THE RUSSIAN BODY
33
The Military Body: Film Representations of the
Chechen and Vietnam Wars
OLGA KARPUSHINA
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
The present article analyzes the representation of the body in
films about the Chechen and Vietnam wars and discusses the transformations the body undergoes when transferred from peacetime to war.
I focus on three major topics—the chronotope of the war world, rites
of passage, and the role and representation of women—in the Russian
films Kavkazskii plennik [Prisoner of the Mountains], Blokpost [The
Checkpoint], and Vremia tantsora [Time of the Dancer] and the American films Full Metal Jacket, Go Tell the Spartans, and The Boys in Company
C.1 In all of these films the representation of a so-called local conflict
(in Chechnya or Vietnam) differs significantly from the depiction of
war in films about WWI and WWII. In the latter, there is no doubt
who the “bad guys” are. The soldiers, Soviet or American, may be
shown as miserable, pathetic, or cruel, but they are always “right,” and
the war they are fighting is always “just.” In films set in the Vietnam
and Chechen wars a moment of hesitation or doubt about the righteousness and justice of the mission often becomes the narrative dominanta. The Encyclopedia of American War Films notes:
Vietnam experience on film had fallen into two major categories—the action drama filled with violence,
revenge and cartoon-like characters, and the realistic
drama which attempted to portray the physical hardships, psychological traumas and general horror that
young Americans had to live in Vietnam. The action
dramas, as represented by such performers as Sylvester Stallone (Rambo: First Blood Part II) and Chuck
Norris (Missing in Action, Parts I-III), had their superheroes, using an arsenal of exotic weapons […]. They
suggested to those back home that the struggle is far
from over. The plots and heroics had more in common with World War II movies of the 1940s than
with the actual Vietnam encounter. Realistic films of
the war tried to evoke the look and feel of the Vietnam experience, sometimes through surrealistic
34
STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
sequences. […] Platoon hinted at the ambiguities of
the war. Hamburger Hill (1987) stressed the futility of
the conflict […] Full Metal Jacket […] emphasized the
themes of dehumanization and aggression that accompany war. (621)
These two approaches to representation are rooted in the ambiguous
attitude of American society towards the war. This attitude shifts from
“let’s-win-it-this-time” (Garland 13) to “God-what-are-we-doinghere?” The “action” and “realistic” subcategories show the body differently: in the first case, it appears as beautiful, invincible, and
Rambo-esque, endowed with an almost cyborgian immortality. In the
second case, the body is often weak, vulnerable, wounded, crippled,
and mortal. Mental or psychological weakness—signaled by hesitation or
doubt—seems to be imposed on the body and causes its physical weakness. “If you hesitate, you’ll be a dead Marine,” drill instructor Hartman asserts (Full Metal Jacket).
The theme of the Chechen War is relatively new for Russian
cinema. Because the conflict is still in progress, it has been an even
more ambiguous and controversial subject than the Vietnam War was
for America. The first Chechen campaign (1994-96) provoked strong
protests on the part of the public and the media; a cinematic reflection
of the protest mentality is Sergei Bodrov’s Kavkazskii plennik (1997), a
film that carries a transparently anti-war message.
The second Chechen campaign (1999-present) prompted a
radical change in Russian society’s attitude towards the earlier war; in
the interim between the two campaigns, Russia was traumatized by
terrorist acts and kidnappings.2 Sympathy for the Chechens gave way
to hatred. Many Russians concluded that peace is unachievable and
demanded that the government put an end to the terrorist horror—
meaning, the complete defeat and surrender of Chechnya. Since 1996
public opinion has been predominantly pro-war. Aleksandr
Rogozhkin’s Blokpost (1998), while still challenging the rightness and
necessity of the war, cannot be called an anti-war film. Kavkazskii plennik strives to blur the boundaries between Self and Other, so that the
viewer can identify with both Russians and Chechens. Blokpost does
not question the Otherness of the Chechens. It does, however, challenge the whole idea of Russia’s presence in the Caucasus. Sgt. Il’ich’s
rhetorical question—“What are we doing here?”—becomes the major
leitmotif of the film.
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35
Two Worlds
The two worlds of peacetime and war operate according to
different laws and are represented accordingly. In movies about the
World Wars there is no outer world. Even the world of peace exists as
a reflection of the war. The home front is still a front, and people
there work to help the soldiers fight. The whole country is shown as a
united front.3 In movies set in the Vietnam or Chechen wars, owing to
the distant locality of the conflicts, the country, by contrast, lives its
peaceful life and does not care much about its soldiers, lost somewhere in the jungle or captured in the mountains. The world of war,
therefore, is an inner, smaller, and usually closed world surrounded by
the outer peaceful life. Blokpost opens with a panorama of the mountains, which literally encircle the battlefield and cut the Russian soldiers off from their world. The voice-over, apparently belonging to
one of the soldiers, Skelet [Skeleton], comments on this isolation: “In
the alien beauty of the mountains there is no salvation for a world,4 at
least the world we vaguely recollect. We are strangers to this world.”
Later, the same voice notes: “Through the telescope of Ash’s [Pepel']
rifle I observe the local sights. Over the mountains there is the sea,
where people from the other, normal world are vacationing.”
