The Medium Killed the Message
David Thomson's new book about War on Film takes us on an ill-contextualized journey through the good, the bad, and the ugly takes on war films.
IN JULY of 1934 the Production Code Association crafted the Code (known as the Hays Code), a self-censorship office of moral conduct for the American film industry. This product of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA; called the MPA today) ensured that the newly powerful film industry—one year shy of its fortieth birthday—would remain under the control of big Hollywood studios rather than local and state governments. This included the necessity to review scripts before production and a ‘Seal of Approval’ before release. Without it, the studio were fined 25,000 USD (over 500,000 today) and wouldn’t be allowed to exhibit the film in the largest markets. They had to comply.
The MPPDA created a non-binding list of “morality” demands in motion pictures—murder presented in an uninspiring way, upholding sanctity of marriage, etc.—five months after the Great Depression began. Religious groups, mostly local Catholics, took the downward spiraling opportunity to apply unified pressure on governments to make sure films, the new mass media of the day (where, in 1930, on average, sixty-five percent of the American public went to the cinemas once a week), wouldn’t promote licentious or violent behavior—to ‘protect’ the youth. The studios, now venturing into the red after the nineteen-twenties Golden Age of low interest rates and monopolizing the popularity of moviegoing, had to back down from this pressure. Will Hays, president of the MPPDA, first adopted the Code, and Joseph Breen, appointed by Hays to run the self-censorship office, started enforcing the Code in July of 1934 through the newly named Production Code Administration (PCA).
But why?
The adoption of the Code was mostly a force of stability in a highly dynamic era. The 18th Amendment (ratified in 1919) banned the sale of alcohol in the United States. This led to the speakeasy era and rise of gangsters like Al Capone and John Dillinger, who trafficked—and made millions—in illicit products. By 1930, Americans, bereft of financial stability (and therefore self-dignity) followed Capone and Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde and other outlaws through the press, as heroic anti-establishment figures. These gangsters, like themselves, were victims of the system. Banks and government were the suspects. These sensationalist figures were exploited by film studios—mostly Warner Bros.—in the extremely popular gangster-film sub-genre, in the most popular medium at the time. Warners released Little Caesar and The Public Enemy in 1931, both inspired by Capone & Friends gangland disputes. Howard Hughes got in on the action the following year with Scarface, also Capone inspired.
These films, and many others in the sub-genre, often ended in the gruesome deaths of their anti-hero protagonists, as well as their friends and family to show, in this inter-Code era, that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.” This was rule one of the Code. Of course, be that as it may, audiences sympathized with the exhilarating and titillating action of these figures—who says they’re “anti-hero”? The cinematic medium was new. Governments, religious groups (which were large and well-organized at the time), and film studios didn’t know how to regulate the morality of this newfound expression. But really, studios were unsure how to regulate the audiences themselves. After all, they still created these gangster pictures for profit. They knew what they were doing to an extent. And they kept on going until the financial boat leaked.
Audiences were sad when James Cagney died young and rich as Tom Powers, bootlegger and first- or second-generation Irish-American rising through the ranks, able to make a name for himself in Chicago, the American Dream. Americans would rather watch this and fantasize about their own fortune-gathering than the reality outside of the theater: Depression. These films were technically anti-gangster morality works, showing how awful and destructive this lifestyle is. But they underestimated the freshly minted power of cinema, trying to replicate the ticket sales of The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith’s racist epic that created the birth of a medium. Studios knew how to make money, but they didn’t know how to regulate the relationship between audience and screen. What would then happen if a more violent and morally ambiguous sub-genre, the war film, entered cinemas?
