War

I couldn't understand why Werner Herzog made Rescue Dawn. A fictionalized remake of his documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, it seemed the kind of war movie that Herzog once would have rejected for not being bizarre enough. As I watched the DVD recently, there were some obvious Herzog touches... the outrageously beautiful and harsh landscape, the quirky details in the POW camp, the acts of lunacy performed more for the camera than for art (eating grubs, deliberate starving of the actors, etc.). But didn't it glorify war? Unlike any other war movie I've seen, Rescue Dawn seemed completely without moral convictions one way or the other. The celebration at the end came across without glory, without much true feeling, a perfunctory act that just went with the territory. Dieter, as played by Christian Bale, gets it and knows he's not fighting any kind of ideological battle, not anti-Communist. No, he just wants -- no, he needs -- to fly, at any cost. Fly he does. The war is just one of the necessary costs of his spiritual quest to be airborne. It's a strange movie, right from the beautiful bombing sequences that open the film, sequences that should appall us, but fascinate instead. Herzog is still fascinated with the world and all its cruelties.

But society's relationship to war -- clearly more a love than a hate relationship -- continues in Rescue Dawn, and how little things have changed since this Vietnam era picture. In fact, another movie I watched this past week, King Vidor's 1918 silent 26-minute short, Bud's Recruit, is remarkable in the way that war was sold even then, the way consent was manufactured, and the way peace workers were shown to be cowardly, misguided, feminine. Of course, WWI was a very bad war ideologically and horrible in its devastation and death. But here again, young boys play soldier, carry sticks, pretend to be older in order to join the army, and the entire process is glorified. It is a fascinating film. The glasses-wearing young man who objects to war -- and is the only male to sit in on the Peace Group meetings -- is eventually shamed into joining the army and marching off to war. It was a propaganda film of the day, but it could have been commissioned by Karl Rove. Le plus ca change... (The film is available on the recent American Treasures film series, Series III, disk 4).