The Limits of Testimony and Local Thinking: On Alex Garland's WARFARE

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The Intensity of The Personal Story

Warfare quietly appeared on screen last month, without much of a media campaign. But anytime Alex Garland does something, I’m going to show up. Ex Machina is slow-burn techno-terror; last year’s Civil War was a brilliant analysis of the role of media in social conflict; Annihilation is a film that diverges from the source material greatly, but only in order to create something as magnificent as the book.

The trailer below gives you a sense of the film, equal parts mundane and terrifying.

Written and directed by Garland and Ray Mendoza—who lived the encounter—the film takes place in exactly one location: the house where the Seal Team was based outside of Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. Last year’s Garland film, Civil War, takes place in a not-so-fanciful trajectory of the future, in which the US has been torn in two along some interesting geopolitical lines. Last year was fantasy; this year is all memoir and recent history.

As a comment about the film itself, the technical expertise is excellent, the ensemble casting was great, and the theatre experience was all-encompassing. The film is shot in a close-up style, both in sight and sound, which immerses the viewer in the fiasco playing out on screen. But a film is always about something, and this is where Warfare has me a bit puzzled.

For starters, the screenplay is pretty minimal: most of the dialogue consists of military jargon and shorthand, with enough translation thrown in for the audience to catch on. The characters, as Seals captured in this one particular instance, are intentionally underdeveloped: there are no emotional montages or flashbacks. We have no idea which soldiers had families, had doubts, had childhood trauma. The plot is simple to the point of being irrelevant—get the wounded soldiers out and evacuate this location. There is no commentary about the politics of being in Iraq in 2006, no real context, no larger statement about the moral arcs of the characters. There is only this moment, and surviving it.

The film, in other words, zooms into the experience of the soldiers and stays there. What we see is what happens. There is no world, interior or otherwise, beyond the utter chaos and bewilderment of being under fire, beyond the blood and mutilation, beyond the muffled sounds and thinking from the smoke and the IED and the fear. The narrative shrinks down to this particular moment and stays there.

The film has been lauded for its experiential immersion, for its looming sense of dread, for its commitment to Tim O’Brien’s thesis that there is no moral war story. As an experience, it’s worth seeing on the biggest screen possible. But this doesn’t tell us what the film is about. Because in truth, it’s not about anything other than the soldiers’ experience. This in itself doesn’t mean that the film is meaningless. On the contrary, it tells us something very significant about the moral act of war—war is intensely personal.

In stripping out all of the traditional context of war films—the montages of families, geopolitical treachery, political commentary—and leaving us with only these people in this moment of survival, Warfare accomplishes something both common in recent war films and necessary: it returns our attention to the particular person.

Recently successful war films—1917, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Covenant—all trade on first-person foci, and tell a story about the war-as-such through that particularity. But here, particularity isn’t about saying something larger, but about saying only this. The characters of Warfare are named mostly in passing, known to each other, as if keeping the audience as an audience to something so intimate that it cannot be fully shared is part of the point.

Apart from the wounded, the particular names are obscured. There are no names displayed on uniforms or frequently bantered about, no inside jokes or sappy stories to help us gain a sense of texture about the particular Seals. The film, filled with stars of the MCU, of acclaimed Netflix and FX series, goes out of its way to obscure the particular identities of any particular actor unless you knew them already.

The effect is one of both humanizing and particularizing war’s effect—like other films before it—but without personalizing it: war does not become here simply an opportunity for this or that person to extend their heroship, but a chance for the audience to see that this thing called war affects particularly—even if unknown—persons. The action and simple story is intensively local, and wants to stay there, to the degree that the audience never really gets to join in the events: there are no bridges of love of family or hometowns or baseball that are built to get us into Ramadi. What happened in Ramadi is presented by those who were there, without our need to validate or understand it.

The Limits of Localized Attention

What Warfare gains in personal attention—in telling an intensely local story of literally one building—it does by obscuring the larger dynamics, or at least downplaying them. Inside are faces; outside are just forces, friendly and hostile. The platoon in question is assisted by outside tanks whose drivers we do not see, by planes flying low in a “show of force”, by thermal imaging of surrounding rooftops. The chatter of supporting entities is heard through earbuds which different characters wear, until dramatically, the platoon leader rips the earbud out to be able to pay closer attention to his immediate circumstance.

