Warfare: Alex Garland clears his throat and says nothing

At least 'Waltz With Bashir' was visually interesting.

If you put enough squibs in a movie it becomes anti-war, right? (A24 press kit image)

I had the thought going into Warfare that the movie I was about to watch was roughly the moral equivalent of making a version of Come and See from the perspective of, say, Oskar Dirlewanger.

But Warfare is much more boring than that.

A genuine Komm! Sieh! would have the virtue of glorying in its politics, its cruelty, its excess or, at the very least, acknowledging them. I think here of Black Hawk Down, a movie so perverse and explicit in its racism and imperialism that it is possible for Ridley Scott to revel in the aesthetics of mass slaughter and to make violent bodily destruction into something almost beautiful. But Garland, who is determined to say absolutely nothing about the whys and wherefores of the second American invasion of Iraq, made a dull, yet tense, and utterly plotless movie.

Here is what happens in Warfare: In November 2006 in Ramadi, a group of Navy SEALs dance to the music video for Eric Prydz ‘Call on Me,’ just in case the title care with the date wasn’t enough to tell you this is set during the Global War on Terror. That night they take over an Iraqi house (with two apartments) in the middle of the night, ostensibly in support of U.S. Marine operations in the neighborhood. The next day, they surveil the neighborhood with a sniper team and air assets. It’s boring. Then an insurgent throws a hand grenade into their position, wounding the sniper (named Elliott). The SEALs call for a casualty evacuation. When the Bradley (an Armored Personnel Carrier) pulls up, the SEALs make their translators go out first, then follow them. The insurgents set off an improvised explosive device that kills one translator, disables the other and badly wounds two Americans. The Americans stand around in the house shooting occasionally and waiting for reinforcements. The reinforcements come from another position. The wounded men scream and bleed. More Bradleys show up. The Americans get out of dodge. A photo and production montage featuring some of the real soldiers rolls after a title card that says For Elliott.*

There’s more dynamism and drama in the GoPro video of Abu Hajaar fucking everything up.

Which, I guess, is probably the point? Garland’s Civil War (a much better movie) and this film are entries in the “If we put enough squibs in this flick it becomes anti-war” genre. That may have fooled some critics,** but it didn’t fool me. Judging by the reaction of the audience I saw it with (two twenty-something white dudes came up to me afterwards saying: “Woah that was crazy,” in the way twenty-something white dudes say to both disavow and fetishize something) and the YouTube comments for various videos associated with this flick, this is not an anti-war film.

Though maybe it could’ve been, if Garland made a movie with some honest politics.

See, Garland’s whole problem with Civil War and Warfare is that he’s not actually concerned with why people fight wars, or how they choose to fight in particular ways. He’s concerned with (say the line Bart!) the mimetic reproduction of reality. Which is not the point of art. To this end, he brought on Ray Mendoza (his Pentagon-approved script doctor from Civil War) as co-writer/director. Mendoza participated in the engagement on which this movie is based.

(I should note here that I have no inherent respect for works by veterans about war. Storm of Steel is neat, and so is Journey to the End of the Night, but for every one of those there’s also Mein Kampf. And let’s not forget that Stephen Crane ate all these bitches for lunch in 1895 on a bet, allegedly.***)

It will take many essays to eventually articulate my whole objection to movies that take the mimetic reproduction of wartime experience as their stated goal (looking at you, Saving Private Ryan) but let’s talk through some of my problems with this movie in hopes of answering the great question: Is there an interesting movie here?

C’est La Guerre!

Garland has a habit of making big expansive claims with his titles, setting up each film as a prototypical example of a broader category of experience or metaphor: Ex Machina (conscious life emerges from sexual violence perpetrated against a robot), Annihilation (of the self through literalized metaphors), Men (masculine violence perpetuates itself through the attempt to assert control over women), Civil War (it’s not like the first American civil war was about anything, right?) and now Warfare.

What Garland is claiming in titling this movie Warfare and not something like Ramadi, or Occupation or Make the translator go outside first, he’s expendable is that this particular engagement tells us something indelible and transhistorical about the nature of warfare, something that neither technological nor social changes can alter. But what is it?

