Conflict on Screen: Hollywood Goes to War
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - Not so long ago, Hollywood was famously shy of telling stories ripped straight from the headlines. The movies, after all, are a form of escapism, first and foremost. Who wants to go to the multiplex to get more of the same depressing images being broadcast on the evening news?
Film-makers and studio chiefs preferred to take a more oblique route to commenting on the pressing events of the moment, especially when it came to questions of war and peace. They transferred the conflict to an earlier time, or to another culture, or simply kept quiet until the conflict itself was long over. Robert Altman’s counter-cultural masterpiece M*A*S*H famously managed to send up the absurdities of the Vietnam war while purporting to be set 20 years earlier in Korea. More recently, Ridley Scott gave us an earful on the follies of imperialism in the Middle East by recreating the Crusades in Kingdom of Heaven. 
Now, though, Hollywood seems to have lost its coyness. Perhaps it began with Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which turned anger at the Bush administration on the eve of the 2004 presidential election into an unlikely box-office hit. Perhaps the moment of truth came with last year’s United 93, Paul Greengrass’s harrowing recreation of the doomed fourth jetliner on 11 September 2001, whose passengers sacrificed themselves to avoid a greater atrocity in a major East Coast city.
The plain fact, though, is that we are about to be inundated with dramas set either in or around the Iraq war, and the tone of most, if not all, of them is hardly complimentary to George Bush’s military adventure in the Middle East.
The first of them is also the one with the highest profile, since it has been written and directed by Paul Haggis, the Canadian film-maker who wrote Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby, then walked away with the Best Picture Oscar for his directorial debut, Crash.
Haggis’s film is called In the Valley of Elah (the Valley of Elah being the place where David slew Goliath), and it follows the story of Army Specialist Richard Davis whose mysterious death near his home base at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2003 was covered up until Davis’s father took on the investigation and discovered he had been stabbed to death by members of his own platoon because he had witnessed atrocities they had committed in Iraq. The film, set for release in the United States in September, stars Tommy Lee Jones as the father and Susan Sarandon as the mother, and Charlize Theron as a (fictionalised) detective who helps the father’s investigation.
About a month later, US cinemas will start showing Grace Is Gone, a melodrama first screened at the Sundance Film Festival (to a mixed reception) in which John Cusack stars as a bereaved husband who has to tell his two daughters that their mother has been killed in action in Iraq.
Around the same time, Reese Witherspoon will be starring in Rendition, as an American woman whose Egyptian-born husband is suspected of involvement with international terrorism. Just before Christmas, Brian De Palma will be out with Redacted, about an Army squad that torments an Iraqi family.
The list goes on. Next year will see the release of Stop Loss, directed by Kimberly Peirce (who made Boys Don’t Cry), in which Ryan Philippe plays a soldier who defies an order to return to Iraq after his tour of duty is officially over. Greengrass, meanwhile, is adapting the non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City - which tells the story of what happened behind closed doors in Baghdad’s super-protected Green Zone - to provide us with what will presumably be a verité-style account of all the mistakes and mis-steps made by the US occupying forces from 2003 to the present. His film is unlikely to come out before 2009.
Several things about these projects come as a surprise. First, that they are being made at all while US service men and women are still fighting the war they concern themselves with. Second, that they all overwhelmingly focus on aspects of American failure - military, political, diplomatic and also spiritual failure. (A seminal image in In The Valley of Elah, we are told, is a Stars and Stripes flag hung upside down somewhere in heartland America.) And third, that they are so close to the sorts of issues that continue to exercise the news and opinion pages of the world’s newspapers.
This is not at all the standard pattern of war film-making over the past century or so. The very first war films ever made - and many, many more since - have essentially been adjuncts of the national propaganda machine, cheering on the troops and demonising the enemy. A 90-second short produced in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War, depicted the (entirely fictitious) seizure of a Spanish government compound in Havana, the Cuban capital, the removal of the Spanish flag by US troops and its replacement by the American flag.
In the intervening years, Hollywood has happily pumped out (and later been somewhat embarrassed by) such titles as The Sands of Iwo Jima, a 1949 John Wayne vehicle in which the account of one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War was sanitised and heavily distorted, or The Green Berets, another John Wayne project from 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, in which the Americans were shown to be winning the war in Vietnam at precisely the moment it was becoming clear that they were in fact losing.
