‘War is Like This’: Jirga, History and Genre Tropes

Abstract

The critically acclaimed 2018 Australian film Jirga follows an ex-Australian soldier, Mike Wheeler, who returns to Afghanistan three years after a firefight during which he kills a civilian. Wheeler returns at risk of his death to confess his guilt to the man's community and the film examines themes of forgiveness and revenge, guilt, trauma, justice, and, as one Afghani tells Wheeler when he explains what he is doing back in Afghanistan, whether ‘war is like this’. ) This article will explore the ways Jirga uses the generic forms of the war film to convey meaning; it interrogates the usefulness of positioning films as either adhering to or subverting generic tropes, and instead points to the historically contingent evolution of generic tropes across time and place. With this understanding we can see genre tropes as complex, ambiguous, and sometimes even contradictory, attempts to develop meaning out of wartime experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Jirga
• war film
• genre
• Australia
• war history

Introduction

Jule Selbo’s analysis of the intersections of the war and fantasy film genres acknowledges that the war film sits as a foundational genre at the very genesis of filmmaking. War films in the early period of filmmaking allowed audiences to witness reenactments of imperialist campaigns and civil wars that had occurred within their own time or were at least not very far removed from their own personal histories. When thought of in this way, such films were not abstractions but, rather, a reflection of the lives of everyday people who were impacted by war; the purposes they served may very well have been political or ideological, but they were also, in a way, a witness to history, albeit a very partial one. As wars, and the social attitudes, technologies and cultures surrounding them changed, so too did the depiction of war on film, from the imperial wars of the turn of the century, to the large-scale theatres of World War One to the more complex renderings of the futility of Vietnam, to modern depictions of the ‘forever wars’ associated with George W. Bush’s declaration of a ‘War on Terror’ in 2001. This mix of socially contingent meaning-making intertwined with historical reality is reflected in the characteristics that constitute the ‘war genre’. Steve Neale’s seminal text, Genre and Hollywood, posits that classifying war films is largely ‘uncontentious: war films are films about the waging of war in the twentieth century; scenes of combat are a requisite ingredient, and these scenes are dramatically central’ (2000: 117). However, under the surface such classification is far from simple. He noted some (significant) ‘ambiguities’ of genre classification, including whether depictions of combat or being situated within a combat zone are necessary for inclusion into the genre; issues of ‘generic overlap’, for example, between spy films, Westerns, and war films; and, issues of terminology, as attitudes and representations of war have changed. For example, it could be questioned whether ‘anti-war films’ are a subcategory of ‘war film’ or a distinct genre (Neale 2000). Selbo furthers this classification, clarifying that with the ‘classical’ genre of war films come clear narrative tropes. These narrative tropes are associated with a basis in history; a focus on ‘the reasons for war, the techniques, the obstacles and struggles of participants’; high (life or death) stakes; heroism, villainy ‘and/or the roots of power’ (2015: 329); and, a confirmation of the audience’s desire to experience a ‘reaffirmation of “normative social values”’ (2015: 333).

This article contributes to the discussion of the ‘ambiguities’ associated with the depiction and classification of the war film. It will assert that rather than a strict dichotomy of either adhering to or subverting generic norms, the characteristics associated with the war genre evolve over time in ways that are historically and socially contingent. This evolution means that genre tropes can be affirmed, rejected, reinterpreted, rendered ambiguous or perform many of these actions in a way that interacts with contemporary understandings and experiences of war. Just as audiences and societies can hold tensions and contradictions about their war experiences, so too do filmic representations of war both across films and within a film. We will examine the socially and historically contingent nature of meaning-making via the war genre by sketching the ways in which the classical Hollywood war tropes have been adapted to the Australian national context over time, with a particular focus on the intersections between history, culture, meaning-making and the ways in which war has been represented on-screen. This paper will then provide a reading of the Australian war film, Jirga (2018), directed and written by Benjamin Gilmour. Jirga presents a significant case study through which to examine the generic tropes of the war film and how those tropes are interpreted across wars and across distinct national contexts. Jirga presents the first and only attempt to portray the War in Afghanistan through an Australian lens using narrative cinema, despite Australia’s significant contribution to this war effort. Indeed, it is one of a limited number of portrayals of this war by Western nations, especially relative to the enormous output of films that focus on World War One and Two. Such films would include Lions for Lambs (Redford 2007), Brothers (Sheridan 2009), Lone Survivor (Berg 2013), War Machine (Michod 2017) and The Covenant (Ritchie 2023). Indeed, many of the most iconic examples of Hollywood films that are set during the Afghanistan War use the conflict as a backdrop rather than as the major narrative focus, such as War Dogs (Phillips 2016) and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Ficarra and Requa 2016).

