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François Truffaut denied the very possibility of an anti-war film. Put on the telegenic actors in uniform and be halfway through tacit glamorization. Well-lit explosions do the rest. Jarhead, in which soldiers see an almost erotic projection Revelation now, makes the point in a goal style.
Perhaps it was the great author’s rule that left the industry in at least one contemporary case. In relation to its duration, the war in Afghanistan it could be the least dramatized since the dawn of the panorama. Not only Korea and Vietnam, but every adventure in the Gulf received more or less treatment in Hollywood. We are poorer by omission. No recent event better teaches subversive thinking that despair is sometimes justified.
There was no plausible response to 9/11 that kept the Taliban and their deadliest guests in place. At the same time, the prospect of securing a land that had confused two empires was fantastic. What you have left is the most eminent case in my life of a perfect problem: to which there is no good answer. She couldn’t be left alone and she couldn’t no to be left alone.
The most eminent case, but not the only one. Here is one closer to home. The plight of deindustrialized cities from Ohio to Yorkshire is, in addition to direct casualties, a threat to liberal democracy. However, there is no big speculation that is safer than this: in most cases, nothing will work. Governments have to try, as have five or six successive UKs. The occasional Pittsburgh will raise hopes. But most sites that arose for an extractive or manufacturing purpose will struggle to survive. Inaction and successful action are more or less the same.
If “hope” has limits, if some crises are intractable, it is easier to give victims the news (better placed than most to be realistic) than their potential saviors. I have spent enough time on the journalistic trail of the ruling classes to feel that voters misinterpret them. It is not malice or arrogance that defines this world as much as naivety. There is less contempt for the masses than an overconfidence in what politics can do against them against the mulish and dragging reality. Tony Blair, a naive man who is still taken by a Machiavelli, is the most utopian case.
It’s something that marks their inner lives, which include too much zeitgeist non-fiction about the restart of the West or whatever, and not enough Naipaul, Chesterton and Waugh. The timelessness of social problems, the perverse consequences of change, the role of futility in human affairs: it is possible to be sublimely educated and selected from these truths. The summer reading lists that make the rounds at this time of year are unreadable.
My own craft is complicit. Unsigned editorials give newspapers essential cohesion and identity. They often attract officials from sovereign states in writing. They are stimulating to the author. But they also work with the premise that all problems have answers: that Angela Merkel, for example, has to “do” such and such a thing. Having seen the sausage made in two world-famous newspapers, I know there would be no publishing house that would throw up its hands at the insolubility of a number. However, there are times when no publisher would be more certain. Immigration from desperate and fast-growing countries to smaller, wealthy countries legitimately opposed to change is as follows. We will work hard to suggest that something can be done.
In the end, this is what the relative neglect of the big screen of the Afghan war means. The modern inability to despair. Most wars connote glory (World War II) or madness (Iraq), which is a guide to future action. This was not a didactic moment, but an extensive riddle. It was right to enter and he had no hope of entering. We have to leave and leave is rushed. A medium as didactic as cinema would always lose with so much ambiguity. The rest we have much more.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
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