What does a Weapon See: hbo goes to War 1

To make sense of the genre effect of HBO’s Generation Kill, we have to recognize that, among other things, it’s a road movie. While that film genre has been deployed in a wide variety of sub-genres – comedies, westerns, crime/noir films, and so on – perhaps the best matches are the films based on the infamous Charles Starkweather/Caril Fugate killing spree as they traveled through Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958: Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1974), David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), Dominic Sena's Kalifornia (1993), and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994).

However, to situate the Generation Kill episodes within the road movie genre, I want to evoke M. M. Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, which he applies to literature. Identifying the chronotope as a "time-space" that captures the "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are are critically expressed in literature," Bakhtin characterizes various  historical "chronotopes of the road" and refers ultimately to "the chronotope of encounter"³³ where "the spatial and temporal series defining human fates and lives combine with one another in distinctive ways,"³⁴ among which is the “chance encounter.”³⁵ Bakhtin’s chronotope addresses the way a text incorporates history as both an enframing temporal context (where in this case, it is the series of events involved in the second Gulf War) and as the day-to-day process of covering the ground, which in this case must be conquered or controlled so that the Marines can capture Baghdad).

There is yet another genre effect that must be considered to adapt Bakhtin's characterizations to HBO’s Generation Kill, the distinctiveness of the television series aesthetic, which involves  a "format" or "formula" that is repeated in each episode as the characters experience a progression of relationships with each other and face events with which they must cope as a collective.³⁶ Apart from dramatic deadly confrontations in the weekly episodes is a background of "uneventfulness" typical of television series.³⁷Accordingly, while the road is Generation Kill’s primary trope, as the Marine unit in focus (Sergeant Brad Colbert's Humvee crew) moves northward, it is both their adventures of encounter and the mundane uneventfulness that characterizes the specifics of the narrative that are in view. Certainly the road as terrain is a major protagonist, emphasized in many shots (see Figure 7).