How geopolitical becomes personal: Method acting, war films and affect
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219832328 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | M Evren Eken |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219832328
Journal of International Political Theory
2019, Vol. 15(2) 210 –228
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1755088219832328
journals.sagepub.com/home/ipt
How geopolitical becomes
personal: Method acting,
war films and affect
M Evren Eken
Süleyman Demirel University, Turkey
Abstract
This article is about weaponisation of emotions through visual culture. It interrogates
how geopolitics trickles down to everyday life and becomes personal through the
embodiment of screen actors. While International Relations is attempting to move
beyond the limits of existing disciplinary methods and methodologies to better
grasp the emotional depths of world politics, this article delves into the ‘method’ in
performance arts to understand how visual culture diffuses emotional narratives of the
state to the population and affectively enables people to experience the international
from the perspective of the United States. In this sense, focusing on ‘method acting’
which revolutionised performance arts in the United States from the 1950s, the article
examines the mundane encounters in visual culture through which screen/state actors
emotionally situate the audience to make them viscerally experience geopolitics,
personally feel like a state/warrior and embody a commitment to the war effort at an
emotional level.
Keywords
Affect, critical geopolitics, everyday, films, method acting, visuality
Introduction
It was the 1990s and I was watching a Jaws movie on television with my mother. As the
movie progressed, the tension was building up, immersing me further in the realms of the
world unfolding before me. And in one specific scene, when the shark’s open jaws sud-
denly popped up on the TV screen, something happened in me. My limbs began to move
in sync without my will, making me wince and jolt backwards. Initially, I took it for
granted for a while. After all, I was a child and it was an occasional movie experience for
me. Sporadically, even my hands were sweating out of excitement, and I was feeling
Corresponding author:
M Evren Eken, Süleyman Demirel University, IIBF, Isparta 32260, Turkey.
Email: Evren_eken@yahoo.com
832328IPT0010.1177/1755088219832328Journal of International Political TheoryEken
research-article2019
Article
Eken 211
shivers down my spine while watching any film. Yet, in a few minutes, something similar
happened to my mother too. Watching the movie next to me, face in her hands, she
obliviously and most vigorously began to drag herself backwards in an effort as though
she was the person trying to pull her friend from the ocean to the safety of the boat while
the great white was approaching. Somehow we were affectively engaged, vicariously
experiencing and bodily reacting to other people’s sensations through a TV screen. The
process was taking place in our everyday life settings. We were not on screen or wired to
it yet tingling with emotions as if we were.
Almost a decade later, everyone was talking about Saving Private Ryan (1998). I
remember how I watched it on a computer screen with headphones on, alone. It was a
captivating experience from the onset. Moreover, it turned out to be the first movie that
allowed me to experience the horrors of war in ways that I could not explain. I vividly
remember how I could not pull myself together for almost 10 days after watching the
movie. Unable to escape the nagging screams, whizzing bullets and afterimages from my
mind, I found myself replaying some scenes in my head again and again. And whenever
I remembered them, my face was getting contorted with bitterness and rage. I knew that
it was just a movie and I was safe, and all the same I was reacting as though I was there
in Normandy in 1944. Why? Why did I feel that fear? Why did I feel involved in the lives
and stakes of those soldiers? Or why did my body try to dodge those bullets as though I
was there? How was something from the depths of the screen able to transmit emotions,
transport my embodiment and transcend my seeming sovereignty on my body and sub-
jectivity? Simply put, why were those moving images moving me?
As Slaby (2014) points out, ‘we are sometimes literally “in the grip” of a situation,
without much intentional control. The events unfolding around us draw us in, carry us
away, make “us” a part of their dynamics, whether we want it or not’ (2014: 44). As a
result, we begin to give a damn about and emotionally feel involved in some events.
Sometimes unwittingly, or even reluctantly, external events begin to matter for us and
gradually we feel an action-oriented commitment, involvement or excitement for them.
In this vein, neither wars nor movies respect the well-established Cartesian axiom relat-
ing to our bodily sovereignty. They both move, penetrate and tear us apart in many ways.
Yet whereas wars’ impacts are more obvious and tangible, we are still oblivious to the
affects and powers of moving images and their ramifications in International Relations
(IR) regarding the relationship between everyday life, emotions, visuality and geopoli-
tics. Put differently, we know that the personal is political, but how does a reverse devel-
opment that makes the political personal and emotional occur? And if it is the case, what
is the role of visuality and emotions in this political hijacking process that engenders a
geopolitical ownership among people? Taking everyday life as the relational locus of
emotions, visuality and geopolitics, this article examines the mundane ways in which
geopolitical becomes emotionally personal through the visual performances of screen
actors.
Visuality and emotions have become the new fascinations of IR scholarship in the last
two decades (Åhäll and Gregory, 2015; Anderson, 2011; Blanchette, 2014; Clément and
Sangar, 2018; Crawford, 2000; Eken, 2016; Eroukhmanoff and Fazendeiro, 2018; Hast,
2018; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2014; Koschut, 2017; MacDonald, Hughes and Dodds
2010; Mercer, 2014; Solomon, 2015). While offering new dimensions to understand the
To continue reading
Request your trial