{"id":105762,"date":"2018-02-05T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=105762"},"modified":"2018-01-30T16:37:20","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T16:37:20","slug":"its-time-to-wage-war-against-war-movies-that-glorify-outdated-models-of-masculinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/02\/its-time-to-wage-war-against-war-movies-that-glorify-outdated-models-of-masculinity\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Wage War against War Movies That Glorify Outdated Models of Masculinity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Leia em portugu\u00eas <\/a><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: David James<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Jan 2018 – <\/em>The Hollywood Reporter\u00a0published a\u00a0surprising story\u00a0earlier this month about film studios turning away from movies about sex. A biopic about Hugh Hefner is stalled, gone for the moment is a James Franco film about a 15-year-old Russian prostitute, and a remake of \u201cA Star Is Born\u201d is being re-thought, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Hollywood begins to navigate the #MeToo landscape,\u201d Tatiana Siegel\u00a0reported<\/a>, \u201cone of the first casualties appears to be big-screen erotica. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, studios are steering clear of sex.\u201d Alyssa Rosenberg,\u00a0writing<\/a>\u00a0in the Washington Post, hopes that Hollywood\u2019s\u00a0embarrassed executives\u00a0are\u00a0navigating\u00a0\u201cthe end of a very narrow way of thinking about what\u2019s alluring.\u201d Instead of\u00a0movies that objectify women,\u00a0she\u00a0suggests more films that portray sex and sexuality in intelligent ways.<\/p>\n

This reckoning is long overdue. And it can be extended to another genre that has\u00a0distorted how men behave: war movies. Hollywood has shown itself capable of making excellent war movies (think \u201cThree Kings,\u201d \u201cPaths of Glory,\u201d and \u201cThe Best Years of Our Lives\u201d), but\u00a0most\u00a0are problematic.\u00a0Some of the biggest war movies of\u00a0the post-9\/11 era don\u2019t just show violence in ways that are often gratuitous and occasionally racist. They model a cliched form of masculinity that veers from simplistic to monstrous.<\/p>\n

For instance, you can\u00a0see Rambo and John Wayne return to life in the latest war blockbuster, \u201c12 Strong,\u201d which was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who also brought us \u201cBlack Hawk Down.\u201d \u201c12 Strong\u201d is an extravaganza about a Special Forces team that fought the Taliban in Afghanistan in the weeks and months after 9\/11. During the movie\u2019s pivotal scene, the leader of the Green Berets, played by Chris Hemsworth (the grievously handsome star of the Thor franchise), decimates a hive of Taliban fighters with his rifle ablaze as he gallops ahead on his fearless horse (yes, he\u2019s riding a horse). In the same way that Hemsworth\u2019s assault weapon goes rat-tat-tat and the bad guys fall like bulleted dominoes, the scene itself checks off one born-in-Hollywood clich\u00e9 after another: of the rugged gunslinger, the warrior in camo, good versus evil, the modern vanquishing the profane, a man at his fullest.<\/p>\n

Whenever I write<\/a>\u00a0about the real-world impact of war movies \u2013 and I\u2019ve gone to bat against \u201cAmerican Sniper<\/a>,\u201d \u201cZero Dark Thirty<\/a>\u201d and \u201c13 Hours<\/a>\u201d \u2014 I always get responses along the lines of \u201cRelax, these are just movies. Don\u2019t take them so seriously. They\u2019re harmless.\u201d That\u2019s when it becomes necessary to say that movies can create or reinforce narratives of history and gender that influence what people think and what they do. Boys and men develop their notions of masculinity from a variety of sources that include the films they watch (the extent to which this is true is, of course, open to debate). The time has come for Hollywood to turn away from war movies that, while satisfying to both a studio\u2019s bottom line and a flag-waving concept of patriotism, perpetuate a model of masculinity that does violence to us all.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, soldiers often do brave things and shouldn\u2019t be denied credit for it. I\u2019ve reported on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia,\u00a0so I\u2019ve seen heroism from soldiers of many nationalities, as well as cowardice and abuse. That\u2019s not the issue. What matters is that well into the second decade of our forever war, the combat movies that populate our multiplexes and our minds are devoted to a martial narrative of men-as-terminators that should have been strangled at its birth a long time ago.<\/p>\n