The best, most powerful, most questioning war films have invariably been made once the fighting had stopped. All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the seminal films about the First World War, was not made until 1930. Other notable titles about that conflict were even longer in coming - Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, made in 1957, or Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981).
The same was true of the Second World War, not least because several high-profile Hollywood stars signed up for active duty and the industry as a whole had an interest in falling into lockstep behind the national project. Cinema screens in the early 1940s were dominated by tales of derring-do and stiff-upper-lip courage under fire - films like Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York, which told the story of a Tennessee farmer turned unlikely military hero from the First World War, or Yankee Doodle Dandy, an unabashedly patriotic musical starring James Cagney, of all people, or stirring, morale-boosting British imports like In Which We Serve or The Battle of Britain.
It wasn’t until 1946 that audiences started seeing more bittersweet stories like William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which looked at the traumatic effect of combat on a group of returning veterans.
That, though, was a conflict that most Americans - despite considerable initial scepticism - ended up supporting. In the case of Vietnam, where US public opinion went in the opposite direction, from support to doubt, Hollywood was extraordinarily cautious about saying anything too directly critical while the war was still on. M*A*S*H caused a furore with the conservative heartland, as did Jane Fonda’s decision, at the height of her Oscar-winning fame, to travel to Hanoi.
In a singularly poisonous political atmosphere, nobody dared make a film chronicling America’s failure in South-east Asia - with the possible exception of Francis Ford Coppola and friends, who seriously considered trying to shoot an early draft of Apocalypse Now in the midst of the real-life fighting in 1972. (They concluded that the risks were just too great.) So it wasn’t until the late 1970s, after the US withdrawal, that we saw the release of films like The Deerhunter, Coming Home and, later, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. By the time of their release, American revisionism of the conflict was in full swing, and soon gave fruit to movies like the Rambo series, in which the Vietnam war was essentially refought and won. The 2004 presidential campaign, in which John Kerry’s war record was questioned and distorted, proved that the issue remains incendiary in American political life.
Fast-forward to the current conflict in Iraq, and no such revisionism is in sight. Unlike any previous war, there simply hasn’t been a propaganda-style movie to chivvy on the home-front audience (unless you count Disney’s Hidalgo, released in 2004, which purports to be the true story of a champion American horse rider who tore up the Arabian desert to win a famous race a century ago - a story that turned out not to be true at all).
Diehard Bush supporters (a dwindling band, these past couple of years) would no doubt argue - as they have argued for the past five years - that Hollywood is simply an unpatriotic hotbed of liberal political correctness unable to set any political issue in its proper context. One prominent veteran, Dennis Griffee, of the Iraq War Veterans Organization, has refused to have anything to do with In The Valley Of Elah because it stars Susan Sarandon, one of Hollywood’s most outspoken anti-war voices.
That argument, though, ignores Hollywood’s history of happily playing any side of the political fence as long as it fulfils the primal need of the entertainment industry, which is to make money.
That, in the end, will be the acid test of the new crop of movies. If they are hits, we will see more of them.
If they are not, Hollywood will doubtless change the subject very quickly indeed. To Paris Hilton. Or something.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
If the mainstream media won’t tell us the truth, and if the government won’t tell us the truth, then we must do what they did in communist Russia - put it out in books, music, movies. Just like any other repressive society, people will still rise up any way they can until the message gets out, or until they wind up dead.
But the important thing is to get the message out. This war, the private army.
What do you think Blackwater is going to do after the Iraq war ends? Just call it quits? I don’t think so.
www.NotOneMore.US - Pledge for Peace
“I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what I don’t want, and get it.” - Eugene Debs
Who ever makes a flim on Gulf War Vets, depleated uranium used in Iraq and the effects on our troops and on the people of Iraq ,will shake the hearts of all who watch it. Real life story are money makers.
The movie “Three Kings” was set during the first Gulf War. A remake of WWII-set “Kelly’s Heroes”, it was pure Hollywood fantasy of the goodness of Americans at war.
The movie “Syriana” is probably closer to the truth.
And please, let us not forget the biggest Hollywood (and New York) lie about the Middle-East as established by Uris’ book and film adaptation “Exodus”.
Great article, compelling, rich in detail and context.
I do want to make a small note and that is in context to the actual impact antiwar films may have on the desired populace, if for example, there is an actual desired populace and a desired effect. After reading and amateur reviewing My War, by Colby Buzzell, I briefly made note of how many other volunteers in the US military were just like Buzzel and claimed Apocalypse Now, and Full Metal Jacket were on their favorite picks list. I thought to myself, now there is a contradiction in terms. What a painfully splendid example of a paradox.
anyway….
