There are no words: moral injury, disability and violence in Duncan Jones Mute

• Main Author: Mattar, Netty
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: PR English literature
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/84931/1/Acceptance_Letter%20%20ERCICSSH1910058.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/84931/7/84931%20There%20are%20no%20words.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/84931/
• Institution: Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia

Never before have we been so aware of suffering. Atrocity and the infliction of pain—of relentless military conflict, humanitarian crises, the steady rise in nationalistic aggression, persistent racial oppression, environmental catastrophe—have become more ubiquitous through social media networks. Our brutal encounters with pain constitute a new reality, one marked by a sense of ethical catastrophe that disturbs the boundaries of the subject. The trauma of bearing witness to and failing to prevent an act that violates deeply held beliefs about right and wrong constitutes what some have called ‘moral injury.’ This disconnect from our understanding of who we are is an experience common in (and perhaps fundamental to) war. Yet it is an ‘invisible’ wound that forces us to reconsider the very notion of trauma and of how it can be represented. This paper investigates how science fiction (sf) can portray the profound and unseen trauma of moral injury. Predicated on an ‘absent paradigm,’ sf is able to evoke complex variations of invisible injury through the construction of imaginary signs only understood in relation to the opponents they imply, which are ‘absent.’ I will examine Duncan Jones’ 2018 film, Mute, as an example of how muteness is an embodied translation of trauma that cannot be spoken and the inexpressibility of pain. I will further suggest that in this technologically-enhanced future Berlin, muteness and the refusal to be ‘fixed’ signifies a resistance to the hegemonic absenting of moral pain. In this way, the film relocates moral injury onto a complex network of power relations, signaled through the pervasive references to ongoing US military aggression, its past incursions and their aftereffects. Focusing on the characters’ struggle to maintain tenuous moral bearings in an apathetic world, Mute effectively weaves together moral injury, disability, techno-science and military violence, drawing our attention to the terrible damages we do to each other.