War Movies: What Are They Good For?

Summary

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Episode Summary: "War Movies: What Are They Good For?"

Release Date: April 17, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Critics at Large, The New Yorker’s esteemed critics—Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Frye, and Alexandra Schwartz—delve into the intricate world of war movies. Focusing primarily on the recently released film Warfare, the trio explores how contemporary war cinema captures the complexities of conflict, memory, and trauma, while also situating Warfare within the broader canon of war films.

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Exploring Warfare: A New Approach to War Cinema

The discussion kicks off with the trio recounting their recent experience watching Warfare, directed by Alex Garland and co-directed by Ray Mendoza, a former US Navy SEAL who served in Iraq. The film is deeply personal, drawing from Mendoza's real-life experiences during a 2006 mission in Al Qaeda-controlled Iraq.

Alex Schwartz highlights the film's emphasis on memory, stating:

“It tries to capture memory. It tries to capture as accurately... what actually happened to this group of Navy SEALs on this one particular day when everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.”
(02:56)

Naomi Frye appreciates the film's unique storytelling approach:

“There's like, actual soldiers who are then portrayed by these actors, and the way they move together as a kind of unit conveys... this kind of, like, wordless bond, but in no way sentimentalized.”
(03:43)

Vinson Cunningham raises thought-provoking questions about the purpose of war movies:

“The film raises a bunch of hard questions about how we document war, why we do it, and whether there's a right or wrong way to do it.”
(04:05)

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The War Movie Canon: Classics and Their Legacy

Before diving deeper into Warfare, the critics take a moment to reflect on seminal entries in the war movie genre.

Naomi Frye cites Apocalypse Now as a personal favorite, emphasizing its depiction of war’s horrors and broader psychological implications:

“It shows... the hell of war. But it also opens up to broader psychological questions and thoughts about the state of America.”
(05:11)

Alex Schwartz recounts his abbreviated journey through war films in preparation for the episode, mentioning Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan:

• Full Metal Jacket:
  Alex notes its brutal portrayal of Marine training and the dehumanizing process soldiers undergo:

  “...the breaking down, or the attempt at breaking down individuality to get a troop of fighters.”
  (11:29)

• Saving Private Ryan:
  Vinson discusses Spielberg’s masterpiece set in Normandy, highlighting its exploration of sacrifice and heroism:

  “World War II is really important as a way station in the canon because it is a war that all Americans agree with was good.”
  (07:10)

Vincent Cunningham further elaborates on the themes of sacrifice and national identity in war films, tying them to America's self-image as a global leader willing to make significant sacrifices for a better world.

---

Warfare: Breaking New Ground in War Cinema

Returning focus to Warfare, the critics analyze the film's distinct narrative and stylistic choices.

Vinson Cunningham points out the film's foundational premise that everything depicted is based on the soldiers' memories, invoking Bertolt Brecht's concept of the distancing effect to create a space for critical reflection:

“That distancing creates space for thought. You know, space to ask weird questions.”
(23:48)

Nomi Frye praises the film's minimalistic dialogue and emphasis on visual storytelling:

“Most of it is silent... there's really no conversation at all.”
(12:34)

Alex Schwartz underscores the film as a form of memory work, aiming to authentically represent the traumatic experiences of war:

“Part of the exercise here is that Ray Mendoza... wanted to capture the perspective of his unit after they went through a very traumatic event together.”
(15:21)

A poignant moment in the film involves the character Elliot, portrayed by Cosmo Jarvis, who lost his memory during the mission. The narrative revolves around Mendoza's efforts to reconstruct the mission for Elliot, emphasizing the theme of "no man left behind."

---

Trauma and Psychological Depth in Modern War Films

The conversation shifts to the depiction of trauma in war movies, with the trio comparing Warfare to other contemporary films.

Alex Schwartz draws parallels between Warfare and Zero Dark Thirty, critiquing the latter for its portrayal of torture's role in locating Osama bin Laden:

“Zero Dark Thirty is a movie that directly implies states essentially that torture was responsible for finding and killing Osama bin Laden.”
(28:15)

Vinson Cunningham reflects on The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, discussing their violent and nuanced portrayals of modern warfare and the moral ambiguities they present.

Nomi Frye introduces the concept of testimonial art, emphasizing the importance of bearing witness to atrocities:

“...the importance, the proof of what actually happened... just the idea of documenting something as it is happening and then having the effect of that.”
(42:29)

Vincent raises concerns about the authenticity of memories and the role of art in preserving or distorting reality, especially in the age of AI-generated imagery.

---

Art, Memory, and the Ethical Responsibility of War Films

Alex Schwartz muses on the power of art to create lasting narratives that shape collective memory:

“Art gives a story... room for something else, which may be why.”
(45:07)

Vincent Cunningham compares Warfare to literary works like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the poem In Flanders Fields, highlighting different artistic approaches to conveying the psychological aftermath of war.

Nomi Frye shares a real-world event—the tragic ambush of Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances by the IDF—to illustrate the ongoing need for truthful documentation and the complexities of war narratives in the digital age.

