Birds-eye Views and Reading Bodies: Drone Warfare
Films and Drone Technology as a Scopic Regime
Stills from Full Contact (David Verbeek, 2015) and Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014)
Master Thesis RMA Arts and Culture: Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam
Name: Ilse van der Spoel
Student number: 11093218
Programme: MA Arts and Culture: Research Master Cultural Analysis
Second Reader: Dr. N. Roei
Date: 13 June 2018
Index
IntroductionThe (Battle)Field of Perception: Drones as a Scopic Regime p. 3
0.1 Drone Theory and its Disregard for the Visual p. 4
0.2 The Gaze, Surveillance and Panopticism p. 6
0.3 The Gaze and Cinema p. 8
0.4 A Contemporary Counterpart to Paul Virilio and the Politics of Verticality p. 9 0.5 Visual Critique or Resistance: Opposing the Gaze and Countervisuality p. 10
0.6 Chapter Structure and Methodology p. 11
Chapter 1
From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Drone Pilots Reading and Producing Bodies p. 13 1.1 Good Kill’s Opening Scene: Biopolitics and Necropolitics p. 14 1.2 Surveillance Cinema and Processes of Signification: From Biopolitics to Necropolitics p. 17
1.3 Frames of War and Mistaken Identity p. 20
1.4 Conclusion p. 22
Chapter 2
Embodiment in the Military Apparatus: Between a Surveillance and a Military Gaze p. 23
2.1 Cinematic Codes and the Surveillance Gaze p. 25
2.2 From a Surveillance Gaze to a Military Gaze p. 27
2.3 Extending the Gaze: Extradiegetic Birds-eye Views p. 31
2.4 Conclusion p. 35
Chapter 3
Resisting the Gaze: Countervisuality and Counter-embodiment p. 36
3.1 Nicholas Mirzoeff’s Visuality and Countervisuality p. 36
3.2 National Bird and 5,000 Feet Is the Best: Inverting the Scopic Regime of Drone Technology p. 37 3.3 “Contact”: From ‘Passive’ Drone Pilot to ‘Active’ Shooter p. 39
3.4 “Full Contact”: From Active Shooter to Vulnerable Boxer p. 41
3.5 Conclusion p. 46
Conclusion
At the Crossroads of the (Battle)Field of Perception p. 47
Bibliography p. 50
Introduction
The (Battle)Field of Perception: Drones as a Scopic Regime
In recent years, the drone or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) has started to appear in various contexts outside of the military domain. With current digital technologies and more
sophisticated, smaller cameras, drones have also become prevalent in other fields, ranging from archaeology and architecture,1 to journalism and humanitarian aid.2 In the context of
moving images, drone cinematography seeped in as a ubiquitous cinematic technique: not only in films and TV series has drone cinematography become prevalent, but also in news reports, advertising and in YouTube videos. Simultaneously, several films came out in the last few years representing military drone operations, in which drone pilots are looking at drone imagery and reading the bodies moving on their screens.3
Drones (Rick Rosenthal, 2013), Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014), Full Contact (David
Verbeek, 2015) and Drone (Jason Bourque, 2017) for instance, all focused on the moral implications of the physical displacement within drone warfare and guilt of drone pilots, while Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015) dealt with the transnational networked ethical and legal implications of drone warfare.4 I want to further explore this current cultural obsession
with drones, drone warfare and a renewed interest and attention for the bird’s-eye viewpoint and aerial perspective(s) in general, by looking at this corpus of fiction films and analysing their visual language and effects. Looking at cinematic representations of drone warfare has the potential of revealing a particular ‘gaze’ and shows a production of bodies on both ends of the screen. On one side, it produces the body of individuals under surveillance as either ‘targets’ or as ‘non-combatants’, while on the other it produces the body of the drone pilot as fragmentary and embodied within a military apparatus.
Hence, in this thesis, I try to better understand this current ‘trend’ in contemporary cinema featuring representations of drone warfare and contribute to and expand theories of visuality by considering drone technology as a ‘scopic regime’. My aim is then to think these representations and (re)contextualise them through the concept of ‘the gaze’, as well as to propose a twofold theoretical framework. Firstly, I want to cover the general lack of attention for ‘the visual’ in academic work on drone warfare, which so far mostly focused on its moral and ethical implications, and hence inscribe the visual in theories of drone. Secondly, I aim to reconsider the wider framework on the relation between war, surveillance and
cinema/media already configured by cultural theorist Paul Virilio. I argue that this configuration demands a reconsideration in light of the recent prevalence of (visual) narratives on/featuring drone technologies, leading to my research question: How can we understand the current trend of (representations of) drone warfare and drone technology as 1 This article is devoted to current challenges of using drones in architcture:
https://archinect.com/features/article/150058176/drones-for-architects-new-capabilities-for-the-construction-sector-how-to-get-started-and-how-to-navigate-the-law
2 As explained in this blog by European Commision: https://ec.europa.eu/echo/field-blogs/stories/how-drones-can-help-humanitarian-crises_en
3 I use the word ‘drone imagery’ when speaking of diegetic drone images (so images that are ‘marked’ as drone images through the use of coordinates and crosshairs, and in some cases ‘grainy’ images), and distinguish it from ‘drone cinematography’, which I use for ‘extradiegetic’ drone footage, or establishing shots made through the use of a drone.
4 Meanwhile, also several documentaries such as Drone (2014) and National Bird (2016) showed the (traumatic) experiences of real-life employees in, and victims of, the drone programme.
a scopic regime? How does it produce bodies and a particular gaze, and how does its politics of vision function?
1.1 ‘Drone Theory’ and its Disregard for the Visual
Though, as I will return to later, the idea of the drone and its (visual and perceptual) implications regarding the vertical perspective have existed for a long time, drones have mostly found their way into mainstream military use after 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror.5 Unarmed drones have been flying over Afghanistan since 2000 and the first armed
drone strike by the US military occurred in 2002, under the Bush administration.6 Especially
under president Obama’s first term the drone programme expanded severely, with five times as many confirmed drone strikes.7
Cinema has gladly responded to these developments by creating narratives that deal with the moral, ethical and legal implications of this changing nature of the battlefield, as also described by The Hollywood Reporter: "There has been no shortage of films dealing with drones over the last few years […] audiences have recently had the occasion to explore a form of modern warfare whose true repercussions are yet to be fully understood, let alone divulged to the general public”.8 This noticeable trend even could be seen as a (sub-)genre of ‘drone warfare films’, taking elements from both the war film, as well as the surveillance thriller, and depict fictionalised versions of real-life drone operations and implementations of the technology, or ‘imagined’ versions of these technological possibilities.9
Some action thrillers also resort to subplots in which drones figure as objects or agents, such as Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008), The Bourne Legacy (Tony Gilroy, 2012),
Hummingbird (Steven Knight, 2013) and London Has Fallen (Babak Najafi, 2016).10 In some
cases this leads to fetishisation of the weaponised drone, as mentioned by one reviewer: “Until now, films about drones haven’t properly engaged in the debate. They either forget there’s someone at the controls, emphasising the alien nature of a remote, robotic death, or, like London Has Fallen, use drones as just another weapon in the arsenal; a cool tool to make bigger, badder bang”.11
In this thesis I want to particularly look at Good Kill and Eye in the Sky, two
mainstream Hollywood productions often mentioned by reviewers as being unprecedented in the way they deal with ‘the grey areas’ of drone warfare,12 and Full Contact, which,
5 As described in the article “A Brief History of Drones”: https://www.thenation.com/article/brief-history-drones/
6 In the documentary Drone (2014), a developer of UAVs describes how, after new GPS technologies became available in the early 1990s, he developed drones initially for tuna fishers, yet instead after 9/11 the Bush administration expressed interest in buying thousands of them for military purposes.
