Spaced out: post-modern spaces in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down

Michael Boughn

“Tu’un me loose, fo’ I kick the natal stuffin’ outen you,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, but de Tar-Baby, she ain’t sayin’ nuthin’. She des hilt on . . ..”

Space is as fundamental to war as war is to space, though we don’t

always think of it that way. We think of war as the extension of politics,

or, more recently, politics as the extension of war. But however we

choose to think of the meaning of war, of its content, it remains in

every case determined by, even as it determines, fundamental

qualities of space. Space, in that sense, is not a container for war. It

determines the nature of war. Clausewitz, the great analyst of modern

war, understood war in the context of a world in which nations

competed for territory. The goal of war was the occupation,

integration, homogenization, and disciplining of space. In order for

those tasks to make sense, space needed boundaries, surface, and

depth. It was penetrable. It was capable of holding or containing fluid

formations that became stable formations once the space was

occupied. It was commensurable using Euclidean measure.

But space is both taken and given in equal measure. The shapes,

textures, and folds of space, its emptiness and vastness, its

crowdedness and its intimate closeness are functions of imagination,

and imagination itself is implicated (and explicated) in shared modes of

Boughn—war—2

being in the world. When decisive changes have been made in the

thinking and practice of war, it has involved the recognition and

creation of new space. Oliver Cromwell, a new kind of warrior grounded

in a new set of relations, could see the space of battle as a field of

dynamic forces rather than a container of fixed positions as it had been

seen for millennia. He altered the organization of the military, its

technology and its tactics, to successfully maximize the use of that

space at Marston Moor and Naseby. The new English bourgeoisie never

looked back.

As an institution and as an organization, the modern military is

highly mobile, technologically complex, and overwhelmingly powerful.

But its differences from Cromwell’s New Model Army are quantitative

rather than qualitative. Although bigger and faster and saturated with

information, it still operates in the same space as Cromwell’s army.

Paul Virilio argues that instant communication has led to a new kind of

war, sometimes called post-modern, determined by speed. That may

be, but as the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq demonstrated, the objectives

and the strategy remain determined by the State’s push to penetrate,

occupy, and homogenize space, and having done that to then recreate

itself in viral and geometric fashion. It just does it faster and more

efficiently, and always against someone who has no hope in that space

of standing up to its overwhelming force.

Boughn—war—3

In Ridley Scott’s 2001 film, Black Hawk Down, the modern

military machine finds itself engaged in conflict in a different kind of

space. Filmed in 2000, the movie’s general release was held up until

January 2002 because of worries about how it would be received after

the events of September 11, 2001. Even so the film opened to

extremely mixed reviews. Largely viewed as an action movie, it was

criticized from all political positions for lacking a political viewpoint,

mostly because Scott never makes any explicit moral judgements or

claims in film. Rather than an epic tribute to the sacrifice made by

soldiers a là Saving Private Ryan (Stephen Spielberg, 1998), or a moral

condemnation of violence of war in the tradition of Apocalypse Now

(Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Scott’s film explores in minute detail how

the State’s military is undone when it attempts to use its mobile

technological might to penetrate Mogadishu.

It is undone because it is unprepared to deal with the spaces of

Mogadishu which are neither the space of modernity, the space of

nations, nor the tribal spaces the colonialists encountered in their first

occupation of Africa. Scott re-contextualizes the notion of postmodern

war imagined in terms of the U.S.’s advanced technology and

information control. All that is there in spades, and arguably much of

the trouble that enmeshes the U.S. forces is due to the arrogance

overwhelming technological might breeds. But Black Hawk Down

proposes that whatever changes make this war other than modern,

Boughn—war—4

changes in equipment, logistics, and communications within the

modern State’s military are only a part of it. Scott represents the very

ground the war is fought on, both literally and figuratively, as of

another world and another order, an order that cripples the modern

State’s might.

