Eyeless in America,the Sequel

Mission Failure Accomplished

You don’t have to walk across an aircraft carrier to know you’re out at sea. When there has been a high tidal bore of films from Hollywood and Indiewood about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where all but three have been industrial strength disasters, what you’re looking for are the lifeboats; a way off the ship alternately sinking or floating rudderless, a brutal vision of the war and entertainment industries drowning us. This article investigates the particular cultural moments during which the 50 films I consider were created; asks what, if anything, might be the real stories of these wars; looks at the statements the films make about the homecoming veteran’s fate; and concludes by discussing why the films have failed to draw audiences, and what future war films will look like.

Money is one indicator of how a film has performed, in part a useful measure of how much the film was seen on first release (money stops being a reliable metric when one considers how many times a particular film has been downloaded over a BitTorrent). Yet a film that does poorly at the box office doesn’t make it a failure: hundreds, arguably thousands, of crucial artistic texts were never recognized in their time. A text’s form, placement, the public’s unwillingness to go along with it, the ethnic, religious, or political affiliation of its author, the digestion and at least temporary repression of the text by the state—all these things can make the work vanish briefly. Some of the films I list but have not discussed at any length may have been seen and had an enormous impact not only on contemporary film makers, but future writers, actors, and directors. Initial success and fame do not make a film worthwhile: lack of these does not discredit another work of art. There are too many interlocking machineries at work to decipher precisely how a film arrives (or doesn’t) on both the big and small screen. The distribution apparatus may have more to do with success than the text itself—films that play on a very few screens in marquee cities in the northeast or northwest may have miniscule life spans: none of these things is relevant to the text’s importance as art or cultural reflection. Beyond that, a film relies increasingly on social media and the web to get its message out—it may not have any life until it reaches DVD or some kind of pay on demand service.

What money can suggest to us is how a large segment of the public reacted to a spate of related texts at a given time. Eberwein (2009) identifies the lack of a ticket-buying public as an intensely political matter: “In late December 2007, Adam B. Vary wrote an article in Entertainment Weekly titled “War Movies Tanked.” It joined other essays devoted to the same subject, such as Diane Garrett’s view on “B. O. [Box Office] Battle fatigue? War is Hell as studios try to sell conflict pics.” Richard Corliss and Christian Toto specifically identified the Iraq War as the one that had failed to sell. And in an article titled “The War Zone,” Owen Gliberman (2009) observed,

Moviegoers, in case you haven’t noticed, are in the midst of a siege of films about the war in Iraq and politics of the post 9/11 world (at this point the two are inseparable). So far, though, it isn’t at all clear that moviegoers are interested. (p. 4)

Why has the audience stayed away in such numbers? Perhaps the films were just too badly scripted, acted, directed, difficult to comprehend, challenging? Perhaps they were too depressing, too much reality after a day filled with news items about American wars sliding downhill at increasingly horrendous human and economic costs? Perhaps if you’re losing your home in a subprime housing bubble, the last thing you can stand is to see other people in pain? Perhaps when your city is drowned in mud and is left to molder, you don’t have any extra energy to spend on the rest of the country’s agonies? Some films, particularly the bleak and overlong Badland (Lucente, 2007; a film that begins with a discharged soldier murdering his scheming wife and two innocent sons, then going on the road) or Divergence (Donnelly, 2007), another distended emotional train wreck, may be diamonds in a very rough state that require too much of a general audience (both clock in at length: Badland is 165 minutes—time operates as space on the wasted prairie where the modest actions occur, and functions as a metaphor for emptiness). While typical special effects tent-pole extravaganza films with de rigeur multiple endings such as The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) or The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) run ever longer, only a small audience will sit for the same amount of time and pay attention to a dragged-out two-hander with low production values, even if it is compelling.

The problem is not the films, it’s the war. It doesn’t provide the kind of spectacle that the movie-going public might want to see, a great deal of which depends on habit. Both television series Band of Brothers (Robinson, Loncraine, & Salomon, 2001) and The Pacific (Van Patten, Nutter, & Podeswa, 2010) established familiar heroic narratives that enveloped and welcomed audiences. The action was always forward, even if there were horrendous delays in the Ardennes or on Okinawa: these forced character development, and so more action. In Iraq and Afghanistan, both wars of occupation, there was nowhere to go except out trolling again, taking the inevitable Improvised Explosive Device casualties, getting mortared and rocketed at night, and then suiting up for the next patrol. They were wars of repetition not of attrition: “The real problem is that [the Iraq war] is too shapeless for plot. Fighting terror with terror is one thing; finding narrative drive or closure for the confrontation, let alone some modicum of catharsis, is another” (Stewart, 2009, p. 45). How can the whole narrative be unsatisfactory when the voting, film-going public twice elected George W. Bush, pushed his popularity ratings (or box office) in the post-9/11 years to a near-record high, acquiesced to the Bush military plan, accepted reductions of personal rights at the Constitutional and quotidian level? Such a question is partly resolved by film critic Patricia Aufderheide, who uses Jurgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere to suggest that there are many publics:

if a public is a group of people who come together around a common problem, these films do not directly address a national public. Rather, they address viewers as consumers, people making a selection among a broad number of channels. They may even quell debate, insofar as viewers echo the protagonists’ stolid following of orders. (Aufderheide, 2007, pp. 56-65)

Aufderheide implies that previous audiences have been more unified and that, presumably because of both convergent and divergent media, audiences now are more complex, varied, and diffuse, and as a result more difficult to coerce than they once were.

Martin Barker raises, as do a number of critics, the question of whether or not it is “possible to make successful movies while America is still militarily engaged?” (Barker, 2011, p. 70)—“success” here is monetary. Is such a question another phantom pain or visual aura left over from the extended Vietnam migraine? Is it possible for American mass culture to grapple with the kinds of morally ambivalent questions that bureaucratic language brings on? Can an American public educated by Band of Brothers be happy beating some unnamed “insurgents” who have, to many North Americans, impenetrably similar forms of religion? How can procedures that sound like torture (creating the sensation of continuous drowning, the shackling of human beings in physically agonizing positions for over a day, prevention of sleep, bombardment with deafening noise, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, shaming with nudity or taboo phobic objects like garments soaked in what is said to be menstrual blood), the incarceration of people who have no access to lawyers and are being held without charge, the abrogation of habeas corpus laws on which the foundational documents for American polity exist, the use of doctors to assist with or enhance torture procedures (Miles, 2006, p. 143), all exist yet not be widely acknowledged as topics for discussion, if not as crimes? Can moral values be suspended when it suits a people to be reinstated later, and if yes, how much later? Will reparations be made? A citizen faces these painful questions only in desperation—yet we have been desperate for this past 10 years and have more than ever needed cultural works to provide us with clarity in order to reflect on what it is we’re up to.