If we take the filmic sadism of the medic scenes, Garland seems to be saying that physical pain is a part of war. Sure, fine, whatever. I don’t think that’s insightful enough to justify spending $20 million dollars, but then I’m not an executive.

Maybe it is, as the YouTube commentators have suggested, that war is mostly boring and then briefly terrifying? This is not true in a transhistorical sense—what are we to make of pastoral nomadic societies or agrarian militias, where war is part of a cyclical, nearly ceremonial reproduction of social hierarchies and highly-ritualized forms of combat take on a religious aspect?

Also, notably, it’s not what the movie argues. Garland deploys the tricks of suspense, horror and war movies to make the parts where nothing happens into moments of tension. It is possible to make boring war movies, perhaps it is noble to do so, but we don’t get any extended sequences of American grunts building FOBs or doing routine counterintelligence work or driving the endless, monotonous patrols on high alert, wacked out but never firing.

An old friend of mine fought in Anbar province and he told me he would chew coffee grounds to stay awake in his Humvee, that all these years later he had trouble with the taste of coffee. He urged me to quit, and talked of the buzz in his head and the electric surge in his chest. Where is that element of the experience of warfare?

Band of Brothers, with its endless administrative problems and its lengthy training episode, is a far more effective way of conveying that war is boring. But there’s no paperwork, no food, no careful management of civil-military relations, no occupation government in Warfare.

Indeed, as far as I can see, Garland’s main thesis seems to be that war is a series of technical problems divorced from any broader historical or political context, that these problems are solved through hierarchically structured emotionally rewarding male friendship, that the people who solve these technical problems deserve respect, so long as they are Americans, and that the American side was the right side in Iraq. That is why this film is boring.

The operations in Warfare are primarily about social control: the SEALs aren’t there to attrit the enemy, or even to engage them. They break into a house and then watch through rifle sights and the cameras mounted on surveillance aircraft as the (unmotivated, unseen) insurgents gather to storm their post. The problems of a broadly superior professional army controlling a restive and politically fragmented population are specific problems. These are not transhistorical phenomena; this is violent technocracy in the 21st century. The war fought by the Americans in Iraq was not the same collision of social dynamics Hannibal or Alexander or Grant or Cao Cao or Bohemond of Antioch faced in their operations. If there is a single transhistorical property to be rescued from “war,” other than physical pain, it is that war is physical politics (thank you, Clausewitz), and politics changes based on the material and cultural organization of a given society.

But America called on the rhetoric of the Crusades to justify its war, radicalize its young men, and send them off to slaughter Iraqis, and to occasionally die themselves. So Bush-era propaganda created the idea of the transcendent, avenging warrior class, the Crusader, cured of his gonorrhea and his tendency to massacre Jewish civilians, the Spartan, stripped of his slaves and his penchant for sexually abusing adolescent boys.

Sustaining the Global War on Terror required new ideological justifications for military power. What began as the Crusading idea under the Bushes morphed, under Obama, into a reverent fetish for ‘The Tip of the Spear’ and ‘Warriors,’ meaning special forces soldiers (SEALs, Delta Force etc.) for their individual bravery and lethal competence. Warfare, with its tight focus on the special forces, is a movie of this persuasion, as was 300. The fetish for the fighting man manifests as a relentless focus on technical problems: the retrieval of gear, the exfiltration of wounded men, the choreography of a street battle, suppressing fire, the Bradleys sweeping the rooftops.

Warfare, in Garland’s world, is only the movement of the gun, not the systems that put the gun in a soldier’s hand, or equip him with bullets and food and coffee.

What this sort of sloppy thinking leads to is the rhetoric of a ‘Warfighting Ethos,’ which an allegedly drunk (at 8:30am EST, lol) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has relied on in his effort to protect his phony-balony job. The American military has never won a war by its warfighting ethos, whatever the fuck that is, it has won its wars by consistently supplying its soldiers with more and better food and equipment than its opponents can match. Political dexterity, industrial capacity and a robust logistics network win wars; a warfighting ethos ends with a bunch of aircraft carriers getting blown up, or with an army group freezing to death before Moscow, or with a few thousand Joint Special Operations soldiers acting a global death squad against popular insurgencies.

We few, we happy few!

