Abstract
There is a seething political critique at the heart of the edited collection Disappearing War that Christina Hellmich and Lisa Purse have compiled. This critique is laid out most effectively in the introduction, where the idea of erasure is proffered as one of the key strategies – weapons? – employed in the War on Terror. The primary target of the strategy is anybody who is deemed to be a combatant and the ways in which Western politicians have attempted to label entire ethnic and/or geographic groupings as such. Erasure is thus a mode of justification for engagement, indeed, a rule of engagement. Less direct, but no less insidious, are the ways that popular culture participates in and perpetuates this erasure, through the representation of localities and individuals. Of particular interest in this volume is the idea of bodies and the ways in which the convergence of politics and violence are writ upon the individual in horrific and graphic ways. This inscription becomes more concerning, though no less horrific, when the body is removed: either graphically, cinematically, historically, or actually. As the editors note, the contributors to this collection ‘reveal that which is hidden, removed and left out of sight in the formation of Western understandings of the War on Terror, its players and consequences’ (pp. 8–9)
With the benefit of some distance, these authors are looking back on representations that look back on the War on Terror. The contributions are varied: Agnieszka Piotrowska contrasts the portrayal of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in an experimental docudrama and the American film Good Kill; Thomas Gregory explores the tacit removal of bodies from fictional portrayals of war, ‘even when they seem to form a central part of the narrative’ (p. 74); and James Harvey analyses the framing of the face in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, to consider how these framings ‘construct an image that embodies … the unknowability of the lived war experience’ (p. 95). Each of the contributions offers a way of considering presence and absence – be that of a body, a face, factual information, or tangible outcomes. For the purposes of review, I will briefly discuss the chapters written by Cora Sol Goldstein and Janet Harris. Goldstein looks at the changing portrayal of civilian killings by American soldiers in films such as Pearl Harbor and Lone Survivor; Harris considers the necessary but problematic task of curating and narrativizing real events for television documentary from a critical and a practical point of view.
Goldstein offers a take on war films depicting two different eras: World War II and post-9/11 wars in the Middle East. The overarching narrative of the chapter is that more recent wars reinforce the popular characterization of World War II as a virtuous and morally unambiguous conflict. By comparison, Goldstein writes, ‘contemporary wars seem excessively violent and even criminal’ (p. 17). Goldstein’s chapter opens with a great deal of historical and statistical information about civilian deaths in World War II. This opening gambit immediately disrupts the conception of World War II as the ‘just war’. The question is then raised: how, then, did World War II become this morally just conflict? Goldstein suggests that it was the immediate connection between cinema and politics during the war itself that caused the machine of propaganda to start working. This popular conception of heroic sacrifice and honourable conduct was put forth to the public from the beginning and representations ever since have adhered to these conventions. More recently, however, the actual military developments in terms of acceptable wartime conduct have put behaviours that run counter to such regulations in sharp relief. Indeed, it was not just failures on the part of individual soldiers that interested post-9/11 filmmakers but the systematic breakdown of command and loss of public trust in the military and the administration thereafter. Goldstein positions Lone Survivor, Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper as key films that present the killing of civilians in interesting ways. Lone Survivor is presented as a morality tale about US soldiers taking the high ground; American Sniper presents a woman and child as combatants, therefore problematizing the traditional understanding of the enemy as being an analogue or direct foil of the protagonist; and Zero Dark Thirty directly portrays the decision to torture civilians for information. Each of these films presents moral dilemmas, given that even if the action ends up being justified, the innocence or certainty of the perpetrators of the action are usually erased. Such moral dilemmas certainly make for great drama, but what of documentary, itself making claims to truth and objectivity?
Harris’s piece considers two episodes of British documentary television, one from the network ITV, the other from BBC1. Harris very quickly outlines her criteria for evaluating these episodes, drawn from Grierson, Nichols and Renov (p. 150-1). There are also more practical angles that Harris considers, those of audience demand for entertainment, demands by the commissioning network on producers, as well as ‘budgets and the practicalities of filming’ (p. 151). It is this last quoted consideration that it seems Harris feels most keenly given that, in addition to being a lecturer at Cardiff University, she is also the director of one of the episodes under discussion. But despite these practical concerns, Harris does not fall into the trap of many researcher–practitioners, keen to rely almost solely on experience and anecdote rather than scholarly rigour. The criteria that Harris sets up are based around the tenets of ‘truth claims’, as well as Nichols’ strata of empirical, psychological and historical realisms; these are contrasted with discussions of the sensational dramatic and aesthetic embellishments often included in mainstream broadcast documentaries. Harris also displays an interest in how filmmakers are influenced by a corpus of works; documentary makers, for example, will have an idea of what war should look like, particularly wars that have the Middle East as their theatre of operations. Discussing re-enactment footage in the ITV documentary, Harris offers: ‘The footage sounds like war, or what we know of war from the cinema, so it must be war, and like cinema the drama and pacing of the narrative keep us firmly attached to our seats in front of the television’ (p. 159). Regarding what is erased from the lived experience of war, Harris considers her own choice to present the debrief of a group of soldiers with a series of long takes, deliberately making the sequence fairly tedious. ‘I was trying to show the event as a bureaucratic accounting for bullets and bodies spent, where the matter-of-fact attitude of soldiers towards their job of killing was as much a part of war as the drama of the killing and the fighting’ (p. 162). The upshot of the discussion is that, with both examples, Harris argues that ‘questions about what sort of war these soldiers are fighting, their reasons for fighting (other than survival) and the reasons behind the engagement of the Iraqi militia are not considered’ (p. 165). Amid the actual conflict acted out on the battlefield, there is another battle ever-raging: between objective truth and that which must be edited down for a primetime audience.
While by no means a thoroughgoing review, this brief discussion should afford some insight into the potential value of this volume. This value will be most keenly felt by researchers interested in cinematic representations of war and conflict, and what must be removed from such representations. This removal could be purely practical, as in the case studies discussed by Harris, or it could be ideological as discussed by Goldstein and others throughout the collection. Regardless, such volumes justify and reinforce the constant need for critical attention on the images and films that emerge from and around conflict: such attention ensures that questions are consistently asked of those responsible for such conflict and the suffering and erasures that inevitably ensue.