The Philosophy of Popular Culture

David LaRocca

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813145112
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen.

In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war.

Drawing upon analyses of iconic and critically acclaimed war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), Restrepo (2010), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), this volume's examination of the genre creates new ways of thinking about the philosophy of war. A fascinating look at the manner in which combat and its aftermath are depicted cinematically, The Philosophy of War Films is a timely and engaging read for any philosopher, filmmaker, reader, or viewer who desires a deeper understanding of war and its representation in popular culture.

Part 1

THE AESTHETICS OF WAR ON-SCREEN

WAR AND REPRESENTATION

FREDRIC JAMESON

A vast entity, a planet, in a space of a hundred million dimensions; three-dimensional beings could not so much as imagine it. And yet each dimension was an autonomous consciousness. Try to look directly at that planet, it would disintegrate into tiny fragments, and nothing but consciousnesses would be left. A hundred million free consciousnesses, each aware of walls, the glowing stump of a cigar, familiar faces, and each constructing its destiny on its own responsibility. And yet each of those consciousnesses, by imperceptible contacts and insensible changes, realizes its existence as a cell in a gigantic and invisible coral (polyp). War: everyone is free, and yet the die is cast. It is there, it is everywhere, it is the totality of all my thoughts, of all Hitler’s words, of all Gomez’s acts; but no one is there to add it up. It exists solely for God. But God does not exist. And yet war exists.

—Sartre, The Reprieve

Stalingrad is like a painting that cannot be observed from close up, but from which one must step back in order to do it full justice.

—Joseph Goebbels

War offers the paradigm of the nominalist dilemma: the abstraction from totality or the here and now of sensory immediacy and confusion. For Tolstoy, as for almost everybody else, the representational consequence was most memorably drawn by Stendhal in The Charterhouse of Parma: Fabrice is unaware that he is an involuntary witness to the emperor’s last stand (“I’m off to the Battle of Waterloo” would be a modernist replay of the exit line Walter Benjamin claimed to have found in one of his baroque tragedies: “I’m off to the Thirty Years’ War”). Yet in both novelists, the aesthetic is already one of what the formalists called ostranenie, or defamiliarization (estrangement), in which a stereotype is dismantled and brought before us in all its nameless freshness and horror. Whether this is an essentially modernist operation or, on the contrary, something all the realisms are by definition called on to do is a question we will for the moment leave open.

Still, it suggests that there exists some stereotype of war for such passages to defamiliarize and that there must then also be representations of war that are content to confirm the stereotype. Indeed, one often has the feeling that all war novels (and war films) are pretty much the same and have few enough surprises for us, even though their situations may vary. In practice, we can enumerate some seven or eight situations, which more or less exhaust the genre. If so, and despite experience that confirms this opinion, this would be an astonishing fact, given the radical changes in warfare that historians document since the hand-to-hand combat in the plains before Troy (Hegel’s prototype of that human and unalienated form, the epic, as opposed to the modern “prose of the world,” denatured by money, commerce, and industry): there is then, marked by technological advances (gunpowder, machine guns and tanks, aircraft, unmanned cybernetic weaponry), a whole periodization of structural changes in warfare and its accompanying strategies that needs to be combined with the narrative typologies we are about to enumerate and to examine in more detail. Add to this complication a periodization of properly aesthetic modes and transformations (allegory, realism, modernism, postmodernism), and we confront a combination scheme of no little complexity that may strike us ultimately as serving less to explain these representations than simply to classify them. But perhaps such possibilities, which account for the organization of the notes that follow into a sampling of exhibits rather than a unified and systematic theory, may be reduced and simplified by the rather different consideration cutting across all of them—namely, the suspicion that war is ultimately unrepresentable—and by an attention to the various forms the impossible attempt to represent it may have taken.

