supernatural.supply

Abstract:

John Huston’s “Let There Be Light” was suppressed by the US Army for decades, due to its unflinching and dispassionate look at the real effects of war. 65 years later, “Restrepo,” directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, takes a deeper and more personal look at the lingering psychological damage caused by combat. An examination of the portrayal of PTSD in documentary film throughout the years can help us benchmark our progress through this difficult national conversation.

Wounded Warriors : Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Two Eras

Avalon Jones, 2011

By analyzing the production background, content, and tone of two documentaries, John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946), and Sebastian Junger’s and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo (2011), we can see how American attitudes regarding war, veterans, and post-traumatic stress disorder have evolved over the time intervening their production. During the year Restrepo was released, 18 American veterans tried to kill themselves each day. That means “an average of 950 suicide attempts each month by veterans who are receiving some type of treatment from the Veterans Affairs Department” (Maze). Many of these suicides are sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); a serious problem that has claimed more veterans’ lives during the War on Terror than enemy and friendly fire combined. If documentary’s purpose is to seek and deliver some version of the truth, its portrayal of PTSD is assuredly an important part of normalizing this illness.

In 1942, shortly after US entry into World War II (WWII), John Huston joined the US Army Signal Corps. His last film there, Let There Be Light, profiles the recuperative journey of seventy-five US Servicemen through an Army psychiatric facility. They were sent there immediately after the war’s end for the treatment of “battle neurosis,” which we now call PTSD.  While Huston “was a commissioned officer with enough authority to exert a remarkable degree of personal control over the films he made for the Army” (Koszarski), the dominant influence on the film’s content is the government. We are introduced to the newly minted veterans: stuttering, twitching, and crying uncontrollably. The narrator (Huston’s father, a well-known actor, familiar voice, and one of the only humanizing elements) informs us, “Here are men who tremble, men who cannot sleep, men with pains that are nonetheless real because they are of mental origin. […] Through all the stories runs one thread: death and the fear of death.” The visual content is no less dramatic than the narration. The film opens with high-contrast shots of gangways and their shadows. We see the patients artfully spotlit and framed by the shoulders of a therapist. The images are glossy and well produced, lending credibility to the institution they depict.

Light’s tone greatly reflects the Army’s influence. It is clinical and authoritative, sometimes to the point of condescension. The narrator often assumes the role of omniscient, infallible psychiatrist, diagnosing the patients and pontificating about what will happen onscreen. He introduces the returning veterans without compassion, “Here is human salvage.” His intrusions exacerbate those of the counselors we see using methods that could be considered quite insensitive to a modern audience. There is little characterization in the film. The men are not named (for reasons of privacy, we presume), and the little we learn about them is through impersonal call-and-response type interviews where the men’s gaze is off-camera. Cutting quickly between therapy sessions flattens the three-dimensional men into mere archetypes of their symptoms. “The mechanical presentations of symptoms and cures virtually eliminates the human beings behind these depictions, an approach that was seemingly in line with the Army’s method of processing people” (Stastny). There seems to be no attempt to involve the audience in the emotional turmoil we are watching.

This dearth of personalization makes sense given the purpose of the film. This documentary is piece of propaganda, an advertisement for the miraculous quality of Army healthcare, and palliative for families receiving damaged soldiers. The wording of the narration is precise, inflexible and unambiguous. In a group therapy session, a doctor proclaims, “Underneath ‘I can’t’, you usually find ‘I won’t.’” We are reassured that “these men are blessed with the natural regenerative powers of youth, now they are living less in the past and more in the future.” The message is clear: the cure is as simple as forgetting about all the bad things that happened to you! Rather than exploring the origins and implications of PTSD, the narration and rapid cutting shuffles us from one miracle recovery to the next. Huston compresses weeks of therapy into an hour, and we see hyper-speed recoveries that strain credibility. Amnesiacs regain their memories and paralyzed men walk after only one treatment. Hypnosis and Amobarbital are panaceas that cure all psychoneurotic ills. Reflecting the self-sufficiency values of the time, the Army is not advocating a New Age psychotherapy experience. It is showing us a factory where broken men are made whole again through discipline and (pseudo-) science. This is understandable as psychotherapy was (and is) a relatively new art at the time. A 1946 audience might be quite unfamiliar with the practices they were seeing, just as they were unfamiliar with PTSD. So the Army was in a position of privilege to manipulate the story. One especially propagandistic scene appears at the end. The men are playing a game of baseball; close-ups of their beaming faces are juxtaposed with flashbacks of their first therapy sessions. The narrator asks, “8 weeks have passed, what about these men? Are they ready for discharge?” Lest we start to think critically about the question, we are quickly and summarily informed, “The answer is yes.”

