A century on, two films answer the current moment

The past couple of days have been filled with dread. The President of the United States has upped the ante for his claim to dictator. If he does, in fact, destroy Iran - the country, its culture, its people - he will have consigned the U.S. to the blackest pit of history. If he executes this diabolical plan, he will find himself at the head of the list of despots and geoncidists. Yes, I believe ahead of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.

Why? Because by now, we should have learned from history. But “should have” does a lot of lifting here. After all, I am referring to a man who knows nothing of history, who cares nothing for others - either as individuals or simply as humanity. I cannot recall anyone in my lifetime who appears to embody ignorance and hatred so completely. 

Of course, he doesn’t act alone. He has begun an unconstitutional and illegal war. He was able to do so because, so far, Congress has abdicated its role as the arbiter for declaring war. Indeed, Congress has abdicated its role, full stop. If the President executes his plan, if the military complies with these orders, the moral repercussions on the United States as a polity will be great. The country has already been rendered a pariah state; committing this most heinous of acts, with no retribution for this man, will damn the U.S. for decades to come. 

Sanctions will be imposed; the world’s militaries will be in place to counter further aggression, the dollar will be reduced to chump change, and the suffering within the country will be severe. Sadly, his supporters will continue to live lives of ignorance and anger directed outwards at all who are other than they. 

Why am I going on at length here? Quite simply, because I recently had the good fortune to see two films on the big screen for the first time in my life. Wings (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) are two seminal works whose narratives are set in World War One. This is the first time in human history where mass slaughter was carried out with bloody and globally traumatizing efficiency. Estimated casualties are somewhere between 15 and 22 million deaths. More were wounded and the conflict was called “the war to end all wars” because no one could imagine this happening again.

Of the two films, Wings is the “pro-war” movie; however, an interesting thing occurred to me as I watched it. Without meaning to, it had the opposite effect on me. I did not feel the exhilaration of Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers’ characters as they joined the Army’s Air Force. I also don’t necessarily think that William Wellman had in mind making a rah-rah “war is great” film; it’s too grounded in violence and loss and right out of the beginning, both recruits meet White, played by Gary Cooper, who dies within minutes of introduction. Their CO comes into the tent, and for all intents and purposes, readies Arlen and Rogers to be the next ground meat. 

That said, the departures from their homes, the misunderstanding that Rogers girlfriend is in love with Arlen, and the forlorn pining of Clara Bow for the clueless Rogers anchor the film early on in youth about to see and do things human beings should never have been called on to do. Calling it a “pro-war” movie is doing Wings a disservice. It’s more nuanced than that. And yes, almost a hundred years later, and the aerial combat remains technically shocking in its freshness. 

We don’t see the wholesale slaughter until well into the film and when we do, there is a sense of tragedy and ruin that we wonder if the men in their flying machines were aware of. 

“This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war…” - title card from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

All Quiet on the Western Front is indeed an anti-war film and it might well be asked, why make an anti-war film in peacetime? A better question is why not? The First World War had only been over for less than fifteen years; many of the cast and crew in both films had seen combat. Of the two films, Milestone’s is as riveting, frightening, and moving as Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It is - as the card - “neither an accusation nor a confession” - but it is very much a cry of anguish and a definitive statement against the horror of this war. 

Throughout the film, we see carnage and death. In many ways, it presages the deglamorization of slaughter that we’ve come to see in Malick’s Thin Red Line and the aforementioned Spielberg opus. Normally, I would spend time discussing the minutiae of the filmmaking process of both films. There are plenty of set pieces to go over, long shots held for inordinate almost uncomfortable amounts of time, but that’s not what I want to consider here.

I want to consider why it is that we have to continue making works like this. We are often told that no one wants war, anywhere. No one really wants to hate or murder. And then comes the qualification: BUT they started it, they are a threat to our security, they want to destroy us, they hate our way of life, and so on, ad nauseam. As long as people are that malleable, that easy to con, we are going to need films like these.

Some people assert that art shouldn’t be moralistic or didactic. On the former point, I firmly disagree. On the latter, didacticism makes for clumsy works, but sometimes you need clumsy. Sometimes the instrument that we need to make a humanistic and humane point requires a degree of bluntness. 

Art is inherently moral. Making art is a moral act. Creating in a world where hatred, anger, and destruction  take up much of the air in any given room is a moral imperative. 

Picasso once said “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” In that light, every creative act is a way of saying “no” to violence and destruction. 

Some would argue that a war movie is a terrible way to fight for peace, but I don’t buy that. Most people will never experience a comrade being blown to bits before their eyes. Most people will never know what it’s like to be shot or disabled from a cluster bomb. But many of us are intimate with the pain and suffering others have experienced. The veteran in your family, among your friends and acquaintances, in you neighborhood, is more than an abstraction to whom you say, “thank you for your service.” If he or she has seen combat, they are human beings exposed to a degree of suffering and emotional trauma few in civilian life will ever know.

In her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gillian Faust describes how the trauma of the war continued and spread across time. It’s instructive to apply the same understanding to our modern age of death and destruction by increasingly “efficient” and implacable weapons of mass destruction that are visited on the families and communities of young men and women sent off to kill, sent off to die.

All Quiet… makes a case against the warmongers from the outset when a schoolteacher fills his class of teenaged boys with ideas of fighting and possibly dying for the fatherland. It’s a stomach-churning moment that is revisited when Ayres’ Paul returns to his village and sees his former teacher still proffering this “patriotism”. He speaks against it all to the class who, uncomprehending, call him a coward. Later, he finds himself in a pub with his father and a couple of his dad’s friends, all discussing what should be done to win the war. Push onto Paris! That’ll do it! All of them utterly clueless. Eventually, Paul just gets up and leaves and resolves to return to the front because he no longer fits in with society.

To my mind, why would you want to? No one listens to you. You are convenient, as “the son”, “the war hero”, but as a person? You are as expendable in the town as you are on the battlefield.

This may not be much in the way of a review, but on what may be the eve of a horrible - perhaps the first most horrible - act of the 21st century, I cannot simply write a “review” of two films, regardless of how great they are. I would rather draw attention to why those films exist and I suspect the reason why they do will continue for as long as there are humans. Not just humans like the U.S. President and his followers, but just humans, gullible and fallible. 

Almost a century ago, two films (and others, foremost among them, would be Renoir’s Le Grande Illusion) stand as testaments to the genesis of mass warfare on a scale no previous civilization could conceive, but that we are inured to. The tragedies are in the billions, but the greatest tragedy is singular; we are numb. We must be, because either through apathy, cynicism, or genuine belief and in his lies, a dictator was elected to office. It is my fervent hope that tonight nothing happens. It is my fervent hope that the madman is reined in and that the apprehension that has partly fueled this piece can abate.

I wish you well, reader. I’ll return to regular programming in the future, I’m sure.