The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq

By Daniel Binns

Considering selected films representing three periods in history – World Wars I and II and their interim, the Vietnam War, and the major conflicts in the Middle East – The Hollywood War Film reflects on Hollywood’s representations of war and conflict, in order to map some cinematic discourses therein. This results in an understanding of the Hollywood genre not just as a categorising tool, but rather as a dynamic, inscriptive, iterative cultural phenomenon. Broadly, the thesis of the book is twofold: Firstly, that there are commonalities in Hollywood films representing distinct conflicts and eras, and that recent war films more closely echo early war films in terms of their nationalistic and idealistic perspectives. Secondly, the work proposes a reconfiguring of genre as less concrete and classificatory, and more dynamic and iterative. In doing so, The Hollywood War Film analyses some of the most important war films from the past century, including All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and The Hurt Locker (2009).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783207565

Daniel Binns

Daniel Binns is a screenwriter and producer who moonlights as a media lecturer at RMIT University. He has written, directed and produced drama, lifestyle and documentary media, including productions for National Geographic and Fox Sports. Dan researches media texts, tools and technologies, and he is the author of The Hollywood War Film (Intellect, 2017) and Material Media-Making in the Digital Age (Intellect, 2021). Contact: School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, VIC 3001, Australia.

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First published in the UK in 2017 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2017 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

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Contents

Acknowledgements and Dedication

Introduction: War and Cinema

Chapter 1: For Glory: World Wars I and II

Chapter 2: Fear and Frustration: Korea and Vietnam

Chapter 3: Live from the Front Line: Conflict in the Middle East

Chapter 4: Extended Discourse: Cross-Platform War

Conclusion: Cycles of Violence, Repeat Performances

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements and Dedication

To the various people with whom I had personal correspondence or conversation over the course of this research, thank you for your time and expertise. These fine souls include, but are not limited to, Bill Nichols, Bruce Isaacs, Richard Smith, David Burchell, David Axe, Brendan Keogh, and the late Hunter Cordaiy.

To Paul Ryder and Peter Dallow: your commitment, guidance, and good humour have been invaluable. It is needless to say that this monograph would not exist without you both. What a ride.

Bottomless thanks to my family, and to Jess, for your love and patience.

* * * * *

This is dedicated to all the teachers and soldiers I have been blessed to know, in particular – but by no means limited to – Ivan Binns, Lyn Wright, Gregory Moffitt, Bashar Atiyat, and Colin Moon.

Introduction

War and Cinema

On war

The world is comprised of innumerable systems. There are the ecological: the currents of the oceans, the rising of water into the clouds and its return as rain, ancient geological shifts and transformations. There are the biological: the constant reconstruction of cells, photosynthesis, digestion, respiration. Beyond the natural world, there are those processes, too, that humanity has established: making use of the resources of the land and sea, construction, manufacturing, and the incessant whirring and clanking of industry. One human process, though, is as old and as unstoppable as all of the aforementioned: war.

For thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, humankind has been engaged in combat. Stanley Kubrick depicts the turning point in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A distant primate ancestor grasps a long bone, lifting it and letting it fall. The ancestor realises the destructive power of the weapon, and triumphantly raises it above his head, bringing it down with force to crush the skull of a long-dead animal. Returning to its clan, the ancestor is then able to defend its companions and its territory. Kubrick implies that this one catalyst – the development of the ability to kill – set history into motion, allowing us to invent more complex devices and activate more elaborate processes. It is certainly true that no other human process spurs innovation as effectively as warfare.

War is ingrained in human experience, so it is unsurprising that humanity has sought to represent the machinations and ramifications of conflict via artistic means. Visual art, sculpture, music, and the written word have all been used to attempt to capture the emotion and scale of conflicts local, international, and globital. Few art forms, though, continue to be utilised more often to depict warfare than cinema. This may be for any number of reasons, but I argue that, at least in part, the development of the war film genre in part echoes the development of cinematic technologies. Paul Virilio interrogates the connections between advancements in cinema and weaponry in War and Cinema (1984), and his findings are utilised throughout this book. As frame rates became shorter, faster, so too did the flow of bullets through machine gun feed blocks. As conflicts became less two-dimensional, so developed was the lens’s capacity to capture deeper space. Virilio advances the concept of a dynamic and changing cinematographic grammar, which has evolved to this day. Where once theorists such as Bordwell, Bazin, and Deleuze could content themselves with shot, sequence, and scene, there are now the new techniques of the re-mediated gaze, the filmed screen (a targeting computer or battlefield map, for instance), and the new point-of-view shot, from the perspective of a bullet, bomb, or drone, rather than of a human being. This new grammatology of cinema – this re-modelling of modalities – allows film-makers a broader scope of techniques to convey meaning. It also allows for a deeper ideological understanding, and semiotic comprehension, of more contemporary conflicts in far-flung corners of the world.

