The Theatre Weapon

As Paul Virilio writes in War and Cinema, “the theatre weapon has replaced the theatre of operations. Indeed the military term ‘theatre weapon,’ though itself outmoded, underlines the fact that the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception.” The battlefield is not just a contest, then, between armies and their sophisticated weapons, but a site for psychological and perceptual combat. He points to a well-known example of acoustic weaponry, the German Stuka, otherwise known as the Junker 87 as a weapon designed not just to eliminate the enemy and his safe hiding places, but specifically engineered for psychological warfare and the destruction of perceptual comfort.

The Junker 87 would climb up to 15,000 feet, and as the pilot located his target through a window in the cockpit floor, he would launch into a startling dive towards the ground below—at a 60 to 90 degree angle with a speed of about 350 miles per hour. The pilot would complete this terrifying dive and then pull up, and along the way, the extensive stress of diving and climbing at over 5 gs would cause severe vision impairment, a grayish haze would come over the perceptual field known as “seeing stars.” Often, the force would cause the pilot to black out, but the Junker 87 came prepared with safety mechanisms to ensure that the mission would be carried out even without a conscious pilot.

The real battle was not in the air, but on the ground. Virilio writes of how the German dive-bomber would sweep down on its target “with a piercing screech designed to terrorize and paralyze the enemy.” It is what Julian Henriques calls “sonic dominance”—the condition when hearing overrides all other senses and an absolute wall of noise. “Sound itself,” Henriques states, “becomes both a source and expression of power.”

stuka A Junker 87 taking a dive.

This sound, which is now to us completely ubiquitous in our urban landscapes (how different is it, really, to the constant fly-overs?), was a key component of the German spectacle of war. As Virilio says, “war can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instill the fear of death before he actually dies.”

Unfortunately for the Germans, the victims of the sonic assault of the Junker 87 eventually became accustomed to its noise, and it no longer produced the same terror. This is the point at which military engineering collides with artistic invention—the constant need to move forward, to produce new spectacles. Luigi Russolo, the Futurist theorist of the “art of noises” who appears a few times on this site, had it right: “Each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators.” If acoustic weaponry becomes ever louder as each invention marches toward obsolescence, how are we ever going to designate an end point? Where is the limit to how much noise we can stand to produce and endure?