Author Archives: Michael Carson

How HBO Killed Art

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For many years, HBO has made money using a simple formula: one part full frontal nudity plus one part excessive gore plus one part family sentimentality = wildly successful drama. They have applied it to many different locations and historical time periods, from California, to World War Two, to Ancient Rome, to Depression-era New Jersey, to present-day New Jersey. Nothing much changes except for the set pieces and accents.  Other networks are trying to cash in but have struggled because HBO continues to up the ante – the prudish FCC still being uncomfortable with eviscerations, incest, rape and any combination of the three. Yet this is in itself uninteresting. TV entertains because it excites the senses and sex and death are very exciting. What is interesting is how this formula has garnered so much critical acclaim. At what point did the mere display of sex and violence become the equivalent of aesthetic sophistication?

Much of daily life in the modern world involves the denial of the fact of sex and death. When Leave It to Beaver aired, people were having sex in America and people were being murdered; therefore the show was false, for it ignored the reality of violence and desire.  It logically followed that to be true shows should not be afraid to show sex and death on screen. The more skin and guts exhibited, the more real it became. This is a valid critique, especially as concealment often helps control women’s bodies and obviates institutional injustices, but over the last twenty years this logic has snowballed dangerously. Today’s sophisticated viewers, those who want quality TV, who consider themselves well-informed, sensible, cultured, people, now assume violence and sex to be aesthetic criteria of the first order. In other words, a show is often considered artful in so far as it is willing to transgress taboos.

This is not to say HBO shows do not have other aesthetic qualities, that they do not have interesting plots, engaging characters and fine acting. They often do. These elaborate soap operas are packaged for demanding audiences who expect twists, ironic dialogue and calibrated tension. But so are many other shows, including traditional soap operas. Nor is this to say that violence and sex should not be on TV. There are plenty of programs that use both effectively. What sets HBO shows apart is how they have made violence and sex central to their appeal. Whether the public wants to admit it or not, this is what makes Rome and Iwo Jima alive to them, not the characters’ lives but how they die and what they look like naked. Many see this as an evolution for television on par with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a brave artistic achievement, when in fact it takes hackneyed assumptions about family, friendship and personal growth and glosses them with meticulously rendered brutality, vulgarity and debauchery.

Some will protest that they are drawn to the shows not for this gloss at all, but the opposite, for the exquisite family tensions and dramatic pathos behind the blood and boobs. They like the way that the shows let us sympathize with ever-proliferating anti-heroes in new and provocative ways. The sex and violence simply provide a more honest and engaging backdrop. This is true. Nothing pleasantly surprises viewers more than the fact that people who kill also have sex and families except perhaps for watching people with families have sex and kill. It makes their own family life feel more authentic while simultaneously making that of killers and ne’er do wells more relatable. Generally this might be a good thing, to appreciate how someone might turn to crime or kill to save a loved one; unfortunately, this apparent empathy is predicated on violence, specifically on the idea that what unites is sex and violence alone, and elides the plot’s trope-ridden sentimentality.

Band of Brothers, beloved by most everyone in the early aughts, exemplifies this formulaic blend of sentimentality and violence. The producers of that show did what they could do be historically authentic, relying on period costumes and up to date staging like any other period movie. The plot too was little different than work that came out in the 1950s, or even propaganda from the 1940s, replete with neatly-packaged assumptions about different officer types, friendships and personal growth. Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back pretty much told the same story. The only difference was the supposed realism in Band of Brothers, the way in which the producers were unafraid to show violence, and how this violence, the havoc of war, both intensified and obscured the schmaltzy and predictable plotting. Viewers could feel mature and jaded while simultaneously indulging in kitsch and sentimentality. The show seems quaint now, not because HBO has given up on a formula that equates realism with violence but because they have made their shows exponentially more debauched, and, according to their logic, exponentially more real.

HBO’s most recent locale is Westeros, a land that is not real in the physical sense but has been made so through violence, and if major web publications are any evidence, many viewers find this fantasy world more real than the war in Afghanistan. This is not especially surprising. Ewoks are more real to Americans than Afghans. What is unique is the way in which over-the-top sex and violence dictate the show’s plot and popularity. Critics anticipate the next slaughter and rape with relish, judging each episode for its audacity, and gauge its success by the number of children killed and sisters slept with. People do not tune in for the dragons and dwarves. That wouldn’t be real enough for them.

George Martin, the author of the original Game of Thrones, has defended his story’s excess by appealing to Sumerian history, essentially arguing that they did it first. He also claims to be informed by his experiences growing up during Vietnam, when atrocities committed in that war pushed him to represent the brutality that comes with war. Others have sought similar solace from British history in attempting to rationalize or justify the show as being authentic. All this is true: war is brutal. Women (and men) are raped. We would be remiss to obscure this. But we are a long way from John Wayne when it comes to art about war. Such a defense conveniently misses not only the fact that this brutality is part of the appeal of war, and is often the reason people go to war and line up to watch war on TV, but the way in this turns real off-screen violence into the only possible human reality. Those who protest are told that this is the way the world works. To shy away and watch anything else is to be inauthentic – to be a coward or a prude.

