Film

Tigris Timidity: Why we can’t have the films about Iraq we need

Declan Tan | Tuesday 1 June, 2010 21:20

The Hollywood system has often come under fire from critics and viewers alike, owing to its persistence in continually churning out the lightest of entertainment and ever-more diluted movies about nothing much in particular, though easily marketable toward a sometimes desperate buying audience. Take for instance the recent best picture Academy award winner, The Hurt Locker. The six Oscars and albeit minor box office receipts for Kathryn Bigelow’s film could either demonstrate the film’s genuine power to evoke the pain of war in the viewer, or indeed its promotion of a skewed vision where as journalist and documentary-filmmaker, John Pilger, notes “the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion”.

Writer, former-war correspondent and now renowned dissident, Chris Hedges, who is quoted in the film’s introduction, (“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”) criticises exactly this type of hero-making: “The difference between the celebrity-inspired heroics and the reality of war, which takes less than a minute in a firefight to grasp, is jolting. Wounded Marines booed and hissed John Wayne when he visited them in a hospital in World War II. They had uncovered the manipulation and self-delusion of celebrity culture. They understood that mass culture is a form of social control, a way to influence behaviour that is self-destructive.”

Movies like Bigelow’s propel the idea that a lust for war and the continuation of such destructive enterprises are down to the soldiers addicted to it, while never bothering to cast its light onto the faceless government administration. Instead the distraction takes the form of fleshing out US and UK soldiers or mercenaries as heroes whilst dehumanising and casting aside the untrustworthy, filthy Arabs. The fact this movie has been described and sold as apolitical seems only a marketing tool to sell the idea behind it and herd people into cinemas.

Edward Bernays’ seminal work, Propaganda, published in 1928 is still a source of meaningful insight for the film industry today. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, pioneered a revolution in the methods of ‘engineering consent’. Where before there were only public relations specialists, Bernays led the establishment of an entire industry. His ideas saw him hailed as the founding father of modern public relations and elites saw this development as a positive.

The minds of the masses, he wrote, are there to be moulded and directed, making it possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.” Fed through the media of news and entertainment, established messages reach audiences on scales inconceivable to Bernays in the 1920s. This commercial system dictates that only a war film marketable to a convergent audience would be likely to get made – casting the net wide to catch the fish. This tends to explain the establishment-supporting views of the recent US-involved war films that have made it onto screens, usually just whitewashing the image of the American soldier.

Nothing too subversive is ever discussed in detail, it all works within tight frameworks. Take, for example, Home of the Brave, where the film opens with a ‘humanitarian mission’. They are forced to fight; they are not a willing or violent force. The Americans are there to liberate, to promote democracy, not occupy and control. It’s all the more convenient that these views align with counter-arguments put forward by coalition governments when the WMDs didn’t show.

In a time when blatantly propagandistic films can be called apolitical and the obliteration of nations can be reduced to glossy action films, where the adventure is exciting, beautifully crafted and caricatured, the strength of Hollywood’s distractive and misdirected power rises like a scum to the top. The framing of discussion set only to a permissible range of ideas, combined with the concentrated ownership of Hollywood studios, along with the propulsion of an atmosphere conducive to consumption, results in a system quite efficient in the creation of necessary illusions. Herman and Chomsky’s seminal work, Manufacturing Consent, a piece of research focussing on the behaviour of the press in the 1980s, seems suitable for application on the American movie business.

Consider Brian De Palma’s 2006 Iraq film Redacted. It deals with a fictional account of the real-life Mahmudiyah killings in which a 14-year-old girl was gang-raped and murdered by US soldiers, along with her family, just one of many similar crimes. Expectedly, right-wing commentators vehemently attacked the film for anti-American sentiments, with some Fox News readers urging on a full-scale boycott. De Palma committed the crime of raising the mirror to America’s own actions. To the ideological managers there are no war crimes, no laws. The widespread outrage simply demonstrates the pack mentality of the commercial elite, studio producers and parts of the press, following the government line, operating as the voices of spin.

Still, more of the same is churned out. Weak sauce like The Kingdom or Brothers, that base stories solely around the invading soldiers, make them out to be the tragic victims of ‘insurgent’ gunfire or eventual post-traumatic stress disorder. These ideas often, if not always, function as the basis for American invasion films, continually feeding the viewers with the same stories and perspectives. The analogy that Bernays uses is the boy dropping stones in a half-full pail of water: “At first nothing much happens. But gradually the water level rises, and finally the bucket overflows—provided, that is, the boy keeps dropping stones long enough.” This is the dangerous manufacture of consent that Lippmann also spoke of and which Herman and Chomsky warn. The elitist view that the “intelligent” minorities must regiment the minds of men is not only worrying and sinister but also undermining of true democracy.

Those movies are the easy targets. A war film with Fiddy Cent can’t really be taken seriously, can it? But in all these pictures there persists the classic myth of sacrifice without question, a tenet as old as the earliest propaganda films that make romantic heroes out of war. These ideas still hold ground here as they did with films like Casablanca.

Yet propaganda is not always defined by what is shown but defined also by what is hidden. It may be argued that Green Zone is the most honest portrayal of the Iraq war to date, dealing with the lies of government officials and the false claims of weapons of mass destruction. But even this film does not and, if we are to apply the propaganda model, cannot go far enough in breaking expectations.

Set around the dates of the initial invasion it also commits the crime of ignorance. It refuses to discuss regime change as an illegal pretext for invasion under international law, even when the removal of Saddam Hussein had been agreed upon long before the 45-minute-to-launch WMD claims. And what of the well-documented intelligence published by inspectors between 1991 and 1998 that showed WMDs were non-existent, any VX factories destroyed in 1996 along with the country’s infrastructure from economic sanctions. For Matt Damon’s Miller, the problem is a matter of intelligence from questionable sources as he, a heroic member of the CIA, which in itself is a misnomer, goes on a quest for truth. Always the same, it’s a matter of Americans being lied to, Westerners being betrayed, rather than the mass murder of countless Iraqis. Much was and has been forgotten amidst the heat of hatred for Saddam. This brand of liberal interventionism is perhaps the most rational the Hollywood system allows, no further. Robert Fisk writes, “the sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost thirteen years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures. Our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 closed the page—or so we hoped—on our treatment of the Iraqi people before that date, removed the stigma attached to the imprisonment of an entire nation and their steady debilitation and death under the UN sanctions regime.” That these facts are left out are no oversight. According to Chomsky, Hollywood is a “major part of the whole indoctrination and propaganda system”. For corporations and governments, the idea that funds and profits need to be protected is not a new one, nor even disputable, it is the foundation on which Western society has based itself. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is America’s military-industrial complex, where the war machine is continually notched up in every annual budget, now topping over a trillion dollars, making the nation rely on its jobs and its politics. It follows that the system would develop separate arms to support itself, such as Hollywood and the right-wing press, that wins the ‘hearts and minds’ of its own people, through so-called apolitical films which normalise murderous behaviour.

The release of a ‘conscientious war film’ such as Green Zone, which will be the last of the recent slew, simply echoes the feistiness that the press have also shown since the end of the war, contrasted with their timidity before it, something the film studios did without taking the task far enough. But at least the point has been raised, right? Yet where is the same criticism of escalating atrocities in Afghanistan under Obama? Conveniently dissent becomes popular, even marketable, when it’s too little and too late. Films like these should be taking the argument to the audience in a challenging way, not pandering to their pocket and their accepted limitations, but this is the actuality of the Hollywood system. The reality is that inconvenient facts must be overlooked when it comes to filming the crimes of the West.

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