This era, the early late-interwar nineteen-thirties, was important: Capone was arrested on tax evasion charges in May 1929, five months before the Great Depression. Japan invaded Manchuria in September 1931, five months after The Public Enemy was released and eight months after Little Caesar. The Reichstag fire was set in February 1933, FDR was sworn in as President a month later, and the 21st Amendment was ratified in December, which repealed the 18th Amendment and legally ended prohibition. Two months after Bonnie & Clyde were killed by one-hundred and thirty rounds of ammunition, Breen started enforcing the Code, the same month Dillinger was killed by the FBI in Chicago, which was two months before the 6th Party congress was held in Nuremburg, attracting seven-hundred thousand Nazi supporters delivered into a highly effective film by Leni Riefenstahl. But all is good, the Code will start to make sure Americans are protected from immoral images on the silver screen. By then it was too late. Cinema would be used as the greatest propaganda medium of all time.
Reviewed:
The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film by David Thomson
HarperCollins, 449 pp., 14 November 2023
THE FILM industry of the nineteen-thirties hadn’t explored the war-film sub-genre as much as the gangster-film. The Big Parade (1925) by King Vidor walked so that All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) could win Outstanding Production (Best Picture) at the third Oscar Awards. The former received $20 million at the box office from a sub-$400 thousand budget, and, according to David Thomson in his new book, The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, “may be the most influential war movie ever made. Its mix of battle and romance (and box office) would be crucial. A genre was established.” More than that, it helped solidify MGM as a prominent studio and proved that war films could be massively profitable. But Thomson criticizes the naivety of Vidor and his use of unrealistic aesthetics for effect. Never mind that this was the first of its kind in an industry invented thirty years prior. He prefers Virginia Woolf’s influence of WW1 on the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, or Robert Graves’s memoir about being wounded on the Somme, as if literature (a medium he inherently privileges without qualifiers) provides an insight into explorations of interiority while cinema explores exteriority, a concept new for cinema (remember, thirty years old, versus literature, which is…much older).
Thomson then moves on to All Quiet. It was adapted from the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a former Imperial German soldier who wanted to write an early entry in the explicitly non-satirical anti-war sub-genre. His novel was published less than a year before the Great Depression started, in Germany, which was quickly translated into English and became the highest selling novel of 1929 in the United States, ten years after that war had ended. Universal Studios bought the rights and immediately began production. Thomson approves of the improvements made since The Big Parade, which scrapped the romantic plot and led to the death of the protagonist in the end. (He also admires the poetic and ambivalent English title, but not before mistranslating the German title literally.) All Quiet made considerably less money at the box office than The Big Parade on a bigger budget, but that doesn’t matter, according to Thomson, because it’s remembered today in a more favorable (critical) light.
Here begins, nearly one-hundred pages into The Fatal Alliance, the problem of context—time and place and politics, oh my, in that, there isn’t much in this monograph. The ambition of a book on a century of war on film with less than four hundred pages of text came at the loss of a lot of background information. While this wouldn’t generally be a problem, Thomson, rather than offering an exhaustive analysis on the matter, criticizes some films for their narrow-minded point of view devoid of historical context. While I agree with this regarding the lazy war-films, the same way period-pieces in general should be critiqued, it would owe a great deal to the sub-genre—and reader—to know more about, perhaps, why black Americans haven’t been more present, or women, or other nationalities. Thomson focuses nearly all his attention on Anglo-American productions, much like his own split-Atlantic identity, as well as several hand-picked continental European examples. The exceptions to the rule include a large chapter simply called “Russia” as well as passing references to colonial peoples in Zulu (1964).
Global historical context is important. But reading this gives one the idea that Thomson’s traditional impressionistic staccato writing style fails to mention that, for instance, The Big Parade was made during a moviegoing highpoint while All Quiet was released half-a-year into the Great Depression. The Depression is referenced, but not explained, nor used conjunctively with “Great,” three times. “Interwar,” “inter-war,” and/or “inter war,” a vitally important era for the sub-genre, along with “modernity” and/or “modernism” are never mentioned. Thomson expects You to know that, which is why he uses that pesky second-person “you” and royal “we” to implicate you and/or me, the reader(s), in his own shorthand of history. Neither can one find much information on the British Empire, nor its hand-over to the Americans in the 20th century, an important event You should already understand, I guess. Instead, he prefers patronizing the reader for not knowing where Somalia is on a map or how many Russians died during WW2—as if he’s unlocking the historical archives for the first time, thus enlightening us. He’ll be shocked to find out how many Chinese people died via the occupation by the Japanese Empire.