The spaces of Mogadishu in the film are the antithesis of the

isotropic, homogenous spaces of modernity as experienced in the

broad open spaces of the U.S. military base, largely determined by the

needs of its technology. The hygenic, smoothness of those modern

spaces are elaborated in the brief images of suburban America itself

during a scene where a soldier attempts to phone his wife before the

mission begins. The spaces of Mogadishu are cramped, close, filthy,

ruined, indeterminate, shifting, and hostile to communication. They are

fold upon fold refolded. The fluid channels constantly move. A street

becomes a dead end. A cul-de-sac becomes a passage. The place

makes the progress of fighting fickle and unpredictable, moving in fits

and starts and swirling bursts. In one of the film’s darkly comic

moments, two American soldiers who have dug into a classic defensive

position find themselves suddenly abandoned by the war which has

swept around them in a chaotic tumult. They have to reluctantly

abandon their fixed position and chase after the fighting. Stability

eludes these spaces. The line of sight reaches only to the other side of

the street or across the square. No one can see the big picture.

Boughn—war—5

Increasingly, and significantly, this includes even General Garrison/Sam

Shepard, the U.S. commander, back at the base watching the events

unfold through his not-so-panoptic eye in the sky.

These unsettled spaces of flows, blockages, and interferences

and unpredictable discharges are unrelated to economic

“development”—as in not enough, as if there were only one possible

mode of becoming developed and ordered with all human worlds

stretched out along its singular line. These spaces have been formed

not out of want (not that there isn’t want) but from the multiplicitous

energies growing out of Europe’s great sweep across the globe. They

do not precede the space of modernity. They follow from it, multiplying

in its wake. Postmodernity in the Mogadishu represented in Black Hawk

Down has its own measure, one whose trajectory is heavily inflected

both by its tribal heritage and its influences from Europe, but which is

other than both.

This Mogadishu is anything but “primitive,” undeveloped, or

unordered as the Americans tend to think. The Somalis’ access to

technology, markets, and media all tend to level out many of the

disparities that once characterized their relationship with the European

powers. The film Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964) depicts a crucial moment in

the European colonization of Africa where the Africans, though vastly

outnumbering the English, are unable to overcome them, mostly

because of an enormous gap in technology—rifles against spears—and

Boughn—war—6

a different discipline of warfare. Black Hawk Down depicts a similar

moment some 150 years later, the main difference being that the

African warriors are now armed to the teeth with many of the same

weapons that the U.S. Americans have, including most significantly

rocket-propelled grenades, the Colt Single Action Army “Equalizer” of

postmodern warfare. Other factors contribute to this equalization of

spatial/field power: international markets in which the Africans

purchase arms; changes in organization in relation to new

communications technology including, conspicuously, communication

devices (cell phones); and knowledge and manipulation of the panoptic

attentions of the international media. All contribute to an

overwhelming sense of the sophistication of the Somalis—a

sophistication all the more sharply etched for its contrast with the

Biblical conditions of their circumstance.

Bruce Sterling, in Islands in the Net, an early dystopian novel

about globalization, ended with a despairing vision of the Globalized

Corporate State absorbing and commodifying the very technology that

the resistance developed to fight it.1 Scotts’ film proposes that the

opposite actually has become the case in postmodern warfare. The

enormous technological advantage of the State turns into its crucial

weakness in a double sense. The State, even as it relies on technology

to provide an advantage of force, cannot control the dispersal of that

1 Sterling, Bruce. Islands in the Net. NY: Ace Books, 1989.

Boughn—war—7

technology among those it intends to overcome. This is not an issue of

the so-called weapons of mass destruction that became an obsession

with the Anglo-American axis during the invasion of Iraq. It’s a matter

of cell phones and rocket propelled grenades. Because technology

itself is out of control, the resistance to the homogenizing push of the

State gains access to critical means of communication and force that

tend to equalize its relation with the State’s war machine. The other

problem for the State is that the more complex and powerful the

technological force it mobilizes (and at the same time becomes

enslaved to, as Heidegger pointed out), the more vulnerable it is to the

uncontrollable distribution and circulation of that technology. All it

takes is one child with a cell phone to alert the warriors in Mogadishu

to the impending U.S. attack, neutralizing the elements of speed and

surprise the U.S. forces counted on. All it takes is one guy in a cheap

nylon shirt with an RPG to bring down the first Black Hawk, causing the

entire American operation to screech to a halt.

