Why Iraq war films fail

A US army private based deep in the Sunni “triangle of death” south of Baghdad put it piquantly to me in May 2007: “We’re a reality show everybody’s bored of.” The soldiers know that nobody cares. According to minute-by-minute television ratings, viewers switch off as soon as an Iraq story hits air. When Siegfried Sassoon wrote his poems, and when Erich Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, much of their audience had lived through the same hell. During both the world wars, the entire nation was involved, and the experience of the soldiers was an intrinsic part of the national psyche. Not any more. I’ve met dozens of soldiers who, since the invasion, have served three or more tours in the warzone, spent more time with their platoons than with their families—and yet they realise that, back home, nobody knows or is interested in what they have been through.

Hollywood also recognises that the Iraq war is bad box office. Even winning the Oscar didn’t goose The Hurt Locker’s ticket sales much. In mid March it barely beat Tooth Fairy on the earnings list in America. On the same three days as Tim Burton’s critically panned Alice in Wonderland grossed $62m, The Hurt Locker only took in $800,000. The big-budget Green Zone also opened to disappointing numbers. And yet, thankfully, some film and documentary makers still feel compelled to explore the topic. More than 30 movies have been made about the Iraq war. Considering how little the average person knows—or cares—about the conflict, we urgently need these films to tell us what is going on. Do they succeed?

Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-triumphing Hurt Locker brilliantly evokes the look and texture of Iraq, with shaky handheld camera shots of armoured Humvees travelling through dusty boulevards. It also succeeds in showing the intense relationships men forge with their comrades by working together in war, and how the adrenaline rush of risking your life can make the ordinary world a little bland. Yet its story, of a “cowboy” bomb disposal specialist habitually putting his team and himself in grave danger, is naïve and inaccurate. In Iraq, “force protection” is emphasised above all else. Putting your men in unnecessary danger is utterly unacceptable; not at all part of the corporate culture. “Cowboys” in the real American military, unlike the ones in the film, are not reckless with their own or their comrades’ lives, but with the lives of non-Americans. So while one could argue that The Hurt Locker is a great war film, it is certainly not a great Iraq war film. Iraq is just the landscape for a tale that could be set in any random conflict.

Other films are based on actual stories from Iraq. Brian DePalma’s Redacted (2007) is the fictionalised retelling of the brutal rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah, and the response of the jihadis, who captured American soldiers from the same company and beheaded them on camera. Meanwhile Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha shows the massacre of innocent Iraqi civilians by a US Marine platoon in frenzied revenge after one of their own had been killed by a roadside bomb. Using documentary style and improvised ensemble acting, both films look realistic enough, but most of the characters, unfortunately, are two-dimensional. We know Specialist Rush is a redneck nutter because De Palma shoots him sprawling under a Confederate flag, while Broomfield's villagers are a textbook loving family turned into innocent victims.

Perhaps more importantly, by focusing exclusively on these terrible war crimes, the films give a misleading impression of the US army in Iraq. In my experience, the military is extremely well disciplined and obeys the rules of war. Yes, thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed by the Americans, but the great majority of them have been killed by mistake: because of misunderstandings and mutual incomprehension rather than through deliberate brutality. The classic example is the family ordered in shouted English to slow down at a checkpoint and when, for whatever reason they don’t, a nervous soldier opens fire, killing mom and dad, leaving screaming children covered in blood in the backseat. In a way, this much too typical accident is just as reprehensible, if less cinematic than the much rarer deliberate murder.

A whole slew of other films don’t even attempt to show Iraq, other than in hallucinogenic flashback. In the Valley of Elah (2007), for example, tells the story of a father whose son has been murdered within days of his return from war. Our sympathies here are with the normal Americans back home. The soldiers are seen as damaged, alien. Their experience has more to do with the clichés of war films than the actual day-to-day life of soldiers serving in Iraq.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad, by contrast, offers a unique and refreshing perspective. In 2003, Vice magazine published an article about an Iraqi heavy metal band and then returned to Iraq in 2006 (right in the middle of the Shia-sunni civil war) to make a documentary about these four Iraqi musicians. Unlike most Iraq war films, Americans play a minor role and the documentary fluently demonstrates the hell that Iraq became a few years after the invasion. Our sympathies are with the Iraqis, in part because they share an obsession with a western subculture—something tangible that audiences can relate to.

However, the newly-released Green Zone (which could have been titled “The Bourne Conspiracy Goes to Iraq”) is probably my favourite. It is big-budget Hollywood, fun to watch; its hero an incredibly dedicated soldier who doesn’t think twice about disobeying his superiors (something soldiers don’t do), but it does try to answer a big question: why did the Americans dismantle the Iraqi army, when it was their only chance to hold the country together? While the film is utterly inaccurate in its particulars, it is, I believe, truthful about the bigger picture. America failed in Iraq in large part because the men running the war were more interested in perceptions back home than the reality on the ground.

On and off, I have spent several years in Iraq and if there is one thing that strikes me it is the remarkable separation between the occupiers and the occupied. The Americans live on base or in fortified compounds. They meet few Iraqis that have not been vetted. Almost no Americans speak Arabic. Incomprehension is endemic. I’m sure more than a few soldiers have gone through their year-long tour and not had a conversation with a single Iraqi. This is unprecedented. In Vietnam, American soldiers had Vietnamese girlfriends, sometimes rented apartments, mixed often with the general population. So did the Germans in Paris, and the Russians in Berlin. The film I would like to see is one about this apartheid and how it led to disaster. The Iraq war was forged in a bubble, and fought in a bubble. It is a tragedy that deserves its Tolstoy. It still awaits its Francis Ford Coppola.