7 As researched by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush
8 From a review by Jordan Mintzer on the documentary National Bird (2016): https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/national-bird-berlin-review-865191
9 The relation with the war film as a genre is also brought up by Caryn James, a reviewer for The Wall Street Journal: "These new films and shows have to keep the action going in situation rooms full of computers, rather than in trenches and on battlefields. And they address moral and strategic questions that old-fashioned World War II movies never had to”. https://www.wsj.com/articles/eye-in-the-sky-how-drones-are-changing-war-movies-1456935497
10 Other action thrillers featuring drones include Syriana (Stephan Gaghan, 2005), Eagle Eye (D.J. Caruso, 2008), Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013), Chappie (Neill Blomkamp, 2015) and London Fields (Mathew Cullen, 2015).
11 From a review by Henry Barnes in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/14/eye-in-the-sky-london-has-fallen-drone-films
12 ^idem. He describes Eye in the Sky as “one of the first drone movies to work in the grey areas that London Has Fallen obliterates”.
through its arthouse-oriented and psychology-driven approach, already provides alternative ways of thinking about embodiment in relation to drone technology.
Considering these three films enables a comparative approach that entails similarities in the way they employ cinematic codes, the way the bodies on screen are read and the bodies of drone pilots are rendered, and how this leads to a certain gaze, pointing towards conventions of what could be considered a ‘genre’. The differences between these three films also need to be taken into account, as each reveals different potentials: Good Kill and
Full Contact are similar in the way they deal with detachment and guilt of the drone pilot,
enabling an embodied point-of-view, though the way these pilots subsequently deal with their guilt is entirely different. While Eye in the Sky focuses more on drone warfare as a globalised network, the way the bodies are read and the gaze functions is still similar to
Good Kill. This comparative approach hence enables a more specific understanding of the
conventions of this ‘genre’, but also see in these films different possibilities, for example how elements of some of these films also already provide different narrative potentials.
Drone technology in general has also already widely surfaced in academic debates, mostly regarding its increasing role as weapons in the War on Terror. Hugh Gusterson for example dealt with the topic in Drone: Remote Control Warfare (2016), examining the way drone warfare has created commuter warriors and redefined the space of the battlefield. He suggests a new understanding of the debate over civilian casualties of drone attacks by mapping ‘ethical slippage’ over time during the Obama administration. Similarly, John Kaag and Sarah Kreps describe the current prevalence of drones in Drone Warfare (2014), in which they engage with the political and legal dimensions of UAVs. Most prominently referenced however, is Grégoire Chamayou’s Drone Theory (2013). Similar to Gusterson, and Kaag and Kreps, he takes a philosophical approach to drone warfare and deals with the moral and ethical implications of the changed nature of warfare in the light of drone technology, even proposing a “theory of the drone”.
Though Chamayou and others touch upon the idea and the importance of the visual, not many of these writers particularly, nor exclusively, focus on drone technology as a ‘scopic regime’ and on the act of looking itself. Instead, they mostly theorise the changed nature of the battlefield, such as how drones have created a remote war, displacing violence and proximity in favour of a distanced perspective. This leads to ‘targets’ not being able to see their ‘opponent’, invoking an imbalance and dichotomy between hunter and prey: the drone pilot’s body is invulnerable, whereas that of target is not. The visual is touched upon in the sense that its role is conveyed within the construction of this type of warfare, but it is not extensively explored. In this thesis, I hence want to approach the assemblage of military and visual technologies represented by films on drone operations as a ‘scopic regime’ and consider its politics of vision, rather than focus only on its ethical and moral implications.
The term ‘scopic regime’ was originally coined by Christian Metz in his book The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1982) to distinguish between theatre
and cinema and their ways of seeing and staging the world: “what defines the specifically cinematic scopic regime is not so much the distance kept … as the absence of the object seen” (61). However, the notion has since been detached from that singular definition of a distinction between cinema and theatre and disassociated from specific media, forms or technologies in favour of a more general definition as “a mode of visual apprehension that is culturally constructed and prescriptive, socially structured and shared” (Derek Gregory, 190). Or, as Martin Jay, who used the term to write about modernity, describes, it can be seen as a
“non-natural visual order operating on a pre-reflective level to determine the dominant protocols of seeing and being on view in a specific culture at a specific time”.13
I consider my focus on (the representation of) drone warfare through the notion of a ‘scopic regime’ not a radically different perspective on drones provided by the writers listed above, but more as a shift in nuance, from the ethical and moral implications of drones, to is more visual and perceptual grounding that leads to these implications. Through a focus on its visual elements, I want to understand how it constructs a particular type of gaze in which bodies are being read and interpreted, leading to decisions on life and death. I hence want to understand the scopic regime presented in, and constructed through drone operation films, and only from there, consider the moral and ethical implications of its politics of vision.
Though few scholars focus on the role of visuality in drone warfare, Derek Gregory, however, in his article “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War” (2011), does take as his object “the ‘scopic regime’ through which drone operations take place” (190).14
He focuses on “the hunter-killer role, the combination of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and weapons platform” and “how the new visibilities of the battlespace of military action that they make possible affect the targeting cycle” (193). This results in his central argument that “these visibilities are necessarily conditional […] because they are not technical but rather techno-cultural accomplishments” (193). Some aspects Gregory
discusses will inform my own analysis, such as the intimacy of this type of visibility constructed through the constant tension (or inherent paradox of) proximity and
remoteness, as well as the paradox between visibility and invisibility: “spaces of constructed visibility are also always spaces of constructed invisibility” (193).
However, while Gregory relies on statements of drone pilots and military personnel, employing discourse analysis and analysing the technology itself, my methodology and approach will be different. Instead, I analyse visual objects (cinematic representations with a specific visual language) and focus on how the gaze functions in these representations. This enables an exploration of how the bodies of individuals under scrutiny are being read, rather than only focus on the technology and the experience of real-life pilots.
