CRITICA

The tagline for the 2025 film Warfare is “Everything is based on memory.”  Co-written and co-directed by real life US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza and English author and director Alex Garland, Warfare is a personal account of a botched November 19, 2006, mission in Ramadi, Iraq, where US military forces surveil “bad guys” after taking over a residential two-story house.  No context is given as to what the mission is, nor why the film opens with a group of soldiers crammed into a small room to watch Eric Prydz’ transgressive music video for “Call on Me.”  The dialogue early on is filled with military radio speak, code names, jargon, precise measures; words most civilians would likely not know or be able to decipher.  Many of the lines spoken are deceptively simple, between 1-3 words at a time, yet layered in meaning for those who understand.  As a reminder of then-President Bush’s infamous weapons of mass destruction speech and a foreshadowing of what we were to find out at the end of the Iraq invasion, one character during the surveillance asks, “ID any weapons?” before another confirms: “No weapons.”

It is not until approximately one-third into the film’s 95-minute runtime that something breaks the mundanity of the assignment: a grenade is pitched into the SEALs’ space.  The explosion injures one of the men, necessitating emergency evacuation, but just as the troop prepare to leave in a tank, an improvised explosive device (IED) detonates on the vehicle.  The troop suffer extensive injuries and multiple casualties including the loss of two Iraqi translators.  The atmosphere fogs over as sounds of disorienting ammunition reverberate.  What follows in the remaining screentime is a feverishly paced rescue mission, filled with chaotic and painful screams, Oh my Gods!, expletives, and nightmarish wounds, thrusting the viewer back into a state of primitive chaos and “nameless dread” (Bion, 1967/2018, p. 116).  By the time the SEALs contact a second rescue platoon, the precise prose we once heard is gone as the description of their location is reduced to: “Look for the blood and the smoke.”  The language here represents a disintegration of the SEALS’ ability to think, and we know mental processing structures have already failed by the time one soldier yells, “Collapse, collapse.  Collapse, collapse, collapse!”

A visual déjà vu is reenacted throughout the film as doubling fills the screen; there are two platoons, two tanks, two rescues, two explosions, all set into motion by the destruction of two towers.  Mendoza said he wrote the screenplay for his close friend and Navy SEAL sniper Elliott Miller who could not remember what happened in Ramadi on that day in 2006.  Miller was severely injured during the mission the film is based on.  He lost his left leg, suffered burns to more than half his body, and sustained a traumatic brain injury that left him unable to speak after the IED exploded.

Mendoza is quoted as saying he wanted to help “fill in the gaps” of Miller’s memory by creating Warfare.  Seen in this way, the film feels like a cinematic psychodrama, not unlike war reenactments, where the recreation of a significant event is used to reexperience and perhaps even resolve psychic injuries.  The two men seem to symbolize complementary split-off parts we often see in patients with trauma: dissociated wordlessness (Miller) and unrepressed reliving (Mendoza).  Only here, insofar as we know, these discrete parts lie within separate individuals, with one trying to pass memory to the other like a kind of performative blood transfusion.

I have to say that watching and then learning about the background of this movie transmitted something to me.  Exactly what, I’m not sure of, but fragmented memories stirred up within myself.  Although on the surface I probably would not be considered the target audience for a film such as this (Mendoza has said he did not create the project for civilians), it made me think about how war and destruction has been and will continue to be a theme in my life – and likely all of our lives – for as long as we live.  And even after we as a species are gone, it is estimated billions of years from now the sun will enter its violent red giant star phase before engulfing our Earth.

But before we get to the end, I want to say something about the beginning.  Curiously, it was not until I began analytic training that I realized I was named after a World War I song called “K-K-K-Katy” that my father used to sing when imitating the patrons of a downstairs pub he and his mother used to live above in their small apartment in Kansas City, Kansas.  Though he never directly admitted to naming me after the song, he often sang the lyrics to me while playfully emphasizing how the letter C made for a superior version of the name.  This realization reminded me of the phenomenon Freud described as “Now I feel as though I had known it all the time” (1914, p. 206).  In essence, I did not know the origin of my name until I knew and now that I know, it has been true my whole life.

Growing up I went by the nickname Cathy, not by choice but because the adults in my life had decided it would be more convenient for everyone, others and myself included, to use a shorter name.  I actually had no idea I was using a nickname until sometime in elementary school when I was confronted by it on a class roster.  Catherine, the sheet of paper read.  But I’m Cathy so who is this Catherine?  In a moment of shock that stayed with me for quite some time, the revelation that I had a different name than the one I was using felt like I had just found out a secret duplicate of me existed when really I was alienated by my own reflection.

Still going by the nickname, I was in 4th grade during the Gulf War when Operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield were underway.  One day our teacher asked the class to make a drawing about the war.  Several of my classmates drew bombs flying through the sky.  Others drew the US flag.  I didn’t know what to draw.  I had a picture of General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf in my head but there was no way my nascent artistic ability, which up until that point had been used to sketch 2-D unicorns, would have been able to carry out the complex portraiture I envisioned.  I was stuck.  And so I drew the only thing I could think of: a B-2 bomber.

The Gulf War was known for using Tomahawk cruise missiles during air attacks, but what I remember most was my father gifting me a gray sweatshirt he brought from work with an odd-looking triangular black shape that had the phrase “B-2 Bomber” written beneath it.  As an aerospace engineer working at Northrop, he had worked on a project building a new stealth bomber that was supposedly invisible yet immediately recognizable.  I didn’t understand how its camouflaging worked (I still don’t), but this was the post-Cold War era where films involving clandestine operations and espionage such as War Games (1983), Cloak and Dagger (1984), and The Hunt for Red October (1990) had prevailed and anything seemed possible.

My father was proud of his work in US military defense operations in the way that I imagine a hunter would feel holding his new safari rifle.  Look at what we have here, Pumpkin!, I picture him saying.  Now it seems grotesquely absurd but I suppose I felt proud of him too at the time for working on weaponized aircraft.  He never told me what became of any of the missions the B-2 had been involved in, and it is likely he did not know or could not have told me anyhow, but I envision him basking in the glory of finishing such an undertaking much in the same way the Manhattan Project physicists celebrated the successful detonation of the Trinity nuclear test: momentarily and blissfully unaware of the devastation that was to come next.

According to the federal government’s legislative website, since the end of WWII the US has continued to engage in numerous military conflicts without formally declaring war.  In my brief research it is estimated there have been 33 such US-involved conflicts with 8 currently active (Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, Hezbollah, Venezuela, Iran) in the 21st century to date.

It seems hard to imagine that we find ourselves here in the midst of multiple wars with no foreseeable end, though some may have predicted this.  In a speech given in 2021 at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said “[W]e live in an era that is best characterised as the end of the end” where “we pass[] from catastrophe to apocalypse and then back to catastrophe.”  I don’t know if we are in an apocalypse or a catastrophe.  I just know I hope I have someone who can help me remember what happened.

References

Bion, W. R. (2018). A theory of thinking. Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1967).
Freud, S. (1914). Fausse reconnaissance (‘déjà raconteé) in psycho-analytic treatment. SE, 13: 199-207.
Mendoza, R., & Garland, A. (Directors). (2025). Warfare [Film]. A24.