'War Whores,' Spielberg's latest film, opens legs wide....

[DrVolin]

it's a form of demagoguery.

And one that can safely be ignored, except for the occasional interesting hypotheses is brings forward.

[slomo]

By HMW's definition, "All Quiet on the Western Front" would be pro-war propaganda, too.

That is, if anyone made a movie about it. Why? Because all movies are made by the pentagon/CIA. All of them.

Gallipoli? War propaganda. It was a movie, wasn't it? How can you be so blind!?

Paths of Glory? War propaganda. Hollywood made it, therefore its war propaganda.

These could be legitimate conclusions, but I'd want to see evidence, either in quantitative terms of the effects of these movies (e.g. in enlistment rates) or at least citing mass communications literature that support the plausibility of this claim, either by documenting similar processes or providing a historical record that this has actively been done in the past.

I don't think it's an insane claim on its face, but I don't think it's self-evident either.

[Nordic]

Well if you've ever dealt with delusonal people, this is how their minds work. There is no arguing with them because they're in delusional world where these things just ARE.

Hollywood, all of it, lock stock and barrel, IS the CIA. Not influenced by, not has a few people in it who are operatives, but IS the CIA. Therefore every movie from hollywood, and everything about any movie, down to the chararacter's last names, down to the colors used in the posters, EVERYTHING, is a creation of the CIA.

And if you don't get this in exactly the same way he does, you're blind, ignorant, brainwashed, or a disinfo agent yourself.

This is how the minds of schizophrenic people work.

HMW is clearly schizophrenic, albiet, possibly, a functioning one.

I've known people like this in my life. Once I was stalked by one.

Yet his constant interjections are tolerated here. Why? Somebody is either inhumanly patient, or else keeps him around for the amusement factor.

Some people like to laugh at the rantings of the insane. I'm not one of them. I think they need to get help. Hugh needs to get help. Feeding his delusions here isn't helping him.

That's all I'm gonna say from this point forward.

[slomo]

Well if you've ever dealt with delusonal people, this is how their minds work. There is no arguing with them because they're in delusional world where these things just ARE.

Hollywood, all of it, lock stock and barrel, IS the CIA. Not influenced by, not has a few people in it who are operatives, but IS the CIA. Therefore every movie from hollywood, and everything about any movie, down to the chararacter's last names, down to the colors used in the posters, EVERYTHING, is a creation of the CIA.

And if you don't get this in exactly the same way he does, you're blind, ignorant, brainwashed, or a disinfo agent yourself.

This is how the minds of schizophrenic people work.

HMW is clearly schizophrenic, albiet, possibly, a functioning one.

I've known people like this in my life. Once I was stalked by one.

Yet his constant interjections are tolerated here. Why? Somebody is either inhumanly patient, or else keeps him around for the amusement factor.

Some people like to laugh at the rantings of the insane. I'm not one of them. I think they need to get help. Hugh needs to get help. Feeding his delusions here isn't helping him.

That's all I'm gonna say from this point forward.

Nordic, I appreciate your perspective. Here's mine, which I will also state only once so as not to beat a dead horse (pun intended): (1) HMW's hypothesis generating missives are often entertaining and interesting and sometimes believable; (2) his unwillingness to support his claims suggests an extremely rigid or brittle mind, i.e. possible insanity; (3) insane persons are valuable, because they force us to confront the fact that "sanity" is a social construction that can be potentially manipulated by external forces with malevolent intentions; (4) insane persons should be tolerated to the extent that they do not abuse others. To points (2) and (4), I personally am willing to entertain the possibility that Hugh is not deranged, if he could humble himself to provide a more thoroughly worked out and substantiated theory, or at least attempt to, without calling others of us idiots or disinfo agents. I'm even open to being convinced - with evidence. I would ask that the community (moderators or otherwise) remind Hugh (and all of us) to be civil.

I don't mean to come off as a condescending prick, as I am trying to be evenhanded, rational, and civil.

[Gnomad]

I don't trust Spielberg. I don't like Spielberg. I don't care for his films (except the guilty pleasure of Empire of the Sun) And it would not surprise me one bit to discover someday that he was in bed with the alpha agency social engineers.