Failure has occurred at the box office and the two wars, their prosecution and methods, and the lack of willingness to publicly discuss political ideas. A closed box office is a symptom of a narrative that has been shut down. In Ellul’s mind, this cannot be a good thing, because

there is more: in a democracy, the citizens must be tied to the decisions of the government. This is the great role propaganda must perform. It must give the people the feeling—which they crave and which satisfies them—“to have wanted what the government is doing, to be responsible for its actions, to be involved in defending them and making them succeed, to be ‘with it.’” (Ellul, 1973, p. 127)

For the people to be with the government in the post-9/11 years meant abdicating legally, going shopping, letting the Executive Branch define what was a war crime, and more, ethical. Hollywood failed to produce war texts that would do the necessary job required by integration propaganda, yet Bush was reelected, his war mandate solidified enough for him to sell a widening and deepening of the war.

Now Playing

Of all the texts that sang out to the public, apart from the typical list of high-speed nearly dialogue-free action films full of what I have elsewhere called “special events” (a “special event” transcends a mere special effect: it is the reason for the film, which reassembles reality in increasingly difficult, challenging ways for the eye to perceive; Blackmore, 2007, p. 368), it was James Cameron’s (2009) Avatar that seemed to be the explicable, acceptable war text. Beneath the action is an interwoven discussion of ecology, capitalism, resource depletion, and colonialism, which Cameron sews up in a happy, familiar western narrative package. The broken, existentially charred soldier hero, Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, is given a second chance by the very military–industrial complex about to discard him, a chance to run free in the forests of an alien world. As this genre demands, he soon goes native (aided by a blue-skinned supermodel), questions his military directives, and with them, his worldview. Action fans are rewarded with a resolution by requisite massive shoot-out, high-tech weaponry borrowed as much from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as from iconic Japanese animé like Neon Genesis Evangelion (Anno, 1995). The whole is partitioned in two compartments: one for proscience, prointerspecies (really, interracial) love, prosoldier, proecology good humans; the other for promoney, neocolonial, promilitary, proresource depletion bad humans. If, as I have argued about Cameron’s take on the Alien franchise, Aliens (Cameron, 1986) was more about Vietnam and science fiction tropes than it was about gender politics, then equally Avatar takes up the two wars against indigenous people in Afghanistan and Iraq rather than being a straight narrative about ecology. Although the text sides with the indigenous population that achieves transcendence through subsistence living, it isn’t an antiwar movie: The solution is military and full of the kind of ideological special events I discuss above. It was filmed so successfully in 3D that it not only brought about a 3D movie recrudescence, but created a market for 3D televisions. The film is a piece of technological wizardry, just as was The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) in its time, ironies that shouldn’t be lost on those suggesting that here were two films humanity could embrace as being unabashedly antitechnology, proecology. Neither could exist without cutting-edge machinery: Both are ads for high technology. Avatar distinguishes between honorable native warriors and soulless cannon fodder drones indoctrinated by a corporatized military that wastes soldiers like video game characters. Unusually in films about Iraq or Afghanistan, science is shown to be a good thing, although it must be engaged in taking lessons from and preserving the native ecosystem. Predictably, the film was criticized for its depiction of human heroes who must save the otherwise entirely superior aliens from colonial destruction. ¹ Hundreds of millions of viewers saw the film, got in nonrenewable fuel-burning vehicles of one kind of another, and went home to pay taxes feeding a military economy feeling energized about ecology, just war, peace, happy natives freed by “us,” and doing right by wounded soldiers. Perhaps Cameron’s (1986) film accomplished the integration propaganda on its own.

In a time when the two wars were continuing apace—one was even ramping up as Obama prepared, in Afghanistan, to repeat Bush’s “surge” strategy (Baker, 2009)—Avatar seemed like the right kind of wondrous fairy tale to tell: It was a visually stunning, immersive wraparound politically correct prosoldier story that had the good guys win, boy gets girl, racial differences eliminated, and corporate greed punished. It was the perfect film about the Iraq war. It didn’t require any understanding of another people or their way of life: The soldier-player-viewer (implicitly the world of the Na’vi is a game world populated by “avatars”) could become, and be accepted by, these strangers who governed an enviable resource-rich planet. There was such an embarrassment of resources that anyone who asked nicely could have some: nobody need do without, be told to reduce consumption. The optics were perfect for the moment, and not just for America (the film has had a lifetime gross to date of over $2.7 billion worldwide).

Avatar is also a guide to what is wrong with most films about Iraq. Their greatest sin is that they are about Iraq. It is a historical occurrence that Susan Carruthers (2008) indicates is not unusual:

The war in Iraq is not the first one in which citizens have declined—or expressed a desire to defer—their “right to know.” Indeed, ever since cameras first began to record still and moving images of war, some civilians have preferred to avert their gaze: an impulse by no means peculiar to Americans. (p. 72)

Avatar transported citizens and soldiers from the here and now and mythologized the struggles so that they could be adapted across cultures: Couldn’t the Na’vi represent a repressed, exploited group anywhere, including in America itself? If, as Carruthers suggests, people chose to turn away, then they must turn elsewhere, whether it was to a recast war in Middle Earth, personal combat at Hogwarts, or tribal wars surrounding young love between humans, vampires, and werewolves. Much of the need to look away is fed by the nauseatingly difficult cognitive dissonance of voting for an administration that vows to deepen wars while miraculously making everyone at home safer and more loved by the world at large. Chasms opened up by such contradictions require enormous amounts of energy to cross, the kind created by magicians who guide Hobbits and other innocent citizens, tweens, girls in love, (all of whom are heroes more than they realize) through life.

