'I'm the same boy I used to be'
A few words about 'Warfare'
I think a lot about the trustworthiness of images, and of sounds. Fictitious times, as Michael Moore once said. A few weeks back, I went to the big IMAX screen nearby and took in a screening of Warfare, the new Alex Garland film that has been roundly criticized since its first trailer dropped several months ago. Black Hawk Down for the Iraq War is what it looked like, in the derogatory sense. That it was co-directed by veteran and expert military consultant Ray Mendoza only worsened the “look” of the project. See: bad. I’d certainly opined as much, especially after being annoyed and bored to tears by Garland’s Civil War, his last attempt to say something about war. It’s easy to be foolish, and I do like to indulge. I felt foolish immediately as the film began.
After some text explaining the setup for the film—a team of Navy SEALs assigned to maintain a sniper position in an Iraqi neighbourhood to support some on-the-ground operation; and the events on screen are drawn from the memories of the participants—its first images and sounds appear onscreen.
There’s no depth in Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me”—a dance club reworking of Steve Winwood’s ‘80s hit “Valerie”—neither in its music and lyrics, nor its video, in which a lone man attends a women’s aerobics class, making a mockery of the already sexually suggestive dance moves. The dancer, Argentinian Juan Pablo Di Pace, turns the MTV-style sensuousness of the aerobics moves into something more aggressive, more distinctly male, and the women step up their game to match. It’s sex, but a particular idea of sex defined by dominance and ironic detachment. Sexy, perhaps… to a teenage boy. The moment I saw the first frames of the music video, the sounds of Prydz’s beat, blasting through those IMAX speakers, I understood Warfare was up to something unexpectedly layered.
The camera cuts between the music video, and shots of a group of SEALSs absolutely bro-ing the fuck out like Spring Break to the sight of the hot women in the video. No doubt a happier moment in the memories of those soldiers who consulted on the film, it’s the choice of its inclusion—the choice, indeed, to start the film here—that lingers. The “Call on Me” video may have no depth on its own, but recast here, it takes on representational meaning. Its juvenile anti-sexuality pushes past kitsch, toward an emblematic depiction of invasion.
It’s a scene of odd euphoria, forced rather than natural. The decked out soldiers pumping themselves up to the song, crowded around the computer, look flatly absurd. Doubtful that this is how the men themselves understood it. Good times before the bad, more like. But what the soldier sees, and what the filmmaker sees are two very different things. This split is inherent in Warfare thanks to its division of duties between Mendoza—also participant in the events of the film, and portrayed in it by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai—and Garland. Without sorting through which author is responsible for which specific details in the film, the film’s schizophrenia opens up a unique space for multiplicity in the meaning of its images.
The film cuts from the loud sound of “Call on Me,” right to a dark, quiet street in a Ramadi neighbourhood. The sound of tactical gear breaks the silence as a unit of SEALs make their nighttime manevuevers. These are the invaders, and their presence is alien, perturbing. They find their way to a house and bust their way in, disrupting the families living there, setting up camp inside for a vantage on the area. It’s a long, monotonous wait, and then all hell breaks loose.
As a straightfoward text, Warfare fulfills a few clear artistic goals on Mendoza’s part. This is his remembrance and tribute to the guys he served with, the horror they experienced, and the brother-in-arms who was killed. There’s nothing political here, per se, just a desire to make a collective diary out of traumatic events, and to give the audience a sense of what war is actually like. The film is all process, all details. It’s not a film about plot, or character development, or anything like that. Warfare is a cinema of immersion, in which the visual and auditory experience of watching it—especially in IMAX—overwhelms its audience with the bluntness of reality.
It’s all filtered through memory and perspective, of course, but even here the film is clever in how it engages the subjectivity of its characters. You can feel it, as you’re watching, when the film is showing something that’s more of an agreed upon, technical fact, versus the personal observations of the participants. When things are peaceful, it’ll be a finger running over a dusty rack, and, when things have gotten bloodier, it might be repeated shots of a face that looks like a corpse. Time distends in these moments, giving the real time-ish construction of the movie a recognizably subjective quality. Scenes of horrific gore, endless screaming in pain, sudden booms of sound, all work toward a very simple idea. War is hell, of course.
Were that all the film was up to, I might have said that it’s fine enough, though queasy in its centring of Navy SEALs in a war where those SEALs were the aggressors, part of an American intervention that did untold human damage. It doesn’t have Black Hawk Down levels of racist othering, but still. Queasy. Garland, though, has more on his mind. While indulging Mendoza’s desire to present an unvarnished, realistic account of his war trauma, Garland finds ways of politicizing the film. The opening scene and subsequent cut into the main narrative are an example. Another is found in the brief moments of perspective granted the Iraqis in the house, including the families living there, and the two Iraqi army combatants assigned to escort the Americans. They’re barely seen, and they barely speak, but their presence is felt throughout the film. Indeed, the film is about them as much as it is the SEALs.
