Of Monsters and Men: Forms of Evil in War Films

Abstract

The present chapter engages with the formal framing of friend and foe in the war genre. Asserting the significance of film for cultural forms of memory and a politics of the past, I sketch out the generic conventions through which particular notions of self and other are inscribed, before I conduct an analysis of Clint Eastwood’s <i>American Sniper</i> (2014) to flesh out what I term a cosmologic form of evil at play in the genre. Secondly, a reading of Nick Broomfield’s <i>Battle for Haditha</i> (2006) introduces an understanding of evil as a systemic property of war independent of individual intentions. Finally, I suggest an inherent banality of systemic evil that becomes conceivable as embedded in mundane everyday routines rather than bound towards the exceptional.