ABSTRACT
Rayment and Nadasdy analyze War Horse as a Hollywood film unique in its pluralistic remembering of the war dead. In excluding American soldiers and heroizing an animal, War Horse implies that the enemy in the Great War was (the) inhumane war itself. As such, the authors argue, War Horse offers itself as a rhetorical ‘war memorial’ for liberals uncomfortable with the tacit nationalism attendant to memorialization. Yet, treating this ostensibly noncontroversial stance with suspicion, Rayment and Nadasdy show the ideological effects of the film overlaying a ‘realistic’ story of men’s survival laterally across a mythico-religious (quasi-Christian) structure of Man’s cyclical rebirth. Arguing that War Horse dramatizes a fairytale odyssey of the saving of ‘m/Man’ through virtue, the authors elucidate that the film hides its Barthian ʻmythologies’ beneath its mythological surface as it idealizes a form of (liberal humanist) American m/Man through Joey, the magical, soul-collecting, wonder horse star of the film. A double helix of earthbound, human dignity entwined with transcendent, divine Humanity, Joey, under the disguise of being an avatar of hope for ‘every man’ in the face of catastrophe, secretly emblemizes and eulogizes a fairytale version of the innocent, free American man requisite for America’s continuance of war-making.
