By Liam Kelly, JBI Intern
As I write this, the film Warfare – co-directed by Civil War’s Alex Garland and Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza – is wrapping up its theatrical run in Australian cinemas. Much of the popular and critical buzz surrounding Warfare concerns its deliberately-narrow scope and purpose: the film purports to represent a single incident from the Iraq War by drawing solely from the memory and photographic records of those involved, including Mendoza. This emphasis on conveying the memory of combat is complemented by a unique formal conceit: once the situation has been set-up, the film never cuts from the perspectives of its soldiers (with one significant exception at the end), and the ensuing events play out in real time.
On one level, the relentlessly-perspectival nature of Warfare is technically and thematically stunning, powerfully deflating much of the myth-making about soldiers characteristic of war films historically. Warfare’s warfighters are not steely-eyed heroes ready to give their lives for a righteous cause; they are terrified men, prone to mistakes minor and major, desperate to get enough of a grip on the chaos enveloping them to save their own lives. Naturally, this dialogue with the war film tradition extends to the formal level as well. While war films (particularly since Saving Private Ryan) have often used graphic violence and gore to illustrate the horrors of war, Warfare’s real time narration ensures that the audience is forced to linger in the aftermath of violence to a degree unmatched even by transgressive art films like Funny Games – the screams of the wounded dominate the soundtrack for at least a full-third of the film’s running time.
These very virtues, however, also constitute Warfare’s chief weakness as a cinematic reflection on the experience of the particular war it depicts. The film’s exclusive focus upon the perspectives of U.S. soldiers precludes, essentially by definition, any insight into the motivation or experiences of those they fight against. To be fair, this partiality is a consequence of the film’s formal design and its nominal refusal to evaluate its subject-matter politically. However, contrasting the sympathetic and realistic characterisation of the SEALs with their opponents – who appear on-screen like the targets in Time Crisis, and disappear with comparable ethical weight – illustrates how this approach implicitly reproduces the kind of moral simplification used to justify the invasion of Iraq in the first place. In this way, Warfare’s thoroughgoing realism ironically occludes the reality of the Iraq War beyond the battered walls of one civilian family’s house in Ramadi: the use of (dis)information as a weapon, the commission of war crimes, the undemocratic privatisation of various sectors of Iraq’s economy levelled by U.S. shot and shell. Despite the noble intent behind Warfare, then, the film is an object-lesson in how doing justice to a single perspective can conceal as much as it reveals.
Warfare’s use of the soldier’s perspective contrasts interestingly with that of a research article, published by the JBI in March, courtesy of Jovana Davidovic and Forrest S. Crowell – ‘Soldier Enhancement, Consent, and Long-Term Care: The Super-Soldier Perspective’. While the term ‘super-soldier’ might immediately carry the mind to the sci-fi futures imagined by schlocky action films of the recent past, Davidovic and Crowell are concerned with technological enhancements of the human body that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) estimates may be feasible for deployment by 2050: advanced imaging systems placed within the human eye, brain-computer interfaces (BCI) allowing soldiers to remotely operate drones and other computer hardware by thought, etc.
Given their literally transformative potential and risks, a substantial literature on the ethics of such ‘super-soldier enhancements’ has emerged, informed by expert perspectives from a variety of disciplines: medical ethics, neuroscience, law, military leadership, etc. Davidovic and Crowell see their work as correcting against the underrepresentation of a crucial perspective within this discourse – those likely to be asked to use these technologies first, members of the US Special Operating Forces (SOF). From a bioethical standpoint, one key issue on which Davidovic and Crowell argue the SOF perspective can shed light is the complex relationship between anticipatory consent – the degree of autonomy soldiers yield to military command through their oaths – and the informed consent certain medical procedures nonetheless require of serving personnel. Another concerns the auxiliary infrastructure of support services and military responsibilities necessary for any consent to enhancement to be genuine: the provision of long-term medical care for enhanced soldiers, opportunities for dis-enhancement post-service, and availability of opportunities for advancement for soldiers who forgo enhancement, among others.
Davidovic and Crowell’s paper shows that, when integrated into a broad range of expertise, the perspectives of soldiers can illuminate, rather than obscure, issues salient for ethical analyses of soldiering, both now and in the near-future. Further, they demonstrate that said perspectives do not just provide practical/logistical considerations to inform external ethical reflection, but are ethically reflective in their own right, concerned as they are with what soldiers, and the nations they serve, legitimately owe to one another. Without the kinds of brain-computer interface necessary to transfer the information directly into your brain, however, the only way to find out what their perspectives reveal is to read the article for yourself.
Liam Kelly is an intern at the the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and final year B.Arts student (Philosophy + Media Studies) at Deakin University.
Correspondence: lckelly@deakin.edu.au