Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

December 10, 2022 3:15 AM

Destroying The Old Lie: What Makes a Film Truly Anti-War [CW: graphic cinema and real world imagery, violence, gore, film spoilers]

SPOILERS for All Quiet on the Western Front & 1917! In this video I explore All Quiet on the Western Front and a broader discussion in filmstudies about when a film is an anti-war film. If you want to support this channel you can do so on patreon

On FanFare:
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
The Great Dictator(1940)
1917 (2019)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)

posted by lazaruslong (32 comments total)

Good interview with the All Quiet On the Western Front director, Edward Berger, that touches on this:

I grew up [seeing] many American or British films and some of them war films. And those stories always are very different because it’s a hero’s journey. As an American, you can tell a hero’s journey. You can tell a story that has some pride in the end, that has a sense of something was accomplished and something honorable was done. Because America liberated Europe from fascism, Britain was attacked, had to defend themselves. So that generates a generation of filmmakers that is going to make a very different film. In Germany, it’s nothing to be proud of, that part of history. There’s a sense of shame, guilt, horror, terror, responsibility towards history. And so you feel, in that sense, it’s a weight that you grow up with. I inherited it. It’s in my DNA. And that DNA is going to influence every creative decision and hopefully then make a film that is interesting to share with other countries because it’s a different perspective from the American and British war films. It just felt like I wanted to get that out of my system and share it with other countries and tell that story. And to make a specifically German film.

I wonder about the films that will be made as America reflects on Afghanistan and Iraq. While those were defeats, I do not think the defeats were so thorough that it's given the US this dream destroying sense of shame that Germany and Japan had experienced. If anything, it's probably more akin to Britain after it lost its colonies: a feeling of loss and some remorse but nowhere near enough of that remorse to erase all of that misplaced pride.
posted by bl1nk at 5:15 AM on December 10, 2022 [9 favorites]

If this is the video I think it is, I always find it strange that there is so little discussion of "Oh What A Lovely War" when discussing Anti War films.

That film manages to visciously be anti war with a strong vein of the bleakest comedy, and is also nominally a *musical*
posted by Faintdreams at 6:05 AM on December 10, 2022 [7 favorites]

Effective anti-war films focus on after effects for civilians and/or vet, and may avoid combat altogether. It helps if the creators have experienced war and its aftermath up close and personal, have lived in entire cities left in ruins. Anti-war films in general - they do these things better outside Hollywood.*

Trojan Women
Two Women
Germany, Year Zero

See also The Human Condition
The Cranes are Flying
City of Life and Death
Generation War

*(Granted, Best Years of Our Lives is a fine film, but the backdrop is still a land of sufficient food and shelter, unsullied by tens of thousands of widows, orphans, maimed veterans living in holes in the ground of once fine cities.)
posted by BWA at 6:07 AM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Uh… Saving Private Ryan is absolutely not an anti-war film. I don’t think it was even intended to be, but even if it was, the roll-out involved US military soldiers dressed in full gear (with guns - presumably unloaded, but given that this was pre-9/11, still incredibly jarring in the US) as a weird sort of honor guard for the film on its opening weekend in various movie theatres around the country. When your film marketing partner is the military, you have zero claims to being an anti-war film.
posted by eviemath at 7:00 AM on December 10, 2022 [18 favorites]

Maybe if I watched longer he brings that up? That simply trying to give the audience a sense of the actual experience of being a soldier in combat doesn’t inherently make a film anti-war (and can even be an pro-war tactic)? Is there a transcript?
posted by eviemath at 7:03 AM on December 10, 2022

Watched the video to the end. It’s not bad, but it would be much stronger if it included coverage of Come and See, IMO.

[Edit to add CW for the plot description in the linked WP article: rape, extreme violence]
posted by FallibleHuman at 7:28 AM on December 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

OK, I guess I have to watch the new All Quiet film. I love the 1931 version so much that I didn't want to see the remake but I'll give it a look.
posted by octothorpe at 7:31 AM on December 10, 2022

every every film about war ends up being pro-war, previously. my thoughts, here.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:45 AM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks, this was an interesting (and mercifully short) video-essay.
posted by senor biggles at 8:22 AM on December 10, 2022

Uh… Saving Private Ryan is absolutely not an anti-war film.
...
Maybe if I watched longer he brings that up?

