Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by phenderson on April 18, 2000 at 18:32:44:

In Reply to: What we are looking for in a war movie posted by Victor Khomenko on April 18, 2000 at 13:21:25:

It is a fact of the human condition that while the enlightened deplore war, nobody wants to put an end to it. What?? Not even me?? No, not even you. While war for war's sake seems beyond defense, wars are generally the result of nations or peoples preferring war to the alternatives. Who is willing to say they would happily become the minion of Hitler or Stalin rather than resist at the risk of life and limb? There are pacifists and some religious groups who feel this way, and I am glad there are such people, but their stance is a hard one to maintain. The pacifists of the Viet Nam War era turned militarists when it came to intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo. So long as we have a multi-cultural planet and significant poverty we will have war. Even if poverty is ended by productivity, man's innate cruelty, his lust for power, and even boredom may revive international or intranational violence. Meanwhile the goal of reducing the world to a universal belief system so as to end conflict is typically the prelude to a scheme of forcibly imposing one culture on the others, utilizing violence, subterfuge, blackmail and centralized government power -- which is one small part of what the recent demonstrations in Washington were about.
As long as there is war, there will be stories about war, and it is inevitable that they will often attempt to focus on some positive aspect. After all, given that we fought Germany, aren't we glad we won? Wasn't Eisenhower brilliant? Wasn't Rommel a worthy foe? And so forth. There are heroes in war, just as there are heroes in a fire. That doesn't make the fire any less tragic. I have never seen a movie about a real fire, but if there were one I wouldn't want to sit in my seat watching people burned alive, one after another, even if that happened in the actual fire. I suppose, for educational purposes, we need to remind the public just how horrible wars are, and also just how horrible fires or shark attacks can be. But it is just not possible (unless you are perverse) to enjoy watching hours of horribleness if you have the option of changing the channel. Even the most negative portrayal of war will be less horrible than the actual experience. Human life takes place in a space suspended between good and evil. If you can figure out a way to get rid of the evil that doesn't involve taking humanity by the scruff of the neck, let us know. Religion tries, and though it is often abused by bad people (especially politicians), the underlying doctrines of western religions tell us to be content with our lot, try to behave as well as we can, and treat others kindly. They also postulate a perfect being above us to whom we are accountable, which may drain off at least a portion of our excess of pride, vanity and arrogance. Humanistic creeds tell us to object to our lot and sacrifice some people so that others may rise. They provide us with an allegedly value-free social science with which to manage the process. With their cost-benefit calculus and winner-loser methodology the humanists are morally more primitive than most religions, though we think of them as more advanced. Once one begins a process that creates winners and losers, strife is inevitable.
America is a country of optimism and idealism. America has a shared religion if you will in which happy endings are possible, even likely. I dare say this trait is a good one and to be nourished, not deflated. For our chronically positive outlook has a lot to do with making America a good place to come to, and making America a relatively benign corner of the globe. These qualities have eroded in recent decades, in part because we have been tongue-lashed by radicals and bohemians into believing ourselves to be crass and animalistic. Though the premiss is one of moral instruction, the effect is often one of diverting us from the moral life, as if morality itself had been shamed. Millions of people have come here of their own free will, escaping one thing or another, or merely seeking their fortune, while hardly anybody leaves. Yes, some people came here as slaves, but mostly by way of South America and with the help of European slave traders who had been operating for centuries. In America's devout and libertarian culture, slavery and its worst abuses quickly melted, whereas they lasted many hundreds of years in other locales. Today America is obsessed with racial justice, but where are the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, who instigated the slave trade and kidnapped many millions over the years? When will the Dutch consider paying reparations to the black inhabitants of modern Surinam, or the Portuguese pay reparations to the Afro-Brazilians, or demand that Afro-Brazilians hold high office in proportion to their numbers? I doubt they give it a moment's thought!
Exaggerating our idealism is a way of preserving it from generation to generation. The fashionable skepticism toward American idealism has grown alongside an ever diminishing quantity of idealism. Nowadays, we do not expect ourselves to behave nobly, so we don't. The gratuitous violence and horror in modern-style war movies conveys to me a nihilistic viewpoint or even a thinly veiled sadomasochism. It aestheticizes blood and death, sweeping aside the heroic dimension consisting in the hero's choice of how to respond to a terrible but inevitable situation. It also pressures us to think that heroism is a conceit if not a sinister fraud, which is sometimes true but sometimes not.
I don't object to war movies that leave us feeling very sad and/or angry that such things are allowed to occur. But neither do I object to war movies that downplay the blood and gore in order to focus on the larger struggles that these wars are a part of (e.g. against Nazism) or the heroism of individuals caught up in them. Each type of movie is true in its own way. But I hope that in the future heroism will be less necessary than in the past, and I freely grant that much glorification of war has been practised from bad intentions and has perpetrated lies of the sort Mr. Khomenko would point to.
A final thought: Americans sometimes speak of having paid a price in blood for our freedom. If that is true, the consequence should be that in the future, as free men and women, we don't have to put up with someone telling us to go out and die for what he or she considers to be imperative. We would not want to say, "the price of freedom is eternal slavery", for that would make no sense! But so far, the price of freedom seems to involve a little slavery now and then, and I don't know how to remove this imperfection.