Some Reflections on Three Kings (1999)
What would it look like to mashup an indie sensibility with the war genre? That’s David O. Russell’s Three Kings.
I first saw this film in high school. Even though it had a collection of actors I loved at the time—George Clooney, Ice Cube, and Mark Wahlberg—I didn’t quite get it.
Depicting the clean-up phase of the first Gulf War, repelling Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990/1991, the film was about as antiwar and politically conscious as an auteur could muster during the unipolar moment. The ethos of “I just wanna get mine” permeates. The film is shot through with American exceptionalism. And despite presenting war as inglorious, Three Kings is also full of visceral, mad-cap action, making war feel a bit like an adventure where you may or may not discover your conscience.
For 16-year old me, this was all too much, and the end-of-history culture of the time was just the water we swam in, so an artistic critique went over my head. In truth, I watched this in a moment when I was trying to get myself ready to join the Air Force, and movies were my primary education about what the military was like (Google was not yet a thing). I was in the wrong headspace to absorb a critique that depicted soldiers as barely competent opportunists engaged in imperialistic occupations of foreign land.
What’s remarkable about this film in hindsight is that its target is the first Gulf War. As I break it down with Lyle Rubin and Kevin Fox in our episode of the Bang-Bang podcast covering the film, Gulf War I was uniquely popular at the time. And not just within the US but globally too. Even most of the Arab world backed the elder Bush’s invasion. That made Three Kings a bit of a Sinatra test—if your critique of war can land on the most popular of wars, then it sticks to wars generally.
In this respect, the film succeeds, accomplishing about as much as any film could in a moment of just total American global dominance.
Whereas the first Gulf War is remembered romantically in Washington as maybe the only “good war” in our lifetimes, Three Kings finds a way to relay that our memory betrays us; this war was far less clean than is conventionally understood. Not just because there were many casualties (which we discount because they mostly weren’t Americans). And not only because we had established a mode of geopolitical thought that primed Saddam to invade his neighbour rather than repay its loans financing Iraq’s war with Iran. But also because we got many Iraqi civilians killed by encouraging them to foment revolution only to leave them to deal with Saddam’s wrath.
All wars are dirty, and even the good ones are bad. Three Kings literally and implicitly asks what is the point of American troops in the Middle East. The bland end-of-history answer that Mark Wahlberg’s character gives—“maintaining stability”—was unconvincing even then.
Further Reading
The Achilles Trap, by Steve Coll
“The Class of 1999: ‘Three Kings’,” by Matthew Goldenberg
“Three Kings: neocolonial Arab representation,” by Lila Kitaeff
“The Gulf War, Iraq and Western Liberalism,” by Peter Gowan
“The Gulf War’s Afterlife: Dilemmas, Missed Opportunities, and the Post-Cold War Order Undone,” by Samuel Helfont