How the Iraq War veteran has or hasn't come into focus onscreen
Gosline, Jeanie Elenor
LIKE MANY members of the moviegoing public, I didn't rush to see Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Redacted (2007), Grace Is Gone (2007), A Mighty Heart (2007),...
...her struggle to adjust to her prosthetic hand (she was a basketball player and coach) is made less predictable by her single 92 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 motherhood, but it is otherwise thin...
...Curtis Jackson as Jamal supplies the role of agitated veteran, consumed by impotent rage brought on by bureaucratic ineptitude in military care and veteran services...
...And because filmmakers believe the war, with its shifting and mendacious rationales, its rabid politicization, and its extreme violence, to be about nothing, the soldiers in their movies must also be filled with nothing...
...Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a sergeant in the Marines, is in a California Veterans Administration hospital after being paralyzed from the waist down in Vietnam...
...I don't know what it's like," he replies...
...Southland Tales is a comedic dystopia...
...Circumstances in the United States are dire: a nuclear bomb was dropped on Abilene, Texas, DISSENT / Summer 2008 • 93 NOTEBOOK in 2005...
...Documentaries have never been popular with the general public...
...A few years, or more, may go by before we see any movies like The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, or even Taxi Driver— movies that artfully revealed the experience of Vietnam veterans and the world they returned to...
...It is not clear whether the film is asking us to reflect on who is serving in our wars or suggesting that we are failing them (before, during, or after the fighting...
...Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda) is the wife of a Marine captain who has spent most of her life on bases, in the cocoon of the U.S...
...The film flashes forward to the four surviving characters back in Spokane, Washington, as they struggle to fit back into their families and small-town life...
...The portrait, I think, is meant to elicit sympathy...
...They agreed, that about sums it up...
...Abilene, delighted, shakes his hand, and when the young guy asks him about Iraq, Abilene replies, waving his hand, "Yeah, Fallujah, that shit got fucked up...
...COMING HOME (1978), directed by Hal Ashby, offers an earlier take on the experiences of physically and mentally disabled veterans, as well as a clear anti-Vietnam War statement...
...Made three years after the Paris peace agreement primarily ended America's ten-year involvement in Vietnam, Taxi Driver reflected a crisis in the American soul...
...There are similarities in Badland to Martin Scorsese's great 1976 film Taxi Driver...
...Directed by Richard Kelly, the film takes place on July 3 and 4 in 2008, in an almost apocalyptic future...
...In a scene common to many war films, the two act out the veteran's inner battle: the Taverner from the past, distraught, tells the Taverner of the future that he can't forgive himself for harming someone in a friendly fire incident in Iraq...
...In contrast to recent films, it relies on well-drawn characters to carry the weight of its message...
...Bob and Luke are juxtaposed early on...
...Taxi Driver's power comes from the questions it raises about right and wrong—in war, in politics, and in the social order...
...But perhaps his family is a standin for the American government and military...
...New York City is full of people and cars and buildings, all of it filthy and corrupted, reflecting Travis Bickle's perception of the place, but it is clear that this is the only environment where he can exist...
...He is a man better equipped for war than for civilian society, who believes that even if the cause is doubtful, his fellow soldiers are worth supporting...
...Abilene's face was disfigured by "friendly fire," and he is addicted to Liquid Karma...
...Samuel L. Jackson delivers perhaps the most thoughtful comment when he tells a therapist that it wasn't the war itself that hurt him the most—it is that he didn't feel anything when he struggled to save the lives of young men and women on the battlefield...
...94 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 As the absurd conspiracy plot culminates, we find out that the soul of the other Iraq War veteran, Roland Taverner, was split when he was accidentally caught up in a government experiment, and both his past and future incarnations are walking around Los Angeles...
...As does the character in Badland, he snaps, taking the staff and his girlfriend hostage at the restaurant where she works...
...Sometimes the same character would act in both ways in the same movie...
...Off duty, he holds court in a boardwalk video-game parlor called Fire...
...Or at least this is what the viewer is asked to believe...
...The character portraits are flat and full of clichés that we remember from other war films...
...Vanessa Price (Jessica Biel) suffers a maimed hand, and Dr...
...Luke is angry and violent, lashing out at the hospital staff...