The world of war is alienated: the war is either commented
on by, or shown through the eyes of, an observer, usually an intelligent and well-educated person, susceptible to doubts and reflection
(Skelet in Blokpost, Courcey in Ted Post’s Go Tell the Spartans [1978], or
Capt. Benjamin Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
[1979]; in the Coppola film the outer world is shown as estranged from
the very beginning, when the reversed image of Willard’s face
“polemicizes” with the image of a burning jungle). Sometimes a character is a war reporter or a radio correspondent, which underscores
his outsider status (reporter Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam!, Foster in Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C [1978], or Joker
in Full Metal Jacket). In Kavkazskii plennik the ambiguous attitude towards the war is rooted in the oscillation between the two poles of the
movie, represented by Sasha, a pro-war character, and Ivan, a pacifist
figure.
Space in Blokpost is organized according to the Chinese-box
principle: the outer world embraces the war world. The latter, in turn,
contains the soldiers’ private space, a microcosm of the outer peaceful
life—the world of barracks and checkpoints, simultaneously protected
and fragile. This private space is thoroughly feminized (inner space
36
STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
equated with the womb). For example, soldiers at the checkpoint
grow roses, keep pictures, and dance. Go Tell the Spartans begins with a
crane shot of a military camp and an armored personal carrier driving
in. The metaphoric isolation and envelopment become quite literal:
the gate opens to let something or someone in and immediately closes
to protect the inner, peaceful space.
Inside this closed space the body is reduced to its basic functions. “There are only three good things in this life,” Khaliava
[Freebie5] explains to Krysa [Rat]. “To stuff yourself, to take a good
shit, and to fuck your brains out. The world is simple. Our world, I
mean.” Because of a sniper, a trip to the latrine becomes a heroic
deed. “I’m going to perform the feat of arms,” says Kaif [Buzz6] as he
reels out a roll of toilet paper. “If I don’t come back, consider me a
patriot. If I do, then don’t” (Blokpost).7
Kavkazskii plennik presents a somewhat different scheme. We
are shown the private world of the enemy, the Chechens. Interestingly, this world is much more militarized and masculinized than that
of the Russians. The anti-war ideology—the Chechen War is bad, the
small but proud Chechen nation fights for its freedom against a much
stronger enemy—is shown through bodies. While Russian soldiers are
depicted as rookies and non-professionals whose clumsy movements,
dirty and poorly-fitting uniforms, etc. betray their lack of desire to
take part in “this strange war,” the Chechen warriors are well trained
and highly motivated. All the Chechens are fully dressed and carry
weapons. Russian soldiers, by contrast, are often shown naked and
unarmed—that is, defenseless (Kavkazskii plennik, Blokpost). The handto-hand combat we witness is what the Chechens do at leisure. The
Russians play cards, drink, talk about women, or dance.8
Inside the encircled war arena time passes in a non-linear
fashion: it slows down or accelerates, ignoring the laws of physics.
More precisely, the notion of time is absolutely subjective. “Our time
is limited to a day or an instant, and the eternity of the mountains
does not fit in this simple scheme,” claims the voice-over (Blokpost).
When Iurist [Lawyer] talks to a Chechen girl, Masha (a Russified version of her real name, Manimat), he says, “We will be staying here for
thirty-one days. It’s so long!” “That’s not long,” she replies. “That’s
very long,” he says. “For me it’s not,” insists “Masha.” “But for us it
is,” asserts Iurist, and Skelet’s voice-over corrects him: “He’s wrong.
It’s actually thirty-two days.”
Even body language does not work as a medium for commu-
THE RUSSIAN BODY
37
nication in the war world. Private Iurist expresses his attitude toward
the natives by raising his middle finger. “His insulting gesture will not
be understood,” comments Skelet. “The natives live according to their
own laws, which we cannot comprehend.”
Money as it is known in the peaceful world does not exist in
the war. It is either replaced by something else or its value is redefined. Thirty-five thousand in Vietnamese currency, the sum that at
first shocks Vinnie Fazio, equals three US dollars (The Boys in Company
C). Shells or guns often serve as monetary units. Masha/Manimat
(Blokpost) charges the soldiers twenty bullets for sex with her deafmute sister. “Twenty for one, twenty-five for both of you. A condom
costs one bullet,” she calmly explains to the newcomers. A Russian
soldier in Kavkazskii plennik pays for two bottles of vodka with a pistol. This kind of exchange occurs only in the closed world of war,
where this “hard currency” keeps returning to its owners: Manimat
shoots at the same soldiers who gave her the bullets; a shopkeeper resells the pistol to a policeman’s father, who later shoots his own son
with it (Kavkazskii plennik). The body in war participates in swapping:
it can be exchanged or sold. A body is a variable equaling another
body (in Kavkazskii plennik two captured Russian soldiers are to be exchanged for Abdul’s imprisoned son), or twenty bullets, or a sheep
(Blokpost).
In war, the human body is subject to rapid and shocking
metamorphoses. In seconds a well-functioning organism is transformed into a pulp of “dead meat” (Full Metal Jacket, Go Tell the
Spartans). Blokpost suggests another form of transmogrification. Animals turn into human beings and people become animals. Private
Krysa’s best friend is a white rat called Krysia [Ratty].9 Krysia is depicted as a human soldier. She wears camouflage and a field cap; she is
killed by a sniper’s bullet; she is buried in a coffin, and the soldiers
want to perform military funeral rites over her body (they suggest
wrapping her in a Russian flag, singing the national anthem, and firing
a salute). Every day Krysa brings a flower to the grave of his
“girlfriend.” Later, Krysa is arrested and taken away because the general has betrayed his soldiers. Krysa is charged with shooting and
wounding a local woman, though the episode was just an accident. He
is also accused of booby-trapping a path (though Kaif is the guilty
party) to kill sheep and get fresh meat. When Krysa is taken away
(“for the investigation,” the local police assures the soldiers), everybody knows he will not return. In the last scene, when Skelet and Iur-
38
STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
ist are standing guard at the gate, the natives drive up and throw
something off a truck onto the road.. Iurist approaches to see what it
is and finds a dirty
sheepskin. “It’s soft but
heavy,” he tells Skelet,
who is waiting at the
gate. The camera fixes
on Iurist’s curious face
as he touches the skin’s
opening with the barrel
of his gun (Fig. 1). Suddenly, he jumps aside
and runs to the gate.
