intertribal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
intertribal) wrote2007-04-08 06:37 pm
intertribal) wrote2007-04-08 06:37 pm
Entry tags:
kill switch engage (or, war is hell)
I know that the military has decided that video games are good for training recruits - shooting accuracy! kill-switch reflexes! - but I find myself in opposition to videogames based off war movies.
Apparently there's a game based off Platoon. Now I'm sure that everyone who plays the game will have seen the movie, which I myself confess I haven't seen - though I would be interested in it, it seems like an interesting movie. Maybe that should be my summer goal - watch some war movies. However, I can't help after reading the plot summary and videos on YouTube (one of which set to the song "Running Up That Hill") that some of the young American men who watched this movie have completely failed to let themselves admit that maybe this movie is not advocating or celebrating war.
You can tell even on the YouTube comments to the Platoon-Placebo AMV.
Then there's the opposite reaction - the desire to ban and dislike war movies simply because they depict war at all. I think many conservative young men think this is the position that most liberals take - and indeed, many liberals do take this stance. It goes along with the whole peacenik-coward thing. The movie Green Berets, John Wayne's ode to Vietnam, has one of those liberal peacenik characters, a journalist, who goes to the battlefield with his sensitivities in tact but leaves convinced that indeed, "war is hell (but necessary)". Now, Green Berets is a horrible movie because it doesn't even show that war is hell. Almost no American soldiers die, and no Vietnamese civilians either - indeed, they rescue one Vietnamese boy named "Hamchuck" from the NVA. Then John Wayne expects the actual Vietnam War to be validated. No. That's not the way it works. And when anybody in class made fun of Green Berets, the conservatives would say, "you just don't want to admit that war is hell." Ironically, Green Berets is far too heavenly.
Platoon does not seem to be. The movie version of Jarhead isn't either, but it's not for girls who get squeamish in times of war. The more I remember that movie, the more I like it, although it does not approach the depth of the book. The movie's end - the burning of the oil fields - is in my opinion painfully and universally beautiful, the same way Moby's music is. The word "fuck" and its variants are used 335 times. The marines basically go nuts with boredom. War isn't glamorized. I can appreciate movies that depict war as long as war isn't glamorized - and by glamorized I don't mean Hollywood glamor, I mean warhawk glamor. Like Rambo and John Wayne and all that shit, even the less egregious Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, which despite being very violent still focus more on the sweet and loyal fraternal bonds that carry the soldiers through to honorable death, survival, or victory. That's still glamorization. If war is really that glamorous, I don't think we would have Gulf War Syndrome, the Winter Soldier investigation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials, or babies still being born deformed because of Agent Orange. But that's not the way we like to see war. In Saving Private Ryan where you see Private Ryan all old and contented weeping over the grave of Captain Miller does not affect me in the least, because I think, "yeah, one wonders how many times he's beat his wife and children, woken up screaming, lost a job in the last fifty years?" Maybe World War II didn't fuck soldiers up, but I wonder about this. We like to think of World War II as "the greatest generation", with patriotic men fighting and patriotic women burning the homefires, but I wonder how much of this is just cultural propaganda, brought to us by the likes of Steven Spielberg (whose Schindler's List is far better, perhaps because it doesn't deal directly with Americans whose reputation he needs to protect). There is evidence that war crimes were still carried out in World War II. I think in all likelihood they were just concealed better. At any rate, The War Tapes documentary pretty much solidifies my point here. Those soldiers in The War Tapes come home so clearly traumatized and deadened, many of them also bearing physical disabilities, and they didn't even see direct combat in the most recent war in Iraq.
And I guess I'm afraid that all of this complexity is lost in a videogame based on a war movie like Platoon. It's a painfully simple game that consists only of trying to defuse guerrilla attacks and blowing up bridges. And of course Oliver Stone and the producers of Platoon had to okay them using their movie's name. Because it brings in more royalties. Sigh.
Anyway, here's the AMV I was talking about. Warning: blood, shooting, gore.
It's interesting that "Running Up That Hill" is seen as too much of a pussy emo song to go with a war movie. Because soldiers can't show weakness or fear or any kind of softness. Instead they should constantly reaffirm their machismo, especially after suffering a defeat or the death of a comrade. Which is why most war crimes perpetrated by a squadron in Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq alike took/take place after some members of a squadron have been killed by the enemy. By the way, here's the summary of Platoon.
Apparently there's a game based off Platoon. Now I'm sure that everyone who plays the game will have seen the movie, which I myself confess I haven't seen - though I would be interested in it, it seems like an interesting movie. Maybe that should be my summer goal - watch some war movies. However, I can't help after reading the plot summary and videos on YouTube (one of which set to the song "Running Up That Hill") that some of the young American men who watched this movie have completely failed to let themselves admit that maybe this movie is not advocating or celebrating war.
You can tell even on the YouTube comments to the Platoon-Placebo AMV.
"the music fucked up th whole thing. you should have put a different song."I completely disagree. Not the least among my reasons is that "Running Up That Hill" is not an emo song. Thankfully some users saw that a deeper meaning was trying to be achieved.
"Agree this song dicked it all up.... This song would be better suited for a video of emo kids attempting suicide..."
