Zion, oh mighty Zion, your bison now are dust
As your cornflakes rise ‘gainst the rust-red skies,
then our blood requires we go…
Marching, marching to Shibboleth

On a recent car trip with my high-school-age son, just for fun, I popped into the CD player, Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.

“What is this, something from the seventies?” he offered, after a while.

“Yeah. What do you think?”

“Weird.”

“Well, sure. But don’t you think it’s pretty funny?”

He gave me, in lieu of an answer, that pity-the-old-guy look he wears when I’m singing along with a Bruce Springsteen CD or trying to explain why The Exorcist is supposed to be a scary movie.

“I guess,” he damned with faint praise.

At just his age, I found Firesign Theatre to be wildly, chaotically, subversively funny. I still do. So why doesn’t he – this man-child nourished from the very breast of modern satire, reader of The Onion, viewer of The Colbert Report – get the joke?

I attribute his reaction to three possible causes:

1) When listening to Dwarf at 16, I was likely to be – how shall I say this? – thoroughly and utterly baked to the gills. And for my son, much to his mother’s relief, that’s apparently not the case.

2) He’s not my son, but rather a student at Commie Martyrs High, diabolically disguising himself as a God-fearing American adolescent.

3) None of this truly exists.

Tempted though I am by the latter two options, I think it’s the first that begs the question. Could it be that Firesign Theatre – not unlike that dreaded 2-hour Grateful Dead space jam – is to be appreciated only, as they say, under the influence?

I’m high all right…but not on false drugs. I’m high on the real thing – powerful gasoline, a clean windshield and a shoeshine.

It’s possible, I suppose. There is a kind of low-level paranoia that hums behind the whole disc. And paranoia, strangely enough, is funny.

First, you notice that the cop is staring at you. Then, you laugh at yourself for thinking such a thing. Then, you realize the cop really is staring at you.

Don’t Crush That Dwarf works in that way quite a lot. It’s the art of non sequitor moving at a breakneck pace. At first, you laugh at it for being off-the-wall, but when you think about it, you see it’s not so off-the-wall after all. Is it going to be…all right?

Friends, it’s going to be all right tonight at the Powerhouse Church of the Presumptuous Assumption…

I don’t want to put myself in a confrontatory position, either with the United Snakes or with…them. And you can believe me, because I never lie. And I’m always right.

In Firesign Theatre world, the only thing crazier than you is…them. The real world. The world of people who tell you and sell you and teach you things that don’t quite make any sense.

Shoes for industry, shoes for the dead! What chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good paying job, more sugar and that free mule you’re dreaming of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes. Now you can see how increased spending opportunities mean harder work for everyone…and more of it, too!

It’s been a mighty long month of Sundays since I was a dope fiend. And now, I suppose, them is me. And being them, I now know what’s best for me. What’s been best for me all along…

Hot Dog, Mom, groat-cakes again!

On second thought…maybe I’ll just put that CD away now.

Serve up a viewing of Bridge Over The River Kwai or The Dirty Dozen, and you could rely on a heapin’ helping of gunfire with the bare minimum of chit-chat. You could rely on knowing – I mean really knowing, as only fellow warriors can know – your racially-mixed band of brothers. And yes, even sniffing away an unacknowledged tear once payment came due on their ultimate sacrifice. You could rely on the fact that – no matter how many times you’d seen the movie before – your heart would race with the fear for your guys. All at once, you’d find yourself wondering if, in fact, the war had not turned out the way you’d thought it had.

Would Jim Brown still take it “all the way” before that final grenade blew up? Would Steve McQueen finally jump his bike clear of that barbed wire fence?

But above all, you could always rely on the fact that – even though the good guys sometimes lost the battle, or even died a nasty death – their sacrifice always brought an end to the insanity and chaos of war. And that meant the return to a benign world in which an 11-year-old could sit watching war movies instead of working in the fields as a Nazi slave, or even doing his homework.

