September 11

This September marks the tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. One can scarcely imagine how many articles and blog posts will begin with similar sentences during the next few weeks. We'll see different angles, hear different tones, and be exposed to all manner of insights and illusions on the subject of 9/11. After all the words, though, and after this much time, will we be any closer to understanding what happened? We all share certain emotions about those traumatic events. What kind of understanding do we share?

9/11 was initially seen as a great unifier and quickly became one of the most divisive events in recent memory. It was a declaration of war, and as Chris Hedges points out in his book of the same title, war is a force that gives us meaning. Unity wasn't just a result of the attacks. It was an imperative result. Any disruption of that unity was seen as a threat to our security, certainly, but it was also more than that. It was a threat to our sense of duty, honor, and courage...because war is what promised to restore all of those things.

For these reasons and others, objective analysis of the conflict, the enemy, and the respective strategies was generally unwelcome. Any attempt to understand Bin Laden's motives, for example, was said to be "too soon" for the still grieving American psyche. Moreover, any such attempt was probably itself motivated by sympathy for terrorists and a desire to justify their cause. Our own president put it very simply. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Granted, his statement was addressed to other nations who might have considered harboring our enemies, but in many people's minds the distinction between foreign enablers of terrorism and domestic critics of the War on Terror was slight, at best.

But it's been ten years now. Osama Bin Laden is dead, which means that at least one of our goals--and ostensibly one of the most significant--has been achieved. We've had time to recover, to plan a strategy and set it in motion, and to see at least some of the results. A few questions seem appropriate to consider. What did Bin Laden accomplish before his death? What have we accomplished? Who is the enemy now, and where do we stand with respect to them? To those interested in the factual background of what follows, I recommend Adam Curtis' documentary The Power of Nightmares and the books Why Nothing Works by Marvin Harris and Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges.

As of the year 2000 or so, Al Qaeda historically had had limited appeal among the Muslims Bin Laden aspired to rule. The group's extreme fundamentalism made it fractious and prone to violent infighting, such that it's questionable whether they even had a coherent philosophy to offer. Intolerance of disagreement, however, was a constant. It extended especially to other Muslims, who have always been the principal targets of Al Qaeda's wrath. In the fundamentalist view, Muslims who demur in the smallest detail are no Muslims at all, and in fact are worse than infidels who never knew the truth. This has led Al Qaeda to practice extensive campaigns of violence against other Muslims.

For the most part, predictably, Al Qaeda's efforts to terrorize their coreligionists into submission backfired, bringing their popularity to a low point before 9/11. Their one reliable sales pitch was opposition to American policy, particularly American military action in Muslim countries. On this it seemed everyone could agree. That is not to say Bin Laden was a freedom fighter. On the contrary, he was thoroughly anti-democratic, power-hungry, and unscrupulous about the use of financial and drug crime as well as wanton violence to expand his field of domination in any way possible. He was, in other words, the mirror image of the American interests ultimately responsible for his training when he was our ally against the Soviets. But even if he was a thug, to Arabs and Muslims he was their thug. In the face of American hegemony, this lent him a certain credibility.

In their desperation, and with the inspiration of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda devised a plan to take advantage of their one remaining strength. They would launch an attack on the US itself, an action of such boldness and scale that it would become a symbol and a rallying point for anti-American resentment throughout the Muslim world. In doing so they would win the widespread support of Muslims who felt oppressed by American power. And there was a second element to the strategy. Al Qaeda calculated that while the US couldn't be defeated on the battlefield, we also couldn't sustain an extended war without drowning in debt. By drawing us into full military commitment in the Middle East and using cheap guerrilla tactics to prolong our expenditures, they would finally drive us out once and for all. They would defeat us not militarily, but economically.