Jirga focuses on the journey of Mike Wheeler (Sam Smith), an ex-soldier who served in Afghanistan as a member of the Australian Defence Force. The film opens with the depiction of a night raid in a village in Kandahar, where Wheeler shoots dead a man standing a doorway. In the present day Wheeler has returned to Afghanistan as a civilian, with a small fortune in American currency, intent on finding the family of the man he killed and making some sort of amends. His journey is difficult; initially he struggles to find someone willing to take him to Kandahar because of the danger and also because many find it difficult to understand why this journey is even being undertaken in the context of the larger impacts of a still ongoing war. Ultimately, a taxi-driver agrees to take him ‘close’ to his destination for the money and the camera follows them from cityscape through lush terrain to increasingly arid, mountainous and rocky landscapes, before the driver screams ‘Taliban!’ and Wheeler flees on foot. After trekking through the parched landscape he collapses and is held captive by Taliban fighters who eventually decide to help him return to the village of the shooting, seemingly unwilling to interfere with the inextricable force that compels him back to the site. They urge him, though, to avoid offering money as compensation and teach him a phrase that they insist he should proffer instead, which translates as, ‘I killed someone, please forgiveness’ (translation in Stanizai 2018). He follows the Taliban’s advice, allowing the money to scatter with the wind and arriving in the village ready to ‘confess’. He walks villagers through the mechanics of the raid, allowing them to identify the man he killed as Atta-Ullah Khan, ‘just a musician’, not a fighter, and they take Wheeler to his home where he is confronted by Khan’s widow and children. The scene cuts to the jirga, a council who perform a function of dispute resolution in traditional Afghan society (Kouvo and Mazoori 2011). Mike sits awaiting their judgement, his anxiety at his potentially imminent execution palpable. Although they briefly debate his fate, the men conclude that Khan’s son ‘has the final authority’. Khan’s son, still a young boy, unsheaths his knife and holds it to Mike’s throat before withdrawing. He walks away as a man at the jirga asserts that ‘forgiveness is better than revenge’ and Wheeler falls forward in a nervous exhaustion. A goat is slaughtered in Mike’s place and its blood soaks the ground. The film ends as the camera pans back from the village and Mike journeys on in a small, crowded bus through the mountains.

A low-budget independent Australian film made by an ex-paramedic, Jirga was largely a critical success, screening at various Australian film festivals and, internationally, at the Toronto Film Festival. Gilmour himself identified Jirga as ‘the antithesis of stereotypical Hollywood war movies’ (as cited in Ward 2019: 34). He also, and perhaps contradictorily, identifies the film as more akin to a fable, removed from a specific time and place, that instead explores universal themes of ‘guilt and redemption’, of how much one is willing to do to be redeemed, and of how far one is willing to go prompted only by the strength of their convictions (Ward 2019: 34). This article will examine how the Australian war genre variant has interpreted genre tropes over time. It is by understanding the evolution of the genre over time and across contexts that we can begin to grapple with the historical nature of film representation and the often ambigious, complex and even contradictory way that genre tropes can be employed both across films and even within a single film, as in Jirga.

History, war and representation from the ‘outpost’

Historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote in 1966 that Australian history has been shaped primarily by ‘the tyranny of distance.’ For Blainey, it seems evident that from 1788, when British soldiers, convicts and free settlers first arrived in what would become the country of Australia, the history of the nation was shaped both by the distance of Australia from Britain, and the internal distance from white settlement to white settlement across a vast continent. Blainey supported the notion that British convicts were not sent to Australia to either die or maintain an expensive offshore jail, but, rather, the colonies functioned as an ‘outpost’ of British civilization, serving important economic, political, and military purposes for its ‘mother country’, a function it could serve precisely because of its distance from Britain and its location in the Asia Pacific region. Understanding Australia’s history and its relationship both to its region and other powers is vital to understanding how Australians have made sense of their war participation and how that participation has been represented on-screen.

Australia’s participation in war pre-dates its own nationhood. When invading the continent that would become Australia, British and colonial forces participated in a deadly frontier war against first nation peoples who had occupied the continent for tens of thousands of years. In 1968 academic W.E.H. Stanner would speak of the ‘Great Australian Silence’, ‘a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale’, by which he was referring to the complete absence of acknowledgement within white Australian society of the atrocities that it had committed against Aboriginal peoples and the violence that continued to be committed in the name of a ‘white Australia’ (see Stanner 1969 for a printed version of this lecture). Such forgetting, he argued, was systemic and purposeful, not accidental, nor a reflection of the scale or impact of violence and frontier warfare in the very fabric of the making of the Australian nation. It could be asserted that the war most significant to Australia and the only one fought on its soil has largely been absent from its feature film making. The small number of Australian Western films since 2000 that posit the Australian frontier as an already occupied and/or a contested and violent space are the closest to a ‘war’ film about these conflicts that Australian audiences have witnessed. Such films include The Tracker (de Heer 2002), The Proposition (Hillcoat 2005), Mystery Road (Sen 2013), Goldstone (Sen 2016), Sweet Country (Thornton 2017), The Nightingale (Kent 2018), and High Ground (Johnson 2020). Certainly, this absence also speaks to the generic overlap that Steve Neale (2000) articulates in relation to the war genre more broadly. It could similarly be argued that Hollywood Westerns feature the frontier wars between first nations peoples and white settlers but similarly avoid classification as war films proper, which is perhaps a reflection of the reticence of settler-colonial nations to fully reckon with their national origins in bloody conflict. Such a reckoning would require the repositioning of ‘settlers’ as ‘invaders’, ‘discovery’ as ‘dispossession’, and a retelling of national myths founded on the notion of ‘free’ land. As Stuart Ward (2005: 56) writes, part of this reticence also relates to the Australian film industry’s heavy reliance on government subsidy, which has curtailed opportunities for overt criticism of government policy or representations that highlight what he refers to as the ‘flimsy foundations of Australian nationhood’.

