movie review: lebanon

Spoiler alert.  Actually I'm pretty much going to destroy this movie, so...fair warning.

Samuel Maoz's highly praised film Lebanon is the perfect crystallization of the Israeli national tendency to want to be both victim and oppressor.  Set during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (in which Maoz was a participant), the film follows four young soldiers who drive a tank into a Lebanese town, then seem genuinely surprised to find themselves attacked while invading someone else's country.

Visually, the film is quite amazing.  Staged almost entirely inside the belly of the tank, our only glimpse of the outside world is through the cross-hairs of the gunner's sights.  The visual trick of being able to zoom in on a target leads to some breathtaking moments early in the film as victims of the war stare straight into the camera at us.  Unfortunately, this slender thread of human connection is broken the moment the tank is hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.  From then on in, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fears and suffering of our protagonists embedded in their rolling fortress.

The film's visual style is an unintentional (I think) metaphor for Maoz's country.  Encased in iron, carrying weapons of mass destruction, the guys in the tank are virtually indestructible.  But they are still terrified.  Believing themselves to be surrounded by enemies, they react with hysterical, disproportionate violence, and in doing so make their worst fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Sealed into a permanent war machine, their only view of the outside world is through a gun sight.  And if you view the world through a gun sight, it's not too long before every human starts to look like a target.

The soldiers spend most of the film in various states of mortal terror.  Okay, I get it.  War is scary.  But in the back of my mind, there's a little voice that can't help saying, "Dude.  You're in a fucking TANK."  Imagine how scary that war would be if you didn't have an enormous white-phosphorus-shooting tin can to protect yourself with.

Many a glowing review has used words like "searing," "harrowing" and "sobering" to describe the violent things the characters see and do.  And yes, these soldiers kill civilians--but only under carefully pre-selected conditions.  There are two instances of fairly graphic carnage right in the beginning of the film.  In one incident, the tank opens fire on an old man driving a chicken truck.  This is the second car to come down the road that the tank is blocking--after a car carrying gun-wielding militants, who have the audacity to kill an invading Israeli soldier.  In the second incident, the tank crew blows away a family in a half-destroyed apartment--but only because gun-wielding militants (again) are using the mother as a human shield.  Said mother then has the temerity to ask the Israeli soldiers what happened to her daughter (who's dead) and freak out when a soldier rips off her nightgown, which has caught on fire (he was protecting her, see.)

In each incident, the violence of the Israelis is only a reaction--a hesitant, guilt-riddled reaction--to the true initiators of violence, who everyone knows are Arabs.  Keffiyah-swathed, nameless, Kalashnikov-wielding Arabs who use women and children as human shields.  (Sound familiar?)  So you see?  The tender young Israeli soldiers didn't want to kill civilians.  The terrorists made them do it.  Compared with this display of hand-wringing and self-pity, there seems to be something refreshingly honest about folks like the Wikileaks Apache helicopter crew, laughing as they mow down Iraqi civilians like targets in a first-person-shooter game.  At least those guys aren't pretending to have any conscience left.

Lebanon shares strategy and tactics with another highly-praised war movie to which it's been compared, The Hurt Locker.  Both films achieve the sleight-of-hand of making the invaders look morally superior while showing Arabs as victims of other Arabs.  Of course, no attempt is made to explain any of the complexities of a war that had already been going on for seven years before Israeli planes and tanks came smashing in.

The leering Phalange militiamen who show up halfway through the film are appropriately creepy, but they're also a foil--the Israelis look downright civilized compared to those gap-toothed, swaggering butchers.  The Israelis even protect their Syrian prisoner, the same guy who fucked up their tank.  Like the guys in The Hurt Locker who risk their lives to defuse a poor helpless sop of a suicide bomber, these soldiers are so noble they go out of their way to protect some Arabs from the other Arabs who want to kill them.

Of course, the war in Lebanon was a civil war, so Arabs did kill other Arabs, in large numbers.  As for the fact that the war's most notorious massacre, the slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, was carried out with Israel's knowledge, aid, and encouragement, by those Arabs who happened to be their allies...well, this isn't a movie about that, right?  Let's just focus on the guys in the tank.

And here we come to another element that Lebanon and The Hurt Locker have in common.  By insisting on such a narrow, intensely subjective perspective, the film scrubs away all context for the war.  Like in The Hurt Locker, the war is just a setting--devoid of cause, history, and power dynamics--a neutral backdrop for the characters' moral dilemmas.  Civilians and even The Enemy pop up like video game characters and disappear just as quickly, nameless extras in the Real Story, which is about how traumatic this all is--for the perpetrators.

This is the problem with this kind of intense soldier's-eye-view movies.  By stripping away all context, you also remove responsibility.  The fact that our heroes are invaders, occupiers, and would-be conquerors gets pushed out of the picture.  They're just guys doing their job.  We're supposed to feel for them and with them, and forget to ask whether their job is justified in the first place.

Lebanon has generally gotten rave reviews from US critics--it had an 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes when I last checked.  Perhaps this is because Americans have been making this very same type of war movie for at least fifty years, albeit with slightly less pathos.  (Americans proactively shoulder the burden of protecting the free world without complaint, while Israelis are only fighting because everyone's out to get them--a small but crucial difference in national mythology.)

Of course the vast majority of American war movies are from the invading perspective--we're usually the ones doing the invading, after all.  It has become so natural for us to privilege the perspective of occupier over that of defender or civilian that we don't even think about it--we just assume that's how war movies are supposed to work.

Perspective is powerful.  It tells us whom we are supposed to identify with, whose emotional experience we are supposed to be sharing.  What unconscious effect does it have to be constantly looking over the shoulder of an invading soldier in our war movies, to be looking through the rifle sights instead of into the barrel as it's pointed at us?  I think it just reinforces an already strongly-held American assumption, that war is something that happens in other places and to other people.  It's never our homes, our neighborhoods, our families under the bombs.  That fate is for other, unluckier people who have nothing in common with us.