How then does Bin Laden's plan look, ten years out? There was a brief surge in his popularity after 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The results were short-lived, however. This part of the strategy seems not to have succeeded in the long term. On the second point, it has been far more successful, though it's not clear that Congress or either of the post-9/11 presidents have recognized it. The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has officially passed the 3 1/2 trillion dollar mark. Meanwhile our metamorphosis into a Third World nation, already well underway before 9/11, has strikingly accelerated. Inflation, if it were measured by the same Consumer Price Index that was used in the 1970s, would probably be around 10 percent. Unemployment, including those who have stopped looking for work or settled for part-time jobs, is around 15 percent and rising. In 2010 the ratio of national debt to GDP passed the 90 percent threshold. In 2011 it passed 100 percent, and this month the United States' credit rating was reduced to subprime for the first time ever. Representative Barney Frank, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, cited war spending as the primary reason for the downgrade.

Operating on a cost-plus basis, the defense industry has long been generating monstrous inefficiencies that have spilled over into other industries. This is to the extent, of course, that other industries continue to exist. Since WWII, the manufacturing base for productive goods has virtually disappeared in the wake of war socialism, Soviet style. Of course, not all our economic ills result from the War on Terror. But the fact remains that we now spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. We spend ten times as much as the first runner-up, China, and this is only counting programs in the Pentagon budget itself. War-related spending in other agencies probably brings the total near a trillion dollars annually. President Obama recently challenged the Afghans to develop an economy not based on war. The comedian Harry Shearer quipped that this sounded like a wonderful idea...and when would it be our turn?

As we go on competing with extremists for control of the Middle East, the people of that region continue to be caught in between. The great majority want to be dictated to neither by the US nor by Muslim fundamentalists. This attitude seems as unfathomable to us as it is to Al Qaeda. Obama has basically stayed the course, yet Afghanistan remains without a viable government other than the Taliban. The Russians learned that you can't conquer Afghanistan, and lost their empire in the process. We're now learning that you still can't conquer it even when you pitch the operation as something other than conquest (a most salesmanly and most American expedient that was supposed to make all the difference).

Those who wrote Bin Laden's obituary this year mostly described him as a failure, a man whose unrealistic ambitions made him foolish enough to trifle with a superpower. There is some truth to this narrative. Bin Laden failed to build significant support for a new fundamentalist caliphate in the Middle East. This is a good thing, so far as it goes. But he may well have succeeded in his ancillary goal of bankrupting the American empire. Even though he is dead, the endgame he set in motion has played out more or less successfully. Each day we are two billion dollars further in debt and that much further from claiming the upper hand.

Michael Scheuer's indispensable book Imperial Hubris, published anonymously in 2004, essentially narrowed our realistic options down to two. We will either have to annihilate the Muslim nations or learn to do business without using coercion. Neither is likely to happen any time soon. The only remaining choice is to steel ourselves for future conflict and loss. Scheuer has some advice that seems especially appropriate on the tenth anniversary of the attacks:


Stop Celebrating Death and Defeat

Since the 11 September attacks, many Americans have engaged in an almost nonstop celebration of the massive US defeat suffered that day. Purportedly sorrowful commemorations of the dead, these endless, well-planned and -scripted effusions of grief, international contests for memorial designs, and, most of all, rivers of stilted, never-forget oratory serve no purpose save to recall our utter defeat and allow us to wallow in dread of the pain to come. In my own organization in 2003, we celebrated "Family Day" by treating visiting relatives to this sort of celebration of defeat. In the main corridor stood a shrine erected to the debacle of 11 September. Beautifully matted photos of the twin towers burning and collapsing, framed artist renderings of architects' plans for memorials to the dead, photos of pseudo-Diana flower piles placed in front of US embassies abroad, and--the macabre centerpiece--a glass display case holding metallic shards from the World Trade Center. All these are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, unmanly. Americans are made of sterner stuff--or, at least, better be, for, as Robert D. Kaplan wrote about our current foes in the Atlantic Monthly, "In a world of tribes and thugs manliness goes a long way."


9/11 memorials have always been a heady mixture of arrogance and self-pity. The tenth promises to be the most extravagant orgy yet, but as Scheuer observes, such things serve no real purpose. After ten years, perhaps it's time to move on. Perhaps we might stop reminiscing on our brief moments spent basking in the world's sympathy and start reflecting on why so much of that sympathy has been lost. We might take a cold look at our response to what happened and judge carefully whether it has helped or hurt us. It remains to be seen whether America is "ready" for such a course. But if we can't be smart about it, let's at least be manly.