In one of the early scenes in the movie the Americans capture a

Somali arms merchant, Osman Atto/George Harris. A fellow clan

member with Aidid and a businessman who supplies Aidid’s militia with

weapons purchased in international arms markets, he is interrogated

by General Garrison. Most of the scene is shot as a close up of Atto’s

perspiring face as he smokes a Cuban cigar and verbally jousts with

Garrison over whether or not cigars made in Florida (which Garrison

Boughn—war—8

smokes, having declined Atto’s offer of a true Bolivar) could ever

match a real Cuban. Implicit in the exchange over cigars is a debate

about international politics that sets up the extraordinary tension

between these two men. The intensity of Atto’s gaze, the sense of

intelligence and malice that haunt his voice and eyes, position him not

as a prisoner but as an opponent, and one who may very well have the

better hand. At one point Atto admonishes the American:

Don’t make the mistake, General, of thinking because I grew up

without running water I am simple. I do know something about

history. See all this? [He gestures toward the outside.] It’s

simply shaping tomorrow, a tomorrow without a lot of Arkansas

white boy ideas in it.

But in fact, Garrison does make that mistake. In a response that seems

prophetic given what happened in Iraq, Garrison condescendingly

replies, “Well, I wouldn’t know about that. I’m from Texas.” It’s a

moment that comes back to haunt him when he finds his precision

operation suddenly entangled in a space it can’t extricate itself from.

This space is all surface. It has no heart to penetrate. No Kurtz

dwells here—neither Conrad’s or Coppola’s. Conrad’s Kurtz embodies

the madness that flows from the revelation of the artificiality of good

and evil, civilized and primitive, the whole structure of thinking that

justified Europe’s arrogant violence. Coppola’s Kurtz/Marlon Brando

embodies a revelation of delusional frenzy at the heart of imperial

Boughn—war—9

American culture at that relatively recent moment when it re-

encountered its deep internal division as a kind of self-devouring

psychosis. He anticipates Gilles Delueze’s and Felix Guattari’s vision of

the war machine, a nomadic remnant of a pre-State warrior culture

that not only exists outside the bipolar axes of the State (they cite

Dumézil’s jurist-priest and magician-king), but in so doing acts to

challenge the State’s self-determined authority, including its military

institution.2

The most telling revelation of this force in Coppola’s film comes

in Kurtz’s camp. Sailing up the last leg of the river, Willard/Martin

Sheen finds himself thrown into in an archaic hell. The boat encounters

a final boundary of white ghost-like figures in dozens of primitive

canoes that close behind the U.S. soldiers as they pass through. They

finally penetrate the heart in which bloody bodies dangle from palm

trees, and anonymous dead drape the terraces of an ancient temple. It

is the realm of the dead and the technology is primitive and direct—

bows and arrows, spears, machetes, some small arms. warriors in loin

cloths squat with spears held loosely between their legs next to

2 “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:--The war machine.” In A Thousand

Plateaus. Tr. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987

[1980]: 351-52. Coppola earlier develops the same thread in The

Godfather (1972) where the Mafia families take on the same weight

and significance.

Boughn—war—10

severed heads that dot the temple steps. Next to them are U.S.

soldiers (Willard’s predecessor) and regular NVA holding M16s and AK

47s.

