Myth in Iraq

As Roland Barthes in Myth Today would say images contain signifiers that denote and connote ideas, through the use of signs that form the 'myth'. "; and it is again this duplicity of the signifier which determines the characters of signification."

The picture of the soldier convey a myth, a message that is generally understood by all viewers, by society, a mass illusion of sorts. According to Barths myth has several characteristics: inoculation, history, identification, tautology, neither-norism, the quantification of quality, and the statement of fact. The photo contains all these features. It inoculates the viewer by prominently displaying the violence and the horrors of war, the destruction of the country, the menacing face of the soldier. It does not hide the devastation of war and therefore it takes away the shock value from the picture, it "vaccinates" the spectator, by giving him/her a strong dosage of war right off the bat. The picture does not place the image exactly in history, it portrays the now, as it also gives the viewer the the ability to identify him/herself in that soldier, an American like me in harms way. The photo in addition, conveys tautology by making the image ring true, that is how things are in Iraq, because no one says otherwise. The concept of neither-norism states the two opposites are balanced and then both are rejected, the fact that war is bad, but also necessary, thus natural. By diminishing the intricacies of the war in Iraq to one single image, this photo uses the quantification of quality feature of the myth, which counts on the fact that images don't require a lot of intelligence in order to be interpreted. The picture depicts the facts of war, the violence, the destruction, assertions that society already knows an accepts as reality.

By bearing all the signs of myth, this picture constitutes a myth, the myth that the American soldier is brave, strong and struggling to complete a worthy mission. The may even be true to some, but it does not tell the whole story. The other facets of the war are concealed so it communicates a perceived reality, that is not exactly or completely real.