"This Film Is Based On Actual Events": Andrew Nicoll's Lord of War

When Andrew Nicoll began pre-production on his 2005 film Lord of War, his first instinct was to look for Hollywood funding, but he quickly found out that no US studio was prepared to back him. This is telling, because - rare amongst commercial movies that try to play politics - Lord of War is a film that is substantially and authentically true.

Narrated by, and telling the story of Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) - an American-Ukrainian arms dealer, it opens on a shot of Orlov himself, perfectly dressed, briefcase in hand, stolling casually over a sea of empty bullet casings in some generic West African warzone. Turning towards the camera, in the manner of Brechtian theatre, Orlov says calmly, "There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?"

A chilling statement? Except that this is how a businessman thinks - and the genius of Lord of War lies in the fact that it realizes that an arms dealer is really nothing more than a businessman - just another link in a productive process that begins in a factory, and ends embedded in a brain: such is the logic of capitalism.


One narrative strand in Lord of War is concerned with the attempt of Interpol agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) to apprehend Orlov. The Hollywood ending here is obvious - Lord of War unequivocably refuses it. Near the end - having been betrayed by his wife - Orlov has finally been arrested. Valentine taunts him, "You are going to spend the next ten years of your life walking between a jail cell and a court room - and this is before you even start serving your time." Orlov coolly responds, "I am sorry to disappoint you, but I will not serve a single day in jail. This is what is going to happen next. In a few moments, you will hear on the door. Outside will be someone who outranks you. He will commend you on your fine work, and then he will tell you to release me. The reason I'll be released is the same reason you think I'll be convicted. I do rub shoulders with some of the most vile, sadistic men calling themselves leaders today. But some of these men are the enemies of your enemies. And while the biggest arms dealer in the world is your boss - the President of the United States, who ships more merchandise in a day than I do in a year - sometimes it's embarrassing to have his fingerprints on the guns. Sometimes he needs a freelancer like me to supply forces he can't be seen supplying. So. You call me evil, but unfortunately for you, I'm a necessary evil."

Is there a better illustration of the fact that the anarchists are already in power? And this is not even all - the really crucial point here regards the humanist trap.

In the middle of Lord of War, Valentine pays a visit Orlov's wife, Ava Fontaine. He tells her what her husband does to fund their luxurious lifestyle - knowledge she had managed to maintain a tenacious ignorance towards up until this point. She suffers a crisis of conscience and confronts her husband, I feel like all I've done my whole life is be pretty. I mean, all I've done is be born! I'm a failed actress, a failed artist... I'm not much good as a mother. Come to think of it, I'm not even that pretty anymore. I have failed at everything, Yuri - but I won't fail as a human being. Why don't you just stop? We have enough."

Orlov whispers back, "Because I'm good at it."

This is the essence of the matter - not greed, not pathology, but only just simple and indifferent technical ability. By refusing to bury itself under trite sentimentality, Lord of War succeeds in demonstrating this point concisely. We are given to understand - Orlov is not really an evil man. But rather just an absolutely alienated one. "I leave my work at the office," he says to his brother at one stage - and this of course was Marx's point with regards to the division of labour. As the latter puts it in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "The object produced by labor, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. . . .The more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself."

Such is the character of Orlov - effectively, a cipher, lacking substance entirely - and this fact sheds light on the major theoretical lesson that can be learned from this film: namely the lesson that moralistic leftism is ultimately impotent and futile.

The ultimate failure of the character of Jack Valentine - the Interpol agent who expressly understands Orlov as an evil man - exemplifies this point. Valentine evinces the following underlying logic: Orlov is an evil man, therefore I, Valentine, am a good man, and the crucial point here is that - as Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals already knew - this logic finally is self-defeating. Not merely because it gets in the way of Valentine's pragmatic efficiency - at several points in Lord of War Valentine could easily get rid of Orlov if he was only a little more ruthless. But more fundamentally, because it drives him to pursue in the first place a basically illogical strategy - namely, to hold Orlov personally accountable for a situation that he certainly exploits, but ultimately did not create.

The deeper point underlying this is the fact that in the end, Valentine does not really want to detroy either Orlov or the system that created him - because Valentine is ultimately complicit in this system. Orlov is evil, therefore he is good - but if Orlov did not exist, then he would be nothing.

In this way, Valentine is essentially a beautiful soul - someone who does not want to get their hands dirty, someone does not really want to do good - indeed, someone who really does not want to do anything at all - but instead wants only to be good, to be something. Let the world disappear, but let me remain. In the famous third part of the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche extensively criticized this attitude, defining it as life against life, as ascetic ideal. His point here was not moralistic, but rather strategic - his insight consisted of recognizing for what it was the lack that lay at the heart of it.

This point noted though, the deeper problem still remains to be answered - what could Valentine have done? Even if he had killed Orlov (he had numerous opportunities) would this really have made any difference? The real problem is a social problem, it concerns the mode of production. The market dictates in this world, and another arms dealer would have picked up where he left off.

There is something to this point, but ultimately it is insufficient - especially since Lord of War ultimately does present an authentic model for the ethical act. Specifically, the act undertaken by Orlov's brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) near the end of the film. Having accompanied his brother (and his erstwhile partner, before he succumbed to cocaine addiction) to West Africa to negotiate a transaction with Sierra Leone rebels, Vitaly sees them murder a woman and child in the refugee camp that we had previously thought they were only guarding, but now realize they are preparing to wipe out. He remonstrates his brother to stop the deal, his brother refuses, "It is not our fight. We don't take sides." Vitaly appears to acquiesce, but coverty takes a grenade, and manages to destroy half of their shipment before he is killed.

In a certain sense, this act might be thought to represent a failure - after Vitaly dies, Orlov completes the deal, and the massacre goes ahead as predicted. Nonetheless - in another way, by it, Vitaly unmistakably did succeed - at least in redeeming himself.