In George Packer’s (2008) eyes, people had already seen enough because each soldier had become a roving personal film unit:

The Iraq War coincided with a revolution in technology that allowed soldiers to disseminate digital images of missions within hours of completing them, a cable network to provide around-the-clock criticism of a rival network’s war coverage, and reclusive twenty-somethings to register their reactions every seventeen minutes on their blogs (and become influential commentators at the same time). The flood of information and commentary resulted in an intense, irritable, balkanized view of the war, but not a clearer view. (p. 19)

Filming reflexively is one of the reasons that Brian De Palma’s (2007) Redacted has the kind of power it does: everything is mediated at least twice, the text is aggressively metatextual, and like most of De Palma’s other work, scopophilic to the point of invasiveness. One of De Palma’s few concessions to his legal department was his agreement to censor (by putting black bars over eyes) actual atrocity images he used in the film’s concluding slideshow (the image collection is a technique he picked up from Sam Peckinpah, who similarly ended Cross of Iron [1977] with stills that forged uncomfortable connections between all war atrocities, whether German, Russian, or American [especially from My Lai]). Packer is right that broadcasting the self through sites such as YouTube made it possible as never before for soldiers, for anyone, to force their images into the mainstream (if only it would pay attention), eluding not only networks, but almost all critics of “bad” (the definition of which depends on the arbiter) taste, judgment, film, editing, or politics, however conceived. The war digitally flooded people’s homes and mobile devices. Unless the user is unusually scrupulous, high bandwidth has made streaming image consumption unavoidable. Packer condemns the “reclusive twenty-somethings” who obsessively update their reactions to the world, although he seems to feel it is reasonable for journalists to become war junkies and clock in as regularly. Common focused discourse is what Packer wants, instead of the scattered, “balkanized” vision of the world that is informed by no information from the ground, which is what’s missing from the stay-at-home commentators’ input.

As ever, Ellul was there first. Long before the digital era, Ellul (1973) reminded the audience that

excessive data do not enlighten the reader or the listener; they drown him. He cannot remember them all, or coordinate them, or understand them; if he does not want to risk losing his mind, he will merely draw a general picture from them. (p. 87)

Data surges not only work against clarity, but more, against understanding. A surplus can work for the state, drowning out all but the most basic, clearest, persistent messages. The more conflicting information assaults the audience, the more myths look attractive. But they will have to be loud and blatant to rise above the data-flow, which is why such “a large percentage of commercial films tend to be violent, technology-driven extravaganzas largely devoid of historical, social, or dramatic authenticity” (Boggs & Pollard, 2007, p. xi). It isn’t that a small film about people can’t be successful, especially if it is relatively light fare, such as a comedy: it’s that there must be an estrangement from history, a divorcing of the text from perceived reality. When Zack Snyder’s (2007) adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, about the Spartans at Thermopylae raked in nearly half a billion dollars worldwide, it was because the film was a clear, polished, dramatic rather than tragic narrative that justified sacrifice and made heroic death look terrific. Miller’s sources were neoconservative military historians like Victor Davis Hanson who had a vested interest in proving their theories about contemporary war-fighting and expansionist policies, especially as they pertained to war in the Middle East (Blackmore, 2005). Audiences exhausted by the complexity of the two wars and their associated death tolls that now seemed to stretch to infinity, could seize on this one clear mission of dying for democracy that, said the film, was as crucial to 21st-century America as it had been to 5th century bce Greece. 300 was not understood as a commentary on a few (hundred thousand, that is) troops fighting barbarians in contemporary Iraq, but rather warmly received as a return to formidable, beloved, swords and sandals epics once so popular in Hollywood, epitomized by patriarchal Christic redemption narratives like Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959) and Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962).

America’s Cutting-Room Floor

The opening narratives are just now coming to a close as the wars, or at least America’s major involvement with them, ends. These 50 films are a series of possible beginnings. Both Hollywood and the publishing industry learned that postwar Vietnam produced a much richer lode of cultural artifacts than had wartime Vietnam. The bulk of the artistic work accomplished by creators of all kinds, as well as veterans, family members, scholars, and lay historians, remained to be done in the two decades following the war’s end. However, there are signal differences between the wars and the texts they have produced, and will produce. Vietnam in America was an open wound that cut through the military and civilian political bodies: bringing the edges together so they could join and heal was urgent. Scholar Keith Beattie calls the war “a healed scar,” and as his book title The Scar That Binds (Beattie, 1998, p. 57) suggests, it is a closing key to the country’s health, even if the discussion remains open at a few sutures. The cultural moments of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq could hardly be more different. During the first existed a society in transition, divided by enormous rifts in its economy, relations between races, genders, and powers: these divisions have altered, although in many cases not improved. Media power looked very different in the late 1960s than it does now. We are only starting digital life, as if the Model T had just finished production. If the digital world has just ended its infancy then, continuing the car analogy, what’s still to come includes the digital equivalent of interstate roads, trucking, the slow death of rail, the creation of Levittown and the suburbs, the elimination of local culture, and the incursion of chains and managerial efficiency at every level, its insertion into every facet of commuter life, the need to secure massive oil resources across the planet. With digital evolution rolling, to look back and say that the entertainment complex (Hollywood on small and large screen, publishing, radio, music, theater, dance, visual art, and so on) didn’t produce important texts about Vietnam during the war, and that the same thing will occur with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is specious.

In the mid-1960s, Ellul warned that the citizen’s position in the war state meant that

All men must prepare for war, and for a dreadful type of war at that—dreadful because of its duration, the immensity of its operations, its tremendous losses, and the atrocity of the means employed. Moreover, participation in war is no longer limited to the duration of the war itself; there is the period of preparation for war, which becomes more and more intense and costly. Then there is the period in which to repair the ravages of war. People really live in a permanent atmosphere of war, and a superhuman war in every respect . . . Nowadays everybody is affected by war; everybody lives under its threat. (Ellul, 1973, p. 142)

While this is true, yet the American public has avoided service (thanks to a military and civilian willingness to force the heavy lifting on a relatively few individuals caught in a permanent war economy underwritten by stop-loss orders) and remained mostly untouched by these two latest wars. There is no jagged tear in the body politic like the one caused by Vietnam. The military has grown immensely stronger through, rather than being nearly broken by, the two latest wars. The public has suffered in the deep recession of the past 5 years, but is unwilling to connect the systemic policies of corporate war production with the economic crash of 2007 and speculation on loss by major banks or begun to feel the effects of a war debt that has already run to three trillion dollars. We have yet to see the true bills for our adventures in Mesopotamia and central Asia (Stiglitz & Bilmes, 2008, pp. 3-4).

