The high flier referred to in the title of Sonia Kennebeck's documentary National Bird isn't the bald eagle, proud symbol of American freedom and individualism; rather, it's the drone, that remote-operated, unpiloted, low-risk surveillance technology that has allowed the military unprecedented access to monitor suspects - and kill where deemed necessary. The recent explosion in drone use - a post-9/11 development accelerated by the Obama administration as a "clean" form of weaponry - has itself been monitored by filmmakers in such diverse projects as 2014's Drone, morality play Good Kill and 'plex-friendly thriller Eye in the Sky. Kennebeck's film is less interested in the drone's technical specifics or systemic application than in its human cost, honing in on three individuals with first-hand knowledge of all this death from above. There is Heather, a Kristen Stewart lookalike who, during her time as a drone analyst, was never once told how many people were killed on her watch; there is Daniel, still operating under security clearance, and having to select his words accordingly - with, it turns out, good reason; and there is the older Lisa, who worked higher up the command chain and now worries - as any denmother might - about the effect this technology is having on the Army's impressionable young recruits.
That title speaks to the way drones have rapidly become normalised, framed as part of the natural order of things: Kennebeck shows us Air Force ads that herald the arrival of an exciting piece of kit for the Call of Duty generation, while excerpts from Presidential pressers provide ample evidence that Obama was enthusiastically sold on this equipment as an effective tool for continuing the War on Terror, one that arrived neatly packaged with its own set of checks and balances. Kennebeck's line is that what's actually been normalised here is the act of killing; that just because someone kills at arm's length, it doesn't mean they don't end up with dirty hands. Her drone operators inhabit the dead centre of a moral maze: the fuzzy pixellations beamed back to them leave considerable doubt as to who's being stalked and what, in fact, they might be doing in these images, yet as the interviewees attest, the presence of just one enemy combatant in these God's-eye views has allowed the military to take out many more civilians without much in the way of comeback or consequence. (And that's assuming the camera's been pointed in the right direction, which numerous strikes on schools, hospitals, aid convoys and wedding parties hardly suggest.)
Where soldiers deployed at ground level could tell you exactly how many opposition troops they've engaged and eliminated, Heather's story illustrates how those steering the drones - several thousand miles removed from the theatre of war - are kept in the dark by their superiors as to whether their actions have done for mothers, children or passers-by: everything's left up in the air. A big part of National Bird is therefore devoted to showing how these erstwhile warriors have striven to clear the fuzz and make peace with themselves. For Heather, a more hands-on role at massage school allows her to reconnect with a world - the world of flesh and sinew - from which she'd previously been held at a remove; for Lisa, penance begins with regular visits to Afghan aid missions, allowing her to see in vivid, often painful close-up a people the system othered in black-and-white. These scenes gesture towards the more comprehensive - and potentially drier - drone documentary we may well get several more years down the line, one that addresses all this collateral damage while looking backwards into the drones' manufacture and technical capabilities, explaining both where these murderous pests came from and how and why they've spread.
Kennebeck, for her part, takes drones as a given - here already, and apparently here to stay - but her film does offer a rich and rewarding sense of a story developing before our eyes. There's a spiky irony hovering over National Bird's second half, wherein the watchers find themselves being watched - monitored as potential whistleblowers, Snowdens-in-waiting, a turn that ties the film to wider questions of national security. (This is the first documentary I've seen to bear the disclaimer "No persons involved disclosed classified information to the filmmakers." I suspect it won't be the last.) The Afghan scenes, meanwhile, form a welcome expansion of the film's field of study, opening up to include the testimony of those who've lost limbs and loved ones as a consequence of this overnight policy shift - and who remain most at risk today, observed instinctively ducking whenever a jet soars over them. A quantum technological leap - allowing us to hold the messy business of war at a coldly comforting distance - is here shown to have given rise to a fatally oppressive mindset: when the US goes from being a big brother, looking out for the interests of the weak and the vulnerable, to playing Big Brother, peeping without pushback, everyone's left with a cloud - or, worse, the shadow of death - hanging over their heads.
National Bird is now available to stream on Netflix.
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