Amanda's Blog

The last texts we examined in ASTU this year was the film American Sniper and the article Redeployment. Both texts illustrate the concept of militarization which is a new term I learned this year. From my understanding, we encounter militarization in our everyday lives whether we are aware of it or not. While watching the film American Sniper, it is clearly evident that militarization influences the lives of individuals differently. Literary scholar Patrick Deer suggests that how one side of militarization shows how distant the military can be from us, and on the other side it shows how it can be very intimate to us. American Sniper allowed me to understand militarization more clearly from the protagonist’, Chris Kyle, point of view. As Deer argues, representations of war in the media have a ‘master narrative’ which is simply viewed as mass killings, whereas counter narratives show a more personal experience of war which is exemplified through Kyle in American Sniper.

Like most of the texts we studied this year, collective memory is a key idea of militarization. The Americans in the film have a certain shared interpretation and memory of the conflict that was happening at the time [in American Sniper]. However, although the majority of Americans have exposure the the tragedy, there are varying levels of intimacy to the war. For example, Kyle is obviously experiencing the war first hand, his wife still has an intimacy to the war because she has a close relationship to someone who is a part of it, and other U.S citizens are watching the news about it on television. Nonetheless, all of these people are being effected by militarization, just to different degrees of intimacy.

The concept of militarization made me think more about how much we are involved and exposed to on a daily basis, but we are not always aware of what it is. The idea that militarization has a more subjective narrative to it reminds me of similar aspects of consumption and the process of commodity chains we learned in Geography and Sociology. We consume the same products on a daily basis but we are not fully aware of the its origin, how it was made, and the individuals that were behind the making of it. This shows that rather than thinking of the outcome of a product, we should be more aware of the effort put behind it in order for it to be consumed by us. Like militarization, most of us are not aware of how much of an effect they have in our daily lives, unless we are personally affected by the ‘counter narrative’.