Magic Hours (15 page)

Nevertheless, one wonders. Just when was it that “competent” became such a terrible fate? Like “cute,” it is a word that has somehow culturally capsized and spilled its initial, positive meaning. And since when have merely good writers been deserving of barbed wire and gruel? I, for one, am glad of the world's good novels. I am reading a good novel right now. I hope to write a good novel someday. (I have already written several bad ones. That does not really seem such terrible providence either, in the end.) Writers who fail are not pathetic; they are people who have attempted to do something incredibly difficult and found they cannot. Human longing exists in every person, along every frequency of accomplishment. It is the delusions endemic to bad writers and bad writing that need to be destroyed. Here are a few:
Writing well will get you girls, or boys, or both. Writing well will make you happy. Fame and wealth are good writing's expected rewards. Writing for a living is somehow nobler than what most people do
. What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing—solid,
honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing—is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal. Some of us will be great but, as King says, that will be an accident, and its determination is beyond our power, no matter how many books we read or write. Perhaps especially if those books are about writing.

There is a final book about writing that I need to talk about. God help us, it is published by Writer's Digest Books, so allow me to encourage anyone interested to steal it forthwith, preferably from the warehouses of Writer's Digest Books. It is called
Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life
, and forms a handsome collection of
Peanuts
Snoopycentrism. Snoopy, of course, is a long-suffering writer, and some of Charles Schultz's funniest strips have been devoted to his worthy beagle's literary frustrations; they are gathered here, in their glorious entirety. My second favorite strip gives us Snoopy in full profile, bent over his typewriter, diligently typing. “Gentlemen,” he writes. “Enclosed is the manuscript of my new novel. I know you are going to like it.” And in the final panel: “In the meantime, please send me some money so I can live it up.” In my favorite strip, Snoopy gives Lucy van Pelt a draft titled ”A Sad Story” “This isn't a sad story” Lucy complains. “This is a dumb story!” Snoopy takes back the draft and holds it close to his protuberant face. He thinks, “That's what makes it so sad.”

That is what makes it so sad. That is also why we laugh. But it is a good laughter, a pure laughter, and not at all at Snoopy's expense. It is the laughter of necessity, laughter rich with the hope that, eventually, all of our stories will be happier.

 

—2004

The Iraq War and Documentary Film

I
n the middle of Peter Davis's Vietnam War documentary
Hearts and Minds,
a large, pale, scarily eyebrowless face suddenly annexes the screen. It's the face of Colonel George S. Patton III as he describes his attendance at a memorial service in Vietnam for some fallen American soldiers. When he gazed upon the faces of the memorial's attendees, Patton says, “I was just proud. My feeling for America just soared.... They looked determined and reverent at the same time. But still”—and here Colonel Patton's abrupt, savage smile reveals a mouth packed with draft horse-sized choppers—“they're a bloody good bunch of
killers
.”

It is a moment you have to see to fully appreciate, which is to say it is a moment you have to see to believe. And it is the sort of completely defenseless moment you often see only in documentary films. No Hollywood dramatization could do justice to Patton's cheerful viciousness, and a print journalist would doubtless hoard Patton's words for some skeweringly perfect ending.
But Davis allows Colonel Patton and reverent killers to float through his film like stray pieces of the dreadful shipwreck that was American aspiration in Vietnam.

Hearts and Minds
hit theaters in 1974. Columbia Pictures,
Hearts and Minds
's original distributor, refused to release the film, and Walter Rostow, who had been national security adviser under President Johnson, sued to block its premiere. Warner Brothers eventually brought the picture out, and it won an Academy Award for best documentary—after which it was denounced by Frank Sinatra, the ceremony's next presenter.

