The Haunting Power of War: Multimodal Analysis of Perpetrator Trauma in Ari Folman’s and David Polonsky’s Waltz with Bashir (2009)

Recent studies of war trauma have shown considerable interest in examining the impact of perpetration on the mental wellbeing and moral integrity of former combatants. The transcendence of the victim-perpetrator binarism has become a trendy act of critique. The perpetrators’ post-traumatic confessional literature features the new war documentary novel by the end of the twentieth century onwards. This genre of war documentary is a subversive personalized narrative to dominant ideologies enforced by colonizing authorities. Such subversive narratives question the moral integrity of the invasive political and military authorities and urge the perpetrator to re-envision their relation to the ethnic other. However, perpetration acknowledgment is mostly obstructed by the victimizer unconscious denial of their guilt as a self- defense mechanism. Guilt, instead, imposes itself in the form of intrusive nightmares and flashbacks that have long been suppressed as unwanted memories. Perpetration narrative is mainly about exploring those implicit memories that reside in the subconscious of the victimizer. The visual depiction of traumatic memories has become pivotal to displaying the moral injury brought about by war perpetration. The graphic novel, Waltz with Bashir, is explored as a multimodal revelation of the haunting power of war on perpetrators with the aim to encourage societal and ethical obligation towards the other.