“It’s Krysa,” he whis- Figure 1. Blokpost.
pers in shock. “I recognized his ear. How could he fit in that skin?
It’s so small!” “I mean, not so large,” he adds helplessly, finally realizing that Krysa has been lynched and dismembered by the locals. The
sheepskin stuffed with the parts of Krysa’s body symbolizes his reduction to an animal state.
Entering the War World
How does a body become a military body? How does it enter
the new military world? In order to turn from a “maggot” into a real
soldier, a body has to undergo certain rituals of initiation. “Rites of
passage,” writes Mircea Eliade,
possess a threefold pattern consisting of rites of
separation, transition, and reincorporation. […] The
important phase in these ceremonies is the middle,
or liminal, period of transition. In this phase people
are morally remade into “new” social beings. Newborn infants are made into human persons, children
are made into adults. […] This remaking of person
involves symbolic destruction of the old and the
creation of the new. It is a dual process of death and
rebirth, involving symbols of reversal, bisexuality, disguise, nakedness, death, humility, dirt, intoxication, pain,
and infantilism. These symbols of ritual liminality
have both positive and negative connotations representing the paradoxical situation of the womb/
tomb – the betwixt and between period when peo-
THE RUSSIAN BODY
39
ple are neither what they were nor what they will become. In the liminal stage, people are momentary
anomalies, stripped of their former selves, ready to
become something new. The transition phase is a
time out of time, when the usual order of things is
reversed and suspended, ready to become reestablished and renewed. (The Encyclopedia of Religion 66;
emphasis added)
Through the rituals of rebirth in a new capacity—here, that of a soldier—the body has to undergo certain transformations. In order to be
reborn, it first must die. First of all, the body must be stripped of all
possessions, everything that belongs to the civilian world, such as jewelry, sunglasses, or clothes (Eliade’s nakedness). The Boys in Company C
provides a good example of this procedure. We witness the whole
process of transforming an unbridled, spoiled, and undisciplined body
into a perfect, machine-like body. The future marines have just arrived
at boot camp in San Diego. The spectator sees a group of young men
in colorful clothes. To stress the difference between the images before
and after the initiation, the camera focuses on the diversity of colors
and styles: a drug dealer, Washington, in a loose, African-style pale
green suit; a farm boy, Park, in a baseball cap and a white-blue T-shirt;
a hippie, Bixby, in a white-blue-brown checked shirt; a Brooklyn hustler, Fazio, in sunglasses and a patterned yellowish-green shirt, etc.
The young men are incredibly hairy – the fashion of the 60s. Luxuriant, uncombed, foot-long manes crown their heads, not to mention
Bixby’s moustache and beard, which, together with his love for everybody, earn him the nickname “Jesus Christ.” The army, however, is a
place for neither long hair nor love.
The action unfolds as a sort of striptease. First, the recruits
are fully dressed; then they are ordered to deposit the contents of their
pockets on the tables in front of them. The next shot is of a line of
semi-naked recruits, towels wrapped around their hips. Lt. Loyce’s
voice asks whether they have ever had sex with men or animals and
how often they masturbate. Then, after stripping the draftees to the
skin, the drill instructor (initiator) begins the transformation of their
civilian bodies. “I want a special job on Jesus. Shave his head off,” Lt.
Loyce tells the soldier in charge of shearing the newcomers.
Full Metal Jacket opens with a similar scene, which conveys the
process of becoming a military man. An electric shaver cuts the draftees’ thick hair, leaving strips of clean-shaven skin. The scene ends
40
STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
with a shot of the floor, covered with multi-colored hair tufts: the initiation requires sacrificing parts of the civilian body. Without hair,
moustaches, and beards, the new faces are hardly recognizable.
Again, to cross the border separating the world of war from
that of peace and to be reborn as military, the body has to be returned
to a newborn state, that is, hairless and naked.10 Kavkazskii plennik
opens with a medium-long shot of the outer world through the window of the optometrist’s office, as if in a farewell glance. The main
character, Ivan, already shaven, is answering a doctor’s questions. After being certified “fit to serve,” Ivan marches down a long corridor,
naked, with his hand covering his genitals. Other naked draftees join
him one by one; the platoon of naked male bodies with a nurse at the
head proceed to have their genitals examined (Fig. 2).
The new body requires a new, military face. “Show me your
war face!” Sgt. Hartman shouts at Joker
(Full Metal Jacket). He
also slaps and almost
strangles
Pyle
(Eliade’s humility and
pain) because Pyle
cannot erase a stupid
smile from his face—
that is, he is unable to
conform to the new
war image.
