Generation Kill Mondays: Episode 1, "Get Some"—Take 1

By Keith Uhlich

As creator, head writer, and executive producer of The Wire, former newspaperman David Simon struck a consistently impressive balance between the instincts of a journalist and those of a dramatist. It was easy enough to mistake The Wire as a work of reportage and realism what with its sober aesthetic and ever-wandering eye, but such pretensions to actuality were a mere facade masking a densely plotted, emotionally resonant (and very knowing) fiction.

From the start, Simon's new project (the seven episode HBO miniseries Generation Kill, adapted from Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright's series of articles and book of the same name) is similarly self-aware, dropping us into the middle of a battle between the US Marines of the First Recon Battalion and an unseen, presumably Iraqi threat... except the skirmish turns out to be a training exercise. Expectation and experience suggests that, once the curtain is pulled back, the boys in fatigues will join together in slap-happy unison, but what's intriguing is how Simon, co-writer Ed Burns, and director Susanna White cut through the resultant posturing - not to devalue it (my gut feeling is that Generation Kill will eschew such easy labels as "liberal" and "conservative"), but to ground it, examine it. The Marines of Generation Kill are a hive mind, yes, but they are also individuals, each with their own ideologies and hang-ups, philosophies and fears. A mess of contradictions, in other words, and fertile physical and psychological ground for Simon and company to explore and, perhaps, to illuminate.
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