I recently tried watching the 2019 film 1917 on the plane, and couldn’t finish it. The movie was a boring play-by-play montage of “horrors of war” tropes. 1917‘s self-imposed artistic trick of showing every frame of the film as if it was recorded in one continuous shot didn’t help either, the “one shot” effect actually made it worse. I literally felt like I was watching someone else play a video game. Video games are fun to play, but boring to watch as a spectator. I realized 1917 is just like Saving Private Ryan, it starts with a contrived excuse for the main character to wander around the battlefield and see various bad things, some of which are statistically unlikely to happen to one guy, especially all within a few hours of each other. It’s video game logic that’s tedious and immersion breaking in a movie. After further thought, I realized 1917 is the extreme but logical conclusion of war movie tropes going back decades. At this point, we might as well fire everybody in Hollywood and just watch movies generated by AI. The tropes are so routine even a computer can string them together just as competently as a person. I have decided this particular war movie trend started with the 1976 movie Apocalypse Now, and will explain why.
Consider Saving Private Ryan, which starts with the main character being told he needs to find a guy in the war zone somewhere, wanders around and sees a bunch of bad things, finally meets him, then has a final battle. The only parts of the movie that actually matter to the plot in any meaningful way are the opening and ending scenes. Even the other characters don’t matter, they mostly just exist to die in various ways. I ask everyone, what was the point being made here? War is hell? We knew this already.
The 1986 movie Platoon is good because it’s about a personal conflict in war. Every scene drives that conflict forward in a logical way. The action scenes are short and snappy, and also important to the story. The final confrontation between Taylor and Barnes wouldn’t make sense without the context of the previous scenes. Barnes being killed is fitting justice for his crimes. More importantly, Platoon is directed by Vietnam War veteran Oliver Stone. He intended his movie to be a cultural counter-point against John Wayne-style war propaganda films like The Green Berets, and absolutely succeeded. Platoon delivers a coherent and effective anti-war message, both in general terms and specifically against American interventionism. Platoon’s anti-war message is so effective, I don’t think we’ll ever see a movie like that again.
Now back to Apocalypse Now. This movie arguably had a much larger impact on the movie industry and I can substantiate this with proof that later war movies, particularly movies made after the end of the Cold War, follow the template of Apocalypse Now to a much higher degree than Platoon. There’s no better proof than Saving Private Ryan, which is literally the same plot as Apocalypse Now. The main character has to find a guy, and sees a bunch of bad stuff on the way.
Apocalypse Now, which to be fair, follows the template of the Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, is about a guy who has to find and kill another guy who did bad things, takes the whole movie to do this, and then kills him. Interestingly, this is how Apocalypse Now deviates from Heart of Darkness. In Conrad’s book, the main character ends up sympathizing with the bad guy and attempts to rescue him. This would have been a much more interesting and compelling conclusion for the movie, and having him kill the bad guy like he’s supposed to is actually self-defeating. If the main character does exactly what he sets out to do, that suggests there was no character development and none of the events along the way had any impact. Even in Lord of the Rings, Frodo fails to destroy the ring, which was literally the one job he had spent three books setting out to do. Gollum is the one who destroys the ring, making him an unexpected hero, though by accident. Gollum was the first person to find the ring, and then the last person. The story all comes together quite beautifully through him.
If Apocalypse Now ended with the good guy joining the bad guy and helping him commit atrocities, that would have been shocking, outrageous, controversial, and a great message about how American interventionism is truly bad and corrupts everyone, even good people. But here’s the problem, that’s not what the movie was about. It wasn’t against war, it was justifying war. By showing the good guy killing the bad guy, the movie implies, however accidentally, the idea that it is possible to follow orders and still be a good person in an American intervention. The good guy is explicitly following orders to be good, which implies that the American government and its interventions can themselves be good. This completely defeats whatever anti-war message the director was trying to convey.
