Ballads of Helicopter Wings

Journal sielwolf's Journal: Ballads of Helicopter Wings 12

Journal by sielwolf on Monday October 31, 2005 @10:23PM

Well with Jarhead coming out this weekend, I thought I'd take a little time to discuss War Movies on two major axes: first, what makes a war movie and, second, why the hell do I hate Saving Private Ryan and love The Thin Red Line. This is complicated by the fact that the first is a War Movie and the second isn't.

Whowanseekwar

A common misconception is that a war movie is about the war. This is wrong. Apocolypse Now! is a great movie, Top 25 material. It has Vietnam, soldiers, and fighting but it is not a war movie (and, no, it is not because it is an adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness). Meanwhile, A Few Good Men, a courtroom drama about hazing and a cover-up at Gitmo and without a single shot fired in anger, is a war movie.

So how can this be? Simple, a war movie is not about the war, but the warriors. More specifically it is about the culture of warriors, the culture of men distilled by the high contrast of conflict. See, In the Company of Men has all the hallmarks of a war movie, save the actual crucible of self-preservation. You add that, and it's a war movie. A military psychologist would say it is an analysis of combat primary groups. The executive summary is Esprit de Corps.

The Scientific View

If the feminine instinct is tickled by the exercises of Romantic Comedies (e.g. what love is, how women and men overcome adversity and end up in pairs) then a similar masculine instinct, no less social, is theorized by war movies. Military training focuses on PT and MOS sets but it really is about one thing: primary groups. This is the psychological theory of sublimating individual goals with group goals. The interesting trick is to take the core survival instinct (self-preservation) and instill a sense of goals that a group wide. This is why the war in the war movie is so important (even if it is some cold tension as in A Few Good Men): the risk of death. Simple team-building is just a positive sum game, convincing everyone that if we all do our parts (uneven as they may be) we will all get part of the spoils. Individual goals are supported by team goals. As much as we want to bemoan losing our jobs or getting paid less for more risk, pedestrian life is all grays and lacks real definition. And we can indulge our instincts at any moment: the risks get to high we can just walk away and work the window at Burger King. The team is composed of selfish individuals.

For the warfighter, the inverse is actually true: in conflict, the selfish instincts are lethal to the group, and even the individual. Where a fight-or-flight instinct might save your ass from getting stomped in a bar or get you out of a mutual fund, in a war, the individuals only succeed in spite of their instincts. Groups that hesitate, freeze under fire, or break and disperse will be rolled over and swallowed up by a ready opponent. And though fleeing might preserve the individual temporarily, his life is in more danger as the very protection he seeks (the greater society) has crumbled because of his selfishness.

Primary Groups are then unlike teams as they do not generally work via reward-giving, instead by punishment-denial. The idea is to replace "I'm going to die if I don't run" with "I'm going to die if I don't help this guy next to me because he's going to make sure I don't get my ass shot off". This creates a Group Individual where the success might like with one or with many but the failure lies with all. Exclusory rather than inclusory fundamentals in the form of strenuous and detail oriented training and, if need be, group enforced punishment. This is the brilliance of the first half of Full Metal Jacket, though R. Lee Ermy is ruthless and the treatment of Pyle is vicious, the unspoken realization is that it was justified. If this sounds brutal, remember, that's why there's the conflict in the War Movie: the absence of war undermine the very stakes of Esprit de Corps. If you take these movies and strip them of the fighting, then it becomes a frivolous exercise. No one would chose to have a son of a bitch shoot wildly at them. The war has set that down as an assumption: "some son of a bitch is shooting at you, what are you going to do?" The question between active and passive conflict is the fundamental one of A Few Good Men: which predominates, the choice of a civilian becoming a Marine or the Marine's fidelity to his fellow Marines and how this is colored by a hot versus cold war? (Though Pyle might have been a draftee [the draft started in '65; Tet, portrayed in the movie, happened in '68] his selection of the Marine Corps was his own. The Marines are interesting as where other services can try to slot every recruit to their ability, Every Marine is a Rifleman, demanding a baseline standard). Deep thought (beer-in-hand is optional) over the treatment of Pyle versus Santiago is the sort of soul searching that any great art form should hope for. And explains one reason why the war movie is such a great genre. It sharpens and illuminates.

Of course many war movies aren't nearly so critical or bleak. Most take upon themselves the complex rituals of respecting rank versus respecting ability (and how both compete and assist the Group). A recent example is the excellent episode of Band of Brothers "The Breaking Point" where Winters has to choose between enforcing order by supporting Lt. Dike (because the Army isn't a democracy) while battling Dike's own incompetence. The instinct question is raised in a different way as Winters (now a Major) must resist the urge to run to command Easy Company (at the risk of the whole operation to take Foy) when Dike freezes. How the rest of the battle plays out is the sort of things that can only happen in real life (because no one would believe it if it was fiction). Kubrick followed a similar path with the much darker WWI movie Paths of Glory (where incompetent French leadership, to hide their own embarrassment at a failed futile assault, plan to execute three soldiers who "fell back" contrary to orders). This one doesn't have much of a happy ending but it's still very good.

