Do All War Films Glorify War?
In a 1973 interview for the Chicago Tribune, The 400 Blows (1959) director François Truffaut stated that, ‘Every film about war ends up being pro-war.’ This view was affirmed by Apocalypse Now (1979) director Francis Ford Coppola, who spoke to the Guardian newspaper saying that, ‘everyone wants to make an anti-war film’ but that ‘Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That’s not anti-war.’ The exact opposite of Truffaut’s view was argued by fellow industry heavyweight and director of Saving Private Ryan (1998) Steven Spielberg who stated that ‘Of course every war movie, good or bad, is an antiwar movie.’ By directly opposing Truffaut’s assertion that ‘to show something is to ennoble it,’ Spielberg posits the unorthodox stance that by merely being presented in film, the concept of war is made unappealing to audiences. This discourse can be narrowed down to the question of whether all war films, by displaying the act of warfare, glorify war — the wider debate being whether there is any such thing as an anti-war film. To answer these questions, I viewed a selection of war films ranging from those regarded as anti-war to those written off as recruitment propaganda, paying close attention to their depiction of warfare alongside their political messaging.
A point of examination that is necessary within this discourse is the conventions of both pro and anti-war films, what must a film do to be anti-war? Moreover, this essay will explore the narrative implications of film as a medium and how a movie’s intrinsic requirement to make profit and therefore entertain stands diametrically opposed to any filmmaker’s anti-war motivations. While the two aforementioned points of discussion have been examined in depth previously, one that isn’t explored to the same extent (but will be in this essay) is the way in which war movies have been depoliticised — the causes of war are not discussed, instead focusing on the individual plight of soldiers abstracted from wider geopolitical circumstances — and how this translates into a film’s stance on the subject matter of war.
When investigating the topic in question, one must first ask the question, what are the characteristics of a conventional anti-war film? In her essay, titled ‘Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film?’, Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet comprehensively lists these elements. Included is ‘an emphasis on the youth of soldiers’ in films aiming to depict the brutality of war; this attribute is evident in what many claim to be the most ruthless of war films, Come and See (1985) which explores the physical and psychological effects of war on its protagonist, Flyora — a fourteen year old Belorussian boy conscripted into the Soviet resistance against Nazi occupation. Monnet writes that the youth in war films, despite being perceived as ‘pre-ideological’ and ‘nonpolitical’, are made to symbolise ‘national identities and its possible futures’. With this interpretation, Flyora now personifies the national identity and future of the Soviet Union — a workers’ state whose own youth mirrors that of our protagonist (being formed only 21 years prior to when the film is set). Having him be brutally tortured, dehumanised, and left broken by the war is not only representative of his own suffering, but that of the young workers’ state which had the highest number of casualties in the Second World War. The youth and innocence of soldiers in these films signifies to audiences the loss of our future at the hands of war. We are made to see our children lose their innocence — not through a constructive experience in which they come out as more mature individuals (as per the norm of coming-of-age films) — but through the pulling of a trigger, the taking of a life, destructive acts that will almost certainly inhibit their development as human beings. Is this not an unflinching condemnation of war?
Monnet also points to the anti-war trope of depicting ‘the rape and abuse of women as allegories or inevitable results of war’ — a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) in which a platoon of American soldiers make crude, often racially charged, remarks about their sexual intentions to a Vietnamese sex worker. Kubrick utilised this trope to embody the raw and brutish exploitation of Vietnam by American, imperialist greed. From the interactions between the soldiers and the sex worker, audiences learn the uneven and inherently exploitative dynamic of the Vietnam war.
With examples like Full Metal Jacket and Come and See, the answer as to whether all war movies venerate war seems clear: they don’t. But this is disputed when considering the view of Anthony Swofford, a Gulf War veteran who, in his memoir, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War, argues that
“…the magic brutality of [war] films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of [the soldiers’] fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man.”
Here Swofford postulates a view not unlike that of Truffaut, that war movies, in their ‘magical brutality’, dignify the lucid mercilessness on screen. In the same way pornography’s normalisation of rape culture translates into tangible violence against women, the war film’s exhibition of vivid gore serves as a vicarious inauguration into the soldier mentality. And while the conscious viewer may ‘weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible,’ the young, alienated male — who is often the target of military recruitment campaigns — will be enticed by the power fantasies of the unaccountable killing machines he observes on screen. Young men are also seduced by the displays of camaraderie present in almost all popular war films; a sense of belonging is procured by showing the brotherly bond formed amongst foot soldiers, whether it be against the Germans, Japanese, Iraqis, Afghans, or even their despotic Sergeant. Vietnam war films, however, broke this mould to a certain extent by directing the conflict inwards, this can be seen in films such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) which primarily focuses on the antagonisms between infantrymen.
Nevertheless, the anti-war stance of films such as Full Metal Jacket is put to question by many who were persuaded into enlisting because of them. In an article for Task and Purpose, marine veteran James Clark writes, ‘When I first watched Full Metal Jacket, I was a sophomore in college. Within a year, I was at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. That’s not a coincidence.’ He continues by describing his experience with the scene in which recruits are berated and abused by their drill instructor, portrayed by R. Lee Ermey:
‘The entire seven-minute scene is one prolonged dive into depravity, pain, and verbal abuse, with Hartman performing like a virtuoso whose medium is profanity. And as a kid who grew up relatively coddled in a Bay Area, California suburb, it also felt a little bit like a dare: Could I deal with that?’
