Why We Fight

i finally got around to watching eugene jaracki's 2005 film "why we fight" ... i love documentaries of all stripes, and i enjoyed this film, but it fell a bit short for me

building its thesis around eisenhower's famous farewell address in which he warned of (and coined the term) the "military-industrial complex," the film uses interviews with ex-members of military and intelligence communities, leftist intellectuals, and a smattering of neo-conservatives to tell its main story about how our defense industry, think tanks, congress, the pentagon, and the executive branch create and maintain an unstoppable force ... woven into this story are some interesting, somewhat exploitative, stories from various "real people"

like most agitprop pieces, "why we fight" is extremely provocative ... i found my head nodding in agreement with much of the outrage from the film's interviewees and i finished the movie more fired up than i've been in a while about The Way Things Are

you can't exactly expect a doctoral dissertation from a 90 minute film, but jaracki kept the intellectual arguments and historical exposition on a pretty simple level ... if you have a passing understanding of the history of the 20th century, and how washington works, then you won't find any of this stuff shocking ... unlike a michael moore film, however, "why we fight" doesn't have any grand populist pretensions ... it's pretty clear that this movie has been (and will be) seen by people "in the know," a large majority of which who are liberal cynics, like myself ... i wish jaracki had made the effort, therefore, to delve in a little deeper into these issues and put some meat on the bones of his arguments

i also would have liked to have seen more from neo-conservatives, others who support the bush doctrine, and cold warriors who haven't gone soft ... the film may have been less provocative with a greater exposition of the opposing viewpoint, but it would have been much stronger

my other complaint is that the film is ultimately and deeply cynical ... it ends with the story of an air force veteran who moved out to a farm to completely divorce herself from the policies and deceptions she was forced to implement in the pentagon

while i empathize with the feeling of helplessness in the face of the fucked up way our world works, i am also endlessly frustrated with the naive anti-globalization "new left" ... i wish this film grappled with these viewpoints and provided more of an answer than the post-60s-hangover-credo: "fuck it, let's move out to the farm"

Grade: 6.3/10
RIYL: "the fog of war", "fahrenheit 9/11"