Here’s the root of the problem. American liberals like war, they just don’t like to fight in wars. They wouldn’t have protested the Vietnam War in the first place if there was no conscription, and why when Nixon ended conscription, they stopped protesting almost immediately. That’s why over time, liberals have grown increasingly hostile to veteran perspectives like Stone’s, because those perspectives tend to reject war altogether. Liberals much prefer meaningless and trite “war is hell” narratives. We can all wallow in how bad war is, but without the burden of actually changing our behavior. We don’t even have to stop fighting wars. It’s the ultimate Meta self-awareness. We acknowledge that war is bad, but do it anyway. Like a thief who acknowledges that committing crimes is bad but continues robbing people.
More than anyone else, Hollywood liberals were responsible for squashing American anti-war sentiment in the wake of Vietnam. Over the following decades they drowned sincere anti-war experiences in a wave of surface-level pseudo-intellectual bullshit. Here’s a classic example, the infamous peace symbol worn by many American soldiers. According to Hollywood liberals, a soldier wearing a cutesy peace symbol was a way for him to be individualistic and edgy. This pop culture representation of the peace symbol was cemented in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket. The main character wears a little peace pin on his helmet as a way to be edgy and gives no actual real reason for it except as a cosmetic statement. That’s the type of mythology that liberals love because it makes them feel smart and better than everyone else, but without having to actually do anything.
The real reason soldiers in Vietnam wore peace symbols is explained in this article by Traveling Soldier Online:
In 1968, in the wake of the Tet offensive, tensions within the army exploded. Drug use and AWOLs skyrocketed.
Mutinies erupted over the next two years and spread from individual units to whole companies. One Pentagon official admitted that, “mutiny became so common that the army was forced to disguise its frequency by talking instead of ‘combat refusal'”.
“Fragging” – the GI term for using violence against their officers for their behavior – was extremely widespread in Vietnam. The army still cannot account for how 1,400 officers and non-commissioned officers died. This number, combined with the official fragging statistics, suggests that 20 to 25 percent of all officers killed in the war were killed by their men, not “the enemy”.
In addition to widespread individual and collective rebellion, rank-and-file GI papers sprang up on bases, ships, and in units in the field. The roughly 200 papers were enormously popular, because they told the stories of soldiers’ struggle in the language of soldiers – and were produced by soldiers themselves. Vietnam GI, a national paper with a circulation of 10,000 – most of it in Vietnam itself – carried stories of technicians sabotaging bombs, exposed Nixon’s peace initiatives as the fraud they were, and interviewed soldiers about their experiences in “the Nam”.
As the war within the army grew more intense, many soldiers began to realize that their real enemies were the “lifers,” politicians, Pentagon brass, and corporations, not the Vietnamese people. The slogan of the U.S.’s brutal war – “search and destroy” – became “search and avoid”. Patrols into the field deliberately evaded contact with the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), and night patrols would halt and take up positions a few yards beyond the base perimeter. Another tactic was for a patrol to secure a safe place in the jungle and camp there.
In this way, GIs declared their own cease-fire with the NLF. In fact, the NLF and the NVA were ordered not to fire on U.S. troops wearing red bandanas and peace signs, unless fired upon first. Two years into the tremendous soldiers’ upsurge, GI combat deaths were down more than 70 percent from the 1968 high. [Emphasis mine]
That’s the ultimate reason so-called “anti-war liberals” rejected the actual reason for wearing peace pins and created an imaginary one. They’re not actually against war. Furthermore, their “war is hell” message is rooted in the idea that the other side is equally bad. NVA soldiers receiving orders to not shoot at Americans wearing peace symbols is an acknowledgement that the other side was good or at least okay, so liberals must reject it.
If you don’t believe me, ask a liberal how we can end the war in Ukraine, Syria, or anywhere else. The liberal will never suggest serious diplomacy addressing the demands of the other side. He just wants the other side to give up and do everything he wants.
Ian Kummer
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Good post. W/r/t Full Metal Jacket, the explicit aim of Kubrick was to show how war was like, without any further message (not even antiwar or similar, not even “war is hell” while the exact phrase is uttered in a famous scene). It’s further mixed up with the idiosyncrasies of the Marines. Due to Kubrick being an extremely good filmmaker, the result is still a very good movie. But it does lack any meaning in the sense Platoon has.
