both members of the British Special Forces, jump into the simulator and are as skilled as their drunk and stoned civilian friend Benny (Jonathan Harden). Generally speaking, aside from Ghost Machine, when military-styled VR does appear in movies, it does so interestingly, as a civilian technology that the military lurks around the edges of in nefarious ways. This common theme begins with Brainstorm , in which a team of researchers, led by Dr. Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) and Dr. Michael Brace (Christopher Walken), build a VR headset that “records” a person’s experiences and memories and allows them to be replayed by another user with full multisensory participation: one early demo of the technology has Michael “experiencing” Gordy Forbe’s (Jordan Christopher) sensations in first-person perspective, in real time via a crude person-to-person biological Internet, sensations that include involuntary reflex movement of the legs, a mismatched meal of steak with peanut butter and hot fudge, and an overloud symphony. ⁹ The portrayal of the technology itself is very similar to the VR in the Kathryn Bigelow–directed Strange Days: in both movies, the recorded memories are mostly used to relive intimate memories. However, the closest that the movie gets to an actual depiction of military VR are a few brief instances of a flight simulator (two scenes totaling less than two minutes of screen time) in which Gordy is carrying out a mission while he is strapped into a moving replica of a fighter plane cockpit (Image 4.1). In the first scene, he undertakes a “low-level simulated assault”; yet when it comes time to shoot down the target, Gordy flies in the opposite direction, smiling and obviously enjoying his resistance to the mission, and the other experimenter notes, in a disapproving voice, that he has “lost control.” Gordy resists the military application of the technology, instead reveling in the ability to explore and extend his body into realms of sensation he’s never had before.

Brainstorm’s version of VR looks a great deal like some military applications of the technology only a decade later, in particular the “Battle of 73 Eastings.” In this military VR, Sterling writes,

they came up with a fully interactive, network-capable digital replica of the events at 73 Easting, right down to the last TOW missile and .50-caliber pockmark. Military historians and armchair strategists can now fly over the virtual battlefield in the ‘stealth vehicle,’ the so-called ‘SIMNET flying carpet,’ viewing the 3-D virtual landscape from any angle during any moment of the battle. (para. 63)

The simulation can be played and replayed, integrating different elements each time, with every iteration affecting the end results of the simulation. Brady labels the project as “one of the first military simulations to make the most of audio-visual tools,” and flags it as an “early documentary game” as it “uses real people, places and subjects as its referents” (83). The relative passivity of VR in “Battle of 73 Eastings” is similar to depictions of the technology in Brainstorm (and Strange Days): the user sits within the environment and “relives” whatever has been recorded; in both films, the audience is shown sitting, unmoving, staring straight ahead into the tech. This inactive receipt of a VR experience is a type of simulator, but is very different than the further (and future) immersive and expansive networked versions of the technology discussed later in this chapter.

VR within Brainstorm begins as, and struggles to remain, a public, civilian technology. The headset is shrunk down and further demoed specifically as a commercial product. But just before Lillian’s death, because the Pentagon is implied to be funding the project, the team is forced to begin to integrate military members in the research and software development. This shift from civilian to military control is the driving tension of the movie: the key scene to examine takes place about a third of the way into the movie, when the research team meets with Marks and a number of other colonels and generals from the Pentagon. Despite Alex Terson’s (Cliff Robertson) proclamations that he doesn’t want his lab muddied “with outside boots,” Col. Easterbrook (Charlie Briggs) states that because they are funding the project, they deserve to see its capabilities. It is then announced that Landan Marks (Donald Hotton) will be joining the team, in large part because he has been working on a similar “system array” and wants to piggyback on the lab’s work. Reynolds protests that she doesn’t want their invention used for “blowing people to Kingdom Come” or to see it on a “Defense scrap heap.” This leads to an administrative/infrastructural shift in the project in which Marks takes over. After this, the little representation of military-styled VR is best evidenced by the second flight simulator scene. In the second instance, this notion of military “control” is central: Gordy is again in the pilot’s seat with his arms crossed and a neutral, if not unhappy, expression on his face as Marks exclaims to his superior that the pilot of the simulator “can take a full 10G rollout without losing control, with just the click of a button.” Gordy, within the simulator, cannot do anything to stop the same experimenter from telling him “bombs away” before the enemy plane is shot down, all without a single movement from the now-powerless Gordy.

It is this notion of control, echoing Wiener’s earlier use of the word in Chapter 2, that is key to understanding the critique of military VR in the film: because the rational human mind is subsumed within the technological system, and the larger military infrastructure, the necessary “control” of the free individual is stripped away and the biological-technological assemblage of the VR user is made too mechanical; the visualization of the technology as passive and the user inert within its usage makes this lack of control even more troubling, highlighting the mechanical species of the assemblage without providing an active participatory collaboration. The militarization of the project keeps it from its potential, as stated by Terson earlier in the film, to be a massive breakthrough in human communication.

Yet it is Terson’s utopian visions for the technology that remain just as problematic when applied to a civilian use. Despite the critique of a potential militarized VR, the civilians in Brainstorm , much like the hackers and whistleblowers of Chapter 6, still uphold popular posthuman or transhuman values: with the human at the core, VR technology bolts onto the liberal individual with the goal of extending or intensifying the human element without interpenetrating it. This then leaves a passive VR user that extends him/herself into the digital space without the healthy embodiment that marks a critical posthumanism. Civilian VR, depicted as an external automatism, is not that different in application from the soldier’s use: it is a mechanized tool in service of, not in cooperation with, the human user. The climax of the movie, wherein Dr. Brace watches Reynolds’ death as it was recorded by the technology, celebrates the potential transcendent quality of the technology, to go beyond “petty” military concerns and applications, beyond the body, beyond death, but in doing so degrades the biological parts of the posthuman assemblage, unbalancing it so that it becomes closer to a postbiological being.

