Black Hawk Down
2001, directed by Ridley Scott
At the end of Black Hawk Down, Sergeant Eversmann ruminates on the recently completed raid in Mogadishu: “I think everything’s changed. I know I’ve changed.” Eversmann (Josh Hartnett) is the top-billed character, and his arc therefore says much about the movie’s arc. He first appears right after the title, expressing shock at the shooting of civilians lined up for famine relief, and fourteen minutes later his fellow Rangers rib him for being an idealist, the only soldier in the camp who “likes the ‘skinnies’”. “ Are you trained to fight, sergeant?” “Well, I think I was trained to make a difference.” What, then, has changed by the end?
When Eversmann says “everything” has changed, anyone can sense that he’s not exaggerating. Since the previous afternoon, this young soldier, who had never before shot at anyone, has witnessed a catalogue of horrors. After a recruit under his command fell from a helicopter, a simple extraction operation turned into roughly fifteen hours of intense urban warfare costing over a thousand Somali lives and nineteen Americans. Several of the deaths were particularly grisly, and Eversmann had to clamp the femoral artery of a soldier bleeding to death. Despite leading his men with valor and skill, he feels responsible for the disastrous complications of the mission, which led to the United States’ withdrawal from Somalia.
Black Hawk Down is unconventional in at least two major ways. First, it was a box office success without offering audiences the usual comforts of triumph. Although the operation captured its targets, the story as a whole is an account of chaos and failure. It certainly didn’t fit the jingoistic spirit of the times, as its release happened to fall in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Second, despite the film’s sober tone, it can be hard to pin down its exact point. Certainly it’s a tale of the unforeseen consequences of war, yet the film does not seem to draw any absolute conclusions. The opening texts admit that a larger force of 20,000 U.S. Marines had previously been successful at averting famine.
The emotional appeal of Black Hawk Down is not obscure, nor is its logical argument. Both, in fact, come down to the same thing. It can be put into words easily enough, with the caveat that those words cannot substitute for the film’s effect, which is readily available to our intuition. To define the film’s logic is not to reinterpret it, but to expose its methods for the sake of added clarity.
A consistent line of contrast runs through Black Hawk Down, but unlike most war movies it’s not a contrast of motives or even of opposing sides. Questions of right or wrong are never foregrounded here; rather, the divide is akin to the distinction between experience and abstraction that’s at the heart of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. To put it in more immediate terms, it’s a contrast between a kind of groundedness and a kind of naivety. It shows, for instance, in General Garrison’s interview with the arms dealer Osman Atto, who rightly dismisses the general’s confident prediction of victory. Garrison counters with an accusation of genocide, but the moral argument makes no impression. Again, the film is not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of either side; it’s simply juxtaposing two attitudes – one forged, for better or for worse, in direct contact with life; the other stemming from a mix of detached idealism and the assumed superiority of an imperial power.
The contrast is not only between Americans and Somalis, but between veterans and rookies, between commanders and the front lines, between aerial reconnaissance and ground action, between before and after, even between the war zone and the home front (a phone call prompts a brief cutaway to a suburban American home, whose comforts clash with the hard life on the army base).
It’s worth stressing that Black Hawk Down does not exactly take issue with Eversmann’s idealistic wish to “make a difference”. He’s sympathetic at the beginning, and he remains sympathetic throughout. When he says that “everything’s changed”, he’s not speaking of some great inner conversion. It’s not that his idealism was wrong, but that over the course of a day it’s been put into context. In one sense it wasn’t enough; in another sense he was overreaching. His foil in this regard is his friend from the Delta Force, “Hoot” Gibson, whose greater experience has taught him to restrain his ambition. “You know what I think? It don’t really matter what I think.” At the end he tells Eversmann:
“When I go home and people ask me: ‘Hey Hoot, why do you do it, man? Why? You some kind of war junkie?’ I won’t say a goddamn word. Why? They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand it’s about the men next to you. And that’s it. That’s all it is.”
In other words, acting humanely within the confines of the life given to us is the antidote to the naivety and arrogance that so often gets people, even powerful militaries, into trouble. In this regard Eversmann is not Gibson’s opposite, he’s merely less experienced. When he’s paired with Blackburn, the fresh 18-year-old who’s come “to kick some ass”, the same axis of contrast favors Eversmann.
