"Let me tell you something about bullshit. It's everywhere. You hit me with a little, I buy it. I hit you with a little, you buy it. It doesn't make us idiots. That's what makes us buddies... and that's what makes us Americans."- Berzin (Richard Panebianco)
There's less than 15 minutes left in Dogfight. Eddie Birdlace (River Phoenix) has just caught his Marine-buddy Berzin in a lie, and Berzin has in turn caught Eddie right back. Eddie knows that Berzin cheated in last night's dogfight, that he hired a prostitute to stand in as his date so that he could win the lucrative award of having brought the ugliest woman to the party. And Berzin knows that Eddie wasn't hooking up with an officer's sexy wife but that he spent the night with the painstakingly-plain Rose (Lili Taylor), his own date to the dogfight. Berzin delivers his diatribe on the unity and universalism of bullshit, and afterwards, Eddie and Berzin agree to not narc on each other but to instead perpetuate each other's fabrications. They're invested in that game-- in the appearance of things, in ignoring ugly realities--and they'll knowingly keep playing.
We're led to believe that this is a type of innocence, or that appears to be the message in context. The story is set on the eve of the Vietnam War, a period held as an American loss of innocence/fall from grace in both the public and academic conscious. This contemporary historical narrative (problematically) reads that because we refused to see the world a certain way before the 1960s, that we were somehow a less jaded (and less accountable) nation, but as turmoil, upheaval, and change bred awareness and maturity, we uncovered blood on our hands that we can't seem to wash off. A similar setup is true for the young characters in the film. The players are all newly-legal adults, fresh to and scared of the world and arguably just now hitting an age of legal and moral culpability. Not to mention, don't we expect a certain wild, reckless cockiness of youth that somehow exempts young men from control; isn't that why "boys will be boys" exists, because we nurture the idea that being young and penis-wielding makes you incensurable for the harm you cause? Eddie especially is faced, perhaps for the first time, with his own wrongdoings, his own shortcomings, his own consciousness, his own mortality, and it is (is it?) as if he's responsible for himself and his place in the world for the first time. So is it so wrong, the film asks, to ignore the very real world going on around you in favor of the youthful perspective we've laid out for ourselves? Can young men maintain innocence by ignoring or denying the reasons we have to feel guilty?
Eddie somehow, admittedly, amazingly, doesn't seem to know any better at the time. He is angry, out-to-prove-something, out-to-be-someone, and he feels entitled to take what he wants because the Marine Corps told him if he became a Marine, he could do that. In truth, he's likely not entitled to much out of life; Birdlace is generally unskilled, ungraced, and charmless. Rose is the 4th or 5th girl he's taken to a dogfight, but this instance genuinely appears to be the first time he realized that women are human, that they have real and valid feelings, that the entire concept of the dogfight was unconscionable. And throughout the night they spend together, as she challenges and questions him, it truly seems as though no had ever told him that there was a rich, deserving world outside of making a show of dominating communists and women with his buddies. He is so blinded by traditions, by history, by power structures, by 19 years of his vision being unchallenged. Still, ultimately, it's hard to accept that any of this makes his actions excusable. Ignorance of the world, especially willful ignorance, doesn't hold water in the court of audience opinion. I can't say I sympathized, though much of, or felt much for Eddie Birdlace, a man who doesn't even have the swagger to be a he's-endearing-but-I-hate-him presence on screen.
As for Rose, we feel for her in all the ways she is wrongd and hope for her in all the ways she wants the world righted. Lili Taylor paradoxically plays a woman whose body seems so broken by the world when she walks, who has been victimized so much by society that she can't manage a brief gaze into a person's eyes, but who ultimately remains outspoken, courageous, and at least, by her own account, driven and ready to make a difference. When Rose learns about the dogfight, that she was selected for her plain appearance as a joke, we're heartbroken not only to see her feisty-and-earnest spirit broken but because Taylor so successfully pulls off the timeless embodiment of any of us let down when we were teenagers-- a surrender to bed, to Joan Baez, to making sure your mother never has to hear you cry. Her pain is palpable and relatable and her hope is moving and sweet. Yet it remains difficult to not also hold her responsible for her own lack of groundedness and her own willful ignorance. Rose's purity is a naivety and an idealism that the only action required to fix the world is a great song she may write some day. While art is fundamental, playing folk records in your bedroom is not the same as action, and she, in her own ways, is a girl distancing herself from her responsibility to the world through action-less romance. She sees that the world needs healing but denies that she should play a role of action in healing it, recluding to the lyrics of Bob Dylan instead. Whereas Eddie may be guilty of denying the problems of the world, Rose is, in some small way, guilty of denying herself an active role in the solutions.
