Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture

A remarkable achievement. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet offers readers a profound, eloquent, and haunting reflection on the relationship between war and American culture.

-- Andrew Bacevich, author of America's War for the Greater Middle East

For all of us drugged by American war culture, this book comes as a Prince Charming to awaken us from our treacherous fantasies. Dr. Monnet’s dissection of the genre conventions that control our emotional responses to war stories is stunningly brilliant. Her exploration of how the conventions of melodrama and horror fiction now tend to undermine the intentions of many would-be antiwar works is truly eye-opening. The book has made me rethink many works I thought I understood well, and it would be a treasure chest for a variety of courses. Anyone seeking to free us from our culture of war must read this invaluable volume.

-- H. Bruce Franklin, professor emeritus, Rutgers University; author of Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War

It was said that the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady changed America forever by laying the battlefield dead at the people’s doorsteps. In her unflinching study, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet shows how the battlefield victims of America’s “war culture” have increasingly dominated the imagery of literature and film since the end of the Second World War—to a degree that Brady’s contemporaries could scarcely have imagined. Theoretically informed, richly illustrated, and driven as much by a hatred of war as by the awareness of its perverse seduction, this book magisterially builds upon the insights of Richard Slotkin’s classic Regeneration through Violence.

-- Will Kaufman, author of The Civil War in American Culture and American Culture in the 1970s

This book is mightily impressive. Its core – an examination of the role of the idea of war in post-WWII American culture, and an associated racially- and sexually-charged thirst for killing (and sometimes self-sacrificially dying) – is carried through with verve, and enlightenment. It makes real new contributions to our understanding of popular genres such as ‘adventure’ and ‘romance’, and does it through beautifully crafted case-studies. These include the battle for Iwo Jima (from the myths around the battle, through the famous Rosenthal photograph, to the several film versions); the narratives of the Green Berets (from novels, to song, to movie); and a series of books and films post-Vietnam war. The combination of sophisticated thinking (grounded in sharply-considered reading) and close analytic study makes this an exceptional contribution to our thinking about the constructed meanings of war.

-- Martin Barker, author of A ‘Toxic Genre’: the Iraq War Films

In this deeply empathetic study of the meanings and significance of American battle field deaths, Professor Agnieszka Soltysik manages, in one sustained effort, to resuscitate – so to speak – America’s soldiers fallen in combat and to spare them the fate of willful oblivion, as just so many body bags surreptitiously brought home. She explores the ingredients that help the survivors to redeem the fallen and to rededicate their remains to a higher purpose to inspire the nation.

-- Rob Kroes, Professor of American Studies Emeritus, University of Amsterdam

We now live and die amid perpetual warfare, the violence of which has been brought home in countless ways. Our foreign policies, backed up by the world’s largest military and politicians on all sides, have reaped a terrible harvest. So has American culture, which since World War II has portrayed our foreign ventures in melodramatic, adventurous, even tantalizingly gothic ways to convince us that war is an answer, combat death glorious, and flags worth saving. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet reveals the lies of such propaganda and offers solutions in our critical understanding of how war damages both our souls and our bodies.

-- John Carlos Rowe, USC Associates' Professor of the Humanities, University of Southern California

Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture makes a compelling, insightful case for post-1945 media as mediating the illegibility of warfare, in light of the fact that death, by definition, is traumatic for everyone, other than the person who experiences it. The dynamics of narrative form, made accessible through film and literature, thus ritualize or sanctify experiences that can neither be reported nor confirmed. Drawing on works including Full Metal Jacket, American Sniper, Dispatches, and Flags of Our Fathers, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet provides a lucid, timely examination of the generic paradigms privileged in contemporary mediations of combat death.

-- Alan Nadel, author of Containment Culture and Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s

This perceptive and imaginative study examines the deep cultural longing for patriotic re-enchantment in the codes of popular war narratives. A brilliant deep dive into the post-sacred temptations of our unacknowledged civil religion.

-- Carolyn A. Marvin, Frances Yates Emeritus Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag

Combat Deaths in Contemporary American Culture is a must-read contribution to war scholarship. Tracing the ambiguities in the representation of American combat deaths, Monnet deftly reframes classic war films, as well as unearths understudied texts, to guide readers into decoding war texts in ways that demystify the seductive war-promoting impacts of Hollywood storytelling. This is the first comprehensive study of the powerful emotions surrounding representations of combat death in popular culture, and it unpacks how both cultural and martial discourse have historically written death of service personnel as symbolically sacred. Beautifully and clearly written, this book rethinks the generic lenses through which to view war violence and lays out methods of recognizing the ways in which Hollywood war films encourage their viewers to be swept out of the horrors of war and into the emotional pull of the melodramatic mode alongside the excitement of the adventure genre. It unpacks how popular depictions of state-sanctioned violence, anchored and nurtured by the cultural addiction to fantasies of war, and challenges readers to resist the seduction and glamorization of war as any kind of solution to the global crises and challenges of the 21st century. For American citizens living with ongoing but barely perceptual “forever wars,” this profoundly relevant book should be required reading.

-- Anna Froula, East Carolina Univer