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Michael [email protected]
Representations of post-modern spaces in Ridley Scotts Black HawkDown
Tuun me loose, fo I kick the natal stuffin outen you, sezBrer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she aint sayin nuthin.She des hilt on . . ..
Space is of course as fundamental to war as war is to space, though we
dont always think of it that way. We think of war as the extension of
politics, or, more recently, politics as the extension of war. But
however we choose to think of the meaning of war, of its content, it
remains in every case determined by, even as it determines,
fundamental qualities of space. Space, in that sense, is not a container
for war. It determines the nature of war. Clausewitz, the great analyst
of modern war, understood war in the context of a world in which
nations competed for territory. The goal of war was the occupation,
integration, homogenization and disciplining of space. In order for
those tasks to make sense, space needed to be of a distinct nature. It
had boundaries, surface, and depth. It was penetrable. It was capable
of holding or containing fluid formations that became stable formations
once the space was occupied. It was commensurable using Euclidean
measure. But this space of nations, which is the space of modernity, is
only one possible space.
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having done that to then recreate itself in viral and geometric fashion.
It just does it faster and more efficiently, and always against someone
who has no hope in that space of standing up to its overwhelming
force.
Ridley Scotts 2001 film, Black Hawk Down, explores what
happens when the modern military institution finds itself engaged in
conflict in a different kind of space. Filmed in 2000, the movies
general release was held up until January 2002 because of worries
about the how the movie would be received after the events of
September 11, 2001. Even so the film opened to extremely mixed
reviews. It was largely seen as an action movie and criticized from all
political directions for lacking a political viewpoint. This is because
Scott never makes any explicit moral claims in film. Rather than an
epic tribute to the sacrifice of soldiers such as Saving Private Ryan
was, or a moral condemnation of violence such as Apocalypse Now
was, Scotts film explores in minute detail how the States military is
undone when it attempts to use its mobile technological might to
penetrate Mogadishu. It is undone because it is unprepared to deal
with the spaces of Mogadishu which are neither the space of
modernity, the space of nations, nor the tribal spaces the colonialists
encountered in their first occupation of Africa. Scott recontextualizes
the notion of post-modern war imagined in terms of the U.S.s
advanced technology and information control. Of course all thats there
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in spades. Arguably much of the trouble the U.S. forces get enmeshed
in is due to the arrogance overwhelming technological might breeds.
But Black Hawk Down seems to propose that whatever makes this war
other than modern, its more than just changes in equipment, logistics,
and communications within the modern States military. Scott
represents the very ground the war is fought on, both literally and
figuratively, as of another world and another order, an order that
cripples the States might.
The spaces of Mogadishu in the film are the antithesis of the
isotropic, homogenous spaces of modernity. Those spaces are
represented in the American camp with its broad open spaces largely
determined by the needs of its technology, and to a lesser degree in
the invocation of suburban America itself during a scene where a
soldier attempts to phone his wife before the mission begins. The
spaces of Mogadishu are cramped, close, indeterminate, shifting, and
hostile to communication. They are fold upon fold refolded. The
channels are fluid and constantly moving. What was a street one
moment becomes a dead end the next. What was a cul-de-sac
unexpectedly becomes a passage. Its a place in which the progress of
the fighting is utterly fickle and unpredictable, moving in fits and starts
and swirling bursts. In one of the films darkly comic moments, two
American soldiers who have dug into a classic defensive position find
themselves suddenly abandoned by the war which has swept around
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them in a chaotic tumult. They have to reluctantly abandon their fixed
position and chase after the fighting. There is no stability in these
spaces and the line of sight is limited to the other side of the street or
across the square. No one can see whats going on. Increasingly, and
significantly, this includes even General Garrison, the U.S. commander,
back the base watching the events unfold through his not-so-panoptic
eye in the sky.
