Over There: Horror films and the War in Afghanistan - Part 3: The Objective

Before we make our third and final stop in this short tour of horror films set against the backdrop of our now rapidly escalating war in Afghanistan, here's links to the first two films in this series. In case anybody needs a refresher before we push on:

Part 1: Sand Serpents
Part 2: Red Sands

Our final film, The Objective, a 2008 genre-stew film by Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, was the first of the three Afghanistan set flicks to get made. Set just two months after the 9/11 terror attacks and one month after the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, the film follows a CIA operative and his special forces escort into the Southern Provinces (currently the operational theater of Canada's military forces in Afghanistan) on the search for a mysterious radiation source.

The film's central protag is the Agency spook. He provides a affectless running narration that lets us know from the get go that this operation is not what it seems. He serves as the squads Ripley (the outside consult with a potentially different agenda). The soldiers accompanying him are, as in the other films, familiar types. His unit includes a Rock, a Vig, a Lemchek, and a couple of Fodders. We also get a pick-up Benny Fish to act as a local guide and an inexplicable Australian sniper. Even odder, the sniper later drops a significant bit of esoteric knowledge regarding the 19th century British Afghan War debacle, making him a sort of stand in for all the other white components of Bush's Coalition of the Willing.

Our crew is choppered into the badlands and, before you can turn a video camera on yourself and say you're so sorry, things start to go wrong in strange and unexplainable ways. Radios cease working. The squad is ambushed by Taliban fighters who vanish, even after after taking shots to the head. Soldiers fall victim to mysterious illness and seeing ghostly assassins through their night vision gear. Compasses go on the fritz. The land seems to be morphing around them - putting mountains and deserts where satellite photos show grassland. Even their trusty Benny Fish gets lost and, eventually, so spooked that he commits suicide.

The cause of all this, we later learn, are invisible ancient pyramid-shaped UFOs. Just what these things can do is never defined, so its best to assume that their uncanny radiation can make whatever screenwriters Myrick, Mark A. Patton, and Wesley Clark Jr. need to happen materialize. The whole mission was a ploy to get a bunch of troops to engage these things just to see what would happen when a bunch of panicked special forces guys shot at them and got their dander up. The answer, it turns out, is the special forces guys get screwed.

The Objective is an intermittently ambitious mess of a flick. Myrick started on familiar ground - the lost on mission plot is close enough to Project that one feels the flick should be in Myrick's wheelhouse - but rapidly loses his way. In BWP the sketchiness of the characterization was thematically supported by the found-films backstory. Furthermore, the thin characterization actually helped to make the unlucky students objects of identification. They didn't have any opaque fragments of personality that would stop the viewer from projecting their own personality onto the screen. Here, the soldiers are too alien - with their jargon, their easy recourse to large amounts of tremendous violence, their (remarkably sloppy and non-standardized) uniforms, their chain of command - to embody the average viewer, but too half-finished to feel like complete humans. The odd exception to this is the CIA operative. Though his voice-over is often tedious, as the film progresses it becomes clearer and clearer that he's a grade A sociopath. Not a foaming at the mouth slasher type, but a genuine a-emotional manipulator who can look a dying man in the eye and, before abandoning him to his fate, say, "Your country is proud of you." The CIA spook is the kinda guy who refers to soldiers as "assets" and says this to their face. While this kind of character is hardly a novel creation, Myrick gets points for making this vile jerk the central character of the story. It's a bold move that actually pays off in several key scenes.

Visually, without the found-film conceit as a cover, Myrick proves hesitant to go verite but unable or unwilling to commit to a more efficient, effective narrative filmmaking style. The result is neither fish nor fowl: An awkward fusion that never feels raw enough to sell as unmediated nor tight enough to drive home the story. The result is decidedly uneven. For every intriguing visual Myrick crafts, there are inert, artless stretches of what occasionally feels like lazy filmmaking. Which is ironic if you consider that they were filming in pretty brutal desert conditions. A lot of hard effort went into this film, I'm sure. I simply wish more of it was visible on the screen.

Finally, the plot derails in the last quarter. Once the viewers figure out that there's no "unified" explanation for why ghosts, and vanishing Taliban, and 100+-year-old British soldiers, and so on are all happening to our protags, the film loses momentum and becomes a collection of strung together set pieces, none of which particularly hang together in any narrative sense. The conclusion, a nod to 2001, feels more like a cop out than a wrap up.