As for the narrative variants, which seem to me to hold for film as much as for the novel, I enumerate eight of them: (1) the existential experience of war, (2) the collective experience of war, (3) leaders, officers, and the institution of the army, (4) technology, (5) the enemy landscape, (6) atrocities, (7) attack on the homeland, and (8) foreign occupation. The final category does not include the related subject matter of spies and espionage (now largely settled into a generic category of its own); nor does it exhaust the phenomenon of guerrilla warfare, from the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan all the way back to the Vendée and indeed to the earliest institutionalization of armies: for guerrilla warfare—the result of uneven development and of the incursion of an “advanced” mode of production into an “underdeveloped” one—can also offer the prototype of war itself and not its savage exception. Yet these very exclusions suggest a different way of cutting across the plot types, for the typical events of foreign occupation (and of espionage, for that matter) take us back to institutions and to the state as actor and agency, while the horror of guerrilla warfare (whether urban or rural) seems rather to lie in the unidentifiability of its actors, who emerge from their surroundings without warning and just as unexpectedly disappear again.

What may prove most helpful here, then, is Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic pentad,” which differentiates between act, agent, agency, purpose, and scene as so many distinct media through which the narrative material can be focused.¹ To use a more structural terminology, we may say that each of Burke’s categories constitutes a different kind of dominant and thereby produces a somewhat different projection of the material, it being understood that there is no correct or true, photographically accurate rendering of such multidimensional realities. Still, narrative semiotics, by identifying Burke’s first three categories with one another—an act always somehow implying an agent and the agent in turn implying an agency—suggests a different ordering of these perspectives, in which purpose somehow withdraws (as a feature of interpretation rather than of representation), while scene emerges as a new element in its own right: in scene, the anthropomorphic is eclipsed and some new and as yet unrecognizable narrative reality comes into view. For the act and its accompanying actantial categories always presuppose a name, and thereby a preexisting concept of the event identified (as already with the word war), while action and agency seem to be determined in advance by this or that institutionalized and organized agent.

Scene, however, remains unnamed at this level of narrative complexity, becoming concrete in the course of the representation. Spatiality is only one possible dimension of scene, to which anthropomorphic elements are subordinated in unaccustomed and estranged ways.

Technology, meanwhile, as alienated and reified human labor and energy, is always a slippery category, moving back and forth between allegory and external (or proto-natural) doom yet sometimes also celebrated as the triumph of human inventiveness and an expression of human action (or its prosthetic extension). It wanders across all our tale types, sometimes organizing their periodization (as I suggest above), sometimes generating a uniquely nightmarish experience, as in the terror and panic aroused by the appearance of the first tanks at the Battle of the Somme in World War I or by the V-2 rockets in that war’s sequel. Yet technology is truly the apotheosis of a properly modernist teleology, a direct line from the slingshot to the megaton bomb, as Theodor W. Adorno put it. Each innovation is also the same in its embodiment of radical difference: witness Ermanno Olmi’s wonderful film Il mestiere delle armi (2001), on the development of artillery in the sixteenth century.

The first category of war narrative, that of the existential experience of war—which has its classical literary realization in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895)—most often expresses the fear of death and, a somewhat different thing, death anxiety: as such, although this category is surely the quintessential form the representation of war takes in most people’s minds, its content (personal danger, decisions and hesitations, contingency, apprenticeship) can be transferred to other generic frameworks. War then becomes the laboratory in which, like the bullring for Ernest Hemingway, such experiences are most unfailingly aroused and observed. Yet it tends toward the bildungsroman to the degree to which it is generally a question of a young and inexperienced soldier, whom the experience does not leave untouched.

With the collective focus, everything changes; yet here also we find ourselves in the presence of a content fully interchangeable with several other familiar and well-defined genres, which call the generic specificity of the war film back into question. For the collective war story turns on the interaction of various character types apparently gathered at random. The experience is the national one, of universal conscription as the first occasion in which men from different social classes are thrown together, at least until the public high school dramas of more recent memory. In the Europe of emergent nationalism, the experience was called on to level the old regional cultures (Sicily, Brittany) and to standardize language and the state’s claims of authority—to encourage discipline, obedience, and recognition of the national system. American war films, taking class difference for granted and only gradually absorbing racial difference, found their originality psychologically, in the typology of personalities thrown together in a group (or a war machine). The intelligent upper-class figure, the sociopath, the weakling, the bully, the fixer, the jokester, the trickster, the Don Juan, the ethnic type (generally southern European, but a black man, a Chicano, or a Native American gradually follows), the religious fundamentalist, the nice guy, the nerd: the list is endless, but the combinations—that is to say, the fundamental dramatic conflicts and clashes—are probably statistically limited and certainly generically predictable.