Avatar

James Cameron is back for the first time, more or less, since 1997's Titanic. Among other things, Avatar is his way of trying to reclaim the art of movie-making for the movie theater. He spent his hiatus pondering the idea of audiences watching movies on cell phones, and he didn't like the implications. With Avatar, he proposes to raise 3-D film-making to a new level and bring something altogether different to the theater setting. I'm definitely in the Cameron fan club, so I had little doubt that he could accomplish this if anyone could. The results are mixed, in my opinion, but worth seeing. So...my thoughts.

The writing is the first thing about this movie that demands your attention, and not in a good way. Be warned, this isn't just the usual snarking that people always feel obligated to do with science fiction movies. It really is bad. This is especially surprising from Cameron, who normally stands head and shoulders above other genre writers. The dialogue in the early part of the film is so blatantly expositional that you wonder why the characters don't just drop all pretenses and talk straight to the camera. "This is the video log...we want to get in the habit of documenting, blah, blah, blah." The familiar Cameron characters are here--spunky female pilot, slimy corporate suit, belligerent jarhead--but the roles don't have much life in them. And for all the film's length, it seems too rushed to develop a detailed, lived-in world like the ones in Aliens and The Abyss. Overall, it doesn't play like a Cameron film.

As for the political overtones and supposed anti-Americanism, they don't require much comment. America is the bad guy here, which has proven quite a shock to the legions of sci-fi fans who either didn't see the Star Wars movies or somehow didn't notice what they were about. Apparently there are more of them out there than you would think. Cameron doesn't spend much time belaboring the point, but instead draws things in very simple strokes. The military basically works for the corporations, everyone's out for the resources, and we'll kill anyone who gets in our way. In other words, it's the same as real life, but because the action takes place so far from Earth it's all carried on straightforwardly and without any mumbo-jumbo about spreading democracy. Nothing here that should be controversial unless you've been living under a rock for the last 60 years or so.

Aside from the writing and directing, the other potential disappointment with Avatar is the 3-D. This will depend on what you expect going into it. My guess was that Cameron would create a much smoother, more integrated 3-D world and one that you could really get lost in without thinking of it as an "effect." This isn't really what Avatar does, though. The environments have the familiar pop-up book quality, meaning they look like multiple layers of flat elements rather than a real three-dimensional world. They're often rich and beautiful, and just as often busy and distracting.

What is groundbreaking about Avatar is not the 3-D but the expressive computer-generated characters. It has aptly been described as "breaking the CG barrier" because, like The Abyss and Terminator 2, it's a film that will change the way CG is used. An actor will be able to play any sort of character in CG form, including human characters of any age or description, and fit seamlessly into a realistic setting. The non-humanoid creatures are a step up, too, moving in a wild, energetic way that's terrifying at times.

Of course, no discussion would be complete without some mention of the battle sequences. They're good, and at times they almost seem about to be magnificent, especially in the aerial battle near the end. But after nearly two hours of lazy narrative and self-indulgent "aww...pretty!" shots of assorted flora and fauna, there's surprisingly little payoff in this department. It doesn't help that the grand finale is a ridiculous hand-to-hand brawl on the forest floor. Then again, it is interesting that Cameron revisits the alien vs. loader theme with the alien as the good guy this time.

Avatar is a breakthrough of sorts, though maybe not the one Cameron hoped for. As of now, we still haven't seen anything in 3-D that isn't essentially a gimmick film with some flashy effects to make up for its shortcomings. Except Coraline, but that doesn't entirely count. Maybe Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland will buck the trend. Meanwhile, Avatar is at least worth seeing, both for its own merits and as a preview of what special effects are about to be.

Inglourious Basterds

When I hear people say, “I don’t know whether it’s a masterpiece or a mess,” I usually think, “That’s because you’re an idiot.” I know it’s mean. That’s why I just think it instead of saying it…so, give me some credit. But this time, I have to admit I don’t know whether it’s a masterpiece or a mess.