The recruits
Figure 2. Kavkazskii plennik.
are shown as bisexual
beings (Eliade’s bisexuality), both male and female. They are taught how to “save their
balls” (The Boys in the Company C) and at the same time they are called
“girls” (The Boys in the Company C) or “ladies” (Full Metal Jacket). The
speeches of the officers and drill instructors to the draftees often imply homosexual relationships. “You better give your soul to God because your ass is mine!” advises Sgt. Louce (The Boys in Company C), in
a discourse of ambiguity that straddles metaphor and literalization.
Not unlike a womb, boot camp is the place where the draftees—embryonic soldiers—grow until their rebirth as military bodies.
Like an embryo, a draftee must pass through all the formative stages.
When he arrives at camp, he is nothing but a protozoa. “How do they
THE RUSSIAN BODY
41
ever expect me to train fucking marines,” Lt. Loyce shouts, “when
they don’t send me human goddamned beings to start with?” (The Boys
in Company C). “If you ladies leave my island,” Sgt. Hartman echoes,
if you survive recruit training, you’ll be a weapon,
you’ll be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day you are pukes, you are the lowest form of
life on Earth; you are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized pieces of amphibian shit! (Full Metal Jacket)
The ritual of initiation requires a new name for the initiatee. Sgt. Hartman gives his “maggots” nicknames: Snowball, Joker, Cowboy, Pyle,
etc. In Blokpost no one remembers the real names of his comrades.
“What is this: Boeing? Mocha [Urine]?11 You’ll have to rewrite your
report, Private,” insists a female investigator. “And don’t use any nicknames.” “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” Iurist bashfully asks. “What’s Mocha’s name?” “Mikhail Shilov,” replies the woman after checking her
papers.
The new military body has to be perfect and it has to be a
weapon. Actually, the instructors’ goal is to make cyborgs, symbiotic
creatures, half-humans, half-killing machines. However, the human
part has to rule. “The rifle is a tool. It is a hard heart that kills,” Sgt.
Hartman explains while trying to “hammer out ‘full metal jackets,’ the
rifle cartridges that are the field ammunition of the combat Marines” (Encyclopedia of American War Films 219).
The new military body must be a perfect weapon, and it does
not function well without its mechanical parts. The Marines chant:
“Without my rifle my life is useless. Without my rifle I am useless” (Full Metal Jacket). When captured, Sasha (Kavkazskii plennik) asks
Ivan whether he managed to shoot. “I didn’t have time,” Ivan answers. “You’re a rotten soldier, Private Zhilin,” Sasha tells him. Ivan’s
clumsiness and physical imperfection (inability to handle a weapon)
cause the prisoners’ recapture and eventually result in Sasha’s death:
when Ivan accidentally shoots off the escapees’ last cartridge, the
sound leads to their discovery.
The drama of Pvt. Pyle (Full Metal Jacket) is that he cannot
master his body and make it perfect. It is as though he stopped maturing and stalled at the stage of a newborn. Symbolically, when he
makes a mistake and is punished, he follows the squad sucking his
thumb, with his pants pulled down. He seems to be unable to even
dress himself (in two scenes Joker either dresses him or teaches him
42
STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
how to tie his necktie). Despising his own undisciplined body (“I can’t
do anything right,” he sobs), Pyle turns his admiration to the rifle instead. He talks to it, cleans and oils it, worships it. “It is clean,” he
whispers in delight. “It is beautiful; it is nice, perfect. Everything is
clean, oiled.” The perfection of the weapon contrasts to the soiled
body of a “baby.” The rifle is all Pyle wishes to be but is not. Little by
little, in his mind Pyle merges with the gun and becomes less and less
human. Not surprisingly, when caught with the gun in the middle of
the night, he first kills the drill instructor, the man who is responsible
for his transmogrification. Then Pyle
kills himself, letting
a “full metal
jacket” take him
away from “the
world of shit.” In
the scene in the
latrine Pyle is
shown as a totally
transformed monster right out of a
horror film: evil
Figure 3. Full Metal Jacket.
grin, eyes rolled up,
lowpitched voice, etc.
(Fig. 3). The weapon that Sgt. Hartman was striving to make of Pyle
has misfired.
After initiation/drilling, the new men are born. The day of
rebirth is the day when the draftees become soldiers. Now they look
like identical siblings: a unified, uniformed, perfectly organized group
instead of the straggling mob they used to be. After graduation, they
are ready for battle.
Women in the Military World
For obvious reasons, few women figure in these war films.
Those shown are represented variously, depending on the category to
which they belong. They are either part of the military and thus appear
questionable, since the army is considered an improper place for a
woman, or they are natives, who pose as civilians but turn out to be
masked enemies and very effective killers. Those women are mysterious and inspire awe. To the first category belong Senior Lt. Alisa
THE RUSSIAN BODY
43
(Blokpost), nurses, and female doctors (Kavkazskii plennik; The Boys in
Company C; Full Metal Jacket). Masha-Manimat and her sister (Blokpost),
a female sniper (Full Metal Jacket), a Vietnamese woman (Go Tell the
Spartans), and, to some extent, Dina (Kavkazskii plennik) belong to the
second.
