#nakedwar

                                     The toughest Audience

           How Some Soldiers Feel About Their Hollywood Counterparts

While reading War As A Way Of Seeing by Goerge Roeder I began to try and place myself in the shoes of a soldier watching a war film. How do they feel about the portal? Are they upset with it? Do they feel it is accurate? As my last post I thought this came close to a full circle understanding of war film. What do the warriors think about war film? Roeder brings up soldiers reaction to films like John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) which seemed to fall flat with recent veterans who had had enough macho bravado for a lifetime, and disliked the films superficial portal of what war is like.”Soldiers were the toughest audience” (77) I can not imagine what it is like to go through the horrors of war, see friends die, and come back home to see that the country is viewing it as a spectacle and your some actor/director has portrayed this horrific event in such superficial terms in order to entertain and make a profit. To be fare I believe some film makers do spend the time trying to understand the authentic point of view of the soldier in battle, as I have herd of directors actually interviewing real soldiers to get a better account of what life is like in war. I believe film has a responsibility to not only the public but to the men and women who have experienced war to portray these conflicts in a way that is sensitive to what the real people in them went through. All film makers have their agenda and I understand that, but in order to keep films ability to explain war we must be sensitive to the human factor of war, that it is fought by real people and who have real experiences of war.

In Donald and MacDonald’s Reel Men at War, they pose the question:

“If media have become the principal teacher of socialization, what are boys learning? What Hollywood-created manly behaviors, values, and taboos do war films reinforce?”

Assuming that If-Then statement contains at least a kernel of truth, I propose that Randall Wallace’s 2002 Vietnam war film, We Were Soldiers, shows an alternate vision of masculinity. Colonel Harold Moore, played by Mel Gibson, expresses devout faith and articulates his capacity to balance the burdens of commanding both a family and a battalion, assuming the same responsibility to serve as protector and spiritual leader of both his children and his troops.

In an interview for hollywood.com, Gibson spoke about his motivation behind taking on the role of Col. Harold Moore: “You see that and then you talk to these guys, well, it totally puts a hook in your heart–there are a lot of things that won’t heal. . . . I think that’s what this film is for–it’s about healing.”

While Col. Moore is training his troops for what will be an extremely casualty-heavy conflict in the so-called “Valley of Death” area in South Vietnam, he happens to walk in on a young officer praying in the chapel on-base. Rather than chastise him for spending time in prayer, Moore joins him, also congratulating him on recently becoming a father. The young lieutenant and the Colonel discuss whether there may be a conflict between assuming the dual roles of soldier and father. Moore remarks,

“I hope that being good at one makes me better at the other.”

This is a refreshing illustration of masculinity in which a sense of fatherly protection is foregrounded. He goes on to lead the young man in a prayer at once both earnest and humorous. In We Were Soldiers, Gibson embodies a man who can both fight and pray, effectively offering a less one-dimensional perspective of masculinity and less emasculated perspective of prayer.

Sources: “A Soldiers Prayer.” FireStrikeProds Channel. YouTube. Web. 3 May 2015.

We Were Soldiers. Dir. Randall Wallace. Perf. Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Chris Klein. Paramount, 2002. Film.

In Dave Grossman’s introduction to On Killing, he critiques society for its alleged ‘blind-spot’ for killing, pointing to “simultaneous repression and obsession” (Grossman xxiv). “At the same time that our society represses killing,” he writes, “a new obsession with the depiction of violent and brutal death and dismemberment of humans has flourished” (Grossman xxvii). He calls to mind the endless canon of slasher films produced since the 1970s, some of which constitute fond memories of my own adolescence. I disagree that this is necessarily symptomatic of a culture of repression, but rather, having more in common with sociological theory of the appeal of the thrill. Commodified, sanitized terror can act as an effective bonding agent among friends.

It should be acknowledged, however, that for others, cinematic violence holds a different fascination. It is for this reason, paired with the unfortunate multi-indexicality of film, that I hate Apocalypse Now. I don’t hate it because it’s bad; Francis Ford Coppola created an incredible piece of art and war theory in the text that is Apocalypse Now. I hate it, rather, because so many people genuinely LOVE the “Ride of the Valkyries” scene, out of context. Air cavalry at the ready, the commanding officer orders someone to “make it loud”. . . inviting everyone to enjoy their cinematic entrance into battle: “Shall we dance?”

Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” begins to play, creating one of the most iconic uses of diegetic sound in war cinema. This filmic moment has long since reached cultural zeitgeist, standing alone and apart from the scene’s context for many viewers of the YouTube era. When the clip is “enjoyed” on its own out of sheer appreciation for cinematic spectacle, divorced from its M.O. of problematizing the Vietnam War, the viewer becomes the sick, repressed-yet-obsessed individual that Grossman claims most postmodern Americans to be. “Ride of the Valkyries” drowns out the pointed critique of Cpt. Willard, played by Martin Sheen, before he accepts his mission to find and kill Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz: “Charging a man with murder in this place was like writing speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

Sources:

Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Perf. Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall. Paramount, 1979. Film.

