As some of you fine people may already have known, for six weeks earlier this summer the cinetrix took a course with admitted Gawker reader and lead Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman. She brings this up now not to be an insufferable name-dropper [she could, and has, been guilty of much worse] or to affix her wagon to a print establishment-cred star. No, she simply mentions it because Sharon Waxman [and subsequently GreenCine and greg.org] reported today that director David O. Russell's 1999 Gulf War flick Three Kings is slated for theatrical and DVD rerelease, in consort with a quickie follow-up doc shot by Russell.
We watched Three Kings [already a cinetrix fave] in Hoberman's class, and he charged us with writing a little sumthin' sumthin' discussing the film's place within the long history of combat flicks. I mentioned it obliquely here at the time.
Now, to celebrate the rerelease of this prescient flick, I subject you to my argument for Three Kings as the first hip-hop war movie. [Apparently, it made Hoberman laugh out loud. Just like there's no crying in baseball, there are few laffs in academia. Is it any wonder I've chosen not to continue?]
Pay attention. There will be a quiz.
These are some serious times that we’re livin in, G. And a new world order is about to begin, you know what I’m sayin’? -- Public Enemy
In 2004, what can Three Kings tell us about the current gulf war, our MBA president, and the likelihood that the American electorate that kept 41 to a single term in office will reelect 43 this November? The short answer is more than W. wants us to remember about how much this war is rooted in big business and a personal vendetta.Three Kings is the first hip-hop combat movie. The film, which takes place during the war that “invented” CNN, is equally influenced by the music that Public Enemy’s Chuck D. called the black CNN. Its stars also have a modicum of street cred: Mark Wahlberg (né Marky Mark) plays Troy; former N.W.A. member and all-around renaissance man Ice Cube is Chief; and Spike Jonze, director of Puff Daddy’s “All About the Benjamins” video, is the redneck Conrad. The film follows the off-the-res adventures of the three soldiers, nominally led by George Clooney as Special Forces trickster figure Archie “Brer Rabbit” Gates, in their quest for bling. These weekend warriors have discovered a map indicating the location of the gold bullion that Saddam stole from Kuwait. With these ingots, they will be set for life stateside, but as the movie progresses, they get a crash course in mo’ money, mo’ problems.
The film opens in the confused immediate aftermath of the 43-day-long MTV edit now known as the first Persian Gulf War. Soldiers who never saw combat during the official hostilities celebrate before the media’s cameras as numerous jingoistic movies and sporting events have taught them to do. But the difference between the gulf war and previous wars is signaled by the soundtrack. The simple patriotism of Lee Greenwood’s more traditional, stirring anthem, “God Bless the USA, ” gives way to an urban call to arms and anomie, Public Enemy’s “Can’t do nuttin for ya, man” (a rallying cry for the United States’ non-interventionist stance in Iraq and the inner city both). Like the fronting gangstas they dance to, the Desert Storm soldiers posture with guns they’ve never fired. All that’s missing from the image is a Parental Advisory sticker.
The plot of Three Kings is propelled by acquisitiveness and self-interest. Sound familiar? Brand names are tossed around indiscriminately: Picasso, Sony, Armani. Our hip-hop-hooray heroes Troy and Chief, working-class reservists who joined up because they couldn’t make ends meet on a single salary, bicker constantly over whether Lexus offers a convertible. Gates is angling for a cushy post-retirement gig in the private sector as a Hollywood consultant. Even Conrad can do the math: One Rolex would buy him a house back in Texas. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling.
The deserting Iraqi soldiers are no different. They scrabble to grab blue jeans as they flee Saddam’s bunkers, which look like Crazy Eddie’s showrooms, stocked to the rafters with consumer electronics. A captive Troy digs through a cache of cell phones looking for a way to call for help. The bullion, in Louis Vuitton luggage, is transported by a fleet of stolen luxury automobiles. Looting is the American way, emulated the world over. The same sense of entitlement and ghetto fabulousness motivated executives to loot their own companies and sparked the recession that has marked W.’s term.
When it was released, the film was criticized for its flat, affectless “music video” style cinematography, but then as now, CNN and MTV look much the same. Music video’s lowest-common-denominator imagery and quick cuts suited the first gulf war’s short-attention-span narrative. The current Bush administration samples the first war (the way Public Enemy sampled Buffalo Springfield’s Vietnam anthem “For What It’s Worth” in their song “He Got Game,” which is the track that plays in both the trailer and TV spot for Three Kings), trying to re-present its hygienic and antiseptic imagery as the extension of a familiar narrative and piggyback on the patriotism the country felt during its 1991 victory. But the truth leaks in like bile, as images of Nicholas Berg’s beheading, flag-draped coffins, and Abu Ghraib torture puncture the Kevlar.
Director Russell also reminds us of the United States’ culpability for the current situation in Iraq by showing us what’s happening on the ground, beyond the news cameras: the betrayal of civilians by the first Bush administration and burning Kuwaiti oil fields. Women get shot in front of their children. Gas fills the air. Everywhere there’s bile and oil and sepsis. And the U.S. armed forces cannot intervene in the occupied country’s domestic disputes. Can’t do nuttin’ for ya, man. The American soldiers meet two American-trained Iraqis, one an entrepreneurial Bowling Green B school graduate (like W.), the other a beneficiary of a School of the Americas curriculum (courtesy of ex-CIA head spook 41?), trained in torture during the Iran-Iraq war. Both express scorn for the “plight” of rich Kuwaitis, the narrative supplied to the soldiers and the American public as the ostensible reason for the war. To them, the war is like shooting a hole in a tanker truck full of milk. Nobody profits except the companies that write off the loss.
A caption at the beginning of the film announces the date as March 3, 1991. The bullion seekers leave to look for the bunkers outside Karbala the following morning. When they bust into a room full of looted appliances in an Iraqi bunker later that same day, an Iraqi soldier is watching the Rodney King video, which aired in March, 1991, and helped set off the LA riots and looting a year later. Its inclusion here suggests that with the gulf war over, the nation’s attention has already shifted to the next spectacle, the next video. As Saïd Taghmaoui suggests during his interrogation of Troy, the war is part of the same consumerist sickness, one so powerful it makes black men like Michael Jackson hate who they are and want to be white. Meanwhile, the looting continues on the highest levels and goes unpunished until Election Day, if then.
[Completists only: In the final paper for the class, the cinetrix examined the use of musical conventions to represent Saddam Hussein in Lebowski and South Park. The cinetrix is not well. She also was too chicken to include a SASE for Hoberman's comments, suspecting she may have already pushed her luck too far.]
