a sense of joy and then a panic

Recommended read from my class - which is called, incidentally, Colonial Encounters. 

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph.  1997.  Good Day, Columbus.  In Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History, 108-140.  Boston: Beacon Press.

In the 1990s, quite a few observers, historians, and activists worldwide denounced the arrogance implied by this terminology during the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus's Bahaman landing.  Some spoke of a Columbian Holocaust.  Some proposed "conquest" instead of discovery; others preferred "encounter," which suddenly gained an immense popularity - one more testimony, if needed, of the capacity of liberal discourse to compromise between its premises and its practice.  "Encounter" sweetens the horror, polishes the rough edges that do not fit neatly either side of the controversy.  Everyone seems to gain. 

Not everyone was convinced.  Portuguese historian Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, a former minister of education, reiterated that "discovery" was an appropriate term for the European ventures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which he compares to Herschel's discovery of Uranus, and Sedillot's discovery of microbes.  The problem is, of course, that Uranus did not know that it existed before Herschel, and that Sedillot did not go after microbes with a sword and a gun. 

Yet more than blind arrogance is at issue here.  Terminologies demarcate a field, politically and epistemologically.  Names set up a field of power.  "Discovery" and analogous terms ensure that by just mentioning the event one enters a predetermined lexical field of cliches and predictable categories that foreclose a redefinition of the political and intellectual stakes.  Europe becomes the center of "what happened."  Whatever else may have happened to other peoples in that process is already reduced to a natural fact: they were discovered.  The similarity to planets and microbes precedes their explicit mention by future historians and cabinet ministers.

I realized this morning that I have become obsessed with deer.  Not real deer, per se, although we did see a truckload of reindeer at the local grocery store being harnessed up to a sleigh, and their Santa walking up from a crappy American car at the far end of a parking lot.  Symbolic deer.  What deer mean to people. 

L'Age du Renne (the age of the reindeer) was the poetic term for the Magdalenian age, the end of the Pleistocene.  Then there was the Sorceror - the antler-wearing human shaman painted in the Cave Trois Frères.  Domestication started soon after, in the Holocene, but did not replace hunting and hunting ceremonies.  As our prey they were put on coats of arms and commissioned tapestries, their heads mounted in hunting lodges all over the north as a symbol of the Swiss Family Robinson way of thinking: "father, I think I've just killed the most beautiful animal in the world!"  Always noble, always fair, always quarry: fairy-cattle made of magic, with crucifixes between their antlers.  Only in the Ramayana was the deer ever used for evil.  Now we run over them with cars and write letters to the newspaper asking for legalized extermination procedures - not just for the sake of our hood ornaments, but for them, the deer.  Meanwhile more and more people have imagined their revenge: the skeletal deer-god of upstate New York in Wendigo, the Nightwalker/Forest God of Mononoke-hime, even the reanimated zombie deer of the Queens of the Stone Age video for "No One Knows". 

When I was in high school and we had to write a creative story about a meaningful event to pass a state exam - demonstrating proper use of English, I guess - I wrote about this father and son that go hunting in the woods and kill a magic stag.  I don't remember what happens at the end.  I think they were attacked by fairies in their cabin, and the body of the stag disappeared during the attack. 

I also played a deer once, back when I did Javanese dance.  Kancil is our Bambi - a poor lonesome fawn separated from its mother who steals vegetables from the villagers' gardens.

Japan takes fear, consumerism, and the human body to a whole new level.  As usual, Nippon is at the cutting edge of the tragi-comic postwar devolution.  It's when I look at Japan that I think, "we may think we're progressing, but we have actually hit the apex, and we are on the way down."  I'm not sure what the apex was.  World War II?  The Berlin Wall?  9/11?  It's sad to think any of those would be the pinnacle of human civilization.  Then you start wondering if we ever reached the apex at all, or if we just fell off the plateau. 

"It doesn't matter at all whether one is religious or an atheist, whether one likes the miniature or not.  What's important is that we've lived on this earth, and we're bound to it."

