What is the point, exactly, of HBO’s Generation Kill? The first two episodes were certainly watchable, sometimes mordantly funny, sometimes outright riveting. But I’m still not sure why we’re watching this now, or what its broader point is about the Iraq war, or for that matter war in general.
When HBO commits to a seven-part miniseries, and brings in David Simon and Ed Burns of The Wire to do it, expectations are automatically (and probably unfairly) raised very high. The Wire achieved a sweeping dramatic complexity while also providing trenchant commentary on American urban life and modern life in general, with its focus on the various corrupted systems that we all participate in, and consciously or unconsciously must bow down before – the crappy bureaucracy, the tyrannical market.
So when Simon and Burns take on the Iraq war, we expect something that sets that conflict in a broader context, and shows us something new about it. There’s no shortage of literary, high modernist material that fits the Wire sensibility: American hubris and ignorance of the world – not just of other cultures, but of geopolitics and war itself. The blood-for-oil factor. The missing WMDs and the media’s credulousness. Rumsfeld’s determination to use Iraq as a lab for his ideas about a lighter, nimbler – and non-nation-building – military.
All those things have been hashed over in books and movies and are still fuel for the flames of punditry, of course, but HBO, Simon and Burns had an opportunity to get beyond all that and explore the whys about what went wrong here, the vintage 21st century American absurdity of the whole enterprise. Maybe we’re not ready for this. Maybe no one would want to watch it. But boy, wouldn’t it be something.
Instead, Simon and Burns take a narrow, documentarian’s approach. We spend all our time with a single unit of Marines in the heady days and weeks of the initial invasion. Watching it and knowing what subsequently happened in Iraq, you do get some sense of the innate ridiculousness of the mission. You also see the idiocy and arbitrariness of the chain of command – which, we now know, went all the way to the very top. The unit commander makes a wrong turn against the advice of a subordinate, then blames the subordinate for the mistake once it’s discovered. The battalion commander decides the Marines must push through a hail of gunfire in a town in their lightly-armored Humvees rather than taking the safe way round – solely to show the Iraqis how tough Americans are. Afterward a lot of Iraqis are dead and the Marines feel fucking great.
Some great post-9/11 metaphors, there! But these are only lightly allusive, and secondary to what, underneath its irony and attitude, so far appears to be mainly a conventional war picture about soldierly camaraderie, a “Band of Brothers” for the millennials.
