Julia Roberts took her time to join the rest of Hollywood’s A-listers in the streaming game, but the wait has been worthwhile. Homecoming , her small-screen début — the first thing we have seen her in for years — is a coolly assured neo-Hitchcock thriller critiquing the American military industrial complex. Roberts plays Heidi Bergman, a counsellor working for the Homecoming Transitional Support Centre, a corporate facility in Tampa Bay, Florida, that claims to help traumatised soldiers readjust to civilian life. As the show progresses, we realise that the facility’s intentions towards the men and women may well be less than honest.
There is much to admire about Homecoming — Roberts’ triumphant comeback, director Sam Esmail’s inch-perfect framing and the thoughtfully retro score. It is also, along with shows like SEAL Team and Fighting Season , and movies like American Sniper , a reminder of the tension between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ ways of being. This is a veritable big theme in storytelling that goes back a fair bit: from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Homer’s Odyssey , all the way down to the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood, Gran Torino and many others.
Focus on the mind
From the very beginning, Homecoming plays with the civilian/military dichotomy in fascinating ways. The facility is almost painfully anodyne: it has been painted in muted colours, designed to look ‘hip but masculine’, and there are no phones or computers allowed outside of closely monitored weekly Skype sessions. Residents have only three mandatories: community meals at the cafeteria, mind-numbingly mundane role-play, and the counselling sessions with Bergman. One might call it a sterile environment, even. As we find out soon, metaphors of disease and ‘treatment’ are central to the show’s ethos.
Walter Cruz (Stephan James), an inmate who befriends Bergman, begins to notice these soporific patterns. But, as he notes about other PTSD-suffering veterans, ‘The other guys, they came home and they got really amped up, and they dove right into everything. And they got problems, and I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want to pollute things here with my problems, my stress’. It is interesting to see the usage of the word ‘pollute’, which indicates contagion, as though war were a deadly virus and Cruz its human vector.
- First Blood (1982): There are better war veteran films out there, but none as thrilling or as viscerally effective as the one which introduced ex-super soldier John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, who also co-wrote the film) to the world.
- Born on the Fourth of July (1989): Based on the memoirs of former soldier and anti-war activist Ron Kovic, this Oliver Stone/Tom Cruise team-up remains a primal scream against the war machine, the dehumanising of both victor and vanquished.
- American Sniper (2014): Not the most subtle of films, but Clint Eastwood’s biopic of legendary sniper Chris Kyle worked largely because of Bradley Cooper’s performance. Not for the faint-hearted.
- Lioness (2008): This extraordinary documentary followed the first group of five American women involved in direct combat in Iraq, including their struggles to readjust to everyday life once they were back home.
- Thank You For Your Service (2017): A gut-wrenching drama about PTSD in the military, last year’s Thank You For Your Service , starring Miles Teller, is another must-watch in this sub-genre.
As Susan Sontag explained in her book Illness as Metaphor , disease brings othering, an instant banishment to the realm of the ill (or the non-productive), a metaphysical quarantine carried out by the healthy, knowingly or not. So must it be for the PTSD veterans of Homecoming and others. Their overnight ejection into civilian life brings nothing but frustration.
In the second season of the show SEAL Team , which aired last month, we see Navy SEAL team leader Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz) recovering from a hallucinatory episode brought on by PTSD. Anybody who cares about Hayes can see that he is in pain, but the show is candid enough to give even more leeway to its characters — they realise that the bigger pain for him is to have to live the civilian life. At this point, he is all but addicted to the rhythms of war and the people around him know it too.
Conflicting views
Another example of this seemingly natural antagonism is the Aussie TV show Fighting Season , whose latest episode was called, rather bluntly, A Good Soldier Is A Bad Civilian . The protagonist is Sergeant Speedo Collins (Jay Ryan), an Australian soldier returning from Afghanistan, whose family and friends have to deal with his radically altered personality. Significantly, the show has been written by Blake Ayshford, who was born into an Air Force family.
(L to R) Writer/Director JASON HALL and MILES TELLER as Adam Schumann on the set of DreamWorks Pictures’ "Thank You for Your Service." The drama follows a group of U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq who struggle to integrate back into family and civilian life, while living with the memory of a war that threatens to destroy them long after they’ve left the battlefield.
Across all these stories, there is an unmistakeable pessimism, a kind of inevitability to the conflict between veterans and people in their new, civilian lives. With the genre’s early triumphs like Coming Home or Born in the Fourth of July, this cynicism was missing even in the bleakest of scenarios. Now this is apparent even in patently lowest common denominator products like Baaghi 2, where Tiger Shroff’s character, an off-duty army man investigating a friend’s case, manages to brawl with the local police within a few hours of his arrival in the civilian realm. It is almost as if in these last 20-30 years, we have learnt to think of war as a constant, and its psychological damage as par for the course. One cannot over-emphasise how dangerous this across-the-board normalisation is. Soldiers struggle with their personal demons long after the bullets stop flying. The least we can do is tell their stories a little less wearily.
