Update. Military bloggers are reporting on their viewing of "Over There". They report the show is derived from old war movies, but not from the present-day military or from direct observation of the War in Iraq.
Air Force Pundit, cdr salamander, Argghhh,
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My original post below
Last night, I watched the first episode of FX cable network's new television show, "Over There". I was thoroughly entertained by Steve Bochco's production. I like the characters, the plot situation, and the combat drama of this premiere. I would like to discuss two matters about the show. The first are random observations about script quirks. The second is the larger issue raised in the show about combat violence that rips and shreds the bodies of the soldiers.
Script Quirks
- Why were the families of the soldiers back home so uniformly unsupportive of the soldiers' service?
- Why did the soldiers, in the introductory segments, seem so surprised to be deployed to Iraq?
- Why did the "Virgins" of the squad, in Iraq, seem so untrained?
- Why did the attitudes of the soldiers seem appropriate to draftees, when the soldiers were volunteer professionals?
- Why was the combat segment plotted so reminiscent of action hero movies? (The good guys play by the rules at first and take a severe, scary beating, but then come through to triumph at the end.)
- Why did the troops not know how to deal with body function (defecating, urinating) on the battlefield, since surely this was part of their training?
- Why did Dim give an editorial speech about soldier's being "savages", though with "grace", since this seemed right out of WW2 fiction, rather than Iraq? This editorial was especially out of place, when the point of the first combat segment was that it was entirely ruled by the Rules of Engagement, even to the endangerment of the squad. Savages don't play by rules.
- Were the squad Army Reserve, National Guard, or active regular army?
- Was the show deliberately trying to neutralize a patriotic, heroic presentation of combat violence?
Body Parts
If one trusts the pre-release reviews, the show was praiseworthy for its portrayal of the violence (savagery) of combat in the Iraq theater. An enemy soldier's upper body was blown away, leaving the legs walking for a few steps. An American soldier was shown with his leg blown off by a roadside IED while he rode in a truck. These scenes were graphic, in the sense that blood was shown and soldiers screamed in pain, while other soldiers expressed horror at the suffering of their comrades.
Why is it noteworthy a television show about soldiering and combat shows graphic violence? Let's assume that the show's writers were not consciously trying to be anti-war. Let's assume that they were not trying to make the pacifist point that all combat violence and death is meaningless suffering, or the socialist/communist anti-war point that the common man (and woman) pays in death and suffering for the decisions made by rich and powerful governing elites. Let's assume that the FX web site is correct in its implication that the point of the manner of the portrayal of the soldier's characters and combat is to humanize them.
Setting aside the notion that this show strikes an anti-war political pose, is the show nonetheless saying that the violence is wrong or reprehensible? What is it about combat violence that is, at a moral level, reprehensible, or at a social level, blameworthy? Why should we not accept this violence and forget about it, as we do so much other violence?
After all, each year over 40,000 Americans die in automobile accidents. Many of these deaths involve horrible pain and suffering. Persons are dismembered, disemboweled, and decapitated. Wrecks are splattered and painted with blood and flesh. Like Princess Diana, huddled in the back seat of her car in a Paris street subway, many persons die in terrible pain, alone, filled with frightened end-of-life thoughts. Many survivors of automobile accidents are maimed and disabled for life. They are burned and scarred and disfigured. They require years of painful therapy to return to a semi-independent life. Their families are devastated or demoralized or destroyed; suffering tracks outward along the lines of network which bind one person to another. We don't have television shows about such vehicular accidents.
Airplanes and passenger trains crash. Passengers are torn apart by the violent mechanical and aerodynamic forces unleashed upon them. They die often slowly. They die so slowly that they can leave written messages, as one passenger did in his own blood on the back of a seat in the Los Angeles metroliner crash some months ago (he was rescued, happily). We don't have televisions shows about the dying and suffering of these accident victims.
Each year, thousands of persons are injured and killed in industrial and building constructon accidents. Workers in factories have their arms and legs torn off. Farm workers suffer from poisoning. I lost a childhood friend of the family whose arm was ripped off by a hay baler, and who died before his co-workers could get him to the hospital. We don't have television shows about such misfortunes.
