A.E. Politics through Film. 2/22/2011
Hollywood loves war. It’s been a recurrent theme in the film industry for the since the first films came out during WWI. The success of the war movie is no surprise as Ernest Giglio points out in his book, Here’s Looking At You, because it “fulfills the audience’s heroic fantasies while celebrating patriotism” He goes on to say that “it explores the dualities of the human condition; individual decency and courage versus brutality of the enemy; individual loyalty and duty versus self-interest and survival; and self-sacrifice versus the collective good.” These topics are readily seen in traditional war movies where a mission has to be accomplished by a band of soldiers the audience can easily relate to and watch as they sacrifice themselves to save others. Nuclear war movies are not always clear-cut like that. These films deal with non-conventional weapons whose power to destroy is almost God-like, which inspires awe, fear and demands an incredible amount of responsibility from those few in charge of their use. Tensions in a nuclear war film are built out of the unknown fear as the world teeters on the edge of obliteration.
Some of the most awarded films in history have been about war. From the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, to the 2008 film The Hurt Locker, the story of war and the struggle by those involved has captivated audiences. War is a time of extremes, when raw human emotion and nature come to the surface to reveal something true about all people. Sometimes these truths are the romanticized versions of self-sacrifice and honor, and at other times it’s the truth that all people are brutish, savage animals that can do unspeakable things in the name of a made-up concept like territory or government. Hollywood tries to show the duality of human nature in these cases but tends to portray Americans as the more noble people who overcome evil in the name of good.
WWII is the most romanticized of the American wars, mainly due to the fact that during the war the OWI was very influential in making propaganda films that sought to inspire and garner support for the troops. The war was seen as a good war because the Allies were fighting to stop the totalitarian Nazi regime from taking over the world and subjugating millions of people, a noble cause that is easily supportable. Hollywood has done its part to memorialize the war with films like Patton; Battle of the Bulge, and Saving Private Ryan, each film glorified the actions of American soldiers in battle as they overcame the evil Nazi forces. The financial success of WWII films in the few years after the war solidified the genre as a dependable mold.
The messages behind these movies spoke to the audience in a way that inspired them to support the government in times of need when there was something greater at work than their own lives. This is reflected in the movie Casablanca where the love that Humphrey Bogart has for Ingrid Bergman is put aside so that the head of the Resistance can escape and continue the “Good Fight”. This form of sacrificing one’s own life for the collective good is constantly reiterated throughout most war movies, but not most nuclear war movies.
Since the end of the Second World War there has been a leveling force in the realm of warfare that Hollywood has used extensively. Nuclear war is a whole different kind of game. In nuclear war there are no large armies facing off with each other, down in the trenches. Instead these wars are fought in the offices and war rooms of country leaders, like in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Here the tone was set by the looming threat of total annihilation because of a mechanical malfunction.
There are five categories of nuclear film that Ernest Giglio describes and they are the following: science fiction/horror film, nuclear war/attack, nuclear accident/ disaster, nuclear survival, nuclear terrorist films. Each film deals with the extreme cost of nuclear war in its own way but a main theme throughout all of them is the idea that man has created a great and terrible technology that changes the landscape of war forever. In the 1964 black comedy film Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick has shown how ridiculous the nuclear scare was during the Cold War. It also shows how technological advances can also be our downfall when they are trusted too much.
These types of accident/ technological breakdown films have a lot to do with the fact that man has come to rely on our own inventions too much, and often we are hoisted with our own petards. Great men of science gave the world this knowledge, but its creation was befouled by its own existence. Hollywood has made many movies in which the unintended consequences of atomic use are disastrous and in most cases, monstrous. From the 1955 film, Tarantula to the 2008 Incredible Hulk, experiments gone wrong serve to teach man one thing, he is not ready or responsible enough to control this amount of power.
This is a far cry from traditional war movies in which the power comes from the men themselves, the sheer cooperative force of destruction that is one army bent on killing another is also awe-inspiring. This can be seen in movies like Saving Private Ryan, where the 30 minute opening sequence of the Normandy Invasion shows the audience the terror of war up close, where thousands of men sacrifice themselves for a few miles of beach. It’s easier for the audience to put themselves in the boots of those men and imagine what it was like to fight that day than it is for them to imagine the blinding light of a nuclear blast.
Another way traditional war movies differ from their nuclear war counterparts is the way they have been used in history. During WWII Hollywood was very involved in the war effort by making hundreds of movies for the US government and for the American people so that they can relax after a hard week of working in the factories. This was a country united and Hollywood put out propaganda films along with inspiring films to keep the country united, or just to profit on the extreme amount of patriotism and a little bit of racism. The Battle of Midway was shot on the decks of the ships involved and was some of the best war footage ever shot, and it occurred at a key time when the US Navy started to turn the tide of battle in the Pacific. At this time the films started to change from being inspiring underdog stories of perseverance to glory-filled films of conquering the Japanese and winning the war.
Nuclear war movies don’t come with this same sense of inspiring virtue. In most cases they are cautionary tales with the threat of doom always apparent. There can’t be movies made in which the use of nuclear weapons is an honorable action it is always something that must be avoided at all costs. This is where the brave characters are those who are able to convince the politicians not to use the bomb, as was the case in the Michael Bay film, The Sum of All Fears, where Ben Affleck’s character is able to convince the Russian president to stand down and avoid total thermonuclear war after a terrorist group detonated a device in a football stadium.
The glory days of Hollywood nuclear war movies seem to be in the past, along with the cold war, but it may in fact turn out that these movies are more relevant in today’s world filled with terrorist groups, unstable third world countries acquiring the technology and a crumbling Soviet Union defense system. The ironic part is that traditional war movies are almost extinct do to the fact that America has been engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq for the last decade trying to win the hearts and minds of the people instead of trying to take a position. The modern war story is that of the struggle of individuals dealing with extraordinary circumstances where there is no clear-cut enemy and the reasons behind the fighting are vague and/or controversial. If this is the case than the intangible fear of the unknown is much more in line with a nuclear war film for the future, where decisions are made by rash men and women in high government that the country is trusting less and less. Hopefully in the end these new films will do for the modern country what they did for it in the forties, unify it in belief that there is something greater than the individual, but that it is each individual life, instead of the government’s sovereignty.
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