I observe how often Ms P. Hilton gets mentioned, in relation to anything trite, empty, shallow and meaningless.
Methinks it’s about time we worked on her. An epiphany is overdue.
After her ‘Damascurian enlightenment’, if every time she featured in the mEss media, she then also vociferously spoke out again the crazed effluvia of President Dicky-heart Cheney etc, -she would then become less of an ass,
~ and more of an asset.
‘Paris J. Fonda’,
- I like the sound of that…
Okay hollywood, (once we find out why he was murdered by his own comrades (three M-16 bullets too closely spaced on the rear of his skull to be an accident)it is time for “The Pat Tillman Story”.
I can see it opening with some actual scenes of Pat’s highlight tape of pro football play, the press conference where he announces his intention to relinquish a multi-million dollar football career to go kill “ragheads”, and then the phoney announcement of his death by hostile fire.
Then the best part of the movie as Pat’s Army Ranger brother and the rest of his grieving family slowly, agonizingly, and then finally find out why the lying bastards who killed Pat did so and how the whole rotten stinking chain of command all the way to the Pentagon (and probably the White House too)were complicit in the cover up.
Somewhere deceased two time congressional medal of honor recipient General Smedley Butler would be smiling!
Film is a mirror held up to a culture–both its conscious and its unconscious elements.
In this case, I would like to HOPE that the filmmakers are sincere in taking a critical stance in regard to the damage the US is wreaking in the world.
There is a big part of me, however that says–Hey, these guys are reflecting crtical stances because they want that seemingly larger and larger minorityt who are against either the war in Iraq or Bush’s handling of it to buy tickets to see their films.
Money is never to be discounted as a primary motivator.
Army Specialist Richard Davis!!! This is the first time I’ve herd of this. Anyone know where I can find out more about this case and anyone know where I can find out more about the atrocities commited by his murderers?
‘Entertainment’ shares etymological root with ‘entrainment’. Though we evolve through genres of the John Wayne sort to “MASH” - we’re still entrained by the control of information.
Apparently Walt Disney got his start making labor force cultivation films for the Department of Labor fielded in Mexico. Also that Donald Duck is fashioned after a precolumbian shaft tomb (read: sacred - never should have been dug up)sculpture called the Colima Duck. http://www.umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum/imgexh/pages/frmimgexh.html
I hear the cadences of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and remember Fantasia w/Mickey Mouse innundated with the chaos of play in the sorcerer’s den.
For some reason I can not get in to comment on the Tillman thread, but I fervently hope for America’s sake, that whole issue is laid bare to the light of truth. (gotta’ hold on to some dreams anyway)
The best movie maker born here, sadly, are in exile and doing great - that was so common during the Vietnam War
Hollywood - a mouthpiece for delusional plans that pushed the good aspects of this Country down a dangerous course of action for the benefits of a few ruthless mad men and women, in denial of anything that the blindest soul on earth would see and evaluate for what it is: a fraudulent attempt to duplicate a failed British Empire format - too bad, too late, too phny to succeed and people here will have to face the costs - and the REAL consequences of what this troublesome delusion carries with it…
POET:Did Pat Tillman use the term “raghead(s)” in a news conference? I do not recall this happening. Please clarify this and/or correct the use of the quotation marks that seem to indicate P.T. used the pejorative and racist term.
I have been an antiwar activist for 40yrs, but Pat’s corpse has been defiled and exploited enough already. If he used the term then I can easily move on to the next issue.
Thank you, POET, for clarification. I do in general like your posts.
They already make a TV movie, “Saving Jessica Lynch.” So you can’t say they haven’t tried to do pro-war propaganda. But that’s small-screen and I assume pretty embarassing when the subject herself calls her film a lie.
At the risk of being called arrogant by the ego-phobic, I’ve been trying to be a far left storyteller for the past twenty years …
http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1479
… but I’ve been dealt nothing but grief for all my troubles …
http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1744
http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2003/02/19/export274.txt
… the following pretty much sums up the barriers storytellers such as myself face: Compare and contrast the two paragraphs …
“… movies, after all, are a form of escapism, first and foremost. Who wants to go to the multiplex to get more of the same depressing images being broadcast on the evening news?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Deadly_Ground#Criticisms
On Deadly Ground was also criticized for using the context of an action-adventure film to promote an environmentalist message … The final scene, with Seagal giving a speech about the obsolescence of the internal combustion engine and the need for cleaner alternative fuels, was cut from its original 11 minute length before the film’s release after audiences at initial screenings complained it was overlong and preachy.
