Watching the Dark: Zero Dark Thirty

Some notes for the above video essay:

1.
My viewing of Zero Dark Thirty and my ideas about it were and are influenced by ideas I first encountered in writings by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Glenn Kenny, Steven Shaviro, and Nicholas Rombes. Their interpretations are not mine, and they should not be blamed for my failures, but I certainly owe them gratitude for whatever insights I have benefited from.

2.
I worked on this video over a period of months, trying simply to gather a few of the motifs and visual patterns in the film (monitors, windows, surfaces, light/dark). It evolved to be something more impressionistic than that, but that was the initial concept.

"Hell Broke Luce"

Tom Waits has made a beautiful, surrealist video for the song "Hell Broke Luce" from his Bad as Me album. It's one of my favorite of his songs, a coruscating view of war and soldiering. Play it loud. (Note: Some strong language.)

Seeing War

I was futzing around trying to create a video essay showing links between Cornel Wilde's 1967 war movie Beach Red and Terrence Malick's Thin Red Line, not really getting anywhere, when I watched Kevin B. Lee's video essay "War Movies for People Who Don't Like War Movies". Most of the video offers his take on two films, Marwencol and La France (films well deserving more attention), but as someone who has seen a lot of war movies, and who would put a few on any list of top movies of all time, I struggled with the opening of his essay, even though he quotes my beloved Francois Truffaut:

There’s no such thing as a truly anti-war film, Francois Truffaut once said. By depicting the adventure and thrill of combat, war movies can’t help but glorify their subject, fueling fantasies of spectacular, heroic violence. It’s a case where the sensational beauty of cinema works against our humanist impulses rather than for them.

I'm not sure that categorizing war films into either a pro-war or anti-war box is the most helpful view of them, but the question of the spectacle of war in the spectacle of cinema is certainly worth thinking about. Lee says he's a "not a fan of war movies as a general matter of principle", but his set-up doesn't do anything to distinguish the violence of war movies from the violence of westerns or crime films or whatever — what makes the subject of war more likely to inescapably "glorify their subject, fueling fantasies of spectacular, heroic violence"? By that logic, Lee must not be a fan of any violent movies. That's a nice principle, and I might believe it from somebody who didn't much like movies in general, but Lee clearly likes movies. (Perhaps the problem is really the word "fan".)

It seems to me that while yes, we can point to specific techniques that glorify war and embody fantasies of glorious violence, we can't necessarily predict how those techniques will affect all audiences. For instance, I loathe Saving Private Ryan. Every frame of it. Yet I also realize my loathing is pretty personal, and that plenty of people have found that film, particularly its first 25 minutes, a deeply powerful conduit toward understanding some of the horrors of war. Alternately, being a Malickoholic, I love The Thin Red Line, but I'm not entirely unsympathetic to criticisms that it aestheticizes war in a way that is not so much glorifying as it is perhaps trivializing or fetishizing or something. (I don't agree, obviously, but I do think it's necessary to think through the beauty of the film's images.)

So anyway, with all that in mind, as well as a recent re-viewing of one of the most affecting and disturbing war movies I know, Come and See, I broadened the scope of my Beach Red / Thin Red Line essay and turned it into an essay on war movies and spectacle:

Theater of War

I began watching Theater of War with low expectations.  Documentaries about the making of plays usually disappoint me for a variety of reasons, not the least being that what works well on stage seldom works well on film -- in so many ways, the art forms are the opposite of each other.  The process of making plays is also not inherently dramatic -- it's generally slow and repetitive, often frustrating, and the best rehearsal processes, at least in my experience, are ones all about doing as much wrong as possible in order to find, through experiment and elimination, what's right.

I often found Theatre of War gripping, however.  Partly, this is because I'm interested in the people involved -- Tony Kushner, George C. Wolfe, Meryl Streep, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht.  The film uses the opportunity of chronicling the 2006 production of Mother Courage and Her Children put on by the Public Theater in Central Park to chronicle much more than that -- to explore Brecht's life and work, and to meditate on essential questions of art and politics.

The Public's production starred Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, was directed by George C. Wolfe, and the translation/adaptation was by Tony Kushner, with music by Jeanine Tesori.  Great actors, a tremendously creative director, and a script by one of the greatest playwrights of the last century translated/adapted by one of the greatest American playwrights of the last twenty-five years.  As ingredients for productions go, that's a pretty marvelous mix, and part of my interest in the film was in seeing how all of those people worked together.