No matter that this is a fantasy. No matter that there is plenty of literature, movies and shows that honestly attempt to explore these cycles of violence in the modern world without making shocking violence so essential to their artistry. In the end, the titillating carnage in this show and others like it functions as violence does outside of television: as a mind-numbing spectacle that effectively mutes out all other considerations of life and art in the name of a supposedly undeniable and inviolable truth, an ultimate reality that justifies the barbarity we crave by making it impossible to imagine a world without barbarism.
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Michael Carson deployed to Iraq in 2006. He now writes criticism at the Wrath-Bearing Tree. Follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

Matthew VanDyke and Obsessive Compulsive Freedom Fighting

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In a short non-fiction essay, “The Spirit of Place,” D.H. Lawrence rejects the idea that young men come to America for freedom. They go west, he argues, simply to “get away from everything they are and have been.” For Lawrence, those who come to America confuse the slavishness of escapism for the authority that comes with actual freedom. “It is not freedom,” he contends, “till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about things they are not.” This negative freedom, which is to Lawrence not really freedom at all, but “the sound of chains rattling,” has worked to undermine the true freedom of place, the kind in which a person has responsibilities, “a believing community” organically understood rather than an “idealistic halfness” petulantly professed. “Men are freest when most unconscious of freedom,” he concludes.

Matthew VanDyke is an interesting study in what happens when people no longer go to America but away from it to find this peculiar variety of freedom. Profiled in the recent Marshall Curry documentary Point and Shoot, Baltimore native VanDyke grows up with few friends and little masculine influence. His childhood was defined by video games, old movies about Lawrence of Arabia, and struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder. As an adult he attended Georgetown University Master’s Program in Middle Eastern studies. After graduation, VanDyke continues to be troubled by the sense that he has not proved his manhood. To find this elusive reality he decides to visit the one place a person an American with an obsessive need to wash his hands would not dare to go: the Middle East. A few weeks later he is in North Africa armed with a camera and motorcycle.

After many misadventures, including a detour with the American Army in Iraq where he poses as a photojournalist, VanDyke eventually finds the fame he seeks in a Libyan prison cell, having been captured by Gadhafi’s forces and then freed by advancing coalition-backed militias. An international darling for a few moments, the dazed VanDyke refuses to go back home. He wants to battle with his friends for the freedom of Libya. Soon enough, he is back in the fighting, though fighting might be too strong a word. Mostly he seems to be hanging about videotaping the chaos, trying to give the solemnity and dignity of a revolution to the seemingly trivial and slap-dash proceedings (which characterizes all warfare and likely all revolutions as well), as well as making heroic efforts to overcome his disgust at the lack of sanitation.

The documentary ends with him not only overcoming his dirty-hands phobia – at least overseas – but also debating whether to shoot, to take another man’s life. He misses but he wants to make clear that he meant to do it. He had the guts, the manliness, and the freedom to kill. No phobia there. Mission accomplished.

Yet for all the exciting adventures VanDyke experiences, it is impossible to get out of one’s head the idea of a reenactment, of middle-aged office workers walking through the woods in Civil War uniforms and young men playing paintball between mounds of dirt. It is all so clumsy, so sad and trivial. He travels to Afghanistan to place an American flag in Bin Laden’s house. He makes the first real friends of his life in combat. Van Dyke’s whole life, his whole idea of freedom, consists in this idea of acting, repeating typically dangerous situations under the gaze of the camera, and while the adventures he finds himself in are ostensibly new, they feel old and worn out. VanDyke very much wants to believe otherwise. He wants to believe his experiences are immediately made hallowed through the ever-present camera, which turns the ephemeral and pointless violence he witnesses, the aimless and meandering journey he travels, into something much more. But it doesn’t quite come off. The camera instead dictates his adventures, hollowing out his experiences, transforming a war and people’s lives into an unfunny Jackass skit.

Garibaldi had politics. Byron had poetry. VanDyke has a camera. Context, ultimately, comes to little compared to the camera angle, the breadth of the shot. Whose freedom VanDyke fights for and against whom is immaterial, for the names and lives of the saved are as interchangeable as those who need to be killed. The war’s entire meaning is bound up in the existence of a picture, a video or a Huffington Post article, artifacts that answer one question and one question alone: was the person there or not? Like much recent war literature and movie fare, the thereness trumps what the author or auteur have to say about having gone. Movies like Lone Survivor and American Sniper have been celebrated not so much for what they have to say about the war, but for what they show about it. Some veteran writers have gone so far as to argue that documentaries best represent these particular wars because we live with ubiquitous lenses. Yet it could also be argued – and Marshall’s documentary seems a good example of this – that war documentaries become ignoble through repetition and overcompensate for lack of imagination with documentation.

From this perspective, VanDyke’s movement from 27 year-old video-game freedom fighter in his mom’s basement to actual freedom fighter does not seem all that surprising. War is a process of self-creation, and for many lost and insecure boys, a process of self-actualization as well. It has been one for likely much of warfare’s history. Yet in the self-reported story of VanDyke one gets the impression that this process of self-creation is done firmly within the constraints of previous documentaries, movies and stories. With the exception of his time in prison – which Marshall is forced to represent through animation – there is absolutely no space for truly disturbing experiences (i.e., not already expected, not scripted, and not violent) to inform who VanDyke is, or for politics to be anything other than a flimsily applied construct, a set of words used when dialogue is expected.

