lumière des étoiles

War Movies
2004-03-16 12:22 p.m.

And speaking of Apocalypse Now, I seem to have a somewhat subconscious yet very present obsession with the film this semester. Why? Dunno - should it creep me out?

Truly a work of cinematic genius, everything in it just "fits", from the score (and use of The Doors "The End") to choosing Robert Duval for a role that was supposed to go to someone else to keeping in that footage of Dennis Hopper not reading the lines from the script but just babbling since he was so high during the shoot. Logically, a good film to show to students. Literary, psychological, deemed "important" by the cannon, the movie works well with the other course texts - it's been easy to generate assignments using the film in conjunction with other texts, and easy to illustrate the objectives of the class that deal with literary construction and thematic connections. But I showed it over a month ago. Why can't I get off it?

Why can't we?

I was surprised to hear that many of my students had never seen it before. I was surprised to hear that after I'd shown it, many of my students watched it on their own. Sometimes three times. Are they so concerned with the course work? I'd like to think so. But thinking that's the sole reason would be naive. They've become engrossed in the film as well, and can't seem to stop thinking about it, talking about it, wondering about it out loud.

Existing a bit beneath our radar, I think, is this fear and this confusion, this "unnatural" combat-zone-esque mode of operations. Why? I don't know. Maybe terrorism, maybe "war-time", which we were technically in for a while there (right?). The protests, media coverage, election-time debates and courses like these do a bit to eviscerate those feelings and force us to consider them, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us.

I think there are odd parallels between now and the Viet Nam era. I thought that last year, and then I dismissed it, thinking that I'm just romanticizing a time of such sincere protest. But still that notion lingers within me, and my students' behavior only reinforces those feelings within me.

I'm angry, so are they. I don't like being lied to. I don't understand where all the media coverage went, or why we can't see anything on the evening news. I don't understand how a president could go on TV and say we've been "well received" in Iraq when every day - EVERY DAY! - I hear about another group of people who have died; their caravan attacked, their helicopter shot down, their camp ambushed.

It's not as extreme, maybe. But can I really say that? I wasn't alive then, didn't know what was on everyone's mind during the conflict in Viet Nam. I see my students' questions now, though, whether they ask them or not. I can't help thinking they might bear resemblance to the same questions of those who sat in their very classrooms forty years before: What is War? Why are we fighting it? What happens when you have to kill, since you've been told killing is wrong all your life? What happens when you feel responsible for the death of someone? What happens when I don't understand why I'm here? What happens when I ask 'Why am I here' and I'm told that's "dangerous thinking"?

For me it comes more in a form of my own protest and wondering what it all means. I have and had certain ideas about the war, I had a bumper sticker in my window that said "Drop Bush, Not Bombs". I knew how I felt, but was maybe too scared or sad to articulate it all. I felt like I knew things that a lot of people weren't thinking about, I didn't understand how anyone could still support this administration after knowing what we now know; I didn't understand how our decision to go to war was "fine" when the rest of the world, save a few countries, were opposed to our decision. I felt foolish when I found out France and Germany may have opposed our move toward war because of their oil connections with Iraq, not because of their humanitarianism or interest in other methods of resolution. I felt angry when I realized I'm hardly ever told the truth, being that I'm an "average citizen" and my government seems to assume that I must not be very bright.

I read, for the first time, a couple of rhetorically sound and rather famous anti-war pieces from the mid to late sixties. I looked them over briefly before the semester started to determine whether or not they'd be useful, but didn't read them closely or put them into context until I assigned my class to do the same. What emerges from Lady Borton's "Wars Past, Wars Present", Lawrence LeShan's "Why We Love War", and Dr. King's "The Importance of Viet Nam" strikes quite a chord in me, and gives shape to my own feelings. What was incommunicable to me before becomes easier to express now. It isn't so much me being able to recite someone else's thoughts or just latching onto others' arguments because they worked for them, either - reading through the pieces has helped me sort through much of what I'm feeling. While I'm just as angry or sad as I ever was, I feel empowered by my "research", no matter how accidental it might have been.

I'm not sure how conscious my decision was to cover all this material in my classes. This being spring break, a time when I look back at the first half of the semester and see how things have been working out, I realized we'd spent way more time than I anticipated. We'd talked most of last class, for example, about all the reported suicides of American Troops in Iraq, wondering if we could tie any of those emotional descents into those depicted in Apocalypse Now or the Tim O'Brien stories we've read. But that's OK. I can't help thinking that's a little more important and relevant right now than us getting to that section on imagery in Guy DeMaupassant's short stories.

O'Brien called Viet Nam "that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure". It's scary how much that seems to be an accurate description of now, both here, in our own country, and abroad, in the middle east and Iraq. We're frightened to death, but we feel good bringing down a dangerous, malevolent dictator. Or do we feel frightened and good about other things too? Seems we can't figure it out, seems we don't much have the words to explain what's going on in our heads. Perhaps we, myself and my class, are working out these issues via things we can "study". Will we feel better?

That I really don't know. I can only hope this will turn from present reality to fading memory soon.

xoxox