Film: Documentary film “The Gate”: Alone with the trauma

If something is supposed to take place in secret, then you either hide it in the middle of normality (handing over the ransom) or, if you really want to be sure that absolutely no one ever finds out about it, you potter around in the middle of nowhere (deserts or deserts are best suited for this other inhumane areas). The Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Oppenheimer and others researched the American atomic bomb, miles away from the city of Santa Fe in the New Mexico desert, is a famous example.

A lesser-known site among the places no one is supposed to know about is Dugway Proving Ground, a remote U.S. Army test site in the Utah desert where the military tests biochemical warfare agents. The crazy thing is that the test area even has its own homepage, which advertises that research is being carried out here on a “safe future for soldiers”. There is a martially staged video with fighter jets and flight exercises and photos of internal military family celebrations and sports competitions. Under the heading “What’s our mission” we are assured that we are working here under the best conditions to be able to ward off a nuclear and biochemical threat in a timely and safe manner.

That’s what you’re supposed to see. The two filmmakers Jasmin Herold and Michael David Beamish dedicate themselves to what you shouldn’t see, what remains when you are no longer useful as a soldier. Her documentary “The Gate” follows a father who is looking for his son who had an accident on the site and has been missing since then, a traumatized ex-soldier who was stationed in Dugway, a military chaplain who, despite his own war experience, takes his son with extreme pride into the future War and a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, who has lived in Salt Lake City, dozens of kilometers away, since the 1960s. It is an idiosyncratic but coherent composition of protagonists over the course of the film (only men can be seen). They are not allowed to talk about their work in Dugway.

Herold and Beamish worked on the documentary for five years, during which time they repeatedly contacted the four main characters in the film. They found out about Kevin’s search for his son Joseph on social media, and Dugway’s story continues to unfold from there. Shane, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, was Joseph’s boss. The time Beamish and Herold invested paid off in the trust they were able to build over time; the gold standard of any documentary.

Again and again you see how the steel-hard fighting façade that the men were trained to crumble. The actual human being emerges with all his injuries. While Shane spends the rest of his life trying to repair his shattered self, Tim, the Afghanistan and Iraq veteran, feels the need to hide all of his bad experiences behind his son’s military career. The scenes in which Tim repeatedly falters when he wants to report on his missions are impressive, and the next moment you see him, with proud tears in his eyes, sending his son off to the next combat zone. A contradiction that Beamish and Herold never want to resolve. Of course, one wonders how deluded a father must be to inflict these horrors on his own son with a clear conscience, but the viewers have to deal with the complexity of the answer themselves.

Because apart from the military’s online transparency initiative (Dugway also has his own Facebook page), “The Gate” tells a completely different story of this unreal place. The war is almost omnipresent, although not a single battle scene is shown. What you see instead is the disaster he leaves behind. Shane can only participate in everyday life with the help of a therapy dog. He fought his way back to life, but again and again you see how his little world collapses when he talks about his time in the army.

One would like to read a pacifist message from “The Gate”, but Beamish and Herold do not want to give in to it, because they also show that the military is an anchor point for entire family biographies, in an area where there is none else There is work. The families we see are working class, they love their weekend BBQ and the monstrous pickup truck in the garage of their prefab home. Fathers teach their sons how to unlock a submachine gun and how to shoot pumpkins with small firearms. Anything else would require an energy from them that they can no longer muster after the numerous missions in war zones around the world.

At some point in the middle of the film, Shane and Kevin are seen walking across the burnt meadow of a military cemetery, looking for a particular gravestone (they walk past several dead people with the same last name, which in itself has an impact). Next to them, an older woman is also standing in front of a blackboard. She leaves immediately after noticing the two. The camera accompanies the woman as she leaves the cemetery and you immediately understand that it is uncomfortable for her to no longer be alone with her grief, as she has probably experienced it as normal for decades. This is actually the strongest scene in the film because it shows what all survivors of war have in common: in the end you are alone with your memories.

»The Gate«, USA 2023. Director and screenplay: Jasmin Herold, Michael David Beamish. 87 minutes. Start: July 25th