Outside the Wire and the Endless War on Unnatural Bodies

 

No doubt on its surface the new Netflix film, Outside the Wire, is intended as a commentary on our current war-by-drone approach to international conflict. It is unlikely the film was intended to construct a troubling commentary on the fear of “unnatural” bodies that reads, like too much American cinema, as the convoluted annunciation of anti-trans logic. However, it does. In the excess of its storytelling, primarily in the palimpsest of its construction, the film relies on the purity of a humanist vision that over-valorizes the “natural” body to defeat “unnatural” technologies that challenge the humanist urge for universal truths about “ourselves,” whoever that is supposed to be.

 The main character, Harp, is a drone pilot safely battling an ambiguous enemy in “Eastern Europe” (the Ukraine) from a computer terminal in Nevada. When he disobeys a direct order and fires on a squad of American troops in the field, killing two of them to save thirty-eight others, he is punished not with a court martial but with reassignment to serve in the war zone alongside Caption Leo. Leo is the sole member of a military intelligence division seeking information on the warlord behind the conflict, Victor Koval, who is supposedly nearing his goal of acquiring access to nearly-50-year-old nuclear missile silos scattered across Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Leo turns out to be an advanced prototype AI cyborg who then turns out to be a self-contained Skynet from the Terminator franchise who recognizes that more technology means more and endless war. So, he goes rogue and attempts to fire those nuclear missiles on the United States. Unlike Skynet, Leo decides to kill a million people to save humanity from machines, rather than kill a million people to jump start a machine age, or something like that. He empathizes, maybe, with humans, at least if he is to be trusted. He wants what is best for us, which requires he kill a few (million) real humans to show them how depersonalized and unhuman war has become--it's being fought with drones and cyborgs even! Anyway, Harp overcomes his original faith in Leo to become the hero who stops Leo by ordering a drone strike that nearly kills them both, though Harp manages to escape.

 The final scene of the film has Leo, his cyborg innards exposed by the incendiary rounds Harp has fired into him, laying on top of the open nuclear missile silo as the nuke within it prepares to launch only to have a drone-strike blow up the launch pad and Leo in one genuine clusterfuck of real and imagined military technologies intersecting in the most explosive way imaginable in contemporary visual narrative. We have the old technology of nuclear warheads (and to call them old as if they will ever be obsolete seems troubling though relevant in this context). We have the new and very real technology of drone-strikes and their inherent flaw: though tethered to a human operator, they are just machines. Their use always runs the (significant) risk of dehumanizing death into black-and-white video screens and the rhetoric of “collateral damage” to obviate the horrors of war. We have the very human-looking cyborg, Leo, who has even been programmed to feel pain—so that he can truly empathize with humans—who represents the science fiction of fully independent AI on the battlefield, a possibility that actual roboticists will tell you is much further from a reality than movies imply.

 Additional references to other modes of technological warfare also enter the film. First, Leo is an advanced prototype of more ubiquitous semi-autonomous robotic soldiers (gumps) that serve alongside human troops, though the gumps lack contextual thinking. On more than one occasion human troops worry aloud that the gumps will make a rash decision and fire first, turning opportunities to talk out solutions without guns into shootouts that kill troops and civilians alike. Second, Leo references a “dirty bomb” supposedly detonated by Koval’s troops, but which is actually the work of a resistance group posing as a humanitarian relief organization in the embattled space between US and Koval forces. Leon, it turns out, has been working secretly with this resistance group to end ALL wars by playing the two sides against each other until they can secure the nuclear codes and “kill a million to save a hundred million,” as Leo says to Harp at the end of the film, when the bad guy conveniently explains his plan. This confession, naturally, echoes Harp’s decision to kill two soldiers to save the other thirty-eight at the beginning of the film, the action that got him assigned to Leo in the first place.

 While the film may seem like a fast-paced, action-filled recycling of old tropes about war and the hard decisions required of soldiers in the field, rather than behind desks, there is troubling excess in its representation that escapes too often for comfort. Example: Leo explains to Harp on more than one occasion, “War is ugly,” which can too easily be read as cover for “don’t judge soldiers who kill civilians.” The film was likely in post-production when the current president (I’m writing this on January 17) pardoned soldiers convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians in what was rightly deemed a war crime, so perhaps the implicit message of the film felt right at the time it was being shot, less so on later reflection. But even with the best of intentions, war stories are always doomed to fail anything less than grandly jingoistic goals. This truth extends to stories that try to depict honest examples of courage under fire, for it is likely that no real stories of valor ever come together so nicely as the structure of a 100-minute film allows. It is equally likely that valor itself is an aporia that might exist, at least conceptually, before and after the moment of battle, but that never firms up as a single, touchable point in the heat of the field. Valor is a narrative, and all narratives of war are always flawed by our desire to either overly-humanize or overly-valorize soldiers. The efforts of narrative, filmic or otherwise, to suture that aporia never close the gap fully, whereas war, that eternal incongruity, remains.

