Monthly Archives: December 2012

film

Zero Dark Thirty: I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit

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“What time are we going on the raid?”
“Zero Dark Thirty, bro.”
“You are such a tool.”

These are my unfair thoughts of Zero Dark Thirty, a movie I have not seen. A movie I am not against. A movie I will see when I get the chance.

Zero Dark Thirty has already been the subject of skepticism and pre-emptive statements from government officials. Besides the inaccurate depictions of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and their futility, there are a number of other things that worry me about Zero Dark Thirty, a tightly shot, beautifully cast, suspenseful punctuation mark to close ten-plus years of real drama, neatly packaged in an easily digestible 160 minutes.

I go to the movies almost every weekend, and I’ve seen the various trailers for Zero Dark Thirty at least a half dozen times. Like any good Hollywood customer, my body has been trained to respond to the cues I’ve been fed. The eerie music, the fading cuts, the crescendoing sounds leading to a quiet scene of night vision-fueled monochromatic green, showing what I know to be the OBL raid, what I assume to be one of the final scenes of the movie.

The trailer got me pumped up for a movie I never really wanted to see, a movie that will undoubtedly become known by the American public as the definitive story of the ‘Global War on Terror.’ A movie that was originally being written as the failure of that endeavor, and was pretty much completely re-written after the OBL raid as a thriller.

You know, to reflect victory.

I’m sure that it’s going to be a great, fun movie. It’s going to be exciting. It’s going to make me anxious, and like Kathryn Bigelow did in The Hurt Locker, it will probably make me feel things that I’ve felt before. Fear, tension, frustration, anxiety, and maybe relief. I’ll probably leave the theater with my chest out, proud to be an American!

In fairness, I liked The Hurt Locker. I thought it was a film that captured the “feel” of being an American soldier on an Iraqi street better than anything else I’ve seen. The scene of the main character overwhelmed by the colors, choices, and ultimate insignificance of the cereal aisle resonated with me and many other veterans I know as a snapshot of “what it’s like” to come back from war. I forgave the movie’s caricature of American soldiers and the details of uniforms and equipment as trivial and insider knowledge that just wasn’t that important. It was a movie, after all. Not a documentary.

Over time though, my thoughts on The Hurt Locker have changed. Because of the film’s success (it won Best Picture in 2010), it became the de-facto Iraq War movie. When I was still in college, people would respond with “Oh, I’ve seen The Hurt Locker” upon meeting me and learning that I was in the Army and had deployed to Iraq. The fact that they’ve seen The Hurt Locker was their way of connecting with me, to let me know that they understood what it must have been like. And that is a little unnerving.

It’s no fault of theirs, though. As a culture, we learn from movies. Most of my imagery of the Vietnam War comes from movies; Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon. I’m sure those are gross characterizations of “what it was like.” I’ve gone further and read about the war, but the images from the movies still color what I learn.

A successful movie based somewhat on reality will become the reality for those who see it. There is already so much buzz surrounding Zero Dark Thirty, it will undoubtedly be successful. This story will become the historical record. Not just for Americans, but for people across the world who will see it and accept it as the way “it” happened.

So here’s why I’m a little concerned:

For those who don’t know, “Zero Dark Thirty” is military vernacular for extremely late at night or extremely early in the morning, a time when it will almost certainly be dark. It’s one of those military terms that is overused by gung-ho new recruits during basic training and discarded by more weathered troops because of how lame it is. Like “hooah, “squared-away,” “get some,” and “hurt locker” (a term that I never even heard until it was the title of the movie).

It means you've been fooled.

It means you’ve been fooled.

To the general public, it sounds cool and ominous. I’m sure that one of the screenwriters came across the term during time spent with US troops, and scribbled it down in a little notebook. I’d be curious to know what the original title was going to be, before the successful OBL raid, when the movie was about the failed manhunt for OBL. But this is the crux of what bothers me about Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s work. They take something mysterious to the public, like a piece of jargon, and then sell it to the public to satisfy that craving for something authentic. A piece of the war that a tiny few actually experienced. The title is just the icing. The film is the cake. It feels like they are taking something inside, controversial, and complicated, producing it for general consumption with beautiful stars and effects, and packaging it as the legit, authoritative experience.

Only it’s not.