While \u201c12 Strong\u201d is marketed as a true story based on a nonfiction book by Doug Stanton, there is nothing in Stanton\u2019s book that resembles the climactic scene of Hemsworth bravely shooting his way on horseback through a gauntlet of waiting-for-paradise Talibs. There is one passage in the book in which the Special Forces soldier played by Hemsworth rides his horse into the corpse-strewn aftermath of a battle, but the fighting and dying are over by then. When I asked the film\u2019s\u00a0public relations\u00a0team\u00a0about this difference, they\u00a0sent me\u00a0the following\u00a0statement\u00a0from Stanton: \u201cThis scene is an amalgamation of the horse charges that the [Afghan] Northern Alliance made against the Taliban, and which the [American] horse soldiers themselves observed and assisted in. But as it appears in the movie, the same scene does not appear in my book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inventions are what Hollywood does best, of course, but it\u2019s hard to know whether to\u00a0chuckle or cry about the grafting of this magical practice onto a\u00a0film\u00a0that purports to\u00a0show\u00a0the\u00a0heroism of\u00a0U.S. soldiers; their actual bravery was\u00a0not good enough for a film-whisperer like Bruckheimer, apparently.<\/p>\n

They called in airstrikes against Taliban positions while riding horses through frigid mountain passes, getting\u00a0sniped\u00a0at by the enemy and taking shelter in ancient caves with guerrilla fighters subsisting on nuts and stale bread? How can I make a movie about that, get me someone from rewrite!\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So\u00a0in the rewrite, the riding-and-shooting-into-a-hail-of-bullets\u00a0courage of Afghan fighters is\u00a0transposed onto American soldiers (hence the promotional still from \u201c12 Strong\u201d that is published with this story). It\u2019s a sort of cinematic stolen valor.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t have to be this way. The best war film of the last year, \u201cThank You for Your Service<\/a>,\u201d based on the nonfiction book by David Finkel, quietly focuses on the troubles of a group of soldiers after they come home from a deployment in Iraq. The film has only two battle scenes, and both are excruciating to watch because their violence is frightening rather than glorious \u2013 the opposite of Bruckheimer\u2019s feel-good shoot-\u2019em-ups. The men in \u201cThank You for Your Service\u201d are struggling with PTSD, painfully coming to the awareness that the combat that gave them such purpose in Iraq has injured their psyches. Nobody looks like Thor in this movie, nobody behaves like Thor, and the John Wayne style of masculinity that these men might have aspired to emulate is shown to be an artificial and harmful construct.<\/p>\n

You know what\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n

\u201c12 Strong\u201d earned nearly twice as much in three days as \u201cThank You for Your Service\u201d has earned in three months. And the numbers \u2013 more than $15 million in ticket sales for \u201c12 Strong\u201d in its first week \u2013 are Venmo pennies compared to the box office\u00a0take of \u201cAmerican Sniper,\u201d the macho movie about\u00a0Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle that has earned more than half a billion dollars since 2014. Who is at fault for the lucrative war chum that Hollywood tosses into our Saturday nights \u2013 the movie studios or the movie-goers who love to consume this masculine nonsense?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll gladly answer that question: both. But first let\u2019s examine the\u00a0greater power of producers, directors, and actors, because their choices are so influential. It\u2019s not a matter of\u00a0deciding to zone out for 90 minutes in front of a screen, but of investing large amounts of time and resources into making\u00a0distorted movies about men at war (such movies are almost never about women). I realize it might be absurd to think that somehow these filmmakers\u00a0(surprise \u2014 they\u2019re mostly men) can be persuaded to reconsider before doing it again. The only thing that might be more ridiculous to imagine is the movie industry\u00a0turning away from\u00a0films that objectify women \u2013 which,\u00a0according to The Hollywood Reporter, is apparently happening.<\/p>\n

So yes, there is hope.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Peter Maass<\/a> –\u00a0 peter.maass@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

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Update: Jan. 27, 2018: An earlier version of this story misidentified the military service to which Chris Kyle belonged. It\u00a0was the Navy SEALs, not the Marines.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the #MeToo era, Hollywood should turn away from war movies like “12 Strong” that send harmful messages about masculinity and violence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":105763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}