I Watched 25 War on Terror Movies. Here's What I Learned.
I’m working on two scripts involving the Iraq War of the 2000s. As such, I watched twenty-five movies to gain a little perspective on the portrayal of the “global war on terror,” which I’ve since learned is commonly referred to as GWOT. The abbreviation has a bit of a right wing internet-y ring to it, but it’s convenient for writing purposes, so we’ll be using it occasionally from here on in.
To be clear, the goal wasn’t to learn the facts about the war itself. One shouldn’t turn to fiction for that, particularly this fiction, for reasons we’ll get into later. Rather, the goal was to learn about how the war has been depicted. What do these movies have to say? How do they say it? Do they do a good job?
I was in lower school on 9/11 and I was in middle school when we invaded Iraq, and as a result, I have a weird relationship with the whole era and these movies. I’ve never served, and I never would, (I doubt the military would want me regardless) yet I found myself frequently critical of the sense of authenticity in these movies. But that’s when the spiral starts because in order to feel authentically 2000s, you have to make your characters actively awful. I’m sure others remember the 2000s fondly, but the 2000s I remember were, culturally, a pit and to authentically feel like the 2000s would mean reflecting the era warts and all. However, I also understand that audiences generally want their protagonists to be likable, and you can’t be likable if you’re a typical 2000s homophobic dickhead. But then blah blah blah the corkscrew goes on forever.
On top of that, I write this during a period of soul crushing violence and genocide in Palestine. The presence of what’s happening in Palestine now looms over all these movies. However, despite the evocation of future horrors to be found in these movies, the Iraq War is a very different conflict from a different time and culture. As a result, for my comparatively irrelevant script work, it shocked me how much I could remove these movies from their contemporary context. The violence in the Middle East still churns, yet these movies feel like they were made centuries ago. I don’t know how that makes me feel.
So what can we learn?
(Also, for the record, there are other movies about this era that I didn’t watch, but I’m sticking to the ones on this list. No, I’m not watching the direct-to-DVD Jarhead sequels.)
The Movies
Jarhead
American Sniper
Zero Dark Thirty
Stop-Loss
Green Zone
The Wall
Sand Castle
Redacted
The Hurt Locker
Max
Lone Survivor
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
The Kingdom
12 Strong
The Yellow Birds
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
The Messenger
Megan Leavy
Home of the Brave
The Kill Team
Cherry
The Outpost
Act of Valor
Brothers
Generation Kill (Yes I know it’s a miniseries. Get off me.)
There Aren’t As Many GWOT Movies As There Should Be, and the Vast Majority of the Ones We Have are Terrible…
Generation Kill, Jarhead, Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker, and The Messenger. These are pretty much the only good movies about the War on Terror, and even then, some of those come with qualifiers. Some movies almost make the cut. Brothers and The Outpost are decent but weighed down by narrative clunk. Sand Castle and The Kill Team try their best but ultimately miss the mark. Everything else is varying degrees of bad, from the boring and plodding to the morally braindead and baffling.
(That list of good ones isn’t ordered, by the way. But if it were, let’s be clear up front that Generation Kill is the best media that’s been made about the War on Terror by a fairly wide margin.)
We’ll get into the specifics of why most of these movies don’t work in a second, but I want to start off by acknowledging that there aren’t many Iraq/Afghanistan movies, most of the ones we have fail, and both are a huge bummer.
Let’s be fair for a second. The War on Terror, be it Iraq or Afghanistan, is a tricky topic. Regardless of the intentions of these movies, there are obstacles naturally present in the subject matter that these movies have to contend with, and that’s even before you get into basic practicalties. How do you portray the local population with nuance, or at the very least, without being racist? (Most of these movies fail on both fronts. Even the good ones.) There’s also politics at play, a sense of due deference to the soldiers themselves, and somehow, you have to balance all these factors.
You could also argue that the time we’ve had to reflect on this era has been hard to pin down. We only recently left Afghanistan and Iraq was not only a prolonged engagement, but in internet years, we had more than enough time to stop paying attention long before it was over and a lot has happened since. It’s hard to say if we’ve processed it all, assuming we have, which is an open question.
