Don't Mention The War

The West is at war but Hollywood has been reluctant to make war films about Iraq or Afghanistan. Where has all the propaganda gone?

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Whereas WWII had an obvious moral backbone that fed into the flag-waving heroics of wartime movies such as Guadalcanal Diary (1943) or the aptly-titled Robert Mitchum outing Gung Ho!(1943), the motivations behind the present conflict are murky to say the least. And while the disillusionment of a whole generation with the chaos of Vietnam was enough to inspire contemporary anti-war films like The Activist (1969), Hollywood has stayed uncharacteristically silent about more recent conflicts. Are producers and directors too scared? Or simply convinced that the Battle for Baghdad won't translate into box office dollars?

That's not to say that war isn't on the menu in our local multiplexes. A swathe of historical epics, from Troy to Master And Commander have ensured that, even in these fraught times, the spectacle of combat is on our big screens as well as our television sets. Commentators, critics and even actors have been keen to read the films as veiled allegories of Iraq. (Brad Pitt has said that he thinks there's a "terrible sense of déjà vu about what the Trojans faced and what we're facing at the moment"). But in reality these costumed war dramas have little to say about events on the ground in the Middle East. Indeed, part of these historical epics' appeal is that they manage to sidestep fraught issues of race and religion.

Fear of inflaming the current tensions between America and the Arab world is certainly one of the reasons why Hollywood has been slow to react. Accusations that the current conflict is a war against Islam have left Hollywood's filmmakers in a quandary. The makers of The Sum Of All Fears, for example, felt compelled to bow to pressure from the Council On American-Islamic Relations and changed the Islamic terrorists who detonate a nuclear device at the Super Bowl into entirely fictitious East European neo-Nazis. As Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association Of America commented in 'The Wall Street Journal' in October 2003, "Who would you have as the enemy if you made a picture about terrorism? You'd probably have Muslims, would you not? If you did, I think there would be backlash from the decent, hardworking, law-abiding Muslim community in this country."