“Blood must flow for the ancient ones to enthrone their chosen kings / Chaos reigns and masquerades as lord of mortal beings / The corrupted faith of those before has damned us to their dreams / Of subjugation to the will of insane, evil things.” - Steel Bearing Hand
Fuck war, all my homies hate war. But we sure do love the spoils, and the spectacle. Anyone who spent the past week being gutted and shamed by Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes should have at least a basic awareness of how “Western civilization” has floated to the the top of the cultural corpse pile on a rising ocean of blood, which sounds cool but definitely sucks. Peck’s hybrid docuseries (starring a remarkably game Josh Hartnett in the roles of pretty much every shitty white guy throughout history) is a devastating dissection and refutation of our much espoused and entirely empty values of enlightenment, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with a Rage Against the Machine shirt and a library card. History has always been written by the winners, of course, but the facts have never changed and they’ve always been floating around out there for anyone curious enough to seek them and willing to sacrifice the comforts of a coddling myth. Even though our culture has traditionally pushed the narratives and ideas of privileged white historians and intellectuals, there are avenues within the primary dialogue, such as it is, that can lead to a more inclusive and accurate understanding. Research is key, and every life decision should include at least a little. If you’re thinking about moving to Los Angeles and are looking for some context, you don’t have to settle for Joan Didion; you can read Mike Davis!
Personal literary preferences aside, the spoils of war are the story of America. This isn’t limited to just the obvious examples of the Revolutionary War, the genocide of Native Americans, the Civil War (and its central cause, the war over slavery, which has never ended but instead been morphed into our ludicrous incarceration rates at privatized for-profit prisons, the racist War on Drugs and an endless assault on voting rights), WW2, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the hilariously monikered War on Terror. Those have all been fucked up in their own special way, and the propaganda that surrounded each of them has been so deeply woven into the DNA of our nation that there can actually be a significant degree of hesitancy to an open declaration of being anti-war. “What about World War 2?” asks your aunt’s second husband who carries a gun because he’s a mall cop and has no inkling of awareness that the Nazis were not an outlying aberration of the supposedly enlightened civilized world, but rather a garishly exuberant example of its founding principles, an embarrassment to the Western world not because of their evil, which is undeniable, but because they nearly shattered the entire facade by saying the quiet part extremely loud. We self-righteously pat ourselves on the back for that one, but we don’t talk about how Hitler’s inspiration for the eradication of the Jews was modeled on our own destruction of the Native American societies that existed and thrived here before the White God authorized us to wipe them out. And how much did you learn about Hiroshima in school? Did you get more than a few paragraphs?
But the more insidious spoils of war hide within the daily comforts that we all take for granted. I went to the anti-war marches and wore the “No Blood for Oil” pins after 9/11, but I’m still pumping that gas to drive to the beach. I claim outrage over the intentional destabilization and anti-labor death squad funding throughout South and Central America by the United States and its corporate overlords, but you know I’m tossing a Chiquita banana into today’s smoothie. Hell yeah I’m against forced labor and child mining! Let me just charge up my smartphone battery so I can google how to help. The cognitive dissonance necessary to keep a sanctimonious culture oblivious to its own consumer-friendly contribution to worldwide suffering requires a propaganda machine of staggering power and reach. Luckily, we’ve got Hollywood. François Truffaut once said “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film” and for the most part he’s right. Even the most gruesome and intensely staged battle scenes will inevitably produce some adrenaline-fueled visceral reaction, a kind of thrill that renders any moralistic notion ultimately powerless. The audience is in no real danger, and our vicarious involvement in war is never more than an entertainment that we can tell ourselves has taught us something. At best, these thrills remind us that “war is hell” for those who fight in them, for our unacknowledged collective convenience. At worst, we are further indoctrinated into the false purity of patriotism and a fawning appreciation for war-forged camaraderie, whatever the fuck that means. As though accomplices to murder render the crime both necessary and forgiven.
