War Machine – Brad Pitt’s look at how We’ve Lost Our Way.

Brad Pitt in War Machine

I heard Brad Pitt talking up this movie on NPR yesterday and had mild interest in seeing it.  I was in and out of the car, so didn’t get the whole thing, but the interview was about the war in Afghanistan and meeting with soldiers – heroic soldiers – who had lost limbs – and about constructing the film – using humor to draw the audience in – and about how successful Brad Pitt as an actor and as a producer is.  Imagine my surprise when I got home and the reluctant son, who almost never watches movies, had just started it and invited me to join him in watching it.  OK, it doesn’t get any better than this.  I grabbed a bottle of water and sat down to be entertained and enlightened.

Unfortunately the movie was more enlightening that entertaining.  It was unfortunate because the enlightenment is, I think, terribly important for us and I fear that those who most need it are not likely to sit through it – they are likely to turn it off – when they feel preached to or at.  And there is a scene where the preaching is being done by a woman with a German accent.  The preaching is great – indeed it seems to be psychoanalytically based – the essence of it is that she fears this man’s “sense of self” is what is driving him into war rather than a sense of what is best for the planet – but preaching to the unconverted is rarely a way to win them over (A film produced by Brad Pitt, Moonlight, is also guilty of preaching - though there it is more contained - the narrative flow as a whole is not contaminated).

The movie’s title is a double entendre.  The War Machine is the Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex and it is also the title character, Gen. Glen McMahon, a pseudonym for the real life general Stanley McChrystal whose behavior was chronicalled by Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings (and also in the pseudonym form) the person who is the unnamed (for a very long time) narrator of this film.  McMahon is heavily and poorly played by Brad Pitt.  Pitt voices him as a gruff, mean and tough guy who is a WWII throwback.  McMahon only sleeps four hours a night and he runs seven miles every morning.  Pitt portrays him doing this in multiple scenes with his arms locked in place – I think intending to look tough or mechanical, but in fact looking oddly comical – like Julia Louis Dreyfus dancing with locked arms on Seinfeld, but also with a certain simian silliness.  Pitt’s face, unfortunately, continues to be boyish, and, despite grey hair that is supposed to age him, his matinee looks don’t match the gravel in his voice nor the coldness that he displays in his relationship with his Plain Jane wife who has only seen him for less than 30 days a year for the past eight years.  It’s like he is a little kid playing at being a tough guy.  Which is too bad – in films like Fight Club, Pitt has been a convincing unhinged person bent on physical and moral destruction, as McMahon is supposed to be.

In their review, CNN maintains that the pseudonym was used in order to create greater laterality in building the character and to avoid libel suits.  As Irv Yalom has pointed out, historical figures, reading about themselves or walking away from a movie, can experience themselves as having kept the secret of who it is that they are – while when we read a novel we really get a sense of the person depicted because they are created out of the psychological guts of the writer.  We get a peak at what makes the character tick in the best biopics – Ali and Julie and Julia, for instance – because the actors are not playing the person they are depicting, but they are fully inhabiting themselves as that person.  Pitt, instead, is playing at being McMahon – who is a made up character based loosely on an historical one - so he should feel less inhibition than he does.  Sometimes a cartoon – the book and movie Ove – portray something important about the human condition, which this movie aspires to do.

And, weirdly, this movie does, in fact, make its point.  The problem is that it is as ham-fisted as the worst of my posts.   It tells us rather than shows us, in the words of the narrator and then in the speech of the German Assembly woman, why the counterinsurgency strategies that are good in theory just won’t work.  Or, as Click and Clack on the radio said yesterday, reality frequently confounds theory.  In the moments when the movie shows us rather than preaching to us, we see McMahon, the true believer, preaching.  He is preaching to his soldiers and later he is preaching to the Afghani tribesmen.  His men don’t get “it” – just how it is that attacking a country that they maintain they are helping – is going to work either for them or for the people they are shooting at.  Similarly, the Afghani tribesman don’t agree with his vision, and they respectfully and simply say, “Please leave.”