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Conclusion: Warfare as a Turning Point in War Cinema

The episode concludes with the critics contemplating whether Warfare signifies a new direction for war movies. The film's focus on memory, trauma, and the psychological toll of war offers a fresh perspective that contrasts with traditional war movie tropes of heroism and clear-cut narratives. The trio agrees that Warfare not only enriches the genre but also invites viewers to engage with the nuanced realities of modern conflict.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Alex Schwartz (02:56): “It tries to capture memory. It tries to capture as accurately... what actually happened to this group of Navy SEALs on this one particular day when everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.”
• Naomi Frye (03:43): “There's like, actual soldiers who are then portrayed by these actors, and the way they move together as a kind of unit conveys... this kind of, like, wordless bond, but in no way sentimentalized.”
• Vinson Cunningham (04:05): “The film raises a bunch of hard questions about how we document war, why we do it, and whether there's a right or wrong way to do it.”
• Alex Schwartz (28:15): “Zero Dark Thirty is a movie that directly implies states essentially that torture was responsible for finding and killing Osama bin Laden.”
• Nomi Frye (42:29): “...the importance, the proof of what actually happened... just the idea of documenting something as it is happening and then having the effect of that.”

---

Final Thoughts

War Movies: What Are They Good For? offers an insightful exploration of how war cinema evolves to reflect contemporary understandings of conflict and its aftermath. Through the lens of Warfare and a comparison with iconic films, Vinson, Naomi, and Alex illuminate the shifting paradigms in storytelling, memory, and the ethical responsibilities of filmmakers in portraying the harsh realities of war.

Transcript

[Nomi Frye]

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[Alex Schwartz]

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[Nomi Frye]

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[Vincent Cunningham]

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[Alex Schwartz]

This is critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm Nomi Frye.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And I'm Vincent Cunningham. Now each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Over the weekend, the three of us, along the separate paths of our lives, all went to see a new movie. It's called Warfare. It's made by Alex Garland, who directed movies like Ex Machina and last year's sort of journalism focused Civil War. And his co director on this film is Ray Mendoza, who himself served in Iraq as a US Navy seal. The film, which is based on the memories of Ray Mendoza and his colleagues, documents an actual mission of theirs that took place in 2006 in Al Qaeda controlled Iraq. Redman 08 is profane. We're seeing activity converging your north and south.

[Alex Schwartz]

This is Frogman 6 Romeo.

[Vincent Cunningham]

We need to be Back at our.

[Alex Schwartz]

Last known position, we have severely wounded. Who's the severely wounded?

[Nomi Frye]

It's not you? Is it me?

[Alex Schwartz]

Who is it? No, it's not you.

[Nomi Frye]

Copy one word. Contact two.

[Alex Schwartz]

We coming to you or you coming to us?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Alex, you saw this movie a while back. It really stuck with you. Why was that?

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, I think this is an excellent movie. I'm just gonna say that right at the top, and I'm so curious to know what you both thought of it. It has stuck with me for weeks. One reason is, as you said, Vincent, it's based on the experiences that Ray Mendoza, who's the co writer and co director, had in Ramadi in Iraq in 2006. And it really tries to capture memory. It tries to capture as accurately. And of course, that's something when we discuss memory, that we have to use a big asterisk for. But it tries to capture as accurately as possible what actually happened to this group of Navy SEALs on this one particular day when everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.

[Nomi Frye]

You guys might be relieved to know, as the resident hater of the group, that I, in fact, very much like this movie.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

You know, part of it, I think, was the kind of, like, choreography, kind of often wordless choreography. You know, there's like, actual soldiers who are then portrayed by these actors, and the way they move together as a kind of unit conveys, you know, this kind of, like, wordless bond, but in no way sentimentalized, which we'll come back to.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. Yeah. So today we're gonna talk about all of that and about the unique approach that warfare takes to portraying these events. For me, the film raises a bunch of hard questions about how we document war, why we do it, and whether there's a right or wrong way to do it. And the big question I had watching warfare is, you know, we've seen so many iterations of the war film, and I wondered whether a story like this that is told as a kind of collaborate effort that tells the story of a team and is the product of that team's effort at reconstruction can actually be a way for all of us to heal. So that's today on critics at large, why we turn to the war movie. So before we get into warfare, let's just take a minute to talk about this genre of the war film. Do you guys have big entries that are also favorites of yours, the war movie canon?

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, I'm not a huge war movie person, surprisingly or not surprisingly, but for me, it does always come back to apocalypse Now. Coppola, 1979.

[Alex Schwartz]

Smell.

[Nomi Frye]

You know that gasoline smell.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, hell. Smells like victory.

[Nomi Frye]

It shows, as many war movies do, the hell of war. But it also opens up to broader psychological questions and thoughts about the state of America. I would say for that reason, it's my favorite.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. I have taken a very abbreviated journey through this genre in preparation for this episode I've seen in very recent days. Full Metal Jacket.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Oh, wow.

[Alex Schwartz]

Stanley Kubrick's 1987 movie, also about the Vietnam War.

[Nomi Frye]

Born to Kill.