I'm not sure why but most of the horse lovers I've ever known were women.

Me neither. He is one of those filmmakers that make me want to puke. ¨

I think the second part is not as much simply about being women, more like what kind of roles for men are seen as socially acceptable. Empathy not usually being seen as all that much a manly trait, and with prey animals such as horses (never mind they are big, they are still prey animals) empathy and gentleness weigh far more than force and coercion. "Breaking" a horse vs. a "horse whisperer" type approach. One needs to assuage the fears, not break an animals will. Spoken like a true non-expert on horses, never ridden one, but have hung around some other traumatized prey animals. It is about building trust.

[slomo]

I think the second part is not as much simply about being women, more like what kind of roles for men are seen as socially acceptable. Empathy not usually being seen as all that much a manly trait, and with prey animals such as horses (never mind they are big, they are still prey animals) empathy and gentleness weigh far more than force and coercion. "Breaking" a horse vs. a "horse whisperer" type approach. One needs to assuage the fears, not break an animals will. Spoken like a true non-expert on horses, never ridden one, but have hung around some other traumatized prey animals. It is about building trust.

True of predators also: felis domesticus and canis lupus familiaris.

[JackRiddler]

.

I agree with Hugh on several important points, which I would phrase as follows:

1) The relevant context for discussion is not that this movie is based on a 1962 book telling a World War I story with an antiwar message. (Sorry to those who loved the book, like Simulist, but this is not about the book.*)

2) The relevant context is that this is a blockbuster aimed at children and the young in the USA and released on Christmas day in 2011.

3) In that context, the sensations, the emotional impact and associations of the experienced movie are important, especially as they are felt by the youthful target audience. The abstract ideas one takes and can state in the words of an adult as the story's intended lesson mean little. (Not intending to see the movie - I fear I would get diabetes - I'll leave that to someone who does see it to describe it for us. However - spoilers! - since the horse is going to survive the horrors of the trenches to come home again and be saved from the butcher in the corniest possible denouement, most of my following points likely apply.)

4) The poster and TV advertisements are works unto themselves and will be seen by many more people than watch the whole movie.

5) In that context, "Separated by war. Tested by battle. Bound by friendship" acts as a military recruitment pitch in which war, a terrible thing, nevertheless tests the individual in a necessary way, and creates exclusive lifetime bonds with one's comrades in arms (equine and other). This is also the pitch of the real-world military. Their propaganda doesn't say, "war is cool." They say: learn cool technology that helps you get a job, become a real man, join the exclusive order of better men, make friends to the death. The intents and motives of those who came up with the taglines are unknowable and irrelevant; the effects count. Intentionally or not, the taglines convey a familiar ideology about the nobility of the warrior, regardless of the possible evils of the war.

6) Leaving aside the mean government agents of ET and other fantasies, Spielberg's war works are, if not always pro-war, then certainly pro-military. (He also managed to sneak film history's most absurd apologetic for the US military-industrial complex as the non-sequitur conclusion to "Raiders of the Lost Ark.")

However, I am agnostic on whether the pun, "War Whores," is relevant.

* Before we go on, NOTE. as a clarification on point 1: This is true even if the film is a "faithful adaptation." Something which the feel-along swell of music already precludes; with that, at best, it's a "faithful adaptation" with insistent, unambiguous emotional cues rattling your eardrums.

...

I also agree almost entirely with Francois Truffaut's observation that there is no anti-war movie, because the physical simulation of war on screen without any real-world consequences (at the end you still walk out the theater or switch the channel to some other junk) tends to become an experience of adventure, regardless of nominal meanings. This will have the most impact on the young and recruitable. The most common of all movie formulas is that of an adventure moving forward along a "character arc." Through an adventure, a protagonist comes into adulthood, discovers himself, finds love, overcomes an enemy, learns to do the right thing or becomes a hero. Rare is the blockbuster (war movie or otherwise) that doesn't fall into this well-worn track, and if the adventure is a war, war becomes an emotional necessity, even with an antiwar nominal message.

