RIDLEY SCOTT’S BLACK HAWK DOWN “Can’t be too fine, can’t be too coarse…”

 

 © 2016 by James Clark

      There are two ways to approach a Ridley Scott film. The first and most popular way is to engage each outing as a totally new venture under the aegis of a writer (or two, or more) never to be heard from again. This preference takes up a vehicle like Black Hawk Down (2001) as a patented Scott patina of highly accomplished cinematic mood in the service of vividly introducing us to the nuts-and bolts details and stresses of modern military action. The second and rarely considered way is to note that, though seldom acknowledged as a (sort of) ghost writer of every production he undertakes, his efforts all zoom to a consistent and rigorously developmental communicative sense of cosmic crisis. As such our film here does not in fact well jibe with indifference toward the ramifications of an al-Qaeda take-down of elite military aircrafts in the productive sweep peppered with the al-Qaeda take-down of the World Trade Centre.

How on its toes is the discursive flood of action propelling Black Hawk Down? An epigraph leads the way—an epigraph far more abusive to the unwary than any of the countless bloody ambushes to come! “Only the dead have seen the end of the war.” The statement is attributed to Plato. Plato, like hell! This little tweak of erudition derives from the philosophy-challenged, General Douglas MacArthur, trotting out an old soldier’s bromide about the huge stature of those in the military and finding it apt that a universally revered clear thinker would be onside. The true author of that reflection on war is a far less celebrated participant within the process of sharing lucidity. That idea, far less self-evident than the General imagined, derives from someone who did his work around 500BC, a hundred years before Plato “flourished” (in the vernacular of professional teachers of the subject of thinking, a métier invented by Plato). Concern for the endlessness of war was a major project for one Heraclitus, of the town of Ephesus (in what is now Turkey), one of his pronouncements being, “War is the father of all and the king of all. Some he has made gods and some men; some slaves and some free.”

 

The saga about to unfold is not without a pronounced Platonic component—that being, first of all the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission to Somalia in the early 1990s; and then the various classical-rational-generated weapons systems endlessly in effect, insofar as those Platonic/Socratic humanitarian measures become brushed aside by the faction of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid who had had 300,000 of his tribal enemies starve to death by intercepting food shipments at the ports. Being a Canadian citizen (but far from a Canadian), I’m in a peculiarly entangled situation in this context, the inventor of the UN Peacekeeping Mission having been a Canadian and the whole history of that land being a hotbed of such effete and self-impressed intellection now being pulverized by a new and harder world than Plato ever dreamed of, a world Heraclitus, however, had tried to point out, to no avail.

The epochal nature of the battle of Mogadishu about to erupt has been introduced by silent-movie, blue-silver chromatics as presenting starving and dead outsiders in an almost prehistoric ambience. In addition to these ancient features, the preamble is graced with written text of a decidedly old-school rhetoric. “Years of warfare among rival clans causes famine on a biblical scale… Hunger is his [Aidid’s] weapon… The world responds. Behind a force of 20,000 U.S. Marines, food is delivered and order is restored… Aidid waits until the Marines withdraw, and then declares war on the remaining U.N. Peacekeepers… In June [of 1993], Aidid’s militia ambushes and slaughters 24 Pakistani soldiers and begins targeting American personnel… In late August, American elite soldiers, Delta Force, Army Rangers and the 160^th Soar are sent to Mogadishu to remove Aidid and restore order.”