Yes. Starts at 4:15 if you want to jump there.

Effective anti-war films focus on after effects for civilians and/or vet, and may avoid combat altogether.

I suppose the question is indeed how one defines effective? I find myself compelled by one of the arguments in the essay: looking at military recruitment figures around the time of the film's release. If a film causes enlistment to increase, like Full Metal Jacket did, then from that sort of consequentialist point of view I'd have a tough time calling it anti-war.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:58 AM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Back in the 60’s I convinced my father to drive me about 35 miles to go see Peter Watkins’ film The War Game. A little less than a hour long, it was a B&W low budget film produced for the BBC and released in 1966, but not in Britain, where it wasn’t shown until 1985. It won an Oscar for best documentary, though it was a fictional depiction of a nuclear strike on a city outside London. I still cringe remembering scenes from this film over 50 years later. Using amateur actors, mostly people from the city where it was shot, this is a truly visceral condemnation of governments and the military and their inherent inability to foresee the consequences of their actions and inactions. It’s out there in internet land if you care to look for it, but I can’t CW it enough given its content. Seeing this film (and going through the Cuban Missile Crisis in my youth) was enough to turn me against the the military even before I faced the draft and the Vietnam war. By the way, the theater I saw this paired it with Dr Strangelove, a similarly themed film but with laughs.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:24 AM on December 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think this is one of those Youtube videos where it will be very obvious if you didn't watch the video and are responding to what you imagine it says.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:53 AM on December 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

J'accuse! (1919)*
posted by kliuless at 11:00 AM on December 10, 2022

OK, I guess I have to watch the new All Quiet film. I love the 1931 version so much that I didn't want to see the remake but I'll give it a look.

It's basically the same as the old one but made by someone who has spent too much time watching Fury.
posted by biffa at 11:40 AM on December 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Then we send a few guys downtown to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on. They also buy a hell of a lot of beer. For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of those damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging.
...
There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his c----, tickling his b----- with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First F---. It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar — the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle
posted by kirkaracha at 1:44 PM on December 10, 2022 [7 favorites]

I really liked the latest All Quiet on the Western Front, but, as noted in the FanFare post, it deviates pretty significantly from the source novel.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:47 PM on December 10, 2022

Renoir's Grand Illusion is the best anti-war movie ever. It doesn't have a single battle but it shows very nicely how peace is better than war. I guess it's a Peace movie.
posted by CCBC at 2:40 PM on December 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was glad this narrator of this video mentioned my favorite unpopular opinion: World War II was not a "good war". To be a considered good, the cost of the war has to be less than the cost of not having fought it. The cost of World War II was 75 to 85 million premature deaths; 100 million with wounds, lost limbs, disfigurement, adding up to countless life years of pain; the destruction of Europe's great cities, and less great cities, the destruction of countless homes, families destroyed; hundreds of thousands of men turned into killers; the destruction of Asian cities and the deliberate burning alive of hundreds of thousands of civilians in bombing raids. Just for starters.

Whatever World War II was fought to prevent had to be worse than this, at least to be considered a "good war". When World War II began in 1938, there were 75-85 million people alive who, seven years later, would be dead. We don't know what would have happened if Europe and the United States had appeased, or surrendered to Axis aggression. It might have been unpleasant. But there would have been 75-85 million people alive to resist fascism and militarism in non-violent ways, and there would have been seven years in which the Hitlers, Stalins and Japanese militarists might have imploded, turned on one another, or fell apart from the non-viability of their political systems. Like I said, it wouldn't have been a pleasant world, but the children who otherwise would have burned alive under the wreckage of Dresden and Coventry, would still be with us, and have the whole 1950s and 60s to deal with it.
posted by Modest House at 6:26 PM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Slaughterhouse 5.
posted by Oyéah at 6:53 PM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Catch 22 as well.
I'm trying to come to grips with the fact that I feel like I should see AQOTWF, but I also don't want to experience that bleakness.
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:29 PM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Paths Of Glory.
posted by Ardnamurchan at 7:48 PM on December 10, 2022 [6 favorites]

Johnny Got His Gun (it's on Youtube)
posted by Rash at 7:57 PM on December 10, 2022

