Black Hawk Down Is as Offensive as Giuliani on Saturday Night Live

On Sept. 29, 2001, Saturday Night Live broadcast an image more invidious than the World Trade Center towers crumbling to dust. The episode opened with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani showing America?and the world?a questionable picture of New York courage: Giuliani stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen and behind their mean faces, a wall of police and firemen?all male, all white. And all too clannish to be tolerated as a definitive emblem of America. Representation matters in an image like that; Giuliani and Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels let the world know their narrow imagination of strength, courage, heroism, America. Against the reality of 9/11's widespread loss, multiethnic sacrifice and cross-cultural survival, an old-fashioned, racist sentimentality prevailed. It resurfaces in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, the new war movie presenting status-quo thoughtlessness through streamlined, subtly racist propaganda.

American media's need to trump up heroes and villains seems like self-congratulation for which 9/11 has simply been the pretext, not the inspiration. Understand: I'm not disputing genuine sacrifice, but the media's careless tossing about of "hero" abuses the concept. That SNL stunt, no different from the pre-mayoral Giuliani's ugly power play during the police march on City Hall, revealed Giuliani's belief in white power. His years of police/community antagonism (now readily forgotten by the media) shamelessly hid behind a national defense posture. Black Hawk Down also fabricates a narrow view of heroism by perverting the disaster of American troops' 1993 intercession in Somalia's civil war. It turns a death knell into a valiant last stand.

Rarely has war looked this chic-yet-chaotic. Choppers (Black Hawks) swoop through the dusky, mazelike streets of Mogadishu, the U.S. troops' encampment a shifting pattern of khaki-mauve-olive-lavender. But Scott can't keep the war strategy straight. Soldiers seem to aim at each other as targets because one action-filled shot follows another with painterly, but not military, logic. Scott can do lavishness, yet he flubs the clear orchestration of action that was central to all the great battle directors since Griffith and Eisenstein. Appreciation of coherent cinema probably died with the popular mixmaster mess of Armageddon. Yet, people who fall for Black Hawk Down actually want Scott to make their political frustration into one long, hellzapoppin' trailer. Armageddon II. This enables irresponsible, exploitative filmmaking to pass as patriotism even though its connotations?as with that SNL/KKK tableau?offend the ideals reasonable people care about in wartime.

Humanitarianism isn't part of Scott's esthetic. Effectiveness being the commercial-maker's rule, he takes no responsibility for the meaning or consequence of his images. Black Hawk Down could be the first wartime war movie that teaches nothing about sacrifice, but only exploits it. Scott makes grief over America's foul-up in Somalia feel like a noble esthetic experience by risking American viewers' best principles. He reduces the war to the oldest, base oppositions of the flickers, coming discomfortingly close to cowboys-and-Indians, explorers-and-savages stereotype. Ironically, this Western hegemony is what's customarily exported to the global movie market. (It's the same tribal instinct Giuliani/SNL used to make 9/11 seem an attack on white folks only.) Somalia gets rewritten as an elegy for our military's caste system. Scott depicts that war as, literally, a black-vs.-white battle. His cast of American soldiers is all white (with one exception) but their targets?The Enemy?are characterless, or cliched, black Africans who only know how to wage battle against Good and Innocence. Scott and screenwriter Ken Nolan don't bother examining the confused motivations in Third World politics or the treacherous involutions of modern-day civil war that extends from Cold War subterfuge. This garbled mythmaking would be appalling if it weren't so cartoonish. Its post-9/11 release has clicked with media mavens eager to play on America's current anxiety about Afghanistan and bin Laden's terrorist network (linked to Somalia in the film's lengthy introductory epigraphs).

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer casts the same generic, photogenic, banal white troops as in last summer's Pearl Harbor. Josh Hartnett is back as the central pilot-hero, Sam Shepard takes another vacation from the avant-garde to personify ornery all-American militarism and Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana and Tom Sizemore (reprising his gung-ho Saving Private Ryan grunt) comprise the testosterone chorus. Throughout the film's relentless battle scenes, these actors are always in motion, always in peril. Masculine versions of silent movies' Little Nell, they evoke the trepidation we felt for the besieged whites in The Birth of a Nation. Patriotic fervor isn't yet the rage (as the superior Behind Enemy Lines proved with its interesting allusion to Capt. Scott O'Grady's heroism in Bosnia) so Bruckheimer resorts to "our boys" shorthand. This displaces the political screwup and military fiasco at the heart of the Battle of Mogadishu. Switching history with fantasy is easiest for American viewers?and jingoists?to swallow. Blatant prejudice isn't Bruckheimer's agenda (after all, he produced last year's brotherhood epic Remember the Titans), but trite manipulation is. He's in the bang-bang nostalgia business, shooting off platitudes like fireworks. Enlisting Ridley Scott gives Bruckheimer's con-job the semblance of artistry, and that?combined with misrepresenting the soldiers of various denominations who served in Somalia?is Black Hawk Down's greatest offense.

