One of these days one of you gents needs to explain to the cinetrix about the male weepie. You know, the movie about sports or war that makes it, Rosey Grier-stylee, all right to cry. See, yesterday I saw Control Room, then watched [most of] Saving Private Ryan for the first time, and it's a toss-up as to which war movie I found more thought-provoking (not for the reasons I'm meant to, I suspect). Both moved me to tears.
The cinetrix is a pushover for behind-the-scenes process documentaries [like The War Room and other Hegedus/Pennebaker films] to begin with, and in Control Room director Jehane Noujaim crafts a compelling counternarrative and has the good fortune of a couple of true characters in her Al Jazeera journo protagonists. If you want to see more of the current war than the embedded American media has shown, look no further than Al Jazeera. While it is refreshing and disheartening to see its BBC-trained Arabic reporters express the same exasperated mockery and disbelief that Bush and Rummy inspire here, what really stays with you, of course, is the terrible human cost underpinning both sides' propaganda and spin. Even the American military's media spokesperson admitted to being troubled.
"The night they showed the P.O.W.'s and dead soldiers . . . it was powerful, because Americans won't show those kinds of images," says Lieutenant Josh Rushing, perhaps the film's most compelling figure. "It made me sick to my stomach."
Those images, of soldiers from Private Jessica Lynch's company, produced an uproar in the U.S. and Britain. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Al Jazeera of violating the Geneva Conventions. For Rushing, who suffers an education over the course of Control Room, the pictures evoked a different sensation, and in the film he recalls Al Jazeera's coverage from the night before the Lynch episode, of civilians killed and wounded in a "bombing" in Basra.
"They were equally if not more horrifying," he admits, "and I remember having seen it, in the Al Jazeera offices, and thought to myself, 'That's gross, that's bad,' and then going away, probably to dinner or something.
"It didn't affect me as much," Rushing says. "It upset me on a profound level that I wasn't bothered as much." [excerpted from the Village Voice]
Which brings me back round to Private Ryan. Too young at her first exposure to develop antibodies, the cinetrix is horribly susceptible to Steven Spielburg's brand of suburban sentiment. He doesn't just know which buttons to push, he pretty much installed them on my tender psyche himself. As a result, the cinetrix gets really mad when she knows her emotions are being manipulated, even if it is by a master. (And I think
my loathing for Tom Hanks is well-documented.) Which goes some way, I hope, to explaining why I had assiduously avoided shaving Ryan's privates until last night.
Seeing the justly famous D-Day sequence I understand why "greatest generation" veterans were reluctant to talk about the war. It is hell. There's plenty of blood and gore and death in Saving Private Ryan, as I'm sure no one needs telling. But it's not the verisimilitude of the battle sequences I worry about, it's the sentiment behind them. Who are the soldiers on the other side? Where are the civilians? For the most part, they're absent. They'd slow down the story. Which may be why the way we're presented with micromanaged images of the war in Iraq doesn't trouble us more. Here's Lieutenant Rushing again:
"I think it should all be shown, the dead on both sides," he says. "In America war isn't hell—we don't see blood, we don't see suffering. All we see is patriotism, and we support the troops. It's almost like war has some brand marketing here."
"Al Jazeera shows it all," he concludes. "It turns your stomach, and you remember there's something wrong with war."
The fascinating thing about Rushing is that his job now is working with studios to ensure accuracy in their portrayals of the Marine Corps. But will fiction filmmakers today be able to impose a shape, a narrative arc on this war, even in hindsight?
During World War II, famous filmmakers like Frank Capra shot a series of documentaries for the War Office whose collective title answered a then-rhetorical question: Why We Fight. Now the answer to that question seems to change daily. There are few stories, save Pat Tillman's, that would even appear to lend themselves to a traditional Hollywood narrative. Perhaps only the open-ended documentary form can capture the fractured onslaught of imagery of modern war.
