Reminder

You really want to know what Bob Kennedy was?

He was fucking beautiful. -- AP reporter Joe Mohbat

Heroes

Noam Chomksy on the great Julian Assange.

Tucker Too

The Naked and the Dead

One of the greatest of all war movies, now mostly ignored or forgotten, remains Brian DePalma's Casualties of War (1989). It is everything The Hurt Locker is not. Both works focus on an American cadre trying to survive in an unpopular war, and from that point DePalma and Bigelow take off in two morally-opposed directions.

For the Oscar Winner, the members of her cadre are mere objects to be aesthetically eroticized. We see nothing of moral weight or consequence (nothing that wouldn't occur to a 12-year-old), but there sure are plenty of brawny arms, magnificent chins, and deep glistening tans. Anything beyond that is chum since it doesn't get Kathryn Bigelow wet.

The DePalma movie -- and perhaps the explanation for its critical (Pauline Kael aside) and box office failures back in '89 -- embodies much more than just a statement against US involvement in Vietnam, and more than just a general statement against war. DePalma's movie, expressed in operatically emotional terms, calls for the rejection of power, the rejection of domination and demonizing; it calls for quiet, thoughtfulness, empathy and compassion. It spits in the face of many tenets of the American "character": brutishness, ignorance, aggression, hatred of women, fear of sex, self-justification, and the love of war. Brian DePalma sides with the raped and those who would protect the raped. Bigelow sides with the rapists and those who would mythologize them. Strange days, indeed.

What happens on the bridge is the only scene I've ever watched inside a movie theater where I had no control over yelling out. It is one of most powerful fictional scenes ever filmed. And it may be movie history's greatest scream against the endless violence of the "strong" against the "weak."

The girl on the bridge, named Oanh in the movie, is thought to be dead: stabbed to death by members of the cadre after they raped her through the night. But in the middle of a firefight, she appears.



This is what is being done, every day and every night, in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan by Kathryn Bigelow's mass-murdering "heroes."