War Isn't Hell, it's Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict

Real war is a cruel theater of death, yet it is also an exciting narrative exploited for national, political and commercial purposes and turned into numerous films, television shows, computer games, news stories and reenactment plays. This book examines the relationship between war, visual media and entertainment from a number of academic perspectives such as film studies, cultural studies, new media studies, sociology and history. Key topics of the essays include: how war is used as an imaginary site to stage dramas; how boundaries between war, media, and entertainment dissolve as new media alters the formal qualities of representation; how entertainment is used to engage audiences; and, what effect products of war and entertainment have on consumers of popular culture.