Full Battle Rattle
Directed by Tony Gerber & Jesse Moss
at Film Forum
July 9-22
Most war documentaries seek to reveal hidden strife in other countries, but Full Battle Rattle reveals the reflection of it in our own. Directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss spent three weeks with the 5-82 Battalion for the duration of its training session at the Iraq simulation in the Mojave Desert; after the practice ended, the grunts headed to the real thing. The resulting movie captures a uniquely theatrical stunt worthy of Brechtian analysis, where the soldiers choreograph their own prospective brutality.
To be fair, the concept behind the camp holds a logic befitting of a militant perspective. Gerber and Moss use a verité approach that implicates no outside talking heads to critique the program, and the participants wholeheartedly believe in the practicality behind it. The implied comic exquisiteness of pro-American Iraqis portraying scared Iraqi residents while nascent American troops pretend to raid their homes generates an aura of absurdity straight from the oeuvre of Christopher Guest. Gerber and Moss don’t need to editorialize with this accidentally satiric material. It provides the rare occasion where bad acting and forced scenarios make sense. The team repeatedly engages in “negotiations” with the Iraqis; but peace, in this case, seems inevitable. At one point, the leader happily hands over Monopoly money and a basket of pears to do penance for the unintended “killing” of an Iraqi’s relative, effectively bringing democracy with hard cash and fruit.
The surge appears to be working like a hammer on a nail: unclean, imprecise but indisputably on target—physically, anyway. Full Battle Rattle implies that the soldiers prep themselves for role-playing in the Middle East to the point where their arrival overseas is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. The actors rehearse, and then they perform. It’s a mentality endorsed by the American government when President Bush visits the training center and refers to it as “an important theater in this war.” By making the illusion work, the fantasy becomes real.
The Iraqi actors, meanwhile, accept the irony of their job and actually relish it. “Iraqis are pro-America,” a cultural guide explains to the troops. “They’re just afraid to say it.” That particular sentiment often gets lost in translation. Matthew Modine’s recent short film, To Kill An American (available online), contains a parade of talking heads from various cultures expressing their allegiance to the country’s ideals. Declaring that it’s “the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom,” they conclude, “America is not a place. It’s a dream. It’s an idea.”
The training center, with its interpretive layout of perceived enemy tropes, perverts that idea: Baudrillard’s simulacra for warmongers. Unfortunately, Full Battle Rattle also exists inside this fabricated realm. The cameras never take us to the real Iraq; we only go as far as the runway before a closing note reveals the fate of the group. Consequently, the movie fails to become a document of our time and settles for the dopey synthetic version instead.
Directed by Tony Gerber & Jesse Moss
at Film Forum
July 9-22
Most war documentaries seek to reveal hidden strife in other countries, but Full Battle Rattle reveals the reflection of it in our own. Directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss spent three weeks with the 5-82 Battalion for the duration of its training session at the Iraq simulation in the Mojave Desert; after the practice ended, the grunts headed to the real thing. The resulting movie captures a uniquely theatrical stunt worthy of Brechtian analysis, where the soldiers choreograph their own prospective brutality.
To be fair, the concept behind the camp holds a logic befitting of a militant perspective. Gerber and Moss use a verité approach that implicates no outside talking heads to critique the program, and the participants wholeheartedly believe in the practicality behind it. The implied comic exquisiteness of pro-American Iraqis portraying scared Iraqi residents while nascent American troops pretend to raid their homes generates an aura of absurdity straight from the oeuvre of Christopher Guest. Gerber and Moss don’t need to editorialize with this accidentally satiric material. It provides the rare occasion where bad acting and forced scenarios make sense. The team repeatedly engages in “negotiations” with the Iraqis; but peace, in this case, seems inevitable. At one point, the leader happily hands over Monopoly money and a basket of pears to do penance for the unintended “killing” of an Iraqi’s relative, effectively bringing democracy with hard cash and fruit.
The surge appears to be working like a hammer on a nail: unclean, imprecise but indisputably on target—physically, anyway. Full Battle Rattle implies that the soldiers prep themselves for role-playing in the Middle East to the point where their arrival overseas is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. The actors rehearse, and then they perform. It’s a mentality endorsed by the American government when President Bush visits the training center and refers to it as “an important theater in this war.” By making the illusion work, the fantasy becomes real.
The Iraqi actors, meanwhile, accept the irony of their job and actually relish it. “Iraqis are pro-America,” a cultural guide explains to the troops. “They’re just afraid to say it.” That particular sentiment often gets lost in translation. Matthew Modine’s recent short film, To Kill An American (available online), contains a parade of talking heads from various cultures expressing their allegiance to the country’s ideals. Declaring that it’s “the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom,” they conclude, “America is not a place. It’s a dream. It’s an idea.”
The training center, with its interpretive layout of perceived enemy tropes, perverts that idea: Baudrillard’s simulacra for warmongers. Unfortunately, Full Battle Rattle also exists inside this fabricated realm. The cameras never take us to the real Iraq; we only go as far as the runway before a closing note reveals the fate of the group. Consequently, the movie fails to become a document of our time and settles for the dopey synthetic version instead.
