Victims
from The Blood Poets, Vol 2, by Jake Horsley
I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.
—Meserve, Casualties of War
Casualties of War (1989) stands alone in Brian De Palma’s oeuvre
as a distinctly moral
film. It was almost as if, with this film, the director was attempting to
address, as a filmmaker, his former sins. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, Casualties
of War (along with Blow Out though for different reasons) is De
Palma’s finest film, and the only one which he has made, to date, that
establishes a wholly sincere relationship with his audience. As such,
it’s his only honestly affecting film. Blow Out, for all its poignance, remains a rather
conceptual work; Casualties of War comes straight from the heart, and goes right for
the gut.
The subject of the film is one
on which De Palma could by all accounts claim to be an authority—male
violence and the exploitation of women. Although it deals with a single,
specific case (a true story, that of a platoon of soldiers in Vietnam who
abduct, rape and finally murder a Vietnamese girl), the film has the
unflinching emotional honesty and power to go beyond the specifics, into wider,
deeper territory. It is an appallingly effective meditation on—and
indictment of—the savager side of the male psyche, and of the diabolic
relationship between libido and aggression; or, to put it plainly, between sex
and war. At its best, the film stands as a testament to victims of male
violence everywhere.
Pauline Kael, in her
unrestrained eulogy to the film (
220;A Wounded Apparition,”[1]),
comments that,
in earlier movies De Palma was
always involved in examining (and sometimes satirizing) victimization, but he
was often accused of being a victimizer... This time, De Palma touches on raw
places in people’s reactions to his earlier movies; he gets at the
reality that may have made some movie-goers too fearful to enjoy themselves. He
goes to the heart of sexual victimization and he does it with a new authority.
Casualties of War gives us the total objectification of women
as an outlet not for men’s desires but for their rage, their frustration
and their impotence. It shows what happens when young, inexperienced boys are
thrown into a terrifying, inexplicable situation and told: make war, not love.
And it is these GIs, ultimately, who are degraded, and not the woman herself,
who somehow (and this may be what’s most surprising about the film,
coming from such a director) retains her dignity, her purity, throughout the
ordeal, all the way up to the moment of her death. She is, in the truest, most
total sense of the words—an innocent victim. (Her “crime” is simply being who
and what and where she is, at that time.) In an atmopshere of chaos, random,
senseless brutality, when young men, who might reasonably expect to be hanging
out in nightclubs and bars courting chicks, are instead fighting for their
lives against a strange, largely unseen enemy—it is hardly surprising if
some of these become, not soldiers, but killers, madmen, seeing as that is
precisely what is required of them.
The GIs in the film, and
specifically their sargent, Meserve (Sean Penn), reach a point at which their
old familiar values, standards, morals, what have you, all that made them good
and “straight” and decent American boys, simply collapse (they no
longer have any meaning or significance here—how could they?). When
Meserve witnesses the death of his friend, Brownie, it is the last straw that
breaks the soldier’s spirit; something dies in him. Meserve decides that
he and his men deserve a little “entertainment,” a release for all
the tension and fear and despair that has been building inside them; and so he
acts, in what he considers a justified fashion. Discovering the local whorehouse to be
off-limits (as the Viet Cong are in town), he organizes the abduction of a
village “gook-whore” (actually a simple farm-girl, Oanh, played by
Thuy Thu Le). The farmers to which the girl belongs are really
indistinguishable to these men from “the enemy,” which is, after
all, poorly distinguished to begin with, hence they feel justified in their
actions. Even when they have raped and tortured and finally destroyed the girl,
they do not feel in anyway accountable for their actions, which they are able
to disguise and condone them as acts of war. What they do is, by all accounts,
a heinous, unjustifiable act, but (the film seems to ask the question
implicitly) is there really any difference between such indivdiual action and
the general American
foreign policy in Vietnam? Which
send its troops into the jungle to indiscriminatley seek out, plunder,
“rape” and destroy—all in the name of some abstract buzz-word
concepts such as “freedom” and “democracy,” but
perhaps, after all, simply to vent its own frustration and prove its own dominance? The film neither answers nor even asks this question, overtly, it leaves that to us;
but it raises serious doubts that, upon reflection, we may not be able to
easily dismiss.
