Young Guns
Jim Hoberman, Village Voice
Documentaries, like spinach, are supposed to be good for you and healthy for the body politic. The most striking thing about Gunner Palace, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's fascinating, if not entirely satisfying, digital video portrait of U.S. forces in Iraq, is that it addresses a hunger for leafy greens—which is to say, images of the war—that you may not have known you had.
Those who lived through the Vietnam period—and perhaps even more those who didn't—are familiar with that war's lysergic jungle iconography, rock chopper soundtrack, and druggy "Born to Kill" ethos. Gunner Palace, which John Kerry screened for his fellow senators last month, begins to provide a comparable simulation. Its points of reference are not Motown and westerns but rap and reality TV. Indeed, this often chaotic camcorder documentary—produced during Tucker's two two-month stretches embedded with the 2-3 Field Artillery—most often suggests a combination of The Real World and Cops, set to a plaintive gangsta beat.
The "Gunners" are barracked in one of Uday Hussein's pleasure palaces. "We dropped a bomb on it and now we party in it," one of Tucker's roommates explains. The ambience suggests a post-nuclear Las Vegas—a bunch of small-town kids with automatic weapons camped out in an abandoned luxury hotel, splashing around in the pool, putting golf balls amid the rubble of a goonish Arabian Nights fantasy. But these children of Oprah and the Internet are nothing if not self-conscious. Most are happy to perform for Tucker's camcorder, clowning in burnoose or expressing inanities they might have heard on TV. The most articulate are the group's rappers: "When those guns start blazing and our friends get hit, that's when our hearts start racing and our stomachs get woozy," Specialist Richmond Shaw concludes his number. "Cuz for y'all this is just a show but we live in this movie."
The brass is nonexistent but the kids are documented having fun with their Iraqi interpreters—middle-aged guys to whom they give nicknames like Mike Tyson and Superstar. (Throughout the movie, these men are killed off-camera or exposed as spies.) Unable to get jiggy with the local women, the soldiers seem to enjoy themselves most when playing with Iraqi kids. One goes to an orphanage and presents a three-year-old with a SpongeBob SquarePants doll: "He's one of my heroes." (Does that constitute child abuse or only cultural imperialism?)
...
Jim Hoberman, Village Voice