Watching this young man’s self-portrait, one gets the sense that the war itself, the fight for freedom VanDyke supposedly assists, does exist somewhere. But the particulars of why they fight and what happens after the fight are unimportant. Marshall and VanDyke try to craft the narrative as a triumph over his Western squeamishness. But this is not what happens at all. It is almost as if instead of VanDyke conquering his OCD, his OCD conquers his mind entirely. His adventures give an excuse for the despotic compulsions of his imagination, and validate the incessant and never ending cavalcade of toppled dictators and heroic liberators. He no longer has to deal with the particular, with the complications of not knowing exactly what to do, with a life without routine, without a script. He only has to clean again and again a damned spot that he has made everyone else believe is there, to purify the perception of weakness and captivity that a lifetime of cameras has made a tyrannical obsession. For what better way to pretend at dignity for ourselves, to make music with our chains, then to perpetually reenact the violence that keeps us bound?

American Sniper’s Uniquely American Kitsch

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Since the release of American Sniper, people I haven’t heard from in years have taken the time to text me and tell me I really needed to see this movie. They said: “you owe it to yourself to see this movie.” “I don’t really want to,” I responded. “Why don’t you want to?” they asked me archly, as if my refusal to see the movie hinted at some deeply-seated and conveniently unexamined perversion. “Well,” I said, “I guess I didn’t much like Chris Kyle’s book and his general attitudes about the Iraqi people.” “Watch the movie,” they said with all wisdom that comes with seeing a movie that someone else hasn’t, especially one of political and patriotic import: “It really makes you think.”

Maybe I was being unfair, I thought. Maybe I did it owe to someone – whom, I’m still not quite sure – to pay ten dollars and watch this story that had roused a nation from its intellectual lethargy and inspired old friends to start thinking about my movie-going patterns.

To my surprise, I did not hate the movie. I nodded off two or three times, wondering how old Clint Eastwood was exactly and whether or not he and Scorsese had reached some kind of artistic dementia unique to directors, but I did not hate the film, or even actively dislike it. If I saw it on Lifetime one afternoon, I would change the channel, but not out of spite, simply because it does not seem different than any other Lifetime special. Far from being authentic and gritty, the sentimentality in the film is perhaps only exceeded by that of Linklater’s Boyhood, its competition at this year’s Academy Awards. Both are drearily episodic American bildungsromans that manipulate the idea of authenticity to play on the audience’s mawkish assumptions and aspirations about history and art. Further, and not coincidentally, both are predictable and safe, working hard to ask uninteresting questions about once interesting subjects.

This boredom genuinely surprised me. I read countless reviews of American Sniper before seeing the movie. Almost unanimously, they took time to point out its essential authenticity, its suspense, the immersive immediacy of the action and the audience’s consequent titillation. Even those who hated it passionately did so with a fervor that suggested the movie annoyed them due to its undeniable cinematic excellence, whatever its ideological failings. For this reason, I had ceded its basic entertainment value going in. But I shouldn’t have. Despite all the violence – or, rather, precisely because of all the formulaic and orchestrated violence – the movie is boring and the movie is boring because everything in it from the love story, to the jokes, to the war story is pure unadulterated kitsch.

How best to describe kitsch? Milan Kundera, a man who endured a regime that used this aesthetic to propagate its peculiar sentimental balderdash, puts it this way in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”

At its most fundamental level, kitsch is a poorly constructed or mass produced object or work of art that elicits a predictable and abstracted emotional response, something like a Pavlovian bell that releases saccharine into the viewer’s gut while shutting down the brain. Yet, contrary to popular belief, kitsch does not only apply to the warm and fuzzy feeling we get when children run in the grass and play with dogs; it also applies to the warm fuzzy feeling when we watch children being gunned down by morally conflicted patriots. The first tear says: how nice it is to see this perfectly decent man wrestle with what it takes to protect his friends and countrymen. The second tear says: how nice it is to be moved, together with all mankind, by watching a perfectly decent man do whatever it takes to protect his friends and countrymen.

Never one for subtlety, Eastwood wants tears, lots of them. I feel Eastwood took bits and pieces of every American war movie since Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back, chose the most hackneyed moments and then tried to make them even more generic, sappy and palatable. Starting with, of course, a lovable loser looking for purpose in life, the movie proceeds to a training scene where people of different race and class backgrounds come together in harmony, the courting of a supposedly cynical girl just out of a break up (which of course turns out to be a girl in need of a real man), the initial battle enthusiasm (Yay! War! We’re going to win!), an evil super-enemy to provide some complexity to the countless legions of brown bullet fodder and a triumph somewhat (but not truly) diminished because of dead friends (whose names we forgot the moment we heard them).