Right after the title appears along this confident grasp of world history, things get far less boss-nation blithe. The crew of a smallish, Delta Force black, assault helicopter—the Soar contingent, operating large, Night-Stalker Black Hawks—beholds hordes of starvelings chaotically accessing bags of rice on a lumbering Red Cross truck. Also apparent is a sprightly half-ton with a machine gun mount. Soon the crew of the latter vehicle is making blood cascade at the food distribution area. The pilot of the order-restoration team is unsurprisingly disturbed. Radioing back to headquarters, he is more than bemused on hearing from a diplomatic Platonist calling the shots, “I don’t think we can touch this…” The leader of the killing spree being granted that diplomatic immunity is also armed with a public address system from which he imparts the news, “This food is the property of Mohamed Farrah Aidid! Go back to your homes!” Seeing the carnage mount, the pilot reiterates, “Request permission to engage!” The devotee of advantageous Platonic circumspection (overriding Platonic ethics), calmly imparts, “Negative… command…Return to base” [paralleling, “Go back to your homes”]. “Roger,” the polite organization man affirms. The less polite, but, as we shall find, no less Platonic figure in charge at the rebuff to the Red Cross and its U.N. protector, happily mimes shooting down that chopper with a rocket launcher (lots of science, mathematics, xenophobia and theological dogma going into that, by way of Saudi moneybags, also owing a debt of gratitude to Platonic happy trails).

“Elite” being a volatile concept, when the All-Stars—after a preparatory evening of bravado, wisecracking about the enemy favoring throwing rocks and not being able to “shoot worth shit,” and maintaining a very low level of respect toward the non-elites doing the planning and directing—do take off to execute the capture of some of Aidid’s cabinet at a district in Mogadishu where they are in full control (but having been found to be scheduled at a place and time derived by spying) the dash and sheen of the vehicles have been slightly undermined by the performance of the local spotter (representing one of the losing clans) and hugely undermined by a group of kids with phones alerting the Aidid fighters who, in the course of becoming armed, reveal to us the Osama bin Laden bequest of and trained crew for ground-to-air missiles and hand-held rocketry. (The day before, we hear the General in command of the U.S. team wryly remark to his officers that “Washington” refused, “in their [Platonic, diplomatic] wisdom” to supply aerial “gun ships.”)

In addition to those realities, we have an arresting optical aura to institute an ominously unprepared force heading into that multi-dimensional phenomenon called “war.” The nifty Delta Force, black, sporty vehicles snapping into tight formation over a lovely beachfront and larger Night Stalkers out of their element in broad daylight all transport the troops toward the seizure of the brain trust in such a way that the personnel dangle their feet along seating at open doors, giving the impression of being en route to a Slo-Pitch tournament. In arresting contrast to the prevailing transient mob flippancy by the “special forces,” there is a cut from a Ranger sergeant having an epileptic seizure, overdoing his zeal for a rerun of a favorite sitcom (opening the door to one of our protagonists, Ever, replacing him and copiously countering laxness), to a young defender of the ruthless status quo at prayer at dusk on the sands surrounding a mosque. With his automatic weapon beside him, he’s shown in close-up, slowly placing his forehead upon the sand, with subtly beautiful textures salient. (That composure reinforces our impression of the body language at the distribution of the sophisticated weapons, where a degree of sensuous inspiration is remarkable.) Two incidents during this prelude to the moment of truth, involving the elites, pertain to a close encounter with the Heraclitean priority. The local spotter, Andy, is not without a degree of nerve, circulating amidst the quasi-Casbah (another old movie touch) of the Bakara Market—where no one goes hungry (the American reference, “Skinnies,” being about the East-African make-up in general; not the short-tem famine)—his baseball cap turned backward bringing him up to speed about the continent-wide flirtation with the devil; as with the earlier arrest of an unforthcoming Aidid-man teasing the General (with his dry complaint about the “genocide” raging) about his Cuban cigars being superior to the captor’s Miami cigars. The General’s first shot at the freshly staged theatre of war is to complain about Andy’s efficiency, as relayed by one of those Night Stalkers doing double duty as a daytime surveillance system. The infiltrator calls up, “There’s too many militia…” The supposed inspirational figure (with a mumbly, fey, abstract, Platonic delivery beside which Bob Cratchit becomes an assertiveness pro) drones out, “Tell him I want his skinny ass parked in front of the damn building, and he’s not getting paid until he does exactly that!” With this, the Black Hawk pilot sees fit to dish out a bit of the smug self-promotional lingo having captured the hearts and minds of the base. “He sounds scared shitless!” Soon fear comes to him and his partners, tearing away the hype they had settled for. We had seen a young, last minute addition to the assault declare, “I’m gonna kick some ass!” As it happens, he’s the first of many casualties, felled not by that secret weaponry but instead by his own panic at seeing one of those rockets miss the mark and thereby losing his grip on the rope-ladder by which he was to join other troopers pounding down on that conference place Andy eventually got to.

