Timing, as they say about acting, is everything. Dame Helen Mirren now knows this more than most. She played Britain’s most beloved Queen at the height of royal sentimentality. In the years following, she could laugh at press nonsense about her red bikini and go on to narrate Barbie. But the release of Golda on 6 October 2023 was a moment that deserves more serious reflection. Timing also matters in war – and messages about war in film.
An academic career is less glamorous, but it does have its adventures. Before I came to focus on genocide, I was a writer on history and film. The link between the two fields was in films dealing with Nazism, the Holocaust, and war.
Right now, I am trying to complete a book on genocide in the midst of daily horrific images that few feature films would dare to show. After all, the films must conform to the demands of entertainment; the commanders in Gaza or Ukraine have the freedom to obey, challenge, or disregard the laws of war even as they know their atrocities will show up in that night’s news.
We all recognise that our media – ‘social’, commercial, cinema, television – spew out images of violence unbearably near but also remote. If any actor knows the remote realities of war on the screen, Mirren does.
Eye in the Sky: the remote realities of war
Her demanding role as Israeli wartime leader Golda Meir, struggling through layers of makeup and male incompetence, is not as powerful or relevant as a previous military depiction. In the 2015 thriller Eye in the Sky, she is very visibly more like herself, even in character as a British army colonel seconded to a counter-terrorism unit.
The film is a relatively early engagement with the deadly new technology of targeted drones. It is a thriller because we are at Mirren’s elbow as she guides a camera device disguised as a fly into the house where terrorists are preparing a suicide mission. The officer she plays then has the responsibility of unleashing hellfire on the terrorists before they can unleash their bomb.
There is a problem. The unblinking eye in the sky through which we also see, picks out a young girl innocently wandering into the range of the explosion set to ‘take out’ the terrorists. Must she also be ‘collateral damage’?
The Guardian said the film “confronts the intricate morality of modern warfare” and the narrative is gripping because new moral challenges arise long before the final one. And if the film might seem less gripping now (I don’t think it does) it would be because the agonising decisions of drone targeting are now nightly fare in reports from Gaza. More people in Britain and other nations took notice after their aid workers were killed in a sequence of three lethal strikes on their marked cars.
We had to ask ourselves whether the moral challenges of Israeli strikes that demolish houses, hospitals and universities and kill whole families of Palestinians were somehow different. And are the less carefully targeted bombings of the IDF any different, morally, from Bomber Command raining bombs on German civilians in the second world war? Neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Vladimir Putin would say they are.
Golda: supporting Israel in fact and film
Golda is being released this month in Australia just after the annual commemoration honouring military service and the war dead of the nation. Anzac Day begins with dawn services all over Australia and New Zealand and at Gallipoli, scene of Churchill’s disastrous landings in 1915. The film’s release is oddly belated, yet once again perfect in timing. In recent interviews Mirren is again careful to distinguish her long support for Israel, rooted in the horror of the Holocaust, from the current Israeli government.
Mirren has previously advocated for a two-state solution, stating that it is an “absolute necessity”, a proposition repeatedly rejected by Netanyahu. Of the demonstrators against Netanyahu she says, “They are my people”. She is happy to talk about the challenges of the prosthetics and the controversy about her casting.
Her concern is to show Golda as a military leader, taking control when all the men were failing. That is what she wants her audience to take away. “I hope they take her courage, her intelligence, her utter dedication to her country, the difficulties she was facing at the time.” She hopes “to give her back her reputation, so damaged by the Yom Kippur War”.
She does understand the power of the film at this time, as historical context for Israel at war. “There was an absolute understanding that if Israel had lost the Yom Kippur War, and they came very close to losing it, as we see in the movie, Israel would no longer be on the map today. It would be gone. That’s the absolute reality.”
Gaza: the reality of inhumanity
The other absolute reality, one we all know, is the unbearable suffering inflicted by Israel on the population of Gaza. The immunity from charges of inhumanity is no longer so securely conferred on a local great power founded in the shadow of the Holocaust. Bankrolled and armed by the pre-eminent great power and others constrained by history, most obviously Germany, there has been no serious threat to Israel’s ability to destroy a captive population of desperate families.
German arms sales after the horror of the Hamas attack were said to raise the 2023 total to a sum at least ten times higher than the previous year. As Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate carnage intensified along with the civilian death toll, Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the German air force, hailed the “accuracy” of Israeli pilots.
Meanwhile, in Germany, Britain and the US, campaigns decrying the support given to what more and more citizens, students especially, call ‘Israel’s genocide’ are ‘cancelled’ by government repression. Criticism of the Israeli government’s actions is frequently howled down as antisemitism.
I remember Peter Watkins, the path-breaking antiwar director, discussing Peter Weir’s Gallipoli with my history and film students. After screening the closing minutes of the doomed Australian charge into Turkish machine-gun fire, he asked, “Is this an antiwar film, or a pro-war film?” What does the manipulation of our emotions really do?
The great films of the Gaza war, Israeli and Palestinian, may yet do more for historical memory than the daily depictions of genocide. Any perceived propaganda in Golda may turn out to be only a blip in the annals of cinema and Mirren’s stellar career. Right now, we can only check ourselves, and take up our positions in the relentless war of inhumanity against humanity.
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