Unmanned? Military Masculinities in Filmic Representations of US Drone Operators

Abstract

Drones have become the new face of American warfare, challenging institutional and cultural norms about what it means to be a soldier. In the context of military masculinities, I examine the representation of the US drone operators in three films: Drones (Rosenthal 2013), Good Kill (Niccol 2014), and Eye in the Sky (Hood 2015). The films feature a male-female team of drone operators and can partly be seen as counter-narratives to the official idealized story of drone warfare by exposing some of the moral dilemmas facing the drone operators. Yet rarely do the films address the larger ethical issues of how drone technology skirts the legal framework of war. Additionally, the films' reconfiguration of the white male drone operator as morally courageous and a potential savior of innocent women and children on the “battlefield” obscures the racialized and imperialist ideologies bound up in the US-led “war on terror.”