MentalPolyphonics
Where have all the plumbers gone?
One thing that was sad was people emphasizing...The US military figured if journalists were embedded in combat units, their reporting would be more pro-war than if they just sat in a Kuwaiti briefing room. The plan was that reporting would get biased by a combination of esprit de corps and internal psyops. But they didn’t embed journalists with commanders who can see the big picture; they embedded them in combat units: theirs is not to question why.
The HBO miniseries Generation Kill is a perfect product of embedding: the war is misguided and all high-ranking officers are either insane or incompetent. The journalist is embedded as a grunt and, sure enough, he idolizes his father and grandfather figures: the Sergeant in charge of his team and the Lieutenant in charge of his platoon. These characters can do no wrong: bad things always happen because higher-ups screwed up. The journalist’s peers can do kooky things like shoot Iraqi kids, but they get redeemed in the end.
Generation Kill‘s simplistic morality and character arcs make it fun to watch in the same way most action and fantasy movies are fun to watch. The tone of the first half of the series is closest to Jarhead: war is about waiting. The second half mixes in some Black Hawk Down battles against video-game towelheads. If you enjoyed both those films, you’ll enjoy Generation Kill, only less so.
Jack
Militaries are fascinating organizations. They make real the masculine dialog between The Outlaw and The Authoritarian, and have that whole bit about soldiers needing a soundtrack to give them social context (The Ecstatic has at least one track targeted at soldiers in Iraq). I can’t think of any other social organ that actively de-socializes people, except maybe the police (although some people think both police and criminal never fully socialize in the first place).
It’s The Hero’s Journey, reified and applied en-masse (“army of one”). That’s one reason stories about war are so engaging — they flick switches deep inside the brain.
I subscribe to the theory that we’re only just figuring out The Heroine’s Journey. It’s interesting to see the differences in what female (the plight) and male (the fight) war correspondents tend to write about, I reckon it’s directly on-point.
Jack
GK is based (closely) on The Killer Elite reportage from Rolling Stone.
Jared
Yeah, I haven’t read The Killer Elite. I’d like to read a review of GK that compares it to KE?