Even going to the movies is different here in the US nowadays. Waiting for the main film to begin last Monday, I watched two ads for soon-to-be-released films with gung-ho US militaristic themes. Then followed the silent invocation “God Bless America”, in appropriate colours, flashed up in huge letters on the screen. It reminded me of Fox Television’s coverage of the Superbowl the day before: not only was there a staggering amount of patriotic schmaltz beforehand, but once the game was under way, statistics were presented by a frequently repeated little series of automated logos starting with what appeared to be a US soldier pressing a button.
It’s all enough to make one feel very much a foreigner in America these days.
But back to the movie I went to see. It was the $90m blockbuster called Black Hawk Down – the chic film to see here at the moment (Dick Cheney, never in military service himself, held a private and hitherto unpublicised screening for friends), and one that made more than $60m in its first fortnight. It lasts 143 minutes, the vast majority of which are taken up by bombs, bullets, grenades, blood and body parts – supposedly portraying the American fiasco in Mogadishu on 3 October 1993, which left 18 US soldiers and thousands of Somalis (yes, thousands, not the 500 often quoted as the official US estimate) dead. If ever a film glories in slaughter, this is it; presumably the director, the ex-BBC man Ridley Scott, knew exactly what he was doing in his depiction of noble, all-American (and almost entirely white) boys pitted against countless anonymous, evil black Somalis. Bizarrely, he dedicated the film to his late mother.
The story behind its release, though, is fascinating. It was filmed in Morocco rather than Somalia, and long before 11 September. But last November, one of President Bush’s closest aides, Karl Rove, flew to Los Angeles to meet more than 40 Hollywood executives in the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills; the purpose of his trip was to ask Hollywood moguls to make films “showing the heroism of American armed forces”. Black Hawk Down was not scheduled for release until next month, but that date was then brought forward to 28 December. The film has, as a postscript, a line saying that President Clinton pulled US troops out of Somalia two weeks after what was, in reality, a tragically ham-fisted and bungled attempt by the high-tech US military to arrest two Somali warlords. That postscript will, I’m sure, mean that millions of Americans leave cinemas saying “And a damned good thing, too”. (Or, in the words of a New York Times columnist last Tuesday: “You leave the theater, heart pounding, wanting to pull out a machine-gun and mow down crowds of Somalis.”)
But while the film was made before 11 September, its released version was not then finalised. In the version completed after 11 September, there was another postscript that finally got to the heart of the matter: it drew a connection between the American readiness to withdraw immediately after one horrible day in Somalia, and the cause of the 11 September atrocities. But that, post-11 September, was then deemed anathema for American audiences after trial shows, and was duly cut out: in the current climate of intolerance of dissidence, such a postscript would have been deemed so un-American that the film would doubtless have been boycotted.
Pulling in such huge audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, the film-makers presumably do not mind cav-ing in, in this way, to the new McCarthyite intolerance. Rove promised producers making “patriotic” films the co-operation and use of US military facilities and personnel; but even before 11 September, such aid was already available to the makers of Black Hawk Down, as 40 US soldiers guarded the sets in Morocco (they were in plain clothes, the actors playing the Rangers in fatigues: a cause of much confusion). This year, at least three militaristic films will come out.
The tragedy of Black Hawk Down is that it feeds in to so many dangerous current American myths: that the UN (which, significantly, Bush did not mention in his State of the Union address) is useless, and that valiant American attempts to “nation build” are doomed.
The movie starts with gunners in a US helicopter refused permission by their HQ to open fire on the warlords mowing down innocent Somalis scrambling for food aid – because of a stifling UN rule that they had to be fired on first before they could open fire themselves. By this time, in real life, 300,000 Somalis had died from hunger: the good ol’ US could have done something about it, was the film’s first message, but were hamstrung by UN bureaucracy. Then the Pakistani UN peacekeepers in Mogadishu are portrayed as ineffectual little twits; again, in reality, vastly more Pakistani (and Nigerian) UN peacekeepers than Americans were killed in Somalia.
In real life, Clinton’s abrupt withdrawal from Somalia after CNN showed the bodies of US soldiers being paraded around the Mogadishu ruins confirmed the view of one Osama Bin Laden: that Americans will not tolerate any serious numbers of military casualties (18 being the biggest military death toll for the US army since Vietnam). In that way, the postscript that never appeared in the final version of Black Hawk Down hit the nail on the head: during the complacent Clinton era, the US came to the collective view that not one single American life is worth a noble cause.
So these are the lessons Americans take from their blockbuster movie in 2002: that to try to help restore Afghanistan to some semblance of normality is not a job for Americans (leave it to the useless UN) and is not worth one American life. This is the underlying reason why British military assistance was largely spurned by the US during the bombing of Afghanistan; the Brits simply got in the way. But they are now welcome to be “peacekeepers” (chuckle, chuckle) in Afghanistan; Hamid Karzai, the country’s new leader, has pleaded personally to Bush for significant numbers of US soldiers, but he now even has to rely on the British Special Boat Service for his own personal protection. Bush has reversed his campaign position on having absolutely nil “nation building”: he has now conceded that the US will play some kind of role in rebuilding Afghanistan.
Yet the audiences (including Cheney’s private one, we can safely presume) pour out of Black Hawk Down convinced that, after Afghanistan’s pulverisation by the US, any attempt to provide significant aid to rebuild the ruins would only fruitlessly risk American lives.
The drama and clever visual and aural effects drown out historical perspective: that precisely by abandoning poor and wrecked countries such as Afghanistan or Somalia, the US stores up festering resentment against it further down the road. Somalia was abandoned by the US, amid much resentment by the suffering Somali people, less than nine years ago; now the Bush administration is taking it as gospel that it is yet another crumbled nation that is harbouring al-Qaeda, and thus is probably in for a spot of satisfying high-altitude pulverisation. If I were Ridley Scott, I would not be dedicating such a wretchedly misconceived movie to my mum.
Content from our partners
Related