The Lawnmower Man presents a similarly negative account of military VR, again in the brief instances where it’s shown, but muddies the technology further, as the aforementioned scholars in the introduction to this chapter do, by blending VR with the Internet-enabled virtual worlds. The movie’s protagonist, Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan), develops an “intelligence-enhancing” VR system within an unspecified and top secret military-research installation’s technology (The Shop) that is interfaced with via a VR bed, gloves and goggle setup. The protagonists of both The Lawnmower Man and Brainstorm resist the militarized adoption of the technology, and the scenarios presented “inside” the VR environments are, for the most part, civilian. Yet, because the Defense Department is funding the project, it is always present at the edges, constantly interpenetrating the civilian use with the military. In The Lawnmower Man , VR begins as soldier-making technology: at the beginning of the film, there is a chimpanzee strapped into the machine and using it as a combat simulator to fight gorillas with a gun (Image 4.2); however, the chimp learns a little too well and, while still wearing the VR helmet and interacting through its interface, grabs a guard’s gun, shoots him and escapes. After this incident, Angelo takes a hiatus from the project, moving the technology out of the installation and into his home, stating that he wants to “make something better than a military weapon.”

However, The Shop remains in the background, as The Director (Dean Norris) insists that Angelo hasn’t really left and that “he’ll be back, one way or another.” Indeed, The Shop provides much of the equipment, space and drugs that Angelo uses in his attempts to increase the intelligence of Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey). Like Brainstorm , this military influence intruding from the sides corrupts the idealistic potentials of the technology. VR technology within The Lawnmower Man carries little of the utopian idealism of Brainstorm, as Smith is driven insane by his prolonged exposure to the technology. Smith’s transition into a murderous virtual monster (the Cyberchrist!) via his interaction with the Internet, especially at the end of the film, probably says less about VR and more about the fear of the Internet in the early 1990s as a new and pervasive civilian technology. ¹⁰ In this, there is a reinforcing of the conflation between VR and virtual worlds that surfaces again in early ’90s movies like The Net, Disclosure, Lawnmower Man 2 (Dir. Farhad Mann 1996), and Ghost in the Machine (Dir. Rachel Talalay 1993). Further, unlike in Brainstorm, the “transcendence” experienced via the technology is corrupted by the act of digitalizing the self, as Jobe is made terrifying and inhuman by virtue of his being postbiological; the human qualities of the user, like rationality and care, are stripped away and replaced with monstrous virtual counterparts. Like the military version of VR in the film, the civilian version is shown to also degrade its human user to that of an animal (chimpanzee) who then becomes just as violent and unhinged as the feared “killing machines” that a militarized use would bring about.

This is what Nayar finds as a common trope of popular posthumanism, “an overarching emphasis on the machination of humans … [wherein] the robot implants … rearrange and derange the human” (6). In addition to this, the transhuman impulse in The Lawnmower Man (and to some extent in Brainstorm) comes mostly from the technology’s ability to fantastically and instantly download information and skills into a user’s brain and incredibly quickly expand their intelligence well beyond her/his natural capabilities. ¹¹ Within The Lawnmower Man, Smith is able to do this, jumping from a sub-70 IQ to genius level within a matter of weeks of using VR; similarly, Dr. Brace tells his son that “with a thing like [their VR device] you could finish the seventh grade in about five minutes.” The fantasy is that with the human at the center, the technology can then, externally acting on a passive user, enhance that human without altering that biological “rational” core; the technology does not co-evolve alongside the user but rather only boosts the biological element. This treatment is the mental equivalent of the exoskeletons from Chapter 2 of this text: VR functions like steroids for the brain, augmenting the “power” and intelligence of the human mind. In the case of Jobe, the technology negatively augments because it programs him to be more machinelike; much like the feared “killing machines” made by militarized VR, it dehumanizes him, stripping him of his emotional complexity and eradicating any empathy.

The Matrix (Dir. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski 1999) complicates this further. ¹² Within the warfare of the film, VR is portrayed as “programs” that are downloaded into a user by “an operator” as he/she sits plugged in and unmoving in a bed; the user then plays through the programs in a virtual simulator software. In contrast to Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man, The Matrix’s version of the Internet is far more complex than the peer-to-peer simple networks of the earlier films; instead, its virtual space is populated by many simultaneous users in multiple, dense networks. Once a user has been “woken up” to the fact that the Matrix is a VR, the user can strengthen his/her abilities with realistic weapons in realistic environments. Tellingly, when Neo first begins his training, Dozer (Anthony Ray Parker) tosses away the “boring programs” and starts him with “Combat Training,” implying that learning how to fight is the most entertaining and of the most importance. When Neo “learns,” he is seated is his VR bed (though with no goggles or gloves like earlier filmic iterations of the text because the technology directly plugs into the brain) and his body briefly twitches, before he emerges, near-orgasmic, from the simulator, gasping. The ability to become a super-fighter, which was feared in the previous films, is now celebrated. In fact, the savior-soldier Neo must use the technology in order to defeat his enemies, a far cry from the somewhat docile and idealistic communication system imagined by Angelo and Brace.

Aside from the training programs, the Matrix software itself is a virtual simulation. However, the “soldiers” of The Matrix are repurposed civilians, fully erasing the military-civilian tensions that undergird the trilogy. The film is rare in that it has simulated virtual combat where those civilian-soldiers fight using military weaponry (guns, helicopters, etc.). However, the focus on combat as the main mode of problem solving and the spectacular nature of the movie’s combat scenes effectively promote the technology as the perfect way to create a transhuman super-soldier. Like a virtual exoskeleton , the technology grants the user’s virtual self the same speed and power muscles; similar to Cage and Max, any civilian user can quickly and effectively become super-human just by using the technology. All this celebrates and mythologizes the combat simulator; the VR training is one more device in the human army’s network of virtual weaponry, and the civilian-soldier in the simulated reality is the most formidable part of the human-technological assemblage. To this end, it is important that learning in the virtual world does nothing to “train” the physical body (as an actual military simulator must). Superficially, this version of the posthuman is positive and heroic in its symbiotic relationship with its virtual/machines selves and the machine and human species around that assemblage, ¹³ as a representation of a VR military training or “re-experiencing” (documentary) technology; however, while perhaps providing some visual vocabulary and expansion of genre elements around the war film, it is too unbalanced toward the virtual self to act effectively in that respect. More than that, the promotion of a civilian-military user in that virtual simulation problematically upholds the Total War Machine’s rhetoric that the world (America) is in an inevitable and ongoing state of war and promotes the notion of technology as a transhuman application that generates awe-inspiring super-users that still uphold humanistic values of “love” and “justice” in the face of “efficient” and inhuman machines.