Aside from it's obviously fictional genre trappings, The Objective is only barely a movie about the War in Afghanistan. Like Red Sands, this is a curiously American-centric flick. Again, not in a specifically jingoistic way. The Objective presents Americans as the biggest threat to Americans. Rather, this is a film about the post-9/11 mentality of America. It is, of course, a critique of the blood-soaked hubris of the Bush administration. The CIA protag's delusional willingness to march into the "graveyard of armies" on what amounts to a suicide mission for objectives that can't even be described is a fitting avatar for our post-9/11 adventurism. But the toxic, conspiracy choked atmosphere of dissent is just as much a target. The plot of The Objective sounds like a subplot of the unhinged film-rant Zeitgeist or the basis for a particularly juicy post on Alex Jones's site. I remember when, leading up to the '08 election, a blogger I know and respect posted - I believe in all seriousness - a post detailing how Bush and his cronies would seize the reigns of power permanently through false flag terror scares. These scares would give them the power to cancel the upcoming election and establish marshal law. I don't bring this prediction up to measure its accuracy (happily, it was off base), but rather to point out that in the American political culture of the mid-00s this sort of thinking was relatively unremarkable. This movie seems very much a product of those grimly anxious years.

To a degree, all the films in this mini-genre are less about the status of the War in Afghanistan than they are about our own image. To one degree or another, they're all thought experiments of Nietzsche's famous hypothesis regarding those who fight monsters. In Sand Serpents, the filmmakers assume traditional heroics - complete with noble sacrifice - will win the day. Though the fact that their hero's final courageous act is essentially a suicide bombing does little to convince us. Red Sands more pessimistically posits that we won't survive this encounter intact. It's difference between that film's djinn baddie and soldier heroes dissolves quickly, leaving behind a single soldier who is, literally, the monster he fought. The Objective suggests that we probably wouldn't be out looking for monsters if we weren't already a bit twisted inside.

Over There: Horror films and the War in Afghanistan - Part 2: Red Sands.

The only one of the three current horror films set in the American Afghanistan conflict to actually have filmed in Afghanistan (Kabul, Afghanistan, specifically), Red Sands may have the curious distinction of not only being among the first horror films to be set on the front lines of an on-going conflict, but the added distinction of featuring footage of the country we're fighting in. Imagine a Nazi zombie film that had been shot in Germany when Nazis could have still shot you. It would be easy to make too much of this odd fact. Most of the film was shot in California. Still, historically, it's a first as far as I can tell.

Red Sands is the second stop on our tour of one of the oddest mini-genre to have developed in this particularly tumultuous era of horror: the first American horror films set on the frontlines of an on-going U.S. military conflict.

Without recapping too much of the first installment of this mini-series, the short version of the story goes like this: Horror films are usually Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to spinning cultural anxieties into filthy lucre, but live-fire wars seem to be the exception. Horror films tend to touch on such conflicts in passing (example: Jacob's Ladder features a shell shocked 'Nam vet after he's returned home) or be influenced by such conflicts (example: some critics have suggested that the slasher formula was influenced by the tedium-then-ambush structure of the Vietnam War), but there are few, if any, American horror films made prior to 2008 that are set in a conflict that is currently popping off. In short, when bodies are actually being shipped home, we don’t tend to invent fantastical reasons that more should corpses should be on the plane.

The current Iraq War seems to follow this pattern. There are several dramatic and action genre flicks that are set in the Iraq War, but no horror films. Arguably, many films have been influenced by the war - some critics have suggested the entire alleged genre of "torture porn" is little more than a symptom of the conflict - but none have featured, say, a unit attacked by ghostly Saddam torture victims in a haunted mansion in Baghdad.Though, for some reason, the War in Afghanistan has broken this rule. In 2008 and 2009, at least three horror films have been set on the front lines of the War in Afghanistan. Questions of artistic merit aside, these three films represent something genuinely new in the horror genre. As such, I think they merit our attention.

Helmed by Alex Turner, the sadly under-appreciated director of 2004's Dead Birds, Red Sands is essentially one giant flashback. We open on a soldier being questioned about a fiasco in the wild hill country of Afghanistan. Seven troops were sent on a mission and all of them died but one. And his story just don't add up.

Credits. Start movie.

We start with a squad of seven troops. They're pretty familiar types: We’ve got a Rock (tough-as-nails sergeant) who later becomes a Hudson (he loses it late in the game), a Tori Montroc (idealist sent to the army by his upper class parents), a Vig (the racist lughead – this particular model happens to be a Southern dude who sports a Confederate battle flag on his helmet), a Fodder (who, oddly, in this flick is obsessed with obscure and most likely imaginary sexual activities of the donkey punch variety), a Bozz (a self-oriented barracks lawyer type), and a Sassoon (the bespectacled translator). Sadly, we're once again short a Brooklyn.