The arguments of this work are twofold. Firstly, I argue that recent Hollywood war films have revived a view of warfare as, if not glorious, then at least essential. Their characterisations shift away from the interests of the individual, using groups of characters as vehicles for ideological discussions of the necessity of combat. The second argument concerns genre. I argue that in being constantly re-worked and revisited, Hollywood’s repertoire of war cinema is a dynamic and evolving corpus of filmic expression. In this instance, rather than being a mere categorising tool, the genre is iterative: with each new work, the domain shifts and evolves. Before charging headlong into the breach, however, the parameters of battle must be defined.

Representation and cinema

Various forms of art necessitate differing approaches: a fresco requires the viewer to move along beside or underneath it, a painting invites the spectator closer, to observe the texture of the brushstrokes or the mixture of colours. Cinema, however – the image screened – removes all movement, instead providing all the moving images itself. The spectator is frozen, held in stasis. ‘[T]he imprisonment of the spectator’, writes Manovich (2001), ‘is the price for the new mobility of the image’ (p. 112). Cinema has one characteristic that other art forms do not: duration. Film is a temporal medium, both in how it is produced and how it is received. Our engagement with cinema is not dependent on how long we wish to stay; a film grabs and holds our attention for however long it wants us to watch. The temporal nature of cinema is not restricted to spectatorship, however. The medium itself is constructed of snapshots of time: moments frozen and, when run past a projector at a rate of 24 per second, presenting the illusion of movement. Cinema is the grand illusion of the twentieth century, and its fleeting images have caused some of the greatest thinkers to give pause.

In the dying years of the nineteenth century, two brothers from Lyon, France, developed a machine that could capture light and movement. It was a step forward from photographic processing, which their family had been involved with for some years. Auguste and Louis Lumière made short documentary films: the workers leaving the family’s factory in Lyon, a train arriving at a station, horse riders performing tricks. The effect was startling: the illusion of movement, composed from still images. The next great film-maker was also French, but he was less concerned with capturing reality. The films of Georges Méliès were flights of fantasy, his most famous perhaps being Une voyage dans la lune / A Trip to the Moon (1902). The raw capture of everyday life by the Lumières gave way to the trick photography and visual effects of Méliès. These tricks, combined with a cinematic grammar developed from theatre, formed the visual syntax of early cinema. These films were always designed to be entertainments; to be screened for the largest possible audience. Further, frequently the actors look directly at the camera, and therefore the audience. Gunning (1986) writes that ‘this is a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator’ (p. 64). While cinema has moved well beyond these early endeavours, there is still a great tension at its heart: to capture the real, or to depict the fantastic? The former will often result in grounded, realistic stories, while the latter will draw in greater crowds, serving as an effective vehicle for escapism. Hollywood war films tend to bridge this gap, falling somewhere between the realistic and the spectacular.

Given its early history, cinema’s quest for legitimacy as an art form was fraught. Earlier I used the word ‘fleeting’ to describe its images, and it is just this brevity, the necessary incompleteness of the medium, that has troubled theorists of art history and cinema itself. Gilles Deleuze opens his Cinema 1 (2005) by outlining the problems with the moving image. At the heart of the mechanical process and the illusion itself, there is no way to actually reconstitute movement. ‘[Y]ou can bring two instants or two positions together to infinity’, he writes, ‘but movement will always occur in the interval between the two, in other words behind your back’ (p. 1). If cinema is a temporal medium, then its central premise must be time. But, according to Deleuze, the time of cinema is itself abstract, not ‘concrete’. Deleuze settles on cinema being representative of time, and suggests that it ‘expresses the duration or the whole’ (p. 11). But his concerns have lingered, and to this day there is no definitive answer to what cinema is.