With this humanism at its core, unlike Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man , The Matrix portrays a civilian population reappropriating a militarized version of VR. Following this line of thinking, instead of looking at the military imposing on civilian VR technologies, this chapter will pivot to examine civilians choosing to participate in military simulations and VR-like environments, such as video games, in their private lives. While past and current video game consoles and personal computers do not fit exactly into the previous definition of VR, the popularity of the previously mentioned commercial (civilian) VR kits make it likely that in the near future civilians will have access to them and, based on past history, will buy and play military-themed VR video games, making an examination of military-themed video games and their portrayal in film especially constructive.

Playing War: The Avatar-Soldier in Gamer

While not yet the all-encompassing virtual realities that require cocooning beds and wraparound headgear (yet), military-style video games were and continue to be massively popular. ¹⁴ As proof, the publisher of the Call of Duty games announced in 2014 that sales of the series had “topped $10 billion in worldwide sales since its creation more than a decade ago,” adding that “in the first week following the release of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, gamers played more than 370 million online matches and leveled up more than 200 million times in the game’s online multiplayer mode” (Poeter para. 1). Activision’s focus in the press release on the online/Internet-enabled portion of the game is crucial: for most players of these games, the single-player mode is nowhere near the main draw; rather, it is the ability to play in real time against other players over the Internet and engage, with increasingly realistic weapons in increasingly realistic environments (i.e., a VR-like environment), in military combat. This ability to play against real players, not AIs, via the Internet, makes the combat more realistic and believable; this is then even further enhanced by the real-time socializing that takes place in these spaces, including voice chat, online ranking systems and leader boards. All these virtual components mix together to make the narratives and value systems created and/or reinforced by the games that much more rhetorically effective than a single-player, non-networked game.

In general, video games are effective (ideological and practical) pedagogical tools: Annadale argues in “Avatars of Destruction” that “thanks to their immersive qualities, games give the players a much greater sense of actually performing an action rather than reading about it or seeing it, and thus the … tactics and consequences gather a concrete immediacy” (98). Mead adds that “videogames provide a powerful, motivating context for learning and practicing new skills. Because these games are interactive, players must take an active role in this learning, making them agents of knowledge” (67). Yet very often, the learning takes place within a military environment where “the viewer-cum-participant/agent is, virtually speaking, outfitted as a soldier—equipped with weapon and ammunition, complemented by navigation and other devices that monitor resource levels and scan for threats—and positioned to act against an imposed enemy” (LaRocca 32). Echoing this book’s introduction’s understanding of the “participation” that the war film demands/creates, when video games are based around military combat, tactics and themes, the (most often) civilian player, virtually “outfitted as soldier,” becomes an agent of military “knowledge” with an active participatory role in the violent acts of the games. These games are very effective: David A. Clearwater’s “Living in a Militarized Culture: War, Games and the Experience of the U.S. Empire” explores the phenomenon of the first-person shooter (FPS) in a post-9/11 world, arguing that the civilian uptick in immersion in “virtual battlefields and imagined theatres of war” (264) act like “recruiting programs” (277). He quotes Wardynski’s argument that such video games are coming to replace experiences of the past in which “a young American could gain insights into military service by listening to recollections of advice of an older brother, an uncle, a father” (277) and, as such, “the younger generation’s comfort with and acceptance of videogames has played a crucial role in the increasingly positive reception [of video games] by senior military leaders” (Mead 62). Extrapolating, military-themed video games are among the key narratives that shape and/or reinforce narratives about past and future wars. It follows then that much like the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood cinema and the American military discussed in the introduction to this text, the American military has followed this trend toward popular military-themed video games (if not instigated parts of it). In 2013, Ajey Lele pointed out that “one of the significant VR trends for the future appears to be the adaptation of videogames for military purposes” (25), adding that “because of this slowly the difference between games and military simulators is found declining. It is expected that in near future militaries would develop some of their VR-based tools by modifying the available games to match their requirements instead of reinventing the wheel” (25). Yet, well before 2013, non-VR video games already had a long history of being adapted from civilian to military-training technology. Mead flags Atari’s Battlezone (1980) as one of the earliest examples (18), while also expanding on the extreme impact that the aforementioned DOOM had (21–23). More interestingly, Kara Platoni unpacks the influence of DOOM, in particular how the Marines modded DOOM in 1997 into a “realistic” combat video game, explaining that “[it] cost the Marines a mere $49.95 to buy and modify the DOOM II CD-ROM, making a few changes so that instead of chasing demons, players shoot Nazi-like soldiers using M-16s. Otherwise, Marine DOOM looks and sounds pretty much like the original game, and the Marines even released a free downloadable copy on the Internet” (para. 2). This modifying of games makes sense when Platoni rightly argues that “games designed by the defense contractors aren’t all that popular. Reality is simply too mundane for gamers. While enthusiasts may appreciate a simulator that has the buttons and switches of a real tank, the players usually don’t want it to move or reload as slowly as the real thing” (para. 28). So, unlike “Battle of 73 Eastings,” the goal of military first-person shooters is not “documenting” or even simulating a “real” experience, but rather generating a version of military engagement that is more exciting and engaging, and then using that technology as part promotional tool, part training technology. This is especially true when considering that the military doesn’t just take/modify civilian games, but also releases games so civilians have access to the same technology.

