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When I was a kid, I watched a lot of World War II movies.
The Longest Day came out when I was in second grade. Loved it.
The Great Escape with Steve McQueen came out when I was in third grade. Loved it even more.
I was too young to see the Bridge On the River Kwai when it played in theaters, but I still remember what a big deal it was when it was first aired on TV one Sunday night when I’d just turned 12. Really loved it, and as Alec Guiness was torn between duty and honor at the big explosive end, I choked up.
Those films were full of spectacle, and good guys and bad guys, but they also had complicated characters and stories.
Most of the ordinary war movies I watched all the time on TV, though – the old black-and-white ones -- were only so-so.
And lately I realized that most of those mediocre B-and-C movies were made during the war. They were cranked out as propaganda, meant strictly to inspire or comfort audiences at home. Like for instance pretty much all the ones John Wayne made --
No, it turns out the golden era for movies about World War 2 came a decade or two after the war ended.
It probably took filmmakers that many years to fully ferment and digest their wartime experiences and ideas before they could turn them into great entertainment.
Fast forward to Vietnam.
The first movie about that war during the war was The Green Berets – a piece of pure pro-war propaganda starring (once again) John Wayne.
Just two years later, though, public opinion had turned very gloomy about Vietnam…and Robert Altman’s MASH came out.
It was a great, dark, funny film -- and the reason people like my Republican pro-war father allowed themselves to love it was that it was set in the Korean War…a war fought two decades earlier….a war at a comfortable remove from 1970.
Fast forward again, to now. Just as MASH was literally about Korea but really about Vietnam, the successful new war movie Jarhead takes place during the 1st Gulf War, but for viewers it’s “really” about the killing and dying in Iraq right now.
The advertising tagline for the film specifically encourages that blurring between Gulf Wars: “For every war, there is a film that defines it. ‘Jarhead’ is that movie for our time.”
Jarhead has done pretty well at the box office and it is beautifully made and acted. But, while it gives a great sense of what it might be like to be an American soldier in the Persian Gulf, its about a war that only lasted four days, it doesn't have much of a story.
The cable series Over There, about a fictional Army platoon fighting insurgents in Iraq right now, debuted last summer. I liked the first episode a lot, but I never got around to watching another one. And it turns out I wasn’t alone…after the premiere, the audience shrank by half.
And so Over There was just cancelled, at the end of its first 13-week season.
Here in the middle of a horrible, messy real war about which no one can’t have mixed feelings, not many of us were eager to see it transmuted, in real time, into entertainment.
I think that for superb popular entertainment or art to emerge from this present war– this war we rushed into too quickly, helter-skelter – is going to take time.
