Erase and Forget (2017) User Reviews

A Man Haunted

[mbotta-45812 · 9/10 · 16 August 2018]

This, at times, shocking documentary flows like a stream of consciousness, a fever-dream of cascading and often contradictory ideals--but throughout its duration, a profound anticipatory anxiety, a duress and hopelessness at the ever plodding on parade of images, emerges. Combining the long-winded ramblings of aging war-hero Bo Gritz, scenes from Rambo (a fictional character whom he inspired), shots from Bo's current life, and actual images from the Vietnam war, the film weaves a narrator-less experience that seems as much about war as it is about how our heroes and icons sour with age and reflection. Bravado for Bo transforms into cruelty, cruelty to doubt, doubt to this endless reflecting, tinged at once by regret/guilt and justification/nostalgia. We watch as Bo alternates between the two-- clearly troubled by the blood on his hands, and on the poised knife he often uses as a symbol for his country, but also unable to regret a life spend walking in the soldier boots of his father. "I don't want them to haunt me" Bo says of the people he's killed; a few hours after a man used Bo's own gun to commit suicide; but we can see the shadows under his eyes, the hunched tension of his posture. Bo is already a man, haunted.