Thoughts and Questions for Pondering Drawn from Multiple Readings

I apologize in advance for any lack of continuity or organization for this post, but I needed to state some things I've been pondering before I could focus on the readings/topics at hand.

Karen Hall's idea of false witness is where the immediate revenge killing of enemy soldiers is linked to the process of grieving for a fallen comrade. especially if the soldier doing the killing did not witness the fall of their comrade directly. Hall example is from the movie Platoon, where one of the American soldiers kills several villagers after some of his comrades have been killed by enemy soldiers. After killing an old woman he remarks that she probably cut the throat of one of his fallen comrades. Where does this false witness end? Only after all available "enemies" have been slaughtered? Does the sense of false witness from that scene from Platoon also lead to some kind of justification for the extermination of Native Americans during the first couple of hundred years our country has been on this continent? I find it hard to personally relate to false witness, I would like to hope that I would not be drawn into that kind of mindset.

Karen Hall, Philippa Gates, and Stahl all discuss the appeal of the realistic portrayal of warfare in the entertainment industry. But does this kind of realism not also make people want to stay away from warfare? I know that when I saw Saving Private Ryan for the first time, I was considering the military/West Point/ROTC as a possible career. The opening scene made me NOT want to do join, the only way I could justify that image was that the technologies of warfare had changed significantly since WWII and that there were other military careers that did not involve getting slaughtered trying to take a stretch of unprotected beach/cliff. In that respect, I think that realism in war movies does not encourage military enlistment but it does lead to a sense of guilt that we, as civilians, are less brave and courageous than the people who put their lives on the line for (in the movies) nonexistent political ideals.

While we were discussing the Hall reading in class, I was wondering what people from the minorities being vilified in the Hollywood war movies thought of those portrayals as Americans and as descendants from those "enemies". How would those movies shape and twist their concept of their self identity?

The film Hollywood and the Pentagon was fascinating. I had no idea the Pentagon did that, but I didn't go out of my way to find that information either. I prefer to decide to see movies based on what I see on the trailer and how I'm feeling, I do not research movies before I pay to see them and I definitely do not rely on reviewer to make my movie-viewing decisions for me. If I did do that, I might have noticed some of the Pentagon influences. But I go to movies to be entertained, and I'm aware of the fact that if I go to see a war movie, there is going to be some kind of war message--pro or anti-- mixed into the story. If you go to see a war movie and think you will see a completely unbiased depiction of war, you will leave the movie irritated and paranoid. I don't see a major insidious ethical dilemma in the collaboration between the Pentagon and Hollywood, rather, I see it just as a symptom of our government, our society, and our culture. The Pentagon does not force directors to do as they say, if the director's artistic vision is being neutered too much, the director can walk away from the Pentagon's help, making their movie will just be slightly less easy. The director makes a choice to either accept or deny the Pentagon's help but that does not mean that the Pentagon controls whether or not a war movie will get made. The collaboration is not absolute authority by the government in all matters relating to the military, and because there are alternatives, no one's rights are being denied and directors can make the movies they want to with or without Pentagon aide.

I actually think the collaboration has a positive side too, for consumers of entertainment and not just the producers and directors of war movies, who wants to see a war movie with obviously CGI and plastic weapons? And if movies are how average people experience war, why not make it as accurate as possible? Who would be a better resource for authenticity than the Pentagon? I do not see this form of militarization as all bad or as all good, and to characterize it as one or the other is to ignore many subtleties.