Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
'Pacific' a Sequel to Exalt War Passions, Not Reflection
Almost 10 years ago Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg teamed up to produce "Band of Brothers," the thick-blooded story of a U.S. Army company making its way from Normandy to the end of World War II in Europe. The 10-part HBO miniseries cost $120 million. This month the Hanks-Spielberg team launched its follow-up, "The Pacific," also in 10 parts and on HBO. That one cost $200 million and remixes an almost identical soundtrack. The similarities end where history bows to worship.
The first at least made an effort to render war the way "All Quiet on the Western Front" was about war: Valor matters, but it doesn't trump horror no matter how noble the mission. The second is a memorial to war, much like the strangely Third Reich-like World War II memorial in Washington. It's more self-conscious pride than sorrow, more gauze than blood, and disturbingly flirty with propagandizing war's necessity.
Lines like "this great undertaking for god and country" and "everybody's got to make sacrifices" (a strange line to hear in a decade of wars when no one but military families have made sacrifices) occur early on. When a young man can't join the service because of his health, he's crushed and cries the tears of an Achilles denied. As if on cue, when a brainy Marine is asked to tell his company "why we're here," he quotes from the "Illiad" ("Without a sign, his sword a brave man draws/ And asks no omen but his country's cause") -- an unfortunate reference, the Trojan War marking, as historian Barbara Tuchman put it, the first step in Western civilization's march of folly. When a hero dies, violins are louder than bullets (just like the water geysers are the loudest things at the World War II memorial) -- "a lie about death," as the critic Nancy Franklin describes it. Far from an original or groundbreaking production, this is the Pacific war as Life magazine snapshot it 65 years ago: Sanitized of context or nuance or anything else that might interfere with the deification of the American fighting man. This is the kind of movie you make to jazz up men for battle, not trouble us with reflection.
I've only seen the first episode of the spectacle, though I sensed I'd seen them all before the first frame. When "Band of Brothers" came out anticipation couldn't be too dented by advance publicity. That's no longer possible. Between YouTube, Facebook, blogged spoilers, reviews more wordy than the screenplay and saturation marketing, the original is old news before you see it. You can safely wait for the DVD collection as a Father's Day present and miss nothing. Not that there's too much to miss in a sequel that speaks at least as much about where we are as a society today than it does about the war 65 years ago, beginning with the motive behind "The Pacific."
When Maya Lin designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., veterans groups were upset that the memorial didn't pay homage to living soldiers. So a sculpture was commissioned to show three fighting men (one black, one Latino, one white) frozen next to the memorial. Then Korean War veterans complained they had no memorial, so they got theirs (an appropriately grim one showing a platoon of soldiers walking unquestioningly in a winter of that war). Then the women and nurses of Vietnam complained that they'd been ignored, and they got their memorial.
"Pacific" was made the same way. Veterans of the Pacific war wanted their "Band of Brothers," as if that series didn't speak a truth universal enough about the entire war. But it did. The Pacific war was not a sequel. It is here, with all the hand-me-down fatigues of war sequels.
War worship aside, I'm also getting tired of our nation looking back at World War II for validating heroics of brotherhood and egalitarian selflessness on the battlefield when we can't muster the same sense of national purpose today at home, where matters are slightly easier. The wealthier the country has become as a whole, the more unequal and fragmented in its parts. The more idealistic we are in our easy nostalgias, which cost nothing, the more grasping and Darwinian we are in our laws and businesses, which cost millions their chance at a decent living. Equal opportunity and the dignity of those who have less, let alone those who need more, is held in contempt.
"Band of Brothers" may have worked because it resonated with what made the nation into what it is. "Pacific" works only in so far as it reflects what the nation has become: a monument to itself more bloated with pride than possibilities.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
24 Comments so far
Show AllThe best telling of the Pacific War would feature at least four narratives: an American GI, a Japanese soldier, a citizen of China or the Philippines, and a Japanese resident of Hiroshima. This "glorious war" needs to be looked at from all sides, not just from one as Spielberg and Brokaw do.
WWII, ironically, was a blow against writing a rational foreign policy for the next sixty-five years. It implied that violent solutions work--a lesson that never came out of WWI, for example. For three generations after WWII ended, American foreign policy ever looked back at the triumph of the last world war and assumed victories would be forthcoming in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and more. Except they didn't come. And they won't. How many more generations will pass before the consequences of this miserable conflict will have played themselves out?
Drosera scalpels through to the internal problems of many war movies. Of course, the winner tells the story, going back even further than the Book of Exodus.