Davis made his documentary with three questions in mind: Why did we go to Vietnam? What did we do there? What did the doing in turn do to us? “I didn't expect the film to answer these questions,” Davis admits on the commentary of the recent Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. “I expected it to address those questions.” Explanatory impotence is not unique to the documentary but in some ways is abetted by the form. Inimitably vivid yet brutally compressed, documentaries often treasure image over information, proffer complications instead of conclusions, and touch on rather than explore. When a documentary film such as
Capturing the Friedmans
or
The Burden of Dreams
charts the mysteries of human behavior, an inconclusive effect can be electrifying. When a documentary film takes on the considerable subject of war, inconclusiveness can frustrate, though one's frustration is not necessarily with the film or its maker. Even
Hearts and Minds
acknowledges, in its closing scene, its limitations: “You were over there too,” one man angrily says to the filmmakers at a stateside parade, “with your damn cameras.”

The damn cameras have now been to Iraq and back. Few of the Iraq War documentaries offer such self—awareness, though, and most neglect to address the war as a result of choices that might have been made differently The most ambitious and in some ways
the finest documentary about Iraq is probably Stephen Marshall's
Battleground.
In showing us insurgents discussing their hatred of Americans while Humvees pass by, an Iraqi translator deludedly explaining that the invasion was due to the collapse of the American economy, a former anti-Saddam guerrilla reuniting with his mother after thirteen years of exile, and a U.S. soldier marveling at the fact that Iraqis wear blue jeans (“They could be anywhere in the United States”),
Battleground
provides a movingly human and admirably ambivalent portrait of the war. It is, however, more the exception than the rule. In the grunts'-eye-view offered by
Occupation: Dreamland
and
Gunner Palace,
the Iraq War functions as a savage reversal of American expectation. In
Control Room,
about Al Jazeera, which largely limits itself to Al Jazeera's coverage of the conflict, the war is a rough beast sprinting towards Bethlehem. In
The Dreams of Sparrows,
a film made by Iraqis, the war is a fiery doorway into a hitherto unknown reality. But in all of these films the war just is. Matthew Arnold famously said that journalism was “literature in a hurry.” The analytic content of these Iraq documentaries sometimes feels like journalism in a hurry. These are partial maps drawn while still within the maze of war.

Traditionally the wartime documentary dealt with the just—ness of the cause, like Frank Capra's
Why We Fight
series, made from 1942 to 1944. Such films, however artful or historically significant, are basically propaganda. The rise of the more questioning war documentary is a relatively recent development. Film provides audiences with a uniquely reactive vulnerability; a vivid description of a shrapnel wound can certainly be affecting, but a two-story-tall image of the same can move you to slam shut your tyrannized eyes. Thus it is not surprising that so many modern war documentaries look upon their subject with considerable jaundice. A time-tested way to turn against a war is to go have a look at it for oneself. “People want their steak,” one soldier says
in
Occupation: Dreamland,
“but they don't want to know how the cow got butchered.”

 

 

Any honest documentary film about war must address the question of human suffering, given that human suffering is war's distillation. But whose suffering? In January 2004, we learn in Garret Scott and Ian Olds's
Occupation: Dreamland,
the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne was living on the edge of Falluja in an abandoned Baathist resort officially called Forward Operating Base Volturno but popularly known as Dreamland. The 82nd's modest mission: “Maintain order and suppress resistance.” The bloody Marine-led siege of Falluja in April 2004 would occur after the 82nd had been rotated out of Iraq. The film thus becomes a spooky exercise in prescience as well as an unlikely elegy, for the Falluja of
Occupation: Dreamland,
having been reduced to a Stalingradian ruin during its assorted American assaults, no longer exists.

The primary focus of
Occupation: Dreamland
is a handful of infantry troopers who occupy a single crowded room papered with
Maxim
pin-ups and scattered with spittoons. In their modest billeting these young men flex and pose in their mirrors, watch
Total Recall
, don their flak vests and goggles while listening to Slayer, mockingly read aloud from letters of stateside support, and heatedly argue politics until their staff sergeant reminds them of the camera. These soldiers' political diversity may—but should not—surprise many viewers. Last summer I spent a month in Iraq embedded with the Marines and found men and women of widely divergent opinions about the war. Some were thoughtful, others clerics of ignorance. Some believed the United States fought for liberty, others for oil. The soldiers in
Occupation: Dreamland
are equally afflicted and afflicting, and one quietly grieves for those soldiers given to more searching turns of mind: “I want some answers,” Pfc. Thomas
Turner (an avowed Democrat) says early in the film. “I want some clarification of what we're doing... I guess someone smarter than me knows what's going on.”

