American Made

American Made (dir. Doug Lyman, 2017) is one of several films and books I’ve encountered recently that highlight the early 1980s and the murky moral climate of the U. S. conduct of domestic and foreign affairs.  In this film, a pilot for TWA named Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) is recruited by the CIA to fly to Central America and take surveillance photographs of sensitive areas, mainly in Columbia, Panama, Columbia, and nearby countries.  He’s successful at this mission and draws attention to himself.  Members of the Medellin cartel recruit him to deliver drugs to the U. S. The CIA overlooks this activity because he’s so successful at reconnaissance.  Then the CIA recruits him to deliver weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras, and to ferry trainees from that country back and forth to a location in Louisiana for training.  Seal ends up working with Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, delivering drugs and accepting payoffs.  He diverts some of the weapons intended for the Contras to the cartel.  The CIA is aware of all this activity and tolerates it, keeping the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI and other law enforcement off Seal’s back because of his success as a reconnaissance photographer. Seal finally manages to deliver photos to the CIA of Columbian drug lords and the Contras accepting drugs and money. However, when these photos are leaked, Seal becomes a liability, and the CIA cuts him off, disavows all knowledge, and leaves him defenseless—he’s later assassinated by the cartel.

The film frames Seal’s experience as an American dream narrative—a man makes good, becomes rich, his family enjoys the wealth.  But what lesson is being drawn? Seal and his wife seem indifferent to, unaware of, the moral issues of what he does and of their newfound wealth—the film suggests that his involvement in these affairs played into the larger Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s (Oliver North makes an appearance). For Seal, this is all a rollicking turn of extreme fortune, a windfall, an adventure. The film is somewhat toneless in its portrayal of Seal. Events are shown as if they're part of a home movie--without irony or satire or condemnation.  This may be the film's method: to let the story stand on its own and to rely on the audience to draw obvious conclusions.  This is not necessarily a safe strategy: many viewers may applaud Seal for taking advantage of opportunities as they come to him.

Tom Crews plays Seal.  Crews is a good actor, though most of the roles he’s played recently in Jack Reacher and Mission Impossible films have been fairly generic. His role in this film is somewhat more specific and textured, but he struggles a bit to fill it.  His wide, toothy grin does suggest the vacuity of Seal’s character, his inability to recognize what he has become.  Domhall Gleeson (who played one of the Weasley brothers in the Harry Potter films) is effective as the soulless CIA agent who recruits Seal.

Barry Seal is based on the actual person who did become an informant for the CIA and drug enforcement, but the details of the real Seal’s life vary significantly from the life shown in the film, which is entirely fictional. The film may have been inspired by real people and events, but it doesn’t present them.

Play it as It Lays, by Joan Didion

Narrated in a harried, disintegrating, sometimes nearly disembodied voice, Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays (1972) traces the downward course of a woman as she undergoes divorce, abortion, her dependency on alcohol, drugs, and sex, mental and emotional exhaustion, her acting career’s decline, anxiety over her young daughter’s disability.  The narrative develops through a series of short chapters and monologues—it begins with a few chapters narrated from others’ points of view, but these soon give over to the dominant form of the novel).

The main character is Maria—the “I” is pronounced as in “eye,” and this is no coincidence.  Maria is a form of the name of Mary the mother of Christ, yet in the novel what at first passes for inexperience and fragile innocence gives way to deepening corruption and decay. I suspect the novel was written at a time when the world could still shock Didion—especially the world of Hollywood and Los Angeles where she spent much time working with her husband on various screenwriting projects.  Maria’s supposed fragility, her hypersensitivity to the world and events around her, may cause us to wonder how closely she is based on Didion, who drove a yellow Corvette as Maria does in the novel.  Maria speaks in the same voice so familiar from Didion’s early essays.  She’s obsessed with her dead parents, as Didion often seems to be in her essays. But Didion nearly always controls her voice, while Maria can control nothing. Didion’s essay voice is highly literate, intelligent, and observant—Maria seems to read little more than old issues of Vogue (for which Didion worked early in her career).  Her intellect is not particularly noticeable.

