Jeremy Scahill would have us believe that he is America’s less creepy neo-noir answer to Julian Assange – but he isn’t. Director Rick Rowley’s new documentary on the disturbing and numerous misdeeds of America’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is an excavation of the underreported covert wars waged in locales from Iraq to Jordan, Somalia, and Yemen. While the content of the documentary is compelling, there is an additional conflict within the film that often eclipses the point of it all — that is to say Scahill’s struggle for the camera’s attention.
Scahill (author of the über-controversial 2008 exposé Blackwater) positions himself as the noble investigative journalist in the spotlight of Dirty Wars, acting as a kind of Jiminy Cricket tour-guide, reminding us of the horror of American soldiers cutting their bullets from the bodies of an American-trained police commander and his family members, two pregnant women among them. Rowley oscillates between traditional documentary realism and a dramatized detective adventure and the result is confusing.
There is endless footage of Scahill going about his “life on the outside,” — getting coffee at a dingy corner café, pouring over newspaper clippings in his ultra-modern apartment, and generally suffering through his own experience of the atrocities. All this detracts from the attempt at verisimilitude in the remainder of the film and we are left with a hesitant and damaged trust in the film’s actual argument for greater public responsibility and transparency in government military operations overseas.
On top of it all, Scahill’s persistently visible melancholy is portrayed as equal parts Bond movie and cheesy memoir. Black and white snapshots of the journalist going about meetings with important men, as though taken by a gumshoe staked out across the street, try and fail to construct a broader narrative that connects the documented events — as though their very connection was not the entire point of the film.
Another attempt at this is made through Scahill’s monotonous, overly pretentious voice-overs which only seem to invite us to sympathize with Scahill more than even the actual civilian victims of JSOC’s dirty dealings. When the witnesses are finally allowed to speak for themselves, their accounts are drowned out by Scahill’s commentary, extreme close ups, and misplaced Instagram-esque filters adding melodrama where it’s entirely unnecessary. Deserts already look dusty.
Ultimately, the rendering of a very real and immediate problem with the Western war machine in such a sensationalist fashion is offensive. It does a disservice to those who do not have the privilege of abandoning the situation and returning to their stylish city apartments to fret endlessly about their own trauma over jarring photographs and a MacBook Pro.
In the end, the documentary seems to be more concerned with announcing Scahill’s heroic stardom than with the actual issues at hand. Dirty Wars is recommended for those who would rather suffer through half a film’s worth of gloomy, grainy close-ups of Scahill’s tortured, achingly empathetic face rather than do independent research on JSOC’s troubling operations.
By Julia Huggins
Photo provided by Mongrel Media
