Superfluous facebook moralizing wears thin but this footage reminded me why I hate Hollywood war movies; its not their infantile moral simplicity, but their constant insistence that war & mayhem begins & ends in a firefight between square jawed heroic/villainous male combatants. Ive had countless stories from WWII & Vietnam related to me firsthand and none of them concern such a narrative - they are strange accounts of unreal scenarios, the imagery often strikes me as dreamlike. Read a fat anthology of war poetry & the bulk of the content covers events outside the firefight or the massed assault. Im not dismissing the perilous courage of the frontline fighter but the bigger picture is open-ended and extends in every direction. It was all I could do to watch this as, increasingly, I find the whole idea of war footage unbearably ghoulish. Yesterday I had to walk away from a documentary on the Battle of Midway. Those Zeros swooping through tracer fire, the shockwaves through the water, the incinerating explosions - it doesnt look like history to me, just heat & alarm & terror. This would be the case for any half-evolved person, Id assume. But journalists generally are not ghouls, and the impulse to document is surely just as valid as the impulse and/or necessity to fight in the first place.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 22:22:48 +0000
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