“It is well that war is so terrible — otherwise we would grow too fond of it,” Robert E. Lee once said.
And it is important to have that balance between viewing war as something horrible and insane and viewing war as cartoonish, Media and Movie Critic James Bowman said at the Center for Constructive Alternatives on Wednesday night.
Bowman said the films of World War II portrayed war in the most constructive way.
He pointed to different periods in history after WWII that changed the way war is portrayed in movies. For instance, during and after the Korean and Vietnam Wars, movies became anti-war and began to portray war as insanity.
In order to portray this fact, Bowman contrasted the way that soldiers responded to their superior officers in the World War II film “They Were Expendable” versus the Korean War film “Pork Chop Hill.”
“As we saw in ‘They Were Expendable,’ the men were given orders that they didn’t like and made no sense to them, but not only did they carry them out without question, but they trusted their superiors to know better than they did,” he said.
That trust was replaced with resentment in “Pork Chop Hill,” however.
Bowman also talked about the War on Terror and the recent film “Zero Dark Thirty.”
“The torture scenes [in “Zero Dark Thirty”] are all that anyone seemed to notice about the movie and are almost certainly the reason the film was all but shut out of the Oscars,” Bowman said. “Our culture is becoming more and more intolerant to those who might have anything good to say about the use of organized violence.”
War has been given a bad name by the politically correct, Bowman said. But we should return to the World War II understanding of it.
“‘Even at this terrible cost, it was something worth doing’ —that’s the grown up way to look at war,” he said. “It’s not simple. It’s complicated.”