Probably the most popular variant of the War Movie is what I like to call the "Willie and Joe" where the movie in some parts takes focus on the sardonic grunt eye-view: Stalag 17, Hogan's Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, or (one of my alltime favs) The Great Escape. Ok, yeah, so Steve McQueen (eternal badass) was an officer, but the gist was the same: wacky "plays by his own rules" American soldier rubs everyone the wrong way. He does his own thing with complete disregard of the Way Things Should Be Done. This means he has like fifteen brilliant escape attempts and schools around on a Nazi bike in a tee shirt and some khakis making mad jumps over barbwire fences. Of course when it comes down to it, what does Hills do: he escapes only to let himself get caught after mapping out the surrounding territory 5 miles around the camp. Sure they give him the head escape slot, but after finding out the tunnel is about 18 feet short of the forest what does he do? He sets up a signal for when the guards are far from the tunnel and then stays, helping the other airmen to escape. Yeah we knew he was Steve McQueen and probably damn near bulletproof but it demonstrates beautifully the fundamental tension between loyalty to self and loyalty to the group. The chips are down but you don't cash in.

Here we could list off all the great war movies (Platoon, Black Hawk Down, Run Silent Run Deep, Crimson Tide, We Were Soldiers, Midway, A Bridge Too Far, Patton, The Big Red One, Das Boot, Stalingrad, Hell's Angels, Gallipoli, All Quiet on the Western Front, Sergeant York, Fire on the Plains, Five Scouts along with those listed above) but I think most of y'all know where to look. And this isn't even counting films focused on the pre-20th century. Much like the question of love and boys and girls, war is a human condition of infinite variations. These movies are just the tip of the iceberg.

What It is... and What It Ain't

"Now that we've gone this far Mr. Smartass, what isn't a war movie then?" Well a great example is The Deer Hunter. Now this movie is kind of a bridge since the argument can be made that it's first half is a war movie: Bobby D, John Cazale (aka Fredo, the only man who had every picture he starred in win the Best Picture Oscar), John Savage and Bruce Dickinson all show up at the wedding, go hunting and have a big metaphorical experience. This then cuts to their imprisonment and outrageous escape. At this point, where Walken is separated from the others it stops being a war movie. Flat. From here on in it's character studies in a way that would not be out of place in a Chekhov play. De Niro walks around the US, goes looking for Nicky. Nicky gets hooked on the professional Russian roulette circuit. The characters are about the connections they have and lost and seek and yearn for. And there are thousands of novels like this: they are written by Nick Hornsby and Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. The group risk is lost and now it is a question of ourselves.

Now is this a bad movie? Fuck no. But this is like what people got when they went and saw Rules of Attraction expecting another stupid teen movie: not something less or more, but something different (more exactly, something they were not there to see). Expectation is never something we should judge something by. And I guess my hope would be is that folks who see of these great not-war movies realize it and not let the "this isn't a fucking war movie" message turn them off to some great fucking film. In these movies war is either a set piece or a larger metaphor for the individual. However all the conversation (even that between characters) is just meta-narration that could all be an aside by the protagonist. Some others:

Lawrence of Arabia - WWI, some great shit from Tony and Omar Sharif, but it's about Sir Lawrence and that's it. Making it about some wage slave would remove a lot of great cinematography but wouldn't change the underlying theme.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly, - A young German boy grows up to fly for the US in Vietnam, gets shot down and then races to his escape. Harrowing but not a war movie. It's a Herzog character study along the lines of Grizzly Man or the one about the ski jumper.

Downfall - Hitler is usually a good sign but this is really just a recounting of a sick and twisted little bastard's last days. We could call it "Willy Loman if He Was Responsible for 20 Million Deaths".

Along the similar lines, The Thin Red Line is not a war movie. So why do I like it and not Saving Private Ryan?

Ranting, Bitching, Complaining

For one thing a genre doesn't make or break a movie. Like I said above, many people saw TTRL and were furious at what it wasn't. That it came out within a few months of SPR meant that the two will always be inextricably linked. Leaving the theater I remember someone declaring "What the fuck was that?"

But before we get to that, first, why do I hate SPR so much? Well let me call it what it is "One Fantastically Gripping Sequence followed by a bunch of Sappy Implausible and Stupid Conventions". The Omaha Beach landing? Great stuff. It channeled so much greatness: John Ford, Kurosawa's Ran. It made the audience both detached (not specifically tied to any one person) and gripped, confused and pained. You could feel the weight of the whole things, like taking a shoulder of the world from Atlas.

And I'll say that if Spielberg would have kept with that, he would've made a great movie. Shit, he actually did, a whole mini-series (the aforementioned Band of Brothers). The problem with realism in war is that everything else (the characters, the circumstance, and the dialogue) all have to sit on the razor edge of plausible tension. This was easier with BoB as it was an interpolation of actual events. But SPR wasn't just the Omaha scenes. There was another two hours after that. And the problem with SPR is that Spielberg tried to make this War Movie into a Non-war Movie with the Find Ryan sequence.

