Detail from Breughel the Elder’s “Triumph of Death”, painted in 1562.

“When you say four thousand dead, that doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just a number. You can dismiss it. But if you start getting into names and faces and you see the mom and you eat pot roast with her, and you drink beer with their friends, and you listen to the guys who carried him back talking about the blood on their uniforms — you can’t dismiss it. And that’s just one. That’s just one.”

Canadian journalist Chris Jones is talking about his Esquire article which documents the journey made by the body of Sergeant Joe Montgomery from an explosion in an Iraqi paddock to his grave in Indiana.

When I studied drama at university, I was hammered with some basic lessons about nomenclature – a kind of naming of parts ritual which would be obsolete within five years. Along with expressionism and surrealism, we learnt about the formal distinction between naturalism and realism. Following Zola, we figured that naturalism used the accidents of life, the exactness and detail, to articulate the human condition as configured by external conditions. Realism, on the other hand, used detail to suggest interior states. I can feel my brain creak as I bring this back to the surface, nearly forty years later.

In fiction, these distinctions have been largely lost as the great revelations about the social origins of behaviour have been completely normalised. Film can only work with exterior behaviour, and realism is the water in which the good little story-telling fish swims.

But in documentary, the terms are still core parts of the artistic project. The tropes of observation are severely naturalistic, and the use of language, so natural in print, is seriously problematic. Interviews must be related to images, while narration threatens a kind of realistic dissonance, in which auteurs weakly complain about “being told what to think” in a voice over. (I don’t have much sympathy with these fears, because the form is not the problem. It’s the hysteria and anti-intellectual stupidity that comes with fumbled attempts to find a mass audience).

The Jones article is full of paragraphs like this:

“Leatherbee wet his lips before he raised his trumpet. That was the first indication that he was a genuine bugler. There is such a shortage of buglers now — ushered in by a confluence of death, including waves of World War II and Korea veterans, the first ranks of aging Vietnam veterans, and the nearly four thousand men and women killed in Iraq — that the military has been forced to employ bands of make-believe musicians for the graveside playing of taps. They are usually ordinary soldiers who carry an electronic bugle; with the press of a button, a rendition of taps is broadcast out across fields and through trees. Taps is played without valve work, so only the small red light that shines out of the bell gives them away.”

We are reading an accretion of detail about the social and accidental circumstances which is absolutely imbued with the naturalistic tradition. Indeed, this kind of article is a Rocky Mountain redoubt of the form, where it is practiced and honed, so the cultural missiles can be polished and tested. It is a very American thing, the badge of Serious Reporting, supported by those large American magazines which keep fact-checkers iike malevolent savants. The articles are expected to mark the progress of the Nation and the Culture, almost atavistically. Here be bison on the wall.

The detail is awesome, and implies a huge amount of work. This article uses a trick I love – take a completely “objective” story, full of stuff that happens in the real world, and then warp it by playing with time. In this case, the account runs backwards from the grave to the explosion. By accident, this reveals an oddity – Jones describes the funeral with an additional layer of intensity and psychological detail, deploying more sensual adjectives, which made me think he was actually there.

With my cod-forensic skills honed by the internet, I can reveal that the interview about the article proves that he first heard about the story from an CNN article which was written at least weeks later. The fine photos are all staged portraits, which don’t claim documentary immediacy.

In other words, the whole story is completely built up with interviews, intensified by visits to the location and functionaries as they repeat the funeral journey with other shattered bodies. At each turn, the accounts are deftly ascribed, and the tenses flow neatly without dissonance. The accounts of these journeys are beautifully and discreetly dovetailed into the over-arching narrative of Montgomery’s return-in-reverse.

From the documentary film point of view, the whole bloody thing is subjective. A retelling and recreation in which a new narrative is built up from corroborated testimony, with telling moments presented in the language of the witness. In the world of video-journalists with small cameras, this is a bit down the totem pole. “Ah, so you weren’t there.” You are using a bunch of interviews, and you are on the way to the dreaded “reconstruction”. However, that is an ironic aside in my own construction here.

This article provoked a fight on Metafilter which illustrates something strange and creepy. The article completely fails to mention the war, the suffering of the Iraqis or the family’s attitude to this vast machine of suffering which has torn their lives apart, and rendered the bodies of their loved one’s into an empty glove packed with gauze, lacking the wedding ring which was never found after the blast.