A medium so riddled with material and philosophical insecurity should not lend itself to strident artistic expression. And yet, some of the most renowned cultural artefacts of the last 150 years have been films. Cinema is a mode of storytelling, of course, and has been used throughout its history to explore themes of love and loss, friendship, courage, and personal or familial struggles. It has also been used to depict historical stories. ‘Surely film’, writes Chopra-Gant (2008), ‘with its exceptional capacity for verisimilitude, can show as history as it was, while the dry prose of an academic text can only tell us about it in a way that makes it seem more distant, less alive’ (p. 51). Whether mobilised to tell entirely fictional stories or those based in reality, cinema is a representative medium. Operating at its highest capacity, film can only ever present a version of what a script or history book suggests should occur. The protracted timelines of film production, too, means that the screened version may be completely different from what the writer, director, or producers had in mind. Thus, any claim cinema might make to authenticity is inherently problematic. The responsibility of representation – particularly with regard to any historical narrative – falls across all areas of production, from the lighting crew to the costumiers to the production designers. This is after the screenwriter has gone back over his dialogue to ensure it is era-appropriate, if necessary, and the director has researched the behaviour and mannerisms of characters that existed in the real world. Beyond the personal, too, there are considerations of the wider systems of society and history: how do film-makers represent gender, sexuality, race, class, as well as contemporary social responses to these ‘categories’? Hollywood cinema, by its nature, employs enormous groups of people in telling its stories. Often there is no single writer behind a given script; instead, teams of writers contribute story ideas, tease out tensions, fill plotholes. While the merits of screenplay-by-committee will not be discussed here, the collaborative character of Hollywood film production means that war films are far from immune to these concerns of representation.

Partially addressing Deleuze’s concerns about the immateriality of cinematic movement, Andre Bazin returns the conversation to a consideration of cinema’s origins – namely, the photograph.

The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber […] Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.

(Bazin, 1967, p. 52)

No other genre depicts the passing of time – the turning points of civilisation – more frequently than the war film genre. War films are themselves ‘change mummified’. In capturing these monumental moments in history, war cinema provides a visual representation of that same history. Further, I argue that the similarities between camera technology and the weapons of war are more than just coincidental, particularly with regard to the war film. As can be seen in the forthcoming chapters, the machinery by which humans surveil and destroy each other is encoded into the visual syntax of contemporary cinema itself.

It should be noted here, too, that this research focuses specifically on examples drawn from Hollywood’s war film output. Hollywood itself has a history almost as long as cinema itself, and its mode of cinematic expression has influenced film industries the world over. Bordwell charts the history of Hollywood from 1960 as a flourishing of narrative and formal innovation followed by the destruction of classical storytelling by the megabudget blockbuster. However, the emergence of the high-concept cinema of the 1980s reopened the potential for more intellectual filmic expression (Bordwell, 2006, pp. 4–6). It is in gauging a continuing fascination with classical form, though, that Bordwell suggests Hollywood’s impact might best be quantified.

The classical tradition has become a default framework for international cinematic expression, a point of departure for nearly every filmmaker. The premises of classical storytelling have played a role similar to that played by the principles of perspective in visual art.

(ibid., p. 12)

Hollywood’s mode of storytelling has become almost exclusively reliant on the evocation of themes, characters, even entire plots ‘by shorthand references to genres and auteurs’ (ibid., p. 24). As the language of cinema was codified across the art form’s development, the types of stories being told naturally settled into a few key categories, such as romance or drama, comedy, crime and, of course, war. But this early categorising was almost exclusively industrial (ibid.). Once scholars applied genre theory – drawn from literary analysis and linguistics – to cinematic styles, the real problems of film genre began to emerge.

Genre

While a great many film scholars might mark down undergraduates for making unfounded generalisations, those same scholars seem to ignore their own tendency to gather huge quantities of films under labels that might not fit them particularly well. ‘When one begins to try to put together criteria for what constitutes the codes, conventions, pleasures, and structures of a particular genre’, writes Redmond, ‘one immediately finds a great degree of slippage and leakage in terms of consistency in mise-en-scène, what are supposedly established narrative patterns, iconography, characterization, and setting’ (Redmond, 2011).

The study of genre is in part a desire to organise, to categorise. Frow (2006) writes that genre ‘is a set of conventional and highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning’ (p. 10), and this is an apt starting point to unpack what genre means in this book. For in addition to the almost interventionist act of capturing the ‘real’, cinema actively and continuously presents and re-presents that reality in order to create meaning.

Film genre is a mode of analysing and understanding popular cinema. If one particular story proves successful, it is the tendency of Hollywood to reproduce that story, with slight variation, over and over again. Writes Grant (2007): ‘Stated simply, genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations’ (p. xv). In a broader sense, genre is also about trying to build on the work of Metz, Deleuze, and Bordwell, with the goal of extending the language of cinematic expression and defining a taxonomy of film. Frow acknowledges the problems of taxonomy, but lays down an ultimatum in terms of approaching the study of genre.

