You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.
― Harold Pinter, No Man’s Land
It’s always good to take notice when a historical event from the distant past begins to pop up all over the place in the present popular culture. I assure you, it is no coincidence when this happens, sometimes stretching across many canvases of creativity – film, television, novels, painting, music and photography.
The phenomenon is not to be associated with the “collective unconscious,” the Jungian idea that deep in our minds sits shared genetically inherited beliefs and instincts, such as spirituality, sexuality, and life and death impulses. According to Jung, these beliefs and instincts are not shaped by personal experience. Rather, they are with us from birth. And as such, they have universal meaning across cultures which may show up in dreams, religion, literature and art.
So what does all this have to do about trench warfare?
I’ll explain.
Creatives, in my opinion, have always been the human version of “canaries in the coal mine” – not dropping dead mid-flight after a sniff of invisible poison gas, of course, but capturing on film, canvas, or the page, a predicted future, be it tragic, triumphant or somewhere in between.
To accomplish this an artist must be inspired, skilled, determined and, most importantly, frightened and angered by what they sense is coming. A classic example is George Orwell’s 1984, which he wrote in 1949, a fictional warning about totalitarian overreach, systemic censorship, and the use of misinformation to control the masses. Orwell came to these conclusions through deep thought and through personal experience, including fighting in the trenches during Spanish Civil War on the side of the anti-fascists. He left the conflict wounded, dispirited, and disillusioned, something he wrote extensively about in Homage to Catalonia:
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
Orwell’s subsequent distrust of the ruling class and their manipulation of the soldier/worker became manifest in his work from then on out, and served as the emotional underpinning for his two undisputed masterpieces: Animal Farm and, as mentioned, 1984. More than seeing the writing on the wall, Orwell felt the future in every fiber of his being. And so he sounded the alarm, choosing to dispense his message in story rather than soapbox, knowing that this would have a more far-reaching and lasting impact. As Rebecca Romney well ascribes in her article, Why Orwell Wrote Fiction:
Orwell wanted to write against the dangers of totalitarianism, but he wanted to drive the point home by writing a novel. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly. He wanted to write his treatment in a form that, if it succeeded, would simply be impossible truly to replicate in a state that wasn’t free. Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Orwell wanted to show us the type of art we would be missing if we lost that liberty.
Now we finally get to trench warfare. It seems to me that recently, many movies and shows and books are focused on World War I and this style of inertiatic battle. For brevity, I’ll focus on just one of these films, 1917, released last year and widely seen and recognized with awards. It portrays vividly, and with immediacy, the suffering of the soldier fighting in the trenches, the madness of it, the horrific sacrifice of lives and dignity and sanity for just a few inches of meaningless turf. It’s a heartbreaking treatise in callousness and cruelty.
And, to me, it’s also a warning about a future that may be already here and growing.
But instead of trenches ground into the European soil, our furrows dug and sandbags piled are happening on social media. Political factions are fighting a fierce war, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, on Twitter and Facebook and other online sharing sites. Mortars are thrown in 140-word missives and machine-gun fire in memes. Algorithms are the new barbed wire and no man’s land is cancel culture. We fight and we fight and we fight.
And for what? A victory in one moment, a slew of likes, per se, are erased the next with criticism and bullying. In the end, no ground is gained. Only the trenches get deeper.
Like Orwell and many others like him, I believe modern artists have a good sense of what is coming. And like him, they are angered, and they are frightened. I know I am.
Time to end the fighting.
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