The rare invader who did start with his game-face on (We’re going to call him Ever because that is the tag he carries written on his helmet [sometimes seeming to say “Even”], his factual, Platonically certified name, Eversmann being too long and also [from Scott’s perspective] not wanting to get tangled with old-school Everyman, when the deal going down here is about Heraclitean sensual equilibrium, a test ever-present) was the commander-sergeant of the rope ladder to the sidelines, his deep-thrust of a voice being unique in a choir overpopulated with tenors. Andy’s imperfect trek leads to a part of a street with a ramshackle building, on the roof of which is a sign saying Olympic. We see it in several camera angles during the first campaign consisting of those not coming apart along the rope ladders and those headed to the target building in Humvees. The term vividly alerts us to challenges over and above the ouster of Aidid and military affairs per se. Though an interpersonal struggle hogs the spotlight, the real story inheres in intrapersonal demands of Olympian weight. (Scuttlebutt about how forthcoming the Pentagon proved to be in this project, for jingoistic interests, stands as simply one of a vast stream of turnarounds whereby Scott seems to be playing ball with obtuse associates but in fact is on a track such associates would never twig to.) On seeing the boastful rookie smash his back on coming to earth the wrong way, Ever sees his obligation switch from squashing a hub of demented miasma to maximizing the lease on life of a not very likeable guy.

He shimmies down the right way and forms a crew of stretcher-bearers and anti-sniper gunners; and there and now the awkward fantasy of smoothly ticking off a ludicrous foe becomes an exercise of surviving a horrific and lethal alien uprising. So universal is the vast and well-fed so-called skinny population (suddenly clogging the streets and advantageously swarming all over the rooftops), that we’re readily in the perspective of Scott’s Alien where primordial dilemmas are there to be fielded not in the spirit of trivial entertainment. Quickly confirming, to the elitist first string for this far more mysterious contest than anyone imagined, that a new strategy had to happen, two of those seemingly invincible Black Hawks get blasted out of the air by modern missiles, in the course of their magisterial beholding of the gunplay below. Shock and awe seep into the modernists; and no one is prepared to count the experience as a golden opportunity.

The Casbah configuration of this battleground lends an all-purpose intensity from out of which Scott unleashes a fiery hail devolving to spectacularly shattered solidity. The first chopper, unaware of the advanced weaponry lurking in such primitive shelters, hovers close to the area where the politicos had been rounded up in short order by the air-show crews, perhaps expecting some riflemen needing to be shooed away to facilitate driving the prizes back to where a decent supply of reruns is to be enjoyed. The director   of the slaughter at the rice dispensary, now leading two ground-to-air experts having just got up to speed courtesy of the children’s first-responder alert, races onto the scene in that half-ton and immediately the Night Stalker has been fatally stalked in broad daylight, black smoke pouring out, and with the calm pulse now having become a spinning deathtrap. (The searing startlement is increased by cuts to a communications chopper high above the fray, where matter-of-fact comments— “Super-Six-One is hit…Six-One is going down… he is going down…”—inform the headquarters that something other than a sitcom is on tap.) Inside the plunging machine, the pilot, with much more emotion in his voice than that of the all-seeing bearer of information several hundred feet above, calls out to his team, “Stay with it!” [a wider consistency ironically making its presence felt]. The craft clips the edge of one of those soon-to-be hate-filled rooftops and smashes to the street in a cloud of smoke and dust. Crumpled in a black mass, it reminds us of the corpse of the hapless gigantic former leader in Alien, having been murdered by a swarm of ruthless pod-dwellers. (Several of the aerial shots disclose pod-like hovels.) The second take-down, from the auspices of that same tireless opportunist, features the pilot’s going into denial that the hit is definitive and the bland radio guy advising he’d better go back to base. Soon a more physically cogent version of the speakers’ world prevails, leaving the pilot (who had, on the party night on the eve of battle, done some whitewashing of a loutish elite’s loutishness) a lone survivor; but crippled physically, to match his far from Olympian motions.

