“Generation: Kill” and Pieces of Flair
by zunguzungu
The things that soldiers possess is an interesting problem, I mused to myself as I watched the second episode of Generation: Kill. After all, soldiers are de-individualized individuals, people with names and serial numbers, and that contradiction is built into the identity. They must take responsibility for their actions but they must also follow orders. Both/And. I’m not interested in teasing that contradiction out any farther than simply observing it to be, on a certain level, a basic and fundamental problem: to be a soldier is to be both a distinct person and to be homogenized into an indistinct mass of soldiery. Walt Whitman loved the idea of an individual en-masse, the contradiction between both things happening at once and so it’s not surprising that he dug soldiers (if you know what I mean; as he wrote: “How good they look, as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with their guns on their shoulders! How I love them! how I could hug them, with their brown faces, and their clothes and knapsacks cover’d with dust!”). What better figure for the American promise of reconciling pluribus with Unum than a Union soldier?
All this, in turn, places in a certain kind of burden on the fact of possessions, the things that makes us individuals in this Western world of possessive individualism (think of the way the term “property” refers to both attributes of an individual and commodities which we have exclusive rights to as individuals). Who owns a soldier’s rifle? Him, or the army? This is why Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” hasn’t quite been beaten to death by all the over-teaching it’s received at the hands of American pedagogy; the problem of being a person and a mass is an important problem for soldiers, and carrying stuff is a way of mediating it, or just of making it immediate.
In Generation: Kill, though, I was struck by the peculiar status of the things these soldiers carry vis-à-vis older Vietnam-era ways of conceptualizing gear. Think of the old Vietnam-movie trope of soldiers adorning themselves with a variety of neo-primitivist pieces of flair (see Apocalypse Now! up there). The point is to display dis-affection from the system, to illustrate not only an antipathy to “the machine” but to do so by affecting a neo-tribal look. This was a sufficiently solid film cliché that Cameron could outfit the marines in Aliens with similar neo-tribal get-up, and it would be instantly understood to be what it was: a representation of their alienation from the system expressed through stuff they wear, whether it be a red bandanna or beads and pseudo-fetish charms, signs of individual distinction from the system, expressions of independence signified precisely by their lack of use value.
Generation: Kill! is a little different, and presumably the book is too. While it winks towards the individual vs. en masse trope by reference to the soldiers’ mustache growing competition (and the mindless sergeant major who wants them all clean-shaven), the much more interesting problem of individuation is the question of outfitting themselves in a war where everything is done on the super-cheap. Thus, when the book emphasizes that these soldiers “would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in ‘The Greatest Generation.’ …These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children,” that status as “disposable” isn’t merely the “raised by TV” bullshit that you get when supposedly transgressive movies like Fight Club channel the “dinner table” nostalgia of that greatest generation. It’s also a way that the book/movie figure, as always, life under neoliberalism, as a situation where individuals are unevenly integrated into predatory institutions precisely by the extent to which they are made to fend for themselves. Sharply unlike Cameron’s vision of soldiers in Vietnam (in which the issue is always bad modernity vs. primitive vitality) and very much unlike the disposable soldiers of John Ford’s They Were Expendable (in which the problem is the disconnect between the band of brothers and their superior officers), the problem here is the infernal squeeze of doing more with less, a problem space it shares with The Wire. They lack the stuff to do the job, so they have to buy it on e-bay. The disposability of the soldiers, in other words, gets figured by the fact that they themselves are more or less responsible for the things they carry: instead of being burdened with the things they need to use (and distinguishing themselves by wearing weird versions of their uniform and carrying useless things), they have to procure the things they need on the field (a gun turret, or a good flak jacket, or sufficient batteries for their equipment) and couldn’t care less about the question of their individuality. Under neo-liberalism, individualism is a status not of autonomy, but of vulnerability to predatory forces, not of independence, but precisely the loss of autonomy which dis-embeddedness implies. And so, as in The Wire, safety is in camaraderie, and cowboy shenanigans get you in trouble. So they mock the other trucks that write slogans on the side (or paint the words “Metallica” on the bumper); don’t stick out and don’t make yourself distinct. And don’t say a word against modernity; the problem isn’t its discontents, the problem is that it’s been withheld…
Dude, why the heck are you talking about this stuff when there is a perfectly good article on Resident Evil 5 that I know is nestled somewhere in your brain?
Well, there’s this from the wikipedia page:
“One particular scene in the game, said to show black men dragging off a screaming white woman, was submitted for evaluation to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which deemed it not to be racist. Sue Clark, Head of Communications at the BBFC, stated, “We do take racism very seriously, but in this case there is no issue around racism.”
Sort of blogs itself, really.
Ahh the BBFC, can they do any wrong? And you completely have the skills to write a kick-ass piece! But whatever, keep up this new trajectory about the Wire and war and leave your Africa stuff to someone else😉.
[…] today, I read Aaron’s post about eBay and the materiality of flair in Generation: Kill. Yet again, flair was used not as an abstract noun, as in “flair for design,” but as a […]
Think of the old Vietnam-movie trope of soldiers adorning themselves with a variety of neo-primitivist pieces of flair (see Apocalypse Now! up there).
Ye olde ‘Nam-ironic-intensity meme. Merican’s can’t handle the truth, so they get flicks of frat boys at war. Coppola shows a few hangin’ corpses, nay-palms, and the cow being cut up (wtf was that about?), Marlon doin’ the TS Eliot bit, but A-Now seems pretty tame compared to the Nam news reels with soldier burger, the old doc- photos (the pistol to the forehead pic worth 3 hours of tinseltown war-staging) or O’Brien’s “Things…” (college town may know that book, but cow-town doesn’t).
The acting and cinematography seems to overpower the war-time narrative (whether historical or literary, ala HoD), and the cinematography tends to be tame, really (at least Oliver Stone’s flicks move, visually, as with NBK).
The usual ‘merican audience couldn’t stand watching a duplication of three hours of a Verdun (not to say a roasting cambodian village–at least the killing fields had boo-coo bones), so they get the soldier drama (or the soldier-whore drama).
Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill, is publishing a new book on April 2 about his experiences with different subcultures in America. Here’s one description:
“From his work as a reporter at Hustler magazine, to his National Magazine Award–winning writing for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, Evan Wright has always had an affinity for outsiders—what he calls “the lost tribes of America.” The previously published pieces in this collection chart a deeply personal journey, beginning with his stark but sympathetic portrayals of sex workers in Porn Valley, through his raw portrait of a Hollywood überagent-turned-war documentarian and hero of America’s far right. Along the way, Wright encounters runaway teens earning corporate dollars as skateboard pitchmen; radical anarchists plotting the overthrow of corporate America; and young American troops on the hunt for terrorists in the combat zones of the Middle East. His subjects are people for whom the American dream is either just out of grasp, or something they’ve chosen to reject altogether. Sometimes frightening, usually profane, and often darkly comic, Hella Nation is Evan Wright’s meticulously observed tour of the jagged edges of all those other Americas hiding in plain sight amid the nation’s malls and gated communities. The collection also includes an all-new, autobiographical introductory essay by the author.”