POSTED MAR 12, 2019
“It will be you—-you who urge us on to battle you who incite us against ourselves you who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler you who would have one man who works kill another man who works you who would have one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live. Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives.” ― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
(2) Wikipedia
Scenes from the original All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et decorum est" read by Christopher Eccleston. Wilfred Owen was killed one week before the end of WW I. The poem was published posthumously in 1920. The Latin title is taken from an ode by the Roman poet Horace and means "it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country". Owen calls this the "old lie" in the last stanza.
POSTED APR 25, 2019
The centerpiece of the film is an attack on an Allied convoy; the U-boat torpedoes three ships...Having finally outlasted the [Allied] destroyers, the sub surfaces to administer a coup de grace--a final torpedo to a burning tanker. As the ship explodes, the captain is startled to see men leaping from its deck: "What are they doing still on board?'' he shouts. "Why haven't they been rescued?'' Drowning sailors can clearly be seen in the flames from the tanker. They swim toward the U-boat, their pitiful cries for help carrying clearly across the water. The captain orders his boat to reverse at half speed, to keep it away from them. What does he think of having let the victims drown? He does not say. Only one sentence in the ship's log ("assumed no men were on board'') gives a hint. It is against the instinct of every sailor to let another sailor drown in the sea. But in war, it is certainly not practical for a submarine to take prisoners. Somehow it is easier when the targets are seen through periscope sights, and the cries of victims cannot be heard.
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”
Though their affair plays a central role in the film, The Americanization of Emily won’t be remembered for their romance, but for Chayefsky’s jeremiad against war as a social pathology and corrupt mythology. Charlie defines himself as “yellow,” a professional coward, who wants to survive by staying as far from combat as he can...The film gives [Charlie] a great many opportunities to inveigh...against the madness of war and its exultation, trenchantly pointing out that “it may be ministers and generals who blunder us into wars, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution.”...For Chayefsky, war and its sacred idols—medals, tombs, romanticized memories—exist to be satirized and condemned. (Cineaste)
A mythical view of World War II is shattered completely in director Samuel Fuller’s 1980 film, The Big Red One. Fuller was a combat veteran who brought a soldier’s outlook to cultural recollections about the war. He had landed in the third wave on Omaha Beach and recalled seeing dead bodies everywhere. When it came to remembering the war, Fuller resisted strongly any attempt to see it as ennobling and argued that the men who fought only wanted to survive and nothing more. In his autobiography he claimed, in fact, that he had turned down an offer to direct The Longest Day because he felt it was too “overblown” and did not pay sufficient attention to the suffering of soldiers. He carried his memories directly into his 1980 feature that was marked by anti-heroic views. In a narrative that follows an American rifle squad through Europe, religious symbols are deployed to suggest that war, far from being a necessary political crusade, was mostly a transgression of basic Christian principles. Some GIs even articulate the view that what they are doing is not destroying an enemy but committing murder. ( historians.org)
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*Imdb
**Between February 13 and February 15, 1945, Allied bombers dropped nearly four thousand tons of high explosives and incendiaries on the historic German city of Dresden. The effect was elemental: Air became fire. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war, was there—but 60 feet underground. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, conveyed to Dresden by boxcar, and billeted in a derelict slaughterhouse as the bombs fell, he was sheltering with some fellow POWs and a couple of dazed German guards in a basement meat locker. They emerged to rubble, ash, twisted metal, death. Somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 people... had been killed. (The Atlantic)
***Wikipedia
POSTED JUNE 14, 2019
On the Beach
“It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”
“No, it wasn't an accident, I didn't say that. It was carefully planned, down to the tiniest mechanical and emotional detail. But it was a mistake.”
“If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.”
A Canticle for Liebowitz
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”
“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? ...And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”
“But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.”
Cat's Cradle
“Science is magic that works.”
“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
“Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.”
“But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.”
Spoiler alert: if you are one of the dozen or so people who have not seen "Planet of the Apes" but plan to do so, you may not want scroll all the way down to the end of this post.
