The War in Hollywood

Welcome “Apocalypse Now;” the Apocalypse is beautiful. The movie that nobody saw but received the greatest honor a movie can receive is the end of an America that feels ashamed of its dirty wars. It’s something that only a female director, someone who’s never lived a war, could accomplish, because no man would have ever had the courage to admit the unpronounceable truth, the eternal, toxic seduction that war exerts over men, from Cain on.

In the face of this history, the cruel, violent, honest “Hurt Locker” is an almost clandestine movie with a low budget (barely $14 million, one twentieth of the cost of “Avatar”) that was ignored by both American and international audiences alike. This has been the trend when it comes to movies about the Iraq War. Even the cathedral of the politically correct, of the happy endings and good feelings, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood, surrendered to “Hurt Locker.”

It said that the America of “Apocalypse Now,” “The Deer Hunter,” “Platoon,” Altman’s “M.A.S.H.” (all awarded best picture), and of “Full Metal Jacket” or “Saving Private Ryan” (lavished as well with secondary awards and nominations), has changed. So has the America of “Catch-22” anti-militarism been forced to run backward to the past, to Normandy or Iwo Jima to recover the meaning of “fair wars” and of the “great generation.” It took 9/11, that watershed event that movies never mention, to change things. Now it hangs over every explosion, every show of courage and every slaughter.

Now the U.S. has to put up with what the invasion, liberation and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have made it become: a nation that is afraid of giving moral judgments about the wars it fights, that reduces everything to a soldier alone with the bomb. It has lost its moral compass and doesn’t fight because it was ordered to do so by the commander in chief – whether it is Bush or Obama – but rather, like the explosives expert sergeant who defuses improvised mines, because it can no longer do without.

War, the simple brutality of killing or getting killed, is the most intoxicating drug, an absurd and impossible to eradicate vice that a generation has injected itself with. So brutal and morally agnostic is the movie that Kathryn Bigelow (the ex-wife of high-tech guru James Cameron, writer and director of “Avatar”) created, that even veterans, survivors and disabled ex-servicemen from the Iraq war-front disowned and rejected it as “absurd,” “invented” and “unlikely,” as if they themselves, the prisoners of that locker, that “hurt locker,” were afraid to find what they had become and how war had upset them.

It was the critics, the intellectuals of every color, from the pages of the New Yorker or the Huffington Post’s web site, the audience of the 2008 Venice Festival with its long applause (ten official minutes) who recognized in “Hurt Locker” the depth of the individual abyss into which the “war on terror” pushes its volunteer soldiers. The bracket between the open self-criticism and self-ironic 70s and 80s films by Coppola, Kubrick, Stone, Cimino and Altman’s tragicomedy was closed Sunday night with Bigelow’s film, based on the report of a journalist “embedded” (in the jargon of the Pentagon) with a unit on the front.

There’s neither anti-militaristic rhetoric nor war rhetoric, nor are there sermons from arrogant neo-conservatives resolved to fight using someone else’s life while they’re safe in their air-conditioned “think tanks” in Washington, nor speeches by pacifist campus orators. The gratuitous stupidity of war, summed up in “Catch-22” or in the camp hospitals in “M.A.S.H.,” the sense of horror murmured by Colonel Kurtz locked in his apocalyptic “Heart of Darkness,” the useless slaughters to conquer the “Hamburg Hills” abandoned right away, disappear in the streets of Anbar, Fallujah and Baghdad covered by the explosives expert sergeant. He is fighting against rudimentary and deadly weapons, so different from those monstrous arsenals made up by Bush and Cheney’s propaganda in order to send him to war.

This film also doesn’t bring out that effect of repulsion, that antidote of the ridiculous mixed with tragedy that makes you do some thinking in front of Francis Coppola’s surfer soldiers, or when you hear the insolent “Mickey Mouse” chorus at the end of “Full Metal Jacket.” The explosives expert sergeant who moves with the same senselessness and lucid fury of a drug addict when dealing with bombs, getting high off the mines in the dust and explosive traps, who is dressed like an astronaut in his protective suit, doesn’t export democracy, doesn’t fight the crusades of Western values, doesn’t stake the stars and stripes on the mountain Suribachi in Iwo Jima. He doesn’t even dream of the far away girlfriend and the house in the prairie where Mrs. Ryan would suffer, waiting for the news of another one of her dead children. On the contrary, the sergeant in the dust cannot live anymore in his own house after tasting the flavor of hell, of that war that makes any other human activity insipid and pointlessly complex in comparison. He wants to go back to war.

More than the rows of white crosses in Arlington Cemetery near Washington, more than the metal coffins that keep being dumped from C130s and C5s into the military obituary of Dover, Delaware, he’s the true lost generation in the overall sixteen years of war between the nine in Afghanistan and the seven in Iraq, where people voted among the explosions on Sunday. On the day Hollywood awarded the first movie that is ruthlessly honest about the price paid to elect a Parliament in Baghdad — which doesn’t care about America at all — is when they could now really claim (unlike the boasts of some politicians) some form of “mission accomplished.” Bigelow has rightly remembered and thanked the men and women who have sacrificed themselves, and continue to do so, adding that she hopes that now her movie will find a distributor that will allow it to earn more than the poor $19 million it made in its first year, which amounts to one tenth of what the latest 3D movie, “Alice in Wonderland,” made in its first week.

We can seriously doubt that this is going to happen, because the America that exorcised the demon of Vietnam a decade after that war ended is more interested in seeing what it used to be like than what it has become. It doesn’t want to see how things are now or what it has done to its children, stowed away in the iron locker of war. This is an America that rewards itself, but doesn’t like itself.