War Over War Movies


Before Vietnam, war movies were either gung-ho patriotic starring John Wayne or philosophically anti-war, starting with “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

This week the Los Angeles Times has been OpEding an argument prompted by a conservative’s contention that today’s Hollywood “stakes out an anti-victory position on the current war in Iraq, continuing its deplorable 40-year streak of working against the United States’ strategic objectives at a time of war.”

That’s a mouthful of accusation: 40 years of celluloid treason, and most Americans failed to notice. While there are legitimate questions about Brian DePalma’s latest opus, they don’t begin to support a collective indictment of Hollywood film-makers as disloyal to their country.

Looking back at decades of the best war movies, from “Paths of Glory” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai” to “Saving Private Ryan” and “Flags of Our Fathers,” what’s most striking is how apolitical they have been, evoking horror over the brutality, hypocrisy and waste of lives and/or celebrating the bloody gallantry of young people under fire.

Until now, even in time of war, serious film-makers were not propagandists with “strategic objectives” but artists trying to get at universal truths.

Just before Iraq, a number of conservative contributors to National Review named as their favorite war movie “Patton,” the 1970 biopic of America’s red-white-and-blue World War II general, co-written by Francis Ford Coppola.

Seven years later, Coppola made “Apocalypse Now,” which ideologues would see as a savage indictment of our involvement in Vietnam.

But both were made years after the wars were over and neither was intended as a political statement, any more than “The Godfather,” which came between the two.

Hollywood people have always had strong political beliefs, but few expressed them during working hours. There was too much money at stake.

Cross-posted from my blog.

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September 29th, 2007
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Viewing 4 Comments

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    Funny you should bring it up but I just caught a few minutes of The Green Berets on TV a few days ago. The scene was a press briefing and the propaganda was thick. I put it on my cue to pick-up at the library because a lot of the pro-war arguments and the disdain for the skeptical reporter were similar to what we hear nowadays.
    As for DePalma, I don't get the attraction and I don't watch his movies. He knows movie history and seems doomed to repeat it. Carlito's Way is the only one I've seen and still remember liking.
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    Absolutely right. Although movies can at times be purposely political, they are typically too costly to make to risk anything other than the widest possible appeal, which is foreclosed by being too partisan, even toward something as nonpartisan as pacifism. Of course, media theorists recognize that all writing, indeed all creative endeavor, is on some level propaganda, but most movies are only passively so. OTOH, political operatives, press offices, and pundits have taken to throwing out heavily propagandistic rhetoric whenever possible to reframe debate: things like "Why do you hate America so much?" and "They hate our freedom." It's really quite facile but oddly effective.
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    Great punchline.
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    Ditto what the Viscount says.

    Forty year streak of treason, eh? Treason being a failure to portray warmongering and slaughtering brown people as both beautiful and holy is what's meant here. Guess those Rambo movies were a lot less subtle in their pacifism than I thought. Oh, wait. I'm confusing them with Hot Shots Part Deux.

    John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey had a good post last year, that I'll have to go dig out, about how Right Wingers, even ones supposedly in the movie business, don't seem to understand that it is a business. A theme Roy Edroso keeps coming back to his how they don't understand the difference between art and entertainment and propaganda. And our own Self-Styled Siren has been on a mission to show that they don't know anything about the history of movies or to have actually seen any of the movies they discuss.

    They apparently aren't aware that Apocalypes Now and Platoon were made after we left Vietnam and Three Kings after the first Gulf War.

    And, besides the movies Bob mentions, they've never seen Windtalkers or We Were Soldiers either. All they know about recent war movies is that none of their friends have told them to go see that great new movie about Iraq where a whole lot of evil towelheads get blown away to riotous applause.
 

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