1-Year Plan
Post 19: 8/4/05
Over There: An Episode
of άλήθεια (Disclosure)
On
July 27, I saw the opening of the thirteen-episode series Over There (prod. Steven
Bochco) in a somewhat desolate area of Detroit near the old Tiger Stadium, now a
neighborhood of
low-rent but pleasant bars and clubs. Actually, "perceived" is a
better term; a number of us were celebrating a
friend's birthday even as the Iraq War, or a
fictionalized version of it, was playing behind the drinking and talking on a
large, sports-style screen. There would have been, a month earlier, an audience
for the Detroit–San Antonio playoffs around that very screen. Now, a visualization of the war
was being unfolded in a series of disconnected scenes: simulated fire fights as
viewed through color-coded night-vision lenses; carefully staged monologues of isolated
soldiers facing agonizing choices; random, dissociated images of blown-apart torsos or
limbs; and hyperrealistic tableaux of
soldiers behind the scenes— all trying to construct an affect-laden simulacrum of really being "over there." Except that "over there"
is, in fact, a window on the unrepresentable: seeing and the inability to
see are equally the case. What was on the screen was something one could never see,
either "over there" or through the distorting effects of media, yet what one
could not see was everything on display:
not only the TV series, but the bar, the crowd, everyday life. The derealizing
effect of The Matrix's sense of another world underneath or parallel to a
virtual one becomes the real content of a televisual war. Everyone knows the
war is going on, and yet that fact is only perceived through the lenses of a fundamental
denial. It seems to be the task of this experiment in alienated media to
see if mimicking that effect could bring about a sudden moment of
άλήθεια, a disclosure.
As The
New York Times review points out, this is the first time a fictional
account of an on-going, unresolved war has been produced as a popular
entertainment in real time. During World War II, war movies were
generally made away from the front, and dramatized the effects of the absent
conflict going on "over there." Even earlier, of course, one finds the phrase in George M. Cohan's hysterical celebration of the
nonplace of World War I, "Over There." In the postwar period,
depictions of combat, in the
stylized genres of the war movie that developed, always had
to deal with the relation of violent (heroic or purposeless) events in terms of
larger motivations that were always the point. Whatever meaningful or
meaningless action had occurred, it was an index to the narrative within a larger
determination of war's meaning or tragedy. It is in this sense that the
world wars, and their narratives of affirmation, continued in the negativity and
nonnarration of representations of
the Vietnam War (Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse
Now), all the way to the end of that period as declared by
George Bush, Sr., with the first war in Iraq. The 90s, on the other hand, presented
Americans with a series of wars (Rwanda, Somalia, the Middle East, Kosovo,
Chechnya) whose motivations were not directly mappable onto narrative frames,
either positively or negatively. It was in this free fall of narrative
indeterminacy that the nonnarrative moment of 9/11 took place—not as the start
of a new story but as something that, finally, could not be brought into one. While
there have been any number of attempts to narrate the post–9/11 world and its
wars, what Over There shows is that none of these badly constructed
narratives
have been accepted as an account of the event of the Iraq War. The war
is simply a subtraction from the otherwise ordinary daily life that is taking
place; any attempt to narrate that event can only be seen as a subtraction from the
present.
This subtractive logic and its unraveling of narrative continue in the second
episode, which I watched at home on August 3. Peak moments from the previous episode cue up a
series of flashbacks of the combat (or noncombat) we have already seen:
the explosion by the side of the road; the soldier's wife in bed with another
man while his video message fails to get through. Framed by nonnarrative, the
narrative of the episode concerns a unit of soldiers ordered to set up a checkpoint
outside a town where combat troops are looking for a high-value target;
seemingly leaderless, the soldiers have very little idea what they are
supposed to do or ought to expect. Predictably, racial and class tensions erupt at
this point, to be put in perspective when the first of four Iraqi vehicles drives
out of the desert directly toward the roadblock and will not stop,
in a metonymy of 9/11 and the inexorable assault of the terrorist planes on the
World Trade Center.
The soldiers are transfixed, try to remember their procedures, rationality
crumbling as the insane car just keeps on coming. Quite naturally they open fire and massacre
everyone inside, who had seemed hellbent on—what? For the next twenty-four hours,
fearful of the bomb the car might contain and without procedures to deal with
it, the soldiers let it
smolder while the bodies are inside pecked at
by vultures, a "realistic" detail. The arrival of a replacement in the form of Tariq, an Arab-American from
Detroit (metonymy for race and class antagonism) offers a possibility for
interpreting this event, as he claims to understand where the men are coming from (Syria) by their dress and their Ray-Ban sunglasses.
