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the American psyche. The legal status of the invasion of Iraq and the widespread opposition to the war was also a key factor in determining audience response. Certainly any attempt to tackle these complex subjects would require a degree of levity.
Filming Iraq – the horror, the
shame and the ramifications It is interesting that two of the most critically
acclaimed films about the war in Iraq actually concern the first Gulf War, fought in 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Three Kings (2000) is a wonderfully-realised war caper movie where the moral boundaries are extremely blurred; and Sam Mendes’ underrated Jarhead (2005) deals with the boredom associated with young men hanging around waiting to fight. Perhaps there is something to be said for a degree of perspective and the passage of time when looking at how well these films work. The current crop of mainstream Hollywood films related to the second Gulf War has been more variable. Two of the directors of the best Vietnam films have focused on Iraq in very different ways. Oliver Stone deals with the build-up to the invasion in an acerbic fashion in his film on President Bush, W (2008). Brian DePalma’s Redacted (2007), on the other hand, is a brutal insight into out-of-control infantrymen who rape a young Iraqi woman and kill her and her family, high on their own sense of power. Meanwhile, in The Valley Of Ellah (2007) concentrates on the aftermath of the war, and its dehumanising impact on a group of soldiers who murder a colleague after a drunken brawl.
Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs (2007) was a film that took a largely political take on events around the War on Terror; but despite its high octane cast of Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, it was disappointing and incoherent in its view of events. The only real spark in the narrative comes from a confrontation between Streep’s liberal journalist and Cruise’s Republican hawk.
The impact of news footage One of the main visual benchmarks for any
film, however, was the sheer amount of news footage to emerge from the invasion and the subsequent occupation of Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan. The proliferation of 24-hour news channels, the continuing growth of the internet and the availability of digital cameras to soldiers and civilians, meant that there was a huge amount of footage documenting the wars from a variety of different perspectives. Redacted played off this use of mise-en-scène by having some of the events shown by hand-held cameras, giving the impression of a verité style. This is particularly true of Nick Broomfield’s The Battle for Haditha (2007) which also follows this template. It is a harrowing drama-documentary based on the real-life murder of 24 civilians in the town of Haditha in 2005, a retaliatory strike for a terrorist attack which resulted in the death of one US Marine. The film follows three sets of characters: firstly the Marines, a mixed bunch, some gung-ho types, others terrified young men. The second group are the ordinary people, trying to cope with the disruption of the war; and the final storyline focuses on the terrorists. Certainly a common bond between the insurgents and the occupiers is their easy manipulation by their leaders. The low-budget nature of Haditha certainly adds to the sense of authenticity demanded by Broomfield. What the film also serves to do is to show the different positions of the main protagonists of the war in an honest and revealing fashion.
The Hurt Locker Perhaps the best film to emerge so far is
Kathryn’s Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009) and in cinematic terms it seems to set the standard. The film, set in Baghdad, focuses on a three-man unit of the US Army’s elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal Squad during the last few weeks of a year-long tour of duty. The film is filled with unbearable tension as the squad work their way through a number of terrifying bomb disposals and Bigelow uses all her experience of the action movie when we see the team pinned down by a group of local insurgents, seemingly destined to meet a pretty brutal end. While the film might be seen to be shackled by some of the main conventions of the war film – men under pressure, loyalty to comrades, maverick leaders, professionalism and the clash between life at home and on the battlefield – it also manages to add a complexity and depth to the characters’ motivations which elevate it far above a great deal of mainstream Hollywood dross.
Small screen warfare:
Generation Kill In many respects the predecessor of The Hurt
Locker was to be found on the small-screen. HBO’s mini-series Generation Kill (2008) scripted by The Wire’s Ed Burns and David Simon and based on the book by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright. It was shown here on the FX channel and terrestrially broadcast on Channel 4 this autumn. It follows the build-up and first few weeks of the Iraq invasion focusing on the Bravo
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 21
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