"the songs tight, it works real well, i'm glad to see ur not an idiot putting metal to the vid just cuse its war, people do that way to much and it takes away the deeper meaning of the whole fucking movie."Not that metal can't have deeper meanings. The metal bands I like are actually very subversive in that they tend to have lyrics that are not macho and criticize much of the culture associated with most heavy metal - Rammstein, Tool, and in the grunge world, Nirvana, are three examples. Still, you don't know Rammstein's message unless you look up the translation, and nobody can understand Maynard James Keenan without looking up his lyrics either. That's what makes them subversive. In the words of Nirvana, "he's the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun, but he don't know what it means." Sometimes I think a lot of war movies are similar. They draw the testosterone addicts - the ones likely to sign up for the military later - in with explosions and hope that the movie will change their minds. Unfortunately, I don't know how successful this is. It's expecting a high level of intelligence from a populace that doesn't always appear able to think critically. Like in Jarhead, when the new troops are shown footage of atrocities in the Vietnam War as a part of their sensitivity/anti-war-crimes training, and the marines respond by cheering.
"Bam Bitch ! Nice movie ;)"That or, they recognize that war will turn ordinary men into monsters, and will make victims out of innocent civilians, but they dismiss it with Sherman's classic "apology": "war is hell (but necessary)." I suppose we (the pacifists and the except-when-completely-unavoidable pacifists, a faction I'm a part of) agree that war is hell, but we think there is no, or at least very, very few circumstances where bringing hell to earth is actually necessary - and certainly, it cannot have been necessary seventeen (and probably more) times in the 20th century alone (look up the military history of the U.S. if you don't believe the military has gone overseas to invade, destabilize, or control through the use of mass, systemic violence that many times).
Then there's the opposite reaction - the desire to ban and dislike war movies simply because they depict war at all. I think many conservative young men think this is the position that most liberals take - and indeed, many liberals do take this stance. It goes along with the whole peacenik-coward thing. The movie Green Berets, John Wayne's ode to Vietnam, has one of those liberal peacenik characters, a journalist, who goes to the battlefield with his sensitivities in tact but leaves convinced that indeed, "war is hell (but necessary)". Now, Green Berets is a horrible movie because it doesn't even show that war is hell. Almost no American soldiers die, and no Vietnamese civilians either - indeed, they rescue one Vietnamese boy named "Hamchuck" from the NVA. Then John Wayne expects the actual Vietnam War to be validated. No. That's not the way it works. And when anybody in class made fun of Green Berets, the conservatives would say, "you just don't want to admit that war is hell." Ironically, Green Berets is far too heavenly.
Platoon does not seem to be. The movie version of Jarhead isn't either, but it's not for girls who get squeamish in times of war. The more I remember that movie, the more I like it, although it does not approach the depth of the book. The movie's end - the burning of the oil fields - is in my opinion painfully and universally beautiful, the same way Moby's music is. The word "fuck" and its variants are used 335 times. The marines basically go nuts with boredom. War isn't glamorized. I can appreciate movies that depict war as long as war isn't glamorized - and by glamorized I don't mean Hollywood glamor, I mean warhawk glamor. Like Rambo and John Wayne and all that shit, even the less egregious Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, which despite being very violent still focus more on the sweet and loyal fraternal bonds that carry the soldiers through to honorable death, survival, or victory. That's still glamorization. If war is really that glamorous, I don't think we would have Gulf War Syndrome, the Winter Soldier investigation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials, or babies still being born deformed because of Agent Orange. But that's not the way we like to see war. In Saving Private Ryan where you see Private Ryan all old and contented weeping over the grave of Captain Miller does not affect me in the least, because I think, "yeah, one wonders how many times he's beat his wife and children, woken up screaming, lost a job in the last fifty years?" Maybe World War II didn't fuck soldiers up, but I wonder about this. We like to think of World War II as "the greatest generation", with patriotic men fighting and patriotic women burning the homefires, but I wonder how much of this is just cultural propaganda, brought to us by the likes of Steven Spielberg (whose Schindler's List is far better, perhaps because it doesn't deal directly with Americans whose reputation he needs to protect). There is evidence that war crimes were still carried out in World War II. I think in all likelihood they were just concealed better. At any rate, The War Tapes documentary pretty much solidifies my point here. Those soldiers in The War Tapes come home so clearly traumatized and deadened, many of them also bearing physical disabilities, and they didn't even see direct combat in the most recent war in Iraq.
And I guess I'm afraid that all of this complexity is lost in a videogame based on a war movie like Platoon. It's a painfully simple game that consists only of trying to defuse guerrilla attacks and blowing up bridges. And of course Oliver Stone and the producers of Platoon had to okay them using their movie's name. Because it brings in more royalties. Sigh.
Anyway, here's the AMV I was talking about. Warning: blood, shooting, gore.
It's interesting that "Running Up That Hill" is seen as too much of a pussy emo song to go with a war movie. Because soldiers can't show weakness or fear or any kind of softness. Instead they should constantly reaffirm their machismo, especially after suffering a defeat or the death of a comrade. Which is why most war crimes perpetrated by a squadron in Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq alike took/take place after some members of a squadron have been killed by the enemy. By the way, here's the summary of Platoon.