The best thing about writing a review of 127 Hours is that I don't have to include a spoiler warning. If you're going to see the movie, based on the true-life survival story of climber Aron Ralston, you probably already know that it involves watching a dude amputate his own arm after five days pinned under a boulder at the bottom of a canyon.
The clever thing about the movie is that it uses this foreknowledge to its advantage. In the film's opening montage, completely quotidian snippets of Ralston's pre-hiking routine--filling a water bottle, fumbling around for a Swiss Army knife--vibrate with tension, because we know what's coming. In the first act, director Danny Boyle (who has hereby redeemed himself from the spectacularly improbable and wildly overrated Slumdog Millionaire) plays with this tension with an almost sadistic glee, faking us out with trips and spills until we reach the final, fateful slot canyon in which man and boulder meet.
A movie where the protagonist spends two-thirds of his screen time alone, immobilized, in a single location, is the kind of thing that tends to get described as "unfilmable." And yet 127 Hours doesn't have a slow microsecond in it. If the movie were a person, it would have 0% body fat. The film zips through its hour-and-forty-minute running time with a frenetic energy that mirrors its protagonist, a happy-go-lucky daredevil so overconfident, or self-absorbed, that he thought nothing of going on a solo hike in a remote area without telling anyone where he was going to be.
Much of the credit for keeping the film moving goes to James Franco's exceptional performance, and the smart, deftly-written script he has to work with. In the middle of a landscape of epic proportions, his character's journey is really all interior, and he takes us through it with a naturalistic performance that never feels overwrought in the most dramatic of circumstances. But equally important is Boyle's willingness to slip effortlessly between reality and Aron's thoughts, dreams, memories, fantasies and hallucinations, creating a highly subjective landscape in which we're maybe as close to being inside someone's head as you can get in a movie. Never again will you take things like water and sunlight for granted in quite the same way.
After hearing all the hype about the amputation scene, I was bracing for something stomach-churning. While it's certainly very bloody, I didn't feel it was unnecessarily drawn-out. It's true that I have a fairly high tolerance for gore, but honestly, there was never a moment I wanted to look away--because the filmmakers had successfully made me care enough about the character that I wanted to see if he could do it. I think this is a very important point about showing any kind of violence or pain on screen: the more invested we are in the characters, the more likely it is to feel earned and not gratuitous. I kept watching because I was rooting for him, and I wasn't the only one. When the amputation is complete and Ralston finds himself suddenly, finally, separated from the boulder that's been his nemesis for the past five days, the audience in the screening I went to cheered. It wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but it was pretty awesome.
In fact, the dominant feeling the film leaves you with is one of euphoria, the pure joy of seeing someone triumph in a seemingly impossible situation and get another chance at life. Here we have a perpetual limit-pusher, an adrenaline junkie who is always flirting with the prospect of death until the day a real life-or-death scenario meets him smack in the face. And, when push comes to shove, he finds himself not only equal to the challenge, but humbler and wiser for it. Even if you're the kind of movie-goer who's not sure you can handle the arm-severing scene, this is one that's worth pushing your own limits for.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
oh yeah. i live in new york city now.
I moved back to New York last week, after two years and two months away. It's fucking sweet. I haven't even been doing anything all that spectacular: hanging out with friends I haven't seen in a while, eating yummy food (although in moderation, as I am rather poor at the moment), knowing I can get anywhere on my own at any time of day/night. But sometimes I'll catch myself walking down the street with a little smile on my face, just basking in the awesomeness: the city's energy, its pace, its diversity, the way it can seem tough and welcoming at the same time. What more can I say? New York is my home.
I'm going to write more about my new temporary neighborhood, Washington Heights. But for now, in celebration of my return, I give you a pitch-perfect New Yorker post from the Village Voice, 50 Reasons to Be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City.
UPDATE! The 50 reasons have a follow-up post, which is almost as awesome.