It’s exploitative, voyeuristic, and pornographic.

Maybe I am off here, but there is something that rubs me the wrong way about a journalist who on one hand writes a story that needed to be written – The Kill Team in Afghanistan exposé – and then on the other hand writes a couple of films that tell a caricatured version of war that is marketed as the authentic story. Wearing the serious journalist hat in the morning, exposing atrocities of the Army, and then wearing the Hollywood screenwriter hat in the evening, making big money telling hooah stories about war.

Of course, the filmmakers can always deflect any criticism by saying “It’s a movie, not a documentary” which is true. But that ignores the reality of how it will be consumed – how they know it will be marketed and consumed. That, to me, is irresponsible.

I’m not boycotting Zero Dark Thirty. I’m actually looking forward to seeing it and I’ll see it when I get the chance. But I won’t accept it as anything but a fantasy.

books

Book Review: Starship Troopers

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I have never seen Starship Troopers (the movie) in its entirety. I’ll catch bits and pieces of it on television if I am flipping through channels, but it is always too embarrassing to commit real time towards finishing. The movie has a cult following inside of the Army, similar to that other terribly painful movie which recently received an unnecessary remake.

With all of the recent talk concerning women in the infantry, Starship Troopers gets brought up a lot.

Women in the infantry!?

“What do you think about women in the infantry?”
“Yeah, like fucking Starship Troopers, man!”

I’ve always been told that the book is much better than the movie. And I’ve read plenty about the book (On Violence spent a good deal of time talking about Starship Troopers in its “War is War” series).

Well, I finally got around to reading the book myself.

I like science fiction, but I’ve never been a science fiction reader. I’ve only read a handful of sci-fi novels, so I don’t have much to compare Starship Troopers to by way of its genre. For me, the interesting part was not the depictions of futuristic combat, but arguments embedded in the narrative for the use of force, the meaning of citizenship, and the thrill(s) of combat.

As a soldier, the book is fun to read because so much of the nuance reflects what most soldiers have already experienced, from the first meeting with the recruiter, to the myriad of exams and tests upon beginning service, to the terrible experience of initial training, to the ho-hum doldrums of life as a soldier. So much of the book is rooted in the author’s experience (a Naval Academy graduate) and although we are almost a century ahead of his time, the comparisons remain apt. It’s not a stretch then, to assume the same would be true for soldiers joining the future Mobile Infantry.

Especially fun for me was reading that in this future force, all potential officers had to first be enlisted, and then attend Officer Candidate School (the way it should be?).

In terms of message, others have described Starship Troopers as a glorification of violence and militarism, and I can see that. There is a lot missing from the book, though. The story is told from the perspective of a gung-ho recruit, so the world is colored through that lens. Like looking for answers from a 19 year old recruit hopped up on Monster.

I was surprised to find that women were not serving in the infantry in Starship Troopers, despite the depictions in the movie. I thought that would be one of the central themes. It is the absence of women, in fact, which is an active theme in the book. The main character spends a good amount of time lamenting the absence of women around him and fantasizes about what it must be like to serve as an officer, where inter-gender interactions were more frequent.

As a companion piece, I’d highly recommend reading Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War back-to-back. I haven’t reviewed The Forever War – I read it over a year ago. It’s another sci-fi novel which follows a soldier who fights in an intergalactic war which (because of faster-than-light space travel) lasts for thousands of years. As a result, the world that he left behind when he began fighting in the world is drastically changed when he returns. The entire story is an allegory of the returning soldier. In the Forever War, unlike Starship Troopers, women do serve in the infantry. It’s an interesting look at what could be. And where Starship Troopers can be declared to be pro-war or militaristic, The Forever War could be classified as anti-war or anti-militaristic.

Starship Troopers has gone in and out of vogue on the services’ professional reading lists. A quick search brought me this blurb from the Navy’s Professional Reading page:

For today’s Sailor, this novel is extremely worthwhile, for it shows that the travails and aspirations of those who serve are universal and timeless. Its point-of-view, that of an idealistic young man learning the ropes in the military, will seem refreshingly familiar to the reader. It is easy to relate to, and root for the protagonist as he goes from being a raw, naïve recruit to a tough leader of men, along the way learning the true meaning of discipline, loyalty, and courage.

“On the bounce, soldier!”