Posted: 07/22/2003

Buffalo Soldiers

(2003)

by Jerome de Groot

“What are we fighting for?/ Who cares, I don’t give a damn”

There has been a spate of pseudo-cynical war films recently—shot, obviously, before 9/11—questioning American military involvement in various global theatres. These films—Three Kings, Black Hawk Down and now Gregor Jordan’s Buffalo Soldiers—present the army as corrupted, indiscreet, brutal and divided. They suggest a move within the mainstream to interrogate, and a generation of filmmakers learning the lessons of Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola. Yet the Gulf and Europe are not Vietnam, and these films lack narrative punch just when it matters—they make their arguments early on, and then back away from the worst of it. Political movies, yes, but crucially compromised. In the end all three could serve to further a neo-conservative argument that military intervention in foreign theatres is to be avoided as all it does is corrupt key American values. Certainly all put a value in ‘going home’, escaping the fragmentation of the foreign for the assurance of the recognisable. Yet at their best these films contain dissident voices we haven’t heard for a while, points of view that suggest war is terrifying not just because of what we know from war films but because of what bullets actually do to you, voices that suggest the refugee problem is not going to solve itself, voices that undermine the myth of ‘peacekeeping’.

Some of the best points that these films have to make are about honour and duty, particularly questioning the commitment of the ordinary soldier to the cause. The greed of the mercenary soldiers in Three Kings fades in comparison with Joaquin Phoenix’s hypocrite Elwood in Buffalo Soldiers—pushing heroin, covering up murder, lying, sleeping with Military Police Top Sergeant Lee (Scott Glenn)’s daughter (Anna Paquin) as revenge, selling supplies to the highest bidder. His excuse is, rather cutely (and this could have been explored further), sheer boredom. Everyone on base is marking time. Peace is Hell. And the key to this is Elwood’s status as forced into the army to avoid prison. There is no glory or duty—these soldiers are working-class scum, whoring and smoking their way through a tour of duty before getting the hell out of whichever shithole they happen to be posted in. The army is just one more microcosm of a destructive, self-devouring late capitalist society turned in on itself—it is no surprise that Jordan cites Travis Bickle and Ferris Bueller as prototypes for Elwood’s fixer. Elwood’s favourite thing about Germany is his car. There is no difference to be made, no people to save—the troops don’t even know which part of Germany they are in, and all ignore the news footage of the Berlin wall tumbling. The American role in this world is to provide cheap cleaning products and hoover up all the heroin the country can muster. As a version of American society the army base is destructive and brutal, racist and criminal.

Jordan’s film was premiered in early September 2001, and has only just been cleared for release in the US having recently arrived in Europe. It has unwittingly poignant things to say about 2003, in particular given the Hollywoodization of political rhetoric and media coverage. In this army base tactics give way to backstabbing, honourable men are useless and impotent, and whoever makes the money wins the prizes (and the girl). The plot is less important than the atmosphere and the presentation of the base. Elwood makes his money but stumbles upon some guns he has to get rid of pdq. He arranges a deal but ends up with a huge amount of raw heroin. He is also under pressure from rivals and the ‘new broom’ Vietnam vet Top. To revenge the death of his Mercedes, intentionally destroyed on military manoeuvres, Elwood sleeps with Top’s daughter. And then it gets a bit complicated with various double crosses and jokes that uncomfortably rest on getting one over on the (Muslim) black crew because they don’t eat real American hamburger. Again, whilst this is blackly funny and undermines the virtue of the humble hamburger (it is used here to prevent those cooking heroin from getting high, hardly a morally clear purpose), its narrative purpose is to isolate the ‘other’, evil gang so that Elwood can escape his punishment. There is a subplot about falling dreams and diving, and a great cameo by a balding, aging, useless Ed Harris—the impotent career soldier related to a Civil War hero who met Kennedy and is now reduced to commanding the Supply section is a good metaphor for the film’s view of the army itself.

The film is based on Robert O’Connor’s savage first novel, which is explicit and unsettling. Elwood here, and the society of the army, is much more corrupted. Narratively, the book is more concerned with the internal movement of Elwood from dumbfuck through the epiphany of losing control to love, to his eventual murder—a kind of Holden Caufield in fatigues. O’Connor’s Elwood is more of a grunt, a lucky fool who turns his girlfriend onto heroin. The key moment of their relationship, in the film, is Elwood’s walking off the diving board—conquering his fears and realising his love. In the book this is filtered through the memory of the death of Parsons McCovey, a junkie soldier killed by falling from a window, ‘a moment of pure joy’ [Robert O’Connor, Buffalo Soldiers (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 314]. In itself this prefigures Elwood’s own eventual transcendent release as he is thrown from the same window trapped in a metal locker. The existential moment of losing oneself to love is undermined by the knowledge of death.

The film presents Elwood more as a benign player, a Milo Minderbender or Radar O’Reilly—less vicious and edgy than the book, more involved. The general effects of the corrupt system are comedic—the drug-fuelled infantry taking their tank on a rampage through a German village echoes the exploding cow in Three Kings, an elongated military slapstick that undermines our reaction to the destructive power of the army. War here is a game, a joke. The film’s publicity tagline (and poster shot of a gurning Phoenix) emphasises the comedic aspect: ‘one man’s misadventures in the military—a story so outrageous you couldn’t make it up!’. The whole thing is poorly aping M*A*S*H. In the novel Top tells Elwood, ‘War, you dumb fuck, is playing for keeps’ (p. 320). The film lacks the cynicism of O’Connor’s book and this dulls the polemic edge of the text; black comedy is fine, as long as it doesn’t mess up the point. Here, a happy ending is interpolated and it is implied that Elwood knew exactly what was going on, that he in fact was playing the Top all along. Top also represents utter evil—he can kill, enjoyed Vietnam and is hiding his scheming behind an incorruptible honourable front. He really is the bad guy. Jordan dispenses with the grit of the original text, betrays it even, allowing the film the luxury of a Hollywood ending (Elwood posted to Hawaii with his fiancée). This recalls the copout ending of Three Kings and the heroics of Black Hawk Down; films that compromise their political edge by conforming to standard narrative structures. All, it is implied, is OK now—Elwood is back on American soil, compulsory familial heterosexuality has been reaffirmed, the bad guy got his and our hero lives to fight another day. Everything will be alright now. Such bullshit endings are mocked by O’Connor’s dreamy account of Elwood’s last fall, his final word ‘hope’ in some ways a matrix for the entire bowdlerising process. Needing to fly and escape into the imagination, but constantly pulled down by the reality of death, we cannot escape, and films that suggest we can even as a black punchline do not serve their audiences well.

Jerome de Groot is currently giving up smoking. He is a resident of London, England.

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