| Summary: | This article examines Generation Kill’s deliberately ambiguous discourse on war, as the series stages, in a mise en abyme, armed invasion and the spectacle of war as somewhere between orgasmic excitement and boredom – between “sensory overload” (as one Marine calls it in the last minutes of story) and radical alienation. In its self-reflexive references to famous war films, its recycling of stereotypes and/or archetypes, the series seems to deliberately contradict itself, over and over, as to whether or not war is a desirable all-male adventure or if it is born of training men to be “pit bulls” (1.1) who must obey the chain of command and disregard their conscience when killing civilians. Between the opening sequence and the final one, when the soldiers gather around to watch the war as their buddy has filmed it on videocam, in a mash-up that “recaps” what the series has immersed us in all along, one might see a progression towards a radical critique of war: when images of carnage replace those of war-as-adventure, the soldiers, one by one, desert the “(re-)viewing”, until the set is left bare. But is this truly an ethical and political “turning away” from the horrors of war, or is it merely an aesthetic gesture, that reflexively “dismantles” the set and the series? What, in particular, is one to make of the voice-over by an allegorical Marine that concludes the series’ audio track and thus gives the gung-ho Marine the last word?
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