The war machine Deleuze and Guattari propose is an

undisciplinable force. Nomadic, it exists on the borders of the State’s

order. Originally warriors and herders whose mode of being was an

itinerant territoriality, they became part of a tradition realized in the

unsystematized, skilled knowledges of itinerant labourers. Kurtz

embodies the recognition that this war machine, deterritorialized and

unrestricted by the various disciplines of the military, constitutes a

kind of pure violence untainted by the bureaucratic and political

contaminations that can cripple (or pollute) the military, making it the

stereotype of absolute might and development.

Imagined as a heart, Kurtz both establishes the space of war as

classically Euclidean in its penetrability, and at the same time sets in

motion and maintains the physical and mythic action and their

revelatory relation to one another. He doesn’t move beyond Conrad’s

radical bipolarity. He embodies its revelation in revelation’s very

possibility, the possibility of the visible and hidden, the surface and the

depth, the revelation of the heart as war machine. He sets up a

metaphysics of war that determines the fundamental nature of the

agon.

Boughn—war—11

Mohammed Farah Aidid, the object of American desire in Black

Hawk Down, is, in contrast, nowhere. Throughout the film he seems to

float in a featureless room, never encountering anyone, never

speaking. He sits and smokes. He is the counterpart, the weight of

another world, the other player to Garrison in his panoptic war room.

But whereas Garrison becomes increasingly frantic as he helplessly

watches his forces become entangled and savaged in the complex,

incommensurable spaces of Mogadishu, Aidid rocks and smokes alone

in a room, preternaturally aware of the events unfolding outside.

In this mode the war machine takes on a different sense than it

does in Coppola’s film. It is not a heart, not a revelation of some

foundation, but a kind of remnant, a “minus-1,” as Deleuze and

Guattari might put it, a wild, diverse, antithetical force that actively

resists the State’s homogenizing might.3 In Coppola’s film, the war

machine is represented as a purity, an horrific purity, but a purity that

both reveals the source of the state’s might and the limit of its control.

Willard’s State sanctioned murder of Kurtz is required to return the

State to the illusion of unfounded unity. The foundation must be

3 “The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher

dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with

the number of dimensions one already has available, always n – 1(the

only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted).” A

Thousand Plateaus, p. 6.

Boughn—war—12

obscured, though it remains the foundation. In Black Hawk Down the

war machine’s antithetical trajectory is of another order. It exists

utterly outside the State’s parameters. It is another world, another

space and a present time.

Aidid resembles a heart, but the resemblance is misleading. He is

the trigger to the Americans’ unilateral action and the focus of their

animus. The operation represented in Black Hawk Down is one piece of

a larger plan to capture or kill Aidid. But he is not locatable because

the Americans think they are in one kind of space, but in fact are in

another. Even if he was locatable, as Atto points out, it would make no

difference—because there is no heart. The initiating penetration of

Mogadishu falters when it becomes entangled in the complications of

that space without a heart. The American force seems to penetrate the

space, but then its thrust is blunted. The helicopters land on the roof

and the U.S. warriors, moving like a machine, set up a perimeter,

searching the building and securing the captured clan heads for

transport back to the U.S camp. They do all the right things. But then

comes the guy in the nylon shirt with the RPG. Suddenly the nature of

the space is revealed as other than what the Americans thought it was.

The surfaces, eddies, bursts and folds proliferate and circulate

becoming a Tar Baby, an endless pellicular entanglement, the

confounding of communication.

Boughn—war—13

At that point, for all its pan-optic power (embodied in the image

of Garrison back at the U.S. camp watching every move unfold on a

T.V. screen with a live feed from a helicopter hovering over the action)

all illusions of the invulnerability of the State vanish in an explosion of

chaotic, random, uncontrolled force. And even though the Americans

eventually extricate themselves (at the cost of 18 dead Americans and

hundreds of dead Somalis), they have lost not just the battle but the

“war” because the very measure of what’s winning and what’s losing

has shifted into a new modality.

