by Roy Scranton
The Casting ends abruptly, ambiguously, with the artist suggesting that the story might not work because it’s too long, then delivering a few spliced-together sentences that have since been interpreted as Fast’s artistic statement: “I’m definitely not so much looking for a political angle. I’m more interested in the way that experience is turned into memory and then the way that memories become stories, the way that memories become mediated.”
With these sentences, Fast offers the exact ideological formulation justifying the consumption of wartime sacrifice as art. Our aesthetic engagement with war, it insists, is not about power but about narrative. We cast the traumatized soldier as our scapegoat, the one bearing the sins of war, and ignore numberless dead Iraqis in favor of attending to one American’s psychological suffering. Politics—the objective fact of the soldier’s existence as an agent of state violence—is displaced by an insistence on “memory” and “experience.” We’re not interested in blood, we tell ourselves. We’re interested in stories.
Fast later called his statement “a complete lie.”
3.
Omer Fast’s 2016 film Continuity is a feature-length revision of his videos Continuity (2012) and Spring (2016). It’s also an expansion and elaboration of The Casting. The film crew has been replaced by a middle-class German couple. The singular actor has been replaced by a series. The soldiers now serve in the Bundeswehr rather than the American army, and the war is in Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but the relationships are homologous. The ritual sacrifice is the same.
Watching Continuity carelessly, it’s easy to piece together a troubling but comprehensible narrative: An aimless, hash-smoking German kid named Daniel joins the Bundeswehr, looking for something that will feel as real as flame burning flesh. While in Afghanistan, he makes a pass at a fellow soldier and is gang-raped by several men in his unit. Later, on patrol, Daniel leaps out of his vehicle and runs into the desert. Several soldiers follow him. They are ambushed and killed.
Back home in Germany, Torsten and Katja Fiedler are crippled by grief, and hire a succession of young men, possibly prostitutes, to act out Daniel’s homecoming. They pick the men up at the Bahnhof, one after another, bring them home, and serve them dinner. The Daniels hallucinate maggots and fingers in the food, an eyeball in the wine, whether from self-medication or being drugged we don’t know. After each dinner, Katja tries to sleep with them. Three Daniels later, the Fiedlers change the game and hire an even younger boy, Felix, to role-play the events leading to their son’s enlistment. On his way to the Fiedlers’ one afternoon, Felix is hit and killed by a stolen sports car driven by a male prostitute, the protagonist of a second narrative strand.
The last Daniel’s disappearance renews Katja’s grief. Driving through the woods with Torsten, presumably to pick up yet another Daniel, she sees a camel walking down the highway and stops. She gets out of the car and follows the camel into the forest, Torsten close behind, to a clearing overlooking a sandy trench full of dead and dying soldiers, some of them Daniels. She watches an Afghan man collect the soldiers’ weapons. Is Katja hallucinating? Did Torsten drug her too? Has the fantasy somehow become real? Does it matter?
The film offers its most delicious pleasures in the domestic theater of the Fiedlers’ dining room, where each new Daniel negotiates a fresh performance of Oedipal fantasy. The second fake Daniel is particularly fun to watch, as he spools out a story in which a chance meeting between Bundeswehr soldiers and an Afghan family erupts into violence, which is then patched over with the gift of an Audi. It’s virtuosic storytelling, and the details are so perfect we’re left to wonder whether the young man is a gifted liar or himself a veteran.
“It’s true,” Daniel number two assures us.
“No it’s not,” says Katja.
“It is,” he says.
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
“Doesn’t matter,” Daniel number two admits. “What would you rather hear?”
4.
On closer viewing, there are several knots in Continuity’s seemingly linear trajectory. The Fiedlers’ drama unspools one scene after another, but Daniel’s Afghanistan comes to us in flashbacks which, on closer examination, don’t quite cohere: the soldier we thought was Daniel wears a nametag reading Vogel and is played by the same actor who hits Felix with a sports car. What had seemed to be one narrative arc dissolves into fragments, while what had been two stories merge, a narrative double exposure filling out a unified symbolic economy.
Working with and against the ideology of trauma, Continuity explores how war functions in the Western bourgeois imagination, how those of us back home projecting our shame, grief, and lust onto the screens of soldiers’ bodies are less interested in the fate of any specific individual than we are invested in a ritual economy of sacrifice. We are more than willing to overlook discrepancies between Soldat Fiedler and Hauptgefreiter Vogel, Daniel number one and Daniel number two, imagination and fact, so long as these young men can fill out the formal roles in our ritual fort-da of trauma and recovery. Like Katja and Torsten and the interviewer in The Casting, we are ambivalent about particular soldiers’ stories—this one is too long, that one strains belief, this other doesn’t match our expectations—but we need their bodies to make our stories about who we are feel real.
