"The Irony of Heroic Masculinity: An Exploration of War and Cinema"
Submitted on May 15, 2013, to Amy Laura Hall in partial fulfillment of the Gender, Theology, and Ministry Certificate. It was pa
On November 17, 2004 I walked into the chow hall of Forward Operating Base McHenry in Northern Iraq, near the city of Hawijah. In the wee ours of that morning, I had witnessed my first American casualty – a long, slow death of a young single father with two daughters back at home. Trapped under the weight of an overturned Humvee, his life slipped slowly away from him and his daughters. By 0500, he would be pronounced dead. After mostly unrecognizable food was haphazardly slopped onto my tray, I turned to find a table. Instead, my eyes settled on the single television screen nestled in the corner of the large tent in which we ate. There on the screen I saw costumed service members reenact for Hollywood the namesake scene of Pearl Harbor (Buena Vista, 2001), in which Japanese Kamikaze pilots strafed the same airfield from which I departed for Kuwait just 11 months earlier. Without skipping a beat, I made a bee-line for the door and dropped my tray in the trash on the way out.
The maelstrom of emotion was difficult to decipher at the time, but it was composed largely of rage and disgust. In combat, the line between reality and falsehood comes crashing down. What I saw on the TV screen contrasted sharply with what I had witnessed just hours prior. It came much later as no surprise that the infamous refrain about “phonies” from Catcher in the Rye was written by a WWII veteran who was among the first Americans to witness the German concentration camps and who would tell his daughter that he never could get the smell of death from his nostrils. Those who see war first hand have a keen sense of its gravity and rarely if ever allow themselves to be involved in its glorification. Jimmy Stewart, a bomber in the same war, enlisted despite already having a promising acting career (including an Oscar for Best Actor), would return from Europe and say in a LIFE Magazine interview that he would no longer star in war movies. My guttural reaction against Hollywood’s version of the day that lives in infamy, it turns out, was not uncommon amongst others like me who had witnessed socially sanctioned violence firsthand.
Once my emotions settled and I was able to think more critically about what I witnessed in the field as well as in the chow hall, I began to ask questions. I wanted to know who these men were; those who appeared in these movies and the people who felt their stories could or should be relegated to the silver screen. One of the thoughts I remember extracting from those emotions that morning in 2004 was the realization that, as a multi-million dollar Hollywood production, Pearl Harbor made someone (and maybe several people) one hell of a lot of money. That money felt like a manifestation of the injustice that robbed the narrative from those who lived to tell it, since (as I knew already) war is the epitome of obscenity. For it to be portrayed in film accurately would earn it much worse than an R rating. The process involved in taking the stories from battlefield to movie theater was in some way cosmetic, a method that necessarily stripped war of its visceral truthfulness, which also serves as its inherent means of self-restraint. Put another way, when you pay $10 to watch war, you can be sure you are being swindled.
In the following pages, I try to simply survey what in retrospect seems predominantly anecdotal evidence. Much of what I have explored in this project has been simply pulling seemingly disparate data together. Where and when I interpret this data, it is done through the particular lens of a combat veteran, drawing upon firsthand accounts as well as the reflections of countless veterans with whom I remain in contact. In the first part of this paper, I will focus on three veterans and the movies that depict their story, reflecting on the ironic gaps that exist between film and reality. Our stories as veterans often rebuff the too-easy assumptions of the dominant American narrative that glorifies the military and its violence. Ironically, this narrative seems to increase as the percentage of the American public who themselves served rapidly decreases. In the second part, I will turn to one person in particular who interprets and shares the stories of these martial members. Randall Wallace, it turns out, was a major force behind Pearl Harbor, the movie that triggered my aversion to cinematic re-appropriations of war. He is also behind similarly themed movies such as We Were Soldiers, Braveheart, and The Man in the Iron Mask. His particular brand of filmmaking and its dependence upon a certain kind of gendered Christianity, will be explored in the second part of this paper, focusing especially on his comments at a lecture he gave at Duke on February 6, 2012. That Wallace does not himself have military experience reflects one such ironic gap, the growing gap between those who serve and those who do not, between those who suffer the consequences of our military violence and those who celebrate it or profit therefrom. As an interpreter of these martially inclined stories, it begs the question of his credentials, his authority to reflect upon them reliably. But before we get to Wallace’s story telling, let’s focus on the subjects of the kinds of stories in question.