I'm going to write more about my new temporary neighborhood, Washington Heights. But for now, in celebration of my return, I give you a pitch-perfect New Yorker post from the Village Voice, 50 Reasons to Be Pretty Damn Euphoric You Live in New York City.
UPDATE! The 50 reasons have a follow-up post, which is almost as awesome.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
notes from joe sacco at nyu
Joe Sacco is one of my artistic and literary heroes. Although my work tends more toward historical fiction and his toward journalism, if I had to make a list of influences he would definitely be near the top. So when I found out that he was speaking at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, I was there.
I hope that excerpts of the conversation between Sacco and NYU professor Zachary Lockman will be up on the Primary Sources website soon. The interview was fascinating and could have gone on longer, and the questions from the standing-room-only audience were sophisticated and thoughtful. In the meantime here are some notes I took from the event:
- Sacco considers himself "a cartoonist who works in the medium of journalism"
- He talked a bunch about growing up in Australia (where he lived from age one to age twelve) among a mishmash of European refugees in the '60s. His parents had lived through the bombing and siege of Malta. Everyone around him talked about the war. When friends got together they would tell stories about living through World War II. "War didn't seem like such a foreign idea; it seemed like something that could happen in people's lives." He contrasted this to the US, where war is a distant and totally abstract idea to a large percentage of the population. "The US is fighting two wars right now, but you'd never know it, unless you know someone who is over there."
- Questioning mainstream/corporate journalism and learning about Palestine went hand in hand. Once Sacco realized the only thing he'd ever heard about Palestinians was "terrorist," he started becoming seriously disillusioned with the US mainstream media. "This [journalism] was what I had studied, but it didn't give me what I needed" to understand the world.
- He hates the concept of "objectivity" as it's frequently talked about in mainstream journalism and said he prefers to strive for honesty instead. He talks more about this idea here, and his good friend Chris Hedges elaborates on the theme here.
- He said that he did not always enjoy drawing Footnotes in Gaza. He found drawing some of the scenes of violence "repellent," and says he may step away from war comics for a while in the future. At the same time, he discovered that no one had really investigated the massacres described in Footnotes, and felt that if someone didn't record the stories of the now-elderly survivors soon, they were at risk of disappearing from the historical record forever.
- He had a very insightful thing to say about drawing versus photography. He talked about how the best images from photojournalism are arresting because they capture the action at the exact right moment. (He mentioned this photo specifically.) Well, in comics, every image can be at the "exact right moment," because you're drawing it. He said that this is a powerful tool and that you can overuse it, that you can "bludgeon" the audience with it if you use it too much.
- I asked why he so frequently draws Israeli soldiers from a perspective where we can't see their faces. I had kind of assumed this was a conscious choice, a la The Battle of Algiers, to tilt our sympathies toward the humanity of the occupied people. But his answer somehow managed to be both more interesting and more humane. Referring to Footnotes in Gaza, which depicts two massacres of large numbers of civilians, he said he couldn't actually imagine what was going through the minds of the soldiers at the moment they pulled the trigger. "I couldn't draw their faces because I didn't know what they were thinking, and I didn't want to assume anything." Other than "a few sadists, who always come to the fore in situations like this...these were ordinary men." And, since this was 1956, it's very likely that some of these soldiers were themselves refugees, survivors of occupation and genocide. He said after drawing Footnotes, he realized this was something he needed to understand, and is "working on a project now" that will help him get more insight into this particular element.
- As you might have guessed from his self-depiction in his comic books, Joe Sacco is really self-deprecating, humble and approachable in person. He signed and drew something for everyone who brought a book, and when I mentioned I was writing a film about Gaza he asked questions about it and wrote "Good luck with your work" when he signed my copy of Palestine. Which means he was actually listening to my somewhat nervous babbling instead of just pretending to listen while he drew something.
