Many of us have felt the impact of digital advancements in the workplace, not just its affect upon employment levels, but also the feeling that the benefits of efficiency are a poor substitute for the tangibility of pen to paper, or face to face contact or the pleasures of understanding the mechanics of your instrument.
When we apply the same rational to modern warfare, the sense of personal detachment becomes heightened. Of all the controversy that surrounds drones (unmanned military vehicles), lack of job satisfaction for the person who pushes the button is fairly low down on the agenda, a bit like worrying about Health and Safety in the kitchen at the MoD. However, if the minuscule act of pushing a button gives you no sense of the machine it controls or the inevitable outcome, how might this transform the act or the person pushing the button when the inevitable outcome is death?
The person in question in Grounded is a hot shot F-16 pilot in the U.S. air force. So far, so sexy yes? She, definitely thinks so, in fact, to say that she lives and breathes her job is in understatement. For her, she only comes alive when surrounded by endless blue, with the robust controls of her trusty fighter in her fists. It's this cocksure quality that soon finds her in an unexpected tailspin of romance, which results in a pregnancy and a little girl. Grounded by her pregnancy, she soon finds herself transferred to Las Vegas where instead of the return to the blue skies she desires, she is forced to retrain, a new lightening rod badge stamped, unceremoniously into her uniform, as one of many pilots now in control of the U.S. government's new 11 million dollar drones. There are some benefits to this new arrangements however, as each 'flight' is undertaken as a 12 hour shift, a constant rotation of pilots taking the controls out in the safety of the Las Vegas desert, which means she can return each evening to her husband and child and still retain her role as mother and wife.
Yet the difficulties of balancing these two lives, and her multiple roles soon begins to takes its inevitable toll. The endless blue is replaced by continuous grey, as she scans the deserts of Afghanistan through a video monitor, searching for insurgents. Her former sense of clarity between the black and white and good and bad starts to blur. The overwhelming shades of grey start to envelop her life and a sense of paranoia and a disconcerting feeling of herself being watched, starts to infect her relationships and confidence in her work, resulting in tragic consequences.
Lucy Ellison performs the show with energetic commitment and expert timing. Essentially trapped within four walls of gauze, with nothing but a bottle of Pepsi Max to keep her company, her physicality fills the space. She embodies (tellingly) the role of pilot more than mother and wife, encased within her pilots uniform throughout, an allusion to her husband Eric's complaints, as he struggles to retain the human being he fell in love with. Ellison provides a strikingly expressive face and strongly beating heart to George Brant's writing, the design and direction effectively minimal, letting the story do its job, illustrating the human beings behind the headlines and giving the cold bones of digital warfare warm and vulnerable flesh. A brutal and enlightening inditement of the terrifying state of modern warfare.
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