The Face of Battle

Occu­pa­tion: Dream­land, dir. Gar­rett Scott and Ian Olds @ Int’l House, 7 p.m.

A few days lat­er, when every­one is more relaxed, the inevitable necrophilic humor of impe­r­i­al war-mak­ing comes out: “How much mon­ey would it take for you to have sex with a male corpse at the fifty-yard line dur­ing the Super Bowl half­time show? What? Five million?

Chris­t­ian Par­en­ti — The Free­dom: Shad­ows and Hal­lu­ci­na­tions in Occu­pied Iraq

Vad­er — “This is the War”

Juelz San­tana, fea­tur­ing Cam’ron — “Kill ‘Em”

2 responses to “The Face of Battle”

  1. stinkcheattorture Avatar
    stinkcheattorture

    per­haps a digression–or maybe i missed the bent of the necrophilia/war metaphor, but i always loved the sniper sequence in full met­al jack­et. after a long desen­si­tiz­ing tran­si­tion from the sim­u­la­tions of boot camp to the reail­i­ties of com­bat, there’s a remark­able snap-to for the sol­diers. hav­ing fatal­ly wound­ed the female sniper who strate­gi­cal­ly hob­bled, then killed, their com­rade, the unit strug­gles over wak­ing emo­tions of com­pas­sion, emas­cu­la­tion, and ven­gance. the scene would­n’t have had the same grav­i­ty with a male enemy/sniper. the gen­der ten­sion brings it back into terms civil­ians can under­stand. that said, to answer your question–paraphrasing eminem–i’d do a stiffo on the fifty for $20 and a bot­tle of mini-thins…which, you guessed it, makes me fuck­ing crazy. still that’s a tough scene. very icon­ic, too.

  2. Blackmail Avatar
    Blackmail

    Would that that were a metaphor! That’s a direct quote!

    Hav­ing seen this film, you get a keen sense of what Iraq was like in 2003, before the Marines laid siege to Fal­lu­ja, before the Abu Ghraib rev­e­la­tions gal­va­nized the resis­tance, before the pro­vi­sion­al elec­tions were held that seem to have only rein­forced eth­nic alle­giances that eas­i­ly give way to civ­il insurrections.

    The sense I got, and a feel­ing I’ve held for some time regard­ing those who feel this is a sit­u­a­tion to be “fixed” for fear of civ­il war break­ing out. The real­i­ty has been that the Iraqis have been fight­ing a civ­il war since the resis­tance began to define the con­tours of their alle­giance to power.

    That said, I think it’s strange that a sol­dier would muse like a necrophilic Ludacris!