Memorial Day

All who are buried here understood their duty. They saw a dark shadow on the horizon and went to meet it.

— George W. Bush, Memorial Day 2006

It’s raining at the start of Memorial Day. Windshield wipers provide a swishy- rhythmic beat as a car full of gonnabe revelers heads into Ocean City, the camera (handled by Josh Fox) pointing at wind-whipped U.S. flags and motel signs marking the holiday: “Remember our veterans,” “Stay safe,” “Have fun.” The car passes girls in bikini tops, boys swinging their shirts, drivers gesturing obscenely at traffic. “God bless the U.S.A.” And oh yes, “Join us steak n shrimp.”

The frames are smudgy, the lights dim, the in-camera editing illegible. Yes, it’s another home-video-doc-like horror film, where kids encounter bad weather, drink too much, and take off their clothes: 13 Fear is Real without alliances. Except these kids aren’t entirely youthful and only naïve in the grossest sense, that is, they seem willful and angry and above all drunk. “I’ve done coke,” boasts one guy. “And I’ve done mushrooms. I’ve done Robitussin — eight ounces of the shit.” His buddies nod, their faces blurry. “Vicodin, what’s the stuff that kills pain? Codeine. I’ve done ’em all. But nothing compares to Ritalin.” A girl lurches into frame, Girls Gone Wild-style: “Can I tell you a dirty story?”, she asks, then loses track while the boys discuss the merits of paying for sex and the disappointment that so few girls know how to give head. After all, “It’s not rocket science.”

Before the night in Ocean City is over, Sarah (Sarah Nedwek) is raped in the car while her friend is driving: the crew is headed to their motel. Throughout this ordeal, the camera observes from the front seat, Sarah’s face coming in and out of focus, agonized and maybe surprised. “Dude,” offers one kid from off-screen, “She’s telling you to stop. Fucking go deeper, man.”

Despite the occasional foregrounding of the cameraman screen left (New York experimental theater and, so meta, Memorial Day director Josh Fox), the scene is less edgy than ugly, one horror as precusor to more. When at last the partiers arrive at their destination, they find not a lumbering cretin with a chainsaw, but more of themselves: a suite full of intoxicated, self-righteous, angry young people. eventually, they gather to watch a porno on TV, their eyes glazed and jaws slack. They’re in their camo now, ready to get up and move out the next morning.

They’re deployed — apparently instantly — to Baghdad. Or rather, they’re running through a generic Iraqi alley into a generic Iraqi home and raiding a generic Iraqi family, its members providing the expected protests, lamentations, and fearful faces. The quick transition from Stateside to war zone underscores Memorial Day‘s thudding thematic point, that those underprepared U.S. soldiers in the Middle East are mostly of the same age and mentality as the kids who show their penises and puke on sidewalks during Spring Break. Inspired by Fox’s traveling theatrical “event,” “Death of Nations 1: The Comfort and Safety of Your Own Home,” the film is less linear than impressionistic, more accusatory than interrogative. The soldiers here abuse each other as they abuse their prisoners, as all are installed at a facility that resembles Abu Ghraib. Here the U.S. representatives entertain themselves by staging the photos and videos that showed (and more pointedly, as Standard Operating Procedure argues, formed) the notorious “scandal.”

Frustrated, bored, and lacking any form of adult (read: presiding officer’s) supervision, the soldiers go on to make up elaborate tortures as if from whole cloth. They’re not assigned to elicit information or instructed in forms of interrogation (they read a field manual out loud, entertaining themselves with the slippery language: “stress positions,” “waterboarding,” “we can strike with open hands”), reduced to hazy emblems of a military and mission gone haywire (or perhaps, haywire from their inception). Directionless and mad about it, they’re childish hard-partiers, well aware of their media environment, though not very sloppy and unambitious readers. That is, their version of self-referential cognition consists of cooking green soldier toys in the microwave, to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries.” Or, while Sarah describes her confusion over the rape back in Maryland (“I don’t know if I have the energy to be pissed about it, I feel like I’m supposed to talk to you about it or talk to fucking someone about it”), she and her friend sit at a table in front of a cell full of shackled prisoners. One man’s disheveled hood allows him to peep at them as Sarah ponders the moral lines she perceives: “It’s like, that’s wrong and psychologically, you’re abusing yourself,” she says, as if earnestly, “But that’s where I find, like, the comfort.”

But Sarah’s effort to sort out her feelings pretty much stops here. Neither she nor the film is looking for resolution or even sense. Instead, the exposure is the point, the exposure of the sameness of here and there for kids without bearings, their pervasive disrespect and roaring ignorance. “The imperative of nature is survival,” pronounces one self-convinced young man (his sunglasses underscoring the myopia of his tirade). “Nature does not give a shit about how you conduct your day, about the ins and the outs, about the morality of your decisions,” he continues,

All it cares about is, at the end of the day, that you produce young, that you write history, and that is what we are doing here. I know you motherfuckers talk about oil and politics and George Bush and whatever the fuck else you want, but I will tell you this: there is a reason why America is on the center of the map. It is because we are the center of the world, it is our imperative that we survive.

For all its visceral assaults and improv-ish aesthetics, in the end Memorial Day offers a conventional assessment. Filtering its critique of the broader, self-consuming culture through these barely outlined, mushed-together figures, it focuses on consequences. In its outrage, it doesn’t quite get to analysis.