Thomson too often relies on disputed facts and anachronisms in his disjointed impressions. For instance, he claims that WW1 “was the first war in which governments felt the need to justify the exercise of those who served.” Before 1914, did governments never propagandized war efforts to retain combat readiness? It wasn’t even the first war of the century to do this. Or that the machine gun, specifically the MG 08—which he uncomfortably fetishizes and tries to implicate us in that as well—though invented in 1890, “had very little testing in action.” Perhaps the Russo-Japanese War, taking place before Thomson’s starting point in 1914, wasn’t cinematic enough. But apparently WW1 was the annunciation of many other weapon technologies: machine guns as well as long-range artillery, submarines, airplanes. One shouldn’t bother looking into the Boer War, the American Civil War, or the Italo-Turkish War. And lastly, to make a counter-point about Russia, he writes that “battle has not been fought on US ground since 1865.” Does Pearl Harbor not count because it was mostly in the water/air—a game of semantics? But surely, he knows about the American Indian Wars, right? As disgusting as those were, they were fought on, and very much for, so-called “US ground.” Or what about that incursion by Pancho Villa into New Mexico in 1916 that Patton was sent to quell? Thomson mentions this incident no more than sixty pages prior but maybe forgot.
Somewhere after Part 1 and into the WW1 chapters in Part 2, around page 100, Thomson reduces his staccato style and begins to lean on plot descriptions, light historico-biographies, and overextended rhetorical questions made up of general and specific irrelevancies meant to provoke, befuddle, and do the opposite of explain. This is how he begins one chapter (still about WW1):
What was it for, the whole thing? Where is history’s omniscient tracking shot going? For so vast and damaging an event, we feel there must have been some purpose, or excuse. Aren’t we obliged to wonder if we hope to deserve history or destiny? Can we really keep up with this mad race of ours if we lack goals or explanation? Is war just one of our fretful ways of giving ourselves a role? Or is its terminal meaning that there is no significance beyond the tidal changes of evolution?
Your guess is as good as mine. And he continues to rely on cheap second-person condescension: “A blizzard of souls? I use that phrase because I’ve just seen mention of a 2021 movie of that name. It’s a film from Latvia about a young man in the Great War, when Latvia, it is said, lost half its population. Did you know that? Could you find Latvia on a 1918 map? Can you grasp the numbers?” The profundity! How could you not know how Latvia fared in WW1??
One gets the impression that Thomson is here to set down his list of favorite and least favorite war films with the minor annoyance of having to provide some basic details about them. Round that out with references to Taiwan and Ukraine and a ‘deeply misunderstood’ Russia, and other general liberal affectations, and voila. January 6th is mentioned three times; one of those times Thomson alludes to a firing squad clearing those Capitol steps like the Odessa sequence in Battleship Potemkin: “Isn’t that what we longed for at the Washington Capitol in January 2021?” If he means the indiscriminate mass killing of American civilians, then no, not really: please stop using “we.” Elsewhere he senses déjà vu when a veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives punches an American First character, making the connection to modern day MAGA—remember the “punch a Nazi” thing? —who has a “responsibility to the world.” So, is he advancing an interventionist position, compelled there via Oscar-winning films?
The audience for this book will be…who, besides from self-flagellating liberal Boomers, war-film enthusiasts, the devoted Thomson readers (I’ve never met one, but they exist), and…who else? Is war on the brain for everyone since October 7th, will that help sales? Ukraine is subsiding in the spotlight and there are other coming attractions. Turn on your television set, fire up the DVD player, and watch graphic battle scenes with a tub of popcorn and your favorite soda pop sitting conveniently in your armchair lazy boy sofa drink holder, left or right, and sip away, or read Thomson’s book.
SO, WHAT is The Fatal Alliance about?
