The Mumpsimus

Some notes for the above video essay: 1. My viewing of Zero Dark Thirty  and my ideas about it were and are influenced by ideas I first encountered in writings by  Ignatiy Vishnevetsky , Glenn Kenny , Steven Shaviro , and Nicholas Rombes . Their interpretations are not mine, and they should not be blamed for my failures, but I certainly owe them gratitude for whatever insights I have benefited from. 2. I worked on this video over a period of months, trying simply to gather a few of the motifs and visual patterns in the film (monitors, windows, surfaces, light/dark). It evolved to be something more impressionistic than that, but that was the initial concept.

Tom Waits has made a beautiful, surrealist video for the song "Hell Broke Luce" from his Bad as Me  album. It's one of my favorite of his songs, a coruscating view of war and soldiering. Play it loud. (Note: Some strong language.)

I was futzing around trying to create a video essay showing links between Cornel Wilde's 1967 war movie Beach Red and Terrence Malick's Thin Red Line , not really getting anywhere, when I watched Kevin B. Lee's video essay "War Movies for People Who Don't Like War Movies" . Most of the video offers his take on two films, Marwencol and La France (films well deserving more attention), but as someone who has seen a lot of war movies, and who would put a few on any list of top movies of all time, I struggled with the opening of his essay, even though he quotes my beloved Francois Truffaut: There’s no such thing as a truly anti-war film, Francois Truffaut once said. By depicting the adventure and thrill of combat, war movies can’t help but glorify their subject, fueling fantasies of spectacular, heroic violence. It’s a case where the sensational beauty of cinema works against our humanist impulses rather than for them. I'm not sure that categorizing war f...

I began watching Theater of War with low expectations.  Documentaries about the making of plays usually disappoint me for a variety of reasons, not the least being that what works well on stage seldom works well on film -- in so many ways, the art forms are the opposite of each other.  The process of making plays is also not inherently dramatic -- it's generally slow and repetitive, often frustrating, and the best rehearsal processes, at least in my experience, are ones all about doing as much wrong as possible in order to find, through experiment and elimination, what's right. I often found Theatre of War gripping, however.  Partly, this is because I'm interested in the people involved -- Tony Kushner, George C. Wolfe, Meryl Streep, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht.  The film uses the opportunity of chronicling the 2006 production of Mother Courage and Her Children  put on by the Public Theater in Central Park to chronicle much more than that -- to exp...

Released on DVD the same day in the U.S., the British comedy In the Loop and the American war movie The Hurt Locker make a fine pairing.  The first is a political satire about the behind-the-scenes machinations leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that feels rather like an extended episode of the original version of The Office , while the second is a tense and intensely immersive view of six weeks in the life of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Baghdad in 2004. Or, to put it all another way, In the Loop is the story of a bunch of repressed homosexuals who start a war rather than deal with their feelings, while The Hurt Locker , as Glenn Kenny pointed out , is a study of addiction.

I'm teaching a section of a course next semester called "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem" at Plymouth State , and since a passionate minority of the readership here seems interested in my syllabi and the (so-called) thinking behind them, here are the texts I've settled on using: The Dark Descent edited by David G. Hartwell Blasted by Sarah Kane Dying City by Christopher Shinn Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut S. by Slavenka Drakulic Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery I don't entirely know what I'm doing with all these texts yet (the order was due at the bookstore last week, but the class won't begin till the end of January), but I chose them because I think they will illuminate different things about each other. The only text that I've been settled on using since the moment I learned I'd be teaching a section of the class ...

The Farther Shore is the current LitBlog Co-op pick, and reading it caused me to think about a few different things, given that the novel portrays American soldiers in East Africa. It was, in fact, exactly a year ago that I was a tourist in Kenya , only a few hundred miles away from Somalia, where Matthew Eck had fought for the U.S. Army in the 1990s. A few hundred miles, a decade of years, entirely different worlds. (The U.S. has had a long history in Somalia , with U.S. military operations continuing , though this time as part of operations against al-Qaeda, while the situation remains complex and difficult .) Before reading The Farther Shore , I wondered about why it needed to be a novel -- why, in these memoir-sodden days of ours, would a writer choose fiction when he could probably have gotten more money and notice by writing about his own experiences? I became a bit skeptical of the fiction, because there were many possible pits it could fall into: politics and polemics ove...