[Alex Schwartz]

Exactly. Parris Island, South Carolina.

[Nomi Frye]

The United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot.

[Alex Schwartz]

An eight week college for the phony.

[Nomi Frye]

Tough and the crazy brave.

[Alex Schwartz]

There's another movie that I would love us to talk about at some point, which is maybe War Adjacent might be a better way to put it. But I feel like more and more movies depict the kind of banality of the in between space in war. And that movie is Beautrevi by the French director Claire Denis, which I have a lot to say about. But I will hold on it for the moment.

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, talk about choreography, right? Talk about wordless choreography.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, we're gonna get into it. Vincent, do you have any. I don't know if favorites is the right word, but for some people, there really are favorites. War is a huge subject and a very cinematic subject.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Very cinematic, I should say, just because I feel generationally. For me, the one that I grew up with and sort of set these stakes for me was Saving Private Ryan.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The Spielberg film 1998, which is set in Normandy, World War II, 1944, and is about an effort to save this young man who, as we learn, is basically the last of his siblings. All the rest of his brothers have.

[Nomi Frye]

Three brothers have died.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Three brothers have died in World War II.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, where's the sense of risking.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The lives of the eight of us.

[Nomi Frye]

To save one guy?

[Vincent Cunningham]

20 degrees. Anybody want to answer that?

[Nomi Frye]

Driver?

[Alex Schwartz]

Think about the poor bastard's mother.

[Nomi Frye]

Hey, Doc, I got a mother, all right? I mean, you got a mother. Sarge has got a mother. I mean, shit, I bet even the captain's got a mother.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I think World War II is really important as a way station in the canon because it is a war that all Americans agree with was good. It's like, okay, do you want a just war that doesn't seem senseless, hollow, nihilistic, et cetera? I think it's the one that has the highest approval rating in American memory and therefore perhaps exists most uncontroversially within this kind of canon. And because of that, it plays into so many of Spielberg's strengths. His way of sort of just spinning up protagonism and making clear heroes and things like this. It definitely introduced some of the tropes of that genre, which maybe we should talk about. Just like what are the things that this genre sort of always or often is working with, subverting, repeating, et cetera.

[Nomi Frye]

Well, I think the question of sacrifice, I mean, talk about kind of like the highest stakes in the world of like Matt Damon, Private Ryan already losing his three brothers, you know, a family, an American family giving it's all to the war effort is a kind of, you know, metaphor to the whole sense of America of itself as a kind of like world leader who is willing to give everything up in order to secure a better world for everyone. You know, obviously later on, you know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about Rambo, you know, Sylvester, Sly stallone in the 80s, where the kind of the horrors of Vietnam were in some sense, you know, the trauma was acknowledged, but there was a sense of trying to recapture an understanding that America was meant to restore order. This sense of kind of like national sacrifice to make a better world.

[Alex Schwartz]

I think a huge trope is camaraderie, which is just a fact also of war. And how camaraderie works or doesn't work is a major subject of war movies. A group of guys who are working in unison to get something done to accomplish this goal. And often involves the self sacrifice that Nomi's talking about. You know, also the kind of question, can a group of disparate people become a band of brothers? And when you get to the movies about Vietnam and you and conscription and a bunch of guys who are just getting shipped off for questionable purposes, disparate people. Can they be molded and made to work as a unit? I mean, here I'm really thinking of. And it's fresh in my mind because I've just watched this. But the first long segment of Full Metal Jacket which begins with Vietnam recruits. They're all getting sent to see if they can train to make it in the marines. And they're getting their hair shaved. So already the opening sequence is individuality off. Unit in and they get the commander from hell who is training them to be Marines.

[Nomi Frye]

If you ladies leave my island, if.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death praying for war.

[Nomi Frye]

But until that day, you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on earth. You are not even human fucking being.

[Alex Schwartz]

You are nothing. But what happens there, I think is Arguably more heartrending and frightening than any of the actual death and bloodshed that later happens. Because you're seeing, and this is quite clearly the point, but the breaking down, or the attempt at breaking down individuality to get a troop of fighters. So that's something that can be horrifying, and it's something that can also potentially be beautiful. And where the line is, I think, is an interesting question that the better war movies explore.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. So all of this comes into play in the movie we're here to talk about today. Let's turn to warfare. It just came out in theaters, as we mentioned. What'd you guys think of warfare?

[Nomi Frye]

I felt like this was really weirdly like an. It seemed almost like an art movie. You know, it was like the fact.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I agree.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, there was. Most of it is silent. I mean, there are, of course, or near silent, let's say.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Like, there are orders there.

[Nomi Frye]

There's orders. That's very clipped, you know, but there's really no conversation at all.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Frogman confirmed sector and building number OP1. Location as follows.

[Nomi Frye]

Papa One Zero, building five eight. How copy? Over.

[Alex Schwartz]

Frogman, read back.

[Vincent Cunningham]

As follows. Papa One Zero, building Five Eight. Good read back, Frogman.

[Alex Schwartz]

Any amplifying remarks?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Over.

[Nomi Frye]

Negative.

