Question from a student and essay on film...

I received the following question from a student today via email:

Project one requires that we make "an original argument concerning the impact of art on war, or conversely war on art"

Are we only using official wars, or can I use the war on drugs, or the war on alcohol and prohibition in America?

It's a great question, and very much in the spirit of the course. So the answer is YES!

The challenge will be to do something original. Simply pointing out that a lot of music is influenced by the war on drugs won't cut it. The author will need to get into deeper connections...But it will be a great project if they can get inside the topic and ask "why" five or more times.

This week's New Yorker magazine reviews Stop-Loss. The review is a mini-analysis of film and Iraq and a great read. Find it here.

Most of the recent feature films about Iraq (“Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Redaction”) have not been very good, and the public has stayed away from them. But audiences ignored Paul Haggis’s sternly beautiful and moving “In the Valley of Elah,” too. Something more than the usual resistance to “tough” subjects may be hurting these movies. The Bush Administration told us that we were waging a war for our survival, but it also suggested that most of us needn’t make sacrifices or even learn much about the conflict. Then again, some people may be so angered by the war that they don’t want to be confronted by it as entertainment.

Class Notes...

We just finished the first class of the term and I wanted to capture some thoughts...

I will be posting a voiceover (Flash) PowerPoint version of today's lecture in Bb Vista by Wednesday night, and will include some of the points I make here in greater detail.

Basically, we're looking for the footprints in the sand left by our ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'll continue to stress that this is not a witch hunt to slam the government or US policies. Part of my reason for approaching the class in this manner is to help clarify my own thoughts and opinions. So think of them as footprints in the sand, or the fog on the mirror, or the echoes down the hall...

The consensus from the class is that there has been little impact on our culture from Iraq. For general readers, it would help to clarify our general demographics: college students (and one prof) in the spring of 2008, living in Philadelphia. So, East coast, urban, privileged (to the extent of being able to teach for a living and to go to school, even if that requires massive loans and sacrifice), and predominantly from the East coast.

I had prepared some slides showing Star Wars and an image of Godzilla. Those films can be used to see their respective times through very heavy-handed metaphor. In the 1970s, mutually assured destruction and a long-fought cold war with the Soviets made Star Wars (arguably) an easy sell. Of course Americans identified with the rag-tag rebels battling the pure evil ("The Evil Empire") that spawned the Death Star, capable of destroying entire planets.

We seemed to know less about Godzilla, although that might be because for 18 year olds today, the Godzilla films blur together. Didn't he fight all kinds of other monsters? Yes. Didn't Mathew Broderick make a crappy big-budget version? Yes.

But the original (as I found out, not really the original...) is a subversive take on the US use of atomic bombs on Japan. Godzilla is a sea monster made gigantic by exposure to Strontium 90 and other isotopes...He then devastates Tokyo on a regular basis. The film was made 9 years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

So with Star Wars and Godzilla as a bit of a creative guide, we went looking for contemporary connections.

The class seemed unanimous that politics and music don't mix...that bands trying to get political are just doing it to gain publicity. I volunteered that country music seems to be addressing the war more directly than hip hop and rock.

Kyle made an excellent connection between the Saw movies and our collective wrestling with torture (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo). I did a (very) little checking...I didn't know there was a short film in 2003, before the 2004 feature-length film. The Abu Ghraib scandal broke in - 2004.

I wouldn't argue that Saw was a conscious response to our debate over torture, but you might easily make a case for its popularity (anyone for Saw V?) being a reflection of our moral debate over torture.

We took a look at the top grossing films of 2007 - all throwbacks to a pre-9/11, pre-Iraq world: Spiderman, Transformers, Shrek...

Ratatouille also came up - somewhat randomly, but I seized on it as a potential example. What effect might Iraq have on our consumption of animated films? Is Ratatouille a sort of detente with France (remember when we were supposed to boycott French Fries?)? Is the focus on cooking a version of 'nesting' - of our aversion to travel after 9/11, our focus on the home, our obsession with home prices? Maybe that's stretching it, and maybe it's just a great movie (Flushed Away wasn't as big of a success...even with Aardman Entertainment's golden touch)...or maybe there is more.

It was a great start to our investigation. I don't have any answers concerning the effect of our 5 years in Iraq (and 6.5 in Afghanistan), but I feel that we have to be seriously affected. We can't have 150,000 of our citizens over there, billions of our tax dollars, thousands of deaths and injuries and have zero effect. It's impossible. When we get to Melville's portrayal of the lawyer in "Bartleby the Scrivener" perhaps we will find some answers.