JUMP CUT
A
REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
1. Rick Bragg, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story. New York: Knopf, 2003.
2. See,
for example, http://www.jessica-lynch.com/; http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Jessica_Lynch;
http://www.jessica-lynch.com/photos.html;
http://jessicalynch.newstrove.com/; etc.
3. “Seven
theses about border genres / five modest proposals about docudrama,” Screening
the Past, 14, 2002, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/
firstrelease/fr0902/paget/dpfr14b.htm.
4. BBC News, World Edition: “Rescued POW Flown to Germany,” 4/3/2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2hi/middle_east/2908477.stm
5. CNN.com, “Rescued
POW Has First Surgery,” 4/3/03, http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/
South/04/03/sprj.irq.rescue
6. The Guardian Unlimited, “The Truth About Jessica,” May 15, 2003.
7. See The
Guardian Unlimited, “The Truth About Jessica,” May
15, 2003, as well as Robert Scheer, “Saving Private Lynch,
Take 2”
http://www.alternet.org/story/15958.
8. See Steven N. Lipkin, Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002): 150 (note 4).
9. Lipkin 149 n. 4.
10. See Lipkin: 13; 23-27. Docudramas also will sequence the real and what it must re-create, that is, alternate between re-created and actual footage, so that the modeled material benefits from its literal closeness to documentary imagery. The interviews with Easy Company veterans that open each episode of Band of Brothers set up this strategy. For better or worse, Oliver Stone used sequencing throughout JFK as a means to augment the authenticity of the claims the film would forward. Another warranting strategy, interaction, places actual and re-created elements within the mise en scene, so that real-life principals move through scenes with actors (the real Jim Garrison in JFK), or actors move through the actual locations where the re-created events originally occurred (the Illinois State Penitentiary in Call Northside 777; the town hall with its memorial wall in Perfect Storm).
11. On The
Insider, see
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert
/ebert_reviews/1999/11/110506.html.
On A
Beautiful Mind, see The New York Times 21 Dec. 2002: “From
Math to Madness, and Back.” On The Hurricane, see
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert
/ebert_reviews/2000/01/010705.html.
12. Other war-related works of note aired in the three-year period since May 2000 include: Submerged; Haven; Nuremberg; Uprising; Gathering Storm; One Night in Baghdad; Daughter from Da Nang; Out of the Ashes; and Band of Brothers.
13. During the Clinton administration the U.S. public viewed the controlled effectiveness of its military in Bosnia in the face of the holocaust-like ethnic cleansing there and consequent need for war crimes tribunals. The debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 underlined the impotence of the U.S. army, highlighted by images of the dragging of the corpse of an American GI through the streets.
14. In the first half of 2004 news coverage of the war in Iraq continued to attempt to grapple with the interrelation of victims, images of U.S. women in the military, and the repercussions of questionable leadership. Incidents of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib brought to the world’s attention the countless replays of photographs of Private Lyndie England “handling” Iraqi prisoners, leading to her court martial. England’s (and others’) defense, that they were following the dictates of army command structure, immediately brought attention to (and the replacement of) General Janis Karpinski, who had been in charge of the prison when the abuses occurred. Stories (and photographs) of Lynch as her hearings progressed in August, 2004 consistently refer to her advanced pregnancy, positioning England as both perpetrator and victim in this chapter of the war.
15. See “Jessica
Lynch Tells Her Story,” Today/MSNBC News, November 12,
2003,
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3475980/
for a transcript of her interview with Katie Couric.
(A search on “Jessica
Lynch” at msnbc.msn.com will bring up mainstream news stories that trace
the trajectory of how this story became publicized in the United States.)