All In One Boat

The scene was familiar: uniformed soldiers, rifles swinging restlessly, big man at the door, boots, gun butts smashing smashing, male voices screaming orders: Get down! Get down you fuckin’ shit! Where are the guns! Where are the fuckin’ guns! Female and children’s voices screaming in terror. No guns here! No man here! –You fuckin’ liar! Hand grasping clothing, hurling bodies against the wall, against the floor. Gun barrels held inches from skulls, from terrified eyes.

Sitting in a dark theater, watching actors and not threatened at all, understanding that the actors aren’t threatened, still the adrenaline pump is in high overdrive. The throat constricts. The heart hammers.

This is all too familiar stuff.

For the last four years, on TV and in documentaries, in still photos and on the Internet, in Anbar province, in Diyala province, in the back alleys of Baghdad. Yet this is not Iraq. This is a film about Ireland 1919 to 1921. The men in uniform and half-uniform are the Black and Tans, special British forces created, at Winston Churchill’s suggestion, to get the Irish insurgency against British rule under control. The Irish want the British out. 800 years was enough. To the Irish, the Black and Tans, and the fearsome Auxiliaries, were occupiers and to be resisted.

As in Iraq in 2003 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 the insurgency only grew, fed by the efforts to suppress it. It grew in numbers involved. It grew in viciousness — on all sides. It grew to civil war and neighbor fought neighbor. Brother killed brother.

The film we were watching is The Wind that Blows the Barley. Directed by Ken Loach, it won the Cannes 2006 Palm d’Or. In England however, it, and the director, has been excoriated by the setters of opinion and taste. Loach is British and the history he shows is not warm hearted about his country’s behavior. There are those who, after 86 of peace with Ireland, call him treasonous. One prominent critic compares him to the Nazi’s Leni Riefenstahl. It leaves one wondering what has elevated these scribes to the level of serious critics. They seem to have some power though. Loach claims there were only 40 copies of the film in England while there were 400 in France. Even those who aren’t frothing in the gums yip in some alarm.

Loach has a long history of social realist films, beginning in 1965 with a BBC production called Up the Junction about working class life in South London. He has some 26 films to his credit, including Which Side are You On?, Bread and Roses, and Land and Freedom about the Spanish Civil War. Loach knows, in other words, which side he is on.

Yet he is not on a side blindly, and he has no romance in him about the great struggles or that great intentions will hide great evils. He has no uncertainty that the occupation of Ireland by Britain was wrong, or the actions of the Black and Tan. The struggle of the IRA against them is justified by all that men hold dear. And yet, and yet the IRA does terrible things and Loach shows us – brutality traded for brutality, revenge the spark for revenge. This is war. But it is not a war film like those favored by the winners.

The Wind Blows the Barley, like Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad, like Dragojevic’s Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, like Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, take all the romance out of war. Damn such films, anyway! No stirring shots of friendly aircraft wheeling in formation, wings waggling in salute; no sailors standing windswept on the deck, eyes narrowed in pride and recollection; no tearful reunions as Johnny comes home, honored and bemedaled. Instead, we have fingernails being wrenched out; heroes shooting collaborators in the head and then vomiting because they had been boyhood friends; brothers parting over the aims of the fighting, finally coming to blows and to execution, up close and personal.

As the Irish –and the two brothers in the film– against the fog of war and promise of partial success, begin to split into differing, then disputing, then civil-waring camps, Loach is not didactic. He likely feels the militants who rejected the treaty –signed by their own leaders– were the more right. But those who did sign, and then fought their brothers, were no less principled, their perceptions of hold this and advance another day were not dishonorable. Loach lets us see the uneasy, unpredictable and terrible results once the battle has been entered into.

I don’t think he set out to make an anti-war film, but by making a real film about a real war we are wooed away from the propaganda platitudes of martyrs and heroes and certainties of God’s favor. We get the sense of how serious the questions are, how seriously they must be answered, before gaily signing on for war. What else can be done? How else can victory be won?

How right are we to hear the echoes of those screaming from 1920 down to our own day?

In his acceptance speech at Cannes he said, “in no uncertain terms, that his movie wasn’t only about the Irish Problem, but was also meant as a commentary about the Bush and Blair policies in Iraq.” [Review.]

Nothing had to be contrived. The mechanisms are well known.

Eventually the wars in Ireland ceased; the longest running in the northern 6 counties, only recently. Somehow all the reasons to rip fingernails out, to control the lives of others, to shoot people in the head all diminished and life went on. The film doesn’t comment on this of course, though we, sitting in the dark, shaken by the violence, thinking perhaps of our own ancestors’ probable participation in it, cannot help but know. The Irish and the English somehow live as cousins now, despite all of that. The Iraqis will one day know the same peace. And yet today, the occupying army still in place, the civil war exploding on a different street corner every day, there seems to be nothing to be learned to help them skip the carnage yet to come.