"Warfare" and Warfare

Or, "Take your pithy quotes and shove them up your ass."

Whenever a war film is discussed online, two quotes show up, time and again, ad nauseam. You probably already know what those quotes are. One is from Francois Truffaut, an intellectual, and the other is from Frankie Boyle, an idiot who certain people have mistaken for an intellectual. Those certain people often deploy these quotes to curtail conversation, accepting without much critical thought that these two statements alone are the be-all-end-all of what can be written about war films. 

I am about to tell you why they are wrong.

Let’s start with Truffaut’s quote: “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Frankly, this one’s already on its way out, because people are beginning to realize that it’s a rule most often remembered after it’s been broken. Whenever a Thin Red Line is released, or a Come and See, someone posts the Truffaut quote, followed by something along the lines of, “This film is the exception.” At a certain point, we have to accept that Truffaut, for all his insightfulness, was wrong, and was speaking more to his own limitations as a filmmaker than any greater human truth.

The other quote I refer to, Frankie Boyle’s, reads as follows: “Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what’s worse, I think, is that they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.” I will return to this later so I can mount Boyle’s head on my literary pike.

I have been forced to read these quotes over and over and over again in recent weeks, leading up to and following the release of the film Warfare. Normally, I’d assume my reader has a passing familiarity with what I’m talking about and as such wouldn’t bother to provide a synopsis, but I’ve encountered multiple people who somehow haven’t heard of Warfare, their receivers presumably overwhelmed by the sheer amount of static crackling off A Minecraft Movie. For those unfamiliar, Warfare is co-directed by Alex Garland and ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. It’s essentially a high-quality recreation of a firefight Mendoza and his squadmates experienced in Ramadi, Iraq, assembled from their memories with painstaking accuracy.

Unlike other war films, it has not been gussied up with retroactively-added narrative or character. No one asks what they’re doing in Iraq in the first place, or kicks a soccer ball with a little Iraqi boy to highlight the humanity, oh the humanity, of the Iraqi people. It is simply an account of a firefight that didn’t even make the news, one of many such firefights that happened over the course of the war.

Let me get my thoughts on Warfare out of the way: it is an excellent film and I highly recommend seeing it in theaters, not only for its artistry, but also for the force it lends to its message. However, I want to write less about Warfare itself and more about war films – how we experience them, what they contribute to our political landscape, and what we can take away from them.

Warfare has found itself in a bit of a bind by virtue of simplicity. By showing a single firefight, stripped of obvious thematic signposting, it means to represent the whole of war – not only the Iraq War, but war itself – hence the title. However, it has also found itself squarely in the sights of discourse hounds, who have chosen to deride it as an example of what has been termed the “shoot and cry” genre, in which an aggressor nation makes war on another only for the aggressor nation's citizens to later create media lamenting said war. Mere depiction, these discourse hounds claim, is not enough, and if you must depict a crime, it should be from the perspective of the victim.

Warfare is unique in that it refuses to telegraph its meaning. However, the meaning is there. It’s in the terror on the SEALs’ faces, the complete breakdown of their professionalism in the face of actual violence. It’s in the Iraqi translators’ horrified acknowledgement that they’re being used as human shields. It’s in the Iraqi family, seldom-glimpsed, stumbling into their ruined home in the aftermath of the chaos. That we see the family so infrequently does not work against this film, but for it, because, as we know, this film is based on memory, and the SEALs simply did not think about them even as they detonated claymores on their roof. We’ll probably never know what the family remembers from that day, but we might come away from Warfare wondering about them, about what war demands of true innocents. Their humanity and plight are so obvious that the only moment that might be taken as thematic signposting – indeed, a single word, "Why?" – seems almost artificial. What the film refuses to say is its greatest strength.

It is worth remembering, always, that war may be waged by men, but it’s started by kings. And while that does not absolve men of whatever they may do in the course of waging war, they should not be conflated with the kings. That would be like conflating a coal mine’s owner, who has chosen to despoil the land for profit, with the men who go into the mines themselves. Those men may have other options, yes, but those options likely do not pay as well, are not as steady, and do not have the cultural backing of a community that honors and praises coal miners. Can we blame those men who go into the mines when we offer so few paths that provide decent benefits and upward social mobility? War is, if nothing else, a fantastic source of employment.

Let’s make this tangible. We all shop for groceries. When we discuss the evil inherent in consumerism, and therefore inherent in grocery shopping, there is a quote you’ll often hear: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” This is another easy out, one that safeguards us from having to think critically, as we reach for that avocado or that water bottle, about what breaking consumerism’s hold on us would mean. People gotta eat, after all. You have to eat, literally, and so does the kid picking your fruit for slave wages.

When it comes to the military, however, there is no easy out. Civilians don’t see any benefit from it, and as such are free to huck tomatoes at the nearest available target. While war is waged by men and started by kings, it’s also men who create films like Warfare and books like The Things They Carried and Matterhorn and Dirty Work. So men take the blame, because they are the ones we can harm in retribution, the ones who we can deride and disregard, while Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are insulated from so much as a finger-wagging.

Perhaps I am attributing undue importance and significance to art. (Never mind that we’re on a literary forum.) I’ll retreat to yet another quote, this one from Kurt Vonnegut: “During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

He’s right. A war film cannot stop a war. What, then, can it possibly do?

As promised, I now return to the Boyle quote. This is one of those sentiments that are nominally accurate, but which crumble under the weight of their own nihilism, too pithy and obvious to serve as anything more than fuel for People of Letterboxd who require pithy and obvious sentiments so they won’t have to weigh complexities. If you believe there is value in what Boyle said, I ask you the following questions:

What is the greater offense – the war, or the art? Would it be better to glibly pretend nothing happened? What use is past sin if not for present instruction?

America will never be occupied, and therefore any appeal on the part of the Iraqi people can only be experienced as theory, not as possibility. It may draw a tear from the eye and inspire some well-meaning glumness, but because it is so far removed from our reality, it will not inspire meaningful action. Perhaps, however, some younger Americans will take pause, seeing Joseph Quinn of Stranger Things and Fantastic Four fame roll around screaming for a solid hour, knowing that he is portraying a real person and that all of what we’re seeing is based on memory. Another photograph of dead children? Who gives a shit. I wouldn’t kill them, and I need a job. But wait — is getting paid really worth losing my legs?

“War is hell.” Another saying (this one attributed to William Tecumseh Sherman) robbed of meaning through repetition. In fact, I believe it’s one of those death-screen quotes you’ll occasionally see in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Yet we must remember the truth of that saying. We must remember what hell is.

I have seen many people arguing that Warfare contributes nothing to the pantheon of war films but a regurgitation of that theme, of war’s hellishness. It’s a bell that’s been rung practically since the dawn of time. Again and again, we hear that war is hell. What more can be said?

Nothing. That’s the point. As often as we acknowledge war’s horror, we find ourselves in another war. And we’ll hope that this one, finally, can be good and noble.

If nothing else, at least we’ll get some good films out of it.