For over a decade, the U.S. military has used the imaginary country of Atropia—“a neutral, Western-leaning oligarchy”—as a backdrop for training exercises. In “Atropia,” the début directorial effort of the actress Hailey Benton Gates, soldiers prepare for deployment to Iraq by spending time on a military base in the Mojave Desert where, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they pretend that they are occupying villages in an Iraq-like country. “Atropia” ’s story line focusses on one of the actors who populate the simulation, a young woman named Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) who is keen to break into Hollywood and instead finds herself even more profoundly bound up with her current workplace when she becomes infatuated with a soldier (Callum Turner) recently returned from the Middle East. Gates, who has had roles in films by Luca Guadagnino and the Safdie brothers, said recently that she had been driven to make the movie in part because she wanted to find a “strange way in” to the bloody story of the Iraq War. Not long ago, she spoke to us about a few books that she thinks share a kinship with her “military-industrial-complex romantic comedy.” Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
War Is a Racket
by Smedley D. Butler
I did a lot of research before I sat down to write “Atropia,” and one of the things I read that I was most struck by was this pamphlet by Smedley Butler, a Marine Corps major general who served in the First World War. Technically, it’s based on a speech that he gave, but the speech was so popular that they turned it into a book.
Butler’s ultimate argument is that, if war wasn’t profitable, we wouldn’t be going to war. He names the corporations and individuals that benefitted from the war. The chapter titles are great: “War Is a Racket,” “Who Makes the Profits?,” “How to Smash This Racket.” One of the solutions Butler proposes is to pay everyone involved in the war effort the same amount of money that a soldier makes, so there’s no profiteering. It would have been Butler’s nightmare to see soldiers privatized, as they often are today.
Enter Ghost
by Isabella Hammad
This is a fantastic novel about actors who are trying to stage “Hamlet” in the West Bank. The main character in it, Sonia, is similar to the main character in my film, Fayruz, insofar as she is also living between cultures and trying to understand where she most feels like herself. They’re also both Arab actresses who don’t look “Arab enough.”
Having an outsider’s point of view in the novel really helps Isabella tell the story of the occupation, because when you have a character who is trying to fit in and to understand things, it allows a lot of questions to be asked that someone who is local might not be able to ask. Another thing I love about “Enter Ghost” is that it finds a lot of humor and beauty in a really absurd and difficult environment. There’s a great moment at the beginning, for example, where Sonia sort of knows she’s going to get strip-searched at the airport, so she wears a really nice set of blue lace underwear in preparation.
Pastoralia
by George Saunders
For me, it feels impossible to talk about role-playing stories without talking about Saunders. He’s really the king.
“Pastoralia,” the title story in this collection, is about two people who work in a theme park, pretending to be cavemen. Like in “Atropia,” the main character is completely obsessed with maintaining authenticity, and is deeply frustrated by his co-worker, who is always breaking character, and by the inanity of the visitors who come and don’t really appreciate the prowess involved in his work. There are also corporate overlords, who are never seen.
My favorite detail from the story has to do with the fact that the cavemen-actors are supposed to roast goats, which sometimes appear and sometimes don’t—it’s up to the overlords—and the main character in the story finds it much easier to fret over the goat not being in the slot than to deal with real life beyond the simulation.
The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq
by Hassan Blasim
I think, because of the title, this book runs the risk of being misunderstood as very heavy. It definitely deals with the heaviest of subjects—death, war, betrayal. But it also has a gallows humor to end all gallows humor. The titular story is about an assassin who is having an extremely bureaucratic exchange with a recruit, explaining to him how best to arrange a tableau of dead bodies for maximum aesthetic effect. It’s chilling and hilarious—it reminds me slightly of the terrific Colombian mockumentary “The Vampires of Poverty.”
My favorite story in the collection is “The Green Zone Rabbit,” which is about these two young men who are crashing in a mansion in the green zone, and has a kind of “Waiting for Godot” quality to it. One of them begins to treat a rabbit as a pet, and eventually it lays an egg and the men freak out. It captures the eeriness of having an uncertain future in a place that has become totally lawless, and it also has a surrealism that turns out not to be totally surreal, which is something I wanted for my film, too.
Written on the Wall
by Shaun Lewis
This book is a collection of photographs of musings that were scrawled on porta-potty walls in Iraq, taken by a soldier during his deployment in 2004 and 2005. I think porta-potties had a kind of mythical status in the Iraq War, because these were the only places where soldiers had any alone time, and, because of that, could become places of pleasure and contemplation. The graffiti here includes extremely detailed drawings of sex acts and records of people coming out and cries of help and even poetry. Some of the most charming moments are when somebody has added a rebuttal to something. In one picture, someone has written “I wish I was where I was when I wished I was here.” Next to it, someone has scratched the words “Lil Bitch.” There’s more serious stuff, too—we put one in the movie that reads “We the unwilling, led by the unqualified, die for the ungrateful.” I wouldn’t say that the photography itself is meaningful or artful, but it’s an amazing collection of documents that, taken together, create a holistic portrait of that era.
