As the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq approaches, many of my colleagues who write about policy have been looking back on their past prognostications to see who was right, who was wrong, and who believed what information on what basis. It’s an interesting exercise, considering how many reputations were made and broken on those assessments, but I’m interested in looking backwards for something different. During the decade of America’s involvement in Iraq, Hollywood’s responded with a huge array of movies, television shows, and miniseries that offer a fascinating, and in many ways disturbing window into our desire to support and honor the people who have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But despite the profusion of these movies, and of soldiers as heroes even in movies that aren’t specifically about these wars, pop culture tells us as much about our attitudes to Iraq in what movies and television largely leave out: the reasons we sent soldiers to Iraq in the first place and kept them there for so long; the rising number of female veterans who are homeless, even as the Obama administration welcomed servicewomen officially into combat; and what medical recovery from combat injury really looks like. Too often, Hollywood products reflect a public desire to support the troops without recognizing what kind of support would actually be useful. And too often, sympathy for veterans substitutes for grappling with the reasons that we asked them to do things that have left them physically or psychologically injured.

As was the case in the Vietnam War, something I’ve written about at some length before, many of the movies about our involvement in Iraq are set not there, but back in the United States after soldiers return home. It’s a setting that allows audiences to mediate their experiences with veterans, and to consider encountering them as people, rather than as symbolic and inert yellow ribbons. And telling coming-home stories allow movies to engage with small parts of the military support experience. Sometimes it’s the families who stay behind, and in some cases are left behind forever when a soldier dies, as is the case in the John Cusack-starring drama Grace Is Gone, or In The Valley Of Elah, which featured Tommy Lee Jones as a father searching for his veteran son, who is eventually found murdered. Other movies deal with at least some of the bureaucracy of the military and the toll of the war in Iraq, as is the case with The Messenger, which follows Casualty Notification Officers as they deliver the news that soldiers have been killed overseas to their families at home.

Not all movies focus on families: others move closer, foregrounding the experiences of soldiers themselves when they try to reckon with reintegration into civilian life, or the impossibility of doing so. Two of the best moves in this class, Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, intriguingly, are both made by women, who convincingly convey an alienation from mainstream American culture that’s very different from that experienced by Vietnam veterans a generation ago. Where Vietnam veterans had to deal with a certain amount of disdain for those who had served in the war, Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker confront different societal challenges: the former is about a soldier, played by Ryan Phillipe, who believes he’s home safe with the war only to find that his contract has been reupped without his consent under the military’s anti-attrition policies, and faces disbelief from his friends when he goes on the lam to attempt to have the decision appealed so he can stay home. Ultimately, he’s unwilling to flee to Canada and forfeit his life in America to avoid another term of duty. An anti-war movement that might have supported him is a long way away: the idea of honoring service is so deeply entrenched that the people around this young man can’t necessarily acknowledge that he might have given enough, that the best way to recognize his devotion to duty would be to let him return to civilian life. In The Hurt Locker, the main character, a bomb defuser, voluntarily decides to return to his dangerous work in Iraq after finding himself overwhelmed and disengaged by the prosperity he encounters on his return to the United States.

And soldiers have become stock figures in all sorts of genre movies, even those that don’t purport to deal directly with war or the soldiering experience as their primary subject—and soldiering roles have become a key way for actors to attempt to rebrand themselves as serious mainstream players. Zac Efron, as part of his attempts to present himself as something other than a teen idol, played a Marine who served three tours of duty in Iraq in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks weepie The Lucky One. Professional wrestler John Cena played a Marine who was discharged for overzealousness in the fight against terrorism in Iraq, and who has trouble adapting to civilian life until his skills become necessary in tracking down a violent band of criminals who have kidnapped his girlfriend in The Marine. The remake of The A-Team, which put a jokey spin on the Iraqi insurgency, was part of Bradley Cooper’s move up from goofy supporting player to star, and an attempt to make South African actor Sharlto Copley a mainstream American movie actor after the success of District 9. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was a silly stop for both Channing Tatum, who between this and Stop-Loss has benefitted perhaps more than any other single actor from the fad for soldier characters, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but it did demonstrate that they were both credible participants in action franchises.
Read more

I saw Zero Dark Thirty in Los Angeles, prior to its screening for critics in Washington, DC tonight, and consequently am reviewing it somewhat earlier than my colleagues in the DC critics’ corps. This post contains extensive discussion of plot details in the film, including the final scene, because it is impossible to discuss the most important issues in Zero Dark Thirty without doing so.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which was in production before bin Laden was killed by American soldiers on May 2, 2011, is one of the difficult movies I’ve ever had to write about. Long before most critics or policy analysts had seen the film, it became the subject of intense debate over whether it presented torture as an effective weapon in the war against terrorism. It’s true that Zero Dark Thirty will be politically unsatisfying to observers who would have liked to see it thoroughly rebuke the idea that any instance or threat of torture ever produces information that can become actionable under any circumstances. As a matter of politics and policy, that’s where my own preferences lie, and I’d like to see the more low-level but still repulsive use of this trope, the threat of torture in police interrogations, slink ignominiously away from popular culture, where it’s become entirely normalized.

