It's the Zeitgeist, Stupid

If you are in the mood for something totally different, I have the perfect movie for you. Having grossed just $10,759 in the States, this film is not exactly mainstream. So prepare to have your deepest convictions and prejudices challenged by a weird and transgressive experience.

I know what you’re thinking: Yeah, yeah, seen it all.

So you’ve seen the world end in 2012, or the greatest president eradicating blood suckers in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Or a homosexual cowboy who’s so fabulously gay that even Anne Hathaway doesn’t get a look in (the ne plus ultra of gayness) in Brokeback Mountain.

Yawn.

You ain’t seen this.

The film is Special Forces and here’s the plot.

A western journalist in Afghanistan, played by Diane Kruger,  perversely ignores all those half-eaten babies left by American soldiers to investigate the case of a local girl sold by her family at the age of twelve. It goes without saying that her west-centric assumption that selling a child is wrong is rather insensitive to the ancient social mores of the Pashtuns. But, fear not, the Taliban in the form of Ahmed Zaief “the baddie” don’t take this sort of thing lying down and kidnap the interfering neo-colonialist.

Our journalist “the heroine” then refuses to make a harmless video statement to admit her obvious guilt so forcing  Zaief to order somebody’s head hacked off in front of her. It’s plain that he finds such things distressing, so when the time comes for Kruger’s own throat to be cut, she cunningly exploits his laudable sensitivity to save her pathetic neck by cruelly demanding that he watch her die. So, like Hamlet, Zaief relents and lives to regret his mercy as she lives on to torment him till the end of the film.

The war mongering president back home then orders special forces to save her pretty blond head, thereby causing the deaths of countless noble Taliban warriors.

If you don't shudder at the thought of western cultural superiority, there’s a lot to like in Special Forces. The brave journalist in peril because of her desire to spread the truth. The Afghan woman who lifts her veil to smile at her pitiless murderers. The decent non-political soldiers who are doing the job they love. And depiction of a cruel, barbarous enemy that must be fought. Particularly enjoyable is a scene where the eponymous special forces make a stand that results in a Taliban commander fleeing and screaming that the western soldiers "are devils”.

To the film critics it was, of course, simplistic and yet another typical black and white Hollywood tale of good Yanks against evil 2D enemies.

But it’s neither typical, nor even Hollywood.

In the eleven years of the War on Terror since 9/11 there have been countless films about feminist heroes, homosexual heroes, working class heroes, disabled heroes and even terrorist heroes. But in a country at war deploying hundreds of thousands of its best and bravest there hasn’t been a single film about contemporary soldier heroes.

I exclude the partial exception of Act of Valor because with all the main roles taken by active duty Navy Seals it’s more like extreme reality TV than Hollywood.

It’s not as if Hollywood has entirely avoided the subject.

We’ve had Matt Damon playing a noble liberal warrior who uncovers the terrible truth behind the war in Iraq in Green Zone. We’ve had psychotic American soldiers wasting innocents in The Battle of Haditha and even their own in The Valley of Elah. They’ve also told us the stories of innocent terrorist family men dragged away from their loved ones in Rendition and Essential Killing.

We had Flight 93 which showed the human side of the 9/11 hijackers and downplayed the throat cutting, and A Mighty Heart about the decapitation of journalist Daniel Pearl that discreetly avoided the decapitation of Daniel Pearl.

Then we had Matt Damon again in the Bourne series playing the ultimate liberal killing machine… of Americans. Jason Bourne wouldn’t hurt a fly, kiss a woman without her signed permission in triplicate, but draws the line at showing mercy to CIA Nazi scum.

So paradoxically, though derided as simplistic supremacism, Special Forces portrays the war more realistically than any of the liberal west-loathing rubbish detailed above. 

So is Special Forces the beginning of a new trend?

Well, it might be, but not a new trend in Hollywood, because it’s French!

Yes, the “cheese eating, surrender monkeys” have done what Hollywood can’t or won’t.

And with that in mind, imagine for a moment that Hollywood had cut as much slack to Hitler and Tojo as they’ve given Al Qaeda and the Taliban. We would have lost to the Nazis and Japanese militarists just as surely as we are losing now in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.

It's the zeitgeist, stupid.