This band o' brothers' latest mission is to monitor a lonely stretch of desert road – well more like a flat wasteland with pretentions to roadness - for potential Taliban activity and, if necessary, engage the enemy. On their way to their new post, these proud few nearly drive over a landmine. They get separated from the rest of their convoy and end up stumbling upon an ancient idol depicting a djinn (or, as most of us say it, genie). The squad's interpreter informs the other soldiers that this genie isn’t a big blue dude who’s here to grant wish and drop one-liners. Instead, it is a shape-shifting creature driven to kill by its limitless, murderous hatred of humanity. The fact that djinn get so killy when left on their own is the reason they get trapped in things like bottles or, oh, I don't know, ancient idols. Like the one our proud few are standing in front of.

Not all the soldiers are immediately convinced that they're dealing profound supernatural forces beyond the reckoning of their feeble modern logic, and they discuss what should be done with the idol. Though none of them could be considered "true believers," they rapidly reach a consensus that there’s no point in needlessly tempting fate. They decide to leave the area immediately and tell nobody of their discovery.

Just kidding. The unreconstructed jackass with the Reb flag on his helmet shoots it to bits.

Jump to: House in the middle o' nowhere.

Our boys arrive off at a small, partially destroyed stone house facing a desolate stretch of sand, rock, and desert brush. This is the not-really-a-road they're supposed to monitor. Or, at least, they decide it must be because they don't find any more road-like features around them. The soldiers explore the house and find a quartet of singed corpses – victims of white phosphorous bombing – that they promptly bury.

Before you can say R-Point, the soldiers are receiving cryptic radio messages and getting weird visions. A massive sandstorm drives them indoors and brings them a mysterious visitor: a young woman wearing traditional garb and speaking a language even the translator doesn’t recognize (it's Aramaic, according to the "making of" featurettes). Soon, their transport is sabotaged and squad solidarity begins to crack under the strain. The situation gets no better when soldiers start disappearing.

A haunted house story in desert camo, Red Sands closely resembles Turner's Dead Birds, which featured an armed gang of Reconstruction Era bank robbers hiding out in a haunted plantation. Unlike that film, however, it lacks the baroque backstory that gave Birds its epic sense of the uncanny. This is both a blessing and a curse. Without a sense of mystery to build on, Sands slow burn approach to the scares feels like an unwise pacing choice. Turner tries to make a leaner, meaner genre machine, but fails on the leaner part. On the plus side, the stock frame lets Turner trick his film out with elements he's picked up from his study of other genre works. Indeed, the pleasures of Red don’t lie in the originality of its conceits, but in the clever application of the directors inspirations. Unlike the stylistically inert visual presentation of Sand Serpents, Red borrows the washed out, sun-blasted palate of Three Kings (complete with caption intros for the troopers). An obvious move perhaps, but appropriate and effective. The soldiers are built almost entirely out of stock parts, but their dialogue snaps and the actors suitably embody their roles. Furthermore, Turner encourages a Hawksian improvisational liveliness to their interactions that gives them an charge. Sands seems less daring and original than Dead Birds, but it is work of a man with a good eye for what works and discerning taste. On those terms, Red Sands is a more modest, but still thoroughly pleasurable success.

As a document of the war, Red Sands is a curious beast. Despite being the only film of the trio on our list to actually include footage from Afghanistan, it seems the most removed from the conflict itself. The Taliban, the ostensible reason for the soldiers' mission, never make an appearance. We witness one extended gun battle in a flashback (within the extended flashback), thought that appears to occur between two groups of US troops firing on one another in a panic. The only other combat occurs between our protagonists or between them and the djinn. Aside from a short intro, the only interactions with Afghan civilians are disasters: We see the remains of a family that’s been roasted alive by US bombs and witness a military arrest that goes sour and ends with the death of a small child. The movie's relentless centered on the American protagonists, but not in a jingoistc or egocentric way. Instead, the US presence is depicted as a sort of giant beast, so powerful that it can touch nothing, observe nothing, affect nothing without leaving destruction in its wake. It's a problem of scale, not ethics. With the exception of Johnny Reb (and the later Ahabing staff sergeant), the soldiers are presently as flawed, but basically good human beings. But they can't do anything right because the only way they have to interact with the world inevitably breaks it. Curiously, this both parallels and contrasts with djinn. The conflict between the soldiers and the evil genie is just as one-sided as any of the conflicts between the soldiers and the Afghan land they stomp through. But where the Afghans face a particularly fatal form of blundering, the djinn is deliberately bloodthirsty (and no respecter of national or political allegiance – it's an equally opportunity killer of Americans and Afghans).

