Lions For Lambs, Robert Redford’s think piece about recent U.S. foreign policy, sounded like a pretentious, humorless slog. Rendition: ditto. No End In Sight and about a zillion other well-reviewed documentaries about the current Middle East mess popped up at my local art house for about a week, only to disappear before I got out to see them (though, to be honest, I probably never tried very hard). In The Valley of Elah is # 71 in my Netflix queue, and United 93 haunted my TiVo for months before I finally admitted that waiting 'til I was in the right mood to watch it probably wasn’t something that was likely to happen for years.
It’s not that I want to keep myself ignorant about the truths and half-truths of the War On Terror. It’s not that I can’t handle dramatic subject matter. And it’s not that I don’t support the troops. But, like many Americans already saturated with information about the infuriating incompetence and arrogance of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy misadventures since 9/11, the past seven years have been such a demoralizing downer that spending my free time deliberately subjecting myself to fresh, Hollywood-inspired fits of impotent rage seems like the leisure time equivalent of driving around in rush hour traffic for kicks. And yet, somehow, after numerous box office failures, Hollywood has finally managed to get the War on Terror right...on the small screen, at least, with HBO’s seven-part adaptation of Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, based on his observations as a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with a Marine battalion during the early days of the current Iraq war.
Are you watching this show? If not, imagine the second half of Full Metal Jacket with more characters, desert locations and hip-hop and you’ll have the basic idea. And yes, I just equated a TV show to a Stanley Kubrick classic, a comparison only possible because, like Jacket, Generation Kill is the product of uncompromising, honest-to-God pop culture genius in the two-headed form of David Simon and Ed Burns (NOT the handsome one from Saving Private Ryan), creators of the justly praised, unjustly underseen and unrewarded HBO masterpiece The Wire.
Like their previous collaboration, which nailed the details of the misbegotten War on Drugs so accurately that cops and drug dealers were among the show’s biggest fans, Simon and Burns have said their main goal with Kill was to depict Marine life during wartime in a way actual Marines would recognize without calling bullshit...and by all accounts they’ve succeeded. Their obsession with verisimilitude over political axe-grinding or boot-in-the-ass patriotism is one of the reasons Generation Kill bears comparison to Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and other grunts-eye-view dramatizations of the day-to-day boredom, frustration, terror, absurdity and pride of military life.
Alternately funny, exciting, terrifying and infuriating, Generation Kill honors the skill, bravery and professionalism of America’s fighting force while also depicting the forces, large and small, that frequently cause it to malfunction so badly.