Even when the post-Vietnam crop of anti-war, war movies came along, the rules of the game didn’t really change. If the soldiers’ world in Catch 22 or Platoon was immoral or absurd, it was the absurdity of the war itself, or the foolishness of the commanders, that made it so. Even more nuanced films (or those 2,500-year-old Greek plays) – hinting that the real chaos resided in the human soul – saw war as the catalyst, the releasing agent for passions otherwise held in check.

As I say, I used to love war movies. But, then, I don’t know much about war.

Perhaps that’s why I found watching Army of Shadows and Letters from Iwo Jima such a queasy experience – both in different ways but, I think, for the same reason. They left me with a feeling I can only describe as existential – the sense that behind the horror and chaos and inhumanity of war lay…the real horror and chaos and inhumanity. War isn’t just hell, in other words. It’s even worse…it’s a total blank.

Together with much praise, Clint Eastwood has also enjoyed a fair amount of criticism for his even-handed treatment of a purely Japanese perspective in Letters From Iwo Jima. In the course of the savage battle, in which 7,000 Americans and 22,000 Japanese died, Eastwood is careful to show – in Letters and in the earlier, American-focused half of his diptych, Flags of Our Fathers – instances both of courage and atrocity on the part of both armies.

This, to some critics, made him guilty of a creeping relativism – there were savageries on each side, the reasoning goes, but there was a good deal more of it on one side than on the other. Fair enough, I suppose. But I’m not sure that was Eastwood’s point.

Why, after all, would a filmmaker go to such lengths to make two different movies built around the same event? Because “war is evil, since we’re all just the same underneath the skin?” As a warning about the toxicity of jingoism and wartime propaganda? Maybe. He would have topical reasons aplenty for that approach, heaven knows.

But I don’t think that’s it. Rather, I think Eastwood wants us to experience the same feeling of nausea…of bottomless horror at the brute fact of mortality, no matter which characters are doing the dying. He wants us to feel like we’re all the same under the skin, all right. But he does it by letting us watch as the defeated Japanese soldiers transform themselves through ritual suicide – not into warrior Shinto spirits – but into bloody, truncated flaps of meat.

No glory in victory, suggests Flags. No glory in defeat, whispers Letters. Half of me wonders whether these really qualify as war movies, at all. On the one hand, of course, the action is all about war. But in another sense, the war is just a convenient place from which to look out at the abyss.

Army of Shadows is another oddity of the genre. Released just in the wake of the anti-Gaullist events of May, 1968, Jean-Pierre Melville’s story of the wartime Resistance is told in the somber voice of a still-numb survivor. Its exquisitely neutral slate-blue and gray images are like those of an often-repeated, little-welcome dream, both familiar and repellent at the same time.

Like Eastwood’s films, Army of Shadows is simultaneously about the war…and not about the war. Although the film fairly seethes with Nazis, for instance, we never see them in an act of violence onscreen. Conversely, we’re treated to a positively excruciating scene in which the men of the Resistance execute – literally by hand – a captured informer.

Again in Melville’s film, as in the Iwo Jima diptych, there is no glory in victory or defeat. In fact, there’s no glory at all. There’s comradeship. There’s duty. There’s certainly courage. There’s pity and fear…but without tragedy.

In fact, the film’s most transcendent moment is one that’s told – but unseen. During an earlier imprisonment, the movie’s protagonist, Phillipe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is, together with his fellow prisoners, herded into a cavernous tunnel, at one end of which is a machine gun manned by German soldiers.

Told by the camp’s commandant to run for his life, Gerbier, aware of the futility, at first refuses. Seconds later, prodded by the Nazi’s pistol, he finally runs and is somewhat too-miraculously saved by his waiting comrades. Yet he soon regrets his decision to run. Perhaps he feels it was a craven cowardice, perhaps a betrayal of a central truth to his existence. The truth that in order to survive, he and the others must accept the fact that they are already long dead.

Later, in the epilogue, we learn that Gerbier, put before the German machine gun a second time, is true to himself and at last, refuses to run. This – in the still-grim winter of 1944 – is as close to a victory as Gerbier will ever get.