In addition to the frontier wars, British authorities compelled colonial militaries to participate in overseas wars too. By the time Australia become a country its forces had participated in wars of British imperial ambition in the New Zealand Wars (1861–64), Sudan (1885), the Second Boer War (1899–1902) and the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900–01) (See Grey 1999 for an excellent military history of Australia). When the separate Australian colonies came together to form a federated (Commonwealth) nation in 1901, the use of colonial forces to prop up British imperialism abroad was one part of the broader debate over what exactly Australia’s relationship to Britain should be. Henry Parkes, the so-called Father of Federation, would celebrate the ‘crimson thread of kinship’ that connected Australian-born people to Britain just as much as English-born people (as reprinted in the Brisbane Courier 1890: 3) and the first Act of Federal Parliament legislated xenophobia via the Immigration Restriction Act (1901) in order to ‘protect’ the British nature of the population (of course, this was illusionary, as non-white people already lived in Australia) (see, Tavan 2005 for a history of the White Australia Policy).

At the same time, a smaller and contradictory narrative existed in Australian society. Although many continued to endorse the fundamental racism of political acts such as the White Australia Policy, others, such as the popular writers at The Bulletin magazine, opposed the sacrifice of Australia’s troops to support Britain’s wartime efforts, instead emphasizing the importance of those ‘native born’ Australians (white people born in Australia, not Aboriginal peoples) having an identity and policy decisions that were distinct from ‘the Mother Country’. As Russell and Chubb (1998: 61) write about Australian resistance to the Boer War:

The Bulletin, as it had done at the time of the Sudan campaign, opposed the war. Its cartoonists portrayed the about-to-federate Australia as flawed from the beginning; its soldiers as dupes of the ‘Fatman’, or money power; and the whole exercise a cynical one of ‘blooding the pups’, so that Australian soldiers would be efficient protectors of wealth and property. The symbolic Australian kangaroo was seen as having metamorphised into an aggressive hybrid: ‘The kangaroo is now a carnivorous member of the lion family’.

As these tensions were felt, Australians were already developing a relationship with America. Both were considered ‘young’, settler-colonial nations who, with other such nations including South Africa, drew a ‘global color line’ of racist policy discourse (Lake and Reynolds, 2008), shared a history of British colonization and subsequent federation and, importantly, Australians had a practical reason for cultivating a friendship with America: as a ‘British outpost’, it saw itself as isolated within a region whose power balance was rapidly shifting in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War (1895–96). Such shifts led, as Norman Harper (1987: 5) asserts, to ‘hopes that a great Anglo-Saxon alliance might be concluded’ between Australian, the US and Britain.

Australia’s contribution to foreign wars preceding and overlapping with its Federation have received remarkably little attention in its war films. World War One certainly overshadowed Australia’s much smaller participation in these conflicts but, also, these wars were divisive and it is perhaps precisely because of this that they lack representation (Inglis and Phillips 1991). Having noted this, Australia’s first narrative war film was Mates from the Murrumbidgee (Rolfe 1911), a silent film, that featured two friends fighting in the Second Boer War. However, this is considered a ‘lost’ film (Vagg and Reynaud 2016) and therefore it is difficult to assess its contribution to the development of the Australian war genre. The only other example of film representation set during this period of conflict is Breaker Morant (Beresford 1980) and its portrayal conveys the conflicted nature of Australia’s participation in these wars. It is based on a true story and the film focuses on the court martial of three Australian soldiers (including the titular Morant) for war crimes, the murder of prisoners of war and civilians, which the soldiers claimed they committed under the orders of their British commanders. The film ends with Morant’s execution and his defiant assertion of injustice: ‘we are the scapegoats of Empire’. Although this period may not have dominated representations of Australians at war some of the ambiguities these conflicts would represent, particularly in relation to its capacity to have voice in its own foreign policy decisions, would come to dominate Australian interpretations of this genre.

Many of the ambiguities that surrounded earlier wars were absent from Australia’s response to the declaration of war in 1914. Prime Minister Joseph Cook decreed, as hostilities gained traction, that Australians should:

Turn your eyes to the European situation, and give the kindest feelings towards the mother country at this time … should the worst happen after everything has been done that honour will permit, Australians will stand beside our own and defend her to the last man and the last shilling. (Blackmore 1976: 36)

Australian forces fought campaigns alongside Allied armies on the Western Front, Gallipoli and the Middle East. World War One cost approximately 60 000 lives out of a national population of just under five million people and about two-fifths of all men of military age served, making its impact on Australian society unparalleled (see, for example, Macintyre 2009). It is perhaps for this reason that, according to Daniel Reynaud, Australian war films have mainly been about World War One and ‘very few deviated from representing the quintessential Australian soldier’ (2021: 203). Such films present the major generic tropes of Australian war films, specifically, ‘themes of mateship, bushmen larrikins, and self-sacrifice’ (Reynaud 2021: 203). Reynaud (2021) argues that from these themes emerge key differentations from corresponding Hollywood films, notably a distinctive type of hero, one who is likely to be positioned as an underdog and to oppose authority, rather than occupying a formal leadership position. Such films are likely to absent women entirely, or to present them through the lens of the male gaze as symbols and archetypes, such as of madonnas who serve the home front and speak to comfort and gentleness.