I keep thinking of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a collection of linked short stories about a platoon in Vietnam. The quotidian mixed with the horror in the book perfectly encapsulates the madness of war for me, at least as far as how I imagine it might be. I am also very happy to have never experienced it.
That's something I've never quite seen in a war film; that odd, idiosyncratic sense of being trapped in something absolutely awful with no over riding moral arc that traditionally suggests meaning and just struggling to survive. I include AQOTWF in this as far as films I've seen, though I will say it comes closest.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 8:04 PM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

The cost of World War II was 75 to 85 million premature deaths

Am I wrong in thinking that number includes the tens of millions of civilians murdered under fascist occupation? People who would still have been murdered if no one had fought against the fascists? Should we think that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany would have murdered fewer people if they had the opportunity to rule over a larger area for a longer period of time?

if Europe and the United States had appeased, or surrendered to Axis aggression...there would have been 75-85 million people alive to resist fascism and militarism in non-violent ways

Fewer than that, see above.

Whatever World War II was fought to prevent had to be worse than this

Genocide. Several simultaneous genocides.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:09 PM on December 10, 2022 [17 favorites]

Okay. I always hope that when I post something to MeFi, that my fellow MeFites will engage with the material before commenting. Especially when it's a single link. But there's many failure modes to a MetaFilter thread, and dropping hot takes without clicking on the links is very common. And, as Kutsuwamushi points out, in this thread it's really obvious who is going down that failure mode. That's fine, I've been here for 20 years and this happens all the time. A little disappointing but forget it, Jake, it's MeFi-town.

This is a little misleading though:
I was glad this narrator of this video mentioned my favorite unpopular opinion: World War II was not a "good war".

What the video actually says is:

It is possible that the Second World War was a "pro-war war", a war worth fighting, even dying for. Yet there are some historians who are questioning WW2s role as the "good war", and certainly just as any other war, WW2 saw brutality, evil, and innocent deaths on both sides. Now whether WW2 was a good war or not, it is certain that in the endless wars of history, very few have been worth fighting and dying over, and in the last 70 years WW2 as a just and good war has been used to get young men to die for the greed, ambitions, and narcissism of those in power.

That's not the same as just stating that WW2 was not a good war. In context it is clearly mentioned to illustrate how WW2 has been used as a model of a "good war" to justify recruiting kids to kill and die in obviously awful wars. Key context is that the second half of the quote above plays over video of actors playing Cheney / Bush and shots of the Iraq war.

I say this just to try and nip a "was stopping Hitler in WW2 bad, actually?" derail in the bud cause fuckkkkk that noise, there's many websites for that sort of "intellectual debate" and MeFi really doesn't need to be one of them.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:10 AM on December 11, 2022 [11 favorites]

fuckkkkk that noise.

Like most people, your distaste for war stops at the margin of your politics. But we all hate fascism. But if we don't model worst-case scenarios, we can never find a moral alternative to war.
posted by Modest House at 7:25 AM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Like most people who value the abstract purity of their philosophy over actual human life, your morality stops at the margin of your (frankly dismal) empathy for other peoples and cultures.

It's fucking telling that, in your pro/con list for WW2, you did not mention genocides.
posted by a faithful sock at 7:56 AM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Since the previous post last month about 'All Quiet..' I've watched it. The text is anti-war, but it's still a war film. Despite all the mud and gore, it's also about a massive spectacle that engulfs the narrator in adrenaline.

As mentioned, I can think of almost no war films that completely get away from that ugly thrill. The closest that I can think of is Die Brücke.
posted by ovvl at 1:29 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's fucking telling that, in your pro/con list for WW2, you did not mention genocides.

It's hard to murder 6 million people in peacetime. Jews were mistreated, jailed, sent to concentrations camps, beaten and sporadically killed in Germany up until 1938. The what we now call the Holocaust took place under cover of war.
posted by Modest House at 2:55 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's hard to murder 6 million people in peacetime.

This may be true if you live in a democracy. It is not true if you live in a totalitarian state, because the power of a totalitarian state stems from terror and state terror requires industrial levels of murder.

Stalin murdered 4.5 million Ukrainians during the Holodomor. One year. In peacetime. Three times as many as were killed by the Nazis during Operation Reinhard (a similar one year time span at the peak of the Holocaust).

