Combat Obscura (2019)

When she finished reading Into The Wild, my daughter wrote "one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience" on her full-length mirror in greasy, red lipstick from Lasting Finish's Kate Moss collection.

In the age of streamers and unlimited bandwidth, the World Wide Web offers more than its share of unfiltered viewing experiences to eat up the bandwidth of the Web and of people the center of whose lives the Web has become.

Of the two best known streamers, Netflix seems to be streaming better video than Amazon Prime these days. Both The Keepers and Roma, a film that probably should have been a series, were worth watching. But Amazon has streamed Combat Obscura (2019), distributed and promoted by Oscilloscope Labs, a viewing experience that may turn out to be more iconic and important than anything Netflix has come up with yet.

Combat Obscura is episodic, elliptical and, yes, unfiltered by anything except the time and bandwidth allotted to it by Amazon. Taped by Miles Lagoze, a Marine Corps videographer assigned to Helmand Province in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012, shortly after Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger were nominated for an Academy Award for Restrepo (2010), Combat Obscura is a fragmented and blurred view of combat, obscured not so much by the fog of war as by the videographer's tunnel vision, his shaky camera and his inability to decide what if anything is important.  It's a restless, no point, no center, no grasp, searching but not finding kind of video.  We never know where we are or when we are. Restlessness and indecision worry and finally defeat the entire video. Even video of a fire fight and a Marine with a head wound, the best combat footage in the video, fails to satisfy. The camera moves away from the wounded Marine just as the realization that he has been shot begins to sink in. Institutions like the Marine Corps imprint themselves on people like bulldog tattoos. Lagoze has a chance to mine that vein. He lets the moment pass him by.

I don't doubt there are viewers who will find Lagoze's tapes hard hitting and revealing. But for others they will be a collection of tropes. We've seen Marines and soldiers smoking dope so many times it would be surprising if they didn't smoke in front of Lagoze.  And we've seen things far worse on YouTube than the body of Lagoze's dead shopkeeper, an Afghan apparently shot by mistake.  Even the Marine Corps finally decided the stolen tapes weren't worth worrying about.

It's amazing how little we see that is new in the 68 minutes Combat Obscura takes up in our lives. Except for a few scenes and images whose promises are unfulfilled, most of the content is uninspired.  The form of the video may be worth talking about, however, if we can find a way to do that.

Since the footage is only structured by the videographer's tour of duty and what he could steal of his own and other videographers' work when his tour ended, deconstructing it ("unpacking" is the current buzzword) would do more harm than good. Although you might think that deconstruction would lighten the load a film or video carries, the opposite is true. Deconstruction lays on a heavy burden of significance that a little video like Combat Obscura would never bear up under.  We should settle for describing it if we can. What we need is something to compare it to.

But it's not that easy to say what Combat Obscura is like. Is it a Marine videographer's journey from youth to manhood? A coming of age story, a personal odyssey as Lagoze claims? We would have to take his word for that. There is no evidence of growth in the video itself. Even the fact that the videography seems to improve over time might be explained by the fact that Lagoze didn't shoot those segments.  Is it a "home movie" then?  It seems too intentional for that. And the aim is negative. Most of us don't shoot video of our friends and family to embarrass them. There is an urban myth that demonstrators spat on soldiers and Marines returning from Vietnam. That never happened. But Lagoze appears to have something like that in mind. "Stop looking at these kids as heroes," he told Stars and Stripes during a phone interview before the video's release.

As a "war film" Combat Obscura begs to be compared to Restrepo. Lagoze actually told The Daily Beast that he thought he was up to something "Restrepoesque" when he was on assignment in Afghanistan. If he was, he failed to pull it off.  Unlike Combat Obscura, Restrepo has a focal point.  We know where we are, when we are and why we are there.  Operation Rock Avalanche, a long battle at the climax of Restrepo, fixes the action of that film in time and space. Nothing in Combat Obscura even comes close.  The creators of Combat Obscura ask us to buy the idea that narrative and structure are unnecessary to film and video, even undesirable, but Lagoze and Oscilloscope Labs haven't closed that sale with me.

What Combat Obscura is most like is the information leaks that WikiLeaks dumps into the blogosphere now and then for the media to amplify. And in a world where journalism professors call leaks the lifeblood of journalism, that may be the future of streaming video.  If that's the case, distributors like Oscilloscope Labs should give up the idea that the leaks have to be feature length and bundle short videos like tranches of sub-prime mortgages or collections of lipsticks.  And beyond that, maybe the way of the future is to cut out middle men like WikiLeaks and Oscilloscope Labs and stream video from drones, satellites, surveillance cameras and videographers like Miles Lagoze in real time to pump a constant intravenous fix of unfiltered experience directly into our bruised and swollen brains.

Equus

A child is born into a world of phenomena, all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes over the whole, uncountable range. Suddenly, one strikes. Then another. Then another. Why? Moments snap together, like magnets forging a chain of shackles. Why?” -- Equus (1977) United Artists

Equus is art that manages to be about violence without adding to the culture of violence.  Neither the Peter Shaffer play nor the 1977 film adaptation by Sidney Lumet are likely to provoke copycats to act out the violence that is the subject of their art.  Alan Strang, the boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike, doesn't inspire admiration or contempt, only pity.  His cruel attack on demigods of his own creation is a desperate act, performed in the midst of despair and excruciating mental pain.