Gregory’s article conveys how research on scopic regimes often entail discourses about vision and technology, rather than visual analysis. Although these two methods are often interlinked, I would argue doing visual analysis adds to the credibility of research on visuality and scopic regimes. A focus on visual analysis is precisely possible through the medium of cinema, revealing ways in which we can get access to the world of drone operators that mostly remains restricted due to military confidentiality. These films then allow us to look at people looking at screens/images and hence enables a focus on the gaze. These films then create a culturally imagined and mediated construction of drone technology and its workings that reveals specific and multiple ways of reading bodies, grounded in a visual and perceptual structure that we can directly analyse, something discourse analysis can never fully provide.
1.2 The Gaze, Surveillance and Panopticism
The concept of ‘the gaze’ is then central to analysing drone warfare films, because drone technology enables a certain type of mediated gaze that is related to discourses of 13 In his entry on ‘scopic regime’ for the International Encyclopedia for Communication:
http://www.communicationencyclopedia.com/subscriber/tocnode.html? id=g9781405131995_yr2015_chunk_g978140513199524_ss20-1
surveillance. Theories of the gaze generally make a distinction between ‘the eye’ and ‘the gaze’, as described by John Walker and Sarah Chaplin: “the eye’ refers to the viewer gazing upon the world, while ‘the gaze’ refers to the fact that we are all subject to the gazes of others” (97). Jean-Paul Sartre also emphasised this when he stated that we reconsider our own being-a-subject through the eyes of the Other: the gaze of the Other is always
objectifying, makes us feel ashamed and strips us of our freedom as subjects.15 How does
this work for drone technology, where the gaze is not reciprocal and the Other supposedly is not able to look back? The mediation of the gaze through a screen already displaces this gaze from a reciprocal relation, to a one-sided dimension.
Michel Foucault, in his work on spectatorship, power and surveillance, radically extends this notion of power suggested by Sartre, by describing the gaze as the perfect medium for spreading domination. The gaze of medicine for example, becomes the ‘speaking eye’ that observes, describes and leads knowledge, which in turn leads to power.16 The drone
warfare films Good Kill, Eye in the Sky and Full Contact also suppose a reading of bodies that leads to ‘knowledge’ and hence power. By reading the bodies on their screens as signifiers, the drone pilots are making subsequent choices on who gets to live and who gets to die, invoking Foucault’s concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’. These concepts entail techniques of power that ensures the surveillance of bodies, including its visual organisation and spatial distribution, entailing “a whole field of visibility” (242).17
Perhaps the perfect configuration of this ‘field of visibility’ and subsequent control, is Foucault’s work on panopticism, which is also particularly relevant for drone technology. Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ was an architectural design for institutions (such as prisons and asylums), allowing all inmates to be observed and rendered “individualized and
constantly visible” by one person (a watchman in a tower for example): “The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately” (Foucault, 1997a: 361).18 The inmates were unaware they are being watched,
inducing a “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”, through which this ‘system’ of surveillance and power relations is sustained independent of the person exercising power: “the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers” (1997a: 361). The panopticon thus is a “machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (1997a: 362). Similarities with drones can be found in Drone Theory: “The agent is spared the embarrassment or shame that may be prompted by seeing one’s actions with the eyes of one’s victim […] the operator will never see his victim seeing him doing what he does to him” (Chamayou, 118).
Drone technology could hence be considered a radicalisation of the panopticon-model. Unlike the inmate, however, the target-subject of drone surveillance is mostly unaware of the watchtower up above, as the drones are invisible from the ground below.19
However, in areas where frequent strikes take place, populations have been described as 15 He explores this in his book Being and Nothingness (1943)
16 Described by Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic (1963)
17 From “Society Must Be Defended”
18 Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism”. Disicpline and Punish. Reprinted in Neal Leach, ed. Rethinking Architecture. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
19 In the documentary National Bird (2016) though Afghani victims of drone strikes described being able to hear a distant buzzing sound, knowing that the drones were flying.
becoming ‘inmates’ of the sky: “it amounts to a psychic imprisonment within a parameter no longer defined by bars, barriers and walls, but by the endless circling of flying watchtowers up above” (Chamayou, 45). In one way then, drones can be considered contemporary extensions of the panopticon. However, Foucault’s panopticon did not entail a sovereign ‘tyrannical power’, but a “democratically controlled” power, since it “will be constantly accessible to ‘to the great tribunal committee of the world” (1997a: 365). What kind of power does drone technology then invoke? Drones are, through their use within the military apparatus, restricted from this idea of “democratic control”, as there is a highly confidential atmosphere around them.
Again, looking at the genre of drone warfare films enables a break from this
confidentiality: though fictional, these films give insight into an otherwise closed-off world and allow us to imagine and visualise the reality (and implications) of drone operations, as well as rethink panopticism and surveillance in relation to drone technology.
1.3 The Gaze in Cinema
The gaze is also central in analysing drone warfare films because the medium of cinema itself has a long history concerning the gaze. Film theory often relies on Jacques Lacan’s notion of the gaze, which relates spectatorship and identification to the ‘mirror-stage’: “The gaze becomes the medium for self-differentiation; like a child first individuates his ego when confronted by his mirror image, so does the spectator derive his identity when confronted by a film image”.20
With regards to visual objects, theorists have then identified “four basic looks in relation to images” (Walker & Chaplin, 98), three of which are relevant for my exploration of the concept in relation to cinema here. Firstly, there is “the look of artists and
photographers/filmmakers and their cameras towards the motif or scene to be recorded” (98). Here, the gaze relates to how painters depict what they paint: scenery, objects, people, but also how photographers and filmmakers frame or stage their work. About the ‘cinematic apparatus’, Jean-Louis Comolli stated that “the mechanical eye dominates the other senses, the perspectival system of representation it inherited has surpassed all other systems”, embodying a bourgeois ideology (Walker & Chaplin, 99). This first look is important in considering how the drone camera is positioned towards what is recorded: rather than a cinematic apparatus, it is a military visual apparatus that works in a certain way. At the same time, as my focus is on drone warfare films, the cinematic apparatus is important as well.
A second look entails those “exchanged by depicted characters within pictures or films” (98). Here the issue of framing and the questions of who looks, who is looked at and in what way? are at stake. In cinema specifically, the act of looking is constructed through the use of the 180-degree rule, which creates (spatial) continuity.21 Through point-of-view shots,
shots of faces, and countershots of what is looked at’, the camera creates a closeness to the character whose gaze we follow, which is called focalisation in film narratology. Through whose eyes we experience the story and its effects are important when considering the gaze in film, particularly if we experience the story through the drone pilot’s eyes.
