FILM
REVIEW Dying with an anti-war
whimper Lions For Lambs,
directed by Robert Redford
Reviewed
by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Lions For
Lambs is conceived as a timely cinematic
antidote to the "war on terror" logic of
conformism, instilling a new civic virtue in
today's America, already saturated by political
debates, by presenting an imaginary version of
social, political and military realities.
It plays with American conundrums - about
the "war on terror", the
role
of the media, the fourth wheel of the great
republic, and individuals' relations to the "war",
despairing about a young generation of Americans
who have no utopia and are in dire need of
enlightenment.
Redford, also starring as a
politically incorrect college professor, is a
rebel with a cause attempting a thoughtful
approach to film as personal political expression
here. Redford has much humanism in him, much like
Jean Luc Godard showing a distaste for the culture
of consumerism, and presents a direct exposition
of contemporary political issues, illustrating the
connection between war, militarism and elite
political irresponsibility.
However, while
it succeeds as a device for political pedagogy,
the movie fails on intrinsic aesthetic criteria, a
casualty of its own excess ideology and zeal.
Dubbed by reviewers as a dull movie that
"plays like a political debate", Lions For
Lambs was initially conceived as a stage
production and, save the early helicopter scenes,
retains its theatrical, or rather
"claustrophobic", atmosphere, with a bulk of the
movie consumed by pure dialogue, eg, between a
hawkish US senator, played brilliantly by Tom
Cruise, and a skeptical reporter, played feebly by
Meryl Streep. Or, on the other hand, between the
left-of-center professor and his students, two of
whom end up as army recruits in Afghanistan
meeting their tragic fate at the hands of
insurgents, representative sacrifical young lambs
in the borderless "war on terror".
One
wonders: Is there a message here, foreshadowing
the ultimate futility of America's military gambit
in an inhospitable land that has repeatedly
repelled foreign invaders?
German
philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote: "We do
not yet hear, we whose hearing and seeing are
perishing through radio and film under the rule of
technology." No such healthy warning sirens about
film are even mildly detected in this anti-war
movie that in a certain sense closes the gap
between politics and art. This even though its
noble, laudatory sentiment is tampered by a
multi-perspectival point of view that, in fact,
gives the September 11-focused pro-war bloc an
edge, given the movie's absence of any brave
questioning, let alone debunking, of the official
September 11 story. [1]
Without a firm
ground to stand on in the absence of such a
debunking, what then is achieved is largely an
exercise in futility.
The film's failure
is connected, first and foremost, to Redford's
inability to confront the problem of the relations
between film's artistic criteria and its social
and political context. The movie's "mimetic
rationality", reflecting the grim reality "out
there", is too closely at work, compounded by a
technical formalism that deprives it of the "play
potential" that could have offset the avalanche of
public criticisms about its "boring" content.
This is, after all, a fiction film and not
a documentary such as John Pilger's superb
Truth and lies in the war on terror, and
could have been much better if its denuciatory
attacks on the ideas and institutions that
propogate militarism through public deceit were
even minimally enveloped in character build-up,
reasonably imaginative plot, or, as in classic
anti-war movies such as Jean Renoir's Le Grande
Illusion or Terrence Malick's Heideggerian
The Thin Red Line, symbolism.
Instead, what Lions For Lambs
offers is a Lacanian mirror of politics, with the
pacifist professor, disillusioned reporter, etc,
supposely reflecting the real state of mind of
Americans. Disconfirmed on its own ground,
Lions's subtle critique of the status quo
may aspire to a new American ethos, banking on
cinema as an emancipatory medium, yet the net
result is its recycling of technical formalism,
conventional story-telling, and largely
monological sermonizing on "doing the right
thing". And this while exploiting the power of the
American solider as hero, unlike Stanley Kubrick's
classic Full Metal Jacket that narratively
and ideologically subverted that image (while
still clinging to "soldiers as victims"). The only
thing experimental about Lions is its
unique penchant for the verbal over the visual,
reflecting a traditional epistemology that
privileges language in the act of
being-in-presence.
Little surprise, then,
that the audience does not really get to
sympathize with the characters on the screen, eg,
the mournful expression of Streep as she passes
the national cemetry, or the heoric deaths of the
two soldiers that is the movie's only allegory,
somewhat duplicative of the final freeze frame of
the heroes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid, facing death quixotically.
For a
population under the constant psychological
bombardment of the "war on terror", a prudent
anti-war, peace-oriented movie should have taken
their fatigue factor into consideration instead of
unwittingly adding to it via its own seriousness,
signifying what Umberto Eco refers to as "closed
text".
A pivotal juncture in the movie,
when a call to the senator's office - interfaced
with the special-op fiasco in the Afghan highlands
- interrupts a lengthy juxtaposition of ideas with
the reporter, is the only moment when the movie
approximates the status of a plot, but it quickly
fizzles by the lack of a follow-up.
As a
result, meanings in the scenes are not mediated
but rather jump at the audience, and are
immediately recognized for what they are, thus
neutralizing their emotional and or cognitive
impact or efficacy. This is, indeed, the movie's
biggest paradox, the fact that its permissiveness
with its own brand of politics (of skepticism)
mimics the logic of conformism that it critiques,
by pointing the audience in one direction even
though it does not explicitly answer the questions
it poses.
It encourages us to think, to
resist political manipulation or consumerist
apathy, but, sadly, via a disturbing essentialism
reeking of political correctness, eg, through
vaguely inspirational rhetoric, it becomes the
very epitome of the cult of politics.
The
form, style, of disenchantment must go
hand-in-hand with the content, and yet this
delicate point is forgotten in this movie. What is
definitive in the content outstrips a sense of
open-endedness and elicits a lazy response,
particularly since the "hostile other", in this
case the Afghan insurgents, are treated as shadowy
figures beyond the reach of comprehension or,
perhaps, any empathy.
With so many Afghan
collateral victims of indiscriminate bombings, the
opportunity to elicit a bifurcated sympathy is
lost in this movie, that otherwise boldly treats
the larger, more abstract questions of war and
conquest.
This sould be disconcerting, if
not outright irritating, to the peace movement in
the US and abroad, seeing how a splendid
opportunity to mobilize the anti-war impulse is
nullified by a gifted director who should have
known better than to prioritize politics over
artistic form, tantamount to what German
philosopher Jurgen Habermas refers to as "internal
colonization of the life-world", though in this
case by a politics of resistance succumbing to an
illicit instrumentalization of aesthetic reason.
Note 1. For more on this
see, David Ray Griffin, Debunking 9/11
Debunking.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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