13 thoughts on “Hollywood’s Omerta On Its Anti-War Stance”
All of the articles I have read about this say Kyle was fighting Iraqis and the most prominent criticism of the movie is that Kyle called the people he was fighting savages.
One the first point, the people Kyle was fighting were not fighting out of nationalistic sentiment regarding Iraq. They were fighting a war of jihad to establish a caliphate. While some of the insurgents were Iraqi, there were also many foreign fighters. The articles never make the distinction of who these people were and what groups they belonged to. They can never bring themselves to say AQ.
The turning point in Iraq came when people were tired of the brutality of the Islamic militants. The Awakening was when Sunni Iraqis turned against AQ and joined us in fighting against them. Together, we pushed them back into Syria, where they stayed mostly dormant until the Arab Spring swelled the ranks of Islamic militant groups.
It is important to remember the brutality that AQ inflicted on Iraqis. It was so bad that Sunni, Shia, and Americans joined together to fight it. It sucks that Obama threw that alliance away but that is beside the point. The same people Kyle was fighting then, AQ and their affiliates, are the same people waging a war of genocide and religious purification in Syria and Iraq today.
I didn’t read the book so I may be wrong but when Kyle used the word savages, he wasn’t referring to all Iraqis but rather to the people we were fighting. The same ones who are beheading, crucifying, and turning people into sex slaves today.
I don’t get how critics of the movie or the war can dissociate the participants of the war from what was going on then and what is going on today. Do they really not understand that the people they thought were Iraqi freedom fighters were really who we now call ISIS?
sucks that Obama threw that alliance away
He didn’t and the US military trained the Iraqi army to be inclusive of everyone in Iraq. The problem is the elected officials of Iraq had different ideas on how to do it.
The situation degraded to a point where, even if the Sunni wanted to fight against ISIS, they are trapped behind enemy lines so they cannot be used as a fighting force anymore.
I disagree. Obama’s disengagement from Iraq was easy to see at the time. He didn’t want troops there and didn’t want any non-military American presence there. He dropped the ball diplomatically. He was not in anyway concerned with the insuring the longevity of Iraqi institutions, government, or the country as a whole. He wanted to wash his hands of Iraq and that is exactly what he did.
Obama didn’t want Iraq to become another Germany, Japan, or South Korea.
Ultimately each country can only be run by its inhabitants, the trick is to set up all the infrastructure, and win over hearts and minds before you abandon it, it’s a trick few conquerors, including the historical colonial powers, get right, it can be a lot easier if the people in the conquered country know they deserved the wiping they got (post ww2 Japan and Germany).
the trick is to set up all the infrastructure, and win over hearts and minds before you abandon it
And I think the complaint here is that Obama didn’t try very hard to follow through on that particular trick.
Maybe a nit, maybe not: Driscoll’s criticisms of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket seems misplaced. For starters, Lee Ermey was allowed to improvise most of his dialogue based on his experiences as a…wait for it…Marine DI during the Vietnam war. And the script was drawn from the experiences of two Vietnam vets, Gustaf Hasford and Michael Herr. I’ve personally spoken to Vietnam-era Marines who said that Kubrick’s movie captured their experiences far better than, say, Apocalypse Now or especially Platoon.
M*A*S*H is another odd diss from Driscoll. And I’m surprised he didn’t call out Catch-22 as well. I just don’t see these movies as being in the same cartoony class as, say, Platoon with Willem Dafoe’s crazed soldier; they seem to be much more, well, complicated than that. Driscoll is of course entitled to his opinion on all of this, but I think it undermines his case to seemingly be tarring all movies that present a complicated view of war.
We don’t use this word “omerta” over here, I read it as meaning “code of silence”, so is all the cheering I’m seeing over American Sniper due to the positive reception and recognition the movie’s getting in Hollywood? Because most of the reviews I’m reading through this site seem to be claiming that other Hollywood movies aren’t so good because they depict some of the baddies as not being psychopaths, and the US troops as not all being saints.
I’ll use Platoon as an example, since it gets a lot of stick from people who complain that Hollywood is too antiwar. The US military was a fkn mess when it was in Vietnam, conscription combined with relatively short tours of duty meant the army was to a huge extent unprofessional, the soldiers weren’t there to do the job, they were there to survive until their tour ended, hence the situation that was depicted in Platoon, a depiction that was all too real.
