The Wire may be gone, but creators/showrunners David Simon and Ed Burns are still making must-see TV for HBO. For their latest production, the seven part miniseries Generation Kill, the duo leaves the mean streets of Baltimore behind for an actual war zone: Iraq circa March 2003, the month that U.S. troops rolled across the border officially beginning the conflict we’re still mired in.
Based on the book by Evan Wright, who was embedded with an American platoon to cover the invasion for Rolling Stone magazine, Generation Kill provides a grunt’s eye view of the early days of the Iraq War and features the same attention to detail that distinguished The Wire.
In fact, in its first two episodes, Kill is almost too technical. Simon and Burns throw us right into boot camp with very little exposition or even establishing shots. It doesn’t help that the actors all look virtually identical, which is certainly an accurate depiction of the military (where conformity is prized over all else) but does make it difficult for ordinary civilians to keep track of who’s who. Don’t let any initial confusion put you off from continuing the series though. By the third episode, certain individuals start to stand out from the pack and the soldier boy jargon that’s tossed about becomes easier to follow.
Of course, those hoping for more political commentary may remain disappointed, as the writers are careful not to work their opinions into the actual text of the series. At the same, if you watch closely, it’s impossible to miss the social critique that’s been woven into the background of every episode. For example, you often hear different soldiers complaining about the lack of resources they’ve been provided with, only to have their grievances shot down and ridiculed by their superiors. And in the third episode, the squad commander’s desire to score brownie points with his bosses back in DC leads him to push his soldiers to their breaking point, resulting in several major mistakes (like abandoning a truck filled with C4 in the middle of the desert) and unnecessary tragedies (a soldier strafes two young kids, almost killing them). They end up arriving at their objective–an Iraqi-held airfield–only to discover that the enemy has long since fled. So it’s a win, but not the kind of hard-fought victory they were hoping for. This feeds into one of the most interesting (and disturbing) recurring plotlines of the series, which involves the soldiers’ desire to witness actual combat and shoot a few bad guys themselves. That kind of bloodlust is undoubtedly difficult for those of us who haven’t been in combat to understand, but even so, it often feels like Simon and Burns are actually using it to comment on the current generation’s inability to separate real fatalities with the kind of violence they’re used to in video games and movies.
Apart from the setting, Generation Kill also differs from The Wire in its storytelling. The Wire is famous for its intricate season-long story arcs, which expertly alternated between small character-based narratives and large-scale stories about institutions ranging from City Hall to the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun. Generation Kill, on the other hand, primarily focuses on the war rather than the histories of the soldiers that are fighting it. We learn little things about the different men in this unit, but the kinds of long monologues about hometowns and girlfriends that you normally hear in war pictures aren’t anywhere to be found here. I tip my hat to Simon and Burns for avoiding that cliche, but again it highlights how difficult it is to find an entry point into this series at first. This isn’t a series you can just watch passively–it engages you, provokes you and, at times, frustrates you. In other words, it’s the precisely kind of television we need more of.