On top of that, there’s production. Even if this weren’t an era defined by streaming and IP, war movies are expensive, and it’s hard to see where they fit other than awards season. Though I think there’s a hyper-cynical point to be made about how you can sell individual wars as their own IPs, it’s still hard to tell who’s buying.
Still, it bothers me that we don’t have a lot of War on Terror media, let alone worthy War on Terror media, because it suggests that we don’t have a lot to say about it. If you think about where we were when that happened versus where we are now, that really shouldn’t be the case. As I said, the GWOT era feels like a much different time. But how different can it really be?
Still, we have what we have, and most of it’s bad…
…For One of Two Reasons. Reason 1: They’re Propaganda
Shocking, I know.
You’d think that a large swath of these movies were made in the years after 9/11 and the George W. Bush administration. It was a time where, after all, in a way that I sincerely doubt we’re going to see again anytime soon, a lot of people were hyped up on America juice. A time when people who wanted to show off their vocabulary started throwing around the term “jingoism” more than they ever have. (That’s not a slight. For whatever reason, I’ve only heard that term thrown around in the context of GWOT.)
This is true to a certain extent. An example that comes to mind is 2007’s The Kingdom starring Jaime Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, and Chris Cooper as a team of FBI agents investigating the bombing of an American residential compound for oil company employees in Saudi Arabia. (A common trick in GWOT related media: Set your action/war movie in a Middle Eastern country that isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan. That way you semi-distance yourself from “politics,” even though it’s obvious what you’re doing.)
The Kingdom uses all the old tricks. The American team representing the intelligence community always acts ethically. All of them are relatable in one way or another. They have kids or they’re goofballs or they’re so gruff and American that they’re willing to literally roll around in mud when the Saudi police don’t want to get dirty. All they want to do is help out the investigation, but the pesky Saudi bureaucrats keep putting up arbitrary roadblocks. (Our team doesn’t get to do any real investigating until what feels like the back half of the movie.) However, the one Saudi State police officer who’s allowed to be likable and human, Officer Faris Al-Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom, who deserves a shoutout), only earns that privilege once he displays similar American qualities.
Americans good. Some Saudis good. Terrorists bad. Don’t think about it too hard.
However, a lot of the more propaganda-y movies came out after the formal end of the war in 2011 during the Obama administration.
In 2012, we got Act of Valor, a movie about a Navy SEAL unit who have to stop a group of Chechen Muslim terrorists from invading the US via a series of tunnels in Mexico and setting off a series of undetectable suicide bombs in crowded public spaces. (At one point, it’s literally said out loud that the goal is to outdue 9/11.) The project started as a recruitment ad, starred real life on-duty and retired SEALs, and practically drowns in the usual conservative signifiers in GWOT movies (despite not taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere in the Middle East). The dehumanization of Muslims and overly sentimental emphasis on the American soldiers. Put all that together and you got yourself a movie as close to actual propaganda as you can possibly get.
A year later, we got Peter Berg’s second appearance in this article, 2013’s Lone Survivor. A movie in which Mark Wahlberg leads a group of SEALs into Afghanistan to hunt a high ranking Taliban official. The mission goes south when they decide not to kill some civilian witnesses, and this leads to them being chased through the mountains. The titular lone survivor only makes it out thanks in large part to the efforts of a local village that hates the Taliban.
Basically, you can take everything I said about The Kingdom, swap out the nouns, and you can apply it here. Noble Americans and savage Taliban members. You could give it props if you want to for having a slightly more nuanced take on the local population’s relationship with the Taliban. But given the one-two punch of this and The Kingdom, I don’t feel the need to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
A year after that, we got the biggest and, from a box office perspective, loudest of the more conservative Iraq movies: 2014’s American Sniper. Statistically speaking, you probably saw it so I doubt I need to explain what’s conservative about this film. But in case I do, it’s an Iraq War movie directed by everyone’s favorite imaginary Obama whisperer Clint Eastwood. I realize that a lot of the more kino pilled among us probably read the hellishness of this movie as some sort of grand anti-war statement. It’s an argument I’d be willing to buy were it not for the fact that it cranks up everything I’ve said about the previous movies up to a billion. The American soldiers are extra heroic, the terrorists go beyond the pale in their barberousness, and the locals effectively don’t exist unless Bradley Cooper might have to shoot them. If there’s any anti-war sentiment to be found, I think it’s purely accidental.
