I can't imagine what the reception for the current spate of war movies would have been if the Sept. 11 attacks hadn't occurred. Black Hawk Down, Hart's War, We Were Soldiers and the forthcoming, much-delayed Windtalkers are old-fashioned, we're-right-they're-wrong, hup-hup-Marine, shoot-'em-up-and-rah-rah-rah pictures. They're as square as a child's block and about as morally complicated.
They show us horrific, flesh-ripping violence in extreme close-up, and justify it in the name of war-is-hell reality.
At the same time, they gloss over any political or ethical ambiguity, and justify that with "our boys are heroes, therefore war is glory" self-deception. Pre-9/11, I think they would have been jeered out of theatres.
Now, however, because North America is engaged in a real war and real young men are dying, these films are receiving an overly respectful, kid-gloves benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve to. I realize they didn't deliberately set out to cash in on the war on terrorism; they were in development long before those planes were hijacked. But ghastly as it sounds, they are reaping the benefits of our newfound collective gratitude to those in uniform -- police officers, firefighters and soldiers.
They would have been impossible to make as recently as 1986, when Platoon, Oliver Stone's autobiographical look at Vietnam, won the Oscar for best picture. Or 1987, when Stanley Kubrick took on Vietnam with the brutal Full Metal Jacket. (Today, it's Platoon and Jacket that wouldn't stand a chance. They're far too negative about war -- and worse, ambivalent about the soldiers who are sacrificed in it.)
And the bombastic, unquestioning patriotism of today certainly would have been unfathomable to filmmakers a generation ago, including Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola. The movies they made -- respectively, MASH (1970), Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (best picture, 1978) and, of course, Apocalypse Now (1979) -- showed us the heartbreaking madness of war. I grew up on them, and assumed that the truths they showed made it impossible for us to go back to the unblinking, unthinking flag-waving of an earlier era. I was wrong.
I blame Steven Spielberg. Way back in 1998, everyone agreed that war was a nightmare. And not just the Vietnam War -- people were rethinking so-called just wars, too. Ken Burns Civil War miniseries on PBS cast new light on that conflict. The novels Regeneration and Birdsong offered wrenching re-examinations of the First World War.
And Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line dared to cast a cold eye on the seemingly unassailable moral imperative of the Second World War.
Then Spielberg lobbed Saving Private Ryan at us, and everything changed. He is a filmmaker of mind-bending skill, and Ryan's grainy, graphic, 30-minute Omaha Beach opening sequence was so powerful that a lot of people mistook it for an antiwar film. It was the opposite. It was an unironic, gung-ho splatterfest. It wanted us to care deeply about each of the American lads -- the better to shock us when they were blown apart in intimate slow-motion.
And it wanted us to stand up and cheer as fields of German boys were mowed down. (So anonymous were they, we mainly saw the backs of their heads.) Presumably, their team had parents and sweethearts and even personalities, which All Quiet on the Western Front dared to admit in 1930 (and won a best-picture Oscar for it). But Spielberg seemed to think it would be sacrilege to show that.
Now Spielbergian tactics are being applied to conflicts not previously lauded for their clarity and decency. Every analyst agrees that the battle of Mogadishu depicted in Black Hawk Down was a disaster, unprepared Americans sent to die by their uninformed superiors. But in the film, the reasons we were there don't matter -- there's no historical context. Who we shot doesn't matter -- the faceless Somalis go down like video-game graphics. Who we are doesn't even matter -- there's virtually no character development.
All that matters is, our boys died excruciating deaths (the film is so explicitly gory, it's war porn). And they were there for each other. The same goes for We Were Soldiers: a badly miscalculated battle, presented with no historical context, fought against waves of anonymous enemies who topple like tenpins, and all that matters is, they were there for each other. (And for their leader, Mel Gibson, who is the bestest father and the hunkiest husband and the nicest Catholic, even though one scene shows him in church asking God to blow the little foreign bastards to pieces. Really.)
Well, guess what: Being there for your buddies is brave and fine, but it's not all that matters. It's simply how we continue to convince young men to fight. And though soldiers may be good and noble, that doesn't mean war always is. Legions of films made before this acknowledged that, and we shouldn't let ourselves forget it, no matter how defensible our cause.
There is one film that was recently in theatres that remembers this. It's called No Man's Land. It's about the Balkan war, and it's about all war: how absurd it is, how tragic, how unavoidable. It doesn't have heroes, only humans. It's nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film. My money's on Amélie, the feather-light French film that was a post-9/11 feel-good sensation. Because in 2002, no one will back a war film that says there are no winners.
Johanna Schneller