The Horrors of War

by James Hansen

Samuel Maoz’s debut feature Lebanon - winner of the Golden Tiger at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival (and one of the few films I missed at NYFF 2009) - may offer little “new insight” in the war movie narrative (war is hell, everyone is unprepared, you’ll never get out the same, etc.), yet its intensely personal evocation of the unavoidable, manufactured chaos inside a clunky, constantly deteriorating war machine makes Lebanon a harrowing horror movie.


Set almost entirely within the confines of a tank named Rhino, Lebanon focuses on the first 24 hours of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The four soldiers who operate Rhino - Assi, Herzl, Shmulik, and Yigal - only see the outside through their targeted scopes. With no experience in combat, the four soldiers become increasingly wary of their situation. Shmulik, the gunner, refuses to shoot a bomb at an oncoming truck which attacks the platoon and ultimately kills one solider. Soon after, a chicken truck driven by a civilian approaches and Shmulik blows up the truck without a warning shot.

Although the POV scope becomes Lebanon’s chief gimmick – overused and oftentimes too directly staged – it makes clear that throughout the battle everyone and everything becomes a target. A sign in the tank reads, “Men are made of steel. The tank is only a piece of iron.” As the scope whirls around the landscapes throughout Lebanon, the sounds of the clanking, rotating lens are a constant reminder of the mechanical nature of the Rhino. The soldiers are reminded that they need to be unflinching steel machines, but, as the film progresses, the fallacy of this idea becomes more and more apparent.


While Lebanon has many interesting parallels with the terrific HBO miniseries Generation Kill, in its last third, Lebanon begins to feel much more like The Descent. The Rhino becomes an inescapable cave. After the Rhino is attacked and nearly destroyed, it begins oozing oil, dripping water, and slowly deteriorating as the soldier’s sanity and optimism does the same. Lebanon's formal rigor – the constant, intense close ups, the violent bouncing of the tank, the horrified glazed over eyes of the soldiers – makes the claustrophobic fear palpable. The only way to get out alive is to keep driving and continue fighting in the start of a war with no leaders and no clear objective. The soldiers rarely know where they are, much less how to get out.


Even with its brief 85 minutes running time, Lebanon formally echos the traumatic mission in such a way that unprepared audience members may flee from the theater. And Lebanon makes clear, for the soldiers (and thereby Maoz himself), there are never going to be explanations for the trauma. However, in a wonderful scene near the end of Lebanon, a seemingly simple act with a POW proves the one thing the soldiers can’t afford to lose is their humanity. This might be a typical anti-war message from a war movie, but Lebanon’s focus is experiential rather than sentimental. The sentiment arrives in bursts and always feels a little overdone, but the experience is frightening.

B

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A Thrill, A Kill, A Fix

by Brandon Colvin

I saw The Hurt Locker with my step-dad. A veteran of Operation Desert Storm, he was a Sergeant in the US Army. During his service in Iraq and Kuwait, and, years earlier, in West Germany, he saw men killed, he saved men’s lives, and he changed. In the deserts, his body frequently dehydrated. Sand particles penetrated his clothes and clogged his pores, preventing his body from sweating. He’s never sweated properly since then. At the slightest bit of heat, he starts gushing. He has to carry around a hand towel to wipe the persistent moisture from his face. Twenty years later, his pores are still compensating, still afraid he might dehydrate. The war made its mark on his body. The mark it made on his mind, though, was made evident when we walked out of the theater.

“Watching that movie put me back in it. The world looks different. It looks like it did when I was in the military. It makes me feel like a machine again.”


The Hurt Locker’s power comes from its ability to inspire this somewhat troubling shift in perspective. The film replicates the frame of mind of the soldier – the justified paranoia, the attention to detail, the reactionary instinct for self-preservation, the willingness to pull the trigger. For my step-dad, a man who has been in combat, the film’s representation of the military mindset is genuine. For me, a man who has never been close to combat, it is damned convincing, allowing me to grasp – if not fully understand – what it means to be a soldier, what it means to kill or be killed, to feel yourself constantly facing death.

