Dry Ice Factory

Northern Pursuit (1943)

Does anybody know what that donut of light with the two stars or plus signs in it is called? I've seen it in other screen caps where light is shining or flashing directly into the lens. Definitely has a toroid shape.

Criterion has released a new version of Ang Lee's Civil War movie that's a bit over ten minutes longer than the theatrical version. I'd seen that earlier version on DVD before and found it a tale of two halves, with the first half being an utterly gripping war story and the second half a strangely mismatched kind of aimless marriage comedy. Watching the new version, I couldn't really see the differences, but the two halves seemed better integrated. I could now see how ambitious the movie was. It's an attempt to wrestle with the same history as previous Civil War epics such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939).

One of the things that disguises this ambition is Lee's typically understated approach. One of the things I've always liked about his movies is how taciturn they are, how nonverbal. There is always a sense that something is going on in the hearts of his characters that cannot be articulated. Another thing that disguises the epic quality of the story is that it happens on the fringes of the Civil War, in the Border War of Missouri and Kansas. All of the fighting is ultimately pointless skirmishing between guerrilla forces that has no effect whatsoever on the final outcome of the great battles back East and in the South. At the core of the movie is the Lawrence Massacre, when a band of men under William Quantrill descended on a Unionist town and murdered 180 unarmed men and boys in the streets and houses. In the movie, this is portrayed as an act of terrorism with no military purpose. The war has unleashed chaos on the land, and the movie raises the question of how order can be restored under these extreme conditions.

Lee explores the question through two major characters, Jake Roedel, who is the son of a Unionist German immigrant, and Daniel Holt, who is a freed slave. Both of them are fighting for the pro-Confederacy bushwhackers because of loyalty to another person -- Jake to a childhood friend whose father was murdered by Unionist Jayhawkers, and Holt to George Clyde, the charismatic Southern gentleman who manumitted him. Both Roedel and Holt slowly change their minds over the course of the movie, and Lee gets the pace of that change exactly right. In fact, Holt is the key to the story, initially treated as a voiceless cipher who gradually emerges from the shadows until we fully understand what motivates him. In his character, Lee captures the main thread of the Civil War: the freeing of the slaves to become independent actors in the history of the country.

If the movie stumbles (and I'm not sure it does), it is still in the final act, which depicts the development of a relationship between Roedel and a war widow, Sue Lee. I think the problem is that her character is not well-developed, because on a surface level this turn of events is exactly the right move. Again, it personalizes the political in the sense that the creation of an ad hoc family (complete with stepchild) is the new order growing out of the chaos of war. Yet unlike Holt, Sue Lee never really gets a story of her own, and thus her relationship with Roedel lacks depth. There is still something aimless about the final scenes in which she and Roedel come to terms despite themselves, and perhaps something stereotypical in the way that she represents the civilizing, socializing domesticity that will heal the wounds of war.

However, over all the movie does a tremendous job of putting American history into a narrative form. The crosscurrents tearing the country apart and pulling it back together are captured in the most intimate details of the characters' lives. The complexity of human experience is laid out both forcefully and delicately. As a drama, it reaches a crescendo halfway through that was physically exhausting both times I've watched it, nearly unbearably intense. It's a war film, and it does not shrink from the damage done, again presented in the most intimate, personal terms. Again and again, it strives to ground the epic, impersonal qualities of history and war in the simple details of daily life and the human comedy. Somehow it manages to make the human choices that form history both concrete and deeply mysterious, perhaps through that effective use of understatement (despite, or in contrast to, the florid, nearly Shakespearean language the characters speak).

This is one I'll no doubt be revisiting, although not lightly. Between this and Titus (also 1999), the movie watching was a bit on the brutal side last weekend.

I tend to be leery of war movies, but based on good reviews and a compelling trailer holyoutlaw and I saw this one at the Egyptian last night. It's about a bomb squad in Iraq in 2004. It is an absolutely riveting, intense experience, since as Luke pointed out you never know what's going to happen next. One of the interesting things about it is that it takes no political stance toward the war, or at least the politics are deeply integrated into the story. There's no discussion of why these American soldiers are in Iraq, what the larger strategic or imperial goals are. It's about three guys trying to survive and perform a job, and it is in particular a character study of one guy who gets off on the adrenaline rush of defusing bombs -- of facing death over and over again.

