In 2008, the Israeli military (IDF) introduced a new technological system named »See-Shoot«. The system’s initial purpose was purely observation. A basic panopticon device, comprising a steel tube equipped with a camera, was erected on top of various posts around the separation wall in Gaza, in order to monitor the area around the barrier. In the event of suspicious activity, the observers at the operations room (female soldiers from the intelligence corps) would send ground troops to the location. But then the system was upgraded and the camera was supplemented with a remote controlled machine gun, allowing the remote operator not only to observe, but also to shoot on sight. The military’s constant demand for real-time reaction short-circuited the delay between the observation in the operations room (»see«) and the reaction on the ground level (»shoot«). At this stage, destruction had become synonymous with the military’s vision of itself.
In 2009, the Israeli film »Lebanon« was released (written and directed by Samuel Maoz), which described the combat shock of a small tank unit during the first Israeli war in Lebanon (1982-1985). The film incorporated the perspective of the war machine itself: throughout the film the camera takes the tank’s periscope point of view, thus imitating cinematically what »see-shoot« does for real, that is, to merge vision with instant destruction. »Lebanon« followed a wave of Israeli films that reawakened the memory of the first Lebanon war, most notably »Beaufort« (Joseph Cedar, 2007) and »Waltz with Bashir« (Ari Folman, 2008). These films belong to what is mockingly called in Israel the »shooting and crying« genre. It typically depicts the IDF in a critical light, as a traumatizer of young soldiers, yet the genre itself is often criticized for turning the assailants into victims, and in a sense allowing the continuation of war under the guise of self-victimization. »Lebanon« is a prominent example of the genre, as the soldier characters in the film are shown as literally crying while at the same time shooting. Yet the crying in the film goes further than merely justifying the actions of the soldiers. Here, the act of crying stands in-between »see« and »shoot«, interrupting and delaying the immediate militaristic link between vision and destruction.
Unlike the tearful protagonists of »Lebanon«, the »see-shoot« system is constructed in a manner that leaves no room for emotional reaction or reflection on the part of the soldier. The system operates at the level of the soldier’s sensory-motor reactions, to respond to the target she observes with immediate fire; short-circuiting not only the distance between the ground level and the operations room - the time between observation and destruction - but also the physical reaction between the eye’s observation and the triggering of the weapon. But while distance and reaction time are diminished almost to zero, the system enlarges a gap between the soldier and the real war. The gruesome reality of war, the materiality of bodies, is completely missing from the image experienced on the operation room screen. The operator is located far from the battle scene, and she uses a joystick to control the camera and to shoot – not at a real flesh-and-blood foe but at something which appears more as data, a pixel on the computer screen - as if this were a first person shooter video game.
When the army engages in a dematerialization or virtualization of the battlefield, perhaps it is cinema’s role to show the real consequences of war. Although the battlefield appears in »Lebanon« mostly through the tank-barrel’s point of view, it is not the sterilized view which the military has allowed us to grow accustomed to (for example the camera mounted »smart bomb« images we have seen constantly since the first American war in Iraq, and which are meant to make us believe in the concept of »clean war«). Instead, we – as well as the soldiers in the tank – see the real destruction, blood, injuries, pain and death that are usually sanitized in the military’s version. The commander of the soldiers stresses to his subordinates the importance of keeping the inside of the tank clean. Ideally, the tank is supposed to give the soldiers a closed and sterilized space which dislocates them from the carnal aspect of war, but in one scene a wounded enemy soldier is thrown inside the tank as a captive. His appearance inside the tank snaps the visual dialectic that held the enemy at the other end of the barrel. The soldiers are confronted not only with an experience of the true consequences of their actions from a distant view, but now have to deal with the presence of a wounded enemy within the »sterile« space of the tank. As reality penetrates the tank’s interior, removing the safe distance it was supposed to establish, the soldiers are traumatized, becoming themselves victims of war, paralyzed and unable to react to their commander’s demands for real-time reaction.
The »see-shoot« war machine depends on the soldier’s sensory-motor linkage. She must be able to react immediately to a target that appears in her view and destroy it. »Lebanon« explores the breakdown of this system by depicting the internal apparatus of the tank and the fragmentation of the bodies within it. The »see-shoot« system aims at constructing a masculine body structure which is characterized by a unification of the observing eye and the shooting hand, and a literally penetrating gaze that immediately destroys the targets on its sight. In »Lebanon« we encounter a separation of these functions, as one soldier is responsible for arming the tank, another for aiming the tank’s barrel and a third for pulling the trigger. But when the soldier’s »killer-gaze« is itself being penetrated by the horrors it observes, it traumatizes the soldiers, consequently leading to a collapse of the correlation between this observing eye and shooting hand.
Julia Kristeva’s concept of »abject« is defined as that which does not »respect borders, positions, rules«, that which »disturbs identity, system, order.«1 It is a state which threatens the boundary of the self, the boundary between the inside of the body and its outside, which according to Kristeva is the foundation of all the basic Western cultural oppositions; man/woman, me/other, life/death and so on. Kristeva describes the abject, with connection to bodily wastes and the corpse, as a subliminal term between terms. The separation wall is a political structure that tries to clean an abject situation, that is, to separate »us« (Israeli Jews) from »them« (Palestinians). The »see-shoot« system which sits on the wall further enforces this dichotomy, with a gaze that separates »us« as observers - the owners of the gaze - and »them« - as the object of that gaze. »Lebanon« shows us that this separation is an impossibility – the war machine cannot keep our national or physical borders clean, as »they« penetrate the masculine gaze, which leads to the collapse of »our« unified body.
Instead of shooting »like men«, in the film, the soldiers themselves fall into a wretched state. They begin to cry, constantly referring to their need to urinate, and their wish to go back to their mothers. A story told by one of the soldiers about an incident that occurred in his teens, after his father died, is symbolic of the situation: when he received the tragic news, his school teacher embraced him to her bosom to comfort him; while he was bursting in tears he was also sexually aroused by her close presence, eventually ejaculating in his pants. In this story, coming and crying are conflated, just as shooting and crying are mixed in this cinematic genre. The premature ejaculation in the story reflects the soldiers’ regression from manhood to a child-like state, which is defined by unrestricted bodily boundaries. Consequently, the inside of the tank is no longer a sterile space detached from real war, but becomes increasingly dirty, moist and dark - a sort of a womb in which the soldiers regress to an infantile, inhibited state. No longer capable of reacting or controlling their bodies, they simply cry. In the seeing–shooting conditions of Israel’s current technological war, cinematic crying is indeed an intrusion, but unfortunately this is really only a momentary deferral of a process it cannot prevent.
Special thanks to Ido Lewit