Film Review: 'Tigerland'
Review of Tigerland (2000); Dir. Joel Schumacher
When talking about Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, or even the Great War, the word “lie” gets thrown about, however misunderstandings about the quality and function of an organisation like the United States Military lose sight of the fact that, whilst a lie or lies can initiate a war or even set a legal precedent for one, once a war begins they cannot drive it.
Tigerland cuts the fat of the American war film, neglecting the ‘war’ part in favour of an acute investigation of the structure and relations of the army. In doing this, it withdraws from the picture and from the spectator the subconscious pleasure of the spectacle of warfare raised by Truffaut in his criticism of the genre, and more importantly at nationalist warfare against a racialised enemy present even in films seen as critical of warfare as a concept such as Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Instead, through fraternisation amongst soldiers (notably the breeding ground of every great revolution) driven by the protagonist, particularly in the first half of the film, its presentation of the psychological machine of warfare as an extension of the bourgeois state comes to prominence. Halfway through the film, the protagonist, Bozz rhetorically questions Paxton, a fellow soldier, whether they’ve been lied to in an attempt to elucidate the nature of the war to him, but questions the nature of the lie, are the officers and generals above them in on the lie or are they as confused? How far does it go?
The manipulation of the psyche of every single soldier seen on screen is not presented as the lie of the morality of the war, of god and the free market, but instead the forced, internalised, not mental but lived truth of it. The army transforms the will to live and the reproduction of human life from something insisting upon itself to that antithetical to itself, the taking of life in the name of exploitation.
A materialist answer is given to what drives the soldiers and the war, explored both through a symbolic political landscape in which Bozz must defend his life, as well those of other soldiers, against the arch reactionary Wilson, as well as through explicit physical symbolism, with one training session seeing a soldier’s genitalia threatened with electrocution. Along with this comes an understanding of the United States as the perpetrator of the war and the oppression of the protagonists, that whether they die in training, in Tigerland, or in Vietnam, their blood is on the same hands.
It is clear that changes to the structure and therefore psychology of the standing army were made between 1917 and 1971 akin to the changes made to the Parisian National Guard, as although Bozz finds revolutionary consciousness in his rebellion against his officers, finding even in them a lack of agency, a sergeant explaining that their foul treatment in training is designed to serve their survival after it, in relative solitude no movement emerges, individualist action succeeding only at saving the lives of a few.