Has anybody seen The Hurt Locker? Cinemas are just reopening in Chile after the earthquake and this movie will still be playing next week and I'm interested. National Review Online wrote very highly of it. I'm always interested in war films that are made seriously and after seeing James Cameron "subtebly" ape himself copying his space marines from Aliens in Avatar, this could be a nice change of pace. I just hope it's more similar to Valkyrie than to Unglorious Bastards.
The EOD team angle is interesting. During the 80s my father actually met several EOD experts from the Carabineros (national police) special forces. He did mention they were very chillingly inmune to fear. A pair actually were missing a few chunks of their bodies and appeared beyond fear. I think that's the point of the story, the protagonist has lost fear of death.
I've only occassionally have talked with special forces guys with EOD experience, but never in a really personal situation. During the 80s my dad was in charge of Valparaiso's water supply and sanitation and they suffered several bomb attacks and thearts. My father actually once found a bomb himself and had to call the police. Fortunately it was a decoy, but that same night a real bomb had blown up elswere.
The Hurt Locker
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george seal
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I saw the movie yesterday night. I thought it was very good. Guess I like gritty war movies. I liked Black Hawk Down and Brazil's Elite Troop. A refreshing change after the normal stupid fare that trivialices war. I also liked the fact that the movie does not demonice soldiers and shows terrorism as terrible and not romantic.
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Pat Holscher
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I'm looking forward to "The Pacific", although I do not have HBO. I'll have to buy the disks at some point.
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george seal
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It's going to be shown on HBO? I saw trailers for it last week but I don't have that channel (at least my cable provider charges it separately). It looked pretty espectacular, specially a bird's eye view of battle with a flamethrower. Band of Brothers is the obvious inspiration here (at least for producers who see a market niche) and that was excellent. I have that one on DVD.Pat Holscher wrote:I'm looking forward to "The Pacific", although I do not have HBO. I'll have to buy the disks at some point.
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detriquette Φ
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Regarding Pacific, I pass along this from VD Hanson. Tom Hanks' comments are personnaly insulting to those who gaave there lives to preserve the Republic.
Tom
March 13, 2010
Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
Much has been written of the recent Tom Hanks remarks to Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine interview about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific. Here is the explosive excerpt that is making the rounds today:
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers. All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus.
Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous. Consider the following.
Asian Relations
In earlier times, we had good relations with Japan (an ally during World War I, that played an important naval role in defeating imperial Germany at sea) and had stayed neutral in its disputes with Russia (Teddy Roosevelt won a 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his intermediary role). The crisis that led to Pearl Harbor was not innately with the Japanese people per se (tens of thousands of whom had emigrated to the United States on word of mouth reports of opportunity for Japanese immigrants), but with Japanese militarism and its creed of Bushido that had hijacked, violently so in many cases, the government and put an entire society on a fascistic footing. We no more wished to annihilate Japanese because of racial hatred than we wished to ally with their Chinese enemies because of racial affinity. In terms of geo-strategy, race was not the real catalyst for war other than its role among Japanese militarists in energizing expansive Japanese militarism.
War in the Pacific
How would Hanks explain the brutal Pacific wars between Japanese and Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos, and Japanese and Pacific Islanders, in which not hundreds of thousands perished, but many millions? In each of these theaters, the United States was allied with Asians against an Asian Japan, whose racially-hyped “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” aimed at freeing supposedly kindred Asians from European and white imperialism, flopped at its inauguration (primarily because of high-handed Japanese feelings of superiority and entitlement, which, in their emphasis on racial purity, were antithetical to the allied democracies, but quite in tune with kindred Axis power, Nazi Germany.)
Weapons
Much of the devastating weaponry used on the Japanese (the B-29 fire raids, or the two nuclear bombs) were envisioned and designed to be used against Germany (the 1941 worry over German nuclear physics) or were refined first in the European theater (cf. the allied fire raids on Hamburg and Dresden). Much of the worst savagery of the war came in 1945 when an increasingly mobilized and ever more powerful United States steadily turned its attention on Japan as the European theater waned and then ended four months before victory in the Pacific theater. Had we needed by 1945 to use atomic bombs, or massive formations of B-29s when they came on line, against Hitler, we most certainly would have.
