“They shouldn’t send heroes to places like Iraq . . .”

That Paul Haggis penned line of dialog is featured in the online trailer for the movie In The Valley of Elah, a soon to be released war movie that one critic exalts as having “The plot of Chinatown and the power of The Deer Hunter“. After having watched said trailer, excuse me as I suppress a groan and an urge to launch something heavy and breakable across this room. I love a good crime drama as well as the next crime-drama junkie, but if a filmmaker is going to go to the trouble of making a film about a current war, while that war is ongoing — can we get a WAR movie and not a big-screen version of CSI Iraq? Calming down a bit, maybe it’s best that we don’t, considering Jarhead, Welcome To The Suck and Valley of the Wolves – Iraq. The Leftists in Hollywood and the anti-Americans around the globe see Americans at war in only one context, and it’s rarely, if ever, a positive one. In fact, if a war film isn’t a total slam against the concepts of war being about love of country, duty and honor, meaningful sacrifice, the Left feels completely betrayed. It is in this context that Pajamas Media’s Jules Crittenden writes That’s Propa-tainment!, in which he takes a look at all of the above.

Despite Hollywood’s best efforts, it just can’t get war right. Filmdom’s fiery-eyed zealots have never quite managed to fake the 1,000-yard stare.

That last line is in reference to Ken Burn’s seven-part documentary on PBS The War, which relies much on stills and some combat footage from WWII. I haven’t seen this as yet, can’t stand the constant begging for $$$ of our local PBS station each and every time I try to watch something featured, and will more than likely wait for it to come out on DVD, but the website gives you the flavor of the commentary, especially by those WWII survivors interviewed, those that were actually there. From my experience, combat veterans aren’t likely to discuss what happens in combat with those that are not “experienced”, and merely reading the quotes from the Life in the Infantry section of the documentary’s website put that into clear focus. But, back to Crittenden on why Hollywood so fails to get it about today’s war and war films in general and why their films can’t hold a candle up to Burns’ The War.

Hollywood is in the fiction business, and has a bad irony addiction. Hollywood is, of course, the original drama queen. Hollywood remains on a quixotic crusade to belabor the obvious: war is bad, and any government that fails to use its words to resolve problems, evil. Hollywood fails to understand that war remains a necessary, ugly business and will be for the foreseeable future.

It may be that it is impossible for zealots with a drama jones to grasp the banality of extreme events, when they require them to be fraught with meaning, particularly when the filmmakers are today, almost without exception, uninitiated. It may also be impossible for actors to feign the subtle expression of faces of men in combat, intent on their business, or in the extreme, utterly expressionless, evocative of the void. You can’t fake those eyes.

As a technical matter, the combat footage of “The War” shows the emptiness of Hollywood’s best efforts, and directors should be forgiven if they give up on reality and honestly devote themselves to cartoons. It’s art, and where they succeed is when they fool people into thinking they have actually represented a reality. The reality can only ever be suggested, and fiction should never be mistaken for anything but a funhouse reflection. But filmmakers will try, doggedly and maybe sometimes admirably.

Perhaps, in snippets. I had a Vietnam vet once tell me that the first scene of the battle scene in Forrest Gump — at the river where you see several groups of guys in the tall grass on a beautiful day, then in a microsecond a shell hits one group and all you see after that is pink spray and carnage — was the most realistic portrayal of a battle event that he had ever seen at the movies. As a viewer you experience that via sight and sound, but unlike in a real situation, not also the percussion, taste, smell or actual fear of imminent personal danger.

Crittenden wraps up his piece with a challenge, although I’m sure those charged won’t pay any attention:

Forget the drama and the labored, moral-shoving plot lines that actually have nothing to do with combat and everything to do with your politics. Focus on depicting something that approaches the reality, and its utter disregard for your moralism.

Suffice it to say, we won’t be seeing all that many, if any, Iraq War films coming out of Hollywood that paint our men and women at arms in any sort of sympathetic light, so we’ll have to leave that up to the YouTubers of the world. I found one such compilation at the USS Oklahoma website During the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the USS Oklahoma (shown in my header graphic) suffered the second highest loss of life. The following is a tribute at that mixes pictures and names of the fallen with footage from the movie Pearl Harbor.

Those on the Left would view this and see nothing but useless tragedy and loss. The rest of us would acknowledge and respect the sacrifice. Those men were our friends of our fathers, uncles and grandfathers. Their generation’s ability to face their fears, and willingness to persevere ensured our way of life and saved the world from the fascists. It’s the current generation’s turn to do the same, against an enemy that is just as bloodthirsty and bent on world conquest as the Germans and Japanese of the thirties and forties. Our debt of gratitude to our warriors of today will be just as great – let’s hope that we don’t bail, leaving them with the tab . . .

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Fever Swamp Madness, Iraq War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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