The lack of context brings up a sort of chicken-egg question with regards to the films liberal borrowings and allusions. Is Red Sands‘s context of no context an unintentional product of Turner’s extensive mirroring of other pop genre works? Or did he deliberately sever the flick from its historical moment, by design or indifference? Deliberate or not, the result suggest to the viewer that, as Julio Cortázar once said of fires, "all wars are one war." No matter who is fighting, or what the fighting occurs, or what people say they’re fighting about, it’s always just a slaughter of the weak by the strong. Like the djinn of the flick, the particulars might shift and change, but its murderous essence stays the same. It's always a horrorshow.

Over There: Horror films and the War in Afghanistan - Part 1: Sand Serpents.

American horror cinema is nimble. Surprisingly so given its dependence on genre formulas and the genre fans' insatiable appetite for re-heated leftovers. Despite the antiquity of many of the genre's most beloved tropes - the specters that haunt modern day-traders and their spiritually besieged girlfriends are fundamentally the same beasties that spooked our preliterate ancestors thousands of years ago - horror cinema is quick to assimilate our latest fears and anxieties. From genuine threats, like nuclear weaponry, to passing fancies, like the 2012 "prophecy," anything that makes us antsy is just waiting for an enterprising low-budget filmmaker to give it the fright flick treatment. The ambulance chaser of our psychic landscape, horror's often the first on the scene of any disaster, ready to help us frame up our latest fears and happy to make a buck or two doing so.

Wars would seem to be an exception to this. During the Second World War, Hollywood kept the homefront eager for slaughter by filling theaters with hundreds of patriotic flicks featuring our fighting men and women in action. Yet surprisingly few horror films made in that period - 1941 to 1945 - overtly mention the war and none are set on the frontlines or featured characters directly involved in fighting. Certainly there were exceptions to this rule: King of the Zombies and Revenge of the Zombies (1941 and 1943) feature Nazi zombie makers, 1942's Black Dragons has surgically altered Japanese saboteurs as the baddies, Dark Waters (1944) includes a torpedoed passenger ship as a backstory plot point, and Return of the Vampire (1944) is set in London and features regular blackouts and bombing raids (and the vamp baddie, in a remarkable example of good taste, poses as a Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe). But none of the era's classics - The Wolf Man, Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Uninvited, The Body Snatcher, and Isle of the Dead, not to mention the sub-classic, but still beloved, late entries into Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein franchises - seriously engage with what must have unquestionably been the single greatest source of anxiety for American film-goers.

The same can be said of Vietnam. Though the "crazy vet" character quickly became a stock character (courtesy of Bob Clark's Dead of Night and other films), Vietnam War era horror flicks that are linked with the war in the critical imagination are usually thought of as metaphorical commentaries on the war era or as products of the cultural wreckage the war caused. For example, many cite the grim, relentless tone and naturalistic visual style of Last House on the Left as a product of Vietnam, but its source material is older and the film is not objectively about the conflict. Even after the war, references to the conflict were usually oblique: Piranha and CHUD (1978 and 1984) feature bio-weapons intended for use against Charlie turning against Americans, House and Jacob's Ladder (1986 and 1990) feature 'Nam vets who are literally haunted by their past, and one could make the case that the unidentified sliver of South American jungle in Predator (1987) is really just a stand-in for the jungles of Vietnam. There must be, in the vast spread of horror flicks, some flick that features soldiers in the Vietnam War coming up against monsters and spooks, but to date America has yet produce a horror film set in the Vietnam War that has the equivalent status of R-Point (2004), South Korea's box office hit spookshow about Korean soldiers battling for their lives inside a haunted abandoned Vietnamese hospital.

Perhaps the magnitude of war simply dwarfs he ability of horror filmmaker to contain it meaningfully in tried and true horror frameworks. Compared with the brutal acts of warfare, their own quiver of spookshow tricks just don't measure up. The savagery of, say, My Lai starkly reminds of how silly and harmless most of cherished horror tropes are. More cynically, perhaps the filmmakers know that their monsters and madmen slashers are the stars of the show and putting their commodity in a setting where their killing prowess would suddenly look bush league is bad for protecting brand identity.