There’s a couple of more we could talk about, some of which are fairly recent, be it Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, 12 Strong, The Wall, and more. But these mainly repeat the same tricks, despite all three of these movies’ varyingly effective attempts to seem more sympathetic to the local Afghani population and Islam in general. (The Wall is also a difficult one to pin down, politically speaking. But there’s a conservative reading of it.)
Why all the movies came out in the years after the war is a bit above my pay grade. My guess is that the killing of bin Laden not only inspired many more people to write about SEAL teams (the last three movies we’ve talked about are about them), but it wouldn’t be hard to believe a scenario where it incentivized the military to up its participation in Hollywood movies. On top of that, I imagine the conservative backlash to the Obama administration and the Benghazi attack probably played a role in it, as well as us just generally having more time to process.
That said, a majority of GWOT movies don’t fall under this category. Instead…
… Reason #2: They’re Well Meaning But Ineffective Anti-War Films
One of the two projects I’m working on came about because, while on a trip to the east coast, I got together with some old high school friends and we spent the night laughing at old anti-war media from the first half of the Bush administration. The American Idiot music videos and stuff like that. (Earlier in the year, we also watched a bootleg of the American Idiot musical. Yes, we’re as irony poisoned and obnoxious as that sounds.)
I’ll give American Idiot this: You can’t blame it for trying. In fact, you could say the same of a lot of anti-war GWOT movies, which far outnumber the conservative entries in terms of sheer volume. Of course, politically speaking, you’re on the filmmaker’s side. But these movies are so ineffective that you can’t help but be mad and want to make fun of them.
It’s not that they fail at what they set out to do. Plenty of anti-war movies do that. It’s how anti-war GWOT movies fail. Specifically, the main problem with these movies is that they use their characters and trauma not to explore the effects of war or dive into the heart of darkness, so to speak. Instead, they use them as a bludgeon to beat the audience into emotional submission.
Stop-Loss wants you to know that its lead character Brandon, who’s on the run from being forced to redeploy, is traumatized. One of the ways it tries to accomplish this is by having Brandon get mugged in one scene, and because his PTSD is so severe, he starts calling his would-be muggers “hadji” and forcing them to get on their knees and submit to a search as if they were insurgents. The whole scene comes off as forced and asinine, as does the fist fight he has with his pro-going-back-to-Iraq buddy Steve or the attitudes of everyone in their hometowns in Texas. (More on Texas in the next section.) It’s so sweaty that it makes the actual traumatizing parts of the movie, ones that could have realistically happened like Brandon accidentally killing a whole innocent family with a hand grenade, seem ridiculous.
Home of the Brave, a movie about a group of soldiers trying to figure out how to cope after they’ve come home from the war, runs through the gauntlet of clichés. Samuel L. Jackson plays a doctor who descends into alcoholism and abusive behavior toward his family because he can’t cope with what he’s experienced. Jessica Biel has to learn how to use a prosthetic hand, and the movie takes every opportunity it can to mine emotional gold from watching her drop any and every object she encounters. 50 Cent can’t get help from the VA, and after being rejected by his ex-girlfriend, he ends up being killed by the police after he takes her hostage. Brian Presley just wants to live a normal life, but the real world gives so little of a shit about vets that he winds up signing up for another tour.
The storytelling may seem rough at face value, but the sanded-down treacly tonality in which these stories are presented makes it infinitely worse. It feels like it not only doesn’t trust you to feel your own feelings, but it also doesn’t trust its own characters to be human beings. They aren’t people. They’re points to be made and to be shot down.
