On Fri, 2 Sep 1994, Ara Rubyan wrote: > Recently Steven Brophy continued a thread along these lines: > ================================================== > "Was _Platoon_ a glorification of the Vietnam war?" > ================================================== > How about another example: Was _Glory_ a celebration of the Civil War? I > would like to see some comparing and contrasting of these two movies and > furthermore how they portrayed war in general. Here are some questions to > ponder and respond to: Is the graphic portrayal of war "bad"? Does it > necessarily promote a celebration of war? Must this portrayal come packaged > together with a well-grounded story or viewpoint in order to have > justification or validity? [virtual ellipsis] > Let's see some discussion on this. Okay. First, I'd agree with Stephen that Platoon exhibits the usual confusion and incoherence that Stone tries to pass of as profundity. While I wouldn't go so far as to argue that it glorifies war, it does manage to provide us with good soldiers, and to frame the problems of war as, in some ways the problems of bad soldiering. We don't have to end war; we have to kill bad lieutenants ("Wars don't kill people; people do"?). In fact, the precise problem with Platoon is its humanism, its refusal to see war as something beyond the aggregate of individual actions. Glory I think is a bit trickier, precisely because it is about the Civil War. Was Glory a celebration of the Civil War? Well, yes, but then celebrating the Civil War is an old business (in the North at least). Anyone who went to high school knows the rap: it freed the slaves, it united the nation once and for all, etc. Glory's depiction of war is brutal, but the cause being pursued is treated as just and the sacrifices made are thus noble and tragic. It doesn't exactly glorify war, but it certainly justifies it, treating it as an unfortunate necessity. In each case, I think the failure of the films to be anti-war stems from giving us good, pro-active soldiers. The most powerful anti-war films, it seems to me, are the ones in which our protagonists are by-and-large helpless victims caught up in forces they can't control and may not even understand. Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Gallipoli, and Midnight Clear all come to mind (as does the final episode of "Blackadder Goes Forth"). In such films, it is war itself that is the villain, not those who pursue it; indeed, the "villains" in such films are not "bad," as in Platoon, but just doing their job, and thus our sense of evil shifts from individuals to the systems and structures which require them to do their jobs (not that we then forgive, say, the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, but we see him as a symptom rather than as the disease itself). Looking back on my list, above, the obvious also occurs to me: in making anti-war films, it helps to use a war that is already regarded historically as ignoble and pointless, like WWI and Vietnam. A film like A Midnight Clear seems to me all the more admirable for setting its anti-war statement during WWII, with all the moral baggage it carries as "The Good War." One could say the same thing about Catch-22. JRG ______________________________________________________________________________ John R. Groch <[log in to unmask]> | "Work! FINISH! THEN sleep." English Department/Film Studies Program | -- The Monster, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 | "Bride of Frankenstein" ______________________________________________________________________________