Ross Douthat in NY Times 3-15-10 looks at this Hollywood penchant for the simplistic untragic in its depiction of political fictions. I have to say I watched The Hurt Locker the other night and could not find a narrative in it worth evaluating. It lacked tragic form, though there were terribly tragic elements. It does not really even touch the political tragedy going down in those wars. Douthat reminds us that tragedy involves terrible complexities, ironies. The monstrous dimensions of the tragic in King Lear or Oedipus involve insoluble conditions of the human soul. We go back to the great tragedies to relieve ourselves of the unserious simplicities that plague much of our film and literature. In melodrama there is always clear villainy and the good guy,  but in tragedy the towering insistent perplexities of the human condition haunts the spectacular speech that meets confrontation: 'O that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew/or that the almighty had not raised its canons 'gainst self-slaughter.....' (Hamlet)...Thanks, Douthat, for the reminder to stay in the substantial world, not the easy oppositions that blur the tragic truth...BP

Consider “Green Zone,” the new Matt Damon thriller that doubles as a meditation on Why We Are in Iraq. The director is Paul Greengrass, a talented Englishman whose quease-inducing “United 93” remains one of the few compelling films to emerge from 9/11. The source material is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” a dense and nuanced account of the Iraq occupation’s disastrous first year. But the film itself, a slam-bang account of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, has the same problem as nearly every other Hollywood gloss on recent political events: it refuses to stare real tragedy in the face, preferring the comforts of a “Bush lied, people died” reductionism.

The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare. You had a nation reeling from a terrorist attack and hungry for a response that would be righteous, bold and comprehensive. You had an inexperienced president trying to tackle a problem that his predecessors (one of them his own father) had left to fester since the first gulf war. You had a cause — the removal of a brutal dictator, and the spread of democracy to the Arab world — that inspired a swath of the liberal intelligentsia to play George Orwell and embrace the case for war. You had a casus belli — those weapons of mass destruction — that even many of the invasion’s opponents believed to be a real danger to world peace. And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have W.M.D. was the best way to keep his grip on power.

But this opening act, and all the tragedies that followed, still awaits an artist capable of wrestling with its complexities. In “Green Zone,” everything is much simpler. “We” were lied to. “They” did the lying. The “we” is the audience, Matt Damon’s stoic soldier and the perpetually innocent American public. The “they” is the neoconservatives, embodied by a weaselly Greg Kinnear (playing some combination of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith) and capable of any enormity in the pursuit of their objectives.

Russ Douthat

NY Times Editorial, the Ides of March, 2010

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