So why didn't this work? Well because the movie then goes about undermining the very Esprit de Corps it must hang its hat on after the first scenes. It creates an almost junior high level scenario of this bridgehead that Must Be Held At All Costs that is more appropriate for a Rambo movie. This just sets up the entire sequence of disasters including Upham "The Character Who Should Have Been Shot in the Leg and Left Behind and Who, Despite The Manhandling By Spielberg Does Not Redeem Himself", the Nazis being both goofily sadistic and moronic and the final scene which is just *ugh* makes my skin crawl. My problem is that both Upham and Ryan undermine the very fidelis at the core of the war movie. They are alien to the very concept of conflict and are the equivalent of putting a costume on a miniature dog and demanding that everyone talks to it as if it was a real person. The characters are all broad emotion without any real authentic or realistic characterization to hold them up. They are just cheap jury-rigs by someone who hasn't taken the time to draw out characters who fit the role. Upham being drug along has the same effect as the foxy teen in a horror movie walking backwards through the dark hallway to where the killer is: it only exists because otherwise the filmmaker would have to think up something original instead of forcing convention down our throats. The same with the teary eyed scene at the end: all it needed was a sweep of violins and the disembodied heads of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ben Affleck floating over it to get the Michael Bay generic emotion ending. It takes something complex (the emotions and loses of war measured against the real and pyrrhic victories) and cuts it down to Hollywood hyperbole. The fact that every time I mention I hate SPR people talk about Omaha, as if someone hit them with an amnesia ray on the rest.

Roger Ebert says that Upham is supposed to be our view through the movie as "he sees it clearly as a vast system designed to humiliate and destroy him. And so it is." I think this is bullshit because it supposes that anyone in the audience would have the Milk Duds wiped from their laps, some BDUs thrown at them and be sent in on D-day RIGHT NOW. Upham is a blissful avoidance of the Primary Groups question. He is somehow inoculated from the entire warfighter experience and plopped down in the center of this movie as to be some sort of statement about individuality. The fact that he then has the preposterous "redemption" burns at me every time. I'm sorry but, no. And that Spielberg tries to pull it over on us makes it even worse.

Now at this point, talking about The Thin Red Line seems kind of odd as it isn't a war movie while SPR is. But what I find so interesting is that I suddenly realized it accomplishes everything that SPR tries to do (all without insulting us or giving us easily digestible answers).

See as He Sees

The thing that kills most people about TTRL is its format. It throws about two dozen characters at us, many recognizable faces (George Clooney, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson) in and out of the sequence before we can even grasp what is going on. At most we get James Caviezel, Sean Penn, Elias Koteas, Shit, Adrian Brody is in there for a scene as is Jared Leto in a long dialogue-less role. But the movie jumps around not just from character to character but from internal monologue to internal monologue. Out of nowhere a character will narrate. Well, the character doesn't seem to narrate, instead something speaks in his voice. The narration has an erudition, an omniscience that is beyond the simple characters. And many, like Roger Ebert, see this as the Malick trying to impose himself on the material.

Of course just taking such a weird device at face value is probably the worst way to approach things. Especially when it mimics a similar device in Wings of Desire. In that movie, angels move among us, cataloguing our thoughts, feeling our pain, shouldering our weight, observing, but never interacting. Some of the most beautiful scenes in the movie are of the angels walking with characters, listening to the stream-of-conscious, and then to feel as the character feels the angel touch them and their emotional state broaden. These narrations, much like those in TTRL are very meta, very existential and too poetic to be seen as just thoughts transposed to the audience.

Stepping out further, it parallels the Christian theory of Jakob Bohme (his work itself having parallels to Eastern philosophical thought) where reality is the result of God only being able to know himself through subdivision of his infinite whole and through this interpolative mirror, finding answers about Himself. Behmenistic thought has the world in a Gnostic Ouroboros where there is a great creative and a great entropic force. The central thesis of TTRL is of nature at war with itself, seemingly burning the wick as quickly as it weaves it. Much in the same way the positive and negative suck infinitely on each other. What separates this from Taoism is the angelic messengers as a vehicle of knowing, a way for God to communicate with his creation. In this way, the actions that play out in Guadacanal in TTRL are mystically transcendent because the battle itself is God realizing Himself (both as question and as answer). The scenes are then loud signals on the single conduit of all reality hurtling by as indescribable noise. The movie is the moments of His greatest pleasure, those moments that define some sort of omniscient clarity. They are both schizophrenic and parts of a greater truth. The renga of many haiku.

And there's no one scene in the movie I see as being beaten out of the Dumb Idea Jar: Koteas is grateful to go home, Caviezel seeks to die in the place where he is at peace, Sean Penn survives. Each one edging in from the corners of the photograph.

Now all of this could probably happen somewhere else. And fans of Jones' original novel have good reason to be mightily pissed off. But sometimes movies aren't about just the events unfolding. The composition of the shots, like so many strokes of paint on a canvas, draw out the director's vision in high contrast. The war in the movie is the tightening of the murky shallows of our lives, pieced into something that we might learn from and move on.

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