But Zero Dark Thirty, quite rightly, makes the argument that whether or not torture is efficacious is not where our debate about its employment should be taking place. Instead, it has a much more radical project. Zero Dark Thirty a shattering, visually stunning argument that we’ve warped our own souls in pursuit of a goal, the killing of Osama bin Laden, that has left us fundamentally empty and dislocated.

The main character in Zero Dark Thirty is a young Central Intelligence Agency analyst named Maya (Jessica Chastain), who, as part of her brief to aid in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, arrives at a black site to witness the torture of a detainee named Ammar (Reda Kateb, in an extraordinary performance that should be one of several contenders for Best Supporting acting nominations) by an agent named Dan (Jason Clarke). When they first meet, Dan remarks on Maya’s lack of preparedness for the work they do at the black site, commenting on “You, rocking your best suit for your first interrogation.” But when Dan tells her “You know, there’s no shame if you want to watch from the monitor,” Maya refuses, insisting on being in the room with him, his team, and Ammar, and in the process provides the key to understanding Zero Dark Thirty: what Maya is willing and able to look at, and what she is capable—and not capable—of seeing.
Read more

As I was reading through the coverage of the announcement that Star Wars Episode VII will be arriving in movie theaters in 2015, I clicked on over to my friend Alex Knapp’s post on the subject on Forbes. And then I lowered my head slowly and repeatedly to my desk. It’s not that I think Alex’s ideas for storylines for a new trilogy are bad ones—they definitely aren’t. But it was that the post fell prey to a symptom I’m finding more and more deadly in criticism these days: the idea that we should just hand the keys to all pop culture over to Joss Whedon and sit back and enjoy the ride.

It’s not that I dislike Whedon, or many of the products he’s given us over the years. But I think there’s something disturbing about the idea that Joss Whedon is good at everything, or that the things that Joss Whedon is excellent at are necessarily the best things that our mass culture can do. It’s a homogenizing impulse—I shudder to think of a world with one dominant action movie sensibility, especially one that particular. And it ignores the fact that for all of Whedon’s strengths, he has weaknesses, a number of which would be particularly tricky for a revitalized Star Wars franchise.

It’s worth remembering, for example, that Whedon’s main accomplishment is revitalizing and critiquing the horror genre, and that he’s actually weak when it comes to one of the most important components of truly transcendent action filmmaking. He often seems relatively indifferent to actual action sequences. The fights in Buffy and Angel (which I’m working my way through now) are almost deliberately indifferent and schlocky in a way that robs tension from them. Matchups may be exciting because of their outcomes, like Buffy sending Angel to Hell, but not because of any clash of styles, or often, any real sense that the outcome itself is at stake. Dollhouse was more attuned to standard-issue training montages than any particular difference in style. Like Buffy, River Tam’s fight scenes in Firefly and Serenity are plausible because of things we’ve told that have been done to her, and she wins because that’s integral to the story’s needs. We don’t see the decisions or things other than the generic martial arts skills she has, that give her an advantage and let her think her way out of corners, because she’s never really in any. If anything, I’d say Whedon has an interest in the artificiality of action sequences, which lends itself to valid critiques of genre conventions, but not always to fight choreography that stands on its own.

The action sequences in The Avengers are somewhat more distinctive than his previous batting average, are mostly better because they involve the Hulk, a fighter who can be used with particular wit and violence, or amusing team-ups of fighters, rather than because Whedon got much better at choreographing actual duels. I shudder to think what Whedon would do with a lightsaber duel—why not at least call in a wuxia action choreographer, given the potential of the Force to shape duels, like Yuen Woo-ping, who did the amazing fights in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon?

