ABSTRACT
Rayment examines the implications of the co-evolution of Hollywood war cinema and American war memorialization. Theorizing an opposition between pre-1968 ʻDecoration Day movies’ (propagandistic monuments to U.S. military glory) and post-1968 ‘Memorial Day films’ (conveyances for a restrained remembrance), he characterizes the latter as vehicles of ideology, which in effect hinder criticism of American war-making and recruit viewers to the cancerous cause of the pro-U.S. militarism that their superficial, ‘horror of war’ rhetoric denies. Rayment considers, too, the post-1968 counter-current tradition of Hollywood war films, which he labels ʻCounter-Memorial films’, claiming that their appearance of dissent also disguises their effective contribution to American remembrance ideology. Examining the correlative association between Hollywood war cinema aesthetics and on-screen American war remembrance, Rayment argues moreover that Hollywood war films’ politico-ideological operation as rhetorical sites of war memorialization is supplemented by their (no less ideological) artistic construction as rhetorical sites of ʻcollective’ memory. Coining the neologism ‘war memor(y)als’ to capture the sense in which Hollywood war films form the locus of a double ideological imbrication, Rayment describes how the patriotic politics of American war memorialization is reified by the cinematic form of their encoding as war ʻmemories’.
