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Conservative Tastes
Honor Bound
“Put your pain in a box and lock it down,” we’re instructed — correctly — in Act of Valor.
Well, of course. No sooner do I make mention (see last month’s “Pseuds and Artists”) of what I think is the indisputable fact that “all war movies are anti-war now” than someone goes and makes a pro-war movie. Except that it is a very curious sort of pro-war movie, even apart from its curiosity as such. In fact, Act of Valor by Mike “Mouse” McCoy and Scott Waugh, whose background is as stuntmen and in making sports documentaries, is more like reality TV than the pro-war movies from the days, more than 40 years ago now, when Hollywood still made pro-war movies. Like so many of those, it could be considered a quasi-propaganda film—and many of the left-wing cultural puritans who dominate the media have not hesitated to call it so—but the propaganda is in some degree sanitized by the presence in it of actual Navy SEALs—everybody’s favorite service branch since they got Osama bin Laden.
Although these men are the undoubted stars of the show, the official cast-list does not include their names. They are not real actors—there’s an oxymoron for you—like the villains, who are listed and whose acting job in this movie consists mostly of doing the familiar dance of death at the business end of the SEALs’ spectacularly effective weaponry. Actually, the cool weapons are the real stars of the movie, at least up until the eponymous Act of Valor—and even then, the men themselves continue to resemble their weapons in never breaking down or going wrong or doing something they shouldn’t do. The perfect synchronicity of man and machine is, after all, what the movie is going for, but it has produced the unfortunate side effect—at least to those not involved in armed forces recruiting efforts—of making the men almost indistinguishable from the machines.
I hasten to add that, insofar as these men, who are not only the heroes of the movie but real-life heroes as well, are expected to do a dangerous but necessary job on which the future and the very existence of our country depends, we should naturally want them to be as efficient and machine-like in doing it as possible, as they doubtless are in real life. But from the much more limited view of the movie audience, for whom awareness of these men and the jobs they do comes only in the form of storytelling, it would be better were it otherwise. Stories in general and movie-stories in particular don’t work very well unless something goes wrong. It’s OK if eventually the wrong thing is put right. In fact, that’s most of what traditional storytelling is about. But the power of the story, particularly stories about men at war, comes from starting with failure and working your way up to success.
Maybe that looks more real to us because it’s the pattern we tend to recognize in our own lives, but it is a more important kind of realism than that which Act of Valor has been praised for. Part of the legacy of the superhero and fantasy culture now regnant in Hollywood is that the currency of reality has been devalued. I know I’m singing an old song here, but people are generally supposed by the movie business not to care anymore if it doesn’t look real, or if it only looks like the sort of highly “realistic” video game that Act of Valor too often resembles—that is, if the realism only comes at the cost of excluding the viewer, or reducing him to the figure at the end of the appropriately named remote. The men of the movie, for all that they are heroes in real life, are a little too much made to resemble movie superheroes, with all the superhero’s remoteness.
One of the good things about the movie is its presentation of the “code” the men live by. Nowadays, it is an Act of Valor in itself to cite that code without irony or condemnation, as when a man writes a letter to a boy, the words in voiceover, and begins by saying his father told him that “the worst thing about being old was that other men stopped seeing you as dangerous.” That’s another way of describing what our ancestors would have called honor—and military men still do—but it is badly out of keeping with the Hollywood-influenced culture of today. He later tells the boy to “put your pain in a box and lock it down” for “no one is stronger than a man who can harness his emotions,” thus calling to mind the ancient epics in which warriors were wont to exhort themselves in such fashion. But to hear these words over the popcorn at the multiplex is like seeing Beowulf or Roland suddenly turn up in a Batman movie. Who now dares to suggest that being such a strong man might be a good thing and not a psycho-therapeutically incorrect indulgence in emotional “repression”?
