Whenever the nonsense of military action begins screeching down the hallways of the power elite, you can just bet that the idiot cliches will come strolling out just to take a look at what's going on. Please note that I said "idiot cliches." Not all cliches are the purview of the imbecilic. Some are quite handy and useful, such as "marching off to war," "popular mandate" and "axis of evil," although it must be admitted that many years have passed since anyone in an American military uniform "marched" off anywhere. But the idiot cliches are the ones used either to frighten us or motivate us; ultimately they desensitize us to the real and genuine abominations that military actions invariably cause.
Earlier this week, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the body of the Senate Armed Services Committee--itself something of a cliche--on "The Case for Action in Syria." If one looks at the website for the U.S. Secretary of State, one can see that the man has already made a remarkably profligate number of speeches. This one, however, does not address the anniversary of Andorra nationhood, and so stands out, at least so far, in the tenure of the man from Massachusetts. The speech begins in an offhand, nearly colloquial style, as if he were making an appearance on "The Tonight Show" as the warm-up comic.
I'm sometimes asked how, as someone who testified 42 years ago against the Vietnam War in which I had fought, I could testify in favor of action to hold the Assad regime accountable today. The answer is, I spoke my conscience in 1971 and I'm speaking my conscience now in 2013.
A nice parallelism happens there, of course, as he contrasts the two events, one real, one anticipated, driving home in the first two sentences the idea that we are not here to repeat mistakes, but rather perhaps to engage in new ones. Certainly, that isn't what he meant to imply. Nevertheless, speechwriters must be prepared for this type of dissection. The real nugget in the words above is "to hold the Assad regime accountable." One may ask, "What does that mean?" Accountability sounds like a good thing, yes, but to what and for what?
A few sentences later we remain just as far removed from an answer to that question. Yet the obfuscations are only beginning.
The faulty intelligence of the Iraq War was a legacy burned into all of us who present the case for action in Syria to the Congress: It has made us press with extra urgency to know that we are highly confident of what we speak now.
The expression "faulty intelligence" bounds off the page and slaps us across the mouths like the food in a popular antacid commercial. "Faulty intelligence?" The term suggests that the information gathered about the possibility of the Saddam Hussein regime possessing WMDs (the king of all military cliches) was on a par with attempting to steal cookies from mother and then when the jar broke putting the blame on a younger brother. The intelligence was not naughty or inept or slipshod. It was manufactured to order by a U.S. regime that had been planning for the eventuality of a war with Iraq since before the "faulty" election of George W. Bush. Kerry knew this vital distinction when he ran against Bush for the Presidency in 2004 and he knows it today. But the expression has been driven into the public consciousness ever since Bush himself used it to blame Central Intelligence in December 2005.
There will be no boots on the ground in Syria.
As Kerry continues with his attempts at maintaining parallelism between the naughty endeavors of Vietnam and Iraq versus the presumably virtuous missile attacks against Syria, he invokes what has become, to my ears, a most egregious and addle-brained cliche: Boots on the ground. As one can decipher from such a term, we don't actually send real live human soldiers into war, but by God if we ever did, they'd be wearing boots and people would hear them marching from the Ganges to the Nile. Come to think of it, such a reality might very well give away our military position in a way even Geraldo never imagined. Perhaps we ought to establish a less tiresome and sneakier metaphor, one which actually requires a bit of thought, one which uses absurdity to drive home the realities of loping around in the scorching desert heat. Some of my Facebook friends and I have come up with alternatives for the Secretary.
Sandals in the Sahara
Wedgies on the West Bank
Danskins on Damascus
Pumps on Palmyra
Loafers on Latakia
Sneakers in Sudan
Tennis shoes in Tunisia
Flip-flops in Fil-Asia
Clogs in Cairo
In one way, this is funny. It might even become a new recreation for service members as they wait around on the offshore missile carriers, jotting down suggestions in between ICBMs. In another way it's horrible, of course. People die when Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles strike their huts. Probably the only thing worse than trivializing it with amusing word games is to desensitize the entire process through the use of stammeringly stupid, numbing cliches.
So what is Syria? It would be a tailored action to make clear that the world will not stand by and allow the international norm against the use of chemical weapons to be violated with impunity by a brutal dictator willing to gas hundreds of children to death while they sleep. Our action would be a limited and targeted military action, against military targets in Syria, designed to deter Syria's use of chemical weapons and degrade the Assad regime's capabilities to use or transfer such weapons in the future.
The italics in the above paragraph of the Secretary's remarks were added for emphasis by me. They indicate what I consider to be well-considered and deliberate uses of vagueness and ultimately meaningless terminology which serve the same political or propaganda functions as cliches and which in the process become ex-officio cliches themselves.
Tailored action. Both Kerry and his President have been using this expression to describe the planned attack on Syria. Tailors, as we recall, make suits. They take measurements, they consider inseams, they honor specificity, they leave little to chance. They are often thought of as the perfectionists of the world of thread. They are meticulous, gentle and humble. Yet this tailoring will be an action, lest anyone get the impression we are weak. Our needles are sharp, pointy, and no desert camel will ever walk through the eye of one of ours.
Stand by and allow. That's what happened to Kitty Genovese in Kew Gardens. Thirty-some people watched her get raped and murdered. Some even turned up their televisions to drown out her cries for help. Well, not us, buddy. When that terrorist-harboring Philistine Assad gases 1400 of his own countrymen, we might have to admit that he kind of sort of already did get away with it, but no way are we going to let him do it again, even if it turns out we don't like any of the thirteen different known groups who constitute that mysterious band of ragtag ragamuffins collectively known as The Rebels. Those people sitting behind Kerry on the TV with their hands painted red to signify that we have blood on our hands should have been with Kerry, chanting "No more Genoveses!" or "Remember Kitty!"
