I Hollywood fighting a rear guard action against World War II ?

I saw this post pop up on a couple of blogs I read last week and I thought it worth talking about. The argument is that current Hollywood is being run by Liberals so incensed by the war in Iraq that, retroactively, they have begun to see ALL war as unnecessary, including previously agreed upon "good" wars like the war against Nazi and Japanese Fascism in World War II.

Driscoll quotes a Mark Steyn piece where Mark argues that this movement began with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN...

"Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing'. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing'. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa."

In a minute I'm going to give a couple of examples to show that Steyn and Driscoll may be on to something. But first I want to argue that their interpretation of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is not completely accurate. Here's the point. I don't think there's ever been a sane, rational, professional soldier who enjoyed war. I'm sure that in their quiet moments many of them reflect on the rightness or wrongness of the cause they are fighting for and they may experience pride or shame depending on how they come to feel about the value of their mission. But in the heat of battle, especially during World War II, which was brutal and often not fought by professional soldiers, my guess is that most GIs were concerned with doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, and not getting killed.

So, when you think about what a guy like the character played by Tom Sizemore might have gone through at the moment he's inspired to utter that fateful phrase that Steyn keys off on, most of it was, in fact, a "godawful mess." I would think a man like that might start to think less about the larger goals of winning the war, and start focusing more on what individual good he himself might have done. Up to that point, Sizemore's character had engaged in a long series of brutal and awful mortal combat. And I can certainly see why he might think... y'know, getting this kid home to his mom would be something I could do and remember and be proud of, rather than going to bed every night thinking about all the Germans I had to ram my bayonet into so that I could survive and get back home to my loved ones.

Isn't it possible THAT'S what he meant... that Saving Private Ryan is the one positive individual achievement that Miller and his men might be able to bring back with them to the real world?

I think so.

But that said, I think Driscoll is right that Hollywood is anxious to find stories set in World War II that they can use to fight the current ideological debate about Iraq. Let's face it, the movies they've made so far that were actually SET in Iraq are getting creamed at the box office, so you can understand why they might wish to continue this fight in a different setting, one to which audiences have historically been much more receptive.

... something like the "good war" in Europe in the Pacific.

I think the real war on World War II began with Clint Eastwood... and you have no idea how much it pains me to write that sentence.

I hated, hated, HATED FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. First of all it's the most boring war movie ever made. Second, I just don't understand the argument. With the vast majority of Americans in, y'know, America, and therefore removed from the fighting, the Government HAD to figure out ways to keep the American public engaged in the War effort. Let's not forget that this was not the big bad USA versus tiny little Iraq. There was a significant possibility that we would lose that war. We needed every American focused and engaged in the effort, not just fighting, but saving precious resources like oil and steel and food. And Americans get war weary, as do all right-thinking human beings... by the time of Iwo Jima, it's easy to understand why many Americans might have been tired of war, and why something like the picture of those men raising the flag above Mt. Siribachi might have been crucial to the war effort. Someone needs to explain to me what the hell could be so bad about using a heroic photo to give the folks on the home front a swell of pride so that they would stay engaged in the greatest battle against evil and totalitarianism that the world had ever seen!?

Stopping fascism by any means necessary is suddenly a bad thing? So they had to re-position the guys and shoot the picture twice... so a couple of the guys didn't react well to being called heroes because maybe in the heat of battle they did things that didn't feel very heroic in retrospect. Sorry, but boo-friggin'-hoo! There's a goddamned war on! It wasn't just that winning was important, it's that losing would have been a planetary catastrophe.

So that becomes, in my opinion, the first salvo in an assault on our collective memory of World War II. The template is, find a heroic World War II story and tell it in such a way that what should have been heroic becomes cynical and manipulative. The incredible assault on Iwo Jima suddenly goes from one of the most incredible acts of collective American bravery to a sham cynically abused by the powers that be to drum up support for a war to, what... seize European oil for Halliburton, I guess.

And there's more to come. Just off the top of my head I can think of two other movies in development that fit the same template. One film centers on the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, which resulted in the deaths of as many as 20,000 POWs, many of them American soldiers. Apparently, argues the movie, General Homma wasn't such a bad guy after all, and he got railroaded by the court that accused and convicted him of war crimes...

What's the point of making this movie? I mean really? Do we need to spend several million dollars to go back and resuscitate the reputation of a man who presided over the deaths from torture and starvation of thousands of human beings? Why!? What good could possibly come from doing that!?

Disgraceful. I wonder, if an American general forced a march that killed 20,000 Iraqis, would Hollywood treat him as kindly?

But getting back to the FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS template (Heroic effort becomes cynical sham)... Hollywood is also intent on making the true story of a particular operation behind enemy lines late in the war in Europe. In this story, a US General orders a small task force to assault and liberate a POW camp guarded by a much larger garrison of Nazi soldiers. It's an interesting story, no doubt, but the against-all-odds, for-our-boys heroic aspects of the movie are not what is motivating Hollywood in this case. I've heard this movie pitch a half-dozen times and it's always the same. They tell basically the same story I just pitched in the sentences above and everyone in the room kind of ho-hums... yeah yeah another mission movie about soldiers going behind enemy lines in World War II... been there, seen that.

But when the person telling the story gets to the punch-line and you can see everyone's eyes light up, as if to say ah-HA... you see it turns out this particular General's son-in-law was one of the prisoners being held in the camp! He sent 300 men on a suicide mission just to rescue his son-in-law!

And suddenly everyone gets why this is a movie that HAS to be made. Because there really is no heroism in war, no valiant struggle against the forces of evil... there are only victims (dullard US soldiers tricked into signing up) and cynical manipulative bad guys (US generals, Presidents, etc.) who send those victims off to die for their own enrichment, or amusement, or whatever.

And that's why Hollywood loves this story, because they can tell their own prevailing narrative of the war in Iraq, but couch it in the framework of WW2. Americans, Hollywood knows, like to see WW2 movies because it makes them proud of their nation. So they'll come in droves to see heroism, and get a dose of Hollywood "gotcha" instead.

Talk about cynical and manipulative.