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Abstract
Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.
Notes on contributor
Dr Janet Larson (PhD Northwestern University, 1975) is the Graduate Director and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey (USA), where she teaches courses in war stories and gender, other women's studies subjects, narrative theory and Victorian literature and culture, a field in which she has published many articles and a book, Dickens and the Broken Scripture. In 2012, her article about postwar consciousness in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway appeared in a collection, The House of Fiction as the House of Life. She began reviewing movies professionally while holding an editorial staff position with The Christian Century in the 1970s; has presented academic conferences papers on Syriana, White Light / Black Rain and other films; belongs to the Afghanistan/Pakistan Working Group of United for Peace and Justice, the US umbrella organization for 1,400 peace groups; and has given many slide lectures on Afghanistan since she traveled there in 2006.
Notes
1 Uncited quotations are film characters’ lines unless context suggests otherwise.
2 See Cohn and Weber (Citation1999), Weldes (Citation1999) and Weber (Citation2006, Citation2010).
3 Crile had studied at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service ('George Crile III') and knew Wilson well. The biography, which reveals compromising details the movie omits, remains an indispensable source despite its biases.
4 See Coll (Citation2004), Mamdani (Citation2004), Kolhatkar and Ingalls (Citation2006), Scott (Citation2007), Fitzgerald and Gould (Citation2009) and Steele (Citation2011).
5 Having a woman echo Jimmy Carter's 1980 State of the Union address serves the film's motif of feminizing slurs against his perceived failures of leadership.
6 I am indebted to Eric Joyce for this phrase and for sharing his film expertise.
7 American slang for ‘politician’ connoting a wheeler-dealer behind the scenes, an ‘old hand’ at politics who has been repeatedly elected and who benefits from the special interests he serves.
8 The film-makers eliminated American–Pakistani male bonds, especially Zia's surrogate fathering to Charlie, sweetened by US military aid (Crile Citation2003: 501–3, 420). On leaving Congress, Wilson became six-figure lobbyist for Pakistan (Johnson Citation2008).
9 This shrunken portrait of Hart, a commanding, ‘handsome, blond forty-two-year-old’ Wilson initially saw as a movie-hero type (Crile Citation2003: 116–29), exemplifies the film-makers’ decisions to exaggerate sex/gender traits and tensions by ‘re-embodying’ the historical characters. CIA officials are visually coded to display weaknesses Crile documents, especially bureaucratic timidity yoked to the blind male vanity of a collective subjectivity formed in exclusive prep schools and their ‘fictive brotherhood of privilege and power’ (Dean Citation2001: 4–5).
10 American foreign policy slang, referring to President Obama's policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.
11 Vickers, now Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence ('Michael G. Vickers’ Citation2011), is the military strategy ‘brain’ linking Vietnam, CIA's Afghan war, America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global war on terror.