[Vincent Cunningham]

No amplifying remarks.

[Nomi Frye]

This group of men, we don't know them. There's barely any difference between them. Their heads are often covered, you know, with a helmet with all sorts of, like, protective gear. So one of them we sort of see has a mustache. One of them is, like, black. One of them is. You know, you can sort of see the most glaring apparent differences between them. But they're hardly full individuals, which I think differs from what many war movies try to do, which is paint characters in order to be heroic or villainous or whatever it is. This we don't get really almost any differentiation between them. And we see them working in tandem in a mission that we don't totally understand. It takes a while to get what is happening. They enter this home in Ramadi in Iraq. Of course, there's a family who lives in this house. They're, of course, terrified.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Terrorized and terrified.

[Nomi Frye]

Terrorized and terrified terrorists. But it's, again, treated as a matter of course. And then we see these soldiers just post up in this house, kind of snipers, surveilling the area to see any movement. That's how we begin. And it proceeds from there. And it's extremely mechanical in some ways, and detached. But I really appreciated that. Like, I thought it was a very. Of course, there's ideology there and we'll talk about this, I hope. But I think I felt that it was an honest movie, or at least attempted to be an honest movie.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's interesting that you bring up this question of ideology, Nomi, because I have rarely been more aware of what I am bringing as a viewer to a movie than I was during the first half of warfare. So I think it's very worth saying that warfare is really this memory work. Part of the exercise here is that Ray Mendoza, the former Navy seal, wanted to capture the perspective of his unit after they went through a very traumatic event together in Ramadi, in part because one of the members of that unit who's depicted in the movie lost his memory.

[Nomi Frye]

He's the one with the mustache?

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes, he's the mustache. And he's played, I think, really beautifully by Cosmo Jarvis, who some of us may know as the dashing Englishman in Shogun.

[Nomi Frye]

I just love the name Cosmo Jarvis.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's great. And he is great. And this idea, I think the film kind of completes this idea that was clearly at the forefront of the actual military experience, which is no one left behind. No man left behind. In one very intense scene in the film, Rhae, the character Rey, goes out into the street after there's been an explosion to bring back what I first thought was the dead body and later realized was the living body.

[Nomi Frye]

But he doesn't even know.

[Alex Schwartz]

He doesn't know exactly of his comrade Elliot, the one who's played by Cosmo Jarvis. It's the idea of, we cannot leave anyone behind. We can't leave Elliot, real Eliot, who had no memory of this day behind. We have to recreate it for him. So the movie has this origin story of years of Ray Mendoza going around and collecting memories and trying to document memories of the guys he was with in order to piece this together for this comrade of theirs, Eliot Elliot Miller. And so I come into this movie thinking, okay, this is about the Iraq war. Well, guess what I'm against. I'm like Joker in Full Metal Jacket wearing my peace button. My adrenaline is already pumping because I'm ready to see some innocent Iraqis lose their lives and to feel real anger at the United States of America. This is what I'm primed for. And so this is just my baggage. This is what I'm bringing. And the start of the movie is this amazing scene that has nothing to do with war.

[Nomi Frye]

I love that scene.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's a bunch. It's all the guys.

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, it has a lot to do with war.

[Alex Schwartz]

It does, but not on its face. But not on its face. No, no, me. I totally agree. Not on its face. The first scene in the movie is these guys all together watching a really sexy music video. The video for Call on Me, which I've learned from interviews with Ray Mendoza, is what these guys would watch every time they went on a mission. The video is the song pumped up to full volume at an exercise class where a bunch of women wearing very 1980s leotards that are just pure V's up to their from bottom to top are doing a whole bunch of gyrations and pulse. And it's kind of like watching something porny together, but totally, like, fine, because it's also gonna be on every MTV station all over the world.

[Vincent Cunningham]

So, okay, classic homo social behavior.

[Alex Schwartz]

Classic homo social behavior. And then these guys go out and they're choosing the right house to break into. And two of them on a dark street. You don't know which ones because they're all in helmets, kind of gyrating back and forth at each other. And you start to remember, oh, right, these are boys. These are young guys. All of the baggage that I took in started to transform once the action really began. Again, you're just plunged into this crazy situation of survival, and more than survival, codependence, which is what the whole game is about. It's what war is about, but it's also what the whole human game is about. And the fact of these boys being in this situation and just being with them in the theater really, really moved me.

[Vincent Cunningham]

In a minute, we'll talk about the choices that set warfare apart from war movies of the past. Critics at large from the New Yorker will be foreign.

[Alex Schwartz]

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[Nomi Frye]

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[Vincent Cunningham]

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[Vincent Cunningham]

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[Alex Schwartz]

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[Nomi Frye]

Just go to LinkedIn.com new yorker that's LinkedIn.com newyorker terms and conditions apply only on LinkedIn ads. Okay, so before we get back to the episode, I have an announcement. Listeners, you asked and it's our duty to answer.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes. We have now gotten enough emails in our inbox about this that we are gearing up for a follow up to one of our favorite episodes of Critics at Large, our advice episode called Help. I Need a Critic.