Alan Strang's parents are unable to explain their son's madness and they're not willing to shoulder any responsibility for Strang.  While Shaffer hints at the roles Strang's mother's religiosity and repressed sexuality and his father's hypocrisy may have played in Alan's descent into a secret world, ruled by improbable gods, ultimately, Shaffer lets the parents and society off the hook.  The connections are just too complex.

Self-flagellation.  Equus (1977)  United Artists  Peter Firth as Alan Strang

One of the reasons Equus works is that it grounds itself in antiquity and refers to fundamentally important things like the struggle between reason and emotion, the Appollonian versus the Dyonesian in culture. The role of psychiatry in Shaffer's Equus is to civilize the child, to bend the individual's will, even his grasp of reality, to the demands of society, even if the unique and creative individual is destroyed in the process.

Equus distances us from the violence it portrays by beginning and ending with: "Why?"

As a play, Equus naturally involves the viewer as spectator more than participant.  And, being a British play by a British playwright, it lacks the cultural references to the Westward Expansion that are so readily available to American artists. But even the film version by American director Sidney Lumet, though it occasionally adopts a subjective point of view and graphically depicts the blinding of the horses, manages balance.  It doesn't just dramatize the struggle between nature and civilization  -- between what Levi-Strauss called the raw and the cooked -- it honestly wrestles with the dilemma and achieves, if not a solution, at least a resolution to the conflict between freedom and conformity.  It wraps the action of the film up in literate and reasonable discourse about a difficult subject.  For better or for worse, it is a cerebral film.  And it's an honest one, because the author doesn't pretend to answer the unanswerable.  He -- and we -- must settle for stasis -- as painful as that may be.

Richard Burton as Martin Dysart  Equus (1977)  United Artists

Ultimately, of course, it is not Alan Strang but Martin Dysart, the child psychiatrist appointed by a British court to ease Alan's pain -- and the one person in the film who has a moral dilemma -- who ends up in chains.

Account for me, Equus demands.

Dysart can no more account for Equus than I can rule out the possibility that some word of mine, some thought, floating loose in the blogosphere where everything is connected to everything else, will forge the last link in a lethal chain some sad day.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011)

The tide of popular culture turns amazingly fast. The rise of one myth flows in over the ebb of another, wiping out all traces of the receding myth, until that myth returns to lap even farther up the beach than before. So it goes with pop culture versions of the fall of man. They keep coming back.

In the Fifties, the French writer Romain Gary raised the issue of mankind's survival in The Roots of Heaven.  Gary's protagonist is Morel, an ordinary French dentist who goes over to the elephants in French Equatorial Africa. Morel is a misanthrope, but Gary, it turns out, is not. The ending of the novel is a tribute to the human spirit. The Fifties were the time of the beat generation, of cool, of jazz, grass, the Korean War, the rise and fall of McCarthy, the presidency of Eisenhower, the post-war boom, the poetry of Patchen and Ginsberg, the death of Robert Capa, the fall of Dien Bien Phu and Brown v. Board of Education.

Just seven years later, Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, contemplated the extinction of mankind and the rise of the ape as the torchbearer of civilization throughout the universe. The Sixties were the time of the hippies, the Cold War ascendent, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, the Civil Rights movement, acid and acid rock, the Vietnam War, the fall of Lyndon Johnson and the rise of Nixon. Alan Ginsberg lived to see Chicago cops riot against the sons and daughters of America's middle class who had tuned in, turned on, dropped out and come back swinging against the war and the draft. I was just back from Germany where I had put in my two years as a medic at an Army hospital, getting high and shooting up Thorazine to improve my tan, so I passed on Chicago myself, but I did show my younger brother how to curl up into a ball to protect his nuts when the cops started beating him. I sent him off to Chicago with a bright red bandana to cover his nose and mouth when the tear gas began to fly.

Boulle's Planet of the Apes didn't speculate about the causes of the rise of the apes as the dominant species in the far reaches of the galaxy, or about the extinction of man and the rise of the apes on our own planet. Boulle simply presented the success of ape culture and the failure of mankind as a fact. For some unknown reason, man was just not good enough.

When Twentieth Century Fox produced the film version of Boulle's book, they apparently thought they owed the viewer an explanation. The plot of Planet of the Apes (1968) hangs on a malfunctioning starship that plunges back to Earth instead of landing on a planet at the far end of the galaxy, and on a nuclear war that wipes out the human race, letting apes take over the planet while the starship and its astronauts are gone.

In Fox's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), the human race is wiped out -- probably -- by a virus. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody takes seriously the idea that man will be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust.  And we're not worried about rogue computers turning on the human race anymore.  The peril now is biological.  In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a virus that makes apes smart enough to talk and to break out of an ape jail in San Francisco is deadly to humans and highly contagious to boot. Good thing for the apes, of course, since, without the intervention of the virus they would have had one good day of beating up on the cops before the bombs started to fall.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox

The idea that apes can beat up cops is as silly as the notion that hippies can beat up cops. It's just more Hollywood eyewash in the style of the Na'vi beating down the guns and machines of corporate America to liberate Pandora in Fox's Avatar (2009). But there is a strong odor of misanthropy and self-hatred about the idea that resonates with establishment critics like David Denby of The New Yorker.

Here's Denby, waxing poetic over scenes of apes, invading a research facility. "When the apes, like water bursting through a dam, pour through the building's glass walls at different levels," Denby exults, "the image is a pop epiphany of freedom."

Something like ice breaking up and cascading down a raging river as a metaphor for revolution I suppose.

The high water mark is definitely creeping up the sand.