Meserve is unable to find,
express or even to feel
love anymore—all he can feel is rage, and fear, and hatred. His, and by
extension his platoon’s (the only exception being Erikkson, played by
Michael J. Fox) treatment of Oanh is not maliciously intended, it is intended
as recreation—as “sport”—(much as they perhaps
originally thought—or hoped—the war would be). The film makes it
plain that the atrocity of the deed in no way reflects the individual
characters of the men, but rather, their lack of character, their lack of individuality. One of
the men even only joins in the rape out of a fear of offending the others, and
above all, the rape, to happen at all, depends on total complicity, shared
guilt, hence then denial of individual responsibility. Meserve initiates the
plan, but his men all go along with it, even Erikkson, who never actually objects until it is already underway, and so is
finally as guilty—in thought if not deed (through passivity rather than
action)—as the others. What is interesting about the film is that our
outrage and indignation at the “evil” of the event is far
outweighed by our pity and anguish at the horror of its consequences. In other
words, we see it largely through Oanh’s eyes, and only peripherally
through the eyes of the others. (Erikkson is our identification point, but he
himself empathizes so strongly with Oanh that she seems more real than he
does.) So although we can’t help but judge and despise these men, we do
so not so much for what they’ve done (for their evil) but for their
total
lack of awareness
of what they’ve done—for their indifference. Which is why Erikkson
cannot be entirely separated from the others. True, he doesn’t partake in
the rape; true, he tries to help, to save her (his fear of being a deserter
makes him vacillate fatally however); and true, he finally levels charges
against the others. He does probably no less than any of us could hope to do
(or would like to think
we would have done), but he is no hero. He doesn’t at any time during the
rape stand up to Meserve, he doesn’t try to stop him, and he
doesn’t ever risk his own life to save the girl. In his own way he is as
numb and indifferent as the others, it’s only that, when he’s faced
with the horrible consequences of the act, he begins to wake up, to become aware of what is really happening here (as Kael put
it, he’s “watching something irrevocable”). And so, finally,
he makes a decisive step away from the madness and brutality, and towards reason, towards
compassion, towards humanity.
At this level, Casualties of
War is probably the most
insightful, thought-provoking Hollywood movie ever to deal with the Vietnam
war, and one of the very finest war films ever made. Because its position
isn’t just “anti-war”—it’s a call to compassion,
to awareness, and to empathy, and it makes it plain that, if we were at all in
possession of these things, the war would never have been possible in the first
place. It exposes war—violence—not only as unnecessary and
unjustifiable, but as inhuman; as beneath
us; and yet, at the same time, as the inevitable side effect of our collective
ignorance, what is destroying us.
Casualities of War is about sex as much as it is about war. It
is about how the frustrated sexual impulse (libido), by becoming obsessive, cerebral, mental, becomes the sadistic urge to dominate, to master, to destroy—in a word, the impulse towards war. The
film shows, in a very direct, simple fashion, this almost symbiotic relationship
betwen sex and violence, and how the one, when frustrated, and thereby
perverted, leads inevitably (and quite “naturally”) to the other.
What Meserve and his men do to Oanh has nothing to do with sex, however, and
everything to do with frustration. There is no possibility of communication, of
empathy, of tenderness, in their act—all the qualities that go to make up
the sexual experience in its true form. The situation here precludes such
“luxuries” as sentimentality or weakness. War, a situation of out-and-out
insanity and chaos, only allows for sex as an expression of sublimated
rage—domination, cruelty, brutality: what Kael called “the supreme
violation” (pg. 177). What De Palma is attempting here is an exercise in
empathy, a startlingly audacious endeavour for a man who has spent much of his
career trafficking in the glitzy, superificial aesthetics of pain. Casualties
of War marks a new maturity, a new
responsibility and artistry, for the director, such as we might never have
thought him capable, and which he only hinted at in Blow Out.[2]
His work here is smooth, confident, assured; there is none of the rough edges
or glaring holes of Dressed to Kill or Blow Out, his best works before now.