A good deal of the film serves up what are by now many visual commonplaces of the Iraq War, in particular the chaotic nocturne of American soldiers on insurgent sweeps, bashing down Iraqis' doors and screaming at people who do not speak English. The familiarity of these scenes makes them no less disquieting. “That might not look all that great,” an officer admits. “but it's a necessary evil that's inherent in war. People are going to be inconvenienced and pissed off. If their husbands weren't trying to kill us, we wouldn't be there.”

Soon enough the mood turns ominous. One suspected insurgent explains to an American through a platoon interpreter: “I'm not opposed. Do you understand me? I'm not opposed.” “Fuck this guy” the soldier responds. “Zip him up.” The Iraqi is next shown being hooded and cuffed and pushed into the back of a truck while nearby some young Iraqis watch mutely. Later, while an outraged Iraqi buttonholes the camera about the “indecent” actions of Americans taking Iraqi women from local homes, a nearby soldier explains where he is from to two supremely unmoved Iraqis. “What is ‘California'?” one Iraqi asks the other in Arabic. The soldiers themselves realize these pathetic public-relations attempts are scarcely worth the oxygen, yet one of the film's most heartbreaking scenes—filmed in night-vision-goggle green—shows an American soldier stopping to make small talk with an Iraqi man near Dreamland's perimeter. An effortful, translation-error-ridden conversation ensues, and one senses that this soldier is so urgently attempting to communicate because he feels his very humanity is at stake. Many of the soldiers, to their credit, acknowledge the legitimacy of Iraqi anger and fear. As one says, “If this was home in Chicago, and there were some Iraqi soldiers
shovin' up on my door, I'd be running up there with a couple guns myself.” Sergeant John Blyler, one of his platoon's most outspoken Republicans, says, “When I first got here, I wanted to help these people. But now after my old squad leader got killed... I just don't really care about these people.” A few scenes later, Sergeant Blyler is wounded in an IED blast, which quickly serves to underscore the mindless retributive logic of war. One of the soldiers present at the blast later regrets not gunning down an Iraqi who, understandably, began to run away: “I should have fucking killed him. I hate these people.” None of these moments—and there are several—are played for “gotcha” effect. Although their film occasionally feels like an elongated
20/20
segment whose profanity has been left intact, Garret and Olds are sensitive without being credulous and unimpressed without seeming cynical.

 

 

The overall atmosphere in
Occupation: Dreamland
is churchy, Skoal-drooling, almost exaggeratedly heterosexual, and not quite Southern so much as southern Indianan. In
Gunner Palace
, the overall atmosphere is pass-the-mic ebullience. Several soldiers freestyle some not-too-swift rhymes (“We live from Baghdad / Man, it's so sad”) and another plays the “Star-Spangled Banner” on his electric guitar before a molten Baghdad sunset. Narrated by its whisky-voiced director, Mike Tucker,
Gunner Palace
takes a markedly different view of the war from
Occupation: Dreamland.
In
Gunner Palace
the war is presented as deadly but vaguely ennobling. Gunner Palace itself, a ruined and colonnaded home that once belonged to Uday Hussein, is described by its commanding officer as an “adult's paradise.” Tucker never really steps back to examine the wisdom of American soldiers locating themselves in the opulent mansion of a murderous regime they came to depose; instead he employs his most pointed ironies by overlaying Donald Rumsfeld saying things
like “Baghdad is bustling with commerce” upon scenes of a Baghdad bustling with flying lead. Which is not to say that
Gunner Palace
lacks a moral measuring tape. In the film's most moving interview, a young Army intelligence analyst, clearly frustrated by the war, says, “I don't think, anywhere in history, somebody has killed somebody else and something better has come out of it.”