In The Yellow Birds, Tye Sheridan’s character Daniel is a mere shy boy until the nurse he has a crush on gets blown up during a shelling of the base where they’re stationed. Then he’s dissociated and functionally not present until he wanders off and gets brutally murdered by the Taliban. Daniel, however, is not the protagonist. His whole story exists to facilitate the arc for the actual lead character John, all leading up to a moment when he tells Daniel’s mother that the reason he never told anyone what happened to her son is because his body was so brutalized that he didn’t think anyone should see him that way, and that he was honoring his wish to simply “disappear.” The jaw-dropping stupidity of that justification aside, Daniel exists so that John can learn a lesson. And because John can learn how traumatized he is by the war, so can you, dear audience member.
Going back to the GWOT media that actually works, all of those movies and shows are vehemently anti-war. But they’re graceful in their approach. (Or at least most of them are.) They take the time to explore every character’s humanity and make sure you understand the nuance of how they’re affected by the war. How it brings out both self-destruction and reliability, but occasionally monstrousness and death. These movies aren’t interested in reveling in their own self-seriousness or perceived profundity. Rather, they let their characters and their actions speak for them. They allow them to simply be. Like people.
Our GWOT Protagonist: The Poor White Guy from Texas
WWII movies, or at least modern ones, have the Saving Private Ryan formula for character development. A naïve farm boy from the south who speaks in an exaggerated accent, a Jewish guy who’s the vessel for the audience’s desire for vengeance and to tie character stakes with the enemy he’s fighting (this guy is the one who gets omitted for media set in the Pacific), a working class guy from New York, more often than not Brooklyn, who’s handsome but has a bit of violence to him. There are a few other guys and you can mix and match their traits, but that’s generally it.
Vietnam also has its guys. The pot smoking semi-hippie who wears a peace sign on his uniform and the college educated grunt who knows what’s really going down and the inhuman psycho who loves killing.
Every era of war movie has its own kind of protagonist, and those protagonists usually reflect some aspect of the war they’re portraying. WWII movies show men from all cities and society, all gung-ho on shooting nazis, whereas Vietnam soldiers are still from all over the country, but most are more anti-war because they were drafted into being there in the first place.
For movies about Iraq and Afghanistan, we didn’t have a draft. On top of that, similar to Vietnam, the Iraq war was contentious in popularity at best and outright despised at worst. So who are our GWOT protagonists?
For starters, he’s white. Granted, most movie protagonists are white, but this protagonist is Southern white. If the movie’s aggressively unsubtle about wanting to tie the inhumanity of the war to the man who spearheaded its existence, George W. Bush, then he’s typically from Texas. If he’s not from Texas, he’s from somewhere Texas adjacent, and in the few cases where he’s not from the South, he’s from somewhere in the Rust Belt or a rural area in an otherwise blue state. Maybe the suburbs outside a major city. Never downtown.
Generally, he’s from a poor or lower middle-class background. They’re rarely from anything above that, and they’re never from wealth. In fact, if there are any rich people in the movie at all, they’re either somehow antagonistic to our poor southern protagonist or they work for a government agency. And even then, we’re talking suburbs at most. The 1% never appear.
Physically, it depends on which era of the war we’re talking about. If the movie’s from early on in the war, they’re clean-shaven. After that era, when all the movies start centering on SEAL teams, they have rugged beards. Regardless of the era, they’re typically built like brick shithouses. Or at least they are compared to war movie protagonists of the past. There’s only so much bulk you can reasonably get an actor to put on, but even then, our ability to put on pounds and pounds of muscles relatively quickly has clearly been fine-tuned over the years, and that’s reflected in both the soldiers and the actors portraying them. (Generation Kill features a few soldiers who were actually in the platoon the show portrays, and they’re mountains, even when they’re not being compared to their actor co-stars.)
Fashion and flare wise, there’s not much to discuss because our characters are soldiers who wear regulation uniforms. But there are a lot more tattoos and a lot more Oakleys.
Essentially, as far as their physicality goes, a lot of them look like white baseball players from high school and college. If you know, you know.
Personality wise, they’re Tony Soprano’s men. Gary Coopers. The strong silent types. Or at least that’s how they are when they’re home from the war. When they’re together you can’t shut them the fuck up (more on that later.) But even then, there’s an emotional remove, be it from trying to detach themselves from the horrors or their need to perform masculinity. A performance that led many of them to sign up in the first place.