Admittedly, there are some aspects of combat, of the soldier mentality that are as impenetrable to my step-dad as they are to me. These are the facets of war The Hurt Locker ultimately attempts to investigate, though the film goes no further than posing questions and suggestions – a wise choice that saves it from didacticism. At the center of this inquiry is the film’s frustrating protagonist, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). Pigheaded, reckless, and inconsiderate, Staff Sgt. James is also a master at his profession – defusing explosives in 2004 Iraq. Working with Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), he fishes for IEDs amidst piles of rubble and trash strewn through Iraqi streets. Staff Sgt. James frequently butts heads with his squad – a pair of soldiers who lost their previous leader to an IED – by ignoring safety regulations, endangering himself and his men and demonstrating what is either a death wish or a massive addiction to adrenaline-fueled high wire antics (as the film’s opening titles state, “War is a drug”). For the ever-responsible and sharp Sgt. Sanborn, James’ behavior is inscrutable, prompting him to ask the compulsive daredevil near the end of the film, “What is it that makes you the way you are?” He only receives a shrug in response.


But Staff Sgt. James is not all bad. Former war correspondent Mark Boal’s screenplay is much smarter than that. He has a hard fought soft spot for his young son, who lives a modest middle-American life with his wife, Connie (Evangeline Lilly) – both of whom James repeatedly chooses to abandon to satisfy his thrill quota on the frontlines, a decision he seems to regret only in quickly passing moments of what he might call weakness. Regardless of his general callousness toward and dissatisfaction with his family, James has a capacity for tenderness, as shown toward Specialist Eldridge, a young and psychologically damaged soldier, and most prominently displayed in the relationship he develops with a young Iraqi boy, one that leaves him vulnerable and ultimately reinforces Staff Sgt. James’ distant, cynical demeanor. The detrimental reality of caring too much hits James hard, interfering with his ability to do his job and compromising him emotionally. Indeed, the truly sympathetic facet of the man is revealed to be a failing as a soldier. Getting too involved means getting dead.

By the end of the film, James’ necessarily detached perspective seems reasonable, even if his near-suicidal bravado does not. His emotional coldness is one of the many aspects of soldiering that the film depicts with startling resonance, the most indelible of which are the sheer physical and temporal realities of life in the field. Depicting both the exhaustive, tense waiting that fills much of a soldier’s time and the abrupt harshness of real violence, The Hurt Locker is paced immaculately – as a whole and on a scene-to-scene basis – achieving an almost inverted approach to action in which gunshots, explosions, and chases are rarely embellished and the anticipatory anxiety surrounding them is allowed to develop, build, and boil over in a way that feels organic and accurate, a testament to the efforts of celebrated director Kathryn Bigelow and editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski. The convincing atmospherics and tonal directness of the film’s editing is somewhat compromised by a dependency on slightly gimmicky “24”-style camera techniques (jittery POV shots, rack zooms, handheld to the max), but not enough to prevent absorption into The Hurt Locker’s involving cinematic environment, one so affecting that it hardens the viewer and conditions his mind.


The film’s final shot reveals the actual bleak result of this immersion in war. Staff Sgt. James suits up in his bomb gear. The heavy metal music previously confined to his stereo fills the entire soundtrack with a crunching riff. Having left his family once again, he walks down an Iraqi street. It all resets. Another year begins in his Sisyphean quest to get that mysterious, unreachable high. Cut off from his own humanity, he recedes into the wilderness, a modern version of The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards, driven by an implacable existential restlessness. As he marches forth, isolated, we sympathize with James, familiar with his world and subsumed into its reality, but never understanding what leads a man to taunt death, to sacrifice it all for a thrill, a kill, a fix.

