ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a different approach to the war genre and to the Western heroic masculinity, one that is based on the concept of affect, foregrounding questions in two war narratives: the book Dispatches by Michael Herr and the film The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow. Herr's Dispatches constitutes the collection of Vietnam War memoirs, published as a single work in 1977, which depicts his experience as a war correspondent with Esquire magazine from late 1967 into 1968. Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, in turn, is an Iraq War movie written by Mark Boal, a freelance journalist embedded in 2004 with a US Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team in Bagdad. Moreover, Dispatches, similarly to The Hurt Locker, also facilitates muscular empathy in Barker's terms. Just like in The Hurt Locker, Dispatches offers a powerful critique of the mythic and technological mediation that separates us from violent death.
