My Flesh and Blood

My body keeps channeling so many contradictory feelings around the figure of the soldier intensity of shame as his body becomes the object of my lust and my violence. I want to kill him for blocking my dream of a demilitarized future, and I want to be fucked by him because the repressive sublimation of his body has become unbearable.

—Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (2012)

1.

Men in tights and spandex clutch each other, hold each other, sweat and bleed together under the white lights, slamming each other to the mat, to the ropes, to the climax, the final turnabout and inspired last-minute rise from soul-obliterating suffering to throw off the hurt and confusion and fear, lay evil low with a perfectly executed suplex, and restore the scales of justice.

The 1980s were a golden age for American professional wrestling, and like a lot of kids, I watched it on TV. My friend Jeff, though, was serious. Maybe it had to do with his being raised in a Catholic church that still observed the Tridentine Mass, or maybe it was the magic of the moment, the conflation of Cold War fears and charismatic freaks—Macho Man Randy Savage, Rowdy Roddy Piper, André the Giant—but he approached each week’s match with religious devotion.

“It’s not real,” I objected. Jeff insisted it was. We argued for weeks, then hashed out a reading that satisfied us both, locating the real in the wrestlers’ bodies: The stories were managed and constructed, we agreed, but Junkyard Dog really did clamber up the ropes in the corner and leap down at Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, clotheslining him with his forearm. Yes, the feuds between Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik were cooked up, but the bodies slamming to the mat each week were raw. It wasn’t until years later, after I’d been to war and had long ago left off watching wrestling, that I realized we were still missing the point.

Meat is not truth. The truth of wrestling cannot be the wrestler’s body, since an infinite number of actual bodies could be destroyed on the mat and wrestling would still go on. No, I began to see, the truth of the event was actually much closer to Jeff’s Tridentine Mass: The bodies lent their substance to the semiotic exchanges of narrative, face and heel, peripeteia and revenge, all of which shaped and channeled viewers’ desires. The truth was the whole: The ritual synthesis of blood and word, flesh and mask, was what gave those falling bodies weight.

2.

I remember first seeing Omer Fast’s video installation The Casting at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. I’d been out of the army two years, and back from Iraq for four. The installation consisted of two screens with projections on both sides. I found myself transfixed by the flicker in the images, the way the performers blinked and wobbled, mimicking still photos, and was moved by the seamless interweaving of an American soldier’s story about killing an Iraqi with the same soldier’s story about dating an unhappy, self-harming German girl. I didn’t know whether the stories were real, but that didn’t seem to matter: The actors were, and they lent their substance to the semiotic exchanges of the narrative, Germany and Iraq, killing and burning, all of which shaped and channeled viewers’ desires to consume the soldier’s trauma.

The situation Fast’s film dramatizes is suggested in its title: a collective casting an individual in the role of scapegoat. On one side of the screens, there are the lights, the screens, the cameras, the actors playing the interviewer, producers, and staff, the whole spectacular apparatus of consumer capitalism attending to its altar, the screen, and the body upon it.

On the other side of the screens, Fast interviews a man who seems to have been a soldier. “So how do you feel about improvising?” he asks, to which the man responds ambivalently: “It depends on how you feel at the time.” Fast presses: “Can you improvise now?”

The man submits and tells his two stories, twisted together in Fast’s deft editing, offering up a perfect proportion of innocence and blood guilt. We drink down his pain, confusion, and desire to be seen, all mediated through gorgeous shots (on the screens’ other sides) of a burning Humvee, a bloody scarf, an autobahn, American soldiers.

The Casting ends abruptly, ambiguously, with the artist suggesting that the story might not work because it’s too long, then delivering a few spliced-together sentences that have since been interpreted as Fast’s artistic statement: “I’m definitely not so much looking for a political angle. I’m more interested in the way that experience is turned into memory and then the way that memories become stories, the way that memories become mediated.”

With these sentences, Fast offers the exact ideological formulation justifying the consumption of wartime sacrifice as art. Our aesthetic engagement with war, it insists, is not about power but about narrative. We cast the traumatized soldier as our scapegoat, the one bearing the sins of war, and ignore numberless dead Iraqis in favor of attending to one American’s psychological suffering. Politics—the objective fact of the soldier’s existence as an agent of state violence—is displaced by an insistence on “memory” and “experience.” We’re not interested in blood, we tell ourselves. We’re interested in stories.

Fast later called his statement “a complete lie.”

3.

Omer Fast’s 2016 film Continuity is a feature-length revision of his videos Continuity (2012) and Spring (2016). It’s also an expansion and elaboration of The Casting. The film crew has been replaced by a middle-class German couple. The singular actor has been replaced by a series. The soldiers now serve in the Bundeswehr rather than the American army, and the war is in Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but the relationships are homologous. The ritual sacrifice is the same.

