Hollywood in Iraq
Hollywood in Iraq
Auster & Quart: The Iraq Films
IN TIM O’Brien’s National Book Award–winning novel Going After Cacciato, a GI says of the Vietnam War, “Honest it was such a swell war they should make it a movie.” The sarcasm in that statement applies just as well to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars that have seen few triumphs, and that elicited public protest and political criticism. Hollywood, which never had a problem depicting America’s past wars, especially the First and Second World Wars, has had difficulty representing our most recent military struggles.
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The Iraq War has presented a somewhat different pattern. Early on, the film industry was reluctant to produce films about the war altogether. (And when they were made, the audience displayed an aversion to them. For example, In the Valley of Elah (2007) only grossed $6.5 million in U.S. theatrical rentals. Even the most critically acclaimed film about the war, the 2009 Academy Award–winning The Hurt Locker, which was produced for a paltry (by Hollywood standards) $15 million, grossed just $49 million worldwide. Only $17 million of that box office came from domestic sources.)
However, as the war continued into its fifth and sixth years, an increasing number of films began to deal with the GIs who served in Iraq (less so Afghanistan). These films, much like the early Vietnam films that preceded them by almost three decades, focused more on returning soldiers and their families than on the war itself.
In Grace Is Gone (2007), Stanley Phillips (John Cusack), a devoted husband and father who was discharged from the service because of bad eyesight, has to cope with the death of his wife who was serving in Iraq. Too disconsolate to break the news immediately to his two daughters, he takes them on a cross-country trip to an amusement park, giving them one last moment of pleasure before conveying to them the devastating information. In the process of traveling through an America of undistinguishable motels and highway restaurants, he predictably strengthens his bond to the girls and begins to cope with his tragic loss. Grace Is Gone is a thin and sentimental work; we never really learn much about Stan beyond his being inarticulately pro-war and emotionally bottled up. Though Stan’s brother John (Alessandro Nivola), a drifting professional student, is allowed to make telling criticisms of the war, the sincerity and decency of Grace Is Gone doesn’t make for art, nor is it sufficient to evoke the complexity of the home-front experience.
In a similar manner, another road movie, The Lucky Ones (2008), traces the cross-country journey of three GIs returning from Iraq who team up to confront the perils of life at home: Fred Cheaver (Tim Robbins), a career Army sergeant heading for an encounter with a wife who barely moments after greeting him announces she wants a divorce; T.K. Poole (Michael Peña), a cocky macho who must deal with fears about his sexual adequacy after being wounded in the genitals; and a sunny, hobbling Colee Dunn (Rachel McAdams), who wants to deliver her dead boyfriend’s guitar to his parents. The film is apolitical and dominated by comedy, contrivance, and the formulaic—just another piece of Hollywood hackwork.
THOUGH THESE films were inadequate, there were others produced around that time that had merit. For example, Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss (2008), the title of which derives from a clause in military contracts that allows the armed forces to extend service even when an enlistment is over, is a generally effective and moving evocation of the wounds that a war can cause even for those who come back physically unscathed. It begins with a digital camera depiction of a deadly ambush on American troops in Tikrit, Iraq—a scene permeated with grievous wounds and death. Almost immediately it shifts to the return of three ordinary American men to the small Texas town of Brazos. The film provides a richly textured slice of a red-state homecoming, as the buddies get drunk, fight, and womanize.
However, there is a dark side to their return, replete as it is with post-traumatic stress (represented through flashbacks and flash cuts to the Iraq ambush and the frequent sound of bombs bursting), alcoholism, domestic abuse, and profound depression. The totally physical Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) is out of control; he can’t sleep in his bed and digs a foxhole in his yard, thinking he’s on a mission. A suicidal Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) beats up his fiancée and then uses their wedding presents for target practice. (The army suicide rate is above the civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War.) After Iraq, a return to domesticity is impossible for him.