This divide between the grounded and the naive defines nearly every incident and every interaction in Black Hawk Down, and moreover it’s materialized in the visual language of high and low positioning. The film owes too much to verisimilitude to make a strict code of this, but more often than not, whoever occupies a lower position has the advantage – whether in conversation, warfare, or reconnaissance. The forces on the streets appreciate the labyrinth of roadblocks better than the officers in helicopters. Most of the hits in the battle come from below or from the same level. When the operation begins, a montage shows how the news is relayed to the warlord’s henchman – not rising physically up the chain of command, but traveling ever-downward, from a young man on high ground lifting his phone to the passing choppers, to a phone dropped from a rooftop, to a messenger alerting the commander, who’s lying in bed.
General Garrison is a recurring figure in Ridley Scott’s films, the powerful man lost in abstraction. Like Tyrell in Blade Runner, Mason Verger in Hannibal, or Max in the London scenes of A Good Year, he’s surrounded by an array of screens relaying the world’s information to him. A large map of Mogadishu complements the screens, again an abstraction of the outside world. After the battle, however, Garrison passes through the medical ward and stoops to wipe a soldier’s blood off the floor. He’s been brought down to earth the same way Eversmann has, brought into direct contact with life, and for once he’s engaged not in some grand ambition but with the immediate task that life presents him.
It would be too much to say that the title Black Hawk Down, or the central image of the fallen helicopter, is a metaphor for this “coming down to earth”. The two helicopter crashes, like Blackburn’s fall from the chopper, are nothing to celebrate. Nevertheless they fit the consistent direction of movement toward a more grounded, less detached point of view. Eschewing triumphalism, the film goes against the grain of a typical war movie, but there’s an honest catharsis in the way it brings everyone closer to reality. Eversmann must have imagined a world where starving Africans would be grateful for his help, but that was always an oversimplification colored by a moralistic framework. The Battle of Mogadishu ends instead with locals mocking the withdrawing soldiers as they run after the armored caravan. On the face of things it’s a picture of indignity, but for someone who’s just spent a day staring Death in the eye, the mockery must feel insignificant. It’s yet another confrontation with reality, and the film should have some of that same liberating effect on the viewer. By the end we can understand why Hoot would have the self-possession to react to unserious questions with silence. The gap between his experience and the sheltered lives back home is too great to bridge with words.
The children laughing at the soldiers, the general bending down to wipe the floor, and the warlord’s henchman being roused out of bed are all pictures of irony. In the same vein, the codeword for the start of the operation is sharply ironic, because “Irene” is Greek for “peace”. Still, the irony needs to be seen in context. Black Hawk Down is not arguing against the very idea of military “peacekeeping” but rather against the casual spirit that so often guides such forays. If a country wants peace, it has to be as serious about peace as its opponents are about violence.
For all of its unrelenting violence, Black Hawk Down is sensitive to the humanity of all involved. Several small moments show the effects of battle on Somalis, including a devastating scene about an hour in where a Somali boy mistakenly kills his father instead of the American soldier they’re hunting. The film manages to assert the preciousness of life without being sentimental about it, and with the same sense of balance it manages to contrast two outlooks – the serious and the naive – without belittling anyone. Its targets, including the commanders and the gung-ho soldiers, are portrayed with dignity despite their errors. Everyone is allowed the presumption of decent intentions, and at least Eversmann and Garrison appear to learn from their experience. The film extends the same respect to the viewer. It should leave us not just with a lesson, but with a bracing sense of having met reality more directly.
CONNECTIONS:
La nuit fantastique – “Irene” as a code name for peace
Black Narcissus – Failure of Westerners in a distant country, with a cathartic sense of understanding at the end
Solaris – Low positioning as a metaphor for a grounded point of view
Stalker – Glass moving across a table to the vibrations of a passing vehicle, presaging a journey ahead
Blade Runner – Contrast between experience and abstraction; chess game as a correlative for abstraction; information screens arrayed around a character whose perspective is too abstract
Full Metal Jacket – Messiness and unpredictability of war; asymmetrical urban warfare
The Martian – Ideal of confining ambition to the task(s) at hand; emphasis on the preciousness of life