Chemical weapons. While I'm fairly certain all weapons are comprised of some combination of chemicals or at least elements, we have been conditioned to associating this term with almost anything except the defoliants and herbicides developed by the United States and used happily in the war against Vietnam. In a more contemporary sense, three main categories of chemical weapons exist: harassing agents, incapacitating agents, and lethal agents. Tear gas is common example of an harassing agent. An incapacitating chemical weapon would be, for instance, LSD, a substance about which the U.S. military learned a great deal in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But Kerry doesn't mean that. What he means is the lethal variety, including such evils as mustard gas, skin necrotizers, metabolic poisons, chlorine, and, the real biggie, Sarin gas. Sarin affects neurotransmitters, causing the body to forget how to breathe. The victim literally chokes to death. So when Assad ordered missiles carrying nerve gases--including Sarin--to be dropped on people just outside Damascus, 1,429 people died in a most unconscionable manner. Chemical war by its very nature is imprecise, which is one reason Kerry suggests a hyper-specific tailored response. In a gaseous state, those chemicals travel indiscriminately. That is one reason why people such as Assad favor them: their very use signals that the regime that ordered them is capable of unlimited barbarity. The intent is to create a mammoth wall of terror against which dissenters will abandon all hope. Kerry and the President are justified in being outraged by it. They may not necessarily be justified in their desired response. But the very use of the term "chemical weapons" delivers, in this context, a wallop against which, it is presumed, only unreasonable people would resist. Dissenters should be expected to abandon all hope.
Violated with impunity. The word "impunity" means that someone believes himself to be exempted from punishment. It is a persuasive expression. It is also as old as "as old as the hills" and about half as evocative.
Brutal dictator. Roughly twenty countries on this planet are ruled by dictators. I always took it on faith that one aspect of dictatorship was the implied use of brutality, which is one of the reasons I'm so nervous here in Arizona. But the term is not entirely redundant, for all its cliched overtones. Al-Bashir in Sudan is brutal. Than Shwe in Myanmar is brutal. Jong in North Korea is brutal. Other dictators have had their angry flare-ups, but are not congenitally predisposed toward brutality. Assad actually is brutal, as one might guess from his understanding of the concept of antisemitism. After he blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, some in the media suggested he was antisemitic. He argued that whereas Judaism--according to Assad--is heterogeneous, the Syrian people are themselves the core Semites and therefore to be antisemitic would be to be against himself, which he asserts he is not now nor ever has been.
Degrade the Assad's regime's capabilities. Any government we don't want to say good things about is a regime. The American government is never a regime, unless the President is Obama and the person using the word is a right wing talk radio host. But to degrade capabilities sounds very much like what one would do to a yard littered with weeds. What would we use to get rid of weeds? Wait! I know! We could use chemical weapons!
These and other weary twists of the tongue deliberately inhibit the impact of a man whose verbal stirring power lies somewhere between Jack Lord of the original "Hawaii Five-O" and former Vice-President Al Gore. The decision to launch missile strikes against Assad is far too important to be put forth in such a dreary and ultimately uninteresting manner. Presumably, Obama's forthcoming address to the nation will be just chock full of lurid images and perky similes. Neither version will attempt to ask some of the hard questions, the most tenuous of all being: Who are these rebels and to what extent will they be empowered or emboldened by such a strike? The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.
Earlier this week, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the body of the Senate Armed Services Committee--itself something of a cliche--on "The Case for Action in Syria." If one looks at the website for the U.S. Secretary of State, one can see that the man has already made a remarkably profligate number of speeches. This one, however, does not address the anniversary of Andorra nationhood, and so stands out, at least so far, in the tenure of the man from Massachusetts. The speech begins in an offhand, nearly colloquial style, as if he were making an appearance on "The Tonight Show" as the warm-up comic.
I'm sometimes asked how, as someone who testified 42 years ago against the Vietnam War in which I had fought, I could testify in favor of action to hold the Assad regime accountable today. The answer is, I spoke my conscience in 1971 and I'm speaking my conscience now in 2013.
A nice parallelism happens there, of course, as he contrasts the two events, one real, one anticipated, driving home in the first two sentences the idea that we are not here to repeat mistakes, but rather perhaps to engage in new ones. Certainly, that isn't what he meant to imply. Nevertheless, speechwriters must be prepared for this type of dissection. The real nugget in the words above is "to hold the Assad regime accountable." One may ask, "What does that mean?" Accountability sounds like a good thing, yes, but to what and for what?
A few sentences later we remain just as far removed from an answer to that question. Yet the obfuscations are only beginning.
The faulty intelligence of the Iraq War was a legacy burned into all of us who present the case for action in Syria to the Congress: It has made us press with extra urgency to know that we are highly confident of what we speak now.
The expression "faulty intelligence" bounds off the page and slaps us across the mouths like the food in a popular antacid commercial. "Faulty intelligence?" The term suggests that the information gathered about the possibility of the Saddam Hussein regime possessing WMDs (the king of all military cliches) was on a par with attempting to steal cookies from mother and then when the jar broke putting the blame on a younger brother. The intelligence was not naughty or inept or slipshod. It was manufactured to order by a U.S. regime that had been planning for the eventuality of a war with Iraq since before the "faulty" election of George W. Bush. Kerry knew this vital distinction when he ran against Bush for the Presidency in 2004 and he knows it today. But the expression has been driven into the public consciousness ever since Bush himself used it to blame Central Intelligence in December 2005.
There will be no boots on the ground in Syria.
