Our Film Critic Explores Why The Harrowing Afghanistan Images May Feel Familiar
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Images from Kabul this week have struck some observers as shocking, familiar and cinematic. Critic Bob Mondello says that's because we've been seeing images a lot like these for decades.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Shortly after he was sworn in as President Biden's secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin urged caution in pulling forces from Afghanistan using a phrase that NPR's Mara Liasson would later echo in her reporting.
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MARA LIASSON: We've seen this movie before. Remember, we...
MONDELLO: In a sense, we have seen this movie before, though people may disagree about which movie. Both Mara and the secretary of defense were using the phrase metaphorically, but America's military adventures have been chronicled extensively enough that there's some truth to the assertion even as fact.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "RESTREPO")
UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER: Where Restrepo died, we shot off flares.
MONDELLO: The Oscar-nominated documentary "Restrepo" chronicled the tragic human cost of securing an Afghan valley that would be given up just months later. "Zero Dark Thirty" recreated a successful mission staged in Afghanistan...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ZERO DARK THIRTY")
CHRIS PRATT: (As Justin) You really believe this story - Osama bin Laden?
MONDELLO: ...A mission that struck an al-Qaida compound across the border in Pakistan. But these are just recent iterations. For roughly half a century, Hollywood has used Afghans as background figures for fictional stories in which outsiders consistently underestimate the grit and determination of the region's people.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING")
MICHAEL CAINE: (As Peachy Carnehan) It's a place of warring tribes, which is to say, a land of opportunity for such as we.
MONDELLO: "The Man Who Would Be King" is based on a story Rudyard Kipling wrote in the 1880s between the second and third Anglo-Afghan wars. It mocks the false premises that gave Britain's empire-building in the region such a shaky foundation.
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SEAN CONNERY: (As Daniel Dravot) We'll go there. We'll say to any chief we can find, do you want to vanquish your foes? Of course, he'll say. Go to it. We'll fight for him, make him king, then we'll seize his royal throne and loot the country four ways from Sunday.
MONDELLO: It didn't end any better for the men who would be king than it did for the Brits. Soviet nation-building also ended badly in Afghanistan; so badly that it became a Hollywood plot point even though most of the world wasn't paying attention. In 1987, James Bond disrupted a deal between the Soviets, the Mujahideen and arms dealers in "The Living Daylights."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS")
TIMOTHY DALTON: (As James Bond) I've come for Koskov.
JOE DON BAKER: (As Brad Whitaker) Well hell, you can have him as soon as I get my opium.
MONDELLO: And a year later, Hollywood's most famous mercenary paid a visit...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "RAMBO III")
SASSON GABAY: (As Mousa) This is Afghanistan.
MONDELLO: ...in "Rambo III."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "RAMBO III")
GABAY: (As Mousa) Alexander the Great tried to conquer this country; then Genghis Khan, then the British, now Russia. But Afghan people fight hard. They never be defeated.
MONDELLO: That graveyard of empires you've heard so much about. A decade later, after the Taliban takeover and al-Qaida's 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan was taken more seriously by filmmakers, including by an Afghan director who used what was reported to be the only 35 mm camera in all of Afghanistan to tell the story of a 12-year-old girl who, under Taliban rule...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "OSAMA")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, shouting in non-English language).
MONDELLO: ...Must pretend to be a boy to support her widowed mother and family. The film was called "Osama," the name she took as a boy, and it won the 2003 Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. It took a few years before American movies dealt again with the country and, even then, mostly with the miscalculations that got us involved there during the Soviet era. The satire "Charlie Wilson's War" was clear-eyed in hindsight about the decision to arm the nation's so-called freedom fighters.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR")
CHRISTOPHER DENHAM: (As Mike Vickers) The Soviets didn't come into Afghanistan on a Eurail pass, they came in T-55 tanks. The fighters need RPG-7 antitank...
MONDELLO: The tragically mistaken theory was that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. At some point, these tails bleed into ones from other conflicts - the Persian Gulf War, as depicted in "American Sniper" or "The Hurt Locker," Somalia's failed helicopter rescue in "Black Hawk Down" and the chaotic scene from Vietnam that President Biden so wanted to avoid - helicopters lifting off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, a moment seared into a generation's memory in news footage as vivid as anything Hollywood could have come up with. Footage from Kabul's airport has that quality, too - panic, sacrifice, desperation. We have seen it before. Sadly, it wasn't a movie.
I'm Bob Mondello.
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UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing in non-English language).
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