Generation: Kill, “Get Some”
by zunguzungu
(I had some thoughts on Generation: Kill here some time ago, but now that I’m taking a tour of the Iraq war movie genre, I’m giving the miniseries a more careful going over
It really is The Wire in Iraq, with many of the same problems. What’s good about it is that it brings the same humanizing ethnographic impulse to the genre that The Wire brought to its subject (my thoughts on The Wire and ethnography here, by the way): if its characters are capable of all sorts of repulsive brutality, they are also human beings, who do these things for human reasons. The moments when we see them lined up chanting “Kill!” are horrifying but brief, embedded within (and submerged beneath) the much larger narrative of daily minutia and human interaction that shows these soldiers struggling to live within the structure of socialization that puts them there and sends them forth to do it. What The Hurt Locker renders as transcendently human, Generation Kill shows as squalid and stupid; what The Valley of Elah shows as the dark heart of inhumanity that the fundamental evil of war reduces its soldiers to, Generation Kill re-fashions (like In the Loop, as Mathew Chaney points out) as a kind of male eros gone wrong. They want to go to war and “get some,” in short, because they want to get some, and this is how a misguidance system has misguided them to seek it.
As with The Wire, however, building a narrative structure out of people vs. institutions produces a certain kind of symptomatic occlusion: just as the underlying narrative of “neo-liberalism corrupting real police work” frees The Wire from questioning what the real purpose of police work is, the insanity of the commanding officers allows them to serve as scapegoat for the perversion of military professionalism that, while absolutely a reality of this conflict, deflects attention away from the question of what we actually need a marines for. In what is surely an intentional riff on the clichés the Vietnam war movie genre — in which there is so much narrative conflict between misguided lieutenants and the grunts who know better — the battalion’s mid-level officers are wise and professional mediators between the insane leaders above them and the cowboys that need to be corralled beneath them. The way Daniels stood between McNulty and Rawls in season one, for example, presaged an underlying narrative of the show as a whole: while individual action against the system is doomed and hopeless — and the powers that be (as a function of their careerist mobility) cannot be trusted — what is at stake in the struggle is the professionalism of good police work that Daniels comes to embody. And like the mid-level commanders that are able — like us — to integrate the little picture into the big picture, the mid-level officers in Generation Kill offer the possibility of a humane Iraq war, one in which, among other things, surrendering prisoners are treated in accordance with the Geneva convention.
But this is bullshit. There is no such thing as a humane invasion of Iraq, and there never was. One of the things that’s striking about a documentary like the Brookings Institute’s No End in Sight (or the contemporaneously produced The Green Zone) is that they deeply want to blame Republican leadership for the manifest clusterfuck that the Iraq war manifestly has become. And of course they’re right; as one of the talking heads in No End in Sight points out, there were a hundred ways to screw up this war, but who could have anticipated we’d try all of them one by one? You simply cannot underestimate the incompetence and misguided hubris of the Bush presidency. But just as The Wire ends up by extolling a never-never land of mid-century Fordist capitalism[1] (the same way Michael Moore pretends FDR is some paragon of anti-racism who never interned Japanese-Americans in prison camps or spent four terms not addressing Jim Crow), Generation Kill seems to imply that if we put the professional soldiers in charge, things would get done. If we let good America do the job — technocrats and professionals and (cough) Barack Obama (cough) — freedom would roll and shit. The Green Zone — a movie so incoherent it has thus far thwarted my efforts to blog about it — is much more explicit about this: precisely because Matt Damon is a good soldier, he starts to buck against the lies and mis-uses of intelligence that characterized the Bush bungle-fest of 2003. But a more humane invasion is still an invasion. And treating surrendering prisoners humanely doesn’t change the fact that they’re fled Basra after you leveled it.
[1] It’s a particular kind of problem, and I don’t want to be misunderstood: compared to the world we live in now, the post-war era in the United States can seem like a kind of paradise. But the fact that women and black people were forced to act like sub-human laboring classes was not a bug but a feature of that paradise; along with the fact that a single income household was possible was the fact that women didn‘t work outside the home. And we can’t — as James Ferguson points out — take seriously the idea of going back to those times.
I haven’t seen “Generation Kill”, but this is fascinating nonetheless.
Fllowing on your footnote, another problem with the fantasy of going back to “good capitalism”, such as it was, is that it is enabled by proponents refusing to get a handle on the reasons why the system changed from then to now. Which is similar to the fantasy about the humane invasion.
(BTW, your reference to “the Iraq war movie genre” makes me sad. There is one, isn’t there?)