As Kerry continues with his attempts at maintaining parallelism between the naughty endeavors of Vietnam and Iraq versus the presumably virtuous missile attacks against Syria, he invokes what has become, to my ears, a most egregious and addle-brained cliche: Boots on the ground. As one can decipher from such a term, we don't actually send real live human soldiers into war, but by God if we ever did, they'd be wearing boots and people would hear them marching from the Ganges to the Nile. Come to think of it, such a reality might very well give away our military position in a way even Geraldo never imagined. Perhaps we ought to establish a less tiresome and sneakier metaphor, one which actually requires a bit of thought, one which uses absurdity to drive home the realities of loping around in the scorching desert heat. Some of my Facebook friends and I have come up with alternatives for the Secretary.
Sandals in the Sahara
Wedgies on the West Bank
Danskins on Damascus
Pumps on Palmyra
Loafers on Latakia
Sneakers in Sudan
Tennis shoes in Tunisia
Flip-flops in Fil-Asia
Clogs in Cairo
In one way, this is funny. It might even become a new recreation for service members as they wait around on the offshore missile carriers, jotting down suggestions in between ICBMs. In another way it's horrible, of course. People die when Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles strike their huts. Probably the only thing worse than trivializing it with amusing word games is to desensitize the entire process through the use of stammeringly stupid, numbing cliches.
So what is Syria? It would be a tailored action to make clear that the world will not stand by and allow the international norm against the use of chemical weapons to be violated with impunity by a brutal dictator willing to gas hundreds of children to death while they sleep. Our action would be a limited and targeted military action, against military targets in Syria, designed to deter Syria's use of chemical weapons and degrade the Assad regime's capabilities to use or transfer such weapons in the future.
The italics in the above paragraph of the Secretary's remarks were added for emphasis by me. They indicate what I consider to be well-considered and deliberate uses of vagueness and ultimately meaningless terminology which serve the same political or propaganda functions as cliches and which in the process become ex-officio cliches themselves.
Tailored action. Both Kerry and his President have been using this expression to describe the planned attack on Syria. Tailors, as we recall, make suits. They take measurements, they consider inseams, they honor specificity, they leave little to chance. They are often thought of as the perfectionists of the world of thread. They are meticulous, gentle and humble. Yet this tailoring will be an action, lest anyone get the impression we are weak. Our needles are sharp, pointy, and no desert camel will ever walk through the eye of one of ours.
Stand by and allow. That's what happened to Kitty Genovese in Kew Gardens. Thirty-some people watched her get raped and murdered. Some even turned up their televisions to drown out her cries for help. Well, not us, buddy. When that terrorist-harboring Philistine Assad gases 1400 of his own countrymen, we might have to admit that he kind of sort of already did get away with it, but no way are we going to let him do it again, even if it turns out we don't like any of the thirteen different known groups who constitute that mysterious band of ragtag ragamuffins collectively known as The Rebels. Those people sitting behind Kerry on the TV with their hands painted red to signify that we have blood on our hands should have been with Kerry, chanting "No more Genoveses!" or "Remember Kitty!"
Chemical weapons. While I'm fairly certain all weapons are comprised of some combination of chemicals or at least elements, we have been conditioned to associating this term with almost anything except the defoliants and herbicides developed by the United States and used happily in the war against Vietnam. In a more contemporary sense, three main categories of chemical weapons exist: harassing agents, incapacitating agents, and lethal agents. Tear gas is common example of an harassing agent. An incapacitating chemical weapon would be, for instance, LSD, a substance about which the U.S. military learned a great deal in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But Kerry doesn't mean that. What he means is the lethal variety, including such evils as mustard gas, skin necrotizers, metabolic poisons, chlorine, and, the real biggie, Sarin gas. Sarin affects neurotransmitters, causing the body to forget how to breathe. The victim literally chokes to death. So when Assad ordered missiles carrying nerve gases--including Sarin--to be dropped on people just outside Damascus, 1,429 people died in a most unconscionable manner. Chemical war by its very nature is imprecise, which is one reason Kerry suggests a hyper-specific tailored response. In a gaseous state, those chemicals travel indiscriminately. That is one reason why people such as Assad favor them: their very use signals that the regime that ordered them is capable of unlimited barbarity. The intent is to create a mammoth wall of terror against which dissenters will abandon all hope. Kerry and the President are justified in being outraged by it. They may not necessarily be justified in their desired response. But the very use of the term "chemical weapons" delivers, in this context, a wallop against which, it is presumed, only unreasonable people would resist. Dissenters should be expected to abandon all hope.
Violated with impunity. The word "impunity" means that someone believes himself to be exempted from punishment. It is a persuasive expression. It is also as old as "as old as the hills" and about half as evocative.
Brutal dictator. Roughly twenty countries on this planet are ruled by dictators. I always took it on faith that one aspect of dictatorship was the implied use of brutality, which is one of the reasons I'm so nervous here in Arizona. But the term is not entirely redundant, for all its cliched overtones. Al-Bashir in Sudan is brutal. Than Shwe in Myanmar is brutal. Jong in North Korea is brutal. Other dictators have had their angry flare-ups, but are not congenitally predisposed toward brutality. Assad actually is brutal, as one might guess from his understanding of the concept of antisemitism. After he blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, some in the media suggested he was antisemitic. He argued that whereas Judaism--according to Assad--is heterogeneous, the Syrian people are themselves the core Semites and therefore to be antisemitic would be to be against himself, which he asserts he is not now nor ever has been.
Degrade the Assad's regime's capabilities. Any government we don't want to say good things about is a regime. The American government is never a regime, unless the President is Obama and the person using the word is a right wing talk radio host. But to degrade capabilities sounds very much like what one would do to a yard littered with weeds. What would we use to get rid of weeds? Wait! I know! We could use chemical weapons!
These and other weary twists of the tongue deliberately inhibit the impact of a man whose verbal stirring power lies somewhere between Jack Lord of the original "Hawaii Five-O" and former Vice-President Al Gore. The decision to launch missile strikes against Assad is far too important to be put forth in such a dreary and ultimately uninteresting manner. Presumably, Obama's forthcoming address to the nation will be just chock full of lurid images and perky similes. Neither version will attempt to ask some of the hard questions, the most tenuous of all being: Who are these rebels and to what extent will they be empowered or emboldened by such a strike? The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.