The creepiness is the point. The account is completely hermetic. Without direct reference, the war strains to escape from the physical detail. From something like this:

First, the soldiers folded the flag twice lengthwise, with a slight offset at the top to ensure that the red and white would disappear within the blue. “Their hands were shaking,” Dawson would remember later. “I could see that they were feeling it.”

Then they made the first of thirteen triangular folds. Before the second fold, Huber took the three gleaming shells out of his pocket and pushed them inside the flag. No one would ever see them again — a flag well folded takes effort to pull apart — but he took pride in having polished them.

After the final fold, Bastille tucked in the last loose flap and passed the flag to Dawson for inspection. Dawson then passed it to the fifty-two-year-old woman with the general’s star standing next to him.

The Army’s Chief of Staff has directed that a general officer, randomly assigned, will attend every funeral of every soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

In the academic study of rhetorical strategies since our simple distinctions all those years ago, eager theorists say this calls attention to the absent fact – the giant reality of a war of aggression. But this article bothers me because it prefers to look inward, to demand that we contemplate the exact reality of the depicted experience. I keep remembering pictures of dead Iraqis when these Americans describe their emotions, and I sense that this is transgressive, as if I am not supposed to create that private intercut. As Jones tries to control the flow of my thoughts, I am stepping out of line. There is a time and a place to make those associations, and it is not supposed to be here.

I have no idea whether Jones experiences any crisis of technique in this piece – indeed, I guess he doesn’t. The work is fabulous in its own terms. But I am left to imagine that he is straining at an idea he can’t get a handle on.

What is going on is both truly monstrous and horribly sad. Out of this whole mess, using precisely repeatable rituals, these ordinary folk have fashioned their civilisation into a kind of cult. Here, of course, meaning is never in itself, is always immanent, looking to a larger fabric to which the individual and reality itself is subservient. (And that construction of the world is totally the opposite of the deep assumptions behind Jones’ journalistic naturalism.)

As these army families struggle with grief, loss and waste, their leaders have constructed their own meaning around it, an overwhelming, detailed metaphor plugged into false history, popular culture and a broken sense of self.

When they arrived at the airfield, sweat-soaked, the brothers were taken aback by the number of cars waiting in a line. There were scores, maybe hundreds, as well as about sixty members of the Patriot Guard Riders and their motorcycles, decorated with American flags flapping in the early-summer breeze. The procession would be three miles long…

…. The Patriot Guard was formed a few years ago in response to the threat of protesters from the extreme-fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kansas, who sometimes disrupted the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. There were rumors the church intended to hold up signs along the highway like, “God Hates Your Tears” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” Gail Bond stayed up the night before for a lot of reasons, but partly because she was worried about how her family and friends might react, how she might react, to such taunts. But now she saw the men on their Harley-Davidsons, with their long hair coming out the backs of their helmets, and she didn’t worry anymore.

To me, this looks like a cult of death.

Thanatos: the mythic name students of Freud gave to the death drive he postulated in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This drive represents the organic need to return to lifelessness and stasis, the ultimate calm of lifeless non-conflict. Freud traced all aggressive and destructive activity to this notion, which impressed him deeply after the outbreak of one world war and the death of his daughter Sophie. That portion of the drive which is turned outward benefits the organism, which would otherwise direct it against itself. However, Freud did concede that destructiveness also affords the ego satisfaction of its old narcissistic need for omnipotence.

The Aztec Battle of Azcapotzalco based on sketches by native Indians, drawn at the request of Juan de Tovar (1543-1623) for his pre-conquest ethnographic history of Mexico, known sometimes as the Ramirez Codex.

Do you see what the Aztecs are doing at the top right hand corner of this picture? They are sacrificing a child. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

There was one detail in Jones’ story which brought the bile to my throat -

The soldiers from Fort Knox removed the casket from the hearse and set it on the lowering device over the openmouthed burial vault. The vault was made by a Chicago company, Wilbert Funeral Services, Inc., designed specifically for soldiers killed in Iraq: The Operation Iraqi Freedom vault is made of precast concrete lined with Trilon, and its lid is adorned with a lithograph depicting scenes from the war in Iraq, including Saddam’s statue falling.

And the true horror of all this, the messiness and emotional chaos and betrayal of decent impulses is maybe here, in another picture, the point of my story, for which I have assembled my own details to provide a context -

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