Then, there’s Whedon’s witty banter addiction and his approach to sexuality, both of which I think are strengths for him almost all the time, in part because he has a smart sense of scenarios where they fit, among them group dynamics or emotional situations that need to be deescalated. Whedon’s characters often use references or wit to defuse situations or to distance themselves from difficult emotions. I love Buffy telling Angel “I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I’m ready. I’m cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.” But that’s not remotely the same thing as Han Solo leaning in to tell Princess Leia “I’m nice men.” The line is an abstraction, but to totally different effect. The menu of movies available to us needs both cuteness and sensuality, lines that deflect and others than pull characters closer to greater intimacy.
Read more

I’m unsure about the voiceover used to sell the movie, but I remain pretty excited for Zero Dark Thirty, in part because of its focus on the role of female intelligence operatives. I’d have a proclivity for these kinds of stories in the first place, and it doesn’t hurt that, as Eli Lake recently recounted in a great feature for Newsweek on women and espionage, is actually an accurate reflection of how the hunt for bin Laden went down:

The most human moment in the trailer may be Chris Pratt asking Joel Edgerton “What part convinced you?” and Edgerton’s deadpan response, “Her confidence.” It’s a relatively new thing, this idea that we could trust women to give orders to men in uniform, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a lot of fascinating female intelligence operatives playing with that tension and those questions about reliability. In the current iteration of the James Bond movies, M stands for mother, to a certain extent, with Bond breaking into her apartment and playing fast and loose with her orders in a classic display of rebellious boundary-testing. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison is meant to seem unreliable because of her mental illness and the way it interacts with her gender, influencing her affairs with both David Estes, her boss, and Nicholas Brody, her target. But the show doubles up the reasons she shouldn’t be trusted, and then proves her right anyway. Now, Jessica Chastain, who doesn’t actually speak a word in this trailer, presented in profile, eyes huge or utterly obscured, is being presented as the person on whose shoulders the mission to get Osama bin Laden rested. That cleaving of the requirement that expertise be validated by machoness if not explicitly by gender, even by emotional stoicism, is fascinating and important. These are big, tense, horrible things the intelligence community sets into motion. And women seem to be the ones expressing the weight of that knowledge, and those decisions.

James Woods’ review of Thomas Wolfe’s latest novel Back to Blood is a fairly comprehensive dismantling, taking on everything from the way Wolfe overcooks every sentiment until they blend together in a grey mush to some of the creepy racial attitudes in Wolfe’s depictions of the overmuscled physiques of his characters of color. But beyond the novel itself, Woods makes an argument about how research can serve fiction, or undermine it:

Over the years, Tom Wolfe has campaigned strenuously on behalf of the journalistic role in fiction. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” and elsewhere, he has argued that American fiction since the nineteen-sixties has fallen into sterility and irrelevance, because American novelists aren’t looking at the world. According to him, they’ve retreated from the traditional calling of writers like Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis, because they’ve exchanged the labor of reporting for easy fictional games (postmodern self-referentiality) or for a few dull inches of ivory (minimalism, dirty realism). The American novel will be reborn, Wolfe claims, when the novelist gets out onto the street and starts copying. Not only will such reporting produce the little details, “the petits faits vrais that create verisimilitude”; it is essential for literature’s greatest effects. American fiction, grounded in “a highly detailed realism,” will properly emulate the Zola who went down into the mines in Anzin, in 1884, to do research. While underground, Wolfe says, Zola discovered that the pit horses lived and died in situ; when he transfers this found detail to the pages of his novel “Germinal,” the reader is moved and aghast….

Very occasionally in this novel, Wolfe gives evidence that he knows the difference between those French prunes and “Hotchkiss, Yale . . . six-three.” At one point, Nestor, fleeing the opprobrium of his community, ends up at a favorite Cuban bakery, where he enjoys “a whiff of Ricky’s pastelitos, ‘little pies’ of filo dough wrapped around ground beef, spiced ham, guava, or you name it. . . . He had loved pastelitos since he was a little boy.” It’s a rare passage without exclamation marks, and superficially it resembles Ivan and the prunes. But the detail about the pastelitos has the whiff not of pastry but of research. Like everything else in this book, it is imparted information, and is thus the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt. Ivan’s French prunes come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus: Why prunes? Why French prunes?

This is something I consider a great deal, and I tend to think that research should serve three main purposes in fiction, whether it’s fiction that means to comment on the real world, or to dream beyond it, both equally valid aims:

1. It should identify conditions and conflicts that provide rich drama: So much of what’s important about research, whether it comes through formal reporting or new life experiences, is identifying new stories and conflicts in the first place. David Simon’s reporting is the reason he could identify bureaucratic tensions and criminal rivalries that would be the basis for The Wire. Thomas Mann might not have seized on sanatoriums as a subject, one of the examples Woods offers up, had his wife not ended up in one. Whether you think they should have happened at all, t’ll be interesting to see how Kathryn Bigelow’s conversations with the Obama administration end up affecting Zero Dark Thirty.

