This Is The End, My Only Friend The End: US Combat Forces Out of Iraq

Answer the following question. The closest parallel to the outcome achieved by seven years of war in Iraq is:

a. Vietnam;

b. Korea;

c. Weimar Germany;

d. Only time will tell.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Marry That Book Before She Gets Much Older!

Despite the strange weather, and an oil spill in the Gulf as big as Rhode Island, it's the beginning of summer break and you know what time it is! Time to get gussied up and get hitched to that book manuscript again! This time the relaitonship will work, I swear: there has been counseling, there are promises not yet broken, and for some of us a new computer will get things started on the right foot. So in the interests of a proper, Connecticut-style traditional wedding, the Radical recommends the following news items to you this week.

Something Old: Looking to warm up by writing an article? Well, look around you and check out who the buildings are named for. At UT-Austin, there is a dormitory named after a member of the Ku Klux Klan, so says Thomas Russell (who used to teach there.) The dorm was built in 1954, and named after a former UT law professor, William Stewart Simkins, who used to boast of his time defending white womanhood in formal speeches on campus. While students don't seem to have been aware of Simkins' white supremacist past scratch the surface of many buildings in the former Confederacy and see what you find, children; then start on the other parts of the country), the UT administration is. Russell has recently posted his research on the topic. Not accidentally, Russell argues, the dormitory was named shortly after Brown v. Board of Education. "During the 1950s, the memory and history of Professor Simkins supported the university’s resistance to integration," Russell argues. "As the university faced pressure to admit African-American students, the university’s faculty council voted to name a dormitory after the Klansman and law professor. The dormitory carries his name to the present day. During this time period, alumni also presented the law school with a portrait of Professor Simkins. Portraits and a bust of Professor Simkins occupied prominent positions within the law school through the 1990s."

Something New: And it is so rare in the historical profession! We've got a new journal out published by Routledge called Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice that is devoting itself to out-of-the-box historical writing. As the website describes it, the journal "allows historians in a broad range of specialities to experiment with new ways of presenting and interpreting history. Rethinking History challenges the accepted ways of doing history and rethinks the traditional paradigms, providing a unique forum in which practitioners and theorists can debate and expand the boundaries of the discipline." Hat Tip.

Something Borrowed? Somebody said to me the other day that a certain fabulous feminist scholar was toying with the idea of ditching Nirvana and heading to one of the best Little Women's Studies Ph.D. programs in the East. No, no, no it ain't me babe, although for a few months the door was cracked open and I appreciated the peep inside. Back to the real news: even if this scholar is just a loaner, this university continues to make a serious effort to recruit and retain the best feminist faculty around.

Something Blue: Or at least I find this depressing. For those of us who write about the political history of pornography (is there more than one of us? enquiring minds want to know) we will probably have to start calling it "sex porn" soon. The Week writes that Americans are becoming addicted to "war porn," combat images and video from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that critics charge are no more than snuff films. "No one loves this kind of footage, says the military blog Mudville Gazette, more than the mainstream "news" business, which gets a ratings boost whenever they employ it, too."

The First Casualty Of War

This video of two Reuters news staff, two children and numerous unarmed bystanders (including a van that tried to assist the wounded) being being shot at and killed by a US military helicopter in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad will resonate for those of us old enough to remember the senseless cruelty of the Viet Nam War. As in Viet Nam, the lies begin with the soldiers on the ground and then trickle up.



It's long and tedious, as well as graphic, but worth watching. It was obtained by Reuters with great difficulty via the Freedom Of Information Act, and sent to me by one of my students. For additional information, see Wikileaks.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Gendering War In The Hurt Locker

It may turn out that I am one of the few people in the United States who didn't like The Hurt Locker, a movie about a bomb disposal team in Iraq which is all the rage. Yes, I know it won six Academy Awards, including the first Oscar ever awarded to a woman director, Katherine Bigelow. I realize that I am always supposed to cheer for the woman, but as a feminist historian and cultural critic I found this film terribly disturbing.

(Speaking of history: Bigelow's Wikipedia entry lists her as married to James Cameron; go to his, and you will discover that they divorced in 1991, and Cameron has added one ex and a current wife since.)

There were the good disturbing parts, of course. Bigelow, a director of several action and horror films, was exactly the candidate for the scenes where Staff Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) has to figure out, not where the bomb is, but how many bombs there are. These moments are positively chilling. Bigelow plays with the scene by trigering the emotions -- suspense, relief, dread and "gotcha" surprise -- that are a staple of the horror film, twisting them to suit and transform another genre. In one early scene James, having defused one IED, begins to pull on a wire only to discover that the bomb he disabled is attached to six others live devices, and he is standing right in the middle of all of them. (Imagine a similar scene where a young woman sticks her hand in a cereal box, looking for a snack, and comes out with a handful of spiders.) The horror if war in Iraq, Bigelow tells us by switching up her genres, makes it historically unique among wars. Similarly, there is a grisly scene where the squad discovers a bomb factory: in an inner room, there is a child's corpse with a bomb sewn inside; James must defuse the bomb by plunging his hands into the freshly butchered body. These scenes are outlandish, but their deftness makes them read true.