Senior Lt. Alisa, a dull young woman with a plump, flabby
body and a plain face, investigates an incident in the village involving
the wounding of a Chechen woman shot while trying to shoot Russian
soldiers. The unusual, tense situation, when every member of the Russian group is summoned to report on what happened, is “resolved” by
means of laughter. Resistant to a female in a position of power and
unable to restrain her physically, the soldiers assert their perceived superiority in standard misogynistic fashion: they diminish her by reducing her to an object of their sexual prowess. In a patriarchal society,
Peter Lehman writes, men assert power by controlling both language
and action, that is, the verbal and physical forms that are “the twin
domains” of patriarchy (12). The army, unquestionably, is the quintessence of patriarchy. “So, how is she?” Kaif asks Iurist, who has just
left Alisa’s office. “What are our chances of fucking her?”12 They proceed to tell dirty jokes and play a trick on a slow-witted Mocha, who
has not been questioned by Alisa yet, telling him that they all already
had sex with her and that now it is his turn. Mocha is so dull that he
takes the story in all good faith and succeeds in what his friends consider impossible, namely, having sex with the officer. Alisa proves a
messenger of bad news associated with death: she arrives at the checkpoint to arrest Krysa, who will later be lynched and dismembered.13
Alisa is represented mainly as a female body called upon to
satisfy men. Though not attractive, she has sex with Mocha and, the
film implies, is a general’s lover. Nothing indicates that she enjoys sex
and she certain does not conform to the familiar paradigm of a “hot”
woman. But she is so used to being identified with her vagina that she
even misreads a word in Iurist’s report (a Freudian slip?). “Please, rewrite the report and do not use C-words,” she tells him. “Where do
you see a C-word?” he wonders. When shown, he slyly replies, “It’s
the word ‘can’t.’ That’s just my handwriting.”14
Whereas Blokpost iterates the standard identification of female
physicality with “easy” sexuality, Kavkazskii plennik provides a contrasting, if equally conventional, representation of the female body. In
a five-second shot a young nurse leads a group of draftees to the doctor’s office. (Later, when the viewer already knows that the draftees
44
STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
will be sent to the Chechen War, this image reads as a flock going to
the slaughter.) The nurse and her colleagues seem absolutely indifferent to the abundance of naked male flesh surrounding them. The sterile whiteness of the nurse’s uniform, her adoption of a dominant
stance and role, and her obvious sexual disinterestedness in men
brand her as simultaneously frigid and dangerous. The stereotypical
image of a nurse as an object of sexual desire (a pussy/cat-type) is
transformed into a frightening image in the Nurse Ratchet mold (One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
Since the military cannot accept a woman as a soldier in the
regular army, if in the service, she must be a “he.” In The Boys in Company C a female doctor examines the arriving Marines’ genitals for venereal diseases. “You’ve got cold hands, little lady,” one of the Marines complains. “It’s Lieutenant,” she interrupts him. “Sorry, Sir,” he
apologizes.15 The next moment, however, the woman is dislodged
from her dominant position (seated while the Marine stood in front of
her, saluting, his trousers pulled down). “You people, please pull up
your trousers,” the Sergeant orders. “What are these nurses doing in
here?” the Captain whispers angrily. “Get them the hell out of here
before somebody kills them!” In a symbolically revealing movement, a
row of the Marines screens the nurses.
In the representation of native women, war films couple the
otherness of the exotic culture with the general “mysteriousness of
woman’s nature” (Freud’s “dark continent”). Native men lack the
mystery presumably inherent in native women. Merely enemies, they
usually do not dissemble, whereas the women keep their inner motives secret, concealing their otherness and their hostility until they
catch the intruders unawares.
The ability to hide and mask is represented both literally and
metaphorically. In Kavkazskii plennik the armed men hide behind the
bodies of the local women, which enables them to capture the two
male protagonists, who do not expect an ambush from behind female
bodies. Manimat (Blokpost) keeps her real name a secret. “Call me
Masha,” she tells Skelet. “It’ll be easier for you.”16 A woman can also
disguise herself as a man, as in Go Tell the Spartans, when Corp. Courcey recognizes a female among the bodies of the killed enemies. “It’s a
girl!” he cries in shock.
Part of the native women’s enigmatic image derives from
their habitual silence.17 Masha’s sister is deaf and dumb (Blokpost). The
Vietnamese girl whose family Courcey invites to the camp never utters
THE RUSSIAN BODY
45
a word. Nevertheless, Courcey has no doubt that he can read her intentions. “She wants me,” he tells the soldiers. His reading of her,
however, turns out to be inaccurate: the girl is a Communist spy and is
killed while trying to escape with stolen weapons. In Vadim Abdrashitov’s Vremia tantsora (1997) the Russian man also “misreads” his lover
as a stereotypical eastern woman. He never doubts her ostentatious
submissiveness and obedience because she conceals her intelligence
and skills (previously a teacher of Russian literature, she now is the
Russians’ enemy).
In Kavkazskii plennik, Dina, a Chechen girl whose father organized the attack on the APC and who is sympathetic to Ivan, initially also does not talk. Her representation, however, differs somewhat from the standard, since a Russian man, not she, is in a submissive position. The usual paradigm is inverted: he is a captive and she a
captor. Her attitude towards the prisoner is shown as exceptional
rather than typical. Consequently, Dina is marginalized in her village
(the children insult her because she is poor, has no dowry, and communicates with the prisoners).
In the masculine genre of the war film, paradoxically, women
or children often are the only ones who withstand the invaders. In
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now it is the Vietnamese girl who
blows up the chopper with American soldiers. The native women seal
off their hatred until the moment of revenge, when their rage explodes. “The local world is inhabited by women and children,” the
voice-over in Blokpost recounts. “Nobody seems to watch us, but we
all can feel their suspicious gaze.” When a local boy blows himself up
while playing with a mine, the Russian soldiers find themselves attacked by the enraged Chechen village women, who, dressed in funereal black, hem in the startled male enemy. The crowd scatters when
the child’s mother shoots and kills a local policeman, and keeps shooting until she herself is shot.