During the silent era, Australia, like many other nations, recognised the enormous propaganda potential of cinema. During the course of World War One, documentaries such as Australians in Egypt (Newton 1915) were used as recruiting tools by the Australian Department of Defence, who also collaborated with Australasian Films on a series of fictional dramas: Will They Never Come? (Rolfe 1915), The Hero of the Dardanelles (Rolfe 1915), A Man—That’s All (Rolfe 1916) and For the Honour of Australia (Rolfe 1916). These films began to establish what would become the recurring themes of Australian cinema broadly, and war films in particular, of mateship, underdog struggle and sacrifice. Soon after, the Australian film industry embraced the larrikin character and associated themes, transposing from Australian literature popular characters like The Sentimental Bloke (Longford 1918) and Dad and Dave: On Our Selection (Hall 1932).¹ These hard-drinking, gambling, working-class archetypes were largely comic figures, which were subsequently introduced into a World War One setting via films like Diggers (Thring 1931) and Diggers in Blighty (Hanna 1933). At the onset of World War Two, comedy made way for earnestness such as in Forty Thousand Horsemen (Chauvel 1940) which brought mateship and self-sacrifice to the forefront and became the blueprint for future Australian war films. In the 1980s, a direct remake, The Lighthorsemen (Wincer 1987), was produced, along with perhaps Australia’s most noted war film, Gallipoli (Weir 1981), which solidified these themes in the public consciousness for another generation.

Mateship is central to these films. In Gallipoli, the entire first act is dedicated to establishing the protagonists’ bond, cemented by their fifty-mile trek across a salt lake to enlist. Upon their arrival in Egypt, the characters are shown engaging in archetypal ‘larrikin’ behaviours such as brawling, drinking, gambling, and visiting brothels. Similar sequences form the opening of Forty Thousand Horseman and The Lighthorsemen, establishing the characters’ bond of mateship via these shared experiences. Critically, the protagonists in each of these films are all enlisted men, not officers, and part of their bonding is built on breaking rules and avoiding authority figures. The positioning of the protagonists as underdogs is further emphasized by the role Australian soldiers are assigned in battle in these films. In Forty Thousand Horsemen and The Lighthorsemen, the Australian cavalry lead the charge, armed only with bayonets (no rifles), sacrificed at the behest of their British superiors. This trope reaches its zenith in Gallipoli, ending with the futile charge by the Australians, completely mismanaged again by their British commanders. More recent depictions of World War One, such as Beneath Hill 60 (Sims 2010) and The Water Diviner (Crowe 2014), have moved to somewhat downplay the larrikin archetype, but maintain the underdog theme, with Australian soldiers again portrayed as the most expendable in the eyes of superior, usually British, officers.

The formula for Australian war films carried over to depictions of World War Two, with The Rats of Tobruk (Chauvel 1944) once again portraying a group of larrikin mates from the outback, enlisting together and bravely fighting against the odds. This Australian archetype was even embraced by Hollywood, with The Desert Rats (Wise 1953) revisiting the siege of Tobruk with a supporting cast of Australian actors. Mimicking the shifting theatres of war, the focus of Australian World War Two films would ultimately move to the Pacific, closer to Australian shores. Kokoda Front Line (Hall 1942) was a newsreel documentary about the Kokoda Track Campaign, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary jointly with similar wartime films, The Battle of Midway (Ford 1942), Moscow Strikes Back (Kopalin 1942) and Prelude to War (Capra 1942). Like many of the American propaganda films commissioned by the Office of War Information and produced by Frank Capra, Kokoda Front Line presented footage from a war zone, narrated with highly biased and often racially charged language, designed to galvanize viewers on the home front against the wartime enemy. This thematic element carried over to narrative drama with Always Another Dawn (McCreadie 1948), which returned mateship and sacrifice to the core, portraying two sailors on the losing end of the battle, but, unlike its World War One predecessors, focused more specifically on the enemy, rather than superior officers. The tone of Australian World War Two films turned darker through the 1980s, with The Highest Honour (Maxwell 1981) and Attack Force Z (Burstall 1982), both centring on war crimes committed against Australian prisoners of war, with the Japanese firmly placed as villains. This approach continued with The Last Bullet (Pattinson 1995), Kokoda (Grierson 2006) and Canopy (Wilson 2013) which all present uncritical portrayals of Japanese atrocities. Kokoda (Grierson 2006), in particular, dehumanizes the Japanese soldiers by never showing the soldier’s faces, instead covering them in elaborate camouflage, so they appear more as monsters than men.

After World War Two, with the British star dimming, Australian politicians simultaneously sought to affirm Australia’s Britishness while also strengthening its ties to America. Prime Minister Robert Menzies, a staunch monarchist, would claim he was ‘British to the bootstraps’ and wax poetic about seeing Queen Elizabeth on her 1954 royal tour of Australia (see, for example, Macintyre 2009). Australians had increasingly turned to America both culturally and militarily during World War Two; American troops were stationed in Australia, which helped to facilitate this cultural and social exchange. This continued after the war. Menzies also committed Australia to a trilateral security agreement with New Zealand and America, ensuring mutual cooperation in the defence of the Pacific region, a tie to America that was supplemented by the 1954 establishment of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation. By 2021, the ANZUS agreement evolved into AUKUS, a military agreement between the UK, USA and Australia regarding the security of the Indo-Pacific (Trembath 2008, Cheng 2022). Menzies would reference the relationship between Australia, the USA and the UK, by describing these nations as Australia’s ‘great and powerful friends’; a reference that paints Australia as a junior and grateful partner to two superpowers (Menzies 1964).

