War Inc., Satire for sanity and perhaps reform

With respect to reviews of War Inc., John Cusack’s recent film, few reviewers get it, including the film critics on Pasadena’s KCRW and, oddly, the satirical journal, The Onion.

Carina Chocano gets it. Ms. Chocano in her Los Angeles Times review understands that War Inc. is a satire, not a comedy, at least not purely. Certainly, it uses “sick gags” (Tasha Robinson, The Onion) to push the plot, but then satires aren’t much concerned with plot, nor should they be, even if the gags, better described as dark comedy in War Inc, could propel the movie to “cult status” as Robinson suggests, but not for the right reasons.

Even so, “War Inc. has survived bad reviews such as Robinson’s to “find an audience in its very limited theatrical release” (Tina Daunt, Los Angeles Times). Selected audiences are getting it. That is, they appear to be interested in the film’s intent: the censure of war criminals, and are subsequently relieved by the purging effects only this sort of film can bring. While most in the media, academia, the streets, have shrunk from the task of their public citizen obligations, (We engage in too much private complaining these days), John Cusack and his troupe have stepped up to engage us in the most difficult dramatic form, political satire, and they have largely succeeded. Even with the adverb, that’s a triumph when choosing satire, the best means Cusack could have chosen to tell the sordid and surreal story of the Iraq War and the corrupt elements of our culture that even presently sustain it.

Ron Suskind has described the current political malaise in America as the unwillingness of its citizens—all of us in all endeavors—to “take responsibility and be adults (my emphasis) about our political circumstances,” a lacking which may remind us of the term: Trahison des Clercs*. Most Germans did not understand what was occurring in Weimar Germany either; they failed to take responsibility looking to Daddy (in the form of the State) to take care of the business “grownups” engage in, certainly not the citizens in a democratic framework. You can believe everything Daddy says and does. Well, even though our Daddy has lost his grace and many seem to be looking to a new Daddy, where is the cultural activity substantiating and informing all the doubt. Are we credible to ourselves as a body politic, or are we not? Some suspect the early signs of cultural psychopathy because of these odd disconnections.

What is satire, and why is it those who should know better seem confused by it? “Satire is strictly a literary genre, but it is also found in the graphic and performance. In satire human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, (emphasis mine) (ideally with an intent to bring about improvement). (Wikipedia).

Why would John Cusack et. al. wish to expose the rotting decay by giving a speech, or shooting a documentary featuring Dick Cheney, Black Water, and the parasitic plague of others who are eating away at the host culture? Surely, others have; some with reasonable, critical success— Robert Greenwald, Iraq for Sale. If Cusack, an actor/writer/director with a cinema background wishes to get the truth out concerning a most sinister and serious story, how does he do it? He makes a satire.

War Inc. is not a “grim hyper comedy or overblown melodrama” as Tasha Robinson asserts in The Onion, a very good satirical instrument in its own right. Though Ms. Robinson is half way home when she says in her review, “It’s hard to laugh or cry…because each makes the other feel wildly inappropriate.” That’s right, laughter is often of the wrong sort when responding to satire. George Bernard Shaw discovered that many in the audience who made his play Arms and the Man a “success,” laughed for the wrong reasons—“Yes, but their tears are the wrong kind,” he said responding to a friend who had emphasized the tears of laughter falling down the faces at intermission. Arms and the Man satirized idealistic thinking (could be ideological in our day) and the adverse military outcomes that followed in its dreadful wake.

With successful satire—“successful” being the operative word—the laughter issues from the brain not the belly. Use the word “gag” if you wish, but these necessary plot elements are darkly humorous dramatizations of what has happened and is still happening. They are not intended to tickle us. Gags in a variety of comedy, excepting dark comedy, make us giggle and laugh from the belly. No giggling in proper satire, no belly laughs. Just the intellectual laugh, accompanied by a sardonic grin, and the relief that you are not crazy for feeling the pent up anger the satire has allowed you to vent. Satire can also educate the uneducated while not preaching at them. This is the underlying hope, I’m thinking, of War Inc.

A savvy person could have a conversation with someone who liked War Inc. for the wrong reasons, i.e. the “oddly funny gags” and decode them possibly leaving the unenlightened fan with fresh insight and the incentive to become an active, public citizen. Too elevated? Movies are just for entertainment? Cusack is not so cynical or pragmatic. If he were, he never would have engaged War Inc.

Thus, War Inc. Funny, ha, ha. Not. “Reports that the 6th century BC poet Hipponax wrote satirae that were so cruel that the offended hanged themselves” gives new meaning to the potential power of this literary and dramatic genre. Although, Ms. Chocano points out in her review in the Los Angeles Times, “Once upon a time, it was possible to watch a movie like “Dr. Strangelove” (which satirized the atomic bomb age descending upon the world in the 1950s) and have an eye opening, revelatory, even epiphanic experience. Not so much anymore, now that culture and politics are no longer cloaked in a façade of seriousness and unimpeachability.”

Chocano’s is an elegant way of suggesting that today’s audiences are perhaps too complacent to be aroused. If you expect corruption, why act? This thinking may appear illogical, yet it seems to explain current inaction in the face of great danger, which hints at psychopathy. Yet Ms. Chocano does not fully accept her suggestion—phew!— when she states at the end, “War Inc. is both right-on and somehow off, but it gets points for trying.”

More from Chocano’s review and how it gets it right: “(The) Deadpan satire hits close to home.” Indeed. Just after seeing the film, my wife and I learned from a neighbor that the brother of her fiancé, a homicide detective in Chicago, had decided to sign up with a private contractor, the type John Cusack satirizes in his film, to make more that $250,000 a year, easily three times the money he makes in Chicago. Does this confuse us? Is the man going for patriotic reasons or financial, or both? Thousands of amputees are coming home from Iraq, hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost counting Iraqi lives, many of them innocent civilians. What are we to think? How are we to think? Enter satire which exposes the elephant in the room and brings psychological relief while edifying, even promoting reforming, healthful activity.

Here’s what one might think when speaking deeply about the truth behind the “gags” in War Inc.—The government is broken in its corruption. We are breaking another nation in order to build it up for reasons of strengthening our geopolitical and market presence. Corporate profit determines foreign policy. Here’s the revelation from War Inc.: It’s not about “building democracies.” Daddy lied.

*Traison des Clercs: Term originally used by the French philosopher and novelist JULIEN BENDA (1867-1956) to describe the betrayal of intellectual values by the right wing. More generally, intellectuals by allying themselves too closely with government, states, or political parties betray the independence which is essential if they are to contribute to public discussion. (We may add today intellectuals of all stripes).

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