The intent of the film is a very good one – and a psychoanalytically valid one.  It is trying to show us that we are engaging in what we deeply believe is a good cause.  We are doing that for good reasons.  And, in ways that we are not conscious of, those beliefs are misguided.  Consciousness raising is a very good thing to do.  It can help us shift our efforts so that they are more fruitful.  The events chronicled in this film really have the potential to do that.  Brad Pitt, with his past portrayals of off the rails people that we can identify with, was a good choice for the lead.  Unfortunately, his execution of the role leads me to believe that it won’t likely change many people’s minds.  In order to do that, the audience needs to be softened not by humor, but by identification with the lead character.  We need to be pulling with and for him.  We need to see how we could be like him – and then to experience the tragic moment as one that involves catharsis – the expression of feelings that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, are the result of more fully understanding the true impact of the attitudes and behaviors that we engage in.  First Aristotle, and then Nietzsche best described this process.  “War Machine” is billed by Netflix as a comedy.  And I think, unfortunately it is.  And the tragedy is that we treat something as important as our disavowed imperialistic “nation building” attempts in the form of counterinsurgent attacks aimed at the flimsy infrastructure of third world countries as something laughable – the hijinks of the biggest bully on the block – look, ma, we messed up again – rather than as a very seriously misguided effort to do good that ultimately creates the worst form of evil.

McMahon himself does the math.  When you have ten terrorists and you kill two of them, how many do you get?  The answer is twenty, because the relatives and friends of the murdered person who were undecided become galvanized by his or her death and become converts.  This math is a very serious problem that we need to confront.  It is a security issue.  I have long maintained that it is a criminal issue – not a military one.  The military is intended to protect a country against the aggression of another country.  The problem of terrorism is a problem of disaffected individuals – who are sometimes supported by states – and in so far as states are doing that we need to address that diplomatically and even militarily, but the elimination of terrorism will, I think, require that we address the individual behavior.  To do this, we need to support the rule of law – not simply supporting supposedly democratically elected governments as the government of Afghanistan that, in the person of Karzhai, is lampooned by Ben Kingsley in this film.  But the rule of law is inconvenient.  Justice - and treating all men and women equally - is a messy business that threatens the established order in profound ways.

Sorry to go off on my own preaching, but, in addition to having a hero that we can identify with – so that we can see the error of our ways – we also need to come up with a way - to see a way to effect the change that we so desperately want to effect in order to achieve a therapeutic outcome.  It is not enough to be shown what we should no longer do, we also need to know what to do.  Now that is beyond the scope of this movie, perhaps.  Indeed, the movie ends with Russell Crowe coming in to take over the command (looking, by the way, much more convincing as the new grizzled true believer), as we double down on the only thing that we seem to know how to do despite just having seen that it won’t work.  

Post Script:  I talked with a friend of mine who treats veterans and I was concerned about the impact this film might have on them.  His position was that while it would be difficult for some, many would feel validated - the film as described (he hadn't seen it yet) would square with their experience.  This led me to wonder if the monstrous/machine like quality of this general was something that Pitt just couldn't quite see himself being - his critical stance towards the character interfered with fully inhabiting it.  The stupidity of his character - instead of being a tragic flaw - and therefore invisible to the actor - was all too apparent to him - and he couldn't quite manage to be the idiot he was portraying.  Unfortunately keeping him at arm's length allows us all to laugh at him, and not recognize how real he is - how central he is to who we all are who support these wars in the various ways that we do.

Post Script: The preaching that Brad Pitt does in this film my highlight his particular ability to understand and inhabit the role of someone like the war machine general he plays in this film.  He fails here - I think because he is playing at being this man - the parts that Pitt clearly enjoys playing are the cool guys - what is hidden in those parts are the ways in which the cool guys - the anti-establishment guys - are exerting control.  If Pitt can come to terms with his inner need to control and inhabit that in a role that he plays - in something like this film - it will be a truly great movie and may change some minds of people in ways that this movie hopes to but will likely fail at doing.  I think Pitt needs to acknowledge his own tragic flaw before he can portray it on film...

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