...These films stood out from other war movies—and became artful historical markers— because they examined the complexity of what is "right" and "wrong" and the disruption of social mores that occurs in wartime...
...In Badland, everything has failed Jerry, who, left empty, is capable of anything...
...The defining point was that these were average men and boys thrown into a situation in which no choice was obvious, but the consequences of choosing this way or that were enormous...
...The political message of the film seems to be that there are many ways to experience this war as a veteran, but it still offers overly familiar takes on PTSD, as well as tired formulas about the government's failure to take care of its veterans...
...fictional films, on the other hand, provide an opportunity for the emotional connection and nuanced interpretation that art can evoke from complicated historical events...
...Two recent films, Badland (written and directed by Francesco Lucente) and Home of the Brave (directed by Irwin Winkler), deal explicitly with the experience of Iraq War veterans trying to reacclimate themselves to life in the states, and so they invite comparison with the DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 89 NOTEBOOK Vietnam films...
...Tommy is shot in the leg, and his best friend is killed...
...and the woman's husband, a captain in the Marines...
...Broken men who snap and commit murder...
...By not giving the reasons why he feels so betrayed and alienated, it allows his extreme actions at the end of the film to be seen within the social network rather than outside of it...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 • 95...
...LIKE MANY members of the moviegoing public, I didn't rush to see Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Redacted (2007), Grace Is Gone (2007), A Mighty Heart (2007), Badland (2007), or any of the other feature films that deal with the U.S.-led war in Iraq...
...I was born a year before the 1973 peace agreement, and grew up avidly watching films made in the late 1970s and 1980s (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, among others...
...In the same article, Sells writes, "With 24/7 news coverage via the Internet, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and even cell phones, never have so many media outlets been accessible in real time," and so, he argues, Americans are "overexposed" to images of and stories about the war...
...The decision to put Iraq War veterans at the emotional center of the movie keeps it from flying off into mayhem and reminds the viewer that this is not so far off from reality...
...The Deer Hunter moves back and forth between a group of friends in combat and in a POW camp in Vietnam (from which they escape), and then home in the United States...
...The first half-hour of the two-hour-andfortyminute film is spent setting up his miserable home life: his wife, pregnant with their fourth child, harasses him endlessly, and a thieving coworker lets Jerry take the blame for thefts at the gas station where he works...
...Motivation, however, is a central question...
...NOTEBOOK Her husband, Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), is a loyal soldier and an ordinary man, whose company has just been called up for service...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 • 91 NOTEBOOK OME OF THE BRAVE, a 2006 film directed by Irwin Winkler and written by Mark Friedman, is a more typical Hollywood story about veterans trying to integrate into civilian life...
...His solution, ultimately, is to return to Iraq...
...I don't think that I avoided these films because of an "Iraq overdose," as the documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald suggests in an article by Mark Sells in MovieMaker magazine (Fall 2007...
...JEANIE ELENOR GOSLINE is the former office manager for Dissent and a fiction writer and moviegoer living in Brooklyn, New York...
...A mentally damaged, alienated veteran surrounded by greed, hypocrisy, and dysfunction...
...I was moved most by the portrayal of soldiers as vulnerable: liable to commit acts of horror and cowardliness and also acts of bravery and compassion...
...Avoidance requires a more complicated explanation than overexposure, especially when one looks not at the documentaries but at the fictional films about Iraq...
...During the chase, Jamal accidentally shoots a civilian woman...
...the United States is still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now also with Syria...
...It shows us the nightmare of that war and the disruption and destruction of the psyches of ordinary men turned soldiers...
...Jerry is a man who has done his duty twice for his country and gotten nothing in return, emotional or economical...
...There is a garden-variety selection of veteran characters: a group of soldiers from the same company, about to return home, undertake a final (supply delivery) mission in hostile territory, when they are ambushed and suffer casualties and severe injuries...
...However, the satire doesn't feel cynical—there is a lovehate quality in the combination of comedy and pathos, especially considering how bad things have gotten for the human race in this parallel universe...
...The portraits are poignant: there are two (three actually) veteran characters: Pilot Abilene, played by Justin Timberlake, and Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), who has been literally split into two manifestations...