Grossman, Dave. “Introduction.” On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009. Print.

In Patricia Pisters’ analysis of the aesthetics of Iraq war films, she writes,

“In the logistics of perception 2.0, we are all participants in a battle of the screens that is quite literally mind blowing” (Pisters 247).

We understand that, while most viewers have not been in the Iraq war, we are all at war and in the endless war that is digital surveillance and fatigue. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, a soldier quips, “If you have a camera, you’re a part of the media.” We are all shooting and being shot every day, sometimes willingly, other times unwillingly, and oftentimes unknowingly.

In a segment of Robert DePalma’s critically-acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful film, Redacted, meant to be read as surveillance camera footage, Lawyer McCoy, played by Robert Devaney, shows an acute awareness of the nonstop digital mediation that characterizes our current existence, articulating the rape incident—a fictional account based on true events— as it might be reported and sensationalized in the news, as a “band of brothers losing their moral compass and trying to wreak vengeance on a fifteen year-old girl.” If he were to come forward with the story, McCoy would be forced to “ride the cable news story all the way to 60 Minutes.” Even though the viewer knows that the first-person footage of a rape incident is ‘not real,’ the videographical method pushes us to the edge of that knowledge, because it is so close to genuine war diary footage, which Pisters claims “become the traumatic kernel of our collective screen culture” (Pisters 247).

Lawyer McCoy’s father, too, shows an awareness of and concern for bad press, rather than for justice served. “We don’t need another Abu Ghraib!,” he yells over Skype. Truth-telling is presented as a threat to the imagined community when that truth does not match America’s idealized, exceptionalist self-image. The line, “We don’t need another Abu Ghraib!” is more affectively intense precisely because of its means and medium of delivery. We read it as a Skype conversation between father and son, and this makes the cold, ‘patriotic’ logic actually hurt more.

Not only is it the traumatic footage that distresses the viewer, but rather, that while the story is fictional, we share in the reality of constant government and employer surveillance, photographic and videographic documentation and publication of our lives by friends and family, and near-constant customer-targeted internet advertising. The “chaotically intense” character of Redacted mirrors that of our own lives at their lowest moments.

Sources: Pisters, Patricia. “Logistics of Perception 2.0: Multiple Screen Aesthetics in Iraq War Films.” Film-Philosophy 14.1 (2010): 232-252. Web.

When pondering the many “What the hell…?” moments when screening Alex Cox’s 1987 film, Walker, the visual anachronisms come easily to mind: the American dictator of Nicaragua on the cover of Time  and Newsweek; a Volvo speeding into and past the foreground; the present-day helicopter whisking away all American passport-holders. The significance of these visually dissonant filmic moments—the anachronisms— were lost on many when the movie hit the theaters. Roger Ebert declared it “a pointless and increasingly obnoxious exercise in satire.” Of Cox’s pointed use of visual (and musical) anachronism, the significance is completely lost on Ebert. “If it is a comedy,” he writes, “it has no laughs, and if a satire, no target.” Rosenstone, on the other hand, asserts that anachronism, along with historical omission, condensation, alteration, and invention, work together as intentional strategies for the handling and interpretation of historical data, declaring Cox’s alteration and invention of history, paired with the visual and sonic anachronisms, as “an innovative and reasonable way of expressing historical ‘truths’” (Rosenstone 3).

In Rosenstone’s analysis of the film, he points to the soundtrack as an important contributor to director Alex Cox’s intentionally liberal usage of anachronisms that many, if not most, directors consider as anathema. While Rosenstone focuses upon the up-tempo modern generically ‘Latin’ music, describing it as “joyous music at odds with destruction,” I’d like to point to the recurring cue, “The Brooding Side of Madness.” In the first half of the film, the viewer sees in William Walker a sort of idealistic ‘renaissance man’ who truly believes in the “God-given right for Americans to dominate the Western hemisphere” and who takes up the cause of Manifest Destiny out of a mix of grief and idealism.

But in the heat of the first major battle in Nicaragua, as Walker and his men are holed up in a house, obviously outnumbered, the leader sits down at a piano to play, while casualties pile up— he uses music as a palliative and mental clarifier, as his own men die. “The Brooding Side of Madness” enters the sonic landscape shortly thereafter, cuing the viewer to understand that Walker has undergone a psychic shift: as the solo piano plinks out a creepy minor-key melody, Walker’s thoughts have ‘gone solo’ and gone minor-key, that is to say, dark: the Walker who acted altruistically for the good of his comrades and his country has been subsumed by the Walker who acts for his personal interests and ego alone. When a close comrade opposes his battle plan, Walker cocks his pistol and shoots him dead quickly and remorselessly. Every time this cue is reprised, we understand that Walker is thinking, and will act violently, not out of passion, but after cold, calculated thought…like the covert violence inflicted upon Nicaragua at the time of the film’s release.

