|
What will we see through the looking glass when this beer-drinkers' war fades into the gleeful archives of history? In the last century, it was cinema, film (more than any other art-form) that captured the images, sculpted our memories, and provided a lowest-common-denominator of security that allowed us to sleep more peacefully with our nightmares, to march more resolutely into the brave future. But it's now the next century... and times have changed. We are flooded with audio-visual imagery of actions as they happen, the instant they happen, the instant before and the instant after. They come like raindrops on the hot sand: cold and sharp for a moment and then evaporated in the heat of the next moment. Light years of tape and discs, a virtual Tower of Babel.
After World War I, during the early days of filmmaking, films poured out of America and Europe, capturing, exploring, distorting, glamorizing, educating, trying to make sense of the "Great War To End All Wars." And this world-war-one genre continued for over 50 years. By World War II, film had emerged as the 20th century art-form, the mirror of our worst self-image. During the war, pre-television. pre-internet, along with radio, Hollywood flooded the population with images good and bad, propaganda and art (and good box-office as well). After the war, Europe joined in, followed shortly by Japan and China and India. The whole world looked, listened, and filled its memory. This genre continues to this day because it tells such a simple story, because it was such a simple war. The good guys were unquestionably and self-righteously good, and the bad guys were unquestionably and self-righteously bad.
The next American war was in Korea; it was called a "police conflict." It was small and it was unclear what the issues were because America was unclear what its issues were. This during the beginning of the glibly-titled "cold war" period, a gray, bland time in America filled with doubts and paranoia. Few relevant films about this war appeared except, incredibly, one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made: Robert Aldrich'sAttack.
Next was the horror in Vietnam. Like the current Iraqi crisis, a unilateral effort by America to do unquestionable good. Sex, drugs and rock&roll with a largely under-class populated army meets a mysterious, oppressed people who want to be free and are willing to oppress themselves to do it. Only two films truly captured the sleeper's nightmare and the insanity of waking up to it: Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. But our collective memory refused to be carved by these images, so we just let it go: the millions of dead and injured Vietnamese, the thousands of dead and injured Americans. And let us not remember the Cambodian genocide that followed, a microcosm of the Holocaust genocide in Europe, prompted by the Vietnamese war or as the Vietnamese call it: The American War. Let us not remember the images of Roland Joffé's Killing Fields. Precious little else for our memories.
And then there was the Gulf War... not really a war at all. A deadly football/rugby match between the Western All-Stars and the sand-dune homies. Mounds of tape and discs, disposable images to be forgotten and only remembered on pay-tv. I don't know of any films worth mentioning from that Sunday afternoon foray.
There are others, distant-from-America wars in Algeria, Israel, Tibet, Africa: all captured in films, some good, some bad, mostly forgotten.
Many film historians and critics believe that all war films are both pro- and anti-war at the same time. I don't think so. Most people on this planet (not all) hate war and want to be rid of it, want to banish violence as an acceptable method to solve problems. There are many films that focus on this collective human desire and want, and there are three that are the are the most powerful, stridently anti-war films ever made: Aldrich's Attack (1956), Kubrick's Paths Of Glory (1957), and David Lean's The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957). Notice when they were created, all about the same time, all after World War II and Korea, all before Vietnam. It is Lean's masterpiece that brings me to the present. At the end of the film, the prison-camp doctor stands on the river bank surveying the littered dead bodies below and the blown bridge in the background; the entire saga imaged before him. And he says: "Madness... madness!"
So what will come from this ongoing Iraqi war and its predecessor in Afghanistan?
What will be the images, the poignancies, the meanings extracted from the flood of media and captured on film for our collective consciousness? Will there be a close-up of someone standing on a hill overlooking Baghdad, and will he whisper: "... madness!" It won't be you, and it won't be me. Who will it be?
|
