| Abstract
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Examining rhetorical constructions that resist the dehumanization and alienation of others into enemies should improve our ability to articulate alternatives to war. Accordingly, this dissertation focuses on identifying humanizing constructions of soldiers and enemies that resist a militaristic aesthetic by challenging and rearticulating dominant myths embedded in the logic of war. Toward this peace-building end, this project puts rhetoric as a cultural practice into conversation with media and film studies to better understand how war might be made more difficult to justify. Specifically, I identify humanizing images in a set of four rhetorical texts released after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. My analysis focuses on the relationship of narratives, images, and myths in the MTV documentary, True Life: I'm Living in Iraq (2004), the PBS documentary, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (2007), and two fiction films: Jarhead (2005) and In the Valley of Elah (2007). Each of the four films in this analysis represents an attempt at perspective taking, with varying degrees of success. Through editing and narrative, each film attempts to recast enemies and heroes not as abstract caricatures, but as characters with families, flaws, histories, and other human traits. I argue that these films ask audience members to look back at their own position or assumptions from the vantage point of the Other to promote an attitude of critical reflection. Ultimately, this project highlights the possibilities of film and media as a site of dissent from war. Through illuminating how audiences might identify with characters and thus identify with the particular message of the film, this analysis highlights how film may function as a site for social and political change by producing models of rehumanization for audiences to emulate. In addition, this project shows how film's ability to court audiences through processes of identification is important to the correction of demonizing narratives and to the rehumanizing process.
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