Militainment, Inc (DVD rip)

Militainment, Inc. offers a fascinating, disturbing, and timely glimpse into the militarization of American popular culture, examining how U.S. news coverage has come to resemble Hollywood film, video games, and "reality television" in its glamorization of war. Mobilizing an astonishing range of media examples - from news anchors' idolatry of military machinery to the impact of government propaganda on war reporting - the film asks: How has war taken its place in the culture as an entertainment spectacle? And how does presenting war as entertainment affect the ability of citizens to evaluate the necessity and real human costs of military action? The film is broken down into nine sections, each between 10 and 20 minutes in length, allowing for in-depth classroom analysis of individual elements of this wide-ranging phenomenon. Written, produced & narrated by Roger Stahl for the Media Education Foundation. Roger Stahl is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. 124 minutes. ____Sections_______ Intro 0:00 Spectacle 1:50 War assimilated into entertainment landscape. Pentagon cooperation with Hollywood as well as the music industry. The "war movie" exemplified in spectacular PR events such as Jessica Lynch case and the felling of the Saddam Statue in 2003. Clean War 15:50 History of efforts to rid war of death. Clean war as necessary for war's consumption. Various linguistic and image strategies for cleaning up war. Technofetishism 28:36 Religious veneration of war machines. Various modes of turning weapons into objects of beauty. Imbuing high-tech weapons with an inherent morality. Demonization 40:35 Saddam Hussein as case study. History of U.S.-Saddam relations. Reducing war to two characters, good and evil. Political analogies for Iraq War. Personally demonizing Saddam Hussein, and how these patterns fit other conflicts. Reality TV 58:08 Explosion of war-themed reality television between 2000-2006. Ways that the embedded reporting system mimicked reality TV genre. Sports 1:18:40 Ways that war is woven with sports in both language and image. Sports enters journalistic war coverage as a prominent motif. Toys 1:27:29 The growth of a toy industry that resembles a "merchandised" Iraq war movie. Toys entering journalistic coverage of war. Video Games 1:33:25 Pentagon training simulators that have become commercial successes. War journalism resembling video games. Games "catching up with" the television war. Dissent 1:46:22 Modes by which dissent is both trivialized and criminalized in dominant news coverage. Outro 2:00:20