hump the honky or where have all the heroes gone?

We are now officially five years into our conflict in Iraq and six-and-a-half since the destruction of September 2001. In the intervening years, a whole new set of political orthodoxies has developed in our country—orthodoxies marked by that peculiar naïve infantilism for which our nation’s politics are best known. Generally behind the times, the motion picture industry in the last couple of years has really ratcheted up its response to the changing political environment. Whether we are talking about feature films or documentaries, the political cinema of the present age seems to be particularly humorless and irrelevant—affected without being effective. Two recent films, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight—a documentary—and Brian de Palma’s Redacted—a fictionalized representation of factual events—typify this trend.

No End in Sight comes highly recommended from critics, film festivals and awards juries. It won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Documentary Feature) and was granted four-star status by Roger Ebert. One would imagine that such lofty accolades would be suggestive of a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking. One would be decidedly disappointed.

Charles Ferguson is not a documentary filmmaker—or at least he wasn’t before making No End in Sight. He is a former academic and fellow with the Brookings Institution with a PhD in political science from MIT. These credentials allowed him to gain access to many of the former government and military officials who were responsible for planning and executing America’s war and subsequent occupation of Iraq (I’ll come back to this). The film’s structure is basically that of your typical History Channel production: lots of talking heads cut with shocking scenes of brutal violence and anti-American sentiment in Iraq.

The first problem with No End in Sight is its focus on the poor and insufficient planning for the occupation of Iraq as the central problem with which we are now faced. Nobody is going to argue over whether that the Bush administration’s planning for the war’s aftermath was woefully inadequate. This is established in even the more hawkish circles. One must ask, however, wouldn’t the question of planning been rendered moot if sensible heads were able to put a stop to the march to war in the first place? The film touches on the shoddiness of the argument for the war, but this is treated as a mere preface to the real issue. Ferguson himself was initially a supporter of the war, so taking this line was probably not an option.

Be this as it may, the issue of the administration’s planning of the war is a legitimate topic of inquiry. The problem here, however, is that the ground covered by the film has been exhaustively trod by many of the top newspapers and public affairs periodicals in recent years—you know, journalists. Any halfway informed citizen with access to the New York Times and a subscription to the New Yorker is likely to come away from No End in Sight with a distinct sense of deja-vu (deja-read?). That documentary films have become something of a substitute for legitimate journalism is problematic and does not bode well for this country’s political future.
This brings us to the film’s fatal flaw: the culpability of its participants. Ferguson’s use of former administration officials who were directly involved in the war’s planning and execution was obviously intended to give viewers the sense that what they are seeing is an unvarnished version of the sequence of events leading us to the current quagmire. That said, a reading of the c.v.’s of the film’s participants can also lead to another interpretation. Let’s take a look at some of these talking heads:

Robert Hutchings – Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (2003 – 2005)

Colonel Paul Hughes – Director of Strategic Policy for the U. S. Occupation

Jay Garner – Administrator, ORHA – February – May 2003

Ambassador Barbara Bodine – In Charge of Baghdad for the U. S. Occupation

The job titles of those contributing to Ferguson’s film offer a couple of possible interpretations. In one sense, who better to explain the problematic execution of this war than those directly involved? On the other hand, one could also argue that these were important people in the administration who not only allowed this war to happen, but also participated directly in its slipshod execution. One gets the sense in listening to these individuals that their hand wringing belies an absent mea culpa. Moreover, if anybody has an axe to grind with the administration, it is this group of disgruntled exes. I do not doubt the truth of the stories relayed by these officials, but I also cannot help thinking to myself that these are the assholes that made it happen.

If No End in Sight is an ultimately superfluous example of the sort of liberal orthodox documentary that has flourished under the Bush administration, Redacted is something else altogether. In it, director de Palma uses mixed media—marine private Angel Salazar’s video diary, a French news crew’s documentary, phony news reports, videos posted on the web sites of jihadist groups and soldiers’ spouses—to tell the story of the American occupation of Iraq in general, and the brutal rape and murder of a fifteen year-old Iraqi girl and her family by a pair of marines stationed in Samarra.

Redacted is one of the most clumsily put together movies I have ever seen. The characters are not really characters so much as they are comments on the sort of characters used in war (or anti-war) movies. Gabe Blix, in his O’Hara reading intellectualism and keffiyeh wearing irony, is something of an analogue for Full Metal Jacket’s Private Joker. Even worse are the two marines ultimately responsible for the movie’s central crime. These two are not so much soldiers as they are Appalachian gorillas who somehow got separated from their Klan rally. The following comments are typical of their presentation:

“The only language these sand niggers understand is force.”

“Waxing Hajjis is like stomping cockroaches.”