Regardless of the reason, American horror cinema, which is otherwise quick to exploit timely preoccupations, has long avoided setting movies in a on-going conflict. It is noteworthy, then, that the War in Afghanistan is the setting of no fewer than three horror films in the past two years. The Iraq War, true to American horror tradition, remains predominantly an influence and allusion. While drama and action filmmakers have had little compunction (and, notably, little success) about tackling the war head-on, horror filmmakers have mostly kept their distance. Where it has been the direct subject of a horror flick - Joe Dante's truly execrable Homecoming - the film has focused on the homefront impact of the war and the machinations of the administration who lied their way into the conflict. But, for some reason, filmmakers have decided that the on-going conflict in Afghanistan is ripe for horror genre exploitation. In 2008, Daniel Myrick, of Blair Witch fame, helmed The Objective, a supernatural thriller involving a squad of soldiers on the hunt for Bin Laden. The next year, Red Sands and Sand Serpents streeted, each featuring U.S. troops battling monstrous threats in the Afghanistan hinterlands.

We'll start this tour of this unique subgenre of modern horror with the Syfy fodder Sand Serpents for no other reason than that happened to be the first flick that came in the mail from Netflix. In what might be one of the strangest business strategies ever, Syfy has apparently decided that it is going to corner the market on "it's a lazy Saturday afternoon and finding the remote would be harder than sitting through this movie" films. Sand Serpents is a slightly above average component of Syfy's vast plan to conquer that crucial 18 through 35 lazy-and-can't-find-remote demographic. Directed by Jeff Renfroe (who apparently knows that his involvement as the editor of Anvil! The Story of Anvil means he need not produce anything else of last quality to secure his place in film history), Sand Serpents follows the misadventures of a small squad of Marines who are sent to recon an unused sapphire mine. To save time, screenwriter Raul Inglis (best known for his cartoon scripts and the narrative interludes in the video game Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects) rolled out his characters from a NPC random encounter generator in the Twilight 2000 rulebook. We've got all the classics here: There's the bespectacled intellectual (the Sassoon), the rough-edged soldier who's in Marines because of a "hometown jam" (the Springsteen), the green recruit leader who must earn the respect of his men (the Tori Montroc), the tough as nails sergeant (the Rock), the racist lughead (the Vig), the guy whose always got a bad feeling about this mission (the Lemchek), and the outsider specialist (the Ripley). There's also some cannon fodder (the Fodder). Despite his apparent comfort with cliché, Inglis forgets to include the loyal native (the Benny Fish), the dude who loses his shit (the Hudson), or the guy from Brooklyn (the Brooklyn). Whether this is because Inglis is tired of these particular types or due to the fickle nature of Twilight 2000 NPC generator, I don't profess to know.

After some efficient backstory setting up their mission parameters, our troops march almost immediately into an ambush. They are overwhelmed by Taliban forces and those that survive the initial attack, about five out of the initial seven, are prepped for videotapped beheadings. This scene gives us a hint of why many filmmakers hesitate to set their monster pics in a live-fire war: Nothing that follows in the movie has quite the tension of watching seven bound and blindfolded soldiers beg for fruitlessly beg for their lives. Ultimately, the soldiers are spared. As it turns out, the ambush above the mine sent tremors deep through the mine structure, awakening massive three, maybe four gigantic sand worms - several stories tall, with a mouth roughly the size of the Holland Tunnel - from their slumber. The sand worms breach the surface with the force of a small earthquake, sending the Taliban soldiers out to see what the heck is up. They are, to say the least, unprepared to deal with the sand serpents and quickly become serpent chow.

Spared the serpent's immediate onslaught, the Marines slip their bonds and regroup. Their movement arouses the ever-peckish titular monstrosities and, after the beasties whittle the number of Marines down slightly, the Marines ponder just how to make it back to base when any movement on their part brings serpentish attention.

The Marines eventually break for a nearby refugee camp. Built on the remains of what appears to be a bombed out brace of block houses, the concrete rubble foundation of the refugee camp serves as a deterrent to serpenty predations. There the team meets Amal and his daughter Asala, two refugees who are willing to to help the Marines if the Marines agree to take them out of the Taliban controlled region. The Marines and the refugees hatch a plan that involves a mad endgame return to the serpent infested mine and call for evac. It's not a utterly crap plan, but you could count the numbers who survive it on a single hand. And not even your single hand, but the hand of a dude who had one of those horrible woodshop accidents they warned you about in high school.