Platoon was based on Oliver Stone’s own experience as an infantry soldier in Vietnam, drugs were widely used by the soldiers, officers control over their men was often poor, fragging, though not common, was common enough.
Even good guys can get caught up in the heat of battle, and Pappert says he saw it happen. “We swept a lot of villages and searched them,” he remembers, “and there were a lot of men who couldn’t wait to get in there and beat somebody’s head off. The expression on Charlie Sheen’s face in the movie was like my expression the first time we went through a village and I saw the brutalilty of the Americans toward the villagers. But when you experienced the death of your own men, you didn’t give a damn about them anymore; you had no feelings for the Vietnamese.”
Of all the Vietnam films Monte Newcombe has seen, he thinks Platoon is the most realistic. “It showed the waste, corruption, filth, napalm, blood and guts, the destruction and absolute craziness of that war,” he says. “I thought The Deer Hunters was a valuable statement, especially with its Russian roulette metaphor. I just saw The Green Berets again. It was a joke. Platoon is an important film.”
A college dropout and pool hustler from Ada, Okla., Newcombe enlisted in 1967 and, like many of his fellow soldiers, discovered marijuana and opium. “We always knew that relief was only a puff away,” says Newcombe. Although he and Stone were in the same platoon, he doesn’t remember too much about the future filmmaker. “There’s a lot I can’t remember,” says Newcombe, now 40. “There’s a lot I don’t think about.” One thing he does recall is the incredible resolve of the Vietnamese people. “Here we were in their homeland,” says Newcombe, “destroying their lives and villages. I could relate to that. I knew how I would feel if they came to Oklahoma and burned down my house.”
The US military today is a far different organization, far more professional, than it was in Vietnam.
” so is all the cheering I’m seeing over American Sniper due to the positive reception and recognition the movie’s getting in Hollywood? ”
No. The cheering is coming from outside Hollywood from a segment of the population that is typically reviled by Hollywood and leftists in general.
The point being made here is that when Hollywood makes a movie about war, they are always anti-war or anti-USA. I don’t know why the author had to drag up stuff from so long ago when there is a large catalog of movies that have been made since 2000 that support his point better. These movies are always morality tales against our military, Bush, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly all of them box office failures.
American Sniper broke from the orthodox progressive paradigm that has been the norm at least since 2000. It isn’t pro-war and it doesn’t romanticize Kyle’s experiences, far from it, but it did portray Kyle, other soldiers, and the war from a perspective that is radically different from other movies in the genre. This deviation is unacceptable to some people.
1. The Hurt Locker
2. Black Hawk Down
3. We Were Soldiers
4. Inglorious Basterds
5. Jarhead
6. Generation Kill
7. Green Zone
8. Zero Dark Thirty
9. Lone Survivor
Of these 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, didn’t strike me as anti US soldier, 5, I don’t remember well enough, 6 and 7 probably are in your category.
I know this is a pretty short list of recent films, but I don’t see the “they are always anti-war or anti-USA.”
I think it’s hard to make a war movie that’s pro war, and I’d be surprised if American Sniper is.
OK good point. 2,3,8,9 didn’t strike me as especially anti-soldier so it is wrong to say “all” movies but this is a small list.
Watched Generation Kill the other week. It was entertaining, definitely portrayed the military negatively but also tried to show that jocularity does not mean hate. I was amazed by how every episode the mission was a total mess and civilians always getting killed but then somehow the guys were on the other side of Baghdad in such a short period of time. It was a glaring contrast when watched marathon style.
Godfather is in American Sniper too.
I’m pretty sure he was referring to films made about Iraq or Afghanistan, and Lone Survivor was a stand out like American Sniper. There was also a good HBO movie called “Taking Chance”, with Kevin Bacon. But other than that, most of the movies have tried to push a Hollywood leftist political angle of one sort or another.
I haven’t read the book or seen the movie (I did read Kyle’s AMERICAN GUN, which I enjoyed); but I’m already favorably pre-disposed toward AMERICAN SNIPER based on the usual gang of “useful idiots” coming out of the woodwork to attack it. If the anti-liberty crowd is grabbing the pitchforks and lighting the torches, Eastwood must have done something right.
Haven’t seen it yet. John Wayne had a ranch here and the locals talk about his generosity and just being one of the guys. We even have a giant mural of the Duke on the wall of one business and his brand is on the interior wall of a local restaurant along with those of many other local ranchers (any waitress can point out which is his.)
So I expect Sniper will get a favorable response when it gets to our historical one screen theater, El Rio, sometime soon.