- Abbas Kiarostami

APOCALYPSE NOW:  This movie, released on my father's birthday, is #37 on IMDb's top movies.  And it full well deserves to be.  I wanted to see it because I love Heart of Darkness, the book that it's based on, and, well, it's one of those movies that everybody sees.  My first Vietnam war movie was The Green Berets, starring John Wayne.  It was horrid, and I don't recommend it.  I've seen snippets of Platoon through an AMV - same goes for Full Metal Jacket.  Other war movies I've seen include Saving Private Ryan and Jarhead.  I like Jarhead, but that's a modern war, more about monotony than war.  I don't like Saving Private Ryan.  So I'm not really a connoisseur of the war genre.  But this film was absolutely amazing. 

Basics:  well, if you've read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, you know the plot.  Captain Willard, who has returned to Vietnam on a second tour begging for a reason to be sent back into the jungle because his American homelife "isn't there anymore", is sent on a classified mission to find the renegade Colonel Kurtz, who is acting without authorization and beyond human decency.  Kurtz was brilliant, when he was classified sane, and on the fast-track to a much higher post in the army.  But he began to act increasingly without the army's permission and finally disappeared, somewhere up a river leading into Cambodia.  Willard is supposed to find him and "terminate his command" "with extreme prejudice", the meaning of which is kept vague by bureaucratic red tape.  He hitches a ride on a boat of younger army guys (for anyone who's read Catch-22, they were like "Yo-Yo's Roomies") who take him up river.  And the further they go upriver, the more all their beliefs about war and Vietnam are unraveled. 

The acting is top-notch, and yet this is not a character-based movie.  Martin Sheen plays the deadpanned, jaded, cynical and reluctantly intellectual Willard with great skill.  Robert Duvall plays Kilgore, a fun-loving commander who "loves his boys" and loves the war, not wanting it to end.  Dennis Hopper is a photojournalist who wears cameras like others in Kurtz's "tribe" wear bone necklaces, who considers Kurtz the second coming of Christ, who can barely speak coherently in the face of God.  And Marlon Brando... wow.  The man has gravitas, and I've never even seen him in any other movie.  His on-screen time is extremely minimal - twenty minutes out of a 153 minute movie - but whenever he appears I found myself unable to move.  Absolutely perfect choice for a man described as a great man in a sea of little men.  He commands everything around him, wields poetry like a sword. 

As far as the directing goes, I don't think I've seen a better-directed movie, and I am being completely honest here.  Judging the man by this movie, Francis Ford Coppola is a visionary.  It's movie-making that is not used anymore - not that I'm going to be a scrooge and say that directors nowadays don't got game, because some of them do - slow, deliberate, lovingly crafted.  Yes - crafted.  The imagery is surreal and fantastical while simultaneously crawling down in the dirt.  Coppola's usage of the camera makes the viewer actually feel, and almost taste, the atmosphere - not by focusing on where the supposed action is, but on other things - while Kurtz recites lines from "Hollow Man", for instance, the camera settles on several still (yet alive?) images for ten seconds - his head, in shadow; the large stone statues of the temple he's claimed as his own; the young Vietnamese girl who tends to him; the captive Willard, in one streak of light.  The effect is beyond powerful.  At the climax, when they finally reach Kurtz (two hours into the movie) and find his legion of white-painted "children" standing silently at an ancient Vietnamese temple, weapons in hand... well, let's just say you feel bad breathing.  The entire half-hour takes place in that dream world, filled with hanging bodies and children playing, where cows are sacrificed and faces are painted and poetry is recited, in the very deep parts of the jungle.  It feels like the beginning and end of the world.  Apocalypse Now.  It's almost an alien world, and yet it is so ancestrally familiar, as if such an image is retained somewhere in our collective unconscious.  It's exactly the atmosphere, with all those silently smiling statues, that I hope to somehow be able to evoke in my writing, even just once - the past is present, watching, in the form of stone gods that are, to borrow from Lovecraft, dead but dreaming.  Some critics saw this part as anticlimactic, after the first two hours that showed a more regular war (but still poked great holes in it), the kind mainstream critics are willing and ready to watch.  I completely disagree.  The last half-hour is like the trance dance at the end of the rite of manhood.  It's the hammer.  But it's also the part that, I suspect, makes people the most uncomfortable with their own patriotism and support-the-troops bumperstickers, because it's in the last half-hour that Coppola really makes clear what he's trying to say.

