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April 28, 2007

Overlord

Other Wars, Other Worlds - And Ours

By Jeff

"If you die, it's gonna be for nothin'. There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be okay... there's just this one. Just this rock."

-"Welsh" (Sean Penn) in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line

Stuart Cooper's Overlord commences with about a minute of flat black screen, which becomes cavernous with implication as the soundtrack gently but insistently assembles itself in the darkness: we hear the steady march of booted feet, the shoed gait of horses pulling wagons, and the grinding treads and flatulent engines of various vehicles. It remains a fairly rhythmic din, almost lulling - as street traffic can occasionally be - except for the increasing nearness of the volume. The aural illusion is both lifelike and dreamlike; as it is not joined to an image, we strain to create one in our mind as the sounds advance. Is it a victory parade? A herd of refugees? Aware that this is a war film, certainly the noise is either preparation for, or the result of, a military presence. We wait for a "significant" or threatening sound - a gunshot, an explosion - but none come, and the minute is drawn to an uncomfortable length until the first image appears in a sharp cut: an aerial shot of the very procession of soldiers, equine and transports we have just heard. Now the only sound is the drone of the plane observing the earth from a distance.

This technique is duplicated throughout the film, where quotidian, concrete aspects of military life and war alternate with elegant, smoothly removed "God's-eye" views from the sky. Are the latter dreams or memories? And if so - whose? The central character (Brian Stirner as "Tom Beddows") assumes his role with a placid lack of affect (not unlike Keir Dullea's "Dave" in Kubrick's 2001), his countenance not so much that of an idealist or dreamer (such as Jim Caviezel's "Witt" in the above-referenced Malick film) but rather a sort of blank mask - one, though, which seems to disguise nothing. If he has any anxieties or ambitions, they're left (mostly) unexpressed as he dutifully mouses his way through the maze of army bureaucracy, training and combat.

The routine of his almost stuporous journey from civilian to casualty is intermingled with additional hallucinatory visions or premonitions: dogfighters bailing out of strafed planes, firefighters attempting to quell cities enflamed after bombing runs, and - repeatedly - a lone, nebulous figure (himself?) felled by gunfire. Beddows passes in an out of these reveries - or do they instead flow through him? - without undue adherence to traditional narrative structure, dramatic motivation or psychological reasoning. War films too frequently provide their characters an excuse for heroism or pacifism (just another kind of heroism) but here the main concern is the inexorable machinery of fate itself. Beddows is little more than driftwood lolling in the tide; when finally deposited on shore in the climactic D-Day attack, he's already dead, just as featureless in death as he was in life. Yet we empathize with his listlessness and understand there are thousands more like him, resigned to their respective ends, writing to their parents or lovers glumly contented lines like "This war has killed so many people already; I"m just going to be another one. Of that I'm sure," or describing their situations as "Like being part of a machine which gets bigger and bigger... while we grow smaller and smaller until there's nothing left."

As Beddows records and recites these lines, he reclines against a tree in a wood; the sun sets behind him while the camera abandons him there and the shadows bleed across the ground. The diminishment of the individual - the lack of will, or at least the inability of the characters to act upon it - is an ever-present theme of the film. Few here seem frustrated or strong enough to protest; there's a weary acquiescence permeating the air these men inhabit. Jokes are made about superiors or bad food or uncomfortable accommodations, but these asides aren't meant to be subversive - they are uttered or thought precisely because these men know that their circumstances are unchangeable. They refer to themselves as "cannon fodder" and make no distinction between dying of boredom or dying in battle: "What's the difference?"

The characters - soldiers, families, girlfriends - all seem to function as if under the sway of larger powers, as conduits for some greater, mysterious purpose, but thankfully there are no politics in the film. We briefly see a profile of Hitler - is he the titular "Overlord"? - detachedly surveying the ground from an airplane. That fleeting glance is the only suggestion of human responsibility for the cataclysms engulfing the earth and sky, but his manifestation doesn't really represent anything other than some sort of epitome (nadir?) of mankind's folly - our destruction seems entropic, impersonal, our systems neither rejected nor blamed but instead just ignored (or allowed to happen) by some deity larger than us, perhaps the elegant, kaleidoscopic workings of the universe itself? As the film concludes, we come to accept that even the best - or worst - of men cannot alter their own or others' stations in the cosmic scheme.

***

For all the words given to the director's clever integration of documentary footage in this fictional film, I was most surprised by the finished form's lack of "journalistic" tone. A typical filmmaker would likely be tempted to use this photographic record (courtesy of The Imperial War Museum) as a shortcut to relaying a "genuine" experience, assembling a thoughtless collage of "authentic" images that wouldn't puzzle the average viewers of, say, the History Channel's WW2 Week specials... But not so, Cooper. This might be a patchwork of "old & real" and "new & fake" but the transitions from one to the other - clear enough if you pay attention - are, if not seamless, then appropriately surreal in their logic, their joints wavering fissures where the real, the remembered and the imagined commingle but don't quite coalesce.

