Catharsis Now

As U.S. Iraq War casualties push 2000, our bloodthirsty entertainment media attempts to keep up. Since the 1993 Iraq invasion, movies have gotten more hideously violent-from Man on Fire to the even gorier remakes of Dawn of the Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of Wax. It's as if our movies weren't simply reprocessing the trash of the past, but actively looking for a war metaphor. In the context of action movies (this era's preferred style of entertainment) we're taught to see ourselves as aggressors, refugees and victims. In Spiderman 2, a roaring train becomes one of the most harrowing symbols in movie history. Americans, trapped in a New York crisis (a runaway subway car), band together in an instance of desperate, almost biblical sacrifice and salvation. This makes it official: Since 9/11, an emphasis on disaster has preoccupied many recent commercial filmmakers. It's more than genre exercise. Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow has a sense of fatality far beyond his Independence Day; suggesting a consciousness of mayhem that any sentient moviegoers alive four years ago can easily recognize and now are expected to share. As a result, in fiction and nonfiction, a new kind of war movie has emerged.

Two of this year's most compelling documentaries, Operation: Dreamland and Gunner Palace, are the first to deal with the Iraq War experience as an American experience. They don't simply put a human face on that war, but our faces-close-up views of young American soldiers patrolling Iraq's desert or its foreign streets. It goes beyond war correspondence. The foot-soldier p.o.v. in this videotaped war resembles our spot in a movie theater or behind the PSP2 console. Dread-filled and sometimes playful, these docs provide an insider's look at the American presence in Iraq in order to examine the practicalities of the Bush strategy and its immediate effects on our frontline representatives. By showing the daily risks and weekly complications, bright eyes and youthful voices in situations of constant stress, these personalized war docs illuminate what war is now like for Americans who have mostly enjoyed three decades of peace, who know the aroma of popcorn better than the smell of napalm in the morning.

The dust-covered, shell-shocked enlistees in Fallujah (Operation: Dreamland) and Baghdad (Gunner Palace) are real-life contrasts to the rouge-and-gun-powder-covered Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Both casts are caught up in politics they are unable (or unwilling) to articulate; both act out controversial, sometimes bloody policy. They elicit affection or idolization, touching on our ambivalent feelings about the government. Curiously, fans of Mr. and Mrs. Smith have been unwilling to acknowledge Doug Liman's snarky political critique. Not seeing it is part of the blinding process of Hollywood marketing, which insists that movies are just entertainment. It matches the public's refusal to know more about the Iraq vets. Yet the tendency to hide from discomforting truth is betrayed by the fearsome content of recent escapist fare.

In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, acts of violence replace scenes of lovemaking. In Batman Begins, the dystopic Gotham City is threatened by both domestic corruption and outside evildoers. Revenge of the Sith abounds with aerial battles that evoke the climate of warfare abstractly-it distends sci-fi into an expressionist fantasy of galactic calamity. Befitting our politically anxious time, these films are split between endorsing violence and regretting it. Even people who don't want to admit that we are at war cannot avoid the obvious fact that the temper of these movies betray that truth.

This confusion goes to the question: Is it possible to support the troops, not the war?

That bumper-sticker paradox expresses a cushy hypocrisy fed by liberal cant that's been outdated since Desert Storm in 1991 and the yellow-ribbon-round-the-old-oak-tree of the 1978 Iran hostage crisis. It's also a weak-willed reaction to the cross-purpose media blitz on Operation Iraqi Freedom. Sloganeers hope to oppose the current administration without seeming like post-9/11 traitors. "I support the troops, not the War" is a couch-potato's version of battle fatigue.

That's why American distress pervades War of the Worlds, which is about aliens the way Guernica is about a lightbulb. Clearly, American cinema is going through a period that demands an approach to popular culture that is no longer naive but willingly confronts tragedy. In Gunner Palace and Operation: Dreamland, soldiers relate to their favorite forms of pop music for an answer to soothe their unease or quell a sense of misguided mission. Their desperate music choices (from rap to folk to metal) bring to mind Bruce Springsteen's retreat to pop solace for his post-9/11 album, The Rising. In "Countin' on a Miracle" he assesses "A fairy tale so tragic/ There's no prince to break the spell." That's the fog of grief and miscomprehension that pop artists instinctively address.

Movies about the Iraq War and our current shell-shocked state require filmmakers-artists-whose sensibilities can combine the American quotidian and the phantasmagorical. Spielberg's astounding reconception of the H.G. Wells novel creates a catalogue of contemporary traumas that uncannily represents the recent and current historical nightmare. For the first time since the Civil War, Americans can conceive war on our shores-and imagine it as precisely, empathetically as catastrophes happening elsewhere. It's not just ashes on Tom Cruise's stunned face evoking 9/11, but the Rwanda-evoking river of blood Dakota Fanning witnesses that draws viewers into an intense awareness of modern political terror. Audiences at War of the Worlds are quiet-aghast-at the depth of response Spielberg's latest fable reaches and reawakens. As distinctive as Elem Klimov's Come and See (the surrealist account of Germany's 1941 attack on Belarus), this is interpretive filmmaking of unnerving immediacy. The spiritual condition of the world is conveyed through the hallucination of war.