One reason talk of honor seems so foreign to people today is that, to those who still care about it, it is bound up with identity. It is “who they are”—which for most of us is now something psychologically rather than socially defined. That’s why, when the advocates of allowing openly gay men to serve in the military appealed to their imagined right to be “who they are,” it was (although unrecognized as such) actually an argument against their point of view. To say of Rorke, the movie’s main hero, that “who he is” is a guy who sleeps with women would be ridiculous. A soldier and a man of honor only becomes who he is when he submerges self in the group identity provided by the honor culture. That identity seems merely inauthentic to many people today—partly because they have been schooled by the movies to look within, and in particular to their sexual feelings, for the only identity that matters.
TO THOSE WITH the more traditional outlook there is always something trivial about the dramas of inwardly defined identity. If you start from the assumption that your emotions must be locked in a box for the duration, then you’re not going to have a lot of time for those who endlessly examine and prod theirs in the hope of finding some meaning there—even when these people might seem to the rest of us tragic figures, like the eponymous hero/heroine, played by Glenn Close, of Rodrigo García’s Albert Nobbs. On one level—the level intended by its authors—this is a movie about a woman who dresses as a man in Victorian-era Dublin and the routine cruelties visited by society on those who choose, for whatever reason, an unorthodox sexual identity. But from society’s point of view, it’s about the price that society feels it can afford to put on people’s identity formation—a price that is always reckoned in repressed feelings.
There’s a good line in the movie when a doctor, played by Brendan Gleeson, encounters Miss Close’s Albert at a costume ball and asks why she/he is not in fancy dress.
“I’m a waiter,” she replies.
“And I’m a doctor,” he says. “We are both disguised as ourselves.” The irony is of course that they are disguised both as themselves and as someone that a more hidden and (therefore?) authentic self wishes to shed. The movies have always been fascinated by the idea of self-defined identity, often in the form of stories about amnesia in which someone is forced by injury or illness to go in search of a lost identity. That scenario back in the days of Hollywood’s Golden Age could easily be seen as a more morally acceptable metaphor for a quest like Albert’s in search of “true” sexual identity, but it is also a reminder of the extent to which, up until recently, identity was for everybody socially defined, as it still is for the Navy SEALs and others for whom society can’t afford a more emotionally indulgent identity.
Ralph Fiennes’s excellent movie of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus offers another kind of reminder—of the gulf that separates us from the world that people only a couple of generations ago still shared with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. When Mr. Fiennes’s Coriolanus, goaded by the Tribunes (and, in his up-dating, by the media) into standing on his Roman honor against the Roman people and throwing in his lot with Rome’s enemies, he becomes in the words of Lartius “a kind of nothing.” In believing that “there is a world elsewhere,” he has made the very modern mistake of thinking his private identity somehow detachable from the social one he owes to a Rome that he despises, and he pays the price of the tragic hero for it. Thus the pride of the man of honor in being apart—one of “damn few” in SEALs parlance—from the society of those weaker or less estimable than himself may make him forget what he owes to that society in the first place. And, having long since forgotten this ourselves, we may find that our only tragedy is that we can no longer understand his.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
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TLP| 4.30.12 @ 6:40AM
I think you're mistaken. The Left LOVES the Military, as long as it suits their Purposes.
For one, they are a great source of Money. They use the Defence Budget, as a quasi Piggy Bank, that they can, and DO, Raid, whenever the mood takes them.
They use them as a BOGEY MAN, to scare little College Children at bed time.
They use their "ATROCITIES" (Pouring water on to a towel that's covering the mouths of JIHADISTS, who would have set off a Nuke, on 911, if they had one) to explain why the JIHADISTS (Who would have set off a Nuke, on 911, of they had one) don't like us.
And, of course, as we're seeing right now with ABU HUSSAIN, they like to use them as PROPS, much like the DEAD MEXICANS that they Murdered, when they gave over 1,000 High Powered Automatic Weapons to the DRUG CARTELS, down there, in an effort to Create a Crisis that they could take advantage of. In this case, a call for More Gun Control, on the way to DISARMING the American Citizenry, once and for all.