You may be wondering why Kurtz is only in the last twenty minutes of the movie.  Well, because although he casts a larger-than-life shadow over the rest of the film, it is ultimately not about him.  It's not about Willard, either.  It's about the system - not just Vietnam, or the U.S. government's handling of it, but about war itself - the system mechanics of war.  Every time I experience a rendition of this story, I get more out of it, and Apocalypse Now suggested a new interpretation.  Kurtz has been rejected by the system because he is too extreme.  But isn't it ironic, Apocalypse Now says, that war can be too extreme?  War is already extreme.  Why is Kurtz being punished for resorting to what he calls the primordial instinct of man, for being what every G.I. fantasizes when he empties his shell casing on a junk boat of civilians?  The people who are ultimately fucked up - and greater villains, in my opinion, because they are in control and no one is going to call the herd insane - are the people running trade posts in wartime, having their polite little dinners on white tablecloths, putting on USO shows with playboy bunnies who after shaking their little bikinis are then airlifted away when the men watching attempt to come on stage and tear the bikinis off, surfing in the beach they just blew up, saying Kurtz is crazy - he's gone too far - he's a psycho.  In one scene, Willard's river boat crew fires that junk boat of civilians for no reason other than their own jumpiness for a solid three minutes.  After they finish - and find that the people were only hiding puppies - they find that one woman is not dead yet.  With a sudden moral righteousness, they decide to take her to a hospital.  Willard shoots her, killing her with one shot, and the rest of the crew now sees him as a monster. 

That, you see, is how America justifies war.  And it's why I don't give a shit if you follow the Geneva convention, if you are there to spread democracy, if you rebuild schools, if you vaccinate children, if the enemy is so much more "savage" than you.  All your self-righteousness about being the better man, above all these backward primitives who will use their own children as shields, means absolutely nothing.  There is no nobility in war, as I said in a previous post about the myth of the noble soldier.  There are no magnificent, honorable troops.  They make their living killing people.  Alright?  They make their living destroying villages.  Alright?  There is no nobility in that, so just stop pretending there is - and that's why I'm a pacifist.  That's why I say no war, no matter how careful you are.  No, World War II was not the fraternal goody-goody fest that Spielberg likes to make it.  It was not the greatest generation.  I think I finally understand why Sherman said, "War is hell" as justification for his ultra-destructive Civil War march to the sea that he was criticized for.  He was saying, as Kurtz is saying, you tell me to come here and bomb a country into submission, and then when I hang the bodies upside down, when I really do what you want me to do, you tell me I'm psychotic?  Some Republican classmates of mine in high school used this to justify not having any "rules of war" at all, and to justify human rights abuses - well, it's war, so it all goes.  That's not at all what Coppola is saying.  He's saying, even a little touch of war is the same thing as war on massive scale.  You cannot justify it - it is an affront to humanity, in all incarnations.  And the moderate incarnation is actually more offensive than Kurtz's extreme brand, because it pretends to have some kind of moral compass. 

This movie is remembered for "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", trigger-happy Kilgore's quote.  But it's really about the idea of honor during war, and you only realize what the movie is saying after you watch the end, after you watch the military sacrifice Kurtz.  It's about savagery.  It's about the very basis of our militarist culture.  The more I think about it the more I admire this masterpiece.  Do we give it the Academy Award?  No.  We give that to a movie about a suburban couple's divorce.  The horror, the horror, indeed.  - (EXTREMELY) Highly Recommended. 

Such is the fate of 28 Weeks Later, the movie that I want to see alone in a theater, having been obsessed with 28 Days Later and seeing that alone in my dorm room. 

This usually does not happen.  Usually, the Journal Star (our hometown paper) gives okay grades to bad movies that may still appeal to a mainstream audience, while the New York Times will bash it.  This is what happened to Spider-Man 3 - the Journal Star said it's a "popcorn movie masterpiece" that's "never even close to boring" and urges viewers to see "your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man".  But the Times said it's "Aesthetically and conceptually wrung out, fizzled rather than fizzy... just plods and plods along". The Journal Star will also give high grades to most indie movies, documentaries, foreign films, and deep dramas - not because its reviewers think that the movie is actually good, because they probably did not understand it, but because they think it looks like a movie they should give a high grade to.  The New York Times is more cynical with those movies as well. 