The blurry lines between civilian and military video games make them important documents to take apart further, and, while beyond the scope of this text, ¹⁵ it is useful to begin reflecting on military video games in films by noting that “Scott Rosenberger [a Virtual Training Facility instructor] estimates that 80% of the soldiers who go through his facility play videogames regularly” (Mead 111). Video games, not just simulated virtual environments, are a key part of the State War Machine , not only for combat but also for tactics and strategy: Mead illustrates this with the fact that “today’s military are training on videogames. … [At] the army’s school for Command Preparation and Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, lieutenant colonels and other leaders use UrbanSim, a game referred to by its creator as ‘SimCity Baghdad’” (Mead 69). This training has had ripples through the State War Machine and has forced the military to adapt traditional roles to these new mediums: looking ahead to Chapter 5’s analysis of drone warfare in movies, “[For] years the military tried to keep unmanned aircraft within its traditional categories by allowing only pilots to operate them. But it has finally been acknowledged as an unassailable truth that the work is best suited to soldiers who’ve honed their reflexes and skills by logging thousands of hours on PlayStation and Xbox” (Teschner 77). The State War Machine’s adoption of civilian video games as military trainers is interesting in and of itself, but what sets the military-created America’s Army and modded DOOM apart from the “Battle of 73 Eastings,” and VR as depicted in Brainstorm or Strange Days , is hit on by Platoni when she writes, “DOOM and its spinoffs can be played as coin-op arcade games, but they are usually played over the Internet by people who may be thousands of miles apart” (para. 2). Writing in 1997, Platoni’s article comes at the point of the popular Internet’s explosion ¹⁶ ; at the same time as civilian Internet usage was exponentially rising, the military was also piggybacking their VR training on that civilian infrastructure and usage. This means, as mentioned previously, the military can use the civilian Internet to release games and connect civilian players together, but can also use it themselves to continue training and sharpening their own soldiers. Soldiers continue to use similar, if not the exact same, VR-like technology as civilians and, in this networked environment, the games function as a major component of a rising militarized culture. Ian Roderick argues this accession is turning civilian and military video-game players into a type of “mil-bot” and creating a potentially warped, unrealistic and unhealthy “dominant image of war” within a Total War Machine that is part of an ongoing contemporary process of “re-legitimizing warfare and affording further the militarization of civic life” (288).

Underlying all this, Clearwater very rightly points out that such video games “reinforce dominant imagery and discourses surrounding war, especially for youthful domestic audiences who have never personally experienced war and rarely see its direct effects” (280); these entertainment-rooted constructions of warfare merge “beautifully with the dominant image of war as seen in Hollywood film and or network television news” (280), rooted “aesthetically and discursively” in the “large screen of Hollywood” (263). The Total War Machine seamlessly mixes the State War Machine with the machinic phyla of video-game and film production: as an example, as Kushner writes, the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), “a U.S. government–funded research and development organization in Playa Vista California” (para. 6), builds video games and simulators that have “also been used in films such as Avatar and Spider-Man 2” under the leadership of “Paul Debevec, who did visual effects for The Matrix before becoming the ICT’s associate director of graphics research” (para. 13). Visually and narratively, Clearwater argues that video games and cinema also have a shared language of imagery generated from influential “combat sequences from blockbuster films” to the point where large portions of military-themed video games mirror Hollywood war films’ “narrative structure, characterization and ideology” (263). Clearwater continues by discussing the “sub-genre of the military-themed shooter” (262), stating that “more concretely, the military-themed shooter game came to resemble the increasing number of military representations in Hollywood’s output” (263):

Producers and fans [of the games] tended, especially early in its development, to base notions of realism and authenticity of formal and aesthetic principles largely derived from representations of warfare as seen on TV or in film (combat sequences from blockbuster films being especially influential). In terms of narrative structure, characterization and ideology, military-themed videogames borrowed heavily from their filmic counterparts. (263–264)

Clearwater goes further in linking the genre directly to Jeanine Basinger’s previously discussed work on the WWII combat film, focusing on the genre’s hyper-realistic weaponry (272) and calling the games, “in many ways, an extension of the combat film … the expanded and interactive version of a combat film’s battlefield scene” (272), pointing specifically to Saving Private Ryan (Dir. Steven Spielberg 1998) as “particularly influential” (273). As such, it is important to look at military-themed video games as represented in cinema as, in the absence of cinematic military combat simulators , they are the closest approximation.

Again, while there are some examples of movies based on military video games, ¹⁷ examples of such video games in film are fairly uncommon, especially when considering, as discussed earlier, the relative ubiquity of the games themselves. There are some sparse examples: in WarGames , when the viewer is first introduced to the protagonist David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) he is playing an non-networked arcade cabinet version of Galaga, immediately establishing his relationship to computers and warfare (endlessly shooting aliens) as one rooted in virtual worlds and “playing.” More, not only does he play Galaga again later in the film, but when he first accesses WOPR, he thinks that he is literally playing a computer game; for him, his playing of video games are meant to signal to the machinic audience that all computers and video games are toys and should not be thought of as a weapons. ¹⁸ Similarly, in films like Shaun of the Dead (Dir. Edgar Wright 2004) and Superbad (Dir. Judd Apatow 2007) the games are shown only briefly and are more demonstrations of a character’s immaturity or divided attention. Additionally, there are scenes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Dir. James Cameron 1991) where John Connor (Edward Furlong) is shown very briefly playing non-networked arcade versions of Missile Command (Atari 1980) and After Burner (Sega 1987). The Last Starfighter (Dir. Nick Castle 1984) is a better example: the protagonist, Alex Rogan, expertly plays an arcade game called Starfighter. The game itself is a first-person 2D shooter, with a clunky reticle and space backdrop. After he breaks the record for most points in the game, he learns that the game is actually a training program to find the best spaceship pilot to fight in an interstellar war between the Rylan Star League and the Ko-Dan Empire. The video game proves very effective: as Rogan is taught the controls of his gunship, he remarks, “This is just like back home!” When in actual combat, the action is distanced by his own Heads Up Display (HUD), which acts like a computerized mediator between himself and the enemies; in this, the original video game feeds into Žižek’s fears: as a simulator, it is so real, yet so abstracting of its enemy, that there is no line between virtual and real, that the violence he undertakes is quarantined to a remote conceptual space that effectively reduces the fighters’ (and the film’s audience’s) exposure to the actual death and carnage that they are participating in. While play of the video game is limited to the beginning of the movie, the film does provide a template not that different from the later Marine DOOM: a civilian video game that is both a recruiting tool and training device.