Now we have the Greatest Hater of the U.S. Military this Country has ever seen (He began his Political Career, and his Best Buds, with a couple - William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who's Domestic Terror Group BLEW UP Recruiting Stations, and BOMBED the Pentagon. They also Murdered some Cops, along the way) standing in front of people who's VOTES, his Party repeatedly DISALLOWS, every Election, and Proclaims them to be "The Rock, on which I shall build my Church". Then a voice says: "Cut! Print it! Lunch. I want everybody back on the Set in 20."
Who says they don't love these guys?
Mike 3/505| 4.30.12 @ 8:21AM
Tim,
You forgot one thing. The left also loves to use the military as the guinea pigs for whatever social experiment of the day they wish to foist on society. today's is "gays."
Regards,
Mike
TLP| 4.30.12 @ 8:35AM
You are absolutely right.
But, you forget that they used to use us as Guinea Pigs for every new VACCINE that came down the Pike.
MANDATORY.
Ah, the memories.
albert constantine jr.| 4.30.12 @ 8:29AM
Congrats, Mr. Pennell;
You beat Jack to the first spot this morning, and I got to see something worth reading.
TLP| 4.30.12 @ 8:43AM
Enjoy it while you can.
Any minute now, a Nurse will slide a Keyboard through a slot in a Door, where food is usually slid in, and CLINT will make his presence felt with one of his Odes to the Crminally Insane, and the whole deal will go right down the Sh*tter, like it always does.
Have a good day.
And, thanks.
Mickey| 4.30.12 @ 10:16AM
TLP
What names will Clinty use today?
Occam's Tool| 4.30.12 @ 12:56PM
Yes, but until then, we can enjoy your odes to sanity, Tim.
Margie| 4.30.12 @ 3:43PM
O.T:
Your pals over at Weasel Zippers banned me and scrubbed months worth of my posts for saying Homosexuality is SIN.
p.s. Hillyer told me I can't say anything against Catholicism here, so I left.
Freedom of speech for anti-Christians but not for Christians!
God bless you.
p.s. Mimi, if you're reading this, God loves you so much, and so do I, and I miss you and am praying for you. Hold on to Jesus, He's holding onto you.
love,
Margie
TLP| 4.30.12 @ 5:24PM
Hillyer's a grade A Punk*ss.
I feel your pain.
Nick| 4.30.12 @ 6:11PM
Margie,
Mimi had heart surgery about a week and a half ago. She posted late last week (Thursday or Friday, I think?) that she was home and recovering, and thanked everyone for their prayers.
Hope everything is well with you and Victor.
God Bless!
Margie| 4.30.12 @ 3:50PM
Mimi,
Or anyone, e mail me at wehavetoomuchstuff@gmail.com. Or Twitter @ myLilMargie.
Chalkdust| 4.30.12 @ 8:46AM
TLP: Excellent post! Remember the pic of Billy-Bub Clinton striding purposely across the the fruited plain with our boys in the misty background? This was soon after his victory in Bangladesh where only 18 of his movie extras were (actually highly decorated military men) killed in a act of nation building.
Cpm| 4.30.12 @ 1:34PM
Chalk, that was Somalia.
Mogadishu.
chalkdust| 4.30.12 @ 4:14PM
Tarnation! I got the country wrong. I guess I'm lucky I guessed the President. After twenty years of sub-par leadership, it's a wonder we're not all addled.
Thanks Cpm
Occam's Tool| 4.30.12 @ 1:00PM
Bibi's father passed away today. A great man, who gave birth to two Commando/scholars, Bibi, and, of course, his magnificent brother, Yoni.
May you live to Bibi's father's age, Tim, and still be writing and thinking well until the day you pass (Bibi's dad died at age 102).
TLP| 4.30.12 @ 5:27PM
You are way too kind to me, but I appreciate it, more than you know.
Thanks O.C.
