Lt. Bobby Dougherty (James Gandolfini) eagerly waits for the call to fire, in Crimson Tide (1995)
On the subject of the development of the screen and interface, Virilio notes the strange, historical moment, now difficult to appreciate, when “the surprise effect came from the sudden appearance of pictures and signs on a monitor”, rather than from some kind of direct perception (War and Cinema 72). It is, then, only natural that this shift should find in film constant visual expression. In Cold War-themed submarine films — Crimson Tide (1995) and The Hunt for Red October (1990) come to mind — the greatest commotion is indeed reserved for when the abstract blip of an enemy sub appears on the radar, sending the whole crew into an acute, practiced frenzy.
The war sub genre in particular is interesting in this regard, in that these films seem to take special delight in the blindness of war and its dramatic effects, as when, predictably enough, the perceptual technologies themselves fail or breakdown under unforeseen, if inevitable, circumstances, leaving the crew blind, isolated, and cut off from the surface. It is at this point, to be sure, when the war machine seems to have lost its mooring, that the high-tech interface, which stands in for the whole technological precondition of war, executes a profound, philosophical reversal: instead of facilitating war all the more efficiently, the communications system comes to impose a blindness on the thought process it’s supposed to augment and fortify.
Generic narrative turns of this kind can of course be taken literally and minimally, with no real larger, metaphorical point to be made. However, and I think this is a somewhat unavoidable interpretation for the audience, the paralysis or failure of the technology of war tends to extend, metaphorically and thematically, to war itself. In the case of Crimson Tide (1995) this is perhaps most clear: an incomplete emergency message received during battle, coupled with the isolation from civilization proper to a submarine, is sufficient cause, according to Navy protocol, to launch a nuclear attack on the USSR. Though this plot certainly permits the audience to read it as little more than an imaginative exaggeration of a far-fetched contingency planning oversight, Capt. Frank Ramsey’s (Gene Hackman) character has the effect of attaching a corresponding attitude, unwavering and incapable of thoughtful deviation, to what would otherwise be little more than a bureaucratic error. Clearly, this film is not simply about an error or an accident, but about the carefully cultivated recklessness that prepares that accident, almost as if to coax it into existence.
Though Ramsey is ultimately persuaded by Lt. Commander Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington), making him a parable of sorts for the shift from Cold War paranoia to post-Cold War reasoning, the military’s culture, as personified by James Gandolfini’s brilliant minor performance as the sneering, warmongering Lt. Bobby Dougherty, is directly implicated in the logic that seems to inadvertently produce, but in fact desires, exceptional ‘errors’. And that’s what this film is really about: the accident that can’t remain, or won’t be allowed to be, an accident. As soon as it occurs, as soon as the message is broken, a situation is established that resists at every turn the possibility of indeterminacy. Lt. Hunter’s sole goal, after all, is to demonstrate that an accident has occurred, that they are not in fact under attack, that the world above has not been destroyed. It’s as if the refusal to believe that an error could have occurred is the same ‘fog of war’ that allowed, and perhaps willed, the error to occur in the first place. This hole or blindness at the center of their thinking, and around which their every action gathers, becomes a kind of projection screen for any and every scenario, however dramatic. For some (Lt. Dougherty) it becomes an opportunity to unleash unimaginable terrors; for others still (Capt. Ramsey), there is no problem and the protocol must be followed; whereas, only for Lt. Hunter is it an accident, a meaningless, non-psychological accident.
Everything works out in the end of course – it’s a Hollywood military picture after all – but the way in which the film’s conclusion neatly tidies up and corrects the military’s image can’t help but leave an unpleasant, suspicious aftertaste, for in reality we all secretly know that there won’t be a Lt. Ron Hunter to set Capt. Frank Ramsey straight, and for that matter Gandolfini’s sadistic Lt. Bobby Dougherty, who is all too eager to find a reason, legitimate or not, to ‘push the red button’, probably won’t be the lowly henchman to Ramsey but just might be cast as Ramsey himself.
Even so, the question remains as to what makes the milieu of the submarine so open to suggestion, why this scene or setting is able to smoothly facilitate a certain imaginary hypothetical situation. Which brings us to a crucial distinction: the crisis does not ‘happen to’ take place on a submarine so much as the submarine has been ’selected’ to best express the crisis — which is precisely why the submarine war film is (or was) a genre unto itself, with its own recurring themes, story lines, and aesthetics. The ‘content’ of the film cannot be said to simply preexist, and so produce, the problems and questions articulated within it when, on the level of narrative design, it’s just as much the other way around. A remark made by Walter Benjamin on the nature of ‘playing’ could in this regard be said of film as well. The “imaginative content of a child’s toys is [not] what determines his playing”, he wrote; rather,
“A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into a robber or a policeman.” (115)
Likewise, with respect to Crimson Tide, the filmmakers in question wanted to form an enclosed, isolated panic room with the fate of the world beyond at stake, and so they situated the experiment on a nuclear submarine cut off from the surface. Just as, no doubt, when filmmakers and audiences want to envision the apocalypse and the ruins of civilization, they employ aliens (Independence Day [1996], War of the Worlds [2005], The Day the Earth Stood Still [2008]), climate change/pathogenic outbreaks (28 Days Later … [2002], The Day After Tomorrow [2004], I Am Legend [2007]), or the distant future (Logan’s Run [1976], Artificial Intelligence: AI [2001], the The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last” [1959]) to provide the proper alibi.
As a poetic or narrative structuring device, with an aesthetic and cinematic history all its own, the submarine milieu brings a specific, recognizable set of conditions to bear on the events that follow. For one, it satisfies, without having to stoop to magical-realist premises, the requirements for a totally isolated chamber, akin to the bunker, the war room, or even the out-of-range warplane in Dr. Strangelove. The submarine cut-off from human contact gives plausible definition to an otherwise too-fantastic hypothetical. If the plot of a zero-sum time-limited nuclear war decision was already, in 1995, a distasteful, tired subject, the war sub genre was still able to recover the ideological framework of the Cold War question par excellence. In the isolation of the submarine, a brute human nature may be plausibly unleashed; and the cold, calculating logic of Cold War scare scenarios, now too openly ideological to hypothetically apply to ‘normal’ foreign policy decisions, is here able to attribute its advancement to the submarine itself. If, as a culture, we could no longer believe that ‘mad men’ were the proper provocation for a preemptive nuclear holocaust (though this concept has of course since been reborn), Crimson Tide salvages the same result and the same question through new means and a new aesthetic.
References
Benjamin, Walter. “The Cultural History of Toys,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. [Link]
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Radical Thinkers). New York: Verso, 2009. [Link]
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