From a strictly horror-fan perspective, Sand Serpents may just squeeze into the the middling territory. With none of the aw-shucks wit and charm of Tremors or raw power of Aliens, its two nearest cinematic predecessors, it comes off as a unoffensive, by the numbers run-and-gun. Relatively speaking, the effects are top notch for a Syfy production. But that's relatively speaking. While this film puts The Snakehead Horror to shame, it's a stain on the shorts of Cloverfield. That said, there is an odd charm in watching the lengths the filmmakers will go to in order to avoid showing the sand serpents. In fact, the film depends on the fact that we most often register their presence solely by the panic reactions of our protags: We've see that the serpents are big enough and fast enough to snatch Blackhawk choppers (or the Syfy-budget equivalents thereof) out of the air, so seeing them on screen in most scenes would just make us wonder why they don't snatch our unlucky heroes up.

As an artifact of the Afghan War era, there are two major points of interest. First, there's the characters of Amal and Asala. During an extend sequence in which the Marines use the mines to escape - apparently the rock the mines cut through to to thick for the meddlesome beasties - the up-to-then trustworthy father and daughter duo have a weird exchange. The father starts to head down a mine and then, after some consideration, changes his mind and directs the Marines down a different shaft. His daughter then intervenes and says that they are headed in the wrong direction. Amal ignores her and maintains his stance. Now, eventually, the Marines pop out of the mines and there are Taliban crawling all over the area. But, before they surface, there's a whole scene in which a sand serpent chases them around the mines, pretty much messing up any chance we'd have to know if the Marines ended up where they were being directed. Was Amal leading them into a trap? Did he start to, change his mind, and then get pressured by his child to carry out the plan? Honestly, I'm a bit hesitant to not put this all down as a product of sloppy writing. To believe that Amal or Asala was leading the Marines into a trap would require we believe that the Taliban plant two people in a refugee camp they had no reason to believe the Marines would go to. They would then assume that the Marine would agree to travel through the mines, though they didn't know about the serpents (which had eaten every last one of the first Taliban squad) which was the only reason the Marines had to travel by mine shaft. Still, the impression you get while watching it is one of potential betrayal, never fully resolved. Where we betrayed? Do we even understand enough to know if we have or haven't been betrayed? While far from the overt racism of Pvt. Jackass, the squads resident spokesman for ethnic hatred, it speaks to a more subtle unease about whether we truly have allies, even when our best interest coincide.

Even more interesting than than the nuanced unease about our Afghan allies is the bizarre final scene of the flick. In the last moment, the remaining two Marines and Asala, the potentially traitorous Afghan girl, lift off in a chopper. Suddenly, a sand serpent rears out of the surface and lunges toward the helicopter. One of the Marines, wearing a confiscated suicide bomber belt of explosives, leaps into the maw of the beast. He detonates, saving the last Marine and the little girl. Watching this, I couldn't help but be reminded of a truly odd essay by Sunny Singh called In Praise of the Delinquent Hero, or How Hollywood Creates Terrorists. It's long been a curiosity among anti-terrorism experts that terrorist seem fascinated by American genre cinema. Terrorists often select their nom de guerres from American action cinema lore. When NYPD anti-terror agents unravelled a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, they found that they terrorists referred to the famous landmark as "the Godzilla bridge," an allusion to the '98 Emmerich flick (not only do they want us dead, their taste in films is horrific). Indian essayist Singh suggests that the connection runs deeper than average pop fandom. She suggest that genre cinema has given terrorists the mental justification they need in the form of the "delinquent hero." Think a War on Terror update of the Kracauer thesis. This figure, in Singh's words, embodies "distrust of sociopolitical institutions and individuals, the privileging of individual judgment over the status quo, and, finally, the utility of violent force in achieving goals, even if it means going beyond the pale of law." (The complete essay is available in How They See Us, edited by James Atlas - buy indie and remember: more of the dollars spent at your independent retailers are circulated back into the local economy.) Though too wrapped up in the military command structure to truly be delinquent heroes, the film does show our Marines clashing and outsmarting an incompetent and avaricious command structure, ignoring their orders because they decided their is a higher set of values they must follow, and using force to solve their problems. Though I find Singh overreaches in her essay, the irony of the fact that hero Marine becomes a suicide bomber would not be lost on him.

[UPDATE: See Singh's comment below; not only because she calls me out on an embarrassing assumption on my part, but because she directs you, dear readers of all genders, to an online version of the essay mentioned above.]