A-
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Maverick vs. The Nazis

by Chuck Williamson

In Top Gun, audiences witnessed the formation of a new American masculinity that apotheosized the slick, surface-only milieu of the eighties. Countering the hyper-macho protest masculinities of Stallone and Bronson, Cruise perfected a balanced mix of boyish androgyny, suburban naiveté, all-American affability, and a homosocial, boys-only machismo masking a deeper, non-threatening sensitivity that always blossomed fully-formed once he started serenading his female co-star to the tune of some Top 40 hit. Formed in smoldering cauldron filled with various inchoate elements—a chiseled hard-body, a charismatic magnetism, a pearly white smile, a homogeneity symptomatic of the decade—the persona crudely birthed in Risky Business became fully alchemized in kitsch-classics like Top Gun, Cocktail, and Days of Thunder. He was vanilla bland, all-American, safe—the sort of man you’d take home to ma and pa if he weren’t too busy saving democracy from the red menace in his F-14 Tomcat.

For the spectator, he became an object of lust fetishized by both the male and female gaze, a blank slate on which the audience could project social and sexual desires—which, most often, commingled. He was a movie star, all surface, no substance, attracting a zeitgeist who unwittingly queered the boundaries of the spectator’s cravings. His super-glamorous visage became one of destabilized signifiers denoting a polymorphous desire—and since the Cruise persona demanded a degree of superficiality and emptiness, the spectator’s desires could be multifarious. He might always be a regular “wingman” with the boys—playing sweaty games of volleyball, indulging in some “flair bartending” one-upmanship, popping wheelies on the race-track—but he’ll always “take our breath away” in a forced heteronormative subplot. In the eighties and early nineties, Cruise was the quintessential celebrity—an empty vessel to store hopes, dreams, and desires.*


With Valkyrie, one might assume that the carefully constructed Cruise persona—itself subverted and inverted in his most successful performances**—would be nullified entirely by the dour, dignified trappings of a World War II drama. But Cruise’s participation in the film only highlights the strange, discordant nature of Valkyrie, as the performance—and the film—are crippled by a series of incongruities and cognitive dissonances that undermine any sort of gravitas that might potentially be cultivated from its subject matter. In this film, Cruise at first appears to be drained of his persona, as he is physically mutilated, sexually neutered, and depleted of his erotic magnetism. Yet through its cinematography, lighting, and editing, the film fails to accurately depict the physical and psychic vulnerability necessary for this role, as Cruise is still framed in glamour shot close-ups, thick studio-lighting, and dramatic—hyper-sexualized, even—static tableaus where the actor poses like a department store mannequin in his chic, fashion-forward Nazi uniform. Cruise falls back on familiar acting tics that have become trademarks of his now weather-beaten persona—and against the will of the filmmakers, he somehow worms through the picture as a tired-and-true, tabloids-and-couch-cushions movie star. Throughout the film, the gulf between our understanding of the character and our expectations for the Cruise persona grow irreparably wide, and the sort of superficial charisma that marked all of Cruise’s mainstream efforts seeps into this film. Alternating between grim intonations and mad-dog barking, Cruise’s performance attempts to mimic a substantive center, but further emphasizes the innate emptiness of his performance. Unable to construct a stable or tactile character out of Stauffenburg, Cruise fails to distance himself from his star persona. He’s Tom Cruise, goddammit, and while the film attempts to dislodge itself from this in-built spectrum of audience expectations, the performance lacks the spatial/temporal specificity needed for it to work. Regardless of the spectator’s desire to suspend his or her disbelief, the familiar persona manifests in the film’s recurring glamorization—both formal and performative—undermine the film entirely. Cruise is not only miscast and outmatched by the material, but his performance functions as but one of the film’s fatal discontinuities.