Part I – War and Film
Ancient Western literature often followed the journey of a single champion; Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example, followed Achilles and Odysseus, respectively. The two heroes survive as archetypes in Jonathan Shay’s Vietnam reflections, which have a wide audience in modern Veterans Affairs clinics across the United States. The popularity of Shay’s work means that his insight shapes innumerable clinicians working directly with the millions of veterans that American wars have produced. These archetypes get played out in reality for most modern wars, and we have our own modern heroes. In the first part of this paper, I explore the lives of three men who each provided, whether they desired to or not, a kind of exemplary model for heroic masculinity for their individual war. For the two world wars, each produced a man considered to be “the most decorated;” Alvin York in the first and Audie Murphy in the second. Vietnam’s unique location in the American martial corpus as a failed war, if not an outright defeat, means the assignment of such a title is muddled with conflicting moral and social sentiments, and for the sake of brevity, I do not treat that conflict here. However, the most recent “Global” war on terror had something like a champion, albeit a tragic one, and that man is Pat Tillman.
My reason for focusing on these three individuals, York, Murphy, and Tillman, depends upon my assumption that their lives provided a basis upon which the wars were able to make sense. York represented the reluctant entry into WWI, despite moral and religious misgivings, who went on to overcome a more numerous enemy. Murphy shared the frontier origins of York, and similarly was the underdog against an enemy with a home court advantage. Neither men were highly educated, and their simplicity allowed for a moral distance from the otherwise incredibly complicated and gruesome reality of combat. Such simplicity provided those in power a narrative that did not seek nuanced and justifiable reasons for entering into wars that initially did not involve the United States. Moving well into the information age, Tillman, on the other hand, was highly educated, with a degree from a reputable university. He shared with York a reluctance that too easily veiled the otherwise dubious justifications for his war, having given up a lucrative sports contract in response to his sense that the events of 9/11/2001 demanded his personal sacrifice. Tillman reflects the necessity of an otherwise rarely cultivated sense of genuine social responsibility necessary by the 1974 abolition of the mandatory draft. Without the benefit of conscription, the powers that be needed individuals to self-elect into military service, such that the reluctance of York was made counter intuitive to the war imaginary that increasingly took hold in post-WWII America.
In this paper, I realize that I assume the very exceptionalism that I challenge. That York, Murphy, and Tillman are outstanding individuals should not be doubted. However, my reservations lie in how their lives were used by mass media, movies in this case, to create fabrications and embellishments which served (at times explicitly) to uncritically lead the American people to war, despite the men’s (at times explicit) wishes to the contrary. My concern is that the martial community to which I and these men belong has and continues to be frequently exploited for the political and material gain of those who do not share in the unique burdens and brotherhood of this military family. The language, imagery, and symbolism of this martial community should have guaranteed control over their own stories and not have them retold in ways that contravene their very lives. Put another way, soldiers’ lives should not be used, so nearly uniformly as they often are, to be cries for more war. With few exceptions, soldiers hate war, for they alone know it for “its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” In the following sections, I explore that terrible wisdom that is tossed like bathwater from the collective consciousness of America when it is glossed over or ignored in mass media.
WWI – Alvin York
Sergeant Alvin York knew a day before world wars. Born in a rural area of Tennessee, he grew up on a farm and developed a mean streak of drinking and brawling before converting to religion. The particular religion he adopted was prevalent in the area in which he grew up. The brothers Campbell (Alexander and Thomas) were reformers within Methodism, who (among other things) felt that the Methodist church in the south supported war and slavery all to readily. The Campbellites were stringently pacifist and somewhat peculiar for the American South of their day. Alvin adopted this Christian denomination because it was the one to which his beloved mother and siblings already adhered. Alvin was not known for his pacifism, but his heroism. The 1941 movie that partly bears his name (Sergeant York, Warner Brothers - 1941) will probably be how he is remembered, which is unfortunate, for it departs often from his lived reality.