I don't know if the production was artistically successful -- I am inclined to trust Michael Feingold's judgment on things when it comes to Brecht, and he had only the barest praise for it.  That doesn't really matter for the movie, though, because the film can sift and sort, showing us only the most interesting moments of the many hours filmed.  Mostly, director/editor John Walter decided to focus on Meryl Streep's performance, and the judgment seems to have been a good one, because it lets us glimpse some of the development of the role.

All of that is fine and good, especially for someone like me, who prefers rehearsals to performances.  But you don't have to be a theatre geek to get a lot from this film, because Walter opens things out effectively, bringing in discussions of Marxism, politics, culture, and history.  It's not obvious why the filmmakers settled on having Tufts University professor and writer Jay Cantor talk about Marxism and Brecht, but the choice turns out to have been inspired -- Cantor is both insightful and funny, with good screen presence, and I sometimes found myself thinking, "Forget Streep and Kline -- let's get back to Jay Cantor and the labor theory of value!"

For me, though, the most exciting material was about Brecht, Helene Weigel, and the Berliner Ensemble.  I could listen to Carl Weber reminisce about Brecht for hours, and Barbara Brecht-Schall's reminiscences of life with her parents were fascinating, though all too brief.  (If only they'd been able to add Eric Bentley!)  I doubt some of these sections would be as compelling to someone who was not particularly interested in Brecht.  I spent much time during my undergraduate years in a love-hate relationship with his work; have, over the last fifteen years, read the majority of his plays, poems, and essays; and have seen quite a few productions, especially of Mother Courage.  Brecht remains a writer I wrestle with more than embrace, but that in some ways makes him a writer of more interest to me than most others (indeed, among playwrights, I would rank him second only to Beckett in the 20th century).  John Walter skilfully weaves together ideas and information that would have proved daunting to many other filmmakers.

Ultimately, there is too much information and too many idea for the film to really cohere, but that didn't bother me too much  -- because I'd gone in with low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the movie was interesting, and then I was willing to follow wherever it wanted to go.  Any of its five sections could have been expanded into a film unto itself, but I was okay with that.  Theater of War got me thinking about Brecht again, about art and politics, about fame and history and humanity.  Most movies accomplish far less.

Double Feature: In the Loop & The Hurt Locker

Released on DVD the same day in the U.S., the British comedy In the Loop and the American war movie The Hurt Locker make a fine pairing.  The first is a political satire about the behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that feels rather like an extended episode of the original version of The Office, while the second is a tense and intensely immersive view of six weeks in the life of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Baghdad in 2004.

Or, to put it all another way, In the Loop is the story of a bunch of repressed homosexuals who start a war rather than deal with their feelings, while The Hurt Locker, as Glenn Kenny pointed out, is a study of addiction.

Murder Madness Mayhem

I'm teaching a section of a course next semester called "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem" at Plymouth State, and since a passionate minority of the readership here seems interested in my syllabi and the (so-called) thinking behind them, here are the texts I've settled on using:

• The Dark Descent edited by David G. Hartwell
  
• Blasted by Sarah Kane
  
• Dying City by Christopher Shinn
  
• Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
  
• S. by Slavenka Drakulic
  
• Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall
  
• Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery

I don't entirely know what I'm doing with all these texts yet (the order was due at the bookstore last week, but the class won't begin till the end of January), but I chose them because I think they will illuminate different things about each other.

The only text that I've been settled on using since the moment I learned I'd be teaching a section of the class is The Dark Descent, an anthology I admire enormously for its generous selection of stories from all sorts of different traditions (contents listed here), and getting to explore it with students will be great fun.

The other books I chose bit by bit as I developed some focus for the course -- the course description I was given is pretty general, and the course goals are mostly just that the students will learn to write and read better, will develop some critical thinking skills, and will have some sort of interdisciplinary experience (the class is, like my current Outsider course, mostly for first-year students).

