The death toll of the war in Iraq is high ““ and getting
higher. Over 2,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the
conflict began in March 2003, and this pales next to the number of
dead Iraqis, which has been estimated by some to be in the tens of
thousands.
But try to think of a film, song or play that addresses Iraq in
a direct or even indirect way, and few examples come to mind.
Not even the Gulf War drama “Jarhead” or recently
canceled television series “Over There” met the subject
head-on. Supposedly outspoken musicians ““ from Kanye West to
Bruce Springsteen ““ have been relatively mum in their
music.
The casualties may be running high, but the number of artistic
responses truly reacting to the war ““ positively or
negatively ““ is quite low.
There are a number of explanations, ranging from the high cost
of producing films to the prevalence of music downloading or the
fear of reprisal for political dissent on stage. What they all boil
down to is this: It’s easier to comment on the war in some
art forms than others, but money rules the day when it comes to
getting that commentary out to a wide audience.
According to film Professor Teshome Gabriel, movies in
particular tend to wait before weighing in on cultural events.
“Movies usually take time. They’re usually
late,” he said. “(The studios) have to do research to
see how much money (a film) is going to make. To try to make a film
right after an event is usually a problem.”
Gabriel, who teaches “Film and Social Change” in the
UCLA Film, Television and Digital Media department, used the
blistering Vietnam War documentary “Hearts and Minds”
as an example of film’s typically slow answer to
conflict.
Despite garnering an Academy Award in 1974 amid much
controversy, it attracted relatively few viewers while in theaters.
And simply enough, the less people are willing to go see films that
address contemporary events, the less inclined studios are to
finance those productions.
“The industry is a business. It’s a moneymaking
machine,” Gabriel said. “The industry is always trying
to see if it can actually make the returns.”
This restrictive caution with regard to money is not a hallmark
of the film industry alone. The song stays the same for the music
business, which despite the success of antiwar artists during the
Vietnam era, is still a business.
Here, as with film, the words of DJ Quik hold true: “If it
don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”
“(Record companies) are concerned with making money. If
it’ll make money, they’ll be happy to do it,”
said Evan Medow, the CEO of Windswept Pacific, a music publishing
company that owns the rights to songs by artists ranging from 50
Cent to The Who. He also received his bachelor’s and law
degrees from UCLA during the Vietnam era, when songs that engaged
the war were both popular and controversial.
“At the time, it was a moneymaking proposition to be
involved with countercultural artists,” Medow said.
“Antiwar music was more the order of the day. Musicians were
of the age that they were subject to the draft.”
Fear of financial loss, however, is not the only reason the
mainstream music establishment has largely ignored the Iraq war. As
Medow pointed out, the recording industry has other issues to worry
about.
“The music business is under attack on every conceivable
level, with downloading and new technologies like streaming video
and broadband,” he said. “Record companies want to get
control of their product. They’re not going to take risks
just for the sake of making a political statement. With things the
way they are, you’re not going to get the adventuresome
thinking necessary to put out political music.”
So corporate ownership plus unresponsive audiences equals low
output of politically sensitive art.
How, then, is the war to be represented in music, film and
theater if no one seems to want it to happen? The answer lies under
the surface of the corporate control that regulates so much of
America’s artistic expression.
To put it another way, go small.
Eli Kaufman, a student in UCLA’s master of fine arts
directing program, made a short film about the war in Iraq,
completing the project independent of the big studios and taking it
around the country to show at festivals.
The film, “Winning the Peace,” follows an
Iraqi-American Marine who enters the war on a personal crusade.
Last November, Showtime aired the short along with those of six
other UCLA graduate students in a program called “Images of
War in the 21st Century.” In making “Winning the
Peace,” Kaufman was able to use the apprehension of big
studios to address the war to his advantage.
“Hollywood is not going to make films it believes are
offensive to their consumers to watch,” Kaufman said.
“So therefore, the door is open to smaller filmmakers that
don’t have to be beholden to big box office sales. It’s
a nice little opening for indie filmmakers. The same thing that
inspires me to make film is what detracts big studios from making
films.”
Kaufman said he believes audience interest in seeing the war in
art may not be as low as it seems. But no matter how an audience
reacts, he prizes the timeliness of his content.
“I have a lot of faith in the movie-seeing public, that if
they were given the opportunity to see the hard questions
addressed, they would come out in droves,” Kaufman said.
“This is a unique opportunity to make commentary about
what’s going on. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong,
but at least you’re making people think about what’s
going on. If “˜Winning the Peace’ becomes out-of-date,
that’s OK with me, because I’ve felt like I’ve
spoken about the war when it was relevant.”
Yet if any medium is able to bring the immediacy of the war in
Iraq home better than others, it is theater. Due to relatively
lower production costs and technological simplicity, the world of
theater has seen the most attempts by far to incorporate the Iraq
war into its narrative.
Perhaps the most prominent example is David Hare’s
“Stuff Happens,” which came to the Mark Taper Forum
this summer and portrayed the American and British
governments’ initiation of the war in Iraq.
Other works featuring derivatives of Iraqi themes abound, from
the Odyssey Theater’s “A Good Soldier” to the
Geffen Playhouse’s “Nine Parts of Desire,” about
the experiences of Iraqi women, as well as Tim Robbins’
Actors’ Gang satirical production “Embedded.”
“The great thing about theater is that it goes back to the
primitive times,” said Hoyt Hilsman, a playwright who once
taught writing at UCLA. “You don’t need an expensive
budget and an editing facility.”
But while it might be easier to put together a play than a
feature film, that’s not to say theater is completely free
from profit-seeking corporations.
“It’s hard for regional theaters, which have
corporate backing, to get funding to put on controversial
plays,” Hilsman said.
Hilsman recently wrote “Back-Channel,” a play
inspired by rumored negotiations before the war in Iraq between
Saddam Hussein’s government and the Bush administration.
In Hilsman’s fictionalized piece, any possible peace deals
are crushed by Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff,
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Although the era following
Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t always been friendly to the insertion
of politics ““ especially dissenting politics ““ into
art, Hilsman feels it is not only his creative obligation to mix
theater and current events, but also something that audiences want
to see.
“People are interested now, more and more, about how we
got into the war. There is concern that it’s not going well.
People are going to be a little more encouraged about speaking out,
and those in the middle are going to be more interested in
alternative viewpoints about the war,” Hilsman said.
“In a larger sense, writers in America are getting more
political in their work. We can start to see ourselves in a global
context that American society is part of the world society. As
artists we have a responsibility and impulse to examine that
role.”
UCLA theater Professor Jose Luis Valenzuela also feels a wider
discussion of the war is necessary to combat that killer of ideas,
apathy. He first noticed it in the eyes of his students when he
brought up Iraq in class.
“I found out how alienated we are as a country and how
important it is to have a dialogue, to be informed, whether you
agree or disagree with the war,” he said.
To help rectify this, Valenzuela and his theater group, the
Latino Theater Company Laboratory, mounted a production,
“Melancholia,” which examines the psychological effects
of the war on soldiers returning to the U.S.
For Valenzuela, as with the other artists who have confronted
Iraq in their work, engaging the war on stage (or on screen or
through music) is essential to promoting an offstage understanding
of seemingly incomprehensible events.
“We should provoke the audience to have a dialogue,”
Valenzuela said.
“We should be aware of what is happening to humanity at a
specific time in history. That’s what informs our work and
our desire to be artists ““ to create dialogue, to
provoke.”