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Can a film effectively criticise war?

Written by Sean Jordan
Saturday, 14 March 2009 00:00

Martin Sheen, the thudding beat of helicopter blades and the sound of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” springing to life. It is one of many iconic scenes in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). The camera cranes over the landscape of Vietnam as civilians are fired at from American choppers. The sequence is at once gripping, beautiful and shocking.

The same sequence is employed by Sam Mendes for his take on the first Gulf War, Jarhead (2005). In a disturbing scene early on in the film, when restless Marines gather for a screening of Apocalypse Now, they’re not contemplating the horrors of war. They hum to the music and cheer. Any message is lost on them. For them, this isn’t anti-war; it’s wish fulfilment. The scene seems to raise the question; how truly successful are anti-war films in their aim?

War has always been a popular subject in Hollywood and it has always been a vehicle for exploring many themes such as honour, brotherhood or the futility of warfare itself. During the 1920s-30s, many war comedies were made, notably Charles Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918), but more interesting, perhaps, are the films that explored the fading valour of modern combat. In Wings (1927) and Howard Hugh’s Hell’s Angels (1930), the drama arises from the advance in technology in aerial combat. Similar themes are present in Jarhead, created over 70 years later. Our heroes have trained, watched the films, and gotten themselves riled up, but when they arrive in the Persian Gulf, all they find is desert. They are told to hydrate, wait, patrol, and hydrate some more. This is the key source of conflict in the film, following the main character Anthony Swofford and his frustration with the situation. He has been trained to kill, is ready to kill, and all he can do is wait. When the time finally comes to practice his skill and he is about to pull the trigger, an aerial bomber swoops in and beats him to the chase. He is again proved impotent, useless compared to modern technology.

The ironic tragedy, from Swofford’s point of view, is that he never gets to fulfil the fantasy he associates with films like Apocalypse Now. When Jarhead was released in 2005, many were hoping for a searing indictment of the situation in Iraq today. What they got was a subversion of the anti-war message itself. When a marine tries to bring the US interest in oil into the conversation, another replies: “Fuck politics. We’re here now; everything else is bullshit.” The film makes no apologies. It neither derides nor glorifies the men it portrays; it simply aims to portray them truthfully. In doing so, it recognizes the ever present role cinema plays in our lives.

Most war films made after Vietnam reflected the American public’s anger and loss of faith. Films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket all portray Vietnam as a descent into hell, from which its characters cannot return. In one famous scene in The Deer Hunter (another movie the marines in Jarhead sit down to watch, by the way) the characters sombrely sing “God Bless America” together, while their lives are irreparably damaged after returning from war. Yet all these films present war on an epic scale, almost larger than life, as if it is too horrific for the ordinary person to understand. The closest we can come is the cinema.

These are the films that today’s generation of soldiers grew up on. I’d wager that, without the experience, when many people hear the word Vietnam today, that famous scene from Apocalypse Now or one like it springs to mind. This scene and others employ incredible visuals and music to depict the tragedy of the war, yet they simultaneously transform it into something theatrical. The knock on effect may be that we become distanced from the actual events, numbed to it. It is no new idea that the very telling of a story can fictionalise it.

This is not to say a film cannot fulfil its purpose. This is its power. Cinema has the ability to inform, entertain and influence passion in us. A filmmaker (or any artist) cannot be responsible for how their work is viewed once it is out there; Ronald Regan famously used Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as his campaign song, completely misinterpreting the song’s true meaning. Underling the drama of Apocalypse Now is an attempt to grasp a truth about war. Yet, with these great films, perhaps a genre has been etched out that influences our attitudes.

If such films gave rise to an anti-war genre, following soldiers through war and its damaging consequences, then this could alter the way we look at war and cinema. Many films that were created after the Vietnam War are critical of the conflict without ever taking place there. In Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle is a Vietnam War veteran, probably suffering from post traumatic stress. Yet, this film is not usually described as a war film. If Jarhead was expected to fall within the genre we are used to, it should be more emphatically critical of war. It wasn’t. Its themes were complicated, and so it disappointed many.

The war film as a genre is where things become problematic. If war is a subject that can be tied up by one type of story, it becomes easier for us to swallow; it is simplified. In modern cinema, there have been many great films produced dealing with the Iraq War, notably In the Valley of Elah (2007). The story follows the murder of a soldier recently stationed in Iraq and his father’s search for the truth, played flawlessly by Tommy Lee Jones. The film again deals of issues of the damaging effects of war on soldiers.

It is an important story to be told, but there is another story conspicuously absent from Western cinema: the effect of the war on Iraqi civilians and their everyday lives. With around 90,000 civilian deaths documented in the region since 2003, it is clear that the spectrum of damage caused by the war reaches far beyond the lives of our troops. Yet, this is the point of view we are given in our films, a structure to make sense of the truth. It is easy to relate to the frustration the troops in Jarhead feel; though after the movie ends and the credits roll, all we’re met with is reality, and it’s not as simple.