These unsettled spaces of flows, of blockages and interferences
and unpredictable discharges are unrelated to economic
developmentas in not enough, as if there were only one possible
mode of becoming developed and ordered with all human worlds
stretched out along its singular line. These spaces have been formed
not out of want (not that there isnt want) but from the multiplicitous
energies growing out of Europes great sweep across the planet. They
do not precede the space of modernity. They follow from it, multiplying
in its wake. Postmodernity in the Mogadishu represented in Black Hawk
Down has its own measure, one whose trajectory is heavily inflected
both by its tribal heritage and its influences from Europe, but which is
other than both.
This Mogadishu is anything but primitive, undeveloped, or
unordered as the Americans tend to think. The Somalis access to
technology, markets, and media all tend to level out many of the
disparities that once characterized their relationship with the European
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powers. The 1964 film,Zulu, depicts a crucial moment in the European
colonization of Africa where the Africans, though vastly outnumbering
the English, are unable to overcome them, mostly because of an
enormous gap in technologyrifles against spears and a different
attitude to warfare. Black Hawk Down depicts a similar moment some
150 years later, the main difference being that the African warriors are
now armed to the teeth with many of the same weapons that the
Americans have including, most significantly, rocket-propelled
grenades, arguably the Colt .44 of postmodern warfare. As well, the
international markets in which the Africans purchase the arms, the
changes in their organization because of new communications
technology including conspicuously, cell phones, the knowledge and
manipulation of the panoptic attentions of the international media, all
contribute to an overwhelming sense of the sophistication of the
Somalisa sophistication all the more sharply etched for its contrast
with the Biblical conditions of their circumstance.
Bruce Sterling, in an early dystopian critique of globalization
(Islands in the Net), ended on a despairing vision of the Globalized
Corporate State absorbing and commodifying the very technology that
the resistance developed to fight it. Scotts film proposes that the
opposite actually has become the case in postmodern warfare. The
enormous technological advantage of the State turns into its crucial
weakness in a double sense. The State, even as it relies on technology
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to provide an advantage of force, cannot control the dispersal of that
technology among those it intends to overcome. This is not even an
issue of the so-called weapons of mass destruction that has become an
obsession with the current Anglo-American axis. Its a matter of cell
phones and rocket propelled grenades. Because technology itself is out
of control, the resistance to the homogenizing push of the State gains
access to critical means of communication and force that tend to
equalize its relation to the State. The other problem for the State is
that the more complex and powerful the technological force it
mobilizes (and at the same time becomes enslaved to as Heidegger
pointed out some time ago), the more vulnerable it is to the
uncontrollable distribution and circulation of that technology. All it
takes is one child with a cell phone to alert the warriors in Mogadishu
to the impending U.S. attack, neutralizing the elements of speed and
surprise the U.S. forces counted on. All it takes is one guy in a cheap
nylon shirt with an RPG to bring down the first Black Hawk, bringing the
entire American operation to a screeching halt.
In one of the early scenes in the movie the Americans capture a
Somali arms merchant, Osman Atto. He is a fellow clan member with
Aidid and a businessman who is supplying Aidids militia with weapons
purchased in international arms markets. He is interrogated by General
Garrison, the American commander (played by Sam Shepard). Most of
the scene is shot as a close up of Attos perspiring face as he smokes a
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when it re-encountered its deep internal division as a kind of self-
devouring psychosis. But his Kurtz is something more as well. If
Conrads Kurtz embodies the madness that flows from the revelation of
the utter artificiality of good and evil, civilized and primitive, the whole
structure of thinking that justified Europes great adventure, Coppollas
anticipates, though only by a year, Gilles Deluezes and Felix Guattaris
vision of the War Machine, a nomadic remnant of a pre-State warrior
culture that not only exists outside the bipolar axes of the State
(Dumzils jurist-priest and magician-king), but in so doing acts to
challenge the States self-determined authority, including its military
institution.1
The most telling revelation of this force in Coppolas film comes
in Kurtzs camp. Sailing up the last leg of the river, Willard finds himself
thrown into in an archaic hell. The boat encounters a final boundary of
white ghost-like figures in dozens of primitive canoes that close behind
the U.S. soldiers as they pass through. They finally penetrate into the
heart in which bloody bodies dangle from palm trees, and anonymous
dead drape the terraces of an ancient temple. It is the realm of the
dead and the technology is primitive and directbows and arrows,
spears, machetes, some small arms. Warriors in loin cloths squat with
spears held loosely between their legs next to severed heads that dot
the temple steps. Next to them are U.S. soldiers (Willards
predecessor) and regular Viet Namese army holding M16s.