Film, Propaganda, and Other Art
In 1971 a group of film students wrote, directed, produced and acted in a movie called Billy Jack. The film, which starred Tom Laughlin and Dolores Taylor, was dependent for approval first upon the pre-existing politics of the viewer and second upon that viewer's decision about the acceptable means of achieving political change. Naive and simplistic, Billy Jack was also brash, daring, and quite accurate in its message that pacifists exist at the mercy of emotional heathens. And emotional heathens have a history of being unmerciful.
Billy: You worked with King. Where is he?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: And where are Jack and Bobby Kennedy?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: Not dead. They had their brains blown out.
The significance of this movie should not be underestimated. Not many films released in the USA have suggested that the Allies lost World War II or that the government's government is none too benignly fascist or that it is not only appropriate but even urgent to defend the country against that government. The film makes the choices simple. The man v. man conflicts are
(a) oppressed native Americans versus reactionary WASPs,
(b) communal dwellers versus urban despot,
(c) youth versus aged,
(d) poor versus rich,
(e) free versus neurotic, and
(f) good versus evil.
At the time, those who enjoyed the film saw it as an inspirational work that gave hope to those opposed to the status quo. Today, such a film would be considered inspired propaganda, even by those who agree with its central themes, just as today such once revolutionary philosophies have been co-opted and perverted by right wing separatists who find safe havens in Idaho and Montana.
1971 saw the release of another subversive film, this one a celluloid adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick's film was just as subversive and yet even more persuasive and down right manipulative than Billy Jack. Beginning with loud synthetic dominant strands of mostly familiar classical music, the movie leads the audience into the protective hands of Alex, the protagonist and "humble narrator." Alex lives in a future where every impulse and action is ultimately and merely functional, and in the process extrapolates on the conservative uses of liberal reform, even though it is impossible to tell who are the reformers and who are the reactionaries.
Alex is a truly despicable character. He leads an assault on a drunken old man, he whips other young folks with chains, he steals a car and runs people off the road with it, he cripples a writer and makes him watch while the gang of "droogs" rapes his wife. And it is this despicable Alex with whom the audience is compelled to identify. Alex is not only the voice and figure who directs the audience through the adventures of the movie; he is proudly nonmechanical and unartificial. So even though he is the embodiment of free evil, we the audience become upset when he is manipulated by a state mechanism that is certainly no nobler than young Alex. The identification with what has been improperly called an anti-hero was reinforced many ways, perhaps most cleverly as we see Alex become programmed to have unpleasant physical responses to hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and slowly realize that something similar has happened to us when we hear "Singing in the Rain," a song Alex sings while leading the gang rape.
Billy: You worked with King. Where is he?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: And where are Jack and Bobby Kennedy?
Jean: Dead.
Billy: Not dead. They had their brains blown out.
The significance of this movie should not be underestimated. Not many films released in the USA have suggested that the Allies lost World War II or that the government's government is none too benignly fascist or that it is not only appropriate but even urgent to defend the country against that government. The film makes the choices simple. The man v. man conflicts are
(a) oppressed native Americans versus reactionary WASPs,
(b) communal dwellers versus urban despot,
(c) youth versus aged,
(d) poor versus rich,
(e) free versus neurotic, and
(f) good versus evil.
At the time, those who enjoyed the film saw it as an inspirational work that gave hope to those opposed to the status quo. Today, such a film would be considered inspired propaganda, even by those who agree with its central themes, just as today such once revolutionary philosophies have been co-opted and perverted by right wing separatists who find safe havens in Idaho and Montana.
1971 saw the release of another subversive film, this one a celluloid adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick's film was just as subversive and yet even more persuasive and down right manipulative than Billy Jack. Beginning with loud synthetic dominant strands of mostly familiar classical music, the movie leads the audience into the protective hands of Alex, the protagonist and "humble narrator." Alex lives in a future where every impulse and action is ultimately and merely functional, and in the process extrapolates on the conservative uses of liberal reform, even though it is impossible to tell who are the reformers and who are the reactionaries.
Alex is a truly despicable character. He leads an assault on a drunken old man, he whips other young folks with chains, he steals a car and runs people off the road with it, he cripples a writer and makes him watch while the gang of "droogs" rapes his wife. And it is this despicable Alex with whom the audience is compelled to identify. Alex is not only the voice and figure who directs the audience through the adventures of the movie; he is proudly nonmechanical and unartificial. So even though he is the embodiment of free evil, we the audience become upset when he is manipulated by a state mechanism that is certainly no nobler than young Alex. The identification with what has been improperly called an anti-hero was reinforced many ways, perhaps most cleverly as we see Alex become programmed to have unpleasant physical responses to hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and slowly realize that something similar has happened to us when we hear "Singing in the Rain," a song Alex sings while leading the gang rape.
Kubrick's earlier film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, has received the most fluctuating degrees of praise and condemnation of any major mation picture. Based on the story by Arthur C. Clarke and released in 1968, 2001 was loved by dopers and art film aficionados, but the general reaction was voiced by Rock Hudson, who reportedly fled the theatre shouting, "Will somebody please tell me what this film is about?!?"
The problem with Mr. Hudson was that--as with so many others who found the film boring--he simply asked the wrong question. One might as well have responded, "Oh, it's about two hours" as to have labored on about the ascent of man and other concepts that loosely unify the manifestation of the director's realization of the senses involved in film appreciation: sight and sound. A great movie such as A Hard Day's Night is certainly not about anything either. Nevertheless, it was entertaining, life-affirming, and as with Kubrick's film of four years later, contained visual scenes and snips of dialog that tend to be retained by the audience for far longer than seems reasonable. Anyone who has watched the Richard Lester Beatles film will recall the response John Lennon gives the interviewer who asks how he found the United States. "Turned left at Greenland." Anyone who has watched the Kubrick film will remember the astronaut's command to the space system computer: "Open the pod door, HAL." This act of instilling memories is nothing short of classical conditioning.