 Perhaps more importantly, and noteworthy in a positive sense, this film works to amend common omissions in our storytelling, especially our martial mythologizing. The stars of the film are both black. The majority of the film focuses on the interactions of two intelligent and capable black men who also happen to be soldiers. Meanwhile, the boots-on-the-ground troops are almost all white. Thus, when Harp is accosted by surviving members of the unit his actions saved, the image of white men in uniforms beating a black man in civilian clothes (Harp is dressed as a civilian for his mission with Leo) registers powerfully for so short a scene. We’ve seen too often this scene with real black civilians and other-uniformed men. We have also see too often men with authority over the lower-ranking troops stand by and accept the beating. He had it coming, they always say, for some sin in the past, usually the primordial sin of daring to act freely for which all black bodies can be called upon to atone.

 But all bodies—the one’s that matter anyway—might be black or white, they might be male or female, but they all fit into a binary order in which, despite progress, we still see visible distinctions that put our characters into clear roles. You can always spot the bad guy—well, bad “guy”—by looking for the figure whose arrangement in relation to “natural” categories is, somehow, fraught.

 When Leo explains to Harp why he was made to look human, he challenges Harp to look at his face—the face of a black man—and says that his face was chosen because it is trustworthy. The singularity of this moment as a statement in our current political climate about who to trust (a black man) versus question (a white man in a MAGA hat, per se, or one carrying zip-ties in full battle fatigues) should have been the key moment of the film to challenge our assumptions. Our heroes are on a quest; they are black; their faces inspire our confidence. After all, it seems like just over a year ago that the particular face playing Leo (Anthony Mackie) was singled out by no less than Captain America to inherit his shield. Bucky was probably too coded as gay at that point in the MCU films, and the Cap’ had just magically appeared after his apparently long and very rewarding, if surely boring, heterosexual life with Agent Carter. Cue legacy scene: there, on the Golden Pond of the Endgame of that phase of film history, order was restored when the straight/cis white man bypassed his lifelong bosom buddy and bequeathed his mantle to a black man, who probably needs to find a wife soon—because, let’s be honest, Falcon’s immediate connection with Captain America in The Winter Soldier would be overwhelmingly homoerotic were it not outshined by the real lovers in that film (no shipping required).

 Unfortunately, Leo is not honest; in fact, the climactic battle at the end of the film—the clusterfuck of past and future technologies destroying each other—includes Harp, having shot Leo nearly to pieces, asking Leon why he should believe him now, you know, since he has been lying for the entire film and all. It is at this point that Leo delivers a line directly counter to his earlier claim that his face is one to trust. He says, instead, “I am the face of endless war.” He has made the calculation that technologies, like himself, will only further dehumanize war and so lead to its perpetuation (he seems unaware that we name ages of history after the technologies of battle, and have done so since before the Nuclear Age and long before the advent of the Anthropocene). He is sacrificing himself because he knows he is such an unnatural aberration that a world of cyborgs like him will only lead to more, because increasingly impersonal, conflicts. He is, after all, only programmed for empathy. It does not mean his empathy is real.

 The Terminator redux in the film is definitely excessive. First, Leo convinces Harp to remove a “tracking device” from his central operating system—except “trust my face” Leo is lying. It is actually a regulator that would override his programming if he were to be compromised by his own duplicity. This scene is a direct reference to a scene in T2, though most folks probably haven’t seen the full scene in that older film unless you watch the director’s cut. Second, Leo nearly chokes Harp at the end of the film but decides against full-on killing him. While choking, Harp unloads a pistol into Leo’s groin, where his programmed empathy does register pain but does not deter him. That the pistol shots into Leo’s groin don’t “unman” him is clear proof he is not a real man. Then Harp, upon awakening, grabs a bigger gun with high-powered incendiary rounds that can blow through an armored car, apparently, and shoots them, one-after-the other, methodically into Leo, whose form shifts and sputters with lights upon each impact—basically like Sarah Connor shooting up the T-1000 with that repetitive one-handed cold-cock in the final scenes of Ridley’s Scott’s film.

