by kevindooley
War on Film
[Via Eunomia]
Matt Steinglass at Democracy in America makes a good contribution to the debate over Iraq war movies:
No doubt there were many supporters of America’s war in Vietnam who found the 1974 documentary masterpiece “Hearts and Minds” unwatchable left-wing propaganda, who hated “M*A*S*H” and “Apocalypse Now”.
This is related to what I was saying in two previous posts. It is unlikely that making films about highly controversial, polarizing wars is going to be anything other than polarizing for both supporters and opponents of the war. It is even more unlikely that there are going to be filmmakers interested in making a film about a war they opposed in such a way that it treats architects of the war sympathetically. If the war in question is still going on, and the war’s loudest supporters are engaging in a lot of triumphalist rhetoric about how they were right all along, that is hardly the time when one can expect antiwar filmmakers to investigate the complex motivations of the war’s architects.
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Once again Daniel has a nice post.
I remember when ‘Apocalypse Now’ came out. There was a lot of criticism of it because of its exaggerations and lack of verisimilitude. Because people on both sides of the War were still too ego-beholden to their own viewpoints to see.
By the time Platoon came out, seven years after Apocalypse Now, the general narrative had started to be formed. You could now make a movie about Vietnam that did not result in such criticism as Coppola’s.
The movies that make a point that war is awful, and makes men do things that are morally repulsive, are the ones that seem to last. Not only Apocalyspe Now, Breaker Morant, and Platoon, but also Paths of Glory, Galipoli, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape, Glory and many others.
As long as examinations of the complexities of war are kept to battles over a generation old, then many people can deal with them, most likely because they have to take no personal responsibility for the war. We just have a problem when the same approach is used for our most recent wars.
Because then people have to recognize their own culpability for the morally repulsive acts that take place. For torture. For the killing of civilians. For the lack of accountability for the leaders at the top. For he huge amounts of money spent.
Much easier to watch something about a distant war, one they can claim they had no responsibility for.
