The Great Imitation [Part Two]
by Adam Hirsch
[The following essay began as a review of three movies that came out this past weekend: Julie & Julia, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and (500) Days of Summer. However, in the middle of watching them, it began spiraling into something much larger. It's in three installments, one for each film. -- AH]
I left off in the last installment by arguing for the existence of a grey area within imitation of an objective art wherein the actual form and procedure of imitation makes everything jell. By “grey area,” I mean to say the subjective portion of the imitative capacity in the work that differs from person to person and action to action. The imitation, when completed in this correct form, becomes new in some way.
Actually, the correct word is manner. It is the manner in which the imitation is performed that provides the proverbial rope with which to hang oneself. For it is in the manner of the tradition engaged that we now look upon.
T.S. Eliot, in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”[1] rallies against the “imitator,” (so to speak) and exalts the worship of investigating the imitation itself irregardless of whoever performed the action. “To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim,” he writes, “for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good or bad.” Importantly, though, he makes the claim that, “impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”
Eliot speaks only of the art within poetry. Yet, since is argument for the placement of the work before the artist is so strong, we have adopted it in this essay to address everything that has been evidenced as a form of art.
The method of imitation, it’s own ingenuity, trumps the imitation itself.
ii. — G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra deals heavily in tradition and imitation. It was born out of it — G.I. Joe action figures came about in the early 1970s as Vietnam came to a close.
What do children do with action figures and toys? They imitate their perception of events through them. Indeed, there exists the important notion of “play” acting committed in ignorance of the weight of actions; but, nevertheless, G.I. Joe, from the very beginning, unapologetically represent one thing: war.
However, the entire G.I. Joe franchise universe represents the more appealing aspects of war — heroism, a distinct and clear “evil” that must be defeated, cool gadgets that can make people jump super-far along with laser guns, and no actual risk of life or limb. All these aspects are carried over into the film, which for two hours engages the audience as an exaltation of (in the near future) the “cool factor” of battle.
Children imitate war on a daily basis.[3] They do not, in any way, try and re-invent war in any sort of way: the sides are clearly made and it is a fight to the death. One side must defeat the other.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra does (in absurdly insulting ways) attempt to re-invent war. Since it is set in the future, certainly the contemporary war on terror and other actual wars can be seen as fought and won. The film follows Duke, who is an ex-Marine now employed by a NATO-like organization working in the Near East, who has to defeat the evil executive whose goal it is to sell his deadly nanotechnology to whoever will pay for it, but in the sale actually reap the weapon for himself and conquer the world. Also, Duke (when he was a Marine) was previously engaged to the Baronness (before she became a Baronness), but after he allowed her brother (Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Joseph Gordon-Levitt.[4]) to be killed (he lived, got deformed, becomes Cobra Commander), he was humiliated, broke off the engagement and went and joined the NATO-like organization that sent him away. The Baronness was then drugged by JGL (along with all of Cobra’s soldiers) to follow orders, and then the movie started up.
In essence, though, there is no plot. That is the guideline for which the action of the story moves forward. Confusing? Yes. But it does not matter because all that does matter within the confines of the film is battle. The energy and speed of the film are fed by the battle sequences and the conflict that nests the sides against one another; it’s symbiotic, though, since the battle sequences are also fed by the energy and speed of the film. No image langours in the frame. There is a rapid editing strategy in place that keeps the eye wanting more and more destruction — death — combat — “cool”.
Although JGL is the propagated antagonist of the film, the actual antagonist is peace. In the imitation of war, peace and reason cannot be tolerated. It follows then, rationally, that the world must be irrationally guarded by Stephen Sommers’ CGI fetishism of destruction. The world of the film does not move in natural, physical landscape, but rather in one where the floating longevity of entertainment masters all. Since there is no story, there is no need to think out any way out of a situation other than fighting. A battle answers all.
However, recall Eliot and his insistence upon removing the poet from the poetry. It goes without saying that G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is not art, nor does it aspire to be. Eliot’s point nevertheless remains: how can the stuff of war be cinematically translated if the “impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality”?
War itself cannot be accurately translated through anything other than experience[5]. In an imitation of war, though, people extract meaning from unconsciously reconsidering their own experiences within the action taking place. To restate: it is the natural empathy of the audience that drives the war depicted in cinema. The majority of the moviegoing audience has never actually fought in a live, military battle. Unless the film is a documentary, there is no way of portraying a true image of war.
Henry Newbolt explicated the nullifying power of war photography in his poem, “The War Films”[6]:
O living pictures of the dead,O songs without a sound,O fellowship whose phantom treadHallows a phantom ground–How in a gleam have these revealedThe faith we had not found.
Brother of men, when now I seeThe lads go forth in line,Thou knowest my heart is hungry in meAs for thy bread and wine;Thou knowest my heart is bowed in meTo take their death for mine. (1916)
Newbolt (b. 1862) was a British poet who was declared too old to enlist in the army. War poetry is a tricky subject; how does the subject matter, the negative capabilities of the verse come to light? In Newbolt’s poem, he concisely relates the emotion of viewing pictures of soldiers and actual soldiers going off to fight. Although the language is not exceptional, the meter and verse plain, the poem is exceptional because it is one of the first recognitions of the void between an image of war and the experience of war. As groundbreaking as “The War Films” is, Newbolt wrote it in the wake of his best known work, “Vitaï Lampada” — written in 1897, a poem about a future soldier learning stoicism within a cricket match that the British government used as recruitment propaganda within proper English public schools, but also satirized and disregarded by the soldiers who actually served in World War I.
