By some luck and love, Tara and I received memberships to MoMa this year for Christmas. Among the benefits are free tickets to every showing they offer, including their various festivals. We made it to the North American premier of the film…
Of Men and War
by Laurent Bécue Renard
Man were we in for a treat. A bitter treat like rhubarb pie, but a treat nonetheless.
Renard’s first film in his “Genealogy of Wrath” trilogy featured the Bosnian widows in the wake of the Bosnian war. The inspiration for his trilogy emerged from the generations of veterans in Renard’s own family. After observing the consequences of unjust war upon his own family, Renard wielded his camera to fight back the tide of violence. Of Men and War is the second of three, focusing on the husbands who leave for war. I get the notion that his third will focus on the children of war.
But first, the fathers.
Did you know there’s only one aftercare facility in the entire United States of America devoted to aftercare for veterans suffering from post traumatic stress?
That is to say, did you know there’s only one aftercare facility to help all veterans of foreign wars (VFW) debrief from the trauma they faced?
I didn’t until I watched the film at MoMa and listed to Renard speak on the issue alongside one of the documentary’s stars, a mortician. The documentary spends nearly seven-eighths of its time in the aftercare facility, a very brutal, very honest analyst’s-eye-view of these harrowing tales of the brutalities suffered, encountered, and instigated by the leading men of the film. In Renard’s words, “War begins in nations, lives in individuals, and dies in families.” For two-and-a-half hours, we suffering through the death of war in the hearts of the families caught in its undertow. Renard would say, “War is what happens when diplomacy fails. We fail and war happens.”
Let me get specific here: I heard the mortician talk about how he had to approach bodies that had resigned themselves to rigor mortis and shovel them into the back of a truck. Another private talked about how he was anally flipping a rifle’s safety as one might flip a coin – on and off and on again – when he accidentally pulled the trigger with the safety off, which resulted in his best friend’s brains being blown all over his bunkbed at point blank. It’s easy to see why the words “trigger warning” seem woefully inappropriate in this context.
Sometimes we need to face the PTSD right along with those we’ve sent to do the dirty work of the state. In this case, we face the worst brutalities of war in all of their psychological complexity. This film I faced not two days before my cousin committed suicide. As Gaiman said, screw trigger warnings – sometimes we have to face the dark things of the world that we might create a tomorrow for our children that’s devoid of the kind of abuses we ourselves witness daily. Had Hamlett come stock with a “trigger warning” on the cover, in the playbill, then we may well have missed one of the best rebukes of the last four hundred years. But I’ll save that for the post on Gaiman’s book tour.
In Of Men and War, you’ll encounter men who suffered through restraining orders, through relapse, through suicide themselves – at least among their number. Early on, Renard said in the Q&A, he used a boom mic, emphasis on boom. The PTSD soldiers, mostly Iraqi “Freedom” veterans, all had visceral reactions to the microphone extender as if it were a rifle shoved into their faces. Instead, with the permission of the men, they rigged the room with hidden mics and used stripped-down cameras throughout the rest of the filming, offering every day the veto power to any of the men being filmed. Rather than asking for the removal of said camera, the men used it to deepen their therapeutic process – through the camera, they could tell their families the gross realities behind their recurring nightmares, confessions previously muted when they found themselves in the typical familial livingroom environ. Because of this “confessional” nature of the camera, Renard and the mortician both agreed that the film crew and the patients at the only PTSD center in America developed a thick, layered relationship with one another, one that could be “picked up without skipping a beat after nine months.”
Some in the audience mentioned the pushiness of the therapist in the film, but Renard replied that he only had four-to-five months to debrief the boys. There’s “No promise of fixing or healing [post traumatic stress]. [We have to find] what’s still alive that we can plant seeds inside.” The editor of the film agreed – in the editing room, he had to chop out hours of footage dealing with death, fighting all the time for the life and hope side of the spectrum. That clinging to life itself became the narrative threat, a thread that even informed the rearing of the children born in the wake of wrath (film #3 for Renard?)
In the end, that’s the job of the therapist at this center: to rehumanize the most dehumanized men in the modern world — those programed to dehumanize all non-Americans they encounter. Renard created a beautiful juxtaposition of the effects of war (confessions about men “fragging out” by diving on grenades) right beside the kinds of small town parades, football games, and charity auctions in which we all expect veterans to take part, waving dutifully their microcosmic stars and stripes. The ceremony, Renard seems to say, lends itself to the consequences of the ceremony. He draws a clean line from kiddie parade to PTSD.
Which, I suppose, begs the question:
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