We should also point out that for many Americans, initially in 1941-2, the real war was with the Japanese, not the Germans (despite an official policy of privileging the European theater in terms of supply and manpower), but not because of race hatred, but due to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Until then (Hitler would in reaction unwisely declare war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941) Germany had been careful to maintain the pretense of non-belligerency, while Japan chose to start a war through a rather treacherous surprise assault at a time of nominal peace — thus inciting furor among the American public.
Despite Hanks’ efforts at moral equivalence in making the U.S. and Japan kindred in their hatreds, America was attacked first, and its democratic system was both antithetical to the Japan of 1941, and capable of continual moral evolution in a way impossible under Gen. Tojo and his cadre. It is quite shameful to reduce that fundamental difference into a “they…us” 50/50 polarity. Indeed, the most disturbing phrase of all was Hanks’ suggestion that the Japanese wished to “kill” us, while we in turn wanted to “annihilate” them. Had they developed the bomb or other such weapons of mass destruction (and they had all sorts of plans of creating WMDs), and won the war, I can guarantee Hanks that he would probably not be here today, and that his Los Angeles would look nothing like a prosperous and modern Tokyo.
The Aftermath
What is remarkable about the aftermath of WWII is the almost sudden postwar alliance between Japan and the U.S., primarily aimed at stopping the Soviets, and then later the communist Chinese. In other words, the United States, despite horrific battles in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, harbored little official postwar racial animosity in its foreign policy, helped to foster Japanese democracy, provided aid, and predicated its postwar alliances — in the manner of its prewar alliances — on the basis of ideology, not race. Hanks apparently has confused the furor of combat — in which racial hatred often becomes a multiplier of emotion for the soldier in extremis — with some sort of grand collective national racial policy that led to and guided our conduct.
An innately racist society could not have gone through the nightmare of Okinawa (nearly 50,000 Americans killed, wounded, or missing), and yet a mere few months later have in Tokyo, capital of the vanquished, a rather enlightened proconsul MacArthur, whose deference to Japanese religion, sensibilities, and tradition ensured a peaceful transition to a rather radical new independent and autonomous democratic culture.
Hanks on the Recent War
Hanks quips, “Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?” That is another unnecessary if asinine statement — if it refers to our struggle against radical Islam in the post 9/11 world. The U.S. has risked much to help Muslims in the Balkans and Somalia, freed Kuwait and Iraq in two wars against Saddam Hussein, liberated or helped to liberate Afghanistan both from the Russians and the Taliban, and has the most generous immigration policy toward Muslims of any country in the world, ensuring a degree of tolerance unimaginable to Muslims in, say, China or Russia. Hanks should compare the U.S. effort to foster democracy in Iraq with the Russian conduct in Chechnya to understand “what’s going on today.”
Unhinged
In short Hanks’ comments are as ahistorical as they are unhinged. One wonders — were they supposed to entice us into watching the upcoming HBO series on the Pacific theater? But if anyone is interested in the role of race on the battlefield, one could probably do far better in skipping Hanks, and reading instead E.B. Sledge’s brilliant memoir, With the Old Breed, which has a far more sophisticated analysis of race and combat on Peleliu and Okinawa, and was apparently (and I hope fairly) drawn upon in the HBO series. (Sledge speaks of atrocities on both sides in the horrific close-quarter fighting on the islands, but he makes critical distinctions about accepted and non-accepted behaviors, the differences between Japanese and American attitudes, and in brilliant fashion appreciates the role of these campaigns in the larger war. One should memorize the last lines of his book.)
It would be easy to say that Hanks knows about as much about history as historians do about acting, but that would be too charitable. Anyone with a high school education, or an innate curiosity to read (and Hanks in the interview references works on the Pacific theater), can easily learn the truth on these broad subjects. In Hanks’ case, he is either ignorant and has done little real research, or in politically-correct fashion has taken a truth about combat in the Pacific (perceptions of cultural and racial difference often did intensify the savagery of combat) and turned it into The Truth about the origins and conduct of an entire war — apparently in smug expectation that such doctrinaire revisionism wins applause these days in the right places (though I doubt among the general public that he expects to watch the series.)
All in all, such moral equivalence (the Japanese and the U.S. were supposedly about the same in their hatreds) is quite sad, and yet another commentary on our postmodern society that is as ignorant about its own past as it is confused in its troubled present.
Tom
March 13, 2010
Is Tom Hanks Unhinged?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
Much has been written of the recent Tom Hanks remarks to Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine interview about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific. Here is the explosive excerpt that is making the rounds today:
“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”
Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers. All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus.
Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous. Consider the following.
Asian Relations
In earlier times, we had good relations with Japan (an ally during World War I, that played an important naval role in defeating imperial Germany at sea) and had stayed neutral in its disputes with Russia (Teddy Roosevelt won a 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his intermediary role). The crisis that led to Pearl Harbor was not innately with the Japanese people per se (tens of thousands of whom had emigrated to the United States on word of mouth reports of opportunity for Japanese immigrants), but with Japanese militarism and its creed of Bushido that had hijacked, violently so in many cases, the government and put an entire society on a fascistic footing. We no more wished to annihilate Japanese because of racial hatred than we wished to ally with their Chinese enemies because of racial affinity. In terms of geo-strategy, race was not the real catalyst for war other than its role among Japanese militarists in energizing expansive Japanese militarism.
War in the Pacific
How would Hanks explain the brutal Pacific wars between Japanese and Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Japanese and Filipinos, and Japanese and Pacific Islanders, in which not hundreds of thousands perished, but many millions? In each of these theaters, the United States was allied with Asians against an Asian Japan, whose racially-hyped “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” aimed at freeing supposedly kindred Asians from European and white imperialism, flopped at its inauguration (primarily because of high-handed Japanese feelings of superiority and entitlement, which, in their emphasis on racial purity, were antithetical to the allied democracies, but quite in tune with kindred Axis power, Nazi Germany.)
Weapons
Much of the devastating weaponry used on the Japanese (the B-29 fire raids, or the two nuclear bombs) were envisioned and designed to be used against Germany (the 1941 worry over German nuclear physics) or were refined first in the European theater (cf. the allied fire raids on Hamburg and Dresden). Much of the worst savagery of the war came in 1945 when an increasingly mobilized and ever more powerful United States steadily turned its attention on Japan as the European theater waned and then ended four months before victory in the Pacific theater. Had we needed by 1945 to use atomic bombs, or massive formations of B-29s when they came on line, against Hitler, we most certainly would have.
We should also point out that for many Americans, initially in 1941-2, the real war was with the Japanese, not the Germans (despite an official policy of privileging the European theater in terms of supply and manpower), but not because of race hatred, but due to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Until then (Hitler would in reaction unwisely declare war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941) Germany had been careful to maintain the pretense of non-belligerency, while Japan chose to start a war through a rather treacherous surprise assault at a time of nominal peace — thus inciting furor among the American public.
Despite Hanks’ efforts at moral equivalence in making the U.S. and Japan kindred in their hatreds, America was attacked first, and its democratic system was both antithetical to the Japan of 1941, and capable of continual moral evolution in a way impossible under Gen. Tojo and his cadre. It is quite shameful to reduce that fundamental difference into a “they…us” 50/50 polarity. Indeed, the most disturbing phrase of all was Hanks’ suggestion that the Japanese wished to “kill” us, while we in turn wanted to “annihilate” them. Had they developed the bomb or other such weapons of mass destruction (and they had all sorts of plans of creating WMDs), and won the war, I can guarantee Hanks that he would probably not be here today, and that his Los Angeles would look nothing like a prosperous and modern Tokyo.
The Aftermath
What is remarkable about the aftermath of WWII is the almost sudden postwar alliance between Japan and the U.S., primarily aimed at stopping the Soviets, and then later the communist Chinese. In other words, the United States, despite horrific battles in places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, harbored little official postwar racial animosity in its foreign policy, helped to foster Japanese democracy, provided aid, and predicated its postwar alliances — in the manner of its prewar alliances — on the basis of ideology, not race. Hanks apparently has confused the furor of combat — in which racial hatred often becomes a multiplier of emotion for the soldier in extremis — with some sort of grand collective national racial policy that led to and guided our conduct.
An innately racist society could not have gone through the nightmare of Okinawa (nearly 50,000 Americans killed, wounded, or missing), and yet a mere few months later have in Tokyo, capital of the vanquished, a rather enlightened proconsul MacArthur, whose deference to Japanese religion, sensibilities, and tradition ensured a peaceful transition to a rather radical new independent and autonomous democratic culture.
Hanks on the Recent War
Hanks quips, “Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?” That is another unnecessary if asinine statement — if it refers to our struggle against radical Islam in the post 9/11 world. The U.S. has risked much to help Muslims in the Balkans and Somalia, freed Kuwait and Iraq in two wars against Saddam Hussein, liberated or helped to liberate Afghanistan both from the Russians and the Taliban, and has the most generous immigration policy toward Muslims of any country in the world, ensuring a degree of tolerance unimaginable to Muslims in, say, China or Russia. Hanks should compare the U.S. effort to foster democracy in Iraq with the Russian conduct in Chechnya to understand “what’s going on today.”
Unhinged
In short Hanks’ comments are as ahistorical as they are unhinged. One wonders — were they supposed to entice us into watching the upcoming HBO series on the Pacific theater? But if anyone is interested in the role of race on the battlefield, one could probably do far better in skipping Hanks, and reading instead E.B. Sledge’s brilliant memoir, With the Old Breed, which has a far more sophisticated analysis of race and combat on Peleliu and Okinawa, and was apparently (and I hope fairly) drawn upon in the HBO series. (Sledge speaks of atrocities on both sides in the horrific close-quarter fighting on the islands, but he makes critical distinctions about accepted and non-accepted behaviors, the differences between Japanese and American attitudes, and in brilliant fashion appreciates the role of these campaigns in the larger war. One should memorize the last lines of his book.)
It would be easy to say that Hanks knows about as much about history as historians do about acting, but that would be too charitable. Anyone with a high school education, or an innate curiosity to read (and Hanks in the interview references works on the Pacific theater), can easily learn the truth on these broad subjects. In Hanks’ case, he is either ignorant and has done little real research, or in politically-correct fashion has taken a truth about combat in the Pacific (perceptions of cultural and racial difference often did intensify the savagery of combat) and turned it into The Truth about the origins and conduct of an entire war — apparently in smug expectation that such doctrinaire revisionism wins applause these days in the right places (though I doubt among the general public that he expects to watch the series.)
All in all, such moral equivalence (the Japanese and the U.S. were supposedly about the same in their hatreds) is quite sad, and yet another commentary on our postmodern society that is as ignorant about its own past as it is confused in its troubled present.
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george seal
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So Hank's behind The Pacific? I'm still interested in the series as Band of Brothers was outstandingly good, even better than Saving Private Ryan, but he is way off in that quote. Additionally, he really has not though it out because the current War on Terror that he seems to condemn was started by a Republican conservative but it is still being fought by a Democrat liberal. As usual Victor Davis Hanson goes on the record against pollitical correctness and in favor of historical fact (he's taken a lot of flak for that). Thanks for pointing this out detriquette.
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detriquette Φ
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No problem George. I also enjoyed Band of Brothers, especially the parts where the real soldiers provided comments. Another good one is "Flags of Our Fathers". If you haven't seen it, it is worth looking at. While it doesn't reach the level of the book (print and audio) it does provide some insight into the post war "demons" that those who served on Iwo Jima had to deal with for a long time after the smoke cleared.
Saving Private Ryan, for me, was a great piece of fiction, but doesn't hold a candle to the other two WWII films I mentioned. Real feats of valor always trump the fictional ones.
Your comments on Tom Hanks are quite true. It always amazes me how the Hollywood types, after making a decent film, feel it necessary to wax philosophic but due to their lack of depth come off being only sophmoric.
You really have to love it.
Hope things are settling down in Chile from the point of the movment of the tectonic plates. It is a great place, as I recall from a visit
Tom
Saving Private Ryan, for me, was a great piece of fiction, but doesn't hold a candle to the other two WWII films I mentioned. Real feats of valor always trump the fictional ones.
Your comments on Tom Hanks are quite true. It always amazes me how the Hollywood types, after making a decent film, feel it necessary to wax philosophic but due to their lack of depth come off being only sophmoric.
You really have to love it.
Hope things are settling down in Chile from the point of the movment of the tectonic plates. It is a great place, as I recall from a visit
Tom
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george seal
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You visited Chile? Cool.detriquette wrote:No problem George. I also enjoyed Band of Brothers, especially the parts where the real soldiers provided comments. Another good one is "Flags of Our Fathers". If you haven't seen it, it is worth looking at. While it doesn't reach the level of the book (print and audio) it does provide some insight into the post war "demons" that those who served on Iwo Jima had to deal with for a long time after the smoke cleared.
Saving Private Ryan, for me, was a great piece of fiction, but doesn't hold a candle to the other two WWII films I mentioned. Real feats of valor always trump the fictional ones.
Your comments on Tom Hanks are quite true. It always amazes me how the Hollywood types, after making a decent film, feel it necessary to wax philosophic but due to their lack of depth come off being only sophmoric.
You really have to love it.
Hope things are settling down in Chile from the point of the movment of the tectonic plates. It is a great place, as I recall from a visit
Tom
The good news: Death told WHENT DOWN. It turns missing people were tallied as dead. Last report only 239 confirmed deaths and 124 missing. At one point it seemed we had close to 1000 dead. For an 8,8 magnitude earthquake followed by a tsunami this is austoundingly good.
Bad news: Winter is already arriving and we've had rains in the south that was hit hard. So shelter building is a race against time.
As for Hollywood types, I don't know. Some do very good war films, pro soldier films anmd then do a 360° turn to appeall to the more radical Hollywwod stablisment. Ridley Scott followed Black Hawk Down with Kingdom of Heaven. Curiosly VD Hanson was only dissapointed at Kingdom of Heaven, as oposed to furious.
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detriquette Φ
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George,
Glad to he about the reduction in the death toll numbers be assured that the people of Chile are in my thoughts and prayers, as winter approaches.
Tom
Glad to he about the reduction in the death toll numbers be assured that the people of Chile are in my thoughts and prayers, as winter approaches.
Tom
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Pat Holscher
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When somebody gets around to writing, in 50 years or so, a history on the war on Radical Islamic Terrorists, I wonder where it'll actually start? I suspect that, like wars covering the totality of the war with Japan, it'll have to have a long prologue. Nobody can really even place a date on when Japan's war began, but it started sometime in the decade or so prior to December 7, 1941. But when? At the Marco Polo Bridge, or earlier?george seal wrote:So Hank's behind The Pacific? I'm still interested in the series as Band of Brothers was outstandingly good, even better than Saving Private Ryan, but he is way off in that quote. Additionally, he really has not though it out because the current War on Terror that he seems to condemn was started by a Republican conservative but it is still being fought by a Democrat liberal. As usual Victor Davis Hanson goes on the record against pollitical correctness and in favor of historical fact (he's taken a lot of flak for that). Thanks for pointing this out detriquette.
So too with this war. We conceive of it as starting on September 11, 2001. But then the prologue will have to deal with the USS Cole, the World Trade Tower bombing, and so on. Hard to say when it really started.
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Pat Holscher
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Any comment by actors has to be taken with a grain of salt, or more like a tablespoon of salt. They're in the public eye so much, it's easy to forget that they're admired, if they are, for their craft, but that doesn't really translate into wisdom about anything else. Far too often actors are regarded as knowledgeable on the topics of their films, which is rarely the case. For example, Dances with Wolves causes Kevin Costner to be the topic of blatherings for awhile, even though it's far from a documentary.george seal wrote:So Hank's behind The Pacific? I'm still interested in the series as Band of Brothers was outstandingly good, even better than Saving Private Ryan, but he is way off in that quote. Additionally, he really has not though it out because the current War on Terror that he seems to condemn was started by a Republican conservative but it is still being fought by a Democrat liberal. As usual Victor Davis Hanson goes on the record against pollitical correctness and in favor of historical fact (he's taken a lot of flak for that). Thanks for pointing this out detriquette.
Of course, it's much more surprising here, as Band of Brothers was excellent, as was Saving Private Ryan, and we'd expect more due to Hank's association with them. Saving Private Ryan, of course, was really a Steven Spielberg production, and in my view he deserves the lion's share of credit for it. That films was truly groundbreaking, as it's a turning point in war films. It's the first war film to really be hyper-realistic, which set the bar for all that have followed. This is true not only in terms of violence, and it's a very violent film, but also in terms of details. The uniforms, for example, are correct in the film. This may sound minor, but in prior WWII films, including some of the very best, there's often only minor attention to that. For example, the excellent The Longest Day is way off in uniforms for the most part, as they tended to simply use the then current ones. Close enough, they figured. Even a film like Lawrence of Arabia, which is a masterpiece, takes poetic license with details, as you'll note that everyone in the film carries SMLEs, Turks as well. This evolution into hyper-realism is probably necessary given the development in film technology for the same reason that nobody listens much to old Victrola era recordings today, while at one time people were amazed by them.
Ironically, probably one of the real errors in Saving Private Ryan is that Tom Hanks is too old for his part. He's a Ranger Captain in the film, as we know. But a real Ranger captain in June 1944 would probably be in his 20s. Hanks exceeded that by a wide margin. You can justify that, however, by attributing his appearance to fatigue and stress. as a lot of WWII 20 year olds look like 50 year olds in photos for that reason. Indeed, the whole Depression Era generation tends to look about 20 years older than they were in photos. Some of that was due to maturity (an 18 year old in 1940 was a lot older, for the most part, than an 18 year old in 2010) but some of that was due to extreme conditions.
Anyhow, that fine film probably lead to Hank's association with Band of Brothers, which is also excellent, and which also features the hyper realism of Saving Private Ryan. And it no doubt lead to The Pacific. I have hopes it will be as good.
Due to a variety of circumstances, Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, and now probably The Pacific, have come to stand as tributes to the World War Two generation. Saving Private Ryan made a direct pitch to this by the way it opened and closed. Band of Brothers effectively did that through the interviews of the veterans it portrayed. So Hank's statements come as a surprise.
Probably what this points out, more than anything, is that Hanks is a Hollywood figure, as noted above. Most actors live in a certain pc world, if not a libertine world. It's really rare to find one who swims openly upstream against that, although there are some who do. Some popular literature in the past decade caused the World War Two generation to be dubbed "The Greatest Generation", and this has itself lead to a certain tone in recent works. I have my theories about this in general (which I'll omit here unless it becomes topical), but we've seen a lot of recent efforts to memorialize the sufferings of the 1939-1945 Allied soldiers in a way the 1914 to 1918 ones never received in the US, or the 1950 to 1954 ones have not and will not. Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting that this is wrong, just that it is.
At the same time, since the 1960s, it's been the Hollywood standard that all values of any type are co-equal and all wars huge misunderstandings. Probably only the Nazis remain as unchallenged agents of evil in film. This is not to say that there aren't portrayals depicting various folks we opposed in the last 70 years as on the wrong side of right and wrong, but it's really been diluted. Even an unabashedly patriotic film like We Were Soldiers goes out of its way to portray the NVA as essentially relatively okay folks. A few years after the events portrayed in We Were Soldiers the NVA shot a bunch of civilians in Hue, which showed just how okay they were, but never-mind.
This is not to say that taking a look at the enemy combatant is a bad idea. I haven't seen all of Letters from Iwo Jima, but my understanding is that it does this fairly well in the case of the Japanese soldier. No film really accomplishes this fully well in the case of the German soldiers, as there hasn't been a film that was really able to handle the topic of the Nazis in this context. Perhaps the most effective one is a really early one that goes by some name like "A Time to Love and a Time to Die". Other good efforts, like Stalingrad or The Cross of Iron have their merits, but they don't quite make it.
Anyhow, Hanks was blandly citing the Hollywood mantra here, and probably unthinkingly. The "it's all equal" and "all wars are big mistakes" thinking is the official line, even while films are made honoring the Allied sacrifices of WWII. The fact that the movie deals with the war against Japan made that probably both easier and probably more automatic, as the US unfortunately failed to really emphasize the nasty behavior of the Japanese militarist during their rule, which was just as repressive and violent as the Nazi's in Europe.
I think Hanks was trying to throw a bone to the anti-GWOT folks out there. There are many arguments those types like to make regarding war in general. They claim that the US never would have used a nuclear weapon in Europe but it was ok in Asia because they look different. The US didn't inter German-Americans in camps but the Japanese-AMericans were interred because of how they looked. They then use this type of thinking to explain why the US fought the indians- they looked different- and the Vietnamese, sent troops after Noriega and into other South American countries, and to explain why we fought Saddam in 1991 and again in 2003 and why we are picking on the poor Islamic terrorists.
I don't know if Hanks really believed what he said or if it was even taken in the right context, but he has been a great advocate for veterans and I'm willing to give him a pass on the comment.
--Brian
I don't know if Hanks really believed what he said or if it was even taken in the right context, but he has been a great advocate for veterans and I'm willing to give him a pass on the comment.
--Brian
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george seal
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Hi Brian,HawkHero wrote:I think Hanks was trying to throw a bone to the anti-GWOT folks out there. There are many arguments those types like to make regarding war in general. They claim that the US never would have used a nuclear weapon in Europe but it was ok in Asia because they look different. The US didn't inter German-Americans in camps but the Japanese-AMericans were interred because of how they looked. They then use this type of thinking to explain why the US fought the indians- they looked different- and the Vietnamese, sent troops after Noriega and into other South American countries, and to explain why we fought Saddam in 1991 and again in 2003 and why we are picking on the poor Islamic terrorists.
I don't know if Hanks really believed what he said or if it was even taken in the right context, but he has been a great advocate for veterans and I'm willing to give him a pass on the comment.
--Brian
I think a lot of pollitically motivated people pay lip service to WWII vets as a way to smear Vietnam and the current conflicts the USA is involved in. By saying WWII was the "Good War" they attack current USA policy. I think Spielberg and Hanks are really interested in WWII vets, but they pay service to this way of thinking, that I think is unfair. I don't belive WWII vets are against the GWOT.
I don't have a suscription to HBO so I still have not seen this series, but I have read good reviews, so I'm waiting to see it on DVD.
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Pat Holscher
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george seal wrote:Hi Brian,HawkHero wrote:I think Hanks was trying to throw a bone to the anti-GWOT folks out there. There are many arguments those types like to make regarding war in general. They claim that the US never would have used a nuclear weapon in Europe but it was ok in Asia because they look different. The US didn't inter German-Americans in camps but the Japanese-AMericans were interred because of how they looked. They then use this type of thinking to explain why the US fought the indians- they looked different- and the Vietnamese, sent troops after Noriega and into other South American countries, and to explain why we fought Saddam in 1991 and again in 2003 and why we are picking on the poor Islamic terrorists.
I don't know if Hanks really believed what he said or if it was even taken in the right context, but he has been a great advocate for veterans and I'm willing to give him a pass on the comment.
--Brian
I think a lot of pollitically motivated people pay lip service to WWII vets as a way to smear Vietnam and the current conflicts the USA is involved in. By saying WWII was the "Good War" they attack current USA policy. I think Spielberg and Hanks are really interested in WWII vets, but they pay service to this way of thinking, that I think is unfair. I don't belive WWII vets are against the GWOT.
I don't have a suscription to HBO so I still have not seen this series, but I have read good reviews, so I'm waiting to see it on DVD.
Something worth noting is that all war films, and to a lessor extent written depictions of war, reflect, to varying degrees, the times in which they were made. So when we view them, we have to take that somewhat into consideration. I wouldn't, however, be an absolutest on this, as I also feel that war films fall into two loose categories, those being attempts to depict a war, and films that use war as a plot device. Films that use war as a plot device are much more heavily impacted by their times.
On WWII, there were some serious attempts to portray the experience of war fairly honestly early on. Battleground, about the Battle of the Bulge, A Walk In The Sun, and the Sands of Iwo Jima are all examples of this from early on. A Walk In The Sun suffers from a lot of inadequacies in my view, but Battleground is one of the best WWII films ever made. It's really probably the hallmark of its type, and films like Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers really follow in its wake.
Starting at some point in the 50s or so more films tended to use WWII as a plot device, and really reflect it. The portrayals of the soldiers in the films often have a lot more to do with what was going on in society at the time than they do with WWII. A lot of cynical combatant movies started coming in during the late 50s, probably reflecting weariness with the Cold War. Quite a few war movies filmed during the Vietnam Era (but not all by any means) are really about the Vietnam War no matter when they're set. The Korean War set film MASH, for example, is really a Vietnam War film. Kelly's Heroes' (which actually has quite a bit going for it really), is really a post VN war film with Donald Sutherland's character being a combination hippie/beatnik, but having nothing to really do with WWII.
I think what Saving Private Ryan did was to yank WWII films back into depictions, and to do that very well. But what that probably says more than anything else is that the country suddenly realized that a generation's experiences they took for granted were soon to pass. For American's Hank's age, WWII vets were regular guys, our father's and uncle's, and not men who had endured horrific experiences. It's only once we realize that what these people endured that we begin to realize otherwise, and seek to portray and preserve that. Sadly, in some cases, such as US WWI vets, that never did occur, and they passed mostly on to the next world with their secrets preserved. Even with the WWII vets, it's frankly been inadequate, as the story of the Great Depression, which is also part of their tale, hasn't really been fully explored either. Probably only The Grapes of Wrath and oddly Paper Moon approach doing so in a very narrow sense. What they fail to really portray is that the disaster wasn't isolated, but universal, in varying degrees.
Having said all of that, the realization that there's a need does not tend to wipe out all the post war baggage of one kind or another. At the same time that generation is waking up, a bit too late, to the experiences of WWII, its still really dealing with its own view of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War still hangs heavy over an awful lot of the American experience for people who are, let's say, 55 years old and older, and perhaps creeping down a bit from there. Even now, with the war having been over nearly 40 years, more recent wars are constantly compared to it. So, I think with modern comments attempt to place WWII in context, we sometimes get feelings that really come up from the 60s and 70s that were probably never really in context.
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george seal
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You are very right Pat. People should recognice the difference of a movie that uses war as a plot device to tell a particular story (such as Deer Hunter) and a history lesson. People that don't read think movies are history lessons. That's why they think Francis Coppola is right in his portrayal of Viet Nam. It should be evident he is portraying a sentiment that evolved from a socio political and cultural crisis of his generation. (OK of part of the youth of his generation. A very specific part that just gets highlighted by popular culture and counterculture). It should be evident Apocalipse Now is a fantasy film (plus the fact that it's a loose adaption of The Heart of Darkness).
So people took their grandparents for granted and overlooked the fact theit WWII experiences mattered? That tells 2 things about modern society: A) Traditional family life suffers crisis (that does not mean it's over or that it won't make a comeback) and B) Hollywood is not real life. Yesterday I read web post on a movie critic who said that Avatar was not seen by, at least, 80% of America. (30 million viewers is 2 times Chile's population, in America it's very litlle. His conclusion: lot's of people don't care about Hollywood because it's unrelated to real life. Wow! Somebody noticed! Moral of the story: Band of Brothers and such exploit a new audience: people that want to see movies about real life. It's just like the Passion of the Christ phenomenom. If people read more, they would ask for more TV and movies that had more basis in real life. There is no reason for the public that is not served by mainstream Holywood not be served by someone else. History Channel shows there is an audience interested in History.
So people took their grandparents for granted and overlooked the fact theit WWII experiences mattered? That tells 2 things about modern society: A) Traditional family life suffers crisis (that does not mean it's over or that it won't make a comeback) and B) Hollywood is not real life. Yesterday I read web post on a movie critic who said that Avatar was not seen by, at least, 80% of America. (30 million viewers is 2 times Chile's population, in America it's very litlle. His conclusion: lot's of people don't care about Hollywood because it's unrelated to real life. Wow! Somebody noticed! Moral of the story: Band of Brothers and such exploit a new audience: people that want to see movies about real life. It's just like the Passion of the Christ phenomenom. If people read more, they would ask for more TV and movies that had more basis in real life. There is no reason for the public that is not served by mainstream Holywood not be served by someone else. History Channel shows there is an audience interested in History.