Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781555975791
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Taking our cue from Junger’s observation that the platoon, the group, counts for so much more than the individual, what—leaving aside particular merits or otherwise—do books of this kind reveal about larger questions of documentary versus fiction, about the ways in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are recorded and represented?

They make one feel thoroughly duped, for a start, by Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. As with the HBO adaptation of Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (written by David Simon and Ed Burns), the viewer is immersed totally in the experience of the American military in Iraq. Both are relentlessly gripping, especially The Hurt Locker, where every bit of trash—and there’s a lot of trash—is potentially life threatening. Indeed, The Hurt Locker is so nerve-shreddingly tense that it’s only when you reemerge into the safety of daylight that you see quite how ludicrously you have been manipulated, how shallow the experience has been. There is a thematic continuity here within Bigelow’s work: The Hurt Locker serves up a military equivalent of the thrill trips that Lenny Nero was hustling in her earlier Strange Days. Lenny sells virtual reality experiences of everything from a girl showering to armed robbery. And that—right down to the same camera techniques—is exactly what we get here. The new twist is in the nature of the simulated environment: all the thrills and spills of combat and bomb disposal in the privacy and safety of your own home-entertainment environment! So impressive is the technical accomplishment that one forgets that the action, while ostensibly unfolding in the context of a real and recognizable war, is operating safely within the absurd liberties of Hollywood convention. As if his life as a bomb-disposal expert were not exciting enough, as if it weren’t stretching belief that a top bomb-disposal outfit could suddenly morph into a crack sniper team, we are treated to a Bourne-style interlude in which William James implausibly and absurdly pulls on a hooded sweatshirt, takes a pistol, and goes on a one-man search for vengeance-justice (in Hollywood the two are dangerously synonymous) at night, in Baghdad—and makes it back in one piece! Throughout, the inflexible rigor of military discipline appears merely optional. While we’re at it, the whole character of James is patently absurd: a short-haired and uniformed reincarnation of Patrick Swayze, still seeking the ultimate ride, not in the surf and skies of Point Break, but in the heat and dust of Baghdad.

The television adaption of Generation Kill is, along with everything else, a sustained critique of the structural and conventional fictions of The Hurt Locker. Taking no liberties with the facts of Wright’s account, the series follows a convoy of U.S. Marines as they make their way from Kuwait to Baghdad. Certain characters have more screen time than others but there are no heroes. As in a platoon, everything comes down to teamwork and ensemble playing. The action is never contrived to assume the shape imposed by the demands of a good story. This is

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