Whereas The Casting offers one single soldier performing his trauma, Continuity gives us the performance again and again, as body after body cycles through the role of symbolic sacrifice. The continuity is explicit. A tattoo on Daniel number two’s forearm reads in saeculo saeculorum, “for a lifetime of lifetimes,” a phrase from the Vulgate that recurs twelve times alone in the Book of Revelation and is sung in the Tridentine Mass. Torsten tells young Felix, playing Daniel, played by Bruno Alexander: “You are my flesh and blood.”
But meat isn’t truth. The truth of war cannot reside in the soldier’s body, because any number of young men could be ground to pulp and the war would still go on, just as any number of wrestlers can fall to the mat, and any number of wafers can become the flesh of Christ. Rather, the truth of war is something like a mass. The soldier’s body lends its substance to the semiotic exchanges of the narratives—freedom and terror, trauma and recovery—shaping and channeling our desires for identity and transcendence. Continuity helps us see how the truth of war is the Eucharistic whole: Through the ritual synthesis of word and blood, fantasy and flesh, we assert our communion in the face of death. [2017]
IV.
Last
Thoughts
Raising a Daughter
in a Doomed World
I.
My partner Sara woke holding her belly. “What time is it?” she said. “Write down the time.” It was late, well before sunrise, and within a few hours contractions were coming on strong, a full sixty seconds every four minutes, so we called the hospital and texted our doula and grabbed our go bag and drove. The next morning, after twenty-seven hours of labor and five hours of pushing, after nine months of worrying and hoping and looking at ultrasound scans, after years of deliberating and wondering and negotiating between the demands of being on the academic job market and our deeper biological cycles, a new human emerged into the world yowling like something feral: our daughter. Tears spilled from my eyes as I hugged her and Sara together, my chest opening like I’d found the source of all joy in the universe and plugged in, streaming total utopian agape.
First I cried for joy; the second time I cried for sorrow, a few minutes later, holding my daughter, Rosalind, and looking out the window over the hospital parking lot, the rows of cars, the strip mall across the street, the flat, ugly, rust-belt sprawl of northern Indiana, box stores and drive-thrus, drainage ditches and concrete and waste fields that might have once been oak groves, a world in which the landscape had been ravaged and brutalized as a matter of course, and in which any possibility for living in harmony with nature had been evacuated. Birds and bees and fr
ogs were all dying, the seasons were out of joint, and instead of grieving, people were on their phones. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our child to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future. “I’m sorry,” I told her, weeping, as her tiny fingers gripped mine. “I’m sorry you have to live in this broken world.”
Anyone who pays much attention to climate scientists or to reporting by journalists on climate change knows that the outlook is grim. It’s a tired story by this point, since scientists such as James Hansen have been warning us for thirty years, but it goes like this: Waste carbon dioxide from burned fossil fuels is accumulating in the atmosphere and trapping solar energy, which is warming the planet at an astonishing rate. This global warming is radically transforming environmental conditions all over the planet, leading to a range of second-order effects including rising seas, destabilized crop yields, mass extinction, unpredictable and dangerously intense storms, drought, floods, and heat waves. The stress these effects are putting on human political, economic, social, and agricultural infrastructure, already intense, will eventually be greater than anything we’ve seen since the twentieth century’s two world wars, and will probably outstrip those. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we live with today is the greatest the human species has ever faced.
Anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume that we’re almost certainly going to botch this challenge. In order to stop emitting waste carbon dioxide completely within the next five or ten years, we would need to radically reorient all human economic and social production, a task that is scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, massive state investment in carbon capture and sequestration, and global coordination on a scale never before seen, at the very moment when the political and economic structures that held the capitalist world order together under American leadership after World War II are splintering, and extremist libertarians are dismantling the United States government from the inside. The very idea of unified national political action toward a single goal seems farcical, and unified action on a global scale mere whimsy. What’s more, significant and dangerous levels of warming are already baked in to the system from all the carbon dioxide we’ve already dumped. There’s a time lag between CO2 increase and subsequent effects, between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap. Our lives are lived in that gap. My daughter was born there.
Barring a miracle, the next twenty years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation, and a wild range of human political and economic responses. These likely trends pose unanswerable dilemmas: Should I start a college fund for my daughter, or would she be better served by learning to shoot, hunt, and live off the land? Should we raise her where we live now, in a state on the cutting edge of privatization, where public services like school buses and 911 call centers and highways are failing but our middle-class income allows us to own a home, far from the rising ocean? Or should we try to move back to one of the blue-bubble cities on the coast, where we’d struggle just to pay the rent, and where floods, wildfires, and drought threaten even the wealthiest? There are no clear answers. Every choice is a gamble.