(Picturing an old man in a rocking chair by the fireplace) Thomson gives us three lessons on the first page to start us out:
One is that war steadily repeats and digests its melodrama, not just in tactics and technology, but in the pattern of misguided hopes and brutal reality. War drags us down, so that we forget peace.
Another lesson—for a book written and published first in the United States—is the way America has seldom understood how marginal it is in this dark history. In two world wars, the American homeland was calm; its industry thrived; its stories swelled in grandeur. But it longs to be the leader and a star in war studies. So America has had few rivals in the making of exciting war movies, or in the ingenuity and expressiveness of its military expenditure. As if the young nation wanted to romance combat or make an advertisement for it.
The third lesson is the most far-reaching: as time has passed since 1914, it becomes clearer that, for so many of us, the most available sense of history is reappraisal through a movie. Later in this book, I will note how some potential viewers complained that The Vietnam War on television, a chronicle by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, was too long. Whereas even at over seventeen hours it is too short. Because an attempt at understanding believes a war of thirty years deserves a lifetime of research. (And if you think it wasn’t thirty years, then you are victim to Hollywood condensation.) But there are many who think Vietnam was Platoon, or Apocalypse Now, or We Were Soldiers, three spectacular films that squeezed the totality to fit a glib story line. If we let movies be our history book, we will only repeat the movies.
Yes, there will be a test on this next week. The first lesson can be completely detached from film and film studies. This general formulation about war as a storytelling device is something most people in the world, unfortunately many times through the hard way, can understand by age ten. He then contradicts his second lesson in the final chapters by arguing that the American Civil War never ended, as well as the Cold War, which The Underground Railroad (Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel) proves. The United States is an occupied country. Fair enough, then why doesn’t he privilege that in the same way as other countries, or different eras, and why does he so thoroughly avoid colonial history? The American homeland has been anything but calm in its history.
In lesson three, Thomson stretches who the “for so many of us” are. I don’t think that most of us reappraise history through movies alone. History books and fact-checked journalism and university departments (and shady think tanks) do the heavy lifting there, which are then used to consult on movies and TV shows. I don’t think anyone thinks that Vietnam was Platoon, or Apocalypse Now, or We Were Soldiers, and the Burns/Novak documentary, which is undoubtably superb, was presented as a TV show on PBS, therefore not a movie. The final line of this lesson is the most important, which carries us through The Fatal Alliance: “If we let movies be our history book, we will only repeat the movies.” He’s afraid that movies will corrupt war, and war will corrupt movies. He wants to sit safely at home and not be confronted with the horror of it all (oh, the humanity), lest he need to deploy a bit of cognitive dissonance. Thomson is also self-aware:
Movie is too often a mask for ignorance, just as so many wars owe their energy to our knowing too little about faraway places. They thrive on the refusal to take history seriously. Thus the dilemma of a book that wants to be a history, not just in the chronology of what happened, but in trying to understand how the technology of film as a medium and its narrative constructs drove and directed our understanding of war.
This book is a good example of “knowing too little about faraway places,” where the big myths are explored and not much else. Journalism move aside, film is here to direct our understanding of history and war.
To explain these lessons, and the conceit quoted above, Thomson makes several literal and metaphorical connections between war/battles and film/filmmaking: “It has never seemed coincident that films and guns are both shot, and that they concern contained explosions. It may seem an awkward proposition, but in taking a picture and firing a weapon there is a level of sexual metaphor, a kind of self-expression that is heady but risky.” I’ll spare you the raunchy connections that followed. More on shooting:
Here’s another thing: as I examine the mechanics of the gun closely I see that it resembles the way film— so many still frames—was loaded into a camera or a projector and then animated by what we call persistence of vision. In both cases, the crucial or live element was ‘shot.’ I don’t want to sentimentalize this process, but I think there is an affinity between the workings of film and the performing action of machine guns. They both mimic time, or take it over.