The "Pacific" trailer on youtube does show, though, some moviemaking magic still. Spielberg has how many thousands who depend on him to come up with "product?" Remember that he directed "Munich" too. Perched precariously on top of a cultural pyramid, Hollywood Movies can't help being what they are.
And Drosera hit my heart too when he mentioned the Philippines occupation, because I've spent the last two years on Mindanao, their southern island. The Japanese occupation is remembered as particularly brutal, so the Americans are loved for returning to boot them out. The people there were so demoralized that for the next fifty years, 90% of the hardwood teak and mahogany trees were cut down for cash. The country's jewels were pawned for the next fiesta that helped the partiers forget horrors.
Now that the last soldier of the Rising Sun has heard that the Emperor surrendered, the Japanese are coming back to replant the trees. Grow Your Own!--movies about my experiences doing that with the Filipinos can be clicked here...
http://co101w.col101.mail.live.com/default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0
peace,
jeff jacob
"It implied that violent solutions work--a lesson that never came out of WWI, for example."
I don't completely agree with this. WW1 resulted in the ineffective League of Nations and horrible reparations against Germany which paved the way for fascistic extremism to flourish.
WW2 resulted in the United Nations (which isn't all that effective, but better than nothing), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other important documents, the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Japan, etc. It could have resulted in much worse.
[I don't completely agree with this. WW1 resulted in the ineffective League of Nations ]
The article and the poster were talking about cultural things, like books, movies and plays. You're bringing political events into the mix. I'd argue that politics are interesting, but humanity developed not because of politicians, but because of artists.
Hm, when she mentioned "writing a rational foreign policy", I must've misunderstood it. My bad.
No, it's my bad. I was thinking of the article more than the post...
But Pacific's "only" the BS (Bush Shadow's) doublespeaking propaganda to steel US for our mutual Iranian assault; like PBS' The War was for the final Bush surge! Obamanible black hole, anyone?
Nice, truth-telling piece by Mr. Tristam.
I've long felt that one of history's great ironies is that the worst thing that's ever happened to this country was winning WW2. This left us with a permanent military in place and led, in 1947, to the National Security State...a hideous, secretive monster that has been gnawing at the nation's vitals ever since.
"war is only good for those who make and sell the guns..." John Gorka
The Nazi SOBs, by being so completely evil, made it possible to convince otherwise reasonable and decent people that war could be glorious and redeeming.
One might say that the worst war is the good war.
Well, we did sort of demobilize in the years after WW2..."you want a vote, send me a boat" and all that from the veterans. But it came back for the Korean War, that's for sure. I'm not familiar with the state of the military between the Korean and Vietnam wars though.
War stories have been popular since Homer, and before.
Why would anyone expect that this will change any time soon?
Especially in this benighted age.
Of course the 'Pacific War' is going to be war-rallying propaganda. How else are the powers that be going to convince young people to join up and kill Iranians for Israel? If you want to ramp up support for another unnecessary war, you've got to pull out all the propaganda tricks.
Hence the production of historical 'fiction' like 'The Pacific'.
The trumping up of phony discord between the USA and Israel over the 'peace process'.
Watch for a staged attack by 'Iranian' forces soon in the Persian Gulf.
Perhaps Spielberg and Hanks should do a film about the grieff that Mothers and Fathers suffer when there sons ,daughters, brothers and sisters come home in a box.
Perhaps they should do a film about the obscene proffits made by the arms manafactures, while they ensconse themselves far from the front in sterile oppulent surroundings.
Perhaps they should do a film about how decisions are made regarding said proffits over lives that are not even on the ledger.
Perhaps they should do a film about what is happening to there once esteemed democracy under the guise of protecting, defending it.
Perhaps they should take a hard look at themselves and ask "is there another motive for making this other than more money"
Perhaps they should but they wont, they are now part of the problem.
Perhaps they should include in the section about "obscene profits" the money made by a GW ancestor who profited from both sides of the war. Those profits were later used to establish the family fortune that gave us both of the Bush presidencies.
Sioux Rose
SKIENDHIU: Thank you for a post that reflects conscience, as well as higher consciousness. Speilberg and Hanks don't realize (?) the degree to which their power as artists is being used to facilitate an interest in war on the part of the young, that generation that might otherwise outgrow this disastrous reptilian response to conflict at a time wherein resource depletion begs that people learn to work together towards shared solutions, rather than destroy each other in a competitive quest to reach the last of what remains.
