What appears to be a group of Muslims at prayer, caught in
the cross hairs of a US drone
I heard a drone pilot explain it this way: You're
going to war for one hour, and then you get in the car and drive home,
and within two minutes you're sitting at the dinner table talking about
your kids' homework. This is a very different experience of war.(...)
You can see the videos on YouTube. It's turning war for some into a form
of entertainment. The soldiers call that "war porn." We can see more
but experience less. P.W.
Singer of the Brookings Institution interviewed in Der Spiegel
I have
been reading about the lives of American drone pilots. These are men and
women who punch in at the office and then spend their working hours
killing people who are half a world away by remote control, without any
physical risk to themselves and then they punch out and go home to a
perfectly normal American suburban family life. This is truly what
Hannah Arendt spoke of when she coined the phrase, "the banality of
evil".
If you look at the world we are creating, where very few people control
almost all the resources and these resources are shrinking, and then we
have a technology where this tiny minority can physically control the
rest of the world's population at little physical risk to themselves,
you can see that we are going down a very sinister path.
While reading about drone pilots, it came to me that this situation has the makings of a
great film, something that in the hands of the right director, armed
with the right script, could be a landmark in the history of the
American cinema, because to me the situation sums up something about
contemporary American life that troubles all of us, something about
alienation and disconnection that is difficult to express in prose,
something that requires the perfect metaphor. In my opinion the drone
pilot's life is that metaphor.
Hollywood is all about archetypes, stereotypes and allegories.
To give you an idea of the possibilities, imagine if Billy Wilder had
filmed the situation with Jack Lemon as the drone pilot... "The
Apartment", with collateral damage.
Maybe you would prefer Alfred Hitchcock in the director's seat with
Jimmy Stewart as the desk bound killer. How would Hitchcock work in the
suspense?
How would John Ford have handled it with Henry Fonda as the pilot?
Who could do it best today? Who would you cast in it?
I would like to open a conversation about this "film to be" in order to
further explore this metaphor of the banality of evil.