"War, inc."

About ten minutes into "War, Inc." my wife asked me what the movie was supposed to be about. I started rambling about Halliburton, Blackwater (rebranded as "Xe," I believe), privatization, Pinochet, and a bunch of other chestnuts pertaining to how American foreign policy is fucked up. "But what is it about?" she repeated, and I realized the movie was answering to a different "being-about" than her question. She wanted to know the plot as a linear movement in which what has happened helps us anticipate and understand what will happen; I had given a non-linear constellational explanation, and when I tried to formulate the movie in terms of plot it came up pretty short ("John Cusack is trying to kill this guy, but not very diligently, and he is trying to get in Marisa Tomei's pants, though that has nothing to do with the premise?"). At about the halfway mark I thought I understood what's going on in "War, Inc": it wasn't a movie, it was a holographic bumper sticker retrojecting itself into the form of the cinematic. Take fifteen odd slogans pertaining to the true, disgusting, and heartbreaking state of American foreign policy under Bush, give them screen life, and string them together. Though the metaphor of "stringing together" gives the false impression that this film is organized as vignettes. Rather, it is like trying to sort through frustrating and similar ideas after too little or too much coffee, in which one gives way to two or three others before it is brought fully to light, so that the continual displacement prevents solid thinking but installs a very effective atmosphere. Communication is difficult.

But then I found that War Inc is more than that--maybe not much more, maybe shyly so, but its confusion accelerates into the rhythm and density that cause a real aesthetic to break out. It moves from capitalizing on the advertisement form (which I consider an extremely weak political tactic today, half a century after Warhol) to embracing the art form. The art form is less efficacious, less popular, it is true, and perhaps the movement from a popular to a difficult discourse is intended to grease the wheels a little. The last twenty minutes or so are hard to describe: they are both rich in the events/diegesis that had been heretofore muffled and even more saturated with an atmosphere that has suddenly proven itself fecund for human life. It put me in the mind of Godard's Les Carabiniers and Natural Born Killers, though it does not equal either of those, or more obviously Dr. Strangelove. It's difficult to say whether the filmmakers wanted the intensity of the surreal or feared it; since they are Americans, I can only assume the answer is both.