There is no clear “mission” underway
In a war rife with college-aged American casualties, the ivory tower provides thick insulation against the realities of our peers who are living on the front line. Gunner Palace, Michael Tucker’s new documentary about the war in Iraq, is a potent reminder that most of the soldiers on the front lines could be behind us in line to tap a keg—if only they weren’t in uniform.
The product of 60 days spent with soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery, a.k.a. “The Gunners,” the film consists of everything from interviews to impromptu freestyle sessions, punctuated by mortar fire and MTV-style editing. The movie doesn’t quite shock and doesn’t quite awe. But it does achieve a subtler success: it captures the difference between the disjointed world of war and the smooth, clearly-labeled sound bytes of the coverage on the nightly news.
This is the very crux of the movie’s success: it demonstrates the incoherence and illogic of war from a soldier’s perspective. The Gunners themselves are familiar to us. Their early awkwardness in front of the camera is reminiscent of an eighteen-year-old asking for a first date. They live in the bombed-out pleasure palace of Uday Hussein, and if not for the uzis and the uniforms, some of the scenes almost evoke Animal House—pool parties, death metal T-shirts, rat chases around the cluttered floor of what looks like a dorm room.
But the movie faces something of a paradox: how does one use footage of reality to communicate the surreal situation of war?
Una de las cosas fascinantes de LiT es c