The old modality was determined by the penetration of space

and its eventual occupation, manipulation, homogenization, and

stratification, all geared toward the reproduction of the State on its

pacified body. The essence of this modality is might, overwhelming

power. This is the mode of the American assault. In the multiplicitous

warrens of Mogadishu the US troops discover that this modality no

longer functions in strange spaces where all attempts to penetrate,

whether “successful” or “unsuccessful” come to naught. They come to

naught because the depth becomes an endlessly unfolding surface that

generates an unpredictable circulation of force that in turn endlessly

occupies the occupiers.

In Black Hawk Down, even though the “mission” is successfully

completed (the tribal leaders who were the object of the attack are

captured and removed), and the U.S. Americans kill hundreds of

Boughn—war—14

Somalis for every one of their own casualties, the battle is lost, and

beyond that, so is the war, because the State’s ability to continue its

action is determined by a kind of late capitalist, neo-liberal, bottom-line

contract with it’s population; e.g. it can do whatever it wants as long as

the “cost” (lives, money) remains within a manageable “budget,” and

the loss of eighteen lives (and more importantly, the public humiliation

that flows from the entanglement) constitute an immediate and

decisive deficit.

A similar situation occurred in Iraq, though the lessons of

Mogadishu allowed the U.S. Americans to more successfully disguise

their defeat. The initial plans of the Bush administration called for

recreating the State in Iraq specifically in the image of the U.S. State,

the fantasy of all American international policy since Thomas Jefferson.

Iraq was to be transformed into “a secular, pluralistic, market driven-

nation.”4 This proposed transformation was not simply the gratuitous

desire of ideologically driven theorists. It was the crucial foundation of

a strategy to deprive Islamicists of a possible base and recruiting

ground by transforming a large Arab country into a clone of the United

States, imposing a State on it whose form was derived from the

principles of the European Enlightenment as developed by the

theorists of the U.S. American revolution.

4 Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. “Threats Force Retreat from Wide-Ranging

Plans for Iraq.” Washington Post, Sunday December 28, 2003: A01.

Boughn—war—15

But the jubilation and triumphalism that followed the initial

“penetration” of Iraq gave way to the recognition that the U.S. was

entangled in another kind of space and that in order to extricate

themselves (especially before the Presidential election in November

2004) they had to abandon their scheme, jettisoning plans for free

markets, a constitution, the abolition of militias (a.k.a the war machine

that operates within the dynamics of the anti-State forces of tribe and

family and that is both the foundation of the resistance to the

occupation and a significant enabling condition of the future civil war),

the overhaul of Saddam’s national food rationing program, and the

privatization of State owned businesses—in other words, the Works,

the whole caboodle of born-again neo-liberal recipes for Utopia that

were to have transformed Iraq into America-lite.

Scott’s analysis of this situation extends from the external

spaces of Mogadishu to the internal spaces of mind/self of the warriors

engaged in this decisive battle. Kurtz as heart holds space to an

economy of repression and revelation in which subjects, like the space

they are in, are informed by a “dark heart.” They are both implicated

and explicated in that space. They have “depth,” “character” and “act

autonomously,” though each of these terms signifies only within a

specific kind of space. This is the case as well with the Americans in

Black Hawk Down. Identity confusion at the beginning of the film

caused by all the identical haircuts, quickly resolves into the

Boughn—war—16

recognizable personalities of a classic war film. The soldiers are

proposed as “persons,” important to the State, as is asserted in the

often-repeated slogan, “No one gets left behind.” This is in sharp

contrast to the Somalis of whom only three are ever identified as

persons. Aidid’s space leaves no room for the illusion of the depth of

subjects. Instead they are represented as what might be seen as a

mass.

But not all masses are massive, nor do we necessarily

understand what is involved in being individuals. Farimbi/ Treva

Etienne draws attention to the complications of these concepts in his

interview with the captured pilot, Michael Durant/ Ron Eldard. After

asking Durant if he is one of the Rangers who has been killing his

soldiers, Firimbi appeals to something very like individualism (whose

absence among the Somalis some critics of the film deplore),

suggesting that he and Durant can negotiate “soldier to soldier.” Of

course Durant can’t, and his obvious inability to do so reveals the

illusion of individuality—or perhaps more accurately reveals the price

the Military extracts from its soldiers. The U.S. Americans are of course

all “individuals”—they have names, faces, play chess, call their wives,

make fun of each other, debate the purpose of the war—but there is

cost for this “individuality” and one measure of it paradoxically is that

they must become part of the machine, a cog in a hierarchical

Institution with carefully and precisely defined roles.