The next twenty years will be tough. After that, it gets worse. The middle and later decades of the twenty-first century—my daughter’s adult life—promise a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror. Recall that World War II, including the Holocaust and other atrocities, saw about 3 percent of the entire global population annihilated. It staggers the soul to imagine what going through a population bottleneck that entailed losing 70 percent of the human species would look like, but that’s what it would take to get us back to population levels circa 1940.
In the almost eighty years since then, the human species has burst the boundary conditions for sustainable life on Earth through what some scientists call the “Great Acceleration,” an unprecedented spike in socioeconomic and earth systems trends—everything from carbon dioxide emissions, surface temperature, and tropical forest loss to fertilizer consumption, water use, and population (from approximately 2.3 billion in 1940 to 7.6 billion today)—a spike which represents “the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere,” in the words of J.R. McNeill and Peter Engleke. And while we might hope that world leaders will correct course and somehow bring this Great Acceleration under control, human history suggests that this bubble will burst like every other, in crisis and chaos. One thing is certain, as McNeill and Engleke testify: “The Great Acceleration in its present form cannot last for long.” On the other side of the inevitable correction, a hundred years from now, whatever Homo sapiens are left on Earth are going to be struggling to adapt to a hot, unstable, and hostile planet.
Why would anyone choose to bring new life into this world? How can I explain my decision to my daughter? And isn’t there anything we can do about it?
It’s true that numerous engineering solutions are available that might help decrease and mitigate carbon emissions, but the social and economic costs of these solutions are so unclear and contentious that widespread agreement on implementation seems practically impossible. Meanwhile, in the US, our political system has been hijacked by thieves seemingly interested only in looting the republic and undermining democratic rule. Faced with such systemic failures, many adopt an individualist approach, arguing that it’s up to each of us to make the personal sacrifices necessary to stop global warming.
According to a widely cited 2017 research letter by geographer Seth Wynes and environmental scientist Kimberly Nicholas, the most effective things any of us can do to decrease carbon emissions are to eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car free, and have one fewer child, with the latter choice having the most significant impact by far. Wynes and Nicholas argue for teaching these values in high school, thus transforming society through education. The real problem with this proposal isn’t with the idea of teaching abstention and thrift, which is all well and good, but rather with the social model their recommendations rely on. Contra Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices, but a complex recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies which then subtly change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible, all the while being disrupted and nudged and warped by countless internal and external drivers, including environmental factors such as global warming, material and social innovation, and the occasional widespread panic. Which is just to say that we are not free to decide how we live any more than we are free to break the laws of physics. We choose from possible options, not ex nihilo.
It’s clear that we should all go vegan for the sake of the planet. It’s a sacrifice I’m reluctant to make, despite the moral and ecological costs of factory farming, because I know, through my years as a vegetarian, that totally forgoing meat leaves me depressed and lethargic. Wynes and Nicholas don’t define what “plant-based” means, though, so if it just means less meat, and especially less beef and pork, then it’s certainly something we could all do without too much hassle. No more steak, no more cheeseburgers, no more pork belly ramen—okay, fine.
And I would love to avoid flying and to live car free. (Truly. I can’t even properly express my loathing for flying.) I lived without a car for several years in my twenties and early thirties, so I know it’s possible, but my world then was largely limited to the range I could walk or bike or get to on public transit, and my work was usually casual and close by. Now, like most Americans, I live and work in a city that was built for cars and has totally inadequate public transit, and which also happens to be thousands of miles away from my extended family and my oldest friends. No car? No job. No flying? No Thanksgiving with the family.
/> As for not having a child, of course nobody needs to have children. It just happens to be the strongest drive humans have, the fundamental organizing principle of every human culture, and the sine qua non of a meaningful human world, since it alone makes possible the persistence of human meaning through time. My partner and I didn’t need to have a child, but without one, our lives felt like they lacked something important.
To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future. I know because I’ve lived like that, and I sometimes even daydream about returning to it: everything seemed so pure then, so simple. But like most of us, I can’t or won’t; I’m committed to this world, the world I live in, in all its stupidity and doom, because this world is the one everyone else lives in too: my colleagues and students, my friends and family, my partner and daughter. This world is the only one in which my choices have meaning. And this world, fucked up as it is, is the only one that offers joy. As George Orwell wrote in 1946, in another time of global crisis, in an essay on the mating habits of the common toad, “If we kill all pleasure in the actual processes of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?”
Furthermore, taking Wynes and Nicholas’s argument seriously would mean acknowledging that the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide. There is simply no more effective way to shrink your carbon footprint. Once you’re dead, you won’t use any more electricity, you won’t eat any more meat, you won’t burn any more gasoline, and you certainly won’t have any more children. If you really want to save the planet, you should die.
