On the day I went to see Oren Moverman’s The
Messenger, the editorialists for the London
Daily Telegraph were so moved by an
interview in that paper with
Christina Schmid, the widow of Olaf Schmid, a British soldier
killed in Afghanistan, that they published an
article in which they are described
as “Two Heroes of the War in Afghanistan.” Sgt. Schmid had been a
bomb disposal expert who, after defusing 64 IEDs during his tour,
was killed shortly before he was due to come home by the 65th.
Mrs. Schmid was commended because her “public dignity and
self-control, rare qualities nowadays when people are expected to
display their emotions openly, are heroic in their own way.” The
editorial added that “none of the speeches made by our
politicians have come close to matching the straightforward
explanation offered by Mrs. Schmid for why the troops are there.
‘They are there to protect our homeland — that is why they go to
war — and they should feel loved and appreciated,’ she said.”
Loved and appreciated as opposed to what? Well, one answer would
be pitied, which is pretty much all that the American movie
industry can manage, even when it is sponsoring an Israeli
director like Mr. Moverman, who co-wrote the screenplay to
The Messenger with Alessandro Camon. Pity we have
got plenty of, and not just for the soldiers who have nothing to
show for their service but psychological trauma. There’s also
pity for the next of kin of those killed in action, notification
of whom is the job of the film’s two soldier heroes, Will
Montgomery (Ben Foster) and Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson). Will, a
staff sergeant, is a decorated veteran of the Iraq war, a bona
fide hero; Tony, an improbably aged captain, is a veteran of the
1991 Persian Gulf War (“it wasn’t much of a war”) who feels
aggrieved that he never got to go back to war again. One of the
bereaved, a young widow played by Samantha Morton, catches the
fancy of Sgt. Montgomery, but any potential relationship between
the two is hedged about with scruples on both sides.
It’s not much of a story, really, though there are some added
bits to hold our interest. Will has an ex-girlfriend named Kelly
(Jena Malone) who dumped him when he was overseas and now is
about to marry Alan (Michael Chernus), though not without some
regrets for her lost soldier-boy. Will and Tony at first don’t
much like each other, then become buddies and go on a fishing
trip, then crash Kelly’s and Alan’s engagement party and behave
rather badly, then tell each other of their secret sorrows. Yet,
through all this the movie seems oddly offhand about, even
uninterested in, the relationship between them. What it’s really
about is the emotions of the bereaved, which may easily be
imagined, and the reaction to them of the two soldiers whose news
precipitates those emotions — and whose own emotions cannot
remain unengaged by them.
In short, the movie is grief-porn. Like regular porn, it extracts
a certain kind of feeling from the lived context that normally
produces it — we receive only the most perfunctory introduction
to the bereaved, who have no other purpose here than to suffer —
and isolates that feeling in order to put it on show for those
who get a “transgressive” thrill out of watching what they know
should not be watched. What ought to be essentially private
experience is opened up to the public in order to produce a
vicarious sense of participation in those with a liking for such
titillation. The difference is that the users of porn are still
quite often ashamed of themselves for violating others’ privacy
in this way, whereas the audience of The Messenger
is much more likely to congratulate itself for its
compassion and its moral superiority to those deluded souls —
who are wisely kept off-stage in this movie — with an Horatian
sense of the honor of military sacrifice. Dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori? We may love our boys in
uniform, but we daren’t tell them that
anymore!
Is nothing sacred? we may ask. Yes. Grief is sacred. Emotion
generally is pretty special, but grief is the king of emotions,
the one deserving of the highest respect and awe. In its name,
all is permitted; with its sanction, we assure ourselves that we
have some understanding of what the grief-stricken have endured
and thus some level of participation in their moral exaltation. I
think we delude ourselves. I think the most affecting grief for
those who do not themselves share it is the kind that is not
given way to. Christina Schmid is said in
another article to have “told ten days
ago how she was ‘beaming’ with pride” when her husband’s body was
brought back to England. “‘I am very pleased to have my husband
home. He is an absolute hero,’ she said defiantly, as she wore
his service medals. ‘It was awesome to see that plane coming in
and to see him being taken off by his friends.’” And yet what she
doesn’t say she feels is felt nonetheless. Sunt lacrimae
rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, to put it in the
decent obscurity of a dead language. We can’t help our feelings
for those to whom the tears of mortality have come. But grief
that has anything more than that to say about itself, publicly,
is cheapened.