Watching Continuity carelessly, it’s easy to piece together a troubling but comprehensible narrative: An aimless, hash-smoking German kid named Daniel joins the Bundeswehr, looking for something that will feel as real as flame burning flesh. While in Afghanistan, he makes a pass at a fellow soldier and is gang-raped by several men in his unit. Later, on patrol, Daniel leaps out of his vehicle and runs into the desert. Several soldiers follow him. They are ambushed and killed.

Back home in Germany, Torsten and Katja Fiedler are crippled by grief, and hire a succession of young men, possibly prostitutes, to act out Daniel’s homecoming. They pick the men up at the Bahnhof, one after another, bring them home, and serve them dinner. The Daniels hallucinate maggots and fingers in the food, an eyeball in the wine, whether from self-medication or being drugged we don’t know. After each dinner, Katja tries to sleep with them. Three Daniels later, the Fiedlers change the game and hire an even younger boy, Felix, to role-play the events leading to their son’s enlistment. On his way to the Fiedlers’ one afternoon, Felix is hit and killed by a stolen sports car driven by a male prostitute, the protagonist of a second narrative strand.

The last Daniel’s disappearance renews Katja’s grief. Driving through the woods with Torsten, presumably to pick up yet another Daniel, she sees a camel walking down the highway and stops. She gets out of the car and follows the camel into the forest, Torsten close behind, to a clearing overlooking a sandy trench full of dead and dying soldiers, some of them Daniels. She watches an Afghan man collect the soldiers’ weapons. Is Katja hallucinating? Did Torsten drug her too? Has the fantasy somehow become real? Does it matter?

The film offers its most delicious pleasures in the domestic theater of the Fiedlers’ dining room, where each new Daniel negotiates a fresh performance of Oedipal fantasy. The second fake Daniel is particularly fun to watch, as he spools out a story in which a chance meeting between Bundeswehr soldiers and an Afghan family erupts into violence, which is then patched over with the gift of an Audi. It’s virtuosic storytelling, and the details are so perfect we’re left to wonder whether the young man is a gifted liar or himself a veteran.

“It’s true,” Daniel number two assures us.

“No it’s not,” says Katja.

“It is,” he says.

“I don’t believe you,” she says.

“Doesn’t matter,” Daniel number two admits. “What would you rather hear?”

4.

On closer viewing, there are several knots in Continuity’s seemingly linear trajectory. The Fiedlers’ drama unspools one scene after another, but Daniel’s Afghanistan comes to us in flashbacks which, on closer examination, don’t quite cohere: the soldier we thought was Daniel wears a nametag reading Vogel and is played by the same actor who hits Felix with a sports car. What had seemed to be one narrative arc dissolves into fragments, while what had been two stories merge, a narrative double exposure filling out a unified symbolic economy.

Working with and against the ideology of trauma, Continuity explores how war functions in the Western bourgeois imagination, how those of us back home projecting our shame, grief, and lust onto the screens of soldiers’ bodies are less interested in the fate of any specific individual than we are invested in a ritual economy of sacrifice. We are more than willing to overlook discrepancies between Soldat Fiedler and Hauptgefreiter Vogel, Daniel number one and Daniel number two, imagination and fact, so long as these young men can fill out the formal roles in our ritual fort-da of trauma and recovery. Like Katja and Torsten and the interviewer in The Casting, we are ambivalent about particular soldiers’ stories—this one is too long, that one strains belief, this other doesn’t match our expectations—but we need their bodies to make our stories about who we are feel real.

Whereas The Casting offers one single soldier performing his trauma, Continuity gives us the performance again and again, as body after body cycles through the role of symbolic sacrifice. The continuity is explicit. A tattoo on Daniel number two’s forearm reads in saeculo saeculorum, “for a lifetime of lifetimes,” a phrase from the Vulgate that recurs twelve times alone in the Book of Revelation and is sung in the Tridentine Mass. Torsten tells young Felix, playing Daniel, played by Bruno Alexander: “You are my flesh and blood.”

But meat isn’t truth. The truth of war cannot reside in the soldier’s body, because any number of young men could be ground to pulp and the war would still go on, just as any number of wrestlers can fall to the mat, and any number of wafers can become the flesh of Christ. Rather, the truth of war is something like a mass. The soldier’s body lends its substance to the semiotic exchanges of the narratives—freedom and terror, trauma and recovery—shaping and channeling our desires for identity and transcendence. Continuity helps us see how the truth of war is the Eucharistic whole: Through the ritual synthesis of word and blood, fantasy and flesh, we assert our communion in the face of death. [2017]