It’s a clarifying moment in the film, because it’s then that the platoon begins to take its fate into its own hands, faking a call to the rescue squadron and pretending to be a commanding officer in order to be rescued. The outside world is alternately forever away as the platoon seeks to survive the attack, while also pushing the outside world away as a distraction, an imposition on paying attention to this place, to this survival.

It’s a powerful motif, but local attention has its limits, as it also creates its own justifications.

One particular dynamic of the film helps us to see this: how this particular building becomes the center of the film’s action at all. The first scene is that of the platoon entering an Iraqi home in the dead of night, waking up the family at gunpoint, sequestering them to a single room, and then breaking open the wall of the second floor to clear out the families living there. The 4th ammendment clearly doesn’t apply to Iraq.

Periodically, we see this family terrified in a single room, and at the film’s end, looking in disbelief at the shattered remains of their bombed-out house. For the soldiers’ frame, this family is at the edges, just outside their scope of concern and attention. The Iraqi home exists as an outpost for the soldiers to occupy, and what becomes of it does not account for someone else having built it, or having to live in its remains now.

Put differently, the local focus of the soldiers—in terms of survival and care for their own wounded—is called into question precisely because it has bracketed out that which exists beyond that particular home: the people of Iraq. In naming the houses, they rely upon geographic coordinates; in naming the people outside the house, they refer to them by articles of clothing; in naming escape routes, they refer to cardinal directions. All beyond this particular house exist as abstractions; what lies within their scope of concern is particular and intimate, soaked in blood and sweat.

What’s In a Testimony?

All local stories emerge as a part of a shared world, playing with and contesting the same concepts of shared love, justice, homemaking. These themes are not specifically American or Iraqi, but might be part of what we call the natural law: these are goods which are good for all creatures living in God’s world. To live in that world well means that the local is in fact where our feet are. But it also means remembering that our feet are traversing through land which is shared. All of this complicates the nature and power of testimony.

To Warfare’s credit, it neither trades in vicious tropes about Iraq nor valorous stereotypes. But this is simply because, in attending to the deeply particular, it does not see Iraq at all, but views it in terms of time necessary to travel, of coordinates, of clothing worn. What it gains in terms of insider care and concern for one’s own mission and wounded, it does so by obscuring the world in which it fights.

This intensely local approach is the same dynamic which I gently critiqued within Isaac Villegas’ recent book on migration, in which local attention and testimony are the backbone of the project. There, I wrote:

I raise the question of migration’s end not to challenge the testimonies Villegas offers but to suggest that there is another dimension to these stories: that God’s presence to migrants is ultimately for the end of their journeying.

Beginning with this end in mind helps us to see more clearly why death is such an affront and what migrants long for in their laments. But it also invites us to consider the testimony of migrants alongside another group of testimonies: the testimonies of those among whom migrants will dwell. Beginning with mercy is appropriate, but moving toward justice invites us to consider testimonies of people of good faith who may want to welcome migrants but have honest questions and honest concerns.

To attend to local moral knowledge is good. To attend to it as a way to diminish other local knowledges is a way of showing that local attention is simply a new and different kind of power. To attend to the stories of migrants, and lifting those silent stories up, is good. To do so in a way which negates others living on the border is to create a new kind of dismissal.

To attend to the pain and suffering of soldiers is good. To do so in a way which obscures the suffering of Iraqis is to valorize only a certain kind of story, to say that the shared land which generates a story is only my land truly.

None of this is to say that testimony is invaluable, but to say that a testimony is the kind of thing which remains vulnerable to others. A testimony is a narration of one’s traversing of a shared world. As such, a testimony functions best when it is an invitation to being tested, not with respect to whether pain or love was felt, but as to whether the pain or love endured was just, good, or necessary.

Making judgments about testimony isn’t a matter of having a God’s-eye-view, but entering with courage into the testimony of another, with one’s own questions and one’s own vision. It is Thomas asking questions about flesh, even if he has been given an eye-witness account, and being shown his questions were redundant. It is Paul submitting his account of Peter backing away from fellowship, after having spoken with Peter: the contesting of testimony has great stakes for how the Galatian churches will live.

Offering testimony is, in other words, central to learning to own our lives. But giving testimony is the first step, not the last. To offer a testimony is to submit it to counter-testimony, and possibly, to judgment. A response to Warfare thus cannot be to dismiss it, but to ask what its testimony leaves out, has obscured, has made possible. It is here that Warfare works, perhaps, against itself, including the story of those who now lived in their wreckage, even if those testimonies remain unfilmed.