That's not to say the film is formless, abstract or cold; the classic, almost mythological (Sisyphean?) stature of the ideas and pictures here act upon our sympathies and the film's emotions come to life in your head, which is where - contrary to popular belief - they always are, after all.

Nor does it mean the film is without humor or sentiment. Besides the droll jokes mentioned earlier, there's a somewhat funny boot camp sequence referred to in several reviews as an influence on the first half of Full Metal Jacket - but, honestly, it wholly fails to match Kubrick's (and R. Lee Ermey's) ferocious and precise satire. This uninspired bit aside, there are several charming montages set to music: in one, groups of men are carried away via train, jeep, etc. while a Kinks-ish music hall number plays "We don't know where we're going until we're there..." and in another, a melancholy jazz melody unspools while we see rows upon rows of tanks and bombs being manufactured, women working in linen mills, grunts doling out food in endless lines, and so on.

A more pointed juxtaposition of music and pictures is achieved when Beddows visits a movie theater with a woman who is presumably a prostitute. As they watch a newsreel of goose-stepping Nazis set to a mocking tune, run slow and fast, back and forth like a silly silent short, the woman eyes Tom, touches his leg, lights a cigarette - her movements carefully edited to match the beats heard on the soundtrack. It's funny, but also unpleasant and grotesque. Her forwardness is somewhat automatic and mechanical and is not reciprocated by Beddows - this may the most uncomfortable moment of the film for him. I'm reminded of A Clockwork Orange's Alex tied to an auditorium chair, made to witness the same films in an attempt at brainwashing. It also recalls Klimov's Come and See, which ends with several minutes of horrible footage played in reverse - buildings reassemble themselves from piles of rubble, corpses walk out of gas chambers alive, bombs rise from the ground to rejoin aircraft, and, finally, Hitler himself is reduced to a cute little baby on his mother's lap.

In all three films, this device obviously alludes to the mechanical nature of fate and the desire of free will to deflect the inevitable. For whatever reason - prudishness? romanticism? - this is the only juncture in the film where Beddows rejects his situation and walks away. It's strange, but I'm not sure why... I don't think a point is being made about his sexuality, nor even about the relationship between sexuality and war. Possibly the woman represents death, or his awareness of death? But even his leaving is sort of blase, an act of avoidance rather than a decision.

Later, as his landing craft crashes through the waves, a haunting episode occurs to him: alone in a bare room with a woman he met earlier at a dance, he allows himself to be laid on the floor as she shows him "How we prepare the dead." She removes each item of clothing while he lays expressionless, unresponsive... until she bends to kiss him and he says, "Now, bring me back." Seconds later (or simultaneously?) he is dead on the beach. This woman has appeared to him often: during a drill she supplants the instructor to ask Beddows if he'll be returning to her ("I don't know," "But I do."); they share another moment together, embracing on the deck of a boat, as unusual and unlikely an image as any in the film. The airless, alien quality of these encounters suggest that they exist only in his mind, but if they grant no solace or escape, neither do they taunt him with regret. It's as if he endures the entirety of the war as an out-of-body experience.

***

Given the timeless, cyclical attributes of the imagery and content, it's appropriate when varied, giant wheel-like contraptions are beheld almost comically rolling through the surf - their purposes must be many (mine sweepers, road layers, etc.) but they each futilely unwind and tumble, like a boy's firework toys, or little galaxies spinning out of control, finally collapsing without a whimper or a bang.

***

In one quiet scene, Beddows rifles through a dead combatant's effects: tobacco, family photos, a lock of hair - none give him pause until he finds a postcard of some vaguely Germanic, fairy tale castle. He gazes at it, and we remember the similar but crumbling ruins of another citadel observed elsewhere, including the last shot of the film. When is all of this happening? When did it start, and will it ever end?

An ebony bomber levitates in the sky, the landscape unreels behind it... each take is several minutes long, only cutting when the plane sways sleepily below the frame... the props moan monotonously and the sunlight flares gauzily off the cockpit glass... farmhouses, forests, rivers and lakes... at what point will the craft disgorge its payload? The gray remains of an ancient castle crown the top of a grassy hill, and the plane glides ominously on... suddenly it's night and the darkness erupts in smoke and lightning, elemental, like an act of creation.

***

Werner Herzog"s Lessons of Darkness ends, absurdly, with one of its characters seemingly reigniting the flames they have just spent untold effort extinguishing.

In The Thin Red Line the camera looks up and tilts across the sky as we hear the bird-like whistling of incoming shells.

In Overlord there is a startling shot of bombs appearing to float away like balloons into an empty sky...

Whatever the horror of war, it is also very weird, and very beautiful in a way - at least to a non-participant like myself. The nightmare of actually experiencing it must be so unreal that at times it dislodges the mind from the body... and I wonder if the events begin to approximate a dream from another life, or another world. And then I wonder what kind of world it is that would engender such dreams.

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