After reading David Thomson’s The Fatal Alliance, I will never be able to watch a war movie as I once did, moved to respond by emotion, undiscerning in the flood, a willing participant in the common images and thematic patterns of most war movies.
It is not that I have watched these movies with all the critical awareness of a potato. I catch the sentimentality of Spielberg and the bombast of Gibson. I know when scenes eliminate nuance, when movies pander to racism or national chauvinism or are so focused on the thrill of killing alone that they become both silly and repulsive.
However, these twin qualities of movies are also immensely powerful – motion and searching:
“It is the motion in cinema that prompts emotion (27).” “ …searching is something the camera and its enveloping technology do so well (314).”
Well-made narratives sweep us along moment to moment. We too want to be in on the hunt for redemption, for survival. Immersed within such movies, we may be led to believe that we too could be heroic. We too could be resourceful. We too could find the way to stay alive and remain honorable. Good scripts and convincing acting anchor us within characters we admire. Thomson understands that “the people we like on the screen tell us so much about ourselves (274).”
I have seen so many war movies, many multiple times, Thomson too, and he understands the effect this has had on how we view each one individually. Thomson tries “to suggest how filmed combat is often a set routine, like solitaire, with red jacks going up on black queens,” but that in “a confusing rapture, films overlap, as if one screen held them all, so that we have digested the repeated shots and crosscuts – the heads tossed in pain, the bloom of fire from a gun, the slumped body – and have forgotten where they began (112).”
The vast majority of us have been nowhere near a war, and yet those who love war movies, like me, have internalized their structure so much so that even though real “soldiers say they hate war, … in the dark, we long to be with them (321).” War is a horror we long to be safely near and combat its nexus.
Thomson loves good combat sequences in war movies – the tank battle in Fury, the bridge defense at the end of Saving Private Ryan, almost all of Black Hawk Down – but he distrusts the idea of war films because of their inherent distancing of the viewer from the reality of battle and of war itself, and because they make us into voyeurs of the worst of human experience:
“Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan is desperate. The portrayal of human damage had not been attempted before with the same dramatic intensity. This is a knockout sequence. But it touches madness, too, because we will not be harmed or put at risk. Do we become domestic connoisseurs of damage, like commanders in a dream? Nothing else about the war and movies is so important (219-220).”
“There is a tension in all war films between the vivid peril on-screen and our demure safety in the dark (223).”
Thomson is often an aphoristic writer. So many lines, far too many to include here, struck my mind with such force that I reread them, and then again and then just sat and thought about all the ideas that sparked off that one observation.
Here are 3 that struck me with particular force:
The Great War might have been so awful in its slaughter and in its “mud and … craters and futility” that some “raw German soldiers conceived the notion of becoming superman and taking hold of human society by brute force (75-76).”
“Young men said they wanted combat, until they got it. Bravado is only a cut ahead of devastation (78).”
“… there is no end to how we anticipate and delight in screen killings (234).”
The last one gets to me, especially in his use of “delight.” For example, watch Sisu and tell me you too do not “delight” in the way he kills Nazis. Watch Apocalypto and tell me you too do not delight in how Jaguar Paw dispatches those who annihilated his tribe. Watch Saving Private Ryan and tell me you too do not delight in the prowess and courage of Daniel Jackson, the God-fearing sniper?
Movies are seductive by nature, and war movies are perhaps best at luring us to want what most portray – the community of the small unit, the value of courage and sacrifice, the excitement of battle – that sense of being completely alive. Thomson understands all this. He wants what we want. He too returns to Black Hawn Down again and again and again. He also reminds us of the cost in our continuing distancing from what is real – Afghanis desperate to leave, falling from the sides and wheels of planes as we left Afghanistan in August of 2021, mistaken drone strikes on marriage celebrations, children by the thousands blown to bits in Gaza, mass graves wherever the Russians have been in Ukraine.
Human beings are so susceptible to manipulation, especially when images move, and music rises and explosions accelerate and faces enormous in size and filled with expressions of determination and valor fill the screen. That’s when we need to pull back and say to ourselves, “What is going on here?”
We should not forget, in fact, it should be at the forefront of our calculations, that we are always safe. As Thomson writes of a character from a sequence in 1917, the viewer, like the character, is placed in a “protective cone” that lets us survive a catastrophe, that lets us watch mass annihilation in comfort and take pleasure in it.