Genre classifications are real. They have an organising force in everyday life. They are embedded in material infrastructures and in the recurrent practices of classifying and differentiating kinds of symbolic action. And they bind abstruse and delicate negotiations of meaning to the social situations in which they occur.

(Frow, p. 13)

That Frow approaches genre from the angle of meaning is a point of difference. Rather than picking arbitrary characteristics or conventions, it is possible to examine a text based on two key points: what is it trying to say, and where is it situated? From that perspective, genre is less about trying to categorise, and much more about contextualising a given film within concentric bodies of work. Rick Altman (1999) identifies a tension between the semantic and syntactic in theories of film genre. The semantic strand observes and analyses the textual elements specific to a genre; the syntactic casts a wider view, observing the film in its context and environment (Altman, p. 219). To demonstrate the crossover between these two approaches, Altman gives the example of the western. There are a number of semantic elements by which we might identify the western genre: the character archetypes of the cowboy, the villain, the damsel, the native; dramatic locales of the frontier, the plain, the range; story tropes of moral ambiguity and connection between man and the land. For film historians, though, the contexts and structures within which each genre emerges are just as important. Altman mentions syntactic approaches that consider the western as an allegory about nature and man, or about the duality of man (ibid., p. 220). The tension between these two approaches, for Altman, is that choosing one generally excises the considerations of the other: ‘[C]hoose the semantic view and you give up explanatory power; choose the syntactic approach and you do without broad applicability’ (ibid.). Altman suggests employing what he calls a ‘semantic/syntactic approach to genre study’ (ibid., p. 221). By combining the two approaches, one can observe the emergence of genre as the semantic delineation of various social structures and processes.

Altman also incorporates industrial concerns into his study of genre, suggesting that the terminology used by studios and distributors has been key in determining the ways in which scholars (and audiences) talk about genre: ‘film genres are by definition not just scientifically derived or theoretically constructed categories, but are always industrially certified and publicly shared’ (p. 16). The concern for Altman is that an industrially certified term may be of limited use beyond the definition of a terminology for any particular genre. Steve Neale (2003) steps in here, suggesting that Altman’s concern is unfounded. Neale does not believe that ‘the aim of generic analysis is the redefinition of a corpus of films’ (p. 166). Such an aim, he says, is reductive and ‘in danger of curtailing the very cultural and historical analysis upon which Altman rightly insists as an additional theoretical aim’ (ibid.). Neale emphasises that historicising the definitions of a given genre is crucial, but provides rebukes to two existing historical approaches: Jauss’s ‘evolutionary schema’ and Schatz’s theory of the progression of a genre ‘toward self-conscious formalism’ (p. 173). The first, Neale suggests, is ‘highly mechanistic; and it treats genres in isolation from any generic regime’ (ibid.). Neale then co-opts Williams who suggests that Schatz believes it is only genres themselves that evolve, rather than ‘the filmmaking system or the social context […] In my opinion, this is clearly wrong’ (Williams, as cited in Neale). The third and final approach Neale invokes is that of Russian formalism, where a new generic example will emerge as a succession of a previous text, ‘a struggle and break with […] something older’ (Jauss, as cited in Neale). According to the Russian formalists, literary genres can be conceived in terms of a flux of dominance and subordination, and a ‘sequence of rivalries’ for the former (ibid.). Neale appreciates that the formalist approach considers a genre’s historicity and the notion of genre as a process; further, he uses the model to open genre to the possibility of much wider intertextual connections:

[…] in its insistence on the importance of an interplay between canonized and noncanonized forms of representation and between canonized and noncanonized genres, it takes account both of the transience of generic hierarchies as well as the role of hybridization in the formation and dissolution of individual genres.

(p. 175)

This concept is crucial for the research herewith. Not only does Russian formalism permit the analysis of a genre within social and historical contexts, it makes concrete the connections between disparate forms of representation. This research thus expands the discussion of the war film genre to graphic novels and video games (see Chapter 4). Beyond this, Victor Shklovsky, a noted Russian formalist critic, discusses a literary technique that this research suggests has been translated to cinema, and is now crucial in representing war on film (see Defamiliarisation later in this Introduction).

Given that theoretical approaches to film genre are so problematic, the war film is as problematic a term as any other genre label. On the one hand there is no single defined catalogue of war film conventions. The sheer volume of films about war, however, means that a generally accepted checklist has emerged. This emergence is less about film scholarship, and much more about discourse. This book reads genre – film genre in particular – in terms of the approaches of