The Making of an Epic (American) Hero Fighting for Justice: Commodification, Consumption, and Intertextuality in the Floyd Landis Defense Campaign (original) (raw)
Democratic Communique, 2014
A s this special issue moves into production, the world remembers the centennial of the Great War, which sadly was not the war to end all wars. Instead, WWI gave birth to modern war propaganda and established a "symbiotic relationship" between the media and the military. The art and industry of representing war through various media forms was finely tuned over the course of what became a very bloody 20 th century, and the military conflicts of the present are firmly embedded in the 21 st century media environment. Since 9/11, media studies scholars have analyzed the nexus of the media industry and the military and scrutinized the media products of war which result from this unity. Many military media products invite their subjects to dispassionately watch and interactively play war; some, albeit a few, display signs of resistance to it. Today, critical studies that seek to unravel the ties that bind the media to the military require multiple perspectives, theoretical formulations and material practices. This special issue presents timely scholarship at the forefront of understanding and responding to current trends in media and militarism. The Media War At a safe distance from the actual battles of war, civilians read war stories, hear war broadcasts, watch televised war fictions and play war games. Yet this mediated field of spectacular vision and immersive narrative space is never actual war, but a partial, selective, often simulated and mostly partisan representation of it. It is something that has been constructed, scripted and produced, and over the years scholars have appreciated the disjuncture between war and its media representations and contemplated the consequences of the loss of the real. War itself refers to actual material referents: invasions, occupations, violent conflicts and coups, and the cities, deserts and jungles where people fight, bleed, kill and die. Media images, tropes, themes and myths of war often bear little resemblance to war itself. Philip Taylor contends that each time the U.S. military wages war, two kinds of war occur: an actual war and a "media war." 1 Civilians never see the actual war but instead consume or play media-engineered stories of conflict-a media war. Indeed, the products of this media warnews clips, TV shows, films, video games and digital content-represent America at war to U.S. and world publics in ways that often do not inform or foster empathy but instead rein