Notwithstanding recent citizens’ revolts, whether in the form of the Tea Party movement or the international Occupy collectives, millions of voters seem indifferent to the lessons learned about how inequitable or nonexistent social safety networks are, particularly surprising in the wake of the vivid race and class examples provided by hurricane Katrina’s 2005 landfall. As Ellul and Packer indicate, information has undergone a sort of censorship of the whole, where the sheer mass of data and opinion prevents people from deciding what they think: People talk at, not necessarily with each other on YouTube and other social networks. The existing mass media closed ranks, such that “Once the war began, the major network studios were virtually off-limits to vehement American opponents of the war” (Solomon, 2004, p. 57). The speed with which commentators charged administration critics with “offering aid and comfort to the enemy” shut down antiwar sentiment, and kept resisting soldiers’ views off the air (when he returned home barely alive, Vietnam veteran and antiwar protestor Ron Kovic learned the same thing about the narrative the media wanted to hear).

If Hollywood followed its habitual safe pattern of avoiding films that might cause outrage, still, Indiewood took chances and made scathing assessments about war and class. What is most astonishing about a film like Badland (Lucente, 2007) is that it was ever made, let alone seen, at all; the same is true for surreal texts like G. I. Jesus (Colpaert, 2006), which refuses the whole American bargain offered to would-be citizens (the main character will be granted citizenship if he returns safely from the war, but elects to desert and return to Mexico instead). Hollywood’s 47 powerful film representatives who met with Karl Rove at the beginning of the war spoke of their plans to join the mission, although one witness noted that “All the panelists seemed focused on Americans’ rights rather than their responsibilities” (Chambers, 2002). In a post–Warsaw Pact, now post-9/11 world, what might those responsibilities look like? It seemed, according to these image makers, that there should be no confusion about the nature of reality, as infamous then-president of NBC Entertainment Jeff Zucker admonished: “Listen, we are not culpable for the images we portray on television. News informs the American public and keeps our politicians honest. Entertainment entertains the American public. The point is that we do it freely” (Chambers, 2002). The suggestion that propaganda cannot be propaganda if it is participated in freely and knowingly, with consent and belief, could not be more ludicrous. At the foundation of contemporary propaganda is the certainty that one is neither its victim nor perpetrator. The belief that news brings truth, that entertainment is harmless, and that one can be excused from creating propaganda in either case, guarantees propaganda can be made at the highest level without there being a discussion of it, since the whole process of offering up images and narratives of the “right” kind has been normalized. Chambers knows what is missing: reflection by the image factory on “cultural imperialism, the impact of Western technology [and] the changes accompanying it that have shaken the West and are reverberating in geometric proportions in the rest of the world” (Chambers, 2002). It would be an enormous surprise to find Hollywood’s producers, focused on maximizing profit above all else, worrying about the rest of the world’s cultures. Hollywood, less so Indiewood, has a predictable view not only of America, but of the world at large. Present-day Hollywood would never push serious money into a film as devastating as Samira Makhmalbaf’s (2003) At Five in the Afternoon, then back its distribution with the full force of a major film marketing campaign. Such things rarely, if ever, occur to small American films dealing with sensitive political and personal issues: They are not part of Hollywood’s spoken or unspoken mandate.

That means that while we may see films, such as Day Zero (Cole, 2007) about the effect the draft’s return has on three friends, such a text will hold off asking the necessary unpleasant, awkward questions about the citizen’s duties. This very reticence was seen by those involved in the film as one of its strongest points, as actor Jon Berthnal indicates, “I think that is the genius in the screenplay: Rob [screenwriter Robert Malkani] wrote a political movie that does not necessarily take a political stand, that resonates to all sides” (quoted in Roussel, 2010, p. 144). If we accept that we live in a political world, and that each decision is, no matter how personal, also political, then all the films up for discussion here are equally loaded. However, that doesn’t seem to be Berthnal’s interpretation—he isn’t delivering a lecture on postmodern relativism. Could the film be political in that it focuses on the draft? Given the way American women have moved onto battlefields as combatants over the past 10 years, why would at least one of the three draftees not be a woman? The narrative is more concerned with defining masculinity and male friendship: the effeminate friend (Elijah Wood) who falls away from the other two encoded heterosexual men cannot and does not survive. None of the men investigate their concepts of nationalism, patriotism, or feelings about the war. The film can be approached from all sides because the characters resolutely refuse to take any. The men are White, heterosexual, middle class: They don’t verge on the much more broadly cast, if stereotyped, soldiers in Bochco and Gerolmo’s Over There (2005). On the face of it, Day Zero must be political because it purports to deal with a political issue, even if it does so without referring to the issue’s cause, meaning, history, importance, or relevance. There is no mention of how wars differ from each other, whether this specific war fits into just war theory, preemptive militarism as espoused by the Bush White House, or liberal interventionism as practiced by the Obama White House. Is the unnamed war colonial, imperial, expansionist, globally strategic, a resource, or lifestyle war? Without this information, the film is narrowed to a disquisition on duty, which is in turn reduced to a narrative about high school friends who used to hang around together because one was bookish and the other was loyal, brave, and good with his fists. Ultimately, personal loyalty trumps duty: the men bow to the state because they’ve resolved their teen differences (except for the pathetically weak one who commits suicide): everything is now settled and war, another step in this “apolitical” coming-of-age story, is the next thing friends will do together. The film succeeds at being a predictable, emotionless, case study of what one writer and another director think might happen if people, presumably like them, faced a draft.

Making a political film without the politics is eclipsed by another tactic a number of the films use, which is to claim the text is “based on a true story.” As an opening caveat (usually seen in a white-on-black title cards preceding the film) for a fictional text, the warning clouds the nature of what follows. The expectation evoked in each viewer will be different: Is what we’re seeing the true story? How much has been omitted? Did things really work out that way? Did the character(s) survive and was she or he (or were they) happy? Is the depiction of the events historically, technically, psychologically accurate? Can I, as an audience member, say that because I saw this text, I have a reasonably clear understanding of the events that occurred? Can I speak about them with authority? Depending on how much one trusts not only film as a truth-telling medium, but different corporate authors, seeing the “based in reality” claim at the start of a film funded by National Geographic or The History Channel will have a different impact than if the film has been funded by an organization I don’t necessarily recognize (the American Enterprise Institute, MoveOn.org). The brand may help me to relax knowing that what I see has been verified, that I trust this particular source.