A similarly unexpected eruption of female violence in the
relatively peaceful life of the checkpoint takes the form of a mysterious sniper. Nobody can locate it, while the constant threat of being
shot turns even a trip to the toilet into an act of courage. Not until the
last moment does the viewer become aware that this source of danger
is the thirteen-year-old girl Manimat.
In Vietnam/Chechen war films the representation of women
often falls into the rape-revenge category, where the assaulted woman
fights back and kills her abuser(s). Unlike the racist plantocratic myth
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of Black (that is, enslaved) female hypersexuality mentioned in Gwendolyn Foster’s study (57-58), and contrary to the stereotype of a
southern/eastern woman as someone extremely passionate, the local
women in the films under analysis here are depicted as absolutely
asexual. They neither express nor manifest any sexual desire in either
the invaders or the local men.
The motivation for their behavior repeats rape-revenge patterns, though the male aggression may assume the form not of actual
rape, but of a more general assault by the invaders. The action unfolds
as a series of attacks or insults, and the victim of these acts is not necessarily the avenger, but may be her relative(s) or simply other women.
The woman kills, so to speak, “for the figurative rape of all
women” (Clover 144) and for the male “rap[e of] the landscape” (Clover 162), troped along conventional lines as female. For
example, the scene with the sniper in Full Metal Jacket takes place
among the apocalyptic ruins of buildings and scorched land. Female
rage is vented upon the soldiers in an act of revenge from which the
avenger draws obvious sadistic pleasure.
Full Metal Jacket likewise depicts misuse of the female body
during war. A scene in which a prostitute in Da Nang tries to seduce
American soldiers is followed by a parallel scene in Hue, where a Vietnamese pimp haggles with an American soldier over the price for a
prostitute he brought with him. In both scenes the women, as traded
goods, are literally undervalued: the soldiers pay half the initial asking
price. War and invasion, in other words, enact a double threat to
women’s bodies. In the Hue episode, the camera conveys the male
objectifying gaze aimed at the prostitute, who “appears” as nothing
but a sexual object. Her gestures and posture are exaggeratedly sexual:
she walks with a wiggle, her hands on her hips; she speaks only to her
pimp and ignores the soldiers’ smirking jokes about her ability to suck.
Yet she obviously does not enjoy her role and makes no effort to conceal that fact. Her angry voice as she talks to her souteneur betrays her
irritation and nervousness. She is the only one who wears sunglasses,
as if protecting herself from the assaulting male gaze.
Her degradation is ultimately avenged by the Viet Cong female sniper, who shoots three American soldiers. What inclines one to
read this episode as a rape-revenge scenario is not only the film’s editing, which places the sniper incident immediately after the segment
with the prostitute, but also the soldier’s blinkered insistence on viewing the female sniper as a Vietnamese prostitute despite her having
THE RUSSIAN BODY
47
eliminated, not sexually served, three Marines. “No more boom-boom
for this baby-san,” notes one of the soldiers looking at the dying girl.
Since “boom-boom” links the sound of gunfire with slang for casual
sexual intercourse, the comment cements the notion of vengeance
wreaked upon male abusers of women’s bodies.
The sniper first wounds Eightball in the leg, then, slowly and
methodically, in the shoulder and foot, before also wounding and killing Doc Jay when he tries to rescue Eightball. Throughout the sequence the camera dwells on the sight of agonized bodies, bursting
flesh, and splashes of blood. As the squad helplessly witnesses this
carnage and prepares to leave, Animal Mother rushes to help. The dying Doc points at the location of the sniper, who at that moment finishes him off. His body convulses in agony reminiscent of orgasmic
spasms. The image of a jerking and twitching body conveys the apparently sadistic (even necrophilic) pleasure the sniper derives from killing the male aggressor, while simultaneously evoking the climax of a
sexual act imposed upon prostitutes and female victims of rape.
When Joker kills the sniper, who, fatally wounded by Rafterman, asked the soldiers to finish her off, her body, true to the codes
of male sexual initiation, yet again serves as a means of passing a trial
of manhood. “I am a man! Am I a heartbreaker and am I a lifetaker?”
exclaims Rafterman, and kisses his rifle as he watches the expiring
sniper.
Joker similarly asserts his manhood in a rivalry with the female-nicknamed Animal Mother, who is depicted as a Rambo-like
character.18 His body is grotesquely militarized. Tall, heavily built, his
chest crossed with cartridge belts, never parting with his flamethrower, even at rest, he is always on the alert and ready to fight.
Completely transformed into a killing machine, he seems unable to
exist without war. “You won’t believe it, but under fire Animal
Mother’s one of the finest human beings,” his commander ironically
notes. As a master of action, Animal Mother, unsurprisingly, despises
Joker the journalist, that is, a master of language.19 “You talk the talk.
Do you walk the walk?” he challenges Joker. When Joker disagrees
with Animal Mother’s decision to “let her [the sniper] rot,” Animal
Mother puts the reporter’s manliness to the test. “If you wanna waste
her – go on, waste her,” he suggests to Joker, whereupon the latter’s
visage transforms into a “war face.” As the camera cuts to a close-up
of that face, it fixes on the symbols of two conflicting options: a peace
symbol, and a helmet with the slogan “Born to kill.” When the report
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STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
of gunfire is heard, the symbols disappear from the frame. “Hardcore, man! Fucking hard-core,” the soldiers’ voices murmur. Manhood, in other words, may be certified by both raping and killing
women.
