Amid US-Israel war against Iran, a look at Hollywood and its Top Gun complex

Now that the US is engaged in an unprecedented no-holds-barred military action against Iran, how Hollywood has represented such post-WWII engagements in cinema becomes a matter of interest. There is opposition from American liberals to the present war and since Hollywood virtually represents the liberal heart of America, how American liberals might respond to their country sending older civilisations back to the stone-age with its massive fire power could become revealing. The Democrats are apparently opposed to this war not on moral grounds but because it is ‘unconstitutional’, which hardly matches indignant public opinion outside. 

The first two important wars after WWII whose Hollywood representations demand scrutiny are Korea and Vietnam. The most important film dealing with Korea may have been Robert Altman’s satirical ‘M*A*S*H’ (1970). It shows violence and blood but on the operating table — the protagonists are three surgeons posted at the front. Altman was a great satirist but it is perplexing that there is not even a mention of the enemy North Korea, and the action is all on the American side as though the enemy were of little consequence. The film ends not with the conclusion of the war but the three transferred out! This will give the reader some sense of how Americans feel about those they are fighting against — as not even worthy of acknowledging.

Vietnam, nominally an insignificant enemy, humbled the US but there were a number of subsequent films like Oliver Stone’s ‘Platoon’ (1986), Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979) and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987) that re-examined US involvement. There is some soul searching in them but the emphasis, as may be expected, is on what the experience of war did to innocent American boys. The first part of Kubrick’s film dealing with training in the US (Parris Island) where these boys are taught to become killers is actually more telling than the second part set in Vietnam. At the climax of ‘Full Metal Jacket’, a platoon of Marines is matched against a single teenage Viet Cong girl sniper who, when wounded and captured, the boys decide to leave to the rats, until the protagonist intervenes and shoots her dead — as a final act of mercy.

A cliché constantly propagated by liberal Hollywood is that all lives are equal and that (following John Donne) any man’s death diminishes oneself. Searching for evidence of belief in this maxim, Ridley Scott’s ‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001) is about American soldiers in Somalia fighting local insurgents. But there is asymmetry in this film in the way the deaths are actually treated. Black Africans are mowed down in enormous numbers and all together — as if they all belonged to a homogeneous mass that could be restocked at will — but the death of each American soldier is scrupulously mourned, and the dying soldier’s dignity is never compromised. 

There is clearly a fetish around the white body, a tacit understanding that it should not be violated or mutilated. French director Bruno Dumont’s film ‘Flanders’ (2006), about French farmhands recruited to fight a war in an unnamed Muslim country, deliberately subverted the convention by showing a rapist castrated and an incendiary bomb reducing white soldiers to charcoal. 

The first Iraq war of 1990-91 brought actual war into the field of entertainment when CNN telecast the happenings on a day-to-day basis. Still, it did not leave a mark on cinema because the war was so one-sided. The second Iraq War however left its mark in films like Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008), where the ground reality has to be contended with by ordinary soldiers. 

But with its massive fire power enough to reduce the landscape to rubble, the US has not done so well in military engagements after WWII. If Iraq was too confusing, the war in Afghanistan left the US looking sheepish. The US had already armed the Taliban against the Soviets and the USSR never recovered from Afghanistan. The US did not learn from this; after much fanfare about ‘taking out’ Osama Bin Laden holed up in the Tora Bora Mountains, its efforts against a primitive enemy finally came to naught and many Afghans on America’s side against the Taliban were eventually left behind to brutal fates by Joe Biden. Since war had become embarrassing Hollywood looked inward at the effects of war upon America itself. 

But what Iraq and Afghanistan have done to Hollywood is to make the term PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) familiar and created a new genre where a veteran from Iraq or Afghanistan finds himself hopeless in civilian life, as in Clint Eastwood’s ‘American Sniper’ (2014). Such military engagements as well as PTSD are now the staple of TV shows and an interesting recent one is ‘The Day of the Jackal’ (2024). This series about a professional assassin is adapted from Frederick Forsyth’s novel. The protagonist is a British sniper from Afghanistan who takes up private assignments when on furlough from the battlefield, killing business rivals for his Turkish employer, and then establishing himself as a full-time professional.   

The latest thing in military engagements today is what is termed the ‘decapitation’ which is to assassinate the leader of the enemy country and kill every one of his replacements as well. How this will work out with Iran is uncertain since to back off now would be humiliation for a country with an ancient culture and civilisation. But Hollywood’s military imagination may be fired by the idea of taking out (in President Trump’s terms) ‘evil people’ so effectively.     

(The author is a well-known film critic)