Quentin Tarantino makes this point quite graphically, but Thomson chose to claim that Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book was “funnier, faster, and more rueful” than Inglourious Basterds. Starship Troopers would’ve been an excellent film to study for this book, but Black Book was given the tepid summary before quickly moving on.
Thomson makes a sort of Chekhov's gun threat: “The fatalism in film’s machine cannot resist fatality. Some movies are more sophisticated than others, but every gun offered will be fired.” Have film : will shoot :: have gun : will shoot. Same fatal thing. I enjoyed the reconditeness of comparing Spielberg to Eisenhower: “And of course, there is Steven Spielberg, the begetter of the film and, in his way, as beloved or trusted a filmmaker as Dwight Eisenhower was esteemed as a military leader and the director of D-Day. I don’t mean to accuse Eisenhower or Spielberg of vainglory or self-importance, though it is obvious that Ike was cast into an inescapable role, whereas Steven elected to make this film.” Both orchestrators of combat, in a way; I wonder if Spielberg felt guilty leading so many men to death at the end of the day—queue Gary Oldman in Truman makeup offering him a hanky. And the grand comparison of them all: “The more we contemplate such movies, the clearer it is that generals and nations are like inane movie corporations intent on clarifying history and heir self-importance for all us idiots. They have to do something—so they run the risk of doing something stupid.” We are all idiots. I can say, with confidence, that if David Zaslav became my president, I would immigrate faster than Nolan jumped ship to Universal.
Thomson’s thesis for The Fatal Alliance is alluded to throughout the book with examples, as well as short semi-explanations in Part 1, but is fully revealed on page 381, three pages before fade to black:
But this book is an attempt—written in dismay—to describe how what we call the media have drawn up an order of battle and turned us from hurt or outraged citizens into numb spectators somewhere between safe and helpless. The community of movie people—the makers and the watchers—may not like to face this, but the condition is inescapable. Film and the media are weapon systems now—and the agony and impotence in being watchers will intensify.
The fatal alliance is between both war and film necessitating battle and action. There’s a massive contradiction to this relationship: how can one effectively convey the horrors of war to someone safely at home? For Thomson, this has turned viewers into numb/passive spectators. “Written in dismay” refers (I’m guessing) to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the book’s raison d'etre, which We, he accuses all of us whether we want to or not, of gladly accepting the horrific events on screen while doing nothing in return. Calls for never again through gruesomely violent depictions of war necessitates it happening again and again.
But he goes further: that this, our current Russia-Ukraine predicament in “the West,” is the insulting, disrespectful, and narrow-minded result of not understanding Russia and Russians well enough. They are privileged in Thomson’s view, as opposed to the unoccupied US/UK (Ireland?), because they lost many more people in WW2 (as is the unfortunate result of large armies clashing), and, most importantly, because Russia or the Soviet Union (oftentimes anachronistically referred to without differentiation) “have often felt on the brink of external jeopardy and humiliation.” Is he referring to the Russian Empire, a nearly two-hundred year-old system that occupied and divided many millions of its neighbors? Or the Soviet Union, which did the same? Cold War politics is reduced to shaming Americans for not understanding Russians. Like Britain, or the United States, if your country/federation has more independence days against you than you yourself, then oftentimes you are a colonizing, victimizing force. How about that largeish country between Germany and Russia, Poland? Could Thomson point out Poland on a pre-WW1 map? Trick question, which is why he mistakenly writes that “the Warners were from territory that was Russia before it became Poland.” Yikes, especially because Thomson wrote a book on the Warner brothers. Krasnosielc was Polish all along, occupied or not, but we just don’t understand the Russians well enough, that’s the problem. Does he know the population density that was killed in Poland during the twentieth century, or the percentage of Polish Jews erased forever? The Shoah is mentioned three times, all in connection to the plot of Schindler’s List. But one wouldn’t know any of these things from Thomson’s text, which avoids much of the context as inconvenient filler.