Blokpost articulates the rape-revenge theme more clearly and
directly. On the first day that a replacement shift of soldiers comes to
relieve those at the checkpoint, a local girl, Masha, appears at the gates
with her older deaf-mute sister. Masha offers her sister’s services to
the soldiers and treats her as an inanimate object, showing the “article
for sale” to full advantage. “Just touch her breasts,” she urges a hesitating Khaliava, placing his hands on her sister’s bosom. “They’re big
and hot. Don’t worry, she‘s strong and healthy.” While Khaliava is
having sex with the mute, Masha and Skelet talk. “Do you also sell
yourself?” Skelet asks. “What for?” responds the surprised Masha, “I
have a fiancé.” “And how about her,” Skelet sarcastically questions,
pointing at Masha’s sister. “Does she also have a fiancé?” “She used
to,” the girl replies matter-of-factly. “But when your side ruined her,
he rejected her. Nobody wants her now.”
What initially chills the viewer as sororial callousness proves
to be more complicated. The true nature of the sisters’ relations is difficult to fathom. With gestures that suggest genuine concern, Manimat carefully shakes off the leaves and straws stuck to her sister’s
dress as they leave the checkpoint. In the next scene, while her sister is
“servicing” Kaif, Masha sits on the log with Skelet, her back to the
camera, her head cocked in the direction where the intercourse is taking place. The camera stays on Masha’s strained and stiff facial expression as she listens to Kaif's heavy breathing off-screen before turning
away to resume her conversation with Skelet.
Although sex always occurs offscreen and we are never
shown actual coupling, Masha’s, and especially her sister’s, reaction to
it brands it as a rape rather than a voluntary act. The spectators hear
Kaif's discontented voice growling at the mute. “What? Are you going
to talk, after all?” When he enters the frame, naked, and plunges into
the wooden tub, his mute partner follows him. Her dress unbuttoned
at the bosom, she thoroughly washes her face, hands, and neck, as if
trying to eliminate all recollection of her recent experience.
In the film’s last scene we learn that Manimat/Masha is indeed the mysterious sniper (Fig. 4). She accidentally shoots Iurist, with
whom she supposedly is in love. As she rises from her knees and
cheerfully smiles at her sister, who is passing by, grinning as she
THE RUSSIAN BODY
Figure 4. Blokpost.
49
Figure 5. Blokpost.
watches the act of revenge,. Manimat notices that the mute is about to
trigger a trip wire. Her offscreen scream echoes Skelet’s while the
camera moves to a close-up of Iurist’s surprised face, blood trickling
out of his mouth as he falls (Fig. 5).
Interestingly, in these war films there is no “final
girl” (Clover), that is, no female survivor. That absence does not depend on whether the female character forgives and saves (like Dina in
Kavkazskii plennik) or punishes and kills the male character(s) (as in
Blokpost and Full Metal Jacket), but on the fact that she does not survive. The survivor is a feminized man, a bearer of ambiguous attitudes toward the war, with whom the spectator identifies. He survives
in order to convey the message of the war’s dehumanizing, absurd,
and violent nature. Skelet (Blokpost), Ivan Zhilin (Kavkazskii plennik),
and Corp. Courcey (Go Tell the Spartains) exemplify this type of character. Courcey survives because a friendly Vietnamese, who gets killed
instead of him, drags him out of the line of fire. Courcey, like Ivan,
refuses to continue the fight. “I’m going home, Charlie!” he tells a
Viet Cong sniper, who, like Abdul Murat in Kavkazskii plennik, does
not shoot him. Skelet is shown as a weak, reflective, and doubting intellectual (he knows Japanese poetry). He survives instead of Iurist,
whom Manimat kills by mistake because Skelet puts on Iurist’s distinctive helmet, which trails a foxtail.
In the relationship between Sasha and Ivan (Kavkazskii plennik), Sasha is portrayed as a character of the killing-machine type. He
likes war, weapons, and control of the situation; he shoots, kills, and
organizes their escape. Literally and metaphorically, he leads: when
the captives walk chained to each other, Sasha walks first, Ivan following. If they are given food, Sasha holds the bread and Ivan has to
nibble from it. Indeed, Ivan emerges as a submissive and feminized
figure (symbolically, he dances the woman’s part when he waltzes
50
STUDIES IN SLAVIC CULTURES
with Sasha). “How will I manage without you?” he asks Sasha's ghost
when the latter visits him. Ignorant of and awkward with weapons,
Ivan excels at fixing small mechanisms like watches. and has a talent
for handicrafts (he carves a wooden bird for Dina). He refuses to accept the rules of the war game. “I don’t want to kill them,” he tells
Sasha, referring to their captors, Abdul, Hussan, and Dina. “You have
to,” Sasha answers automatically. “It’s war.” Ivan even refuses to run
away. When Dina brings him the key with which to unchain himself
so as to escape, he refuses it: “I can’t. They won’t forgive you.” Ultimately, Ivan survives because of his femininity and passivity—a
“female” nature in a male body. As he finally runs away, we see the
Russian helicopters heading to bomb Dina’s village.
