Perpetrator trauma and current american war cinema

This chapter builds on the term ‘perpetrator trauma’ that I introduced in 2013 as a new paradigm1 in cinema studies to deal with national traumas, one that for the first time recognizes a shift from the victim trauma paradigm typical of the twentieth century to the perpetrator trauma paradigm typical of the twenty-first. Differentiating between the two centuries also means differentiating between modern war (e.g., the First World War), in which one army faced another, and what Mary Kaldor calls new war, in which “violence is directed against civilians not as a side effect of war but as a deliberate….