2. It can be a source of unexpected details that make characters more fully-rounded people: Woods’ complaint about Wolfe’s use of pastelitos is not that the description of them isn’t accurate, but that it’s unsurprising. Knowing that a Cuban character enjoys traditional Cuban food doesn’t necessarily add much to our sense of that character as a distinct person. But learning, as was the case with the opening of this season of Mad Men, that Madison Avenue advertising executives were stupid enough to throw water balloons at Civil Rights protestors, both creates a powerful little anecdote and exposes the gap between the sophisticated facade of self-appointed masters of the universe and the reality of their behavior.

3. It should avoid errors that take knowledgable viewers out of the story: It may be a little thing to complain about, but one of the most irritating things that television, in particular, does, is name a location where something is happening in the name of credibility, and then show a place that is patently not that location. Homeland committed a particularly egregious violation of this sort last season when it said an attack was going to take place in Farragut Square in Washington, DC, and then used a location that had precisely nothing in common with the block-sized park. Slips like that may not matter for the majority of viewers of any given cultural artifact. But it’s silly to gesture at realistic detail and immediately undermine the attempt. I’m not saying that everything in fiction has to function exactly the way it does in the real world—fact-checking is an awfully boring way to watch television. But if you’re commenting on the world as it is, or putting characters in a familiar world, considering whether the choices you’re making and the details you’re including pull consumers out of the universe you’ve created or create internal contradictions will serve you as well as them.

The first trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden was making even before President Obama ordered the operation that killed him, that’s stoked controversy about the briefings Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal received about the operation, tells us little but implies much:

There’s the implication of stressful interrogations in the repeated questioning of an unpictured detainee, but no word yet on where Zero Dark Thirty will come down on torture. There’s the sense of secret history being unredacted in the black lines fading away from the title text they’ve crossed out, but also of a new one being created as a black pen eats through other lettering, through the eyes of people in photographs who have been disappeared from the world, all on its relentless way to triangulating a target. It looks like Chris Pratt and Jennifer Ehle are in the field and Kyle Chandler and Jessica Chastain are in a command center. And beyond that, it’s going to be an even longer wait until November now that we’ve seen this.

Conservatives are apparently very upset that the Obama administration talked to Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal for their upcoming movie about the campaign to hunt down Osama bin Laden—despite the fact that Bigelow and Boal have been clear that the movie will cover the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations:

Complaining about the White House’s efforts to stall the organization’s requests for death photos of the Al-Qaeda leader, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “These documents, which took nine months and a federal lawsuit to disgorge from the Obama administration, show that politically-connected filmmakers were giving extraordinary and secret access to bin Laden raid information, including the identity of a Seal Team Six leader.

“It is both ironic and hypocritical that the Obama administration stonewalled Judicial Watch’s pursuit of the bin Laden death photos, citing national security concerns, yet seemed willing to share intimate details regarding the raid to help Hollywood filmmakers release a movie ‘perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost’ to the Obama campaign.”

This is a silly complaint. First, the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, is coming out more than a month after the election precisely to avoid any suggestion that it’s an attempt to influence the campaign. Second, collaborating with a fictional movie project is as much of a risk for the Obama administration as it is a guarantee of an election slam dunk. Kathryn Bigelow is the inverse of a director like Michael Bay who’s willing to rent his opinions to the government in exchange for lots and lots of military hardware. She’s got a very specific vision, one that isn’t particularly triumphalist and is based more on the front lines than in the halls of power.

And finally, what this kind of objection really reveals is an attempt by conservatives to preserve the idea that only they can authentically represent the troops. When Act of Valor casts real Marines for parts in a silly, overdramatized movie, that’s supposed to be a move so dedicated to honoring members of the military that there’s no valid way to critique it. But when Bigelow and Boal do research to try to give their movie verisimilitude, they’re dupes who couldn’t possibly care about the truth of the story they’re trying to tell.

The bridge is yours.

-Stock sitcom plots that no one makes anymore.

-Angela Bassett as Storm in an X-Men movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow would have been the greatest of all things.

-Is this the next huge dystopian YA series?

-Because Battleship didn’t make little enough sense already.

-Can we all agree the Emmys miniseries category has no plausible definition for what qualifies to compete in it?

-Morgan Spurlock goes to Comic Con: