I was recently watching Ken Burns’ documentary “The War” on PBS. It reminded me of a truth I have long known. The best anti-war movies are the best war movies. The movie that originally made this truth clear to me was Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. That great film opens with a harrowing reenactment of the D Day invasion of Normandy. It is almost impossible to watch, but Burns’ account of D Day in his documentary makes the reality of the event seem even worse than Spielberg was able to depict. That there is great heroism in war I do not doubt; yet neither do I doubt that heroism is not the ultimate characteristic of war. The ultimate characteristic of war is death. Along with death war is characterized by suffering, immense, unfathomable suffering. Physical and mental suffering. Suffering by those who die and suffering by those who survive. Suffering on both sides. Suffering by those whose cause is “just” and whose struggle is defensive and suffering by those caught up in events beyond their control who end up fighting for causes that are not just. Suffering mostly by those who fight and die but suffering also by those who do not fight and die but who lose children, siblings, parents, spouses, other loved ones, or friends or who live in fear of such loss . Suffering while the fighting lasts and suffering that lasts for a lifetime afterwards. The pain of physical wounds and the psychic pain of PTSD, the nightmares, the continuing fear, the shattered psyches and shattered relationships.
The best and most effective way to turn people against war is simply to tell them the truth about war. Telling the truth about war is something the powers that be in America (and not only in America) have long been loath to do. American movies about World War II are a perfect illustration of this truth; and a perfect example is the contrast between two movies about D-Day, the aforementioned Saving Private Ryan from 1989 starring Tom Hanks and 1962’s The Longest Day starring John Wayne. The Longest Day is a classic of the post-war American genre of World War II movies. Those movies showed a version of the violence of war, but it was a sanitized and romanticized version of it. The apparent intent of those movies was not to present a realistic view of war. It seems rather to have been to celebrate, even glorify, the service of the Americans who had fought in the war. Yes, they showed people dying, but even the dying was sanitized. The dying was romanticized. It was, as nearly as it could be, dying without suffering, dying without loss. They showed killing, but any killing the Americans did was always killing without regret, killing that was righteous, killing that was merely giving the bad guys what they had coming. The humanity of those dying on the other side of the war was rarely if ever depicted. All of these things are certainly true of The Longest Day.
Saving Private Ryan is a very different kind of war movie. Especially in its opening reenactment of the D-Day invasion that movie presents an unblinking look at war in all its horror. It shows the fear. It shows the chaos and the mistakes that are always made. It shows the suffering. It shows the dying without sanitizing it, without romanticizing it, without ennobling it. We see war in all its horror, or at least as much of its horror as it is possible to depict through a reenactment. There are other movies that present similarly unflinching views of the reality of war. Platoon, set in Vietnam, and Glory, a story of Black Union soldiers in the American Civil War, are two that come to mind. I’m sure there are others.
I had the same reaction to each of the three films I have mentioned, Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, and Glory. They are films every American, perhaps every person, should see, and they are films that left me happy at some level that I had seen them but definitely wanting never to see them again. They are too disturbing. They are too gory. They are, in other words, too real. They come too close to showing what war really is. Each of these films strengthened my preexisting aversion and opposition to war. They show what war really is---suffering, death, and destruction, acts that when committed by an individual are treated as the most serious crimes but that we consider honorable when committed on orders from a nation.
The great Georgian/Russian protest poet and singer of the Soviet period Bulat Okudzhava has a song with a line that sums up nicely the way we accept in war what we never accept from individuals. He calls the song “Song about an American Soldier,” but of course it applies to all soldiers; and Okudzhava certainly intended it to apply to Soviet soldiers as well, he just couldn't say so. One line of that song goes, in my translation from the Russian: “And if something isn’t right, that’s not our problem. As they say, the motherland has ordered it. How glorious to be merely a simple soldier, not guilty of anything.” A soldier who kills. A soldier who maims. A soldier who destroys, yet he isn’t guilty of anything because he does it all at the behest of his nation. The best war movies see through that pretense. They see through the idealization of war that the ruling powers of all nations perpetuate and propagate among their people. They jettison the romanticizing of war that the powers so love and that the film industry is usually happy to provide. The best war movies show war as it really is, and that’s what makes them the best anti-war movies.
If people really understood the horror of war there would be no war. If everyone really understood the reality of war the people would rise up and demand an end to war. They would refuse to participate in war. In the great anti-Vietnam war song “Eve of Destruction” Barry McGuire sang “You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?” If people really knew they wouldn’t tote those guns for the powers that be. That’s why the powers that be of every nation since the beginning of nations have worked to make war noble and heroic. To make it every citizen’s duty. To make it necessary in order to bring security or even to end war itself, which of course it never does and never can. The best war movies show the reality of war, which is what makes them the bast anti-war movies. So far they haven’t brought about mass popular resistance to war. We can only pray that some day they will.
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