TagsMatthew Thomas PayneRoberto SirventTanner Mirrlees
Consuming War: How Pop Culture Captures Our Attention and Fuels Forever Wars
Paper
This cultural analysis series showcases how, every day, Americans are inundated with cultural products promoting militarism. Consuming War papers provide case-by-case introductions to the militarization of movies/tv, video games, and sports. Papers are authored separately by media studies scholars Tanner Mirlees (Associate Professor, Ontario Tech University) and Matthew Payne (Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame) and political theorist Roberto Sirvent (Lecturer, Harvard Medical School).
From movies to sporting events, our attention is often captured by messages that glorify combat while obscuring the deadly realities of war. The entertainment we consume obscures the costs of war and can normalize the military’s central purpose — war-making — by framing it as a shared value, preventing reflection about the choices behind the use of the U.S. military, the treatment of military personnel, or the consequences of U.S. militarism. The Consuming War series examines how the Pentagon influences cultural creations to recruit troops and build public support.
When we as Americans are aware of how we are consuming cultural messages, we are better able to resist their effects and ask critical questions about how the U.S. engages in the world.
Tanner Mirrlees is an Associate Professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies program in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University. One of his research areas centers on the intersections of media, war, and conflict. Mirrlees is the author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry, which provides a comprehensive study of the relationship between the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. media and entertainment industries within the broader history of U.S. Empire.
Mirrlees is currently researching the U.S.-China superpower competition and how it manifests in the domains of media, digital technologies, and popular culture, and recently authored “The US and China Tech War.”
Matthew Thomas Payne is the author of Eugene Jarvis: King of the Arcade (Bloomsbury, 2025) and Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (NYU Press, 2016). He is co-author of Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game (Amherst College Press, 2024), and is a co-editor of the anthologies How to Play Video Games (NYU Press, 2019), Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (Routledge, 2009) and Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, 2010). He teaches media studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.
Roberto Sirvent is a political theorist who studies race, law, and social movements. He also works at the intersection of ethics, philosophy of religion, and science and technology studies (STS). His primary research examines the prevalence of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and immigrant detention centers. He is also working on various projects around AI, particularly its connection to the exploitation and surveillance of workers, as well as its use in education, policing, immigration enforcement, war, and other military applications. He is co-author (with Danny Haiphong) of the book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News―From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse, 2019).