Boughn—war—17

It’s as if the individuals aren’t really individuals, or as if being an

individual is not quite what we think it is, that in Derridean parlance it

is to be individual. In the same sense, then, perhaps the mass of

Somalis is not a mass, at least not as we have been trained to think of

it in relation to individuals, but something else. The very idea of mass

is determined in the sense of a “loss” of something and so tied to an

implicit defense of the presence of that thing. The OED has “mass” as

“a multitude of persons mentally viewed as forming an aggregate in

which their individuality is lost.” That “loss,” at its most obvious, has

been represented in war films largely through caricature that renders it

grotesque, simultaneously laughable and despicable. That’s the stuff of

open propaganda. Think of the representation of the NVA in Green

Berets (Ray Kellogg, John Wayne, 1968) a movie whose determining

gesture, following the propaganda films of WWII, was to caricature “the

enemy” as mindless and soulless and the U.S. soldiers as having

inherently special, almost supernatural, “human” characteristics.

Somewhat more subtly, We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace, 2002),

rises slightly above caricature, but still manages to imply a kind of

implicit evil to the faceless “enemy.”

These images differ significantly from those Scott creates, with

their extraordinary energy and seemingly undirected intelligence.

When the Somalis pour out of various buildings to seize the second

downed helicopter they flow like water from the structures surrounding

Boughn—war—18

the Black Hawk, a pliant force that erupts into uncontainable and

unpredictable flows of bodies riding untranslatable energies. Rather

than singular Might directed by pan-optic vision, Scott gives us an

image of an a-centeric force in which all individuals are

interchangeable. They are a multitude, not a mass. Their

numerousness is not to be confused with facelessness or unity, and

especially not with the loss of something. They are another kind of

force. We could say tribal if that’s understood as a fundamentally

different form of social organization, a different kind of machine, say,

than the Military Institution of the State. It’s not a question of

“mechanical” as opposed to “organic,” but rather of different modes of

connection (industrial, tribal), different machines, unfolding into

different modes of force. One is orderly, disciplined, and requires

individuals trained and drilled to work as a unit, while the other is

random, spontaneous, and chaotic and requires members who respond

with absolute precision and knowledge to unpredictable flows.

The entire body of the people—men, women, and children—

comes alive in this space to maul and expel the Occupiers, something

the Americans never understand. In a remarkable scene at the

beginning of the U.S. operation, a number of children call in to report

the approaching Black Hawk squadron. One holds up a cell phone to

transmit the sound of the helicopters back to the city, and an American

soldier, misinterpreting the gestures as a sign of welcome, waves at

Boughn—war—19

him in a moment that reveals the incommensurability of the two

worlds. These children are everywhere. As the fighting intensifies,

every member of the community seems to join in, picking up the guns

of the fallen to continue the attack.

Farimbi says that in this world, to kill is to negotiate, and that

“there will always be killing, you see, in our world.” What’s at stake

here, then, is the question of killing that has not been appropriated and

legitimated by the State but remains the provenance (and

responsibility) of the multitude. The Somalis have what might be

characterized as an active, social relation to death, or perhaps even an

intimate relation. Within that relation resides the ability, even the

responsibility, to negotiate. For the Americans that relation has been

co-opted by the State in exchange for the promise not to be left

behind. But even that promise, Farimbi points out, is part of a world in

which the Americans lead “long, dull boring lives” which to each of

them is divinely unique, preordained, dramatic—and fatal in any

deviation from the prescribed norm.

