Abstract
The drone warfare genre has emerged as a significant new type of combat film which depicts military killing by remote-controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The chapter uses Good Kill, Eye in the Sky, and Five Thousand Feet is the Best as case studies to explore how the mediated image of UAV combat is depicted in this genre. It is shown that the genre tends to depict pilot trauma as a key component of the narrative. One of the sources for potential trauma is identified as related to the mediated images of violence to which the operators are persistently exposed. Thus, these films depict fictional dramatic scenarios as a means to engage with the ethical and legal debates of drone warfare currently circulating in the culture.
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Bender, S.M. (2017). Splats and Splashes: The Drone Warfare Genre and Digitally Mediated Trauma. In: Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64459-2_6
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