2. A WORLD OF EXTREMES
The ultimate form of cinema
creates conditions in which extreme expressions of love, hate,
action, violence, and death can find representation.
production numbers of war films
Explosive action sequences
Superhuman feats of bravery
Spectacular displays of mass destruction
State of War:
hellish no-man s land of violence and death
Slightest actions (or inaction) death of self or
comrades
3. BREAKING RULES:
Suspension of Reality
The battlefield is a world in which the laws, beliefs,
behavior, and morality of a civilization are
suspended (201).
War rewrites civil and criminal law
OK to kill, an imperative (opposes thou shall not
kill )
Good guys break the rules (motivated by moral outrage,
expediency, or compassion).
Convenience governs morality
Might makes right
End justifies the means
4. BREAKING RULES:
Deviant Narrative
From Individual to Group Goals
The exceptional circumstances of the
battlefield force individuals to place their own
needs beneath those of the platoon,
squadron, division, battalion, fleet, army, and
nation (Belton 197).
Individual heroism = form of self-indulgence,
counterproductive
Cooperation becomes crucial to the survival
of the group/platoon
5. SEXUAL COMBAT:
MASCULINITY IN THE WAR FILM
Oedipal Battles
Conventional Homoeroticism
Masculine/Feminine
Back from the Front
6. Oedipal Battles
Absence of women,
different sexual dynamics,
non-traditional love
triangles
Headstrong recruits
engage in oedipal
romance and/or warfare w/
top sergeants
Proof of courage,
manhood
Father figures
Platoon (1986)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
7. Conventional Homoeroticism
Women (when shown) are objects of
desire, competition/rivalry
Sexual relationships w/ women symbolic
of male desires for each other…
According to psychoanalysts (thanks,
Freud), displaced homoerotic or
homosocial relationship rivalry becomes
exchange
8. Masculine/Feminine
Women as threats
(sound familiar?)
Vulnerability, emotion
potentially destructive
Goose s death in Top Gun?
Must repress the
feminine elements of
the psyche
Boot camp scene
(warning: contains
offensive language)
Full Metal Jacket
9. Back from the Front
Normal world (family, wives, children) = Alien
World
Difficulty veterans face reintegrating into
society upon return home
Unfit for traditional social order due to
hypermasculinization (rage, violence)
Portrayal of Veterans as social outcasts,
outlaws
Willard s comments about his divorce, no
longer having a home in Apocalypse Now,
Rambo in First Blood
10. CROSSOVERS: WAR AND GENRE
Excesses define norms of
conventional cinema through
transgression
Broad variety of perspectives
on war beyond the combat
film
Every film that depicts/refers
to war & every film made
during times of war.
War comedies: Shoulder
Arms (1918), M*A*S*H (1970)
Musical Melodrama: Meet Me
in St. Louis (1944)
11. THE BATTLE FOR PUBLIC OPINION:
PROPAGANDA & THE COMBAT FILM
War films = crucial weapons in the shaping
of public opinion about a war.
Preaching War and Peace
Pacifist neutrality during peacetime
Propagandistic to garner public support during wartime
Mass Conversion: The Politics of Sergeant York
Why We Fight: Education and the War Film
Nationalist ideals: evoke messages of freedom,
equality
The Vietnam Reversal
Anti-War, challenge/question morality, justness and
motives, goals, purpose of war
12. RACE, ETHNICITY, AND THE WAR FILM
Representation in films vs. reality of race
relations in America at the time the film was
made.
Segregated units.
Japanese Americans were held in internment camps
and their property confiscated.
Real wartime racial tension was rewritten into
onscreen racial harmony; racism at home
was suppressed or displaced onto another
race.
13. CONFLICTED:
THE PSYCHIC VIOLENCE OF WAR
The Enemy is Us
Most Vietnam War films take an antiwar stance that as critical either of U.S.
political policy that led to involvement in the war or of the damage incurred
by servicemen in Vietnam.
Vietnam War films tend to undermine the traditional values celebrated in
films about WWII and others by reversing or obscuring the clear-cut
distinctions between us and the enemy.
In many Vietnam War films, we become the enemy.
The Aftermath
The difficult adjustment of Vietnam veterans to postwar America is
frequently cast in terms of conflict between them and those who stayed
behind.
Though the veterans of other wars are occasionally depicted as having
difficulty in adjusting to civilian life, their problems remain contained within
the family or the workplace; they rarely result in acts of civil disorder or
criminal violence.
However, the scars of the Vietnam War extended deeply into the American
psyche; the clear sense of victory that characterized WWII was contrasted
sharply to the sense of defeat and lack of closure that was the Vietnam War.
14. THE 1991 GULF WAR &
WORLD WAR II REDUX
The Gulf War World War II Redux
• Contemporary war films • Darker films; exploration of the
shaped by the American true nature (and non-
experience in Vietnam. redeeming qualities) of WWII.
• It is these films • Saving Private Ryan
approach to combat as a • The Thin Red Line
source of personal
trauma that links them to • Miracle at St. Anna (watch clip)
films about the Vietnam
War.
15. THE IRAQ WAR
Few produced, limited success at box office.
Majority focus on post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), brought about by
psychological trauma incurred during the war.
Moral: the war has traumatized the American
psyche.
War crime is presented as the consequence of
the stress placed on American forces.
In the Valley of Elah (2007)
Agitprop: Political propaganda
Op-Ed on Iraq War films, claims the main point
omitted from Elah:
…wars are lost by victims; they re won by soldiers.
16. MEDIATION AND REPRESENTATION
The war film mediates our relationship to war, helping to
prepare us for it, reconcile us to victory or defeat, and
adjust us to its aftermath.
The conventions of the war film continue to shape our
understanding of real wars.
Images of war explain why we fight; they stage and
restage war s battles; and they attempt to explain why
we won or lost.
All contemporary wars are waged on two fronts: the
battlefield and the screen.
Whether we win or lose the battle, the movies are there
to enable us to win the war.
