The Military Gaze: War, Intelligence and Security on Twenty-First-Century Screens

Edited Collection

ed. Jo Coghlan, University of New England, Australia

The Military Gaze: War, Intelligence and Security on Twenty-First-Century Screens

The military is among the most visible institutions of twenty-first-century screen culture. Film and television take audiences onto battlefields and military bases, inside intelligence agencies and special operations units, into drone control rooms and surveillance centres, and into the homes of soldiers, veterans and covert operatives. Yet the military gaze works in two directions. We watch military and security institutions while those institutions increasingly exercise power by watching others.

The Military Gaze: War, Intelligence and Security on Twenty-First-Century Screens invites contributions examining how film and television have represented, organised and interrogated military and security power since 2001.

The collection begins from an expanded understanding of what counts as military. Conventional armed forces remain central, but twenty-first-century screens repeatedly locate military practices within special forces, intelligence agencies, counterterrorism organisations, covert operations, paramilitary formations, private military contractors and technologically mediated systems of warfare. They also follow soldiers and operatives beyond deployment into domestic life, veteranhood and civilian institutions. The boundaries separating soldier, spy, security operative, contractor and civilian have become increasingly difficult to locate.

The concept of the military gaze provides a framework for bringing these representations together. The gaze concerns both how military power is made visible and how military power sees. Intelligence gathering, surveillance, reconnaissance, targeting systems, drones, satellites and algorithmic technologies transform vision into an instrument of military and security power. At the same time, film and television construct particular positions from which audiences encounter soldiers, institutions, enemies and violence. Who gets to look? Who becomes visible? Who remains hidden? Who possesses the authority to identify another person as soldier, civilian, threat or enemy?

This approach shifts attention beyond the war film and the battlefield. The military is also an institution and a social world, with distinctive hierarchies, languages, bodies, uniforms, spaces, rituals, technologies, relationships and forms of knowledge. Twenty-first-century screens allow audiences to enter these worlds, while shaping how military authority, secrecy, violence, belonging and identity become visible and intelligible.

Suggested Case Studies and Approaches

Contributors are encouraged to consider individual texts, comparative studies, genres, national screen cultures and transnational representations. The following case studies and approaches are indicative rather than exhaustive.

Conventional Armed Forces and Military Culture

• Black Hawk Down (2001)
• Jarhead (2005)
• Kokoda (2006)
• Generation Kill (2008)
• The Hurt Locker (2008)
• Our Girl (2013–2020)
• Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (2019)
• The Outpost (2020)

Possible approaches include soldiering and military identity, hierarchy and the chain of command, training and discipline, military language, combat and boredom, institutional culture, comradeship, military bodies, national military traditions and everyday military life.

Elite and Special Forces

• Lone Survivor (2013)
• 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
• SIX (2017–2018)
• SEAL Team (2017–2024)
• SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022–)
• Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (2023)

Possible approaches include elite military identity, selection and training, secrecy, exceptionalism, masculinity, expertise, comradeship, sacrifice and the cultural mythology surrounding special operations.

CIA and Covert American Power

• Homeland (2011–2020)
• Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
• Sicario (2015)
• American Made (2017)
• Special Ops: Lioness / Lioness (2023–)
• The Agency (2024–)

Possible approaches include intelligence gathering, covert action, secrecy, surveillance, infiltration, assassination, national security, deniable violence and the increasingly uncertain boundary between intelligence and military action.

Intelligence, Security and Alliance

• The Code (2014–2016)
• Secret City (2016–2019)
• Pine Gap (2018)
• Total Control (2019–2024)

Possible approaches include intelligence sharing, surveillance, sovereignty, strategic alliances, the Five Eyes network, secrecy, political accountability, security institutions, geopolitical dependency and autonomy, and relationships between national and transnational security structures.

Soviet and Russian Intelligence

• The Americans (2013–2018)
• Bridge of Spies (2015)
• Red Sparrow (2018)

Possible approaches include espionage and state service, ideological loyalty, secrecy, intelligence training, enemy perspectives, Cold War memory, competing national identities and the incorporation of covert state power into everyday and domestic life.

British Intelligence and Security

• Spooks (2002–2011)
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
• The Night Manager (2016)
• Official Secrets (2019)
• Slow Horses (2022–)

Possible approaches include secrecy, surveillance, bureaucracy, institutional loyalty and failure, intelligence work, disclosure and whistleblowing, and relationships between security organisations, military power and democratic states.

Israeli Intelligence and Security

• Munich (2005)
• Fauda (2015–)
• Operation Finale (2018)
• Tehran (2020–)

Possible approaches include intelligence, counterterrorism, assassination, undercover operations, infiltration, surveillance, national security, competing perspectives and representations of state violence.

Counterterrorism and the Security State

• 24 (2001–2010)
• Homeland (2011–2020)
• The Code (2014–2016)
• Eye in the Sky (2015)
• Patriots Day (2016)
• Bodyguard (2018)
• Pine Gap (2018)

Possible approaches include counterterrorism, emergency powers, surveillance, interrogation, security, intelligence, threat construction, exceptional measures and the movement of military practices and logics into civilian institutions.

Paramilitary and Covert Operations

• Sicario (2015)
• Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
• The Contractor (2022)
• The Terminal List (2022–)
• Special Ops: Lioness / Lioness (2023–)

Possible approaches include deniable violence, clandestine operations, blurred institutional authority, secrecy, extrajudicial action and increasingly uncertain distinctions between soldier, intelligence operative, police officer, contractor and civilian.

Private Military Power and Mercenaries

• Blood Diamond (2006)
• The A-Team (2010)
• Strike Back (2010–2020)
• Extraction (2020)
• The Contractor (2022)

Possible approaches include mercenaries, private military companies, the commercialisation of military expertise, military labour, loyalty and payment, post-service identities and the detachment of organised violence from direct state service.