...As the film goes on, Bob grows bitter and despairing while in Vietnam, and Luke becomes not only compassionate toward his fellow vets, but stages a one-man protest at the Marine Corps recruiting station after a young vet kills himself at the hospital...
...Travis, like Jerry, is obviously screwed up— he is a former Marine recently honorably discharged from Vietnam who can't sleep and who drinks alcohol out of a paper bag as he walks the streets...
...Indeed, it is the only recent film that I know of featuring a female soldier...
...A major difference between the films is that Badland deals explicitly with an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD, while in Taxi Driver it is only hinted that Travis Bickle's dementia is a result of the Vietnam War...
...Jerry's motives seem to exist outside the war and the "stress" that it causes...
...Biel's character is intriguing only because we have rarely seen a female veteran onscreen...
...The end of the world will occur—"not with a whimper, but with a bang"—when the two souls meet...
...I think contemporary filmmakers do understand that this is a fundamental ideological rift between the government that put soldiers in Iraq and many of the soldiers fighting there...
...He is old-fashioned and conservative—he doesn't want Sally to work, particularly in the "morbid" hospital...
...Travis's fellow cab drivers are too willfully ignorant or jaded to notice or care about him or any of the other lost souls around them...
...There are several feature films on the Iraq War and its veterans slated for release this year and in 2009...
...Shot after shot of the empty, cold plains, reflects the emptiness in Jerry...
...The viewer understands that Travis has made Iris the innocent that he must save and that he sees her pimp and john as the filth that he must eradicate from the earth—and understands too that this justification is demented...
...It is easier to suppose here than in Badland that Travis has transplanted a warped perception of good and evil (developed in Vietnam) to the criminals on the street...
...pERHAPS IT IS the fear that we are seeing this terrible situation repeated in Iraq that keeps the public from embracing any recent films about the conflict...
...Repeating the exchange "friendly fire" and "I forgive you," hands clasped, the Taverners move slowly toward a flashing vortex...
...Sally's heartbreaking flaw is her belief that if she and Bob stay together no matter what, she will be able to help him heal (as she did Luke...
...Tommy, whose bravery is exemplified by his willingness to walk into the hostage situation, represents the good soldier, broken up by the loss of his best friend and his helplessness in the face of death...
...Jerry's daughter, Celina, embodies the only innocence in the film...
...One of the most pointed moments comes when a young man shows up at Fire and mentions that his father was the plastic surgeon who worked on Abilene's face...
...or suggesting something else entirely...
...border patrol is heightened to the point where soldiers staff huge machine guns equipped with computerized targeting devices...
...The cost to U.S...
...This factor, as well as her loyalty to her husband even as she embarks on an affair with Luke, keeps her character anchored—she does not undergo big political changes herself, but she understands why she must support Luke as he does...
...Perhaps as long as the Iraq War remains the ongoing, backburner conflict that it is now, with elusive goals and no positive outcome, movie characterizaNOTEBOOK tions of veterans will be trapped in clichés and will keep us from moving any closer to understanding the conflict...
...Like Celina, a young girl named Iris (Jodie Foster) is the embodiment of innocence here...
...a military housewife...
...One of the film's surprising successes is that with the story set in the "future" rather than the present world, the characters are freed from overly familiar depictions, and the film achieves an unexpected resonance...
...Pilot Abilene, who also narrates the film by quoting "scriptures" that make up the tales of the Southland, mans one of the huge guns at the "border" of Venice Beach...
...A low-rent drug lord dressed in desert-shade fatigues, Abilene supplies the narcotic/hallucinogen Liquid Karma, a substance originally developed and tested on soldiers by the government...
...He snaps, kills his wife and sons, then goes on the run with his young daughter into the wastelands of Wyoming...
...It isn't clear how Jerry feels or what he thinks about his experience in the war...
...Many of these films spent scant weeks in the theaters and made almost no money...
...The TV shows what it's like...
...Tommy Yates (Brian Presley) and his best friend, Chad (Michael Murray), as well as fellow soldier Jamal Atkins (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), pursue snipers through a series of houses...
...he is a soldier "dishonored" in a morally ambiguous war...
...One of the earliest films about Iraq war veterans, Home of the Brave attempts nuance through ensemble...