Displays of hardship in war films become challenges for audiences, they put themselves in the combat boots of soldiers, asking themselves how far they could go in a war zone; and for people like James Clarke, the answer extends beyond hypothetical thought. This view was attested by the late R. Lee Ermey who wrote that, ‘even today, seventeen years later, there’s not a day goes by on the base but what at least one person doesn’t come up and tell me I’m the reason they’re in the Marine Corps. Full Metal Jacket was their motivation.’ What goes on in someone’s head when they see Full Metal Jacket and decide then and there that their future lies in the army is beyond me, but it is a clear indicator of the limitations of film as a medium in creating an unadulterated anti-war message.
So what must a film do to be considered truly anti-war? Monnet argues that,
“In order to take an absolutely unqualified antiwar position, a film would need to show war not only as ineffective, morally wrong, destructive to the soldier, civilian, and society that accepts it, but also to show death in combat as meaningless and utterly unredeemed.”
In other words, the task of an anti-war film would be to disenchant war; however, film’s innate requirement is to engage and entertain viewers is arguably incompatible with this. Audiences can’t help but get a kick out of the sprawling, single-take action sequences in 1917 (2019) where our protagonist just barely avoids being pulverised by mortars as he dashes across no man’s land; or the scene from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) in which gunmen on helicopters indiscriminately shoot innocent people to the tune of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. As Calum Marsh opined in a piece for The Atlantic, “war films are still essentially action films — blockbuster spectacles embellished by the verve and vigor of cutting-edge special effects.” The media coverage surrounding 1917 (2019) almost exclusively focused on its technical feat of appearing to be filmed in one continuous take — that is the legacy of one of the most popular war films of the past decade — showing us that audiences view war films in the same vein as action/adventures where narrative comes secondary to the special effects measuring contests a film has with the last of its type. In their attempts to be more ‘realistic’, war films now get successively hyper-violent, because the battle of Normandy must have been abundant with flying limbs and pools of blood. But this focus on hyper-violence takes on an adverse effect, heightening the separation between the audience and warfare. One must look no further than Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) to see this in full effect. Spielberg deploys the technique of having blood splatter onto the camera lens in order to bring the action as close to the viewer as possible. This approach, however, only makes the barrier protecting audiences — the screen — visible, like throwing paint on the Invisible Man.
This emphasis on supposed ‘realism’ also ends up de-politicising war films; this comes as a limitation for anti-war films as being truly anti-war is a political stance. In his book, Capitalist Realism, the late Mark Fisher writes on the pitfalls of hip-hop and mobster films, ones that can easily be applied to anti-war films:
“The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for ‘what it really is’: a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality.”
War, as seen in war films, is perpetual; often with no cause or end goal, they act simply as vehicles for the character development of soldiers. It is presented as the natural order: of course there’s a war going on, that’s just how things are. Having war-for-the-sake-of-war allows for these films to instead focus on the struggle of the individual soldier, abstracting the narrative from the surrounding geopolitical circumstances. Full Metal Jacket begins while the Vietnam War rages on, and ends the same way — despite being made over a decade after America had removed its troops from the nation. Theorist Jean-Louis Baudry argues in his article, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, that cinema is ‘an apparatus destined to obtain precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology … It collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism.’ The idealist depiction of war as constant fulfils the dominant, imperialist ideology; Western audiences can’t discover that a society without war is possible because that would mean the United States and other imperialist powers would have to lay down their badge and gun, resigning from their role as the top goon squad for war-mongering CEOs. This view of war, in my opinion, re-enchants it: war becomes separate from the will of humanity, a thing of nature that simply is. In the words of George Orwell, ‘The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous.’
In the earlier stated Guardian interview with Francis Ford Coppola, the Jack (1996) director details his concept of the perfect anti-war film:
“I always thought the perfect anti-war film would be a story in Iraq about a family who were going to have their daughter be married, and different relatives were going to come to the wedding. The people manage to come, maybe there’d be some dangers, but no one would get blown up, nobody would get hurt. They would dance at the wedding. That would be an anti-war film.”
Coppola reveals here that films must offer a world outside of war to convey a genuine anti-war narrative. His example of an Iraqi family attending their daughter’s wedding is potent with meaning. Audiences in the West recognise Iraq only when it is subsequently followed by ‘war’; by severing the connection between the two and proposing that the film should be harmonious and peaceful, viewers are made privy to exactly what war steals from us — joy. Only then can a film be anti-war, according to Coppola.
To answer the titular question of this essay: the war film is a sort of Catch-22 for filmmakers aiming to craft an anti-war narrative. By showing the savagery of war — the bloodshed, the walls of sound created by gunfire, the dismembered arms of soldiers flying at the audience in spectacular 3D video — war films can’t help but be a source of excitement. The late WWII veteran and filmmaker Samuel Fuller argued that ‘bullets would need to be spraying out from the screen, taking out members of the audience at random, one by one, in scattershot carnage’ in order for a film to be true to the experience of war; the limitations of film mean that experiencing the battlefield on the silver screen will ultimately be dramatised and in some way mystified for narrative purposes. The same could be said about all genres in the medium, but while most viewers have had romantic experiences prior to watching a romance film, not nearly as many go into a war movie with prior wartime experience. This, tied with the ideological function served by most war films, including those of the ‘anti-war’ kind, means that a film which displays the act of warfare cannot be considered anti-war. I would instead point to films like Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) which takes place outside of active combat, instead focusing on a brother and sister trying to survive a Japan which has been obliterated by WWII, as an example of a true anti-war film. With films like these: the competitions of making the most realistic visual effects are avoided, audiences are not thrilled or excited, we are left with the cold aftertaste of war which kills all that we love — not through gunfire, but hunger. This is anti-war.
