There are popular wars in Hollywood and unpopular wars. The last popular war was World War II and so you get movies from Hollywood that still portray its goals and objectives as good, such as “Saving Private Ryan” and the one we watched last Saturday, “Windtalkers.” Sure, they show that war is hell, but I wouldn’t expect anything else.
But unpopular wars like Vietnam and now either of the Gulf Wars are unpopular among the cultural elites so they get the full treatment that the war had no objective, that it was pointless, that our soldiers were not motivated, that our conduct of the war was unethical and inhumane and so on.
Brendan Miniter, writing in the Wall Street Journal, examines the latest one of these films, “Jarhead,” based on a book by a Marine who served in the first Gulf War.
“Jarhead” is yet another movie about the depravity and uselessness of war. ... It may surprise a few Hollywood execs that this isn’t an easy sell in a post 9/11 America. In the Brooklyn, N.Y., theater where I saw “Jarhead,” viewers were streaming out of the theater even before the film was over. What the viewers were hoping for was a rousing film portraying U.S. forces as the good guys sacrificing for a worthwhile mission, or at least, a sense of joy in the victory. But it never came. So on her way out, one woman protested for all to hear: “They sold us [the movie] with prompted-up music, but then they gave us this.”
