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July 10, 2005

Catharsis Now!

New York Press critic Armond White has a compelling and frustrating review essay that compares Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds adaptation to the recent spate of soldier docs, including Gunner Palace and Operation: Dreamland. I'm currently writing a conference paper that focuses in part on Gunner Palace, so White's take on that film (and his continued adoration of Spilberg) seems worth noting, if only for selfish reasons.

First of all, I think he's probably right that fiction filmmakers are actively seeking metaphors for the war on terror. Zombies (Dawn of the Dead, etc) and monsters (the Texas Chainsaw remake) continue to haunt as directors raise the bar in terms of violence. And what makes the essay so compelling is the fact that White joins this impulse in blockbuster film with the similar impulse in soldiers' eye docs, which themselves convey a certain kind of horror. He's also right that in the post-Vietnam context, critics of war have found themselves in the rhetorical bind of the popular bumper sticker: "Is it possible to support the troops, not the war?" Before continuing, I do think that White's question creates a false alternative between "supporting the troops" and "opposing the war," but White is correct to recognize the question as informing much political discussion of the war.

In addition, I think that White misses a lot in the development of this metaphor. While I don't want to completely evacuate documentary's claims towards truth or authenticity, White's assertion that Gunner Palace and other soldiers' eye docs present us with reality of the war seems a bit simplistic:

We are there with them on the missions, evading land mines, dodging explosives, interrogating the non-comprehending Iraqis, bringing them "freedom," receiving their rebuffs and feeling caught in the middle (my emphasis).
White's suggestion of a pure identification with the grunts in Gunner Palace seems overstated. While the subjective camera and the emotional interviews (often featuring the soldiers' freestyle raps) are designed to create identification, there's also a distancing effect ("you can't really know what we're going through"). There's also a problem with the horror film metaphor. Horror villains, such as Dawn of the Dead feature villains or monsters who are unknowable. Extending White's metaphor, the Iraqi civilians that appear in Gunner Palace would seem to take on that role, and to a certain extent, that's true of the film in my reading of it. Iraqi civilians are portrayed as unknowable, as a threat, a portayal that should have been complicated considerably.

White's implicit critique that these soldier docs don't provide "patriotic cheer" also seems misplaced in that the Iraq War itself has been the subject of tremendous skepticism, especially since the Bush administration's WMD claims have been disredited. That being said, White's claim that Speilberg's War of the Worlds allegorizes aspects of the war on teror is almost enough to make me want to see Spielberg's film, even if Tom "Psychiatry is for Dupes" Cruise is involved (thanks to IFC Blog fo the link).

Posted by chuck at July 10, 2005 3:04 PM

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