The ‘war on terror’ was sold to a global public with a message of clarity and authority – in George W. Bush's words, ‘you are either with us or against us.’ However, it was soon clear how little knowledge was accessible, both to those in power and certainly to the spectators. This lack of knowledge was at odds with the saturation of images arriving each day thereafter from the Middle East. In Nicholas Mirzoeff's words, ‘instead of moral and visual clarity, all is confusion’ (Mirzoeff 2004: 18). In spite of this confusion, as Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner argue, the Bush administration's successful shaping of public opinion created a willingness to consent to conflict, based primarily on rhetoric and the deprivation of information (2005). Dense, almost opaque images of spectacular violence and suffering were attached to messages of defence and need, in ways both continuous and distinct from the twentieth century's visual culture of conflict. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's infamous claim about terrorism's ‘purest form of spectacle’ (2003: 30), John Tulloch and Richard Warwick Blood note the way in which ‘the semiotic/symbolic struggle of images spiralled on, entwined within the contemporary war of images’ (2012: 115). The convoluted motivations, methods and outcomes of the post-9/11 sociopolitical landscape has spawned a culture of uncertainty and dread, replete with images whose import is not easily judged. Consequently, when conflict is depicted in contemporary media, our ability to judge things clearly is significantly clouded.

Describing this condition in the images of torture from Abu Ghraib, W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that ‘it's as if the longer and more intensely one contemplates these kinds of images, the more opaque they become’ (2011: 108). This opacity has certainly seeped into cinematic fictions produced in the US in recent years, evolving out of the pictorial realm and into the atmospheric. It is becoming clear that certain thematic, iconographic and aesthetic tendencies have developed in contemporary US cinema and when we relate these tendencies to the contemporary moment, we must surely argue that Mitchell's location of opacity has had an effect.