From the Cheap Seats

Seeing as how it’s five years since the tanks rolled in to Baghdad, the statue of Saddam was toppled and we were told it was ‘Mission Accomplished!’, it’s an appropriate time to reflect on the movies that have emerged from our misbegotten adventure in Iraq. After all, there’s an impressive roster: Lions for Lambs, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Stop Loss, Grace Is Gone, Battle for Haditha…

The trouble is, I’m not sure they’re actually very interesting. I haven’t seen all of them (most haven’t opened here at the time of writing) but everything I’ve read leads me to believe that they don’t say much I don’t already know from looking at the news. I’m sure I can find common ground with them – I wasn’t much in favour of the invasion and I’m deeply depressed about what’s gone on since – but I’d like a movie to offer more insight than pointing out that this war was A Very Bad Thing.

In fact, I’m not convinced that film is actually very good at reportage, capturing the moment as it happens. It’s true that movies can be made ever more quickly but urgency is no guarantee of insight. It can take time to do a film right, to really explore the subject. Let’s go back to the Vietnam war for an example: only one film was made that directly addressed that conflict during major combat operations and that was John Wayne’s The Green Berets.

It’s tempting to devote a paragraph or two to this film. It’s obviously very bad and morally offensive even after forty years, even to someone who wasn’t born when the battles were raging. Yet it’s a fascinating cultural artefact. It’s essentially just a second world war film clumsily adapted to a new setting, suggesting that The Duke hadn’t grasped why this war was different and why so many were appalled.

Most filmmakers who wanted to examine the war in South East Asia did so elliptically, most notably M*A*S*H (nominally set in the Korean war). It wasn’t until the war was over that The Deer Hunter and, most especially, Apocalypse Now appeared. Both those movies went beyond the headlines and sought to understand the war on a metaphorical level. They are artistic responses to war that help us – even those of us who know it only from history books – understand what was going on.

More recently, there’s David O Russell’s masterful Three Kings, about the first time the West butted heads with Saddam Hussein. It was released 8 years after the close of play, after the dust had settled. The distance allowed for a broader sweep and a more satirical approach: the film makes its points using a sardonic tone that’s much more effective than hand-wringing earnestness.

It could be some time before we have a film about the second war with Iraq that articulates more than the anger so many people feel about the war and the shock about how it’s being prosecuted. Future generations will, I suspect, get no more out of Lions For Lambs than I got out of Brian De Palma’s 1968 film Greetings!, which concerns three young men with a horror of being drafted. They might have been the epitome of cool back then but I found these radicals whiny and self-satisfied. Far better is the film he made about Vietnam with the benefit of 20 years hindsight: Casualties of War.

For the moment, the best reflections of the war and the times we live in are the oblique ones that don’t tackle the subject directly. There Will Be Blood explores the combustible mix of capitalism and fundamentalism – and the lust for oil – that got us into this mess. Crucially, it never loses sight of the drama and never lapses into easy schematics to spell out what it means.

But for me, the film that best defines the age we’re living in – one of uncertainty, of governmental deception, of rampant patriotism and sheer bone-headed official incompetence – was made in 1997. Yes, Paul Verhoeven predicted The War Against Terror pretty accurately in Starship Troopers.

Finally, it’s perhaps significant that all of these Iraq films have done very badly financially. The public aren’t interested. It’s too soon: the war is too painful. And after five years of it, I have every sympathy with someone who wants to bury their head in the sand and relax with a nice comedy. Let me finish this sentence and I’ll join you.