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Military-themed videogames are significant cultural artifacts that shape popular geopolitical narratives and venerate dominant post-9/11 War on Terror discourses. Overwhelmingly resonant with the Military Entertainment Complex, these artifacts, not excluding America’s Army (2002–2013), envision the world through a Western lens. Over the past decades, America’s Army has come to challenge dominant orthodoxies and ideological presuppositions, disseminating new configurations of power. The article argues that the latest installment of the game, America’s Army: Proving Grounds (2013), marks a paradigmatic shift from the post-9/11 discourse permeating most military-themed videogames. Taking past scholarship on geopolitics and multimodal legitimation as points of departure, the current study unfolds the militarized aesthetics and politics of gameplay unique to America’s Army: Proving Grounds in its capacity to promote redefined ideals of hegemonic masculinity, on the one hand, and substantiate US universal legitimacy, on the other. To this end, the research endeavor proposes a more nuanced multimodal legitimation analytical framework in an attempt to capture the full spectrum of the semiotic affordances instilled in the gaming space. Key convergent discourses and practices of hegemony emerge therein, fundamentally: proficiency, efficiency, virtuosity, agility, nobility, solidarity, precision, stoicism, and aggression. The spatio-temporal shift away from post-9/11 discourses reifies new militaristic representations of hegemonic masculinity symbiotically entangled with futuristic and non-contemporary ideological war narratives.

Musical numbers, as viral modes of entertainment, influential forms of visual culture and catalysts of popular discourse are dense with multivariate aesthetic performers, and are interlaced to punctuate the melodramatic narrative texture in advancement of the plot and characterization in musical films. Performing identity through dancing bodies has been the subject of several film, music, culture, performance and communication research endeavours yet has rarely been explored from multimodal discourse analysis perspectives. To examine the ‘resilient identities’ underlying performances, the article adopts an eclectic approach informed by the Bakhtinian chronotope with regard to two numbers drawn from a recent American musical film in order to pinpoint: (a) the full repertoire of multimodal resources of narrative agency and identity performance; (b) the emotional experiences evoked by the musical numbers; and (c) the social practices that constitute, maintain and resist social realities and identities. The unconventional approach to the analysis of the musical numbers is what makes the current research project stand out among interdisciplinary studies of musical discourse.

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Within visual culture, postcyberpunk films are best approached as 'places of Otherness' whereby human identity and agency are downplayed and posthumans are magnified in highly technopolic societies marked with scientific determinism. Postcyberpunk treats the posthuman as an enclave oscillating between utopian and dystopian spaces, potentially, and optimistically, creating a space for humanity to be reassessed and renegotiated. The hybridity pertinent to the film genre and the inner and outer topographies of posthuman representation are insightful investigative vantage points of multimodal inquiry for the socio-political and technocratic implications they underlie. Against this backdrop, Blade Runner 2049 is one fertile example grounded in paradoxes and ambiguities around the contradiction between humans and replicants, artificial intelligence and super-large enterprises. With technology seamlessly integrated into social spaces and posthuman bodies, Blade Runner 2049 is arguably structured as an emotional journey composed of multiple spatial layers, ruptures and bifurcations expressed through socio-political capitalist projections. The article adamantly argues for new philosophical perspectives and praxis in redefinition of the social relationship between humans and posthumans.