It is hard to determine whether Lord of War is a comedy, drama, or documentary. The audience with which I viewed this film laughed regularly — often with the same kind of unease that occasioned inappropriate laughter in Pulp Fiction. An opening scene has Yuri Orlov witnessing a mob hit, and, instead of recoiling in horror, what he learns from the experience is that guns are the ultimate consumable product. At one point in the film he explains that one out of every twelve people owns a firearm and then he says, “The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?”
Orlov inhabits a dark, underground world of military-grade gun running. He is the go-to guy when any two-bit dictator needs to invade a neighbor or put down a rebellion. Though punctuated by tragedy, there is an unmistakable “cool” factor to his life on the knife's edge. He manages to win and wed the girl of his high school dreams, but this doesn't stop him from engaging in serial adulteries. He is a concerned father who won't allow his young son to play with toy replicas of the guns he sells that have murdered countless other children. War is his business and business is good.
If this were just another tale of a morally bankrupt criminal, it might be able to be filed with a host of other nondescript films of its type, but Lord of War is determined to be taken seriously. Amid the crime, death, and sex, comes the informative voiceovers and political commentary that audiences seem to take in as gospel as long as they are entertained. The concept of “consider the source” is lost when that source is wealthy, attractive, cool, and on the inside. We all crave secret knowledge.
American men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan might be surprised by the two main tenets of this film: that all governments are equal in their corruption, and that all war is merely slaughter. According to Lord of War, the only one who gets ahead is the untouchable arms dealer — everyone else is just a customer.
Government as Corruption
When the ancient Israelites determined to reject God as their sovereign and turned instead to a human king like other nations, God warned them through the prophet Samuel that a human king “will take your sons and place them for himself in his chariots and among his horsemen and they will run before his chariots. He will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and of fifties, and some to do his plowing and to reap his harvest and to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.” (1 Sam. 8:11-12). In other words, human kings will take advantage of your children and your treasure in order to build themselves up. Human governments lead to corruption.
While it is true that all governments struggle with corruption, Lord of War takes pains to completely level the playing field. In a telling scene, Andre Baptiste, Sr. — the sadistic Liberian dictator — shows Orlov a newspaper article announcing that the Supreme Court has voted to confirm George W. Bush's first election as president. Baptiste uses this as “proof” that Liberia is a democracy as well. The intimation is that the Supreme Court's intervention turned U.S. elections into nothing more than a coup d'etat — morally indistinguishable from Baptiste's own.
Of course, ultimately, were all the claims in Lord of War true, if all of the world's governments are equally corrupt, then why even make this film? What good could come from it? What hope would any individual have in the face of such overwhelming power? The fact is that the film ends on a notoriously nihilistic turn. Even the staunchest do-gooder is helpless to stanch the flow — ultimately we are all destined to be mown down. As Orlov wryly notes: “They say that 'evil prevails when good men fail to act'. It should be 'evil prevails.'”
War is Slaughter
Lord of War is disinterested in the reasons for combat, or in the philosophies that inform battle. In some nations there was a time in which distinctions between combatants and non-combatants were fixed. Richard Weaver, in Visions of Order, declared that the scientism of the 17th century is partly to blame for the erasure of that distinction and the introduction of total war. By removing any concept of teleology — the idea that we explain things on the basis of what they are “aiming at” or “trying to become” — we are left to look only to supposedly primitive origins. “War,” Weaver notes, “is not now a matter of changing minds, but an engineering problem, and an engineer must deal with the basic physical forces.” People are nothing more than matter.
The problem is not political, but spiritual. Throughout the film, even when Orlov's weapons are about to be used to slaughter women and children — or even his own brother — his stock response is that “this is not our fight.” There is no sense of salvation or justice — only money. And that lack of salvation, or justice, ultimately applies to Orlov as well. But he seems comfortable in his damnation because, after all, he's good at it.
To solidify the point, that war is merely slaughter, there is no scene in Lord of War during which anyone can approve of the firing of a weapon. Compare this film to movies like The Great Raid, or Saving Private Ryan, and it becomes clear that absent the monologue of Lord of War people do recognize a distinction between slaughter and just warfare. When war is waged to defend against or defeat evil, or to bring freedom to an unjustly enslaved people, approval is granted. Young soldiers returning to the U.S. from Iraq are often greeted with appreciation — citizens can tell the difference.
Troubled Ends
Laughter and attractiveness are potent persuasion lubricants. It is easier to accept the claims of a film when we are being entertained. We need to look beyond the arguments made by single films and place them, instead, into a broader cultural and religious context. Lord of War has a message it wants us to swallow — weapons are bad. But as Greg Harris once noted, he did not teach his sons not to throw rocks, but to hit what they aim at. Rocks, and other weapons, can be valuable deterrents to evil if wielded well and in the service of a just cause.
The Scriptures paint a complex picture of war and the state. Evil rulers wage war on the just, and godly rulers take the field to overthrow evil. The state, when ruled by the wicked, causes people to groan, but when ruled well it serves as a deterrent for evil and makes people's hearts glad. The problem, then, is not the existence of weapons, but the service to which such weapons are put and the wisdom and resolve of a people to know when war is needful and just.
(Marc T. Newman, PhD, is the president of MovieMinistry.com — an organization that provides sermon and teaching illustrations from popular film, and helps the Church use movies to reach out to others and connect with people. This article courtesy of Agape Press).
