It burns a child.
Before the analysis of the film a bit of subjectivity: backtracking on a television picture: The strongest image I received is child, had the news: during the Vietnam War in the News of the newscast, we see a scene where a man, a Vietnamese soldier, was transformed into a torch, while a U.S. soldier told his comrades: "The guy is trying to burn out." His word came to me as a greater shock than the image itself.
Other forms of destruction: The metaphor of barbecue in the film: in Valley of Elah , destruction is immediately taken into fratricide. And even in infanticide. This is an internal destruction (our children) through the destruction of the other (Children of Iraq). This is also what makes the film's strength. In this reflection, the child becomes common. The destruction of the child has symbolic value. It is an allegory in the film. but both a metonymy: the father and the child apply to all fathers and all the children of humanity. It supports the symbol so heavy. Sorry face, ravaged Tommy Lee Jones, is that of America.
Village of the Damned
But it reminds me at once one of the first sequences of the film by John Carpenter "Village of the Damned " . As the film begins, all the villagers go to sleep during the school fair. We find the man who handled the barbecue charred head. The link seems to me afterwards that much closer than in the , it is indeed murder from the community, and those who are most innocent.
In the Valley of Elah is a photo taken by a mobile phone, that of a crushed Iraqi child, refers to murdered soldier who took this photo, as well as his comrade condisait the vehicle and is responsible: they have become by the conflict machines death acting through automation but also on the orders came from above (do not saw the neighborhood where the ambush). in the village of the damned , the order came from another planet, a radical exteriority.
Body Snatchers.
Are we in our current political systems in a bad movie, like "Body Snatchers "Ferrara. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Are we owned the inside? Beyond the reference to cannibalism of In the Valley of Elah is obvious. The desert in which the body was found asseoit the context of a return to the archaic. And we can not help but make an association between eating chicken after the murder by band friend and found the charred corpse. The same association as the we had a barbecue with the Village of the Damned . Last but not least is a return to tribalism, which ultimately endorse the establishment in Iraq. Tribalism of all countries. exactly as in Chechnya. Tribalism and factions of the Russian army itself. Tribalist drift is one of the strongest aspects of negation of the common. In Carpenter's film is a paradox in many ways, allowing Carpenter out of moralism. Indeed children out of the commonplace (and moralime agreed) to better emphasize in their wake. It's already at work in the barbecue party: one who has blown grid. Inversion of subject and action.
Flanders
Animality back on the front of the stage, making a map, humans and meat. But also in animals and humans. It was also another way in the film by Bruno Dumont on Bosnia. In the same principle of return. On assertion and deconstruction of the country. There is a logical principle of inversion. The moral principle must be returned and play just as paradoxical as the American flag at the end of In the Valley of Elah.
In Village of the Damned Carpenter, wife of the pastor in the latest fighting against children is also charred by his act of revenge. The effect BBQ sets up the solidarity of the victim and the executioner. Or rather the outcome of the action and the agent of action. Value - why not say "universal" the common thing in action. Do unto others as you would not want done to yourself. It is not only moral but acts concerning the real. The common thing is an ecosphere. The next backlash of America is the destruction of capitalism itself. We can align the platitudes: "sawing the branch on which it sits." But for us it is urgent. Urgency to act with political forces and instituionnelles with politics, the workings démlocratiques. Emergency not to be satisfied. As shown long been a number of films. Not just the police, media, and action by agencies. The common thing anyway here we understand one dimension: it is in act. The act does not exceed the corporation, he is not satisfied, he subsumes. It extracts the principle real and alive. In the film In the Valley of Elah , this act is an aesthetic principle: "barbecue effect". In the end we ask the following question: what is the ratio of the trash aesthetic, Iraq? (We are in fiction).
Bowling for Columbine and Elephant
And finally if there was something keep in Michael Moore, for example in Bowling for Columbine : director at wholesale shoes, brings the massacre organized by young people, with the job of a fighter pilot's father said in conflicts if Outdoor I remember well. Because the question mark in the film is well within what makes it for the coup of his youth, his point of origin. We are in a moral reflection in the strong sense: our actions have consequences. This is diametrically opposed to the film Elefant Gus van Sant who evacuated the question, put it aside. The film is incomparably more powerful than that Moore's film in terms of cinema. However incredibly poor in terms of moral causality of violence is reduced to playing video games by adolescents.
The report of the gore that comes from the news ... and that of Gore staged ... This image of that unforgettable human torch in my child's mind and adult. Ask questions of adults and children alike. Get children to talk. The children are fed crushed shut. We have enough to see children shut up in us.
Journey to the End of Hell?
Similarity, the American flag erected in both films. But Valley of Elah "other" does not appear that hollow, like a victim, as the photo. In Cimino's film, the other is the image of the cruel Vietcong but also inserted the Polish diaspora in the U.S. American landscape. What is not found in a valley of Elah identaire more, more fundamentalist, closer to the Old Testament. The reference community is no longer a diaspora, but "the" American family. Deer Hunter (Journey to the End of Hell) arrives just after the decline of the new American left end sixties. We can correlate the cement community, and the lowering of the gun, the abandonment of hunting around the flag and the American anthem. 35 years later with a new quagmire, In the Valley of Elah you return the flag. What has changed? A doubt, a flaw in what is the spirit of positivity, the essence of America. In the Valley of Elah you feel a weight of fatalistic attitude to what appears like a machine of war that has its origins in the American spirit itself. This reversal says the main character, is the signal of the disaster. Simultaneously it is the reversal of the logic of war, as well as the American spirit. An ambivalence that is inescapable. I venture to think that the paradox mentioned that this war in Iraq, yet refers to the actual economic system that the door that the doubt referred to is that we owe our economic base is now universal and whose America is currently the center.
