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April 7,
2003
War and Art
When
War Goes Off the Script
By JOHN MACKAY
"If I had to sum up current thinking
on precision missiles and saturation weaponry in a single sentence,
I'd put it like this: once you can see the target, you can expect
to destroy it."
-- William J. Perry,
Former U.S. Defense Secretary
Cinema, or rather most "mainstream"
narrative cinema, has two distinct though nonexclusive faces.
On the one hand, movies organize images into orders that, in
their unfolding over time, give some meaning to those images
and their interrelations. Usually these orders coalesce into
stories of some kind, as the suspenseful play of giving and
concealing information about the characters gradually produces
a whole and satisfying tale. Movies can also offer arguments
and explanations (think of the "safety procedure"
videos on airplanes), which similarly bring certain visual/aural
"facts" to the fore, arrange them and render them
significant. The other side involves all those moments when
narrative or explanation are temporarily arrested in order to
offer us a more direct sensory charge (or "buzz,"
or "thrill"): dance scenes, sex scenes, special effects
fireworks of all kinds. Of course, the two "sides"
can blur into one another and always thoroughly interact, as
when (for example) an exciting shootout becomes the pretext
for some further narrative: usually, a narrative of revenge.
Wars are not movies, despite the fact
that most of us receive all our knowledge about wars in cinematic
or televised form, and pace the "generalissimo" pretensions
of the most hubristic directors. Still, comparisons of war with
cinema may not be entirely gratuitous, keeping in mind their
shared dependence on narrative and the visual. Not only do
armies need to make a whole range of largely visual distinctions
-- most fundamentally between friends and enemies, with "uniforms"
used to simplify this separation -- but wars, to legitimate
themselves, require both narrative justification ("why"
we're doing this) and the promise of satisfying closure (the
"happy end"). On the ground, soldiers depend on the
narrative play of visibility/invisibility as well; a good strategy,
like a good storyteller, keeps the interlocutor guessing. Most
importantly, combatants (as Paul Virilio notes in "War
and Cinema)" require a clear, meaningful purview of the
"theater of war," even while they generate the very
chaos (destroying landmarks, wrecking infrastructure) that undoes
any steady perspective; successful closure of this dynamic (by
one side or the other) is one of the meanings of "victory."
War films, too, oscillate between accounts
of the "progress of the war" (often focusing, as in
historical novels, on the interaction of the lives of the rank-and-file
with the larger "theater") and representations of
violent conflict whose impact can be quite literally "visceral"
(see "Saving Private Ryan"). In our day, the form
of visual culture most immediately bound to the unfolding of
war is not cinema but television; yet clearly enough, the media
"coverage" of the war contains both narrative/expository
and "spectacular" elements. In the first category,
we have not only "stories from the field" but endless
maps, charts, computer simulations, satellite cartography and
so on. On the other side, think of the images of "strikes,"
those big, loud, exciting explosions, sometimes accompanied
by audible moans of appreciation from the TV "pundits"
themselves. Plainly, this media exhilaration equally extends
to their own power to broadcast "information" from
any point and (aided by "night vision") at all times
-- a news technology best regarded as an appendage of the military's
own surveillance apparatus. Perhaps the perfect fusion of meaning
and spectacle is provided by the now-familiar black-and-white
images of "precision" targeting: a placidly rational
grid, punctured at the bull's eye by a captivating puff of
devastation that (apparently) leaves no bloody residues.
There are, of course, other images less
susceptible to such fusions, and censorship spares us some of
them: the sight of bodies burned and shattered by bombardment,
ruined cities and towns, polluted land, air, and water, and
(less visibly) devastated social networks. Yet the "bad
stuff" can't be ignored, and the larger goal of war-as-cinema
(i.e., on the ideological level, and setting aside strategies
of simple denial) is to absorb both the "unwatchable"
pictures and any untoward elation about our spectacular technological
prowess into a narrative that both justifies and satisfies.
At the moment, the dominant trope is perhaps the damsel-in-distress
story, familiar in cinema at least since D.W. Griffith and
formally characterized by continual crosscutting between the
hapless damsel (classically tied to the railroad tracks) and
the inexorably advancing hero. In the present conflict, "coalition
forces" are cast as the heroic rescuers, with the "Iraqi
people" (terrorized by a suitably dark, mustachioed villain)
in the damsel's role. To be sure, other, competing narratives
exist; they tend, however, under the dominant discourse, to
get lumped together under the rubric of "conspiracy theories."
The arguments used to justify the present
war centered on issues of visibility and concealment. And proving
the Iraqi regime's "guilt," at least to the public,
will depend rather heavily upon visual "documentary evidence"
to fill in the footage missing from the legitimizing narrative.
A sort of virtual scripting of the war's proposed aftermath
has been happening, involving both comic and tragic trajectories.
One half of the movie will be comic and filled with sunlight
and air; its protagonists are crowds of cheering Iraqis, offering
warm handshakes and baskets of domestic produce to their rescuers.
The other part of the scenario is of tragic or perhaps gothic
tonality, with its locations placed decidedly under ground:
the projected revelations of vast caches of WMDs, and grim (perhaps
even "unwatchable") images from Saddam's scream-proof
cellars. Indeed, the fascination with "night vision,"
along with the weird silence registered most of the time by
the cameras mindlessly recording what they "see" from
hotel rooftops in Baghdad, suggests a hidden yearning for some
new penetration of the camera into opaque and subterranean worlds.
As we come to feel that the real action in the city is happening
below the surface, a truly underground cinema is required to
get "the whole story": to expose the illicit stashes
of weaponry, nestled in the earth alongside the torture chambers,
secret bunkers, still-undiscovered Mesopotamian antiquities,
and Iraqi oil. (Anyone interested in developing such a cinema
might glean some stylistic clues from "Dark Days,"
Marc Singer's harrowing documentary about homeless people living
in NYC subway tunnels.)
In the mind, many of us have even "screened"
our own fragmentary versions of these scenarios. One might well
imagine some intrepid producer already commissioning scripts
and perhaps even shooting scenes along comparable narrative
lines, prior to the war's "conclusion" -- much as
the "coalition" itself has wasted no time in pre-emptive
apportioning of Iraqi land and resources to various global-corporate
beneficiaries -- constructing the sets, as it were, for staging
a whole array of projected post-bellum narratives.
In both fantasies -- comic above ground,
tragic or gothic below -- what is really at stake are versions
of Iraqis and of us. Because they are stories of global consequence,
we can be certain that visual "documents" will be
carefully selected, ordered and disseminated to cohere with
and authenticate the anticipated denouement. Yet neither "we"
nor "the Iraqis" can be scripted at all, of course,
as recent and deadly visual confusions at checkpoints and elsewhere
have demonstrated; nor can we clearly discern what sort of welcome
the liberated damsel will offer her rescuer. It's in those moments
of frustrated narrative expectation -- moments that just don't
make sense -- that our (bad) Hollywood framework for apprehending
the war gets displaced by a more authentically documentary mode,
wherein we realize that the "characters" are not actors
but acting, trying to write their "script" for themselves
and in ways we might not grasp.
John MacKay
is an assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures
at Yale University. He teaches courses in Russian film and film
theory.
This column originally appeared in Yale
Daily News.
Yesterday's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
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David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
Prashad
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Tom
Stephens
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Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
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Pierre
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Show
Hammond
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Steve
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