I hope that excerpts of the conversation between Sacco and NYU professor Zachary Lockman will be up on the Primary Sources website soon. The interview was fascinating and could have gone on longer, and the questions from the standing-room-only audience were sophisticated and thoughtful. In the meantime here are some notes I took from the event:
- Sacco considers himself "a cartoonist who works in the medium of journalism"
- He talked a bunch about growing up in Australia (where he lived from age one to age twelve) among a mishmash of European refugees in the '60s. His parents had lived through the bombing and siege of Malta. Everyone around him talked about the war. When friends got together they would tell stories about living through World War II. "War didn't seem like such a foreign idea; it seemed like something that could happen in people's lives." He contrasted this to the US, where war is a distant and totally abstract idea to a large percentage of the population. "The US is fighting two wars right now, but you'd never know it, unless you know someone who is over there."
- Questioning mainstream/corporate journalism and learning about Palestine went hand in hand. Once Sacco realized the only thing he'd ever heard about Palestinians was "terrorist," he started becoming seriously disillusioned with the US mainstream media. "This [journalism] was what I had studied, but it didn't give me what I needed" to understand the world.
- He hates the concept of "objectivity" as it's frequently talked about in mainstream journalism and said he prefers to strive for honesty instead. He talks more about this idea here, and his good friend Chris Hedges elaborates on the theme here.
- He said that he did not always enjoy drawing Footnotes in Gaza. He found drawing some of the scenes of violence "repellent," and says he may step away from war comics for a while in the future. At the same time, he discovered that no one had really investigated the massacres described in Footnotes, and felt that if someone didn't record the stories of the now-elderly survivors soon, they were at risk of disappearing from the historical record forever.
- He had a very insightful thing to say about drawing versus photography. He talked about how the best images from photojournalism are arresting because they capture the action at the exact right moment. (He mentioned this photo specifically.) Well, in comics, every image can be at the "exact right moment," because you're drawing it. He said that this is a powerful tool and that you can overuse it, that you can "bludgeon" the audience with it if you use it too much.
- I asked why he so frequently draws Israeli soldiers from a perspective where we can't see their faces. I had kind of assumed this was a conscious choice, a la The Battle of Algiers, to tilt our sympathies toward the humanity of the occupied people. But his answer somehow managed to be both more interesting and more humane. Referring to Footnotes in Gaza, which depicts two massacres of large numbers of civilians, he said he couldn't actually imagine what was going through the minds of the soldiers at the moment they pulled the trigger. "I couldn't draw their faces because I didn't know what they were thinking, and I didn't want to assume anything." Other than "a few sadists, who always come to the fore in situations like this...these were ordinary men." And, since this was 1956, it's very likely that some of these soldiers were themselves refugees, survivors of occupation and genocide. He said after drawing Footnotes, he realized this was something he needed to understand, and is "working on a project now" that will help him get more insight into this particular element.
- As you might have guessed from his self-depiction in his comic books, Joe Sacco is really self-deprecating, humble and approachable in person. He signed and drew something for everyone who brought a book, and when I mentioned I was writing a film about Gaza he asked questions about it and wrote "Good luck with your work" when he signed my copy of Palestine. Which means he was actually listening to my somewhat nervous babbling instead of just pretending to listen while he drew something.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
haifa, part 1
I have a few half-completed posts from my trip to Palestine with IFPB that I'm trying to turn into completed posts. Here's the first one.
The day after I was interrogated at the Allenby Bridge, I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Haifa. It was the end of a three-week trip and I was pretty exhausted. But we hadn't been anywhere in the north of Israel, my friend M wanted to go with me, and more than anything I wanted to talk to M about what had happened at the bridge, because she's Palestinian and has been interrogated many times by Israeli border officials. So I dragged my luggage up the Old City steps and onto a bus.
She asked me how I was, meaning were there any lingering effects from my border adventure the previous day. I told her I was fine. Of course I was. They'd let me in, right? They hadn't hurt me or anything, and I had never been worried that they would. I knew it wasn't that kind of situation. The worst they were going to do was try to scare me. And in the grand scheme of Israeli repression, what was a little psychological roughing-up, really? It was nothing, I said.
