#warcinema

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.