Imperialism at the Movies: Hollywood and the War on Terror
By Frann Michel
Recent attempts by the US administration to re-brand the so-called “war on terrorism” as the “long war” reveal (among other things) the decline in popular support for US militarism. Though heads of Hollywood studios promised in 2001 to do their propaganda best, rogue liberals have lately been having their cinematic say about imperialism. But recent mainstream US films addressing conflict in the Middle East have promised much and delivered less. To some extent we expect this: artifacts of mass culture have a stake in preserving the status quo by providing audiences with escape rather than provocation. Yet, they must in some way address the real conditions of viewers’ experience in order to engage those viewers’ psychic energies. Jarhead, Munich and Syriana explore the vicissitudes of masculinity and the generation of violence. But even when locating the roots of that violence in political and economic relations, as do the latter two films, they offer the viewer a comforting promise of retreat to a sacralized private sphere.
Jarhead and Munich are both historical films, set in the not-so-distant past; but narratives of the past tell us at least as much about the time of their production as about the time in which they take place. Jarhead, set during the 1990-91 Gulf War, has the most obvious relation to the current war in Iraq and thus the most potential for commentary on it. Yet it does the least with its opportunities.
Jarhead: Waiting for the Kill
Despite brief mention of the need for oil, the film does not try to explore the larger forces at work in historical events. As one character says, “Fuck politics. We’re here. All the rest is bullshit.” Nor, though it is much on display, is there any questioning of the military’s repeated equation of sex and death, killing and heterosexual masculinity. Indeed, because of the film’s individualist focus, the audience is invited to share the soldiers’ misogynist hostility to the unfaithful wives and girlfriends they’ve left back home.
Directed by Sam Mendes and based on Anthony Swofford’s bestselling memoir of the same title, Jarhead follows the experiences of Swoff (Jake Gyllenhall) through basic training, further training as part of a sniper team with his friend Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), and their tedious wait in the desert for Operation Desert Shield to become Operation Desert Storm. Like Full Metal Jacket and other boot-camp-is-hell films, Jarhead offers a vision of the maddening effects of military life, but the nature of even that narrow critique is equivocal: much of the madness seems to come from not getting to shoot anyone.
The long build-up and the substitution of air power for ground forces mean that Swoff and Troy never use their skills as a sniper team, and their resentment at this militarius interruptus outweighs any critique of the perversity of their conditioning. The pleasure and pride that a soldier, like any worker, might take in the exercise of skill is never problematized by a larger context. (Compare Peter Davis’ 1974 Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds, in which bomber pilot Randy Floyd speaks about both his pride in his technical expertise and his horror at the real effect his actions have on humans on the ground.) What turns out to be most maddening is evidently not the horrors of war but rather exclusion from military life and action.
Munich: the Politics of Retaliation
Like Jarhead, Munich focuses on the damage to those whose job it is to pursue violence on behalf of states. But unlike Jarhead, it acknowledges the collateral damage inflicted on noncombatants, and attempts to address the political motives for violence. Directed by Steven Spielberg from a script by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Munich spins a tale of the aftermath of the 1972 Olympics, at which a group of Palestinians took hostage and killed 11 Israeli athletes. In retaliation, a group of Mossad agents are recruited to kill 11 Palestinians they are told are responsible for the action.
Parallels abound with the US response to the events of 9-11. The least elaborated, though perhaps the most important, is that in neither case is non-state terrorism the origin of the conflict. One of Mossad’s targets has a brief scene in which he and his wife articulate the grievances of Palestinians whose homes have been taken and whose lives are subject to the oppression of the occupying Israelis. The force of this scene, however, is outweighed by the vividly dramatized events at the Olympics, to which the film repeatedly returns; much as images of blazing and falling World Trade towers tend to obscure the US military presence in Saudi Arabia and other acts that were the avowed motives for the 9-11 attacks. More weight is given in it to the questions of how to respond to non-state violence, and whether, as one character puts it, everything is changed now. In case we miss the irony of that familiar phrase, the closing shot features the 1970s New York skyline, complete with the twin towers.
Avner (Eric Bana) is the leader of the Mossad team, and like most of his teammates, grows increasingly uncertain of their mission. Is retaliation worth it if it means killing innocent bystanders? Were these 11, in fact, the ones responsible for the athletes’ deaths? Will the show of “strength” in response to violence bring an end to violence? The point that violence begets violence might seem a truism, if not for the vitriolic attacks the film has elicited from critics on the right. To its further credit, it resists much of Spielberg’s usual sentimentalism. For instance, after the mission, Avner’s reunion sex with his wife is intercut with flashbacks to the killing of the athletes, suggesting the most intimate personal relations are tainted by the violence of the public sphere.
There is one idyllic family in the film, untainted by the machinations of its patriarch. Louis (Mathieu Amalric) and his father (Michael Lonsdale) sell the Mossad team information on the whereabouts of their targets. Papa’s lucrative business is guided only by a refusal to deal with states and by a loyalty to his extended brood, whose fair-haired children we see romping through an al fresco luncheon. Avner’s decision to leave Mossad and move his family to Brooklyn marks his rehumanization, and family remains a touchstone of value and a haven to be protected.
Syriana: Oil and Blood
Betrayals of family ties are far more pervasive in Syriana, which is in several ways the most ambitious of these films. Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, Syriana, in multiple intersecting plotlines, addresses the US government’s protection of corporate interests in the oil wealth of the Middle East.
The corporations in question are the fictional energy companies Connex and Killen. The young lawyer charged with shepherding their merger through Congress (Jeffrey Wright) does so by disdaining his biological father and betraying his immediate superior to the investigators, thus managing the appearance of due diligence, and winning the approval of the firm’s head (Christopher Plummer). He, in turn, has very friendly relations with both the CIA and the head of an unnamed emirate where Connex hopes to operate. Another American turns up at a large party at one of that Emir’s mansions: energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), who has a wife and two young sons.
The Emir isn’t interested in his consulting pitch, but after one of Woodman’s sons dies in a freak accident, he is hired by the Emir’s elder son Nasir (Alexander Siddig). The wife leaves in indignation, while Woodman gushes about Nasir’s plans for liberal reforms. Those plans include investing the nation’s wealth in the interests of its people and expanding women’s rights. But because they also include ousting US bases, or perhaps because they include denying development contracts to Connex, the CIA sends agent Bob Barnes (George Clooney) to assassinate him.
It’s refreshing to see a film that addresses the nexus of corporate and government power without reducing the problem to a few bad apples, that acknowledges the profit and power motives behind US interventions abroad, that admits that the CIA kills people (though former CIA officer Robert Baer, whose memoir See No Evil is a source for the film, insists that this element is fiction). Moreover, Syriana has the further merit of positioning non-state terrorism as a response to capitalist consolidation. The Connex-Killen merger leads to layoffs in the oil fields, and the newly unemployed Wasim (Mazhar Munir), who starts frequenting a madrasa because it serves good meals, ends by becoming a suicide bomber and attacking one of Connex-Killen’s tankers. The sketchiness of this subplot is a weakness of the film. (A far more complex and compelling depiction of suicide bombing can be found in the Palestinian film Paradise Now.)
But Syriana goes beyond its systemic portrait to a totalizing vision that may engender despair about the possibility of public-sphere change. The mortal failures of both liberal and Islamic resistance, and absence of any other possible response, leave the well-meaning no option but to retreat to the private sphere. The film ends with Woodman’s somber return to his wife and remaining son.
Still, all of these films are well acted and visually skillful, and they offer material for conversations that might press their analyses in more radical directions.