Sources:

Ebert, Roger. “Walker movie review.” RogerEbert. Ebert Digital LLC, 4 Dec  1987. Web. 2 May 2015

Rosenstone, Robert A. "Walker: The Dramatic Film as Historical Truth." Film-Historia II.1 (1992): 3-12. Web.

Like so many war films, Bataan begins with an epigraph: “To those immortal dead, who heroically stayed the wave of barbaric conquest, this picture is reverently dedicated.”  The reverent portrayal of those “immortal dead” is reserved only for those soldiers who best fit into the American mythology, namely, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose forefathers have worked, fought, and sacrificed their lives to shape the country into a Teutonic melting-pot.  The opposition are a faceless, soulless enemy, referred to as “monkeys,” “tail-less monkeys,” or “dirty monkeys” more times than the viewer can count, and the ethnic members of the heroic platoon are stereotyped (Slotkin 483). The film, released in 1943, as the war in the Pacific Theater raged on, unabashedly excludes Japanese from America’s imagined community, as this screenshot from the trailer illustrates.

“Mythology is . . .one of the primary constituents of nationality” (Slotkin 471).

The editing strategies of the film’s trailer clearly reveal the work that Bataan does in perpetuating the national Frontier Myth, in which America, according to Slotkin, is originally portrayed as “a racial identity”, namely a WASP nation, chosen by God as a race uniquely capable of democracy, chosen to build a nation from coast to coast, removing any brown Others standing in the way (Slotkin 473). Take this image of four soldiers, the screen divided into four equal squares, each fighter engaged in the struggle. While the platoon is comprised of six WASPS and six ‘others,’ this shot is three-quarters WASP, with a ‘token’ minority.

Minorities in the film are not given equal footing, but rather portrayed in vaudevillian one-dimensional stereotypes, never possessing the same measure of courage or heroism as their WASP comrades. For example, Desi Arnaz’s character, Private Felix Ramirez, dies of fever rather than in combat.  The hot-blooded Latino, loudly defensive about his sickness, proves too weak to battle the hostile jungle environment. His WASP commanding officer remarks: “Jitterbug kid. . . .shakin’ himself to death.”

While Bataan may be a groundbreaking film for its foregrounding of the struggles and reconciliations of a multiethnic platoon, it not only perpetuates ethnic stereotypes but deepens those biases by subjecting brown soldiers to uglier and less honorable deaths than their WASP counterparts.

“Dismissed by the front door, racism reenters by the window” (Slotkin 483).

Sources: Bataan. Dir. Tay Garnett. Perf.  Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Lloyd Nolan. MGM, 1943. Film.

“Bataan - Trailer.” Warnervod channel. YouTube. Web. 7 Mar 2015.

“Robert Taylor - Bataan (1943).” Robert Taylor Drama/War Films channel. YouTube. Web. 7 Mar 2015

Flags of Our Fathers opens with an eerie male voice singing a cappella, the fog of war gradually clearing to reveal a landscape destroyed by war, and an abrupt cut to an aging man, who has woken from what the viewer understands to be a war nightmare.  The rest of the film alternates between retrospective storytelling from the veteran and extended flashbacks to the events during and after the battle at Iwo Jima. The veteran begins: “Every jackass thinks he knows what war is,” going on about the tendency to simplify war into binaries: good/evil, bad/good, hero/villain. A few minutes later he critiques “what we see and do for war” in order to make sense of it: for example, turning a photograph of marines raising a flag on Iwo Jima into a sign of victory. Similarly, George H. Roeder writes that “wartime imagery reinforced those aspects of the culture that encouraged thinking of international relations in simple terms of right and wrong,” continuing on to suggest that the use of imagery to shape public perception “must be calculated as one of the costs of…war” (Roeder 78).

Above: the version of the movie poster used to advertise instant streaming of the film on YouTube and Amazon Instant Video.

Below: the version of the movie poster used to advertise the DVD version for sale on Amazon

For a film that seems to make busting binaries and problematizing the idealization of war its M.O., the film’s posters read like propaganda.  J. David Slocum points out “a thoroughgoing, intrinsic ambivalence pervading war cinema” (Slocum 196).  While Flags of Our Fathers reads as something of an anti-war film, its marketing and graphic design read as a patriotic film.  On the one hand, Eastwood subjects the audience to an onslaught of artillery fire, flying limbs, careless tanks, American bombers inadvertently taking out their own, and ruthless bond-slinging. On the other hand, the film’s producers are pitching it as an inspirational war movie, a behind-the-scenes look at “a photograph [that] was taken…that changed everything,” according to the film’s trailer.  In an America that languishes in foreign armed conflict, a spirit of patriotism sells movies better than Eastwood’s vision of internal conflict, mixed motives, and disillusionment.

Sources: Flags of Our Fathers. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Ryan Phillippe, Barry Pepper, Joseph Cross, Adam Beach. Warner Bros., 2006. Film.

“Flags of our Fathers - Trailer.” Paramount Movies channel. YouTube. Web. 1 Mar 2015.

Roeder, George H. “War as a Way of Seeing.” Hollywood and War, the Film Reader. Ed. J. David Slocomb. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.