[Nomi Frye]

Help.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Help. In case you missed this episode from a few months ago, go back, just take a listen. It's a great episode and it's our version of an advice hotline show. You listeners got in touch with specific cultural dilemmas.

[Nomi Frye]

For instance, our listener Adam, whose therapist told him he should be looking for depictions of healthy relationships in films and novels. Imagine that. It's actually kind of hard to come by. So we helped him track down a few.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, or Lucy, who wanted examples in literature of being a young adult in a state of arrested development. Vincent took it all the way back to Hamlet.

[Nomi Frye]

Never forget that's true.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Words, words, words. So, listeners, here's what we want. Send us your voicemails. We want to hear about whatever dilemma in culture that you are facing. It can really be anything. What exactly is bothering you? What's grinding those gears? The more specific, the better.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah. Make it fun, make it painful, make it spicy.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Send us something a little bit fucked up, we'll fix it.

[Nomi Frye]

Oh, we're ready for the challenge.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, yeah. Send your voicemails to themailewyorker.com with the subject line critics and you will be hearing from us.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay, now back to the episode.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'd love to talk a little bit about the choices that warfare that kind of set it apart for me. It was actually the title card where it tells us everything in this movie is made up of these people's memories. Knowing that from the very beginning this is the setup, made me question every single thing I saw. I was thinking about Bertholdt Brecht, the dramatist and critic of the theater. One of his sort of most lasting ideas was this idea of the distancing effect or the alienation effect, which is like. You can see that there is a kind of reality being represented behind what you're seeing. But there's also an artifice.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That distancing creates space for thought. You know, space to ask weird questions.

[Nomi Frye]

And space for politics as well, and.

[Vincent Cunningham]

All of that stuff. And so there are moments in this film where the camera really early on comes up really right behind somebody's head. And we see a young guy, just before we even know the character, just scratching the back of his head, like the nape of his neck. And I'm really thinking about the script. I'm like, did one of these people say, I remember my friend touching his head before? You know, by the way, another thing that happens in this movie is a bunch of huge, terrible explosions, after which there is blood, guts, severed limbs. Things that are real, correspond to realities. And then you think about, okay, the effects that the movie does to all of a sudden, everything. Every choice that the movie is making in terms of, like, blocking choreography, as we've spoken about, it's like, this happened, and it's horrible. And also, these guys, just as boys play at war, are playing pretend as boys who were actually sent into wars.

[Alex Schwartz]

You mean the actors, when you see these.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, these guys. Exactly. Yeah. The actors are doing this. War is a kind of choreography, is a kind of play. And then I'm thinking about the camera and the way that the machinery of a movie set is like a sort of theater of war. And so it just. It kind of. One way to think about the movie's politics is to say it brings into stark relief how much of a production, a theatrical thing war is. And when this whole production, this whole fatal production, has a disastrous effect and it kind of means nothing. These guys did this for ends that we still can't justify the sadness of that. I haven't said it yet, but I did really love this movie. Yeah. It just brought that so sharply to me that I don't know.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, I think it really brings it into the body. Not just into one's own body when one is watching the movie. But I just mean even how everything that involves the body and movement in space takes time and is onerous and is complicated. And a guy, one of the guys, at first, before the big disaster that happens, gets. His hand is hurt and he's in pain. He can sort of manage it, but he's in pain. And the soldiers need to go back into the room, which has now been compromised to get the gear that a couple of the guys have left there. And just the drama of getting back with one's body into that room and getting those things takes like 10 minutes of the movie. And it's like, how are we gonna get this done? You know? And you realize how difficult everything is.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You know, it's interesting because, you know, the Iraq War has now been, like, pretty well depicted. I was thinking about the pair of war movies by Kathryn Bigelow.

[Alex Schwartz]

Interesting.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The first being the hurt locker in 2008, the second being Zero Dark Thirty in 2012.

[Nomi Frye]

Jessica Chastain is. I forget her name in the movie, quite frankly.

[Alex Schwartz]

I didn't even want to use you.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Guys with your dip and your Velcro and all your gear bullshit.

[Nomi Frye]

I wanted to drop a bomb.

[Alex Schwartz]

But people didn't believe in this lead.

[Nomi Frye]

Enough to drop a bomb.

[Alex Schwartz]

So they're using you guys as canaries. And the theory that if bin Laden isn't there, you can sneak away and no one will be the wiser. But bin Laden is there and you're gonna kill him.

[Vincent Cunningham]

For me, those were dark, action packed, violent in a very different way. But I'm just wondering, does this depiction of that war, or just a war in general feel, have a difference in kind for you guys?

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, this is such an interesting question. So Zero Dark Thirty is a crazy movie. I'm willing to just say that and put that out front because it is a movie that directly implies states essentially that torture was responsible for finding and killing Osama bin Laden.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It sure does.

[Alex Schwartz]

And that is not necessarily what the facts would support. And yes, you do have Jessica Chastain as Maya, a woman driven in a man's world. Can she find the.