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The War Machine, as Deleuze and Guattari propose it, is an
undisciplinable force. It is nomadic and exists on the borders of the
States order. Originally warriors and herders whose mode of being was
an itinerant territoriality, they became part of a tradition realized in the
unsystematized, skilled knowledges of itinerant labourers. Kurtz
embodies the recognition that this War Machine, deterritorialized and
unrestricted by the various disciplines of the Military constitutes a kind
of pure violence untainted by the bureaucratic and political
contaminations that can cripple (or pollute) the Military, making it the
stereotype of absolute might and development.
Imagined as a heart, Kurtz both establishes the space of war as
classically Euclidean in its penetrability, and at the same time sets in
motion and maintains the physical and mythic action and their
revelatory relation to one another. He doesnt move beyond Conrads
radical bipolarity. He embodies its revelation in revelations very
possibility, the possibility of the visible and hidden, the surface and the
depth, the revelation of the heart as War Machine. He sets up a kind of
metaphysics of war that determines the fundamental nature of the
agon.
Mohammed Farah Aidid, the object of American desire in Black
Hawk Down, is, in contrast, nowhere. Throughout the film he seems
almost to float in a featureless room, never encountering anyone,
never speaking. He sits and smokes. He is the counterpart, the weight
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of another world, the other player to Garrison in his panoptic war room.
But whereas Garrison is increasingly frantic as he helplessly watches
his forces become entangled and savaged in the complex,
incommensurable spaces of Mogadishu, Aidid rocks and smokes alone
in a room, preternaturally aware of the events unfolding outside.
In this mode the War Machine takes on a different sense than it
does in Coppolas film. It is not a heart, not a revelation of some
foundation, but a kind of remnant, a minus-1, as Deleuze and
Guattari might put it, a wild, diverse, antithetical force that actively
resists the States homogenizing might.2 In Coppolas film, the War
Machine is represented as a purity, an horrific purity, but a purity that
both reveals the source of the states might and the limit of its control.
Willards State sanctioned murder of Kurtz is required to return the
State to the illusion of unfounded unity. The foundation must be
obscured, though it remains the foundation. In Black Hawk Down the
War Machines antithetical trajectory is of another order. It exists
utterly outside the States parameters. It is another world, another
space and a present time.
Aidid resembles a heart, but the resemblance is misleading. He is
the trigger to the Americans unilateral action and the focus of their
animus. The operation represented in Black Hawk Down is one piece of
a larger plan to capture or kill Aidid. But he is not locatable because
the Americans think they are in one kind of space, but in fact are in
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another. And even if he was locatable, as Atto points out, it would
make no differencebecause there is no heart. The initiating
penetration of Mogadishu falters when it becomes entangled in the
complications of that space without a heart. The American force seems
to penetrate the space, but then its thrust is blunted. The helicopters
land on the roof and the warriors, moving like a machine, set up a
perimeter, searching the building and securing the captured clan
heads for transport back to the U.S camp. They do all the right things.
But then comes the guy in the nylon shirt with the RPG. Suddenly the
nature of the space is revealed as other than what the Americans
thought it was. The surfaces, eddies, bursts and folds proliferate and
circulate becoming a Tar Baby, an endless pellicular entanglement, the
confounding of communication.