Atto suggests that the U.S. attempt to capture Aidid, while

ostensibly for “humanitarian” reasons, is actually governed by the

mythologies of individualism associated with the American west. “What

do you think this is,” he asks Harrison, “the K.O. Corral?” He implies

that the American “strategy” of getting Aidid is governed by a deep

mythic compulsion toward individual shoot-outs, that the Americans

Boughn—war—20

see themselves in the position of the Earps in a showdown with the

Clantons, and that such a mythos will not signify within the “space of

Aidid.” Harrison’s response, a condescending snigger and a smug

correction—“You mean O.K. Corral”—dismisses Atto’s critique by

asserting his own superior knowledge of American pop culture, while at

the same time ignoring the meaning of it.

Apart from raising the issue of the ways in which differing

illusions of forms of subjectivity affect the strategies of the opposing

forces, Atto’s comments also raise the question of the role of governing

narratives in the film. Perhaps he’s right, and at some deep level, the

OK Corral lurks as governing narrative for the Americans. But it’s not

one that circulates openly as rationale for the military adventure. It

doesn’t serve as master narrative in the sense that Lyotard has

proposed.5 The fundamental arguments for the American presence are

covered in an informal exchange between two soldiers, Eversmann/

Josh Hartnett and Hoot/Eric Bana, just before the mission is

launched.Erersmann, characterized by his comrades as an idealist,

articulates the idea that the U.S. must act to relieve the suffering of

the Somali people. Hoot, the hardened warrior, counters that all that

matters once the fighting begins is to take care of yourself and your

5 Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmpdern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge. Tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and

History of Literature, Volume 10. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Boughn—war—21

comrades: “They won’t understand it’s about the man next to you,

that’s all it is.” These attempts to provide narrative coherence are

supplemented by others during the course of the combat: “watch out

for the man next to you,” “nobody asks to be a hero, they just are,” “it

ain‘t up to you, it’s just war,” “no one gets left behind,” and so on.

Each of these narratives in turn has been put forward by various critics

and marketers as the master narrative for the movie. Yet their sheer

plenitude makes it impossible to single out one to play that role. No

one of them dominates the discourse and provides coherence. Instead

they all circulate freely, contesting and competing for legitimacy.

Strangely missing is the master narrative that informed the last

50 years of American military and political mission: the defense of

“liberty” and “freedom” in the struggle with fascism, communism,

and/or barbarism. That defense focused on a real or perceived threat

to the security of the State and established a space of unity within

which the State could reproduce and introject its singular self under

the rubric of defending freedom. The resulting massification of

fractured American experience continues to serve, as Fredrick Jameson

has argued, as “the great Utopian moment of national unification.”6 In

Scott’s film, the absence of such a master narrative is glaring, though

the nostalgia for it is everywhere. There is simply no way to mobilize

that narrative in this space. The local stories that circulate among the

soldiers do not replace that master narrative. Instead, they circulate

Boughn—war—22

within the space left void by it and draw our attention to the black hole

of its absence.

In that sense Black Hawk Down, unlike Coppolla’s film, has no

interest in moral judgments about war and violence. If there’s a sense

of horror, it’s local rather than global. Rather than the horror of

violence, it’s about disaster, the disaster the State’s military institution

faces when it engages the war machine in the territory of post-

modernity. The war machine—tribal and nomadic—although

responding to the conditions of modernity, exists outside its

parameters and structures and so evades its symbolic metaphysics of

emanation and penetration. Scott’s sense of the war machine is not as

a deeper or more penetrating moment of violence, a revelation of

primal integrity. It is of another order, one that is impenetrable to the

State because it is all surface. Its organization is anarchic and

6 Jameson, Fredrick. A Singular modernity: Essay on the Ontology of

the Present. London: Verso, 2002: 212. More recently, the current

representatives of the American State have attempted to renew this

narrative in an attenuated form by raising the spectre of terrorism

and claiming that exporting “freedom and democracy” can undo its

“breeding grounds.” While superficially similar to the much

disparaged “root cause” argument, this argument differs in proposing

the “root cause” as being the absence of the State rather than some

injustice or exploitation caused or supported by the State.