[Nomi Frye]

Much like Bigelow.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. Most frightening terrorist of all time. Zero Dark Thirty is a movie that plays very, very fast and loose with the truth to enormous moral consequence. And I find it deeply disturbing. And I do think in that way it is an absolutely indispensable cultural relic of that era.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It won four Bigelow the Academy Award for best director. She was the first woman to win that honor.

[Alex Schwartz]

And as you say, Vincent, it's what the movie was. 2011-2012-2012-2012. Okay. Been in Iraq since 2003. 2012. Gotta make it look like something good came out of there. And Afghanistan since, of course, 2001. These kind of forever wars that were so under depicted, both in the news itself and in culture. Recall, as I'm sure you both will, that there was a ban on having photos of coffins coming off planes from Iraq and Afghanistan. We were not allowed to see these things. You would think this would make depiction all the more important. And I think it just created a lot of confusion and chaos around what we were supposed to be showing and what we were supposed to be seeing. One thing I think is really interesting is that after he was done with his career as a Navy seal, Ray Mendoza set himself up in Hollywood as a consultant on war movies in order to help Hollywood depict war as accurately as possible. Because having seen it, he felt, okay, you know, there really is some room to get it more accurate, to kind of cut back. Maybe on now, I'm just speaking for him, but on some of that Vaseline lens, you know, slow mo, heroics, all these kinds of things we think about. And to show you very, very accurately, here's what happens. Here's how the body moves. Here's what it's like to hold a weapon. Here's when you deploy it. Here is what it physically is like.

[Nomi Frye]

It's funny because I was rewatching some clips from Apocalypse now this morning, and, you know, just a quick synopsis for the two people maybe, who don't know what the plot of Apocalypse now is. But it's basically, you know, Captain Willard is being sent up the river in Vietnam to find and essentially kill Kurtz, a guy who lost his mind and now kind of has this guerrilla army in Cambodia. And Kurtz says to Willard, you know, he has this sort of soliloquy about war and about the horrors of war. And he says to him, I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And if I were to be killed in Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything you saw. Because there's nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies.

[Nomi Frye]

What he is saying is kind of. I feel like what we're identifying, or one of the things we're identifying is the brief for, like, a good war movie, right? Which is like, bring back the facts, show people what it is. Of course, this is a very complicated thing. Ideology always makes itself its way in. Politics always make their way in. But I think that is one of the things, right? Or at least it seems so to Me. And that figures in warfare as well.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah, yeah. That is a. You know, we've heard this, that, you know, civilians ought to know what happens in a theater of war. People who don't go to war ought to know what we've been through. Mendoza has said, he says it's not that it was for veterans to say, we see you, you have been seen what the sort of. The true horrors of this kind of experience. But of course, no work of art stays within a group like that.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah. You know, it's like. It's like everybody else just like traded on the, you know, like the veterans organization. We went to see it at BAM or whatever. You know, it's like.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. And it's like it's politics. I mean, I would like to talk a little bit more about its politics because I think it is incredibly open ended.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

For example, this is what I kept thinking about. Unfortunately, our secretary of defense currently, Pete Hegseth, does nothing but talk about how awful, how lethal, how miserable war is. I could see him pushing this to the middle of the table and being like, see this band of brothers? This is why we can't be distracted by trans people. This is why we can't be distracted by DEI or women. Because look at this. You know, we don't need. War is so horrible that it should only be about, as he said, lethality and this and that. Look at how bad war is. So don't come to me with affirmative action and don't be telling me about who should be in the splatoon. Let these men kill or whatever they do. Because it is such an intense experience of not only sociality, but maximity to.

[Nomi Frye]

Death and masculinity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm just saying that I don't think this movie is uncontroversially anti war or pro war or anything like that. It's oddly an object that I think can be pushed around in many different directions.

[Alex Schwartz]

That's very interesting and I think that makes a lot of sense. If Pete Hegseth were to do that, I would say to him, pete, you have totally perverted the meaning of the film. Because I agree with you, Vincent, that you absolutely. It can cut in a lot of different ways. But the idea that a whole bunch of just like from the extreme right playbook ideas would be grafted onto this movie and that this movie couldn't be made to stand for them, I think is anathema to what is actually going on in the movie, which is all about the adequacy and inadequacy of each person to handle these experiences.

[Vincent Cunningham]

We have so many different models for the war movie, the propaganda film, the anti war film. Does a movie like Warfare point us in a new direction? Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back. Hi, folks.

[Alex Schwartz]

Let me see if I can sum up.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Midnight burger in about 25 seconds.

[Nomi Frye]

Really big monster, zero irony. Pardon me, Gloria. Might my husband and I have a word? The radio is talking to me.

[Vincent Cunningham]

So this is how it ends. Eaten by wolves in space. There's a pocket dimension in the deep freeze.

[Alex Schwartz]

This is the stupidest dystopia we've ever been to.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What the hell is that? Because you're having a cigarette in 415 million BC. Where are we? Space. Can you narrow that down?

[Nomi Frye]

The bad part?