At that point, for all its pan-optic power (embodied in the image
of Garrison back at the U.S. camp watching every move unfold on a
T.V. screen with a live feed from a helicopter hovering over the action)
all illusions of the invulnerability of the State vanish in an explosion of
chaotic, random, uncontrolled force. And even though the Americans
eventually extricate themselves (at the cost of 18 dead Americans and
hundreds of dead Somalis), they have lost not just the battle but the
war because the very measure of whats winning and whats losing
has shifted into a new modality.
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The old modality was determined by the penetration of space
and its eventual occupation, manipulation, homogenization, and
stratification, all geared toward the reproduction of the State on its
pacified body. The essence of this modality is might, overwhelming
power. This is the mode of the American assault, as we lately
witnessed in Iraq. In the multiplicitous warrens of Mogadishu the US
troops discover that that modality no longer functions in this strange
space where all attempts to penetrate, whether successful or
unsuccessful come to naught. They come to naught because the
depth becomes an endlessly unfolding surface that generates an
unpredictable circulation of force that in turn endlessly occupies the
Occupiers. In Black Hawk Down, even though the mission is
successfully completed (the tribal leaders who were the object of the
attack are captured and removed), and the Americans kill hundreds of
Somalis for every one of their own casualties, the battle is lost, and
beyond that, so is the war, because the States ability to continue its
action is determined by a kind of late capitalist, neo-liberal, bottom-line
contract with its population; e.g. it can do whatever it wants as long as
the cost (lives, money) remains within a manageable budget, and
the loss of eighteen lives (and more importantly, the public humiliation
that flows from the entanglement) constitute an immediate and
decisive deficit.
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More recently a similar situation has occurred in Iraq, though the
lessons of Mogadishu have allowed the Americans to more successfully
disguise their defeat. The initial plans of the Bush administration called
for recreating the State in Iraq specifically in the image of the U.S.
State, the suspected fantasy of all American international policy
towards everyone since at least Woodrow Wilson, if not Thomas
Jefferson. Iraq was to be transformed into a secular, pluralistic, market
driven-nation.3 This proposed transformation was not simply the
gratuitous desire of ideologically driven theorists. It was the crucial
foundation of a strategy to deprive Islamicists of a possible base and
recruiting ground by transforming a large Arab country into a clone of
the United States by imposing on it a State whose form was derived
from the principles of the European Enlightenment. But the jubilation
and triumphalism that followed the initial penetration of Iraq has
given way to the recognition that the U.S. is now entangled in another
kind of space and that in order to extricate themselves (especially
before the Presidential election in November 2004) they must abandon
their plans. In the last several months they have had to give up plans
for free markets, a constitution, the abolition of militias (a.k.a the War
Machine that operates within the dynamics of the anti-State forces of
tribe and familyand that is both the foundation of the resistance to the
Occupation and a significant enabling condition of the future civil war),
the overhaul of Saddams national food rationing program, and the
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privatization of State owned businessesin other words, the Works,
the whole caboodle of born-again neo-liberal recipes for Utopia that
were to have transformed Iraq into America-lite.
Scotts analysis of this situation extends from the external
spaces of Mogadishu to the internal spaces of subjectivity, to the
nature of the warriors engaged in this decisive battle. Kurtz as heart
holds space to an economy of repression and revelation in which
subjects, like the space they are in, are informed by a dark heart.
They are both implicated and explicated in that space. They have
depth, character and act autonomously, though each of these
terms signifies only within a specific kind of space. This is the case as
well with the Americans in Black Hawk Down. There is an identity
confusion among them at the beginning of the film caused by all the
identical haircuts, but it quickly resolves into the recognizable
personalities of a classic war film. The soldiers are proposed as being
persons, important to the State, as is asserted in the often-repeated
slogan, No one gets left behind. This is in sharp contrast to the
Somalis of whom only three are ever identified as persons. Aidids
space leaves no room for the illusion of the depth of subjects. Instead
they are represented as what might be seen as a mass.
