Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007) is a hideous little movie about a hideous, gargantuan war that sidesteps most of the trapdoors that collapse even ostensibly peace-mongering war films into propaganda. By rooting around inside the feedback loop between barbarism and tedium that has defined American warfare since the 1960s, De Palma preserves intergenerational rage at the military industrial complex while forsaking the unwritten mandate that a movie ought to entertain.The finished product fails utterly as drama but triumphs as a devastating essay film starring De Palma’s own horrified indignation. If the baby boomers did anything right, it was the sustained, unapologetically defiant effort to delegitimize America’s war in Vietnam. It should have been more than a little embarrassing to contemporary filmmakers that a director who released his first movie during the same year as the Tet Offensive would make the most courageous American movie about Bush II’s war in Iraq.
De Palma based his script on a true incident from 2007 in which U.S. army soldiers stationed in central Iraq gang-raped 14-year old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and then murdered her along with most of her family. Abandoning his usual baroque visual stylings, he distances himself and the audience from the proceedings by hopscotching through staged facsimiles of various war media: video diaries of the enlisted, CCTV footage from the base, jihadi videos, Iraqi TV news, embedded European journalists, army wife vlogs, interrogation footage, video calls home. “Found footage” films à la Paranormal Activity (2007) were all the rage in the Bush years thanks to innovations in consumer video, but no milieu justified the technique more than an ongoing war producing gigabytes of footage by the hour. Only a few years after YouTube arrived, and two years before the first iPhone, De Palma surfed the proliferation of images and image-channels that continue to make our experience of the world more vivid and less real.
Reportedly, Mark Cuban approached De Palma, stuck in a hitless slump since Mission: Impossible (1996), with a carte blanche offer of a $5M budget so long as he shot with HD cameras. The flatness of the early 2000s video image, in which color is neutered but every wrinkle is indiscriminately sharp, is perfect for sapping adrenaline from IEDs and machine gun fire. Through these crude lenses, the ironic, casually misanthropic soldier patter that typically humanizes warriors and coaxes chuckles from wary liberal audiences lands with a thud. Spending time in these barracks isn’t edgy fun among foxhole poets, but a bad robotrip among charmless, traumatized creeps. De Palma finds humanity in his recreation of Iraqi TV, as professional reporters earnestly interview the survivors of American atrocities.
The disjunction between the flatness of the film’s visual regime and the apocalyptic evil it depicts forces open a lacunae in which American viewers are asked to sit and consider their relationship to war, its perpetrators, and its images. Redacted is a serious reminder that even though we are spiritually compelled to ruminate on the wars fought with our tax dollars, we enjoy the reenactments of such needless mayhem at our own peril.
Redacted screens this Sunday, March 22, at Gray Area as part of the series “The Bush Years.”
