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This year’s list of Oscar nominations features three films centered on wars. Christopher Nolan’s urban classic Dunkirk , The Darkest Hour chronicling Winston Churchill’s most difficult years and Mudbound by Dee Rees, a story of two soldiers whose racial fault line blurs through the experience of fighting in the same war. Apart from this, the Vietnam War has a large role to play in shaping Steven Spielberg’s The Post and The Shape Of Water finds its context in the Cold War.
As an overview, America’s fascination with wars becomes a key feature in films considered worthy of accolades and awards. In effect, the event films that make all the money these days — be it the Avengers franchise, or Wonder Woman — also wage wars set in quasi historical backgrounds or with futuristic enemies.
The experience of battle, death and loss runs prominently through the American psyche and Western identity. Which is why Hollywood films and TV often anchor their stories around these wars, to capture a sense of history in the making, and also to focus on identity-defining conflicts that dominated the West for most of the 20 century.
This legacy of fighting ‘just wars’, always a debatable term, has been a feature in the U.S. During the JFK presidency, when the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought brinkmanship to the point of an actual nuclear war looming with the USSR, the Cold War flexed its muscle, brandishing its potential capacity to destroy the entire world and make innocent colonies and emerging nations collateral damage. Yet, warning signs ignored, this escalated to consume lives of young soldiers and expensive resources in the form of weaponry and intelligence-gathering for both the U.S. and the USSR well into the ‘80s.
The Vietnam war, which has developed into a sub-genre of storytelling on film, TV and literature, epitomises the craziness of it all — an unwinnable all-consuming war fought on a faraway foreign land, killing thousands of young American soldiers who were compelled to conscript. Similarly, the Afghan war of the ‘80s sowed the seeds for Osama Bin Laden, the ongoing AfPak crisis and the Afghan Conflict during the Junior Bush presidency.
When it comes to its foreign policy, American reality has remained relatively unaltered for decades. As presidents change and parties shuffle power among one another, the continuous conflict has been a permanent feature of the nation’s modus operandi. While President Dwight David Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex that fuels and sustains war might appear dated today, it does seem to serve as the backbone to American exceptionalism and aggressive resort-to-force tactics to impose U.S. foreign policy. Titled the ‘Global War on Terror’, America and its allies, often Great Britain, actively participate in ‘crisis resolution’ and ‘tackling terrorism with war’.
Which is why these stories resonate widely with audiences in America. An Oscar nod guarantees that a film, however small or niche, will find larger number of viewers and screens. Mudbound , with its story of shared experiences of battle, is bound to speak to numerous veterans of American wars on foreign shores. Often, the mainstream U.S. media doesn’t report on regular skirmishes, but young American men and women continue to lose lives or limbs in seemingly random wars. Similarly, the attempt to muzzle the press during the Vietnam War resembles the hostile attitude that the current White House under Donald Trump has towards the media.
Dunkirk has found acclaim worldwide for its unique cinematic treatment. Further, it has won respect for its honest comment on this particular battle as being a huge strategic mistake by the Allies. The Darkest Hour , of course, celebrates the past glory of a Western world grappling with economic slowdowns, cultural clashes and a crisis in leadership. Apart from these, this year had the poignant First They Killed My Father , by Angelina Jolie on Netflix, a film about an inhuman Cambodian Communist regime. American TV’s biggest winner, Homeland , narrates the story of an dynamic CIA in sync with the times. And that’s just one that I name.
War defines the politics and cultural identities of the American people, as does the Second World War in Western Europe, where a new form of history emerges after its bloody conclusion. Fiction and entertainment, therefore, find a safe audience for content based on these themes. It’s an experience that is remembered, lived and recalled over time in these geographies.