Yet all stories we see, especially mythic tales and fables, are in some way “based on a true story” or “real events.” For some, the claim suggests a near one-to-one correspondence between what we see on screen and what has happened to someone, somewhere, off-screen. Knowing we’re watching not a documentary but a drama that contains liberties taken with the story, that all is not quite as it seems, that things have been rearranged, revised, rewritten so that they have more impact on the viewer, is a fact that may become less urgent for us once we’re caught up in the story. The phrase suggests that there is a safe space (watched over by trusted editors) between dramatic artifice and documentary “reality,” an area shaped by the story on which things are “based.” ² Connecting a fictional text (no matter what its origin in fact) to real-world action (requests for donations, usually made on DVDs of the film, to particular websites and causes) underlines how “true” the events are, and how much reality is the steel inside the narrative’s structure. Asking for money to help people wounded or in some way damaged by the wars not only emphasizes that what we’ve seen is accurate, but also shames the viewer: What moral right does someone have to complain when others are hurt? The objection that one might not have wanted people to hurt others, fight, kill, or be hurt in any way seems, in the context of a suffering veteran and family, preposterous, churlish, almost sacrilegious, certainly unpatriotic. As film scholar Patricia Aufderheide (2007) notes about the practice of films that “often feature dedications to the fallen,” is that it, “at the very least, stifles criticism” (p. 60). These techniques (the suggestion that entertainment and news are separate; the creation of a sanitized, digestible apolitical political text; using the slippery interface between “real” and drama; the shutting down of dialogue through shame) all work to narrow vision, reduce the discussion to a few minor points over which people may safely argue at length without threatening systemic policy: “As in all propaganda, the point is to make man endure, with the help of psychological narcotics, what he could not endure naturally, or to give him, artificially, reasons to continue his work and to do it well” (Ellul, 1964, p. 225).

At the Mill—in Iraq—With Slaves

Preparing the public for war means shutting out true costs (reservists, particularly, losing houses and jobs over long terms because of extended deployments, grievous permanent wounds [closed-head injuries, irreparable brain damage, blindness, deafness, single or multiple limb amputation], abuse to family members by psychologically damaged soldiers, rape, spousal murder, suicide) and focusing on the exhilaration of mass group action. The propaganda required for that is agitation, not integration, propaganda, the kind that excites people and makes them anxious to be part of coming change. Agitation propaganda is a superheated fast-burning fire, and cannot be used often or for long:

After one has, over the years, excited the masses, flung them into adventures, fed their hopes and their hatreds, opened the gates of action to them, and assured them that all their actions were justified, it is difficult to make them re-enter the ranks, to integrate them into the normal framework of politics and economics. What has been unleashed cannot be brought under control so easily, particularly habits of violence or of taking the law into one’s own hands—these disappear very slowly. (Ellul, 1973, p. 76)

The people who joined up, especially those who acted in the patriotic haze following 9/11, are the most thoroughly integrated—those who have been absorbed by or given themselves over to the military. For those who stayed at home, the problems become urgent when agitprop heroes return. At home, there has been a world of tedious chores and loneliness but, barring household catastrophes, no real excitement. Here it is all integration propaganda. For the combatant to shift from the toxic mix of terror, boredom, panic, exhaustion, and exhilaration of battle space where the individual learns to survive by living in permanent neural and somatic arousal, where every noise and movement might be life-threatening to an urban or suburban world where the din is harmless, where there is no happy outlet for adrenalin, means the soldier begins to look back to the war with a sense of loss and nostalgia.

While the films are almost without exception prosoldier, they are also confounded by the return home. In the rare case that an audience has appeared, it has come for a war film, not a drama about the messy things that take place when the veteran comes home. As one wounded soldier in Over There (2005) is told, “You were there, you’re back, right?” (Episode 11, 27:13) That’s the end of that discussion and the war that went with it. The newly foundational text for successful, serious Iraq war films, The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2008), features a soldier who, in scholar Martin Barker’s eyes, is “a character who is the living embodiment of posttraumatic stress disorder, but who is treated by the film as not disordered at all” (Barker, 2011, p. 157). This is why Sergeant James is so compelling: He is an invulnerable, unbeatable charismatic. He is a hero from Band of Brothers or The Pacific. Actor Jeremy Renner infuses James with the same kind of personal attraction that George C. Scott invests in Patton. The audience should have had all its fear for James beaten out of it: It is Iraq that should be scared of James, just as both the Americans and Vietnamese are terrified of Platoon’s (Stone, 1986) Staff Sergeant Barnes, the brute who has become war, and most of all like Kurtz in both Joseph Conrad’s (1902/1999) Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s (1979) Apocalypse Now! Unlike Barnes and Kurtz, James is a survivor: “He has just forgotten how to be [posttraumatic stress disorder’s] victim, and thus becomes a poster-boy of the Iraq war generation” (Barker, 2011, p. 157). Barker grasps supremely well not only how it is that James survives, but why: He is the perfect soldier and can never function otherwise, having already permanently disengaged from his wife and infant son. James seems to be the husband that The Messenger’s (Moverman, 2009) Olivia Pitterson is now in the odd position of lamenting, unable as she was to stand him while he was alive. She recounts her story of her husband to a sympathetic veteran:

When Phil reenlisted for a third tour, it was like he needed to go. Staying home was no longer an option. I was relieved to see him go. I missed him, but, I didn’t. I didn’t miss the guy that just left, because I missed the man he was a long time ago. One morning, I opened the closet, and a shirt fell out, and I smelled it. And it smelled awful. It smelled horrible. Not of, like, another woman or booze or cigarettes or—it smelled of rage, and fear. It smelled of the man that he had become over there, you know? (The Messenger, 1:08:56)

Olivia could be describing The Hurt Locker’s Sergeant James, the colonel’s “wild man,” who tells his young son that he has come to love only one thing: being at war disarming explosives. The world of rage and fear is the same one of excitement and adrenalin and cannot be replaced with exhortations that peace is worthwhile. When addicted to agitation propaganda’s permanent state of arousal, the world of integration propaganda flattens, dulls, and serves only suckers. Ellul (1973) notes about those confronting life’s terrors, an existence that is unpredictable, uncontrollable, complete with chance events, destructive occurrences, illness, uncertainty in all its shadowy forms: “Ambiguity is painful to him, and he seeks to escape it” (p. 190). The military abolishes ambiguity and attracts those who find the civilian world now untenable in much the same way that Gulliver found a return to the doubtful civilization of England impossible after his life among the Houyhnhnms. Those unable to bear the quietude and endless small blanks of civilian life are more than welcome to return to Iraq, which is precisely how a number of the films conclude.

