Jeff's Jots: Post #9: War Movies as Media Ethnographies

War movies appeal to me because of the human factor: old war movies, more often than not, focused on ultra-patriotic themes, but newer movies focus on the individual soldiers fighting the war, and the conflict’s effect on them. Several character tropes exist within this genre: the grizzled old veteran, the level-headed leader, the anxious new recruit, the fast-talking New Yorker, the black man from the Deep South, etc. These movies often focus on a close-knit squad or platoon of soldiers in which these tropes are allowed to manifest themselves naturally. Very often, this squad must accomplish some sort of mission—whether issued from a superior commander or, more abstractly, from within themselves—and naturally, with a variety of people comes a variety of opinions on the best way to do so.

The most commonly occurring themes can vary from the aforementioned ultra-patriotism (The Green Berets, any war movie involving Mel Gibson) to the loss of innocence (Platoon, All Quiet on the Western Front, Full Metal Jacket), to the overarching ideologies that factor into war (Kingdom of Heaven), to a simple look at how normal people behave when thrown into combat (Band of Brothers, The Hurt Locker). This genre is limited in the sense that war, in its most basic sense of one group of people killing another, has remained fundamentally unchanged since the dawn of time, and some would argue that there are only so many times that one can watch people getting killed in various nasty ways before it starts to get old. It can also be argued that the character archetypes that I listed above appear in many, if not most, war movies and that there is little or no room for character development or expansion.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)