That's the most I've cried at a movie in a LOOOONG time

[sophia_sol]

This weekend I watched Black Hawk Down with some friends. And can we say DEPRESSING MOVIE?

It was a very...strange experience, watching it. I mean, I'd gone into it expecting an action flick, because that's what we'd been discussing watching, when one friend recommended Black Hawk Down.

So it started, and stuff happened, and I found myself getting extremely uncomfortable, because "action movie" to me implies violence with a level of unreality that allows you to have FUN with the violence. But looking at this movie, which is set in a real life civil war in a real life country that is STILL IN THE THROES OF THE WAR, and being under the impression that we the viewers were supposed to be ENJOYING the violence? Oooooooh, that made me squirmy.

But eventually I figured out that no, it's SUPPOSED to be a depressing movie. So then that was okay.

I'm pretty sure, though, that I watched a different movie than most people who see it, on account of my facial-recognition issues. (I could not keep track of a single character in the movie, because they all had the same haircuts and the same clothes and HOW ELSE AM I TO RECOGNIZE PEOPLE? The names on the helmets, when I could catch a glimpse, were useful but not useful enough.) The movie I saw was "here is a lot of senseless death in a civil war in Somalia." I think the movie I was supposed to see was "here are some people, ordinary people like you and me, who have to do brave and dangerous things for the sakes of their friends, and die for it."

Which meant the concluding scenes, with the characters being all Grim and Determined and making speeches to dead friends about heroism, felt very out of place, because THAT WASN'T THE MOVIE I WATCHED. The movie I watched didn't have anything to say about heroism except that it's stupid, that no matter what you do war will just end up killing untold people on both sides and making everyone miserable.

Frankly, I like the movie I watched better, even if it did make me cry for the entire last third (and was near tears for about the last two thirds). I didn't know anything about any of the characters, but just...watching all of that death and injury and despair going in all directions was just...ooh, it was hard. And painful. And tragic. Watching frightened women getting gunned down by the Americans, watching the injured dude with the photo of wife and son getting set upon by Somalis, watching person after person after person die....yeah.

I'm just glad I got to spend the movie snuggling against my girlfriend, because otherwise I don't think I'd have been able to make it through it.

But the thing is, I'm not entirely sure what the movie was trying to say about the American involvement in the Somali civil war. Because at the same time that it was showing how AWFUL war is, it seemed to be...glorifying it at the same time. And I just don't even know how to go about looking at that.

And the friend who recommended the movie had said it did a good job of showing that the "right" side isn't necessarily right, but I didn't really see that. I mean, yes, it showed that the Somalis didn't think they had any other options (cf the scene with the dude talking to the kidnapped American), but it still seemed to be saying that the Americans had the right idea in trying to violently depose the dictator even though it wasn't working too well. *sigh*

I mean, even the text on the screen at the end about the deaths was weirdly biased. "1000 Somalis died" and "19 Americans lost their lives". I don't think I'm reading too much into that when I say the language choice there is saying something? Also that the movie seems to be implying that the deaths of those 19 Americans are Just As Bad as (or WORSE THAN) the deaths of a THOUSAND Somalis.

And I don't know whether I'm going anywhere with all of this. Mostly I'm just trying to put forth my Thoughts and Feelings as words so that I can be more free of having them running around my head in circles.

But that's not even ALL of the Thoughts and Feelings this movie inspired -- but the rest is still too inchoate to even put into a disorganized thought-dumping post like this. IDK.

Comments

[calvinahobbes]

I'm just really impressed that you got all the way throug. I've seen some of it in passing on multiple occasions and I just never managed to sit through the whole thing. (I think I also had trouble telling the people apart.) War movies are just very much not my thing. I think many war movies have that same problem you mention, of attempting to depict war as Awful and Meaningless while simultaneously trying to establish a traditional Good><Bad narrative. I never thought of it in those terms before.

[sophia_sol]

*sigh* yeah. I think the problem is that war is an intrinsically fraught and complicated beast, and Hollywood likes to essentialize things. I think it would have been possible to make a wonderful and meaningful movie about the awfulness and meaninglessness of war, mixed up with the complicatedness of the situation in Somalia, and trying to get at the questions about what's the Right thing to do when there's a country with that much unrest -- what's best for the civilians? What's best for the country at large? Is there a right answer? And this was not that movie, and I don't think any movie created by the mainstream media will be that movie.

I didn't particularly want to get all the way through this movie. But -- I had to find out how it ended, so I had to keep watching. Otherwise it would have itched at my brain for AGES. Er, not that it isn't itching my brain now for other reasons.....