But not all masses are massive, nor do we necessarily
understand what is involved in being individuals. Farimbi draws
attention to the complications of these concepts in his interview with
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the captured pilot, Michael Durant. After asking Durant if he is one of
the Rangers who has been killing his soldiers, Firimbi appeals to
something very like individualism (whose absence among the Somalis
some critics of the film deplore), suggesting that he and Durant can
negotiate soldier to soldier. Of course Durant cant, and his obvious
inability to do so reveals the illusion of individualityor perhaps more
accurately reveals the price the Military extracts from its soldiers. The
Americans are of course all individualsthey have names, faces,
play chess, call their wives, make fun of each other, debate the
purpose of the warbut there is cost for this individuality and one
measure of it paradoxically is that they must become part of the
machine, a cog in a hierarchical Institution with carefully and precisely
defined roles.
Its as if the individuals arent really individuals, or as if being an
individual is not quite what we think it is. In the same sense, then,
perhaps the mass of Somalis is not a mass, at least not as we have
been trained to think of it in relation to individuals, but something else.
The very idea of mass is determined in the sense of a loss of
something and so tied to an implicit defense of the presence of that
thing. The OED has mass as a multitude of persons mentally viewed
as forming an aggregate in which their individuality is lost. That
loss, at its most obvious, has been represented in war films largely
through caricature that renders it grotesque, simultaneously laughable
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and despicable. Thats the stuff of open propaganda. Think of the
representation of the NVA in Green Berets, a movie whose determining
gesture, following the propaganda films of WWII, was to caricature the
enemy as mindless and soulless and the U.S. soldiers as having
inherently special, almost supernatural, human characteristics. More
recently and more subtly, the Randall Wallace/Mel Gibson film, We
Were Soldiers, rises slightly above caricature, but still manages to
imply a kind of implicit evil to the faceless enemy.
These images are very different from those Scott creates, with
their extraordinary energy and seemingly undirected intelligence.
When the Somalis pour out of various buildings to seize the second
downed helicopter they flow like water from the structures surrounding
the Black Hawk, a pliant force that erupts into uncontainable and
unpredictable flows of bodies riding untranslatable energies. Rather
than singular Might directed by pan-optic vision, Scott gives us an
image of an a-centered force in which all individuals are
interchangeable. They are a multitude, not a mass. Their
numerousness is not to be confused with facelessness or unity, and
especially not with the loss of something. They are another kind of
force. We could say tribal if thats understood as a fundamentally
different form of social organization, a different kind of machine, say,
than the Military Institution of the State. Its not a question of
mechanical as opposed to organic, but rather of different modes of
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connection (industrial, tribal), different machines, unfolding into
different modes of force. One is orderly, disciplined, and requires
individuals trained and drilled to work as a unit, while the other is
random, spontaneous, and chaotic and requires members who respond
with absolute precision and knowledge to unpredictable flows.
The entire body of the peoplemen, women, and children
comes alive in this space to maul and expel the Occupiers, something
the Americans never understand. In a remarkable scene at the
beginning of the U.S. operation, a number of children call in to report
the approaching Black Hawk squadron. One holds up a cell phone to
transmit the sound of the helicopters back to the city, and an American
soldier, misinterpreting the gestures as a sign of welcome, waves at
him in a moment that reveals the incommensurability of the two
worlds. These children are everywhere. As the fighting intensifies,
every member of the community seems to join in, picking up the guns
of the fallen to continue the attack.
Farimbi says that in this world, to kill is to negotiate, and that
there will always be killing, you see, in our world. Whats at stake
here, then, is the question of killing that has not been appropriated and
legitimated by the State but remains the provenance (and
responsibility) of the multitude. The Somalis have what might be
characterized as an active, social relation to death, or perhaps even an
intimate relation, and within that relation resides the ability, even the
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responsibility, to negotiate. For the Americans that relation has been
co-opted by the State in exchange for the promise not to be left
behind. But even that promise, Farimbi points out, is part of a world in
which the Americans lead long, dull boring lives which to each of
them is divinely unique, preordained, dramaticand fatal in any
deviation from the prescribed norm.