If American Sniper wasn’t based on real events, we would likely laugh it off as a poor man’s Full Metal Jacket. Yet our uniquely modern kitsch privileges authenticity to such a degree that it mistakes authenticity for art; worse, it excuses bad art through the lie of authenticity. Our superficially ironic modern audience knows to feel warm and fuzzy about a girl running through a field (or a heroic marine-saving SEAL) is a little old fashioned and silly. But if the event really happened, the audience can feel warm and fuzzy (or angry and titillated) without any guilt for the obviously contrived sappiness. This child really does run through the grass just like my child so my feelings of joy and warmth at watching this child run through the grass are real and true and profound. This man really did kill 160 people and save soldiers and help veterans so my complete emotional investment and sense of solidarity with my fellow movie watchers is not only justified but an act of political courage. Right?

Not quite. Eastwood’s Kyle is nothing like the Kyle of the memoir – a person of infinitely more interest, an American gem, a fantastic and fascinating mass of contradiction, absurdities, and hypocrisy, worthy of much more than this movie gives him. Instead, this movie manipulates substandard genre tropes to produce an innocuous and utterly uninteresting character study, turning a once breathing man into a figment, an avatar of our lazy imaginations. All the characters beside Kyle are interchangeable – hard bodies and strong chins, except for the broken and mutilated men, with soft bodies and soft chins – which is impressive considering Kyle himself is but a shadow. The sentimentality in the film’s opening and final moments reaches near criminal proportions. The shootouts are loud and repetitive, the enemies cowardly, sadistic or – hold it – cowardly and sadistic. They and everyone else in the film are no more true to life than the targets Kyle practices on. It’s as if the fact that they existed gives the director the excuse to make them as uninteresting and stereotypical (or unreal) as possible.

I should say here that the problem of kitsch is not unique to war films, or films beloved by Red America. Boyhood, the Academy’s likely Best Picture winner, is nothing if not an egregious attempt to confuse an audience into accepting bad fiction as profound art through the sophistry of authenticity. It suffers from the same sense of confused profundity, and critics have fallen all over themselves to celebrate a movie that amounts to little more than a glorified reality TV show, replete with incredibly banal dialogue and moralistic tripe. We are supposed to celebrate this and shed tears because we lived it, but I’ll save my tears for a movie that give me more than pop-cultural touchstones, a face aging in real time and platitudinous white angst.

This is not to say there are not inspired moments in both movies. In American Sniper, most occur on Kyle’s return home. When he yells at the nurse to stop his baby from crying, I paid attention. There are times when his very obliviousness makes Kyle into a heroic sad sack, just way in over his head in a world that does not allow for heroes (Cooper is a superb actor). But, still, these were flashes, a few well-timed complexities in a movie of explosive sappiness. By the tenth gunfight and the slow build to the inevitable confrontation between the evil brown sniper and good white sniper, I looked around to see if anyone else was as bored as me. I wanted to ask someone if they realized the way in which every character seemed to be playing a part in a movie, and how nearly every one of them played it badly. But there were no takers. They all wanted to see what happened next.

Of course, these failures in themselves point to a reason to celebrate the movie, and Boyhood as well. Their unique kitsch corresponds perfectly with recent American history, which is essentially a series of moments where we let sentimentality drive our actions, all the while unaware of (or maybe just unconcerned with) how those in power manipulate our intellectual indolence to their perpetual advantage. The Iraq War was an absurd proposition from the start, whose disastrous prosecution and consequences should have been obvious to any country not driven nearly insane by saccharine nonsense fed to them in movies that informed American Sniper (Rambo, Saving Private Ryan and An Officer and a Gentlemen for example).

So while most of us do not live violent lives like Kyle, we do, like Kyle, live lives of violent sentimentalism. We do live in fogs like the characters in these movies – irresponsible, lost, and drunkenly emotional. But just because we live such lives, lives of exceptionally cartoonish renderings of reality, replete with stereotypes, racism and an absurdly simplistic and insidious sense of history, does not make an accurate recording of our human failure art; these movies are, in truth, only glorified documentaries, which serve their purpose and have their uses, but cease to do so as soon as they are considered sublime and magical, exciting and profound. At this point, they then become in many ways a gesture of collective despair, an implicit admission that we can no longer achieve anything but a fickle emotional bond in dark theaters, eyes rolling, tears dripping down our cheeks like Dollar Tree communicants.

But when it comes down to it, no one escapes kitsch. It is part of us – this substitute spirituality, a farcical aesthetic we live and breathe as pre-capitalist societies used to live and breathe God. But we can, as Milan Kundera, the author of the earlier quote, once argued, be at least open to the fact that we are indulging our maudlin fantasies. At least a movie like Nightcrawler has the courage to point out the obvious – to make us aware of what it is we do when it comes to violence and cinema – and to do so in an entertaining way. As for those who argue American Sniper is the only movie out there really tackling trauma: watch Babadook and tell me which of the two has something to say and which one just repeats what we want to believe in predictable and cowardly monotony

Towards the beginning of American Sniper, Kyle’s father tells him that there are three types of people in this world: wolves, sheep and sheepdogs. The sheepdogs, his father says, protect the sheep from the wolves. Kyle is supposed to be a sheepdog, protecting us. Maybe he was. Neither a Navy SEAL nor a think-tank fellow, I can’t really speak to the success of his guardianship. But I can say with some authority that it is the kitsch in movies like American Sniper and Boyhood that turn us into sheep, and no one will be happier to see the bleating masses fattened by this sentimental drivel than the wolves.