Really, I wanted desperately to talk about it, to pour out the whole story, every detail. I wanted someone to commiserate, to tell me I'd made the right choices, to say, "those bastards," with the shake of the head and the wry half-smile that says, "I've been there." But she said we should be careful what we talked about on the bus, so I held in the story and we talked about other things.
I spent most of the day in a haze of cognitive dissonance, wandering through the stunning ordinariness of Haifa. I got out most of the salient details over coffee in a shopping area that felt oppressively normal. I kept thinking about that quote from Joe Sacco's Palestine:
"Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there's parallel universes. Here? On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards...And over the wall behind closed doors, other things--people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss...other things happening for reasons of national security."
Okay, yeah, my experience wasn't nearly that dramatic. But still. I'd spent a few hours in that other world--or at least in the first circle of it--and today the ordinariness of the normal world that covered it up seemed unbearably criminal and sick.
Throughout the day, little things kept setting me on edge. The soldiers that seemed to be on every bus. A woman's voice with a particular accent. The bag search at the bus stop, which two days ago would have been a minor annoyance, but today felt invasive and icky.
By lunchtime there was a cold twisty knot of anxiety in my stomach, almost enough to keep me from eating. This wasn't a final-exam or a night-before-the-big-pitchfest nervousness, but something deeply wired into my body's emergency response system, an elemental fear. It wasn't the kind you could channel into a burst of adrenaline and focus, but the kind that paralyzed, the kind that made you want to curl up in a ball and hide somewhere. I realized the source of this fear was the thought of going through another Israeli-controlled border terminal (Ben Gurion Airport) in less than 24 hours. I had to do it because I had to get on the plane to go home, but I really, deeply did not want to.
I realized maybe I was not as fine as I'd said I was.
Then I started to get angry. I was angry at them for having so much control over me, and angry at myself for letting them. It felt like something that had been done against my will, this installation of fear. No matter how many times I told myself I wasn't afraid of them, that they didn't intimidate me, that my non-Palestinian identity kept me safe from actual physical harm, it didn't matter. My emergency responses were doing something else.
I was ashamed, too, at the thought that I'd let them get to me. I felt I wasn't living up to the Palestinian standard of toughness. Because what they did to me was so minor, really. Barely a blip on the radar compared to the repression they dish out against Palestinians. But it had still left a mark.
I also felt a kind of backhanded awe for the enormity of the oppressive power Palestinians have to face every day. And I realized why everyone always says they're fine. Because there's always someone who has a worse story. Because everyone feels a responsibility to be tough for everyone else, to shrug it off with a defiant grin and a flash of bravado. Because you don't want to admit how much of a hold they have on you, because if you admit it you might never get out.
I admitted to M that I was feeling really nervous about the airport. "It's helpful to prepare for the worst," she said. This didn't seem like very comforting advice at the time, but it actually turned out to be quite useful. After preparing myself for a strip search and more questioning, the quick bag check and pat down with clothes on, and the fact that the airport security people were merely bored and not hostile, felt like a gift. But that made me a little angry too. Because being only mildly harassed by airport security shouldn't feel like a fucking gift.
The day after I was interrogated at the Allenby Bridge, I got up at the crack of dawn to go to Haifa. It was the end of a three-week trip and I was pretty exhausted. But we hadn't been anywhere in the north of Israel, my friend M wanted to go with me, and more than anything I wanted to talk to M about what had happened at the bridge, because she's Palestinian and has been interrogated many times by Israeli border officials. So I dragged my luggage up the Old City steps and onto a bus.
She asked me how I was, meaning were there any lingering effects from my border adventure the previous day. I told her I was fine. Of course I was. They'd let me in, right? They hadn't hurt me or anything, and I had never been worried that they would. I knew it wasn't that kind of situation. The worst they were going to do was try to scare me. And in the grand scheme of Israeli repression, what was a little psychological roughing-up, really? It was nothing, I said.