My dream last night said that 28 Weeks Later got four stars, and I was amazed.  Well, when I opened the movie review section, "Ground Zero", this morning, I saw that 28 Weeks Later had instead received 1 1/2 stars.  The review was actually stolen from The Orlando Sentinel, because they don't have the staffpower to see every movie that comes out, apparently, and it says, "another Hollywood killing machine, brutal and heartless", apparently not fond of the central message of the movie: "here's a movie that comes out on the side of genocide.  Sympathy is weakness.  Empathy - for children, innocent civilians, parents and your own offspring - will get you killed", and also criticizes the familiar whipping point of the first movie: the "jaded attitude about the coarse and callous U.S. Army". 

The New York Times, however, denotes the movie a "critic's pick", an extremely rare honor.  Chief reviewer A. O. Scott says of the movie, "brutal and almost exhaustingly terrifying, as any respectable zombie movie should be.  It is also bracingly smart, both in its ideas and its techniques".  To Scott, the central message of the movie is: "To the soldiers and survivors alike, there are only bad choices, and doing what seems like the right thing - firebombing an open city or rescuing children from the bombs - can turn out to have horrendous consequences."  It also points to something I agree with - the ability of the zombie movie to serve as grand allegory.  Here it's the war in Iraq - Americans occupying a ravaged land in order to return stability to it, then destroying it to save it, etc.  Benevolence is punished, but for the Times, that's a political point. 

Incidentally, 28 Weeks Later has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the Cream of the Crop reviewers giving it 88%.  (Spider-Man 3 has a 61% rating, and a Cream of the Crop rating of 45%)

The reviews lend themselves to issues I'd like to resolve for myself:  the good Samaritan issue, the overkill issue.  Along with who are the sympathetic characters, why does anyone do what they do, how are the zombies dealt with - standard zombie movie questions.  My impression is that whereas 28 Days Later was post-apocalyptic, this movie is apocalyptic - it's about breakdown, not the survival of a few in an already broken world.  And anything that concentrates on the breakdown itself is bound to be more depressing than that which concentrates on the perseverance of survivors.  I guess that when everybody said 28 Days Later was smart and meaningful, it was only because the embedded message (or so they thought) was the triumph of the good guys.  If that's not the message, simple minds get uncomfortable. 

But I would like to see it myself.  Alone in a dark theater. 

The New York Times' Movie Dispatch has this article called "Hollywood's Shortage of Female Power".  It links the decline of movies "geared toward women and girls" - both at production sets and at the box office - with a declining number of women working in decisionmaking positions in Hollywood.  Some producers are apparently concerned over this:

Still, some long-time Hollywood producers feel that something has shifted. “For every Lionsgate, you’d hope there would be another company saying, ‘We’re going to make ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ ” said Lindsay Doran, an independent producer (“Nanny McPhee,” “Sense and Sensibility”) who once ran United Artists. “You don’t see that. You don’t see companies saying, ‘More than half of this population is women, we should design a slate to come up with movies like ‘The Break-Up,’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ ”

Or how about not.  The article does make the point (good job, New York Times, here's a star!) that women go to the "male", adrenaline and testosterone-laden gunfights, monster movies, and special effects extravaganzas.  But this point is very downplayed - in general, the tone remains concerned that with a reduction of female presidents and chairwomen at blockbuster studios (Paramount, Disney, and Universal are mentioned) comes a reduction of what I can only call chick flicks, and thus that women like fashion and romance... and that's about all they like.  A movie is not geared toward women if it is not inundated with over-the-top, happy-ending, heterosexual love between attractive stars, complete with a cast of lovable supportive goofs, some ridiculous rivals, and a very nice wardrobe that may just end up the movie's only Oscar nomination. 

