Eye In the Sky – Alan Rickman’s Final Performance

In the movie Eye in the Sky, Alan Rickman turns in a final, wonderful performance in a beautiful and difficult film about drone warfare.  Rickman’s sneer was his signature facial gesture and the dominant emotional stance of the characters that he played – his attitude of disdain permeates roles from movies like Love Actually and the Harry Potter Series to roles on Broadway.  But it is the complexity of the characters that Rickman played that drew him to them – he commented that he loved playing Severus Snape because he was loved his ambiguity.  And we are ultimately drawn to his characters not by his disdain, but by the deeply felt attachment to human life that his characters feel – including and perhaps especially the British Military General he plays in this film.  The General who is responsible for managing the relationship between the British and American military coalition and the British lawyers and politicians who oversee the military action in this incredibly tightly told tale that escalates dramatically from what was to be a capture situation, observed from a safe distance, to an urgent need to act in ways that are plausible but unpredicted.  While this is a tale; it is, I think, also a reasonably apt description of the process and perhaps the underlying dilemmas present in the real life of modern anti-terrorist warfare.

This story moves between multiple interlocking and parallel scenes on four continents as a decision is made, on the fly, about whether to engage in an act of warfare.  In each of these far flung and isolated places, different but related moral, ethical and psychological dilemmas are played out while the communication between them – essential though it is – is minimal, indirect and, in one tremendously important subplot, one way only.  It is only the viewer of the movie that gains access to all of the ways that these interlocking scenes generate, each in their own way, a variation on a central theme – one that I think is critically important as we decide who the next president of the United States should be (as I have also opined in another recent post about Trump).

The central theme of this movie, I believe, is best captured by the “incidental” family caught literally in the crosshairs of the central drama – though the family is completely unaware that they are in any way involved.  This family is Kenyan.  They live in a very poor neighborhood recently taken over by a fundamentalist sect.  The father’s central concern (and, indeed, that of every other character in this drama) is protecting his daughter and her love of life – her engaging in learning and playing – from the fundamentalists who would have her be covered from head to toe or be beaten – who would take away her books – and who would prohibit anything as free and unrestricted as playing with what may be her sole toy – a homemade hula hoop that she artfully flings around with her body – they would stop her from joyfully being a ten year old girl and imprison her in a world that her father does not want her to live in.

This is a film that is told from the point of view of the west.  It is about our fight against fundamentalism and terrorism.  The terrorists here are the bad guys – they want to kill, hurt and maim us and to strike terror in our hearts.  We want to destroy them before they destroy us.  There is no question about the need to do that.  And yet this movie is not a condemnation of the entire culture.  Since the fundamentalists have moved in, the neighborhood is safe – it is patrolled, but also the law is clearly now enforced (even it that includes using sticks to beat women whose wrists are showing), and maybe it wasn’t so much before the fundamentalists move in.   The “soldiers” themselves – scary when we are trying to infiltrate their stronghold – turn out to be quite human and responsive when the need arises.  The film, rightfully, I think, targets the terrorists as people who need to be killed – but also rightly leaves broader moral questions about the goodness or badness of the respective cultures murkier…

And the ability to target individuals that drone warfare provides ends up being the pivot point around which the drama of the film rotates.  We are no longer fighting a war with other states – but instead with clans, groups, paramilitary entities, or splinter cells.  Most legitimate governments are at least nominally our allies in this fight – or we make them so.  Drone warfare is, then, kind of a fun house mirror version of terrorism.  Where the terrorist would strike fear by having an entire populace fear that they are the target, drone warfare is intended to target the perpetrators of evil – with as little collateral damage as possible.  We are no longer carpet bombing the Germans, a tactic Kurt Vonnegut abhorred, but we are engaging, or trying to engage, in surgical strikes.

But war is, inherently, messy.  And this film is grippingly and intensely focused on that fact.  And on the ways in which that messiness interferes with our ability to engage in it precisely because we are all united with the father in wanting to protect his little girl’s world.  The General begins and ends his day picking out a toy for his granddaughter.  He doesn’t care which toy it is, but he knows that she does, and knows that he has to get the right one.  Just as the father in Kenya knows that his daughter will delight in the colorful hula hoop that he creates for her.  We all want the same thing – protection – which requires violence to enforce, and therein lies the rub.  This film articulates the complexity of weighing the competing qualities in psychologically compelling ways.

In America, the drone’s pilot, a man, and his navigator, a woman, are vividly and eerily aware of the possible consequences of their actions as they voyeuristically join the lives of the people they can forever alter.  Their US commander’s response to the intensity of the dilemma they have faced, and the valor of their actions in the face of it, is delivered with a diametrically different attitude than the British Colonel – played by Helen Mirren – has towards her subordinate who must engage in a parallel activity under considerable pressure from her.  The reluctant wife noted that it was nice to see the Colonel’s role – the person who continues to propel the action towards the necessary – and necessarily violent – action, being played by a woman – noting that we need to know that women can be good soldiers.  I think it is no accident that she is also, though, able to own the tragic, complicated aspects of her actions more thoroughly and completely than her male counterpart in the U.S.  I think that women in our culture do not have to disavow various aspects of their experience (more about that in a blog post soon about the psychological treatment of men).

