From director William Friedkin came the war drama, Rules Of Engagement. As we re-evaluate the cinema of 2000, does it stand the test of time? This is the latest in AJ Black’s series of features on films released in the year 2000. He previously looked back at DreamWorks animation, The Road To El Dorado. Potential spoilers ... Rules Of Engagement | A William Friedkin war drama scared to face its demons
In that series, the noble Klingon Commander, Worf, is tried by an extradition hearing. In the middle of hostilities between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, Worf commanded a vessel that fired on and destroyed a civilian transporter, mistakenly believing it to be a Klingon warship.
That episode is called – you guessed it – Rules Of Engagement, and it aired just three years before Friedkin’s film came out. Perhaps the original writer of the film, James Webb, saw the episode, liked the title and premise, and ported them over. Stranger things have happened. Either way, Rules Of Engagement probably shares its parallels because it’s a well-worn story in fiction, sci-fi, and any morality-based dramatic narrative.
Friedkin’s film was eventually written by studio-hired screenwriter Stephen Gaghan from Webb’s original script. It was one of two films penned by Gaghan, the other being Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic at the end of the year, for which he would win an award. Rules Of Engagement is about the United States military and their own rules of engagement in a combat situation. Samuel L Jackson’s Colonel Terry Childers, while leading a Marine squadron to evacuate an American diplomat and his family from an under-siege Yemeni embassy, orders his men to shoot at a crowd of protestors, some of whom appear to have opened fire on his men. Ninety eight men, women and children end up slaughtered. Images make the front page of every global newspaper. And the US government want Childers’ head on a spike, forcing him to enlist his old friend, Tommy Lee Jones’ military attorney Hayes Hodges,to defend his honour.
The subject matter, and what it wants to say about modern American imperialism, soon becomes more interesting than the film itself.
William Friedkin was, of course, one of the great American directors of the late 20th century, known principally for 1973’s seminal horror movie The Exorcist, but who went on to make brawny, edgy pictures that defy categorisation: Sorcerer, Cruising, and more.
All of those films felt more personal to Friedkin and his particular style than Rules Of Engagement, which often wants to have that edge but feels restrained by Hollywood realities and the politics around it. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee suggested it was “probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs in Hollywood”. Friedkin’s defence against this was typically florid from an auteur who was often as irascible as the films he made. Here’s what he said to the BBC’s Film 2000 at the time:
Let me state right up front, the film is not anti-Arab, is not anti-Muslim and is certainly not anti-Yemen. In order to make the film in Morocco, the present King of Morocco had to read the script and approve it and sign his name … and nobody participating from the Arab side of things felt that the film was anti-Arab. The film is anti-terrorist. It takes a strong stand against terrorism and it says that terrorism wears many faces … but we haven’t made this film to slander the government of Yemen. It’s a democracy and I don’t believe for a moment they support terrorists any more than America does.
This, in all honesty, is fair. Rules Of Engagement neither slanders Yemen as a country or government, nor does it champion terrorism. Friedkin was right in challenging those accusations, and seems aware that his film is being demonised for political reasons. Naturally, Arab communities would consider a film like this to be racist, because Rules Of Engagement makes little or no effort to give Yemeni or any other culture beyond the American a voice, which is in part the point.
Friedkin’s film isn’t about fighting terrorism. It’s about how America is at war with its own place in the world at the turn of the 21st century. This is even more apparent a quarter of a century on, having experienced years of Middle Eastern conflict and fundamentalist strife following 9/11. Samuel L Jackson is interesting casting as Childers, because he is an actor who, even by this point, comes with a level of baggage. Jackson is known for hip Tarantino dialogue, and bringing the word “m*therf*cker” back into popular use in Pulp Fiction.
That word is used against him in Rules Of Engagement, which casts him as a flawed American hero. This is a soldier who we see in Vietnam adopts his own rules about life and death in combat. He executes a Vietnamese captive in a breach of POW human rights. The difference with the Deep Space Nine episode is that there is no Rashomon-structure here; Childers does say “waste the m*therf*ckers” in Yemen, making his Marines slaughter many civilians in his way. He does it with a balance of military confidence and rigour only an actor like Jackson can get away with.
It’s why Tommy Lee Jones, as his defender, is such an interesting counterpoint, because what he’s really trying to defend is not the man, Childers, but the honour and decency of a pre-9/11 America, free of the Cold War, struggling to identify its place as defenders of the free world, policing the less civilised nations. During the Yemeni set-piece (which Friedkin stages well; it’s arguably the most compelling part of the film), Childers actively delays the escape of Ben Kingsley’s corrupt diplomat and his family to bring down the bullet-ridden American flag from the embassy.
It’s a potent symbol for America’s decaying sense of global imperialism. Rules Of Engagement presents a world where the nations under their geopolitical hold are pushing back, and Childers is the staunch, defiant warrior refusing to give way. “I was not going to stand by and see another Marine die just to live by those f*cking rules!” Jackson bellows in his trial, having been caught breaking American military codes.
Friedkin certainly seems interested in drawing parallels with Vietnam, a conflict which has cast the longest of shadows over the American psyche, given it was the first war it failed to outright win. Jones’ Hodges points out to Guy Pearce’s Major Biggs, the fair and balanced government prosecutor, that life expectancy for an American soldier dropped into Vietnam was “16 f*cking minutes”. The American loss of life was incalculable, young men lost to a war without meaning, and Friedkin is concerned the same is happening in 2000. What are Childers and his men defending? Why are they in Yemen? It certainly presages the fury that drives Al-Qaeda to their horrific attack on the World Trade Center just 18 months after Rules Of Engagement came out. The script can see the writing on the wall in how American military intervention has an entitled toxicity. Childers represents that fallen idealism.
Rather problematically, Rules Of Engagement lets Childers off the hook. Had it wanted truly to defy the accusations of racism levelled at it, and sell the broad point about the poisonous danger of American combat and conflict overseas, Gaghan’s script would surely have thrown the book at him.
Maybe Jackson would have refused to play an already morally dubious character who’s found to be a murderer. Maybe everyone involved felt that it would have been too downbeat an ending. Maybe in the end Friedkin believed that Childers – and by extension America – deserves a shot at redemption. The final moment has Childers rest his conscience when the Vietnamese man he spared all those years ago seems to forgive him. Bruce Greenwood’s crooked NSA advisor – who tries to conspire against the case – gets his comeuppance. The bad guys lose, but who are the bad guys? Rules Of Engagement loses its nerve in facing up to the reality it initially sets out to present.
Perhaps Hollywood just wasn’t ready for a story like Rules Of Engagement, which when you remove these themes, ends up as a fairly staid, uneventful blend of war film and courtroom drama. There’s nothing that feels obviously Friedkin-esque in tone or texture. Had the film been made two years later, it would have no doubt ended up being far more jingoistic, determined to depict the renewal of pure American heroism in the face of its post-9/11 trauma.
Rules Of Engagement at least comes close to facing the dark, long-held hypocrisies of American foreign policy, even if it is too scared to confront those demons.
Who knows? Maybe Star Trek one day will do an episode which does…
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