… I can see the tombstone now: Here lies the planet Earth–died from global warming because some spoiled ass white folks from the suburbs thought an eco-friendly movie was “overlong and preachy” …
http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2004/05/26/opinion/fear_no_evil/fearnoevil.txt
“Africa, which contributes the least to global warming, is suffering the most,” an August 2003 issue of Workers World reported. “The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, emits 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.”
The American movie audience is, by and large, so brain dead and incapable of independent thought that only a small minority will respond in any constructive way to films like the ones described. If that were not the case, we would not be in the where we are.
Any rational, reality based, civil society would have stopped this fiasco with the stolen election of 2000. 911 would never have occurred and unbridled, catastrophic climate change would not be accelerating apace.
The runaway fascist train has too much mass and momentum to be stopped by a few loose rails or bodies on the tracks. Only an immovable wall of revolution has any chance of stopping it.
relayer@q.com
There have been so many good non-Hollywood films on the Middle East and Iraq recently. “Reel Bad Arabs” by Jack Shaheen and “Iraq for Sale” come to mind. You can find clips on google video on these two. I also highly recommend the film “In this World” about an Afghan refugee boy.
Don’t even bother with the Hollywood crowd if you want to learn the truth of whats going on. They are just banking on an anti-war trend to make money.
Hollywood essentially plays one side of the political fence, that of the status quo, as John Pilger makes clear in “Hollywood Hurrah” excerpted below and found at this link: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=1525
Are the coming films likely to break the mold? Probably not; we’ll see.
Pilger:
Following the Vietnam war, in which around five million Vietnamese were killed during the American invasion, and their land was destroyed and poisoned by American weapons of mass destruction, Hollywood came to the rescue with a string of Rambo-and-angst films that invited the audience to pity the invader. These films provided a cultural purgative that helped clear the way for America to mount other Vietnams - in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia and elsewhere. The current “war on terrorism” is underpinned by the same Hollywood caricatures. Films like Black Hawk Down, which promotes a mendacious version of America’s killing spree in Somalia, act as cultural “softeners” before the bombing starts again for real.
Even in finely crafted films like The Deer Hunter and Platoon that look as if they might break ranks, there is an implicit oath of loyalty to imperial culture. This was true of Three Kings, a movie that seemed to take issue with the Gulf war, but instead produced a familiar “bad apple” tale, exonerating the militarism that is now rampant. So dominant is Hollywood in our lives, and so collusive are its camp-following critics, that the films that ought to have been made are unmentionable. Name the mainstream movies that have shone light on to the vast shadow thrown by the American secret state, and the mayhem for which it is responsible. I can think of only a few: Costa-Gavras’s Missing, which was about the destruction of the elected government in Chile by General Pinochet’s puppet masters in Washington, and Oliver Stone’s Salvador, which made the connection between Reagan’s Washington and El Salvador’s death squads. Both these films were quirks of the system, funded with great difficulty and, in the case of Missing, dogged by vengeful court actions.
The slaughter of up to 8,000 urban poor in George Bush Sr’s attack on Panama in 1990 would make a fine action movie. And why not a sequel to Black Hawk Down, this time with the 8,000-10,000 Somali dead (a CIA estimate) who were airbrushed from the original? Or how about a David and Goliath epic set in modern Palestine, with young Palestinians facing down American tanks and warplanes operated by Israelis?
“… these films were quirks of the system, funded with great difficulty … dogged by vengeful court actions.”
And yet, I swore an oath to God years ago that I’d spend the rest of what’s left of my life being such a quirk in the system — despite the Rocky-esque odds against me. Someone else said …
“The runaway fascist train has too much mass and momentum to be stopped by a few loose rails or bodies on the tracks. Only an immovable wall of revolution has any chance of stopping it.”
… that’s exactly why I’m gambling that the pen is mightier than the sword …
http://coanews.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1479
… maybe the sword is mightier, but I’m far too old to be running around in the bush with a gun like Che, so I’ve gotta hope/wish/pray that being a storyteller is enough …