From Romance to Collateral Damage: Media Treatment of Civilians in Wartime and What it Means for How America Wages War

Abstract

This article analyzes how Hollywood films shape Americans' understanding of the impact of war on civilians. Movies have created a narrative, rooted in a distorted view of WWII, which continues to shape discourse about the use of military force. In films, rape and prostitution were portrayed only rarely, and then in the most coded and romanticized ways. Films were completely silent on civilian casualties from strategic bombing. Vietnam War movies began to portray atrocities by Americans, but this trend was reversed by Saving Private Ryan, which erased any ambiguity about the ability of America to wage a “good war.”

Notes

1. By “total war,” we mean conflicts fought between modern industrial societies using mass manufactured weapons and conscript armies. Total war requires the mobilization of the resources of an entire society and not just a warrior class. As a result the lines blur between those who are part of the war effort, and so legitimize military targets and innocent civilians protected by rules of civilized warfare. While there is scholarly debate about what was the first total war (Bell (2008) argue for the 19th century Napoleonic Wars), in this article we will focus upon 20th century conflicts.

2. This practice and the gory hyperrealism of recent war films (like Saving Private Ryan) are memorably spoofed in Tropic Thunder (Stiller, 2008).

3. So, for example, when President Obama spoke in Normandy at the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings, within a list of the contributors to the victory he noted that the Russians had suffered “some” of the heaviest casualties of the war. Historical accuracy would require dropping the “some” and raise a number of questions about the actual significance of the D-Day landings.

4. This distinction is now largely discredited by historians who have chronicled the full complicity of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust and other crimes of the Third Reich (Wette, 2006), but is constantly assumed in Hollywood war films, most recently in the Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie (Singer, 2008)