Figure 9: The Marine’s Route in Generation Kill
If we heed what is threatening in the landscapes in both texts, we are encouraged to evoke yet another film genre, Alfred Hitchcock’s noir-type dramas in which there is frequently something distinctiveness about the landscape. As it has been summarized, “Hitchcock’s camera typically only begins by enacting a survey of a seemingly natural scene. Eventually, as the filming proceed, it becomes evident that there is a perverse element in the landscape” (for example, in his North by Northwest (1959) in which a biplane crop duster is fogging the ground where – as a bystander tells Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) – there are no crops to dust, shortly before the plane attacks Thornhill. Thus, the film’s movement invariably proceeds from landscape to stain, from overall shot to close-up, and this movement invariably prepares the spectator for the event.”40
In Generation Kill the landscape-as-threat is accentuated in the moments when the viewer sees it from the point of view of the Marines (we see at those moments almost exclusively from the eye-level vantage point of the Marines). And as is the case in Natural Born Killers, the drama unfolds, the viewer also see the protagonists as threatening. Just as there is tension in the film over whether an encounter will yield another a corpse from an innocent victim, the same tension builds in the HBO series as it becomes clear that the Marines cannot easily distinguish combatants from non-combatants (in some cases) and are not encouraged to make such distinctions (in others). At a minimum, most of the Marines’ encounters involve a militarized, weapon-implemented gaze. The series’ most typical shot shows Sergeant Colbert, at the window of his Humvee, prepared to see Iraq through the scope of his rifle (Figure 10).
Figure 10: Sergeant Colbert in his Humvee
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