In face of this wakening to a far less comedic and Platonic world, General Garrison (a name seemingly granting carte blanche to observe from a distance) opts for protocol in the form of the geometry of securing a perimeter around the crash sites and from there dealing with fatalities, the wounded and the beleaguered counter-attackers. “Move quick,” is his order to the leaders at the front. “The whole damn city will be coming on top of them.” To his aide he admits, “We just lost the initiative.” Implicit in that statement is the extremely hard work of real Olympians, in contradistinction to talented but coddled repute. With his decaying front teeth—too many sweets? —deadened presence and boring vocal delivery, you have to suppose that the General will not be the one to stage a counter-attack against that sloth. Onside, at least formally, with Garrison’s order about securing perimeters, Army Ranger Captain McKnight has something else to convey to his troops facing a gauntlet of fire from every vantage point: “Take a breath and calm down…” As with Eversmann, the Captain has a more interesting tag, namely, Knight, than his full name.

As the fusillade worsens (vaguely drawing upon Custer’s Last Stand), Knight and Ever become narratively prominent in improvisationally facing deadly attack with a view to saving the many comrades in various types of distress. Both of them being the butt of widespread ridicule (to be specified later) for taking their obligations very seriously, such caring would activate that chivalry in face of creeps, so dear to Scott’s own (and poorly appreciated) seriousness. Overtaken, in scale, by the shattering of those choppers, Ever’s focus upon converting his charges, designed for the conference-centre interruption, to rushing a critically injured man to that same destination but with a view to health rather than politics (hitching a ride on one of the Humvees scheduled to carry out the prisoners), takes us deep inside the microcosm of war. While the gunner of one of those Humvees experiencing a big interruption of their own, gets shot in the head by a high-powered weapon at point-blank range—a source of pain to the Captain, who, in ascertaining that the trooper is dead, gets an abruptly snide report from the other crewmen—Ever is lifted off the ground by a rocket hit aimed their way. Leaving most of the assault team to form a little open-air garrison—and, jocularly explaining to the increasingly gung-ho teammates being sidelined (and thus complaining) for their own and the project’s good, “…because you’re dependable…”—he soon receives a nasty cut to his trigger hand, from shrapnel ricocheting along a stone wall. Though patched up by one of his crew and never seen as a factor again, the bloody chopped meat speaks cinematically to the new deal being dealt out and touching even perverse also rans. His turnaround, after reaching a destination that’s not so safe, involves leading some Rangers to the fallen Night Stalkers. Many twists and turns populate his actions and those with him undergoing that strange battlefield where they do not have it pretty much their own way. But a particularly arresting moment has to do with the only functional shooter on deck at the first helicopter wreck, improvisationally firing off myriad rounds of automatic gunfire as the monstrosity with many legs closes in. He has been shot in the face but his body language is remarkably steady, an indicator that a viewpoint of lazy Platonic advantage in the service of reflexive Platonic humanitarianism is being (somewhat, at least) overrun by integrity going far beyond tidy, self-serving political display. The extraordinarily visceral eventuation on screen occupies a maelstrom (well evoked by the distemper and beauty of Mogadishu) whereby “take a breath and calm down” includes seeing fit to stand up to lethal hostility because “elite,” though widely out of order, still comes rooted in a repertoire of going for broke. The maelstrom, however is far more extensive than solely military challenges, a condition which defines Blackhawk Down as the strangest war movie ever produced.