Thirdly, there is “the look of the spectator towards the images” (Walker & Chaplin, 98). For cinema, this is dependent on which character has the gaze. As viewers we are often 20 As described by Jennifer Reinhardt in this blog entry on ‘the gaze’:
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/gaze/
21 “The filmmaker builds the scene’s space around what is called the axis of action, the center line, or the 180-degree line. Any action […] can be thought of as occurring along a line or vector” (Bordwell & Thompson, 233).
asked to identify with the character who focalises or narrates, and are therefore placed in a similar position. Laura Mulvey has famously criticised the gaze in cinema as being an
inherently ‘male gaze’. She argued that in classic Hollywood cinema, men are always
positioned as ‘bearer of the look’, while women are ‘an image’ to be looked at, staged in the spectacle to be gazed upon. In order to gain pleasure (‘scopophilia’) from the viewing experience, female viewers then have to identify with the male position and hence with the self as object. This gaze therefore determines whom the spectator is steered to identify with, a question that raises similar issues with regard to drone warfare films: who are we asked to identify with; the drone victim or the pilots? And how does that position us as viewers?
Regarding drone technology and drone warfare films, the gaze functions on these multiple levels as well: it is the gaze of the drone pilots looking at their screens, employing the mediated gaze of the military apparatus, visualised through a gaze of cinematic codes. If the drone pilots focalise, how does that position us as viewers? Reworking existing theories on the relation between surveillance and cinema, I bring these ideas together by focusing on a ‘surveillance gaze’ and a ‘military gaze’.
0.4 A Contemporary Counterpart to Paul Virilio and the Politics of Verticality
More generally, the relation between cinema and warfare has already been thoroughly explored by cultural theorist Paul Virilio in his book War and Cinema: The Logistics of
Perception (1989). He describes the synchronous or intertwined development of visual and
military technologies, stating that “war is cinema and cinema is war” and that “the battlefield has always been a field of perception” (26). He describes for example how aerial
reconnaissance developed at the beginning of the twentieth century: “cinema and aviation seemed to form a single moment. By 1914, aviation was ceasing to be strictly a means of flying and breaking records; it was becoming one way, or perhaps the ultimate way, of seeing” (22). Thirty years after Virilio’s book and over one hundred years after aviation became ‘the ultimate way of seeing’, how can we think about similar, yet more contemporary versions of these technologies? And how does the ‘way of seeing’ of the drone function and create a particular relation between cinema and military technologies?
“Weapons are tools not just of destruction, but also of perception,” Virilio said, a statement which also applies to drone technology: the drone can be a tool for surveillance as much as a weapon, often collapsing the distinction between the two. Though Virilio
mentions them, drones or UAVs were not prevalent at his time of writing,22 and with
contemporary developments on drone technology, as well as the recent trend of drone warfare films, I argue his theory demands a contemporary ‘update’. New technologies and changing visual paradigms enable us to rethink and recontextualise his ideas in urgent and distinctive ways.
Virilio also stated that “war consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic or other material victories as in appropriating the ‘immateriality’ of perceptual fields” (10), which is also a perspective that will return in this thesis. It relates to the literal vertical perspective onto the ‘battlefield’ but also the figurative ‘vertical politics’ that these scopic regimes entail. Indeed, vertical or aerial perspectives have also been considered by more contemporary writers like Paula Amad, who explores the “myth of aerial vision” by
22 “Most interesting from our point of view however was the pilotless Drone, an aircraft with a wing-span of approximately three metres, whose camera could take two thousand pictures and whose onboard television could broadcast live to a recepter station 240 km away” (103). This 240 km is now highly outdated, as drones can be operated from the US to fly all the way in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
“examining its modern development and its impact (aesthetically, ethically and ideologically) upon how we view, document and understand the world” (67).23
Similarly, architect Eyal Weizman wrote about vertical perspectives and the ‘politics of verticality’ in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict:
A new understanding of territory had to be developed to govern the West Bank. The Occupied Territories were no longer seen as a two-dimensional surface, but as a large three-dimensional volume, layered with strategic, religious and political strata. New and intricate frontiers were invented, […] under which the Palestinian Authority was given control over isolated territorial ‘islands’, but Israel retained control over the airspace above them and the sub-terrain beneath. This process might be described as the ‘politics of verticality’.24
Here, verticality is twofold, representing a figurative position of top down or vertical (rather than horizontal) politics, but also a rather literal seizing of space that moves in a vertical way: from the skies to the underground. Through this, Weizman underlines the importance of airspace as an arena of power relations: “Airspace is a discrete dimension absent from political maps. But it is a space of utmost importance – cluttered with civilian and military airways, allowing a vantage observational point on the terrain under it, denying that position to others”,25 an assertion that will also prove vital to my analysis.
Artist and scholar Hito Steyerl has subsequently extended Weizman’s ideas to visual culture:
Our sense of spatial and temporal orientation has changed dramatically in recent years, prompted by new technologies of surveillance, tracking, and targeting. One of the symptoms of this transformation is the growing importance of aerial views: overviews, Google Map views, satellite views. We are growing increasingly accustomed to what used to be called a God’s-eye view. (13) 26
Drone viewpoints can be considered as part of this changed visual paradigm and this ‘god’s-eye’ (or ‘birds-‘god’s-eye’) viewpoint. Simultaneously, if read through a Virilian lens, it could be argued that this is not a new development as Steyerl states, but a continuation of earlier aerial views: “In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when the military application of balloon, kite, pigeon and rocket photography was still imprecise,
photographing from above, especially from balloons, attracted adventurous amateurs who incorporated the aerial view into pictorial conventions” (Amad, 78). What exactly is then new or different about the bird’s-eye viewpoint as explored through drone imagery? And how can considering drone technologies and their ‘politics of verticality’ contribute to a wider cultural reflection on, but also critique of, vertical perspectives? These questions are at stake in my consideration of drone technology.
23 In her article ‘From God’s-eye to Camera-eye: Aerial Photography’s Post-humanist and Neo-humanist Visions’, published in the journal History of Photography in 2012.
24 In the introduction of The Politics of Verticality: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp
25 https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_810.jsp
1.5 Visual Critique or Resistance: Opposing the Gaze and Countervisuality
This idea of critique on the vertical perspective has already been considered in a recent research project led by Sarah Tuck titled Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest (2016-2018), which explores “how drone technologies impact on photography and human rights, opening up questions about the vertical dimensions of surveillance, warfare and protest”.27 It
also initiates both a focus on the visual and a (visual) critique and resistance to drone vision: “the research will consider the new visuality emerging with drone technologies and the visual and material consequences of images from above as part of a strategy that redefines warfare, surveillance and the infrastructure for protest”.28 Though her objects of analysis,
photography as image and as data, are wholly different from my focus on cinematic
representations of drone warfare, our approach in thinking ‘the visual’ in relation to protest, and critique, is similar. One of the questions I want to address as well is: can we also rethink the scopic regime of drone technology and drone warfare films and find possibilities for resistance or critique, within or outside of these narratives?
