Hollywood and the military
My husband and I recently watched two movies about the military. Or rather, I should say, he watched one and I watched the other. The movies’ tones were instructive, especially because I later got corroboration for my sense that Hollywood’s post-Vietnam hostility to the military has real world consequences (that is, it’s not “just” entertainment, assuming one can attach that noun to the corrosive stuff Hollywood releases about the U.S. military).
I’m an aficionado of old movies, especially musicals. One of my favorites is Hit the Deck, a 1955 movie that boasts an absolutely ridiculous plot, mediocre acting, and some of the best songs the 1920s had to offer, as filtered through MGM’s 1950s extraordinary musical making machine. The silly, time-worn plot (even in 1955 it was time worn), involves three sailors on leave and their escapades, a melange of singing, dancing and fighting (to defend a lady’s honor, of course). One of the sailors is an admiral’s son, and the admiral finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to enforce harsh military punishment against his son (potentially destroying said son’s future at Annapolis), until he’s rescued from this dilemma by his ingenious lieutenant. The movie pokes fun at the military (the hidebound admiral, the impulsive sailors, the ineffectual MPs), but it’s loving fun. There’s no meanness behind it. The Navy is an integral part of American culture, and can be gently spoofed. The biggest musical number is essentially a recruiting song:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6kK2MO5lj0[/youtube]
Join the Navy, and see the world!
While I was doggedly making my way through Hit the Deck, my husband was watching (and was trying to induce the kids to watch) 1987’s Good Morning, Vietnam, a movie separated from my movie by a little more than 30 years. Good Morning, Vietnam, like Hit the Deck, pokes fun at the military, but there’s an overt viciousness to the humor. This is not gentle jollity, this is humor as a deadly weapon. The military is presented as an over-class of rigid, humorless cretins, men who exist to grind, not only the enemy (a pathetic victim of American aggression), but the American common man himself into the dust. Poke military men, and they don’t giggle; they pop in an cloud of army green effluvia.
That Hollywood hates the military is pretty obvious. The question is, “Does it matter?” I think it does. Just the other day, I was talking to a man who told me that his boyhood dream was to become a Navy SEAL. Had he done so, he would have been a good one: he’s intelligent, self-disciplined, decisive, and has superior athletic abilities. What derailed him from this dream was Hollywood. He watched Born on the 4th of July (made two years after Good Morning Vietnam), and turned his back forever on his military aspirations. He wasn’t going to be a part of the green killing machine.
The problem is that a country needs a defensive force. Without the draft, it needs to be a volunteer force — and the only way you can ensure volunteers is if popular culture informs the country’s youth that the military is a reasonable career option. Given that the popular culture coming out of Hollywood and Madison Avenue is aggressively hostile to the military, it’s a testament to America’s innate respect for that institution that the military is able to meet its recruiting goals.
A young man I know just enlisted in the Marines. His mother told me so, rather shamefacedly. It was clear that others had reacted badly to this news (“You’re letting your son train to be a baby killer? And he’s probably going to get killed!”) My reaction surprised her: “That’s wonderful. The military is the last institution in America that trains boys to be men. It also trains all the troops, men and women, to be leaders.” She started glowing. I had actually made her feel better, not just by responding politely to her son’s decision, but by seeing it as an affirmatively good thing, not just for America, but for him. (By the way, just as the Marines will be good for this young men, he’ll be good for the Marines. He’s as good, and bright, and self-disciplined a kid as one can hope to find.) It was sad that she had to hunt around for approval, but unsurprising, given the poisonous image of the military that Hollywood has sold to America for the better part of 40 years.
The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land,
available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon or Smashwords.