Knight progresses, in a Humvee, with juggling issues of delivering prisoners and protecting the wounded. Neither call is gratifying, though the prisoners are finally loaded and the vehicle moves at a snail’s pace. He has a driver, shot in the head and bleeding profusely, but still functional. He operates as the gunner. On the intercom from a Delta Force shiny black bug he’s told, “You have to slow down. There’s a delay.” Knight calls back, “We can’t slow down! We’re taking a lot of enemy fire!” He orders the badly wounded driver, “Keep your foot on the gas!”—not from indifference but from shared disinterestedness. Knight and the driver he drove to the edge of death abandon the “fuckin’ bullet magnet” and he leads a group into the shelter of a building away from the congested area. There he encounters “Sizemore,” who had been left out of the initial raid due to a cast on his arm. At the arrival of prisoners and some wounded to the airstrip-base (the doors of a Humvee is opened, revealing much blood and flesh), Sizemore cuts off the cast and joins a reinforcement unit. He tears into Knight (catapulting into the action without that wave of frisson which would temper his attitude) for becoming less than a 100% attacker. Knight maintains that the casualties matter, that (chivalric) “no one left behind” must be covered. In the tag, “Sizemore,” we have a latent bid toward that expansiveness that can reach beyond the Platonic mundane, but at the same time crash to a banality of its own. Not to be missed and much to be mused upon is the final scene back at the base   where Sizemore suits up to help find the missing casualties.

From out of a sensual weave pertaining to that Casbah, there have been signs that the savages are not without their own Ever, Knight and Sizemore. But we have to assimilate how those seeming initiatives can turn on a dime and display cheap, shallow, religious-cult self-interest which spills forward appalling, sadistic venom. From the perspective of that all-seeing quarterback in the sky, a wounded elite is swarmed by locust-like, frenzied agitation, hoisted upon many devout arms, stripped and torn to pieces. Assisting our purchase upon such disturbing exotica, we have the annoying entitlement of a Delta Force player, first seen standing in solitary if not solitudinal splendor on a sand dune awaiting one of his pilot buddies to taxi him back to the organization that brought him to Somalia to kick some ass. He holds aloft a carriage-trade bicycle. (The plane is in fact a Night Stalker; and though being the first Black Hawk down, the attitude reminds us of the second one with the pilot trying to gloss over a bad scene.) But, gods preferring their own level of fabulousness, this reunion is not simply a moment of facilitating a cheeky AWOL soulmate, but a moment of a cabin crew giving a pretty divine joy ride to those Triple-A Rangers with some time to spare. They had invited their country cousins aboard with clever facetiousness in the form of (mere) commercial airline cordiality and then gone on to a sophomoric, Platonic debate about whether the abbreviation “limo,” they being limo guys, is a bona fide term. During an eve of battle barbecue feast of wild boar—unlike the wild bores in the cockpit—shot down by another crew, and representing the only clear sailing of the excursion, that same wandering hipster with the action-adventure contemptuous eyes cuts into the chow line. His victim pleasantly responds, “Hey, man, there’s a line and you’re not at the end.” The VIP opts to disregard anything spoken to him by mere mortals, and Knight confronts him, indirectly, on the point of not having the safety lock of his hand gun on. The solipsist gives him an inaudible gangstah statement and flicks a finger by his eye by way of a course of mutiny seemingly tolerated at these lofty heights. Sensing that McKnight does not have forever to see order and grace on the way, one of the verbose limo drivers explains, “Let it go, Sir. The guy hasn’t eaten for a couple of days.” The Captain, having been shown some neophyte priorities, can, it seems, only close with, “You Delta boys are undisciplined cowboys… I’ll tell you somethin’. We get to the 5-yard line, you’re gonna need my Rangers…” (That latter phrase soon being ridiculed by one of his subordinates, who, on being ripped open a few hours later by automatic fire, leaves the Knight doleful, for a little while.) Maybe that hand jive did serve a function of lucidity for the standoffish fighter. In the middle of the next night, with American casualties mounting and the swaggering VIP of the half-ton dispenser of death directing rocket fire upon the ground troops, the equally swaggering Delta cowboy(of course being a cool-gear-geek), leading a few fellow demi-gods with night vision apparatus, stage-manages a come-from-behind garrotting of one of the rocket-launcher imports from Saudi, upon which a rocket is levelled at the local swagger, putting him out of the game.