Alvin is known especially as the most decorated WWI veteran, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for actions on a small field in France toward the end of the war. He also won numerous awards from other countries, though the accuracy of the “most decorated” claim might be disputed. Nonetheless, his heroic tale provided the kind of narrative elements that make for wonderful propaganda, and when he came home from Europe, he was approached vigorously to sell the rights to his story. He refused, opting instead to focus his time and fame on improving public education in his rural community in Pall Mall, TN. For 20 years, the story lay in Alvin’s hands, until the outbreak of another war proved incentive enough for the Warner Brothers film company to once again insist he sell his story. And that is when the narrative begins to look a lot like Swiss cheese.
Executives at Warner Brothers wanted to make a case for support for the Allies in Europe, despite the majority in America in 1940 being in favor of non-intervention. A documentarian is quoted in the film saying that they didn’t just want the film to depict waving flags, but have the audience do so as well. The release date was set with this pre-determined intent, July 2nd, 1941, to maximize patriotic fervor that would both fill seats and recruitment offices. Viewers would even leave the movie theater and head straight for the nearest recruiting office. Indeed, in one of the earliest lines of the movie, a marketer visits the small general store near York’s home, which was run by the local pastor, saying, “In modern merchandising, the storekeeper must endeavor to create a demand!” The storekeeping filmmakers do in fact so endeavor to create a demand to go to war, glossing over many facts in favor of creating a new narrative that will show not Alvin’s reluctant service and restraint, but the winning over of pacifism in favor of machismo. Even the movie posters proclaim boldly; “It’s still a guy with guts and a gun that wins the war!” Which is to say that it is not the guy with pacifist convictions and healthy distaste for war that wins.
Besides, Alvin could stomach violence, as his many barroom brawls would attest. Neither did he have a distaste for guns, as he was a crack shot and hunted wild turkey for food. In fact, when he received his draft card (which still resides in the national archives), he responded to the question “Do you claim exemption from military service, and, if so, state the reason” by scribbling in response “Yes. Don’t want to fight.” He was quoted later as having said emphatically, “I didn’t want to go and kill. I believed in my Bible.” His application for conscientious objector status was in fact covered in the film, but seemingly more as a foil to prove the thesis that “it's still a guy with guts and a gun that wins the war.” That York was a pacifist seemed to build common ground with an isolationist American public, such that York (almost literally) was the straw man for Warner’s intention of bringing America into WWII. In fact, Congress felt similarly, pulling the movie from theaters just a few months into its release for violating the Neutrality Acts of the 1930’s. Nonetheless, Sergeant York is, to this day, the highest grossing film of all time after adjustment for inflation. Some of the anecdotal facts about the film are important to consider.
For one, a number of literary tropes are espoused by the movie, including War for Peace, Man and Work, and Frontier Nostalgia. War for Peace says that war is fought so that peace may prevail, that fighting is really so that the fighting can end. The last opening credit to roll cites York implicitly as one of the major people who agreed to have been portrayed (after two decades of cajoling); “To their faith and ours, that a day will come when man will live in peace and earth, this movie is dedicated.” Wars, in this trope are really for peace. But this is ironic, since the war that York fought in was popularly conceived as “the war to end all wars.” His name and likeness was literally used in order to prove that claim false, against his own pacifist inclinations. Man and Work plays out repeatedly as well, especially in an increasingly industrialized society in which the movie primarily aired - in urban centers. The movement from rural agrarian settings to massive cities was fresh in the American conscience, precipitated as it was by the First World War and its need for industrialized labor to produce things like tanks, machine guns, etc. The American man was alienated from his work, reduced to one specific task along an assembly line, and longed for a revival of the past where things were simpler and purer, like a country bumpkin and his story, which Alvin unwittingly provided. Finally, the Frontier Nostalgia is similar, in its use of rural imagery, especially, in this case, Daniel Boone. A reference to him arises early, for it was in the same area that both Alvin and Daniel were raised up and acquired the fame they did; Daniel for killing a bear with his bare hands, and Alvin for killing 28 men with his hunting rifle off in the battlefields of France.
But it was that number that haunted Alvin the rest of his life, a number and its consequences that does not make much of an appearance in the film. He would never forgot the fact he killed all those men. He wondered aloud upon his deathbed to his son George Edward whether he would be forgiven. Even during his life, he didn’t want to be remembered if it was only for having done so terrible a deed. The movie itself remembers it poorly. In his diaries, Alvin recalls leveraging his sharp shooting skills only after repeatedly telling each man in his sights to surrender. Before each shot, he would yell loudly that they put up their hands and come quietly. It was only after he had lost 28 of his men that the German officer in charge surrendered his entire company. Gary Cooper, who was reluctant to portray York for his lack of war experience, never once in the movie makes the same plea. In fact, in early contract negotiations, York refused to allow any war scenes into the movie, concerned as he was that the necessary but mournful violence he committed might gain him improper prominence. In the end, as is the case with many compromises, he lost out. Nearly half the movie depicts Cooper in York’s military uniform, either home in the states arguing about pacifism with his commanding officer or overseas, treating Germans like turkeys instead of human beings. Whether caused more by his actual experiences or by knowing how his experiences were portrayed, York would wrestle with something akin to PTSD for much of his adult life, evidenced by his deathbed confession to his grown son.
WWII – Audie Murphy
Audie Murphy had a few things in common with Alvin York, the ‘most decorated soldier’ of the war preceding Murphy’s. Both men came from rural areas and struggled with poverty. Documents record that his family was frequently near starvation. Unlike York, Murphy was not a crackshot with a rifle, but what he missed in accuracy he made up for in bravery. The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, his mother died and he had to send his younger siblings off to Texas orphanages. Being only 17 himself, he had no obligation to the former life he had of helping to raise them, so he took the advice of an older farmer who fought in WWI and left to enter the military to help fight the next big war. Too young and scrawny, he is rejected by all except the Army, but even there, the paratroopers that once were home to York refused him entrance. Instead, he’d fight in a regular line unit and see firsthand how gruesome war could be. In his autobiography, he reflects on his service as a “brand,” like one he would have given a cow on his ranch in Texas. Two years after his 1971 death in a plane crash, his grim memory of reintegration into civilian life was inscribed on a memorial in his honor at the Army medical training center at Ft. Sam Houston, in Texas; “After the war, they took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately, and let ‘em sink or swim.”
The movie itself has poor character development and leaves a number of questions unanswered, like what part his father played in his early life. The elder Murphy never makes an appearance, and it is assumed he is a deadbeat after Murphy remarks to his mother Josie about the stupidity of waiting on money that never comes, presumably from his absentee father. Later, when one of Murphy’s friends dies in combat, I had trouble even remembering which friend it was from earlier in the film, even though it is this friend that sets off Murphy’s rampage that is part of his Medal of Honor citation. To its credit, the movie does try to build up the reality of war, which is by far a heavier emphasis than it was for Sergeant York, the earlier film depicting war about half the movie, with To Hell and Back getting there in less than 15 minutes. Two references to the title appear, first at about 24 minutes in: the first being “To hell and back, that’s where this outfit is going,” with the second comes at an hour and five minutes with, “To hell and back, that’s where we’re jumping off to.” I had wondered if ‘hell’ implied war and ‘back’ implied home to the states, but these two references trouble that impression.
I found elements of this movie to be surprisingly true to form, and indeed many active soldiers were used as extras and much of the filming took place at Fort Lewis, Washington, a major military installation in the Pacific Northwest. Audie Murphy played himself in the movie, though he had to be convinced to do so, at first suggesting Tony Curtis instead. That he played the lead role raises important questions about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and one of its primary symptoms, which is reliving traumatic events. Audie Murphy spoke up publicly about what was then referred to as “combat fatigue,” advocating on behalf of veterans returning home. Himself suffering from the disorder, he frequently battled nightmares, insomnia, cold sweat, etc. For him to star himself must have taken its toll, though his direct involvement as the star does seem to have influenced the outcome of the film, as it was not the propagandistic type that I expected, of which Sergeant York was representative.
