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| Photo credit: Mudbound/IMDb |
In Dee Rees’s Mudbound,
Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) gets a taste of a meal he’d rather not have.
Ronsel’s a tank commander leading the American charge across Germany in the
late stage of World War II, the time when the Allies slogged their way toward
Berlin and toward a victory made to sound
deceptively simple by the narratives spun by the nation’s leaders. Thanks to
the propaganda machines rubber-stamped by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and
Harry Truman, citizens at home are led to believe in American might, ingenuity,
and moral righteousness in opposition the heinous Nazis.
Ronsel orders his men to maneuver on the battlefield
from inside his tank, a marvel of American engineering, its armored exterior
enough to give even the most anxiety-prone soldier a sense of comfort on par
with the folks eating their meatloaf dinners at home. But it’s not safe and
comfort isn’t possible when hunks of blisteringly hot metal hurtle toward him
and his comrades from the increasingly desperate German soldiers who have
nothing left to lose. Mortar shells shred the sides of the vehicle like toilet
paper, and light seeps through. Bright beams
that would mean hope in any other context instead become harbingers of doom as
bullets whistle through the tank’s newly punctured exterior. Ronsel’s eyes
bulge, disbelieving what he sees. “We’re winning, this can’t happen,” his
desperate pupils seem to say while his mouth hangs slightly agape. The sounds
that follow over the ensuing moments—which feel like hours—are sickeningly wet,
and Ronsel’s open mouth is dotted with a foreign substance. He recoils, unable
to understand that on his tongue lies the blood of his friend, now slumped in
the tank, never to move again.
The war has force-fed
Ronsel something vile. Every morsel of actual food he muscles down and every
swig of cheap whiskey he glugs for the rest of his days will only share space
in his mouth with the taste of survivor guilt, of his country’s misplaced
hubris, of carnage.
But Ronsel is not alone in his film. Much like
the tank he left in Germany, his home merely has the guise of comfort. It’s a
place that should be safe but is nothing more than a target for viciousness.
The white establishment in his home state of Mississippi, many of whom are
veterans of the First World War, spews racist and increasingly violent bile at
him, and his war experience proved to him that his family’s rickety wooden home
won’t protect him any more than his far sturdier tank did. We humans
are remarkably capable of breaking through all protections in order to hurt
each other, and my, oh my, do the white people in town ever want to hurt Ronsel
for being alive. While Ronsel wishes to never again be subjected to war, these
pitiful old white men had a different reaction to their time in the armed
forces: They got a taste for war, and they find in Ronsel a meal for the
taking.
Nor is Ronsel alone in film history. The
intermingling of food and warfare pops up again and again in war pictures that
focus on intimacy, introspection, and claustrophobia.
The 1932 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms makes you feel the weight of World War I fall on top of
you—literally—during a meal shared by protagonist Frederic Henry (Gary Cooper)
and others in the Italian army. They are huddled in the closest thing a trench
can have to an “office.” The men display a war’s version of opulence, pulling
out a hidden wheel of cheese from a bag and cooking the longest spaghetti
noodles you’ll ever see because, as one man says, “There won’t be anything to
eat once the attack starts.” It’s a ritual meant to evoke normal times in the
face of danger, but this normal-times fantasy is only for the privileged
few—lines of soldiers march grimly past the office’s door to their deaths with
nary a morsel to call their own.
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| Photo credit: A Farewell to Arms/IMDb |
Director Frank Borzage keeps these figures
huddled in a close circle, but the camera hangs back at a medium distance to
keep itself removed from their display of excess (relative to the other
soldiers). They dine among death, delaying coming to terms with their lack of
power to stop the war, or the plight of the less lucky soldiers who pass them.
They chomp, they chew, and then the lights go out. The walls quake and flashes
of bright fury pop on the screen. Support beams fall and a dust cloud hangs
thick over the room like the spaghetti sauce had on their food. It turns out
the man who was so quick to eat was wrong—there remains plenty of food to eat
as long as you don’t mind snatching it from the hands of a dead man. Frederic,
as an American who enlisted as an ambulance driver simply because it was
gainful employment, is arguably the film’s character least complicit in the
floundering war effort. He is left injured and sent to a hospital, marked with
the guilt of having eaten well while his fellow soldiers, the men he was
duty-bound to save from the battlefield in his ambulance, perished all around
him. But at the hospital, he finds love and tragedy, and something that resembles redemption.