But these flash-in-the-pan peasants-at-heart serve to maintain that the full weight of this film’s invention and traction pertains to life-long devotion to and cultivation of awe. Despite sporadic workplace effectiveness, a Platonic smartass like that “elite” constitutes little more than poisonous crap (or, on a good day, a sounding board), the real war having no days off. After the UN tanks allow the evacuation of the Casbah, Ever, Sizemore and Knight try to sum up what’s left for them. Fittingly, for aspirants to Olympian acuity, the refuge has been erected in a football stadium. Ever’s delicately modulated disappointment (He’s at the morgue, bidding farewell to a Ranger he helped a medic improvise over, with few resources, on a massive abdominal wound. [The medic being a confirmed exponent of the goodness of coffee, he repeats a precept he dished up during the blissful outset, “Can’t be too fine, can’t be too coarse…”]Addressing the man he saw die, as so many out there, feeling blessed, in spite of the horror, and who asked, “Tell them [his family] I fought well”) might seem to be a relapse to the mainstream humanism he was teased about on the eve of something he didn’t expect.“It’s not that I like them [the locals] or I don’t like them. I respect them.” (And with this he can be seen to be akin to Hal the respecter of crash dummies, not because they’re priceless little gods but because they’re propped up by an infinity of cogent power, out of which they might be brought to some semblance of shared comprehensive discovery and love. Unlike grizzled Hal, however, young Eversmann at that point nevertheless largely cleaves to a rigid [Platonic] ethos of calculative advantage.) “People with no jobs, no food, no education, no future. We can either help or sit back and watch the country destroy itself.” Ever seems to cling to the clichés and turn his back upon his fiery weekend with Heraclitus. “Everything has changed. I know I’ve changed. People asked me [before shipping out to East Africa], ‘Why are you going to fight someone else’s war? You think you’re a hero?’ If they asked me now, I’d say ‘’No…Nobody has to be a hero… It just sometimes turns out that way…’” Or is this a “not too fine/ not too coarse” medley? This stab at Heraclitean synthesis had been elicited by Ever’s becoming a sounding board for Sizemore, who, unlike his fellow-survivor, finds a comfort zone in Army. “They’d say, ‘Hey, are you some kind of war junky?’ If someone asks to explain what happened, I won’t say a goddamn word. They wouldn’t know… It’s about being true to your men. Solid answer…” Solid subterfuge. McKnight, first seen to be a humorless war junky—Putting a headlock on the trooper mimicking his reproof of the snotty elite, “You know we have a chain of command, don’t you?”—is, as actions go forward, probably the most consistent contestant of the blend of “fine” and “coarse.” We last see him at the stadium, rallying a wounded figure downwards on the chain of command. “You bet your life!” [we’ll go back for Game 2]. Sizemore would silently despise those who wouldn’t know, and carve out a life in an aerie (a gated game many others have been playing for years). Ever would occasionally spoon out his A-game within a slog largely devoted to small kindnesses, like his promise to the dead man to visit his parents to tell them about their son’s courage. Though based in a military arena, the plunge to equilibrium here is very largely about civilian life, precisely the menu Heraclitus metaphorically dished out quite a while ago. (The name of the critically wounded warrior of particular concern to Ever, namely, Twombly [as in elusive modern painter, Cy Twombly] aims for the problematic world at large. As does the name of a hostage, Ridley!)

The half-ton rocker scoops up Ridley, a crippled trooper found stashed away in a building, in hopes of bringing off a prisoner-exchange. The guard, quick to pick up the weakness of the pilot’s declaring to him that, being a pilot, he isn’t responsible for the killing (and going on to brazen that he cannot bring about the exchange which he is sure his side will never allow), mocks, “You Americans all live an interesting life…Of course you have the power to kill but not to negotiate… In Somalia killing is negotiation. Without victory there can be no peace. This is how it is in our world…” Pretty much Plato, the heavenly host and arbiter of comfy conclusions. Step away from “our world” and things begin to live up to that phrase, “an interesting life.”