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Michael Carson deployed to Iraq in 2006. He now writes criticism at the Wrath Bearing Tree. Follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

Nightcrawler: The Holiday Season’s Best Violent Movie

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Most people read or watch war stories not to peek into life but to get an intimate glimpse at death. The irony here is of course that the more anti-war a book or movie wants to be, the more likely it is that they it emphasize violence. It is almost as if a condition of a truly anti-war piece is that it provides voyeurs as much violence as they desire. So the honest war storywriter ends up creating excellent war porn for the would-be voyeur and directors as politically and aesthetically diverse as Stephen Spielberg, David Ayers and Clint Eastwood compete with each other to reveal war’s obscenity to an audience eager for the obscene.

Though not a war story, Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut, contemplates a problem central to war stories: namely, the cultural appeal of violence and the authorial exploitation of obscenity. And by subverting our expectations surrounding violence, art and success, Gilroy’s manages to successfully satirize both an audience that consumes violence and the people who orchestrate this consumption without – as is the case in some comparable projects – resorting to the same exploitation he decries. Would-be tellers of war stories could learn a lot from a movie like Nightcrawler.

The plot is simple enough: Louis Bloom – played by an emaciated and bug-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal – evolves from a Los Angeles bottom-feeder who steals copper to sell for a little money to a Los Angeles bottom-feeder who steals the last moments of people’s lives to sell for a little more money. It is a classic American success story, where a young man or woman harnesses a unique skill set to make friends and influence people. Except in this instance the hero succeeds by filming people in extremis, artfully recording hemorrhaging bodies and eventually arranging their deaths to keep up with the audience’s insatiable demand for such theater.

Many movies have explored the corrupting influence of money and violence and the way in which American culture uniquely intertwines the two (and not a few have used Los Angeles as their setting). The satire comes not in Bloom’s rise to prominence but in the very ridiculousness of his conquests. As opposed to movies like Wolf on Wall Street, where the rise and fall is dramatic enough to elicit envy in the audience, Gilroy scales Nightcrawler back to reflect the banality of Bloom’s efforts and achievements. Bloom counts himself a success because he owns a business with two trucks instead of one. He considers shaking hands with a third-rate newscaster tantamount to fame. He falls for a failed news producer twice as old as him who he has to blackmail into having sex with him. Bloom is a petite-bourgeois devil, one whose success is as pathetic as what he has to do to achieve it.

Neither does Bloom have any sense of having done wrong. Early on in the film Bloom sits alone in his empty yet tastefully furnished apartment and clicks through the morning TV news shows. He laughs at the newscaster’s corny jokes unaffectedly. In the film’s final moments, the detective investigating Bloom can’t get past the fact that Bloom filmed his friend dying. Bloom replies, “It’s my job. It’s what I do. I like to think if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life.” Bloom’s laughter remains the same – innocent as it is amoral. Here and elsewhere, the film lacks any dynamism, either into cynicism or away from it, and the static characterization, Bloom’s resolute innocence, survives his ethically questionable activities unscathed, even as the more and more people end up on the wrong side of his camera.

In the climax, we do learn something important about Bloom: it’s not that he doesn’t understand people, it’s that he understands them and discounts their reality. “Maybe I just don’t like people,” he tells his partner. Throughout the film he makes seemingly earnest attempts to mimic human emotion – patting his assistant’s shoulder after they see someone they know die, giving self-help talks to the people that he meets, “Who am I? I’m a hard worker…people say I am persistent” – and the sad fact of the movie, the central conceit, is not that Bloom is a joke but that everyone in the film ends up being like Bloom; ultimately, we must take him seriously, for this is what passes for seriousness in our society – his grotesque films and entrepreneurial optimism are the only art and hope in an artless (indeed kitsch and sentimental) world.

Gilroy seems to be saying that Bloom dislikes us, the people who watch his videos, who form the literal fodder for his ambitions, but we watch these videos because we dislike people as much as him. In this respect Nightcrawler is not quite like other satires of American masculinity, violence and terror (like say American Psycho or Fight Club). Nightcrawler satirizes these movies. It critiques our rabid consumption of violence in movies that seek to make an earnest commentary about violence in America. It mocks us for desiring this violence, for wanting to indulge in death while simultaneously acting sententious about those who indulge in death (tellingly, Gilroy gives us little actual obscenity in a movie about obscenity). At times the plot stumbles – Gilroy has too many targets for a single film – but the movie does better than most in capturing this curious tension between indulgence and opprobrium, between our own self-involved fears and nihilistic desires.

Now what does this have to do with war stories? Well, a lot actually. Most war stories over the last forty years have been obsessed with representing the true obscenity of war; they operate under the notion that realism – a faithfully rendered account of horror – somehow does justice to the conflict. Many of these stories try to abrogate politics through authenticity and eventually mistake obscenity for profundity.  Bloom and the people around Bloom rationalize his snuff films in much the same way. In a way, Bloom gives the dying people dignity, by acting as a sort of witness to their final moments. The audience participates willingly, possessed by fear and hatred, projecting themselves on to the dead, forgiving this invasion of privacy and sadomasochistic prurience under the auspices of aesthetics.