I was once told that it was possible I "have a serious problem with women".  Sometimes I think this is true.  I have no doubts that I'm straight, and I always identify myself as female.  See my entire livejournal.  But I don't usually identify myself with the female character, especially in chick flicks.  This doesn't mean I identify with the male character, either.  It means I identify with no one.  And when I find female characters in movies that I can actually applaud, I am ecstatic.  That's why I still love "Independence Day" - Jasmine (although I have just realized that I tend to be more sympathetic to female characters who are minorities - of all the characters that are a challenge for me to like, I think the White Woman that is most difficult).  Same with Sarah Harding and Ellie in the "Jurassic Park" franchise. 

These are all, however, extremely "masculine" movies.  Of course, I think they're more like "people" movies, in my opinion - saving Earth from aliens, in this world, is macho.  One wonders what a women's alien invasion movie would look like (because surely the softer "Signs" is not a women's movie either, since all the main characters are male).  I suppose it wouldn't exist, because women don't think about aliens, and in fact, they don't seem to think about anything larger than themselves and their own friends and families at all.  Movies about Earth are not women's movies.  Lionsgate, that macho movie house that makes "Hostel" and "Bug" movies, also made "Lord of War".  Omigod, it's about guns, it must be macho.  It's about arms proliferation and how it's one of the worst things happening in the world and no one seems to care.  Then there's "Requiem for a Dream", also by Lionsgate.  Drugs!  Macho!  Even though the protagonist is female!  Same with "The Descent", which features a cast of entirely combative, athletic women and monsters, but is still a masculine movie, I suppose, because it is set in a cave, there is blood, there is gore, and there are no men to flirt with.  And if that attitude isn't sexist, I don't know what is.  I mean, all this hoopla is just bullshit, and I almost feel like writing to the New York Times on this. 

When I hear these attitudes, I feel like I'm a contradiction in terms.  Lionsgate is one of my favorite production houses.  So are Magnolia and Focus Features (and Rogue Pictures).  Further, I watch football and figure skating.  I played with Legos and Barbies.  "Jurassic Park" was my first favorite movie.  I love zombie movies, horror movies, and apocalyptic movies.  I love documentaries.  I watch Law & Order, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, and America's Next Top Model.  I absolutely loved "Hot Fuzz", even though there are close to no female characters in it and it's unabashedly a testosterone flick.  Whatever.  I firmly believe I am not abnormal, and I do not have a problem.  As me and Kim decided when we saw it, we're cool because we were two girls who went and were not there because we were dragged by our boyfriends.  All it means is that we won't have fights over what movies to watch with our husbands.

And another issue - this feeling that women's movies just aren't being made anymore is not quite true.  Discounting the unsuccessful Hollywood romantic comedies, what about "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"?  Are you really going to tell me "Little Miss Sunshine" is a masculine movie?  "Transamerica" wasn't masculine.  Then there's "Brokeback Mountain", which is like the opposite of traditional macho.  Maybe it says something that all these movies I'm listing off are indie movies, and that my favorite movie studios are all independent.  All these movies are also all good movies, not trash like "The Holiday".  But you know what?  Men go to see these movies as well as women!  No, men don't willingly see chick flicks, and yes, women do willingly see macho movies.  And while maybe this has something to do with men not being free to express their feminine side whereas women are allowed to be masculine, I think it's far more likely that macho movies, that don't have to pay their stars gargantuan amounts (see Julia Roberts' salary) and can actually devote this money to the movie itself, who recognize that adrenaline and excitement is not a high available only to men, and that are usually much funnier, with better scripts, and are much more willing to poke fun at themselves, are just better movies. 

Oh yes, and I should take this opportunity to say that I don't quite agree with the opinion in comparative politics that if more women are elected to office, women's issues will be brought to the agenda.  For one, what are "women's issues"?  My issues are security, democratization, militaries, norm change, nationalism, and colonial legacies.  None of these issues are particular to women.  Things like abortion, equal wages, equal legal rights, sexual violence, discrimination, and genital mutilation are not on my plate, not because they're not important, but because I'm just not into them.  If I were elected to public office, I would discuss the military budget and foreign policy.  Period.  And don't anybody dare say that because I believe war is an unnecessary evil, I'm showing my feminine side.  No.  I'm showing my human side. 

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.

"the music fucked up th whole thing. you should have put a different song."
"Agree this song dicked it all up.... This song would be better suited for a video of emo kids attempting suicide..."

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.

"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.