[Alex Schwartz]

Ava? Yeah, that didn't work at all. At the nexus of all things, there is a diner. Look for Midnight Burger on your favorite.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Podcasting app or just go to weopenat6.com. I do want to kind of get back to the thing that's been bugging me, which is, are we looking at a different kind of war movie or a new direction for the war movie? Warfare seemed to me to be so much about psychological effects. It is a kind of exercise in immersion. But perhaps my literalism kept on going back to immersion in somebody else's memory. So a kind of surrealism happening as well. There's all these moments of, like, buzzing and humming where we're trying. They're trying to portray to us what it's like to sort of be going through trauma in the middle of a traumatic event. People need to, like, sit down for a little while. You know, all of a sudden, they can't really hear, or they're kind of blacked out because, you know, their buddy is on the floor howling in pain. At every sort of moment, they have to put on tourniquets, and you see the ravaged legs of these horrible things, and we see how this has a mental effect as well as a physical effect. The clearer trauma happening. And people that are witnessing their friends either die or this or that. It just seemed to me to be a. Is that a product of our times? Like a focus on.

[Nomi Frye]

On the trauma.

[Vincent Cunningham]

On the trauma. I kept on being like, oh, this is now the only event in this person's life that matters. I kept thinking about this image will never leave this young man's mind and psyche in a way that I don't think I've ever thought about in a movie like this.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, I feel like that because.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I've been so attached to plot, which this movie is so kind of not giving us. Except for will the tank make it to the house.

[Alex Schwartz]

Right. I mean, maybe the reason for that in this case is because you have no other information about the lives or military engagements or anything that these characters have that it's. But yeah, I think you're right that the movie is implying that this is a obviously life altering market event.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The other thing that I can think of recently that has this as a kind of feature is the dark comedy Barry, which is sort of created, often directed and starring the SNL alum Bill Hader. It's about a war vet who then becomes a contract killer and then through the magic of the theater, tries to leave that life and keeps getting sucked back in. But he has these, you know, these flashbacks. And I think the flashback we could talk about as a trope of this kind of movie. I just wonder if our newly acute awareness, emphasis on the effects, the psychological effects of trauma is something that this is bringing to us in a new way. I wonder.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, you know, I think it's a really interesting point and I think you're probably right that it is something. And, you know, often when we critics, I think, talk about trauma, we at this point have a bit of a raised eyebrow because it has become a very totalizing category. But in these cases, we are seeing indisputable enormous trauma. And if you think about how long it took for society, medicine, art, to actually depict the effects of wartime trauma, all of it makes sense to me that something like warfare would try to actually locate them in the moment at which they're happening. You know, I'm thinking back to World War I, for instance, when something called shell shock first became known very widely as an experience that soldiers went through. This is what we'd now call post traumatic stress disorder and at the time was called shell shock because of the shells exploding near the trenches that so many soldiers were in. And it really was a case of, on a societal level, of suppress it, ignore it, try not to see it. Stiff upper lip, stiff upper lip in the English tradition. And it came to artists to try to show what was the case. I'm thinking specifically of, to me, one of the great depictions of a shell shocked soldier, which is Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, which does not take place on a battlefield. It takes place in a beautiful day, sort of in real time, also marking the time, much like warfare in London after the war is over. But the war is not over for Septimus Smith, because it can't be over for him. And that depiction of a mind that is so addled and detached from reality is heartrending, and it remains heartrending today. And it also makes me think of a really different depiction of World War I. Another classic, the poem In Flanders Field, which is written by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, Canadian physician. And it's this very structured poem. It has order, it has structure. It has a kind of classic aesthetic beauty and is also describing horrors. We are the dead short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders Fields. It's describing this perspective of the dead. And it's done in a way that is like the total antithesis of the kind of realist immersion that in very different ways, Wolf and Warfare are doing. And one reason is that it's all about encouraging people to go on with the fight. It's this patriotic keep going thing. But I think it's almost like trying to give a kind of artificial structure to an experience that has no structure whatsoever. And I find that moving too.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's so interesting that you mentioned that the sort of formal poem is the site of this kind of disclosure, because one maybe overly schematic, simplistic way of talking about maybe the difference I'm trying to suss out is what used to be conveyed by form, that the first half of the 20th century, much of the art was in its form, a reflection of the shattering effects of war, World War II, the incommensurability of the camps and all that it entailed sort of either putting stress upon strict form or loosening form. Thinking about Wolf, thinking about Gertrude Stein, others. Now it seems like that energy goes into something less aesthetic and more like confession. Even the emphasis on this is these guys memories. And part of its emotional appeal is this happened. And I'm telling you, and it's not diaristic, but it is testimonial.