Richard,
Why does it make you sad? I think the real tragedy is that we there is no conversation about the war at a national level, the fact that we are all (albeit for different reasons) so uncomfortable talking about this ongoing never-ending clusterfuck that we don’t. In some ways, talking about Iraq war movies as a “genre” is probably misleading; as a function of our amnesia towards the present, in fact, I’m not sure these movies really function as a conversation that’s aware of itself in the way a genre does, especially since each movie treats with a very different aspect of the war (The Green Zone shows the search for WMD’s in 2003, Generation: Kill shows the marines who were to be the spearhead for a hot invasion, In the Valley of Elah shows the home-front and returning soldiers from the insurgency period, The Hurt Locker shows bomb disposal in the (more or less) present of the insurgency, and so forth). There’s a curious attraction to close focus views of this war, I suspect, because it prevents us from seeing the big picture, which no film I can think of has bothered to even gesture towards.
Occasionally I’m filled with flhaess of outright terror that you are right Mrs. Spit, that it is catching. I hope we are both very wrong.I used to get my birth control from Planned Parenthood. I crossed a picket line to do it once. While I’m not typically a prayerful person, I truly hope any prayers they directed at me or my (at the time) nonexistent offspring were redirected to someone somewhere that actually needed them.I wish Focus on the Family would focus on funding to remedy the real and present perils families face like diseases and complications of pregnancy, like orphans that are already here and suffering, like genetic disorders and tragic childhood illnesses. Funding toward remedies for these issues would do more good for families in this world than mountains of faith.
Yes, regarding the lack of conversation, I agree with you. That’s part of why it makes me sad–also the related fact that the war’s gone on long enough to generate so many of these movies.
It seems to me that the Vietnam movie has still yet to move beyond various “close focus views”. We seem incapable of seeing big pictures.
Generation Kill was unsuccessful on many levels.
Among the reasons for this was that the series couldn’t be shot in Iraq, of course. But why the team chose, then, to shoot it in Africa, defies my understanding. The faces of the people are obviously African, not semitic. The architecture, despite being shot on Zanzibar and in Mozambique, which has a huge Islamic population going back centureies, is still obviously East African. Etc.
I talked recently with some of the Burns-Simon team about this, and they seemed hurt that I’d noticed this!
IOW, they really didn’t know the territory, and even though the entire narrative focus is on the recon marines, it didn’t ring with that authentic truth of rooted in the dirt of the place that The Wire had, and hopefully Tremé will also have (it gives every sign that it does), as so many involved with Tremé are New Orleans people.
Neither Burns nor Simon have even been soldiers, much less hung in the Middle East.
Love, C.
I did notice that, and it’s weird, isn’t it? It occurs to me that it’s a manifestation of a larger failure of the genre, the failure to take Iraq and Iraqi’s seriously as part of the story. GK is, in this sense, clearly inferior to the Wire, in that it tells only one side of the story, though there’s also a certain strangeness about the kind of perspective from which getting every last detail of the soldiers’ gear is important for realism, while things like casting crowds of Iraqi’s is so scattershot that any brown person will do. But I have yet to see an Iraq war movie that seems even to be aware that there is an other side of the story.
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Since it was based on Evan Wright’s book by same title, who reported on the invasion as an embedded journalist in 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, it couldn’t be any other way.
After all, too, this is a classic narrative form — the quest (i.e. getting to Baghdad), so these are just one goddamned event after another (to employ more polite language than the marines), moving right along.
Love, C.
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I had a rather hard time choosing just one type of physician I would want to work for. So many of them fascinate me, and with me not really going into any medical field other than support, I never gave this any thought in the past. After reading the list, I am more favorable of working for a neonatologist. It is difficult to think about how neonatologist physicians sometimes have the most difficult job in the world, but I can only imagine how amazing it would be to be a part of saving a baby’s life. I had a coworker once whose baby was born at 36 weeks, and her baby had a lot of heart and lung problems. There were concerns about whether or not they would ever fully develop once she had him, but after many months in the NICU, and many scares that happened during it, the doctors were able to save him and he is now a very healthy 5 year old. It is because of that I have a higher interest in the neonatologist field.I hate to say which type of physician I would care less to work for, and it is because I worry that many will take it the wrong way. When I was 16, I used to help my mom at an assisted living home as a caregiver. We would get to work at 7:00 A.M. every morning to prepare breakfast for four of the elderly men and women that we were caring for. We would then make sure that all bedding was changed, rooms were cleaned, meals were prepared, and appointments were handled. We worked 12 hour days, and they were always grueling. The owner of the home made sure that everyone had their medicine and made it to their doctor appointments on time. However, she was more worried about getting paid for her services than actually helping the elderly. She would yell at them if they did something wrong, and even call them terrible names. My mom reported her and we both quit our job, but it has always left a sting in my heart since then. It is because of my experience with that situation that I do not think I could ever work for a gerontologist. I know that the situations would be much different, but ever since my experience with caring for elderly individuals it is very hard for me to think about assisting a physician in geriatrics because I worry that someone else might treat the elderly in the same way the owner of the home did. I am a firm believer that the elderly deserve the ultimate care and comfort when going through any treatment and aging in general, but I do not think I could ever work in that environment again.