These errors are, of course, not immediately apparent. After a somber, multilingual opening (a sign that this is Serious Fucking Business), the brutal scarification that would rob audiences of the Cruise persona takes place off-screen—a clear sign that, through visual nondisclosure, the film will comply with the spectator’s wish for Cruise to be Cruise. As mentioned, Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenburg, a dissident officer stationed in North Africa who is critical of the various (vaguely alluded to) transformations that have transpired in Germany since Hitler’s rise to power. After critical injuries to his eye and hands sends him out of the frontlines and into the belly of German bureaucracy, Stauffenburg falls in with a clandestine group of disgruntled officers and politicians plotting to seize power from Hitler in an attempt to, in their words, “show the world that not all of us [the conspirators] are like him.” Inspired by the cacophonous commingling of Wagner and air-raids, Stauffenburg concocts a plan to maneuver into governmental power through Operation Valkyrie, a proposed back-up administration that would, hypothetically, be activated in the case of Hitler’s death. By assassinating Hitler and initiating Valkyrie, Stauffenburg and his co-conspirators plan to take control of Berlin and sign a peace accord with the Allies, thus sparing Europe the human cost of a full-scale war. Of course, this convoluted power-play hinges on a carefully orchestrated assassination attempt that, if botched, could be their doom.


While we rarely expect pop-entertainment to attain the sort of biopictorial verisimilitude found in a Rossellini film, Valkyrie nonetheless weakens its ability to generate pathos, authenticity, or historical coherence through its reductive, Manichean reconstruction of Nazi Germany. Drained of all subtlety, Valkyrie opts for historical revisionism. While such revisionism is not uncommon in Hollywood—look to John Ford for its most successful progenitor—the degree to which this film depoliticizes its subject ultimately wounds its narrative. Specifically, the film systemically censors—much like the fascists it ostensibly rejects—all overt references to ethnocide, pogroms, or concentration camps, glossing over these things through an occasional euphemistic aside that is coded to the point of obfuscation. While such reductive depoliticalizations might work in exploitation or b-movie fare, in this film it creates nothing more than a disconnect between the film’s historical misrepresentations and the choking austerity and dourness produced by the film. This might be acceptable once Valkyrie sheds its somber tone in the second half—turning the failed assassination attempt into a moderately successful suspense sequence—but then again fumbles. Limited by its foregone conclusion, Valkyrie fails generate a sustainable suspense that can withstand our foreknowledge that—spoiler alert—Hitler survives and their plan fails. Like the inclusion of Tom Cruise, the film’s attempts at simulating the formal and narrative elements of an espionage thriller creates a cognitive dissonance where the audience fails to reconcile the visual/aural stimuli provoking a specific response and the elementary foreknowledge of the film’s fixed denouement. This creates an obvious problem. Burdened with a dismal central performance and an ahistorical conceptualization of Nazi Germany, the film fails as an authentic World War II drama. Yet despite the suspense-thriller posturing that dominates its third act, Valkyrie also fails as pop entertainment.

Although director Bryan Singer keeps Valkyrie slick, entertaining, and well-crafted, the burden of its flaws makes his task Sisyphean in scope. Valkyrie never fails to entertain—it ticks along with the full-throttle intensity of Singer’s superhero efforts—but it still sags under the heavy weight of its dissonances and discontinuities—particularly the casting of Tom Cruise, who acts as a sort of albatross even during the most technically competent suspense sequences. Even the erratic accents—a chaotic mélange itself—underline the absurdity of Cruise’s inclusion, where his West Coast enunciations create a linguistic atonality amongst the solid hum of European voices. Alternating between high camp and absurdity, Cruise’s performance feels unthreaded from the rest of the film, coming across as nothing more than a last-ditch effort for respectability from a movie-star long disgraced within the tabloid culture that created him. While never the disaster many forecasted at the beginning of the year, Valkyrie is a muddle, inconsistent effort irreparably harmed by the participation of one individual.

* These aspects of the Cruise persona later became the fodder for parody, as evidenced in the National Society of Film Critics’ gag vote for his nomination as best supporting actress in Vanilla Sky. This could, unfortunately, also have something to do with Cruise’s homophobic gay panic responses to media doubts of his alpha-dog heterosexuality—but that, my friends, is an essay for another day (actually, do a google.com search for “Tom Cruise + Gay” and have fun with the myriad search results).