Maria’s problem, her psychological instability, her excessive fragility, must certainly predate the events in the novel.  She’s hardly capable of controlling her behavior, of changing the course she finds herself on.  She just plummets and plummets, and at some point more than midway through the novel I found myself wanting her to get it over with. This may be the main flaw in a novel that is otherwise deeply upsetting and compelling—her desire to destroy herself, her resistance to any form of friendship or help or love (all of these have betrayed her, or she has betrayed them).  One ceases to care about individuals so enthralled by the nothing.

The account of Maria's illegal abortion is grim—illegal because it was written before Roe v. Wade.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion

In Blue Nights (2011), Joan Didion pushes the limits which readers might be able to bear under the onslaught of personal revelations about her daughter’s death, her loneliness, her fears of aging, her marriage, and her family. Didion is the most personal of writers.  Her private insights reflect the outer world.  At times, one isn’t sure whether the world she writes about, or her private reflections, are more real, more important.  This method has worked to good effect throughout her career, especially in the essays of Slouching towards Bethlehem and White Noise and in other writings, such as Play it as it Lays, a novel in which the protagonist seems so like Didion that it is difficult to separate them. In this memoir Didion seems more fundamentally fractured, more vulnerable and scarred, than she does in any of her other works, including The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne.

The book has a rhythmic quality.  Didion moves back and forth in time as her thoughts and emotions dictate.  At points, she seems to leave the subject of her daughter behind entirely, but this is really an illusion.  Everything pertains to that reality: her daughter’s death at the age of 39 from complications from a lung infection. She doesn’t dwell on the details of the illness, or of other problems in her daughter’s life, though she does make clear her distaste for the sometimes abrasive and cruel practices of doctors and hospitals.

We learn a great deal about Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo: her adoption, her childhood precociousness and (sometimes) paranoia, her eccentricities and anxieties, and ultimately the diagnosis of manic depression.  Yet we learn much more about her impact on her parents, specifically on her mother.  The mother is the survivor. She agonizes over what she could have done to save her daughter, how she might have raised her differently, what she failed to notice.  She is full of self-recriminations, and more than once mentions her daughter’s statement that she was a bit “distant” as a mother.

“What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead.” This statement by Euripides is one Didion returns to repeatedly, an emotional refrain at the center of the book.  She reiterates her own observation: “when we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”

Just as it was difficult to read about the suffering of the Japanese tsunami victims in Richard Lloyd Perry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami, so here is it difficult to read about—to be exposed to, even plunged into—the writer’s grief, sadness, loneliness.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah casts his memoir about growing up in South Africa, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016), in a casual and light style.  But style shouldn’t lead readers to assume there is no substance.  Loosely following his life from infancy to early adulthood, Noah reveals what it was to grow up as a racially ambiguous boy under apartheid in the early 1980s.  However complex one may consider America’s racial climate, it is not as complex and fraught as South Africa’s.  Yet Noah’s story is not representative, and he makes this an important point: his father was a white-skinned German businessman.  His mother was a black-skinned Xhosa.  She was independent and assertive and despite living in a male-dominated, racist society, and against many odds, she made her own way and struggled to raise her son.  (He did not make it easy for her.  He was, to use a word Noah employs on a number of occasions, a “naughty” boy). Although she was not married to his father (inter-racial marriages were banned), she spent much time with him.  When they walked in public, mother and father would walk on separate sides of the street so no one would suspect they had a relationship.  She had to hide the fact that she had a light-skinned son.  His very existence, under apartheid, was illegal because sex between members of different racial groups was illegal: hence the title of the book. Because of his skin color, Noah could “pass” as white or colored.  Because he grew up in his mother’s Xhosa family, he knew how to “act” black.  Like his mother, he knew how to speak a number of major South African languages. He therefore fit in among black South Africans, once they got over the fact of his light skin. He could also pass as white, and the “colored” segment of South Africa did not exactly know what to make of him. He was as a result able to navigate his way through the last years of apartheid.  This book is a touching and revealing portrait of Noah’s mother (a remarkable woman) and of various members of his family and of his own childhood and adolescence in South Africa.

