09 · 02 · 26

THE LION'S DEN: On War and the Invisible

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

The history of film genres is, in a way, the history of the United States of America. To begin with the fact that the Western genre tells us the story of the nation’s origins amid the colonization of North America, the brutality of a lawless land where gunslingers made their way through shootouts, and the beginning of the omnipresent State where the sheriffs keep an eye on those who haven’t committed a crime yet. This leads us to gangster films, which are also, fundamentally, US-American, since although organized crime is not exclusive to the streets of New York and Chicago, it transformed these cities into worldwide hubs of criminal activity. The first films that portrayed this process on screen emerged from what would later become the Hollywood industry. Among others, war films are also related to US-American history because of its constant interventionism, which quickly got Hollywood’s attention and led it to invest in recreating battles with crowds of horses, tanks, and airplanes; although it is worth noting that only occasionally European film industries equaled these productions. 

This helps to explain the limited presence of war narratives in Latin American cinema. Despite the significant mobilization of military forces caused by the Monroe Doctrine and the fear of communist invasion during the twentieth century, Latin America rarely had the chance to finance these kinds of productions. In addition to this, the history of the Latin American armies itself is pretty complex, since its clashes do not occur as battles between regular forces—as expected—but as guerrillas [unconventional warfares]. That is to say, these irregular rebels are the invisible enemies that represent a major challenge for the film industry.

Given that the essence of cinema lies in visually portraying things, how is it supposed to film stories about unseen adversaries and, most importantly, what would be the ultimate goal of it? John Ford explored this in his classic They Were Expendable (1945). Here, the Japanese enemies are practically invisible. Ford didn’t seem quite interested in making a film about the U.S. victory in the Pacific, but rather a film about its inner cruelty, which culminates in a painful climax when John Wayne’s character is forced to retreat from the Philippines, leaving his men behind in order to defend the rearguard. This is not the typical story of a hero fighting against the Japanese, but rather of a bureaucrat compelled to execute inhuman commands and live with the weight of guilt. Perhaps this is the very reason Ford chooses not to focus on the enemy.

Many years later, based on his own experiences in Vietnam, Oliver Stone directed Platoon (1986), a film in which, though the soldiers of the National Liberation Front of South, the main conflicts unfold among the US-American soldiers. They debate the necessity of relying on sadism against an enemy that is like a duck to water among the population, as prescribed by Mao Zedong’s revolutionary theory.

In a similar way, the Peruvian filmmaker Francisco J. Lombardi—a film criticism graduate—seems to have been taking inspiration from Ford, Stone, and other US-American directors while shooting one of Latin American’s most uncommon (yet most remarkable) war films: The Lion’s Den (1998). This movie depicts the conflict between the Peruvian army and the Shining Path through a kind of invisibility—reminiscent of the most self-reflective U.S. war films. What is particularly worth highlighting is that this film is a pure act of bravery, given that in the years of its production and release the Shining Path was condemned even by the left wing for its excessive violence and dogmatic approach to Marxism. In spite of this, Lombardi chooses to focus on the dangers of sending such an aggressive force as the Peruvian army into combat among rural communities—which, in fact, ended up suffering the most severe consequences, exactly as the film comes to demonstrate. Even today, it remains quite controversial when someone refuses to believe that the Shining Path was solely responsible for all that violence and that the State did nothing more than contain it. However, Lombardi had the courage to challenge that idea, and this allowed Latin American cinema to enrich its history with a powerful new chapter. 

The story follows a detachment of the Peruvian army sent to a village in Ayacucho in 1983—the region and the period of the most intense activity of the Shining Path—with the mission of eradicating the revolutionaries in the area. Nevertheless, they manifest themselves only through the corpses they leave behind, or through graffiti and minor acts of defiance, such as removing the Peruvian flag from the barracks and replacing it with their own flag.

We, as the audience, aren’t even able to witness how the peasants lying at the beginning were killed. Lombardi presents them as a ghostly presence, which brings the film close to the horror genre: in these initial scenes, the music gives a sinister tone and reinforces the idea of a hidden monstrosity, in the style of Jacques Tourneur and Alfred Hitchcock. In contrast, what the director does show us is how the soldiers kidnap and torture a peasant to extract information from him.

