TARGET CONFIRMED: DRONE VISUALITY, DEHUMANISATION AND THE WEEPING SOLDIER IN EYE IN THE SKY
A critique of 'shoot and cry' sentimentality and anthropometric dehumanisation in drone movie Eye in the Sky (2015).
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From the introduction:
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This chapter focuses on two aspects of Eye in the Sky in depth, examining what it reveals both about drone discourse and about the role of the close-up of the face in the representation of war. First, Eye in the Sky is a bold example of what Israeli critic Ilan Pappe has called ‘shoot and cry’, a rhetorical strategy in which military murderers emphasize their own pain and regret to downplay the savagery of their own actions and, importantly, to exonerate themselves morally of these actions. The weeping drone operator is emphasized across a range of drone fictions: it is a figure which functions to supplant political and moral questions of the ethics of military violence with private reflections on drone operator trauma. Second, in stark contrast, the movie is a clear example of the ways in which dehumanization is built into drone visuality. This form of militarized machinic opticality synthesizes targeting, cartography, surveillance, and imperial racism, and its representation and reproduction in Eye in the Sky both reproduces its dehumanizing gaze and contributes to a technophilic fantasy in which drone visuality achieves total visual and informational transparency. The scene, that is, interleaves two visual registers, one that brings the characters’ humanity to the foreground, and another that works to eliminate it altogether.
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PUBLICATION DETAILS:​
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In:
War Faces on Screen: Photography, Film
and the Politics of Representation
Edited by Katy Parry and Mani Sharpe.
(London: Bloomsbury, 2026), pp. 129-148.
​Hardcover ISBN 979-8-765-1292-03
eBook/pdf ISBN 979-8-765-1292-34
eBook/epub ISBN 979-8-765-1292-41
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