Return to an endless war in Iraq is presented as the answer to a variety of problems in films that include Day Zero (Cole, 2007), Divergence (Donnelly, 2007), The Lucky Ones (Burger, 2008), Over There (Bochco & Gerolmo, 2005), Source Code (Jones, 2011), and Stop-Loss (Peirce, 2008). The only thing that convinces Source Code’s Captain Stevens that he should forfeit the war is that he learns he had completed his last mission in Iraq and saved a friend before being incapacitated. It also becomes apparent to him that being among the living dead, preserved without honor as the American government’s pet science project, has its limitations. In Divergence, despite the unease Tim Lawson feels about his job as a helicopter pilot and the combined love and escape his newfound partner Clare offers, he determines to return to Iraq because this is the unexplained ambiguous “deal” of which both speak. While all three soldiers go back to war in The Lucky Ones, the crucial shift occurs in Tim Robbins’s character—the smartest, oldest, and wisest chooses war because it is now his only home. In Over There, an ex-soldier now amputee does everything he can to return to Iraq. The story arc’s direction suggests that had the series continued, he would have succeeded even at the expense of his wife and infant (she repeatedly tells him that his war is over). Stop-Loss and G. I. Jesus (2006) face the problem Day Zero avoids: What does a volunteer do when his choices are taken away from him by a bad faith governmental maneuver? Should the soldier obey the stop-loss laws, or flee the country? The flight is represented as permanent, but these films have forgotten that shortly after the end of the Vietnam war, President Jimmy Carter offered full amnesty to any American who had dodged the draft during the 1960s and 1970s. It is wrenching to leave country and family, but not necessarily irrevocable. If a few Americans face emigration based on articles of conscience or conscientious objection, they would join the hundreds of millions of emigrants who moved countries, surrendered whole cultures, let alone languages and religions, to reach more politically tolerable climes. For some reason emigration seems to be something “foreigners” do to arrive in America, not something Americans do to preserve their ideals. Emigration because of political conscience is subtly identified as being unpatriotic, let alone cowardly. When Stop-Loss’s Sergeant King chooses to return to war, he makes an inevitable and solid financial decision rooted in the Hollywood film’s $25 million budget and stars. King and Hollywood’s desertions are both impossible.

In his book The Good Soldiers, David Finkel (2009) says about a unit that took part in the 2007 surge in Baghdad, that

it wasn’t as if they had a choice. They were soldiers whose choices had ended when they had signed contracts and taken their oaths. Whether they had joined for reasons of patriotism, or romantic notions, to escape a broken home of some sort, or out of economic need, their job now was to follow the orders of other soldiers who were following orders, too. (pp.84-85)

Finkel’s otherwise perceptive book misses the point that soldiers, especially soldiers, always face the hellish problem of refusing orders. If they do, they may not be welcomed with open arms, may have honors stripped away, may be denigrated, rejected, expelled from the community, beaten, imprisoned, even murdered; but resisting morally corrupt or illegal orders (as defined by international agreements like the Geneva Convention and Protocols) is at the heart of the Allies’ prosecution of war crimes in Nuremburg. The German “Befehl ist Befehl” (“an order is an order”—sometimes called “superior orders”) became a notorious phrase during the Nuremburg trials; International prosecutors decided it was an illegitimate defense for having committed crimes of war (Cornish, 2001, p. 976; Paschall, 1999, p. 782). Since “just following orders” was not accepted from Germans and Japanese after World War II, and the idea behind an international court of law as well as the Geneva Accords and Protocols was that they applied to everyone, then American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much responsible for their actions as any soldier (or enemy, no matter what euphemism is used to avoid the law) the U.S. government would hold up for prosecution. To insist that soldiers’ “choices had ended” when they put on uniforms extracts them from the moral battlefield, excising both their agency and responsibility. Resistance may be inordinately difficult, but it is possible, and legally defensible. One blunt demonstration of personal moral choice was delivered by Jeff Paterson, a Marine of 4 years who, when stop-lossed for the 1991 war on Iraq, sat down on the tarmac and refused to go (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Reality, in principle: Marine Iraq war resister Jeff Paterson sits on the tarmac, under arrest for refusing to deploy to the Persian Gulf, 1991. Uniforms don’t eliminate moral choices (Picture used by permission)

Paterson served jail time, as did Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia who refused to return to what he describes in The Road From Ar Ramadi (2007) as an immoral war on civilians. Finkel (2009) writes sympathetically and well about the troops with whom he spends time, but he aligns himself and his narrative with Hollywood, signing on to the idea that America must be right. If it is not, that’s a story that won’t be shown, seen, or discussed. The soldier’s job is to go to war, obey the rules, just follow orders, and return to the war zone until he or she can no longer stand it, function, or is deemed excess by the military. What happens when the war finishes is his or her problem. ³

Eyeless Visions

A few things are clear: The contemporary moviegoing public doesn’t want to see films about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Using what happened to film during and after the Vietnam war is not an instructive parallel for determining why things have gone badly for fictional representations of the present wars: the films remain enormously useful historically, thematically, technically, structurally, semiotically. When in 2004 America had a chance to reject a wealthy military dodger and elect a Vietnam veteran who seemed likely to draw down the wars in the Middle East, it did the former, reelecting a militarist, expansionist government while averting its gaze from fictional representations of wars for which it had voted. The wars began to appear through what were then new media forms: personal blogs and YouTube. Increasingly, the war was self-mediated (Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time in Iraq [2005] was drawn from his initially banned blog: the military soon became accustomed to soldiers blogging their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan). Have personal mediations replaced Hollywood’s epic narratives? Is the job of integration propaganda, in some public relations expert’s dream (if psychologist’s nightmare), being accomplished by the populace against itself without further prodding?