In almost all war movies, even if the hero dies for nothing, he dies a hero. Throughout the movie you get the sensation without the real danger. It's like old heist films, pornographically depicting the details of a well-executed robbery, until the robbers get caught due to some final twist to satisfy the MPAA that the movie didn't endorse the crime. Except that heist films will implausibly serve the purpose of recruitment into criminal conspiracies, whereas war and in fact "antiwar" films usually do serve military recruitment: How would I have acted? Would I have risen to the challenge? Am I good enough?

It's not, by the way, as though anyone's going to come out of the movie and run straight to the recruiting office. Not even "Captain America," an explicit US Army recruitment film that includes the Uncle Sam "I WANT YOU" poster in its credits, is going to do that. It's also not that the movie will work as a timebomb, that a 12-year-old will see "War Horse," turn into a war sleeper, and six years later suddenly recall a feeling he had from the movie and march into the recruiting office. Rather, pro-warrior views that are already ambient in the culture are further shaped and reinforced gradually, through many works that repeat aspects of the ideology, implicitly or explicitly, over many years. If the propaganda has a significant effect, then above all through repetition and via many platforms.

Direct experience of hostilities may be shown as horrific, almost random carnage, maiming and scarring in ways visible and invisible, but in the movies even that experience somehow ennobles, making for a greater if traumatized being: a protagonist, one with whom we feel. Almost anything that focuses on soldiers' struggles, without explicitly and yea, didactically conveying the contexts and history of what made the war in the first place, is going to be a lie, an offering of catharsis. Especially in a culture where people rarely have a clue about the history of anything, including the immediate run-up to present events.

I think very few filmmakers pulled off the feat of depicting war without romanticizing or ennobling soldiers, turning the story into an adventure with character arc, or sexing it up with thrills and sensation: Kubrick clearly among them. The final scene of "Full Metal Jacket" may have veered into a romanticism of a kind, but importantly: of the supposed enemy. It has the power of leaving no doubt that "we" were the bad guys, not ourselves (like Charlie Sheen in "Platoon," the movie that FMJ kills) unformed victims who were sucked into and shaped mercilessly by the forces of war. That's not anti-Americanism talking; I'm for pretty much any war movie wherein the country of the film's origin is unequivocally the bad side. In that case, even with the sensational aspects, it's anti-recruitment.

Of recent films, "Green Zone" offered quite the contrast to the deep-psycho know-nothing fascism of the falsely-labeled "apolitical" "Hurt Locker." For one thing, several Iraqi adults got to speak actual views. (In the likes of "Hurt Locker," if there are any speaking Iraqis at all, then they exist to hurl themselves screaming "Allah!" at surprised US soldiers, or else to plead, "Help me! Help me, American!" before they go boom at the hands of their own compatriots.) And what can you say about a climactic moment where the film so clearly wants you to root for an insurgent's rocket to hit a helicopter full of American killers serving a neocon plot? This moment corresponded to the applause scene in a conventional war narrative, and the silence in the New York theater was awe-inspiring. Kudos to Mr. Greengrass, even if his most important other movie was a straight rendering of Chapter 1 of "The 9/11 Commission Report."

.

[Bruce Dazzling]

.

I agree with Hugh on several important points, which I would phrase as follows:

1) The relevant context for discussion is not that this movie is based on a 1962 book telling a World War I story with an antiwar message. (Sorry to those who loved the book, like Simulist, but this is not the book.*)

2) The relevant context is that this is a blockbuster aimed at children and the young in the USA and released on Christmas day in 2011.

3) In that context, the sensations, the emotional impact and associations of the experienced movie are important, especially as they are felt by the youthful target audience. The abstract ideas one takes and can state in the words of an adult as the story's intended lesson mean very little. (Not intending to see the movie - I fear I would get diabetes - I'll leave that to someone who does to describe it for us. However - spoilers! - since the horse is going to come home again, most of my following points will apply.)

4) The poster and TV advertisements are works unto themselves and will be seen by many more people than watch the whole movie.

