Introduction
The War Film
Even if this were not an American- made book by an American writer for a mostly
American readership, the lion’s share of films covered herein would still emanate
from the United States of Amer i ca. That’s because the United States has been an
extraordinarily bellicose nation since its inception, at war 222 of its 241 years to
date (92 percent of the time). This being the case, American society has always
had an outsized reverence for the force of arms and all things military— regarded
in the popu lar imagination as the only true and sacrosanct test of au then tic mas-
culinity, courage, and patriotism. Accordingly, Americans have an abiding passion
for war films. That’s why we make so many of them and why American war films
consistently rank among the world’s most accomplished and popu lar films, ethi-
cal and po liti cal considerations notwithstanding.
Though always a crowd- pleaser, the war film genre is an inherently schizoid one.
In an earlier era, war films often functioned as jingoistic propaganda or de facto
recruitment vehicles ( there is a long history of the Department of Defense provid-
ing material support for war films for which it approves). In more recent de cades
increasingly jaded tastes and po liti cal complications have spawned war films that
mostly traffic in the high- octane machismo of martial glory— putatively apo liti cal
but ideologically suspect upon closer examination. On the other side of the schism
are anti- war films, which attempt to characterize war more realistically—as, at best,
an unavoidable tragedy in ser vice to a good cause (e.g., to end slavery or defeat
fascism) or, at worst, a senseless orgy of death and destruction that only benefits
corrupt ruling elites, war profiteers, and undertakers. And it gets more complicated
still, because the divide between the tendency to romanticize or condemn war is
often blurred within each war film, insofar as the cinematic depiction of combat
typically comes off as thrilling entertainment that often amounts to a pornogra-
phy of vio lence, a tendency famously identified by Francois Truffaut, who wrote:
“It seems to me that war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify
war. A film that truly shows war, battles, almost necessarily exalts war— unless it
is a matter of parody... The effective war film is often the one where the action
begins after the war, when there is nothing but ruins and desolation everywhere...
War should not be shown as an accepted fact, inevitable, imponderable, but rather
as a human decision, made by a small group of men... After having shown those
who give the orders, one should show those who receive them, and their reactions
(the simple soldiers)” (quoted in French, 2006).
All too often, war films implicitly serve an oppressive social order by making
the worst of human evils palatable to impressionable young men “ardent for some