Gunner
Palace
Documentary
presents a soldier's eye view of the Iraq occupation
Like so
many movies released nowadays, "Gunner Palace" begins with
a gun battle. Combatants have squared off in a city street
and are exchanging gunfire while people run for cover,
hoping that this day will not be their last.
The difference is, in "Gunner Palace" the gunplay is real.
And without the technical expertise of Hollywood to help
it, the battle reveals one of the most amazing ironies of
war: a lot of the time it ain't nearly as exciting as it's
made out to be. As the gunfire rings out, the cameraman
swings his camera around but is never really able to
pinpoint the source of the trouble; the soldiers on the
ground shout a lot, but they are nothing at all like the
lean, mean fighting machines we are used to seeing
depicted. They take what cover they can find and from that
moment on the whole enterprise is basically an exercise in
exchanging sporadic gunfire at vaguely defined targets.
Once the bullets start flying, ideologies disappear and war
becomes mainly an exercise in not getting hit. For those
experiencing the adrenaline rush of combat, there's
undoubtedly a huge time compression factor, but for the
objective viewer, watching from the vast remove of the
movie theater (the kind of viewer one soldier talks about
later in the movie), well, (shrug), visually, there's often
not much to look at.
But then, that's why Hollywood has to dress it up so much,
isn't it? Get the viewer's adrenaline going, get them
pumped.
But the real thing? The clips you see on the evening news?
Ha! If it weren't for the fact that someone could get hit
by a real bullet, the whole encounter, on both sides of the
trigger, seems kind of pointless, boring and stupid.
As you can probably tell, I'm an anti-war person. I think
it's pointless, boring and stupid. To me, "Gunner Palace"
is an anti-war film. It shows soldiers risking their lives
for a mission that none of them really seems clear about.
That's a horribly unfair use of their lives.
I'm sure that there are just as many people on the other
side for whom the experience of watching the film will be
the opposite: "God bless our boys in khaki, fighting for
this and that and the other." Etc. "They may not understand
their mission, but they had a job to do and by God they
stepped up to the plate." Etc.
The reason that the film can evoke the same reaction is
that it is one of the most loosely structured films I've
ever seen. There is no particular push for the viewer to go
one way or the other. It's a documentary from the "I Am a
Camera" school, where the cameraman rolls film and records
what happens. I don't believe it is possible — truly
possible — to ever make anything that has no
viewpoint — inevitably, a few subtle editorial
choices are bound to tilt the scales, even if just a little
— but "Gunner Palace" is about as objective as
possible.
The film follows a company of soldiers, called "The
Roughriders," if I understood correctly, whose current
place of residence is one of the many luxury palaces and
compounds built by Saddam Hussein. Their palace was the
residence of Saddam's son, Uday. At one time, it was no
doubt gaudily impressive, but there is nothing luxurious
about it now, with rubble strewn everywhere, and the upper
floors reached by staircases that "should be safe to
climb," according to one soldier.
Picking up four months after "major combat operations" are
supposedly over, the film chronicles a year or so of the
Roughriders' duty in a Baghdad that — if anything
— is growing more hostile and dangerous as time goes
on.
Apart from minor scene-setting commentary by a narrator,
the film lets the soldiers do all the talking. As you might
expect, many of the soldiers are not very articulate; they
do not seem to be deep thinkers. From people facing a real
prospect of sudden death, or the moral quandary of killing
someone else, I admit I expected to hear something more
philosophically pithy; these are big topics. But if they
don't seem to be deep thinkers, that does not make them
stupid, and it's perhaps unfair of me to expect them to
risk their lives and be eloquent as well. Perhaps the
lesson of "Gunner Palace" is that merely staying alive is
the point, and that deep reflection is for people who have
time and safe environment to do so.
It's also true that when I say (and as the promotional
material claims) that the war is presented in the soldiers'
own words they are — for the most part — words
caught in the flow of the moment, little asides to the
camera as they ride out on some mission. No one is ever
placed in isolation in front of the camera, as Robert
McNamara was in Errol Morris' "The Fog of War," and given
the chance to really summarize what they might want to say.
What the film does show extremely well through its approach
is how the soldiers' attitudes change with the course of
time; no one remains untouched by the experience. Some of
the soldiers start out with the usual macho bravado their
army training instills in them; some seem to be simply
naive young men, overly impressed with the fact that a few
months earlier they lived in some forgotten outpost in
small-town U.S.A. and now look where they are! — and
some of them seem to be budding hip-hop stars, delivering
their spiel to the camera in that relentless driving beat
that I invariably end up tuning out, not because I'm not
interested but because the delivery becomes a monotonous da
da da da, da da da da; a droning word blur.
The gist I got from the rappers in the Company is that in
their view they have simply exchanged one urban battlefield
in America for another one very much like it in a faraway
land.
And it is a battlefield. It's obvious from the start that a
very serious war is going on, in spite of how one
designates "major combat." Even viewing from the remove of
a movie theater, the tension you get from the soldiers is
real as they ride out, fairly exposed and unprotected, in
the back of a truck or Humvee, Their eyes are constantly
searching, wary, expecting an attack. As a viewer, I, too,
was always expecting a sudden explosion, or outbreak of
gunfire. The soldiers were often extremely vulnerable to
such assaults.
It's no wonder that as the film goes on, the soldiers
become visibly worn down and tired. They can get killed at
any second, and their mission is vague and is not really
what they were trained to do. They were trained to attack
and destroy armored divisions of enemy troops; now, they
are reduced to rousting families out of bed at three in the
morning, holding women and children at gunpoint in the
middle of the night, often without finding any of the
evidence they were seeking.
The strength of "Gunner Palace" — its willingness to
just let the cameras roll — is also its weakness at
times. The viewer is required to supply their own context
for much of what is happening. We know, for instance, that
the escalation of violence in the film might be tied to
certain events: the approach to the "handover" and the
escalation of insurgent attacks, and if I remember right,
some of the filming took place during April, 2004, which
was one of the deadliest months in the whole of the
occupation, with almost as many soldiers killed that month
as died during the whole of "major combat."
If all this context is missing, however, it is only because
the soldiers do not provide it. Their field of focus is
very narrow; they never discuss the mission as a whole, or
talk in terms of larger problems: Shiite versus Sunni
sectarianism, what will happen if the Kurds don't get their
share in the new government, etc. It would be interesting
to know if they themselves don't have a view of the larger
picture, don't care, or if they can really only afford to
stay focused on the picture immediately around them.
The soldiers don't talk politics at all, really, and don't
really get passionate about anything for that matter; they
don't seem gung-ho rah-rah about why they are there. They
are there because they were in the Army, and that's where
the job took them. And as far as politics goes, what they
really seem to care about is making it back home, just
making it back home on the out side of a coffin, and
perhaps that is the most profound and eloquent statement
anyone should ever be expected to make.