Kubrick has accomplished the conditioning miracle in two other films:The Shining and Full Metal Jacket.
The Shining, before it was a movie, was a novel. The man who wrote the novel was Stephen King. At that time, 1978, Stephen King's books were of the horror genre. The Shining was so intensely horrifying that it was at times psychologically painful, higher praise for which does not exist. By contrast, the movie was not painful. The movie lured the viewer in most seductively, went together waltzing, cleverly cascading through unexplained episodes that again were too compelling not to be trusted.
The King people hated it. Adherents of strict translation of novel to film felt betrayed, generic horror fans shrugged out of the theatre (no doubt thinking, "Will somebody please tell me what this film is about?!?"), and King himself was so displeased (he claimed that among other things, he strongly disliked Jack Nicholson's performance and felt this was very much the wrong actor because his work in an earlier film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, led people to assume the same character had stumbled into this film) that twenty years later he produced the abysmal remake entitled Stephen King's The Shining.
The problem with Mr. Hudson was that--as with so many others who found the film boring--he simply asked the wrong question. One might as well have responded, "Oh, it's about two hours" as to have labored on about the ascent of man and other concepts that loosely unify the manifestation of the director's realization of the senses involved in film appreciation: sight and sound. A great movie such as A Hard Day's Night is certainly not about anything either. Nevertheless, it was entertaining, life-affirming, and as with Kubrick's film of four years later, contained visual scenes and snips of dialog that tend to be retained by the audience for far longer than seems reasonable. Anyone who has watched the Richard Lester Beatles film will recall the response John Lennon gives the interviewer who asks how he found the United States. "Turned left at Greenland." Anyone who has watched the Kubrick film will remember the astronaut's command to the space system computer: "Open the pod door, HAL." This act of instilling memories is nothing short of classical conditioning.
Kubrick has accomplished the conditioning miracle in two other films:The Shining and Full Metal Jacket.
The Shining, before it was a movie, was a novel. The man who wrote the novel was Stephen King. At that time, 1978, Stephen King's books were of the horror genre. The Shining was so intensely horrifying that it was at times psychologically painful, higher praise for which does not exist. By contrast, the movie was not painful. The movie lured the viewer in most seductively, went together waltzing, cleverly cascading through unexplained episodes that again were too compelling not to be trusted.
The King people hated it. Adherents of strict translation of novel to film felt betrayed, generic horror fans shrugged out of the theatre (no doubt thinking, "Will somebody please tell me what this film is about?!?"), and King himself was so displeased (he claimed that among other things, he strongly disliked Jack Nicholson's performance and felt this was very much the wrong actor because his work in an earlier film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, led people to assume the same character had stumbled into this film) that twenty years later he produced the abysmal remake entitled Stephen King's The Shining.
Despite the objections of literary purists, the Kubrick film was not only cinematically magnificent, it also pulled off associations and manipulations equally affecting casual viewer and celluloid scholars. The perfect mental association is formed when the Jack Torrance character (played with superhuman strength by Nicholson) destroys the bathroom door behind which his wife and son are hiding, puts his face up to the curtain of wood, and prefatory to the anticipated slaughter of his family, bellows with great jocularity, "Here's Johnny!" So successful was that burst of tension relief and so exact was the actor's delivery that from that moment on it became impossible to listen to Ed McMahon's introduction for his boss on "The Tonight Show" without conjuring up that same mental image. Earlier in the same motion picture, the audience is persuaded to identify with Jack Torrance, even though this character becomes a very bad man. His wife, Wendy, played by Shelly Duvall, does not deserve the bad things that her husband is trying to do to her. And yet the audience is clearly pulling for Jack. In one familiar scene, Wendy is protecting herself from Jack by wielding a baseball bat. Jack has the funny lines, the motivation, the flattering shots, and far more name and visual recognition than Ms. Duvall, who in her character comes across weak, helpless, and pathetic. It may be that Kubrick lured the audience into siding with Jack because the director believed that we could only understand the character's public and private demons if we sympathetically identified with that character. Or, just as likely, the director himself enjoyed this type of psychological manipulation and may even have felt his film's successes depended upon this.
Whatever Kubrick's motives, his unparalleled skill in group coercion made it perfect that he would direct one of the best films about the Vietnam War, Full Metal Jacket.
Whatever Kubrick's motives, his unparalleled skill in group coercion made it perfect that he would direct one of the best films about the Vietnam War, Full Metal Jacket.
By the late 1970s, the war experience had become fodder for movie studios. The very fact of a film being made about the war suggested the slant would be anti, but that was not necessarily so. Coming Home, starring Jane Fonda, Bruce Dern and Jon Voight, was certainly a film that did not seem to much care for the war in as much as Voight--whose character was crippled--was able to "give" Fonda the orgasm her pro-military husband Dern could not. But besides that and a great period piece soundtrack, the movie offered little. Not much better was The Deer Hunter, although it did deal with the psychological horrors affecting people long after the war was over. And even though Oliver Stone would later make two excellent films with the war as the focus, for the better part of a decade, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was the ultimate Vietnam War film.
And for very good reason. Based tangentially on the Joseph Conrad short novel Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, in the words of its director, "wasn't about Vietnam. It was Vietnam." True enough. This was a big film with big actors and a big budget and there can be no doubt that anyone who has seen the movie has come away with at least snippets of realization of what the war was like. Coppola's intent was not to sermonize or persuade, and the film is genius in the way it deals with power without dealing with politics. The audience finds darkness, they find madness, but they are finding it less through their own eyes than through those of Willard, the captain played by Martin Sheen.
