"Pure Hunters, Us"
The Culture of Violence We’ve Grown to Love
From now on I’ll be reading all of my pieces out loud. Most of the time, recordings will be reserved for paying subscribers, but this one’s a freebie because I’m happy to be back in Paris/am feeling generous. Voilà quoi:
1
“We chase down happiness,
Pure hunters, us.
The sun continues to shine.
On a festival of cruelty
In your head, and in mine.”
Albert Camus, Caligula
There’s an almost identical image in the fictional movie Civil War (2024) and the 2021 docuseries The Line that’s been haunting me for weeks.
In Civil War, directed by Alex Garland (The Beach, Ex-Machina, Annihilation, Men), a hardened war photographer named Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) travels with her journalist pals across a sectarian USA to document the brutality of a 21st-century American civil war.
Without spoiling much (I’ve seen it three times), suffice to say Civil War succeeds as an anti-war film for two reasons: first, there’s no clear understanding of which side the viewer should be rooting for, and that’s the point—when the shooting starts, you can throw your made-for-TV social-media approved morality out the window—and second, Civil War reveals just how quickly brutality is normalized during wartime; by doing so, it glorifies beautifies violence in a revolting, awe-inspiring, addictive way.
2
Whenever something violent happens in the USA, civilians and politicians alike are the first to say it:
“There’s no place for violence here in America. It’s not who we are as a nation.”
But America isn’t a nation, and such phrases are a fantasy. Civil War makes clear that there is a place for violence in the USA (the place can be almost anywhere), and pretending proselytizing otherwise only perpetuates the problem by convincing us of objective morality, and that it remains something knowable the deeper we delve into the human abyss.
3
“But Civil War is just a movie. It isn’t real life.”
Which begs the question:
where do I draw the line between knowledge entertainment and sensationalism voyeurism?
I watch blurry videos of mass shootings to stay informed experience the shock factor, noting escape routes at movie theatres and Walmarts because I’m told to be prepared. The news, the movies, and the algorithms now suggest I inform myself about child abductions in foreign countries while my friends’ real-life children learn the term “active shooter” in elementary school … and still, I insist you’ve gotta listen to this true-crime podcast while I lament the brutal videos I watch about what’s happening in conflict zones across the world.
4
What might happen if I acknowledged that in some way, I, too, am complicit?1
In 2023 alone, the United States of America spent over $900 billion on military investment, which is more than the following fourteen countries combined … still, if I want to pretend the violent bedrock of the world economy doesn’t affect my psyche, I can settle for a different kind of sublimation via made-for-TV tales of rapist celebrities serial killers, domestic abusers, cult leaders, and anything else the black screen of death can do to raise the hair on my calloused skin—here’s looking at You, Penguin, True Detective, Mind Hunter, Joker, The Jynx, Fargo, Lady in the Lake, Ripley, Promising Young Woman, Dahmer, Call of Duty, The Last of Us, true-crime podcasts narrated by soft-spoken voyeurs, and three of the four top books on the NY Times Bestseller list:
It’s uncomfortable for me to acknowledge such casual ubiquity of violence in my life,
which strikes me as a problem in an economy that sells me violence at every turn. The alternative is to continue uttering the empty phrase this is not who we are as a nation whenever a mass shooting rouses me from my sadistic slumber … or to hashtag #freegaza when enough acquaintances make me feel guilty about “not doing anything” (as if social media ever gave peace a chance) … or, finally, to chant trite slogans in the streets to sublimate my complicity, forever chasing the darker demons of my nature far, far away.
Another alternative, however uncomfortable it may be, is to steel myself
to confront the ugly truth that we are all of us living participating in a society of spectators enthralled by a culture of violence, which is precisely what Alex Gibney’s 2021 docuseries The Line reveals in a brutal, harrowing, and uncompromising way.
5
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
(Spoiler Alert: if you’re not familiar with the story of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, consider learning about him here before continuing)
A tale as old as time:
A liberation army is sent to a devastated land to protect vested interests fight monsters. In the process, soldiers within the liberation army become the very monsters they were sent across the globe to fight.
