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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.

After a silent disclaimer ensuring the fantastical and fictitious nature of the characters and events to come, and Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and  Love the Bomb opens with a short narrative set-up: a deep baritone voice recounts the rumors of a Russian doomsday device over dreamlike high-altitude clouds and swirling wind. Kubrick then cuts to an extremely phallic close-up of a refueling rod, which comprises the film’s title sequence.  Romantic, almost seductive lounge music blasts as the viewer is treated to an up-close-and-personal view of two fighter jets refueling. It quickly becomes clear that Kubrick’s mission is to expose the deep love for ‘the bomb’ in Cold War America.

“The spectacle,” William V. Spanos writes, “is intended to rob the spectator of speech—and thus of a polity” (Spanos 178). Kubrick’s opening sequence, so absurdly sexual, renders me speechless at each viewing.  It makes clear the attachment to nuclear arms, the attachment to a militarized, defensive posture that the American government took during the Truman administration.  The film contains spectacular bookends, with the sexual refueling at the beginning, and its famous nuclear bomb detonation montage at the end, featuring the iconic wartime hit, “We’ll Meet Again,” which was recorded as Britain was preparing to enter World War II, and endured as a morale booster throughout the 1940s (Charles, et al 276).

“A chosen people with a vocation must, by definition, always already produce crisis, that is, must always force the ordinary into the extraordinary (exception)—render it increasingly spectacular. This, in turn, means eventually reducing the witness to the status of a mere spectator” (Spanos 182).

In the film, Cold War paranoia, xenophobia, preemptive attack legitimized by an ideology of exceptionalism, and spectacular violence are writ large. Kubrick tells a fantasy that in its use of humor makes the reality behind the jokes obvious, and terrifying. It envisions the possible endgame of the American imagined community’s production of crisis for the sake of clinging to the false notion of chosen-peoplehood.

Sources: Charles, Hugh, and Greta Gard. "“We'll Meet Again”." The Literature of War. Ed. Thomas Riggs. Vol. 1: Approaches. Detroit: St. James Press, 2012. 276-279. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden. Columbia, 1964. Film.

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.

If asked to sit down and create a shortlist of things most “American,” I would include baseball, apple pie, and Westerns. Nationalism, as Anderson points out, lacks philosophical grounding and coherence, yet carries much political power; it should be treated as a cultural phenomenon rather than an ideology (Anderson 5).  John Ford’s Western films both reflect and shape the American understanding of the so-called “Indian Wars,” with a focus upon the conflicts west of the Mississippi after the Civil War. 

The cinematography of both films sends the message that Indians, while native to the land we call America, are not Americans. 

Watch the first thirty seconds of the trailer for Stagecoach (1939):

First, a beautiful landscape shot of the Monument Valley, tiny stagecoach braving its way westbound; and with a quick pan to the left, a menacing band of armed Indians on the mesa above. A few close-ups of foreign-looking faces, and a finger pointed at the unsuspecting [white] Americans below.  Director John Ford cuts again to the stagecoach, peaceful music playing, followed by another quick pan left, where the Indians are mobilizing for war—or so we are expected to presume.  Anderson defines nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 6). 

The way that persons in America imagine “Americans” excludes the millions of original inhabitants of the Americas. 

In The Searchers, the conflict focuses specifically on the Comanche, one of the four tribes who attempted most strongly to assert their rights as Native Americans (“Indian Wars”).  There is no room for them in the imagined American community, however. Watch the opening scene:

In this iconic shot, we see the western landscape from the first-person perspective of a back-lit female figure.  Without a face, the viewer can imagine that she is anyone; she is the self; she is an American. Gazing out into the open country, the scene evokes our imagined destiny of a nation stretching ‘from sea to shining sea’. The only thing standing in the way of that in Texas, 1868 (as the film is set) is the Indian.  Anderson writes: “No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind” (7).  In Ford’s western films, the peoples native to the Americas are beyond the imagined limits of how Americans define themselves.

Sources:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 1983. New York: Verso, 2006. Print.

"Indian Wars." The Columbia Encyclopedia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Credo Reference. Web. 22 Feb 2015.

The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Perf. John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles. Warner Bros., 1956. Film.

