One of the most infamous gaffes in film history comes at the end of The Green Berets. Colonel Mike Kirby (an aging John Wayne well into some serious boozing) and his newfound Vietnamese ward walk into the sunset. Trouble is the sun is setting in the east, a mistake that—as Gustav Hasford notes in the Vietnam War novella The Short Timers—”makes the end of the movie as accurate as the rest of it.”
That a movie with more than a million bucks of Pentagon support behind it couldn't get a sunset right might be a harbinger of what's to come on the film front when it comes to the War on Terrorism. Two months ago, a committee of entertainment executives (convened by Motion Pictures Association of America president and former Johnson administration lackey Jack Valenti) announced they would work with government officials to develop programming that would better “position” (we use the marketing vernacular) America's counterterrorism campaign.
But don't freak. Flag-waving badasses and inaccurate representations of war were omnipresent on movie screens near you in 2001. Without prodding from government or military, and long before Sept. 11, Pearl Harbor and Behind Enemy Lines espoused the gun-happy messages both institutions adore. If Valenti's group has its way, you'll simply get more of the same in 2002.
The last war in which the government and Hollywood openly colluded to catechize audiences was World War II. Then, the government's Office of War Information and Hollywood's War Activities Committee worked together on two fronts: to convince an initially skeptical public that American involvement was necessary and to suppress critical viewpoints. In Yank In the RAF, Tyrone Power overcame British suspicion to kick some Nazi ass and teach the limeys a thing or two about courage and brawling. Films that negatively portrayed war (like John Huston's 1946 documentary Let There Be Light, which depicted the plight of shell-shocked troops) were simply banned.
Like Europe and Japan, Hollywood has been occupied territory ever since. On backlots around Southern California, military “advisers” (current and former) help directors keep it technically real. Their payment, sometimes, comes in the form of script changes that turn history upside-down. For example, the U.S. Marine Corps insisted that the upcoming John Woo feature Windtalkers not mention that the World War II-era bodyguards of Navajo code talkers were instructed to kill their clients if they were in danger of being caught by the Japanese—even though the proclamation the surviving code talkers received along with their congressional gold medals last year cited those instructions. After acquiescing, the film's producers got the Marines' full support.
But let's be real ourselves: most of Hollywood, driven by knowledge that its demographic buys heroes, volunteers for military service. Pearl Harbor's sympathetic portrayal of “the Japs” as reluctant warriors was that film's only thematic break from traditional World War II propaganda. The rest of the World War II-era film motifs are there because they put asses in theater seats: the glory of volunteerism, the necessity of sacrifice, and the inevitability of an American victory. Echoing Yank In the RAF, in Pearl Harbor, a British commander watches Rafe (Ben Affleck) enthusiastically assist the Brits and says, “God help anyone who goes to war with America.” It was as if the picture were keyed to George W. Bush's post-Sept. 11 speeches: steel yourselves against the many defeats on the path toward an inevitable American victory.
But the most crucial message in Pearl Harbor—one the current propaganda machine is working overtime to churn out—is that war is an everyday part of life. That's a lesson our grandparents, insulated by American isolationist sentiment, needed to learn in theaters around the nation. Now it's our turn. Pearl Harbor's closing shots—a little boy conceived during war leaving flowers on the grave of his father, who was killed in action, and then going for a plane ride—is a dream ending for the Pentagon. And Hollywood.
By contrast, Behind Enemy Lines could not care less about sacrifice or valor. Here, war is a game in which you bomb foreigners with cool weapons. Behind Enemy Lines is a celebration of the gadget-happy American military's superiority over even its allies. Indeed, war is so goddamned exhilarating that the film opens with Lieutenant Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson) resigning from the Navy because he's not seeing any action. He finds the adrenalin rush he wants by employing a preferred method of the Bush II regime's foreign policy: flouting treaties and flying into forbidden territory on his own.
Like movies in which bad guys are stopped only by cops who ignore the rules, Behind Enemy Lines treats Burnett's violation of NATO policy as heroism rather than national disgrace. But the flick also gives a nod to what the rest of the world deplores as America's self-centered foreign policy: NATO Captain Piquet (Joaquim de Almeida) tells Admiral Reigart (Gene Hackman), “All you Americans care about is your own damn pilots.”
Damn straight, spic!
In the end, rogue violence persuades Burnett to stay in the armed forces, and he rips up the letter of resignation that Hackman had kept in his possession. Their court martial-worthy defiance of orders proves decisive in the war against Milosevic. Who cares about the enemy—or our allies, for that matter, since Americans are always right anyway?