Lombardi is provocative in choosing what we see and what we don’t, and, in addition to this, he also demonstrates his theoretical imagination by turning this opposition into the film’s central idea. He is driven not by whim, but by a critical questioning of the State and its role in the vast number of crimes during Peru’s internal conflict. It should be noted that the film also reveals Lombardi’s cinephilia, since he is deeply aware of the Hollywood tradition—so much so that the idea of visibility becomes a precursor to Brian De Palma, who would release his own film a year later about the Vietnam war. 

In Casualties of War (1989), the motif of an invisible enemy, first introduced in The Lion’s Den, reappears: one of the soldiers named Gallardo (José Tejada), weary of the endless waiting that military campaigns bring and intoxicated by the power of carrying a loaded gun on his shoulder, he rapes a young woman, but he didn’t expect his act to be witnessed by Luna (Toño Vega)—the protagonist, who dreams of being admitted into the  officers’ academy. Undoubtedly, the enemy on the other side is imperceptible, but there is another enemy closer, within their own ranks—an enemy who is seen, witnessed, yet never confronted. Once the young woman formally accuses Gallardo, Lieutenant Roca (Gustavo Bueno)—his commanding officer—dismisses the accusation, not because he disbelieves her or because he shows sympathy for Gallardo, but because he must keep the troop united. In this situation, Luna chooses to stay silent in order to safeguard his professional advancement. Through a similarly constructed storyline, De Palma asks whether or not innocence can be regained after what is seen and done in war.

Lombardi suggests a connection with Hollywood’s recent past by making Lieutenant Roca the subject of rumors that allude to another classic Vietnam War film, The Deer Hunter (1978), directed by Michael Cimino. In Lombardi’s film, the lieutenant cannot be promoted because he settled a love affair with another officer by playing Russian roulette. This makes reference to Cimino’s film, in which the same game is imposed on US-American soldiers by their Vietnamese captors and turns into a symbol of post-traumatic stress. In The Lion’s Den, Lombardi inverts the symbolism and transforms it into a climactic moment of the confrontation between the protagonist and his commanding officer, which brings us back to Platoon.

In this film, directed by Oliver Stone, an officer—played by Tom Berenger—maintains that indiscriminate violence is the only effective way to wage war against a population that appears to be the enemy. For a moment, it appears to justify the character’s opinion by showing how the enemy, perhaps with the help of a rural community, has killed one of the US-American soldiers.

Lombardi shoots a similar scene and places his character in a comparable conflict, yet he leaves no room for doubt or restraint in his critique. Unlike what Cimino and Stone did, Lombardi shows absolutely no mercy or indulgence toward his soldiers, as he shows how the men’s resentment—especially that of the rapist Gallardo—culminates in a mass execution. In Platoon, in spite of Stone’s critical posture, he avoids showing a massacre like My Lai—whose death toll may have exceeded 500 people. Instead, he limits himself to portraying only an episode where two civilians are killed and the protagonist stops his fellow soldiers from committing sexual abuse.

Lombardi evolves from being a mere spectator (a critic) to becoming a manipulator of the image (a filmmaker) so as to transform images similar to those of Hollywood cinema into something more confrontational. The massacre at the end of The Lion’s Den is massive and, subsequently, covered up. In this particular case, the Russian roulette is not a symbol of the trauma inflicted by a barbaric enemy, but rather a game in which a subordinate of the Peruvian army has the chance to confront his commanding officer for his crimes.

The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that, back when he was a critic, he considered himself a filmmaker; but once he became a filmmaker, he saw himself as a critic. Lombardi shows a similar attitude in The Lion’s Den, which seems to radicalize the criticism found in Vietnam-war cinema to conclude, like Ford, that the worst enemy resides in the institutions themselves. Lombardi’s film is traditional and subversive in equal measure, and that is precisely where its relevance lies: the most valued quality of a war film is its willingness to stand as evidence before the court of public opinion. Revealing what only a few can see is no longer an act of curiosity but rather an act of justice. The mere act of looking becomes a testimony against what power keeps hidden.

Translated by Michelle Olvera