Firemen and policemen (including women within those categories) are wounded and killed. We do have television shows about these first-responders, sometimes portrayed as heroes, sometimes as anti-heroes.
Each year, thousands of persons suffer horrible accidents and painful, sometimes lonely, deaths in their homes. They are splashed with boiling fats and oils in the kitchen and suffer first degree burns. They fall in slippery bathtubs. They cut themselves with knives. Blood spurts all over the place. Bits of fingers are retrieved and appear in salads in fast food restaurants to be the basis of law suits. Children died from suffocation in cribs. Elderly folks fall down stairways to break their necks and limbs.
Each year there are thousands of murders, kidnappings, rapes, and vicious dismemberments of victims by criminals. The horrors perpetuated by sexual predators against women and girls are so extreme and unbelievable in their common credablility, that reading about them on a weekly basis on local newspapers and news is almost beyond bearing, even in their heavily edited depiction. In the past several years, several local carjackings went bad, killing two women I knew. The women were pulled out their cars by the carjackers, but they were caught in the doors when the carjackers sped away. They were dragged to their deaths, their flesh being torn from their bodies on the road, bleeding, abrasion burns searing their bodies, limbs worn away, until finally they died. It is impossible to imagine that these women did not wish fervently, pray, for their death as release from the hell into which they had been cast.
Capital crime in the City of Los Angeles is so frequent and horrifying that the city is metaphorically another Baghdad with gangs of "insurgents" and "Al Qaeda criminals" attacking police and neighborhood civilians.
There are few television shows about any of these terrible deaths with graphic depiction like "Over There". So what is the vividly portrayed, combat violence of the new show, "Over There", about? Why is it notable?
The answer has to do, I believe, with the structuring of suffering and dying. We ordinarily compartmentalize risk of suffering and dying. We utilize two broad categories: risk due to free personal choice, and risk due to decisions made by others for us or that affect us.
I presumably choose to drive on the freeway. Perhaps I speed. I have an accident. Maybe a tire blows at 80 mph, because it is too old and I decided against spending the money to replace it. The car rolls over, hits another car, I get smashed and torn from limb to limb. After a few hours, perhaps of emergency care, I die. Okay, so what? It was my fault.
Alternatively, when I am ordered into combat and am injured, that is the fault of the military and the civilian authorities who put me in harm's way. I may behave foolishly in combat and get injured, but I wouldn't have been in a position to behave foolishly in the first place if I had not been ordered into this battle.
We are here distinguishing between the personal and the political. But this distinction is, I would like to argue, false. As a thesis, I maintain that in a free society with democratic vote and representative government, all injury and suffering and accidental death that has an aggregate presence and is a social phenomenon, is, like combat injury and death, politically constructed. They are all put into place by politically existential decisions that set up rules of social engagement, so to speak, that is, the laws, policies, regulations, and institutions that guide our personal decisions and provide the technological and social vehicles within which we execute them.
From this perspective, there is no difference between the terrible pain and suffering and death of vehicular and airplane crashes and combat; no difference between being splashed with boiling vegetable oil at a stove and combat; no difference between dying while being dragged behind a carjacked car and combat. We make social decisions about our existential situations, we construct policies (etc.) that increase or decrease the aggregate risk of accident, crime, and combat.
Political decisions we all make (or decide not to make, which is also a political-existential decision) de-politicize traffic accidents, airplane crashes, and home accidents, thereby making them appear to ourselves as "personal" risk choices. Political decisions also politicize combat violence, making combat risk appear not to be the personal choice of the soldiers.
Where do my observations (and this thesis) take us with regard to the show? The answer is, we can't make the assumptions with which I began this discussion.
We can't assume the show has no political agenda. If the show accurately reflects combat violence, and combat violence is politically constructed, then the show has a political point. What is that point? I think the point is that the political structure that produces combat violence in Iraq is not noble or heroic because the violence is not noble or heroic.
Does this point deflect us from a patriotic view of the graphic violence? I think it does. Surely, we are obligated to be patriotic in the sense that we are obligated to make ourselves worthy of the sacrifices borne for us by the soldiers who suffer such horrifying violence. The television show sets its point up in such a way that this obligation is not evident.
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