5) In that context, "Separated by war. Tested by battle. Bound by friendship" acts as a military recruitment pitch in which war, a terrible thing, nevertheless tests the individual in a necessary way, and creates exclusive lifetime bonds with one's comrades in arms (equine and other). This is the also the main pitch of the real-world military. Their propaganda doesn't say, "war is cool." They say: learn cool technology that helps you get a job, become a real man, join the exclusive order of better men, make friends to the death. The intents and motives of those who came up with the taglines are unknowable and irrelevant; the effects count.

6) Leaving aside the mean government agents of ET and other fantasies, Spielberg's war works are, if not pro-war, then certainly pro-military. (He also even managed to sneak in an absurd apologetic for the US military-industrial complex at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark.").

Yes.

Well said, Riddler.

As for this...

Well if you've ever dealt with delusonal people, this is how their minds work. There is no arguing with them because they're in delusional world where these things just ARE.

Hollywood, all of it, lock stock and barrel, IS the CIA. Not influenced by, not has a few people in it who are operatives, but IS the CIA. Therefore every movie from hollywood, and everything about any movie, down to the chararacter's last names, down to the colors used in the posters, EVERYTHING, is a creation of the CIA.

And if you don't get this in exactly the same way he does, you're blind, ignorant, brainwashed, or a disinfo agent yourself.

This is how the minds of schizophrenic people work.

HMW is clearly schizophrenic, albiet, possibly, a functioning one.

Consider this an official warning, Nordic.

One more psychiatric diagnosis of a board member and you'll be watching from the sidelines for a while.

[brainpanhandler]

wrt women love horses...

My first thought upon seeing the trailer was that it might be a way to romanticize war for the female population for which other more standard blood and guts male bonding story lines are not as effective.

I did a brief search for information on the demographics of horse ownership and "women love horses' etc... and it does seem as though there is an historical trend whereby the association of gender with horse lovership has shifted to women in the last century. Very cursory research.

Mostly I am drawing on personal experience. In fact my sister and niece are right now on the way to the theater to see war horse. My niece has her own horse and rides competitively in equestrian events. My sister loved horses since she was a little girl. Girlfriends, aunts....etc

Since neither of them have any idea of my potential interest in the film as propaganda I will question them about their opinions of the film and report back here any intertesting responses.

[Gnomad]

I'm sure it is a recent shift. I read one old book on good manners (a local work) from the 1940s, and about love letters it said that women could apply some perfume to a letter, but for a man, only added smell acceptable is that of the horse stables - it is a manly smell - so you could leave the love letter in the stables overnight to get that nice scent on it. In those times, horses were mostly for work and transport, not for leisurely sunday rides.

In WW2, horses played a large role here, the local breed called "Finnhorse", as gas was short. Many many horses perished along the men, and documentaries have been made about them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnhorse also mentions the wars. Still a popular, gentle mannered breed.

[Nordic]

What? I can't hear what people are saying in this room -- something about horses? -- because of this enormous elephant blocking the sounds! Speak up please!

[sunny]

wrt women love horses...

My first thought upon seeing the trailer was that it might be a way to romanticize war for the female population for which other more standard blood and guts male bonding story lines are not as effective.

I did a brief search for information on the demographics of horse ownership and "women love horses' etc... and it does seem as though there is an historical trend whereby the association of gender with horse lovership has shifted to women in the last century. Very cursory research.

A better search would be 'girls love horses'. Young girls don't have to own a horse to love them. I really can't explain it but it IS a quasi romantic attachment. Magnificent, powerful beasts with no agenda who can be trained to obey you and can carry you off on his back to romantic adventures that YOU guide and control? Why yes.

[norton ash]

We've used the term 'horse lover' a few times in this discussion.

The main character in VALIS is Horselover Fat, an author surrogate. "Horselover" echoes the Greek etymology of the name Philip, while in German, Dick's surname means "fat".

There's an echoing chuckle from the PKD thread next door.

I'm a horse lover, have a dark fascination with WW I, and I think Spielberg is a social-engineering spook. So I'd probably get pulled into a lushly-filmed landscape/costume drama, cry my eyes out, and come out feeling like I'd just been fondled by a cop.