Interestingly, shortly after Light was released, “when the film was shown to an audience of high-ranking officers, a three-star general walked out after forty-five minutes. Others followed, in descending order of rank. […] Huston was informed that his film was ‘anti-war’, and likely to be ‘demoralizing to men who were going into combat for the first time’. The film was shelved.” (Koszarski). “In 1945, depictions of physical weakness, dysfunction or deformity, much less dependency, in men –and in military men in particular– were incompatible with the self-image promoted by the US military. By using visually compelling physical deficits (such as stuttering or paralysis) to represent the internal, less tangible mental distress of veterans, Huston may have compounded the problem his film presented to American military culture” (Morgan 139). The Army made another film, called Shades of Grey, which was claimed to be a remake of Light using actors to recreate the scenes. However that film completely upends psychological theory and frames PTSD as the result of a poor upbringing and not of combat stress. So it would seem that the Army felt even the shallow exploration of the origins of PTSD in Light was too damning for American audiences of the time.

The inflexible rhetoric, authoritative narration, and uncaring treatment (literal and filmic) of mental disorders are understandable in context. WWII was a popular war and America was riding high on our decisive victory, we did not wish to dwell on the negative consequences. Before TV and Internet, movies were a primary medium for information, which could be highly manipulative and hard to disprove. The counter-culture sentiments of the 1960s and ‘70s were still incubating. But soon America became embroiled in a substantially less popular war, Vietnam. “Documentary filmmakers were very much a part of articulating opinion about the war, particularly for those who opposed it. The repercussions of the war, both direct and indirect, became central topics for some of the best nonfiction work of the 1970s” (Ellis/McLane 242). Vietnam was a watershed (two decade long) moment for American culture, documentary, and warfare. Its neglected veterans also substantially raised the profile of PTSD.

Restrepo was directed by Sebasatian Junger and Tim Hetherington, a reporter and a photojournalist on assignment for Vanity Fair. The film portrays a year in the life of an Army platoon deployed in the most dangerous valley in Afghanistan. “Embedded reporting is nothing new, but Junger and Hetherington covered the platoon throughout its deployment, from August of 2007 through their departure the following year. Most embeds last for three weeks. The filmmakers ate and slept in the same outposts as the men, forgoing such luxuries as running water and electricity” (Lybarger). This closeness with their subjects helped the filmmakers elicit candid moments later in the film.

The war in Afghanistan is something of a forgotten one. In the Global War on Terror, a war whose popularity has waned much like Vietnam’s, Iraq got the lion’s share of press as soon as bombs began to fall on Bagdad. Junger gives this as the primary reason for making Restrepo: “For most of our time over there, we’ve been in Afghanistan for eight or nine years, we’ve had 15,000 to 20,000 men, from a population of 300 million. There are 40,000 cops in New York City. It’s a tiny commitment by our nation. I’m surprised at how small it is. I think it’s very easy for the citizenry to not register what’s going on over there. It’s just not soaking up a lot of manpower or resources, so it’s not getting much attention. During World War II, what were there, two million servicemen, something like that? […] There’s nothing particularly extraordinary in the history of warfare about what those guys did. But our society does need to understand what they did, and I think the movie helps us do that. We need to understand what they did, so they can be fully understood and fully appreciated, empathized with, and ultimately reincorporated.” (Lybarger). Rather than congratulating us on a war well won like Light, the purported purpose of Restrepo is to show us the true face of the troops we claim to support.

Restrepo’s visual content reflects the conditions under which it was filmed. Night scenes are dark and difficult to decipher. Battle scenes are blurry and occasionally lack sound. This is a documentary clearly influenced by the ideas of Direct Cinema. There is no artful staging like what we see in Light, no “womb-like apparatus of Hollywood production values – the dolly tracks, the multiple camera positions for extensive coverage, Cortez’s manifestly aesthetic arc-lamp lighting set-ups” (Turnour). In addition to gritty field photography, there are individual interviews with soldiers filmed after the fact. Here they lack the intrusive intermediary of a psychiatrist. “These are shot Errol Morris style […] mainly tight close-ups of faces, with an occasional full body, against a black background—and not only provide reflection, feeling, and insight, but also the narrative spine for the film. Their personalities and perspectives are made to frame and impel the film’s action sequences, in lieu of “voice of God” narration or other direct commentary from the filmmakers” (Sklar). One of the first scenes is filmed inside of a Humvee that strikes an improvised explosive device. The camera falls askew and focuses for several beats on a paper skeleton swinging from the rear-view mirror. This euphemism exemplifies the tone of Restrepo and stands in stark contrast to the blunt, authoritarian Light.

