Vertigo

--Iraqi Oscar, Hajo de Riejger

This way of waging war seems
to me as stupid as it is cruel.
It can only be found in the head
of a coarse and brutal soldier.
Indeed , it is pointless to replace the Turks
only to reproduce what the world rightly found
so hateful in them ... the Turks will always outdo us
because they are Muslim barbarians
--Alexis de Tocqueville (1841)
_______________

Ranger walked out of the film "Green Zone" after 15 minutes. Ditto "The Kingdom" and "The Hurt Locker".

All three movies made him physically ill, stomach churning and mind unable to focus on the jumping, jittery screen. We understand the desire for verisimilitude, but trying to achieve that via the relentless hyper-movement of the camera felt as immature as the efforts of the Blair Witch Project. The subject matter is disconcerting enough, and if the tale is well-presented, the amatuerish jiggly screen is gratuitous; more than gratuitous, a distraction.

A commenter at the The New York Times review of The Green Zone had it right:

"Chaos A+, clarity D-. There is nothing admirable about the creation of this film unless one is thrilled by ear shattering volume, crashes, helicopters, weaponry noise, throbbing, banging music, the shouts and words of American soldiers that we can't even hear in the din. ... And camera work that repeats the excruciating tempo by its trembling and shaking. Maybe this IS the war movie to end them all unless someone can make a war film where the movie screen explodes and kills a few of the audience. Then of course there would need to be a movie about that ..."(A Search for the Casualty, Truth).

This American effort at cinéma vérité fails because like so much of what we produce, it is overkill, Supersized. The chaos is an overload to the system, and too much for the average neurological system to bear.

We wear earplugs in all films today, and still the noise levels offend. The result is a kind of freeze reaction in the viewer, the inducement of a mild trauma. This is neither pleasant nor conducive to a thoughtful film experience.

Movies like Black Hawk Down and Band of Brothers were palatable as they gave the viewer a followable story, integrating special effects only as they would enhance the progress of the story. They offered both historical documentation and entertainment. Is it possible that my senses will not accept the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) as having any entertainment value?

In all three movies, 15 minutes of exposure caused Ranger to lie down and rest, until his mind became calm and habitable again. No more PWOT movies for Ranger.

Movies should be either provocative or a form of escapism, or both -- not an emetic.

[NOTE: The NYT's Ross Douthat wrote a good analysis on the film, "Hollywood's Political Fictions". --Lisa]