Atto suggests that the U.S. attempt to capture Aidid, while
ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, is actually governed by the
mythologies of individualism associated with the American west. What
do you think this is, he asks Harrison, the K.O. Corral? He implies
that the American strategy of getting Aidid is governed by a deep
mythic compulsion toward individual shoot-outs, that the Americans
see themselves in the position of the Earps in a showdown with the
Clantons, and that such a mythos will not signify within the space of
Aidid. Harrisons response, a condescending snigger and a smug
correctionYou mean O.K. Corraldismisses Attos critique by
asserting his own superior knowledge of American pop culture, while at
the same time ignoring the meaning of it.
Apart from raising the issue of the ways in which differing
illusions of forms of subjectivity affect the strategies of the opposing
forces, Attos comments also raise the question of the role of governing
narratives in the film. Perhaps hes right, and at some deep level, the
OK Corral lurks as governing narrative for the Americans. But its not
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one that circulates openly as rationale for the military adventure. It
doesnt serve as master narrative in the sense that Jean-Franois
Lyotard has proposed.4 The fundamental arguments for the American
presence are covered in an informal exchange between two soldiers
just before the mission is launched. One (Eversmann), characterized by
his comrades as an idealist, articulates the idea that the U.S. must act
to relieve the suffering of the Somali people. The other, represented as
a hardened warrior (Hoot), counters that all that matters once the
fighting begins is to take care of yourself and your comrades: They
wont understand its about the man next to you, thats all it is. These
attempts to provide narrative coherence are supplemented by others
during the course of the combat: watch out for the man next to you,
nobody asks to be a hero, they just are, it aint up to you, its just
war, no one gets left behind, and so on. Each of these narratives in
turn has been put forward by various critics and marketers as the
master narrative for the movie. Yet their sheer plenitude makes it
impossible to single out one to play that role. No one of them
dominates the discourse and provides coherence. Instead they all
circulate freely, contesting and competing for legitimacy.
Strangely missing is the master narrative that informed the last
50 years of American military and political mission: the defense of
liberty and freedom in the struggle with fascism and communism.
That defense focused on a real or perceived threat to the security of
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the State, and established a space of unity within which the State
could reproduce and introject its singular self under the rubric of
defending freedom. The resulting massification of fractured American
experience continues to serve, as Fredrick Jameson has argued, as
the great Utopian moment of national unification.5 In Scotts film, the
absence of such a master narrative is glaring, though the nostalgia for
it is everywhere. There is simply no way to mobilize that narrative in
this space. The local stories that circulate among the soldiers do not
replace that master narrative. Instead, they circulate within the space
left void by it and draw our attention to the black hole of its absence.
In that sense Black Hawk Down, unlike Coppollas film, is not
interested in making moral judgments about war and violence. If
theres a sense of horror, its local rather than global. Rather than the
horror of violence, its about disaster, the disaster the States military
institution faces when it engages the War Machine in the territory of
post-modernity. The War Machinetribal and nomadicexists outside
the parameters and structures determined by Modernity and so evades
its symbolic metaphysics of emanation and penetration. Scotts sense
of the War Machine is not as a deeper or more penetrating moment of
violence, a revelation of primal integrity. It is of another order, one that
is impenetrable to the State because it is all surface. Its organization is
anarchic and spontaneous, unpredictable and contingent rather than
technological and disciplined.6
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Absent any rationalizing uber-narrative, whats left is the drive
by the State to recreate itself. The pursuit of Aidid is part of a larger
plan to remove power from the competing (and brutal) multiple centres
of the War Machine and resettle Somalia in the form of a unitary
State under the rubric of a transition to democracy. Although its not
part of the material of the film, such a move presumably is a step
toward integrating Somalia into the States globalized Empire of
capital. It is as simple and blunt as that. Everything about the
American undertaking is geared toward and defined by the massive
unity of the State, the States desire to eliminate difference and to
reproduce itself: E pluribus Unum. But in the end as the American
troops run through the gauntlet of the Mogadishu Mile, Attos
observation about the future hovers over them.