 That is not the only scene from another film being referenced, though. In both the touchstone for a history of gay representation in film, The Celluloid Closet, and in Netflix’s own 2020 documentary follow-up on trans representation, Disclosure, a key film under scrutiny shows an investigator, having cornered the bad “guy” in a public restroom, pump said bad “guy” full of lead. Said bad “guy” writhes in agony with each gun shot. Blood explodes out of “his” back onto the surprisingly clean tile walls. Said bad “guy” is not a guy, though, or at least not a natural one. He is a “tranny,” in true Hollywood fashion. “He” is a small-framed man passing as a woman to commit various acts of mayhem, robbery, murder—but really he’s a dude! And we all know gender-bending is unnatural, so as both documentaries explain, the ostensibly straight and cisgender audience feels no empathy for him as he is shot and dies. Similarly, we are made to see unnatural freaks as lacking all humanity in, say, a character like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. The unnatural body, especially when revealed to us on screen, is a site of horror, not humanity, and lord know we are not supposed to empathize with its twisted psychosis. The more unnatural, the easier it is for an audience to lionize (valorize?) the hero who shoots that monstrous body full of holes (or wholes? That body was not complete—it was a hazard of admixture, incomplete, subhuman—so why not close out the plot and make whole the narrative by killing that unnatural creature off?).

 One could go so far as to say Outside the Wire quotes another scene from another movie, The Crying Game. The scene of Dil’s revelation has become the source of any number of parodies—what could be funnier than a girl with a dick? Well, not just funny, also potentially horrifying until neutered with a laugh. Similarly, early in Outside the Wire, Harp watches Leo change shirts, signifying on the potential for the homoerotic gaze even if unintentionally. At this moment, Leo “flexes,” after a fashion, allowing his brown skin to become see-through and thus revealing that beneath his skin, he’s not human at all. Harp does not respond by punching Leo or retreating to the bathroom to vomit, but he is visibly stunned. Leo calls him out for his sudden discomfort and then demands Harp’s trust at this moment, or face reassignment. Of course, as the revelation implies, everything about Leo is a lie. He isn’t even human, just fake skin posing in human form. As the commanding officer on base has already told Harp about Leo before sending him to Leo's workshop, "He [meaning Leo] isn't like us."   

 In December 1952, Christine Jorgenson made her debut in American popular culture as the GI who, through the miracle of modern science, had transformed into a girl. Susan Stryker identifies this moment in trans history as connected to two growing fears in mainstream American society that Jorgenson’s transformation exhumes. On the one hand, the advent of a nuclear age led to fear of what science could do to human bodies—and while for some there was potential for positive change, all change can lead to paranoias. On the other hand, there was an already growing fear about the loss of virile American masculinity, which was seen as a measure of the health of our capitalist society. Manly men meant defeating communism (and homosexuals, and maybe also controlling those increasingly unruly blacks about that whole voting thing). From that frame, nothing could be more terrifying than a man becoming a woman through the miracle of science. C. Riley Snorton extends Stryker’s reading of Jorgenson into a black context by pointing out that the narrative of scientific possibility embodied in her transformation must be seen in the context of whiteness. Snorton then identifies black trans individuals from the same period who were not treated so welcomingly by the press, which, at best, had no idea what to do with them, at worst made them jokes.

 And here, in 2021, a black-embodied cyborg gives itself a eulogy about the dangerous potentials of technology. We can’t have a world of unnatural, inhuman robots. We must do anything with out power to maintain only natural, virile bodies, or so says the self-sacrificing cyborg while laying on top of an actual nuclear warhead. Oh my, what dangers await us if we are not careful with our hu(man)ity.

 The film ends with Harp looking longingly at his attractive fiancée, who has been alluded to throughout the film even if she never appears in person. It is important that the real man left standing after the cyborg body has been destroyed have someone to go home to. Outside the Wire does little to hide the forms on the tablet recycled for its production; they remain, the old letters denying humanity to anyone except those we can represent in clear visual frames.

Too many films trade on the image of a hero riding away on his white horse (Harp drives what looks like a white Corsica) to their promised bride, and we are never meant to imagine that bride as anything less than beautiful, their love anything less than natural. I prefer a narrative with more potential for the subversive. Would anyone read the final scene in context with The Crying Game. When Fergus stole Dil’s picture from Jody, he probably convinced himself that the rewards for surviving his particular battle were clearly gendered, too. Cue finale, soundtrack: "When a Man Loves a Woman," that old Shakespearian rag. 

In the aporia we suture with our narratives of valor, we should always look for the bodies we are told we shouldn’t see.