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Bob Dylan
"Blowin' in the Wind": Yes, 'n' how many times must a man look up ...Before he can see the sky?...Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have...Before he can hear people cry?...Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows...That too many people have died?...The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...The answer is blowin' in the wind
"With God on Our Side": Through many dark hour I've been thinkin' about this..That Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss...But I can't think for you, you'll have to decide...Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side... So now as I'm leavin' I'm weary as Hell...The confusion I'm feelin' ain't no tongue can tell...The words fill my head and fall to the floor...If God's on our side He'll stop the next war
"Masters of War": You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins
POSTED AUG 1, 2019
In 1965, a teenaged Guthrie performed a “friendly gesture” that proved to be fateful. Arlo was arrested for littering, leading him to be deemed “not moral enough to join the army.” Guthrie attained international attention at age 19 by recounting the events on the album Alice’s Restaurant in 1967
Seeger sang the song on the taping of the CBS show The Smothers Brothers in September, 1967 but CBS management censored the song prior to broadcast. After the show's hosts voiced their strong support, CBS later relented and allowed Seeger to come back and sing the song on the Brothers' February 25, 1968 show
As performed at Woodstock in 1969
(This has the "alternate" F-I-S-H cheer so if you're offended by an "obscene" F word more than by the obscenity of war, you might want to skip this.)
"They made themselves laugh...They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing - these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight."
Tim wrestles with leaving for Canada. He stops at the Tip Top Lodge near the Minnesota - Canada border. "The man who opened the door that day is the hero of my life - the man saved me. He offered exactly what I needed, without questions, without any words at all. He took me in...Six days later, when it ended, I was unable to find a proper way to thank him..."
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done....Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, war has the feel - the spiritual texture - of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent."
When their medic has a breakdown and shoots himself in the foot to get away from the war, no one blames him. "He said he'd done his best. He'd tried to be a good medic....rambling a little, he talked about a few of the guys who were gone now... and how crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead."
"But this is true: stories can save us. I'm forty three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted lavender, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed and an old man sprawled besides a pigpen."
"This fictional account of Kien, an infantryman for North Vietnam, follows his transformation into a writer, his struggles to overcome his memories of combat, and the terrible mess his life has become as a result."
In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells the story of his war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier. In the tradition of Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial-- and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.
"A review in The New York Times in 1956 claimed that Greene’s novel about Vietnam had characters that stood in for nations and political factions rather than as their own people. Greene’s conclusion seems to be that America was a somewhat “innocent” nation that did not understand the people it was fighting with or against. Often cited as one of the best Vietnam war books, it is also one of the most recommended in Greene’s large body of work." (Bookriot)
Francis Ford Coppola made a 40th Anniversary restoration of Apocalypse Now that was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring.
Nominated for 9 Academy Awards, 1978's The Deer Hunter came away with 5, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Platoon was the first of three films Oliver Stone made about the Vietnam War: the others were Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth, each dealing with different aspects of the war.
"Often cited as the best Vietnamese movie about the War, Dang Nhat Minh’s 1984 feature When the Tenth Month Comes* is strikingly devoid of any scenes of combat. Like many of the other films on this list, it adopts the perspective of a young Vietnamese woman, who here struggles to protect her vulnerable family from the dreadful news of her serving husband’s death. Swapping guns and gore for poetry, this is a stunning melodrama about the impact the conflict had on families left behind by Vietnamese soldiers." (Seven Vietnam War Movies You Probably Haven't Seen, But Should)
"Filmed on location in the rubble of a recently-bombed Hanoi, Hai Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hanoi* is evocative of post-WW2 realist films. As such, if you were more interested in the city setting of Good Morning, Vietnam , then The Little Girl of Hanoi is for you, as all of the action takes place in Hanoi’s concrete jungle. This movie was produced before the War’s end, as director Ninh was moved to express the horror inflicted on unsuspecting residents of the city after witnessing it first-hand." (Seven Vietnam War Movies You Probably Haven't Seen, But Should)
*I couldn't find English subtitled trailers for the Vietnamese films. The embedded video for each is of the entire film with English subtitles.