If his reference to Arkansas white boy ideas refers specifically
to William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. president at the time of the
Mogadishu events, it also resonates beyond that to challenge the
assumption of those representing the State that the political
institutions of Euro-American Modernity are universally applicable and
desirable. This Utopian vision of a single world united by one market
and one State form has, as John Gray has eloquently argued,
unleashed as much violence on the world as any of its competitive
utopian visions, including Marxism and Islamism.7 Like any utopian
movement, its greatest weakness is its belief in its Truth. In Black
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Hawk Down, that belief staggers and stumbles in the final scenes of
the film. Its an astonishing moment. Finally rescued by the Pakistani
U.N. forces that they initially dismissed in their unilateral assault (in
another of Scotts prophetic moments), the American Rangers and D-
boys are forced to run out of Mogadishu on foot pursued by the
Africans. Its a running battle in which men, women, and children pick
up the guns of the fallen to join the pursuit. In one telling scene, an
African-American soldier shoots down an African warrior, and then
watches as a woman in a chador runs to pick up the fallen mans
weapon. Dont do it, he mutters, dont do it. But she does reach
down and pick up the gun, as she must. And he does shoot her, as he
must. The film makes no judgment. It doesnt question the integrity of
the soldiers plea. But the disaster of the moment is absolute and
unspeakable.
The Americans are stunned. Jogging in full gear out of the city,
dogged by African warriors in techs, they find the road lined on both
sides with men, women, and children hooting at them, mocking them
with what we finally realize must be traditional tribal gestures meant to
humiliate a defeated enemy, gestures whose origins for the Americans
lie in some alien and inaccessible world of ritualized war: a hand raised
just so, the brushing of the hair with the hands, a certain movement of
the feet. These are the same people shot down by Aidids men in the
opening sequence, the people one of the minor narratives claims the
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BoughnWar24
Americans are there to feed. Its a moment in which the two worlds
confront each other s utter incommunicability in a space that is all
difference.8
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1 1227: Treatise on Nomadology:--The War Machine. InA Thousand Plateaus. Tr.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987 [1980]. Coppola earlier
develops the same thread in The Godfather where the Mafia families take on the
same weight and significance.2 The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but
rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions
one already has available, always n 1(the only way the one belongs to the
multiple: always subtracted).A Thousand Plateaus, p. 6.
3 Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Threats Force Retreat from Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq.
Washington Post, Sunday December 28, 2003: A01.
4 Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmpdern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Tr.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature, Volume
10. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
5 Jameson, Fredrick.A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.
London: Verso, 2002: 212. More recently, the current representatives of the
American State have attempted to renew this narrative in an attenuated form by
raising the spectre of terrorism and claiming that exporting freedom and
democracy can undo its breeding grounds. While superficially similar to the
much disparaged root cause argument, this argument differs in proposing the
root cause as being the absence of the State rather than some injustice or
exploitation caused or supported by the State.
6 Its not a binary division. The State has access to the War Machine it contains,
and vice versa. This occurs in the film when the panotptic power of the State
breaks down in the chaos of Mogadishu and the Delta Force platoon attempting to
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reach the surrounded Rangers abandons the States technology (and plan) and
enters the city on its own terms.
7 The era of globalisation is over,The New Statesman, 24 September 2001.8
I should note that although Black Hawk Down is based on Mark Bowdens
remarkable account of the actual events first published in the Philadelphia
Inquirer and later expanded into the book, Black Hawk Down, this scene, as well
as the other crucial scenes I have described, especially those in which Atto and
Farimbi converse with Garrison and Durant, are not part of Bowdens narrative.
They are the work of Scott and script writers Ken Nolan and Steve Zaillian.
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