On War Films

How a genre develops during the Global War on Terror

Connor Mannion
Aug 23, 2017 · 9 min read
(Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2016)

War films in the modern era suffer from an emotional crisis I’ve noticed. We’re in the transition period of how a genre is made and structured, which I’m not sure I’ve ever been alive for or observed in a meaningful way.

I guess it would help to define the genre as it was and then move on to how it is changing.

War films are, succinctly, films about war and conflicts. It’s one of the earliest genres of film — emerging before really the concept of genre came about in media studies.

War film as a genre predates film study when you think about it (newsreels with zealous updates on the war are worth their own course of study), so it’s interesting to examine them because they predate criticism. But essentially they’ve held the same central plotting for a long time: good v. evil, an unstoppable moral good somehow crashing throw an immovable evil.

This is best demonstrated through a cursory summation of war films in the 1940s and 1950s. Most, if not all of them, are tales of heroism from the front lines. (Sergeant York and The Red Badge of Courage are good examples of this).

These films have a protagonist who is a mythic figure: a figure who overcomes doubts and flaws to become more than man: a legendary hero.

[War films are, unfairly, a masculine-ized endeavor so it’s almost always from a male perspective.]

These films, as far as my experience/viewing can tell, didn’t really vary until two key events, one real and one cinematic.

One was the release of Saving Private Ryan and the other was the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Global War on Terror, which has continued for over 16 years as of my time of writing. These two events transformed the genre entirely, and has molded it into a new frame of mind and plotting, alongside new characters.

In this essay, I’d like to compare and contrast the new and the old versions of war films, which I will do by citing multiple examples of such films. I also hope to delve into how influential films of both eras are for our current culture — as war films have had an unmistakable impact on the politics of post-9/11 America.

Through looking at these films (films like Zero Dark Thirty, Saving Private Ryan, Munich and others) I hope to better illustrate what has changed about the genre and more importantly where war films are going.


I. WAR FILMS BEFORE SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

War films before Steven Spielberg’s [arguable] magnum opus were fairly trite despite dealing with heavy subject matter. Barring the exception of Vietnam war films (which reflected the general public disdain for the war and were more current event film than the retrospective genre of war film) most war films pre-1990 lionized their protagonists and idealized the conditions of warfare.

Usually the endings of these films highlighted the triumph of human endeavor in victory or something, with shots of smiling real-life inspirations (alongside the actors for added sentimentality).

And this manner of film is still very popular today, as we can see in the relative success of Hacksaw Ridge (2017, dir. Mel Gibson). That film does mix the grittiness of warfare with the sentimentality of a film like Sergeant York (1941, dir. Howard Hawks), but it is essentially a classic Hollywood-type film.

This changed with the release of Saving Private Ryan and the intensity of its opening scene. Many viewers were reported to be shocked by the realism and brutality that compared to previous cinematic portrayals of the European beachfront. [To be fair, I hear media reports of WWII veterans praising every new war film for realism now, so it feels mildly apocryphal at this point to say people were shocked by realism in a film].

But the realism of Saving Private Ryan cannot be discounted in relation to the rest of Spielberg’s body of work. For being one of his most famous films, it is starkly different in tone from all his other films (barring his other works that concern war: Schindler’s List and Munich).

This is an important point: Spielberg does approach his histories with much more reverence than fantasies/serials like E.T. or Indiana Jones. See Lincoln or Bridge of Spies for examples of such reverence or hagiography of historical events and figures. But both of these respective history films are still much different than Spielberg’s Trilogy of War.

It’s partially an issue of tone.


II. SPIELBERG’S TRILOGY OF WAR

The three films in the Trilogy of War are: Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Munich. Chronologically that is the rough order of the films, but also it’s the order they were released in (1993, 1998, and 2006 respectively). Out of these three films, Munich is only tangentially linked to WWII, but it shares a dramatic through line with the preceding two films.

A quick note, since one of these films hasn’t really entered into the pop-cultural collective like the other two have, i.e. I don’t feel like I have to explain the story/plot of Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan, like I feel inclined to do so for Munich.

The reasons for this are why Munich is probably rightfully described as Spielberg’s most contentious film [ignoring the spades of critical acclaim], since it documents a morally ambiguous series of killings and wades into the politics of Israel and Palestine.

Munich is a 2005 film based on a book recounting Operation Wrath of God, the Israeli government’s retaliation against the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics. (This is cribbed from Wikipedia)

For reasons I’ll explain, all of these films are 1) a part of an important trilogy of Spielberg films that concern the themes of World War II from multiple fronts and 2) different from Saving Private Ryan: Schindler’s List is a Pre-War Film. Munich is a Post-War Film. There are tropes shared by both, but both of these films are not essentially a “war film” like Saving Private Ryan.

The trilogy (as one can guess from the emotional arc of any trilogy in literary or filmic form) deals with the rise, height and aftermath of World War II. Schindler’s List documents a man who has no reason to be good doing the right thing (even if it was for selfish reasons in the beginning).

Saving Private Ryan documents the human cost of war and the burden it weighs on someone’s soul even decades removed.