In his 1990 essay on politics and film in postmodern America, Michael Rogin writes: “Film, by functioning in Reaganite politics to confuse the historical with the imaginary, also preserves an objective memory of scenes that have now entered history” (105).  He calls this tactic of “motivated forgetting” through covert military spectacle mediated by film and television as “political amnesia” (Ibid). I would like to briefly compare and contrast the soundtracks of the final battle scenes of Glory (1989) and The Red Badge of Courage (1951), focusing upon the role that music plays in re-membering the American myth of manifest destiny while forgetting the realities of the Cold War.

In our postmodern world in which the line between movies and politics has blurred, (Rogin 118) Glory paints a idealized picture of the Civil War. The 54th Regiment, finally given its chance to fight, storms Fort Wagner, running toward certain death.  As lives are lost, viewers are treated to a sweeping symphonic score, with operatic choral singing strongly reminiscent of a Haydn or Verdi Mass setting.  The religiously evocative music signals to the viewer: “America is on God’s side.”

Director John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage was released in the midst of the Korean War, the first notable armed conflict motivated by Cold War-era American imperialism.  While truce talks began little more more than a year into the fighting, making the Korean theatre a rather minor engagement, it served its purpose as a demonstration of American power to stop the spread of Communism. The final battle scene’s score is dominated by drum cadences punctuated by artillery fire, which plays the part usually filled by a bass drum. To a 21st-Century ear, the sporadic bugle charge cues sound more like a professional football or baseball game than a bloody conflict.  The rhythmic snare drums and bugle triads signal that war is exciting!

As the final charge begins, the score transitions into a rousing orchestral rendition of “John Brown’s Body,” which takes the Union troops across the battle field and over a short wall, victory theirs.  “John Brown’s Body,” also sung by Union soldiers earlier in the film, re-members the famous abolitionist, a proponent of change through violent means. In the context of the Korean War, the song choice signals to the viewer the necessity of bloodshed in achieving liberty and justice for all.  The Red Badge of Courage, a Civil War film that leaves African Americans notably absent from the screen, succeeds at achieving the desired forgetfulness of the millions of Korean casualties, all for the sake of maintaining the myth of American preeminence.

References Horner, James, score. Glory. Dirl Edward Zwick. Perf. Andre Braugher, Cary    Elwes, Morgan Freeman, Jihmi Kennedy, and Denzel Washington. Sony, 1989. YouTube.

Kaper, Bronislau, score. The Red Badge of Courage. Perf.  Audie Murphy, Bill Mauldin, Douglas Dick. MGM, 1951. YouTube.

"Korean War." The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide. Abington: Helicon, 2014. Credo Reference. Web. 14 Feb 2015.

The film industry, in close collaboration with the U.S. government, produces war films that not only reflect American viewers’ collective experiences and anxieties of war, but rather, that shape viewers’ perception, attitude, and anxieties about war (Slocum 3). In other words, one’s understanding of war is mediated and formed by the visual and ideological products handcrafted for our consumption by Hollywood, in cooperation with the State. Even since the onset of 24-hour television news media, what we consider “real” or “raw” is influenced by its financial backing, creative direction, and camera work.   For the first week of my graduate seminar on American war cinema, I screened D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation. J. David Slocum posits that this first feature-length war film established the themes of courageous acts in the face of extreme adversity, self-sacrifice on the homefront, and “chivalry and gallantry in combat” so characteristic of the genre (Slocum 4).  I would like to highlight the mediated ideation of the homefront in The Birth of a Nation.  About thirty minutes into the film, as the Civil War begins in earnest, the first act of homefront sacrifice is conveyed in the inter-title: “Mother’s gift to the cause—3 sons.”  In the midst of World War I, female movie-watchers received the unstated message that mothers should and must sacrifice their sons, giving them up for ‘adoption’ to their patria.

At 56:27, the inter-title communicates that the battle’s end is near as “‘The little Colonel’ leads the final desperate assault.” The film cuts quickly from the extended battle scene, American flag in the foreground waving incessantly and insistently above the billowing smoke of war, to a moralistic family tableau of the homefront: father’s hands resting on the Bible, mother with eyes closed like a sorrowing madonna, daughters at parents’ feet in a posture of prayerful subservience.  In 1915, viewers received the message that the best action on the homefront is to assume a posture of prayerful resignation.

References

The Birth of a Nation. Dir. D. W. Griffith. D.W. Griffith Productions, 1915. Film.