** Just so everyone knows I’m not a bully needlessly picking on defenseless multimillionaire Tom Cruise, I will admit to really liking three of his performances: his berserker misogynist in Magnolia, his battered-and-broken war vet in Born on the Fourth of July, and his staccato-speaking cuckold in Eyes Wide Shut. Interestingly, all of these performances acknowledge the Cruise persona in some way: subversion, inversion, parody, whatever. Singer’s film merely tries to have us ignore it by forcing its character to look glum for two hours.
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DVD of the Week: "The Steel Helmet" (Samuel Fuller, 1951)

Reading many kind words about Manny Farber this week, none struck me more than Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1993 essay, which he reposted on his website, from the first collection of his work, Placing Movies. If you haven't read the entire essay yet, you should all work your way through it. Not only a great tribute to Farber, it, in typical Rosenbaum fashion, sheds light on films that most people aren't watching. At the time, and possibly still, one of these films is the early Sam Fuller film The Steel Helmet. It may not be my favorite Fuller film (that will probably always be Shock Corridor which was the first one I saw); still, The Steel Helmet was, and still is, a striking and powerful war film with the distinctive Fuller touch.

Instead of writing more about the film here, use that time to absorb Rosenbaum's essay. Then, go out and watch The Steel Helmet. It may be a strange kind of tribute, but I think it is a tribute nonetheless to the man who strongly influenced most of my favorite modern critics and writers.

-James Hansen

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"Miracle at St. Anna" Trailer

Thoughts? Reactions? I tend to like Spike Lee, although I found Inside Man a bit too standard. This seems to be a pretty typical war movie, but I am pretty intrigued by it all the same.

PS- A DVD of the Week entry is on the way...sorry for the delay! It's a busy week...



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Who's Afraid of the Iraq War?

At a time when the Iraq War films are struggling to get audiences, Kimberly Peirce’s new film Stop-Loss probably doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell either, and will most likely disappear into oblivion, only to be kept company by its predecessors. Sadly enough, Stop-Loss stands out in its awareness of the war film genre, and particularly draws on influences from the Vietnam War film; yet where many Vietnam War films are poignant and provocative, Peirce’s approach to the Iraq War is vague and indecisive, making the film monumentally unmonumental.

In the late 1970’s, films about the Vietnam War slowly started to emerge, with plenty more coming in the 80’s and beyond when the war was out of sight and (somewhat) out of mind. During the war, photo-journalists reporting from Vietnam had supplied the world with images never to be forgotten - so many, so haunting, so horrifying - leaving nothing to the imagination, and consequently contributed greatly to the political discourse concerning the war, nurturing the dissatisfaction and numerous war protests all over the world. As a result, Hollywood studios considered the Vietnam War to be a poor choice for film material, simply because the war had already been so over-exposed. Surprisingly then, when films such as The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978), Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979), Platoon (Stone, 1986), and Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987) were released, many films were well received and relatively popular amongst audiences and critics. Since then, many of them have made a place for themselves in the film canon. Amongst the things these films have in common, is a confrontational, scrutinizing and dialectical approach to the war they are portraying, and its effects on the soldiers, veterans and landscape in the aftermath.

Today, the situation, at least to me, seems exactly the opposite. Images distributed from Iraq are scarce, when compared to the abundance of images we are left with from the Vietnam War, and the news desks are obeying censorship to a large degree. The camera lenses seem to be interested in capturing and depicting secondary events of the war, and wish to spare us from seeing the actual cruelties and costs of war. Instead, we are shown photos of successful raids, scenes where bombs have gone of after the fact, i.e. devoid of people but full of dust and piles of bricks, making it hard to get a real sense of what is really happening. There are the occasional provocative photos, often taken by the soldiers themselves, depicting aspects of the war we don’t usually see or know about. Had it not been for the widespread use of cameras amongst the soldiers in Iraq and their distribution online, many of these larger atrocities would never have come to light. The Iraq War is in this sense a completely different war - visually - from that in Vietnam, as it remains largely invisible and hidden from us and is often drowned in ambiguous political discourse, such as renaming the war as merely a conflict.