I like Quentin Tarantino a lot, even though I don’t think he’s in the same league at all with some of the filmmakers he imitates. This comes down to the fact that Tarantino, unlike Martin Scorsese or David Lynch, usually has nothing to say. However, his movies are more fun than just about anything else you can see in a theater these days. What he does, he does superbly. A new Tarantino film is a big event if only for that reason.

So, what to make of Inglourious Basterds? Is it just supposed to be fun, or is it a more ambitious kind of Tarantino film? How does it succeed or fail at whatever it is that it’s trying to do?

On the level of pure fun, I’m in the camp that calls IB a smashing success. Don’t listen to anyone who says Brad Pitt is out of his depth in this role. He gives his character, Lt. Aldo Raine, a single-minded quality that’s both laughable and strangely lovable. When he tells a German officer that he’s in the “killin’ Nazi bidness,” he’s treating us to his own version of light-hearted understatement. Killing Nazis is much more than a business with him, and more than a passion…it’s closer to a religion.

The German officer Col. Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, is far more well-rounded. He’s fluent in at least four languages and appreciates a fine pastry. At least, he appreciates it right up until he buries his cigarette in it--for all his sophistication, he sees French culture as a status symbol to be taken up, consumed, and discarded. He doesn’t see it as something to be lived in or informed with. This is in contrast to Shosanna/Emanuelle, for whom culture is everything. “I’m French…we respect directors,” she says to the German soldier Frederick Zoller, who is his own nation’s Audie Murphy. This holds true even though she hates Zoller and his army.

Brad Pitt’s Lt. Raine stands in contrast to both the German and French characters. For him, culture is neither sacred nor swanky. It’s something he’s just not aware of at all. His virtue as a practical American is to be concerned only with justice. This is what sets him apart him from the hauteur of the French and the vulgarity of the Germans. He’s the quintessential American, a man in the bidness of doing what’s right—nothing more, nothing less.

So far, so good. The film works well on the same level as those to which it pays homage, that is, as a rousing good vs. evil story. America represents integration and freedom from prejudice, as we see from the example of the Jewish/German/Austrian Basterds. We have the pure-hearted Joes rescuing the cheese-eating surrender monkeys from the Hun pigs…all of which comports well with our own American mythology. But Tarantino complicates matters even at this level. The Americans and British bungle the operation at every turn, and the French aren’t so hapless after all; it’s only because of Emmanuelle’s craftiness (and Landa’s selfishness) that the operation succeeds.

Not only is the effectiveness of the Americans a complicated question, but so is the nobility of their actions. This is the second level at which the film invites analysis. Starting with the first chapter (called “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France,” a reference to the director Sergio Leone of spaghetti Western fame), the story features an ongoing cowboys vs. Indians motif. The traditional American mythology is inverted here, with the cowboys (Nazis) as the bad guys and the Indians (Jews) as the good guys. In the first chapter, Col. Landa is framed in the French family’s doorway like John Wayne in a visual quotation from The Searchers. This is bold, to say the least…but it makes sense. John Wayne’s character in The Searchers is somewhat like Col. Landa. He would happily rid the world of Native Americans, just like Landa is trying to rid the world of Jews. And, in fact, Hitler studied the white settlers’ extermination of the natives, admired it, and based some of his own policies upon it.

The motif continues in the following chapters, with the Basterds resembling Indians in several ways. Aldo, their leader, is referred to as The Apache. Other team members have descriptive names with a Native American ring to them, such as “Bear Jew” and “Little Man.” And, of course, they ambush and scalp their Nazi enemies. By drawing this parallel between occupied France and the American Old West, Tarantino shows the struggle against fascism as part of a larger struggle against intolerance and oppression in general. And he suggests that the USA is on the wrong side of the struggle sometimes. The picture of the righteous American is therefore more ambiguous than it appears on the surface. On the first level, which is the straightforward narrative level, the film is a celebration of American heroism. On the second, intertextual level, it’s a critique of American racism. It should also be noted that the Basterds’ tactics are indeed inglorious. They gladly partake of the same cruelty and dishonor as their enemies.