The ANZUS Treaty, the cultural, political and military relationship between America, Australia and Britain, and other domestic factors, resulted in Australia committing combat forces to both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Just as these wars, and particularly Vietnam, were divisive in America, sparking mass protest and a re-evaluation of the nature of war itself, Vietnam was also a flashpoint in Australian culture. American films did not portray its participation in Vietnam on film until the war was over, with the notable exception of John Wayne’s propaganda effort, The Green Berets (1968). After the completion of the war, however, American participation in Vietnam stimulated the production of anti-war films that constructed war as variously nihilistic, imperial, and/or a reflection of the troubled nature of men and masculinity and as emblematic of deeper systemic, national troubles. Seminal films such as The Deer Hunter (Cimino 1978), Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979), Platoon (Stone 1986) and Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick 1987) all present deeply troubled American soldiers, a major departure from the uncomplicated heroes of World War Two films. Australians, too, did not produce narrative films about this war at the time Australian soldiers were fighting. Since then, Australia has produced relatively few films about its participation in Vietnam, perhaps the most publicized of which was The Odd Angry Shot (Jeffrey 1979), which featured a cast largely composed of comedians or comedic actors, led by Graham Kennedy, and rarely shows battle at all, choosing instead to focus on the ‘larrikin’ nature of Australia’s soldiers as they wage war on tinea (see Bertrand 2008 for an overview of critical reactions to this film).² It wasn’t until Danger Close (Stenders 2019) that actual combat in Vietnam was depicted in any detail, however, the film was criticized precisely for this focus on the nature of combat without corresponding reflection on its complexities; Blake Howard (2019), for example, sees the film within the lineage of Green Berets. However, it could be argued that in the 1970s and 1980s the impact of the Vietnam War was explored via some of the most famous war films that Australia would ever produce—Breaker Morant, Gallipoli and The Lighthorsemen. Rather than grapple with Vietnam and the moral ambiguities of participating in that war as a nation, such films arguably undertook the ‘remasculinization’ process that Susan Jeffords explores in her seminal 1989 text. That is, the war films of the 1970s and 80s took the experience of loss, failure and division associated with the Vietnam War and sought to reposition that experience by returning to more unifying wartime experiences, around which a nationalist mythology was built. These representations shifted the blame for Australia’s wartime failures onto greater powers (the British, commanders), and elected to focus on the redemptive personal qualities of individual soldiers and the transcendental qualities of the homosocial bond between soldiers, which allows failure (in the form of war crimes, campaign losses and individual death) to be seen as beside the point.

We can see from this overview of Australian war history and its representation on screen that there are indeed similarities between the Hollywood genre and its Australian variant. Like its Hollywood counterpoint, Australian war films do provide a narrative that is based on historical events and people, including films of large scale campaigns and closer studies of particular units or actions, and issues of heroism, villainy and power. Australia’s history, however, has led to distinct variations of the genre, where the villains are just as likely to be allies as enemies. For heroes, success often looks like failure, and the bond between men is often worth fighting for more than anything else. Heroes look like working-class larrikins, who prove their mettle under fire, not officers or gentlemen. Like American war films, there is generic overlap, particularly in relation to the Western’s portrayal of frontier conflict, and this allows for narratives that potentially destablize the national myth to be represented in a way that seems less challenging than if they were categorized as ‘war films’. Australia has a less pronounced history of ‘anti-war films’ films than America, with Australian films more likely to serve nationalistic purposes than denounce them, or render them complex. This history and the films that interpret it demonstrate Australia’s long history serving in wars around the globe that have no direct relationship to Australia’s interests. These wars, with the exception of the British invasion of Australia in 1788, did not threaten the sovereignty of Australia, and these representations can, in a sense, be seen as an attempt to reconcile that fact and to imbue a meaning in war outside of the seeming nobility of defending one’s land.

Jirga

After viewing this history of war participation, Australia’s participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seems hardly surprising; rather it fits a pattern of conflict in various locations throughout the world that helped to bolster Australia’s military alliances but seem far from Australia’s own interests. In 2001 Australia committed combat troops to join American forces in Afghanistan, as part of the ‘War on Terror’ and as one member of the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’. Australia was one of the first nations to make this commitment and invoked Australia’s long formal and informal alliance with America as cause (see, for example, Middleton 2011). Australia only ended its commitment in Afghanistan in 2021, after 41 Australian soldiers had died and 39 000 had served (Laugesen 2023). Mimicking the limited portrayal of the Vietnam War we have already noted that, apart from Jirga, Australia has not produced narrative cinema surrounding this war. Perhaps, like Vietnam or pre-Federation conflicts, the complexities behind this war are such that representing it on screen is too challenging to nationalist myths to be appealing to funding bodies or audiences. Perhaps, it is not represented because Australians do not have a sound enough understanding of the war for film making of it to be viable; as Kevin Foster asserts, the Afghanistan War is the ‘worst reported and least understood conflict in Australian history’ (as cited in Laugesen 2023: 2).