Correction: It was “ain’t war hell?”, not “war is hell”. Uttered by the most famous fictional door gunner in history.
In my opinion, Apocalypse Now is a good movie, in a dark ‘jungle adventures’ style. It is not a great war movie, and you’ve got very good points explaining why.
I would be very interested in reading your opinions about the 1965 French film The 317th Platoon (La 317eme Section) set during the First Indochina War. It is not a ‘jungle adventures’ movie, it’s a true war movie. The director was a French Army cameraman during the war and was captured by the Vietnamese. He was then saved from death by a Soviet reporter who was covering the war from the Viet Minh side.
I am not American so perhaps I just miss the toolkit to understand. Who are these “liberals” you always speak about in this kind of articles? And, more importantly, who would the non-liberas that behave in a different way? Who is not dehumanizing Russian now, for example? Who has a real anti-war sentiments? I have the feeling that the word “liberal” is just synonymous of Westerner, and it used by Westerners authors in prerogative way to make some kind of imaginary distinction between themselves and whoever they want to badly talk about.
I am well aware I might be wrong, but hopefully you can enlighten me.
I’m not American either, but American liberalism is something I have defined as follows:
“Liberalism is the mental disease that cheers on and justifies the invasion and destruction of defenceless, especially non white countries, the loot of their natural resources, the emplacement of corrupt puppets as their leaders, the wholesale takeover of their economies, and the mass killing of the fathers, husbands, brothers and sons of their women, in the name of ‘liberating’ those women to gamble in casinos and lie naked on the beach.”
I’ve never watched Apocalypse Now and do not intend to, but you should also have mentioned Black Hawk Down, which was made specifically as an advertisement for militarism, with the full cooperation of the Pentagon. I reviewed it here:
https://bill-purkayastha.blogspot.com/2012/12/black-hawk-down-study-in-racism.html?m=1
You said about Platoon that
True enough, but I remember that when it came out a lot of Reaganites watched the film, as one reviewer I recall stated, “to see American firepower wipe out lots of gooks.” To this day no Hollyflick will ever be made without showing masses of disposable “enemy soldiers” or “terrorists” being slaughtered.
In fact if there is one anti war film that I could name that they would never ever permit to be remade now, in any form, it’s Dr Strangelove. They’d probably arrest anyone who attempted something like it as a “Russian agent.”
Your statement on Vietnam War liberals and the fact that their protests had everything to do with conscription is something I keep pointing out every time that I see someone claiming that America will have to re introduce conscription. If it does, the pro war sentiment in American society will disappear in a nanosecond, and the Pentagon knows it.
Naked Capitalism, by the way, makes the same point as you do, here:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/rob-urie-americans-are-unleashing-monsters-they-have-no-idea-how-to-contain.html
At the same time, Hollywood is losing ground rather rapidly, with its long term prospects bleak. It may be faced with the choice of either closing shop or making something halfway watchable again.
Hi Biswapriya!
All good points. About Platoon – I would say it hardly portrayed the Vietnamese as ineffective and impotent, rather the opposite. But then again, the Reaganites loved the film adaption of “Starship Troopers,” which was openly making fun of them, much to the frustration of its director. They also loved Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” which was also quite obviously making fun of them, much to his frustration as well. Reaganites were very effective at co-opting enemy propaganda and making it their own. I guess it’s fitting justice that Reaganites themselves got co-opted and overshadowed by their leftist counter-parts. For example, the Reaganites’ Holy Bible, the Tom Clancy novels, are now being re-written as woke leftist messages against the bad Russians, who are also an obvious stand-in for white conservatives.