Somewhere along the line, I misjudged Alex Garland. I’d enjoyed his work, the films he’d written, and Ex Machina, his real directorial debut. I hadn’t cared for his follow-up, Annihilation, and I didn’t even bother with Men. But I did see Civil War, and while I didn’t find it offensive in the way others had, my main takeaway was that Garland’s read on politics, war, and journalism lacked anything like serious insight. It took only the opening scenes of Warfare to change my mind. (I’ve since gone back to Civil War, and now appreciate it much more.)
Garland is an odd filmmaker. More of a writer than a director, but actually more of an ideas guy than either. To hear him tell it, his ideal role is something closer to TV showrunner, which he’s tried his hand at with Devs, and the film Dredd, a failed experiment in bringing that TV heirarchy to moviemaking (rumours had it Garland ghost-directed the film, when in fact he hired a director the way he would have for television). As an artist of Ideas, he forms his images and sounds around core interests, with a narrative built to suit. The results are often arresting, but as often thudding. Pulling a bunch of strands together for the purpose of getting ideas across more than story is the biggest reason many took issue with The Brutalist, and why Garland has also come in for plenty of derision. The Texas-California alliance in Civil War, rather than being taken in good faith as a deliberate unreality, was mercilessly mocked. I mocked it.
When Warfare cut from the guys dancing to “Call on Me,” to the scene of their nighttime infiltration, I had sudden thoughts of Starship Troopers. Not that Warfare is a satire, but then, many missed (and continue to miss) that Starship Troopers was satirical in the extreme. What connects the two films is not comedy, but perspective. The audience is situated, in both films, within the perspective of the invader. Only an ironic distance separates us from those onscreen. In Starship Troopers that presents in the film’s absurdity, and even some outright jokes and gags. In Warfare, Garland creates distance through the images themselves, the edits between them, and the accompanying sounds. The film is an immersive experience, but knowingly so. The deliberate denial of contextual information, or even a sense that there’s much of a world existing outside this one neighbourhood—reconstructed on a set in Hertfordshire that feels as artificial as it is accurate—keeps the audience at a remove from the characters, who are similarly thinly sketched. They know more than we do, about themselves and their situation, but for as much as we’re placed “in their shoes,” the distancing allows space for consideration, and judgment.
It’s this contextlessness that seems to drive Garland of late, like he’s lost trust in the ability of explicit context to properly frame our understanding of events. One look at our current media ecosystems proves the succeptibility of “context” to whatever the warped intention of the people conveying it. There’s little truth to hold onto. Warfare arrives as a reckoning with that reality, in which Garland places his trust in form to convey his ideas. It’s well and good to be against the Iraq War and American imperialism. It’s another thing entirely to understand the experience of being under the thumb of that imperialism, particularly in the chaotic reality of war. In cinematic form, Garland finds an avenue for understanding that a journalistic report, or an essay, or a pamphlet can’t convey. War is more than battles and casualties, and it’s more than the politics that drive it. It’s a visceral experience that flattens humanity into blood and guts, leaving questions of why? For what?
“War is hell” movies are nothing new, and on that level, all Warfare has to offer is a more technically accurate and perhaps immersive depiction of events in Iraq than some other Iraq War films. On this front alone, it’s successful enough, but without any interesting purpose. Mendoza’s tribute to his guys is hardly the stuff to justify spending $20 million on a recreation of their horrific experience, well made as it is. Artistically, it’d amount to bankruptcy. This is where Garland’s authorial voice comes in. Not only in the film’s style, which is very clearly his, but in the intent of its images.
In situating the audience within the perspective of the SEALs, without much detail other than the specifics of their experience that day, the film leaves open the contradications of their presence: the clanging footsteps of decked out soldiers in a quiet neighbourhood at night; breaking through walls in their chosen campout site, waking terrified families up from their slumber and shoving them in a room to wait, silently, for hours, under threat of guns, all while telling them that this is all good and normal and they’ll be fine; sending Iraqi military escorts first in line out into live fire as human shields and cannon fodder without a second’s thought paid to their humanity; a final narrative image of the wreckage left behind, for no apparent reason or worthy goal. It’s the absence of context as a form of clarity.
As in Starship Troopers, there’s a sick sense of humour to all the destruction and mayhem, though Warfare’s images of dismbowled bodies and booming explosions don’t leave much room for laughter. Still, one feels the appropriate smirk on Garland’s face in the film’s final sequence: a montage of photos and clips breaking the fourth wall. We get footage of some of the actual SEALs visiting the set, photos showing the real individuals involved side-by-side with photos of the actors playing them. It’s typical, cheesy, based-on-a-true story shit, except here it’s presented with an undercurrent of menace. Unsettling music scores the sequence, in which most of the real-life soldiers have their faces blurred out. What is the audience meant to take away from photo after photo of smiling actor next to blurred out snap of a guy at some base overseas? Nothing positive, I’d say. The last of these we see are a blurred out photo of the family terrorized throughout the events of the film, followed by the actors in the film cosplaying as the soldiers, smiliing while giving middle fingers to the camera. Fuck yous don’t get much more literal.