Poster Girl

Today is the day the Oscars are announced and it's also one of the days that the Documentary Short nominees are being shown in theaters across the country. This is the first year such a show was shown and I must say that all the nominees were exceptional...though generally rather depressing as well. I didn't mind that, as the films were intended to point out societal problems--and that is not what I'd consider 'fun'.

Of the five nominees, I think that "Poster Girl" is probably my least favorite--but it still is an excellent film and I can see why it's nominated. It's the story of one particular combat vet from the Iraqi war and here difficulties that have arisen from her moral objections to the war as well as her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The film is strongly anti-war and makes quite an emotional impact on the viewer. I can't imagine anyone who is in favor of the war not feeling some sort of turmoil as a result of seeing the way this experience damaged the subject of the film--a very troubled young lady whose life seems to be a complete mess since coming back home. On this level the film is very compelling.

However, and here is my main objection to the film, is that it left way more questions in my mind than it really answered. Yes, I understand that war sucks and this morally vague one worse than most. But I couldn't help but feel that much of Rybynn's story was missing. They said in the film several times that she had physical injuries from her service--but what they were and how she got them was inexplicably missing. We know she had some sort of back problem and some other problems but I just kept thinking about the lack of clarity. The same, to a smaller extent, was true of her emotional injuries. All too often it seemed like a lot of what she experienced was left unsaid.

Another potential difficulty, and you can't blame the film for this, is that because this is the story only of one particular individual, you never really get a handle on how typical or atypical her experiences were. Yes, you do see her with a few anti-war activists here and there--but you only see at most a dozen at a time. I would like to see a 'big picture' film one day about this.

So how do I think the voting will go? Well, I am obviously not very good at guessing based on the last several years of watching all the shorts and predicting the winners! But, I assume that since Hollywood is generally to the left politically, I'd assume the film has a strong chance of winning. And, if it does, it certainly was a very good film. My votes, if I had them, would be for "Warriors of Quigang" or perhaps "Killing in the Name" (whose message is, at times, the opposite of "Poster Girl") or even "Strangers No More"--three films that just seemed more complete and which seemed to offer more answers.

UPDATE: The Oscar winner was "Strangers No More". I wouldn't have picked it since it was a rather tame and non-controversial film but it was uplifting and nice.

Its heart firmly in the right place, POSTER GIRL limns the depressing story of Robynn Murray, a gung-ho U.S. Army soldier who came back from her tour of Iraq to doom, gloom and too-late enlightenment. The huge (with those bearing mental problems always under-counted) population of casualties from our two current wars presents a human loss and social problem almost too immense to contemplate.

The film focuses solely on one person, which is a sensible approach. Robynn was literally a poster child, appearing with two fellow female soldiers on the cover of an army magazine to encourage our patriotic fervor and support for these armed conflicts. Though the Iraq debate has subsided as violence in that nation quieted down, Afghanistan (plus its neighbor Pakistan of course) remains on the front burner as American and other Allied soldiers are killed on a daily basis, with little hope (beyond the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel fantasists in our government) of a successful conclusion to the conflict.

Murray came away with a number of ailments, including stress disorder, and in a telling scene shows us an array of dozens of prescribed pills she should be taking, of which she's (wisely) narrowed it down to just two. Her travails with the government to obtain the disability payments due to her have a Vietnam War vet guiding her through the idiotic bureaucratic red tape to a semi-successful conclusion (I wasn't thrilled to hear how little the monthly stipend she finally received was).

Ultimately she freed her mind & spirit, which we witness in various stages of deep, deep depression, through art, taking a plaster cast of her body and using it to create anti-war exhibition pieces made up of pieces of uniforms or her training manuals. It's that good old American "Birdman of Alcatraz" triumph of the human spirit that always gets me, and movie audiences in general.

My caveat in both enjoying and being enlightened by POSTER GIRL is that it wallows in despair, with essentially too little payoff. Does Robynn face a bright future: the answer is no. Is there anybody out there (with power), including Pres. Obama, working to end the current wars NOW: the answer is no. I knew Dennis Kucinich (and his then-wife Sandy) personally back at college in Cleveland (CWRU), but having him in the White House, with Joan Baez as his Secretary of Peace in the cabinet to pull us out of wars is about as remote a possibility as the existence of those UFOs poor Dennis has admitted to seeing.

So while my emotional strings were successfully pulled in watching POSTER GIRL, upon reflection I go back to my own natural state of depression. The film did not provoke action on my part, but merely reinforced my feelings of powerlessness in the face of a huge military/industrial juggernaut taking us all (except perhaps the tiny sliver of jet setters at the apex of our society, readying their exit strategies to relocate to Costa Rica or some other remote spot in case of existential crisis) over the precipice.