Overall, these war films represent local women as both mysterious and dangerous objects, as purchasable bodies but also as lethal
weapons against the enemy. Their incongruous presence in the war,
their inappropriateness, may be deduced from the films’ repeated tendency to eliminate them from the scene before the film ends. While
male troops, and especially the protagonists, often lose limbs or illusions in their struggle to “fulfill their military duty,” female characters,
quite simply, do not survive.
Notes
1. Although these films do not explicitly mention the Chechen war, the historical, political, and cultural context makes it obvious that the narrative
concerns the war in Chechnya.
2. The outbreak of the anti-Chechen and pro-war propaganda took place
after the events in Budenovsk, where a group of Chechen terrorists occupied the maternity hospital and took the staff and the patients hostage.
There were also reports of many cases of intentional crippling, castration
(mentioned in Kavkazskii plennik), and disemboweling of Russian soldiers
and civilians.
3. This idea, of course, figures prominently in Russian war films (Dva boitsa
[Two Soldiers], Zhdi menia [Wait for Me], Letiat zhuravli [The Cranes Are
Flying], etc.).
4. In Russian, the word “mir” means both “peace” and “world.”
5. “Khaliava” (jargon) means something taken for free.
6. “Kaif” means “drug” or “being high.” He acquires his nickname because
he always smokes pot.
7. Here Kaif mocks the famous slogan of WWII, when Soviet soldiers asked
that they be considered communists if killed in battle.
8. Aleksandr Nevzorov’s 1997 film Chistilishche [Purgatory] depicts the Chechens in accordance with the conventions of “action” movies—that is, as
THE RUSSIAN BODY
51
beautiful, invincible, well-trained, and armed soldiers. The representation
of the Russians, by contrast, follows the standards of “realistic” trends,
and their bodies, consequently, are brutalized (wounded, crippled, dismembered, decapitated, or crucified). In general, however, the film repeats the pattern of Socialist Realist cinematic representation of World
War II. It unfolds as a typical story about becoming a Russian Soldier, a
Real Man under the supervision of an older and more experienced mentor. The movie is one-sided, tendentious, and apparently anti-Chechen,
which is why I omit it from my discussion.
9. In Russian, the soldier’s nickname is “Krysa” (Rat) and his rat’s name is
“Krysia,” which sounds similar to a girl’s name: Krisia, Christina.
10. A similar example may be found even in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the
film least concerned with the Vietnam War per se. Locked in the limbo/
womb-like space of his suite, cut off from the outer world, naked and
bleeding, Capt. Willard waits in pain to be reborn to the war world as a
military body.
11. “Mocha,” with the stress on the second syllable, in Russian means
“urine.” But the nickname “Mócha” derives from another word—
“mozhno,” which means “May I?” or “Is it possible?”
12. This is not an exact citation, but it is difficult to translate the Russian
word adequately into English. Kaif refers to his penis as “a shaggy one”
and wonders whether he can, literally, “drive it in.”
13. This moment evokes the stereotypical notion of woman as signifying both
birth and death. Here woman is presented only in her second hypostasis.
14. In the original, Alisa misreads the word “izba” (hut) as “pizda” (cunt).
Russian obscenities are perhaps richer than their English equivalent in
capturing shades of meaning, and actually function as a second language,
especially in closed milieux (e.g., prison).
15. This idea is exemplified in GI Jane, where, in order to be accepted as one
of the Marines, a woman-soldier has to “grow” a penis. “Suck my dick!”
shouts Jane to the “enemy.”
16. “Masha” is a Russian name.
17. And not only women. Hussan in Kavkazskii plennik is mute. The natives in
Blokpost, The Boys in the Company C, and Go Tell the Spartans are also taciturn.
18. “The homo-erotic, proto-fascist nature of the POW-MIA version of the
national myth,” writes Kern, “is deeply undercoded in the shots of
Rambo’s body glistening with sweat, shown in extreme close-up. We see
only the parts of that body that suggest strength—biceps, forearms, pectorals. These shots are intercut with shots of affectionate fondling of
weapons—the survival knife, the bow, the arrows” (48). The depiction of
Animal Mother’s body fits this paradigm. The goal, probably, is to deidealize a Rambo-type character as the national symbol.
19. See the passage quoted in Lehman (13).
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Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Gender in the Modern Horror Films. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
The Encyclopedia of American War Films. Ed. Larry Langman and Ed
Borg. NY: Garland, 1989.
The Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. Mircea Eliade. Vol. 1. NY: Macmillan,
1987.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Cinema. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999.
Garland, Brock. War Movies. NY: Facts on File, 1987.
Kern, Louis J. “MIAs, Myths, and Macho Magic: Post-Apocalyptic
Cinematic Visions of Vietnam.” Search and Clear. Ed. William J.
Searcle. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1988. 37-54.
Lehman, Peter. Running Scared. Masculinity and Representation of the Male
Body. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.
Shklovskii, Viktor B. “Iskusstvo kak priem.” Poetika. Ed. D. Kirai and
A. Kovach. Budapest: Tankönwvkiadó, 1982.
Filmography
Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Francis Ford Coppola,
1979.
Blokpost. Dir. Aleksandr Rogozhkin. Partiia, ORT-1, STV, and ORTVideo, 1998.
The Boys in Company C. Dir. Sidney J. Furie. Columbia Pictures, 1978.
Go Tell the Spartans. Dir. Ted Post. Avko, 1978.
Full Metal Jacket. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros., 1987.
Kavkazskii plennik. Dir. Sergei Bodrov. Caravan and BK Production,
1997.
Vremia tantsora. Dir. Vadim Abdurashitov. ORT, 1997.