A few lines stuck out as being pregnant with meaning that Murphy, being the author of the book upon which the screenplay was based, may have intended to be proverbial for war more generally. The first comes moments after the first time death is depicted in the movie. A fellow soldier remarks to his squad “That’s what it means to be a veteran; to be scared all the time.” Indeed, Murphy famously slept with a gun under his pillow the rest of his life upon coming home. His co-author, Dave McClure, remembered him as emotionally volatile and explosive. However, the book was published in 1949 and made a movie in 1955, so Murphy had not had the time to be a veteran for long. His words may have been not pregnant with intended meaning, but prophetic with unintended implications.
Another comes much later, during an air raid in Sicily during a short leave the men take (none of whom take cover in the course of the raid, which I found to be accurate of desensitivity to danger after prolonged combat). A woman remarks to Murphy “One cannot feel sorry for all who die. It’s too much.” Here again are words of warning to combat soldiers, just as the last remarks could have been similarly taken. We are also reminded a number of times in the movie that battle-hardened soldiers do not make new friends, for to do so is “too much” when they inevitably die. Better to accept as friends the ones who come into a unit with you, for you can’t choose them.
This and other earlier remarks suggest that this film is far closer to the reality of combat than was Sergeant York, though the tale of its coming to be is not without irony. Murphy in fact tried to produce a sequel, called The Way Back, about reintegrating to civilian life after WWII, but he failed to find the financing necessary to make a feature film. Like many things combat related, the American public has a limited attention span, and is reticent to hit too close to home, of being reminded that the war comes home with the soldiers we send to fight. Murphy continued to make movies and had a relatively successful career, despite frequent and perpetual struggles with PTSD. Though the film did an impressive job of describing the hell of war, it predictably failed at narrating the whole story, including the way home and the struggles soldiers face upon once familiar shores. In displaying Murphy’s virtue and ignoring his vices, it only gives one side of the story and leaves out a substantial and fundamental element of his post-war character. Soldiers are human, with capacity for good and evil, which Murphy’s life after war illustrates, having been indicted for assault with intent to commit murder and being known widely for carrying loaded firearms while on the job and maintaining a reputation for being emotionally volatile. That Hollywood failed to tell a more complete story is indicative of an unhealthy appetite for lopsided depictions of war and its effects.
GWOT – Pat Tillman
York and Murphy had in common that they were lauded post-war for being the “most decorated soldier” of the war in which they fought. York was older while Murphy was draft-defyingly quite young. There is some dispute about whether either or both of them were in fact awarded the most awards, which leads me to think about how such a claim is propagated (by a LIFE Magazine cover, for example) and the purpose it serves narratively. Warner Brothers approached a persistently reluctant York over 20 years after he returned home, as the next world war had already broken out across the pond, trying to make an appeal for a non-interventionist American populace to enter another European war. Murphy, on the other hand, gave an immediate and full-throated approval to having his likeness used in recruiting efforts after his tour, despite his public and painful struggle with what we would now call PTSD.
Pat Tillman was neither a poor country bumpkin nor a zealous patriot. He even violated the jock caricature he otherwise exuded as a star football player; he got his BA in just over three years and earned a 3.8 GPA. The religious trajectory begun with York and diluted with Murphy finds its next logical expression in Tillman’s atheism. Keenly aware of his potential to be caricatured and exploited as a recruiting tool as his predecessors were, Pat wrote into his last wishes to not be given military honors in the event of his death. As he posthumously predicted, his family was indeed pushed to accept a military funeral. Losing his earlier faith in the American war effort, in which he participated by deploying as part of the invasion force into Iraq, he had arranged to meet with prominent anti-war intellectual Noam Chomsky upon a return from what would have been his second deployment (to Afghanistan). While on a foot patrol with his Ranger company, he was killed by what was at first called intense enemy fire. Much to his certain chagrin, upon his death, the public affairs machine set to work upon his dead body, hailing him as an American Hero, an archetypal image that would reinforce the pre-determined narrative of the white straight Christian male cut down in his prime by the evil enemy against whom the country could unite. Conservative pundit Ann coulter cited Tillman as “virtuous, pure, and masculine, like only an American male can be,” refusing to believe his own mother’s account that he had anti-war (but not anti-military) views. The Tillman Story, an independent film by Amir Bar-Levi, documents the deliberate government cover up that followed his death.
