The possibility of anti-war films

Something has been bothering me for a while: after escaping from a New Year’s Eve party stuffed to the gills with vacuous 80s party dress wearing hipsters, I ended up at a much quieter gathering that promised board games but instead delivered a small group of people sitting around the TV and watching a DVD of Full Metal Jacket. They stopped the movie part way through in order to watch the ball drop in Times Square at midnight, but once that was finished, they resumed watching it.

The party-goers were middle-class, educated, and of broadly liberal views, even though they seemed ill-versed on even the historical basics of the Vietnam War. One wondered about why the Americans were talking with Vietnamese officers, apparently not knowing the differences between the ARVN, the NVA, and the VC. Another was perplexed why there was urban fighting at all, assuming that the Vietnam war took place exclusively in the jungles and rice paddies. Which isn’t to say that they were complete dunces, as there was a bit of a conversation about Stanley Kubrick’s aesthetics—about how shots were framed, and so on—but there was very little interest paid in what sort of statement Kubrick was making about Vietnam. Maybe the specifics of the Vietnam War aren't as important as general points about war and militarisation in general, but even so, that was lacking. Instead, there was laughter at the Drill Sergeant’s torrents of abuse at the recruits; there were emulations, complete with feigned accent, of the Vietnamese prostitute’s lines to the American soldiers.

As far as American Vietnam war movies go, I feel that Full Metal Jacket makes the strongest and least ambiguous statement against war. In contrast to other films that are against war, but still manage to glorify it to one extent or another (think of the helicopter gunships bearing down on the riverside village to the sounds of Wagner in Apocalypse Now or about the troops getting stoned, singing, and dancing in the bunker in Platoon), Full Metal Jacket offers a completely bleak view of war and militarism and the effects that it has on men: the first part shows how a campaign of sustained brutality and humiliation can turn ordinary American boys into killers. The second part shows war and killing not as something belonging in an action movie, but rather as something truly terrible. Moreover, Full Metal Jacket doesn’t have a sense of camaraderie. There isn’t the sense that despite all the terrible things about war, that this can be, at least in part, mitigated by close social bonds.

But if a film that so unequivocally makes this point about war can be taken as light party entertainment, are anti-war films actually viable? I don’t mean this in the sense that an anti-war films can actually prevent war—as if all that Bush really needs to do is spend an evening with a couple of Oliver Stone films—but rather in that if even one of the most clear-cut cinematic statements about war can so easily be rendered innocuous, what does this say about the possibilities of anti-war cinema as a whole?

I guess I need to start by asking what we mean when we talk of anti-war movies. I’m not certain that it’s possible or even useful to come up with a schema by which to understand anti-war films, but the one characteristic that most have in common is in their depiction of dying and suffering. A realistic depiction of war isn’t enough. While this may distinguish a proper war movie from a Rambo movie, one needs only look at the Ministry of Defence’s recruitment ads on TV—the ad for the Royal Marines Commando emphasises the toughness of their training by showing a recruit nearly drowning in an exercise—to see that this may in fact be a selling point. However, we would never see images of soldiers dying in the field in these ads. Nor would we see former soldiers living on the streets, mentally ill and unable to cope with civilian life. The suffering depicted can be as much about what happens after as it is about what happens during fighting. The suffering makes the anti-war film. And yet there are so many exceptions.

The 1996 Serbian film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame is a curious example of how the ‘anti-war’ moniker can be misleading. On the packaging of the DVD, Total Film that this is “[one] of the most electrifying anti-war films ever made”, while Variety claims that it is “[wilder] in its black humour than ‘M*A*S*H’, bolder in its vision of politics and the military than any movie Stanley Kubrick has made”. And yet it’s difficult to watch the movie with any sort of understanding of the war in Bosnia and see this as anything but a propaganda film. The movie employs racist stereotypes of Muslims; it talks of the Turkish (Bosniak) and Ustasha (Croat) threat to Serb existence; it mocks Belgrade’s anti-war demonstrators. Sure, in showing our protagonists dying and suffering it has something in common with anti-war films, but that’s about as far as the similarity goes.

Black Hawk Down is another movie that shows many different unpleasant and realistic ways of dying. It watches like Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, but with Africans standing in for the role of insect-like aliens. Again, it’s difficult to see how Ridley Scott is making a statement against war, if indeed that was even his intent. Or let's look at Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers, a film that doesn't minimise the suffering of the soldiers or of their families, but turns this not into a point about how awful war is, but rather one about patriotic duty.

Even when the anti-war politics of a movie aren’t as open to question as the above-mentioned movies, there is the question of whether or not the movie will be received as the director wishes. Anthony Swofford makes this point in Jarhead:

There is talk that many Vietnam films are anti-war, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill. They turn their fighting and killing everywhere; they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But, actually, Vietnam films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible and they will tell their friends at church and their family this. But Cpl Johnson at Camp Pendleton, and Sgt Johnson at Travis Air Force Base, and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station, and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg, and Lance Corporal Swofford at 29 Palms Marine Corps base watch the same films and are excited by them. Because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man. With film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real first fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are anti-war, the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

Or, in other words, images don't convey an intrinsic meaning. We may watch war on screen and think that it is terrible but this is by no means that only available interpretation of it.

What is meant by an ‘anti-war movie’ seems simple and straightforward. Yet, the matter is often more complicated than this implies. To be anti-war is a political position, yet movies, as aesthetic objects, often don’t sit comfortably within easily identifiable political positions. Let’s take Apocalypse Now as an example. It is, without question, a classic anti-war film; however, it does have scenes, such as the aforementioned helicopter attack on the village, that are spectacular and exciting. Should an anti-war film show combat as something exciting? Moreover, Apocalypse Now is a visually stunning film. Again, should an anti-war film captivate the eye in such a way? What about the movie’s basis in Joseph Conrad and Werner Herzog? How does this fit politically? To label something as ‘anti-war’ is to simplify it into an easily understandable political category, though this is far from the best way to understand art.

Tim O'Brien, in "How To Tell A True War Story" from The Things They Carried, gives us one way of understanding war movies.

How do you generalize?

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth, war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.

Okay, sure, Tim O'Brien, who served as a soldier in Vietnam, is talking about his actual experience of war and not cinematic representations of war, but I think that his point can be applied to war movies. There is something captivating about them beyond their poltical stance. Do I think that wanton destruction and carnage are politically or ethically acceptable? No, but they can make for exciting viewing.

And yet, I don't think that the anti-war movie is an impossibility, though movies will have to go beyond showing the combat aspect of war to really express this. One recent example is Jasmila Zbanic's excellent Grbavica (in English as Esma's Secret), a film that looks at the impact of the Bosnian War into the present day. Not only do we see the ruins of Sarajevo, but we also see how the war has a lingering and devasting impact on the lives of the people who lived through it even ten years after the fighting stopped. It's emotionally devastating. Another option is satire. Another Bosnian film, No Man's Land, does a brilliant job of showing the absurdity of war, again in a way that can't be taken to glorify it.

Hopefully this makes some sense, as they are very provisional thoughts right now. Any comments or discussion are more than welcome.