Jirga’s structure reflects many of the ambiguities surrounding how the ‘war film’ is defined. Steve Neale argued, as we earlier established, that scenes of combat are essential to a film being classified as a ‘war film’ and this film begins, and the narrative is propelled by, a combat scene. The establishing scene of the film is the firefight between Allied forces and forces assumed to be Taliban fighters. We witness Mike shoot the man we later learn is a civilian; he lifts the night vision goggles from his eyes and surveys the scene, seeing the unfiltered reality of his actions. From this scene the film transitions into Mike’s quest to return to the village, now as a civilian. Active combat scenes are never shown again in the film, although war is omnipresent: helicopters fly overhead, civilians fear Taliban fighters, we witness a Taliban execution, and Mike listens to war stories told to him by Afghanis. For some, the idea that most of the film does not feature combat and, indeed, does not feature official military personnel once Wheeler is a civilian would defy the categorization of the film as a ‘war film’. Others, such as Russell Earl Shain (1972), take a broader view. He classifies war films as those:

Dealing with the roles of civilians, espionage agents, and soldiers in any aspect of war … Under this definition war films did not have to be situated in combat zones … comment about war is not restricted to combat and … contemporary wars do not belong exclusively to the military.

From the outset, then, Jirga reflects the generic complexity of the war film, but it also, importantly, reflects an evolution in the way societies wage, perceive of, and experience war. That is, contemporary wars move away from pitched battles and a marked division between home front and frontline, and our social understandings of war have moved away from one-dimensional views of war that see its impacts confined to soldiers in times of conflict towards understanding that war impacts soldiers, civilians, and societies, not only during the time of conflict but long after and in multiple and compounding ways. Correspondingly, representations like Jirga reflect this shift, acknowledging that war in this context is everywhere, impacting everyone.

This article has provided an historical sketch of Australia’s war participation and its representation, which supports that there are characteristics that are distinct to the Australian war genre, although these characteristics may vary from film to film and across time. These particular genre inflections relate particularly to representations of mateship, a relationship to the bush, anti-authoritarianism, larrikinism, self-sacrifice, a presentation of the hero as underdog rather than officer and war as a male affair. Jirga continues the legacy of Australian films by exploring many of these characteristics and, in many instances, adhering to ‘traditional’ representations of the genre in Australian cinema. The characterization of Wheeler is central to the film, and, like most Australian war films, the hero is a good man and his quest is essentially that of an underdog: many Afghani civilians inform Mike that the quest is doomed to fail and he seems willing to die for the greater, moral good. In this sense he is the epitome of the self-sacrificing Australian soldier. He can be seen as anti-authoritarian to the extent that his quest is seen as outside the boundaries of what is considered appropriate or even sane, yet he continues. Like other Australian variants ‘the landscape features prominently’ (Reynaud 2021: 211) and Mike’s character seemed formed in relationship to it. The director identified that the landscape was designed to subvert audience expectations, yet it is difficult to see this as subversive. Rather, this representation seems in line with the trek across the salt plains that starts Gallipoli, or any of a number of war films that feature the Australian bush landscape. The landscape in Jirga and its predecessors is both formative and symbolic, moulding the heroes and representing their inner landscapes.

Mateship, the sense that one is willing to die for mates and that the bond between men is the central element that helps soldiers to survive their conditions, is one of the central components of Australian war films and Jirga’s representation can be seen as an evolution of this trope. Mike is not shown as willing to die for his friends but, rather, he is willing to die for a common humanity amongst men. In this instance, Jirga’s mateship moves beyond the parochialism of defending men who are bound by nationhood and towards a fellowship with all men who share an experience of war, including impacted civilians. Mike is shown as able to communicate across language barriers, share common food and appreciation for music, and even to sympathize with the impact of war on Taliban fighters, emphasizing the centrality of the homosocial bond regardless of other markers of difference such as language and race. The seriousness of this message undercuts the larrikinism typically present in Australian war movies, a generic trope that has been increasingly downplayed since 2000. This homosocial bond is also reinforced by representing traditional gender binaries; like other Australian war films, Jirga sidelines the perspectives of women. Only one woman is presented in the film, the widow of the man Mike killed, and she is not examined except through her relationship to men, as a wife, mother, and widow. The exploration of mateship in this film is, then, emblematic of a larger tension: generic tropes can and do evolve over time, yet this evolution is also deeply historical, tied to social mores, and not unproblematic. While it is possible for those men impacted by war to find mateship with each other over the shared horrors of war, including women’s stories, which may include stories of rape and abuse at the hands of ‘heroes’, remains a bridge too far for Jirga.

We have noted that Gilmour posited that Jirga is the antithesis of the classical war film (Ward 2019); our discussion so far complicates that assertion by noting many of the ways this film actually confirms to the central genre tropes of the Australian war film, and how it reflects the ambiguities associated with attempts to categorize war films generally. A close reading of this film also highlights that in many ways this dichotomy between subverting or confirming to genre tropes does not reflect the historically contingent evolution of genre tropes over time, where films can and often do present complex and contradictory representations of genre. Certainly, one interpretation of the film can readily see that Gilmour has used genre tropes to convey an antiwar message, one that takes the traditional divisions of the war film, between heroism and villiany, white and ‘Other’, home front and frontline, and breaks them down, pointing instead to the all-encompassing impacts of war through life and the similarities all people have to one another, rather than their differences. The porousness of landscape that Wheeler traverses mimicks the compplicated boundaries that Axel Heck noted in his analysis of the Danish film, A War (2015). Heck suggests that this film features the blurring of boundaries between bravery and blame, peace and war, frontline and home front, and this fuzziness allows audiences to understand the ways in which ‘peace [author’s note: and, it could be argued, forgiveness] is a social practice of everyday life’, one that allows people to continue to live surrounded by threats, war and latent forms of violence (2020: 103). Such a breakdown of traditional boundaries can certainly be seen as subversive of genre tropes.