Countering particularly the scopic regime of drones by extending and inverting some of its attributes, has already been explored in “Drone Encounters: Noor Behram, Omer Fast and Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare” by Matt Delmont (2013). He considers how “Noor Behram’s photographs of drone attack scenes and Omer Fast’s short film 5,000 Feet Is the
Best undermine the supposed precision of drone technology and the invisibility of drone
warfare” (194). This idea of visual critique or ‘resistance’ to the scopic regime of drone technology as it is presented in drone warfare films, I also intend to engage with, on two (intertwined) levels: the level of visuality and the level of the body and embodiment. Through this, I do not only want to address visual critiques of the paradoxes (between visibility and invisibility for example) inherent to the bird’s-eye viewpoint of drone technology, but also the way it produces bodies, not only the targeted body, but also the body of the drone pilot. For this consideration of resistance or visual critique, I use visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept ‘countervisuality’: “The ‘realism’ of
countervisuality is the means by which one tries to make sense of the un-reality created by visuality’s authority [...] while at the same time proposing a real alternative. It is by no means a simple or mimetic depiction of lived experience, but one that depicts existing realities and counters them with a different realism” (2011a: 5). As I also focus on the role of the body and embodiment, however, I not only argue for countervisuality, but also propose an extension of Mirzoeff’s concept: ‘counter-embodiment’.
1.6 Chapter Structure and Methodology
In Chapter 1 and 2, I will analyse the cinematic language of contemporary drone operation films and particularly focus on the way drone pilots are reading the bodies on their screens and how this constructs a certain gaze. I will take Good Kill as my main object, as this film features most drone operation scenes, but also comparatively branch out to Eye in the Sky and Full Contact to explore similarities in how the drone pilots reading bodies on their screens functions in these films. Particularly contrasting Good Kill with Eye in the Sky reveals interesting differences between the two films, such as the way drone violence is presented as either incidental or structural. My analysis entails a film narratological approach,29 drawing
27 A study undertaken at the University of Copenhagen, by Sarah Tuck, as listed on the webpage for the project: https://akademinvaland.gu.se/forskning/forskningsprojekt/drone-vision--warfare--surveillance--protest
28 ^idem
on Peter Verstraten’s Film Narratology (2009) and David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s
Film Art: An Introduction (2013). In relation to the gaze, particularly narratology’s concept of
‘focalisation’ provides tools to consider narrative techniques within cinema that enables us to read how the drone pilots look at the bodies on their screens.
In Chapter 1, I address this ‘reading of bodies’ through Michel Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’, and Achille Mbembe’s reworking of Foucault through the concept of ‘necropolitics’. In addition, Judith Butler’s concept of ‘grievability of lives’ as explored in Frames of War will be important to consider in relation to this biopolitics. As I argue, drone pilots are not only reading ‘targeted’ bodies, but also the bodies and lives of people who are not considered targets. Through reading these bodies on their screen the drone pilots are deciding about “who must live and who must die” (Mbembe, 11) and therefore also implicitly which lives are considered ‘grievable’ and ‘non-grievable’. Contemporary drone technology, and drone warfare films, in particular then also force us to rethink these already consisting theories of ‘biopower’, and the precarity of lives and consider drone technology as a (visual) site of power.
In Chapter 2, biopolitics and necropolitics will be further explored through the concept of the gaze, particularly considering a ‘surveillance gaze’ and a ‘military gaze’. Though the two chapters are intertwined in analysis and approach to these objects, Chapter 1 takes as its main focus the ‘reading’ of target and non-targeted bodies on screens, and Chapter 2 ‘the gaze’ constructed within these films and the body (and embodiment) of the drone pilot within the military apparatus, and how not only both targeted and non-targeted bodies are read, but also living bodies and dead bodies. Both chapters draw on the
paradoxes which I argue are inherent to drone technology in these films: tensions between remoteness and proximity, between intimacy and detachment, and between visibility and invisibility. In Chapter 2, I will also start moving towards the idea of visual critique or
resistance by analysing how the surveillance gaze is also extended to incorporate the world of the drone pilot.
In Chapter 3, I will deal more constructively with possibilities of ‘resistance’ of, and to, this kind ‘drone gaze’ and the paradoxical relation between visibility and invisibility (and distance and proximity) of the bird’s-eye viewpoint. My approach to resistance is twofold: firstly, it can be considered on a visual level, by considering ways in which certain aspects of the scopic regime are countered, invoking the concept of countervisuality. Secondly, ‘resistance’ can be considered on a level of the body and embodiment, for which I (following Mirzoeff’s
‘countervisuality’) propose the notion ‘counter-embodiment’. The film Full Contact will figure more prominently in this chapter, as it is particularly this film which counters the
embodiment of the drone pilot with other types of embodiment. By exploring the figure of the boxer in the particular, I analyse how Full Contact explores the body and embodiment in a way that is vulnerable, proximate and physical. Visuality and embodiment are not separate, but remain intertwined, similar to the way bodies and the gaze are intertwined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
Chapter 1
From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Drone Pilots Reading and
Producing Bodies
“At this point, it is a matter no longer of surveillance and punishment, but of surveillance and annihilation”
-Grégoire Chamayou in Drone Theory
In this chapter, I will focus on the way drone pilots are reading and interpreting the bodies seen on the drone imagery on their screen, and explore how we can understand this as this move from surveillance and punishment, to surveillance and annihilation. I want to look particularly at how this takes place in the film Good Kill (Andrew Niccol, 2014), by focusing on the scenes in which drone pilot Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) and his crew are surveilling, identifying and bombing their targets. I will close-read how drone imagery is used on a diegetic level and bodies are read by the soldiers as they are mediated through screens. As subsequently these ‘readings’ lead to decisions about life and death, I will relate this reading of bodies to Michel Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’ and Achille Mbembe’s reworking and extension of this concept ‘necropolitics’, which I first explore through outlining how the opening scene of
Good Kill entails a move from reading bodies to decisions of life and death.
Contrasting the opening to other scenes in the film, I further explore biopolitics and necropolitics by arguing that the drone pilots, by constituting these bodies as ‘readable’ signifiers, are also constructing them as identities without identity, relating it to Catherine Zimmer’s work on surveillance cinema,30 and Judith Butler’s ideas on ‘grievability of lives’. I
will also explore the paradoxes inherent to drone technology as a scopic regime, such as that of proximity/intimacy and remoteness/detachment, but also that of visibility and invisibility, related to medium specific issues, such as low image quality and framing and how this also risks ‘mistaken identity’ and collateral damage. These attributes are particularly addressable through the medium specific possibilities of cinema, especially in relation to surveillance cinema, which further emphasises how these films could be considered a subgenre of the surveillance thriller, and the war film, providing a mixture of the two that has the potential of becoming a genre in and of itself.