This brings me to the final unique aspect of Tillman’s story over York and Murphy’s. During the GWOT, there was no draft. In WWI & II, the government had a smaller imperative to convince the public of the righteousness of the war. They could conscript as many as was needed to get the job done. York was an objector who acquiesced only after heated debates with his commander and 48 straight hours of prayer on a mountaintop. Murphy technically was not eligible due to his age, height, and weight. There is something oddly self-contradictory about focusing on these two young men to advertise the righteousness of their wars (or war in general) and implicitly justify the draft by valorizing champions of war who actually were not supposed to have been drafted in the first place.
But under the illusion of an All Volunteer Force, the imperative to convince a public about the need to wage war grows exponentially, for the threat of failing to entice/enlist enough ground forces becomes much more tangible and immediate. The government needed Pat far more then it needed York or Murphy. But Pat knew he didn’t need them. His fratricide was a felix culpa for the propagandistic instincts in the government, a tragic convenience that was squeezed for every ounce of rhetorical force the powers that be could get out of it. Furthermore, the “they” shifted as well over the course of the three wars I’ve chosen to cover. It was a private corporation, Warner Brothers Entertainment, who in 1941 packed and threw the propaganda snowball called Sergeant York, with Alvin in its core. By WWII, it was a mix of Hollywood and Washington, with To Hell and Back, each more or less tossing in their own interests and influence, evidenced by the use of military land and personnel as backdrops. Finally, the entertainment industry had next to no presence in the Tillman spin cycle; The Tillman Story emerged from independent sources. This transition is curious, since it would seem that commercial interests in war have in fact increased over that same span of time. But in these particular examples, the inverse is true. At least in cinema, Hollywood has stepped back and the Pentagon has stepped up. Implications thereof will be important to explore, though brevity prevents an extended discussion here.
In the end, Pat’s mother calls the spade for what it is, this martial/entertainment symbiosis. Harkening to the era of John Wayne, Mrs. Tillman calls out the practice of spoon-feeding men tales of masculine glory in order to make them self-elect to be cannon fodder;
To write these glorious tales is really a disservice to Pat and to all the other soldiers. You are diminishing their true heroism. It may not be pretty, it may not be like out of a John Wayne movie, but that’s not what war’s all about. It’s ugly, it’s bloody, it’s painful. Everyone should understand what’s going on, and we shouldn’t have smoke screens thrown in our face.”
In the Hollywood GWOT blockbuster that did make headlines and won Oscars, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (Warner, 2008), used no actual soldiers as extras and faced defamation charges from one of the explosives personnel her team shadowed. Even glowing reviews from within the veteran community cited inaccuracies and embellishments. For a film to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay over and above the objections of members of the very community and culture that it features would seem Orwellian, if Hollywood had not already begun recasting the military and its members in whatever terms it saw fit. Instead, it seems to fit the precedent evident in Sergeant York, itself an Oscar winning not-quite-right portrayal of events. The selective attention given to (and at times the fabrication of) events that reinforce a nationalist myth that only valorizes military service and its personnel is highly problematic, if not outright duplicitous, for soldiers are complicated and nuanced human beings and deserve to be treated with subtlety. That Hollywood awards fabrications is an indictment of its overt departure from reality.
Part II – (Randall Wallace)
If it is true, as I alluded to in introducing Part I, that soldiers with few exceptions hate or at least are scarred by war, then how is it that movies get produced that depict war so compellingly? Which is the link in the chain of storytelling that gets the narrative so wrong, or sees it so strongly in binary terms? For this reason, I turn now to a kind of case study of one such link in the chain, a screenwriter, director, and producer of the very film I witnessed that morning so long ago in the midst of war. Randall Wallace, it turns out, wrote and produced Pearl Harbor. It was not the first major motion picture he was involved in, being preceded by Braveheart (Paramount, 1995) and followed by We Were Soldiers (Paramount, 2002). He is also behind an effort to cinematize the story of the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Desmond Doss, revising an existing documentary film titled The Conscientious Objector (Independent, 2006). Despite the evidence of his filmography, he insists that he does not produce war films, but “make[s] movies about love.” After all, he was also behind non-martial feature films such as The Man in the Iron Mask (MGM, 1998) and Secretariat (Walt Disney, 2010).
