"Have you ever been to Philly sir? You have to be crazy to live there."-- Nicholas Cage, snickering his way out of involuntary confinement, circa 1984
In the days following 911, like most Americans, I wanted a response, and like most Americans, I did not really give much thought to what it meant, to wipe the Taliban off the face of the earth, indeed, to eradicate Al Qaida, radiate the group with isotopes so that it would suffer the worst kind of slow and incurable poisoning imaginable, and like most Americans, this slog bequeathed to us by Rumsfeld and Cheney, in conjunction with Iraq, has infected American power, weakened our collective blood stream with a persistent influenza, which still battles our white cell count, the victor undecided.
Although the current administration bears some criticism in how these conflicts have been resolved, commitment to any kind of goal lost in the process of leaving it on the shoulders of Karzai, the issue is less ideological and more prone to ridicule. The Chinese secret police quell their internal protest demonstrations more effectively than a democratic superpower and its Nato allies can achieve a goal, to pacify a territory that seems to lack any intuitive understanding of national sovereignty. This adds to the weight of my disdain for Kathryn Bigelow, which is unfortunate, but I will sift my way around to that. It has nothing to do with her importance in being, in the moment, an influential female director who tackles war theatre without apologies, leaving viewers to extrapolate and interpolate the harsh tactical angles, which, if we compare it to Alan Parker's Birdy, illustrates how much war films have changed, and how much studios feel they are willing to risk, perhaps as payback for our shame, or how much Cheney was willing to squander principle to justify the ends, and left us as dirty as the manifest destiny and violence against the indigenous left us with a blood guilt buried in textbooks and forgotten, only pulled out and referenced when liberals feel like kicking me in the teeth.
Birdy is an independent film for which I have a soft spot, personally and artistically. I saw it first with collegiate friend Tom, the memory of our give and take only growing in commensurate value as the years pass and I have no real links, or a bond, with anyone of his like, not for sexual affection, or even love, but the pleasure of his company, the value of aesthetic conversation. If I knew Alan Parker he would probably be a spirited ally, given the motifs he coaxed out of Cage and Modine, their resistance against control, poverty, and a bleak mechanized urban blight only accentuated by the heightened trauma of Vietnam.
Bigelow dispenses with the artifice of metaphorical salve to such wounds, but she should not be the decisive factor in how we repair the Clinton - Bush legacy, and Obama's tepid resolution of such a problematic paradigm. Killing Osama may have involved tactical danger, but it was otherwise a pointless exercise, since we seem to lack a vision for restoring the moral ascendancy of Pax America, and Bigelow gets to amuse herself being a modern GI Joe cocktease who does not condone torture, as if we expect her, and her producers, to say anything else. If her work is admirable, didactic, offers an interpretation to be celebrated, then hey, but to the extent that the public does not care, then the public needs castigation for refusing to be educated. Zero Dark Thirty should be an augmentation, and nothing more than that. Do I object if the Academy awards her? Certainly not, but if you allow her films to define the most successful terrorist plot in human history, then just give it up now, resign from the United Nations, and let the Mexican drug cartels retake our Western territory, and we can govern ourselves as effectively as the Castro's govern their island ninety miles from our shores.
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