Even a film as ostensibly anti-war as Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) is damned by design. While nowhere near as culpable as the hand-wringing jingoism and odes to “sacrifice” paraded throughout the slog of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan from the same year, Malick’s film nevertheless bears the guilt of containing genuine thrills and inappropriately gorgeous cinematography; war as travelogue. An ensemble cast cannot do justice to the conglomeration of doomed souls fed to the grinder in any armed conflict, and Jim Caviezel’s angelic Private Witt—the gentle pacifist so reluctantly embroiled in battle and Christlike in his healing words and actions—is a person that does not ever exist. The well-known saying claims that there are no atheists in foxholes, but an indisputable and less comforting reality is that there are no heroes in the killing fields. There are only those who die and those who do not; everyone kills, whether by action or inaction. Perhaps Bob Clark’s Deathdream (1974) does some justice to the cognitive dissonance of the American relationship to its violence overseas, but Clark knew that an actual war film could never really deliver the message. So he hides his ideas in a horror film about a vampiric Vietnam veteran delivered from the dead by his mother’s patriotic prayers, and the inevitable disintegration of the family that is both symptom and cause of that pointless adventure.
But is it possible that an actual war film—battle scenes and all—can generate the required revulsion to reframe our understanding of what war really is? Can we possibly experience that hell in a convincing enough way? Personally, I can think of two very effective examples. Fair warning: these are not necessarily films that I’m recommending you watch, you cowards. Both are exemplary in their effort to de-romanticize the aura of war, but neither are entertaining in a way that most audiences seek. This is the point.
FLANDERS (2006) dir. Bruno Dumont
My father served in Vietnam. He was drafted. He didn’t want to go, but as one of five kids from a rural farming family his options were limited. After spending his teenage years ingesting speed, stealing cars, racing them and crashing them (my dad was bad!), a stint in the military and the possibility of an education that it claimed to offer probably seemed about as good as a few years in jail. He also idolized John Wayne as a child, just as he was trained to do, so vaguely defined “patriotism” wasn’t a totally alien concept to him. Plus he had no friends or connections in the draft-dodging pipeline, and conscientious objectors didn’t openly exist in Craig County back then. Relatively lucky, he served his time as a cook and claims to have never killed anyone “as far as I know.” But he knew a lot of people who died, and he put in time amongst the corpses. He still doesn’t really talk about it. The irony of all wars, imperialistic or otherwise (joking; they are all imperialistic) is that the price of blood is always paid by the poor and working classes, those least entitled to the ill-gained spoils.
Bruno Dumont understands this. A philosopher by nature and briefly by trade, his work leans heavily into the esoteric and is seemingly presented without any obvious intrinsic judgements. His films, particularly the earlier ones, consist of unadorned depictions of the natural world, performances devoid of affect delivered primarily by non-actors, sparse dialogue, an unsentimental observation of human suffering, jarring moments of mundanely presented violence and the occasional sliver of supernatural possibilities. All of these are the elements of war as it legitimately exists. There are no sweeping proclamations of intent or visually transcendent moments of triumph here; it’s all just the repetitive drudgery of uneducated rural existence and its eventual transposition into a foreign realm, the unacknowledged and untreated psychological traumas of a hardscrabble existence worked out in extremis by the xenophobic brutalization of unknown/unknowable enemies, as designated by the powers that be. The characters in Flanders are simple, stubbornly stoic and wholly unprepared for the responsibilities of war that they so unemotionally volunteer themselves into. Protagonist Demester is an inexpressive cipher who works at menial farm tasks, wanders the muddy streets and occasionally engages in brief and mechanical copulation with lifelong friend Barbe. One night while they are quietly drinking beers in the pub, Barbe flirts with and fucks new-guy-in-town Blondel, but there is no conflict in this. Dumont denies us the dramatic pleasures of the standard love triangle narrative, as each of his characters are wholly free to pursue their own whims. It’s just that for the most part they don’t seem to have any.
