Our War State

Kathryn Bigelow knows what works. Shoot the unknown soldier.

It has been seven years since the invasion of Iraq and the bombardment of Baghdad. The countries involved in this “freedom” are also involved with the market indexes, the dollar and oil prices, recessions and unemployment. Iraq is no longer a newsworthy story. The Iraq war commission forced a humbled Tony Blair to explain the weapons of mass destruction, the secret reports and the removal of Saddam in a war not sanctioned by the United Nations. The election of Obama is one of the few positive consequences of this lost war.

I should emphasize the word lost. As the manuals and masters of the art of war teach, wars are won and lost, and whoever wins gets the right to write the final version of history. Not in Hollywood, however, and certainly not with the war in Iraq, a lost cause with no winners. The daily life of war with its cortege of cruelty and violence, of sterilized hatred and chemically pure aggression, of silent victims, of collateral damages, of the crippled and refugees, mass graves and murdered, will ultimately be diluted in the final big picture, a movie of heroes and scenes of grandeur in which human life is a statistic and the results are the mark of reason. The passage of time absolves all crimes. Iraq had elections, but nobody is very interested in who won or lost or in how many bombs exploded in how many cars and markets. No one can predict if Iraq will be divided or not, if the Sunnis are in power or not, if the government rules, if Iraq will ever again be a country instead of a cluster of armed tribes and creeds.

The experts are concerned about Afghanistan. The failure of Vietnam has soured public opinion on the morality and necessity of “freedom” wars, and the right and left cling to a favorite argument: I am against it if you are in favor of it. Almost all people like causes and do not like wars. Iraq is the past. Iraq is dust and residue in the news, a flash of smoke and charred debris with the woman in black crying on the side. It is a hospital corridor full of men screaming and despairing. It’s a bloody stretcher, a dead child in his father’s lap, an open wound with dirty bandages. The advocates of the war stick their heads out of their posh offices to swear that everything runs well and promise that democracy and oil will begin to flow again. Portugal would also enrich the reconstruction of Iraq. Hence the Azores. Remember?

Some people don’t like causes and like wars. Some of these people make excellent soldiers and heroes. Others make excellent corpses. For these, war is a place of physical and ideological indifference; doesn’t matter whether it represents good versus evil, the classic American dichotomy, or if emotion must yield to reason. Some people need to live in a state of war. It’s an excuse to dilute the boredom that is life, to dilute the small picture in the big picture. The miserable everyday life with its procession of mistakes, the overbearing boss, a small salary, the messed up family, the mechanical employment and the imperatives of religious and patriotic dogma dissolve in the bigger picture where wishes are important and make difference. War provides a measure of control: the euphoric control of life and death.

When a country is not at war, some people live in natural belligerence and undertake warfare daily, yelling, whistling, cursing, invading others. When the great war recruits and trains, disciplines and educates, some of them embody courage and are the example of a good soldier: do not think, just obey. Some of these people, left on the loose, turn from heroes to cowboys and purposely sniff out danger. War is as ridiculous as life, but these people have never read about the “The Good Soldier Svejk” or met the “Catch-22.”

Kathryn Bigelow’s movie is about one of those people. Rarely are movies about these people, and it’s so close and paused, without ratings or overtones, gods or demons. I do not know if I care that it took a woman to do one of the best war movies or if this movie is about hormones and alpha males. It is a movie about fear, about the particles of sweat of fear, about the domain of fear and its exaltation. It is a movie about the invisible war of ordinary lives. It is a movie about the universal sound of silence before the explosion. Bigelow knows what works. Do not shoot John Wayne but John Doe. Shoot the unknown soldier.