The narrative is episodic, and the episodes are centered on different kinds of bombs -- IEDs, car bombs, a body bomb, a suicide bomber. They also run into a group of British mercenary bounty-hunters ("contractors") at one point and are involved in a gun battle alongside them. There are episodes between the bomb-defusing and combat where the tension and dread is ramped down and the characters seek release and recovery of their humanity. The camera keeps us in close; we're with the unit, almost part of it. (As with Public Enemies, there is a you-are-there video look, but it's not so anachronistically jarring.) At the same time, just as there isn't much overt political commentary, there isn't much psychological probing. For the most part we are just shown what these soldiers do, and even when what they do is personal or idiosyncratic, it isn't tied to biography or character analysis. The main character doesn't know why he gets off on taking crazy risks any more than we do. The closest we get is a soliloquy spoken to his infant son, in which he tells us how he feels but not why.

The title is enigmatic, perhaps poetic. It's hard to say what it means, but it tugs at understanding. This is a tense, terse, powerful, unsettling film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. It left me almost physically shaken, and yet meditative. It delves unflinchingly into the horrors and dangers of war, and yet it circles around a charismatic figure who gets off on it. At that level, perhaps it is a political statement about America.

Okay, I know that my political posts are about as interesting as, oh, every other uninformed political post on the intertubes, but sometimes I can't help myself.

Anyway, a while back I read that the Marines had requested that there be a restructuring of deployments so that the Army handled Iraq and the Marines handled Afghanistan. I thought at the time that this was the Marines saying that Iraq was an idiotic waste of time and resources. Today the Seattle Times reports that the Secretary of Defense has turned down the proposal, and it contains some black comedy along with an interesting insight into the military perspective.

Marine Corps Commandant James Conway is quoted as giving several reasons for the proposal. First he indicates that things are getting so quiet in Anbar Province that "lance corporals are complaining that they don't have anybody to shoot." Ho ho ho! "But that doesn't drive strategic thinking, of course," he is quick to assure us. Nice to know!

Next comes a more feasible reason: "There's a little bit of a recruiting consideration here in this," he said. More baldly: "Switching to Afghanistan at lower numbers would give Marines more time between combat tours, while appealing to those potential recruits who like the idea of fighting in the country that gave haven to al-Qaida before it carried out its Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Conway said." So it's apparently easier to motivate people to fight their actual enemies! How surprising.

Then comes the punchline: "He referred to the Marines' current duty in Iraq's Anbar province as almost like occupation duty." Yeah, almost! "Occupation is not the right word here, but the long-term security forces, that's not a Marine function," he said.

If "occupation" is not the right word, why is it the first one that occurs to him before he remembers the politically correct one? Still looks to me as though the Marines are saying that Iraq is an idiotic waste of time and resources.

There is an article in today's New York Times about the war of narratives being waged in Lebanon. 'An Israeli cabinet minister, who spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of the topic, said, "The narrative at the end is part of the problem."' Is it a bit bizarre that cabinet members are talking like postmodern lit profs about "narratives"?

'Shlomo Avineri, a former Foreign Ministry official and professor of political science at Hebrew University, said Israel could never prevail in an Arab narrative.' Which calls into question the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword. In this case, they both might be equally futile. Certainly as I've read and listened to various analyses of what's going on in Lebanon over the past couple of weeks, I have a growing sense that this war isn't going to change anything and that everybody is furiously moving their goalposts in attempt to redefine their goals.

'"Israel is trying to frame its narrative now around the most minimal achievement, which is a major setback to the fighting capacity of Hezbollah," Mr. Grinstein [a former Israeli negotiator and director of the Reut Institute, a research group] said. "But the question and the challenge is to frame a narrative of victory around more ambitious objectives."'

For some reason all this talk of framing narratives gives me vertigo. The war will be indecisive, so the battle becomes one of warring narratives. What ever happened to the victors writing the history? What ever happened to victory? Oops, sorry, I meant "narrative of victory". Never mind.