War Movies, Good God, What are They Good For?

Absolutely understanding their effect on young men’s idea of war?

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I find it very hard to reconcile some of the views I hold having served in the army.

On the one hand I have many fond memories, I hold it as an excellent learning experience and a rite of passage that I would never trade for anything. On the other hand, I deplore war unless absolutely necessary and I could never imagine myself shooting someone.

Since getting out of the army 2 years ago I have also found that I can’t bring myself to watch war movies anymore. Regardless of their intention, they almost always glorify war and make flocks of young men want to sign up no matter how graphic and disgusting the images might be. Worse still, many films that appear gritty and realistic promise to show what war is really like. These movies still glorify war and are so much more damaging for that fact.

Black Hawk Down is an excellent example. As always, we learn about the individual soldiers – who they are, what they are like, their foibles, their wives back home and so on. One of them believes in the mission and wants to do good in the world, another draws pictures for children’s books about brave knights, and the big badass of the movie does it just because of the man next to him. Essentially, we are shown they are human and they have the same human tendencies, wants, and desires to do the right thing as we do. They are always trying to help whatever poor, war-torn country they are in. So, of course we sympathise and even empathise with them.

Then we see the inhabitants of that country, who are essentially shown to be cannon fodder.

Every Somali shown in BHD is shown to be nothing more than an antagonist trying to kill the Americans. The Americans wave to a kid as they go on their mission, and he is calling in to the bad guys that the soldiers are coming. This will evoke anger in most people, because they haven’t shown the reason the kid is calling in is because he will probably get to eat tomorrow. Likewise, many of the Somalis who fight for Aidid do so probably because it’s they only way they get to eat. A scene later in the movie, after the Americans had taken casualties and the two black hawks were down: The support helicopters make a run and strafe hundreds of Somalis on the rooftop with machine gun fire. I remember as a young twenty something thinking “yeah, take that!”, because those poor American soldiers were just trying to help.

It wasn’t until I had gotten out of the army that I realised what was so wrong in this movie, and in almost all commercial war movies – the Americans, the Brits, Australians and so on, are always given fleshed out characters. The “enemy” of the conflict, they are there to shoot. Because we are given an insight into the character of the protagonists and none for the enemy, we can’t help but see them as there to obstruct and kill the good guys. When in fact, they have their own dreams, desires and hopes for the future.

In every single one of these movies, the protagonists are the invaders, yet we see the locals always labelled as insurgents and trying to prevent the good the protagonists are trying to do. We forget it is their damn country in the first place. We forget that because someone has different desires and goals than us it doesn’t necessarily make them evil. But no, we are always shown as the good guys trying to educate and help these poor, uncivilised people, and they should just damn well give up and let us.

This is where the danger lies.

When young teenage males see these movies, they are being shown something in black and white that is in reality not even close. They cheer for the enemy having his head blown apart without realising that he may have been a father or even a grandfather. He may have been an upstanding member of the community trying to do some good in the world. Hell, he probably hosted Sunday lunches with all his family at his house on many weekends. All the audience sees, however, is someone evil who is trying to stop the good guys, so it’s a good thing when his brain matter flies across the screen from the sniper’s bullet.

You do not need to doubt my words. Many of the younger guys I served with wanted to get over to Afghanistan to “kill c**ts”. R**heads, desert c*on, sand ni**ers,” they used a mind blowing amount of horrible, racist adjectives to dehumanise people they hadn’t even met but had already condemned as worthy of putting a bullet through.

The portrayal of good and evil in movies isn’t the only thing that makes a young man thirst for war though, the entire military experience is shown to be something amazingly masculine and cool. Guns aren’t just tools, they’re awesome and something to be drooled over. Think of how many movies you’ve seen where they focus on the soldier’s weapon as he is chambering a round. It’s close up, it’s usually done with cold aggression or some pithy remark, sometimes all you hear is the mechanics itself because the sound is so damn sexy. It’s so freaking cool.

If you want more proof of this, check out any TV show or movie featuring guns. The people using them are always cocking the trigger, which hasn’t even been necessary since the Wild West. They chamber rounds when they don’t even need to chamber rounds, because the sound is awesome. Think back to Under Siege, where Steven Seagal says “yeah well”…(round chambers), “I also cook”.

He didn’t even chamber a damn round. The only motion you see of his hand makes it look like he’s releasing the mechanics forward as though he just changed magazines. He didn’t change the magazine and he sure as hell didn’t move the cocking handle backwards and forwards. That doesn’t stop the sound editor from putting the full chambering sound in there though, because the only thing more awesome than a boss one liner is to put the sound of a chambering a round in with it.

There have been very few war movies I have seen that actually give what I consider a fair and balanced view of both sides of a conflict. Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima are companion movies that follow the Battle of Iwo Jima from both the Japanese and American points of view. They are absolute masterpieces, not just of cinema, but of presenting alternate points of view.

Many movies and even textbooks of the war paint the Japanese as a uniquely brutal race of people. Give the book Tales of Japanese Soldiers a read and you’ll realise that many of them didn’t want to fight anymore than people on the other side. Letters from Iwo Jima showcased this brilliantly. This is why the fact that Eastwood would go on to make a completely one sided, jingoistic movie like American Sniper baffles me. I single Eastwood out because his previous work showed the rare sensibility to depict war properly, but it never fails to disappoint me how many of the other great directors still manage to glorify war in their movies.

This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of really good war movies out there, but I’ll take a wager that the large amount of young men that flocked to see American Sniper won’t ever watch a movie like Apocalypse Now or All Quiet on the Western Front.

From the viewer’s point of view, think back on all those war movies that you love and try to remember something really important. Ask yourself how many of them feature a conclusion where the “enemy” is torn apart by strafing from an aircraft, or blown up, or seen screaming and on fire from napalm being dropped on them? Some of them even get close up and show arms and legs flying through the air, and gallons of blood is always mandatory. Then they cue the soaring, triumphant music, as though they are just getting what is coming to them. Every time you see such a movie remember, what you are being sold is a single, overly simplified point of view where the people who look like you are heroes and the other people die horrifically, but always justifiably.

The movie has spent 2 hours showing us how good we and our cause are, so anyone opposing us deserves their death and by the end we actually believe it. I have heard more than a few critics say that we haven’t yet seen a definitive film about the war in Afghanistan or the second invasion of Iraq. Unless they are showing what the people who live there are going through as a result of the conflict, we’ll never have one. Too many movies show war to be something waged by the righteous against people who are evil. When in reality, if we met these people, we’d realise they are little different from us.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book with the working title Army Jerks: 6 Years as a Soldier in the Australian Army.

By Peter Ross

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Picture: Flickr/Anna & Michal