About Talal Chami

Talal Chami is a Media professional and a regional analyst and researcher. He holds a Master’s Degree in Media Studies from the American University of Beirut. Founder of the blog The Axles of my Wagon Wheels. Currently a Media and Communication lecturer at the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut. Producer/TV director with extensive experience in the MENA region as well. With projects in Damascus, Amman, Manama, Doha, Tunisia, Tripoli, Casablanca, Paris and Seoul just to name a few. He is also a member of the board of the Lebanese-Korean Friendship Association based in Beirut. Several times Political Elections-Jury member at the Colombian Embassy in Beirut. His master's thesis topic was on some of the Lebanese Civil War militiamen’s war texts produced during the war (1981-1991) that dissolve with Post-Vietnam American War films as amplified versions of hyper-masculinity. He argues that these war texts represent intensely Herculean war/film junkies or street stars –in highly visible and re-configured heterotopic-like settings of war, that underscore their hyper-masculine performances. With varying degrees, these war texts or visual representations of war signify hard-body militiamen who transform in Lacanian processes of identification and transmogrify to become the film heroes themselves, in displays of self-aggrandizement. All this suggests a revelatory idea: Post-Vietnam American war films, among other timely factors, led to the Hollywoodization of the Lebanese Civil War, which turned out to be its possible sequel.