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The business of War in Hollywood
by Duc Nguyen
In America, war is like a test trial. As long as it does not cost, no question asked. But, when the body bags begin to return, the public start to wonder. The recent reports on seven U.S. servicemen killed in action do more than raising questions, they slowly unveil a painful fact of war-casualty. The death of a Navy Seal in Afghanistan- ironically resemble an event portrayed in the film Black Hawk Down, revives a growing concern. It’s not because who he was but because of how he dies.
Thirty two year old Neil Roberts fell from the helicopter after it was under attack by rocket-propelled-grenades. He survived the fell but was shot by the al-Qaida fighters on the ground. His execution by the enemy is considered more than a regular casualty of war. Death in the hands of the enemy while being witnessed by the people on his side is a startling experience for Americans.
The nineties brought us such shocking scene when an Army Ranger was dragged by Somalian through the street in Mogadishu. Seeing your fellow countryman being slaughtered by the enemy but unable to intervene reduces the military might of the U.S. forces to the esteem of a quivering prey instead of a stoic hunter. When President Bush told the American public that his troops were going to smoke them [the al-Qaida and Taliban] out of their holes, he didn’t mention anything about what happens when one of his hunters fell into the hole. “The physical and psychic horrors of war, its micro-practices and dismemberments, its fragmentations and disruptions, must be depressed so that a unified national imagery can pose as the ultimate authority for explanation.” (Zimmerman)
“Wars manufacture enemies through imagery: the heartless Nazi, the vile Jap, the plotting Vietnamese, the obsessive guerilla, the drug lord, the evil Arab, the impure Bosnian.” In modern war film, the marginalization of the enemy image is increasingly blurred in term of definition. In Black Hawk Down, Somalian were portrayed as swarming “skinnies” that seem to multiply by minutes like the relentless ghostly skeletons in The Mummy. The idea of the enemy is proliferated in term of multiplicity and infinite. To fully exterminate the incalculable “other”, detonation of weapon of mass destruction is legitimized. To blast the swarm of enemies into smithereens makes…