Attending the presentation in 2012, I went with my blood boiling, and for what reason I could not quite put my finger on. Thankfully, I did not speak up, but my attention was focused fiercely on listening to what draws Wallace to do films that focus so heavily on violence, especially martial violence. I was and remain fundamentally a veteran, and some (though not all) of the stereotypes thereof succinctly describe me. There is a joke, after all, about how many veterans it takes to screw in a light bulb: “You don’t know, you weren’t there!” Indeed, my sense of Wallace was that he had not been to war and therefore had no authority to speak about what war does or how it does it to those who do go. After all, there is another idiom, more prophetic than parodic; Those who speak don’t know and those who know don’t speak. In other words, the more someone goes on and on about war, the less and less likely it is that they know what the hell they are speaking about, because war is a kind of hell, and who the hell would want to talk about that? When you peek behind the iron gates of hell, the last thing you really want to do is recall it over and over again. This is partially why I discourage the question, so often asked of combat veterans; Did you kill? The more eager and repetitive (or PG rated) the response, the less trustworthy the tale.
But more importantly, in researching for this and other papers, many of which focus on postliberal and narrative theological frameworks, I stumbled upon a seminal book by a little known author, Hilde Lindemann-Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Cornell, 2001). She suggests that identity be seen “as a complicated interaction of one’s own sense of self and others’ understanding of who one is.” Furthermore, damaged identity is characterized by two primary factors, which Lindemann-Nelson calls deprivation of opportunity and infiltrated consciousness. The persistence of valorization of veterans in America makes the notion of deprivation of opportunity deeply muddled, and I will not enter into an extensive discussion on it here. More central to my interests in this paper is her notion of infiltrated consciousness, which she describes as a person endorsing, “as part of her self-concept, a dominant group’s dismissive or exploitative understanding of her group, and loses or fails to acquire a sense of herself as worthy of full moral respect.” I believe that many veterans do not believe, on some important level, that they have full moral respectability. As evidence, I would point to the suicide rate that has been making headlines for well over a few years now. I take it as self-evident that, in the western world, one does not take their own life if they believe in their own full moral respectability.
If identities are indeed “collaborative ventures,” Wallace obviously needs veterans for the stories he tells, but they similarly need him. Society as a whole, everyone who consumes these martial tales (even the bad ones that Mary Tillman alludes to in her congressional testimony) shares in the complex relationship that make veterans who they are. Veterans need influential storytellers like Wallace to refuse bad stories, poor narrations, incomplete and superficial characterizations of their subjects, for such treatment can take root in the collective conscious. Paint veterans as only heroic, and their failure to be heroic in gruesome and complex situations may damage their identity. Superficial depictions of combat and those engaged therein infiltrate the consciousness of civilians and influences how they interact with those who go to war. But poor narration also infiltrates veterans consciousness and can wreak havoc on their lives from within and without.
Wallace may shoulder a heavier responsibility because major motion pictures are consumed by more people and therefor affect a wider populace. The same could be said of any filmmaker, but for concision, I will keep my attention on Wallace and the pictures he has produced. The power of movies in our day to infiltrate the consciousness of veterans and civilians is clear; we see it in Mary Tillman’s own testimony, referencing “a John Wayne movie,” which is anecdotally corroborated in the works of Jonathan Shay and David Grossman. The movies that attract the most viewers can leave lasting impressions, but war is not attractive. It is obscene, grotesque. The first battle of Bull Run, the inaugural battle of the Civil War, saw civilians setting up picnics to watch, and it is not hard to guess why that practice died out quickly – nobody wants to see bodies shredded by mortar fire and limbs severed by flying shrapnel.
