A Rap on War
Tim Appelo, Seattle Weekly
The "gunner" in Gunner Palace, which opens in Seattle on Friday, March 11, at the Metro and Meridian theaters, is any member of the U.S. Army's 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment. The palace is a tastelessly ornate Baghdad pad Saddam Hussein gave his psycho-sadist son, Uday, who reportedly used the place for poolside orgies replete with booze, hookers, heroin, and maybe the odd rape or whim killing. Soldiers call it "the Love Shack."
It was more dangerous when former Seattleite Michael Tucker went there in September 2003 and February 2004 to shoot his disheveled yet affecting documentary, even though the 400 U.S. gunners were forbidden to drink anything stronger than Snapple at their pool parties. The half-bombed-out palace, its grand spiral staircase ascending from rubble, is smack dab in the red-hot center of Saddam loyalism and anti-Americanism. The last place where Saddam felt safe enough to appear in public, borne on people's shoulders like Eddie Vedder at a grunge concert, was the nearby Sunni mosque, the most important one in Baghdad. "When we first got here, they were waving at us," Sgt. Robert Beatty says in the film. "Soon as we'd drive by, we'd get shot at. . . . You know, they will take your life."
Granted incredible access inside the palace, on patrol, on raids, during interrogations and riots and firefights, and at the airport as casualties got loaded aboard big-bellied planes, Tucker recorded it all, with interesting political restraint. He's on the soldiers' side, but not overtly against the commander in chief, and while he's sympathetic with the Iraqis, who bear the brunt of the war, his camera captures the hostility that keeps many of his young gunner subjects from being PC nice about the locals. Children run up to gunner Humvees with arms outstretched, then throw rocks. The gunners find weapons and $48,000 at a sheik's house. "Later that week," Tucker's somber voice-over explains, "the sheik stopped by with a home-cooked meal for the colonel, as if nothing had happened and they were old friends." "Good Amrika!" chirps one boy; "that little kid tried to spit on me!" notes a soldier. In one home-invasion raid, a terrified Iraqi woman says, "Thank you! I love you!" Does she know English? "A little! I'm sorry!" Miscommunication and paranoia rule, an effect heightened by Tucker's shaky-cam vérité.
And yet, Tucker's voice-over notes, "Some days it feels almost normal here, as Lt. Colgan and his team talk to the neighbors—people wave as they drive past." Second Lt. Benjamin Colgan's team was called the "Tomb Raiders," but he's the least gung-ho soldier in the film, the quietest, depicted shaking hands companionably with an Iraqi. An insurgent's improvised explosive device (IED) killed Colgan after Tucker left. It hit the filmmaker hard, because Colgan was from Kent, and Tucker "knew the mountains he dreamed of." Another tough thing: Colgan might have been fatally betrayed by Mohammad, aka "Mike Tyson," a U.S. interpreter and accused insurgent spy. "If it's true, he's responsible for at least three murders," a soldier reports. "He'll be sent to Abu Ghraib prison. Nothing is black-and-white here anymore."
Gunner Palace is a litmus test for an America scarcely less bitterly divided than Iraq. When right-winger Sean Hannity grilled Tucker on Fox News, he thought maybe the footage of GIs frolicking in Uday's pool might be a Michael Moore–ish slur on our brave boys. (Tucker noted that fun in the sun feels different when there's a mortar shell in the pool, and more are apt to fall at any time.) When left-wingers at the film's Telluride premiere last Labor Day demanded that Tucker denounce the scene in which punky young gunner Pfc. Stuart Wilf dons a sheik costume with a mop for a wig and mocks Iraqis, Tucker refused to bust him for cultural insensitivity.
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Iraqi democracy looks great in U.S. headlines, but early on, it doesn't look so great at the blighted grass roots. Gunner commander Bill Rabena tries to soothe angry Iraqis at a political meeting: "Please remember, we had this conversation about acting civilly two months ago! I'm sure we can get the same discussion done without screaming across the table. Now, is the issue that we have one of our council members that's not showing up because he's been threatened?"
Right-wingers can view the chaos as justification for the war and sneaky Iraqi murderousness as justification for Abu Ghraib's brutality. Left-wingers can point out the scene where an Iraqi in handcuffs protests, "I am a journalist! You mistake this!" and the gunners tell him to shut up. "Just shut your mouth in Iraq," he bitterly replies, neatly nailing the hypocrisy of Bush's "democracy building." Right-wingers can see him as an insurgent. Left-wingers can see that he sure as hell will be if he gets out of the rape rooms of Abu Ghraib alive. When Tucker films a young U.S. intelligence agent bragging about how he reduced muscular 205-pound Iraqis to blubbering tears by threatening to send them and their families to Cuba, and the guy snickers about lying about the evidence against them (which they can't read because it's in English), rightists will snicker with him and leftists will weep for democracy.
Because of its ideological ambiguity and the universal wish to support the troops, Gunner Palace won an extraordinarily rare victory over the Motion Picture Association ratings board, which granted an appeal to change the rating from R to PG-13 ("parents strongly cautioned"). Variety calls it "the most profane PG-13 pic ever," and some ratings jurors reportedly wept over the landmark decision. Fahrenheit 9/11's similar appeal failed, even though its four "motherfuckers" are far outnumbered by Gunner's fusillade of F-words. Typically, two F's get you an R. But if the Army gets to recruit kids on campus, it's only fair that they should get to see a movie showing what happens to them thereafter.
But the denizens of Gunner Palace don't think Americans really care what happens to the troops. "After you watch this, you're gonna get your popcorn out of the microwave," predicts Beatty in the film. "And you'll forget me by the end." He's wrong. Gunner Palace sticks with you.
Tim Appelo, Seattle Weekly
