Restrepo

After the AP exams, I'm pretty much done teaching.  I have some grading left to finish and then I head out to read AP US exams in early June.

What we do instead is watch movies with some plausible connection to the coursework.

The problem is that watching the same movies year after year, class after class becomes tedious.  For instance, the DBQ on this year's AP US exam dealt with Nixon.  Normally, I might show Frost/Nixon, but I watched that three or four times last year.

Last weekend, I watched Restrepo for the first time, after one of the filmmakers, Tim Hetherington, was killed in Libya and it was all over the news.  I was amazed. I can't think of another such film, though perhaps there is one out there, The Battle of Algiers maybe, that similarly chronicles a conflict with cinema verite.

Anyway, I decided to show the film to my Comp Gov classes.  We blocked out time to watch the 90 minute film straight through.  My early read is that it left a mark.

It was also striking that I just finished watching it for the third time this week, and I wasn't bored with it.  How could you be?  As "real" as recent combat movies have been, starting with Saving Private Ryan, you can't get any more real than Restrepo did and still be a film.

Finally, it is difficult to watch that film, and then conclude that we should remain in Afghanistan for one minute longer than we absolutely have to.  We could be there a hundred years and not make a significant impression on that population.

There's also a cliche about how the heroes are the ones who don't come home.  Sorry, but that's wrong.  The film shows that they're all heroes.  All flawed and human and with different weaknesses, but every last one of them is a hero.