Following closely the script by
David Rabe, De Palma keeps his customary flourishes and self-serving
directorial set-pieces to the minimum. He clearly respects his material, and
intends to do it full justice, and he’s both confident and generous
enough to take a back seat for once, and let the script and the performers
carry the show. This isn’t “A Brian De Palma Film” in the
usual, bombastic way, but its gives intimations of what De Palma is really
capable of as an artist. He evolved in leaps and bounds in the ten years
between Dressed to Kill
and this film, and became the most technically proficient of directors. His
technique here is as flawless as Hitchcock’s; but, like Hitchcock, De
Palma is only as good as his material—he doesn’t have the visionary
qualities of a Scorsese or a Coppola (his fellow Italians and “movie
brats”), and with a mediocre script (like Wise Guys, for example) he can appear to be no more
than a competent hired hand, a hack (just as Hitchcock was a hack on Dial M For Murder or Torn Curtain.)
Since Casualties of War, De Palma has made half a dozen movies, only a
couple of which are even worth the price of admission. Carlito’s Way is by far the best of the bunch (reuniting
the director with Sean Penn and Al Pacino)—a rather routine gangster
story that nonetheless goes a long way towards helping us forgive the director
for his sins on Scarface. His talents for creating set-pieces, and pulling them off with
minimum fuss and maximum delight, are truly formidable by now, and when it
comes to suspense sequences—such as the poolroom shootout, the final hit
on Sean Penn’s weasel lawyer, and the climactic chase at Grand Central
Station—De Palma is truly without peer. Aside from this film, the
director bracketed a return to small-scale, personal (but also negligible)
filmmaking, Raising Cain,
with the twin fiascos Bonfire of the Vanities and Mission Impossible: mega-budget, star-studded exercises in
futility, of which it’s hard to say which was more regrettable—the
amount of dollars poured into these films, or the amount of talent and time
wasted on them. However, De Palma seems unphased by such “regrets”
(Mission Impossible
was, in any case, a hit: although it seems doubtful if anybody actually liked the film, millions paid to see it). Of all
the major, maverick American directors, De Palma seems to be the most ameniable
to “selling out,” he doesn’t appear to resent or lament the
studio demands upon him, or his increasingly sinking status, over the last ten
years (roughly since Casualties of War) as a studio hired hand. As a result, his
reputation has clearly suffered, and, of all the movie brats to come to
prominence in the ‘70s (Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg), and even
compared with the auteurs of the ’80s (Lynch, Stone, Demme), De Palma’s reputation
is undoubtedly the worst.[3]
He is variously dismissed, reviled, scorned or condemned as an empty showman,
an untalented plagiarizer, a tasteless schlock-meister, or a sadistic
misogynist. To have offended so many different people is no easy feat, and De Palma, whatever else you
may say about him, is a genuine individual—the most willfully irreverant
and playful of all the American auteurs, and also perhaps the one with the greatest untapped
reserves of talent. De Palma’s charm is one with his failings—he
doesn’t take his own art seriously (otherwise he could never make a
shambles like Mission Impossible). So the obvious question is, why should we? The obvious answer is—take a look at
what he can do, when he
puts his mind (and heart) to it.
Casualties of War has its flaws: it’s a little too slick,
the opening scenes seem almost to have been shot in a studio and are poorly
rendered, and the film could do overall with some of the gritty, muted realism
that Coppola brought to Apocalypse Now. But it’s a searing, audacious, angry work,
with more emotional force and depth than a dozen lesser Hollywood movies put
together. It has an urgency and an honesty (which is part of the pain and the
rage which its expresses) that makes it seem timeless, the mark of a real work
of art.