Such global, political, fate-of-mankind sensitivity recalls the Vietnam era when dispute about the war framed all discourse, suffusing even stories about American civilian life (Five Easy Pieces, Straw Dogs, Nashville). The facetiousness of Mr. and Mrs. Smith comments on America's image, Demme's Candidate analyzes American character, just as Tom Cruise's evolution from blithe Top Gun cadet to a panicky, weary father comments on the crisis of our post-disaster morality. There's also piquancy in Fanning-the voice of primal terror, the eyes of eternity. The full American spectrum indicates where we stand in the universe as well as in Iraq.

In Gunner Palace, directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein include a soldier saying, "It is critically important to connect the two realities [of Iraq and U.S. soldiers and civilians]." The grunt's-eye-view of Operation: Dreamland and Gunner Palace contains insights not offered by tv's network news. It satisfies our urgent need to get close to those troops sent on far-away assignments. We are there with them on the missions, evading land mines, dodging explosives, interrogating the non-comprehending Iraqis, bringing them "freedom," receiving their rebuffs and feeling caught in the middle. "The crowds are getting angry not because of bombs but cuz we're there," says a Gunner Palace soldier.

Tucker and Epperlein take couch-potato Americans where they don't necessarily want to go. Their authentic yet incongruous images (a soldier playing guitar next to a centuries-old high stone gate, jeeps driving past an ornamental palace entrance) document a new global reality. The tighter the close-quarter video cameras move in on the GIs' faces, picking up their hiphop slang and suburban irony, the greater is one's sense of indebtedness. Gunner Palace's phantom-dark video imagery tops Three Kings' satire of Third World invasion; the inherent absurdism provokes more care and apprehension than laughter. It's a reminder that before M*A*S*H, military comedies used to be called service comedies. These nonfiction films make you want all our movies to do right by our soldiers-to help us better understand our own citizens' duty along with global responsibility.

But it's difficult because these docs don't provide patriotic cheer. They're informed by skepticism about the war that mostly reflects the left-leaning filmmakers' agenda. Garrett Scott and Ian Olds made the sarcastically titled Operation: Dreamland to depict the chimera of American military imperialism. Focused on Alpha Company of the 82nd Airborne during its 2004 mission to maintain order and suppress the Sunni Arab insurgency, the film depicts the soldier's hard quest and their doubts. But Scott and Olds miscalculate that the boys' complaints are also in the time-honored tradition of foot-soldier disgruntlement (as in What Price Glory and Catch-22). After Vietnam, casual dissent gets twisted to incite domestic political turmoil or as proof of injustice. Operation: Dreamland too easily confuses American class inequities with criticism of foreign policy. Gunner Palace, on the other hand, keeps a difficult, balanced view of GI bewilderment.

Watching these fish-out-of-water stories of rock 'n' roll young adults who are sent to police a Muslim culture without knowing exactly why reveals more than U.S. arrogance; it's both do-or-die coercion and faith. These Iraq War chronicles confront the domestic dissatisfaction felt by so many young enlistees-a frustration that goes back before either Bush administration. Operation: Dreamland doesn't admit the resolution these kids seek, idealistically suggesting that many of them are wannabe artists from a nation of petulant prodigies. But in Gunner Palace, soldiers who express their commitment to duty tell an unglamorous truth about responsibility and work-for-pay trust. Scott and Olds miss that the troops are not misguided mercenaries but ideal Americans. Their sense of duty is betrayed when the doc depicts them as bullies engaged in folly.

Trusting the troops is tougher than hollow "support." One soldier worries "I would hope that something like this [film] doesn't discredit the Army. We're a lot of different guys from a lot of different backgrounds and we all signed a contract saying we'd come out here." But his tact goes against the filmmaker's effort at undermining him. Even better he advises, "I think there are things that people just don't need to know about [going on] in the military. People want their steak but they don't want to know how that cow got butchered." As a realistic view of what war accomplishes, that's more insightful than the fascist-paranoia of the "You need men like me!" speech in Rob Reiner/Aaron Sorkin's namby-pamby A Few Good Men.

Operation: Dreamland first screened in the Human Rights Film Festival-not an apolitical showcase. Scott and Old mistake pacifism for humanism, as if pulling out is the only way to justify these soldiers' loyalty. Honoring our troops requires a more complicated sense of soldiers' dedication, not just shock at what is required of them. This is where the media's stock, sentimental view of patriotism has failed. Still reeling from Vietnam-and probably without military experience themselves-too many filmmakers profess a Disneyland view of military valor. Any sign of aggression or professionalism is shown as cloddish or menacing.

It's only in the fictional emanation of this war that you get a sense of American grief to regulate the docs' gloating report of our troops' ignorance and confusion. In War of the Worlds, the moment of a son's willingness to sacrifice or the chain of responsibility that is formed when civilians grab a soldier who is pulling a father out of the clutches of death (democracy as a lifeline) are among the most amazing meditations in any war film. Amazing because, like Gunner Palace and the best parts of Operation: Dreamland, these images allow viewers to struggle through the complexities of this anxious experience. Movies that deny the imperatives of the day are worthless. Filmmakers that hold on to Vietnam's cynical spectacle-as in the overrated release of Apocalypse Now Redux-are worthless, too. A new kind of war movie should be like the lightbulb in Guernica, illuminating our current traumas and politics by bringing the issues home and personalizing them; supporting us all as soldiers. We may never fully heal from 9/11 and Iraq, but the new war movie must insist: Catharsis now!