So here we are, in the middle of November, sandwiched between the release of the latest James Bond flick and the upcoming release of the new Star Wars. The War on Terror rages on, with no end in sight. The Coen Brothers have migrated to TV where Fargo is ripping it up. Wouldn’t it be awesome if somehow, all these different experiences could be smoothed together into one event? Wouldn’t that just save so much time?
So, I present to you, The Men Who Stare At Goats. A spy-comedy derived as a fictionalized adaptation of a controversial non-fiction book about “psychic soldiers” fighting in Iraq, with overt Star Wars in-jokes…I can’t say it’s a good movie, but it has so much else going for it, quality might be beside the point.
There’s so much going on here, it’s hard to know the best place to start—so I’ll just jump back way, way too far and start in the 1920s with Fritz Lang. Why start all the way back there? Well, because thanks to pulp thrillers like the Mabuse films and Spies, ole Fritzy is significantly responsible for creating the movie spy genre that led to James Bond.
I’m not saying Fritz Lang invented espionage—that would be silly. What I am saying is that he invented a cinematic language by which to structure stories about espionage. He defined the genre rules that mostly govern how movie spies work.
And those rules are: crazy stunts, sci-fi weaponry, disguises, and an endless flow of over-the-top incident.
The thing is, apparently there were real people in the actual real world working for the actual real national security apparatus who thought that looney sci-fi tinged stuff should be a part of real spycraft. And these guys managed to finagle real US tax dollars to be spent cultivating psychic powers like invisibility, levitation, teleportation, telekinesis, and clairvoyance. Eventually the US military lost interest—when the greatest success in your ESP research amounts to a guy who can kill a goat by staring at it, you have to wonder a) if this is in any way real and b) even if it is real, who cares?
Or did the military’s interest wane? In the early 2000s, journalist Jon Ronson wrote a book chronicling the bizarre and frequently absurd attempts by the famed Military-Industrial Complex to harness and hone psychic powers. But more than that, Ronson’s book attempted to chart how those New Age-era obsessions had not died with the Cold War but were in fact in use in the War on Terror. Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare At Goats was well-received, even if his theories about the persistence of these schemes in Iraq and Afghanistan was met with skepticism.
As happens with all best-selling books, it turned into a movie. Screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Grant Heslov however had a challenge in adapting the material—the book was a sprawling work of non-fiction spanning many decades. Characters needed to be composited together, and new plotlines invented to stitch the thing together. The end result appeared on movie screens in 2009 as a comedy starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey, and Jeff Bridges.
The film has an awkward tone, never quite fully committing to the absurdity of its premise. Instead it hovers between slapstick, farce, and genuine action-movie thrills. This delicate balance is possible—it’s the bread and butter of the Coen Brothers, for example, who thrive on mixing absurd comedy with high-tension suspense—but Heslov lacks the Coen Brothers’ deft touch. It’s Coen-esque, Coen-lite.
That being said, it’s brilliantly cast.
For example, George Clooney plays an accomplished psychic spy, capable of zapping a goat dead with just his dreamy eyes, but soulfully concerned about the proper moral place of such powers in the world. It’s a part that demands that he be simultaneously convincing as an psychic spy, a moral guide, a wise old man, a lost soul seeking redemption, and a delusional clown who mistakenly believes himself to be all those preceding things. If you want someone to balance their performance on the razor edge between slapstick and serious suspense, George Clooney is an obvious choice (and a Coen veteran, at that).
For that matter, Clooney arrives with a fair amount of baggage from his previous work that informs his portrayal here: between films like Syriana and Three Kings that find Clooney dealing with the unrest in the Middle East, to his appearances as a comically-inflected spy in the likes of Burn After Reading and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, to his suave leading man charm in the Ocean’s series, it’s as if his role here was designed as a distillation of pure Clooney-dom.
Then there’s Clooney’s mentor, his Obi-Wan. This role calls for an old hippie blithely tone-deaf to how nutty he sounds, imminently cool as cucumber and serenely confident in his abilities. In other words, a character not unlike the Dude from The Big Lebowski—so of course, he’s played by Jeff Bridges (another Coen veteran).
But then there’s the Dark Side, the villainous serpent who seeks to pervert these psychic powers for selfish and evil ends. Who else but Kevin Spacey, who doesn’t even need to put much effort into the role since all that’s required is Generic Kevin Spacey Character Number One.
Now, you may have noticed I’ve started drifting into Star Wars-y language as I described Jeff Bridges as an Obi-Wan like figure, or Kevin Spacey as a sort of Darth Vader. Well, the fact is, all this time when I’ve been saying “psychic spy” I’ve been hiding the ball. The term the movie uses, throughout, to refer to these spies is Jedi Knights. There’s even a point when George Clooney tries the “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” trick from Star Wars and seems to genuinely believe it will work in escaping from some Iraqi insurgents.
Given the relentless Star Wars references, it’s only natural that the lead character is played by Obi-Wan Kenobi himself, Ewan MacGregor. He plays a journalist, loosely based on Jon Ronson, who starts off pursuing a gimmicky story as a sort of human interest puff piece only to fall into the world of Jedi Knights and fancy himself a Jedi, too.
It works as a canny subversion of the “Hero’s Journey.” For those of you unfamiliar with the term, that’s the story archetype that Joseph Campbell developed that supposedly underlies much of Western literature. The pattern involves an ordinary person, called to adventure by unfamiliar circumstances, who initially refuses but is persuaded by a wise mentor to take his fated role as a hero… blah blah blah. It was thrilling in 1977 as the basis of Star Wars, but has since become pretty tiresome. The Men Who Stare at Goats nods in the direction of this pattern, but since the “adventure” in question may just be the delusions of drug-addled hippies and washed-up charlatans, there’s a dimension of doubt that rarely intrudes in the usual Hollywood version of a Hero’s Journey.
To quote Joseph Campbell, “a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Like any good Star Wars-inflected film, The Men Who Stare at Goats dutifully gives all of Joseph Campbell’s archetypes an airing: there’s a near-death ordeal and resurrection (thanks to a roadside IED), a crossing of the threshold (as MacGregor is taken into the heart of the New Earth Army’s secret Iraqi base), and the triumphant moment where the hero uses his discovery to transform the world… it’s just that in this telling, that “transformation” involves giving LSD to US troops and letting all their Iraqi prisoners go.