Alan Brooks| 4.30.12 @ 1:29PM
War is great unless it is you or your family who are collateral casualties.
chalkdust| 4.30.12 @ 4:26PM
War is never great, but sometimes it becomes necessary. Down through the years, those who stood a post and marched/sailed into harms way, fully understand that and so do their families. That is exactly why we call them heroes and pay homage to their lives.
Don't be so smarmy Mr. Brooks.
Alan Brooks| 5.1.12 @ 3:42AM
Praise from Caesar.
Appleby| 4.30.12 @ 7:14AM
I kind of think this movie was made specifically to reassure Hollywood and the Latte Liberals that America has forgotten about duty, honour and country and is firmly focused on sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Their true hope is that this movie vanishes in a week, and the only people who see it are the ones who buy the DVD. A "failed" movie is quickly discounted and forgotten, and TheKids will not think about whether or not any of it was true.
c. j. acworth| 4.30.12 @ 7:44AM
"...everybody's favorite service branch since they got Osama bin Laden."
Mr. Bowman, you are misinformed. It was our awesome Great Helmsman and Dear Leader who got bin Laden. Popped a cap in his ass personally.
William L. Gensert| 4.30.12 @ 8:21AM
After strangling bin Laden with his bare hands, and singlehandedly ending terror worldwide, and with the tide of war ebbing, Barack Obama has come to the conclusion the nation doesn't need a defense. Besides, no matter how much he spends, or how powerful our armed forces remain or become, he will never get credit, because the heroes of America's military are the men and woman who volunteer to stand on that wall, ever-vigilant, so that demagogues like Barack Obama can be successful, while despising them and the sacrifice they make for their country.
Read more of my article: http://www.americanthinker.com.....z1tWeK9E11
TLP| 4.30.12 @ 8:54AM
I heard that he only needed one hand, to strangle Bin Laden. I heard that he was Firing one of those Rail Guns, with his other hand, thus saving the lives of the Seals, were Frozen with Fear, and unable to help him on this Mission.
I know it's true because every single Respected jounOlist on MSNBC said it was.
That's good enough for me, because I'm not a Racist.
JimH| 4.30.12 @ 8:57AM
I'm not sure anyone is making 'pro war' movies unless they are of the fantasy Call Of Duty type. Act of Valor is however that now rare film which celebrates the courage and commitment of the military.
Seek| 4.30.12 @ 1:43PM
Consider:
"Saving Private Ryan"
"The Thin Red Line"
"Black Hawk Down"
"Windtalkers"
"Hart's War"
"We Were Soldiers"
"Flags of Our Fathers"
"Letter from Iwo Jima"
"The Hurt Locker"
All these major-budget war films were released during the last 15 years. I defy anyone to tell me they were "anti-American."
albert constantine jr.| 4.30.12 @ 6:47PM
While I prefer not to use words like “defy”, I will take a few moments to review your list and see if fault can be found in their treatment of the American fighting man in some sense.
"Saving Private Ryan": Gritty realistic combat, but the theme, plot and dialogue suggest that the only positive aspect of the Second World War was that Private Ryan didn’t get killed (ignoring the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis, etc.).
"The Thin Red Line": Never saw it start to finish, just as I never finished the book when I started it in 1987 (only one of about a half dozen books out of the thousands I’ve started that I never finished).
"Black Hawk Down": One of Saddam Hussein’s favorite films because of the outcome; I saw vastly outnumbered American soldiers fighting bravely and making use of their grit as well as their technology to prevail (only to be let down by their political “leadership”); he likely saw Rangers running from Mogadishu being flipped off by children.
"Windtalkers": having served with the nephews and grandchildren of the Navajo Codetalkers, they would have been surprised to learn that NCOs stood by to kill them to prevent capture and “protect the code”, as apparently that was a dramatic device added to the plot for additional conflict (as if the war in the Pacific didn’t provide enough).
"Hart's War": Hogan’s Heroes meets Lord of the Flies meets The Defiant Ones. My late next door neighbor was a guest of the Germans following his dropping in on them after being shot down as part of a bomber crew. He died before the movie came out, but my interactions with him suggests that he would take exception at the portrayal of some of the enlisted American POWs.
"We Were Soldiers" and "Flags of Our Fathers": I thought both were fine films that bent over backwards not to portray our enemy in the respective conflicts in a negative light.
"Letter from Iwo Jima": This was the battle from the Japanese point of view; in this film we were the bad guys, though I thought it was worth viewing.
"The Hurt Locker": American soldiers portrayed as adrenaline junkies.
This is not to say that most of the films above don’t also show positive aspects of the American fighting man, but my remarks should demonstrate that there is an arguable theme or plot line in many that portrays many as questionable at best. One film that did not make your list is “The Raid”, which I think portrays the historical event well, and could be called pro-military and pro-American.
TexasMom2012| 4.30.12 @ 9:48AM
Well it sounds like at a minimum this film doesn't denigrate the Seals... So at the least it is an improvement from most recent films. Along the lines of TLP stating that O and other Dems use the troops for photo ops; has the O visited wounded troops? I know when the Seals and service dog where killed in the copter crash, O went to see their return but still didn't follow the families express wishes and had his €#^^%%}^~< photo taken as
the flag draped coffins were offloaded. Because it looks like his visits and actions are always about himself and increasingly his reelection. Haven't read of a single time that he reached out to the troops without the former blazingly in evidence.
TexasMom2012| 4.30.12 @ 9:53AM
And as a daughter of a former Navy man (who doesn't consider himself a vet as he was never under fire) I find myself highly offended by the party that uses our troops for photo ops and bragging rights and at the same time does its utmost best to deny active duty troops in harms way their voting rights!
It was the same with Kerry who lied about our troops during the Vietman war and then tried to claim the mantle of honorable service when he ran for President.
Gag!
Mike W| 4.30.12 @ 10:20PM
Actually as a peace time Marine infantryman I am more offended by your father's attitude that he is not a veteran. He can speak for himelf on that one. Perhaps it has something to do with being in the non-Seal Navy.
Evenrude| 4.30.12 @ 2:30PM
Ma'am, I still recall the first time the fake man named "0" as in the integer, not the letter, had a special (something like) midnight trip out to Dover AB to welcome home and salute a casket. Was it about August 2009?
Done in the dark of night.
I guess this provided more cinematic, dramatic effect.
Must not have been a Cool And The Gang concert that night at the White House. Or no poetry readings by convicted rappers.
And the "o" wouldn't have to rise out of bed until after 11 a.m. the next day....
This choreographed to the hilt photo op in Dover for the sitting evil one known as the current president was then splashed across the mediawaves to calm and affirm to the American people that the "0" has a true and beating heart for the troops.
Why is this story not revisited today so that Americans can consider it in light of what we all now know?
What I wanna know bad: Who are the anti American, empty souls who photograph politicians in these cameo moments? Who are these consciousless photographers? Who are the ones who aid and abet the frauds that are there to both lead AND serve us? Maybe the enablers are just as evil as the perpetrator at the top.
Some will do...anything for a buck, eh?
Thank you for posting and for your comments today, Texas Mom.
Kingofthenet| 4.30.12 @ 10:29AM
"Put your pain in a box and lock it down,"...I am pretty sure that is stolen almost verbatim from 'The Hurt Locker'
One if by land...| 4.30.12 @ 11:27AM
No military person would be some dumb as to use ANYTHING from "The Hurt Locker". It is by far the worst Iraq war based movie ever made and a total insult to those of us that served there.
Mike W| 4.30.12 @ 4:09PM
Well said. The Hurt Locker was ridiculous fantasy. It was made for civilians that don't know any better. The lady that made it should have quit with another movie she made, one of the best ever, Point Break.