About Black Hawk Down – I read your review and I would like to share pieces of it here linking back to your blog, if that’s okay with you. I do agree on all the points you made. Though I would add that I read up on the case of John Stebbins, he has always maintained his innocence and I tend to believe him. He’s from Ithaca New York, where my mother grew up – and I think this is a classic trailer trash divorce. It’s very easy to claim the father molested the children, with no evidence, and both civilian and military authorities will all believe it. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if the Pentagon specifically threw him under the bus so his case would stay quiet and not poison their “heroic victory” at Mogadishu. I bet the wife/ex-wife picked up on this attitude pretty fast and went wild inflicting all the revenge on him she could, with the full cooperation of authorities who should have been reviewing both sides of the case equally. She sounds like a very typical “dependapotamus” cunt.
I read Mark Bowden’s book, and yes, it is MUCH less “heroic” than the movie. I remember the part you quoted about the helicopters tearing babies out of women’s arms and throwing them down the street. And there’s that inconvenient truth that the Pakistani peacekeepers were the heroes of the day who linked up with the Rangers, and took significant casualties to do this. Part of the problem was that the army general had not bothered to notify anyone else in the UN force that he was carrying out a mission, so no one was even remotely prepared for a rescue, which caused huge delays. It’s an unfortunately typical trait of American “coalitions” that we don’t trust anyone else and look down on them. Case in point, large numbers of foreign troops and contractors being left behind during the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the American troops sneaking out of Bagram at night without telling the ANA.
Yes of course you can share it.
I find this to be a very strange interpretation. A central theme is that Kurtz has gone mad in the context of the war, and the guy who eventually hunts him down and kills him also goes to a very bad place by the end of the movie. Other characters, including a previous assassin sent to eliminate Kurtz, in fact do fall under his sway. That the protagonist ultimately doesn’t was probably intended to be a twist on the source material. At the end of the movie Sheen is given the opportunity to replace Kurtz as the new warlord and turns it down. The movie has nothing good to say about war in general. I find it very hard to come away from the movie thinking the main character has come out as any sort of triumphant good guy. You claim he has no character development. but by the end of the movie he looks to be a psychological wreck. I seriously doubt he returns to his bosses and is eager for their next assignment. He probably just wanders away into the jungle to also be a weirdo, though not in the same way as Kurtz.
Now you can argue the movie isn’t sufficiently critical of US involvement in that war specifically, and yeah. I’d actually kind of agree with that. In fact the idea that Kurtz has gone rogue is kind of a howler, because things not too dissimilar to his activities were at times sanctioned US policy. But Platoon doesn’t really land any firm message about the entire war being inherently a bad cause either. Platoon still boils down to some soldiers are good and others bad. It’s all very individualized and leaves the impression that maybe if there were more of the ‘good soldiers’ things would be better.
Basically no Hollywood production about Vietnam has ever remotely come to terms with what the US did to Southeast Asia over the course of 20+ years. Even outside the domain of fiction, something like Ken Burns ‘definitive’ documentary is in many ways a long-form exercise in obfuscation.
Ian,
I beg to differ. Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now do indeed, at one level, share the same plot. That is, both are “quests”. In SPR it is the rescue of a soldier. In AN it is finding a monster. Yes, both protagonists (main characters) go through ordeals to do this. But this is to illustrate the costs involved and to allow the characters to arc through the story.
IMHO, SPR’s theme is sacrifice. This is clear with the loss of the “Ryan” brothers and the decision by the President to “save the last surviving Ryan.” There is loads of sacrifice involved. That D Day landing, and other events in the movie show the sacrifices involved (the death of just about everyone involved) to “save” the individual “Ryan” and reunite him with his mother who has already sacrificed so much.
AN has a very different theme. This is about good and evil. And whether “good” in seeking to confront evil isn’t corrupted and becomes the very thing it seeks to destroy. Hence, the main character (on his quest) moves from being reasonably sane (insofar as that was possible in Nam) to being the monster’s alter ego.
So, potentially the same story. But IMHO, very, very different messaging.
By the way, keep up your good efforts. As an aside, I see you haven’t posted much recently about life in Russia as a foreigner and one from one of the “unfriendly” countries to boot! I’d be interested in more on how you are doing personally. Obviously, if you don’t feel like writing about this, please feel free to pass on this request.
Another point. I do enjoy your perspective and insights. Do keep going and all the best with the book (I do write fiction myself but not the kind you’re doing!)