Spielberg is too dirty for me to take at face value, so this indeed could be less of an anti-war statement (in spite of the best intentions of the novel) than a warm, beguiling immersion in a culture of nobly marching into gas and machine guns.

I'll listen to all views on anything Spielberg does, the timing, the promo imagery, the place in the zeitgeist. Showing the twin towers toward the end of 'Munich' was so obvious it was a pure revelation of method. I got into the quality of that film, and wound up very pissed off at the ultimate message to the audience.

[DrVolin]

Great post Jack. Full agrement. I think the closest I have seen to an antiwar film is Thin Red Line, simply because it gives viewers time to think and reflect while watching it, a rare luxury these days. Even Peckinpah's ostensibly antiwar masterpiece Cross of Iron lures the viewer into the brotherhood of soldiers in the final scene with, admittedly, one of my favourite lines ever, when Steiner, in the face of advancing Soviet tanks, looks at the unfit Junker officer and says in final grim defiance: 'I will show you where the Iron Crosses grow'. Of course, he should have inserted the word 'posthumus' in there somewhere, just for the sake of truth in advertising.

Perhaps Sydney Lumet's The Hill, although (or perhaps because) it includes no depiction of actual military combat, also qualifies as antiwar. As the busted Sgt Major Roberts declares, 'everyone here is doing time, even the screws'. Anyway, I'll be sure to take my insulin before I rent War Horse.

[Plutonia]

Jack, I think you nailed it.

And a big hell yeah! to Spielberg as a spooky career social engineer.

And as for the specific mechanism that is being targeted for co-option by this kind of feel-good propaganda, I think Joseph Chilton Pearce identified it with killer clarity some 30+ years ago in Magical Child, but here it is restated in Evolution's End:

First, starting at around age eleven, an idealistic image of life grows in intensity throughout the middle teens. Second, somewhere around age fourteen or fifteen a great expectation arises that "something tremendous is supposed to happen." Third, adolescents sense a secret, unique greatness in themselves that seeks expression. They gesture toward the heart when trying to express any of this, a significant clue to the whole affair.[1]
—Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution's End (1992)

And here's a quickie primer on adolescent brain development that references the above quote:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=ca ... GmiDgc8M3g

.

I agree with Hugh on several important points, which I would phrase as follows:

1) The relevant context for discussion is not that this movie is based on a 1962 book telling a World War I story with an antiwar message. (Sorry to those who loved the book, like Simulist, but this is not about the book.*)

2) The relevant context is that this is a blockbuster aimed at children and the young in the USA and released on Christmas day in 2011.

3) In that context, the sensations, the emotional impact and associations of the experienced movie are important, especially as they are felt by the youthful target audience. The abstract ideas one takes and can state in the words of an adult as the story's intended lesson mean little. (Not intending to see the movie - I fear I would get diabetes - I'll leave that to someone who does see it to describe it for us. However - spoilers! - since the horse is going to survive the horrors of the trenches to come home again and be saved from the butcher in the corniest possible denouement, most of my following points likely apply.)

4) The poster and TV advertisements are works unto themselves and will be seen by many more people than watch the whole movie.

5) In that context, "Separated by war. Tested by battle. Bound by friendship" acts as a military recruitment pitch in which war, a terrible thing, nevertheless tests the individual in a necessary way, and creates exclusive lifetime bonds with one's comrades in arms (equine and other). This is also the pitch of the real-world military. Their propaganda doesn't say, "war is cool." They say: learn cool technology that helps you get a job, become a real man, join the exclusive order of better men, make friends to the death. The intents and motives of those who came up with the taglines are unknowable and irrelevant; the effects count. Intentionally or not, the taglines convey a familiar ideology about the nobility of the warrior, regardless of the possible evils of the war.

6) Leaving aside the mean government agents of ET and other fantasies, Spielberg's war works are, if not always pro-war, then certainly pro-military. (He also managed to sneak film history's most absurd apologetic for the US military-industrial complex as the non-sequitur conclusion to "Raiders of the Lost Ark.")

However, I am agnostic on whether the pun, "War Whores," is relevant.