Petronius| 4.30.12 @ 11:57AM
I have not seen this film yet. The last war movie with more reality than not was Hamburger Hill. We Were Soldiers had its moments. And comparing any to the John Wayne genre which is all tour de force is pointless. There have been odd ducks like Pork Chop Hill too. Maybe the day will come when a grunt soldier who saw action and came under fire writes a screenplay. Maybe then.
The "identity" and "code" components are all too real though. But what matters is really Acceptance and reputation. For these I give you Tora Tora Tora. The Pearl Harbor debacle was the result of those in command having more regard for their colleagues opinions of them than protecting the nation. One didn't dare "throw away the book, " saith Kirk Douglas to John Wayne, In Harms Way.
Today the book is Liberal PC and our real soldiers are being wasted worse than 'Nam under the command of a pack of Wesley Clarks. With the DoD planning to RIF active duty troops out before their enlistments are up to avoid paying them Veterans benefits, we may soon see if they'll fight for the regime in our own streets. But nobody will be acting then.
Richard Baker| 4.30.12 @ 9:15PM
These SEALs are the sort that Orwell mentioned in his quote regarding rough men. "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Understand there is a question as to who said it but the sentiment is absolutely correct.
POST American| 5.1.12 @ 5:28AM
---And when oh when was it precisely
that war films became GQ action modeling.
And, one and all should be raising a
banner of profound remembrance
in this, the AGAIN 'mysteriously
overlooked', awesomely relevant
60th Anniversary of the Globalism,
RED China and EUGENICS 'unfriendly'
----------------KOREAN WAR-----------------.
"KOREA, and NOT the long gone
World Wars, is rapidly emerging
as --the-- definitive conflict of the
20th century, viz a viz the 21st."
-POST American
-----RED China empowerment
-------Mind control
---------Betrayal
-----------'Disappearance'
-----------------EUGENICS 'friendly' GENOCIDE
-------------------and FINAL EUGENICS
HOW much more relevant do we need?
SO, once again, in this, the very 11th hour
of the CFR---RED China handover, takedown,
OCCUPATION and FINAL EUGENICS OP
----------------------WE--------------------------
remember those who served and sacrificed,
and those 5500 Americans STILL missing,
and MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of Koreans
who died, and are dying NOW, in the hideously relevant,
yet unfolding
----------------KOREAN WAR--------------------.
AMEN
FeFe| 5.5.12 @ 4:21AM
... Act of Valor ... identity ... honor ... authentic self ... the few ... repressed feelings ... pain ...
I am hopelessly lost, but in the homefront, right? Mustn't our society at large have the group identity of an "honor culture" too to be worthy of the soldiers so that they are indeed of us? Past and present? Might I recommend The Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain by Richard North:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Many-N.....545&sr=1-1
"Democracy, in its literal sense of "people power" has rarely come our way, and one example I give is in the early stages of the Blitz, where the people of London (some of them) defied their masters and sought shelter from Nazi bombing in the Tube stations, forcing a change in the shelter policy. ...
Such an independent spirit, which occasionally did manifest itself, could not be allowed to survive. Ever since, the establishment has sought to bury this spark of independence, of rebellion - partly by substituting its own legends and distorting the history of the period.
For this reason, we have the technocratic myth of "The Few" coming to the rescue of the many, replacing the fact that "The Many" were forced to engineer their own salvation. The idea that people can be self-reliant, that our rulers are not needed, is not one that the British establishment can permit.
To keep "The Many" in their place, the establishment, then and now, has sought to instil a sense of dependency, projecting the idea of a paternalistic government on which the people must rely, gulling them into a belief that they are without power. ...
What we have lost most of all, though, is the sense of our own power.... When we regain that, we can have our revolution, but when we regain it, we won't need one."
"To restore that history is to change the way we think about ourselves. We are part of a nation which, in time of peril, rallied and by collective endeavor engineered its own salvation... That makes us a different people from the passive, shadowy inhabitants of a myth -- and all the more powerful. What we could do once we can do again."