Boughn—war—23

spontaneous, unpredictable and contingent rather than technological

and disciplined.7

Absent any rationalizing uber-narrative, what’s left is the viral

drive of the State to recreate itself. The pursuit of Aidid is part of a

larger plan to remove power from the competing (and brutal) multiple

centres of the war machine and resettle “Somalia” in the form of a

unitary State within the narrative of a “transition to democracy.”

Although it’s not part of the material of the film, such a move

presumably is a step toward integrating “Somalia” into the globalized

Empire of capital. It is as simple and blunt as that. Everything about

the American undertaking is geared toward and defined by the

massive unity of the State, the State’s desire to eliminate difference

and to reproduce itself: E pluribus Unum. But in the end as the

American troops run through the gauntlet of the Mogadishu Mile, Atto’s

observation about the future hovers over them.

If his reference to “Arkansas white boy ideas” refers specifically

to William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. president at the time of the

7 It’s not a binary division. The State has access to the war machine it

contains, and vice versa. This occurs in the film when the panotptic

power of the State breaks down in the chaos of Mogadishu and the

Delta Force platoon attempting to reach the surrounded Rangers

abandons the State’s technology (and plan) and enters the city on its

own terms.

Boughn—war—24

Mogadishu events, it also resonates beyond that to challenge the

assumption of those representing the State that the political

institutions of Euro-American modernity are universally applicable and

desirable. This Utopian vision of a single world united by one

(democratic) market and one (democratic) State form has, as John

Gray has eloquently argued, unleashed as much violence on the world

as any of its competitive utopian visions, including Marxism and

Islamism.8 Like any utopian movement, its greatest weakness is its

belief in its Truth. In Black Hawk Down, that belief staggers and

stumbles in the final scenes of the film. It’s an astonishing moment.

Finally rescued by the Pakistani U.N. forces that they initially dismissed

in their unilateral assault (in another of Scott’s prophetic moments),

the American Rangers and D-boys are forced to run out of Mogadishu

on foot pursued by the Africans. It’s a running battle in which men,

women, and children pick up the guns of the fallen to join the pursuit.

In one telling scene, an African-American soldier shoots down an

African warrior, and then watches as a black woman in a chador runs

to pick up the fallen man’s weapon. “Don’t do it,” he mutters, “don’t do

it.” But she does reach down and pick up the gun, as she must. And he

does shoot her, as he must. The film makes no judgment. It doesn’t

8 “The era of globalisation is over,” The New Statesman, 24

September 2001.

Boughn—war—25

question the integrity of the soldier’s plea. But the disaster of the

moment is absolute and unspeakable.

The U.S. Americans are stunned. Jogging in full gear out of the

city, dogged by African warriors in techs, they find the road lined on

both sides with men, women, and children hooting at them, mocking

them with what we finally realize must be traditional tribal gestures

meant to humiliate a defeated enemy, gestures whose origins for the

Americans lie in some alien and inaccessible world of ritualized war: a

hand raised just so, the brushing of the hair with the hands, a certain

movement of the feet. These are the same people shot down by Aidid’s

men in the opening sequence, the people one of the minor narratives

claims the Americans are there to feed. It’s a moment in which the two

worlds confront each other’s utter incommunicability in a space that is

all difference.9

9 Although Black Hawk Down is based on Mark Bowden’s remarkable

account of the events first published in a series of articles in the

Philadelphia Inquirer and later expanded into the book, Black Hawk

Down (Berkeley: Atlantic Monthly Pres, 1999) this scene, as well as

the other crucial scenes I have described, especially those in which

Atto and Farimbi converse with Garrison and Durant, are not part of

Bowden’s narrative. They are the work of Scott and script writers Ken

Nolan and Steve Zaillian.