The Situation with "The Situation"

When director Philip Haas began filming the first-ever American dramatic feature on the Iraq war, he initially wanted his gritty, pessimistic portrayal of a nation mired in social and sectarian complexities to be a "partisan movie." One year later, Haas says The Situation has played well with people from across the political spectrum, as a year of violence and mismanagement has made a film which could have once spoken to the polarity of the American public remarkable for its inability to polarize.

Nevertheless, I had to pause a few times during the film to consider the question of what exactly I was watching. Was it a movie about an improbable love triangle between a journalist, an Iraqi photographer, and a CIA agent, or a movie that was meant to be an honest, realistic representation of the complexities of life in a bitterly, violently divided country? Was it art based on current events, or an unapologetically partisan appeal to my political sensibilities? And is it even worth trying to distinguish between artistic and political motivations as far as a film about the Iraq war is concerned?

It is doubtful that it is worth trying to unpack them both. The movie is indicative of the dilemmas that accompany the conflation of the political and the artistic. Although The Situation does conform to public perception about Iraq and is perhaps true to some of the more nuanced, complex realities on the ground, it is also a demonstration of how the infusion of art and politics only makes them appear even more incongruous.

For instance, The Situation includes a number of overt attacks on neoconservative ideology. The chaos depicted in the movie should be condemnation enough, but the inclusion of a smarmy, outspoken, bow-tied neo-con diplomat as an idealized foil to the realities unfolding just beyond the Green Zone gives the film a tactless and wholly unnecessary ideological aspect. According to Haas, that character was modeled after the decidedly non-neoconservative Tucker Carlson-which means that in this case isolated, even ephemeral political flights of fancy took precedence over artistic depth.

This and other blatantly politically motivated artistic liberties (for instance, the comedically large pictures of Bush that hang in virtually every room of the U.S. embassy) leave viewers in the uncomfortable position of reconciling the objective reality of current events with subjective artistic standards and Haas' not-so-submerged political stances. It is even more difficult to reconcile the Iraq of Haas' imagination with the Iraq we see daily in the headlines.

The entire endeavor of putting the Iraq War on film while it is still going on is intriguing, audacious, and inevitably absurd. It's impossible to watch The Situation without the strong suspicion that Haas has gotten the whole thing completely wrong. If he got it wrong, I'm sure he didn't do so deliberately, but it was his own, deliberate decision to make a movie about the war without giving us a few vital years of historical distance. But, as Haas himself said, this was originally a "partisan" movie.

Of course the fact that art and political exigency go so awkwardly together doesn't mean they can't compromise: Errol Morris's Oscar-winning interview documentary The Fog of War (which I hope is required viewing at SIPA by this point) was comprised of about an hour and a half of commentary from Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara, and though filmed in 2001, the words "9/11," "Bush," "Cheney," and "Afghanistan" did not appear once. Thus the politically liberal Morris conspicuously avoided contemporary politics in order to produce a damning masterpiece of modern political filmmaking and demonstrated that in the eternally uncomfortable relationship between art and politics, it is, ironically, an apolitical approach that is sometimes the most politically jarring. It is the political one, on the other hand, that too often comes up short.