Aside from the film’s numerous achievements, The Line’s most jarring lesson is how entertainment modern warfare makes voyeurs criminals out of you and me.
Ostensibly, The Line is about the 2018 war crime trials of Eddie Gallagher,
a decorated Navy SEAL trained killing machine accused of murdering civilians in Mosul, Iraq, including a sixteen-year-old an ISIS fighter who Gallagher allegedly stabbed before posing for a photo next to the teenager’s corpse.
The docuseries interviews various witnesses and defenders of Gallagher’s misconduct war crimes, which include gruesome stories of sniping an old man standing on a street corner and shooting a little girl playing by a river in the stomach (the details are grotesque, as the filmmaker warfare intends; as a viewer an informed citizen, it’s impossible to look away).
Throughout The Line, Gallagher’s accusers insist that there are unspoken rules to war and that “the truth” (i.e., objectivity) is paramount tenable. Gallagher’s supporters, on the other hand, believe war is hell, and that to speak of its hellishness is to cross a sacred line—in other words, truth morality is malleable in times of war, or to use the words of William Tecumseh Sherman: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
While Gallagher’s actions were undeniably ruthless, his accusers’ naïveté is absolute regarding the documentary’s underlying lesson. Navy SEALS require a different moralistic line than you and me during times of war, and the film deftly reveals the armchair ethicist’s absurdity in criticizing a bigoted soldier an obedient killing machine for becoming the very type of psychopath he was sent across an ocean to fight.
6
At the end of The Line, the viewer is invited deeper into the abyss via shaky headcam footage that shows a Navy SEAL addicted to Tramadol Eddie Gallagher ripping open a medical kit to treat an injured ISIS fighter sixteen-year-old writhing and moaning on the ground (the headcam is turned off before the alleged war crime is committed).
According to all available sources, the captured POW dies a few minutes later from injuries stab wounds to the chest and neck, culminating in the now-infamous photo of Eddie Gallagher an American killing machine posing next to a corpse, grabbing a boy soldier by the hair, holding him up like a proud hunter who’s just felled a deer with a high-powered rifle (see below).
No longer at risk of imprisonment, in the documentary, Gallagher explains his version of the story from the warmly lit interior of a suburban home:
“Nobody had any intention of saving this dude or trying to bring him to a higher level of care … I just knew, I was like, ‘we’re not gonna execute this guy. We can’t just outright kill this dude. So we’ll just do medical treatments on him until he expires … using it as almost, like, a cadaver, like, go ahead and practice it.’ We were not trying to save this guy. It was about making this guy feel pain … The guy needed to die … I’d say the [medical] procedures were just, like, the cherry on top, I guess.”
The human being knows no limits when it comes to justifying brutality,
and while I’d like to think I’m nothing like Eddie Gallagher, The Line forced me to consider my own voyeuristic fascination as part of the same spectrum of violence that haunts me in the film’s final images.
At the end of both The Line and Civil War, the viewer is confronted with an almost identical image that beckons me closer to the screen deeper into the abyss … and though I’m writing to you, dear reader, safely from my peaceful Parisian apartment, far, far away from the killing fields of both real and fictional wars, in some not insignificant way, I’m left with the conclusion that I, too, am a perpetuator of this culture of violence, an imbiber of intoxications both real and imagined,2 that macabre elixir which polite progressive society doesn’t dare want me to admit.
My latest novel, The Requisitions (Kingdom Anywhere, 2024), is about the Nazi Occupation of Poland, which rendered everyone complicit in some way as perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Read more about it here or purchase The Requisitions wherever books are sold.
I’m in Japan right now. One thing I love about Japan is that I never, ever feel like anyone is sizing me up. In the US, there is an undercurrent of potential violence that I often feel from other dudes. That’s absent in Japan.
American English could also be considered more violent with everyday idioms. For example, “I’d kill for,” “bite the bullet,” “take a stab at it,” “twist your arm,” etc.