“Oh, great. Great. The captain’s crying.”
Film studies teachers point out how moviemakers make movies. We do this in the hope of helping our students recognize that what seems obvious and clear is the result of careful design and planning, and a whole lot of steady effort that is anything but “natural.”
We often spend time unpacking the standard narrative, or the way a story is told. Of necessity, this includes discussing chronology—whether a story is linear and orderly, or not—implying that there exists a masterful storyteller struggling to build character in a story world to occasionally share a theme that motivates everything.
The conventional pattern is called Classical Hollywood Style. Everything about it encourages our pleasurable engagement with characters who spend every moment of their adventures trying to solve a serious dilemma. We are invited to accompany them as they face hostile opposition, and we never once spend time considering how the story was constructed to enhance our sense of fun. Instead, we ask questions like, “Will the central romance work out?” We equally learn to never ask, “How come we haven’t seen the protagonist do anything other than the stuff that makes them so obviously able as the protagonist?”
An alternative storytelling style I enjoy is called Experimental Narrative. In this style we face the process of how stories are told, figuring out what events matter, and we are frequently exposed to original lines of thinking that can stretch the bounds of what a movie can be, sometimes to help us re-define what makes great entertainment.
TV writer-producer turned filmmaker Ed Zwick released Courage Under Fire in July 1996. It has a “straight,” or conventional story, and a more “troublesome,” or experimental narrative hiding alongside it.
The straight story is a military-set morality tale that kicks off in January 1991 during the Gulf War. We watch a tank brigade enter combat under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Serling (Denzel Washington). In the fight, Serling’s tank fires on and kills the crew of an American tank. His forces then overwhelm the Iraqis, and the friendly fire incident is swept away, beginning the next day, when a medevac unit carries off the dead.
In February that same medevac unit, piloted by Captain Karen Emma Walden, flies to the aid of a downed helicopter behind enemy lines. Walden’s crew destroys the enemy but takes heavy fire and crashes. Fighting off further Iraqi patrols, Walden’s crew of four survives because she held off enemy fire to help them escape.
Leading up to Veterans Day 1991, Serling, now a drunk and a stateside Army investigator, is asked to review Walden’s case and decide if she deserves the Medal of Honor. He begins asking questions about her actions while his friendly fire case is similarly being investigated, and he starts to realize that the testimony of her crewman and various witnesses don’t hold together.
Serling finally decides that Walden is a hero, that her crewmen were unable to cope with gross dereliction of duty, including attempted mutiny, and the proof is in their cover up of how Walden really died defending her crew. Serling also confesses to killing his friends in a subordinate tank crew, but he is forgiven because an audio tape clarifies that he made the right choice to fire and then provided the necessary leadership to win the battle.
The troublesome story of Courage Under Fire is a messy police procedural in which the various story points I’ve just summarized do not unravel in the chronological order I’ve just written.
On-screen, Courage Under Fire begins in January, 1991, flashes to October, moves back through various witness accounts to the same main events in February, always returning to changing incidents in October, until the climax of a Medal of Honor ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in November that resolves to a coda where Walden picks up Serling’s fallen man in February.
Plus, the movie uses Walden’s crew as literal unreliable narrators. We have Staff Sergeant Monfriez (Lou Diamond Phillips), a hot head who calls Walden cowardly; Specialist Ilario (Matt Damon), who offers a sunny disposition but can’t keep his facts straight; Sergeant Altameyer (Seth Gilliam), who has returned home to a fast-killing cancer diagnosis; and Warrant Officer Rady (Tim Guinee), who sustained head trauma and spinal injury, and was unconscious through the whole incident. Each of these four men shade the story of who Walden was and what she did, and no two versions of the helicopter incident are the same.
Who do we trust? Who does Serling trust? Is there another version of events that will make more sense and explain, exactly, what happened to Walden and her crew? Is war an experience where these considerations matter?
Serling’s journey, then, is epistemological (how do we know what we know?) and ontological (what do we know?). There is no single omniscient, bird’s eye view of the fast-moving battle scenes, and every new version of events is re-imagined on-screen to favor whichever crewman we’re currently visiting with. Their recollections contain overlapping banal truths, but in the heat of the moment, the perspective changes, and that’s when Courage Under Fire presents a likable facsimile of the kinds of war footage most moviegoers recognize from years of repetition.
The movie’s story is a journey that questions patriotism, the courage and backbone of common troopers, the underlying purpose of justice, and the value of a gimlet-eyed pursuit of truth as little more than the peeling of an onion to make everyone cry. Still, Zwick manages to create an emotionally affective experience that combines three noteworthy taboos—women in combat roles, military units lead by non-White commanders, and war violence, generally—and mash them all together into a puzzle that requires a bit of work, some patience, and lots of unexpected pleasure at how far away from the conventional pattern this movie story moves.
–November 30, 2018