Demester, Blondel and their companion Mordac eventually make their way to an undefined conflict somewhere in the Middle East (as filmed in Tunisia). They volunteer for the war with the same lack of emotion or concern that dictates every other element of their lives. There are no heroic or even patriotic notions, only the shrug of indifference to such an extreme experience. Demester and Blondel never have the confrontation over Barbe that Hollywood would frame the entire film around, and there are no moments of redemption. Rather, the casual barbarism embodied by any occupying force is rendered unremarkably corporeal in our three farmboys and their fellow soldiers. The expected atrocities of war all play out, but there is nothing cinematic about any of it. Shots and framing are basic to the point of inconsequentiality, there is never any tangible sense of what the mission might be, and the unit never congeals around any shared sense of duty. With no guidance or consequences to speak of, the soldiers engage in offhanded acts of cruelty. Nearly everyone they encounter is unarmed, yet they harass, torment and eventually kill them anyway. The discovery that they’re being fired upon by child soldiers pushes some of them close to madness, but no mercy is shown. The outrage is perfunctory and is never met with the counterassault of humanism that Spielberg would have emphasized. A local woman is gang-raped without comment or objection from anyone; our soldiers partake with the bemused enthusiasm of kicking around a soccer ball.
At home, Barbe is unravelling due to a diagnosed but never defined mental illness, and it is vaguely posited that she may be telepathic. Supernatural abilities regularly occur in Dumont’s films, but they never seem to make much of a difference. She has become pregnant, but the baby will never be born. Meanwhile in the war zone, the one soldier who did not participate in the rape but did nothing to stop it is unceremoniously castrated and shot, screaming “I didn’t do anything!” as both his desperate defense and unintentional mea culpa. Demester alone will survive through dumb luck and a callous sense of self-preservation; he saves no one and sacrifices only his supposed dimwitted innocence. He will murder unarmed villagers to make his way home to Barbe, whom he will unenthusiastically lay with again and mutter hollow confessions of love. An occupied land has been ravaged by their aggressive indifference, but their lives will uneventfully go on. Mediocrity perpetuated by violence, the self-preservation of Western exceptionalism. Now, as the United States prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan—the longest-running war of its imperialistic history—it’s difficult to imagine the lifetimes of torment that we have inflicted onto a land that we never came close to understanding, because we never really cared to. In the two decades that it took to destroy an entire part of the world, I have lived in four different American cities, complaining about gas prices and internet speeds in all of them. Mission accomplished?
COME AND SEE (1985) dir. Elem Klimov
I was lucky(?) enough to see the new restoration of Elem Klimov’s mega-bummer masterpiece at a theater in Hollywood just a few short weeks before everything was shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I had seen the film once before, but witnessing its litany of horrors on a massive screen in a room full of people who had mostly never seen it was a ritual of voluntary collective trauma that further solidified its reputation as perhaps the most effective and affecting anti-war film ever made. Judging by the near total silence of the sold-out show’s audience as we were leaving the theater when the film ended, it certainly succeeded in ruining everybody’s weekend. My two friends and I made our way to the nearest dive bar to drown our shared induced misery and try to reignite the spark of dumb jokes and excited conversation that we had been basking in before having it all obliterated by the movie that I had enthusiastically suggested we see. But this is an impossible film to shake off with anything as pedestrian as booze, and it tends to change people who view it in ways they may not realize or understand for years to come. Maybe that’s the mark of a truly great film. I can say that having seen Come and See only four times in its entirety, I would rank it as one of my top five favorite films and I still recommend it to people who I know will end up hating me for doing so, should they choose to take that plunge.