The Long March, by William Styron

When I start reading something by William Styron, I am stricken with the same surprised amazement I feel when I encounter writing by Philip Roth or Don DeLillo or Joan Didion or William Faulkner.  The shock of style, of a distinctive, idiosyncratic, enveloping style of writing that invests the meaning and events of the piece with significance, artistry,  and the author’s personality.  This is the feeling that came to me in the first few paragraphs of Styron’s short novel The Long March (1956).

The novel begins in a North Carolina military encampment of Marine reservists who have been called up for duty seven years after the end of World War II.  The Korean War is the reason they’ve been mustered. Two major events stand at the center of the novel: an accidental pair of explosions that kill eight reservists and a 36-mile march called for by a colonel who wants to enforce the rigor of his reservist Marines.  Most of the reservists have been called to duty from the middle of their domestic lives, they’re approaching middle age, they have families and jobs, and their plans don’t include a return to service.

The main character is a Marine captain named Culver and another captain named Mannix whom he’s become friends with in their six weeks of reserve duty. One point of the novel is to consider skeptically how Marines are always supposed to be Marines, even if they have been decommissioned for seven years.  When called to duty from private lives where they were free to set their own course, they are now expected to submit to authority and accept their place as integers in a complex equation of soldiers and machines and military hierarchies.

Culver and Mannix see themselves as individuals. They chafe in different ways against the reimposition of authority.  Culver comes to realize that to the colonel in command the reservists are just cogs in a machine.  The men who died in the explosions were unfortunate casualties.  What is important to the colonel is his ability to impose his will, to burnish his reputation, to display his ability to move large groups of men in one direction or another, in a grueling and pointless march.  Their individual lives are of no importance.

Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, by Mark Bowden

Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, by Mark Bowden (2017), recounts the central battle of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam.  American and ARVN forces didn’t expect an attack and hadn’t detected a buildup of North Vietnamese forces.  The North Vietnamese planned to take over the city amidst a civilian uprising which they thought the offensive would prompt. This was one of the costliest battles of the war in terms of civilian and military casualties on all sides,  Although the American story has been that the U. S. was victorious in Hue, Bowden argues that at best the U. S. could claim a draw, and that in many ways it was a defeat.  Psychologically, the battle was devastating to the American forces and to public perceptions of the war back home.  It revealed not only that the North Vietnamese forces were well organized and professional but also that the American leadership made numerous poor decisions and disseminated misleading optimistic information about the war that created false impressions back home.  Bowden uses many first-hand accounts, from soldiers in the field to military officers to civilians.  He describes acts of heroism and bravery, moments of sacrifice. He also notes the frequent disorganization of the American forces, their racism (all Vietnamese were “Gooks”), the looting and random killings in which some of them engaged. Although his emphasis is the American forces involved, he gives detailed accounts of the South and North Vietnamese perspectives as well.  The result is an account of the battle for Hue that is balanced, and thoroughly grim and depressing. 

I was a senior in high school during the Tet Offensive and paid attention to television and newspaper accounts of the battles.  I remember Walter Cronkite’s report in late February 1968 that had much to do with changing American perceptions of U.S. involvement in the war.  I was beginning to wonder whether I would be called to serve.  As a college student I would have a four-year deferment, but after graduation I would be subject to the draft.  My draft lottery number, which I received in my sophomore year of college, was 108.  At that point, draftees were being inducted with much higher numbers than mine.  I did not want to serve. I fiercely opposed the war, and while I could have given you reasons for my opposition, fear of death and injury was a prime factor in my opposition. I didn’t buy the domino theory and didn’t see the point of risking my life for something that didn’t impact the home front. I didn’t want to die.

Bowden’s account of the battle for Hue is one of the most graphic, violent, and unsettling accounts of war I’ve read. Young soldiers, many of them my age at the time, were dying or suffering brutal injuries.  They were not trained for urban combat, they themselves were afraid, and they lacked direction and purpose.  They often lacked leadership.  They fought because they were ordered to fight, because their companions were fighting, because they believed in what they were doing—there were many reasons. 

I have often reflected on what I would have done if I had been drafted.  But the last draft based on the lottery was in August 1972, and the last number called was 95