Though the scene is short, The Hurt Locker gives one of the more effective arguments for the role of video games in the Total and State War Machines when Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is playing Gears of War (Epic Games 2006) after a stressful incident disarming a bomb. The camera shows his third-person avatar constantly shooting into a hoard of enemies, the screen going red when the avatar is hit; Eldridge plays with grim intensity until the psychiatrist (Christian Camargo) comes in telling him to “stop obsessing” over his visualizations of his own death, after which he asks him, “Right now, what are you thinking about?” Eldridge smoothly puts down the controller and picks up his rifle while the video game’s sound effects remain present in the background. In this seamless juxtaposition, the source of his “obsession” is obvious: there is no difference between the controller and his gun, between virtual warfare and the “real” physical one; they are both functions of war’s ubiquitous presence in his psyche.

The most extended example of the crossover between military-themed video games and films is Gamer (Dir. Neveldine and Taylor 2009). Within the world of the film, technology has been developed that allows other humans, via an Internet connection and a VR-like interface, to remotely control other humans. The most common civilian application of this is a video game called Society wherein other players choose another human, dress them, and then make them do all sorts of “deviant” activities ranging from drugs to sex. In this way, the technology resembles the Internet-enabled “real-life” avatars in Surrogates, in which users, while lying in a chamber/bed, remotely control androids that allow the users to enact fantasies of “immoral” escapism. Both films, released in the same year, present the critique that Internet-enabled technologies allow users to distance themselves too far beyond their “real” (physical) self and, therefore, the VR-technology mutates and erodes a user’s sense of self and humanity; the clichés and fears of the predatory Internet user, as embodied by the overweight perverted basement dweller that appears in both films, are critiques of how avatars, as enabled by the Internet, not only fracture the self but also provide a virtual playground devoid of compassion and human emotional connection that quickly escalates into spaces of sex and violence. ¹⁹

Gamer is worth analyzing in more depth here because its avatar-user dynamic is specifically constructed as a game, whereas Surrogates portrays the technology more as a hyper-inflated extension of a civilian avatar usage in social spaces like Facebook. More specifically, the most popular spectator “sport” in Gamer is a multiuser video game called Slayers that allows civilian users to control armed convicts; the controlled convicts are given military-grade weapons and put into arenas that resemble typical video-game maps (like bombed-out buildings and war-torn streets) and are told they must shoot and kill each other in order to survive to a “Save Point” with as many points (and kills) as possible. The game, and its extreme violence, is cheered by viewers from all over the world; the utopic global village that McLuhan hoped for is instead a bloodthirsty collection of voyeurs easily folded into the military entertainment complex.

The film opens post-credits with multiple explosions and the camera staring down the sight of John “Kable” Tillman’s (Gerard Butler) rifle as he is controlled, much like the Jaegers are piloted in Pacific Rim (Chapter 3), by 17-year-old Simon (Logan Lerman). From this, the movie uses multiple fast cuts to create a sense of hyper-chaos as the viewer is thrust from shots of Tillman in combat to other players dying from headshots to close-ups on the firing muzzles of guns to further explosions and running, nameless characters. In this, the scene is no different than the typical urban combat scenes common in the war film genre and, while the avatars are convicts and not soldiers, they are in flak jackets and combat boots, and they fire military-grade machine guns while they communicate with military-style hand signals. The action, which is typical of the virtual combat scenes in the film, is meant to be exciting and the underscoring of the metal soundtrack is meant to give the players, particularly Tillman, a positive aura of fearless invincibility.

All through the combat scenes, as with Ghost Machine , the viewer is made aware of this as a mediated experience as the movie pixilates and distorts with a glitching noise. However, more interestingly, the action is then combined with HUD nanotechnological graphics that are common within military-style FPS games, such as the distance to the “Save Point” in bright electric lettering, a point total, and the weapon readouts; additionally, the movie watcher alternates between the first-person perspective common in a military-themed video game and the third-person perspective more common in cinema (Image 4.3). The movie then plays with the audience’s understanding and comfort with both forms and merges them, following Clearwater’s observations, so that the similarity between the two is brought to the forefront. On the surface, this looks similar to the doubling of Butler’s frame that was established in Chapter 3 of this text, and recalls the discussion of the mediated first-person perspective shots “through the eyes” of the Iron Man suits and/or the drone footage to be discussed in Chapter 5. In this sense, these shots are meant to be reflections, much like the discussion of Chapter 3, of how the machinic phyla of cinema and video games meld effortlessly into the Total War Machine: the synthetic images created by video games are similar to those created by digital cinema, and the perceptual realism that the user/gamer becomes immersed into is a troublingly distanced and virtual recreation of “reality” that strips the people of their humanity and makes them a disposable part of the “game.” The key difference between the movies’ treatments is that Gamer’s usage of overlaid information, like “Kills” and “Distance to Save Point,” are not meant for the soldier in combat (i.e., Tillman), as it is for the users of the Iron Man suits; instead, it is meant for some combination of the remote-control user (like drone footage), and, more uniquely, the global viewers watching the footage of Slayers that are cheering on the carnage. In this way, the information has no functional purpose for combat, but is instead purely for clarifying the “game” and further deepens the critique of the mediated digitally networked space that simulated and remote warfare generates. Similar to the aforementioned Ghost Machine , it is here that the audience is reminded of the intended “spectral” nature of the virtual world that Slayers takes place in while also being forced to confront the fact that the soldiers are not avatars in a virtual world, but are actual humans being treated as if they are avatars; Brainstorm’s dreams of VR as a breakthrough in human communication has instead been co-opted and mutated by the military entertainment industrial complex. The frontier of the virtual has been conquered and now there is no difference between the real and the avatar; the technology has made it as such that it is morally acceptable to treat the biological human in the same way one treats a virtual avatar.