Co-written by Belarusian writer and critic Ales Adamovich and coming into existence after nearly a decade of struggle against the Soviet censors, Klimov’s film concerns the occupation of Belarus by the Nazis and their razing of 628 villages (and all of their inhabitants) throughout the country. We are introduced to the young Flyora as he digs through the sand of a battle zone, searching for a rifle that he can use to join up with the Partisans and engage the approaching German army. His enthusiasm for war is born of ignorance, and the stark landscape, rigid academy framing and incessant low drone of the soundtrack sets the stage for the epic tragedy to come. Flyora rushes through a goodbye to his devastated mother and two twin sisters as Soviet troops lead him off to his destiny. He will never see them again (although we, unfortunately, will). What follows is a descent into the insanity of war that radiates with such genuine horror and unceasing attention to the surreal details of systematic genocide that it’s nearly impossible to describe with words. Klimov’s camera hovers at the very edges of a reality that he never quite allows us to look away from, but the morose truths revealed threaten to shatter the very fabric of reality itself. A gallery of exploding woodlands, charred but living victims, the psychedelic streams of tracer bullets ripping through pastoral landscapes and the perpetual haunting hum of a single Focke-Wulf Fw 189 aircraft (the German army’s “Flying Eye”) hovering overhead, Flyora’s journey through the occupied countryside is tantamount to a wide-eyed and shell-shocked spiral into Hell. Actor Aleksey Kravchenko was fifteen years old at the time of this portrayal, and the gaping mental war-wounds on the kid’s face by the film’s conclusion are so genuine and real that it’s a miracle he made it to adulthood.
There are no real moments of respite throughout, despite a brief interlude in the anti-sanctuary of a temporary Eden sheathed in mosquitos, where Flyora and his older female companion Glasha (the equally dedicated and impressive Olga Mironova, who would never appear in another film) bask in the rain and their final moments of untainted youth. The ordeals that we witness them suffering are soaked in an oppressive dread that strangles all hope from the film; the colors are muted but still vibrant in their anguish, the landscapes irreversibly scarred by traumas both physical and psychological, the Steadicam gliding through the nightmare like the dispassionately observant eye of some bird, oblivious to the ideological insanities of humankind that could claim to justify such abject inhumanity. In one of the film’s pinnacle moments, Flyora and Glasha struggle through a thick swampy bog to reach an island where they hope to find survivors of the Nazis’ systemic annihilation. The muck is nearly impossible to traverse, and we relate to that suffocating encroachment of mire; the film itself is an impossible bog. We emerge from it soaked to the bone, the miasma of unforgettable atrocity hovering in our minds. This is not the nauseating shock resultant from the periodic bursts of carnage in Dumont’s film; Klimov drags us into the depths slowly, perpetually, guiding us by the hand and cajoling us to keep our eyes open to those enormous injustices of history that we’d rather forget. “Come and see” the film demands, and we oblige.
The climax of all this squalor is difficult viewing for even the most hardened filmgoer. An orgy of suffering made all the more harrowing by the confidence and ecstatic drunken joy with which it is carried out, topped only by Klimov’s final assault: actual footage from the extermination camps to remind us that despite the severity of what he’s shown us, the reality was much worse. To watch the film today and realize that there are people all over the world who still believe in the Nazi cause, who still celebrate such wanton acts of depravity and bloodshed, is to struggle with losing all hope for humankind. That sounds like an extreme reaction to a film, but let me say again: there are STILL Nazis. New ones everyday! But as anyone who spent some of their quality lockdown time finally getting around to watching Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (also from 1985) can attest, perhaps the more unsettling crime of history is that of those who saw what was happening, who knew what was coming, and did nothing to stop it. Reluctant to give up our own comfortable lifestyles, we still choose the convenience of ignorance to the slow-motion processes of genocide all around us, all over the world. Despite the barbarism on display, one of the most disquieting images in Come and See is that of a woman sitting unconcerned in the cab of a Nazi military vehicle, greedily slurping down some gourmet delights while an entire village is burned alive. Spoiler alert: that’s us, ya’ll.
German death metal stormtroopers Minenfeld have crafted an entire oeuvre of anti-nationalistic concept albums about the first World War. Although this particular album doesn’t quite meet the task of making war seem devoid of thrills (because it fucking stomps and gets me PUMPED), the combination of propaganda tunes from the period with relentlessly pummeling modern metal that also channels the disgust of the much-missed His Hero is Gone absolutely rules. They are the War Horse of Bolt Thrower acolytes.