I agree, presumably but I’m not sure, with Thomson that the United States took the wrong direction in the immediate postwar years by immediately countering the Soviet Union without properly understanding the destruction inflicted upon them and all other German occupied hellscapes. The Soviets had a massive military but shit infrastructure, only war-industry, and without enough agricultural production to survive. The Marshall Plan was an engineered fiasco in economic propaganda, the Iron Curtain went up—we know the story—Germany was propped up on both sides, ensuring a generation of Nazi party members entry into the finest managerial occupations for both sides. These details, entirely devoid and without allusions, are unimportant for Thomson. He claims that us viewers, as “warriors” and armchair dreamers, “need to grasp the enormity of the Russian war, not just in proper respect for that much abused country” on the same page as Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), who was a Ukrainian filmmaker born in Artemovsk (now called Bakhmut). Which is the abused country and from when? Shepitko’s film, as well as her husband’s film Come and See (1985; Thomson dismisses as “self-pity and boasting”), in my opinion, are as good as one can get to being anti-war films. Thomson makes the point, shaming You/Us once again, that American actors couldn’t have been in The Ascent because they haven’t been properly occupied. He neglects to mention that the two protagonists of that film (Vladimir Gostyukhin and Boris Plotnikov), were born after WW2 ended and into an imperial system. Lived experiences be damned in favor of epigenetics and, perhaps, atavism. What was happening in the Soviet Union in the late nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties? Who knows, except you should, according to Thomson.
Last point on Thomson and Russia, as he brings us to the present:
So now we have the fresh catastrophes of Ukraine, and Russian behavior— seemingly as cruel as it is irrational—that leaves the West begging to be involved, or waiting for insurrection in Moscow. But are we falling for the “nastiness” of Putin and missing the accumulation of Russian depression? The West is not trained enough in carrying on a hopeless attitude for as long as forever. We want the movie to end.
Without making a global historicopolitical contextual point, We (who is that here, nobody knows?) watch, expecting to become more central to the story (via US intervention presumably before Putin abdicates) or look away, ending the movie. Nope. It’s because we don’t understand Russia’s deepfelt depression, that Putin is a movie villain who’s just misunderstood, the casting is off, and the audience is judged.
THIS BRINGS me back to the central thesis, the fatal alliance itself: Thomson entirely underestimates the power of social media and TV while overestimating the power of cinema. This book would have made sense in the pre-internet era, but not today. We become numb to violence through seeing dead civilians and airstrikes on X rather than All Quiet on the Western Front. (The German 2022 version, produced by Netflix and winner of many awards, was critically awkward in Germany because a strange level of sympathy is placed on the fictionalized German officer—played by Daniel-Frederick “Stolz der Nation” Zoller-Brühl—who hammered out the armistice, a character and event not in the book and completely against Remarque’s point that older generations were at fault for sending younger generations to die for them. American critics and viewers even soured on the obvious anti-war message: yes, we’ve seen it before, boring—and too late.) Instead, Thomson, an octogenarian who likes talking about his early years experiencing the Battle of Britain irl, comes off as ignorant of contemporary events (beyond the Labour/Democratic neoliberal hand-wringing of neocons). Partial-proof: he ambiguously blames video games for being too realistic, he makes a lame ADD joke in saying that a more modern War and Peace adaptation would have to conform to our epidemic of attention-deficiencies—he maybe hasn’t noticed that the most popular and profitable movies since Titanic have regularly been over two hours long, sometimes closer to and above three. And on the same page: artificial intelligence will create a culture that won’t need anyone to read/write War and Peace. Good thing Tolstoy already wrote it!
Let’s go back to the movies.