Indeed, Gerbier’s truth is at the heart of all three films. The single, unforgettable image for me is that of the burrowed Japanese soldiers, peering out from what will soon be their freshly dug graves into the flat, blinding sunlight of a world that no longer seems their own. They are, in fact, already dead, peering out from their tombs if only to see how the story ends.

There are the rare exceptions (think of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Brides and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita) that succeed mainly by trying to be something quite different from the books on which they’re based.

For the most part, however, filmmakers are content to abridge and abbreviate, jogging along behind the novel’s action, cameras in hand. Narrative voice is transformed into voice over – to quite different effect – in which hard-to-film subtleties of language are slathered over by a fruity accent.

I’ve never read the short story on which Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, Old Joy, is based, and now, I’m not inclined to. That’s because, in her small, lush feature, Reichardt has reversed the usual calculus, and given us an adaptation whose original could only – if perhaps unfairly – prove a disappointment.

Old Joy is a road movie, but one in which the road ends up being a closed loop. In this pocket Odyssey, two old friends cross the perilous straits between past and present, less transformed by their journey, than numbed by the passage of time.

What is remarkable about Old Joy, however, is the way it tells its tale – through silences rather than words. Reichardt’s searching camera is most expressive when focused – not on the characters who are talking – but on those who are listening. As a result, it speaks in a language unique to film, in a register too high for readers to hear.

The action itself is fairly simple: old friends Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London) reunite and set off on an overnight camping trek to find Bagby’s Hot Springs – a spot both beautiful and beatific, nestled in the heavily wooded mountains outside Portland. On the way, times are caught up on, much pot is smoked (at least by Kurt), and the way, inevitably, is lost.

Forced to spend the night in a trash-strewn campsite, Mark listens, bemused, while Kurt shares his brilliantly stoned grasp of astrophysics (“the universe is a teardrop, falling through space”). But Mark’s amusement quickly turns to embarrassment when Kurt, in an almost unbearably awkward moment, tells Mark how much he desperately regrets the distance that’s grown up between them.

That distance, and the awkward feelings that accompany it, are not so easily to be dispelled. The lives of the two men have gone in quite different directions since the time they were close friends. Mark, now a prematurely harried, father-soon-to-be, senses that it’s time to leave such childish things behind, while dreading the less childish things that will replace them. Kurt, on the other hand, an aging, yet still childlike slacker, seems to have crossed that subtle but unmistakable divide between being a free spirit…and being essentially homeless.

But the beauty of their story – and in Reichardt’s telling of it – lay not in how much, but rather in how little the two men had themselves changed. It’s not we who are altered with time, Old Joy seems to say, but the world that alters around us. And like the urban landscape that gradually gives way to primeval forest, the shift can be so gradual that we don’t notice until it literally surrounds us.

By the time the friends finally reach their forest nirvana — immersing themselves, naked, beneath the hot waters in a ritual of rebirth that’s at once mocking and loving – they already know there’s no cure for time. Like the hum of samsara that intrudes on Mark’s attempt at meditation, the world will have its way.

It is a rare treat to watch Oldham and London wordlessly express the way that discomfort turns to pity and pity to fear. And it’s an even rarer one to be given the space to watch them, as Reichardt’s camera lingers in reaction shots so lengthy and so tight that they make you long to look away.

In the end, however, it’s well worth keeping your eyes on the filmmaker’s art. With barely a false note, Old Joy offers us a snapshot of the universe in motion, and a reminder of the speed with which it turns.

But for all that, the mood of the movie is less bittersweet than worldly wise. Despite our best intentions, life teaches us that friends will grow apart and beauty will become shopworn. That is the price of living. And perhaps for Reichardt, also the seed of art.

While we are welcome to share in Kurt’s realization that “sadness is just worn-out joy,” she also seems to say that we are bound to remember that corollary in reverse – that joy, no matter how bright, is only unexplored sadness.