And that is not something which can be said about Full Metal Jacket. FMJ used a creative reportage journey style of telling its story, but where Apocalypse Now moved slow and inexorably closer to the darkness of Kurtz, Kubrick's film was calculated second by second. Comprised of three parts, the movie begins with the post-induction pre-boot camp scene where the inductees have their long hair clipped off to the tune of Tom T. Hall's "Hello Vietnam." Young male volunteers, dozens of them, one after another, are freed from the liberation of their hair. The second part of the film is boot camp itself, where the audience is in the hands of Private Joker, our humble narrator. the Private has written "Born to Kill" on his helmet and wears a peace button on his uniform, which, he explains, is an attempt to say something about the duality of man. Kubrick brings back the Orange-style coercion as we watch a fat, stupid, frustrating recruit played by Vincent D'Onofrio be brutalized by his squad one night in retribution for a punishment doled out by the drill instructor. Since few in the audience desire to identify with an overweight ignoramus, the lure is to side with the group against him. But since Joker is the protagonist, we wait to see what he will do. He does exactly what an eighteen-year-old Marine would do under those conditions and administers a particularly savage beating. The ethics being thus resolved, the audience is freed to savor the brutality.
The final part of the film is set during the Tet Offensive, where our Marines are in Vietnam, fighting it out in an infantry gang where it quite appropriately becomes a challenge telling good guy from bad. But Kubrick doesn't so much play fair as he plays real. Having already accepted so much brutality upon the person of Joker, and having already rationalized that Joker's antisocial behavior was acceptable, the slaughter of the Vietnamese in turn may become an alright thing as well, just as it did in real life.
Aside from the fact that this is precisely how societal evils become palatable to the majority of media-hungry processing units, the prime message of all these Kubrick films is sobering: if the public can be manipulated, can be aware of the manipulation, and in spite of that fact continue to respond to the manipulation, then is it not just as likely that the audience is being conditioned outside the movie theatre and may even be acting complicit and in concert with that far more significant level of manipulation?
The key element in any act of manipulation or coercion is the perceived authority of those in a presumed position of power over those potentially being controlled. In 1962 and 1963, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments at Yale University devised to test obedience. Forty participants were told they were engaging in an exercise to measure the effects of aversion on memory. The participants were told to read a series of questions and answers via intercom to subjects behind a separating wall. After this, the participants were to ask the questions again, and this time the learners would attempt to give the correct answer. If the learner gave the wrong answer or failed to reply, the teachers were to administer increasingly higher levels of punitive electric shock. Aversion treatment apparently played no role in memory retention because the learners begged and pleaded for the horribly painful shocks to stop. Despite the fact that the learners argued and shouted that they had heart conditions, and despite the fact that ominous silence eventually became the learners' response, sixty-five percent of the teachers followed Milgram's orders to administer the highest voltage possible, a level several steps beyond which the learners pounded on the wall and begged for release. Several teachers became emotionally disturbed as a result of what they realized about themselves in this and subsequent experiments, even after it turned out that the learners were simply acting and were not actually being shocked.
As Dr. Milgram described it: "With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority."
And that is not something which can be said about Full Metal Jacket. FMJ used a creative reportage journey style of telling its story, but where Apocalypse Now moved slow and inexorably closer to the darkness of Kurtz, Kubrick's film was calculated second by second. Comprised of three parts, the movie begins with the post-induction pre-boot camp scene where the inductees have their long hair clipped off to the tune of Tom T. Hall's "Hello Vietnam." Young male volunteers, dozens of them, one after another, are freed from the liberation of their hair. The second part of the film is boot camp itself, where the audience is in the hands of Private Joker, our humble narrator. the Private has written "Born to Kill" on his helmet and wears a peace button on his uniform, which, he explains, is an attempt to say something about the duality of man. Kubrick brings back the Orange-style coercion as we watch a fat, stupid, frustrating recruit played by Vincent D'Onofrio be brutalized by his squad one night in retribution for a punishment doled out by the drill instructor. Since few in the audience desire to identify with an overweight ignoramus, the lure is to side with the group against him. But since Joker is the protagonist, we wait to see what he will do. He does exactly what an eighteen-year-old Marine would do under those conditions and administers a particularly savage beating. The ethics being thus resolved, the audience is freed to savor the brutality.
The final part of the film is set during the Tet Offensive, where our Marines are in Vietnam, fighting it out in an infantry gang where it quite appropriately becomes a challenge telling good guy from bad. But Kubrick doesn't so much play fair as he plays real. Having already accepted so much brutality upon the person of Joker, and having already rationalized that Joker's antisocial behavior was acceptable, the slaughter of the Vietnamese in turn may become an alright thing as well, just as it did in real life.
Aside from the fact that this is precisely how societal evils become palatable to the majority of media-hungry processing units, the prime message of all these Kubrick films is sobering: if the public can be manipulated, can be aware of the manipulation, and in spite of that fact continue to respond to the manipulation, then is it not just as likely that the audience is being conditioned outside the movie theatre and may even be acting complicit and in concert with that far more significant level of manipulation?
The key element in any act of manipulation or coercion is the perceived authority of those in a presumed position of power over those potentially being controlled. In 1962 and 1963, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments at Yale University devised to test obedience. Forty participants were told they were engaging in an exercise to measure the effects of aversion on memory. The participants were told to read a series of questions and answers via intercom to subjects behind a separating wall. After this, the participants were to ask the questions again, and this time the learners would attempt to give the correct answer. If the learner gave the wrong answer or failed to reply, the teachers were to administer increasingly higher levels of punitive electric shock. Aversion treatment apparently played no role in memory retention because the learners begged and pleaded for the horribly painful shocks to stop. Despite the fact that the learners argued and shouted that they had heart conditions, and despite the fact that ominous silence eventually became the learners' response, sixty-five percent of the teachers followed Milgram's orders to administer the highest voltage possible, a level several steps beyond which the learners pounded on the wall and begged for release. Several teachers became emotionally disturbed as a result of what they realized about themselves in this and subsequent experiments, even after it turned out that the learners were simply acting and were not actually being shocked.
