The 5-Year Lapse: Hollywood and the Iraq War

It is often said that Hollywood is five years behind the times. That is, whatever happens today will be explored in a film five years from now. While this has much to do with the long development cycle that a movie (especially a big-budget movie) requires, it speaks more to the desire to avoid turmoil. Controversy can certainly bring a movie into the spotlight, it can also cripple a movie's chances of doing well. Last weekend, MTV films' Stop-Loss (right) opened in theaters nationwide. It garnered generally positive reviews, but nevertheless did poorly on its opening weekend. As of this weekend, the movie is in a limited amount of theaters - a search for the movie in downtown Los Angeles this weekend shows only four theaters playing Stop-Loss, as opposed to the 7-10 theaters for movies like The Ruins. When it comes to Iraq, it seems, the five years since the invasion isn't enough time at all.

But is this necessarily unexpected? For years after the 9/11 tragedy, movies shied away from the event - even video games had to remove any mention of the towers. The rationale was that the subject was just too sensitive. Similarly, as soldiers are dying in a war zone there may not be much of an audience wanting to watch them die onscreen. In a broader sense, war movies are often an incredible litmus test when it comes to public perception of a war. Before American involvement in World War II, Isolationism was policy, so when Warner Bros. put out films decrying the Nazi's Anti-Semitism, they had to testify before congress. Once Americans started fighting the war, films tended to be standard escapist fare, or rabble-rousing propaganda films. However, It was only after the war that classics like Tora! Tora! Tora! and Bridge on the River Kwai, films that imagined battles through Hollywood eyes, came to be - and many were made quite a few years after the war itself. Once the threat of the enemy to American soil and American sons was no longer tangible Hollywood started to comment on the social changes and situations that had happened due to the war, such as women in the workplace.

Though not all may believe it, however, the Iraq War is quite different from World War II. Its biggest difference is in public opinion -- most citizens recognized the need for action after Pearl Harbor, but even before that, there was growing resentment against the Nazi war machine. The public opinion during this war is more similar to the one during the Viet Nam war. In that era, there were two staunchly opposite sides - the youth and "hippie" movements against the war, and the "silent majority" that supported the war as a fight to Communism. This divisive split was the battleground from which movie makers could draw their revenue.

The path of Viet Nam movies, therefore, can serve as a guide to the very similarly sculpted landscape of the current populace. Few can deny that great and piercing films were made about the Viet Nam war. In fact, most of the Iraq-themed movies are born out of attempts to capture the feeling of films such as Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July. However, the first successful Vietnam film was not known for its artistic purpose. It was The Green Berets (left), which came out nearly ten years after the conflict had started. Even at this point, the only movie that had any success was a brawny action movie that celebrated a conservative, anti-communist, pro-military stance. In fact, the first fifteen minutes of the film shows a group of Green Berets fending off a liberal news media, arguing many of the points that this "silent majority" wanted to hear. When a housewife asks why she never heard many of the soldier's accounts in the newspapers, he replies, "Well, that's newspapers for you, ma'am. You can fill volumes with what you don't read in them."At one point, the prodding of an anti-war journalist prompts a soldier to point out the weapons they captured from the Viet Cong, and he notes that the weapons are made by Chinese communists, Russian communists, and Czech communists. It seems obvious to him, he says, that this is a communist takeover of the world.

Why did this film do so well in the box office? It came out in 1968, America's most tumultuous year. Amidst all the shouts of the hippie movement and the political protests, conservative Americans wanted something that affirmed their view of the war. John Wayne and his Green Berets provided just that. Looking at comments being made today in regards to Stop-Loss, it is obvious that the the situation still stands. One commentor wrote that "The reason no Iraq war movie has done well is because they have all been anti-American themed, with the exception of The Kingdom (which tried to be somewhat neutral)." While this is quite far from true (The Kingdom seemed rooted in the same soil as 24, while Stop-Loss is strongly sympathetic to the American Soldier). Drowning in protests against the war and in media that sings to the choirs of those against the war, the conservatives that believe in the war are aching to see an obviously pro-soldier, pro-military stance. In fact, that is likely a large part of why The Kingdom did so well in the box office. If the Battle of Fallujah, for instance, were to be turned into a movie like, say, Black Hawk Down, with soldiers "just fighting for the man next to him," it would tap straight into that frustrated conservative audience.

But the key here is not to look at time lapses, or key points in the war. The most important thing to note is public opinion. In many ways, the current opinion on the war is divided just as it was back in 2003. The left still claims that this is an unwanted, unjust and illegal war, and the right still claim that it is a war for freedom, and an essential leg of the War on Terror - basically, the same rhetoric that was tossed around when Michael Moore lambasted President Bush in his acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine. The majority of the Iraq war movies being presented today (such as In the Valley of Elah or Redacted) preach to a certain demographic that already knows this to be the truth. Young filmmakers, who grew up with the mythos presented by films such as Platoon, probably wanted to make films in the same vein. But in this case, five years is certainly too soon.

So what has to change for this sort of atmosphere to shift? First of all, the war needs to end, one way or another. Once that happens, and American men and women are not in danger, audiences will be more responsive to seeing these images on film. But what is needed most is time. The safest time for a critical look at the war would be years after the effects of the war on the international political scene are played out. World Trade Center capitalized on this - the two largest audiences for the film were conservatives and teenagers. The conservative angle is obvious, but the teens are a little more elusive. The reason? Those who were teens at the time of the film were too young to understand the situation in 2001. Thus, they went to see World Trade Center to tap into the feeling that they missed. Eight or nine years after this war, films that show this war as a tragedy may well be accepted as great films, possibly as great as Platoon. Even Platoon was made more than ten years after the war was over.

But what should filmmakers push now? Something that addresses both sides of the war, and looks at soldiers as currently fighting, not relics of a distant war. A spy thriller that leads viewers on a chase to hunt down a terrorist. A movie that doesn't remind Americans of the war's worst, but relays its complexity. While public opinion is still divided by the same lines as the ones at the war's onset, films should open a dialog with those opinions. As good as it may be, Stop-Loss doesn't present itself as part of either view, and that proved to be its downfall.