The tight focus on one unit in one location on one day limits the possible images Garland can put in the film. Thus we get low-light interior scenes and a few street scenes, all beige, all dusty, all with little dynamism. This is an interesting technical imitation and at times the red of light through curtains or the grime on a man’s face makes for a compelling image. But for the most part, Garland’s film is a series of dull images that do little to show the interiority of his characters. A film shot this close to a unit’s POV might as well do something with that choice, using the camera to complicate the validity of that perspective or to emphasize its tenuous isolation in a hostile urban environment.

Scott does that in Black Hawk Down, but then Scott likes to make big, colorful movies that say and do weird things and make grandiose claims. Garland thinks he is more incisive, and his films tend to have a sort of unambitious competence in the frame and lighting that, while admirable in the streaming slop age, is entirely unimpressive. See, Garland believes he is making high brow movies with significant conceptual weight, and he thinks a dispassionate, workmanlike adherence to the obvious choice is the way to show these things plainly. But the writing and direction of his films belie this, as do his grating interviews. Garland is actually pretentious: A middlebrow filmmaker who has tricked himself into thinking the noise of phlegm in his throat is oratory. He opts always for the boring choice.

It is often the case that war movies made by Anglo-Americans would be more interesting if they simply focused on the other side. (This is why Clint Eastwood made Letters from Iwo Jima at the same time he made Flags of Our Fathers and why the former is regarded as a classic and the latter entirely forgotten.)

If there is an interesting movie in the engagement on which Warfare is based, it would be about the motivations and technical problems of the Iraqi insurgency. How do the insurgents conceal the IED that wounds two SEALs and kills a collaborator? How have they trained for urban combat? How do they gather and process intelligence on the American whereabouts when they are under such heavy surveillance? Who are they? Why are they fighting? How do they maintain popular support? They can’t call for a casualty evacuation when one of their number is wounded, so what happens to the men who are shot by the Americans or wounded by the 30mm shells fired by the Bradleys that eventually rescue the SEALs?

Instead we get an American squad movie.

Squad movies can raise interesting questions about war and can be aesthetically powerful, but they need room to breathe. Two useful comparisons here are Stalingrad (1993) and Waltz with Bashir (a complication of the genre), both of which take place over years and span wide geographies.

See Stalingrad, like Warfare, is about the experiences of an invading army as it takes casualties. But Stalingrad takes us out of the battlefield to show us the capriciousness, cruelty and foolishness of the Nazi war effort. It is very much concerned with why and how its soldiers fight, and the technical problems of war structure the possibilities of the plot in genuinely interesting ways. The men run out of food, they have insufficient clothes, they run out of fuel. All this forces their decisions over a long period and we see how Witzland’s efforts to fight in something like a moral way are punished by a high command intent on a war of genocidal violence and sexual conquest. Stalingrad, as a text, is resolutely opposed to the systems of logic and desire that drive its soldiers and it punishes them ruthlessly for Hitler’s war of aggression. It’s bleak, it’s beautiful in places, it fucking works, and it actually manages to say that the Second World War was a crime.

Waltz with Bashir has a strange place in my heart. On the one hand I think the animation style is very interesting (even if Flobots had more fun with it) and the decision to structure the movie around an event that cannot be recalled or fictionalized is fascinating. On the other, it’s perhaps the greatest work of shoot-and-cry apologia to ever come out, and its plot hinges on an Israeli man being unable to face his responsibility for running security for the Lebanese falangists as they slaughtered thousands of Palestinian and Shi’ite Lebanese civilians in cold blood. I saw this movie a year or two after it came out and it was key in breaking through the ambient Zionist conditioning I’d received growing up in George W. Bush’s crusader state. What’s most interesting about Waltz with Bashir and the problem of mimetic reproduction is that the movie leaves Israeli memory as cartoons; what the IDF did and experienced is not real. What is real, concrete, is the suffering of the Palestinians slaughtered in Sabra and Shatila, and this is shown to us in news footage from the aftermath of the massacre.

Blending fictitious experiences with real atrocities is an old cinematic trick—Ivan’s Childhood etc.—and it works in Waltz precisely because of the difference between animated, false memory and real, deplorable violence.

But both of those movies, despite being narrowly focused on the specific experiences of small units, take dramatic stands about the morality and conduct of the specific wars they depict. That central statement is what makes them work at the textual level and what gives them some level of dramatic motion.