You get the point. The problem with this approach, however, is that when finally faced with their abhorrent crime, the audience can only conclude that they never should have been allowed into the marine corps in the first place—rather than that somehow the “horrors of war” have turned otherwise good boys into monsters. What might have been the film’s saving grace is its unorthodox structure, which recalls de Palma’s earlier (and much better) films such as Hi, Mom! (1970). This pastiche of media is used in the first place to give a rounder perspective on the events and circumstances portrayed, but it also serves as something of a critique of the media’s presence and possible complicity in modern war. The problem again is in the execution. What could have been an effective technique for really digging into the complexity of the conflict as it now stands in Iraq, instead becomes a crutch in which the same, oversimplified arguments are used to criticize the American occupation.

In one scene, presented as a documentary by a French television crew, we are presented with a view of one of countless roadblocks set up by the occupation forces to curtail the spread of violence. The following title appears on the screen:

Over a 24-month period, U. S. troops killed 2,000 Iraqis at checkpoints. 60 were confirmed insurgents. No U. S. soldiers were charged in any of these incidents.

Then you see a car speeding into the checkpoint. As soldier after soldier signals the car to stop, it only speeds up and swerves to dodge the marines in its way. Once it reaches a certain point without showing any sign of slowing, the marines open fire on the vehicle. As it turns out, the vehicle was carrying an exaggeratedly pregnant woman being driven to the hospital by her brother. She and her unborn fetus are tragically killed. What is sort of left hanging there, however, is the fact that you have this group of American soldiers who know that there are people out there trying to kill them by any means possible. When they see a car speeding toward them, ignoring all entreaties to stop, their rules of engagement tell them to open fire on the vehicle. These kids are scared like the Iraqis are scared and it is difficult to blame them for playing by the rules in such a circumstance. This is war we are talking about, not a drunk-driving checkpoint. War is ugly, people die, lives are destroyed. What is the point?

Hi, Mom!, on the other hand, uses similar techniques to create a film that is highly entertaining, extremely funny and truly prescient in terms of its satirical take on the racial politics of its era. Take, for example, the National Intellectual Television presentation of The Black Revolution Part 2: Artificial Dissemination. Participants in a radical theatre production Be Black Baby walk around Greenwich Village exhorting the non-Black residents to learn what it means to be black in America. The responses of the people they encounter are double-edged in the sense that they both typify the white response to sixties era black radicalism as well as patronizing benevolence of white liberals. An older white woman informs her black interlocutors, “You know, we have been on many marches in Harlem. We’ve done lots of things. We haven’t been born today, you know. How do you expect to be where you are now if we don’t help you?” At the group’s continuing insistence, the woman’s husband inquires, “Just what do you want from us?” As though to say, we marched with our white friends in your honor, we read the appropriate liberal publications, our obligation is met—stop being so fucking demanding.

The satire—and satire is key here, why is nobody doing satire anymore?—gets even richer with the “production” of Be Black Now at the film’s end. This scene is so masterful in its economy and the complexity of its subtexts as to be archetypical of what satire can and should do. The group starts by explaining to their liberal white audience that being black means being loose and gives them the opportunity (the secret desire of many whites) to fondle the assembled afros. The responses—“it’s kind of springy,” “it’s like a sponge,” “like angel food cake (ha!),” “I had expected steel wool”—are perfect in their absolute truth and embarrassing irony. Or when one of the performers explains that in order to be black and to feel black, you’ve got to eat black and serves the disgusted white audience a meal of black-eyed peas, collard greens and pigs feet. When the audience members politely refuse to eat the food they are literally force fed by the performers. This is as hilarious as it is confrontational.

The performance’s finale is one of the high-water marks of satirical cinema. The black performers, their faces whitened with pancake makeup, blacken the faces of their white audience. The satire is turned on its head when the performers begin to slyly steal the purses and empty the wallets of the white audience members—at once exposing ingrained prejudices and preying on the audience’s deepest fears. Then, in the production’s climax, one of the white women is grabbed by the white-faced black men, her clothes are torn from her and it is apparent that she is about to be raped. When a police officer arrives in response to the noise, the white audience is relieved, until, responding to their blackened faces and absence of money or identification, he scoffs at their stated names (“Martin Zinn? More like Martin Freeman. Prime Minister of the Black Panthers”) and places of residence (“Scarsdale? Come on, Martin, where do you live?”) and wantonly beats them.

Mick LaSalle’s review for Redacted from the San Francisco Chronicle is quoted on the DVD case:

“ . . . Made with a clear intention—to stop the Iraq war.”

The problem is it is too late for that, and this is sort of the point. Where was this flood of public attention to the developing situation with Iraq in 2002? Perhaps if people and filmmakers were more engaged at that point, this war may not have happened. Now that most of the American public is fully in tune to the ridiculousness of this enterprise, it is too easy and ultimately irrelevant to adopt this stance of protest. In any event, if filmmakers are not going to have the courage to ask difficult questions and take unpopular stances, the outlook for the future of political cinema is poor indeed.