As Dr. Milgram described it: "With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority."
Milgram came under substantial criticism for his experiments, mainly because they tended to reveal unsettling things about how people are so easily able to exert power over willing "victims." After all, if we knew that the power came from us, we might choose to withhold it. Fed up with distracting questions about his ethics, Milgram replied:
I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.
Click HERE for the video Milgram made.
Milgram was pleased that not everyone went to the final level. He describes one such encounter.
The subject, Gretchen Brandt, is an attractive thirty-one-year-old medical technician who works at the Yale Medical School. She had emigrated from Germany five years before. On several occasions when the learner complains, she turns to the experimenter cooly and inquires, "Shall I continue?" She promptly returns to her task when the experimenter asks her to do so. At the administration of 210 volts she turns to the experimenter, remarking firmly, "Well, I'm sorry. I don't think we should continue."
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.
Brandt: He has a heart condition. I'm sorry. He told you that before.
Experimenter: The shocks may be painful but they're not dangerous.
Brandt: Well, I'm sorry. I think when shocks continue like this they are dangerous. You ask him if he wants to get out. It's his free will.
Experimenter: It is absolutely essential that we continue.
Brandt: I'd like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue I'll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I'm sorry. I don't want to be responsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn't like it for me either.
Experimenter: You have no other choice.
Brandt: I think we are here on our own free will. I don't want to be responsible if anything happens to him. Please understand that.
She refuses to go further. And the experiment is terminated. The woman's straightforward, courteous behavior in the experiment, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed. Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects.
I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.
Click HERE for the video Milgram made.
Milgram was pleased that not everyone went to the final level. He describes one such encounter.
The subject, Gretchen Brandt, is an attractive thirty-one-year-old medical technician who works at the Yale Medical School. She had emigrated from Germany five years before. On several occasions when the learner complains, she turns to the experimenter cooly and inquires, "Shall I continue?" She promptly returns to her task when the experimenter asks her to do so. At the administration of 210 volts she turns to the experimenter, remarking firmly, "Well, I'm sorry. I don't think we should continue."
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.
Brandt: He has a heart condition. I'm sorry. He told you that before.
Experimenter: The shocks may be painful but they're not dangerous.
Brandt: Well, I'm sorry. I think when shocks continue like this they are dangerous. You ask him if he wants to get out. It's his free will.
Experimenter: It is absolutely essential that we continue.
Brandt: I'd like you to ask him. We came here of our free will. If he wants to continue I'll go ahead. He told you he had a heart condition. I'm sorry. I don't want to be responsible for anything happening to him. I wouldn't like it for me either.
Experimenter: You have no other choice.
Brandt: I think we are here on our own free will. I don't want to be responsible if anything happens to him. Please understand that.
She refuses to go further. And the experiment is terminated. The woman's straightforward, courteous behavior in the experiment, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed. Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects.
Unfortunately, most of the time, what Milgram encountered was the horrifying scenario recounted below.
Fred Prozi's reaction, if more dramatic than most, illuminate the conflicts experienced by others in less visible form. About fifty years old and unemployed at the time of the experiment, he had a good-natured, if slightly dissolute, appearance, and he strikes people as a rather ordinary fellow. He begins the session calmly but becomes tense as it proceeds. After delivering the 180-volt shock, he pivots around in the chair and, shaking his head, addresses the experimenter in agitated tones:
Prozi: I can't stand it. I'm not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering?
Experimenter: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but. . .
Prozi: But he's hollering. He can't stand it. What's going to happen to him?
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you continue, Teacher.
Prozi: Aah, but, unh, I'm not going to get that man sick in there. Know what I mean?
Experimenter: Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on, through all the word pairs.
Prozi: I refuse to take the responsibility. He's in there hollering.
Experimenter: It's absolutely essential that you continue, Prozi.
Prozi: There's too many left here. I mean, Jeez, if he gets them wrong, there's too many of them left. mean, who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
Experimenter: I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue, please.
Prozi: All right. The next one's "Slow--walk, truck, dance, music." Answer please. Wrong. A hundred and ninety-five volts. "Dance."
Learner: Let me out of here! My heart's bothering me!
Experimenter: We must continue. Go on, please.
Prozi: You mean keep giving him that? Four hundred fifty volts, what's he got now?
Experimenter: That's correct. Continue. The next word is "white."
Prozi: "White--cloud, horse, rock, house." Answer, please. The answer is "horse." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next words, "Bag--paint, music, clown, girl." The next answer is "paint." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next word--
Experimenter: Excuse me, Teacher. We'll have to discontinue the experiment.
If filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was unaware of Milgram's test on obedience, he apparently drew the same conclusions. People can be controlled in a democracy as long as they bestow authority or responsibility upon the person directing their behavior. For a film director such as Kubrick, his repudiation alone is nearly enough to persuade an audience to obey. Add to that the celebrity of his actors, the magnificence of his craft, along with the dark black confines of a movie theatre, and one has sufficient conspiring elements to twist the moviegoer's ear in favor of endowing the director with unconditional power.
Fred Prozi's reaction, if more dramatic than most, illuminate the conflicts experienced by others in less visible form. About fifty years old and unemployed at the time of the experiment, he had a good-natured, if slightly dissolute, appearance, and he strikes people as a rather ordinary fellow. He begins the session calmly but becomes tense as it proceeds. After delivering the 180-volt shock, he pivots around in the chair and, shaking his head, addresses the experimenter in agitated tones:
Prozi: I can't stand it. I'm not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering?
