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Redacted

Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz

"To Redact is to edit or to prepare for publishing. Frequently a redacted document or image has simply personal (or possibly actionable) information deleted or blacked out; as a consequence redacted is often used to describe documents or images from which sensitive information has been omitted. The true story of our Iraq war has been redacted from the mainstream corporate media." - Brian De Palma

In an era before blow dried, million dollar, cleft-chinned Ted Baxter-like anchormen and women, most Americans got their news from Walter Cronkite, a man who had made his bones as a reporter during World War II.  It was Cronkite’s voice that informed the public that President John Kennedy had been shot.  He was there when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and when our President, Richard Nixon, was a crook.  The American people trusted him, and on the February 27, 1968 special newscast, he cashed in the credit he had built up with the American people.  Returning from a trip to the war zone in Vietnam, he solemnly intoned in an editorial that, “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” President Lyndon B. Johnson, watching the newscast, turned to one aide and said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.”

    The President was right, but it would take another seven years for the last of our troops to get out of a war we could not win. What happened in Vietnam was extremely hard for a generation of middle class Americans who saw us as a force of good on the world stage; and that a war in a country most people could not find on a map was part of a larger struggle against communism. We assumed that we were on the side of angels, killed millions, and burnt villages down to save them.  It took someone like Walter Cronkite to wake us up.  In today’s corporate media, there are no Walter Cronkites and somehow we learned all the wrong lessons from Vietnam.  An engagement that was only supposed to last a few months and cost us almost nothing because of all that oil money, is now being spoken of in terms of a generational conflict. Because of our imperial hubris, we are left in the same position we were three-and-a-half decades ago, hoping and praying that a weak leader with almost no popularity in his country, can somehow get his act together, stop the violence, and do our bidding, all for the cost of a few of our soldiers a day.

    Instead, what our government learned is to control the press.  Taking their queue from Ronald Reagan, the Bush administration has realized that images mean everything. The world is a movie set and all you have to do is control the props. There can be no photographs of naked little Arab girls burnt by napalm, no film of dying American soldiers, no terrified images of civilians caught in the crossfire. No press is allowed to take pictures of the flag draped caskets coming home on transport planes.  In turn, whenever our President speaks publicly, uniformed military personal are in the background to show how much he loves the troops, he nor anyone in his administration will ever be seen at one of their funerals where real love is shown, but he loves the troops.  All those photos say so.  The press was embedded, briefed, and controlled because no network wanted to be seen as unpatriotic. In the name of protecting the public, the graphic nature of war has been cleaned up and almost every broadcast needs a paper sash across it proclaiming that it has been sanitized for our protection.   Granted there are images from Al Jazeera, snapshots from soldiers’ cameras at Abu Ghraib, and the gore for porn scandal, but for the most part the American public has been kept at arms length from this war. As director Brian De Palma notes, "In Vietnam, when we saw the images and the sorrow of the people we were traumatizing and killing, we also saw the soldiers wounded and brought back in body bags. We see none of that in this war.”

          De Palma decided to make a film to show the American people a bit of life’s reality on the ground in Iraq.  Responsible for such classics as Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Blow Out, it has been over a decade-and-a-half since he has made a decent film.  Yet, he decided to make one of the first films about the Iraq War.  Making a war film about atrocities is nothing new for De Palma, who made the extremely underrated Causalities of War starring Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox.  Having to go lean and mean because there was no way he was going to get major funding for such a project, the director found a passion that his films have not possessed in years.  While labeled as fiction (to avoid a potential lawsuit), almost anyone who has paid attention to war knows that De Palma is documenting the real life events that happened in Mahmoudiya, Iraq. 

          Filmed like a fake documentary, the central story of Redacted is the rape of a 14-year-old girl and later murder of her and her family by American soldiers. The family’s home was later burnt to the ground to cover up the crime. (In real life her name was Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and it is telling that most stories published in this country about the incident fail to mention her name. No photographs of her. She became just another nameless Arab girl. We should know the names of our victims. Shot in Jordan and using a montage of created footage from different sources like an al-Jazeera-like Arab network, video shot by a Latino soldier named Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), and film from a French documentary, De Palma seeks to portray the events leading up to the incident and its aftermath.  Through Angel’s footage we get to know the American soldiers of Alpha Company.  They are typical American young men, bored and horny.  They look at porn and talk about getting laid, like most young men. The perspective then switches to an American checkpoint, one of the places where over 2,000 Iraqis have been killed, only 60 of which were insurgents, mainly because half the Iraqi population is illiterate so they cannot understand the signs telling them what to do.  When a car appears to be running the checkpoint, the Americans open fire.  In the aftermath, what they discover is that it was just a brother taking his pregnant sister to the hospital and he believed that he was being waved through the stop.  De Palma then cuts to Al-Jazeera-like footage of the woman and her baby dying in the hospital.  Local Arabs grow hostile, as the Americans seem to have little remorse or concern for the dead woman.  Things take their course from there until De Palma unflinchingly shows scenes of cruelty that make you almost sick to your stomach, including a decapitation. Yet, much like Schnidler’s List, De Palma saves his knock out punch until the end when he shows real photographs of dead Iraqis, including a pregnant woman who was killed at a checkpoint.  In the height of irony, this montage is so powerful that producers decided to redact several of the photos, blurring the faces and covering the eyes.

          Do you recommend a film that is hard to watch? But then again, it is about a war that has been equally hard to watch.  It took until the late 1970s for our cinema, with films like Welcome Home and The Deer Hunter to start addressing what happened in Vietnam.  At the same point in the Vietnam War, John Wayne was turning out the flag waving film The Green Berets.   I have a feeling that this movie will be more talked about by the talking heads of our society than seen… kind of like the war.  The Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the world will call De Palma a friend of the terrorists and unpatriotic. Just another example of liberal Hollywood (even though De Palma had to leave liberal Hollywood to make and finance this project), but what they fail to understand is what the director is trying to say with this film. What he is saying is in situations where soldiers don’t know who the enemy is, where everywhere is a frontline, where the local population cannot understand the troops, and vice-versa, bad things happen and escalate.  It is not bad apples but rather the bad barrels in which kids are placed.  I just wish the press would report this.

 Verdict: An Extremely Hard To Watch Film