The sand of the desert is sodden red–Red with the wreck of the square that’s broke,The gatling’s jammed and the colonel’s dead,And the regement blind with dust and smoke.The river of death has brimmed its banks,And England’s far, and Honour a name,But the voice of the schoolboy rallies the rank–“Play up! Play up! And play the game! (1897)
Remember: Newbolt never saw or went to war; his verse rests in pure conjecture. The battle itself has meaning only through the dramatic action of the poem — not the reality of war itself. The language of “Vitaï Lampada,” the bare verse, does not recapitulate war, but rather Newbolt’s own, bizarre meditations on what war should be. It is a dangerous, pretentious outlook that’s not the jingoist, gun-happy firepower of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, but more of a mixture that’s even parts FOX News, MTV, and the speculative war fictions of Tom Clancy, all served up within a marketable, Walmart aesthetic[7]. This is not as much an imitation as it is dramatic speculation. War itself — voices from the battle itself — has been translated though verse for thousands of years, the earliest being the epic of Gilgamesh. But the most relevant, vivid translation from what battle actually means came first (and best) from Homer:
Athena led the arrowto the spot where the gold buckles on the beltrest on the joint in the doubled body armour.The keen arrow dug into the leather strap,passed right through the finely decorated belt,through the richly embossed armour, the body mail,his most powerful guard, worn to protect his flesh,by blocking spears and arrows. The arrow pierced it,going through that mail, and grazed the skin of Menelaus.Dark blood at once came flowing from the wound. (IV, 156-66) [8]
So. The excerpt clearly and vividly explains and, indeed, crafts a deft imitation of war through verse, and here, the imitation itself takes on a unique and, perhaps, greater characteristic than the individual battle itself. Although the Battle of Troy, arguably, cannot be concretely known, although some archaeology has validated that there was a war fought and that people were unwillingly conscripted on both sides to fight in it. Also important is that Homer, being a Greek citizen in the time that he lived (likely the 7th Century, B.C.E.[9]), would have had mandatory service within the army — if Homer was actually one, singular person[10], he saw battle. The Trojan War likely had become a tradition of epic poetry in which authors wrote and built upon. In this case, though, it is Homer’s recitation of the war that has influenced humanity more than the war itself. The verse — the interpretation — outweighs the original.
For a film, things become much more difficult. There is a language of cinema, and that language is difficult to express. In order for film to express war, there must be a formal recitation of war, there must be a collective experience within the theater that translates as war. The images and editing must in themselves recapitulate conflict. It is a battle of movement versus stillness.
Again, Spielberg’s opening of Saving Private Ryan takes the cake in terms of formal filmmaking. Besides the graphic realism, there is a formal relevance to the first three sequences (the beach, taking the bunker, and getting orders) — the first is edited harshly and quickly, and slowly moves after that. It is a battle of motion versus stillness.
To imitate war for the sake of war — imitating the Platonic form of war, so to speak — does not embody an action as much as an idea, like love. But love, when “imitated,” is always seen as cheap and ephemeral. The best works of love embody a specific love within it (more on this later). To accurately create an imitation of war, the filmmaker must root him-or-herself within some form of context. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, though planted within our world and its (general) regulations, is nothing more than a fantasy of war. It can be said now that imitation must take shape not within a tradition of imitations, per se, but rather within the guidelines and, indeed, problems of humanity. Filming war in context is a much more difficult task.
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[1] From The Sacred Wood (1920).
[2] However, they didn’t hit their stride until the 1980s when a cartoon series, comic book and proliferation of a whole litany of “Joes” came out.
[3] Frequently, it is male children who do the imitating (and screaming and fighting) and the sexual stereotype follows suit, but I still extend the modus operandi to both sexes.
[4] Hereafter labelled as JGL.
[5] The one very notable objection to this is the opening act of Saving Private Ryan. Here, the neo-realism employed results in a shocking, almost sacred re-enactment of one of humankind’s greatest moments — the storming of the beaches of Normandy. The opening act shows not an imitation of war, but rather an exaltation of humanity in the immediate shadow of death. (Recall that, on the landing crafts, the soldiers standing in the front [who were lined up arbitrarily] could hear the rapid ticks of the machine gun fire against the front of the boat before it lowered and they were to face certain death by that same gunfire.) However, Jean-Luc Godard had an interesting criticism of another Steven Spielberg WWII epic, Schindler’s List. He found the film to be nothing less than profanity — sickening. He believed that the only believable story that could be told of the concentration camps would be from the perspective of the wife of one of the guards of the camp. That would be the truest form of imitation.
[6] From A Treasury of War Poetry, ed. George Herbert Clarke (1917).
[7] The Walmart aesthetic is a term your author uses to describe creative output that has been rendered out of pure economic and social control — not just marketability, but rather a larger social phenomena that likens trend (in a strictly non-Malcolm Gladwell use of the word) and appeal to what can be sold.
[8] From The Iliad, trans. Ian Johnson (2007).
[9] It’s a tough challenge to date when Homer lived, and even more difficult to pinpoint when he wrote each work. The Iliad came decades before The Odyssey — that is known. However, there’s much speculation on whether Homer came in the 8th Century, 7th Century or 6th Century. Interestingly, some scholars believe that, like most of Greek literature, the majority of Homer’s output has been destroyed through the centuries; The Iliad and The Odyssey, some believe, were the first two volumes of a ten-part cycle that illustrated the lives of all the warriors after the war.
[10] The problem of authorship. Although there is voluminous information that could easily persuade someone to believe that Homer (the man by the name) did not actually write “his” works as we have them now, the evidence most scholarship has at hand points to one singular author writing the two seminal works. Like many great Makers — re: Shakespeare — people question the humanity of the author. That is, could one lowly human actually write something so profound?