Scott's heartless technique easily converts into racist propaganda because he's selling the battles as product, just like a tv spot. After tv's specially managed coverage of Desert Storm, only a generation distanced from war can approve the noisy imprecision?the machine-gun delectation?on display in Black Hawk Down. It takes a modern form of barbarism to misread Scott's mayhem for engaged, forthright self-defense in the anti-Al Qaeda spirit. Scott has no special view on battle or death?that's why he imitated Saving Private Ryan's 20th-century look of chaos and oblivion for the ancient battle scenes of Gladiator and here. Scenes of white soldiers mowing down the marauding black Somalis have the same convictionless chill as the concluding sequence of American soldiers trotting through a cloudy miasma. Cheered on by frolicking roundheaded native boys welcoming them to the liberated area of Somalia, the G.I.s are greeted with gleaming, pellucid glasses of water. After two and a half hours of relentless bloodshed, this harmony of First and Third World archetypes follows Benetton logic. Damn that Ridley Scott, it's also the most exquisite Evian commercial ever made!

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Now's the time to recognize the Scott threat. Black Hawk Down, though superlatively art-directed and awesomely well photographed, has no visual gravity. Scott's flat, tv compositions and blurry editing don't affect the senses the way true Cinemascope framing should. Even a miniaturist like Wes Anderson does better 'scope in The Royal Tenenbaums?a single shot of Gwyneth Paltrow's foot stretching across the screen to unlock a door with her toe is more dynamic than any of the explosions and crashes in Black Hawk Down.

Scott's recent ascension up the Hollywood mountain, certified by the Oscar-winning, standard-lowering Gladiator, proves the omni-influence of his British tv-commercial style. It has destroyed an art form. Scott's peers Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne also turn out flashy garbage; so does his family (brother Tony has his own share of gaudy junk, including Spy Game's geopolitical hodgepodge, and son Jake, who made the lousy period drama Plunkett & Macleane, also does derivative music videos). Scott was the first of this group to be thought an artist. But the director of Black Hawk Down isn't exactly the same promising esthete who, out of nowhere, did the sumptuous The Duellists, the extraordinary Alien and the eye-popping Blade Runner. Hoping to legitimize his style as cinema, Scott once evoked comparisons to Josef von Sternberg and Bernardo Bertolucci, but eventually proved he lacked their intelligence and seriousness. Soon?after Legend, Black Rain, 1492, Thelma & Louise and the atrocious Hannibal?the hack overtook the hiree who had a great eye.

In Black Hawk Down Scott goes way past superficial spectacle for an opportunistic jingoism to which magazines The New Yorker and Time have already pinned the medals "best" and "resolute." (It goes with naming Giuliani Person of the Year.) But if Somalia should inspire anything, it's sorrow and ambivalence. Fact is, Scott doesn't believe in mourning America's Somalian casualties any more than he cared for the harsh lives of Roman gladiators or any of Hannibal Lecter's poor victims. In our 9/11 fragility, we are susceptible to propagandists as stylish as Scott or crude as Giuliani/SNL. This country has not survived because white people held it together, but through the aggregation of intelligences and allegiances?something bin Laden thought was easily toppled, that Somalia's warlord Aidid tried to decimate, a fact that Giuliani has always circumvented. Beware media labeling public officials heroes; its usually trying to run a power move, a hegemony play.

There used to be an astringent appreciation of the political and moral gestures in war movies; and films like The Thin Red Line, 1941, Saving Private Ryan and They Were Expendable stand up to it. They don't traffic in spurious symbolism or distracting kinetics; they express complicated experience. Malick, Spielberg and Ford were fully attentive to ethnicity and race as wartime expediencies. Scott's simplification lacks the political and moral standards we need (the very nuances people yawned at in Saving Private Ryan). He's become one of the worst hack directors ever, because his expressive potential succumbs to tv-commercial sellout. Saturday Night Live could parade white supremacy as patriotism while passive tv-watchers nodded. Sadly, there's been no uproar over the captious patriotism in Black Hawk Down either. All this mindless hero-mongering reveals the gullibility of terrorism-weary audiences. When images of heroism become this axiomatic, American integrity crumbles like the towers.