For the soldiers in Stop-Loss, male friendship matters more than any other commitment. Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is the most stable and principled of the three and their leader, though he’s beset with guilt about leading his men into the ambush at the beginning of the film. Back in Texas, he finds out he has been stop-lossed—a fate he shared with upward of 81,000 GIs. With the words “fuck the president” barely out of his mouth, he angrily sets off on a cross-country trip with an empathetic friend Michelle (Abbie Cornish) to find a senator who emptily promised that he would help war hero Brandon if he ever needed it. On the journey, Brandon calls on the parents of one of his men who had died and runs into a black AWOL soldier hiding out with his family in a fleabag motel—both part of the war’s legacy at home. Brandon also visits a badly maimed and blinded comrade, Rico Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk), who through his ordeal has managed to keep up a cheery patter about feeling “lucky.” Unfortunately, Peirce allows the camera to linger close up to Rico’s face, manipulating his pathos for audience sympathy.
Brandon has the chance to escape to Canada or Mexico, but he fears the loss of self and his world. In a contrived and Hollywood-style manner, Brandon decides to rejoin the army with the military-loving Steve. Brandon’s loyalty to and intimacy with Steve, built on brawling rather than words, is stronger than any antagonism he feels toward the Iraq War. The film is attuned to the experiences of its characters, whose sense of patriotism and anguish are utterly merged. Though Peirce’s characters express pain and resentment about what they have been through, they themselves are rarely anti-war. Stop-Loss is a good film; but it is finally too conventional—too bound to external behavior and incident—to go deep into the heart of its characters’ emotional lives.
The wounds of American soldiers are reflected in a deeper, much more tragic manner in The Messenger (2009). Subtly directed and co-written by first time director Oren Moverman, himself a veteran of the Israeli army, the film deals with Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a highly decorated veteran who carries all sorts of scars from Iraq: shrapnel in his body, a girlfriend who is marrying someone else, and a heavy dose of survivor’s guilt. With three months left in his enlistment, he is assigned to work for the Casualty Notification Office. His unit has the onerous task of notifying families that their sons or daughters were killed in action. Montgomery’s mentor and partner on the job is Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson). Harrelson, breaking from his usual affable roles, plays an officer whose stoic commitment to the rules of his job (such as the prohibition on touching or offering help or compassion to the families) hides profound loneliness, insecurity, and insomnia. Adhering to the rules helps Stone, who has never seen the enemy, keep himself together—while Montgomery treats the job with obvious distaste. His face silently registers his troubled and empathetic feelings when he delivers the standardized spiel to family members about the death of loved ones. They react with rage, hysteria, denial, collapse, and quiet despair, and he can do nothing more than stand there.
The Messenger contains no images of military combat or war horrors. And though the army is Stone’s whole life, he holds off from endorsing its patriotic rhetoric. Neither officer is anti-war, but the film stirringly conveys the pernicious effect of the war on those who see combat. It suggests that those who experience battle have survived a world so painful that it’s beyond the comprehension of their friends and families—that the war is so monstrous that it’s beyond justification. Yet for the most part, The Messenger also eschews the predictable scenes that are usually an integral to recent films about vets returning home—alcohol-fueled fights, murderous rages. Instead it uses the more understated and sensitive effect of unsentimental close-ups of vets that have been indelibly marked by war.
A more elegiac film about what the Iraq War did to American soldiers was Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah (2007). Inspired by real events, Haggis’ film was based on an article by Mark Boal about the murder of Specialist Richard Davis that appeared in Playboy in May 2004. The film begins with a blank-screen voiceover of a GI calling for a buddy to get back into a humvee. In the very next moment, we hear a telephone ringing to inform Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), just returned from Iraq, has gone AWOL. Hank is a retired army MP sergeant who served in Vietnam, and whose furrowed face suggests a depth of experience and weariness with life. After leaving his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon), Hank sets off to search for his son. Upon his arrival in Fort Rudd, New Mexico, he discovers that his son has been murdered, his body stabbed and dismembered.
