From the Archives: Iraq on the US Big Screen (November 2007)

One of our goals, since we launched EA's ancestor, Libertas, in 2007, has been to link study of US foreign policy to areas like culture and media. Soon after Libertas' launch, my colleague Melani McAlister wrote this piece, which viewed the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath through the prism of American cinema.

The opening of Brian De Palma’s Redacted this weekend marked a new moment in the debates about the Iraq war in the United States . The widely admired director of Scarface, Dressed to Kill and Casualties of War has created an important film – at once fascinating and deeply flawed, compelling and utterly infuriating. Based on the true-life story of the rape of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her family by a squad of American soldiers, the film created a sensation at the Venice Film Festival last summer, where it got a five-minute standing ovation, and De Palma won the award for Best Director.

Redacted is a turning point in large part because it speaks about the Iraq war in ways that, up until now, have been the provenance of documentaries.

For several years, remarkable films like Dreams of Sparrows or Gunner Palace have been exposing the horrors of the war, the suffering of Iraqi civilians, and the nightmarish quagmire faced by US soldiers. De Palma undoubtedly knows this: Redaction wears its longing for documentary status on its sleeve. One character tells us at the beginning of the film that we won’t be offered a straightforward chronological Hollywood story, and indeed the most compelling aspect of Redacted is the self-conscious way it is structured, supposedly stitched together from a variety of sources. One large part is supposedly the video diary made by one of the soldiers; some action is viewed as if through a security camera; and sometimes we see a fake French documentary that is delicious parody. There is also a beheading, which we see as if it were on a web site, and some scenes are shown as news reports by an al-Jazeera-like station.

De Palma’s self-consciousness about form invites the audience to see how much our knowledge of the war is based on our ownstitching together of such partial and problematic sources. De Palma is certainly not the first director to engage and question the power of the image; the compromised role of news, entertainment, and surveillance, has been taken up in movies from The Siege (1998) to Syrianna (2006). But Redacted does it very well, and De Palma goes well beyond simply criticizing the news media. He shows us ourselves, caught between so many ways of seeing that we somehow refuse to see at all.

At this level, Redacted is superior to most of the flurry of films about the Iraq war or the so-called war on terror that have come out this fall. The Kingdom, for example, starring Jamie Foxx, is a showy fantasy about a group of FBI agents who go to Saudi Arabia to hunt down the Muslim bad guys who have bombed a US outpost. The film features buddy bonding, Jennifer Garner in tight T-shirts, and plenty of action, plus a few good Saudis amongst all the terrorists to prove that the film isn’t anti-Arab. Though there are a few moments of minor critique in the film, The Kingdom generally says that --diplomacy be damned -- fighting the war on terror is a tough job, and if we want it done right, then Americans have to do it, wherever and whenever they please.

There have been other more critical films, of course, such as the Valley of Elah and Lions for Lambs, though both were flawed by their own earnestness, and hamstrung by the necessity of waving a “support our troops” banner behind almost every statement of criticism of the war.

At first, it seems like Redacted feels no such necessity, that it is a tough-minded and thoroughgoing critique. Granted, it is in many ways an old-fashioned platoon film with a multicultural American cast. The center of the story is McCoy, a ruggedly handsome and rather idealistic solider who is ultimately complicit in the cruelty. The group also includes a hard-nosed African American sergeant, who dies early and needlessly; a white but vaguely ethnic intellectual of the group; a Latino video diarist, whose home-movies are supposed to be his ticket to film school; and two white goons who initiate the violence. Unlike many platoon films, however, Redacted insists that the soldiers are not just victims of the nightmare of war. Yes, the Iraq war should never have happened, but the attacks on civilians are also born from the racism and arrogance of these particular men, and the aggressive, woman-hating masculinity of the military culture around them.

I was compelled by this edginess, by the anti-earnestness of the film’s anger. But DePalma lost me when he decided to place the primary impetus for the rape and murders almost entirely in the hands of two characters who are little better than parody. Flake and Rush are irredeemably stupid, Southern racists who love porn and decorate their bunks with confederate flags. The two goons are working-class stiffs to the core. In case their “ain’ts” aren’t enough to tell us that back home these guys are likely to be driving pickups to factory jobs, we get the picture when one of the two, Flake, tells a long and chilling story of his brother, a pool-playing Teamster who, like Flake, delights in senseless murder. These two soldiers hate Arabs, of course, and, in the end, everybody else in the unit is pulled, with varying degrees of protest, into their murderous sexually charged rage.

The Southern racist bad guy is certainly not a new character in American movies, but what’s striking is how De Palma uses commentary about the domestic politics of race and racism to comment on America ’s role in the world. In fact, De Palma is far from alone in this. Race matters a great deal when Hollywood sends Americans abroad – often in unexpected ways. These days, when Hollywood want to show that a particular use of global power is good, it often signals the justice of military might by placing African Americans characters in a leading role. Thus The Kingdom signaled the fundamental moral uprightness of the Americans’ mission in Saudi Arabia by casting Jamie Foxx as the FBI agent leading the team. You could see something similar with Denzel Washington holding up American justice in The Siege or Courage Under Fire, or Samuel Jackson as the officer who makes hard decisions in Rules of Engagement, or just about  any movie with Morgan Freeman as president. Even zombiemovies take the cue: in the best B movie of this year, 28 Weeks Later, US troops occupy Britain after an outbreak of zombie-ism, and when a U.S. general takes the horrible step of ordering massive killing of civilians, we know that this is repugnant butnecessary – and we know that in part because the General is played by the sexy and righteous Idris Elba (who in recent years also played a sexy and very unrighteous drug dealer on HBO’s The Wire).

I’m not saying it’s the case that Hollywood generally treats African American men as moral exemplars, of course -- far from it. But that’s what makes the association of black men with the justification of US military or police actions so striking. Hollywood , which all but ignores the daily lives of African Americans, draws on a perverse kind of racial liberalism to authorize its use of force abroad -- the black general as righteousness insurance. (Which is what I guess Colin Powell was for the Republicans, before he got caught lying at the United Nations about the justifications for the Iraq War.)

De Palma uses race differently, but to a similar effect: Other members of the Redacted platoon, like the square-jawed McCoy, are implicated, but the truly guilty are the ignorant, racist southerners who insist that they are going to kill some “sand niggers.”They are the hicks who show up to war wrapped in a Confederate flag, and who take otherwise decent men down with them.

At one point in the film, one character makes an anxious comparison to Abu Ghraib. The reference is supposed to highlight the bravery of our somewhat-hero McCoy for telling the truth, even in the face of embarrassing the military. But there is another layer here, as De Palma also evokes, without self-consciousness, the moral complexities of that real life nightmare: as we all know, the lower-level military police at Abu Ghraib have been convinced for their crimes, while most of those who set the policies that authorized torture are still wandering the halls of power.

It was obviously useful for the architects of the Iraq war to posit, as our president did after Abu Ghraib, that we can solve the problem of such horrors by getting rid of the few “bad apples” – those who sully an otherwise righteous democratizing project. But De Palma, who imagines himself challenging such hubris and delusion, offers up exactly the same sacrifice to the gods of war: Don’t blame us, we’re very upset about the war! Take them, the ones who are really to blame: they’re right over there, somewhere near the Walmart parking lot. We’ll wait here, in the theater; and meanwhile, we promise to feel really bad about what they are doing in Iraq .