How geopolitical becomes personal: Method acting, war films and affect

Abstract

This article is about weaponisation of emotions through visual culture. It interrogates how geopolitics trickles down to everyday life and becomes personal through the embodiment of screen actors. While International Relations is attempting to move beyond the limits of existing disciplinary methods and methodologies to better grasp the emotional depths of world politics, this article delves into the ‘method’ in performance arts to understand how visual culture diffuses emotional narratives of the state to the population and affectively enables people to experience the international from the perspective of the United States. In this sense, focusing on ‘method acting’ which revolutionised performance arts in the United States from the 1950s, the article examines the mundane encounters in visual culture through which screen/state actors emotionally situate the audience to make them viscerally experience geopolitics, personally feel like a state/warrior and embody a commitment to the war effort at an emotional level.

The Geopolitics of Protected Areas

“…Writings on geopolitics emphasise the behaviours of states and the consequent geographical dimensions of power, mainly at regional and global scales. The scope and focus of geopolitics have however changed over time to encompass geopolitical representations of the "self" and the "other", political actors, the materialities of everyday life, and the diffusion of emotional narratives of the state to the population (to make people feel like the state (Eken 2019). This critical geopolitics pays attention to the ways in which domestic policy becomes 'a geopolitical device enabling the internationalization of state territory and economy' (Li and Jonas 2019, 70).…”

Narrative Structure and Ideology. Eisenstein in Saving Private Ryan

“…The choice of SPR responds to its classification within a purely ideological genre such as war (Valantin, 2005;Loftin, 2018), which viewers find appealing for the emotional affect and the spectacle of combat (King, 2009;Hochberg, 2013;Eken, 2019). Specifically, SPR was such a massive success with audiences and critics alike that it returned the classic World War II combat sub-genre to the prominence of bygone eras (Basinger, 1998).…”

“…These characteristics explain the ample research undertaken on the ideological intent of the film's narrative and its stylistic resources. Such studies have considered the characterization strategies of its protagonists (Gates, 2005;Kuri and Kaufman, 2020) and that of the enemy (Brown, 2009), its use of the documentary filmmaker's point of view of (Eagle, 2012), its visual portrayal of violence (Allison, 2017), its editing style (Montero and Fernández-Ramírez, 2015) or the acting techniques used (Eken, 2019). However, no study appears to address the cathartic design of its narrative structure.…”