ABSTRACT
In its continued technological progress, the American military is becoming increasingly cyberpunk with its reliance upon soldiers cybernetically wired into military drones they command half a world away. From early depictions of video games as training grounds for armed conflict in TRON (Lisberger 1982), to representations of virtual worlds in The Thirteenth Floor (Rusnak 1999), cyberpunk allows for a repertoire of images that connect military and entertainment complexes in a way that presages the depiction of drone warfare by game-like simulation. Films such as Sleep Dealer (Rivera 2008), Ender's Game (Hood 2013), or Good Kill (Niccol 2014) allow for greater understanding of the roles cyberpunk plays within the intersection of the military-entertainment complex and America's 21st century military culture that continues to exert itself on national stages across the globe.
