Crazy Ivan [RI2]
General and cold war depictions of conflict
(What is this? I explain here. You’re reading Chapter 2 in a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. You can go back to Chapter 1 here, or go on to Chapter 3 here)
There are already a lot of good books about war in popular culture so I’ll keep this brief. I just want to make four points, and using those four points give an overview of the landscape within which the fiction I want to talk about in greater detail occurs.
One: war films rarely talk about the political reasons for the war, or the historical and cultural context of the war.
This trend appears to be accelerating. Compare, for example, the definitive World War 1 films of the 20th and 21st centuries: Paths of Glory (1957) and 1917 (2020). Neither really say much about why world war one was fought; the 1994 Disney husky dog racing film Iron Will talks far more about the geopolitics of the era than either[1]. Yet while Paths of Glory may not have interrogated, or even referenced, the reasons for the war, it did at least understand and present war as the product of human folly: a fundamentally human act committed by humans against other humans. In 1917, as in its spiritual prequel Saving Private Ryan (1998), war is treated as some sort of exotic weather event, entirely independent from any human agency or political process. These are war films in that they are films set in a war, but in truth they are disaster movies, with the war as the asteroid.
Even war films that do engage with the idea that war is something humans do to other humans still tend to abstract that idea. War might as well happen because someone pressed a big button marked “war”; it is not treated a manifestation of complex political dynamics setting logistical processes in train.
Two: war films valorise war; even the ones that don’t try to.
The relationship between most mainstream Hollywood fimmaking and the Pentagon, where significant support in kind is exchanged for script approval, is well documented[2]. But even most supposedly anti war or war-ambivalent films tend to consider the experience from the perspective of the soldiers, not those over whom they fight. So even when war is murder, it is fraternal, companionable murder.
This argument is strikingly made in John Pilger’s 1986 memoir Heroes, in the chapter “A Noble Cause” (itself a revisiting of his notorious 1979 essay “the Gook Hunter”). It excoriates every Vietnam war ever made, but particularly The Deerhunter (1978) (which many people — myself included — had previously made the mistake of considering an anti-war film) by pointing out that these films remain fundamentally uncritical of the underlying logic of war while aggressively othering the adversary.
“At the level of popular culture, always the vanguard in matters of national redemption, the post-war propaganda has worked assiduously to celebrate the invader and to reduce the invaded to their wartime status of commie stick figures on celluloid. …. A Hollywood catharsis was required urgently. Certainly, few movies have been better timed than The Deerhunter… a movie which would reincarnate the triumphant Batman-jawed Caucasian warrior (‘liberal by instinct’) and present a suffering people as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots…
“None of this, of course, was new; it was how Hollywood created the myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be an American Indian; and how the Second World War and the Korean War were absorbed into box office folklore, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a dumb Kraut or an unspeakable Nip or a commie chink; and of course, The Deerhunter was harmless enough unless you happened to be a gook…
“The most recent Vietnam movies have been more subtle. Those like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, in providing glimpses of the Vietnamese as human beings, as well as sequences of American mania and atrocities, have created a false credibility that has served to reinforce their essential Rambo-and-angst message: a potent combination.”
This is particularly prevalent in the west. In contrast a Soviet film like Come and See (1985)[3] plays war as pure unmitigated horror. I cannot imagine an American Come and See: even films that come close for brutality — Sam Peckinpah comes to mind — still have an element of war-as-adventure to them[4].
Three, war is treated like a game, often a computer game (computer games do this too but in fairness they have an excuse).
It’s quite hard to avoid this. War is a game if you are a commander, and a fun one. Moreover the vast vast majority of our recreational activities are based around the concept of warfare in one sense of another. Partly this is tautology: war is contest by all available means, games are contests according to specific rules. Partly this is because games have always traditionally, and maybe even evolutionarily, been used as training for war. The vital difference is that games are designed to ensure no one gets hurt, war is not. So games might feel like war but war does not feel like a game.
The best art can articulate that, and place the humanity back into the brightly coloured animations and the shuffling of pieces around in the sandpit that media can otherwise reduce war to. Some art even explores that very idea, most famously Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) and Terry Pratchett’s Only you can save Mankind (1992), both of which revolve around the idea of a game player coming to terms with the fact that the pieces in their games are real individuals. But much art does not.
Unfortunately it is common to see war thought of as a game even in policy circles. See, for example, a recent paper by the Royal United Services Institute: The Future of Fires (2019), which made the suggestion that if the UK were to abandon its support for the Convention on Cluster Munitions it would be in a much better place to prevent an all-out land invasion of eastern Europe by Russia: in other words it floated the idea that the UK should leave an international treaty that prevents children from having their hands blown off because the author got carried away in an adolescent fantasy about winning Red Storm Rising (1986)[5].
Four, war is fought between goodies and baddies.