In short, he’s poor and barely educated, and thus depending on the political leanings of the movie you’re watching, he’s either easily manipulated into fighting for an unrighteous cause or he’s the salt of the earth standing up for what’s right. Fox News thinks the former category of movie looks down on him when in reality, the liberal anti-war films find his earthliness “authentic” and they try very hard to capture it. Most of the time, they fail because, as much as I’m loathe to admit that Fox may have a point, they do look down on him. Or at the very least, they look down on the southern culture he was raised in. (Not that they’re necessarily wrong to do so, but that’s for another article.)
Regardless of the ideology, both approaches point to a bigger problem most of these movies have in common. One we’ve already touched on and one we’ll be come back to again: Rarely is our GWOT protagonist allowed to be a human, no matter what the movie tries to say. He can be a bludgeon and he can be a martyr. But he can’t be anything else in between.
In Hindsight, the Zero Dark Thirty Discourse is Hilarious
Zero Dark Thirty is far from a perfect movie.
The protagonist, Maya, is one-dimensional (and that’s when she’s allowed to be a character at all), despite some heavy exposition it can be hard to follow the chain of events that lead Maya to make one decision after another, a Pakistani acquaintance of mine pointed out that they frequently speak Arabic in the Pakistan scenes, a curious decision given that they don’t speak Arabic in Pakistan, and so on and so on. (There’s also some debate about whether or not Pakistan counts as “the Middle East” as there have been efforts to evolve what that term means. But generally speaking, it’s not, despite what most Americans clearly think.)
That being said, many accused this movie of encouraging or justifying torture, and the idea that anyone could walk away from Zero Dark Thirty thinking that it was in any way pro-war or pro the use of torture is, at least to me, funny as shit.
It’s an example of one of my favorite and most frustrating forms of media illiteracy. The idea that “movie shows X BAD THING, therefore, it must support and endorse X BAD THING.” Setting aside that the movie makes it clear that the torture didn’t produce any useful information, Zero Dark Thirty is specifically addressing the ugliness of the kind of nationalistic revenge its detractors accuse it of reveling in. As Angelo Muredda put it in his review at Film Freak Central:
“By that token, Zero Dark Thirty is no more a glorification of torture than Melville's Moby-Dick is a defense of the brutality of whaling or Atwood's Alias Grace is a pamphlet for nineteenth-century pseudo-science. Whether it produces valuable information in Maya's eventual discovery of bin Laden's courier or not (and for the record, it doesn't), torture's presence in the film is a token of an overwhelming lack: the absence of an intelligible and efficacious way of putting the lid on the ghosts of 9/11, which licenses the most humiliating corporeal punishments. What's most troubling about the picture, then, isn't its triumphal progression towards bin Laden, but the eerie hint that the "advanced interrogation techniques" (so the euphemism goes), obsessive data collection, and night raids that comprised that narrative were all inevitable–a powerful military nation's inexact translation of trauma into process, or one system's retaliation against another through paperwork that begins and ends with maimed bodies.”
I don’t have a point to belabor here. I just wanted to say how funny I think it is that this movie flew over so many people’s heads, and how a lot of people can’t read subtlety. At all. Even in movies like Zero Dark Thirty that don’t have much subtlety to begin with.
The War on Terror, For Whatever Reason, Brought Out the Worst in Many Great Filmmakers.
Except for Kathryn Bigelow, of course.
Let’s cut these filmmakers a little bit of slack first. GWOT didn’t just bring out the worst in artists, but just about everyone walking the planet. Everything about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, from the build-up to the war itself to our eventual exits, was so stupid and rage inducing that it’s a small wonder the totality of it didn’t shatter all of our minds. Or maybe I’m being naïve and it actually did, as two of the three movies I’m going to talk about in this section were made many years after the war broke out.
That being said, there’s a point to be made that when the shit goes down, you need people at their best. Rarely do you get it, but it’s what you hope for, particularly when it’s your “job” to help process emotional baggage through art. In this regard, a lot of normally trustworthy filmmakers failed spectacularly.
The most prominent example that comes to mind is Redacted, a 2007 film written and directed by Brian De Palma, which is a genuine contender for the worst GWOT movie I watched.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, Brian De Palma has been on a slump that began at some point after Mission: Impossible. That being said, if you made Carrie and Blow Out, you get to call yourself a master filmmaker regardless of what you did before or after. On top of that, there’s a lot of negativity you could throw at Redacted, but making a movie this vehemently anti-war was an objectively incredible thing to do in 2007. You could also give it some bonus points for being ahead of the curb on the use of home-shot footage on (legally distinct) Youtube.
That being said, it’s hard to know where to begin with this one.
In its zeal to condemn the war, it depicts the American soldiers as either bloodthirsty maniacs or powerless moralizers. Neither come off as human beings, though the former is attempting to capture the barbarousness of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq to ineffective results. On top of that, I think certain subject matter is handled with no grace (particularly the gang rape of a local Iraqi woman committed by two American soldiers), its visual choices are frequently confusing and aesthetically displeasing in a way that distinguishes itself from seeming like it’s trying to look bad on purpose, and it makes the bizarre choice of being a movie consisting of two or more fake documentaries at once. Specifically, a documentary made by one of the soldiers and a French documentary that offers an outsider’s perspective when narratively necessary.
It is, all things considered, a mess. And not an engaging or interesting mess either. It’s the kind of mess that someone will try to convince you is secretly genius because it was made by a master filmmaker. That it’s a mess on purpose to evoke the giant mess that was the war. To me, however, if there is a mess it brings to mind, it’s auteur theory, and the miles of goodwill we’re willing to extend to directors who turn around and do shit like this.
Another film that comes to mind is Cherry, made by the Russo Brothers and released in 2021.
Some may scoff at the idea of labeling the Russo Brothers as great filmmakers. Indeed, they’ve gone out of their way to alienate any and all movie and TV fans over the years, be it with their opinions on AI or just generally what they make these days. However, though I have not had the pleasure of seeing The Grey Man yet, I would argue that they have a base competency many directors don’t. Even if the narrative quality of what they’re making isn’t up to snuff, everything I’ve seen that they’ve made is very watchable. They’re visually kinetic and, at the very least, they know how to keep a scene moving and keep your attention while doing it. Also, as someone who’s watched the Community DVDs with the commentary, they sure seem to be responsible for why season two looked as good as it did, so maybe I just have a soft spot for them. (And again, I haven’t seen The Grey Man. I could be talking out of my ass.)
Still, Cherry is a special kind of mess. Unlike Redcated, it’s an interesting kind of mess, but a mess nonetheless. Specifically, it distinguishes itself in that the titular Cherry actually manages to fall somewhere between the emotionally stoic soldier and a human-shaped ruler to beat the audience, and by comparison with other GWOT movies, he seems nuanced. (You form weird opinions when you watch 25 GWOT movies in a row!) His life devolves into petty crime and addiction, and he does a lot of truly reprehensible shit. But we understand how we got there.
However, this effort also gives the movie a strange quality of opposing the war while also treating it more like a bizarre pitstop during a drug movie. The movie’s more concerned with the trauma he endures after the war, and as a result, the invasion feels like a dream our hero eventually snaps out of as opposed to a real traumatizing event for both him and the audience.
It’s a movie that gestures in the direction of substance without actually having any. Its stylistic choices are style for style’s sake, and all in all, it’s a big loud ill-advised nothing that feels like the kind of thing you want to make when you’re no longer viewed as “serious.” It’s a more noble failure than I think people give it credit for. But it’s still a failure.
A third example is Ang Lee’s 2016 film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. (We’ll refer to it as Billy Lynn from here on in.)
Ang Lee is a fascinating case for me. When he lands, he lands hard, and the same can be said of his failures. He’s made movies I love dearly and hate deeply, and he’s made movies I’ve found both over and underrated. This makes him someone I respect because, unlike a lot of filmmakers, you can’t accuse him of not trying or experimenting. That being said, Billy Lynn is a special case because it makes a truly baffling decision every ten to fifteen minutes.