Military Technologies and the Gaze at a Distance

• Good Kill (2014)
• Eye in the Sky (2015)
• Black Mirror, “Men Against Fire” (2016)
• Pine Gap (2018)
• Outside the Wire (2021)
• Interceptor (2022)

Possible approaches include drones, remote warfare, targeting, surveillance, satellites, screens, artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, algorithms, missile defence, technologically mediated perception, distance and responsibility, and the transformation of seeing into a military act.

This category foregrounds the collection’s central concern particularly clearly: audiences watch military institutions whose own capacity to act increasingly depends upon technologies of watching.

Occupation and Counterinsurgency

• Generation Kill (2008)
• The Hurt Locker (2008)
• Green Zone (2010)
• Our Girl (2013–2020)
• Mosul (2019)

Possible approaches include occupation, counterinsurgency, asymmetric warfare, civilian populations, checkpoints and borders, cultural difference, military space, the occupier’s gaze and relationships between military knowledge and unfamiliar environments.

Enemy and Adversary Militaries

• Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
• Lebanon (2009)
• The Americans (2013–2018)
• Deutschland 83 (2015)
• Mosul (2019)
• Tehran (2020–)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
• Andor (2022–)

Possible approaches include enemy perspectives, opposing military institutions, national and ideological difference, identification and estrangement, humanisation, enemy-making, competing gazes and distinctions between “our” military and “theirs”.

This category particularly invites consideration of what happens when the enemy becomes the subject rather than the object of military vision. What changes when audiences look with an adversary rather than simply at one?

Military Domesticity

• Army Wives (2007–2013)
• Brothers (2009)
• The Americans (2013–2018)
• Thank You for Your Service (2017)
• SEAL Team (2017–2024)

Possible approaches include marriage, parenthood, intimacy, military families, secrecy within the home, emotional labour, absence and return, and the extension of military and security institutions into domestic space.

Veterans and Military Afterlives

• In the Valley of Elah (2007)
• Homeland (2011–2020)
• American Sniper (2014)
• Thank You for Your Service (2017)
• Bodyguard (2018)
• The Terminal List (2022–)

Possible approaches include return, memory, trauma, veteran identity, institutional belonging, civilian reintegration, violence after service and the persistence of military ways of seeing and acting beyond formal military life.

Gender and Military or Security Power

• Homeland (2011–2020)
• Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
• The Americans (2013–2018)
• Our Girl (2013–2020)
• The Old Guard (2020)
• Interceptor (2022)
• Special Ops: Lioness / Lioness (2023–)

Possible approaches include female soldiers and operatives, gendered military authority, military bodies, leadership, violence, sexuality, motherhood, masculinity and femininity, the gendered gaze and institutional cultures historically organised around masculine authority.

Military Memory and National Mythology

• Kokoda (2006)
• The Water Diviner (2014)
• Deadline Gallipoli (2015)
• Gallipoli (2015)
• Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (2019)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Possible approaches include military mythology, war memory, commemoration, masculinity, sacrifice, military heritage, national identity, historical reconstruction and the ways twenty-first-century screens look back at earlier wars.

The military gaze can therefore look backwards as well as outwards. Screen cultures continually reconstruct earlier conflicts through the political, cultural and visual frameworks of the present.

Military Bureaucracy and Satire

• In the Loop (2009)
• Enlisted (2014)
• War Machine (2017)
• Space Force (2020–2022)

Possible approaches include military bureaucracy, administration, hierarchy, incompetence, institutional absurdity, political decision-making, civil-military relationships, satire and comedy as a means of making military institutions differently visible.

Speculative Militaries

• Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009)
• Avatar (2009)
• Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
• The Expanse (2015–2022)
• Occupation (2018)
• Occupation: Rainfall (2020)
• Outside the Wire (2021)
• Interceptor (2022)
• Andor (2022–)

Possible approaches include military government, empire, colonialism, invasion, occupation, authoritarianism, insurgency, resistance, civil-military relations, technological warfare, artificial intelligence, imagined enemies, national defence and the use of speculative worlds to estrange contemporary military power.

Watching and Being Watched

These categories deliberately overlap. The Americans can be approached through intelligence, enemy perspectives, domesticity or gender; Homeland through intelligence, counterterrorism, gender or veteranhood; Eye in the Sky through counterterrorism, technology, surveillance or remote warfare; Pine Gap through intelligence, surveillance, technology, alliance or sovereignty; and Andor through enemy militaries, occupation, surveillance or speculative militarism. Such overlaps are central to the collection’s purpose. They demonstrate how difficult it has become to isolate “the military” as a discrete institution within twenty-first-century screen culture.

Proposals addressing other relevant films, television programmes and streaming productions, including work examining screen cultures beyond the predominantly Anglophone examples listed here, are strongly encouraged.

The Military Gaze asks what becomes visible when military power is placed on screen and how acts of looking participate in the production of that power. Twenty-first-century screens have expanded military representation beyond soldiers and battlefields to encompass intelligence networks, covert operations, surveillance technologies, private actors, domestic spaces, veterans, enemies and imagined military institutions. At the same time, the institutions being watched have become increasingly dependent upon their own practices and technologies of observation.

The military gaze therefore names a relationship between seeing and power. It asks how screens teach audiences to recognise soldiers and enemies, how military institutions identify threats and targets, how some forms of violence become spectacular while others remain concealed, and how the boundary between watcher and watched is constructed.

To examine the military gaze in the twenty-first century is to ask not only how we see military power, but how military power has learned to see.

Email Abstracts and brief biography to jo.coghlan@une.edu.au.

Abstracts due 1 March 2027.