This leads us to the film’s third level, the self-referential level, where IB refers not to other works in similar genres but rather to itself. The significant parallel here is between IB and Nation’s Pride, the German propaganda film whose premiere is the setting for the finale. The similarity between us and the Nazi audience is apparent—we’re cheering the deaths of Germans just as they’re cheering the deaths of Americans. What’s less obvious is the relationship between the two films and the two audiences’ reasons for applauding them. As we’ve seen, IB resembles the extremely sincere war movies we all grew up with. Pitt’s character embodies the simplistic mindset that lets us, as Americans, see ourselves as the heroes in every situation. At the same time, the character is also a parody and the film a critique. The most obvious inference is that “our” movies are propaganda, too, and that we shouldn’t be too quick to judge other cultures when they appear to have blind spots. A nice sentiment, true as far as it goes, and one that many Hollywood filmmakers would be satisfied with.

But Tarantino isn’t satisfied with it. Judgment does come at the end of Inglourious Basterds…and it comes with a vengeance. Emmanuelle literally sets fire to the fantasy world of the Nazis’ propaganda and exposes them to a reality that’s entirely different. In the end, IB doesn’t see all the myths as equivalent. It does believe in a reality that exists behind the myth, and it shows the truth to be more powerful than propaganda.

Or does it? Because the interesting thing about Inglourious Basterds is this. The very moment when the Nazis’ fantasy world is annihilated by reality is the same moment when the film departs from reality altogether and enters a fantasy world of its own. When the theater explodes in flames, killing Hitler and his inner circle, all pretense of truth is abandoned. We’re in a world of pure vengeful catharsis now, a world grounded not in real history but in WWII-era comic books like Captain America…in other words, a world of propaganda. And there’s nothing in this finale that invites us to second-guess our emotions. IB embraces unreality at this point, in the name of fighting fascism, apparently without any qualms.

This is the tried and true philosophy of art as assault, which dates back to Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. There, the concept of a filmic attack on the audience is expressed with the image of a razor slicing through an eyeball. It’s the essential insight of Marxian critical theory since the Frankfurt School, which sees film as a means of direct revolutionary action. The Marxian project is to subvert film’s role as a transmitter of fascist (i.e., bourgeois/capitalist/patriarchal) ideology. It does this not by refuting the dominant ideology on its own terms; the Frankfurt School recognized that the masses were not directly susceptible to an anti-bourgeois agenda. Instead, it undermines the ideology by undermining the very idea of art as a medium of communication in the usual sense. In this view, film is not a means of communication, but rather a means of manipulation and control. It’s a form of propaganda.

The climax of IB thus moves beyond mere critique of American culture based on general moral principles and into subversion of culture itself based on specifically revolutionary principles. As such, it has much in common with the Nazis’ view of culture as something subordinate to political goals. In this view, it’s questionable whether the film’s portrayal of the Basterds’ atrocities is really a critique. The unironic good vs. evil story and the self-referential subversive agenda merge, frightfully, into the same thing. Instead of cheering the Americans because they’re Americans or because they represent “good” (how naive, that), a more sophisticated audience can cheer them because they represent an enlightened, anti-bourgeois agenda. But in the end, what we’re cheering is a raw assertion of power.

It’s anyone’s guess how aware Tarantino is of these overtones. I may be over-analyzing, but there’s no doubt that academic theorists will relish this aspect of the film. The disturbing thing, to me, is that Inglourious Basterds ultimately minimizes the struggle of real, bourgeois people under a fascist regime and turns it into the story of one power-based ideology competing against another. In a sense, that was what WWII was about—the struggle between communism and fascism. But in the real history of the world we live in, there are “glorious” ideals, one of which is the value of truth as opposed to propaganda. To some extent Americans have represented those ideals, however imperfectly. A film that criticizes our imperfections should always be welcome. A film that crosses the line from criticism to cultural pessimism in the Marxian fashion, perhaps less so.