Munich concerns violence and how it begets itself, and how it is so easy to become the violence that you hate so much.

Of these three films, only Schindler’s List has something approaching a happy ending if you can call it that (despite it having the darkest plot of all three). Schindler ensured a future for people he will never know, and that is displayed by the families and Liam Neeson laying flowers at his grave in memoriam. In this way, Oskar Schindler finds immortality in the people he saved. It’s melancholic, but not pessimistic.

The other two films approach nihilism in their endings. Despite a large family who loves and cares for him obviously, Ryan seemingly doesn’t feel like he “earned” the chance bestowed on him by Captain Miller saving his life.

In Munich, it’s much more stark. Avner is divorced from his position with Mossad at the end, and has changed for the worse (spiritually speaking). The mission he pledged his spirit toward destroyed him because, in the end, he felt no different than the terrorists who incited the actions of the film in the first place.

You can see the emotional through-line: Melancholy begets existentialism which begets nihilism. War changes you in terrible ways, there is little nobility in it. Filmmakers seem to have reckoned with that emotional reality, and have adjusted films to tonally match that of Saving Private Ryan.

And yet, in the real-reality which these films are based on, war continues.


III. THE WAR ON TERROR

I’m writing this sixteen years removed from 9/11, but I live in a world affected by it. As do all of us in some way or another. Film was affected too.

Filmicly, I think we’ve struggled to adapt the War on Terror like we’ve portrayed World War II or even the Cold War on screens.

With those two struggles, there was a clear enemy and we had tropes to generally portray them. With the Nazis, a cruel despotism, and an enigmatic matching of wits with the Soviets.

With the War on Terror, we’re fighting a concept (terrorism) aligned with a loose collection of terrorist movements and guerrilla fighting groups.

And with the war stretching on past a decade, filmmakers seemed to find an opportunity to look inward rather than externally and make the central conflict about internal morality.

I like to imagine the future of film theory and what we will study. Most likely we’ll look at either Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker & Zero Dark Thirty) or Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down) as the emblematic filmmakers on war film in the early 21st century when this era is written about in future film textbooks. More so than earlier war filmmakers, they’ve set a general standard for how the stories and characters of war films are supposed to be laid out in the modern era of the genre.

Much of it can be attributed to many general developments in film and television: a larger and more diverse range of characters and perspectives & the ambiguation of morality.

The second point is one worth examining closer: in Black Hawk Down although the military is shown to be in the right in the conflict, there is a general sense in the film that the conflict in Somalia is futile for the American soldiers to gain any real upper hand.

This ambiguation of morality is much more clear in Bigelow’s recent war films. At the end of The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner’s Sgt. William James admits he knows nothing else other than warfare and re-enlists.

This is artistically highlighted in the supermarket scene where it is almost unbearably clean compared to the rest of the gritty film, and where William is shown to be explicitly uncomfortable compared to his jockeying for adrenaline in the Middle East.

(The Hurt Locker, 2009 dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

Likewise in Zero Dark Thirty, Maya (Jessica Chastain) breaks down in tears at the end of the film because the hunt for Osama bin Laden had become her life: without it her life is empty. This is articulated and highlighted in the contrast between Maya and her friend, a fellow CIA officer, earlier in the film.

The other officer, Jessica, is explicitly stated to have a life outside of her work. So it’s dramatic irony that Jessica’s life ends in the attack on Camp Chapman while Maya continues living despite finishing the one thing that is her life — the hunt for the leader of al-Qaeda.

Taken largely, William and Maya are both deconstructions of the key feature of war film protagonists and really, the larger mood of war films before the War on Terror: a question of what drive accomplishes and how it factors into morality.


IV. SYNTHESIS

When we question drive, we question morality. And questioning morality is (in a way) questioning the narratives society builds for itself.

The central question of war films was the drive of the protagonist to become a hero. When we remove the grounding of morality, we remove the very central bearing of war film: good vs. evil.

And it’s an appropriate question for our day and age. We’re mired in seemingly endless numbers of conflicts in countries we know next to nothing about. Veterans are having an extremely difficult time reintegrating into society. And politicians seem to absolutely love the idea of war and ignore the costs of it when they are so thrifty on literally any other aspect of the U.S. economy.

So it’s reflected in our art by removing certainty. The drive of protagonists in modern war films almost always end up resolving the plot’s physical conflicts (i.e. killing the enemy) but never reckons with these characters’ emotional realities. These characters seem divorced from what they do and what they want.

By doing this, modern war film once again asks the question of “why war?” and answers “because.” This is not satisfying to be sure, but it is an answer.

Conflict is resolved in a sense in all modern war film. But like war, we’re left to reckon with shattered pieces that we have no idea how to piece back together. There is no emotionally easy answer to war film because there is no emotionally easy answer to war.

By recognizing this, films (which primarily in American culture [in my opinion] function as a vessel for escapism) approach something approximating reality — and forcing us to emotionally reckon with a difficult part of the modern era: a world at war with no clear answers.

)
Connor Mannion

Written by

Writer in my tiny little corner of the internet. You can reach me at connor.a.mannion@gmail.com with thoughts

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