An alternative interpretation, however, is more morally ambiguous. From such a vantage point, Wheeler’s point of view is the central and ‘right’ view of the film and the lens through which we, the audience, can interpret the ‘Other’. Wheeler disregards the warnings of three separate Afghani men, who tell him that the dangers of travelling to Kandahar are too great and that, indeed, he would endanger them with his request. The final man, a taxi driver who, after multiple refusals, concedes to drive Wheeler as close as possible to Kandahar because the money is too tempting to refuse, suffers an unknown fate; he screams ‘Taliban!’ as the camera follows Wheeler out of the car and we are left to wonder at the price others pay for Wheeler’s redemption (a scene also noted by Windsor 2018). Wheeler himself can be seen as essentially a signifier, an embodiment of liberal white guilt, rather than a fully fleshed out character. We learn very little about him as a person throughout the film, and Gilmour suggests that we should, indeed, empty him of some of the traits that would situate him as a soldier within a war setting, by noting that although Wheeler may be seen as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder this is not a factor that should be seen as compelling his action; instead his motivation should be viewed as ‘moral courage’ (Ward 2019: 36). Similarly, the Afghani characters act as educators, guides and absolvers of white characters and they exist only through the lens of a white man who makes demands of them.

Such discussion taps into two integral components of the war film. The first is the nature of heroism and its relationship to power; Gilmour argues via interviews that this film is a fundamental rejection of ‘us versus them’ within the context of Trumpism, and therefore it seeks to disrupt genre traditions that emphasize heroes versus enemies (Ward 2019: 34). It is clear that the film does attempt to break from generic tropes that either present the enemy in the abstract or else in (often racist) caricature. The film remonstrates on the notion that the category of enemy is related to point of view rather than moral binary (Mike is both enemy and hero), that even enemies are worthy of forgiveness (and indeed that forgiveness is a virtue and pathway to healing), and that we are often more alike than we are different (shared music and food, and attempts at mutual understanding through language barriers emphasize this). It seems, ultimately, that power resides not with Mike but with the people he meets on his journey; his fate is held in the hands of those who will take him to Kandahar, the Taliban, the jirga, and the film ends with his fate undetermined as he travels on a bus through the mountains. To view this as destablising of the genre and its tropes is also problematic, precisely because one must ask what avenue was available for these characters except to forgive Wheeler? This is a question that is mirrored in Harry Windsor’s review of the film, where he notes that the film ends ‘exactly the way you think it will’ and lets Wheeler ‘off the hook in a manner too neat to be dramatically interesting’ (2018, np). It is difficult to imagine an alternative ending where Wheeler is shot by the Taliban or where he is executed by a jirga, and if we accept that such an ending is improbable then the power always resides with Wheeler and his quest becomes another demand on already traumatized people, and a way for white liberal audiences to exorcize guilt without real risk or confrontation. And further, does this, then, simply act to fulfil the ultimate purpose of war films that Selbo (2015) identifies; to reaffirm normative social values, in this instance that white invasionary forces are fundamentally good, caring and worthy of forgiveness? Rather than simply discussing whether the film adheres to or subverts conventions, these various interpretations point out that films can do both at the same time, holding tensions and contradictions that are not easily resolved but reflect the real life complexities that come with attempting to make meaning from shared trauma.

Like all war films Jirga constructs a relationship with an historical past and a notion of truth. Although it is not based on a true story, it uses techniques that are designed to create the impression that the audience is viewing reality. For example, the filming was supposed to take place in Pakistan, however, when funding fell through, Gilmour deliberately moved to Kandahar with a crew that consisted only of himself and Sam Smith as Wheeler, with local citizens cast as the remaining characters (Ward 2019). Gilmour referred to this as lending the film authenticity, to the point of blurring the boundaries with documentary style filmmaking techniques. While appealing to its historical credentials, Gilmour positions the film as timeless and more akin to a fable, thereby decontextualizing this film from a time and place, and even a particular war (Ward 2019). Such a view is potentially contradictory but in many respects it also reflects an ambiguity that rests at the heart of the war genre: the simultaneous impulse to represent history, but to do so always in a way that is partial and reflects not an actuality but the social and cultural meanings that are made out of war. Such ambiguity also acts as a caution against seeing a subversion of genre as necessarily equating to a radical, positivistic or politically liberal message. If we are to remove historical context and specificity, to see war stories as only fables, we also renounce our responsibility to understand the actual impacts of war on those who experience them and to understand those impacts as various and nuanced across time, place, and peoples. Alex Vernon (2017: 382) makes a similar observation about the Hurt Locker, noting that while this film appeals to timelessness in doing so it may enact the ‘very brand of racism and imperialism’ it seeks to refute.

