BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott

SCREENWRITER: Ken Nolan

FILM STARS: Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Ioan Gruffudd, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, Sam Shepard, Kim Coates, Željko Ivanek, Jeremy Piven, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Mark Bowden

TYPE: Non-Fiction

PUBLISHER: Corgi

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 2000

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1999

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: War

WORDS: This is a ball tearer of a movie. It is both historically interesting being based on real events) and viscerally exciting.

It is highly manipulative with its siege mentality, but it has to be. It’s a film. Narrative film is all about good guys and bad guys with some occasional shades of grey. Ostensibly a war movie about one battle it is also a men on a mission movie, a escaping from enemy territory movie, a survival movie, a fighting against overwhelming odds movie.

You can see shades of The Dirty Dozen (1967), Too Late the Hero (1970), Zulu (1964), The Warriors (1979), Escape from New York (1981), The Wild Geese (1978), The Alamo (1960).

Many films have exploited the numerical disadvantage scenario. And here is the problem, you always find yourself rooting for the underdog regardless of the nobleness of his cause. Here the cause was noble, but I do recall finding myself hoping the skinheads would evade the overwhelming number of Asian Australians trying to get them in Romper Stomper (1992) and I have zero love for skinheads. That wasn’t the point of the movie but that is how it played. I mean is there any reason to root for the British colonialist army that commits a wholesale slaughter of Zulus at Roarke’s Drift in Zulu (1964)? No, but we do. Film does that. It is natural to go for the few in number, the outnumbered, the out gunned … and, beyond film but in a world dominated by visual media, perhaps that explains in part, some of the support for Hamas over Israel.

The sight of hundreds of black Africans being killed by a largely white army is something you don’t find on screens much nowadays. (Rightly or wrongly) Imperialism and colnialism, once the staple of 1930s action adventure films (The Lost Patrol (1934), Beau Geste (1939), Gunga Din (1939), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), King Solomon’s Mines (1937), any number of Tarzan movies) aren’t very popular unless there is a noble cause.

Here though the cause is noble.

The movie documents efforts by the Unified Task Force to capture Somali faction leader and warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in 1993, and the resulting battle in Mogadishu between United States forces and Aidid’s militia. The battle was crucial in securing humanitarian aid to the populace of Somalia. Only the most hardened anti -American like a Noam Chomsky, or John Pilger would find fault here, but then again, they would rather have the populace starve to justify their intellectual viewpoint.

There may be ulterior motives, there may be historical and philosophical inconsistencies, there may be alternative explanations, there may be societal nuances, there may have been with hindsight better solutions, but at the time the mission was a noble one.

And the film can get away with the action and violence against the third world because the cause is noble … much like it is in Tears of the Sun (2003), The Wild Geese (1978), and even The Wild Bunch (1969).

The film is well directed and visceral and impressively Ridley Scott (who runs, hot and cold, but mainly hot, even his failures have merit) keeps the actions flowing, keeps the factual narrative understandable, while keeping the big cast of characters (there are at least five or six central roles the story revolves around) in view at all times. Needless to say, the larger enemy, as is common in films like this are largely anonymous. They are given some time but nothing approximating “their version of the events”.

More impressive is Scott’s success in keeping the cast sounding American. At least four of the leads are English or Welsh, and there is an Australian, a Slovenian and a Dane playing Americans. Generally, as is the style they tend to broad American accents (not all Americans have broad accents) but they all work. Of course, try as they might they can’t sound as authentically American as native speakers with authority like Tom Sizemore and Sam Shepherd. It’s hard to single out anyone but Harnett (always underrated) is great and Bana’s performance rightly solidified his popularity in the US whist Tom Sizemore looks and acts as if was at the battle.

The screenplay but Ken Nolan was his first and he gives all his characters bits of dialogue to link the action set pieces and also to explain the history behind the action and conflict whilst keeping them relatable individuals. I note, apparently, Nolan was one of several writers (including Steven Zaillian, Stephen Gaghan, Eric Roth) who contributed to the final shooting script, though he was the only one to receive on-screen credit.