Fury has been in theaters for about a month now. American Sniper will soon follow (timed perfectly to capture the coveted January demographic). These Christmas films have gone through great lengths to be accurate, to replicate the obscene violence of 1944 Europe and 2006 Iraq. Many will argue that it is possible to watch them simply out of respect for authentic death, not to find a sense of authenticity through this death. Yet after a movie like Nightcrawler, it is increasingly difficult to make the claim that we can do the former without also indulging in the latter, and perhaps this all movie about American violence can do – open us up to the nightcrawler in each of us, the ones making these films and the ones who keep going to see them.
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Michael Carson has written non-fiction about war and violence at Salon, the Daily Beast, The Hooded Utilitarian and Splice Today. He also attempts to write fiction that neither indulges in obscenity nor sanitizes the obscene. So far he has been unsuccessful. Check out his blog, the Wrath Bearing Tree, or follow him @WrathBT on Twitter.

The Successful Fascism of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers

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Paul Verhoeven’s reputation as a visionary director took quite a hit after his 1995 Showgirls, and the release of Starship Troopers in 1997 only damaged it further. But twenty years have passed and the fickle tides of critical revilement have begun to turn. Adam Nayman’s new monograph on Showgirls, It Doesn’t Suck, argues, well, that Showgirls does not in fact suck. Meanwhile, at the Atlantic, Calum Marsh has been encouraging critics and fans to reexamine Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, pointing out that, contrary to what many critics previously thought, the movie “is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism.” I’m all for critical reassessments. I think they can add much to our understanding of a work of art. But these particular reassessments fail to account for what was actually wrong with Verhoeven’s later American filmography. They fail to see that just because a movie imitates a terrible movie perfectly doesn’t make it satire – it just makes it a self-aware terrible movie.

Calum Marsh is not the first person to argue that Starship Troopers is a great movie masquerading as a bad movie. I had a college roommate who thought much the same thing. It is so awful, it is good, he would say, quoting the final line of Sontag’s “Notes of Camp” out of context like a good college student. It is also clearly bad on purpose, my roommate would say, which makes it really ironic, and hilarious. Moreover, my roommate would contend, more quietly now, as the conversation in the space of two sentences had turned deadly serious, it has a message – it is making fun of people who champion war and the effects of fascism.

“Really?” I asked as another bomb blew orange bug blood over the lead space marine.

“Yeah,” he said, “fascism.”

And then one of the characters would say, “do you want to live forever?” and the space marines would charge the bugs with their guns and their bombs and my roommate would laugh and cheer at the irony and the “awesome” CG special effects.

I get what Marsh (and my old roommate) is saying. It’s satire. It’s making fun of people who act like this and the propaganda that creates these situations through hyperbole. In this interpretation, Verhoeven went about with the fastidiousness found in a Borgesian narrator to recreate and caricature the world of fascist propaganda. The clumsiness of the plot, the wooden acting and the facile characterization represent what happens in a fascist society. “War,” Verhoeven himself argued when asked about the movie, “makes fascists of us all.” Elsewhere, he claims he played “with fascism or fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American society.” By choosing the worst possible (but fantastic looking) actors and then making them naked and have sex and then die at the hands of giant bugs, Verhoeven, it seems to many, has made a teenage fantasy; but it’s okay, because it’s making fun of those teenagers (and their adolescent-minded parents) while it entertains and makes money off of them.

Having been swept into similarly disastrous martial project in real life, I am enormously sympathetic to Verhoeven’s critique of American society. What I find off-putting though is the way Verhoeven went about accomplishing this critique. I have no problem with irony if irony is understood to be – as Richard Rorty claimed – the constant search for more useful metaphors (rather than the search for things as they actually are). Likewise, I have no problem with using irony to effect satire. I do have a problem with people who fall back on irony in lieu of criticism and to escape criticism. Verhoeven and his fellow directors only play at the pretense of irony, an irony that wants to be ironic when it works in their favor to be ironic and obnoxiously moralistic – and decisively reductionist – when it wants to be so. The advantage of this peculiar variation is its utter abnegation of ownership and responsibility – one can enjoy (and market) horrible and exploitive experiences while simultaneously condemning them, a curious rhetorical trick that manages to be both sententious and prurient all at once.

If – in conversation with my roommate – I accused Starship Troopers of being almost nostalgic toward the idea of “a great war” and the propaganda surrounding fascism. He would say, no, the movie is a joke; it’s making fun of this propaganda. But if I accused him of treating it as a joke, he would say, no, it’s a serious commentary on fascism. This sounds a lot like camp, not satire, where the line between that being mocked and that doing the mocking is purposely blurred (check out Oscar Wilde for examples). But the problem with movies like Starship Troopers, which attempt to treat war and fascist ideologies similarly, is the fact that fascism is already a variety of camp. The fascist has, as Walter Benjamin famously pointed out, aestheticized politics. Fascist aesthetics are already achieved through ironic choice – in the idea you can create a new morality and new type of people through a carefully cultivated, exaggerated and self-aware aesthetic of violence and manhood. It is not simply reactionary, but reactionary modernism, part of the same aesthetic world of the surrealists and the “degenerates” they despised. Thus, when a director attempts to mock it through hyperbole, the director reproduces not only the image of fascism but its substance.