Good Kill revolves around military pilot Major Thomas Egan, who once flew F-16 fighter jets, but is now ‘flying’ armed drones in foreign air space, operated from an Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada. His service is not entirely voluntarily, as he took on the
assignment due to a reduced call for fighter pilots in the Air Force. By doing UAV tours, Egan
30 As described by Zimmer, films from the early days of cinema “were laying the groundwork for cinematic genres to come, but they were also clearly mapping the kind of exercises of both surveillance narrative and surveillance practice that are often considered more contemporary” (249). Not only contemporary surveillance cinema, but also its extension in the drone warfare film hence has its roots in the earliest days of cinema, underlining how military and surveillance technologies have developed contingently with cinema.
hopes to be ultimately asked back to fly ‘real’ planes for the military, rather than sit in a control in a cabin in the Nevada desert, thousands of miles away from ‘the action’. The film consists of scenes in this control room, exchanged with scenes where Egan is at home. This structure of scenes divided between ‘work life’ and ‘home life’ already emphasises the changed nature of military operations, where the distance between ‘there’ and ‘home’ is obliterated. Though physically close to his family, Thomas distances himself from them by drinking heavily. As the intensity and frequency of drone strikes increases, he becomes more frustrated with the missions, resulting in a downward spiral and a suggested trauma. To further analyse how these drone operation scenes take place in this film, I will start by describing the opening scene of Good Kill, which will function as a ‘base scene’ to which I return for my comparative analysis throughout this chapter, and the rest of the thesis. 1.1Good Kill’s Opening Scene: Biopolitics and Necropolitics
In the opening scene of Good Kill, an intertitle informs the viewer that “After September 11, 2001, the U.S. military began using weaponized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the War on Terror” and that “This story is set in 2010, during the greatest escalation of targeted killings. Based on actual events”. These intertitles are followed by drone imagery, marked by a crosshair in the middle of the image, the use of text, numbers and coordinates on the screen and the use of grainy or low-quality footage shot from above. We are slowly gliding over the buildings located in a desert below, their style assuming a non-Western location due to the square shaped compounds with walled-off backyards, a style typical of rural
Waziristan (Figure 1).
A radio transmitted voice is heard stating: “Eyes on Kahlili objective. 19:30 hours. Entering surveillance hour four”, followed by a close-up of a squinted eye, “No sign of target”. Again a close-up of the squinting eye, and the mouth, stating “Non-combatant approaching”, followed by another drone image frame, in which we see a black dot in the distance moving down the road: the presumed ‘non-combatant’. A shot of a hand moving a K gear forward, intercut with drone images of a person wearing a hijab, and again the squinting eye. A small boy moves to hug the person in the hijab, while the pilot states “Two
combatants” (Figure 2). A different voice is heard: “Fresh op. New heading, one, eight, zero. Insurgents sighted four klicks north, deploying weapons”.
The pilot, still only seen in close-ups of his eyes or mouth, moves a joystick and feet pedals, followed by another drone image in which the camera turns and spins, while he states “Sensor, slow the ball to new coordinates”, after which another gear is pulled and the patch on his uniform is shown to read ‘Thomas Egan’. Again an intercutting of the eye squinting, followed by a drone image not from above but looking ahead in the sky and over mountains, and sounds of either mouse clicks or the snapping of a camera can be heard.31 The drone camera is seen zooming in on a group of young boys with a ball. Cut to another drone image of a different group of people, seen from above, while the voice states: “Eyes on new objective. Throttling back”, intercut with an image of his mouth and of the hands
moving over another gear. The other voice (coming from outside of the scene) states “Guns are hot. Target qualifies. Engage at your discretion”. “Roger that”, the mouth replies.
The camera drone moves along the road to the right, spotting an oncoming bus. Mouse click sounds are heard, zooming in on the bus and the mouth stating: “Civilian bus, one klick south”. The camera moves back to the group, while the ‘external’ voice states: “Too close Major, get the strike on this pass, or abort”. The view returns to the eye and the mouth, stating: “Copy that. I can get it”. Return to the drone image of the group, while the ‘external’ voice states “Rifle when ready”. ‘Our’ character says: “Master arm hot. Fly the laser”, and voice states “Target, lasered”. Images of the mouth and the eye are intercut with images of his hand on a joystick: “Three, two, one, rifle”, he says as he pushes the button: “Missile away, time of flight, ten seconds”. The missile strikes on the crosshair (centred on the group), and fire and smoke are seen, just before the bus reaches the location of the strike. The drone imagery is now seen in extreme close-up and it becomes clear that these images are
mediated through a screen. The camera pans to the right in a 180 degree turn, revealing the face belonging to the eyes and mouth we had been watching until that point – the face of Thomas Egan – who states: “Good kill”.
Already from this opening scene, the reading and interpretation of bodies viewed on a screen is apparent. The figures identified as a woman, signified by wearing a black hijab, and a child are marked as ‘non-combatants’, while the ‘insurgents’ are recognisable (though not easily identifiable) as males carrying rifles. An emphasis is laid on the act of looking, a 31This ironically intertwines the meaning of the military term “klick” (a distance of one kilometre or 0,62 miles) with the meaning of the mouse click.
Figure 2: Two figures described as 'non-combatants'
gaze that is marked by a ‘bird’s-eye view’ from far above and on a relation between the grainy drone images and the eye of the drone pilot. This is indicated by the fragmented representation of eyes, followed by countershots of what is seen on screen, removing the borders of the screen in favour of a direct representation of this grainy footage: our eye coincides with that of the drone pilot, and we see what he sees. The targets do not know they are being watched, putting the drone operators in a position of power.
This idea of the drone pilots watching without targets knowing they are being watched invokes the idea of panopticism. Like the inmates who are subject of the gaze from the watchtower, the same applies to the targets who are subjected to drone technology: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in
communication” (Foucault, 1997a: 361). A certain type of ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’ seems to be present when it comes to the reading of these bodies, constructing a “domain of life over which power has taken control” (Mbembe, 12). It invokes the ‘sovereign power’ Foucault described in The History of Sexuality: “[…] one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death” (135). Like the sovereign, the drone pilots (or their commanders) decide who gets to live and who gets to die based on the footage and movements of bodies on the screen. Foucault further develops this concept of power in “Society Must Be Defended”:
[…] in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we saw the emergence of techniques of power that were essentially centered on the body, on the individual body. They included all devices that were used to ensure the spatial distribution of individual bodies (their separation, their alignment, their serialization, and their surveillance) and the organization, around those individuals, of a whole field of visibility. (242)
In the opening scene of Good Kill, this organisation of a ‘field of visibility’ around individuals is invoked as well: the idea of a spatial distribution or separation of which bodies need to be killed, becomes clear through the way distinctions are made between targets and ‘non-combatants. A relation between visuality and the body was also described by Foucault with regard to the medical gaze: a readability of bodies produces knowledge about, and hence power over, those bodies.32 In Good Kill, reading for knowledge also leads to a position of
power, which is underlined by the fact that the bodies on screen are unaware they are watched: the field of visibility is a one-sided one, and hence also entails an invisibility.
