I hate documentaries where the investigator becomes a character. Dirty Wars commits a common cinematic sin: casting a white male protagonist to tell a story about victims who are not white males so the audience will sympathize with the topic. Dirty Wars feels like an eighty-seven minute humble brag about how awesome Jeremy Scahill is for not being deterred in the face of danger and veiled threats from not so shadowy government officials.
Dirty Wars feels more like a fictional thriller than a documentary, which detracts from the grave nature and validity of Dirty Wars’ allegations. Unfortunately if Dirty Wars wanted to mimic a genre, it should have mimicked found footage movies, which mimic documentaries, which is what Dirty Wars is supposed to be, by showing instead of telling us about Scahill receiving mysterious late night calls or getting envelopes dropped at his doorstep thus building tension and validating his paranoia. I’m assuming that Dirty Wars did not show that because the documentary is a reenactment of his investigation, not a visual diary of it, and the book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is hopefully less sensational though I have no interest in reading it.
If you scrape away Dirty Wars’ wretched narrative conceits, the documentary exposes how the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operate throughout the world killing with the President’s authorization and little to no accountability or transparency when JSOC kills innocent people. What was most chilling about Dirty Wars: how the US tries to cast innocent victims, some of whom were US allies, including a police chief and a couple of his pregnant family members, as terrorists then secretly apologize using local customs such as sacrificing a goat. Dirty Wars shows how such covert actions radicalize people who could be our allies and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of a growing terrorist threat. I hope that other documentaries do a better job of telling the story because it would be a shame if Dirty Wars’ message got lost in its format.