You could argue that this is Verhoeven’s point, I suppose, and this is why he did this, to teach us how fascism works by letting the audience stick their hand in the proverbial fire. Yet, I would argue, his source material, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, is already fascist (in so far as it celebrates a cult and art of virility and war as an answer to social degeneracy), as opposed to faux-fascist, or camp-fascist, and does not need to be imitated through camp. If this is the joke, and the lesson, the book itself is sufficient. He could have used the 100 million he spent on CG effects toward making a movie that really tried to grapple with the dizzying refractions of aestheticized violence rather than imitating it and calling this laziness satire. And this brings me to another problem with the film: if Verhoeven’s project was indeed a straightforward satire, it lacks one important precondition of satire – namely, it isn’t in fact funny. Swift’s “Modest Proposal” is morally horrible and hilarious. Starship Troopers is just horrible, filled with hackneyed pop-cultural references to Vietnam movies as if written by a bunch of teenagers quoting Full Metal Jacket in funny voices. This is not satire, or even amusing, just sophomoric and stupid. At least, more often than not, the pulp violence of Tarantino – which also touches on the intimate and problematic connection between violence and representation – redeems itself by being genuinely clever. I can see parts where Verhoeven (or the screenwriter, Edward Neumeier) tries to be clever, but trying and being clever are two very different things.

In an article on Adam Nayman’s Showgirl’s revisionism, Noah Berlatsky identifies a “long and hypocritical tradition” where “earnest commenters enjoy the degradation of sex workers, and enjoy decrying that degradation, and decry the enjoyment of that degradation—all at the same time.” He suggests Showgirls – if truly a statement about sex workers in America – falls firmly within this prurient, confused and highly sententious tradition. I see no reason why Starship Troopers cannot be considered similarly; it is as a movie like say, Stone’s Natural Born Killers, where earnest commenters enjoy the degradation of violence, and enjoy decrying that degradation, and decry the enjoyment of that degradation. This has the appeal of looking very sophisticated, of having two opposing thoughts in the mind at once, while being, in practice, not only sophomoric and pornographic, but a travesty of self-criticism that strategically insulates itself from criticism.

After nearly twenty years, Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers does not look so original, just one more in a long line of alien invasion movies. It even has sequels, TV shows and video games, all hyperbolic replications like the movie that inspired them. The art, the symbol of war and alien invasion and the purging vision of apocalyptic violence still very much define our politics and culture. This is not Verhoeven’s fault of course, but Starship Troopers in no way contributes to the conversation substantively. At the end of his Atlantic article, Marsh argues that if you get what “was really going on. If you’re open and attuned to it – if you’re prepared for the rigor and intensity of Verhoeven’s approach – you’ll get the joke Starship Troopers is telling. And you’ll laugh.” I can personally attest in the real wars fought since his movie, soldiers honored one of their favorite movies by asking each other, “you going to live forever?” as they charged down hillsides and took pictures of themselves in the streets of Baghdad, Mosul and Kabul. They were being ironic of course, and this made them laugh because it was “self-aware.” Too bad this brand of self-critique looked a lot like fascistic self-indulgence to those not in on the joke.

Read more by Michael Carson at http://wrathbearingtree.wordpress.com/
 

A True War Story Does Have a Moral

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“A true war story is never moral,” says Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried.  “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, “ he continues, “then you have been made a victim of a very old and terrible lie.” A nice idea. I thought of it after finishing Ben Fountain’s novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Certainly I did not feel uplifted in the sense that I wanted to go and fight a war. But the story quite clearly had a moral, even if I couldn’t quite put the moral into words. Would this book be proscribed according to O’Brien’s ideal? Would O’Brien’s own book?  Were they in fact true war stories or did fiction circumvent this requirement?  For some time now, Americans have been caught in a frustratingly circular conversation about war movies and war literature (see here and here for examples of those using O’Brien to break the impasse). The debate is not so much pro-war versus anti-war, but the authentic versus the non-authentic, with each side accusing each other of the same lack of authenticity. I blame Tim O’Brien. A true war story is always moral.  Encouraging young writers, young soldiers and young civilians to believe such amoral stories exist or might be someday written is a dangerous American tradition that we would be well advised to stop.

Though nominally a work of fiction, The Things They Carried obsesses over the idea of a true war story. One chapter – appropriately titled “How to Tell a True War Story” – goes so far as to layer successive, often contradictory, arguments as to what makes a war story true.  At one point, the reader is told that in a true war story “it is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” At another, the reader discovers a true war story is actually not even about war, but about “sunlight” and “the special way the dawn spreads out on a river.” During a particularly desperate moment, the narrator asserts with vague spirituality, “a true story makes the stomach believe.” Throughout the chapter, no definitive positive verdict is rendered. O’Brien instead turns to negative affirmations like an apophatic theologian defining God. Thus described, a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior.” In other words, “if a war story seems moral, do not believe it.” It is O’Brien’s contention that an author or director who chooses to focus on camaraderie among US troops or the enemy’s sadism actually idealizes war. A story’s moral uplift, however subtle, excuses mistakes made along the way and justifies the entire war effort. Hence O’Brien’s warning to would-be-war-story readers and watchers: be wary of making sense of war’s nonsense lest you end up “the victim of an old and terrible lie” (and in Vietnam or Iraq or where have you).