The film is a rollercoaster and even at almost two and a half hours it never lags. There are the stock heroic situations, but they are deglamourized by Scott who keeps it real and visceral. The action, unrelenting though always, in these kinds of films makes one think the body count should have been a lot higher that it was especially on the ”heroes“ side. 140 US elite soldiers went into battle, 18 were killed, 73 wounded. The Malaysian and Pakistani forces who were involved with the US are sidelined story wise, though here perhaps understandably as the Malaysian forces suffered one death and seven wounded, and Pakistani forces two injuries. Somali casualties were higher; most estimates are between 133 and 700 dead.

The book is one of those (I find) annoying narrative non-fiction books (aka the non-fiction novel, creative non-fiction, literary non-fiction). It is non-fiction that supposedly reads like fiction. By that I don’t mean academic non-fiction that is so well written its page turning and cliff hanging stuff (it does exist) but non-fiction that has stuff going on the author couldn’t possibly know for sure. ie: Where there is fictitious conversations and dialogue between characters (where no recording or notes exist), where the author has articulated the thoughts of the historical people, and where the author uses the storytelling techniques of fiction

It’s a spectrum though. Narrative nonfiction is still meant to be non-fiction. The books are (hopefully) well-researched and factually accurate but the author is trying to tell a compelling narrative or story that is both informational and entertaining.

Imagine the difference between non-fiction and fiction as a lineal spectrum, where on one side is strict academic factual non-fiction and on the other is completely imaginary fiction. Narrative non-fiction would sit as close to the fiction side as you can while still being non-fiction (on the other hand, historical novels are as close to non-fiction as you can while still being fiction – factually correct in dates, places, and sometimes people, but wholly made up otherwise).

And here is my problem. I like to read for knowledge and for entertainment and know that there is crossover. However, the informational side of my brain that relishes non-fiction (and even likes to critique it for accuracy) works so actively that when I read a book that calls itself “non-fiction” albeit narrative non-fiction, I find myself thinking “well how the fark did he know that?”, “He would not have said that”, “How do we know what was going through her mind?”. A non-fiction approach to the same would have said something like “We don’t know what was going through their head but given the events that were unfolding, and the nature of the person in question, it is reasonable to assume X or Y was being thought about”. Not really page turning stuff.

This stuff has been around for years but really rose in the 1960s with people writing for magazines, especially youth oriented magazines. Truman Capote claimed to have invented this genre with his book In Cold Blood (1965). That is a milestone book but I will cut Capote some slack as he sat down and interviewed both the killers central to the story, and took some 8000 pages of notes and even then true-crime writers at the time complained of fabrications made by Capote which distort the historical reality.

And this is ultimately my problem. I have no drama with the non-fiction narrative novel as long as it does not distort what historical fact we know and as long as it allows for other explanations. There is not much opening there but those books do exist. Generally though, I prefer to read a historical novel or a non-fiction book on the events … they make the compartments in my brain happier.

I’m a lot more forgiving when (non-documentary) movies do narrative non-fiction because they are meant to be pure entertainment and don’t purport to be real (and because we are seeing actors, and sets we know it isn’t) and again, they don’t usually explain what is going through a real life historical characters head.”

Author Mark Bowden was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote for Sports illustrated, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Men’s Journal which perhaps explains the narrative non-fiction style as magazines love that in short story form. He has also written Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (2001) and Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam (2006).

There is a lot of detail in the book with maps and photos and good descriptions of the battle (though, yes, in the narrative fiction style) but it seems (according to the historians) to get the facts right as well as the mood … there is even a chapter called “the Alamo” where the soldiers dig in around the site of the first Black Hawk helicopter crash site and fend off the larger enemy. And to the authors credit he does credit (sic) at the end of the book where in his notes, written or recorded, the conversations or events come from as well as other articles and books. Like all good non-fiction there is an inddex, as there should be, even in a non-fiction novel. I have less trust if they dont have one.

I have dipped into the book and may read it, but I will definetly watch the film again.

Maps from the book

Well most people know where Africa is (I hope), but Somalia, perhaps not

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