...Left alone for the first time, Sally moves off the base and volunteers at the VA hospital...
...lonely, injured folks struggling to get care from the government that sent them into harm's way—all are meaningful portraits, often heartbreaking and true...
...While the lack of a pro- or antiwar stance keeps the movie from falling into agenda-filled storytelling, it also manages to avoid delving deeply into anything...
...The first two films about Vietnam released in the United States after the war was over were Coming Home (1978) and The Deer Hunter (1979...
...THE PORTRAIT of veteran-as-lost-soul in a politically and socially corrupt universe can be powerful...
...As long as filmmakers rely on narrow agendas and imitative characterizations, as long as they are unable to convey a nuanced understanding of the war in Iraq, the veterans in their films (in tandem with real-life veterans) will disappear into a vortex where most will be reluctant to follow...
...The film draws a portrait of a veteran driven to mass murder by the horrors of war...
...At a midpoint between the early seventies, when films evoked the feelings of hopelessness and confusion brought on by the war without mentioning the war at all, and the late seventies, when films began to confront the war directly, Taxi Driver can allow the origin of Travis's psychosis to remain obscure...
...soldiers and the ugly outcome were growing clearer...
...A middle-aged doctor, Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson), who has volunteered to serve, and several army personnel—a woman among them—are caught in the ambush...
...Several of the recent films deal with the struggles of soldiers returning home—a central cinematic theme after Vietnam...
...I wonder, will the public give them a better reception than their predecessors...
...I only know what it is...
...What emotional response is appropriate after returning home from war...
...He berates Sally and is less than sympathetic with the other vets...
...The Second World War also spawned a handful of films about the experience of veterans, notably The Best Years of Our Lives and, much later, Saving Private Ryan and Flags of Our Fathers, but the message then, after the "good war," was decidedly different from what came after Vietnam...
...The early proliferation of films about the Iraq war seems to indicate a desire on the part of filmmakers to illuminate this war and the experience of its soldiers—but there are flaws in the execution...
...Pilot Abilene has the last word, announcing in his closing narration that Roland Taverner "was my best friend"—and the one responsible for the friendly fire that disfigured his face...
...In an early scene, his wife asks the children if they've washed their hands...
...After failing to assassinate a political candidate, Bickle murders Iris's pimp and john as well as a bouncer where she is working, and the media and public transform the killings into heroic acts...
...The revelation at the end of the film that he has been declared a hero by "daylight" society again shines the spotlight on a civilization allegedly at peace, as well as on the chaotic, dehumanized culture of war...
...In Badland, the story follows Jerry (Jamie Draven), a veteran of both Gulf wars who has been dishonorably discharged, to his home in the Midwest...
...He asks for Tommy, his fellow soldier, who comes to the restaurant and attempts to talk him down...
...There is no mystery to the liberal, antiwar stance in Coming Home, but the experience of the vets in the film squares with historical accounts...
...If he was a supremely unhappy, resentful being before going to war, and the effects of the atrocity that he was involved in (during the fighting in Fallujah) are never made clear, the message is made even murkier...
...Bob's outlook, however, is vastly altered by his service in Vietnam, and his crisis produces a revelation, that he doesn't "belong here," not in Sally's house, not in the military, not in America...
...The end of the world and the soldier's ability to reconcile himself with his actions hang in the balance...
...The movie follows Sally as she blossoms from a passive, devoted housewife into a more proactive, questioning person in the eye-opening environment of the hospital...
...and a primarily unsympathetic and clueless civilian population...
...But, with a narrow vision of the conflict, and no time yet for retrospection, it will take a while before we see a real engagement with the dynamics at play in Iraq that will illuminate the experiences of returning veterans...
...and Homeland Security has run amok...
...The two Taverners find each other amid a freakish outbreak of mass violence in the general population...
...It was supposed to have been released in 2005, only two years into the war, but did not get distribution until 2007...
...THE WILD CARD among the recent Iraq War movies is the "fantasy" or "sciencefiction" film Southland Tales...
...The plot is complicated and not necessary to recount here, but satirical targets include governmental invasion of privacy, incomprehensible and miraculous solutions to environmental crises, consumerism and celebrity worship, the Los Angeles Police Department, counterrevolutionary movements—essentially everything...
