Turbulent times tend to help produce more reflective filmmaking, and nowhere has this been more apparent than in the wealth of anxious, sometimes allegorical dramas and usually more straightforward nonfiction narratives that have put the war in Iraq and broader questions of domestic security, privacy invasion and American military commitments abroad under the microscope. To this end, director Eugene Jarecki (below) recently took some time to chat about his cautionary documentary about the big business of the American war machine, 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Why We Fight.
Jarecki was inspired to make Why We Fight by then-outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, which Jarecki stumbled across while making his previous film, The Trials of Henry Kissinger. In the classic speech, Eisenhower — the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II — warned Americans of the dangers of what he called “the military industrial complex,” a term coined to describe the increasing power of abetting bureaucrats and unelected — and thus unaccountable — think tanks and corporations who peddle the big business of war. (The prophecy appears fulfilled: America now has a military budget greater than all other 18 members of NATO, and all other discretionary portions of the federal budget combined.)
“The film looks at American wars dating back to the end of World War II and hypothesizes that there’s something that links these wars together,” says Jarecki, “that all too often you find there’s a tremendous gulf between what Americans think the particular war is about when it’s starting and happening, and what they gradually start to wonder about over time. They come to find out and believe that the reasons they’ve been given (for war) are not necessarily in keeping with what’s been discussed and going on behind closed doors. For me, that represents a kind of democratic crisis, that you have such a big disconnect between what the policymakers are doing and what the rest of us think should be happening.”
Unlike Michael Moore or Robert Greenwald, though, Jarecki’s movies tend to take a less overtly politicized bent. “My films try to reject the partisan pigeonholing of some of those other films, and the way that I do that is just by working overtime with a real range of people who are firsthand, front-line insiders,” he says. Interview subjects in Why We Fight range from William Kristol and Gore Vidal to John McCain and the Center for Public Integrity’s Charles Lewis. “I do that because I really like detective movies, and I also know that when people go out on a Saturday night (they) want to go on a journey, and everybody likes to be a sleuth,” says Jarecki. “So I try to structure the films to reveal information in much the same way that I find it in the archives.”
Why We Fight also takes a long, hard look at America’s collective psychological state. “I think there’s no question that as a country born in a revolutionary way by a small band of colonists who were also very poetic thinkers, who wrote some of our greatest prose about democracy and the tradition of the fight for human dignity,” says Jarecki, some of that remains imprinted in the American DNA. “All of that is a founding that has a lot of idealism in it,” he continues, “and of course it forgets the Native American massacres, it forgets African-American slavery, it forgets women and other groups and how long it took to find their way in this society. But nonetheless it’s fair to say that America has been, in the broader context of human history, a place for finding better standards for global democracy. Flawed as it is, it has a lot of heart, it’s trying very hard and it’s always been a very well-meaning work in progress. So it’s understandable that Americans should look at past wars in that (revolutionary) context, but the danger is of course when you look at all wars in that context because that would create a sort of carte blanche for our policymakers to always pretend that every war is a great war and a war worth fighting.”
While the film itself is a knockout, the DVD includes a hearty collection of extended and deleted scenes, a nice historical timeline, an audio commentary track by Jarecki and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, an audience Q&A from a special screening, Jarecki’s television appearances on The Daily Show and The Charlie Rose Show and a clutch of educational DVD-ROM material, which turns the disc into a handy lesson plan for educators. Mostly, though, Jarecki hopes Why We Fight inspires a dialogue about the country’s core principles and its massive commitment to such standing army and its attendant infrastructure. “There’s no question that we’re writing the world story now, and the better our story gets the better the world will be,” says Jarecki. “And that means holding America to the type of standards that we care deeply about — the standards that are ingrained in our Constitution and in our founding history.”