While I hesitate to call remake on a 24-year-old film, great power potentially lies in a reimagining of the film in a contemporary context. The sense of entitlement & dehumanization of the dogfight is something we see in a lot of today's young male spaces--the military, the fraternity, the high school football team-- and one can easily assume that similar misogynist traditions continue in some of these environments today. But those men aren't innocent, right? Ignorant, sure, but are we willing to say those"boys will be boys" and these particular ones just have yet to learn their lesson? And in the world of that film, how would their lesson even be learned? What horrific event would simultaneously expose them to the unshakable ugliness of the world as well as thrust them into an oppressed social identity (i.e. a Vietnam War Vet) so that they realize they can't live in the smoke and mirrors, in the bullshit any longer? That's the roadblock I keep hitting. Angry, entitled young men are invested in Berzin's bullshit and they benefit from it, tangibly-- it propels their entitlement and power, distances them from harshness, allows the "boys to be boys" unchecked. Which makes me wonder to what degree the Vietnam War era should be a watershed for American revisionists if so many American men won't see the blood on our hands, won't accept the truths that "women and minorities are people" and "violence is trauma," won't see both the harm and the emptiness of "hitting each other with bullshit" in a world where terrible things are happening and no one is doing anything about it.
I know that Dogfight has often been discussed as a story of the power of love and goodness to heal and to overcome shitfuckery. But for me the story most powerfully communicates these questions of interpersonal and historical culpability. When and how are we as people and we as a nation no longer guiltless but answerable to the harm we cause? Why do we willfully ignore the ugly or hard things of the world, who benefits from the ignoring, and is it morally conscionable ? And for me, personally, why do we pretend like there was a "better era" before we were responsible for our actions socially, not just individually, and when the fuck are we going to claim accountability for the pain we cause when we deny that pain and that accountability in the first place?
For now, I leave you with the film's closest thing to a dreamboat, River Phoenix. Not that I don't think River has a gorgeous, sensual, earthy face--the "high and tight" haircut just did him no favors.
I can dig it.
BONUS ROUND:
1) The role of Rose was originally written as an overweight girl, but Lili Taylor so brilliantly articulated a plain, self-conscious, frightened-but-filled-with-dreams woman that Dir. Savoca had the role slightly altered.
2) Brendan Fraser's first film role. He's a navy guy who gets in a brawl with a few of the marines. So we have Nancy Savoca to thank for The Mummy and to blame for literally everything else.
3) Literally every detailed synopsis or extensive review of the film I've read makes a point of mentioning that that River Phoenix over time realizes that Lili Taylor isn't physically ugly, just plain-looking. I found this phenomenon so strange, which isn't to say that I think Lili Taylor looks terrible. I just don't remember the film ever directly articulating Eddie deciding Rose wasn't ugly or wasn't ugly enough. So the synopsis writers and reviewers focus on Rose really not being all that ugly seems to suggest that's a prerequisite to their night of romance and to Eddie realizing he shouldn't be subjecting Rose to the dogfight. That pokes a lot of holes in people's righteous indignation about the dogfight if they're suggesting that one of the reason's Rose is "worthy" is that she's actually not that ugly. Surely Eddie could be faced with the inhumanity of it, even if Rose was frightfully hideous? Perhaps he could even make himself vulnerable enough to see Rose's earnest and powerful spirit and still want to kiss and sleep with her? Gosh, we hope so.
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