I’ll step back for a moment: I argue there is merit in looking back to Vietnam, despite the fact that the wars took place in such drastically different cultural tempers. If we consider the Vietnam films that have become important critically, financially, popularly, then we could argue that we have yet to see the kind of films we want or expect to see about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Canonical Vietnam films (whether pro- or antiwar) include Apocalypse Now! (Coppola, 1979), Born on the Fourth of July (Stone, 1989), The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978), Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (Levinson, 1987), Hamburger Hill (Irvin, 1987), In Country (Jewison, 1989), the Missing in Action films (1984-1988), Platoon (Stone, 1986), and the Rambo (Stallone, 2008) franchise (1982-2008). These films, astonishing or terrible, have yet to be made about the wars in the Middle East. Stewart (2009) suggests that the problem has to do with technique itself where “In the new digital milieu, anything approaching to oppositional cinema in a realist combat mode risks being thwarted by the requisite authenticities of its own visualization. The genuine anti-war film requires of cinema some special work of witness” (p. 47). What could possibly disrupt the viewer the way that Apocalypse Now! did in 1979? What, in the present day, could match the face-melting terror of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s opening barracks-room tirade in Full Metal Jacket? What will surprise an audience that has grown up on these Vietnam texts, is comfortable with the bodily invasions and obscenities of the Alien series (1979-1997), and considers the opening of Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) to be tame? What would the new Apocalypse Now! look like? It certainly isn’t the first time that film seems to have reached its maximum, a point of exhaustion where the medium is incapable of bearing any more cultural weight. If there were to be a new war film, one that requires Stewart’s “special work of witness,” it might be visible to only a few—and not necessarily an avant garde elite. Contemporary conventional narratives that Hollywood and Indiewood produce must surpass each yet more outrageous step taken by previous filmmakers and receptive audiences and must keep pace with film fashioned, edited, and produced inside the computer. The signified for “conventional” is always shifting: Action film conventions have followed our boundaries of comfort. Action films from the 1970s now appear to be courtly dramas with stately, dull, set pieces. Iraqi blogger Riverbend (2006) points out,

This war has redefined “conventional.” It has taken atrocity to another level. Everything we learned before has become obsolete. “Conventional” has become synonymous with horrifying. Conventional weapons are those that eat away the skin in a white blaze; conventional interrogation methods are like those practiced in Abu Ghraib and other occupation prisons . . . Quite simply . . . conventional terror. (p. 141)

If conventional war films are doomed to repeat the past (one that people refuse to buy again), then subgenres such as torture porn may constitute new directions, as I have said above. Perhaps new kinds of film have already been produced, purchased, and been played in living rooms and dens across broadband connections streaming Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft, or console games like the Call of Duty franchise. Perhaps we just don’t recognize them for the narratives they are. All conventional war films exist in the shadow not only of astonishing texts from the past but real-time media from the present. Conventional weapons that Riverbend identifies, like the pyrophore white phosphorus, a substance that ignites on contact with air at temperatures of 30°C, and was used in the 2004 Marine assault on Fallujah (Cobb, LaCour, & Hight, 2005, p. 26), is the kind of weapon which, like Napalm, fits well into a world of torture porn horror films. But then, there’s nothing new about white phosphorous: It’s an old horror visited on new victims. Riverbend’s suggestion that “Everything we learned before has become obsolete,” would include the way we make and see films, or more, reality. We keep reaching for the end of the film strip, and with each new excess, seem to have arrived there. Audiences now eagerly awaiting the third in a trilogy of films in The Human Centipede franchise (2009-2013) cannot unsee the past, a narrative of 3, 12, or more human beings stitched together mouth to anus. Shock now involves being connected directly to the digestive system where we are consumed and horrified by the consumption: Taking orders means getting in line and processing the waste created by the person in front of us. We are also entertained by the horrible. We cannot turn back to a time when we were surprised or convinced by bad effects: Those circuits are burned through and no longer electrify us. Each text must outdo the preceding extreme work of high-resolution special events that have made it possible to film virtually anything.

At the very end of 2011, news collection website Reader Supported News (RSN) posted an article by Dan Froomkin about the American war dead and wounded. Froomkin rightly argues that the Pentagon’s official numbers of dead and wounded ignore the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have returned, are returning, or have yet to return from Afghanistan or Iraq, wounded psychologically or physically in ways that are not integrated into the war calculus (Froomkin, 2011). In Froomkin’s article’s comments section, an antiwar speaker posted sharply:

Sorry, I’m a RSN reader from Europe and I’m not that much interested in the number of American casualties and wounded. Sorry. Since you, Americans, have been the attackers. No, I am rather interested in the number of people you killed in Iraq or who got killed as a consequence of this war that you started—and ended—absolutely irresponsibly. I would like to know how many men, women, children—young and old—you killed there. (Aljoschu, 2011)

The number of civilians, not “insurgents” or enemy combatants, killed now exceeds 115,000 people, including, especially, women and children. These are the kinds of numbers that cause genocide historians to reach for their calculators and a map to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Aljoschu’s comments may foster outrage in an American reader. I could wish Aljoschu had more sympathy to go around—that soldiers, usually caught in a class war themselves, who have been stop-lossed, returned to Iraq for multiple tours against their will, were grouped more toward the unwilling end of the spectrum than the leaders and politicians who concocted the wars and pursued them for nine or more years. But Aljoschu has a point: Where will these disappeared ever appear? Will they be accounted for as America begins taking note of its sorrows? Landmark texts like Platoon (1986) diagnose a sickness in the platoon and by extension, America, but the film has no time for the 2 to 3 million Vietnamese killed. Once the Cambodian dead starred in their own (British) film of The Killing Fields (Joffé, 1984), that issue too, was shelved. Should new films dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cause North Americans to look, finally, and see, we can predict that those texts will not be concerned with Iraqi and Afghani civilian dead and wounded. This is what Solomon means when he says that we’re governed by a politics that commands, “Do not let too much empathy move in unauthorized directions,” that is, toward people whose lives are, we feel, “decidedly secondary” (Solomon, 2004, p. 58). Even good films that will arrive on screens face an acid test about the wars themselves.