Image 4.3

What Slayer’s audience watches as Kable plays

This conflation is best manifested in a later combat scene where Simon is literally behind Tillman as he controls him, sardonically giving orders by controlling him via a full body interface (Image 4.4) that produces a mirrored movement from Tillman. This one-to-one controlling of another human in combat, via the Internet, is exactly the simulated environment that a military trainer aims for. Like the combat scenes in The Matrix , Gamer dwells in the fantasy of virtually experiencing “real combat.” In The Matrix, the avatars are obviously super-human, contorting in slow motion to dodge bullets, running and flipping off walls, all in stylish clothing. In addition, enemies don’t bleed; they simply crumple or disintegrate. The combat and the killing are cartoonish and deliberately unrealistic and the joy of The Matrix trilogy is in the fantasy of doing things, godlike, well beyond a human’s bodily capabilities. In contrast, Slayers takes great care to show “realistic” combat, the violence of a headshot, the visceral chaos of grenades exploding and bullets being fired. In comparison to the early discussion of VR and simulators in Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man , the simulator here is portrayed as negative because it is so incredibly active, requiring the remote user/controller to kill and delight in killing by proxy. The movie’s main critique follows from this to argue that both virtual spaces, as enabled by the Internet and populated by avatars , and military-themed video games are negative because they dehumanize fellow users, flippantly dealing with death and celebrating military-style solutions to conflicts. Simon, after seeing Tillman’s friend Freak (John Leguizamo) get killed, calmly explains away his death and calls the dead body “gibs. Like giblets. Kibbles and bits. Pieces everywhere.” When asked how he deals with being at the center of the carnage he dodges any responsibility by stating, “I just play games.” While this notion of “games” and simulations is unpacked further in Chapter 5, within Gamer , the implication then is that the game/simulation is too distanced from the consequences and subsequent real horrors of actual combat and is creating greatly desensitized users. While largely aimed at criticizing the role that corporations play in this desensitization, the military’s central role is further underlined at the climax of the film, when it is revealed that Slayers began as a military technology designed to enhance and then control soldiers in combat and that Tillman was one of the soldiers in early experiments using the technology. The film’s solution of Tillman killing Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), the creator of Society and Slayers, and therefore “freeing” the users, is meant to criticize the casual adoption and normalization of such militarized spaces into civilian life.

Image 4.4

Simon hovers behind Kable and controls him during a round of Slayers

However, the sensational filmmaking involved in the actual combat scenes (including the mediated first-person perspective, slow motion, fast-paced editing, and bombastic soundtrack) undercuts most of the criticism the movie puts forward: Kable is a “perfect soldier. A tactical killing computer,” as Castle describes him, and the movie showcases his military abilities in heroic combat scenes that glorify stylized military violence. In this way, it fits in with what Clearwater sees as representative of war films post-9/11, which he argues “tend to gloss over political and ideological questions and reduce war to an individual’s heroic exploits on a seemingly realistic-looking but immersive and entirely aestheticized battlefield” (272), producing a “highly controlled and carefully scripted form of spectacle” (279). The movie watcher is not encouraged to leave the movie thinking that such a video game would be terrible; the aesthetics of the whole movie encourages a movie watcher to want to partake in such a space, with the same visceral violence.

As for the soldier-figure of Tillman, as is common in the war film genre, his emotional journey is toward the return of his family. To this end, Tillman’s quest to regain his wife and daughter, symbolic of the sort of intimate human connections that the film upholds, is the driving tension of the film. Tillman’s repeated assertion that he be called “Tillman,” and not his avatar moniker “Kable,” serves to reaffirm the human element of his sense of self and push him away from his “puppet” (virtual) identity. When he tells one of the guards that “when the trigger pulls, it’s just me,” there is a reclaiming of responsibility, unlike Simon, and an acceptance of his consequences that is in contrast to the ethical system created by the remote puppetry of other humans and establishes him as the hero of the film. The vilification of the virtual simulating technologies of the movie reinforce the notion that the extension of the liberal human body and mind, in particular that of the soldier in combat, into participation with other machine species degrades the notions of justice and compassion that are key to upholding the human as the core component of the transhuman . Much like the hard technological bodies of Chapter 2, Tillman’s resistance to this virtualizing again upholds that the human, the man-in-the-middle , must be made the primary responsible part of any technological-biological assemblage.

Conclusion: War Films as Combat Simulation

There is more likely a fairly straightforward initial answer as to why there is very little VR presence in war films that speaks to a general problem with integrating computer use and VR into movies: it’s boring to watch someone use the technology! While this thought will be complicated when analyzing the Internet’s role in the surveillance present within the films discussed in Chapter 6, concluding this chapter, cinematic treatments of video games and VR (and computers in general) within war films are generally used as plot devices or as spaces to include interesting visualizations once inside the simulation, and perhaps explore the notion of virtual and physical bodies; actually watching someone type at a computer or sit while playing a video game is not particularly compelling. This is why a number of 1990s movies that include Internet usage (such as Hackers, Disclosure and The Net) ²⁰ rely on unrealistic interfaces and special effects like tie-dye colors, monstrous avatars and zooming cameras as ways to liven up representations of the Internet and computer use. Having said that, showing VR in film in an interesting and familiar way is possible and the technology will likely become more common in film as commercial versions of VR are released, just as portrayals of Internet usage in movies became far more commonplace from the early 2000s onward. The continued normalizing of VR technology will make it easier to generate visual shortcuts around its usage and provide entertaining cinematic visualizations. While films to this point have missed out on providing potential critiques and examinations of military-style simulators and VR environments, a near future where that is undertaken is not out of the question.

Even given that optimism, the question remains: despite its very real use in the American military, why would a war film show a soldier fighting in a virtual environment when the movie could just have the soldier actually fighting in combat? Such engagement raises the stakes (the possibility of a non-virtual death) and does away with any audience squeamishness around “real” physical and “fake” virtual selves that might undermine the ideology of the soldier’s cause; without VR, the soldier remains completely “human” (biological), which allows the movie to take advantage of the emotional responses that come with a soldier in peril. The few examples that do showcase a VR or military-style video game place the biological human soldier at the center of the soldier-assemblage, generating the sorts of problematic transhuman subjects that still uphold human-centric relationships with their machines species around them.