This is a movie that features particularly brutal combat scenes. It also features a fake Destiny’s Child whose faces we never see. Moments of intense PTSD are juxtaposed with bizarre humor and ridiculous plot lines such as a mini brawl that happens between Billy Lynn’s platoon and the security guards at the football game they’re attending and the battle over payment for the movie rights to tell the story of the squad at the center of the movie with the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.
It’s rife with bizarre casting choices, there’s the clunky handling of war themes, and there’s the frame rate and 3D of it all, both of which I didn’t get to fully experience with my home viewing. Billy Lynn wasn’t the worst movie I watched. But it might’ve been the most confusing. What are we supposed to feel?
I don’t know what any of this means. I don’t know why anything related to Iraq brings forth the impulse to try weird shit that ultimately doesn’t work. But they do, and for the life of me, I don’t know why.
GWOT Movies Emphasize Camaraderie as Detachment More Than Any War Movies to Come Before Them
Again, World War II was a relatively popular war in support of a righteous cause. Or at least murdering Hitler is as righteous a cause as I can think of. (As for the Pacific front, a more qualified person than me will have to discuss that.)
The Vietnam war, however, was massively unpopular, as was, eventually, the War in Iraq. (My understanding is that Afghanistan was more of a moving target. It was popular in the beginning but much less so after we killed bin Laden and even then there were dips and valleys in public support and so on and so forth.) So you’re making GWOT media and you want to demonstrate the traumatizing effects of the war in order to take an anti-war stance, or if you’re making a movie more to the right, to demonstrate the brotherhood of the soldiers. How do you do it? Detachment through camaraderie, of course!
All war movies have this to a certain degree. WWII movies use it primarily as a bonding tool to solidify what one might call a band of brothers. (See what I did there?) Vietnam movies use it not only to demonstrate trauma, but to add a little bit of historical context. The pot smoking soldiers the movie inserts to show the creeping counterculture amongst the ranks of the soldiers, for example. In GWOT media, however, it feels different. Of course, there’s the bonding and the demonstration of connection the soldiers have to one another. But more than any war movie, it’s used as a form of ironic detachment and an avenue the soldiers use to deflect the horrors happening around them.
This kind of camaraderie is a large part of what makes Generation Kill so special. On the surface, it’s a show that follows the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion and the reporter who gets entrenched with them as they make their way from a tent base in the desert to Baghdad. But more so, it’s a show about the Marines dealing with the breathtaking incompetency of its leaders and the vast landslide of shit that gets hurled in their direction from higher rungs up the ladder. A captain wants to impress the battalion leader, so he sends some soldiers on a night mission to find landmines, which is how several soldiers get severely injured. Some soldiers mistake some lights from a small town in the distance for an invading force, so they call in an airstrike which only blows up a small patch of desert and now they have to manufacture some proof to justify the bombing in the first place. It goes on and on.
So to deal with it all, the soldiers sing songs in the humvees, take their wins when they can, and spew a near constant stream of bullshit at one another.
It’s glorious. Moreover, the incompetency on display in Generation Kill from 1st Battalion’s leaders is hilarious until you remember that it all really happened. Then you realize why everyone had to joke around so much.
Another shade of this kind of deflection can be found in Jarhead. Only in this movie, it’s less about coping with trauma and incompetency and more about fighting boredom. A very qualified kind of boredom, but boredom nonetheless.
If Jarhead is “about” one thing, it’s what it means to have your identity completely rewritten by the military. You were whoever you were before you joined up. Then you have to become someone capable of killing another human being. This, one way or another, means leaving some of yourself behind or outright killing it, particularly if you’re in a specialized unit like the snipers we follow in Jarhead. But what happens when you change so much, then you’re sent off to war and you spend a ton of time in the desert doing absolutely nothing at all? What if in all that time doing nothing, you drive yourself slowly insane thinking about what your loved ones might be doing and contemplating the pointlessness of putting yourself through all this in the first place? If all this was for a righteous cause, maybe you could justify it to yourself. But in this case, it’s not. So all you can do is think and go through the same routine over and over and over again. What do you do? Well…
Honestly, what else is there?
