Drone strikes and authorial intentions
I saw Eye in the Sky the afternoon it opened in London. I went with few preconceptions, knowing only that it was about drones and featured the last performance by the great Alan Rickman. That evening Iposted a review under the title: We bomb because we care (http://angelandelephant.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/we-bomb-because-we-care.html). As far as I was concerned, what I'd seen was a defence of drone warfare. Certainly there are arguments for and against, but the balance is of a most precarious kind and topples over at a breath of scorn from Rickman's lips.
The story is about a joint operation, involving British, American and Kenyan forces, initially to capture, then (as circumstances change) to kill 3 leading members of al-Shabaab who have gathered in a house in Nairobi. The case for striking becomes even more compelling when two suicide bombers are seen loading their vests with enough explosives to kill an estimated 80 people. When a nine-year-old girl sets up a bread stall just outside the house, she becomes the focus of the debate between the military commanders, played by Rickman and Helen Mirren, and the weak, hand wringing politicians who are called on to authorize the attack. "Save her," Rickman intones, "and risk killing 80 others." Against such numbers, the case for saving the child is made to seem merely sentimental.
Certainly, the film contains some powerful visual sequences that imply an opposing argument, but they're overshadowed by the charismatic power of these two actors and the lines Guy Hibbert has written for them, and most of all by those numbers: one innocent life to save 80. How do you counter that, except by reference to the facts that the film ignores, such as this from Micah Zemko, a scholar at the Council of Foreign Relations, quoted in the New York Times, "Most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names."
And yet the director, Gavin Hood, believes that his film "doesn't take a position". And in an interview with Cora Currier for The Intercept, he asks, "Through this policy, are we escalating or de-escalating the conflict that we're in? The real question at the end of the movie is not: Did we do or not do the right thing in targeting these suicide bombers? The real lingering question is: What about this population that felt this missile come down on them?"
Well, yes, that is the real question. But in tweets using the Eye In The Sky hashtag, among those who express views on the film's political stance, the great majority love it for its strong defence of aggressive military action and the rest hate it for the same reason.
A long time ago, as a student of English, I was the introduced to the concept of "intentional fallacy" and learned that the meaning of a work of a literature is not necessarily what its author intended it to mean. It occurs to me that this is the literary equivalent of what, in a military context, we call the law of unintended consequences.