Different from the Vietnam War, however, is the making of films about the Iraq War while it is taking place; however, this time, it seems like no one really wants to see them. Two of the more prominent “war films" from last year, Redacted (DePalma) and In the Valley of Elah (Haggis), came from important/popular directors, but both did quite poorly at the box office. While the quality of the films is arguable, audience interest seems curiously lacking, and the same appears to be happening for Stop-Loss. Kimberly Peirce is an important and fearless director in that she once again approaches what is considered very difficult and sensitive subject-matters, making Stop-Loss nearly ten years after her powerful début film Boys Don’t Cry (1999). The world Peirce depicts in Stop-Loss is as rough and tough as in Boys Don’t Cry. The milieus her characters inhabit are so similar, in fact, that the characters in the different films could probably live across the street from one another. Unfortunately the parallels and similarities between the two films end here.

Peirce is fully aware of the widespread use of digital cameras by the soldiers in Iraq, and starts her film in this home-video mode, portraying a group of soldiers at their base. This opening is both effective and promising concerning its style and storytelling technique, and the behind-the-scenes-look of the Iraq war is immediately captivating. After these first glimpses, the film continues into its battle scenes that are well-made, and congruent in staying with the exhilarating insider point of view we get in the opening. Unfortunately, the film leaves this format quickly as the scenery shifts from Iraq to the US, and moves into a more “traditional” style and use of camera, placing the spectator firmly outside of the diegesis, This decision is disappointing in that the audience is quickly and effectively supplanted deep within the war, then all too quickly taken right back out. The effects created by the home-video style are remarkable in that they place the spectator visually and virtually within the war that is rarely seen in such a insider way. If this affect could have been sustained, Stop-Loss would have been infinitely more successful.


The story of Stop-Loss is reminiscent of that of The Deer Hunter, with the trio of friends returning from war back to their small town, all of them mentally or physically ill to some degree. And as an echo of The Deer Hunter, Brandon (Ryan Philippe) in Stop-Loss finds consolation and help in his best friend Steve’s (Channing Tatum) girlfriend Michelle (Abbie Cornish). However, both the psychological and political aspects of The Deer Hunter, that makes it such a great film (along with its outstanding acting) is unfortunately not repeated in Stop-Loss. One of the reasons the film doesn’t work nearly as well is its reluctance to deal with the Iraq War in any real or critical sense. Of course, Stop-Loss deals with the hopeless and tragic situation that so many soldiers fighting in Iraq are trapped in, which is openly portrayed as a negative factor, and is main battle of Brandon. However, that Brandon doesn’t want to go back to Iraq is in itself not that interesting after the first ten minutes, as there is no real change in him, which cannot be blamed on the rather straightforward performance by Ryan Philippe but the script. Abbie Cornish has been given equally little to work with, as she is the girl who unquestioningly supports the troops, but is afraid of ending up as a war widow.

Since the characters continue to be so patriotic and so afraid of self-examination in their own motivations of going to war in the first place, or even why the war is fought, Stop-Loss never challenges its characters or its audience. Not to say that Stop-Loss needs to convey one specific message or take sides, but it needs to deal with the problems and questions that implicitly exists in its subject-matter if it is to be successful. It is unfortunate that the film instead seems to be saying that if Brandon had been asked nicely, he would definitely have gone back to Iraq one more time, and that he only objects to the bad treatment he feels he is given by the military. Instead, the war is depicted as inevitable and non-questionable, making Stop-Loss just as diffuse in its answers as the current administration when confronted with questions and problems concerning the Iraq War.

by Maria Fosheim Lund
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