Hypermediacy, Embodiment and Spectatorship in Brian de Palma’s Redacted

Abstract

Despite a growing awareness that public access to and understanding of contemporary conflicts is increasingly dependent on digital mediation, many Iraq War films (such as The Hurt Locker) continue to proffer a vision of combat as distinctly embodied and perceptually immersive, largely to the exclusion of remediating these digital interfaces. Simultaneously though, there appears to be a growing trend to deploy a hypermediated aesthetic that may be geared towards a contemplation of the shifting role of the war film amidst the new media ecology. Brian de Palma’s Redacted epitomises this latter tendency via a diegesis in which there is literally no scene or even point-of-view that is not already mediated in one form or another. This paper explores the wider implications of hypermediacy in Redacted with a particular focus on the emergent spectatorial positions that such a text delimits. Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s seminal work on remediation, as well as studies of war and media by the likes of Andrew Hoskins, Ben O’Laughlin and Patricia Pisters, and ethical approaches to film, I argue that Redacted fundamentally casts digital connectivity as a mode of ethical complicity by way of implicating viewers in a position of guilty inactivity in relation to the violent mediatised spectacle which perpetually solicits their sadistic gaze.