But Gamer , by integrating in the visual synthetic markers of a video game into its filmic aesthetic and deliberately highlighting portions of the double frame from Chapter 3, draws attention to the simulated nature of war films themselves and how movies, as cultural interfaces , are modes in which the civilian participates in war zones without peril or immediate consequence. The documentary game “Battle of 73 Eastings” is then a cousin to the war film, perhaps more closely related to the genre than video games, as it functions more as a passive cinematic experience: the “traditional” movie theater experience is intended to look a lot like that simulation and the VR in Brainstorm and Strange Days, where the audience member sits and engages with the movie in a relatively passive manner. While this is obviously a stereotype, and I have written elsewhere about the faulty thinking behind the construction of such a docile viewer, ²¹ war movies do generate a simulating effect, duplicating and distributing virtual versions of combat, providing the same ability to participate in warfare without actually having to participate; all this is done in a relatively realistic mode that, as Clearwater argues, uses much of the same imagery and filmic techniques as a simulation and/or video game might.

Echoing Chapter 3’s discussion of digital effects and perceptual realism , Stuart Marshall Bender argues that films need not even be completely “realistic” or “authentic” to be effective simulations, but rather fall in line with the concept of “reported realism” that depend on “specific cues that prompt claims of realism” within a film (author’s italics 2); he adds that “the details presented need not necessarily correspond to actuality. Rather, the details simply need to appeal to the audience’s expectations of reality” (9). His argument is that combat films cannot be real and their rhetorical effectiveness depends instead on markers of “authenticity,” such as shaky cams in first-person POV, that are heightened by “subtle movements such as background actors conducting more detailed business such as reloading weapons, communicating via field radios, and looking around for the enemy with much more focus and attention [than earlier films in the war film genre]” (11). Reported realism then makes it so that viewers of modern war films are able “to run an off-line mental simulation of the diegesis with a high degree of vividness” (8). ²²

So then, an effective “realistic” simulation does not necessarily depend on matching a “real-life” military engagement or battle, but it needs to bear the aesthetic markers that a viewer has coded as “realistic”; the best simulating automatisms, the most effective war movies or video games or VR experiences, are going to be the ones that accept and manipulate the synthetic nature of their mediated relationship with their audience. Within the contemporary war film, this means recognizing that “the military … is busy filming itself at every turn, from high-altitude surveillance transmits to video diaries and cell-phone souvenirs” (Stewart 170). This cinematically manifests in the aforementioned Stop-Loss , where Eyeball’s “homemade” videos use a mix of casually shot footage, war imagery and the same soundtrack that can be found in many contemporary war films; there is an effort to mirror the genre, to replicate it and its aesthetic markers. Gooch argues effectively that “the soldiers themselves are implicated in this [digital] construction, but they cannot resist the larger power of the state and, by extension, those who profit from war: these reflexive mediations enact a seemingly inescapable cycle of surveillance, war, and death” (163). Stewart adds that because they are unable to escape, “this is just the sort of personal videolog that the returned vets gather drunk to rescreen on a laptop after they’ve aimlessly resumed their civilian lives. They can’t get the war movie out of their heads” (Stewart 180). Like the scene in The Hurt Locker where the videogame controller is swapped seamlessly for the real gun, the “amateur” home videos come to underline how ingrained those documents are into the soldier’s experience with war and how ubiquitous warfare is for them. Similar to the “test footage” found in the Iron Man films (Chapter 3), the fact then that the footage is so effortlessly integrated into the film shows how few barriers there are between the two: the “real” homemade version of war borrows heavily from, and then is folded into, the larger movie; the audience then also codes this action as reported realism, the “realistic” making of these movies and their integration into warfare and the soldiers’ lives, as authentic.

However, let’s also remember that “real” soldiers watch war films and that as a genre, like most genres, it perpetuates itself by making movies with the same conventions. LaRocca makes the point that “film is an especially receptive medium for reference by subsequent filmmakers, in part, because its grammar is available to both creators and viewers; they co-create the objects of interest through an evolving critique of the values and virtues faced on-screen” (22). This notion of “co-creation” between “creators and viewers” within the immersive spectacular simulation of the war film is the key, and from this, perhaps the best version of a cinematic VR simulation, the one with the most powerful rhetorical “grammar,” is soldiers watching other war movies within the world of the film. In Jarhead, based on a memoir by Anthony Swofford, soldiers are often shown watching other war movies under the same rhetorical umbrella of team building and experiential exposure that simulators are often tasked with: they watch Apocalypse Now (Dir. Francis Ford Coppola 1979) in a boisterous group, cheering wildly when the helicopters come over the Vietnamese trees; later, they are also shown watching The Deer Hunter (Dir. Michael Cimino 1979) together. The watching of these movies is described in Swofford’s memoir and is therefore purported to “have happened”; more specifically, he points to his fellow soldiers watching “Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, Full Metal Jacket, Sands of Iwo Jima” (64). Movies, in functioning as creators and reinforcers of ideological values, when shown in other movies, hold the same function a combat simulator or a video game within a movie might: they show the soldiers engaging in warlike activity without having to actually fight. Within Jarhead, other war films are the simulating technology and therefore there is no need to have a VR simulator present.

In this way, war films are military simulators , and incredibly effective ones. No matter the simulating technology, if the viewers of the films, or participants of VR, engage with the products of the Military Industrial Entertainment complex without an active critical posthuman reflexivity, war films will continue their normalizing of the integration of military solutions and violence into everyday life. Dealing specifically with VR and military technology in the war film, even in critique, the tendency to aestheticize the violence within overshadows most of the attempts to resist promoting the rhetoric of the Total War Machine , and the technology it entails, as anything less than a beautiful and “cool” part of culture. If Gamer argues that the real terror of the future is treating the “the biological human in the same way one treats an inhuman virtual avatar,” then the way to break free from that terror is to recognize all species, including machines, as worthy of sovereignty and recognition. Hope for more critically affective films lies in the understanding that the technology and narratives presented within movies and virtual spaces, like video games , are not tools to be mastered, are not distancing and abstracting screens: they can and should be positive cooperators in a healthy and peaceful ecosystem of biological and technological species.