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BTW, The Wire is being taught in quite a few universities, in a variety of departments. At Tulane, it’s being taught in the English dept., for instance.
Love, C.
Fllowing on your footnote, another problem with the fantasy of going back to “good capitalism”, such as it was, is that it is enabled by proponents refusing to get a handle on the reasons why the system changed from then to now.
Are there any books that go into more detail about this? I’d be interested to know.
Very true! Makes a change to see sooneme spell it out like that. 🙂
Economies are in dire straits, but I can count on this!
“Are there any books that go into more detail about this? I’d be interested to know.”
Sorry for the delayed reply… no doubt there are numerous such books, many published by Verso or Montly Review Press, but some that have helped me have been The New Imperialism and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, both by David Harvey, but coming at it from slightly different angles.
There’s also a book called Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992, by the Midnight Notes Collective. It’s a collection of essays that goes into some fascinating detail about the nature of the class war in that period. I highly recommend it. It’s published by Autonomedia and can be ordered here. The Midnight Notes website is pretty rudimentary, but here’s a list of publications, w/descriptions, here.
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An even more delayed reply: I would have said Harvey, too, and Richard beat me to it. But I’d add Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism. Harvey’s stuff is indispensable, but he’s also a basically top-down thinker who, however much he argues with other economists, more or less assumes their frame of reference. Sennett’s approach is really a useful supplement; Harvey can say a lot about why capitalism changes, but Sennett can show in incredibly sociological detail HOW it changes, which is it at least as important, I think
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Harvey “more or less assumes their frame of reference”, unless you simply mean that he generally looks at it a point of reference of the system as a whole.
I mentioned the Midnight Notes book in part because it gets into what kinds of things were actually going on with workers during the period in question.
In any event, apparently I need to read Sennett’s book too!
No, I meant more the systemic perspective. Sennett does fieldwork with middle managers and such-like.
that, permit me tell you exatlcy what did deliver the results. Your article (parts of it) is actually rather persuasive and this is most likely why I am taking the effort to comment. I do not make it a regular habit of doing that. Second, although I can certainly see the jumps in reason you come up with, I am not certain of exatlcy how you seem to connect the ideas that make the final result. For the moment I will yield to your point but wish in the foreseeable future you link your facts better.
I had a rather hard time choosing just one type of physician I would want to work for. So many of them fascinate me, and with me not really going into any medical field other than support, I never gave this any thought in the past. After reading the list, I am more favorable of working for a neonatologist. It is difficult to think about how neonatologist physicians sometimes have the most difficult job in the world, but I can only imagine how amazing it would be to be a part of saving a baby’s life. I had a coworker once whose baby was born at 36 weeks, and her baby had a lot of heart and lung problems. There were concerns about whether or not they would ever fully develop once she had him, but after many months in the NICU, and many scares that happened during it, the doctors were able to save him and he is now a very healthy 5 year old. It is because of that I have a higher interest in the neonatologist field.I hate to say which type of physician I would care less to work for, and it is because I worry that many will take it the wrong way. When I was 16, I used to help my mom at an assisted living home as a caregiver. We would get to work at 7:00 A.M. every morning to prepare breakfast for four of the elderly men and women that we were caring for. We would then make sure that all bedding was changed, rooms were cleaned, meals were prepared, and appointments were handled. We worked 12 hour days, and they were always grueling. The owner of the home made sure that everyone had their medicine and made it to their doctor appointments on time. However, she was more worried about getting paid for her services than actually helping the elderly. She would yell at them if they did something wrong, and even call them terrible names. My mom reported her and we both quit our job, but it has always left a sting in my heart since then. It is because of my experience with that situation that I do not think I could ever work for a gerontologist. I know that the situations would be much different, but ever since my experience with caring for elderly individuals it is very hard for me to think about assisting a physician in geriatrics because I worry that someone else might treat the elderly in the same way the owner of the home did. I am a firm believer that the elderly deserve the ultimate care and comfort when going through any treatment and aging in general, but I do not think I could ever work in that environment again.
wow!!! Christina Carroll!!! I have been FB buds with your dad for a year or so, but never found you on there. I hope you & your mom & brother are all doing well. You have an amnaizg birth story and gorgeous twins!!! You were always such a beautiful child & young lady growing up! I am so glad to have found you on here!! Congratulations to mother hood! It is challenging at times, but the rewards are worth every second! I hope to catch up with you some day! May God bless you abundantly!! HUGS sweetie!!Kellie
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A simple and intelligent point, well made. Thanks!