Thomson writes several times that the book follows a sideways, non-chronological approach: Part 1 is the introduction, Part 2 is WW1 (or rather the Great War, as he insists), Part 3 is WW2, and Part 4 is everything afterwards. The largest chunk in Part 3 is “The Just War.” That title, along with the ‘Greatest Generation,’ a uniquely American concept, aren’t explained or contextualized in any way. But they go a long way in illuminating films like Saving Private Ryan (1998), which Thomson spends a lot of time summarizing without analysis. Mid-nineteen-nineties: the Wall just fell, End of History, Balkan states are rumbling and jockeying, and Turkey, our NATO ally, is displacing hundreds of thousands of Kurds from tens of thousands of villages using American weapons. It is two full decades away from Vietnam, the Soviet Union is gone, as well as Reagan, a New Democrat is in office and can play the saxophone, and Steven Spielberg recently reached into his familial roots to make Schindler’s List (1993) to win his Oscar (the Oskar Oscar), which he tried to do again with a more popular film set at the same time celebrating the sacrifice of American WW2 veterans. Those valiant heroes that saved democracy from fascism. They’re getting old in the nineties; Vietnam and the critical films made about it left a sour taste, so nostalgia was thick for the last war Americans fought on the winning side.
Before his chapter on Saving Private Ryan, Thomson criticizes Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) for being vacant and decadent, spectacular yet vague. But most importantly, Dunkirk doesn’t disturb the legend eighty years later or investigate its background (and neither does Thomson). While not being Nolan’s job to do so, as opposed to a book about war on film, the legend of Dunkirk works well for the film medium: projections of fantasy and splendor. Dunkirk doesn’t revel in action sequences with blood and guts, but rather resembles a survival film, a thriller, a sub-genre using war as a background rather than the topic of exploration. We get the impression that Thomson doesn’t believe in upholding uncontested legends and myths in films, that context is important and necessary for illumination. Then he mentions Fires Were Started (1943), a documentary film used explicitly for propaganda purposes for a country mid-war. Since this film was “reality,” with “real” fireman and “real” places, it’s therefore authentic and wrenching. He admires the matter of fact quality of it and how common folks are doing common things during a war. That this isn’t propaganda. Definitely no legend or mythmaking going on here.
While Dunkirk is mere legend re-presentation, Fires Were Started and Saving Private Ryan are authentic portrayals with lots of realism, according to Thomson. After all, Spielberg used real photos from the events to base the mise-en-scène on and blood hits the camera! Thomson describes the D-Day myth in detail and enjoys Saving Private Ryan’s common people at war approach (who are reduced to basic, accented caricatures). Without blinking he writes that “the portrayal of human damage had not been attempted before with the same cinematic intensity.” What does he mean by cinematic intensity? Come and See and many others that he brought up are certainly more intense. He then claims that Spielberg “does not make too many casual pictures for fun” and then lists his “fun” movies in the following paragraph: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark (SS’s first Nazis are evil film), and Jurassic Park. Thomson’s favorite Spielberg film set during WW2 is Empire of the Sun.
This takes me to the anti-war film part. Thomson is skeptical it exists: “I doubt there is any such thing as an antiwar film. That has to do with our duplicitous nature, and with the bursting firepower of movie itself. In the dark, whatever the official motive or the orders, we go to war for excitement.” True enough, if you follow his thesis that equates the tensions between watching horrific events from afar without properly experiencing them. But can it not exist? Spielberg believes every war film is an anti-war film, or at least conveniently thought so during the publicity and awards season campaigning of Saving Private Ryan. That directly contradicts François Truffaut, who claimed there’s no such thing as an anti-war film. Regarding Saving Private Ryan, this film does the obvious demystifying of what everyone knows—war is hell—while reinforcing the illusions and myths of the Just War and Greatest Generation. It assumes that American forces freed the world, that soldiers were acting instinctively and not ideologically according to propagandized efforts, like Why We Fight, or Fires Were Started. Every war needs grand cases for intent, otherwise why fight? Americans were fighting for democracy and freedom in Europe, in both World Wars, and then in Korea, then Vietnam, then Iraq—twice, and Afghanistan…
Spielberg is the greatest propagator of this Greatest Generation myth in filmmaking. He and George Lucas came out of the reactionary popular side of New Hollywood, where conformity and pro-government “anti-war” films made a lot of money and brought in shiny awards after the Code ended. That was easy to claim for a brief period between the two Gulf Wars. The righteousness of fighting fascism was traded at a premium for much of postwar history, and Spielberg exploited that. Thomson refers to “the Just War” as publicity, seemingly a term of honor, and nothing else. Critical evaluations of that term, its era, and its films could and should be found elsewhere.