The crucial thing about this collective system is that it is itself the abstraction of something else. We may focus the action in terms of male bonding or the psychology of hierarchical institutions, with the problem of authority figures (incompetent, psychotic, etc.) added later on. The first versions of the form emerge in what we may call a prefeminist world, and certainly the absence of women is a significant structural part of the form—later women will be admitted as yet another variation on the male character types—but the crucial feature here is the absence of the family and of peacetime, indeed of wage labor. This is why a juxtaposition with the heist or caper film is so interesting: for in this last we find the same abstract structure, the same variety of character types and their clashes, the same as it were sealed social world, but in which the legitimacy of the institution of the army and the declaration of war has been stripped away, yielding a different kind of defamiliarization, where the overall aim of the collective action is not even war aims (defeating the enemy, defending freedom, or some other such socially plausible motive) but rather simply money itself—the ultimate abstraction, the ultimate “axiomatic” emptied of concrete content. Yet the absence of wage labor or commodified labor is here retained; and as in many other kinds of crime films, there is a utopian overtone in which the characters live in a disalienated world and in which activity is akin to play (I have elsewhere tried to show that these utopias can be invested with very different valences: for example, the Mafia film quintessentially appeals to nostalgia for the family by way of collective envy of the southern European clan system).

Thus, what both war films (of the collective buddy type) and caper films abstract from and yet dramatize in their own specific generic ways is the division of labor itself: each of the character types stands for a certain competence, something brought out much more strongly in the caper films, where each character is selected for a specific specialty. The small or micro group is the Deleuzian nomadic war machine, literally or figuratively—that is to say, an image of the collective without the state and beyond reified institutions. Still, such “groups-in-fusion,” as Jean-Paul Sartre calls them in The Critique of Dialectical Reason, become forerunners of the institutional as such, as they ossify.² Indeed, when the peacetime army (or indeed the police force, in current procedurals) comes into its own mode of representation, it is rather bureaucracy whose epic is sung before us (without being named as such, except in socialist realism), and the collective structure of the nomads is appropriated for the celebration of the state. Both are afterimages of the social, and we make a more productive use of Gilles Deleuze when we grasp his dualism as an alternating possibility and realize that libidinal investment in the nomads can be no less reprehensible (but also no more so) than libidinal investment in the state.

As for the third category, that of leaders and institutions, it initiates a shift of gravity toward the exterior of the experience of war, whether individual or collective, for the officers are ordinarily as much a part of the soldier’s external environment as the enemy itself; and they are indeed equally often objectified into what gets identified as the bureaucracy or the state. Initially, however, such characters furnished the staple of the older chronicle history, with its great men and world-historical figures—what Georg Lukács assigns to the potentialities of the stage,³ as in Schiller’s Wallenstein, Strindberg’s Gustavus Adolfus, or Shakespeare’s war-riddled history plays (and the shorthand German imitations that come out of them, like Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen or even dramas of Kleist and Büchner). This is, on one traditional yet rather narrow acceptation of the term, the place of politics as such; and it cannot be doubted that the various populist representations of the simple soldier and the common man in uniform are dialectically later than these less and less glorious figures striding about the stage and vocalizing their decisions, with or without a note of human, all-too-human pathos.

Tolstoy’s notorious loath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: War Films and the Ineffability of War
• Part 1. The Aesthetics of War On-Screen
• Part 2. War as Condition of Self-Formation and Self-Dissolution
• Part 3. The Ethical Tribulations of War
• Part 4. War, Nature, and the Absolute
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix. The Multifarious Forms of War Films: A Taxonomy of Subgenres
• Contributors
• Index