Semper Die: Marines Incarnadine in Nina Menkes’s The Bloody Child: An Interior of Violence

It’s the desert at sunrise, and the only narrative is the howling wind. White cars come and go; white soldiers and white MPs dot the landscape of Twentynine Palms Military Base. The whiteness of this Mojave Desert outpost and its pale, tattoo-dappled occupants is ruptured only by shots of a bloody female body stuffed into the back of a car. These shots are, in turn, interspersed with glimpses of another woman; naked, her white skin is made all the whiter by an unidentifiable powdery substance that covers her body as she sits in the middle of a thick jungle, writing on her arm with a stick. The film is Nina Menkes’s The Bloody Child: An Interior of Violence, the title of which obliquely invokes Macbeth, a play that is referenced directly in the film’s intermittent repetitions of the witches’film—like Macbeth lines, which are intoned from an offscreen space in a distinctly non-narrative fashion. But for all its stunning, stark white imagery and its masculinist military setting, Menkes’s film—like Macbeth’s own fearful summons of the dark, desperately disavowed “woman-within” every man of woman born—is very much about the intersection of blackness and femininity. Rather than externalizing this conjunction of blackness and femininity into the “weird” or “weyward” sisters (aptly described as Shakespeare’s “black and midnight hags”), Menkes’s spin-off pushes the viewer toward this connection through a series of mind-bending montage effects that force the spectator into an encounter with the “interior of violence,” a phrase that, in addition to providing Menkes with her subtitle, also refers to the post-traumatic stress that is acted out by the Gulf War veterans featured in the film.