All of the articles I have read about this say Kyle was fighting Iraqis and the most prominent criticism of the movie is that Kyle called the people he was fighting savages.
One the first point, the people Kyle was fighting were not fighting out of nationalistic sentiment regarding Iraq. They were fighting a war of jihad to establish a caliphate. While some of the insurgents were Iraqi, there were also many foreign fighters. The articles never make the distinction of who these people were and what groups they belonged to. They can never bring themselves to say AQ.
The turning point in Iraq came when people were tired of the brutality of the Islamic militants. The Awakening was when Sunni Iraqis turned against AQ and joined us in fighting against them. Together, we pushed them back into Syria, where they stayed mostly dormant until the Arab Spring swelled the ranks of Islamic militant groups.
It is important to remember the brutality that AQ inflicted on Iraqis. It was so bad that Sunni, Shia, and Americans joined together to fight it. It sucks that Obama threw that alliance away but that is beside the point. The same people Kyle was fighting then, AQ and their affiliates, are the same people waging a war of genocide and religious purification in Syria and Iraq today.
I didn’t read the book so I may be wrong but when Kyle used the word savages, he wasn’t referring to all Iraqis but rather to the people we were fighting. The same ones who are beheading, crucifying, and turning people into sex slaves today.
I don’t get how critics of the movie or the war can dissociate the participants of the war from what was going on then and what is going on today. Do they really not understand that the people they thought were Iraqi freedom fighters were really who we now call ISIS?
sucks that Obama threw that alliance away
He didn’t and the US military trained the Iraqi army to be inclusive of everyone in Iraq. The problem is the elected officials of Iraq had different ideas on how to do it.
The situation degraded to a point where, even if the Sunni wanted to fight against ISIS, they are trapped behind enemy lines so they cannot be used as a fighting force anymore.
I disagree. Obama’s disengagement from Iraq was easy to see at the time. He didn’t want troops there and didn’t want any non-military American presence there. He dropped the ball diplomatically. He was not in anyway concerned with the insuring the longevity of Iraqi institutions, government, or the country as a whole. He wanted to wash his hands of Iraq and that is exactly what he did.
Obama didn’t want Iraq to become another Germany, Japan, or South Korea.
Ultimately each country can only be run by its inhabitants, the trick is to set up all the infrastructure, and win over hearts and minds before you abandon it, it’s a trick few conquerors, including the historical colonial powers, get right, it can be a lot easier if the people in the conquered country know they deserved the wiping they got (post ww2 Japan and Germany).
the trick is to set up all the infrastructure, and win over hearts and minds before you abandon it
And I think the complaint here is that Obama didn’t try very hard to follow through on that particular trick.
Maybe a nit, maybe not: Driscoll’s criticisms of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket seems misplaced. For starters, Lee Ermey was allowed to improvise most of his dialogue based on his experiences as a…wait for it…Marine DI during the Vietnam war. And the script was drawn from the experiences of two Vietnam vets, Gustaf Hasford and Michael Herr. I’ve personally spoken to Vietnam-era Marines who said that Kubrick’s movie captured their experiences far better than, say, Apocalypse Now or especially Platoon.
M*A*S*H is another odd diss from Driscoll. And I’m surprised he didn’t call out Catch-22 as well. I just don’t see these movies as being in the same cartoony class as, say, Platoon with Willem Dafoe’s crazed soldier; they seem to be much more, well, complicated than that. Driscoll is of course entitled to his opinion on all of this, but I think it undermines his case to seemingly be tarring all movies that present a complicated view of war.
We don’t use this word “omerta” over here, I read it as meaning “code of silence”, so is all the cheering I’m seeing over American Sniper due to the positive reception and recognition the movie’s getting in Hollywood? Because most of the reviews I’m reading through this site seem to be claiming that other Hollywood movies aren’t so good because they depict some of the baddies as not being psychopaths, and the US troops as not all being saints.
I’ll use Platoon as an example, since it gets a lot of stick from people who complain that Hollywood is too antiwar. The US military was a fkn mess when it was in Vietnam, conscription combined with relatively short tours of duty meant the army was to a huge extent unprofessional, the soldiers weren’t there to do the job, they were there to survive until their tour ended, hence the situation that was depicted in Platoon, a depiction that was all too real.
Platoon was based on Oliver Stone’s own experience as an infantry soldier in Vietnam, drugs were widely used by the soldiers, officers control over their men was often poor, fragging, though not common, was common enough.