As Erikkson, Michael J. Fox
takes a little while to fill in his role—at first he seems too much of a
lightweight, and too much the clean-cut, all-American boy for the part. But
that’s presumably why De Palma chose him to begin with, and I think he
was right to want him in the film. Fox has a gift for conveying incredulity and
horror; with his mouth open and his small figure swaying slightly on his feet,
he seems to be in a daze for much of the movie. He can also express grief
superbly, and the film’s power depends enormously on this ability, and on
his reactions to what we’re seeing: he’s the only
“accomplice” we’ve got. Sean Penn, on the other hand, in
another slyly effective performance, makes Meserve a truly beguiling and
chilling character. We don’t ever hate him (the way we hate Clarke, for
example, played by Don Harvey), and although he’s monstrous and
frightening, he’s also unfathomable and impressive, so we can’t
help but respect him, even as we despise him (he could almost be Colonel
Kilgore’s baby brother). As the actor and director interpret him (working
from Rabe’s script), he’s too complicated for us to judge him by
his actions. (Penn and De Palma seem to bring out the best in each other
here—as they do in Carlito’s Way—and there’s the making of a great
director/actor team here, along the lines of Scorsese/De Niro, perhaps?[4])
Casualties of War is the most traumatic war movie that I know
of, and one of the most compassionate films ever made. By concentrating on a
single, specific (and historic) incident, De Palma is able to get closer to the
true horror of the Vietnam (or any) war than even Coppola managed with Apocalypse
Now. It’s astonishing what he
accomplishes here—that, after all the thousands upon thousands of deaths
and murders we’ve seen in movies (and all those we know are happening in
wars across the world every day), he can make us feel so intensely the agony,
and the pathos, of a single, isolated incident. But he does, and the film may
even be too affecting
for some people, it may give rise to feelings that they’re not ready or
willing to deal with, in life, much less at the movies (and least of all at a De
Palma film!). But that’s what
movies—at least the great ones, of which this is one—are for. When Casualties
of War slackens off in the last
third, it actually comes as a relief—De Palma doesn’t overdo the
comeuppance-of-the-transgressor bit here (when Erikkson brings the others to
trial), he breezes through it without ado, knowing that we’re just about
all wrung out, emotionally, from what he’s put us through, and that we
will need this time to recompose ourselves. (If the film kept up the level of
intensity which it achieves during Oanh’s rape and murder, we’d
have to be carried out of the theatre on stretchers).
De Palma only falters on two
occasions: the opening scenes, as I say, and in the film’s epilogue,
which seems meant to be consoling, but for which the director apparently
can’t muster much enthusiasm. When the oriental girl reassures Erikkson
that his bad dream “is over now, I think,” no one, least of all De
Palma, seems convinced. The words are hollow, and Fox’s expression in the
last shot (awkward bewilderment, maybe about just what he’s expected to
express!) is a real dud for the film to end on. There’s an irony implicit
here, for those of us familiar with the director’s previous work at
least: a De Palma movie invariably leaves its characters permanently scarred by
the events which they’ve been put through (by the director, naturally),
and these events have never been more potentially scarring than they are here. Far
from a consolation, De Palma’s recurring message in his films is:
“the nightmare never ends.” And so it must be here, too, never mind
what the script says. For when it comes to the nightmare of war, there truly is
no conceivable end in sight.
34. And which he had seemingly all-but rejected outright with the (low and high) trash of Body Double, Wise Guys and Scarface. Even The Untouchables, the film he made previous to this one, is at best a rousing, first-rate piece of Hollywood trash.
35. Pauline Kael is the obvious,exception in this state of affairs, and much of the (undoubtably excessive) zeal of Kael’s various De Palma reviews (which read almost like love letters) is certainly due to the fact that Kael is attempting to “right an imbalance,” by over-praising a director she rightly sees as almost criminally underrated. Kael’s work notwithstanding, to date there is not a single, serious book-study on De Palma’s work available. (Exceptions are Michael Bliss’s Brian De Palma, an old [1981] non-trade book, and The Devil’s Candy, on the making of Bonfire of the Vanities.)
36. Sean Penn has repeatedly stressed his retirement from acting in order to direct his own films, but expresses a special fondness and gratitude to De Palma, who actually coerced Penn out of his “retirement” for his role in Carlito’s Way. Since then, Penn has returned to the game, but continues to direct his own work (to date, his films are the honorable but dull The Indian Runner and, a beautiful and profoundly affecting work, The Crossing Guard). He remains, fiercely, a lone wolf in his profession, and one of the half dozen finest male actors working in America today, as well as an extremely promising writer/director.