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July 15, 2005
Soldiers Pay
Tricia Regan, David O. Russell and Juan Carlos Zaldivar's Soldiers Pay (IMDB) was originally scheduled to be included as an extra on a DVD re-release of Russell's Three Kings; however, because Russell had been critical of the Bush administration, Warner Brothers chose not to release the film, citing "production issues." The documentray has since found its way to the public via an election-eve screening on IFC and is now available on DVD. The documentary itself, filmed on an extremely low budget, consists almost entirely of talking-heads interviews with Gulf War veterans, psychologists specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder, and some Iraqi civilians (including participants in Russell's Three Kings).
After watching the doc, I'm not sure that it adds anything particularly new to the dicussion of the war. As the Philadelphia City Paper critic notes, Russell makes a "crude" attempt at balance by including Iraqi civilians who dealt with Saddam Hussein's brutal leadership. The documentary also spends too much time following a story that closely parallels the narrative of Three Kings, about a group of soldiers who found several million dollars in a house. Had this narrative been folded more effectively into a critique of the treatment of the soldiers, the documentary might have been stronger.
Despite these flaws, the documentary raises some interesting questions about representations of the war in Iraq and its aftermath. As I was watching this doc, I couldn't help but think about Michael Tucker's Gunner Palace, and the degree to which both films are careful to cultivate a rhetoric of authenticity in representing the experiences of the soldiers. It's probably nothing new that both war films and documentaries return to the question about the impossibility of true representation, but the degree to which these documentaries insist on that impossibility seems significant. In fact, I'm inclined to think that the war film and the documentary are two of the cinematic genres most concerned with authentic representations, and that it's worth asking how these genres seek to establish their authenticity (and how that authenticity is defined).
I'm in the process of writing a paper on Gunner Palace, so I'll likely be talking about these issues frequently over the next few days, and one of the questions I'd like to consider is the degree to which both Gunner Palace and Soldiers Pay are indebted to or informed by previous generations of war films (Vietnam, World War II), but also by other media. Specifically, I've been thinking about Thomas Doherty's discussion of Vietnam as the first "living-room war" in Projections of War, the ways in which TV (or at least represenations of TV) so heavily informed representations of Vietnam and the first Gulf War. In this context, I'd also like to think about the ways in which films about the current war in Iraq might be framed by discourse associated with the Web, including (discussions of) blogs maintained by Iraqi citizens as well as by American soldiers. This idea is still developing, but I think the language of authenticity, usually rooted in personal experience or first-person narrative, is remarkably similar in both the documentaries and the blog narratives about the war and its aftermath.
Posted by chuck at July 15, 2005 4:07 PM
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