He Saw It Coming [Peter Watkins]

He Saw It Coming

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/peter-watkins

The forgotten filmmaker who anticipated our modern media madness

by Michael Hirschorn
November 2008

The filmmaker Peter Watkins is legendarily unknown. His movies are
virtually never shown, except at rare cine­phile screenings, museum
retro­spectives, and lefty campus events. Over the past few years,
most of his 14 films have dribbled out on DVD, but until a
screenwriter friend turned me on to him recently, I had no clue who
he was. When I expressed amazement at the uncanny way his films, most
of them dating back to the '60s and '70s, presage the contemporary
cultural and political landscape­from Fox News to The Daily Show,
from reality TV to the coverage of the Iraq War­my friend responded,
"Now you know the secret source. All things come from Watkins. All."

Watkins specializes in historical and current-affairs re-creations,
but his real subject has always been the media­and on that subject he
is a startlingly current filmmaker, even though almost a decade has
passed since his last film. To the degree that he is known for
anything, it is for a 50-minute film he made in 1965 called The War
Game, which was underwritten by the BBC, then buried for 20 years,
most likely at the behest of 10 Downing Street. A fictional account
of a nuclear war's consequences for the United Kingdom, The War Game
tracks the conflict from its first horrifying impact on the county of
Kent, through to the spread of disease and starvation, and finally to
the breakdown of civil order and the imposition of quarantine and
martial law. The BBC, in justifying its refusal to air the film,
stated: "The effect of the film has been judged too horrifying for
the medium of broadcasting."

The film was incendiary not merely because it showed the
unshowable­that the then­Cold War era could yield a hot war for which
England was uniquely unprepared­but because the whole thing was
presented in documentary form. The War Game intercuts fake news
footage of the disaster with apparently real-life quotations from
scientists, bishops, and other authority figures whose fatuous
reassurances ("In the next world war, I believe that both sides could
stop before the ultimate destruction of cities so that both sides
could retire for a period of post-attack recuperation, in which World
Wars Four to Eight could be prepared") stand in absurd counterpoint
to the apocalypse unfolding before our eyes. (Watkins was four years
ahead of Monty Python, and decades ahead of Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert, in ruthlessly mocking gasbagish expert commentary­only he
didn't think it was quite so hilarious.) This wasn't an attempt to
perpetrate a War of the Worlds­type hoax; instead, it was a deep,
unerring analysis of how we use media to anesthetize ourselves
against uncomfortable truths.

Watkins's films don't just posit that we are being lied to; they show
exactly how. His first professional film, Culloden (1964), deploys
his faux-documentary skills in the service of historical
deconstruction, restaging the slaughter of thousands of Scottish
Highlanders who fought under the Jacobite pretender Prince Charles
against the larger, better-organized, and better-armed English forces
in 1746. A tale of mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing, Culloden is
leavened only by an adrenaline-fueled British historian who watches
the bloodletting from behind a stone wall and comments on events
("This is incredible … The rebels are being literally blown apart!"),
much as '60s newscasters reported on the West's attempts at
post-colonial pacification. The resonances with the myth­olo­gization
of the American Civil War are equally uncanny: among Watkins's
targets is the long-standing depiction of the defeated "Bonnie Prince
Charlie" as a tragic hero, rather than, as Culloden portrays him, a
blithering, self-involved amateur who allowed his men to die in the
name of a dynastic feud they barely understood.

Watkins's later films ratchet up the intensity of his media critique,
dropping the contemporary press into wildly anachronistic
environments. In his last film, the six-hour (!), French-language La
Commune(Paris 1871), rival networks cover the events of that March as
if they're fodder for your local news, complete with
man-in-the-street interviews ("I've got a message for the bourgeois.
They're gonna have a headache 'cos we're here to kill 'em") and
expert commentary from bow-tied men a stutter step away from the
ex-generals who fanned out across the airwaves in the months after
the 2003 Iraq invasion, rationalizing the fiasco thousands of miles away.

Like a Centre Pompidou of cinema, Watkins is forever laying bare the
arti­fice. Fiction and nonfiction merge: non-actors improvise roles
in fictional accounts of factual events (the effect is very
reality-TV); and the contrivance inherent in any media narrative is
exposed as Watkins shows the cameras, the sets, his directorial
technique. His endlessly recursive gambits serve as a metatextual
critique of how fact and fiction are just different ways to impose
narrative­and yet they never seem like academic posing; indeed, they
carry an amazing emotional wallop.

It helps that he's able to extract remarkable performances from
nonprofessionals. In La Commune, the actors, many residents of
working-class neighborhoods not dissimilar from the ones that bred
the Communards, break character to discuss their roles. In Punishment
Park, a 1970 faux-documentary loosely inspired by the trial of the
Chicago Seven, young activists who bear more than a passing
similarity to the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale improvise
their way through a story that's chillingly apposite to the age of
Guantánamo and other black-box prisons. Shot in the style of much of
the Vietnam War coverage of the time (shaky handheld cameras rushing
through the underbrush, de-centered framing, panting newsmen), the
movie follows two groups of prisoners who are allowed to race through
the California desert in the hope of reaching an American flag 53
miles away, shadowed by county troopers and other uniformed goons.
Ostensibly a "National Network" TV-news account of an
alternative-sentencing program for political dissidents, Park gets
great mileage out of the way the vacant, macho police types and
government officials emasculate the media observers, who are left
sputtering at an injustice they can do nothing to stop. (Hilariously,
the officials have set up a catering tent in the desert­a poor man's Doha.)

But Park also helps clarify why Watkins isn't more widely known. His
Village Voice­circa 1975 politics, which make parts of the film seem
as dated as the most pretentious Lina Wertmüller, are at once
sentimental and punitively moralistic­as if continuing in your
bourgeois existence after watching one of his films is a form of
ethical suicide. Nobody likes a didact. Or a martyr: Watkins reacted
to his travails with the BBC like a delicate flower, too sensitive
for this world. The director, now 72, repeatedly pursued self-exile:
to Sweden, Lithuania, and Canada. Featured in a major retrospective
in Toronto in 2004, he refused to attend after a Globe and Mail essay
that called him a "genius" also took issue with his politics. Stunts
like these, and his allegedly shirty interactions with potential
financial backers, have made it easy for the industry to find excuses
not to support his work.

But the world his early films anticipated is the world we inhabit
now. Like no filmmaker before or since, Watkins captures the constant
manipulation and counter­manipulation of the modern media, the
push-pull of image projection and message management that has blurred
the line between news and propaganda. His films are testaments to
central truths of the current media environment: that mere logic is
powerless against a brilliant projection of personality, that
self-conscious "objectivity" and truth-telling are very different
things, and that compelling narrative is impervious to facts. From
the selling of the Iraq War to the selling of Sarah Palin, Watkins,
like Orwell before him, shows how we are lied to, and how we lie to ourselves.

It's the first Gulf War, not a Peter Watkins movie­but it's exactly
the sort of moment his films foreshadowed.
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Michael Hirschorn is an Atlantic contributing editor.

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