Be the best: Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now
"All war films tell two stories, the story of a war and the story of the men fighting it," writes James Meek in his Guardian Review feature on the modern war movie. With a curious serendipity, the same day's paper also carries news that Japan appears to be heading into hot water with a forthcoming blockbuster about the 1945 sinking of the battleship Yamato.
The film's makers stand accused of painting an overly sympathetic portrait of the boat's crew and, by implication, Japan's role in the war itself. This strikes me as a fine illustration of the way in which Meek's "two stories" can become dangerously entwined.
We saw a similar hoo-hah earlier this year with the release of Downfall, Olivier Hirschbiegel's acclaimed account of Hitler's last days. Here again, there were many who felt that the picture's view of a scared and desperate Nazi high command amounted to a veiled apology for the Third Reich. I could never quite get on with this argument. It seems to suggest that history's villains should either be portrayed as out-and-out monsters or else not at all, whereas the truth is lot trickier than that.
Let's take a contemporary example. I personally consider the current US president to be the pampered, blinkered front-man for what is arguably the most purely evil administrations in American history. And yet, had I met Bush for a beer during his wild, drinking days, I worry that I might have found him an affable, entertaining, stand-up sort of guy. In reality, the worst acts of wickedness are committed by everyday human beings with the same hopes, fears and failings as the rest of us. To claim otherwise is just plain ignorant.
But there is another issue that Meek's article touches on: the possibility that there is no such thing as an anti-war movie. Whatever message they were intended to give, films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket have effectively become recruitment adverts for today's armed forces. Similarly, the upcoming Yamato film might have been conceived as the tragic tale of doomed teenage sailors who are sold down the river by their superiors. Most likely, it will be embraced as a cracking disaster romp in the mould of Titanic or The Poseidon Adventure.
Perhaps the problem is down to the medium itself - or at least with our relationship with it. Cinema has glamour in its DNA. It fetishises everything that it turns its lens on, be it Marilyn Monroe or the plumes of oil smoke rising over a war-ravaged Iraqi desert. It forces us to empathise, to identify, to desire. We are gangsters when we watch GoodFellas, drunks when we visit Sideways and maybe even Nazis when we see Downfall. And there is, I suspect, no way around this. The lights go down, the curtains go up and we willingly allow ourselves to be seduced and suckered in.