In attempting to find out who murdered Mike, Hank works out a wary partnership with a local police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), who eventually joins him in investigating and unraveling the mystery of Mike’s death. As in all police procedurals, there are the requisite red herrings. The one that reveals something about Hank involves a Mexican-American buddy of Mike’s, Private Ortiez (Victor Wolf), a former gang member who is initially suspected of killing Mike. Ortiez’s capture moves Hank to explode in a redneck-racist tirade that is his one emotionally uncontrolled moment in the film. But luckily In the Valley of Elah is about more than just solving a not particularly interesting murder mystery. Haggis sees the film as “asking questions about where we are in America right now and what’s happening.” So he places a moral mystery at the film’s center, best reflected in the metaphor of the Valley of Elah (the place in the Bible where David defeats Goliath).
What monsters are being fought? Is it the army that tries to engage in a cover-up of Mike’s murder, or the buddies who stonewall Hank? Is it Mike himself, whose cell phone carries a set of difficult to decipher, frightening digital video images, from him tossing a football to Iraqi kids who steal it, to the committing of war crimes like torturing prisoners? Is it the war itself, with its roadside bombs and orders to regard every civilian, even children, as a potential threat? It’s hard to say—there’s never an unambiguous picture of who the monster is. But what makes it a morally resonant work is its depiction of how the war in Iraq has devastated and dehumanized the soldiers fighting it. Questions about moral culpability are secondary to the experience of war—an incarnation of hell itself.
Though Mike’s murderer is found at the end of the film, Haggis cares much less about finding the killer than how Hank has changed over the course of the movie. Hank had no sympathy for his son’s tears when he called to ask Hank to help him get out of the army; by the end, he remains committed to the troops but is aware of what the war has done to them and to the country. Returning home, Hank passes a school and decides to raise an American flag that his son had sent him, but upside down. It’s the internationally recognized distress signal—and Hank’s acknowledgement of the dreadful state the nation and its soldiers have found themselves in because of the war. The ending risks seeming heavy-handed, but it is somehow quite powerful.
A VERY different kind of response to the Iraq War is found in gifted action-film director Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009). Instead of the moral morass of the Iraq War, she explores the character of a war lover, defined in an opening title quote by former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges as someone for whom the rush of battle is often a potent and murderous addiction. The war lover in this film is Staff Sergeant William James, who joins an explosive disposal unit after the unit’s former leader Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) is killed. For this unit, every patrol is a matter of life and death. James embraces the adrenaline rush of disarming the IEDs carefully planted by the Iraqi insurgents. In his first action with the squad, he sets the tone by dramatically disposing of his scuba-like protective helmet and declaring: “If I’m going to die, I’m going to die comfortable.” James is relentless and expert in disarming bombs on the perilous streets of Baghdad, which, though The Hurt Locker is not shot there, feel authentically ominous—streets where every person looking out of a window or passing on foot could be a sniper or detonate a bomb. In fact, James is so caught up in his job that he revels in the lethal artistry of the Iraqi bomb-makers, keeping as trophies a whole box of detonators.
His two squad-mates—the by-the-book Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and the jumpy Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty)—resent his seeming recklessness, though James is usually too professional to needlessly gamble their lives. Sanborn and Eldridge have thirty-eight days left in their deployment and don’t want to take unnecessary risks. Nevertheless, their sharing in a deadly task forms a bond among them, sealed in a scene where they brutally pummel each other after a particularly violent encounter with a band of Iraqi snipers. The Iraqis in the film are treated as curious and possibly dangerous spectators of the squad’s efforts, or as a shadowy and lethal other. The sole exception is a boy James fondly nicknames Beckham (Christopher Sayegh), a soccer-loving, bootleg DVD hawker. But the film is too realistic—too aware of how ambiguous relationships between U.S. troops and Iraqis are—to turn him into a cute mascot, like the old John Wayne war films would have done.
