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4 Three Kings assault on victory culture (1999) .s. Army Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) is distraught in the beginning scenes of Three Kings.1 Despite the surrounding triumphant revelry of Desert Storm’s coalition forces, Gates cannot muster the same celebratory fervor in the Iraqi desert as his comrades.2 It is March 1991, and the war, we are told from the opening titles, is just over. Gates, a Delta Force GI and once doing important work behind enemy lines in Iraq, is now assigned the more tedious and less valorous job of media escort. He tries to partake in the jubilation by pounding away in sexual intercoursewith one of the female reporters, but this only gets him into trouble with his colonel, who walks in on them flagrante delicto. The colonel berates Gates for shirking his responsibilities in this ‘‘media war.’’ He is supposed to be acting more professionally and escorting a different reporter, Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn), to whom he has actually been assigned and to whom he feels no attraction, mentally or sexually. For Major Gates, something about this war and this victory is just not right. In the scene to follow, he is called on the carpet by his commanding officer. ‘‘I don’t even know what we did here,’’ Gates yells back at his CO while pointing to the Iraqi surroundings. ‘‘Just tell me what we did here, Ron.’’ The colonel shoots back quickly, ‘‘What do you want to do, occupy Iraq and do Vietnam all over again? Is that what you want? Is that your brilliant idea?’’3 Unable to come to terms with the military ‘‘chickenshit,’’4 Gates replies, ‘‘Fuck it, I am retiring anyway.’’ Responding to which the colonel puts him straight, ‘‘Until you do, you’re an army officer. You’re still taking care of that reporter. So, do it right.’’ The colonel walks away from him and boards an awaiting helicopter, an icon that brings back to the American audience memories of the frustrating war in Vietnam. As the chopper flies off, Gates is left in the whisking sands, where he shakes his head in bewilderment. Like the films that I have analyzed so far, Three Kings taps the fount of Orientalist fear. However, Three Kings has some unique and interest- three kings 125 ing aspects. The previous films deal with the Arab assault on a weakened America and take place in America. In contrast, this film shows a strong masculine America that has already defeated the Arabs at the beginning of the story. Moreover, this film suggests a struggle against the Arabs that Americans have undertaken outside their own homeland, a struggle located in the Middle East. But the Arabs still are portrayed as threatening to America, even here under these circumstances. Orientalist fear, as I have asserted earlier, develops in part from the Arabs’ power to threaten American ideology and myth. While it seems that the first Gulf War has ‘‘exorcised the ghost of Vietnam’’ and put the United States back on the path to glorious military triumphs, the Arab villains in Three Kings keep the American heroes from reclaiming their rightful destiny, or what Tom Engelhardt calls America’s ‘‘victory culture.’’5 From these early scenes of the film, the audience has been cued to the hero’s frustration with the present state of affairs. Gates must seek a way to reconcile the Gulf War experience within the American myth of war, the role of the heroic and masculine warrior, and the meaning of military victory in the next one hundred minutes of the film. He will draw upon his classic Special Forces character, reminiscent of Robin Moore’s fearless, cunning, compassionate , and sometimes disobedient character of the Green Beret.6 The hero’s struggle to set the myth right again and the struggle against the efforts of the Arab villains to keep the myth unbalanced are the verbal and visual narrative premises of the film. Engelhardt’s victory culture is the ideal American view of a national destiny that is victorious in the struggle against aggression. Such ‘‘triumphalism ,’’ as noted by Engelhardt, is so much a part of American culture that it is ‘‘in the American grain.’’7 The path to victory is deemed certain , and victory culture assures Americans that even the setback of a lost battle, like the Alamo or Custer’s Last Stand, is only a ‘‘springboard to victory’’8 and that ultimately defeat will be redeemed...

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