“We’ve seen this movie before.”
Those were the words reportedly used by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in March when he tried to persuade President Biden to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan, despite Biden’s contention that their presence would do nothing to prevent a civil war in that country.
Austin — who with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, warned of a disastrous outcome should the United States pull of out of Afghanistan entirely — was referring to what happened after America’s pullout from Iraq, when the Islamic State overran that country’s military. But for most Americans, Austin’s “movie” referred to a far more iconic scene: the panicked evacuation of Americans and South Vietnamese from a rooftop in Saigon in 1975, an event that filmmaker Rory Kennedy revisited in 2014 with her riveting documentary “Last Days in Vietnam.”
The same level of grief and desperation that Kennedy captured in her film was on alarming display this week, as thousands of Afghans crowded the Kabul airport in a frantic attempt to escape the country. At least seven people died in the chaos on Monday; some were seen grabbing the sides and wheel wells of a departing U.S. military aircraft before at least one individual plummeted to Earth, into a terrifying future.
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Whether those images felt shocking or grimly predestined might depend on which version of the war you’ve seen and believed.
For the past 20 years, Hollywood has told an array of stories about the war in Afghanistan, even if they’ve adhered to a remarkably limited number of generic forms. Their parameters were largely delineated by the established canon of war pictures that preceded them. Although an unapologetic idealist like Steven Spielberg could get away with classic battlefield heroics in a World War II drama like “Saving Private Ryan,” after Vietnam, contemporary war movies that trafficked in triumphalism no longer struck the right tone.
Few argued the strategy or ethics of invading Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But the Bush administration’s swift pivot to Iraq made the enterprise less a theater for clear-eyed vindication and patriotic pageantry than yet another messy, increasingly unresolved quagmire.
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The movies that sought to mine entertainment value from the war in Afghanistan had to acknowledge that ambivalence, either tacitly or by way of outrage and satire. To anyone who watched them closely, the events of this week have played out like the grimmest of foregone conclusions. Still, even the toughest, wisest films about the war couldn’t delve more than superficially into the realities on the ground that are now making themselves felt with a vengeance.
The first shot across the cinematic bow came in 2004, with Michael Moore’s characteristically tendentious documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11,” in which he laid out a strident but persuasive case against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. That film became a hit, reaching millions of viewers, but having little discernible effect on policy.
Then, in 2007, came three movies that addressed the Afghanistan conflict with varying degrees of success.
Share this articleShareRobert Redford directed and starred in “Lions for Lambs,” an earnest but inert critique of an American society marching heedlessly into a misguided war. In the smart Cold War-era primer “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Tom Hanks played the title character, a colorful Texas politician who helped engineer U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. And by the time “The Kite Runner” appeared in theaters, audiences were eager to see its depiction of pre-Taliban life in Afghanistan, if only as a dim reminder of what we were fighting to restore.
Each of those films tried to make some narrative sense of a country and conflict that most Americans found incomprehensible. It was in documentaries that viewers discovered the most trenchant critiques. Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side” was the first deeply reported indictment of the United States’ disastrous and ineffective torture and detention program during the George W. Bush administration. In 2010, Amir Bar-Lev created a masterfully layered meditation on service, sacrifice and jingoistic mythology in “The Tillman Story,” about former NFL football player Pat Tillman, whose 2004 death by friendly fire near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was spun into a media frenzy of propaganda.
As persuasive as these movies were in questioning the core wisdom and geopolitical advantage of keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan, mainstream Hollywood was more interested in the conflict either as a backdrop (the country was little more than of-the-moment scenery in 2008’s “Iron Man”) or as a crucible for real-life heroism. Eschewing knotty political analysis or dizzyingly dense historical context, mainstream filmmakers sought narratives that centered on the bravery of individual soldiers (“Lone Survivor”) or the teamwork of specific units (“12 Strong,” the grunt-level documentary “Restrepo”). These mission-centric narratives focused primarily on competence in the face of hostile, unknowable enemies or ineffectual bureaucrats and top brass, and occasionally they allowed real-world ambiguity to seep through (“You will be cowards if you leave. You will be enemies if you stay,” an Afghan warlord tells Chris Hemsworth’s Special Forces captain in “12 Strong.”). Extra points if your star was a Navy SEAL.
After the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011 (an episode that was immediately re-created for the screen in “Zero Dark Thirty”), a palpable shift began, from “Wake up, America!” polemics and supposedly apolitical pro-soldier panegyrics to satire. The folly of what was by now called America’s “forever war” was either the subject of glib cynicism (“War Dogs,” “Rock the Kasbah”) or off-key attempts at rueful humor (“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”). The 2019 documentary “Combat Obscura,” by former Marine videographer Miles Lagoze, presented a brutally candid, often unflattering flip side to the “Support the Troops” pieties that had defined — and foreclosed — wartime rhetoric, cinematic and otherwise.
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Two genuinely nuanced films emerged during this era: Brad Pitt played an absurdist analog of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in 2017’s “War Machine,” a frustratingly uneven attempt at Kubrickian parody that has wound up looking lamentably prescient in its depiction of official self-deception and arrogance. Similarly, Rod Lurie’s 2019 drama “The Outpost,” an immersive dramatization of the 2009 Battle of Kamdesh, succeeded in raising crucial questions, not just about why its protagonists were forced to fight a no-win battle, but about the futility of the larger war.
Through the years, we were afforded glimpses of the precarity of life under the Taliban, usually through nonfiction films. “Afghan Star” (2009) chronicled singers hoping to appear on the country’s version of “American Idol,” as well as the beginnings of a fragile (and ill-fated) democracy. And in 2015’s “He Named Me Malala,” Malala Yousafzai embodied an even more sobering reminder of the savage, sexist range of Taliban abuses.
And yet, movies could go only so far in conveying the full story to American audiences. What documentary maker could convince U.S. military officials to go on the record regarding their profound doubts about the Afghan soldiers they were training? What producer would have greenlighted a thriller that got into the weeds about the corruption that festered under former presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani? What screenwriter could have gathered details on the Pakistani intelligence services that were enabling a resurgent Taliban?
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Indeed, had a filmmaker been able to embed with the Taliban, they might have discovered the unsettling fact that U.S. forces thought they were nation-building, but their opponents were world-building. And that act of moral imagination was utterly alien to the Hollywood model of character beats, plot points and tidy catharsis. Their inciting incident occurred almost 1,400 years ago. Their hero’s journey might take hundreds of years more.
While we were edified, amused, enraged and reassured by what we told ourselves was the story of Afghanistan, an entirely different tale was unspooling outside the dominant narrative. It’s not that we’ve seen this movie before. It’s that we were watching the wrong one all along.
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