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Say cheese! Operation Iraqi freedom on film.

Article Excerpt
The Americans are a very strange people," opines one of Peter Sellers's three characters in Jack Arnold's 1959 satire The Mouse that Roared. "Whereas other countries rarely forgive anything, the Americans forgive everything. There isn't a more profitable undertaking for any country than to declare war on the United States and to be defeated. No sooner is the aggressor defeated than the Americans pour in food, machinery, clothing, technical aid and lots and lots of money for the relief of its former enemies." The route to regeneration for bankrupt Grand Fenwick is clear: "We declare war on Monday, we are defeated on Tuesday, and by Friday we will be rehabilitated beyond our wildest dreams."

Needless to say, this impeccable logic soon unravels. The best-laid plans of one of Sellers's characters are undone by the haplessness of another who, fundamentally misunderstanding the war plan, defeats America when he impounds a ticking neutron bomb. A fissile comedy of nuclear errors, The Mouse that Roared anticipated a future in which cinemagoers would stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. But it 'also cast a mischievous backward glance over a trope that Hollywood had done much to entrench over the previous fifteen years: the "good occupation."

Proponents of preemption had frequent recourse to this conceit in bolstering the case for war with Iraq in early 2003. Viewed in a flattering light, postwar Germany and Japan appeared miracles of American reconstructive surgery. "Extreme makeover" on a grand scale, regime change apparently possessed similar formulae for instant, all-round gratification. A little nipping and tucking to excise undesirable excess, a strategic implant or two to shore up sagging assets ... et voila! With Saddam toppled and the Baathists expunged, democracy in Iraq would flourish, allowing a new regional order to take root, in response, grateful Iraqis could be expected to throng the streets with placards that might've been borrowed from Grand Fenwick's exuberant peasants--"Welcome Americans," "Gum Chum?," "America--We Love You."

Tinged by wish-fulfillment and dimpled by hubris, this roseate vision of military occupation as an enterprise both easy and ennobling owed a considerable debt to Hollywood. In search of a fitting sequel to the good war, the studios found buried treasure amid the detritus of defeat: pathos, humor and romance.

The 'good occupation' scenarios of Henry King's A Bell for Adano (1945), Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), and Daniel Mann's The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), stripped military government of its asymmetries, playing the contradictions of imposed democratization for laughs. "They're gonna learn democracy if I've gotta shoot every last one of them," huffs Colonel Wainwright Purdy III, the broadest character in Mann's Okinawa-set burlesque. After much slapstick cross-cultural collision, Teahouse ends in felicitous convergence. Having abandoned army fatigues for a kimono and ditched the DOD blueprint for a pentagonal schoolhouse in favor of a traditional Japanese cha-ya, Glenn Ford's Captain Fisby achieves a blissful epiphany, no longer sure "who's the conqueror and who's the conquered." Human needs, from Iowa to Okinawa, reduce to the same colorless distillation, or in Wilder's blitzed Berlin achieve a lubricious equilibrium. Occupying men and accommodating women--American GI's and German "furlines"--harmonize supply and demand to mutual satisfaction.

From the black market to 'fraternization,' seemingly no occupational hazard or reward lay beyond reclamation as the combustible tinder of comedy or romance. In these Hollywood features, no vestige of wartime enmity remained. Occupiers and occupied cheerfully rubbed shoulders, or considerably more. Love blossomed. Enterprise flourished. Misunderstandings dissolved into mirth, and rehabilitation proceeded without tears.

But while its architects surely envisaged Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) following a familiar script, it strains credulity to imagine these congenial scenarios remobilized for contemporary service. A minaret for Adhamiya? A teahouse on the Tigris? Romance in Ramadi? The 'spirit of gracious acceptance' found in Fallujah? Hardly. Once upon a time Hollywood had no trouble projecting Arabian fantasies onto a lush Mesopotamian backdrop, whether these adventures involved All Baba and his light-fingered friends or a fractious seraglio of Babes in Baghdad ("The Shapes that Shook a Harem Empire!"). Contemporary Iraq, by contrast, presents studio screenwriters with impossible challenges. Hence while 9/11 dramas proliferate, Hollywood's first reckoning with Iraq isn't scheduled for release until mid-December. Feel-bad holiday fare, Irwin Winkler's Home of the Brave is a homecoming drama--an anemic The Best Years of Our Lives--in which Spokane looms larger than an unspecified Iraqi locale, actually shot in Morocco.

Just as the Vietnam War generated only one Hollywood feature while in progress--John Wayne's The Green Berets, which as...

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