Although the same thread of death and fear of death runs through these mens’ stories, it is spoken of in different, more human words. The psychological drama of the film is subdued and implicit. The first mention of PTSD (not by name of course) is made at minute eight by a serviceman in an interview: “They’re gathering intel right now on how to deal with us. Because there’s no research or intel on how to treat us right now, because they haven’t had to deal with people like us since WWII and Vietnam.” It is intimations like this that draw us into the film and personalize the social actors we see.

Where Light instructs us on what is going on with these men, Restrepo lets the patients speak for themselves. We also see what happens on the battlefield and the emotions the men experience there. This provides an intimate and well-rounded portrait of PTSD and helps us relate to the un-relatable. In a scene recalling one in Light where a patient is overwhelmed with emotion and tries to end the interview, a soldier recalling the death of a comrade confesses, “I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. One of my good friends had gone.” He loses his composure and asks for, “Time out. Just trying to keep my train of thought.”

While this exploration of PTSD is much more compassionate than the 1946 film, the unfeeling warrior ethos has hardly disappeared. Following the deaths of nine men in another company, the platoon hears this pep talk from their commander: “I want you guys to mourn, and then I want you guys to get over it and do your jobs. […] The fucking only way to bounce back from shit like this is to go out there and make the individuals that did this to us fucking pay. […] We make them feel how we feel right now.” Despite similar lapses in compassion from leadership, the messages of the two films seem diametrically opposed. Light advocates forgetting, Restrepo is all about remembrance. One man describes being haunted by nightmares, “I still obviously haven’t figured out how to deal with it inside. The only hope I have right now is that eventually I will be able to process it differently. I’ll never forget it.” Should he try hypnosis or narcotherapy as advocated by Light? This question would elicit different answers from Americans of 1946 or 2010.

There are some stylistic similarities to be drawn. Non-diegetic music sets the tone in both films. Light uses patriotic songs like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” to evoke patriotic pride and delightful music during occupational therapy to let us know recovery is well underway. Restrepo uses ethnic Afghani music to “take us there” with the soldiers. But for the most part, the styles of each film are quite dissimilar. Restrepo outwardly exposes the vulgarity of war but the tone is implicit and euphemistic. It shows a much more liberal view of mental illness and a more honest approach to filmmaking that grew as film theory evolved and neuroscience emerged. Light seems to explore the vulnerability of broken humanity but the tone is discordant and unsubtle. The methods we see are, to a contemporary audience, unorthodox and sometimes disheartening. The style reflects the motivations and values of a bygone era. But what of the PTSD sufferers depicted in each film? Let There Be Light ends with the soldiers, fully cured, riding away in a big bus while their attendants wave and gay music plays. The penultimate scene in Restrepo winds down the film with a montage. Diegetic acoustic guitar music, provided by a platoon member, plays over images of the stark Afghani landscape and close-ups on the contemplative faces of the veterans. Their prognosis is less clear.

References:

Ellis, Jack, and Betsey McLane. A New History of Documentary Film. 1st. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. Print.

Maze, Rick. “18 veterans commit suicide each day.” Army Times 22 04 2010, n. pag. Web. 22 Nov. 2011. <http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/04/military_veterans_suicide_042210w/&gt;.

Morgan, C.A.. “From Let There Be Light to Shades of Grey: the construction of authoritative knowledge about combat fatigue.”Signs of life : cinema and medicine. Ed. Graeme Harper and Ed. Andrew Moor. 1st. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. 132-152. Print.

Koszarski, Richard. “Subway commandos: Hollywood filmmakers at the Signal Corps Photographic Center.” Film History. XIV.3-4 (2002): 296-315. Web. 2 Nov. 2011. <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:fiaf&rft_dat=xri:fiaf:article:004/0101363 >.

Lybarger, Dan. “From the valley of fire: an interview with Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger.” Cineaste. XXXV.4 (2010): 38-41. Web. 2 Nov. 2011. <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:fiaf&rft_dat=xri:fiaf:article:004/0381904 >.

Sklar, Robert. “Restrepo.” Cineaste. XXXV.4 (2010): 42-43. Web. 16 Nov. 2011. <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:fiaf&rft_dat=xri:fiaf:article:004/0381108 >.

Stastny, Peter. “From Exploitation to Self-Reflection: Representing Persons with Psychiatric Disabilities in Documentary Film.” Literature and Medicine. 17.1 (1998): n. page. Web. 2 Nov. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/literature_and_medicine/v017/17.1stastny.html&gt;.

Turnour, Quentin. “In the Waiting Room: John Huston’s Let There Be Light .” Senses of Cinema. 6 (2000): n. page. Web. 2 Nov. 2011. <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/cteq/light/&gt;.