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Right stuff, right place, wrong day. Harlan Jacobson explains why Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down fights the good fight
The real battle was always there, masked by the Cold War, dormant, waiting to announce itself: the war between the postand the premoderns, or more conventionally between the First World and the Third, between the haves and have- or want-- nots, between the secular state and religious fundamentalism, between Nike, mv, and McDonald's on the one hand and Allah on the other. The Nineties roared by like the Twenties, a rolling, decadent party fueled by new technology, so much money to be made and spread around, world be damned.
With that in mind, at first glance, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down seems slight, as if it were about nothing much beyond good American kids taking a wrong turn in the ghetto. On closer inspection it actually rides the wave of America's confusion about what posture to strike in the post-Cold War world. The only memory that cuts through the fog of the Nineties is CNN's footage of a GI's body dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu. Here that appalling televisual touchstone is relegated to a quick cutaway. Is this evasion the work of the man who gave you the bad chest pain in Alien? Who battled the studio as fiercely as his tumbling killer acrobat in Blade Runner? Who sent Thelma and Louise off a cliff? Was it Scott or his studio overlords who judged our sensibilities so fragile after 9/11 as to omit the one moment in Somalia that could have told us, in retrospect, that the destruction of the World Trade Center was waiting for us?
At his best, Scott is a troublemaker. He gravitates to characters whose quiet sense of justice requires them not so much to break rank as to speak truth to power. Though it harks back to Alien in its focus on a situation spinning out of control, Black Hawk Down continues Gladiator's reinstatement of the strong, silent protagonist who gets the job done. "Heroes? No way in hell," concludes Josh Hartnett's Matt Eversmann at the end of the film. "Nobody asks to be a hero. It just sometimes turns out that way." It's as if Scott intended...