Really, I wanted desperately to talk about it, to pour out the whole story, every detail. I wanted someone to commiserate, to tell me I'd made the right choices, to say, "those bastards," with the shake of the head and the wry half-smile that says, "I've been there." But she said we should be careful what we talked about on the bus, so I held in the story and we talked about other things.
I spent most of the day in a haze of cognitive dissonance, wandering through the stunning ordinariness of Haifa. I got out most of the salient details over coffee in a shopping area that felt oppressively normal. I kept thinking about that quote from Joe Sacco's Palestine:
"Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there's parallel universes. Here? On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards...And over the wall behind closed doors, other things--people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss...other things happening for reasons of national security."
Okay, yeah, my experience wasn't nearly that dramatic. But still. I'd spent a few hours in that other world--or at least in the first circle of it--and today the ordinariness of the normal world that covered it up seemed unbearably criminal and sick.
Throughout the day, little things kept setting me on edge. The soldiers that seemed to be on every bus. A woman's voice with a particular accent. The bag search at the bus stop, which two days ago would have been a minor annoyance, but today felt invasive and icky.
By lunchtime there was a cold twisty knot of anxiety in my stomach, almost enough to keep me from eating. This wasn't a final-exam or a night-before-the-big-pitchfest nervousness, but something deeply wired into my body's emergency response system, an elemental fear. It wasn't the kind you could channel into a burst of adrenaline and focus, but the kind that paralyzed, the kind that made you want to curl up in a ball and hide somewhere. I realized the source of this fear was the thought of going through another Israeli-controlled border terminal (Ben Gurion Airport) in less than 24 hours. I had to do it because I had to get on the plane to go home, but I really, deeply did not want to.
I realized maybe I was not as fine as I'd said I was.
Then I started to get angry. I was angry at them for having so much control over me, and angry at myself for letting them. It felt like something that had been done against my will, this installation of fear. No matter how many times I told myself I wasn't afraid of them, that they didn't intimidate me, that my non-Palestinian identity kept me safe from actual physical harm, it didn't matter. My emergency responses were doing something else.
I was ashamed, too, at the thought that I'd let them get to me. I felt I wasn't living up to the Palestinian standard of toughness. Because what they did to me was so minor, really. Barely a blip on the radar compared to the repression they dish out against Palestinians. But it had still left a mark.
I also felt a kind of backhanded awe for the enormity of the oppressive power Palestinians have to face every day. And I realized why everyone always says they're fine. Because there's always someone who has a worse story. Because everyone feels a responsibility to be tough for everyone else, to shrug it off with a defiant grin and a flash of bravado. Because you don't want to admit how much of a hold they have on you, because if you admit it you might never get out.
I admitted to M that I was feeling really nervous about the airport. "It's helpful to prepare for the worst," she said. This didn't seem like very comforting advice at the time, but it actually turned out to be quite useful. After preparing myself for a strip search and more questioning, the quick bag check and pat down with clothes on, and the fact that the airport security people were merely bored and not hostile, felt like a gift. But that made me a little angry too. Because being only mildly harassed by airport security shouldn't feel like a fucking gift.
Monday, October 18, 2010
movie review: budrus
Sometimes I forget that the Palestine I know and love is so very different from the view of Palestine and Palestinians that gets presented in the mainstream media and is absorbed more or less uncontested by most Americans. Anyone who wants to see my Palestine--the real Palestine--should watch Budrus.
Budrus is a good documentary by any standard, but as an education tool it is simply superb. It shoots down so many myths about Palestine and Palestinians all at once--that Palestinians are unreasoning violent terrorists; that Israel is just defending itself; that there is too much ingrained hatred for Palestinians and Israelis to ever live and work together; that Palestinian women and girls are meek and submissive and play no role in the struggle. All these stereotypes and more are soundly demolished in the film's slight one hour and eighteen minute running time.