[Nomi Frye]

Testimonial, yeah. One thing that I wanted that I was thinking about this issue of testimonial, I think, or bearing witness, let's say. Right. And I was just thinking, you know, there was this horrible thing that recently happened in the Gaza War. Israel, the idf, you know, ambushed a convoy of Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances. And later they were discovered, you know, all the paramedics and rescue workers who were there, 15 people were discovered buried in a shallow grave and just absolutely insane and horrible. And Israel at first said they didn't have their flashing lights on. They weren't identified as ambulances. And in fact some of these people were Hamas warriors. Okay, but then what happened is that later, early in April, on one of the bodies of the dead paramedics, his phone was found with a video that showed that in fact the ambulances ahead of him, because it was a convoy, were flashing. Everything was according to protocol. It's like why they shouldn't get attacked as suspicious elements. And so the importance, the proof of what actually happened, like show the world what actually happened in this particular encounter. And the importance of that, just the idea of documenting something as it is happening and then having the effect of that.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, yeah, I mean, that is current day context is kind of impossible to ignore. Where an image interestingly becomes totally contested, it does not, you know, the IDF says something, somebody else says something, and it muddies the discourse waters, at least enough to cast even like the blankest, most objective thing into question. Totally.

[Nomi Frye]

It is.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And it's odd that like somebody's words then goes through the crucible of art making so weirdly the work of like sort of taking something, putting it through this pressurized strainer that in this case is the movie set and then the resulting new images, false images, but is the one that weirdly produces something like perhaps maybe this is the hope of the movie trust. Whereas I was thinking also about AI, Whereas now somebody could, and I'm told I won't look at it because I believe it is a demon. Whatever. It's like you won't look at it. You see, I could just say to a computer, no, I know, this happened to me. This happened to me. This happened to me. It looked like this, it looked like that.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm against it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And the computer could, you know, seamlessly, without all the friction. We don't have to hire a dp. I could just tell the thing what happened and it'll make an image for me. And somehow art, the insane difficulty of making something, putting it through this totally inefficient process that we call art, somehow carries more authoritative weight than the bloody image that will not stop showing up on my screen. So that is something that I'm like, is in my stomach as I talk about all this stuff and I don't know how to deal with it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, well, it means many things, but one of the things it means is that it gives art makers great power. Because since these things stay with us, and they stay with us for a lot of reasons, they stay with us because of story, which we all cling to, like the barnacles of hope and salvation, as we just go floating around through our lives. And even a movie like Warfare, which we keep saying, ah, there's no backstory. Well, there is a story. The whole movie is story. It's the story of how these guys dealt with the experience that they were in that story. Art gives a story. And I also think art makes room for something else, which may be why. I mean, I don't wanna say this is the reason art is so powerful. There are many reasons.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Go ahead, say it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, it makes ways for other kinds of noticing. And that, I think, has so much to do with how we actually live through experiences. How something that seems like it is not part of the essential core of the experience, an image, the way sound goes in and out, the way someone looked, the way a piece of clothing looked, may actually become the thing that you most cling to. I do think when we're talking about war and film, I keep seeing directors drawn so strongly to the visuals, not just of the scuffle and of the fight and of the mud and the blood and the. But also to what it is like to have these male bodies in motion together or in stillness together, choreographed. Director after director after director keeps noticing that there is something dance, like in what these guys are doing that makes it both extremely beautiful and because that contrasts to what their actual activity is about. Terrible. I think that is what's going on in a lot of ways with the sequence at the start of the movie, the Call on Me dance sequence, where you just see libido and youth and vigor, all of which is about to just get completely shut off, like a tap. And it reminds me of Beau Travail. You were talking, Vincent, about how this is like an art movie. Or maybe you were saying that Naomi Nomi did. Naomi said that. Yeah, it is like an art movie, in part because of this noticing. I think that's what we're talking about when we talk about art, what we choose to elevate. And Beau Travail by Claire Denis, which is about a group of French legionnaires in Djibouti, is so much about the male body in coordination, in motion, the beauty of it, but being used for very highly questionable purposes. And it ends with, I think, the most incredible ending sequence of any movie, maybe ever. And the end of the movie has nothing to do with war. It's just Denis Levant, even stripped of character, almost dancing wildly, just with total abandon. It is seeing all of those impulses expressed as art and not as war. And maybe that's what we're thinking of, how These things could be like sublimated into art. If only.

[Vincent Cunningham]

This has been Critics at Large. Our senior producer is Rhiannon Corby and Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Conde Nast's head of Global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from James Yost with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at [e-mail] Critics quick reminder. We're working on an all new Critics at Large advice episode. Send us your voicemails describing a cultural dilemma you're experiencing. Maybe you need a recommendation for a super specific circumstance. Maybe you've just encountered a classic work of art for the first time and don't know what to make of it. Whatever your problem, we're here to help. Email your voicemails to themailewyorker.com we can't wait to hear from you.

[Alex Schwartz]

Hi, I'm Susan Glaser.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm Jane Mayer.

[Alex Schwartz]

And I'm Evan Osnos. And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.

[Nomi Frye]

For me, this is the water cooler. This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in the country and, you know, just.

[Alex Schwartz]

Kind of compare notes.

[Nomi Frye]

Now that's so true because first of all, we are actually friends in real life. But I can't wait till Fridays to hear what you guys think. Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps.

[Alex Schwartz]

I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on, and I'm always smarter for it. If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago, often it can help you understand about what's happening today. So if you're looking for weekly insights.

[Nomi Frye]

Into what's going on inside the Beltway.

[Alex Schwartz]

Please join us every Friday on the Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's.

[Nomi Frye]

Political Scene podcast from prx.