As with any class, my first step was to decide what to give up. For a while, I was thinking of including both Titus Andronicus and King Lear, but then I realized that, much as I might find the comparison scintillating, it was likely to be quite difficult to drag the students through two Shakespeare plays in one term -- I taught Shakespeare every year for 10 years in high school, sometimes with success and sometimes not, but it seemed like too much of a risk for this particular class, partly because I just don't know how to teach Shakespeare when the class doesn't meet every day, and the time and effort it would eat up could be used more productively, I thought, with other texts.

Next, I gave up on trying to represent the world. For a while, I kept things like Bolaño's By Night in Chile, Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales, and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light on the possibles list, but they came off one by one for different reasons (Tanizaki because I wanted novels rather than more stories, Wicomb because I find the shifting viewpoints of the novel annoying and didn't really look forward to rereading it [and though I adore her You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, I once included it in a class and it was just too subtle for the students to appreciate], the Bolaño because it requires a certain kind of readerly sophistication that I just don't know how to teach to kids who've just come from high school and, more often than not, don't like reading). I also wanted to include some plays by Euripedes and maybe John Webster, but then had to remind myself that it's not a course in dramatic lit.

Finally, I decided to let the course be about the intersections of murder, madness, and mayhem, and to take a particularly socio-political approach, one that might make it a bit less of a struggle for students who aren't English majors (few, if any of them, will be). Thus, a certain focus on war -- all of the texts other than The Dark Descent explore some aspect of war or combat.

Sarah Kane's Blasted, which is currently playing in New York (I'll be seeing it with Rick Bowes in a couple days, in fact), presents a brutal and hallucinatory version of war and its effects on people, while Chris Shinn's play Dying City offers a rich and subtle exploration of the Iraq war and the homefront. I thought that Blasted would make a bit more sense to students if they read a realistic account of the Bosnian war, and I thought about including a book of nonfiction (even Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde or The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo), but settled on Drakulic's S. because though it has a certain documentary feel, it will still allow us to continue thinking and talking about how people respond to real horrors through fictional writing. Mother Night is a favorite of mine, a wonderful book to teach because its accessible surface lures students into thinking it is less complex than it is, and when they discover its complexities they tend to get excited by and passionate about the book. Daughters of the North and Liberation will be the final books, ones that get us talking about, I expect, how and why writers extrapolate from present trends, and if murder, madness, and mayhem must always be aligned during times of political crisis.

In amidst all this, I'll toss some essays and, I hope, a bunch of poems. We'll see. It's a tight schedule just with these books, and I could change my mind about a lot of things between now and the end of January...

The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck

The Farther Shore is the current LitBlog Co-op pick, and reading it caused me to think about a few different things, given that the novel portrays American soldiers in East Africa. It was, in fact, exactly a year ago that I was a tourist in Kenya, only a few hundred miles away from Somalia, where Matthew Eck had fought for the U.S. Army in the 1990s. A few hundred miles, a decade of years, entirely different worlds. (The U.S. has had a long history in Somalia, with U.S. military operations continuing, though this time as part of operations against al-Qaeda, while the situation remains complex and difficult.)

Before reading The Farther Shore, I wondered about why it needed to be a novel -- why, in these memoir-sodden days of ours, would a writer choose fiction when he could probably have gotten more money and notice by writing about his own experiences? I became a bit skeptical of the fiction, because there were many possible pits it could fall into: politics and polemics overcoming the alternate sort of experience fiction offers; a glorification of the battlefield; all sorts of sentimentality -- the men from various backgrounds who start out distrustful and end up bonded as brothers in blood, or, alternately, the sentimentalism of so much of Hemingway: the hyper-masculine matter-of-fact tone that can't hide the drip of how tough-and-yet-noble it is to be guys being guys. And then there was Africa, which causes even more of my hang-ups to rattle their hangers. It's an unfair prejudice, but I rarely read books about Americans going to Africa. That continent has for too long been used as a literary device for otherness, and I think it's time to read literature by Africans and let them tell their stories for a while. (If we need a place for exoticization, let's use Europe, instead, since European literature has a long and vivid history to counteract our fumbling representations, and there's less chance of doing damage, less chance of our inadvertent, best-intentioned stereotypes propping up a master narrative of dehumanization.)

All of which is just to say that I read and enjoyed The Farther Shore, and if I was able to do that through all the distorting lenses of my biases, then it's clearly got something going on.