But there’s a problem. O’Brien’s own book has a moral. If considered as a whole, The Things They Carried must be read as a condemnation of the Vietnam War, himself for fighting in the war, and war in general. The book’s uplift is quite clear in this respect even through the fog of fractured narrative and unreliable narrators. This is why people are so drawn to the novel – it encourages readers into empathy and introspection; it makes them think about war and its consequences. Likewise, movies to emerge from O’Brien’s war, movies one suspects O’Brien would agree with (Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now) quite obviously have a moral as well– mainly, the Vietnam War was a stupid and horrible war and we should think long and hard about what war does to young men before starting another. I am not old enough to vouch for how they were received at the time of release, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that they were interpreted as movies with a message. Yet in the intervening years something has changed.  They have been turned into War Art, divorced from their original motivation, their original justification, and, unbelievably, have been used to justify exactly what they sought to condemn. This is possible, I believe, because Americans sincerely imagine true war stories to be without morals, an experience rather than a re-presentation, which can be enjoyed or appreciated rather than confronted.

 

Just because war is about as moral as two pit bulls tearing out each other’s throats, we should not assume stories written about war will lack morality as well. Unless the director/writer happens to be a computer or camera, the very act of re-presentation requires an argument on the part of the writer/director. Yet if one believes a true story is never moral – that it mirrors the violence it purports to represent – then one can conveniently ignore uncomfortable intellectual arguments made by the writer/director or any intellectual investment whatsoever. A liberal can enjoy Lone Survivor and a conservative can appreciate Platoon. This would be a fine moment of open dialogue if any attempt were made by either party to engage with the moral and intellectual arguments in these movies. Sadly, this is not the case. The viewers shut down that part of the brain and simply enjoy being party to pure violence for several hours. They use the fiction of the amoral war story to fantasize about what they would to in a world without morals. They pretend at broadmindedness while uncomprehendingly confirming their own desultory morality.

This disconnect extends to the soldiers as well as civilians.  Even before 9/11, the US military consisted (and still consists) of culturally conversant generation Xers and Yers. We are not talking about Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming here. There is no need to keep them down on the farm as the Internet and television already took them off the farm. They knew of Kubrick, Stone and Coppola before they even volunteered. Thus, the same soldiers can schizophrenically reference Full Metal Jacket and then cry like a baby at the end of the Notebook (which is the point of Kubrick’s “Mickey Mouse Club” ending I think). They can laugh hysterically at Team America and then order their soldiers to do exactly what the movie mocked without feeling the least sense of contradiction. Soldiers can do this because they truly believe a war story – like war itself – has no inherent moral so they can use these movies and literature as they see fit.  Soldiers can ignore the moral messages in these movies – indeed celebrate movies with what they might consider offensive moral values  – by telling themselves and being told by others the movies don’t really have a moral to relate.

Toward the end of In Pharaoh’s Army, Tobias Wolff, a Vietnam veteran like O’Brien, has a conversation extraordinarily similar to that of O’Brien’s in The Things They Carried. Wolff cannot quite pin down the best way to tell a story about the role he played in the destruction of a Vietnamese village. Wolff feels terribly sorry for what he did, but even as he tells the reader about his sorrow, he pauses to ask: “isn’t it just like an American boy, to want to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart?” Wolff is not talking about what he did anymore – if he ever was – but how he can relate to the reader what he did without being insufferably moralistic about it. The very act of apologizing becomes an act of conquest and, therefore, justification – look how deeply sorry the American soldier feels about what he did! How uniquely and inspirationally American this introspection is! Yet Wolff does not skirt this very real intellectual and moral dilemma – arguably the heart of the war-story genre – by an appeal to the idea of an “amoral” war story. To do so would divorce war and those who fought in it from any larger context of morality. War, in this reading, just happens, like a miracle or spontaneous combustion; it saves the soldiers and those who sent the soldiers to war – civilians, politicians and generals – from thinking about why they tell these stories and who can’t tell these stories, those benighted souls in Vietnam or Iraq who don’t have the capacity or genius to admire their own sorrow at being immoral. These stories allow us to learn much about ourselves all the while thinking not at all about changing who we are.

 

So the next time you go and see Lone Survivor or read Yellow Birds, don’t ask yourself if the movie or book has successfully captured war’s authenticity. Do not get hung up debating whether or not the movie’s or book’s moral overwhelms its accurate representation of war’s horrors. Do not ask if it does or does not have a moral. Don’t be stupid. Of course it does. Ask yourself instead what the moral is and if you agree with it.  Ask yourself in which way you have been uplifted and if you want to go in that direction and – if you don’t – why or why not? Otherwise, you will walk away believing war to be the one place where morality does not matter, when war – and questions of war’s justification, prosecution and remembrance – should be the one place where morality matters most.
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Michael Carson is an ex-soldier who studied history and now writes fiction on the Gulf Coast. He regularly contributes to and helps edit the Wrath Bearing Tree along with a philosopher and a journalist.