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Brian De Palma's Iraq War film Redacted opens in London this week, trailing in its wake the opprobrium it attracted in its director's homeland.
De Palma is no stranger to controversy: ultraviolent movies such as Scarface and Dressed to Kill have made him the bête noire of feminists and reactionaries alike. But even he must have been a little shocked by the calls for his imprisonment.
Let's get this straight, Redacted isn't a particularly good film, nor is De Palma a great director. But with its jerky, impressionistic collage of YouTube video clips and hand-held digital camera footage, the film goes some way to addressing a yawning hole at the heart of American politics: what is actually happening in Iraq?
Redacted is based on the gang-rape, murder and burning of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza Al-Janabi, by US soldiers two years ago. They went on to murder her parents and younger sister as well. The word "redact" means to revise something in order to make it suitable for publication, and De Palma's - perhaps not very subtle - point is that this is precisely what has happened with the war in Iraq. Of course, in an environment so difficult for journalists to operate in, that isn't difficult to achieve. But even so the US government's spin doctors have done a splendid job keeping the lid on the cesspit they've helped dig.
And are still digging. Ever since the troop "surge" at the end of last summer, most news sources have toed the US government's line that there have been massive improvements in security. Yet the reality of the situation - that the capital has been partitioned - has been deftly obscured, as has the way former Ba'athist " terrorists" have been co-opted wholesale to become new "militias". Bombings killing hundreds still regularly occur.
If this is peace, it's a fragile and bloody one, but no one really wants to scream at the outgoing emperor that his clothes remain in shreds. Dubya gave a speech last week continuing to defend "water-boarding" and other forms of torture; he went on to sing his own version of The Green, Green Grass of Home at a slap-up dinner on Friday night. He is truly the most sentimental and cruel of men.
Yet with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tearing chunks out of each other on the issue of national security neither has any real desire to expose the current situation for the farrago it truly is. Besides, neither of them has a decent plan on how to extract US troops without leaving a regional meltdown in their wake. As for John McCain - he is the surgemeister.
People have been saying how odd it is that the recent crop of US Iraq movies have scored so low at the box office and cited the success of those about the Vietnam War in contrast. But Apocalypse Now et al were mostly filmed five years after the last helicopter lifted from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon; it's going to take easily that long before the disaster of Iraq really percolates into the American body politic.
Reader views (1)
Wow a film about Iraq by Hollywood that pours shame on the war. Quelle Suprise!
It's a shame Brian de Palma was not around during the second world war. His devastating expose on how the Allies went to war against that nice Mr. Hitler, causing millions of casualties to civilians on the simple excuse that he was murdering his own people and kept invading other people's countries, would have really appealed to Mr. Self, who unlike the ten of thousands of Iraqis being ethnically killed by their leader, lives in a free society where he and Mr. de Palma can make films like this.
In case it is lost on Mr. Self, war is hell, and should be avoided whenever possible, but sometimes, you just have to fight for human rights, even if it is an inconvenient interruption to your need for a nice quiet life. And when you fight, and the fight is as dirty as the terrorists make it, mistakes happen and innocent people die.
There are revisionists now saying the Allies should not have gone to war against Germany and people who say that there is never an excuse for war.
Try telling that to my large family in Poland. Oh no..sorry you can't - they were all killed in 1942.In a camp.
- Stephen Rothbart, Prague, Czech Republic, 12/03/2008 11:38
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