Experimenter: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but. . .
Prozi: But he's hollering. He can't stand it. What's going to happen to him?
Experimenter: The experiment requires that you continue, Teacher.
Prozi: Aah, but, unh, I'm not going to get that man sick in there. Know what I mean?
Experimenter: Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on, through all the word pairs.
Prozi: I refuse to take the responsibility. He's in there hollering.
Experimenter: It's absolutely essential that you continue, Prozi.
Prozi: There's too many left here. I mean, Jeez, if he gets them wrong, there's too many of them left. mean, who's going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
Experimenter: I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue, please.
Prozi: All right. The next one's "Slow--walk, truck, dance, music." Answer please. Wrong. A hundred and ninety-five volts. "Dance."
Learner: Let me out of here! My heart's bothering me!
Experimenter: We must continue. Go on, please.
Prozi: You mean keep giving him that? Four hundred fifty volts, what's he got now?
Experimenter: That's correct. Continue. The next word is "white."
Prozi: "White--cloud, horse, rock, house." Answer, please. The answer is "horse." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next words, "Bag--paint, music, clown, girl." The next answer is "paint." Four hundred and fifty volts. Next word--
Experimenter: Excuse me, Teacher. We'll have to discontinue the experiment.
If filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was unaware of Milgram's test on obedience, he apparently drew the same conclusions. People can be controlled in a democracy as long as they bestow authority or responsibility upon the person directing their behavior. For a film director such as Kubrick, his repudiation alone is nearly enough to persuade an audience to obey. Add to that the celebrity of his actors, the magnificence of his craft, along with the dark black confines of a movie theatre, and one has sufficient conspiring elements to twist the moviegoer's ear in favor of endowing the director with unconditional power.
Such cinematic exercises have been trivialized since the 1980s. Now audience manipulation is unsubtle and direct in ways that would have embarrassed the makers of Billy Jack. In a film such asSpeed, for example, the good guys and bad guys are grossly two-dimensional, the plot is action, the conflict is mechanical, character development is inherent in the good or bad looks of the character, and whatever minimal audience manipulation does exist can only be measured in a reduction of alpha waves.
A few noteworthy and refreshing exceptions to this trivialization do exist. In 1991, Oliver Stone released JFK. Stone is possibly the only big money filmmaker working in America today who can approximate the Kubrick-style conditioning, and JFK proves the point. Predictably, the movie was bludgeoned by much of the media and was attacked by American intellectuals and nincompoops alike for the agreed-upon charge of distorting history.
Stone argued that some of his attackers had a vested interest in maintaining the myth of the Warren eport. That may well be true, but no one would have cared at all what the film was saying had it not been said with such authority. In the context of the film, the theory that forces within the U.S. Government conspired to kill John Kennedy because he supposedly deserted the cause of anti-Castro Cubans and was signaling an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam is a sharply convincing one. JFK is a motion picture that leads the viewer to consider his or her own programming while being programmed to do so. Or, as Stone himself said, "It is a counter myth." Or, as Kevin Costner, in the role of prosecutor Jim Garrison, says in his closing remarks to the jury:
I believe we have reached a time in our country, similar to what life must've been like under Hitler in the 1930s, except we don't realize it because fascism in our country takes the benign disguise of liberal democracy. There won't be such familiar signs as swastikas. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. "Fascism will come," Huey Long once said, "in the name of anti-fascism." It will come with the mass media manipulating a clever concentration camp of the mind. The super state will make you believe you are living in the best of all possible worlds, and in order to do so will rewrite history as it sees fit.
A few noteworthy and refreshing exceptions to this trivialization do exist. In 1991, Oliver Stone released JFK. Stone is possibly the only big money filmmaker working in America today who can approximate the Kubrick-style conditioning, and JFK proves the point. Predictably, the movie was bludgeoned by much of the media and was attacked by American intellectuals and nincompoops alike for the agreed-upon charge of distorting history.
Stone argued that some of his attackers had a vested interest in maintaining the myth of the Warren eport. That may well be true, but no one would have cared at all what the film was saying had it not been said with such authority. In the context of the film, the theory that forces within the U.S. Government conspired to kill John Kennedy because he supposedly deserted the cause of anti-Castro Cubans and was signaling an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam is a sharply convincing one. JFK is a motion picture that leads the viewer to consider his or her own programming while being programmed to do so. Or, as Stone himself said, "It is a counter myth." Or, as Kevin Costner, in the role of prosecutor Jim Garrison, says in his closing remarks to the jury:
I believe we have reached a time in our country, similar to what life must've been like under Hitler in the 1930s, except we don't realize it because fascism in our country takes the benign disguise of liberal democracy. There won't be such familiar signs as swastikas. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. "Fascism will come," Huey Long once said, "in the name of anti-fascism." It will come with the mass media manipulating a clever concentration camp of the mind. The super state will make you believe you are living in the best of all possible worlds, and in order to do so will rewrite history as it sees fit.
It is not always a simple matter to determine what constitutes a political film. Is it more political to challenge authority than to support it? Is a political film one that strives to unearth some secreted fundamental facts about the nature of society, or is it one that champions the individual psychology as true political enlightenment? Or is a political film only one that is about politics or politicians?
The problem with such questions lies in assuming that a movie can only be political, as opposed to being romantic, thrilling, action-packed, or comedic. The fact is that hundreds of major motion pictures have been made that had very strong political messages, or that at least were weighted with political connotations.
The problem with such questions lies in assuming that a movie can only be political, as opposed to being romantic, thrilling, action-packed, or comedic. The fact is that hundreds of major motion pictures have been made that had very strong political messages, or that at least were weighted with political connotations.