* Before we go on, NOTE. as a clarification on point 1: This is true even if the film is a "faithful adaptation." Something which the feel-along swell of music already precludes; with that, at best, it's a "faithful adaptation" with insistent, unambiguous emotional cues rattling your eardrums.

...

I also agree almost entirely with Francois Truffaut's observation that there is no anti-war movie, because the physical simulation of war on screen without any real-world consequences (at the end you still walk out the theater or switch the channel to some other junk) tends to become an experience of adventure, regardless of nominal meanings. This will have the most impact on the young and recruitable. The most common of all movie formulas is that of an adventure moving forward along a "character arc." Through an adventure, a protagonist comes into adulthood, discovers himself, finds love, overcomes an enemy, learns to do the right thing or becomes a hero. Rare is the blockbuster (war movie or otherwise) that doesn't fall into this well-worn track, and if the adventure is a war, war becomes an emotional necessity, even with an antiwar nominal message.

In almost all war movies, even if the hero dies for nothing, he dies a hero. Throughout the movie you get the sensation without the real danger. It's like old heist films, pornographically depicting the details of a well-executed robbery, until the robbers get caught due to some final twist to satisfy the MPAA that the movie didn't endorse the crime. Except that heist films will implausibly serve the purpose of recruitment into criminal conspiracies, whereas war and in fact "antiwar" films usually do serve military recruitment: How would I have acted? Would I have risen to the challenge? Am I good enough?

It's not, by the way, as though anyone's going to come out of the movie and run straight to the recruiting office. Not even "Captain America," an explicit US Army recruitment film that includes the Uncle Sam "I WANT YOU" poster in its credits, is going to do that. It's also not that the movie will work as a timebomb, that a 12-year-old will see "War Horse," turn into a war sleeper, and six years later suddenly recall a feeling he had from the movie and march into the recruiting office. Rather, pro-warrior views that are already ambient in the culture are further shaped and reinforced gradually, through many works that repeat aspects of the ideology, implicitly or explicitly, over many years. If the propaganda has a significant effect, then above all through repetition and via many platforms.

Direct experience of hostilities may be shown as horrific, almost random carnage, maiming and scarring in ways visible and invisible, but in the movies even that experience somehow ennobles, making for a greater if traumatized being: a protagonist, one with whom we feel. Almost anything that focuses on soldiers' struggles, without explicitly and yea, didactically conveying the contexts and history of what made the war in the first place, is going to be a lie, an offering of catharsis. Especially in a culture where people rarely have a clue about the history of anything, including the immediate run-up to present events.

I think very few filmmakers pulled off the feat of depicting war without romanticizing or ennobling soldiers, turning the story into an adventure with character arc, or sexing it up with thrills and sensation: Kubrick clearly among them. The final scene of "Full Metal Jacket" may have veered into a romanticism of a kind, but importantly: of the supposed enemy. It has the power of leaving no doubt that "we" were the bad guys, not ourselves (like Charlie Sheen in "Platoon," the movie that FMJ kills) unformed victims who were sucked into and shaped mercilessly by the forces of war. That's not anti-Americanism talking; I'm for pretty much any war movie wherein the country of the film's origin is unequivocally the bad side. In that case, even with the sensational aspects, it's anti-recruitment.

Of recent films, "Green Zone" offered quite the contrast to the deep-psycho know-nothing fascism of the falsely-labeled "apolitical" "Hurt Locker." For one thing, several Iraqi adults got to speak actual views. (In the likes of "Hurt Locker," if there are any speaking Iraqis at all, then they exist to hurl themselves screaming "Allah!" at surprised US soldiers, or else to plead, "Help me! Help me, American!" before they go boom at the hands of their own compatriots.) And what can you say about a climactic moment where the film so clearly wants you to root for an insurgent's rocket to hit a helicopter full of American killers serving a neocon plot? This moment corresponded to the applause scene in a conventional war narrative, and the silence in the New York theater was awe-inspiring. Kudos to Mr. Greengrass, even if his most important other movie was a straight rendering of Chapter 1 of "The 9/11 Commission Report."

.