That same logic can be applied to the soldiers in The Outpost, a genuinely fascinating movie that, though structurally wonky, feels immersive to a degree that most GWOT movies rarely achieve.
The Outpost tells the story of Camp Keating, originally Camp Kamdesh, a base set up in Northern Afghanistan for the purpose of community outreach and reconstruction. The camp was established in a strategically dubious spot surrounded on all sides by the towering Hindu Kush mountains. As a result, the Taliban simply needed to aim their weapons downhill, and attacks on the camp were an almost daily occurrence. This would eventually lead to the Battle of Kamdesh, a thirteen hour battle in which eight American soldiers were killed, twenty-seven were injured, and a garrison of Afghan soldiers was wiped out. (For what it’s worth, the portrayal of this battle in The Outpost is one of the highlights of all 25 movies.)
A lot of the lead-up to the battle is also spent watching soldiers die on pointless missions and bucking against unqualified and unpopular leaders. Between the internal conflicts and the constant assaults on the outpost, we spend a lot of time watching the soldiers bullshit with one another. Sadly it seems like these scenes have never been uploaded to Youtube, but a particular favorite of mine comes after two soldiers get into a heated fight with one another and are forced to say “I love you” to each other over and over again.
One need not go to war to understand that war is harrowing and scary, and in the end, all the soldiers have are each other. Sometimes they bring out the worst in one another, as is the case with all three of the above examples. (Particularly when there’s a more mentally unstable member of the squad.) But I think of what comforts me in times of distress, and honestly, it’s not too different than what’s in these movies. Gallows humor and bad jokes. Thus, in that sense, this tactic of relying on camaraderie serves not only as a great example of portraying how soldiers cope with the chaos but also says a lot about each individual soldier.
They’re just like us. They are us. They’re just in infinitely worse circumstances.
We’re Doing PTSD Wrong (But We Can’t Stop Trying)
Just about every one of these movies hits on the topic of PTSD, and the vast majority don’t feel right.
I am in no way qualified to offer an informed opinion about PTSD. But the issue isn’t really with accuracy. (I’m sure plenty of doctors and soldiers have spilled ink on that particular subject.) Rather, I think the issue is with intent and execution.
Some films treat PTSD as an obstacle to overcome. A hurdle to be cleared in order to fully “return home” and be a loving father or something along those lines, rarely exploring why it was necessary to traumatize these people in the first place. Others use PTSD as another tool to critique the war. Some will do something entirely different.
Setting aside the inherent inaccuracy of treating PTSD like something that can be fully “cured” (at least that’s my understanding), you can argue a certain amount of validity to all these approaches. Despite the conservative lens I used to code the description of the first method, PTSD is something that can be managed, and to treat it like a death sentence that always ends in suicide or tragedy is, arguably, irresponsible. However, that also validates the anti-war approach. There wouldn’t be anything to treat in the first place if you didn’t send soldiers to fight in an obviously pointless war that ruined countless lives.
Despite the varying validity of the approaches, in execution, most of these movies fail because the filmmakers’ intentions usually strip the characters of their humanity. Going back to the Stop-Loss example from earlier, in which protagonist Brandon treats a couple of would-be muggers as if they were POWs, the purpose of this scene is so obvious that you can’t see anything else. It’s there to demonstrate the extent of Brandon’s trauma. However, it’s literally all we can see in the scene, and the scenario is so ridiculous that it makes it that much more on-the-nose. In this moment, Brandon’s no longer a person. He’s a peg designed to fill a hole. A bullet in an arsenal being shot at the war.
Scenes like these reduce their soldiers down to just their symptoms. Their PTSD is the only thing that defines them in any meaningful way. It’s an approach that anyone with any mental illness would and should find disrespectful and demeaning at best. Nobody wants to be defined by their worst selves.
The thing is that I’m not sure there’s a solution. PTSD needs to be portrayed, and the points people make with portraying it need to be made. I don’t know if we can actually get it right. But we have to keep trying, even if we only get it right in degrees.