Notes

• 1. “With a more dynamically designed and coded cyberspace, the number of websites grew from 130 in June 1993 to 23,500 in June 1995, to over 650 thousand by January of 1997. The amount of web traffic grew 11% each month” (Tucker, Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema 10).

• 2. Joshua Gooch, in “Beyond Panopticism,” provides a slightly different argument, writing that “Stop-Loss imagines the working through of trauma as a process of self-surveillance through video. The film sets up visual production as central to processing trauma: after its opening battle sequence, the film cuts to a soldier’s self-produced memorial video for his wounded comrades” (158).

• 3. Rosewarne also usefully ties the cinematic hacker and notion of the frontier to a distinct and often oppressive masculinity in her discussion, echoing earlier arguments about Jeffords’ overly muscled and masculine hard bodies (132–134). This is discussed further in Chapter 6 of this text.

• 4. Mead outlines further examples through War Play, including Spacewar! (14), SIMNET (19), Virtual Battlespace 2 (105–106) and Foldit (162).

• 5. Chapter 5 of this text gives more exploration of cinematic representations of data-driven simulators.

• 6. In 2016, no fewer than three companies released major commercial VR projects: the Oculus Rift, the Vive, and PlayStation VR. There is also further work being done with Augmented Reality like, Microsoft’s HoloLens and Google Cardboard.

• 7. All the films briefly touched on here are expanded upon with more depth in Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema.

• 8. In the chapter “Reel/Real Internet” from Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema, I use Christian Metz’s concept of trucage (“‘Trucage’ and the Film.” Critical Inquiry (1977), 3 (4), 657–675) to discuss the cinematic effects that tended to mark “entry” into the Internet and what sort of “filmic space” is generated from this entry (197).

• 9. In truth, some of the demos of the technology in Brainstorm look a lot like early VR demos for the contemporary Oculus Rift, in particular one section of the film that takes participants on a rollercoaster ride in much the same way that the Oculus Rift did.

• 10. I further this argument in my own Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema, specifically in the chapter “The Cables Under, In, and Around Our Homes” (38–39).

• 11. Further thoughts on downloading-as-learning, with a specific focus on The Matrix and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (Dir. Robert Butler, Walt Disney Productions 1969), can be found in the chapter “Don’t Shoot the (Instant) Messenger: The Efficient Virtual Body Learns” within Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema.

• 12. Like Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man , the film is not a stereotypical war film, but the battles between two armed forces and the specific military-style weaponry make it much like Starship Troopers (Dir. Paul Verhoeven, Columbia-TriStar Pictures 1997), as it is, to paraphrase Jeanine Basinger, a World War II movie without World War II (xii).

• 13. While I’ve argued in my other work that this version of the posthuman is positive and heroic in its fully intergraded relationship with its virtual/machine selves and the machine and human species around that assemblage, I want to amend my thinking here. On the surface, this version of the posthuman and its use of VR is more healthy: the machine and human components are far more internal and messy than the external and passive devices of Brainstorm and The Lawnmower Man; for Neo, he literally has the technology implanted inside him. The ability to produce a high-definition version of the user’s avatar in this space more closely tethers the virtual and physical identities, which is further demonstrated by the fact that if the virtual body dies, the physical one dies as well. Yet as Herbrechter points out “what is necessary for Neo’s posthumanization is again a very human ingredient: Trinity’s unconditional love” (134). It is therefore problematically human-centric that when he dies at the end of the film, it is in the simulation while digitally embodied; it is Trinity’s kiss of his physical body, with again the humanistic value of emotion at its core, that saves him.

• 14. Influential military-style examples would include Wolfenstein (id Software 1992) and DOOM (id Software 1993), the later Quake (id Software 1996) and CounterStrike (Valve Corporation 1999) and, more recently, the Battlefield series (Electronic Arts 2002–present) and the Call of Duty series (Activision 2003–present). A better, more contemporary, example would be the military-made free-to-play first-person shooter America’s Army (United States Army 2002-present).

• 15. A strong popular exploration of this blurring can be found within Michael Macedonia’s “Games Soldiers Play” (ieee Spectrum, March 1, 2002. Accessed March 23, 2017. http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gaming/games-soldiers-play).

• 16. See note 1 from this chapter.

• 17. The movie version of DOOM (Dir. Andrzej Bartkowiak, Universal Pictures 2005) is perhaps of passing interest in that it is an adaption of the most influential military-styled videogame (which popularized many of the tropes of an FPS), but the movie itself, while a combat film that focuses on a Marine squad’s defeat of an alien race on Mars, has neither actual video games nor combat simulators.

• 18. There is much more discussion of Lightman and WarGames in Chapter 5’s analysis of war simulations as well as Chapter 6’s critique of Lightman as a deeply influential cinematic (immature) hacker.

• 19. I expand further on Surrogates in “Avatar in the Uncanny Valley: The Na’vi and Us, the Machinic Audience” (Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema 78–85).

• 20. Hackers and The Net are the focus of “The Cables Under, In, and Around Our Homes” while Disclosure is analyzed further in “Reel/Real Internet” (both found in Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema).

• 21. In particular, I align my thinking on this with Vivian Sobchak’s concept of the cinesthete (Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and Allison Muri’s arguments in “Of Shit and Soul: Tropes of Cybernetic Disembodiment in Contemporary Culture.” (Body and Society 9 (3) (2003): 73–92). I write more completely on this in Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (157–158).

• 22. Though somewhat tangential, it is worth considering the role of convergence culture in these movies. Henry Jenkins defines as convergence culture as “a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (Convergence Culture, New York: New York University Press, 2008, 3), explaining that the multiple modes of producing and consuming information, art, education etc swirl and mix together in a messy overlapping ecosystem that “changes the ways religion, education, law, politics, and even the military operate” (4). We should add to this list “entertainment”: looking specifically at cinema, under this idea of convergence culture, movies will integrate videogames, books, TV, webpages, all sorts of different forms of media, into their world and have their characters interact in this whirlpool of media.