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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   36667 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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What an impressive propaganda technique. That's my one-line review to the "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat", and I mean it most sincerely. I really am impressed.

This quote from a New York Times film critic serves both as a quick plot summary and as the main impression the film conveys:

... a sprawling film that's a well-researched essay about the 1960 regime change in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the part the United States, particularly the C.I.A., played.

Let's focus on the "well-researched" part, the part that lends the film a documentary gravitas, the propaganda technique I so admire.

The documentary is a collage of footage, archival audio and video clips, and quotes with careful citations that briefly appear on screen. It doesn't have a narrator--except occasionally it does, like from 22:56 to 24:19, where English text quoting In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo.Inc overlays archival footage while the said author reads his work in original French:

The algorithm Congo Inc. was invented Africa was carved up. Capitalized by Leopold II, it was quickly developed to supply the whole world with rubber and smooth the way to World War I. The contribution of Congo Inc. to the 2nd World War was key. It provided the U.S. with uranium from Shinkolobwe that wiped Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth while it planted the concept of 'mutual assured destruction'. During the so-called Cold War the algorithm remained red-hot. It contributed vastly to the devastation of Vietnam allowing Bell UH1-Huey helicopters, sides gaping wide, to spit millions of copper bullets from Kolwezi over the countryside from Hanoi to Hue via Danang all the way to the port of Haiphong.

Here's the beauty: "Congo Inc." is a work of fiction. It is a novel. It is not, and never claimed to be, an accurate and contextualized account of history, nor is it subject to the kind of critique for accuracy that a work of non-fiction would receive.

The technique allows the film to convey the impression of historical gravitas while absolving it of any responsibility for truth, accuracy, or context. What is there to criticize? All the film does is feature a Belgian writer connected to Congo by birth and some years of residence, reading from his work. It's a work of fiction--so what, when the main theme of the film is to suggest the interweaving of art and politics. The film's omission of the category of the work is completely in line with their omission of such information about their other sources. Surely the film has done its due diligence by accurately citing the sources, thus providing any interested viewer with the requisite information to establish the necessary level of epistemology for the content of any citation it happens to feature. If anything, it's a mark of respect for the sophistication of the viewer that the film doesn't bother contextualizing these works, since surely the viewer is quite familiar with both the history of Sub-Saharan Africa in general, and prominent literary works of authors with Sub-Saharan African ties in particular.

Yes, its Sundance Festival Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation is well-deserved. I look forward to future adaptations of this technique, where documentaries about the CIA quote John Grisham's novels, and documentaries about the Catholic Church quote "The Da Vinci Code".

Growing up, multiple Vietnam war vets I worked with or had as scoutmasters or baseball coaches told me that to understand what Vietnam was like, I should watch Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now.

I'm not sure what you find objectionable about a work of historical fiction being used to illustrate a period. It's a tradition that dates back to...I'm not sure it actually has a beginning. If it does, it certainly goes back so far that it predates or mingles with the creation of our concept of fiction.

Growing up, multiple Vietnam war vets I worked with or had as scoutmasters or baseball coaches told me that to understand what Vietnam was like, I should watch Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now.

I can't help but object that those are all really different movies, which makes me confused about those people thought Vietnam was like? Full Metal Jacket is mostly famous for the first half showing the brutal boot camp. The second half is pretty forgettable, with the main character working as a journalist in Saigon. Apocalypse Now is based on Heart of Darkness, a book set in 19th century Africa, so it makes the Vietnamese look like primitive savages, which always bothered me. Platoon is by far the most realistic, since it's based on Oliver Stone's own experiences in the war, although of course it focuses on the most sensational parts and ignores all of the bland, boring parts that would make up any normal soldier's life.

I'm not in a real position to argue for or against them as factual representations of the Vietnam war, I've never been in a fistfight in Vietnam let alone a war there.

But I can tell you that's what these guys told me. They experienced it, and they felt that the information from that experience could best be communicated to me by those fictional films. They felt it captured something about what it felt like. When you say the films are all very different: the experience of the war was different for different people. When you say they drew influence from other fiction: there's a universality to the experience, and the soldiers themselves would have viewed it through those narratives.

They experienced it, and they felt that the information from that experience could best be communicated to me by those fictional films. They felt it captured something about what it felt like.

I agree that the value of fiction is, among other things, in its success in conveying emotional truths. If "how it felt" is best conveyed with disturbing depictions of atrocious savagery told in flat matter-of-fact manner (like in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"), then that's what the author does. Nobody need question whether this specific instance of atrocious savagery happened, or even whether this type or this level of atrocious savagery happened somewhere in this time-and-place. Nobody need question such thing, because that's besides the point, so long as the depiction serves to convey "how it felt".

The problem arises when fiction gets presented as historical fact. I would have a problem if a documentary on Vietnam intermixed historical footage with scenes from "Apocalypse Now", while Tim O'Brien reads excerpts from "The Things They Carried", especially if the intended audience is not familiar with either work or the author and thus is unaware that they are works of fiction.

This just feels very standard in a lot of documentaries.

Maybe you're right. I have drifted away from watching documentaries in the past decade, and even then my preference was for nature and science themes. It's possible that the standards of presenting evidence have significantly changed (deteriorated?) since then.

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