Perhaps the new visions will come from sources they often have before: veterans. While there have been a score of veterans’ memoirs, there have so far been few novels, none with the power, grace, and fury of those by Vietnam veteran novelists Tim O’Brien, Joe Haldeman, Larry Heinemann, Gustav Hasford, Philip Caputo, Robert Olen Butler. It takes time for memories to cool, for liquid reality to become fictional substance. If we are looking to veterans for new ways of seeing, we are looking too soon. As Carruthers (2008) points out about the films,

while civilians snooze, their uniformed counterparts in Iraq are busily shooting everything in sight—digital cameras having become an essential piece of 21st-century kit. Over here no one may be looking. But over there it seems that everyone is snapping and filming (pp. 74-75)

those visions and the films they create must come home. If a veteran could convince an economically scorched Hollywood to take a chance on swallowing what appears to be Iraq box office poison, then we might see some of the narratives that people, no matter how they voted, will be curious about. At the moment, the drive toward special event action films, high-speed jittery 21st-century cinema verité, is escalating: but storytelling remains powerful. Even still, it would be foolish to believe that if the veterans do better and America finds a new series of films to add to the canon of important war films, they will have a broad impact. Film, like all art, can make sense of the disaster, integrating it into the body politic and its worldview. But for that art to be produced, there must be social hurt, and a corresponding need to resolve political, moral, and human problems. Given the miserable, protracted tragedies that have ruined at least two countries, where are the audiences for the integration propaganda that would resolve these two wars? Again, it is Ellul who directs us. Propaganda serves a purpose and has specific aims: “Propaganda cannot be gratuitous. The propagandist cannot simply decide to make propaganda in such and such a direction on this or that group. The group must need something, and the propaganda must respond to that need” (Ellul, 1973, p. 37).

According to what I’ve argued over the last pages, there isn’t yet a need—there may never be—for integration propaganda. Karl Rove was wrong, and Hollywood was wrong repeatedly and at length: This was a case nobody cared to see. Apparently, no civilian has the necessary rage and commitment to tell a story that contradicts what Solomon (2004) would call “the official directives,” identifiable because they determine where emotion will go, and prevent “empathy [from moving] in unauthorized directions” (p. 58). We could be waiting on angry veterans for the missing pieces. After all this time and hundreds of millions of dollars in film production costs, miles of unspooled film, the patriotic lessons Hollywood set out to make with producers “willing to volunteer to become advocates for the American message” (Zabel quoted in Cooper, 2001) have not found acolytes. The strip of films I’ve unreeled above indicates that unlike Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not damage, let alone come close to tearing apart, the country. Hollywood went to work as promised. It labored in all genres looking for the right combination of war and love (Brothers [Sheridan, 2009], Divergence [Donnelly, 2007], The Messenger [Moverman, 2009], Over There [Bochco & Gerolmo, 2005], The Situation [Haas, 2006], Source Code [Jones, 2011]); war and tragic loss (Day Zero [Cole, 2007], Grace is Gone [Strouse, 2007], Home of the Brave [Winkler, 2006], The Lucky Ones [Burger, 2008], Taking Chance [Katz, 2009]); war and payback, where the army is the hero (The A-Team [Carnahan, 2010], American Soldiers [Furie, 2005], Battle Los Angeles [Liebesman, 2011], Body of Lies [Scott, 2008], Green Zone [Greengrass, 2010], Kingdom of Heaven [Scott, 2005], Rendition [Hood, 2007]); war and the heroic technical wizard (Generation Kill [White & Jones, 2008], The Hurt Locker [Bigelow, 2008], The Kingdom [Berg, 2007], Over There [Bochco & Gerolmo, 2005], Source Code [Jones, 2011]); war and outrage, sex and torture (Fair Game [Liman, 2010], Five Fingers [Malkin, 2006], In the Valley of Elah [Haggis, 2007], Mark of Cain [Munden, 2007], Redacted [De Palma, 2007], Rendition [Hood, 2007]); war and insane veterans (Badland [Lucente, 2009], Brothers [Sheridan, 2009], G. I. Jesus [Colpaert, 2006], Garrison [Valderrama, 2008], Home of the Brave [Winkler, 2006], Homecoming [Dante, 2006], The Kill Point [DeMonaco, 2007], Stop-Loss [Peirce, 2008], Time Bomb [Berry, 2007]); three made money. Few possess the kind of conviction that served the early films made about Vietnam: They may have been flawed, but they were stoked by persuasive rage.

With no integration propaganda necessary and an unwounded America—its citizens more distraught over the housing market crisis and deep worldwide recession than over the loss of a hundred thousand civilian lives and the families ruined along with those losses—all might seem well. However, there are rumblings from the deep, epitomized by a young soldier back from Iraq and angry with his fellow citizens’ ignorance:

All in due time, we [veterans] tell ourselves. America will know. All in due time.

This is what we say. This is what we actually believe. The truth always comes out in the end. But somehow the truth doesn’t come out.

So there’s nobility. Hanging on for the sake of sharing our story. Because we realize that the truth can come only through us. (Smithson, 2009, p. 93)

The sense that the soldier is the repository of truth is something Vietnam veterans, arguably all veterans, face. They will channel the facts as we civilians need to know and understand them—perhaps. But Smithson needs to recall the casualty gap: class has an enormous impact on what stories get told, what articulate, powerful speech soldiers can muster. Andrew J. Bacevich, retired army Colonel and Vietnam veteran whose son was killed serving in Iraq, reviewing Kriner and Shen’s book on the gap between the classes, notes bleakly: “However regrettable, the fact that poorer segments of the country bear a disproportionate share of wartime sacrifice is entirely consistent with the actual practice of American democracy” (Bacevich, 2010). In truth, we don’t know whose stories will get through the money maze and arrive at the soundstage, ready to be made into films that will be produced and distributed, let alone successfully. One of the many aspects of integration propaganda is that because it is total, controls all forms of media and organized education, it needn’t be successful all the time and in every medium. Ubiquity makes for redundancy: if Hollywood didn’t need to work as hard as it did on this job, it’s because other cultural arms (opinion “news” channels like Fox, successful videogame franchises) accomplished the work first, more efficiently, more widely.

When the meaningful Iraq war films come home, the idea is that people will choose to see. The visions may cause a wound to open such that it must be tended to, addressed, for it to close and heal. Over the long run, it is true that the grimmest war films have become, as author Anthony Swofford has said, a paean to the strength of the American military killing machine. If the veterans are angry enough not only at how they’ve been treated, but at what they saw happen to civilians and innocents in the middle east, then the kinds of films that would compel our attention would have twisted into their DNA a message that will sicken and shame us about using war to subdue worlds and peoples about whom we neither know nor care. Narrative force will bring these films to the forefront: no matter how strong the special events, none are more enthralling than a true horror story told well. These films will carry in them seeds of division and trouble, unease and nausea, outrage and obscenity. Most of all, they will remind the “storied dream factory” of Hollywood that it has been eyeless in Iraq this whole grievous time.