Stanley Kubrick was a filmmaker wholly
uninterested in redemption. The soul’s gradual corruption was more his speed, which
was apparent from the very beginning of his career, 1953’s Fear and Desire. The
film does not concern itself with a specific conflict, but rather war itself.
The sides go unnamed, although they resemble Americans and Germans, with the “Americans”
represented by a group of soldiers shot down behind enemy lines. Their journey
back to their side of the war causes each to lose his humanity in chilling
ways. The lost soldiers find a cabin occupied by a pair of “Germans.”
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| Photo credit: Fear and Desire/IMDb |
Besides the two foreign foes, the cabin holds
much-needed supplies, including guns and
food. Kubrick takes extra care when shooting the food in close-up,
as the enemy soldiers cook up some beans and bread and chat warmly with each
other. Our heroes need to get in and dispense of their
enemies as quietly as possible so as not to alert any others in the area. That
means they must resort to using knives, those sharp utensils that carve up
everyone’s favorite savory foods. Stabs and jabs go straight into the camera,
as the presumptive Americans’ faces stare
back at us with a mix of confusion, detachment, and a sense of pained
self-awareness buried deep beneath their training to kill. The presumptive Germans’ hands grasp around them and land in a pile of beans,
which look upon closer inspection to be a visual equal to the entrails spilling
out of them just out of frame. Their hands twitch, clutching a piece of crumbly
bread stained by viscous bean juice and blood, and stop. The youngest “American”
soldier, Sidney (Paul Mazursky), stares at the meal he and his fellow “chefs”
have laid out in front of them. He loses his ability to speak as he peers into
the eyes of the men he has killed and the food he has spilled. His soul is
gone, and his brain is quickly on its way out the door, too, all while his
stomach rumbles.
The sanity of Maya, the analytical and logical
CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty,
is never in doubt. She is a modern soldier on a different battlefield,
and her tactics are not the same as the ones used by the soldiers discussed
above. She sits at a computer and reviews travel records, bank statements,
video footage, and more for nearly a decade as she hunts down Osama bin Laden.
Her hunger is less immediately noticeable than the other soldiers’, but it
exists. She starves for information that will lead to the satisfaction of being
right, and for the consequences of that rightness: the death of a man so
diabolical that his actions caused the collective nervous breakdown of a
country—a breakdown that still deepens to this day. It’s almost like actual
food doesn’t once cross her mind, with one horribly ill-timed exception:
when the old soldiers’ battlefield inserts itself into the new soldier’s life.
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| Photo credit: Zero Dark Thirty/IMDb |
During a dinner with the one person she can
plausibly call a friend, Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), Maya sits at a table in one
of those luxury hotels that have popped up in the Middle East as the region
looks to showcase its oil money. On the surface, the pristine setting is as far
away as you can get from the meals consumed by Ronsel, Frederic, and Kubrick’s
ragtag bunch of soldiers. The floor is buffed within an inch of its life, the
wine glasses are full, and the spotless tablecloths betray no loose threads. Once again, it’s all for show. Soon enough, the fine
marble, the polished floors, and the delicious food is mixed with flames,
blood, and mangled limbs as a suicide bomber’s attack destroys the exterior of
the Islamabad Marriott. Maya and Jessica are touched by the war, just like the
soldiers of old. The food in their mouths becomes tainted with smoke, plaster,
dust, and the remains of humans who had the hubris to believe they could outrun
the war’s—the hunger’s—grasp.
But they can’t. It never ends. Soldiers of all
kinds will forever taste the fruits of their labor, becoming consumed by their hunger or sickened by what they’ve consumed. But perhaps, Mudbound
suggests, there is something that can take the bad taste out of a soldier’s
mouth. They won’t like it, though. It’s merely replacing one form of trauma
with another. The Ku Klux Klan, terrorists as cruel as any in bin Laden’s
organization, cuts out Ronsel’s tongue to punish him for some ginned up reason
that makes sense in their twisted minds. Their hunger for blood removes his
ability to taste it. He’ll never taste war, nor anything else, again.
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