Cinema of Empire and Exception

 

 

Gods and Generals (2003) Directed by  Stephen Lang. Cast: Jeff Daniels, Robert Duvall, Stephen Lang, Mira Sorvino, et al

Gods and Generals centers on the short career of Stonewall Jackson, a hero-martyr of the Confederate States of America. The relatively unknown Stephen Lang, who starred in 1990’s Gettysburg (to which Gods and Generals is a prequel) plays Jackson as an early-Victorian David Koresh prone to spasms of logorrhea. Whether extolling the book of Samuel as a model of effective writing, or, mounted splendidly on horseback, gazing down on his faithful slave/cook and explaining that the War Between the States is in fact a matter of defending the Homeland rather than the unpleasant, moribund institution of slave-ocracy, Jackson perorates with all the clutter and sweep of a tidal wave flattening a beach resort . In this respect, Gods and Generals not only aspires to literacy, but continues the corrupt tradition of American cinema’s representations of slavery. Though cinematic tactics have changed– from DW Griffith’s grand White Supremacist apologetics in Birth of a Nation to the remarkably enlightened planter who frees his slaves and even finds multicultural safe-haven from snide British killers in Mel Gibson’s The Patriot– American film never fails to distort the wages of slavery either in stripes and lacerations or the profits accrued for White Christian capitalists. That tradition continues somewhat altered in films such as Cold Mountain, which exhibits the defining traits of an exceptionalist strand of cinema cleansed of history: in that film slaves are distant figures laboring in the fields, present for less than a minute.

True to his historical counterpart, Lang’s Stonewall is a man aflame with Jesus, a fire that only exacerbates the epic scale of his contradictions. Informed he will be leading Confederate volunteers into battle, Stonewall chastely enjoins his young wife to read Scripture,  an idealizing gesture Lang uses to invoke Gilded Age moral virtue. Yet God, the horizon of all meaning for the general, affords darker martial pleasures as a means of libidinal outlet. Prim as a schoolgirl with the ladies, Stonewall bellows “Kill them all” in the heat of battle, thereby demonstrating that sexual rectitude and ardent patriotism are the private and public expressions of a powerful fundamentalist zeal. Significantly, sentiments concerning home do not extend to the nation as a whole but solely to the Cotton States, Virginia in particular. In a riveting scene a mere half hour into the story Stoney argues passionately for the necessity of the bayonet as the noblest and most apposite weapon against the invading northern army.  Again Lang attempts to complicate and elevate Jackson’s character: such a choice of arms is the outcome of a education in the Classics, an emulation of Thuycididean phalanxes lined up against barbarian hordes.

In one of Gods and Generals’s most startling sequences, Stones gets a finger blown off in his first battle and spends the rest of the carnage yelling, mangled hand lifted elegantly as if waiting for a tray of martinis, while local civil war re-enactors are PG-13ed to death. In another– Ted Turner and Sen. Phil Gramm ’s (R-TX) cameo– dandified southern gentry chortle in Confederate costume while a Texas fancylad sings and claps. That Phil would actually don a CSA uniform indicates his weak grasp of the potential power that visual image might have with certain members of his constituency. Not poor enough to get drafted to go to Vietnam, here Phil takes the opportunity to make it up by grimacing uncomfortably for the camera, girdled in braid and sash.

Yet G&G raises the issue of the Civil War epic as a subgenre, and what shared characteristics unite these kinds of films. DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) is some kind of paradigm, though surely there are earlier silents that treat the same set of events. Broadly speaking, BON and G&G share a north-south structure, drifting between domestic tableaux in both regions. Stoney prays at home in Virginia while Mira Sorvino, ensconsed in her parlor in Pepperidge Farms, quotes the kind of longwinded, Swinburnian trash that Mathew Arnold defended in that manifesto of bourgeois aesthetics, Culture and Anarchy. The effect of all this grandiloquence– King James hexameter and late-Romantic narrative verse– is to bleed these scenes of any psychological clarity.  G&G is so baroque, so excessively ornamental, that it becomes virtually impossible to absorb the narrative as history. In this sense the film departs from Birth of a Nation even as it retains Griffith’s Victorian sensibilities. Actors in painstakingly accurate uniforms declaim floridly while rank upon rank of anonymous soldiers fall into the grass. Yet the audience never sees the homes of these soldiers because the film is more concerned with the mysteries of ruling class domesticity than the lives of those who fought on foot. 

Predictably it’s the Irish who work the hardest in this version of the Civil War. Irishness performs the critical function of representing one of the most significant and gendered themes of civil war: brother fighting brother. In keeping with the it-wasn’t-slavery thesis so popular amongst certain revisionists, one Mick remarks on the crushing irony that the Southern Irish are only fighting their Northern countrymen in order to defend their new homes.  Once again, the similarity of this logic to the rhetoric of DHS raises the possibility that G&G is in fact a kind of ideological template for the loose confederation of influence and interests that is the 21st century Right. All of the major features are there: a deep-fried evangelism, parochialism construing itself as patriotism, a psychotic disregard for one’s own moral and ethical contradictions, arrogance, blood-lust.

 

The Torturer’s Horse

Iraq has become the other scene of American life, a kind of geopolitical limbo that exists beyond the horizon of intelligibility, at least for those Americans who manage to breach the cocoon of their everyday lives. Surfacing from our mediatized narcosis we gaze past the computer screen out the window onto the street and imagine what it would be like to see our neighbors screaming and bleeding on the pavement, to feel the buildings shake from heavy weapons fire. Later, as we go slack in the moment before sleep, we brush against the fantasy of the door snapped off its hinges and half a dozen bellowing, armed men crashing into the room kicking over the furniture. Or not. It’s tempting to succumb to the vague conviction that nobody knows what anybody else is thinking, that the apparent apathy and disconnectedness of acquaintances and passersby regarding the US occupation of Iraq and its larger imperial project of dominating the “dark corners of the world” (as one of El Busho’s speechwriters once phrased it) is endemic, generalized, the symptom of a cultural zombification which could only be interrupted by some cataclysmic event. 

The kids who still watch television have a reservoir of selected and approved images, bytes and clips to draw from whenever Iraq enters the conversation. The dead boy’s mother jabbering incoherently; the American soldier– lean or beefy, tall or of middling height, padded with gear, gloved, booted, helmeted– virtually erased as a person by his equipment; the sprightly dignitary, girdled with kevlar, smiling, palpably thrilled to be in the midst of well-trained, purposive men and women whose destinies, directly or indirectly, he shapes. 

Six years gone and the Iraq War image-system has expanded into a minor constellation:  from the obscene abstractions of policy makers and pundits and technocrats concretized in ink– the print cacophony of position and rebuttal and counterposition and reiteration– to pixilated YouTube “videos” of resistance operations: the odd US soldier dropped by a sniper, another humvee buckling from an IED blast, a man in a keffiyeh firing an RPG. There is a surplus of such signs and messages, and they have become so ubiquitous they no longer encourage reflection but function as a somewhat interesting yet insubstantial scrim against which we live our lives.

Meanwhile the occupation and its strange inchoate politics, their mass mediation, proceeds according to a principle by which what is revealed remains hidden– airstrike, kidnapping closed-door meeting. New “actors” emerge: “militias” morph into “criminal gangs”; the Sunni-Shia narrative, which was always an intentionally and dangerously stupid oversimplification, fragments and coalesces. Nobody really knows what’s happening, possibly those who are in Iraq least of all. 

And here, in the US, New Babylon, where we are permitted to see parts of the world in order to ensure we remain insulated from it, “the dogs,” as Auden observes, “go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”