If the US and Great Britain had appeased Nazi aggression, the Holocaust would have happened anyway. The Nazis sought Poland and Belarussia as their path towards restoring their old Reich, and Hitler's entire claim to power was contingent on terror and murder, as was Stalin's. Those two powers would've still gone to war. Japan was already in the midst of slaughtering its way through China. In fact, by the time Hitler invade Poland, Japan and China had already been at war for 3 years.

So in this scenario - let's say America adopts 100% isolation and doesn't give Stalin lend lease nor threaten to embarge Japan. Which, for what it's worth, is totally the position that most American fascists wanted.

Scenario 1: Stalin and the Soviets eventually crumble. Hitler takes Russia and liquidates most of the Jews. For simplicity, let's say that's a similar total death toll to the Eastern Front but more of it on the Soviet side than German, but probably doesn't include additional genocides that the Nazis would've conducted to pacify and manifest destiny their way across Ukraine and Russia once they had a free hand here. 31 to 40 million dead. Japan finishes their invasion and conquest of China fueled by American and Dutch oil. Again for simplicity, let's say it's the same as the Pacific theater and replace most of the American and British casualties with Chinese deaths. The Japanese won't be firebombed by American bombers, but they'll probably kill more Chinese as they head further inland than they did during WWII.

What are the odds at this stage, with two dominant fascist empires on the world stage that America or Great Britain doesn't slide into fascism themselves as white supremacists in the US see the vindication of their world view in the Nazi and Japanese victories (which were inspired and modeled after American slavery and post-Reconstruction practices) and start reinstating blacks as an underclass in America?

Scenario 2: Stalin and the Soviets hold the Germans and eventually roll them back, but at much higher personal cost. Let's say 33% higher? Maybe 50 million dead? Let's say in this world now all of Europe is under Soviet control. Japan takes China. Same 22 million dead. So now you have 72 million deaths anyway. But now at least you can have some peace that you didn't participate in it. You just let it happen.

I think World War II is horrible. I think it's a global tragedy. But I struggle to see how avoidable it was. The only way out of having to fight WWII is, I think, to have kept Germany from sliding into fascism. So if your counterfactual scenario assumes that Germany is still fascist and it's just about Britain and the US opting out, I'm afraid to say that's already too late to avoid the worst of the war's horrors. Because, let's be honest, the other lie that WWII films make that needs to be killed is that it was about the US when it really, really was not. America benefitted a lot from the postwar order, and had a significant role in bringing it to an end as early as it could have, but it actually had very little influence in whether the war would actually happen or not.
posted by bl1nk at 7:57 PM on December 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Perhaps it would help discussion to drift from the extreme case of WWII to the more general point made in the linked video...

Now whether WW2 was a good war or not, it is certain that in the endless wars of history, very few have been worth fighting and dying over

What about defensive wars? Take for example the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Certainly the war is not worth fighting in the sense that Putin should not have invaded, but from the perspective of the defenders? We have philosophically consistent pacifists in the thread who might want to discuss the morality of self-defense, but in keeping with the focus of this thread perhaps we should focus on film and video. One way to think about anti-war film might be to ask what intentionally pro-war film looks like.

I have in mind pro-Ukrainian online propaganda videos. (propaganda doesn't mean lies, it means deliberately spreading a favorable message) These have messages that seem to fall into several categories including...
1) Humanization of our side's soldiers. They do TikTok dances! They rescue pets!
2) The enemy is perpetrating atrocities against civilians. A concert in a bomb shelter. Grandmothers embracing the liberators.
3) We're going to win! Our soldiers have impressive weapons. Seriously, check out this machine that makes explosions!
4) Dehumanization of the enemy. They are stupid and faceless and evil, that is the message. In this category we find the genre of kill-camera footage of Russian soldiers being killed by drone-dropped bombs, videos typically ghoulishly gleeful in tone.

It might be worth asking whether it's possible to make a pro-war film that is not inhumane.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 8:59 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

I will be forever changed by a post from Dee Xtrovert about war movies, surviving and about the profound joy soup can bring.

I have a kid that just this weekend was talking about the war in Ukraine. There’s a kid in his grade who is Russian. I have friends who are a Russian married to a Ukrainian. War isn’t some far away theoretical thing.
posted by zenon at 8:21 AM on December 12, 2022 [4 favorites]