Explaining why they had come to die in Iraq, he observes, “It’s like being a
hippie in 1969 and then hearing about Woodstock. I mean, how could you not go,
you know?”—a disturbingly wrong metaphor that links hippies to terrorists, hedonism to violence,
60s to the present, but which is quickly rejected. The
overall point of such discarded metaphors is that the soldiers are otherwise
without a framework to understand
what is happening. Pressing toward a disclosure, Tariq rigs up a device to open the trunk, and presto, the
narrative is clarified as a trunkload of C-4 explosive rips
the car apart. Proof of guilt (there were WMDs) follows unsanctioned massacre
(we're not a trigger-happy rogue state) in only twenty-four hours, even
as the next three incidents qualify such certainty.
The first incident condenses the shift from 9/11 nonnarrative to provisional
narrative with the invasion of Iraq, motivated by a cause that was to
be discovered after the fact—except that it was not, there were no WMDs. In
this fictional scene, WMDs are conveniently identified and their threat is defused—except that the larger
narrative is now even more unclear. What was supposed to
happen next, the sequence suggests, once we had found we were justified in invading Iraq
by the discovery of WMDs? The next car approaching the barricade contains three
terrified young women in head scarves ("old ladies," the inspecting
soldier remarks) who manage to make it through, muttering "America
good" as their prayerful thanks. Procedures, however, still are not
observed, their trunk is not inspected; who knows what such duplicitous women
might have concealed? When the next car looms out of the desert, failing to halt, again the soldiers open fire, hoping for the magic restoration of narrative. Only this time it's
an old man and a little girl; both are pointlessly slaughtered. One soldier goes
to pieces at this, but what effect can that have? When the fourth car approaches the
checkpoint, Tariq, the enlightened Arab-American, tries to show how it is done;
approaching the halted car, he questions an older couple in
Arabic; everything seems to be going well until a cell phone goes off in the trunk of the car.
Sensing a trick, Tariq panics and shoots both the man and his wife, but when he opens the magic trunk,
he finds a young man
who is probably the son of the couple, whom they were probably trying to smuggle
away
from the combat. He is ordered out of the trunk as another soldier
screams, "If he makes one move with his hands, shoot him on the spot." Total
dead: four Iraqis, two Syrians. One "prisoner." No larger purpose is served; no one
knows how many mistakes have been made; we never find out the result of the
mission. (Interspersed throughout this sequence is a counterplot involving the soldier
whose leg was blown off the previous week; his alcoholic father, in total denial of his
son, is flown out for a pointless encounter. The soldier wants to get back to
his unit and not abandon his men as his father had done him [as had been done in
Vietnam], but such willfulness is simply an effect of his injury, which sooner or later he
will have to accept.)
That's entertainment, circa 2005. We are watching the
structure of our own denial, both of the war and of the narrative we are within—the
co-occurrence of the series and the war implies that no narrative can ever
contain both.
There must be a disconnect between violence in Iraq and narrative on the screen. What we see, then,
is what cannot be seen when we are telling ourselves the story we think we are
within, which with every unraveling trope returns to an unimaginable
event, to the failed connection of one event to the next. This is a window, a disclosure. One
only hopes that
this use of nonnarrative will have an unraveling effect on the profitable
machinery that drives the vehicle of the war through its episodic unfolding.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the out-going Wolfowitz and in-coming Bolton, nameless
generals, the media
machine, the military-industrial-prison complex—should be troubled by this inversion of the unreal spectacle they have
created out of the unknowable event. We have returned to the Vietnam War on television,
at least for thirteen weeks, now located in the
fictions we tell ourselves. The potential result is a raising of consciousness
that should be a beacon for who oppose the war, who must continue to do so, but who for how long
have been living life as a disconnect. Existence in Iraq, the war on our screens, is an elsewhere
that must be disclosed!
Reviews:
Nancy Fraser, "The Yanks Are Coming," New
Yorker
Alessandra Staley, "The Drama of Iraq, While It Still
Rages," New
York Times
Dana Stevens, "War (in a General Sense) is Hell, MSN
News
Interview with Steven Bochco, "Over There Peers into
Soldier's Lives in Iraq," NPR
[Text copyright ©
Barrett Watten 2005. Not to be reprinted
without permission, except in
short excerpts in electronic media.]