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20096252,00.html
Even good guys can get caught up in the heat of battle, and Pappert says he saw it happen. “We swept a lot of villages and searched them,” he remembers, “and there were a lot of men who couldn’t wait to get in there and beat somebody’s head off. The expression on Charlie Sheen’s face in the movie was like my expression the first time we went through a village and I saw the brutalilty of the Americans toward the villagers. But when you experienced the death of your own men, you didn’t give a damn about them anymore; you had no feelings for the Vietnamese.”
Of all the Vietnam films Monte Newcombe has seen, he thinks Platoon is the most realistic. “It showed the waste, corruption, filth, napalm, blood and guts, the destruction and absolute craziness of that war,” he says. “I thought The Deer Hunters was a valuable statement, especially with its Russian roulette metaphor. I just saw The Green Berets again. It was a joke. Platoon is an important film.”
A college dropout and pool hustler from Ada, Okla., Newcombe enlisted in 1967 and, like many of his fellow soldiers, discovered marijuana and opium. “We always knew that relief was only a puff away,” says Newcombe. Although he and Stone were in the same platoon, he doesn’t remember too much about the future filmmaker. “There’s a lot I can’t remember,” says Newcombe, now 40. “There’s a lot I don’t think about.” One thing he does recall is the incredible resolve of the Vietnamese people. “Here we were in their homeland,” says Newcombe, “destroying their lives and villages. I could relate to that. I knew how I would feel if they came to Oklahoma and burned down my house.”
The US military today is a far different organization, far more professional, than it was in Vietnam.
” so is all the cheering I’m seeing over American Sniper due to the positive reception and recognition the movie’s getting in Hollywood? ”
No. The cheering is coming from outside Hollywood from a segment of the population that is typically reviled by Hollywood and leftists in general.
The point being made here is that when Hollywood makes a movie about war, they are always anti-war or anti-USA. I don’t know why the author had to drag up stuff from so long ago when there is a large catalog of movies that have been made since 2000 that support his point better. These movies are always morality tales against our military, Bush, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly all of them box office failures.
American Sniper broke from the orthodox progressive paradigm that has been the norm at least since 2000. It isn’t pro-war and it doesn’t romanticize Kyle’s experiences, far from it, but it did portray Kyle, other soldiers, and the war from a perspective that is radically different from other movies in the genre. This deviation is unacceptable to some people.
1. The Hurt Locker
2. Black Hawk Down
3. We Were Soldiers
4. Inglorious Basterds
5. Jarhead
6. Generation Kill
7. Green Zone
8. Zero Dark Thirty
9. Lone Survivor
Of these 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, didn’t strike me as anti US soldier, 5, I don’t remember well enough, 6 and 7 probably are in your category.
I know this is a pretty short list of recent films, but I don’t see the “they are always anti-war or anti-USA.”
I think it’s hard to make a war movie that’s pro war, and I’d be surprised if American Sniper is.
OK good point. 2,3,8,9 didn’t strike me as especially anti-soldier so it is wrong to say “all” movies but this is a small list.
Watched Generation Kill the other week. It was entertaining, definitely portrayed the military negatively but also tried to show that jocularity does not mean hate. I was amazed by how every episode the mission was a total mess and civilians always getting killed but then somehow the guys were on the other side of Baghdad in such a short period of time. It was a glaring contrast when watched marathon style.
Godfather is in American Sniper too.
I’m pretty sure he was referring to films made about Iraq or Afghanistan, and Lone Survivor was a stand out like American Sniper. There was also a good HBO movie called “Taking Chance”, with Kevin Bacon. But other than that, most of the movies have tried to push a Hollywood leftist political angle of one sort or another.
I haven’t read the book or seen the movie (I did read Kyle’s AMERICAN GUN, which I enjoyed); but I’m already favorably pre-disposed toward AMERICAN SNIPER based on the usual gang of “useful idiots” coming out of the woodwork to attack it. If the anti-liberty crowd is grabbing the pitchforks and lighting the torches, Eastwood must have done something right.
Haven’t seen it yet. John Wayne had a ranch here and the locals talk about his generosity and just being one of the guys. We even have a giant mural of the Duke on the wall of one business and his brand is on the interior wall of a local restaurant along with those of many other local ranchers (any waitress can point out which is his.)
So I expect Sniper will get a favorable response when it gets to our historical one screen theater, El Rio, sometime soon.