That said, one problem with The Hurt Locker is that, for a war movie, it is also strangely dull, despite Bigelow's perfect skills as a director and several lively combat scenes. It relies for its narrative on a series of tense scenes: in each, the bomb disposal team deals with excruciating danger as the devious bombers challenge James' skills as a defuser. Each episode is beautifully crafted, but quite similar; they are interspersed with far too sketchy glimpses into the inner lives of the men who do such work (they drink, they fight, they smoke, they play video games.) Recreation for the squad consists of getting nasty drunk and belting each other in the stomach until one guy collapses (because you have to feel the pain somehow, right? Duh.)

Lesson? The inner lives of these men have been completely evacuated by the work they do; they are dead men walking. As I recall, one soldier actually describes himself as "already dead" early in the film. James, in one of the few scenes where the men speak about something other than their work, cannot seem to remember whether he is actually married or not. He knows he has a son, and that his son has a mother, but the woman's precise social relationship to him is foggy, in contrast to the acute sense of space and time he can access when defusing an IED.



Since I tend to not be interested in men or women who have lost empathy for other living things, it may be my limitation that I had trouble connecting to the characters. However, I also didn't love the lack of plot in The Hurt Locker, even though this is probably a skillful political device if you want to win an Oscar about a charged subject. The movie is neither pro-war or anti-war; it just is. Furthermore, I occasionally found the action outside of the bomb disposal and combat scenes confusing -- like why, for example, does James hunt down the family of the murdered child only to terrorize them and then run away? What does he think they did to deserve him storming their house? Is the point that he doesn't know what he wants from them? Is it supposed to be a metaphor for the whole rotten enterprise? None of this is clear. Or why, at the end of film, does he ends up back in Iraq? I thought he had re-hitched because he was no longer suited for civilian life (a common trope for twentieth century wartime masculinity dating back to Erich Maria Remarque's 1928 World War I novel All Quiet On The Western Front.) My friend, on the other hand, thought he had actually been killed, and was doomed for all eternity to dress in the fat suit and wander the dusty streets of (name your favorite city in Iraq here.)

Like Kimberley Pierce, who directed the haunting and lightly released Stop-Loss (2008), I suspect that Bigelow is trying to break out into the big time (and succeeding, as Pierce did not) by marketing herself as a woman director who "knows men." This may be one explanation for the most more serious historical problem with The Hurt Locker in my view: there are no women in it, minus a brief glimpse of the mother of James' son and shots of Iraqi women who literally scuttle around the streets during the various crises. In these scenes even male Iraqi bystanders have agency: they study American soldiers with empty, unreadable expressions (we are expected to experience the soldiers' constant watchfulness that any one of these men might trigger the bomb; the racist effect is that they all become terrorists.) Given the fact that collectively women have served over 150,000 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and 2,000 of them have won the Bronze Star for valor in combat, I find it inexplicable that there are no uniformed women in this movie. None, not even in crowd scenes where men get to be the stars. In other words, part of what has been erased in The Hurt Locker is what makes this war historically distinctive -- so that Bigelow can hook us with portraits of wounded masculinity from past wars with which we are already (un)comfortable.

Therefore, it mattered that a woman directed this movie because....?

One explanation, and what ought to be of greater concern about The Hurt Locker, is that it skates over much of what is distinctive about this war to beat us over the head with an old story about war: irreparably wounded masculinity. Will James is Natty Bumpo, the man who knows Indians who, as Richard Slotkin taught us, will be central to American regeneration through violence but will forever remain outside civilization as a consequence. Furthermore, the cultural work of The Hurt Locker is similar to that of the Viet Nam movies that Jerry Lembke discusses so intelligently in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998): to persuade us that returning veterans are likely to be crazed, lost misfits who will never fit into society again. Following on a grisly discovery in London that one trendy chain store is selling a Travis Bickle fashion line (here's another link to a US store that will help you dress like the homicidal Viet Nam vet from Martin Scorcese's 1976 hit, Taxi Driver), I think this cultural trend should be of greater concern. Granted, many soldiers returned from Viet Nam terribly damaged, and some remain traumatized by their experiences to this day (although they weren't helped by the fact that shell-shock had been removed from the DSM-III, so they were given diagnoses that articulated their condition as unrelated to their war experiences.) Many men and women have, and will, return from Iraq requiring far more care than I suspect they will get.

But the legacy of Viet Nam movies, as Lembke argues, is the cultural expectation that once a man has gone to war he never really returns to a normal social world. Bigelow underlines this promise by turning James into a one-trick pony, who lectures his baby son about how he has come to only love bombs. There is also an idiotic psychotherapist who appears periodically in the film to remind us that no one --particularly those whose job it is to do so -- cares about what soldiers are going through. The pompous shrink delivers endless platitudes in the face of his client's growing despair and fear, and he refuses to actually engage the world that the bomb disposal unit inhabits. When challenged to do so by his angry client, for unexplained reasons the shrink finally agrees to go out on patrol with the squad. He does a variety of stupid things, utterly unsupervised by anyone, and gets blown up. Predictably, this adds to his client's burden of guilt and shame.

So yes, The Hurt Locker won six Academy Awards -- but in my view it doesn't hold a candle to the Iraq movies that have been overlooked, most prominently In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007). But the verdict from this historian? Thumbs down.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.