Wallace, however, denies making movies about war. To the contrary, his movies are “about love.” In his love stories, “the violence is presented to the characters and what they will do in the face of the violence is their individual heroism.” The conflation of love and violence, in this account, is somewhat confusing in its ambiguity. His comment left me wishing he illustrated their relationship more carefully, since pairing love and violence evokes images of domestic violence or rape. A more concise question might be why violence is needed in order to tell a story about love, whether love needs anything external to itself, or if it is violence that is the privation. If God is love, then the burden of proof in Christian terms seems to rest upon violence to need something external to itself, but Wallace’s pictures do not seem to share this assumption, or perhaps I have just failed to see it. Instead, the love stories within them fade to the background to the at times frequent and almost comic depictions of violence.
On factor complicating his suggestion that martial stories he depicts are ultimately about love is the question of the role of women, since historically war has not been particularly open to their presence and participation. In his movies, therefore, men are almost exclusively the subjects of our attention. Love in this context must be abstracted somewhat, since Christian men cannot love war or violence without substantial literary or theological justification. In his presentation, he seemed to anticipate accusations of androcentrism inherent in this inescably masculine martial dynamic by relating his comment about characters facing violence to the scene in We Were Soldiers in which the wives receive and distribute notices of death delivered by a cab driver. The heroism of the women, he reminds us, “was certainly equal to any of the men in their lives.” But what is love if it looks to violence so much? Even The Man in the Iron Mask revolved around a Davidesque lustful betrayal by King Louis XIV in which the monarch sent the son of a musketeer off to be killed so that he could sleep with the soldier’s wife. The exception, in Wallace’s case, is his latest; Secretariat, in which a woman is the main character and in which comparably little violence is depicted.
To his credit, Wallace insists that if his movies were glorifying violence, he would be appalled. His stated purpose in storytelling is, at least according to the discussion in question, to illustrate the kind of trust required by a life of faith. He compelled his audience that night time and again to make the leap of faith, to jump into the river of life and trust it to carry you, not knowing exactly where it will lead. “You find miracles in the trusting,” he proclaims toward the end of his speech. But again, a question itches beneath the surface; to where are we jumping? What if the river we dive into takes us plunging to our death, or if we leap into the dark abyss? Discipleship requires guidance, it assumes a community in which those who have gone before and who are on the journey with us can mutually illuminate a safe path to our shared destination, which is God. Wallace, with no firsthand experience in war, is not such a guide, at least not to God through the maelstrom of war. He recognizes this, if only subconsciously. In his presentation, he twice motioned to a few Vietnam veterans that attended the event, making of them tokens to validate a point he made that they might not necessarily share. His gesture felt akin to the comment that one certainly cannot be racist because they have black friends, or that one cannot be sexist because they have a wife or daughters.
To this end, I wondered if my concern erupted out of the fact that an outsider was narrating the story of my own community of choice, the military. I agreed that “these men did something that divinity school we called ‘moved the Christ consciousness.” Men and women in the military do indeed inspire one another as well as the civilian counterparts. As I mentioned above, I agree with the basic premise of earlier movies that men like York, Murphy, and Tillman were people of incredible character. But what happens in their retelling by non-members like Jesse Lasky, the Pentagon, or Randall Wallace is at best unreliable and at worst misleading. It is no coincidence that America at large frequently assumes a homogeneity within the military that denies the deep complexity of the men and women who make it up. Prominent pacifists and just warriors alike speak of military service as though the moral content of a uniformed x-ray technician was the same as an infantryman. This moral dyslexia contributes to a massive misrepresentation of combat and veterans that denies them access to their rightful sense of full moral respectability. Soldiers are not reducible to either hero or monster, and it is the duty and responsibility of everyone in a society to narrate war with far more nuance than we have thus far seemed capable of.
In the words of Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, “Everyone should understand what’s going on;” no more sugarcoating war in order to keep recruitment at a sustainable level. If wars cannot be fought in such as way that they live up to the moralizing rhetoric we use, then we should not fight them. Unjust wars would not be fought if the government failed to make a legitimate case for their engagement. Furthermore, the more full and encompassing knowledge about war would decrease the gap built up by Hollywood between fact and fiction, between what war is really like and what will fill movie theater seats. War is not entertaining, it is a kind of hell. To depict it as anything but the obscenity that it is reflects a moral culpability in the grave situation reflected by veteran suicides and other social ills.