So when Garland does his little zoom out at the end and shows the blurred photos of SEALs and shows Elliott clowning around on set, the effect is not to make the war real, but to give the sense of a high school reunion and the reenactments of genocide from Act of Killing in the same shots. It comes off as a schmaltzy, almost Marvel Avengers type credit sequence rather than a moving meditation on the costs of war.

The unstated assumption in Mimetic Reproduction films is that what matters in war is the experience of combat and the survival of individual soldiers. But the truth of the matter, and what gives the lie to such projects as accurate reconstructions, is that war has moral stakes that are far more significant than the survival or pain of individual soldiers. If the Germans defeated the USSR they planned to exterminate 60 million people. That the Israelis created a system of fragmented buffer states to destroy secular Palestinian resistance and secure regional hegemony ultimately produced Hamas, pushed Hezbollah to organize itself and created the political context for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The American invasion of Iraq created the ideological and material circumstances that gave rise to ISIS there and to Donald Trump here. To make movies about these wars without addressing their political stakes is not to Show How Things Really Were, but to avoid the consequences and conduct of combat operations in favor of a masturbatory fantasy about group male bonding.

It is Cowardice.

This is why movies that take firm stances on political matters—even reactionary ones—are better films than those which treat war as technical problems solved by the bros. Zulu makes it clear through its camera work, its script and its music that it is on the side of British colonization as a civilizing mission. Imagine what that movie would be if it never showed the Zulu soldiers, never had them sing, never showed the Zulu casualties, and instead focused narrowly on a group of men within Rorke’s drift’s hospital until the battle itself was over. It’d be boring.

The same thing with Black Hawk Down, a movie that very firmly takes the side of the Americans as civilizing agents fighting a barbarian horde, rather than an invading power that slaughtered thousands of people.

Film requires dramatic stakes, and Garland’s restrictive camera and narrative frame attempt to avoid giving the movie any real stakes while still taking the American side. The camera, that mechanical eye, is not a neutral observer in any film, but a participant in and commentator on the action. Garland does not seem to know this, he seems to believe in the distance between the director and the action directed. But he is not an experimental or arthouse filmmaker, he is not interested in the sort of formal choices needed to make the camera something close to a neutral participant. Think here of the static shots in Zone of Interest or the way plotlines in Gaspar Noe’s Climax run on without the presence of the camera, or the intensive formalism of Sergio Leone’s westerns, where the only thing to exist is what is before the camera at that moment.

Garland has made a movie endorsing the American war and the American perspective, while insisting that he has made something close to reality. It is a bad, boring movie restricted by its insistence on saying nothing and showing even less.

Some numbers:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median writer/author in the United States earns $34.75 per hour. This movie is 95 minutes long plus previews, so 2 hours. I wrote this essay in two sessions each of approximately 3 hours each and then edited it in two sessions each of approximately 90 minutes, that totals 11 hours or $382.50 of uncompensated labor.

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Thank you, as always, for reading.

-30-

*Just because the Navy SEALs would definitely beat me in a fight and also desecrate my corpse for fun does not mean I have to respect them. They lost a war and got rich making shoot-and-cry movies, fascist coffee companies and fitness podcasts. They’re a glorified death squad. The Pakistanis gave them Bin Laden on a silver platter and they still crashed a helicopter. Thank you for your service in preventing an invasion of the lower 48 by neighborhood militias consisting entirely of ex-Baath party officers. Looney Tunes-ass Praetorian guard. If Sejanus saves the Republic, maybe I’ll respect them.

**It’s hilarious that AV Club headlined their review of a pro-war movie where the main problem is a casualty evacuation “The brutal Warfare wages [sic] its tight filmmaking against combat's casual disregard for life.” Like literally the entire movie is about the U.S. military trying not to take a K.I.A. The only lives casually disregarded in the film are the lives of the two Iraqi collaborators, who the Americans send out first onto a street they know is booby trapped. After the translators are blown up, the wounded and dazed Americans spend the remaining runtime crying about how badly the insurgents are kicking their asses. They barely do any shooting in this shoot-and-cry thing!

***Anyone want to pony up for a Nye Canham screenplay?