...Bob starts out as a matter-of-fact patriot ready to fight because it's his job...
...Sitting through a film about Iraq was not high on my list or, apparently, on anyone else's, of things to do...
...Coming Home is a film dominated by veterans conflicted or downright resentful about their role in the war...
...They vary in types of service (medical, supply delivery, combat), age, race, and gender...
...But if the coverage is constant, the information it contains rarely varies...
...it is centered around the relationships among three principal characters: a paralyzed vet...
...Her stories have been published in literary magazines and an anthology, and she is currently writing a novel...
...Even the war, he says, won't have him...
...lost souls wandering aimlessly in an alien (American) landscape...
...Commenting on this type of characterization in the Winter 2008 issue of World Affairs, George Packer says that "they [filmmakers] treat soldiers as abstractions, empty canvasses onto which the 90 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 filmmakers can project their own fantasies about the war...
...As she sees the suffering, both mental and physical, that the young vets endure in cramped understaffed quarters, her empathy is stirred and her assumptions about the military and the war are disrupted...
...The war in Iraq has dragged on against popular expectations, and media accounts have varied little over the last few years, regularly reporting assassinations, roadside explosions, and car bombs in public places, among other dire developments that make any kind of success difficult to imagine...
...Halfway through Coming Home, Sally goes to Hong Kong to spend time with Bob on his holiday leave, and sensing that he is already growing disillusioned about the war, she asks him what it's like...
...The focus is shifted back to the viewer, and the distinctions between "us" and "them," between peaceful civilians and violent warriors, are erased...
...disillusioned patriots...
...He says that his loved ones "betrayed" him, and the film suggests that it is this "betrayal," rather than anything that happened in Iraq, that spurs his violence...
...Samuel L. Jackson gives the finest performance and does his best to bring psychological depth to a man who is sworn to save lives but has shut down emotionally...
...Even after she falls in love with Luke, Sally is determined to go back to Bob when he comes back from Vietnam...
...The Vietnam movies are infused with anger toward the war and the military in general, as well as with a kind of retrospective hopelessness...
...Bob returns and the affair ends, but Bob is obviously damaged, his faith in what is "right" shattered, his desire to be a hero now nakedly pathetic, and things take a dark turn...
...Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Jerry is teetering on the edge...
...Sally's compassion is central to her persona and never wavers throughout her journey...
...But in this case she is a twelve-yearold prostitute, and it is only Travis's perception that instills her with innocence...
...The final scenes in the film are shattering in their illustration of loss—loss of innocence, loss of hope—and that life, however wrecked by loss, must move forward...
...fossil fuel has just about run out...
...This leaves him nowhere—like the characters in Badland, Taxi Driver, and Home of the Brave...
...In Badland, Jerry reveals his life history in a monologue at the very end of the film, and it is a bleak tale of abandoned hopes and no prospects...
...Anyway . ." When I saw the film, this line got a big laugh from the people in the theater—but it was laughter tinged with sadness and irony...
...It sure as hell don't show what it is...
...military...
...Here is a crucial question, never adequately addressed in this or the other films: What is it that we expect veterans to feel about what they did or didn't do in the chaos of battle...
...Only In the Valley of Elah was praised by critics (mostly owing to Tommy Lee Jones' performance) and did reasonably well at the box office, earning just over $6.5 million...
...Marsh tries to save it...
...Celina opens her palms and says, "My hands are clean...
...The filmmakers seem unwilling to delve into the specific ambiguities and complexities of the Iraq War and the lives of its participants...
...George W. Bush, having declared years ago the war in Iraq a "victory," might suggest pride or patriotism...
...What is most striking about many of the current films is their reliance on characterizations we've seen before—in The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, and also in Taxi Driver...
...The only place that will have him NOTEBOOK is the hellish nighttime culture of New York City...
...Both films attempt to implicate society in the terrible consequences that result, but Taxi Driver's silence about who or what is to blame gives the film its weight...
...What this indicates about everyone else in the film is never developed...
...Southland is a new area encompassing Southern California...
...a landscape (the plains of Wyoming, the streets of New York) that reflects the souldeadened interior of the character...
Vol. 55 • July 2008 • No. 3