For the second half of the eighteenth century, Foucault sees a different development regarding power and its relation to bodies: “a new technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary […] Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new non-disciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species” (1978: 242). With this development, it is not so much (only) about controlling and organising individual bodies (anatomo-politics), but more about controlling the mass and bodies as a collective: “Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (1978: 245). Issues pertaining to biopolitics therefore include the population’s “birth rate, mortality rate, various biological disabilities and the effects of the environment” (1978: 245).
With the move from anatomo-politics to biopolitics, and from punishment of the individual body to control of collective bodies, for Foucault, death became “no longer
something that suddenly swooped down on life”, but something “permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it” (1978: 244). With drone technology, it could be said to be both: when a missile strikes, it is quite literally death ‘swooping down on life’, hitting unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere: the group targeted in the opening scene are unaware they will be bombed until the moment of strike.
At the same time, in a state of perpetual and continuous drone strikes, death is always a possibility, even for those bodies that are not directly targeted (for example the people on the bus who narrowly escape death), but do risk becoming collateral damage: it ‘slips in’ permanently. At moment the drone pilots or their commanders decide that a target ‘qualifies’, such as done by the commander of Thomas Egan, and that killing is in order, the idea of Foucauldian anatomo-politics and biopolitics becomes more in line with what Achille Mbembe defines as ‘necropolitics’. This is a reworking of Foucault’s concept that returns to the question of sovereignty: “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides […] in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11).33
Mbembe’s sees Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ as insufficient to address more contemporary forms of domination, subjugation and violence, which drone warfare could be considered as well. “What place is given to life, death, and the human body? […] How are they inscribed in the order of power?” is then a question that is definitely at stake in considering the scopic regime of drone technology. Mbembe describes politics and
“becoming subject” as the “work of death”, and his concern is particularly “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14).
Particularly the material destruction of bodies applies to the destruction and control over life and death involved in drone warfare operations, in general, but also particularly in
Good Kill as well: with the pilots deciding who lives and who dies, drone technology might be
better understood in the realm of necropolitics. Yet, as we saw in the opening scene, not only the bodies of targets were being read, there is a whole process of signification around the non-targeted bodies as well. How do we then further understand this process, which is also found in other scenes in Good Kill, and how does this relation between signification and drone technology and the move from biopolitics to necropolitics function?
1.2 Surveillance Cinema and Processes of Signification: From Biopolitics to Necropolitics
Similar to Foucault’s conception of anatomo-politics and biopolitics, Catherine Zimmer describes how visual technologies associated with cinema “are intimately connected with surveillance practice and the production of knowledge through visibility” (428). She argues that surveillance in cinema was also originally employed as a means to discipline and manage the human body:
The cinematic apparatus can be considered as a cultural technology for the discipline and management of the human body, and […] the long history of bodily analysis in medicine and science is critically tied to the history of the development of the cinema as a popular cultural institution and a technological apparatus. (248)
This development is found in early cinema, where surveillance narratives and practices also related to the visibility, reading and production of bodies, as Zimmer argues. Historically, the black body was produced, in films such as A Nigger in the Woodpile (1904), as an “identity that is without identity: a signifier upon which the narrative can turn” (432). In this ‘caught in the act’ narrative, the slang expression of ‘a nigger in the woodpile’, meaning “suspicious and/or concealed” (432), figures literally and figuratively, as there are two black men
sneaking into a woodpile and being blown up by hidden explosives. The film thus plays “with the stereotype of Black criminality by multiplying the meaning of the title to signify the identity of the criminals, the scene of the crime, and the means of their exposure and punishment” (422). Zimmer links this to the historical surveillance and punishment of escaped slaves through visual means, like the slave pass and ‘Wanted’ posters, which served to “produce identifiable visual markers around black identity, establish surveillance around an assumption of black criminality, and use that surveillance to expose and discipline” (432). Cinematic narratives around race were hence organised similarly to real-life surveillance practices, by “producing a black figure as an identity that is without identity: a signifier upon which the narrative can turn” (432).
In drone warfare films, the use of drone surveillance and the interpretation of the images also leads to ‘foreign’ bodies being produced as “identities without identity”,
signifiers upon which a narrative can turn, but also signifiers which can be read and projected onto. This is not only visible in the opening scene of Good Kill where women and children are signified as ‘non-combatants’, but is also particularly striking at times where we see drone operators voyeuristically witnessing private moments in the lives of the people and
communities that appear in their crosshairs, but which are outside the realm of the mission. An example of this appears when Thomas Egan’s co-pilot Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz) looks at imagery of a boy playing football, and says “He’s getting good”, as if she was watching a home movie of a neighbourhood boy playing in the street. “Focus on the compound”, Thomas Egan tells her. They zoom in on a house with a courtyard, shielded off by a concrete wall. A woman sits down and takes of her headscarf, brushing her hair, revealing an
extremely private moment not meant for public eyes (Figure 3). At the end of the scene, their commanding officer then says “As much as I’d like to watch her put her son to sleep, I gotta be home before my kids wake up”. This not only underlines the obliteration of ‘here’ and ‘there’ (simultaneously being at war and being ‘home’), but also the power relations of this panopticon-like vision become apparent again: they reveal a one-sided intimacy and proximity.
This intimacy is also described by Derek Gregory, but more in relation to the drone analysts identifying with the American troops on the ground, rendering the ‘Othered’ space familiar: “high-resolution imagery is not a uniquely technical capacity but part of a techno-cultural system that renders ‘our’ space familiar even in ‘their’ space – which remains obdurately Other” (201). As Good Kill reveals, this intimacy and identification can also apply to local civilians: there is a familiarity, with the drone pilots relating to the lives on their screens as if they knew them. Though a political potential could be found there, and the idea that
recognition and identification might stop them from bombing certain targets, the one-sidedness of their viewpoint will always make this only a projection on the bodies on their screens. Again, it becomes a recognition of ‘our’ space in ‘their’ space, without fully engaging with the Other and understanding them as human subjects.
In scenes where drone pilots witness these private moments, this surveillance becomes more structural and does not only relate to the body of the (targeted) individual anymore, but also becomes a way of controlling non-combatants, entire populations even. I would argue that in these moments it moves from the anatomo-politics of the “man-as-body” to the biopolitics of “man-as-species” (Foucault, 1978: 243). It is a type of surveillance
that no longer
sticks to one
individual body,
but to all kinds
of bodies, one
that
“regularises” life and controls the lives of those civilians who are part of the communities in the countries where this control takes place: not only targeted bodies are read, but also
targeted bodies are signified and projected onto. Drone technology then does not only entail a shift from biopolitics to necropolitics, but is also very much grounded in both biopolitics (of both the individual and the population) and necropolitics.
