I can’t believe how long it is taking these few sets of photos to leave my computer, especially given that I am sending them one set at a time. I thought Windows 7 was supposed to be super fast, but these pictures would have left my computer half and hour ago on Windows 2000.
Truthfully, though, I don’t know enough about these things, and I am probably sending them in 400 megabytes (if that’s even how you say it) per shot. I think a re-enactment would have been faster.
I guess it’s like snail mail in the way that I don’t have to sit here all night and watch them go. Still, if they don’t leave my email box soon, I’ll worry and wonder if I have jammed something up irreparably.
On the other hand, this can’t be much of an interesting entry for anyone but me, and even I am beginning to yawn.
While I wait, I could say instead that I watched The Hurt Locker this evening, and as much as no one can argue that it certainly captures, in documentary style, the heart and heartlessness of the war in Iraq, I felt gratuitously manipulated. The film, which should have left me stock-still for a week and a half, stayed with me all of two minutes – the time it took me to switch from it to Project Runway.
Yes, yes, I know what you’re saying. Anyone who could be more riveted by Project Runway than by a war in the Middle East (or anywhere) doesn’t have the depth of character to appreciate The Hurt Locker.
But that’s not true. I have watched The Deer Hunter until my eyes practically fell out of my head, and I know by heart all of the songs in Coming Home – a staggering war movie – and The Thin Red Line is still with me, years after my first viewing, and I can’t even talk about The Killing Fields without crying.
What I don’t need to see, as one of the movie’s dozen examples, is a bomb squad unit member eviscerating a child’s stomach and pulling out a package of explosives. I believe that this kind of monstrous behaviour must happen in Iraq, otherwise why would the director be hammering these scenes down our throats from start to finish? You will tell me that she does this because this is the reality; this is the Iraq we have not seen; these are the tales of a new war that we do not know.
All I have to do is watch the news and pick up a well-written article to know what is happening in Iraq. I have seen the looks on the faces of hundreds of soldiers, and Iraqis, since the 1980s, and I know enough about war (my late husband was a war historian, after all) to understand its brutality, senselessness and immorality. I think a person would have to be living in a cave to not get that; to not care.
The relentlessness of this story, The Hurt Locker, and the necessary craziness of the characters, however, drives home its point in a jack hammer way, and leaves me with nothing but a feeling of depletion – not even a little room for reflection. In fact, the most effective parts of the film took place during the last ten minutes, listening to the conversation between the two soldiers, watching their eyes, and following the brief scenes back on American soil. I don’t think a grocery cereal aisle has ever been as poignant.
Still, despite the film’s solid performances, I found much of it too easy. Without nuance and silence and absence, we have nothing to imagine, fill in, or bring to the story. Mostly, we are just horrified, and I don’t need a film to just horrify me. I have imagination enough of my own to know what goes on in Iraq without a screenplay. I want more, in fact: more complexity, more range, more of what I have been taught to call back story. And I don’t always or even often want a two-hour movie to be obvious (and brutal) for two hours. I could have told you within seconds, for example, how long Ralph Fiennes would be on the screen – and why – all of which makes me wonder how hard people are willing to think, and feel, about what is put before them.
Anyway, I am one woman having a late night opinion about a film that Rotten Tomatoes rates at 97%. What do I know? Besides, the photos are finally gone, and I can go to bed.
Found on the Internet, and far more meaningful to me…
Shadows of War
I walk in the gardens,
on the run from the news.
The orange waste-sacks,
bellied with swept leaves,
crouch between the limes
all along the bare avenue -
prisoners of Guantanamo.
I walk in the orchards,
abandoned to autumn.
A dog leaps playful
out of its owner's control,
runs with the leash trailing
among the shit-coils in the dirt -
barking an echo of Abu Ghraib.
I walk in the break-time,
see poems on a classroom wall,
Owen, Sassoon, Sorley,
the texts of this year's syllabus:
words wailing like shells,
beyond the limits of our hearing -
mourning the corpses of Fallujah.
Derek Sellen
November 2004