I remember reading in Harper's that the CIA began funding artists in l949 who projected anti-communist themes into their media works. It's plausible that the embarassment of riches thrown at the MIC makes possible a budgetary stream diverted to artists willing to champion war, and/or celebrate anti-terrorist themes in their modern creative works. Tragedy is compelled through too many venues.
War is essential to nation states - it's the shedding of blood that binds the band of brothers together in the service of the patria. If Band of Brothers was more muted, it was made in a less militaristic time. Now that Americanism has all too obviously revealed itself to be a fascist ideology, I expect far more story telling of this sort, story telling designed to justify torture, invasion, extra judicial murder, genocidal attack on "enemy" populations and adulation of the hired killers who enable all these horrors and atrocities. It is already here, in populist dramas. Hurt Locker was an exerise in the same genre. Now another set of quality propagandists have joined the task force.
The only thing that makes me tired are authors like this trying to take things out of the context of their time. That was a time when men indeed cried because they werre rejected because it was a war that would determine whose way of life would ruke.
Anyone stupid enough to wish the Nazi, Japanese or Italians had triumphed or that wish to revise things to suit their own little prejudices in this day and time are simply ignorant, uneducated callow children. Period.
I doubt that from what I've heard so far that the Pacific will be a truthful representation of that time or those battles.
The protest is not that it will not be 'truthful' but that it will be used to rally another generation to fight a war now. It's like using the Franco-Prussian war as a justification to fight the Second World War.
Asking that a 'docudrama' like the 'Pacific' not be a gung ho let's all get together and smite Amerukahs enemies, is not the same thing as wishing that the Axis had won the last major war. Unless you're an idiot.
Drosera is right. The WWII American victory narrative led the next several generations of US policy makers to believe that killing people can successfully work to achieve laudable ends, and letting slip the dogs of war would never come back to bite you in the ass (Vietnam being the exception that therefore validates the rule). Militarism works, you see. That's the intended message. If the cause is just, the command leadership remains steadfast, and the troops are heroic, then militarism works.
Having watched the first two episodes of "The Pacific", I share Pierre Tristam's criticisms. There is little if any nuance and a great deal of follow-the-flag cheerleading. Nothing there remotely resembling Catch-22, Vonnegut, Mailer, or Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - war stories that transcend glorification of war and expose its tragic absurdities.
In my opinion, there is one redeeming aspect of The Pacific that should be properly credited. The Pacific theatre of operations in World War II was deeply fueled by rabid racism. The Japanese slogan was Asia for the Asians. In return, American propaganda virulently depicted the Japanese as a ratlike, subhuman species to be exterminated. Life magazine in 1942 actually ran a major article ostensibly educating Americans how they could tell the physiological difference between "good" Chinese (our allies) and "bad" Japs (the enemy).
There are scattered moments in the script of The Pacific in which the blatancy of the underlying racism gets verbalized in a very jarring manner - briefing speeches to fire up the troops for the big assault at daybreak for instance, in which the viewer is momentarily made aware how vicious racial stereotyping in the 1940's was just another tool in the Pentagon psy-ops toolbox for the waging of war.
For that reminder, I give the HBO Pacific series one-and-one-half stars.
Bill from Saginaw
An interesting point, Bill. Racism informed the Pacific war in ways that it did not in Europe. Some have speculated that the great number of Americans of German ancestry (from Eisenhower on down) played a part in this. For example, the US Army Air Force in the Pacific adopted the British tactic of indiscriminate area bombing by night (which they had disdained in Europe) of civilian areas of Japan. And eventually, did the most horrifically indiscriminate bombings of all - Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I was impressed by "Band of Brothers" (even a pacifist friend of mine was impressed by it, such was its quality). Sadly, I get the impression that "Pacific" is not in the same league.
Plug the Speekies On Your Tweet empirePie March 25th, 2010
The predator in all of us;
Homo-erectus of the fore by four;
Hummer dumber than before,
four score, for a score of seven, when years ago
time tuned in for the dormant cells
to flash the flesh for bigger sells.
But you are not alone,
just without a pilot,... on a jumbo jet
a jumbo drone
crouched for that final flash
to rebuild the towers with more cash.
so feather your lair
paint feathers on your Lear
settle on the couch
to untune the ‘white man’s burden’
then at...
Five cents a peek
plug the speekies on your tweet.
war may be hell, but it is also very entertaining especially on TV.
I'm so sick of Spielberg and Hanks and glorifying war. Period. If they had experienced its horrors first-hand, there is no way would they be making these staggeringly bullshit propaganda films.
America's military-entertinment complex makes me want to retch. Hollywood and the DoD are joined at the phallus.