A few days ago I was getting ready to see Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, The Hurt Locker. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since word first started to emerge from the festival circuit towards the end of last year. According to the buzz, it was a nail biting thriller about a bomb disposal squad in Baghdad – a real throwback to the Friedkin era of, well, explosive filmmaking.
Before seeing the film, I flicked briefly onto this blog from the great Jonathan Rosenbaum. He’s writing about the response of American critics to the film’s politics, or, more specifically, to what they see as a (welcome) lack of them. To be honest, I didn’t get too far through it as he warns about spoilers. But while watching the film later that day, a line from this blog suddenly came crashing home.
Trying to put the movie into some sort of context, he calls it “the best commercial American film about the so-called ‘war in’ (I prefer ‘occupation of’) Iraq…” Rosenbaum doesn’t really linger on the point, but if you follow this train of thought – that America is an occupying power, not a liberating army – and apply it to what we think of as ‘Iraq War’ films, I think you end up in an uncomfortable place.
Now, this is based on the assumption that the war and occupation are both illegal and immoral, but I don’t think anybody really opposes that view anymore (not least because of the sterling cinematic work done by the likes of Alex Gibney in Taxi to the Dark Side, or Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight).
For starters, there’s something fundamentally inappropriate about mediating the pain and horror of this war through the experiences of the aggressors. Especially when the high command of those aggressors refuses to even keep count of the casualty rate among the people they’re oppressing. For a bit of perspective, let’s turn this on its head: imagine if the majority of World War II films were told from the equivalent side. The horror of the Blitz is suddenly only given meaning because of the traumatic psychological effect it has on German bomber pilots. Or the Holocaust told from the point-of-view of a Nazi camp guard who loves his job and believes in his country’s cause.
That’s not to say that the Americans can be directly compared to the Nazis – they’re not dragging Iraqis up against a wall and executing them every time an IED goes off. But let’s not kid ourselves; they’re doing the next best thing. Just because the occupiers speak English, just because they don’t wear a uniform with a skull and crossbones on the cap, doesn’t make them any less criminal than the Germans 60 years ago.
Suddenly, Hollywood’s ‘war’ films of the last few years acquire a whole different slant. The Hurt Locker isn’t a nail biting thriller about a maverick bomb disposal officer, it’s a film that asks us to sympathise with the men whose responsibility it is to put down the Resistance. It’s like watching the recent Max Manus and hoping that the German guards manage to defuse the bombs before the Donau sets sail. Or being relieved when Flame and Citron’s murderous rampage is brought to an end by the heroic Gestapo death squads. In The Valley of Elah is like watching a film that claims that the worst thing to happen in Europe between 1939 and 1945 was that a few German soldiers were psychologically undone by the pressure. And oh, how their families suffered! John Cusack’s (as yet unreleased) Grace is Gone would find its equivalent in the story of a German family taking a painful road trip because their mother had been killed in Stalingrad, trying to find a way to reconnect with each other, but never once sparing a thought for what she was doing there in the first place.
You get my point. There’s something utterly perverse about the movies America has made about Iraq. Just as there’s something entirely inevitable about them too. What’s the difference between the Nazi occupation of Europe and the American occupation of Iraq? The Nazi’s lost outright, so they weren’t in control of the story. America, by contrast, has its Hollywood hand in every country of consequence, shaping a narrative that suits it best. But if cinema has taught us anything, it’s to disregard the bad guys. They don’t have thoughts or feelings or dreams or families. And by its own definition, articulated over decades of filmmaking, America is the bad guy in Iraq.
And worst of all? This is what passes for liberal. Our cinemas are filled with images of disturbed soldiers, bombed out cities and pointless destruction. These films aren’t apologies for war. But what they’re not filled with is Iraqis. And what they’re definitely not filled with is Iraqis making the case for armed insurrection.
It was the great American John Adams who extolled the virtues of the country’s own revolutionaries: “Liberty must at all hazards be supported,” he once wrote. “We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. ” Samuel Johnson said, more simply, “Let us…under God trust our cause to our swords.” What worth would those words have today in Iraq? Or in cinema?