Conclusion

Jirga’s representation of war can be seen as part of the evolution of the Australian war genre, but it is not the antithesis of the genre that Gilmour positions it as. Indeed, it is worth questioning whether possibility exists to create a true antithesis to a genre film and still be able to identify that film as a genre film. Further, it is useful to consider whether the paradigm of using or abusing, subverting or adhering to, genre conventions is a useful way to examine genre film. Such a view posits an ‘either/or’ approach to analysis when representation functions in more complex, ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory ways, in much the same way as our social understanding of war evolves. Such representation is also historically contingent, reflecting changing perceptions of, ways of waging, and new understandings of war. Gilmour presents an updated Australian soldier, one who exhibits many of the characteristics of earlier representations, but with a more modern and nuanced understanding of the complexities of war and heroism that reflects the understanding of contemporary audiences. Many of the tensions and contradictions that Jirga explores both explicitly and inadvertently, such as Eurocentrism, the role of history and the imbalances of power in storytelling, likewise repeat tensions that exist in many modern interpretations of the war film. This also reflects, as Daniel Reynaud (2021) asserts, the increased international collaboration around filmmaking in Australia since the turn of the century, which has resulted in war films that are more likely to blur national boundaries and problematize the nationalist myths that have arisen from representations of Australians at war. However problematized they may be, though, these myths are not reputated in Jirga; nor have they been completely repudiated in Australian society.

In a 1984 review Alan Williams reflected on the many potential troubles with the word ‘genre’ when applied to film studies. Genre, he suggested, implies neat and tidy categories where no such categories exist, and it prompts scholars to consider genre variation as a circular phenomenon, whereby early genre films form the classical interpretation, which subsequent waves attempt to subvert, before returning, yet again, to the classical form. He ultimately argues against seeing history as merely a set of social influences that inform genre and towards a ‘return to film history  …  to produce individual genre studies with real historical integrity’ and that see genre films as ‘not exclusively or even primarily a Hollywood phenomenon’ (124). While a full film history of the war genre in Australia that considers not simply films themselves but production contexts, funding arrangements and other apparatus around filmmaking is beyond the scope of this article, this paper has sought to situate the war genre within a distinct national (Australian) history. Understanding historical context and its connection to representation in the war genre is important because it helps us to understand the ways in which the Hollywood war film is not simply replicated elsewhere, even in nations that share similar histories of colonization, federation, and war participation. Rather generic tropes are interpreted variously in different national contexts, and even within those national contexts variation also exists, due to local factors such as funding and social and cultural understandings of war participation, which are never static and are always open to the interpretation of the audience.

In Australia, war films are far more likely than their Hollywood counterparts to emphasize themes around mateship, self-sacrifice, and the larrikinism, along with an ambiguous or negative relationship to authority and/or Allied nations. The funding model of Australian filmmaking, along with other historical factors, has meant that even into the contemporary era Australian war films are likely to confirm nationalist discourses and less likely to problematize Australia’s war participation or render such participation as morally or politically problematic. Such tropes are also a reflection of the ways in which Australian storytellers have made sense of Australia’s history of war, including the tensions between national independence and reliance on the Crown and American military might, and silences over events that destablise national myths and identities; tensions that have remained consistent in Australian history since 1788. Jirga demonstrates the actual flexibility of genre films, to conform to generic tropes in some respects but to play with or attempt to subvert them in others. It also demonstrates the problems inherent in viewing genre as cyclical, because it can equate subversion of genre tropes, such as moving from war films to antiwar films, as inherently liberal or radical. Jirga demonstrates the complexities of such an ideological reading of the film, where subversion can create ambiguity or even a reinforcement of classical meanings around war.

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Notes on contributors

Emma Hamilton

Emma Hamilton is a senior lecturer of history at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research relates understanding representations of history on film, and cultural histories of gender, sexuality, age, and race across time and place. Emma has published two books on the Western film genre: Masculinities in American Western Films (2015) and Unbridling the Western Film Auteur (2018, an edited collection with Dr Alistair Rolls). She also contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning, with a particular focus on widening participation and online education.

Paul Chojenta

Paul Chojenta is an associate lecturer in screen and cultural at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research focuses on the role cinema plays in public knowledge of history and culture. He is a current PhD candidate, whose thesis will explore the role of film canons in the discipline of screen studies. He also contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning, with a particular focus on enabling education and student engagement.

Notes

1 This period was, according to Melissa Bellanta in her book Larrikin: A History (2012), a turning point in the meaning and use of the term ‘larrikin’. Previously a derogatory term applied mainly to poor and working class urban youths synoymous with ‘hoodlum’, or used to identify street subculture, during and immediately after World War One the use of the term became mainstream and its meaning positive. Bellanta (2012: xvi) asserts that the term became associated with ‘diggers’ (Australian World War One servicemen) and, after the War, its use became synonymous with national identity and its meaning ‘crystallised; the idea that to be ‘true blue’ [a slang term meaning to be authentic] one had to be a Ginger Mick [this is a reference to an Australian literary character, a World War One soldier whose adventures became the blueprint for ‘larrikin’ behaviour and who was immortalised in print and film], quick with one’s fists, given to salty language and tomfoolery, but with a heart of gold underneath it all.’ Bellanta (2012).

2 Tinea is a contagious form of fungal skin infection that, when present on the foot, is more commonly known as athlete’s foot. Although played more for laughs in this example, in their study of skin diseases in war, Matz et al (2002) point out that skin diseases including fungal infections were the leading cause of hospitalisation for military personnel serving in the Vietnam War. The humid climate, coupled with unhygienic conditions and reduced opportunities to bathe all contributed to skin conditions being a serious issue for soldiers. Matz et al. (2002)