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Attention, soldier!
This is the educational column, dedicated to fighting the
culture war while you sit back and read about it. Carnage! Blood!
Today we will discuss art derived from the battlefield. I would
like to remind everyone that you can make a difference in the
culture war. That’s right, the educational columnist wants
YOU! There are no civilians in this struggle, and many casualties
are unfortunately among us. Take the average war film. Most of the
time it is semi-propagandic, semi-Hollywood formulaic trash.
Learning about fathers and sons dying has long been a storytelling
favorite, from Homer’s “Iliad” and even the Old
Testament. Now the danger is often that war films become exciting
destruction fantasies that breed hate rather than peace.
Don’t believe me? Get down and give me 50, you filthy piece
of maggot loins! “Black Hawk Down” used images of
petulant Somalians, mobs and mobs of them like ants coming for your
picnic basket, to create a sense of fear. Thus, the Americans were
shooting all these blacks unsympathetically, the same way Brendan
Fraser kills bad demonic dudes in “The Mummy.” We never
take a glimpse into the pain of the families or friends of the
1,000 Somalians who died. They’ve become video game targets.
Indeed, now war films are shoe-ins for the video game treatment.
“Top Gun” became a flight simulation game, giving you
the chance to shoot down Russians as coolly as the Cold War itself.
“Star Wars” ““ doesn’t the title just say it
all? ““ has the player shooting Imperial enemies in space.
“Pearl Harbor: The Virtual Simulation” and
“Saving Private Ryan: The Video Game” ““ relive
the first half-hour of carnage! ““ can’t be too far
away. In retrograde fashion, many films now come from video games.
It’s very simple: people want to see blood baths, and video
games are abundant with blood bath scenarios. The logic is
impeccable, because coming up with new reasons to have people
shooting outrageously big guns in the chaos of combat is
undoubtedly pretty difficult. Even “Black Hawk Down”
seems to be an elaborate “Counterstrike” bout ““
the American terrorists did not win. The alternatives are
plentiful. Many anti-war films have been made, even by Hollywood,
such as “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Lawrence
of Arabia” and “Schindler’s List” ““
all winners of the Best Picture Oscar. I believe “Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” while not being about war per se, was
a good anti-violence film, which any anti-war film must be. Sure,
the film glorifies martial arts, but only the bad characters
actually hurt people ““ as in, lodged a big blade into
someone’s head. Martial arts are a form of self-defense, with
the usually trigger-happy Chow Yun Fat espousing a kind of Buddhist
nihilism. Don’t know what that means? Give me another 50, you
frog-licking roach worm! Those “boring” first 20
minutes has Chow Yun Fat’s character give up his sword, the
equivalent of Stephen King giving up his pen or Bob Dylan giving up
his guitar. He wants to settle down as a “civilian”
with his woman. Yet he must later take back the sword to avenge his
master in the name of honor. When this comes at the price of his
life, he renounces his warrior code and tells Michelle Yeoh’s
character that she was what he wanted out of life. Of course, Yeoh
must avenge her lover, as the cycle of violence continues. But she
doesn’t, stopping a few inches away from beheading Zhang
Ziyi’s beautiful head. The vicious cycle of vengeance has
ended with peace. Thus the film shows the roots of violence, the
results of violence and the solution to ending violence. The real
danger of war films, and indeed war itself, is that history is
retold, reshaped and sometimes completely erased. The Nazi
propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” still encounters
much hostility, even after most agree on its watershed role in
documentary filmmaking. “Pearl Harbor” tells the
history of an infamous date through the compelling point of view of
shiny bombs being dropped. “Braveheart” makes medieval
war seem fun and a form of male initiation. At that point, war
becomes the extension of sport, being a kind of extreme sport where
you can die. Unfortunately, as bombed Canadian soldiers will attest
to, there is no reset button in reality. .