Spielberg’s contemporary, Francis Ford Coppola, also made a war film, Apocalypse Now (1979). It was more critical of the myth, which was adapted from Joseph Conrad’s adventure up the Congo. It was also four years after Saigon was evacuated; Americans lost that thirty year war. No nostalgia, just pure texture and aesthetics and hell; Thomson calls the film a “morose pageant, full of ravishing scenes and unhindered overacting.” But Coppola has no illusions: Apocalypse Now, he claimed, isn’t anti-war. His anti-war film idea is interesting: it would have to take place outside of war itself: perhaps an Iraqi family enjoying a wedding without any disturbances, love and peace and tranquility without sequences of intense violence. Something like The Burmese Harp (a Japanese film set during the Burma campaign, nominated for a foreign language Oscar. Thomson only mentioned Japanese films to criticize Akira Kurosawa for being as opportunistic as Roberto Rossellini). Give nothing to the viewer to tantalize. Perhaps.
As Thomson correctly formulates, film can’t separate itself from being engaging entertainment. But to become anti-war, a film would need to disenchant itself from exactly those powers. Thomson and I diverge on how to get there: he wants realism and vague senses of ‘understanding’ while I want meta-contextual politicizing. Emphasis on realism destroys the politicizing of war films though. Films are not journalism, films are not social media feeds, films are not TV, all three of which Thomson confuses between. Films are dreams on a screen; fantasies closer to one’s subconscious than the horrors of reality, though they aren’t mutually exclusive. This is why audiences in 1931 went to The Public Enemy: they didn’t care for the socio-political reality and morality of gangsters. They wanted to watch the thrills and have adrenaline and serotonin released during tense moments of audiovisual spasm. In 2009 audiences wanted to forget about the Great Recession and watch an alt-history in which Hitler is overkilled by the Bear Jew in a crowded theater of Nazis burning to death.
Anthony Swofford wrote the book Jarhead in 2003 after his deployment, which Sam Mendes adapted into a film two years later. (Jarhead is unmentioned in Fatal Alliance but Thomson quite enjoys 1917.) Swofford claimed that war films have a magic brutality that celebrates terrible things. Young men join, many times because of war-based video games. These movies and games offer a vicarious experience through a soldier’s brutal mentality. R. Lee Ermey, the Marine drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket (1987), nearly the most anti-war an American war film can get, was asked daily, for a decade and a half after the film, by recruits, that this film got them to join. (September 11th was a better recruitment tool afterwards.) In Full Metal Jacket, Ermey’s tough approach drove a private (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) to commit suicide after shooting Ermey in the chest. Did these new recruits want to test themselves? The anti-war film can exist, but not here and now in the Anglo-American sphere. Films, no matter how depressing and graphic the events on screen, have a vicarious connection to the audience that is just as powerful today as in 1930. Studios better understand the relationship between their films and the audience today, post-self-censorship, in that they know how little they understand. That connection has always been there, it hasn’t been molded over time through exposure to a specific sub-genre, the war film, and ignorance of current events and history.
The same rules can apply today, but the propaganda battles that were fought between fascism and communism and capitalism on film brought the world to war in the nineteen-thirties are now fought on social media. One can now easily dismiss the forgery of online content, but the subconscious truth of film is unmovable. Films can be censored and redacted and edited, but their meaning derives from outside the immediate conscious realm. Thomson ends Fatal Alliance with much gruff about Ukraine and nostradamusing about Taiwan (he missed the Middle East) and ends by stating “that we are accustomed to forms of occupation by now, the systems that ask for passwords and insecurity. And while some complain at that, others feel reassured. That is war’s weather system, the idea of being under control. Oppressed, yet sort of safe? Warn yourself.” Except this is the internet, not film.
