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.