A few different things saved The Farther Shore for me. First, the compression of its narrative. This is a very short novel: 173 pages of somewhat large type and pages with a comfortable amount of white space (it's a nicely designed book). It is full of events, but the writing is not that of a novel all about its plot. The plot happens to the characters, and that's part of what the whole book is about, the gravitational force of events. The narrator's life is one where again and again everything changes in less time than it takes for consciousness to catch up. The words don't try to explain it all for us, they don't slow down to let us have a more reflective experience than the characters get. And yet they are more reflective, the words on the page, because the narrator is looking back -- looking back and still wondering what happened.

This is not, then, a novel about Americans going to Africa and getting lots of difficult experience and hard-won knowledge, though their experiences of being separated from their unit and wandering through hostile and indifferent territories is certainly quite difficult. Nor is it the Heart of Darkness Africa where everything's a symbol of metaphysical blight. It's more like a Werner Herzog movie, where people from one world go to another world and moments of comprehension are few. In a sentimental story such moments would be precious and valued and trascendent, but in a more honest tale such as this one, they do nothing so much as highlight how much disconnection there is.

There is strangeness at the heart of the book, too, as the landscape gets sparer and the narrator and his fellow lost boys wander aimless and wounded through senseless ruins. People become little more than objects and stimuli, and I don't think I will soon forget a scene where the narrator is numbly cruel to a little girl. "You never know where to stand in a war," he says in one of the book's most quotable sentences -- and its own quotability, the fine bite of its sound, the pregnant possibilities of its implications, tells us much about where the narrator has gotten to at that point: it's no coincidence that that sentence comes only a few pages after this passage:

"I bet they'll make a movie about us," Zeller said. His face was thin and pale by now, and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, surrounded by dark shadows. He'd lost a lot of weight. We all had. I wondered what I looked like. Maybe like a hero.

"They'll make a movie about us," said Santiago, "made for TV."

We all laughed.

After a while Santiago said, "I wonder if they'll include the kids we killed?"

And so reality gets mediated, and men who have grown up on images of war get battered by war themselves, and in their struggle to enunciate all they have seen and done, they fall back on what they know, seeking a way to fit their lives into a comfortable three-act structure with rising actions and climaxes and good guys making it out okay after struggle and hardship, their actions paved over with swagger.

I wondered what I looked like. Maybe like a hero.

Or maybe not.

I wonder if they'll include the kids we killed.

The novel falters -- perhaps inevitably -- at the end, because once everything has been in extremis there's hardly anywhere else to go. I kept wishing there were a way it could end with the haunting scenes of an abandoned train, rotting on rails going nowhere, an image that becomes, for the characters, something more concrete: a place of rest. I started rewriting the novel in my mind after that point, which is utterly unfair to it, but I'm a playwright at heart and it was such a wonderful set that I wanted it to be the one we stayed with, a variation on Joanne Akalaitis's staging of Beckett's Endgame in a post-apocalypse subway car. Mostly, I just didn't like the last few sentences, which tinkled in my ears like lines from a country song.

It's the imagery that makes this book more than something predictable or familiar, because the ordinary and sometimes cliche-spattered sentences of the soldiers gain, every few pages, some twist or turn to move the language beyond the immediately familiar (though it never, for better or worse, becomes estranging. The imagery is sometimes that of dreams or nightmares, but dreams or nightmares based in a known world, comprehensible. Is this a strength or a flaw? More limitation, I think, or maybe, again, a bias of mine: I like to see the deformation of words alongside the deformation of consciousness.)

Ultimately, this is not a book about Africa at all, which is probably for the best -- it's a book about a person caught by chaos, and chaos knows no geography, but settles wherever it can find some ground. It's a cousin to the reveries of The Short-Timers and Apocalypse Now, but more staid and stoic, with a narrator who observes more than he participates in the whole dream -- even his actions seem separate from his observations, and the effect is the same as what (in completely different circumstances and a completely different work of art) Dr. Dorn in Chekhov's Seagull says is the effect of alcohol: "...your true 'self' fades away and you start seeing yourself in the third person."

The farther shore of the title has various implications, but perhaps in addition to the implications of that image as it is used in the novel there is another one -- an image of a man looking out across the ocean for a self he can no longer distinguish from the horizon and the waves.