In Africa, the girl’s father’s closest ally is a man he has never met – a Somalian who goes to heroic lengths – and puts other’s in harm’s way, both to save the girl and to get the bad guys – meanwhile repeatedly putting himself in more and more perilous situations.  And all that time that he is exposing himself to physical harm – the politicians are arguing about which outcome will cost them the most political capital.  And their delays put people at risk – and are intended to save people – and they have complex motives – motives that are self-interested and those that are more altruistic – and we see them play against each other – and paralyze them – in very human, and very British, ways.  And above it all, Alan Rickman’s General observes and pushes, cajoles and reacts, helping us to appreciate the intensity of the need to act and the necessity to consider the consequences before doing so – and the frustration of it all – culminating in his assessment of his own role in the process, a truly splendid moment of acting.

This film, then, is a rich and compelling one in part because the characters are real and complex.  Often films, like dreams, assign one aspect of the psychological functioning of a person to a character – and the character might be funny or morose – but it is a character rather than a human – while the roles in this film feel richer – even the stock roles feel filled with the complexity of containing all of those contradictory aspects of being human in one skin.  And there is an irony here – this is a film in which the long view is taken – literally.  People are empathizing with someone that we, the audience, knows up close, but they only know from, literally, the 30,000 foot level.  And she is black.  And she is African.  And, for all they know, she may be a child of the enemy.  She is also, really just by chance, exposed.  There are people nearby.  People could saunter by after the missile is launched.  There are people inside the houses nearby, unseen, who could become collateral damage.  But she is visible.  And she serves as a deterrent to action – to murder.

The irony is that, from the long view, we can also become terribly inhuman.  Freakonomics is a book that I am currently reading with my son.  In it an economist looks at human motivation through a statistical lens.  He also asks moral questions in crazily inhuman ways.  For instance, he suggests that violent crime started to drop in the 1990s because of Roe vs. Wade, which, he provides compelling evidence for, helped low income women who likely would not have been able to care for children abort them rather than birthing them and then being unable to care for them, with some of them turning into murderers.  He then poses the question, “What is the ratio between aborted fetuses and prevented homicides that makes sense?”  He acknowledges that framing the question in this way makes little sense, and I completely agree – the long view can frequently lead us to become removed from the human nitty gritty and the difficulty choosing a course of action in trying circumstances.  He would reduce that human moment to an equation – one with, presumably, an answer.

This movie uses the long view to humanize a situation that, from a distance, could look coldly and absolutely precisely answerable.  The kind of situation politicians are fond of giving as examples of being clear cut.  And, by the time the situation is described to the US Secretary of State, his take on it could not be more succinct (and rightly so, given the portion of the problem he is asked to address).  But it is hardly clear cut at all.  It is messy and complex and layered.  And, as limited as the information is, it is generally used by the players to engage in a process of restraint – one in which every moment is used to check and countercheck, to delay, to consider, and to pass things up the line to someone with more authority.  As much as we might laugh – or sneer- at the prevaricating of the bureaucrats, we side at first with them, but then become more and more uncertain about that as the urgency of the situation rises – as the military necessity becomes clearer and clearer.

On Monday morning, when this, if it ever does, makes the papers, we will have an opinion about what should have been done, and it is quite likely that we will take the position that the action taken was the right one or the wrong one.  And some of us will be quite certain of that.  I certainly have a position about the action that was taken.  I don’t think it changed as the movie unfolded, but it is one that is at odds with the central premise: that we are working to keep that little girl safe.  And if I had taken the other position, that, too would have been at odds with it.  There simply is no right answer here.  And yet we must act.  All the cerebration, all the emotional commitment and human attachment and compassion in the world won’t keep us from having to face terrible decisions with awful consequences.  Pretending that we can avoid the consequences or know the “right” answers is something that we like to believe all the time, I suppose, but we seem somehow to being particularly vulnerable to reductive and simple solutions to complex problems when politicians promise that they will work.  I pray that we don’t fall victim to that kind of thinking – simple, centralized thinking has led, time after time, to draconian “solutions” that we have had to labor for generations to redress.  I am grateful to Mr. Rickman and the rest of crew that brought this tale to life for engaging us in this lesson on the complexity of action.

Other posts on movies with Mr. Rickman include Love Actually and Bottle Shock (maybe someday I will post on Harry Potter...) and I also posted on Mr. Rickman in the Broadway play Seminar.

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