Sanborn is looking forward to returning home after his tour is up, though he feels that “nobody gives a shit” about the war. But for James, war remains a drug he can’t get enough of. He can’t adjust to life at home with his wife and child. In a not too subtle scene, James is confronted by a cornucopia of brands in a supermarket and can only toss one at random into his shopping cart. All that’s left for him is to return to Iraq. The Hurt Locker’s final scene shows James striding down a street in some city in Iraq in full bomb-disposal regalia, doing what he really loves.
By focusing on soldiers and combat, The Hurt Locker avoids more expansive discussion of the war. Bigelow enters the psyches of these men, but asks nothing about the meaning of the war, other than as a conflict of great human cost. Perhaps Bigelow and her scriptwriter, the ubiquitous Mark Boal, should have built the film not around Chris Hedges’ statement about war as a drug, but instead around his 2003 commencement address at Rockford College: “We are embarked on an occupation that if history is any guide will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and security.”
The larger moral and political damage of the war and occupation is vividly on display in Paul Greengrass’ action-filled Green Zone (2010), based on Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. Greengrass and his screenwriter Brian Helgeland’s explicit subject is the absence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or of any viable reason for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Greengrass’ stoical, idealistic hero Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) finds out, after numerous wild goose chases in dangerous locations, that the WMDs never existed. Miller is a tough professional, but he dismisses the argument of his top sergeant that “we’re here to do a job—the reasons don’t matter,” with the comment, “The reasons we go to war always matter.”
In pursuit of the WMDs, Miller, who ultimately acts alone and defies orders, enters a hall of mirrors where a Rumsfeld-like Defense Department bureaucrat, the insidious Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), can proclaim to a press conference that “democracy is messy” while warning Miller not to pursue his investigation into the whereabouts of the WMDs. There is also a pallid journalist Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan)—presumably modeled after New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, whose dispatches did so much to support the administration’s positions about WMDs—who pursues her own search for the source of the intelligence on the weapons. That source is the mysterious “Magellan,” a stand-in for the infamous “Curveball,” who supplied the Bush administration with false intelligence. Magellan turns out to be a rogue Iraqi Ba’athist general, Mohammed Al-Rawi (Igal Naor), who rather than confirming the existence of WMDs actually denies they ever existed.
The film would have had more political resonance if Greengrass and Helgeland—who see the American government as lying, stonewalling, and mishandling the occupation—had decided to explore in depth the ways in which the media abdicated its responsibility to fully investigate the Bush administration claims; how the decision to go to war was made irrespective of any real evidence; and how the occupation was carried out by people who knew little of the language, culture, or politics of the country they were invading and needed to govern. Instead they opt for concluding the film with an unruffled Miller searching for Al-Rawi—a section that might have been titled “Jason Bourne goes to Baghdad,” since Greengrass’ kinetic style, quick cuts, handheld camera, and high-decibel sound effects reprise the style and action sequences of the two Bourne films he previously made with Damon. Despite these failings, Green Zone is the first Hollywood film to take a critical perspective, limited though it may be, on the way that higher-ups conducted the Iraq War. Indeed, a comment by an Iraqi nicknamed “Freddy” (Khalid Abdalla), who becomes Miller’s interpreter, is eerily prophetic about what will follow: “It is not you who will decide what happens here.”
If the relationship of Hollywood to the Vietnam War is still a relevant paradigm, then The Hurt Locker and Green Zone may be just the beginning of films that take a more critical look at the nature of the Iraq War. Certainly, they are long overdue, as would be any films about Afghanistan, now the longest war in American history. Indeed, we need those films more than ever. As New York Times critic and reporter Brooks Atkinson once famously said, “After each war there is a little less democracy to save.” But in a more pessimistic vein, better war films probably won’t make a difference in the policies we pursue—even if they might give us a vivid sense of the horrors and futility of war.
Albert Auster and Leonard Quart are the authors of American Film and Society since 1945. This article is adapted from that book’s fourth edition, which will be published by Praeger this summer.