When the residents of the West Bank town after which the film is named learn that Israel's apartheid wall will slice through their town's land, cutting through the cemetery and separating villagers from most of their agricultural land, they decide to resist, using classic tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. The Israeli army, predictably, responds with disproportionate, punitive violence. The struggle unites local activists from Fatah and Hamas, men and women, young and old, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis. Lead organizer Ayed Morrar's teenage daughter Iltezam is a force unto herself.
The scenes of Palestinian and Israeli activists defending each other against the army are some of the most inspiring moments in the film. You can see two groups of people learning to trust and care about each other like family. "They don't all hate us," realizes Iltezam Morrar, speaking about her new Israeli friends, which is striking because it's usually framed the other way around. You can see the change in the Israeli activists too, how someone from an oppressor settler-colonial society can be transformed by switching sides and throwing their lot in with the oppressed. In those moments, you can see how the whole apartheid system could collapse.
For those already familiar with the history of unarmed resistance in Palestine, Budrus won't present tons of new information. Visitors to the Occupied Palestinian Territories now have the choice of attending one of a dozen or so protests of the type seen in Budrus on any given Friday. What the film does do is tell the story of nonviolent resistance in one West Bank village incredibly well. The filmmakers were there at the right time, and in the right places, and they reveal the transformation of the village through struggle in such an uncomplicated, straightforward way that the film's power doesn't really hit you until some time after you've left the theater.
Budrus is currently playing in film festivals and limited release around the world. Look for a screening near you here.
Budrus is a good documentary by any standard, but as an education tool it is simply superb. It shoots down so many myths about Palestine and Palestinians all at once--that Palestinians are unreasoning violent terrorists; that Israel is just defending itself; that there is too much ingrained hatred for Palestinians and Israelis to ever live and work together; that Palestinian women and girls are meek and submissive and play no role in the struggle. All these stereotypes and more are soundly demolished in the film's slight one hour and eighteen minute running time.
When the residents of the West Bank town after which the film is named learn that Israel's apartheid wall will slice through their town's land, cutting through the cemetery and separating villagers from most of their agricultural land, they decide to resist, using classic tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience. The Israeli army, predictably, responds with disproportionate, punitive violence. The struggle unites local activists from Fatah and Hamas, men and women, young and old, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis. Lead organizer Ayed Morrar's teenage daughter Iltezam is a force unto herself.
The scenes of Palestinian and Israeli activists defending each other against the army are some of the most inspiring moments in the film. You can see two groups of people learning to trust and care about each other like family. "They don't all hate us," realizes Iltezam Morrar, speaking about her new Israeli friends, which is striking because it's usually framed the other way around. You can see the change in the Israeli activists too, how someone from an oppressor settler-colonial society can be transformed by switching sides and throwing their lot in with the oppressed. In those moments, you can see how the whole apartheid system could collapse.
For those already familiar with the history of unarmed resistance in Palestine, Budrus won't present tons of new information. Visitors to the Occupied Palestinian Territories now have the choice of attending one of a dozen or so protests of the type seen in Budrus on any given Friday. What the film does do is tell the story of nonviolent resistance in one West Bank village incredibly well. The filmmakers were there at the right time, and in the right places, and they reveal the transformation of the village through struggle in such an uncomplicated, straightforward way that the film's power doesn't really hit you until some time after you've left the theater.
Budrus is currently playing in film festivals and limited release around the world. Look for a screening near you here.
Monday, October 4, 2010
writing is a job
If I haven't been writing here so much in the past month, it is only because I am busy writing other things. I'm working on two feature scripts in collaboration with other people, plus some of my own stuff, plus organizing a move back to NYC for next month (yay!).
I do have several unfinished posts from my trip to Palestine that I want to get up in the next few weeks, and as November 19 approaches you know you can expect some posts of the wizard inclination. But if I am not writing here so regularly, fear not. I'll be back soon.
I do have several unfinished posts from my trip to Palestine that I want to get up in the next few weeks, and as November 19 approaches you know you can expect some posts of the wizard inclination. But if I am not writing here so regularly, fear not. I'll be back soon.
Friday, September 24, 2010
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.
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.
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