World war two was a good war for this, with goodies and baddies who were kind enough to clearly identify themselves as such. The cold war was also good for this, because there were clearly two sides to it and Hollywood was on one of them. These experiences have so indoctrinated the west that they appear genuinely shocked to find out that for most of the rest of the world they are the baddies. Hence the outrage when something breaks through such as, for example, that the Korean songwriter PSY (remember Gangnam Style?) had previously written songs and performed in concerts with heavily anti-American themes; or that the plot of the Japanese hit film Battle Royale 2: Requiem (2003) presupposes that the United States is evil and ends with the protagonists joining an outfit clearly intended to resemble Al Qaeda.[6]
Occasionally you will get a piece of western media, like Tintin and the Picaros (1976) which acknowledges that protagonist and antagonist are near carbon copies of each other and our choice of hero and villain is largely arbitrary. Even then the logic of narrativization soon takes hold and our arbitrary protagonists are transformed into our plucky band of heroes.
In fact that’s a fairly standard trick: even if the war is morally suspect the antagonists wish our protagonists harm, therefore they must be the baddies. So all we need to do is find a person or group to relate to and quibbles about the morality of killing their opponents can melt away. Platoon (1986) uses the platoon for this. The Seven Samurai (1954) finds us seven samurai[7]. The Rambo (1972) franchise takes this logic to an ultimate extreme, finding the one good man in a bad war and turning him into a one man army. No matter how bad the war, narrativization compels us to find good warriors to cheer on.[8]
These tropes find their purest expression in muscular American fiction of the cold war, a genre that provides much of the cultural touchstones for my generation. Tom Clancy’s novels, which I admit I devoured avidly as a child, are perhaps an easy target here because they embrace them with such joyous boyish purity. His 1984 novel The Hunt for Red October introduced many of us to the (usually) submarine manoeuvre the “Crazy Ivan”, and through it a convenient synecdoche for late-Cold War notions of the other. But Clancy was far from the worst offender. Indeed there’s a straightforward innocence to his work; pretty much all other cold war thrillers have the same politics presented more insidiously.
The disappearance of this big bad — “West loses enemy that defines it” as the headline read in the Detroit Free Press in 1992[9]— caused this muscularity to evolve in some pretty odd directions. Some of those directions involved rabbits.
Notes
[1] For a film about how a teenager needs to overcome his fears and the distractions of fame to encourage a group of dogs to pull a sledge quite fast over quite a lot of Minnesota Iron Will contains far more chat about the perfidy of the Kaiser than you might expect. This seems to be a minor trend in 90’s sports movies: silly 2000 mountaineering caper Vertical Limit goes into a surprising amount of detail with respect to revanchism in Kashmir.
[2] I’ll talk more about this in Chapter 7.
[3] Granted the scale and magnitude of the Eastern Front dwarf that of any other theatre of world war 2, indeed perhaps any other theatre of any other war ever.
[4] Likewise few soldiers who have experienced the horrors of combat up close share this boy’s own attitude to war. Consider this clip from the BBC archives of a survivor of world war one recounting his experience of taking a life. One would be hard pressed to find a depiction of war less glamorising, more humane, or more foreign to that presented on our film screens:
[5] To be fair to the author he was willing to talk to me about this, despite my being quite rude about his report. He was keen to emphasise that he wasn’t saying the UK should abandon the convention, but merely that that would be one option and that he notes, in passing, that committing war crimes is a lot cheaper than not committing them. But what his report actually says is that since everyone else is doing war crimes we should too or we will be left behind. Or in his own words, “the moral objections to their [ie cluster munitions’] use become somewhat moot in a high intensity conflict in Eastern Europe, where Russian and US forces will employ cluster munitions liberally. Without appropriate munitions, British forces will simply be outranged, outgunned and thereby defeated in detail by Russian formations.” This argument is silly enough that I’m not going to waste time refuting it.
[6] More broadly it is extraordinary and terrifying how often western discourse seems to forget or minimise the fact that the USA nuked Japan twice. Just imagine how hard it would be not to hate a country that nuked yours twice and then repeatedly appeared to forget that it had done so. In this context Battle Royale 2 appears frankly restrained.
[7] It’s worth noting in passing that The Seven Samurai are early practitioners of something we might recognise as the responsibility to protect, maybe even as peacekeeping utilising a robust protection-of-civilians mandate. Their primary motivation is to prevent harm from coming to a group of civilians who have requested their help for this purpose. There’s not much more to say than that, which is why I haven’t put them in my later chapters which talk about this in greater detail. But it shouldn’t go past without mention. And of course because it’s in the Seven Samurai that means it’s also in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and A Bugs Life (1998). And since this will be this series’ only mention of A Bugs Life I feel I need to mention that A Bugs Life is one of the most overtly Marxist mainstream movies of recent times:
[8] Although interestingly Rambo evolves over the course of the series. Initially he is indeed the one good man in (and then no longer in) a bad war but by 1988’s Rambo III the anti-US military sentiment of the original has evaporated and Rambo joins into an uncritical alliance with the CIA and the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan
[9] My notes say that this was on Jan 7, and that I know this because they show the headline in this wonderful sports documentary here, but I’ve watched it back looking for it so I can add a timestamp and can’t find it. Did I dream it?:
