Both Tommy and Hathaway’s pilot become attached to the flight suits they wear, seeing them as a symbol of an identity that’s rapidly being scraped away. And both are ultimately haunted by the new reality of having to stick around and watch after the bombs hit the ground. “Linger,” Hathaway says, describing her orders after a strike. “Linger.” Charles Lindbergh worried about the consequences of new military technology in the earliest days of the United States Army Air Forces, comparing fighting wars from the sky to “listening to a radio account of a battle on the other side of the earth. It is too far away, too separated to hold reality.” Then, as now, Americans were embracing a new technology that gave them enormous power without forcing them to be on the receiving end of the destruction. But the reality of being a drone pilot is different again—you’re removed from the conflict but forced to watch it on clear, high-definition screens long after people are reduced to dust and ashes.

“Tommy doesn’t put his own life at risk,” says Hawke. “It’s a very different feeling to take someone’s life when your life is threatened. There’s an integrity to it. But for Tommy, and this whole generation that’s being asked to do it, it’s a completely different things to be making mortal decisions from the safety of a Winnebago. It’s a different kind of ethical crisis.”

“When he was in an F-16,” Niccol adds, “he could drop his bomb and fly away. Now he drops the bomb and stays there, and watches the destruction he caused.”

This ability to watch the aftermath of a battleground from the comfort of a U.S. base was depicted in the first episode of the fourth season of Homeland, in which Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) orders an air strike on a house in Pakistan after tip from a source reveals that a terrorist leader is hiding there. The strike ostensibly kills the terrorist, but also 40 civilians who’d gathered at the house to celebrate a wedding. Later, Carrie watches as a lone survivor stares up at the sky, and as bodies are pulled out of the debris. Before this is revealed, the team celebrates the strike by giving Carrie a birthday cake decorated with the words “The Drone Queen.”

​* * *

A sense of anxiety about drones becoming autonomous forces in the fight against terror—fertile and powerful organisms rather than worker bees—is present in Good Kill and Grounded, even if it’s secondary to the concerns about how drone wars are affecting the Americans being asked to fight them. But it’s fully explored in Muse’s Drones, which sees drones not as a reality so much as a metaphor. The album tackles issues of agency and independence and coercion within relationships as much as it acknowledges warfare and an imagined totalitarian force that needs to be overcome, but the image of unmanned robots wielding power from the sky is always present. Muse’s Matt Bellamy told Rolling Stone that he came up with the idea for the album after reading Brian Glyn Williams’ Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on Al Qaeda. “I didn’t know how prolific drone usage has been,” Bellamy said. “I always perceived Obama as an all-around likable guy. But most mornings he wakes up, has breakfast, and then goes down to the war room and makes what they call ‘kill decisions.’”

The album sweeps between lyrics about killing and dictating orders and rejecting hope. “Your mind is just a program/ And I’m a virus, I’m changing the station,” Bellamy sings in “Psycho.” “And I’ll improve your thresholds, I’ll turn you into a super drone/ And you will kill, on my command/ And I won’t be responsible.” The song, a bass-heavy, soaring act of aggression, was released in March as a single, with an accompanying lyric video featuring a drill sergeant barking orders, and a recruit screaming, “Aye sir,” in response. “I’m gonna make you/ A fucking psycho,” the chorus goes. “Your ass belongs to me now.” Later, the song “Mercy” references a “puppeteer,” and “men in cloaks” who operate the “ghosts and shadows the world just disavows,” while “Reapers” disavows subtlety altogether to draw parallels between shady government forces and a cruel lover.

You rule with lies and deceit

And the world is on your side

You’ve got the CIA babe

And all you’ve done is brutalize War, war just moved up a gear

I don’t think I can handle the truth

I’m just a pawn

And we’re all expendable

Incidentally, electronically erased, by your Drones

Killed by

Drones

As a work of art, Drones is less about overtly exploring the consequences of drone warfare than it is about making heavy-handed use of drone imagery to express feelings of isolation and rage. But it does tap into the anxiety expressed in other works about the long-term consequences of giving so much power to machines. In Grounded, this fear emerges as a suspicion directed by the pilot toward security cameras in a shopping mall, and a sense that she, too, is being tracked by the cameras she uses to monitor the movements of people several thousands of miles away. “We’ve lost privacy,” says Taymor. “She’s saying that we are being watched, and the idea that we’re not going to be watched by drones in the future is ridiculous. Drones are going to be delivering Amazon books and pizzas, but you will have no privacy. They will be able to find you anywhere.”