This ‘scopophilic’ (illusion of) proximity and intimacy,34 and the ‘projection’ onto these
bodies reaches its final dramatic peak at the end of Good Kill, where a traumatised Thomas Egan locks himself in the control room. He strikes a missile at a man seen raping a woman several times throughout the film, a man previously referred to as “a bad guy, just not our bad guy”. In this final act, the film suggests that Thomas’ final “Good Kill” (perhaps the true “Good Kill” of the film’s title), is one he can actually live with: he has directly helped a woman he witnessed being violated and presumably made her life better through his own agency, rather than killing suspected terrorists, and civilians, on behalf of an invisible commander.
However, how can Thomas know that the (sexual) violence he witnessed made this woman a victim? Though the violence seems obvious, this woman could still be
(economically or socially) dependent on this man. Circumstantial and possibly complicating factors cannot be determined from drone imagery alone, and hence this scene presents the ultimate and final projection of a white male saviour onto a female, foreign and presumed victimised body. More significantly, it also puts at risk the life of the woman, as we hear Thomas say “Oh please, please, please, please get up” after she lays on the ground after the strike. This position reveals again how proximity renders (the space of) the ‘Other’ as
familiar: Thomas feels a closeness to the woman, a sense of proximity that puts him in the position of saviour. However, this proximity is merely an illusion and will always remain one-sided, again pointing to the techno-cultural mediation Gregory discussed: it is a recognition of ‘our’ space in ‘their’ space, “which remains obdurately Other” (201).
These processes of signification can finally also be reconsidered with regard to a move from biopolitics to necropolitics. Mbembe states that with necropolitics, “sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (27). In that sense, necropolitics and sovereignty are comparable to Judith Butler’s ‘grievable lives’ and ‘non-grievable lives’.35 Bodies of women and children (‘non-combatants’)
were shown to be ‘read’ and signified differently than the bodies of (‘military aged’) males (‘insurgents’), and in the subsequent drone operation scenes in the film assessing whether collateral damage is ‘proportionate’ depends on these bodies, the drone pilots deciding which are ‘grievable’. Butler describes the idea of ‘grievable lives’ as follows:
We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others – even if it means taking those latter lives. (38)
In the way bodies are read in Good Kill, the drone pilots are automatically making a
distinction between grievable and non-grievable lives, with the lives of females and children being considered grievable, and the lives of ‘military aged males’ non-grievable. This reading 34 Scopophilia can be defined as the act of looking itself as a form of pleasure (Mulvey, 835)
of bodies and signification process of ‘collateral damage’ is hence highly gendered: men are automatically not considered civilians, while for women there it is assumed that they could not be terrorists. With drone technology then, the distinction between grievable and non-grievable lives does not only entail the lives of the drone pilots or American ground soldiers as grievable and those of the local tribes and populations as non-grievable, but also entails a distinction within the population itself, with the women and children being ‘grievable’ lives, counting as ‘collateral damage’, and the lives of ‘military aged males’ (regardless whether they are innocent civilians or not) as non- grievable.
1.3 Frames of War and Mistaken Identity
Another important aspect about these processes of signification is that this difference between combatants and civilians, or the difference between objects or circumstances, could also be interpreted wrongly. Not only is this due to the ‘projecting’ and interpreting done by the drone operators, but also due to technological factors, such as the low image quality of the drone footage. In one scene for example, a commanding officer orders to do a “double tap”, to kill the rescuers’, who are presumed to be affiliated with potential terrorist targets. Drone pilot Vera Suarez protests: “They are rescuers”, while another drone pilot argues “Who do you think these first responders are going to be, Quakers? Those rescuers have RPGs”, to which Suarez retorts: “I see people with shovels”. In another scene, one of the drone operators ‘reads’ a night vision image of a car filled with crates with ball-like objects as a car filled with grenades, while their commander says (in an interesting semiotic shift): “No, they are pomegranates”. Objects and bodies being read incorrectly, is rather realistic, as a former real-life drone data analyst states: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian's life all because of a bad image or angle”.36
Also, as seen in the opening scene of Good Kill, the camera is able to pan and spotted the civilian bus just in time to coordinate the missile flight time and prevent civilian
casualties. Yet, in a different scene in Good Kill, exactly in the ten seconds the missile is underway to strike, two young boys unexpectedly run ‘into’ the frame and hence into line of strike, causing one of the drone pilots to shout at the screen: “Run, you little shits!” (Figure 4). The technology and the boundaries of the frame of the camera, and therefore also that of the screen and the viewpoint of the drone operator, in combination with the time it takes for the missile to reach its target, not only risks objects and bodies being read ‘wrongly’, but also risks something unforeseen being just outside of that frame, such as the two children
‘walking into the screen’ at the last moment.
36 in an interview with The Guardian in 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military
As Butler also argues “Framing cannot always contain what it seeks to make visible or
readable, it remains structured by the aim of instrumentalizing certain visions of reality. This means that the frame is always throwing something away, always keeping something out” (xiii). In the case of drone warfare films, this is also a literal framing: the drone camera, and the screen on which the footage is watched, that wants to make bodies not only visible, but also ‘readable’. Simultaneously, these images remain vulnerable to possible ‘interventions’ from outside the frame, visualising what Butler calls the “precarity at the limit of the frame” (xvi). The scopic regime of drone technology hence again invokes a paradox. The bird’s-eye viewpoint assumes an omniscient and mobile gaze that produces a kind of visibility and ‘readability’ of bodies that is otherwise impossible for humans to physically encompass. However, it simultaneously produces a limit to the technology, which in turn undermines this visibility and points more towards the ‘invisibility’ or blind spot of the technology.
This limit is also already present in the films described by Zimmer: “while ‘caught in the act’ and chase films were frequent narrative tropes, misunderstanding and mistaken identity were equally common” (431). Much like these films, through mistaken identity, “serve to undermine the production of identity through visual technologies” (431), it could be said that for drone technology in drone warfare films the same is true. The risk of misreading the bodies on the screens of drone pilots also undermines the production of identity through the visual technology of the drone and affirms it as what Gregory refers to as
a
‘techno-cultural mediation’, or, as I argue, a scopic regime that is not neutral but produces bodies and its own limits. Though drone technology gives the illusion of proximity and precision, some of the examples I described involving the ‘lacks’ of the technology, further leads to non-targeted, civilian bodies being implicated in drone strikes. Hence, it not only becomes a biopolitical control of populations, but also the necropolitical destruction of those populations, tearing apart bodies, families and communities through the use of technology and its inherent flaws.
Mbembe’s analysis ultimately focuses on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, following Weizman’s ‘politics of verticality’, and describes how in this conflict there is a proliferation of the sites of violence: “The underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict zones” (29), leading to systematic destruction of societal and urban networks and an
“infrastructural warfare” (29). This form of “late-modern colonial occupation” entails a “concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical” (29). The same ‘multiplicity’ of powers at play can be considered with drone warfare operations, as I tried to work through in this chapter. It is an anatomo-political targeting/disciplining of individual bodies and a biopolitical control of populations by implicating them in this targeting, and finally, it is also a necropolitical destruction of both individuals and
populations: “it allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy” (30).
1.4 Conclusion
